by James Lowder
“Run!” Tanis croaked. He gazed at Soth. The banshees and skeletal warriors were right behind the death knight, and behind them, the shattered main gate. Taking a step backward toward the bronze dragon crouched in the street, the half-elf shouted, “There is nothing you can do against these!”
Lord Soth drew his sword and took a deliberate step toward his foe. At that instant a draconian from the citadel landed in front of Tanis. The half-elf smashed the creature with the pommel of his sword, kicked it hard in the stomach, and leaped over its scaled back and leathery wings.
“The kender!” he yelled to Fireflash.
The dragon took to the air. With an easy elven grace gained from his mother’s people, grace not hampered even by the heavy armor he wore, Tanis trailed Fireflash at a steady run. The other knights scattered and raced off into the nearby alleys.
Revulsion battled a dull self-satisfaction as Soth watched Tanis flee in disgrace. The undead knight had dismounted in order to face the half-elf in accordance with the Measure, the strict code of the Solamnic Knights; in the pages of the Measure it was deemed unfair to battle from horse against an unmounted opponent. Such an honorable act was not unusual for Soth. Although he held the Measure in contempt, he followed it whenever possible, proving that the supposedly honorable men of the Order should not be esteemed for their rigorous principles.
Yet Tanis’s cowardly retreat had surprised even the fallen knight. He had expected the half-elf to fight, or at least to attempt to delay his charge into the heart of the city. The surprise was tempered by the loathing he felt for a man wearing the badges of a Rose Knight who had chosen to flee from battle. Once that armor had symbolized all that was dear to Lord Soth, and seeing someone sully it by cowardice reminded him that he’d expended his life pursuing the phantom of honor. The knighthood may not be the group of pure-hearted paladins that they pretended, but knowledge of their failings was never sweet to the death knight.
Having cleared the street, the skeletal warriors subservient to Soth now gathered around him. After watching the bronze dragon disappear around a building, Tanis following swiftly behind, the death knight turned to his minions. Farther into Palanthas, down the long, straight road, a group of poorly equipped merchants were erecting a barricade against the evil army. Armed with old, battered swords taken from pawn shops or from their places of honor over family hearths, the Palanthians were piling crates and overturned tables in the path of the advancing enemy.
“Those nuisances block the way to the tower,” Soth growled, pointing to the doomed group. “Remove them.”
The skeletal warriors pulled hard on their reins, and their nightmares bolted down the road. At the mounted skeletons’ approach, a few of the merchants scattered, but those who stayed at the barricade fought hard. At first it seemed they might succeed in holding the undead at bay, until one of the banshees joined the fray. As the unquiet spirit raced above the street, her bone chariot rattling fearfully, she brandished her swords of ice. She smote the trees lining the way, trees whose beautiful leaves resembled fine gold lace year round. With each blow, one of the rare trees withered and died.
“Up!” the banshee shrieked to the wyvern pulling her chariot. “Over the barricade.”
Flapping its wings, the wyvern pushed higher into the sky. The great flying lizard barred its yellow fangs and twitched its scorpion’s tail as it drew close to the barricade. Then, with a shriek, the creature grabbed one man from atop the redoubt in its two taloned feet. The banshee in the chariot sliced through another defender. Before the two halves of the man fell to the street, many of the other merchants fled. Those who remained to fight were swiftly overwhelmed by Soth’s minions. The battle was brief and bloody.
Neither complimenting his servants nor even acknowledging them, the death knight mounted his nightmare and rode through the gap they had cleared in the barricade. Most of the skeletal warriors chased the fleeing Palanthians. Others shuffled mindlessly from body to body, beheading the wounded. The banshee stood in her chariot, waiting for her wyvern to finish with the body of a fat fletcher. Though the unquiet spirit had control over the dim-witted dragon-kin, she knew better than to deny it a well-earned feast.
The forebears of these men lined these same streets once and pelted me with garbage on my way to prison, Soth mused as he passed the headless corpses. My vow is now fulfilled. They have been made to pay.
Yet the death knight felt no joy at that realization; like many emotions, joy was denied him by his curse. Anger, hatred, jealousy—those and many other destructive impulses still had power to make Soth’s unbeating heart flare. He could destroy, but never know anything but a dull, ash-gray pleasure from it. Like a tepid glass of water, such a reward did little to slake his thirst for relief from the monotony of unlife.
So it was, under a pall of impotent dissatisfaction, that Soth rode through Palanthas. All along his route draconians were slaughtering people dragged from their hiding places. The victims’ blood colored many a white facade of home and shop bordering the road to the city’s second ward, where the Tower of High Sorcery lay. The feral screams of evil dragons, fighting against warriors mounted on their good-aligned brethren, reverberated all around the city. Blood from one of these battles rained into the street, drawn from some fatally wounded dragon. The eerie shower created pools of gore that evaporated with a hiss under the burning step of Soth’s nightmare.
With his hellish mount’s reins in his mailed fist, the death knight caught a glimpse of the flying citadel. The floating mountain lumbered almost drunkenly across the sky. Though it appeared to be free from attack, the fortress lurched as if it had been stricken. After puzzling over this strange occurrence, he realized that the citadel had stopped and was hovering unsteadily over the Tower of High Sorcery.
With the arrogance of one inured to mortal threats, Soth dismissed the citadel’s odd movement and raced off in the direction of the tower. He found the rest of the city empty of challengers; the few who saw the death knight charging through the streets fled at his advance. Soon Soth saw the avenue widen, then open into the courtyard surrounding the Tower of High Sorcery. The citadel hanging over the ancient structure blotted out the sky overhead, but the darkness that hung around the accursed tower was omnipresent, as was the twisted grove that stood sentinel around it.
Soth urged the nightmare closer to the picket of massive oaks known as Shoikan Grove, but the creature shied back. An intense cold radiated out of the dark trees, making the nightmare’s hooves burn less brightly, its hot breath steam in the air. With a frightened snort, the mount pawed at the stone pavement and reared.
After letting the nightmare retreat a few paces from the Shoikan Grove, Soth dismounted. “Go, then. Return to the infernal flames that spawned you.” Again the nightmare reared, then vanished in a burst of foul-smelling smoke and ash.
As he crossed the empty courtyard to the grove, the death knight studied the ancient structure guarded by the oaks. The Tower of High Sorcery had once been a vaunted seat of magical learning, a place where mages stored their books and underwent the dangerous tests to determine their place in wizardly society. But many years past, when Soth himself had been mortal, the Kingpriest of Istar had launched a crusade against magic; the religious zealot branded sorcery a tool of evil and directed the people of Ansalon against the towers. The wizards destroyed two of the five existing strongholds rather than let the peasants assume control of the secrets they housed, then agreed to retreat to a single tower far from civilization. The tower in Palanthas was supposed to have been abandoned.
On the day the mages planned to leave the Palanthian tower, a wizard of the black robes, a servant of evil, cursed the structure. He swore the tower’s gates would remain closed and its halls empty until the vague prophecy he uttered came true. To seal the curse, he leaped from the tower’s highest balcony onto the spiked fence surrounding it. Instantly the gold and silver gates turned black, and the once-beautiful structure darkened. Now the Tower of High Sorce
ry was a pool of shadow within the radiance of Palanthas; its ice-gray marble stood in stark contrast to the pure white stone that made up the city’s minarets.
The only way to enter the Tower of High Sorcery was through the Shoikan Grove; not even powerful spells of teleportation could gain someone entrance. The twisted oaks that had grown up around the tower housed dreadful supernatural guardians. The grove radiated fear as well. The terror the place inspired was so overwhelming that even kender, whose curiosity almost always overcame their fears, could not pass within the grove without their resolve crumbling.
Such threats held no sway over Soth, and he stepped into the bleak grove as if it were any ordinary wood.
Yet as he moved into the trees, the death knight dimly felt the chill that would have made a mortal shiver uncontrollably. An eternal darkness hung like moss on the grove’s twisted roots and branches, and no wind stirred the ragged, shriveled leaves. Indeed, there was a presence in the grove. Soth recognized the pulsing that permeated the cursed wood: the aura of souls caught in tormented unlife. It was a feeling with which he was quite familiar.
The ground, spongy with decaying leaves and mold-covered from the lack of sunlight, trembled with each silent step. When Soth was surrounded by the tall trees, the trembling stopped. Covered with grime, a pale hand burst from the dirt and reached for Soth’s leg. Another bony hand, then another, pushed through the soft earth to clutch at the death knight. Still more dead hands closed around Soth’s ankles and tried to pull him down.
“You have no cause to bar me, brothers,” the death knight said calmly. The pale, decayed hands hesitated. “I wish to take nothing from the tower that you have been sworn to guard, but I will destroy you if you delay me.”
From inside the ground a voice came weakly, “We know you, Soth, as one of us. What do you seek in the Tower of High Sorcery?”
“The mortal woman—Kitiara Uth Matar—half-sister to the dark mage, Raistlin. She passed through the grove a short time ago, did she not?”
“She attempted to brave the Shoikan Grove,” came the disembodied reply.
“Attempted?” Soth asked, anger edging his voice. “She possesses a black jewel granting her power to pass through your grasps unhindered. I was with her once when she used it against you.”
“The jewel grants her protection… unless she shows fear,” the voice murmured from deep in the ground.
Tensing at the guardian’s implication, Soth snapped, “Where is she?” The hands fell back and withdrew into the spongy earth.
“Surrender her body!” the death knight shouted, furious. His hollow voice echoed through the silent trees.
The oppressive feeling in the grove grew stronger, and a quiet moan of despair floated from deep underground. A single hand pushed through the matted fallen leaves. It held a fragment of night-blue dragonscale armor. “We wounded her, shattered her armor, but we did not claim her body. She is alive, in the tower.”
The death knight stormed toward the iron fence that surrounded the tower. He wrenched the rusted gate open, then forced the rune-covered door that barred his path into the tower itself. Like the guardians of the grove, the shapeless, shadowy things haunting the ancient halls of the Tower of High Sorcery cowered before Soth.
Once inside, the death knight stood at the foot of a long stair that ascended to the tower’s upper floors, its length lit sparsely by globes of feeble magical radiance. The room that held the portal to Takhisis’s domain, the room that had been Kitiara’s goal, lay far above him. Without hesitation, Soth stepped into a large corner of shadow, away from the magical globes. Using a power granted him by his nether-life, the death knight melted completely into the darkness.
A moment later, Soth emerged from a similar shadow that darkened the door to the tower’s laboratory. This was the room that housed the portal. Noting with a dull satisfaction that the wards had not prevented his magical travel within the tower, the death knight pushed the heavy wooden door. Its battered hinges creaked a loud complaint as it swung open.
The outcast elf, Dalamar, gazed at the open door, but at first Soth hovered in the shadows, hidden from sight. The mage sat in an uncomfortable chair, reflexively crumpling, then smoothing his black, rune-covered robes. “No one can enter,” he said softly to an armored man who knelt with his back to the door. The mage’s hand dropped to a parchment scroll in his belt. “The guardians—”
Soth stepped into the room just as the armored man turned to face the door. It was Tanis Half-Elven. “—cannot stop him,” the half-elf said, completing Dalamar’s sentence.
A look of horror came over Tanis’s face at the sight of the death knight. Dalamar smiled grimly and relaxed. “Enter, Lord Soth,” he said. “I’ve been expecting you.”
When the fallen knight did not budge, Dalamar repeated the invitation. Soth remained in the doorway a moment longer, his orange glare locked onto Tanis’s visage. The death knight didn’t care how his foe had come to be in the tower—perhaps he’d flown over Shoikan Grove on the bronze dragon and dropped onto the roof. All that mattered to Soth was that Tanis Half-Elven stood between him and his prize.
Tanis lowered his hand toward his sword, a move that surprised Soth after his earlier cowardice. Dalamar placed slender fingers gently on the half-elf’s arm and said, “Do not interfere, Tanis. He does not care about us. He comes for one thing only.”
Dim candlelight illuminated the laboratory, revealing rows of black-bound spellbooks, ominously hissing vials and beakers, and huge stone tables reserved for larger, more frightening experiments. The portal through which Raistlin had already passed to encounter Takhisis stood on the opposite side of the room, away from Soth. The great circlet of steel was covered in gold and silver runes, and five carved dragons’ heads snarled around its edges. In a corner away from the portal, covered in a cloak, was the object of the death knight’s search. Kitiara! Soth’s undead heart leaped as he crossed the room with forceful steps. He drew back the cloak and knelt beside the corpse.
In death Kitiara Uth Matar appeared as beautiful to Soth as she had in life. Her bright brown eyes were frozen open in an expression of horror. Her night-blue dragonscale armor had been stripped away by the tower’s guardians, and her black, tight-fitting doublet was shredded, revealing her tan skin. The death knight hardly saw the bloody gash in her leg or the long scratches, purple from poison, that the guardians had inflicted. The charred hole burned into her chest, undoubtedly from some magical attack of Dalamar’s, troubled him for only an instant. The wounds mattered little as long as Kitiara’s body remained intact enough to house her revived soul.
The last embers of Kitiara’s mortal life were flickering out, yet her soul still hung over her body. A small, ghostly image of the general writhed in torment, attached to her corpse by a thin, yet brilliant cord of energy. “Let go of this life,” Soth murmured to Kitiara. The cord brightened as the soul clung desperately to mortal life. The cause was not fear, but love.
Soth turned to face his most hated adversary. “Release her to me, Tanis Half-Elven,” he said, his voice filling the laboratory. “Your love binds her to this plane. Give her up.”
The half-elf screwed a look of resolve onto his face and took a step forward. His hand was on the hilt of his sword. Before he could move closer to Soth, Dalamar warned, “He’ll kill you, Tanis. He’ll slay you without hesitation. Let her go to him. After all, I think perhaps he was the only one of us who ever truly understood her.”
The words of the outcast elf fanned the blaze of hatred in Soth’s heart; Kitiara was being kept from him by cowards and lackeys! The death knight’s orange eyes flared. “Understood her?” he rumbled. “Admired her! Like I myself, she was meant to rule, destined to conquer! But she was stronger than I was. She could throw aside love that threatened to chain her down. But for a twist of fate, she would have ruled all of Ansalon!”
Tanis gripped his sword more tightly. “No,” he said softly.
Dalamar grasped the half-elf's wrist an
d met his gaze. “She never loved you, Tanis,” he said without emotion. “She used you as she used us all, even him.” As Dalamar glanced toward Soth, Tanis started to speak. The dark elf cut him off. “She used you to the end, Half-Elven. Even now, she reaches from beyond, hoping you will save her.”
As Soth grasped his own sword, ready to strike Tanis down, the half-elf's face went slack. It was as if he had been granted a vision of Kitiara’s selfish soul. Tanis met the death knight’s fiery gaze as he released his grip on his sword. Lord Soth considered killing the half-elf anyway, just for giving Kitiara up without a fight; such a lapse proved again to Soth how unfit Tanis was to wear the armor of a Knight of the Rose.
He will have to live with this cowardice, the death knight decided as he turned to retrieve Kitiara’s corpse.
Her soul was gone.
Though Soth had hoped Kitiara would not try to escape him, he had foreseen this possibility long ago. Even as the death knight gathered her corpse up in Tanis’s bloodstained cloak, his seneschal journeyed across the Abyss to the domain of Takhisis. There the ghostly servant would capture the highlord’s soul and return it to Soth’s home.
Stepping into a shadowed corner of the laboratory, the body in his arms, Soth called a spell to mind that would transport him to his castle. With a single word, he opened a dark chasm at his feet. The void belched a blast of icy air into the room. With one withering glance at Tanis Half-Elven, who had shielded his face from the numbing cold, the death knight stepped into the gate and disappeared from the Tower of High Sorcery.
• • •
The dusty plains stretched infinitely in all directions, parched by a hell-born vermilion sun that never set, never moved in the sky. Siroccos that smelled of burned flesh pushed spinning clouds of grit across the blasted landscape. Occasionally these whirlwinds would merge into a shrieking tornado and reach up into the air. Such disturbances never lasted long. The sun beat them down with the same brooding might it used to oppress everything entering the domain of Pazunia.