Spectre Of The Black Rose tols-2

by James Lowder

  Or badger’s teeth, thought Inza, smiling darkly to herself. They would do quite nicely.

  Something winked on the floor behind the throne, distracting the Vistana from that pleasant thought. She knelt upon the cold stone flags to get a better look.

  Shards of glass lay scattered across the back of the dais, pieces of the large oval mirrors that had once hung behind the throne. Inza gasped. These were fragments from the memory mirrors Soth had once used to prompt his reveries. Her mother had told her about them. The mirrors tapped into a person’s memories and fantasies to create a waking dream that could be experienced as if it were reality. There were few men strong enough to resist a memory mirror’s seductive powers. Most who used them quickly abandoned the real world for the mirror’s tantalizing illusions.

  Inza picked up one of the larger shards. As she looked into the mirror fragment, she saw not her own reflection, but a knight clad in gorgeous silver armor patterned with roses and kingfishers. This was Soth as he had been before his curse-at least, how he remembered himself.

  The Vistana moved to slip the fragment into the pocket of her leather breeches. Before she could, something white and fleeting snatched the glass from her fingers, slicing them in the process. Inza cursed. She reached for Novgor, but an unseen force grabbed her long black hair and toppled her backward. Thrashing like a landed fish, she finally got the blade in her hand. She brandished it at the three apparitions floating above her prone form.

  The trio of ghostly women scowled, a particularly unattractive expression on their angular elven faces.

  “Not for your eyes,” one banshee moaned.

  “Unless you wish to share the dead man’s dream,” the second added.

  “Unless you wish to share the dead man’s fate,” cried the third.

  Inza pushed herself up onto her elbows. “I make my own fate.”

  Howls of ear-splitting laughter ripped through the hall. It echoed up the stairs and shook the dust from the rafters. The banshees circled the Vistana. Evil mirth twisted their faces.

  “Away from me, wretches,” Inza finally shouted.

  She lashed out with Novgor at the nearest of the trio. The needle-sharp blade bit into the tattered, ghostly shroud that cloaked the spirit’s frame. Another howl went up, this one of pain and fright.

  “I am cut!” the banshee shrieked. “I am wounded!”

  The hall’s main doors creaked open, and Lord Soth stalked into the room. At first Inza thought the banshee’s cries had drawn the death knight, but he ignored the unquiet spirits’ calls for vengeance. “Your men approach, Inza Magdova,” Soth stated without preamble.

  The Vistana let a sigh of relief escape her lips and closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them again, Lord Soth was gone.

  The smirk on Inza’s face was almost as sharp as Novgor as she turned to the banshees, still lingering near the throne. She held the dagger up for them to see. “Another sharp word to me, and I’ll cut out your tongue,” she murmured. “I’ve done it to my own kind. I’ll gladly do it to you lot of howling bed sheets.”

  The banshees were silent for a moment. They regarded Inza with pale, dead eyes, then said, “We serve the mistress of Nedragaard faithfully, as loyally and honestly as we have served all those who have gone before.”

  Though the pledge had been voiced without any hint of sarcasm or anger, Inza knew it was a threat. The words had the weight of a curse, a promise of something unpleasant to come.

  The sound of Alexi’s voice drew her attention away from the banshees. The last of the Wanderers were shuffling through the main doors. They looked terrible, little better than the undead ogres who staggered in behind them. The forced march had pressed them to the brink of exhaustion. Their faces were pale, their clothes ragged and dirty. A grimy, makeshift bandage encircled Nikolas’s chest. Piotr had one hand, or all that remained of it, wrapped up tight. The ogres, too, had been hacked and battered. Some were missing arms. Another had been slashed across the face with a blade of some sort. Its swollen black tongue lolled from the hole in its cheek.

  “The whole Invidian army is right on our heels. They’ve been pursuing us all night,” Alexi said. He slumped onto the floor. “Soth’s soldiers cut the bridge away the moment we crossed.”

  Neither the news of the Invidians nor the suffering of her people mattered to Inza. She was interested only in the whereabouts of the chest. “Where is it?” she growled, grabbing Alexi by the collar.

  “Outside, raunie,” he replied. “Safe.”

  “Safe?” Piotr groaned. “Nothing here is safe. We’re surrounded by dead men, and there’s an army on the doorstep.”

  “I’ll keep you safe from the dead men,” Inza purred. “As for the Invidians, I’m certain Lord Soth will know how to deal with them. He is a warrior, after all, one used to seeing armies camped before his walls.”

  The same thought occurred to the Knight of the Black Rose as he climbed the spiral stairs up to the top of Nedragaard’s central tower. This, at last, was a problem he could face head on. It had been centuries since he had looked upon the banners of a besieging force, but his warrior’s instincts and knight’s training left him in no doubt of the course he must take.

  He and his thirteen loyal retainers had held off an army of Knights: Sir Ratelif and the best soldiers the Solamnic orders could muster. They’d been flesh and blood then. Hunger and cold and despair had been their foes as much as the besieging Knights. Not so now. With his thirteen deathless warriors, Soth was confident the keep could withstand the charge of the entire Invidian army, with Malocchio himself at the vanguard.

  Lost in thought, he continued his march to the keep’s upper floors. The interior stair wound in a circle, tighter and narrower as it ascended. Soth barely noticed as the number of steps passed one hundred, then two hundred.

  It was not until he reached a small landing high in the keep that he paused. In life, it had been his practice to run his fingers over an inscription etched crudely into the stone: Est Sularus oth Mithas. My honor is my life. The sacred Oath of the Knights of Solamnia.

  He’d carved the words there over many days as a boy of five, starting on the afternoon he rescued Caradoc’s sister from the chasm spider. His father had rewarded his heroics with a real blade. The small dagger was unfit for combat, but it seemed a formidable weapon indeed when compared with the blunted wooden play swords he’d been given up until then. With that knife he declared his intent to become a Knight of Solamnia, if only to the watchmen and to the rodents that frequented that isolated part of the keep.

  Here now was that declaration again. The words were faint, just as they had been in Dargaard Keep. The original inscription had been worn down by Soth’s fingertips, which he traced over them year after year as he marched to the highest platform to watch the sun set on the Dargaard Mountains. Nedragaard had always lacked this detail. Yet it was in the right place, in a child’s awkward scrawl. His awkward scrawl.

  Soth had been so caught up in his concerns with Invidia and the White Rose, he’d failed to notice how closely the keep was beginning to resemble its original on Krynn. He’d called the place Nedragaard because of the small but noticeable flaws that differentiated it from Dargaard. Ruined doors hung where there should have been ones intact. Hallways extended a few paces too far or stopped a few paces too soon. The oath Soth had carved on that landing had always been missing. Until now. Those flaws, along with the more substantial imperfections brought on by the death knight’s inattention, were apparently being corrected.

  As he pushed aside some rubble that marked the stair’s end, a cold wind tugged at Soth’s cloak. Ignoring the chill that surely signaled the coming of winter, the death knight stepped onto the keep’s highest vantage. From the ruins of the tower’s upper floors, he surveyed the fortress’s defenses.

  The shadows that filled the Great Chasm were roiling, as they did on some bright mornings, almost as if the sunshine made them angry. This day they swirled with particular ferocity ag
ainst the high cliffs that surrounded the keep on three sides. The darkness lapped, too, at the shores of the isthmus that connected it to the chasm’s eastern cliff.

  Or rather, had once connected it to the shore. Just outside Nedragaard Keep’s front gate, a group of undead ogres were even now completing the task of drawing in the wooden bridge. A thirty-foot gap between the crumbled outer wall and the isthmus gaped blackly.

  The reason for this defensive precaution milled on the chasm’s eastern shore. A massive force, at least a thousand Invidian troops, had claimed the overgrown garden-graveyard there. More were straggling south along the Chasm Road. Soth could hear the ragged cheer that went up from the army as each wayward company arrived.

  A banshee rose up before Soth. The sunlight made it appear even more insubstantial than normal, less a spectre than the memory of one. It was joined by a second, then a third. Leedara, Marantha, and Gisela, his three primary tormentors, the leaders of the shrieking host, stood before him.

  “The wolves are at your door,” Marantha began.

  “They have claimed the graveyard, claimed your buried dead,” Gisela added.

  Leedara, whose phantasmal form still gaped from the wound Inza had inflicted upon her, hovered directly before the master of Nedragaard. “Your dead are all you have, withered rose. Lose them, and lose yourself.”

  “There is no chance I’ll be defeated,” the Knight of the Black Rose said smugly. He gestured to the east and the south. “In Sithicus, the living and the dead heed my battle cry. Even now my fleshy army comes to drive the curs from our stoop.”

  They totaled twice the Invidian thousand, elves from the east and a ragtag army of miners and farmers from the south. At Soth’s bidding, Azrael had mustered the troops. They were intended as an invasion force, a sword point the death knight meant for Malocchio Aderre’s throat. If they had to fight first on Sithican soil, all the better. The slaughter of the invaders would harden them and give them a taste for Invidian blood.

  Soth watched in anticipation as the elves fanned out, forming their favored order of battle. The miners, too, arrayed themselves for the clash to come. Their lines were irregular, befitting the assortment of picks and flails and axes with which they armed themselves. The difference in formations mattered little. Soth was certain either army could easily break the siege.

  A cry went up from the garden-graveyard, the fitting place where the three armies met. It was not the clamor of war Soth heard, nor the outraged roar of the dying. It was a cheer of fellowship. The three armies were now one.

  The siege of Nedragaard Keep had begun.

  Fifteen

  The tripartite army’s cry of unity reverberated from the walls of Nedragaard Keep, echoed across the Great Chasm, and finally faded. The leaders of the three allied forces stood for a moment, bathed in the glow of fellowship, before turning to consider the seemingly inviolable fortress looming before them. The good cheer fled, and the relief at having finally ended their long marches soured into exhaustion.

  It was Gerhard, commander of the miners and farmers from the south, who gave voice to the question vexing them all. “Well,” he asked gruffly, “now what do we do?”

  “The isthmus is too narrow for any large-scale frontal assault,” noted the elven general Ulrisch, an effete nobleman from Har-Thelen. “Perhaps we could mount a sneak attack from the chasm and have a few dozen men attempt to gain access to the keep from below. They could reset the bridge, allowing the rest of-”

  “Who’d be idiot enough to climb down into those shadows?” interrupted Gerhard.

  “Why, your miners, of course,” the elf sniffed. “They’re used to the dark. Besides, all those stories about the chasm are silly. It’s just another hole in the ground.”

  “Well, then, your elves can go,” Gerhard snapped. “It’s your idea, after all.”

  The commander of the former Invidian forces, a particularly gruesome ogre named Onkar, snorted his amusement. He immediately scratched furiously at the gaping hole where his nose once had been. Snorting always made the tattered flesh there quiver.

  “What for do you think we carry all this wood?” Onkar asked, gesturing to the heaps of timber piled at the center of the garden-graveyard. As each company of ogres and mercenaries arrived from the north, jingling with the gold and silver Azrael had used to buy their loyalty, they dutifully deposited more logs and beams onto the stack. There was enough there now to construct the frame for a fairly large house.

  “Siege engines,” the elf noted, “Of course. That would have been my next suggestion. Only we have nothing to hurl at the keep.”

  “Elves,” Gerhard grumbled. “We have plenty of elves.”

  Onkar removed his foot from the large granite headstone upon which he had planted it. The stone was ornately carved, inscribed with the name Gelbmartin and the badge belonging to the lord steward of the keep. The ogre reached down and yanked it from the ground. “These make good crash,” he said. “When we run out, we dig up the dead guys and fling them, too.”

  Gerhard and Ulrisch stared at the brute. “Crude, but creative,” the elf said at last. “You supervise the stockpiling of the��� missiles, Onkar, and we two will begin construction of the catapults.” He encircled Gerhard’s shoulder with an arm and steered him away from the brute. “Let us discuss the division of labor.”

  When they were safely out of earshot, the elf murmured, “Is there anything about this situation you find odd?”

  Gerhard shrugged. “Odd? Like you pointy-eared wine sippers showing some spine for once-that kind of odd?”

  With an exasperated grimace on his face, Ulrisch rolled up his shirt sleeve. His arm was a mass of scars from elbow to wrist. “I was captured by my Iron Hills kin. They flayed my arm, and a few other parts of my body you wouldn’t care to see, before I managed to escape.” He let the sleeve slip back into place.

  Gerhard patted the politska’s silver axe hanging at his belt. “I’ve peeled a few people in my day, too. None of ‘em escaped, of course. Still, you’re all right by me if you stood up to that sort of torture.”

  “I’m so glad,” the elf said blandly, “but you still haven’t answered my original question.” At the blank look on Gerhard’s face, Ulrisch prompted, “Our situation. Do you find anything odd about it? Where, for example, is Azrael?”

  “Back at the mine,” Gerhard said quickly.

  “And what, exactly, are we supposed to accomplish here without him?”

  The politska remained silent.

  Ulrisch nodded curtly. “You’re catching on. Even if we do manage to get inside the keep, who here will stand against Soth?”

  “We’ve been tricked,” Gerhard rumbled.

  “Used,” the elf corrected. “We are a diversion, nothing more.”

  Gerhard kicked the dirt and muttered a string of obscenities as vile as any creature lurking in the Great Chasm. “So what do we do about it?” he asked after he’d calmed a little.

  “Play the role assigned us,” the elf replied.

  “Why not leave?”

  “Azrael stationed some of your axe-wielding comrades in Har-Thelen just before we left,” Ulrisch noted mournfully. “I thought it an uncharacteristically thoughtful gesture on his part to guard the city while we fought. I suspect now that none of us would find our families alive upon our return should we betray him or not do a creditable job in this siege.”

  Gerhard closed his eyes tightly, picturing the camp where the families of his troops awaited their return. It, too, was guarded by the Politskara. “We’re all dead men,” he murmured.

  “Not necessarily,” the elf said. “I suggest we keep the Invidians-pardon me, former Invidians-to the front ranks. From the clank their purses make, they’ve been paid too well to notice their peril.” He paused to survey the fire-blackened walls of Nedragaard Keep. “And hope.”

  “For what?” Gerhard asked.

  “For Soth to discover Azrael’s plan, whatever that may be, or for the dwarf to succeed
in his scheme.” The elf sighed raggedly. “It doesn’t matter which, so long as it happens before the lord of Nedragaard decides to sweep us from his stoop.”

  “To me, my knights!”

  From the gallery overlooking the main hall, Lord Soth watched the thirteen undead warriors arrive from their various stations around the keep. The first to enter was Wersten Kern, most loyal of his men in life. He was the most loyal, too, in death-if loyalty was a trait these shuffling skeletons could possess. The shadow of that quality lingered in them at the very least. For Soth, that was enough.

  Farold, Valcic, and Vingus, the inseparable Knights of the Sword, arrived together. Meyer Seril took up his usual station beside the main doors. As if pulled away from some other, more important task, Derik Grimscribe straggled in last. Once, the Sword Knight had been a master of words. His explanations for his tardiness would have amused the gathered knights no end. Now his jaws moved soundlessly, his tale trapped on the remnants of his rotted tongue.

  The thirteen gathered warriors turned their eyeless skulls to their liege. Before Soth could speak, though, another voice sounded in the hall.

  “How goes the siege, mighty lord?”

  The skeletal knights looked to the shadow-shrouded dais. They hesitated, then dropped to one knee. Soth leaned over the gallery’s rail. He had to look straight down the wall to see the Vistani girl perched upon a heavy wooden box set next to his throne. Long ago, another chair had been positioned there, the one belonging to the mistress of the keep, Soth’s wife.

  “My knights mistake you for someone else,” Soth said coldly. “You mistake yourself for someone other than a guest.” The death knight’s harsh tone made it clear that he did not readily dismiss such improprieties.

  “No insult was intended,” Inza replied. “I thought it best to speak to you of my concerns before you sent your troops anywhere.”

  “You have nothing to fear. I will keep my word to your mother. You are safe in my-”

  The crash of stone against stone resounded through Nedragaard as the bombardment, which had stopped for nearly half an hour, finally resumed. The missile had not struck the keep itself, though; it had crashed into the rocky ledge to the north. The aim of the engineers directing the catapults had not improved in the five hours they’d been directing sporadic fire against the keep. Far from offering Soth relief, their ineptitude only infuriated him.