Spectre Of The Black Rose

by James Lowder

  The skeletal warriors shuffled out to the undead horses already milling in the courtyard. Inza called out to Soth as he was about to follow them. "Surely a coward such as Azrael would not place himself in harm's way."

  "Of course not. He is hiding somewhere, probably at the Lake of Sounds, eavesdropping on the fight he should be leading."

  "The Lake of Sounds!" Inza exclaimed. "If he and the Rose know about that place then the battle is already lost!"

  "What are you saying?"

  "The salt shadows that killed my mother are spawned from that place," Inza explained frantically, "but they are the least of its dangers. There are rituals using the lake's water that could grant someone control over all the shadows in Sithicus."

  Soth did not reply. Instead he drew his sword and stepped into the darkness near the throne. An instant later he returned. His orange eyes blazed in fury. The cold radiating from him made Inza gasp at its intensity. "The way is blocked. He has sealed the area around the mine to me."

  "They have begun!" Inza moaned. "You only have a few hours. They'll try to complete the rite late in the afternoon, when the day's shadows are longest."

  "They cannot bar me from the mine for long," Soth rumbled, already heading back to the shadows.

  "There is some small magic I can perform," Inza shouted after him. "It will help shield the keep from whatever dark sorcery Azrael and the Rose conjure."

  "Protect yourself however you see fit," Soth replied, even as he vanished once more into the darkness.

  The death knight did not see Inza throw open her wooden trunk, did not glimpse the large black bottle, swaddled like an infant, that rested within. However, he felt a shiver of apprehension as he emerged from the shadow of a massive outcropping on the road just outside Veidrava.

  The death knight strode boldly into the open. As he marched toward the mine, his own shadow ranged beside him. He could not help but glance now and then at the wavering image. There was power in such things as shadows, he knew, as there was in the true names of plants and animals. Though a thing of fell sorcery himself, Soth disliked such magic. It seemed cowardly somehow, the stuff of assassins, not warriors.

  He mused upon that subject even as he passed through the abandoned mining camp, which already looked as if it had been that way for a decade. Rats scurried incautiously between the hovels. Insects clustered on the window sills. Carrion crows searched for scraps on two corpses hanging at the camp's crossroads. They eyed Soth warily as he passed, trying to decide if he was a rival for the few bits of gristle left on the well-picked bodies.

  The anger that had hurried the death knight from Nedragaard had diminished somewhat by the time he passed Ambrose's store. Rage had resolved into a cold determination. The mine's towers lay ahead, their shadows reaching down the hill to beckon him. If Inza was correct, his enemies would attempt the rite soon, before the shadows began to merge. Soth did not hurry his stride. He was lord of this domain. They could not escape him.

  Even when he encountered the invisible wall, the same barrier that had barred him from entering the mine directly from Nedragaard, he maintained his grim calm. With his ancient sword he battered the unseen shield. Blow after blow fell upon the wall. Each slash produced a shower of sparks and left a blue-white scar in the air. The rifts healed swiftly, but Soth followed each strike with another and another. Soon the hillside trembled with a chest-rattling thrum, the sound of the mystic wards buckling before Soth's onslaught.

  Another, more terrible sound rang out before the wall collapsed-the triple-toned shriek of Nedragaard's banshees. Their keening split the air over Veidrava as they materialized beside Lord Soth. Their once-beautiful elven faces were contorted with an awful mixture of anguish and glee.

  "Betrayed!" the trio of the unquiet spirits howled.

  "Deceived," Leedara screamed.

  Marantha interposed herself between Soth and the unseen wall. "Plundered." she added.

  A wide grin full of obscene mirth curled Gisela's phantasmal lips. "Lord Loren Soth," she said at last. "Lord Cuckold of Nedragaard Keep."

  The words were familiar, almost identical to those the elf maids had used all those years ago to alert Soth to the infidelity of his wife, Isolde. The death knight paused in his assault on the barrier only long enough to say, "Begone. This is no time to replay scenes long grown stale. I have no mistress to cuckold me."

  "This outrage is new," said Leedara, "but it is as old as your damnation."

  "You have let a viper into your home," Marantha whispered. "She has warded the place against your servants."

  -"What?" Soth rumbled.

  "While your knights and our sisters sallied against the besiegers, the gypsy witch erected wards that bar us from our home," Gisela said. She wove a pattern around the death knight, taunting him. "She barred you from your home, too, no doubt, but she will not be lonely."

  "The halls of the keep will be filled with life," noted Leedara.

  "She has thrown open the doors to the enemy," Marantha explained, "even as she bars us from entering. The keep is in their hands."

  The fire that blazed to life within Soth's breast was as old as it was familiar. The fury consumed all, conquered all. Reason and logic collapsed before it. Whatever fragile shreds of mercy remained in his unbeating heart scorched and withered. "By my honor I kept her alive," the death knight said. "By my honor I will see Inza Magdova dead a thousand times for each affront she has heaped upon me."

  Lord Soth turned away from the mine. He did not doubt that Azrael lurked there or that the dwarf intended some malefic rite. He did not even doubt that the ritual could grant the traitor power over all the shadows in Sithicus. Soth himself had seen the Lake of Sounds and felt the potency of its waters. None of that mattered. Vengeance was all.

  As the death knight vanished into the shadows, the banshees trailing in his wake, Ganelon crept from his hiding place behind a crowd of discarded barrels. He had spotted Lord Soth from Ambrose's store, where he had gone to look for some sign of his old friends. For a time, as he watched the death knight hammer at the unseen barrier, his heart had soared. Here, perhaps, was an ally, someone more worthy to stand against Azrael. But it was not to be. This task was to be his alone.

  The soft clatter of his leg brace seemed as loud as the banshees' keening as Ganelon made his way up the now-silent hill. He reached the spot in the road where Soth had stood. The air still smelled of heated steel and something else, a salt tang far stronger than the usual fetor that hung over the mine. Ganelon reached forward with one hand. He expected to encounter whatever invisible wall had barred Soth's way. Instead he found a minor resistance, as if the air had been transmuted to cold, still water. He closed his eyes and stepped through.

  As he crossed the barrier, a line appeared on the ground below him. It was the uneven, dark splash made by water spilled onto dry earth, and it encircled the entire hilltop. When Ganelon reached down to touch the dark line, it retreated from his fingers. The thin black band squirmed like a serpent, the ripples flowing along its length in both directions until they disappeared. Finally, when it could retreat no farther, the line broke. It flared blue-white for an instant before dissipating.

  "A fine trick," someone called from up the hill. "You must teach it to me."

  Ganelon recognized that melodious voice and hurried to find the speaker. In the shadow of the Engine House, in a small circle cleared amongst the debris of the shattered wall, he found him.

  The Bloody Cobbler struggled in vain to push himself up from the dirt. Gore spattered his ripped and tattered clothes. Most of it now was from his own wounds. His fingers had been broken, the flesh stripped from his chest. Clumps of his fair hair lay upon the ground alongside the blood-soaked tools of his trade. The silver snips and needles and knives had all been bent or broken.

  As the Cobbler looked up at Ganelon, it appeared for an instant as if he had no face, only a mass of pulped flesh.

  Tm here to stop him," Ganelon said simply.

&n
bsp; "I know the path you walk," the Cobbler replied through swollen lips.

  "Of course you do," Ganelon said. He reached out to help the Cobbler to his feet and felt that same sensation of cold, still water. There were wards here, too, tight around the Cobbler to keep him from escaping. When the line appeared in the dirt, he reached down and broke it.

  " 'No one who has died may cross it,' " the Cobbler repeated in a singsong voice. " 'No one who is merely alive may break it,' Azrael used to taunt me with that during our little . . . chats. He set up the wards so not even he could break them." He wiped the gore from his face with his cloak. The damage was not as great as it had seemed. "I'm certain he never imagined there was someone who could."

  Ganelon looked down at his feet. The dead man's soles made him more than "merely" alive but not truly dead.

  The Cobbler sat up. "I'd stitch myself up if I had time," he said absently. He lifted one of his needles from the ground, frowned at its sorry state. "There's little of that left for any of us, though."

  "Then, it's over," Ganelon said.

  The Cobbler gestured toward the late afternoon sky, just beginning to dim with the first hints of twilight. "No," he said. "We are finally ready to begin."

  Ganelon followed the Cobbler's crooked finger with his eyes. There, marring the boundless blue overhead, hung a small crimson smudge. A red moon, Ganelon realized after a moment.

  "They made it back to the Rose," the Cobbler offered. "Helain and the others."

  "Is she-?"

  "The Beast kept his word." The Cobbler laughed brightly. "As if he could even imagine breaking it! No, Helain's madness has been lifted."

  As the Cobbler stood, it was clear to Ganelon that his wounds were already healing. Even his clothes seemed to be mending themselves. The pale-clad man extended a hand to Ganelon. In it he held a silver knife, the least damaged of his tools. "Take it," he said. "I would stay to help you, but-"

  "Your path leads elsewhere," Ganelon concluded. He gratefully took the blade and tucked it into the small duffel he carried slung over one shoulder. "After all," the young man added cryptically, "he needs you."

  The comment baffled the Cobbler for an instant. Then he nodded gravely; the Invidian spy had asked him his identity just before he died. Ganelon share that knowledge.

  With a smile and a flourish of his broad-brimmed hat, the Bloody Cobbler disappeared into the Engine House's lengthening shadow.

  As he made his way to the mine entrance, Ganelon thought about the reunion that awaited the Cobbler, about the reunion he imagined for himself and Helain. It seemed unlikely, but then, so many impossibilities had come true in the past few weeks he could not let the hope die. Even now, a second new moon struggled to be seen in the sky overhead, one as red as the rose Helain had given him when last they parted.

  Ganelon carefully dug the bloom from his duffel. He'd armored it in a tin cup to keep it safe, but he saw now that the effort was wasted. The crimson petals had, like all others of their kind kept too long on Sithican soil, turned black.

  He let the wilted rose slip from his grasp. After a moment, he followed it into the pit.

  Sixteen

  Ganelon knew by the screams that he was headed in the right direction.

  The shrieks and moans welled up from deep in the pit, much farther down that he'd ever gone. There were scores of abandoned tunnels in the depths of Veidrava, some that had been flooded, others that had stopped yielding enough salt to be worthwhile. One of those deserted shafts supposedly housed a chapel. Ganelon knew almost from the moment he'd begun the long, tedious process of lowering himself from level to level with emergency ropes that the chapel was his destination.

  He came at last to the tunnel from which the unearthly sounds originated. Human voices were not making the clamor, of that Ganelon was certain. He'd heard the cries of the dead and damned enough in the past few days to recognize them now. He was not surprised to find the uncanny sounds so close to the place he'd called home. Rather, he marveled that he'd been so blind to it before.

  Cautiously, he started down the tunnel. Before long, a faint blue glow suffused the rubble-strewn passage, and Ganelon extinguished the lantern he'd taken from the surface. He left it, still smoking, in an empty niche hewn into the wall.

  Ganelon did not notice the flowers carved around the niche, barely recognized the elaborate statuary of hounds and harts and other creatures that stood to either side of him as the tunnel opened into a broad hallway. The ceiling, which reflected the light of the torches in the hall as a sky-blue glow, scarcely drew his eye. Once the workmanship of these objects would have filled him with wonder. Now he only saw them as places to conceal himself from his enemies or places from which those enemies might strike at him.

  The weird cries echoed all around Ganelon as he crept from statue to statue, ever closer to the fire-lit room at the hallway's end. Through the open arch, he glimpsed shadows wheeling across the walls. He expected to find a hundred men in there, all dancing in anticipation of the grim rite Azrael intended to perform. When he got close enough to get a better look at the room itself, though, at the melted benches and the scarred altar, Ganelon realized that these shadows had no mortal anchors. They were darkness incarnate, salt shadows, and they were celebrating the strife to come.

  It was only their sheer number, the combined clamor of hiss upon hiss that made the shadows' voices heard. That same quality made it impossible for any of them to speak above the din or to raise a discernible alarm when Ganelon stepped into the Black Chapel.

  The floor was dark with massing salt shadows, but Ganelon's footfalls sent them splashing back like so much fetid water. As in the Vistani camp, the lost souls recoiled from the dead flesh on his feet. They whirled about the vaulted room, curling over the repulsive statues lurking in the corners. In some places the most agitated shadows forced their bodies off the floor. They scurried toward Ganelon like misshapen spiders. Yet they could not bring themselves to envelop his death-tainted flesh.

  The altar stood ready for Azrael's ceremony. A black cloth covered the stained and profaned block, while a chalice carved of ebony stood at its center. Around the cup were arranged bits of plants and animals. Ganelon opened the small bag of poppy seeds Malocchio Aderre had given him. Carefully he emptied a few into the cup, then secreted others among the bits of greenery and grue. He had returned the bag to his duffel and was considering what to do with the large vat that stood before the altar when a familiar voice made him stop short.

  "What are you doing here?" asked Ambrose.

  Ganelon turned to find the pudgy shopkeep standing in the mouth of a rough-hewn tunnel, which led from the chapel deeper into the earth. His face was pale, his eyes devoid of any of the good humor that had once shone in them. "What are you doing here?" Ambrose repeated.

  As Ganelon started forward, arms outstretched to embrace his old friend, he noticed the shadows teeming at the shopkeep's feet. The darkness slithered up Ambrose's legs and reached out with tendrils to caress him. "You've been touched by Death," Ambrose said in a voice only vaguely like the one Ganelon remembered so fondly. "I can smell it on you."

  "What happened?" the young man asked. A fist of grief closed around his heart at the sight of his friend so changed, so defiled. "How-?"

  "I claimed this body a long time ago," the thing within Ambrose said. "It just took me some time to drown the last bits of that fat slob's personality. He lusted after Helain, you know." "No. I don't believe it."

  A vapid smile quirked Ambrose's mouth. "It doesn't matter what you believe. He lusted after her all the same. I tried to goad him on-Helain would have been quite a conquest-but he was too cowardly to let me guide him."

  "You can't even tell love from lust," Ganelon said coldly. "No wonder Ambrose kept you at bay for so long."

  The youth reached into his duffel for the crystal orb. Before he could close his fingers around it, Ambrose was at his side. The shopkeep's quickness startled the young man, as did the savagery of his
attack. The bag slipped from Ganelon's grasp as the blows began to fall. Soon he was on the chapel floor beside it, curled tight against the relentless hail of punches and kicks.

  "What's going on here?" Azrael snarled as he emerged from the tunnel. In his wake came Kern and Ogier. The two men carried a massive bucket filled to the brim with water from the Lake of Sounds.

  "A spy," Ambrose said. "I don't know who sent him."

  Azrael took one look at the leg brace and snarled, "He's Malocchio Aderre's man, but he's supposed to be dead." With his iron-shod boot, the dwarf rolled Ganelon over. "Wait," he said when he saw Ganelon's face. "This fellow used to work at the store, didn't he? He's no spy."

  "Yes, he's from the mine, but the shadows won't touch him," Ambrose noted. "There's something strange going on."

  "It doesn't matter what he is or why he's here," Azrael said. "It's too late for him to stop the ceremony, and that's all that matters." He motioned to Kern and Ogier, who had just finished emptying the huge bucket into the vat before the altar. "Keep him out of the way."

  To Ganelon, supported by Kern and Ogier, much of the ceremony was a blur of dark shapes and flashes of light seen through a haze of pain. Azrael chanted for what seemed like hours. The words burned in the air as he spoke them, then floated down to the vat' of black water. They extinguished one by one with a hiss that was echoed by the salt shadows.

  As the last of the words drowned, the water began to churn. The salt shadows eagerly circled the vat. The stinking liquid followed their lead, spinning until a whirlpool formed in its center. At last, Azrael raised the ebon chalice. Ganelon gritted his teeth in anticipation; he said a silent prayer that he'd put enough poppy seeds there to kill the werebeast outright.

  Azrael overturned the cup. The poppy seeds scattered onto the chapel floor, unnoticed by the dwarf or his minions. The sight struck Ganelon like a blow to the gut. He bowed his head. His ragged sigh carried with it the last of his flagging hope.