Spectre Of The Black Rose tols-2

by James Lowder

  The orb’s light faded, then faltered. Ganelon dropped the blackened crystal into the ashes. With trembling hands he tore into the duffel once more, searching for the silver knife. There might still be time to kill Azrael, to save Helain and everyone else from eternal slavery.

  But Ganelon had already ensured their freedom. The poppy seeds he had secreted in the items Azrael used for the rite, the flesh and the greenery he had tossed into the vat, were not enough to kill the werebadger. They were, however, sufficient to taint the drink, to force his body to reject it.

  Even as the roiling mass of darkness threatened to burst the dwarf like an overfull wineskin, he vomited it up.

  The captured shadows poured from Azrael, bleeding from his nose and mouth, seeping from his eyes and ears. They filled the Black Chapel, each one echoing the dwarfs tortured scream. Ganelon felt himself lifted by that sea of darkness. It bore him along the tunnel and up the mine’s main shaft.

  Dazed, still clutching the shabby duffel that contained everything he owned in the world, Ganelon found himself lying in the ruins of Veidrava’s Engine House. How much time had passed he wasn’t certain. A geyser of shadow still rose up from the pit. The darkness was amassing in the sky high overhead, merging with the shad ows spewed up from the Great Chasm a hundred miles to the west.

  The last of the darkness rose into the heavens. For a time, the gathered shadows hung motionless, their bulk blotting out the triple moons that shone in the twilight sky. Finally, the ebon mass shuddered and began to fall.

  To Ganelon, it resembled nothing so much as a mountain hurled from the stars.

  Nedragaard Keep was burning.

  Screams sounded from the tower’s upper floors. The clash of steel in the bailey had been replaced by the shriek and thud of blazing bodies plummeting from the battlements. It was little consolation, but the corpses met their shadows as they struck the ground.

  The mountain of darkness had burst apart upon impact, hurtling the individual shadows back to their originators. It was the unstable nature of the massed darkness that prevented it from doing even more damage to the Sithican countryside. Still, the spectral mountain had laid low the Land of Spectres, and it would be years before it recovered fully.

  Through it all, Soth and Isolde stood silent at the center of Nedragaard’s main hall. They regarded each other with eyes that saw through the centuries, to a time when they had been the still point at the center of another cataclysm. Like Azrael’s foiled scheme, that disaster, too, had been within Soth’s power to prevent, but his rage had mastered his mind and his heart, just as it had on the outskirts of Veidrava.

  “I think it’s time for you to run along, little girl,” the Whispering Beast said to Inza. He slid down into the throne, caressed the Vistana’s thigh with one stinking, outstretched foot. “Too bad, too. We could have had fun.” He playfully nibbled one of the severed ears hanging at his chest.

  “She has other playmates waiting for her,” the Bloody Cobbler said. He thrust Inza off the dais. She landed in a fighting crouch, dagger already plucked from her boot. “You’ll want to save that for outside,” noted the Cobbler. “They’re waiting.”

  “They know what you’ve done,” the Beast added, “to the giant, the Wanderers, your mother, all of it.”

  “Everyone will know,” chimed the Cobbler. “For ever and ever. Sithicus is going to be like that soon.”

  A tremor shook the tower, and a rain of stone and dust showered the main hall. The Cobbler held his hand out as if testing for rain. The Beast leaped from the throne. He crouched in a fighting stance mimicking Inza’s. “Off with you,” he growled, slapping his misshapen hands on the stone.

  Inza turned and ran. Soth started after her, but Isolde laid a restraining hand on his arm. “No, Loren,” she said softly. “Other powers control her fate.”

  The Vistana emerged into the chaos of the courtyard. The dead and wounded covered the ground. Soth’s thirteen skeletal warriors marched among the bodies, methodically hacking anything that moved or wept or bled too much. Overhead, the thirteen banshees wove frenzied patterns around the keep in their wyvern-drawn chariots of bone. The light of the blaze and of the new red moon, shining full and bright over Nedragaard, made the usually pallid spirits appear drenched in gore.

  Inza passed through the carnage untouched, as if surrounded by an invisible shield. She reached the courtyard’s edge. There, the gaping rift in the outer curtain opened onto the isthmus and freedom. Only, the isthmus was gone. The section of the earthen bridge closest to the keep had collapsed into the Great Chasm. On the opposite side of the gap stood the hapless giant Inza had crippled, with the three remaining Wanderers crowded at his strangely booted feet.

  Nabon started to back up, as if he intended to leap the gap. Inza could see Alexi, ever-practical Alexi, trying to make the giant reconsider. Piotr and Nikolas, on the other hand, cheered him on. It was obvious that the giant would make it. His anger and his hatred would vault him over the entire chasm itself if necessary. Inza knew Nabon would tear her limb from limb for what she’d done to him.

  Nabon started forward. His footfalls shook the fragile banks of the remaining isthmus, sending chunks of rock into the eternal murk of the Great Chasm. Inza met the giant’s charge with a smile of defiance on her face and her storied ancestor’s dagger in her hand. But before Nabon could leap, Inza Magdova Kulchevich threw herself from the cliff.

  They watched her fall, the giant she had tortured and the adoptive kin she had betrayed. That insolent smile remained on her lips-until she felt the darkness cradling her, slowing her descent. As vile hands lowered her into the chasm’s lightless depths and the gloom closed over her like a shroud, Inza finally screamed.

  Within Nedragaard’s main hall, the White Rose nodded again to Soth. “There,” she said. “The sound of justice.”

  The Beast lowered his necklace of ears, which he had raised in a mocking posture, as if they might amplify the Vistana’s shriek of horror. “Come now, what does he know of justice?” he rumbled. With one grimy hand he indicated Soth. “I swear he could not define the word.”

  “You must know something to pervert it,” the Cobbler offered. He walked slowly around the death knight, regarding him carefully. “Just as you must recognize the path of the righteous to choose not to tread upon it.”

  “Respect,” Isolde chided. “Regardless of what he is, you must show your father respect.”

  Though his face was hidden by his helm, Soth’s voice made his horror clear. “These monsters are not mine, woman.”

  “We are,” the Cobbler said, “and we are not alone. This entire land was built around you, Father. Why should you wonder that you are the sire of its nightmares, too?”

  “We are monsters only to the likes of you,” the Beast snarled, “to men who swear oaths and break them.”

  “To those who recognize, but squander the gifts the gods have given them,” the Cobbler added. “They afforded you the capacity for valor, for honor, and the strength of arm to protect the innocent. But you wasted their munificence.”

  “Honor is an illusion,” Soth replied. “You can be no progeny of mine if you do not know that.”

  Isolde stepped forward, gently lowering her cowl as she came. Her flesh was charred from the fire that had claimed her life, a blaze much like the one burning above them in Nedragaard’s upper floors. “This place has made you forget. That is its nature.”

  “I forget nothing,” Soth said as he, too, unmasked.

  Like Isolde’s, the death knight’s flesh was blasted, withered. But around this never-changing, ever-corrupt core a phantom hovered, a ghostly reflection of the honorable man he’d once been. Had Soth cared to look, he would have recognized his own deep-set eyes in the Cobbler’s handsome face. Even the Beast, beneath the outward filth and seeming armor of corruption, resembled his sire.

  Smoke had begun to fill the hall, and Isolde swayed, more from remembered pain than any actual discomfort. The Beast and the Cobbler we
re at her side in an instant. They stood to either hand, steadied her, as she faced Soth. “The curse I laid upon you at my death is strong, Husband, strong enough to send me here to ensure you do not escape its sting. Before I can be released, I must be certain you are ready to feel its barb once more���”

  Isolde drew her hands together. As she did, the Beast and the Cobbler melted into mist. The pale fog flowed into the White Rose’s outstretched arms, reformed as a whimpering, skeletal infant swaddled in a fire-blackened bunting.

  The blaze had burned down to the main floor at last. The ceiling groaned under the weight of the toppled stone and timber pressed down upon it. Isolde held out the mewling child, poor slain Peradur, and said, “Please, my lord, he is your flesh.”

  Soth placed his helmet back onto his head. He stared for a moment at the monstrous thing in Isolde’s grasp. Even as he recognized the spectral child as his own, his spirit rebelled at the thought of accepting it. To do so would overturn the final action that had brought Isolde’s curse upon him and made him what he was. To do so would be admitting he’d been wrong.

  The ceiling collapsed. Burning wood and blackened stone rained down upon the hall. Indifferent to the havoc, Lord Soth turned away from Isolde and Peradur, just as he had a world away and several lifetimes ago in Dargaard Keep.

  With that decision, the death knight’s scarred and patched memory finally healed. He looked inward and found that the last missing fragments of his past had been replaced. His history unfurled before him, a grim pageant that he had scripted, he had directed.

  As he looked out upon all his deeds, both glorious and infamous, the Knight of the Black Rose felt that same history enfold him in its cold embrace.

  Epilogue

  Through the perpetual twilight of Nightlund they came, the undead and the undying, the things of darkness that made that cursed realm the sorrow of all the peaceful lands surrounding it. The air shivered with the tread of monstrosities. The blasted fields stirred to the unsettling susurrus of lost souls wending over the earth. They put aside their quarrels, those beasts that lived for bloodshed alone. If only for one night, they recognized a unity of purpose.

  They came to pay homage.

  They came to prove for themselves that the tales were true.

  When those foul creatures saw the light burning within the ruins of Dargaard Keep and glimpsed the armored figure standing atop the fire-blasted battlements, they quailed and cursed, even as their corrupt hearts rejoiced. The Knight of the Black Rose had returned.

  Unquiet dreams plagued the peoples of Krynn that night. From the deepest tunnels of Thorbardin to the most isolated, moonlit glade in the Silvanesti Forest, the sleeping minds of men and elves and dwarves alike were overwhelmed by a similar vision. A black rose had taken root in the garden of Ansalon. Its petals slowly opened until, immense and festering with corruption, the bloom engulfed the entire world.

  The denizens of Sithicus, too, dreamed of the tainted rose, but in the nightmares of those luckless, terror-ridden people, the flower that had so long loomed over their land shriveled and fell away. Lord Soth was gone, and with him the plague and the White Rose, the Whispering Beast and the Bloody Cobbler. Nedragaard Keep had toppled. Its ruins sat upon a spike of stone in the Great Chasm, cut off from the cliffs, surrounded on all sides by a sea of hungry shadow.

  A single moon shone down upon that rubble and all the other destruction wrought by the shadow mountain’s impact. Some claimed the pattern on the orb formed a rosette with petals of white and black and crimson. Others saw things more ominous than a rose in the pattern, though they were reluctant to describe just what it was they recognized there. The only thing upon which all could agree was the strangeness of the moon’s triple-hued light. Such weird illumination befitted the curious land Sithicus had always been.

  If Inza Magdova Kulchevich ever saw the light of that strange moon, she kept her thoughts to herself. The Vistana hadn’t been seen since the Hour of Screaming Shadows, as the Sithicans had come to call that terrible afternoon. Still, the brave souls who ventured close to the Great Chasm often told of a woman’s mocking laughter from the depths. Those who tarried at the brink had also heard grim murmurings in Patterna, the Vistani dialect pilfered from a hundred other tongues. Wisely, they never lingered long enough to make out just what ghastly confidences the murmuring revealed.

  Nabon knew the truth of those tales. He knew, too, the dark things Inza whispered deep within the shadow-choked scar. With Alexi and Piotr and Nikolas, the remnants of Magda’s caravan of outcasts, the giant walked a ceaseless patrol around the chasm. Wanderers all, they shared stories of Inza’s perfidy and waited for the traitor to show herself. When they met again, the fragment of Gard they had recovered from Magda’s grave would be their gift to her, a stake destined for her black, loveless heart.

  Two last wayfarers made their way through the strange light of the triple-hued moon. One brought hope to the farmers and miners and villagers of Sithicus, the other dread.

  Few were the men or elves who did not recognize the soft clank of Ganelon’s leg brace as he made his way through the countryside. The road he traveled was lonely, but he never failed to pause long enough to offer aid and comfort to those in need. Through the severed ear left him by the Beast, he cultivated reason in minds overgrown with madness. With the Cobbler’s blood spattered silver knife, he cut away sickness and despair from the innocent, life itself from the hopelessly corrupt.

  The blade could not exorcise his own suffering, though. For all that he longed to see Helain again, Ganelon knew that her life was forfeit should they meet. If his resolve ever weakened, he needed only to recall the deaths of Ambrose and Kern and Ogier in the Black Chapel to remind him of the power of Inza’s curse. So he drifted through the Sithican night, hoping for and dreading a reunion that should never be.

  Fewer still were those who did not recognize the ear-splitting howls of Azrael as he raged through the Fumewood and the Iron Hills, or the clatter of his carriage, still armored with the teeth of his fallen enemies, as it raced along the Merchants’ Slash. To meet the dwarf in the flesh was to meet death. The tenuous strands of restraint and rationality that had kept his wildness in check had withered at the Hour of Screaming Shadows. If he was not mad, he was as close to that abyss as any sane creature ventured.

  It was not just the defeat of his grand scheme that so unhinged the dwarf. All his life, he had trusted the dark, and the dark had lied to him. He could not think about that betrayal without a greater, more awful question pressing to the fore of his troubled mind: If this much of what he had believed was a lie, how much else was a lie, too? The answer was there, but he did not want to hear it. The dwarf’s was a common enough problem in Sithicus in the wake of its old master’s departure. The nature of the domain had changed with the death knight’s passing, transformed by the White Rose’s magic and the nature of Soth’s original curse. The place that had fostered so many half-truths and deceptions, lost histories and corrupted memories, revealed its new nature in a hundred horrible ways. To those, like Azrael, who had armored themselves in illusions for so long, the transformation of Sithicus was the most harrowing.

  Like everywhere in the domains of dread, grim things lurked in the Sithican shadows. They preyed upon the minds of the weak, whispered tales that opened the portals of madness.

  But in Sithicus, those things in the darkness now spoke the truth.

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