Knight of the Black Rose

ONE

With each strike of its burning hooves, Lord Soth’s monstrous steed left flaming tracks on the arrow-straight streets of Palanthas’s New City. The creature was a nightmare, a denizen of Hades that evil beings such as the undead knight could summon for use in battle. One look at its coat of most profound black, eyes of sulphurous red, and nostrils brimming with orange flame revealed the steed’s unearthly origin.

Lord Soth was unconcerned with his mount’s reputation for treachery. His mind was wrapped around thoughts of his own traitorous plans.

The death knight served as vanguard for the armies of the dragon highlord, Kitiara Uth Matar, who coveted the city of Palanthas for a single magical building sheltered within its walls. In the Tower of High Sorcery, near the city’s heart, lay a portal to the Abyss, and through this portal Kitiara’s power-mad half-brother Raistlin had ventured to confront the evil goddess Takhisis. The dragon highlord planned to raze Palanthas to reach the tower. From it she would present the defeated city to whomever emerged victorious from the portal; Soth cared for none of this. He wanted Kitiara, preferably dead.

Though he now led the armies of Highlord Kitiara, the death knight had warned Palanthas of her coming. Soth knew the Palanthians were not powerful enough to stop the evil troops, but the guardian of the tower had magic enough to bring Kitiara low. After retrieving her corpse and trapping her soul, Soth planned to abandon the fight and return to Dargaard Keep. In the shelter of that hellish place, he could perform a rite that would make the highlord his unliving companion for all eternity.

Soth banished these thoughts as he drew near the twin minarets that framed the main gate. The death knight could see scores of men, some armored, others clad only in cloth, lining the ancient wall. Their gazes were locked on the flying citadel that had just dropped from the clouds and now moved steadily over New City. As Soth stopped before the gate, many turned in horror toward the undead herald come to deliver the attacking dragon highlord’s demands.

“Lord of Palanthas,” he called, his hollow voice echoing from the walls. When the noble Lord Amothus moved to the fore on the battlements, the death knight continued. “Surrender your city to Lord Kitiara. Give up to her the keys to the Tower of High Sorcery, name her ruler of Palanthas, and she will allow you to continue to live in peace. Your city will be spared destruction.”

A pause followed in which the soldiers around Lord Amothus evidenced panic. Though frightened himself, Amothus ran a hand through his thinning hair and glanced with forced casualness at the death knight, then at the flying citadel approaching in the sky.

Lord Soth sat astride the nightmare, clad in ancient armor. The fire that had taken his life had also blasted the mail and obscured its intricate carvings of kingfishers and roses. The lone image still visible-a rose on the breastplate, charred black-had become the dead man’s symbol.

A flowing cape of royal purple waved in the breeze behind Soth like a ghostly banner of challenge. From his helmet, his eyes glowed with an orange fire of their own. He sat stiffly in the saddle, one mailed fist gripping the reins. His other hand rested on the hilt of his sword, a blade dark with the blood of hundreds of men. As the citadel passed overhead, a shadow covered the death knight and he faded from view slightly, as if the darkness welcomed and engulfed him as part of itself.

The flying citadel was a masterpiece of evil sorcery. A dark-stoned castle rested on a mammoth rock, which was itself surrounded by boiling, magical clouds. The shock of being wrenched from the earth had toppled a few of the keep’s walls, but the citadel remained intact enough to house an army of foul creatures. And as the citadel came close to the walls protecting Palanthas’s Old City, evil dragons dropped from the clouds. They flew in looping, chaotic patterns around the fortress as they awaited the order to attack. Even now evil creatures lined the edge of the rock, waiting to drop into battle. Formations of good bronze dragons sped into the air and clashed in defense of Palanthas with the blue and black swarm. The great dragons dove through the sky at terrible speeds, their screeches resounding through the almost-silent streets.

“Take this message to your dragon highlord,” Amothus said at last, forcing steel into his voice. “Palanthas has lived in peace and beauty for many centuries, but we will buy neither peace nor beauty at the price of our freedom.”

The citadel was even then gliding over the wall surrounding Old City as Lord Soth shouted his reply. “Then buy them at the price of your lives!”

Softly the fallen knight uttered a magical command. From the darkness around him there appeared thirteen skeletal warriors, all mounted, like their lord, astride nightmares. Behind them banshees from Dargaard Keep rode low over the ground in chariots wrought of human bone. Wyverns pulled the ghastly chariots, but it was not those broad-winged, lesser dragon-kin that thrust fear into the Palanthians’ hearts. The banshees were wailing and swinging swords of ice as they circled before the gate. It was the sound of their shrill cries that froze the souls of men on the battlements.

Again Soth spoke a word of magic, pointing a gauntleted hand at the massive gate before him. A gorgeous pattern of frost spread like lace across the iron bands that held the gate together. The frost rapidly grew thicker and thicker until it covered the entire gate. At another command from Soth, the frozen gate shattered.

Faintly the death knight heard the frantic cries of the city’s defenders as he rushed forward, his skeletal warriors and banshees trailing in his wake.

“The gods of Good save us!” one man shouted.

Another soldier fired an arrow at the undead warriors. “Stop them! By the Oath and the Measure, we can’t let the monsters inside!”

This last exclamation-uttered by a Knight of Solamnia-caught Soth’s attention, but only momentarily. The knight’s words and the various other cries were drowned out by horrified gasps as the army began to plummet from the floating citadel onto the walls and into the city. Their leathery wings spread out to slow their fall, draconians leaped by the hundreds from the fortress. The creatures looked in many ways like men, but their flesh was reptilian and their hands and feet savagely clawed. As they lowered, the draconians shouted out their battle cries. Inhuman, lisping voices swore allegiance to Highlord Kitiara and Takhisis, the dark goddess she served. Other draconians called out for human blood and licked their lips with long, snaking tongues.

One such creature landed next to Soth as he entered Palanthas’s Old City for the first time in three and a half centuries. The draconian hit the ground next to the death knight’s horrible steed and cringed in fear at the demonic horse and its inhuman rider. Even the lizardlike soldier, with its tough, scaly skin, felt the cold radiating from Soth. Like the human defenders of the proud city, the draconian fled before the fallen knight.

“Kitiara is planning to race to the Tower of High Sorcery on her dragon once the battle begins. Kill everyone standing between us and the tower,” the death knight said. Magic carried his words to the skeletal warriors and banshees, even over the din of battle.

The undead minions began their slaughter, but Soth’s attention was drawn to the defensive line forming far down the street. In the middle of the broad, stone-paved way was a group of mounted Solamnic Knights, waiting for Lord Soth and his undead warriors. The assembled Knights of the Rose interested the death knight only marginally, however. His attention was drawn to their leader.

Tanis Half-Elven.

Lord Soth headed straight for Tanis. The death knight had faced the heroic half-elf before, and Tanis had survived the conflict through luck-or so Soth believed. Then the half-elf had killed the dragon highlord Ariakas and taken the mighty Crown of Power from the body, stealing the artifact out of Soth’s very grasp. But that defeat had little to do with the overwhelming hatred the death knight felt for the young hero. Tanis had been one of Kitiara’s many lovers, and the half-elf held a powerful influence over the ruthless general.

Now, by the armor Tanis wore, it seemed the Knights of Solamnia had granted him some honorary rank for his help in defending Palanthas. Soth scoffed at the sight of the half-breed wearing the armor of a knight; in his day, the Order would not have allowed such a travesty. Tanis had surely never faced the necessary tests for advancement. He had proved neither himself nor his family worthy of such ranking. Smiling foully, Soth told himself that he would prove the half-elf unworthy in battle before the day was through.

The death knight’s eyes blazed as he watched a small figure leap at Tanis. A kender, one of the much-maligned, mischievous race of beings known for their penchant for “borrowing” things not their own, clung to the half-elf like a sorrowful wife at her husband’s departing. After a brief struggle, Tanis caught the kender around the waist and dumped him unceremoniously out of harm’s way. As the child-sized kender landed, Soth recognized him as Tasslehoff Burrfoot, one of the half-elf’s longtime companions.

“Tanis!” the kender wailed from the mouth of a nearby alley, “you can’t go out there! You’re going to die. I know!”

The half-elf glanced once at the kender, then ran back to the knights. “Fireflash!” he shouted, looking to the sky. With an audible rush of wind, a young bronze dragon swooped out of the air and landed in the broad street next to Tanis. Close at hand, the other knights’ chargers whinnied and shied away from the good dragon.

From the alley, the kender ran a few steps down the street, his blue leggings pumping frantically. He stopped, then screamed, “Tanis! You can’t fight Lord Soth without the bracelet!”

Bracelet? The death knight pondered the kender’s words for an instant, then he concluded that Tasslehoff must be referring to some magical trinket meant to aid Tanis against the undead. “Imposter,” Soth murmured maliciously. “No real knight would ever use wizardry in a duel of honor.”

The death knight was close enough now to see that the half-elf wore the insignias of a Knight of the Rose on his armor. At last, one of the mounted riders pointed at Soth and called his commander’s name. Tanis turned, his brown-red beard framing a frightened scowl. His gaze met the flaming orbs glowing from Soth’s helmet, and an expression of fear spread across his tanned face. The death knight reined in the nightmare and slowly dismounted.

“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 Sorcery 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 and 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.

“Forty-nine thousand and thirty-eight. Forty-nine thousand and thirty-nine.”

A lone being trudged across the wasteland, his shoulders hunched, his head cast down. Caradoc, for that was the poor soul’s name, did not need to lift his eyes to know that spread around him was an endless plain of dust. He had been walking for hours, perhaps days, through this netherworld that served as the threshold to the Abyss. Only three things broke the monotony of the place, and none of them were particularly welcome diversions.

Far from Caradoc, almost at the horizon, the river Styx crawled sullenly across Pazunia. Its banks were as treacherous as the rest of the land, for the river was by nature a thief, not a benefactor. Simply touching water drawn from the Styx robbed a man of all memory, and its swift currents had swept many a traveler in the netherworld to his doom.

“Forty-nine thousand and fifty-four.” Caradoc put his hand to his forehead. “No, wait. Forty-nine thousand and forty — four.”

Weird fortresses wrought of iron jutted from the dead earth in places, too. These were the forward outposts of the most powerful tanar’ri lords that dwelt in the six hundred and sixty-six layers of the Abyss, camps from which they could launch forays into the world of mortals. Horrifying guardians stood watch over these fortresses, protecting them from fiends serving rival tanar’ri lords. Still, attacks were frequent. Sounds from these bloody battles-metal ringing against metal, shrieks of the wounded fiends, and curses vile beyond belief-carried on the wind in Pazunia. Luckily for Caradoc, the fiends involved in the conflicts had little interest in a single traveler on the dusty plains, especially one who was already dead.

“Forty-nine thousand and sixty-eight,” he murmured kicking a small stone in his path.

Glancing down at his high black leather boots, Caradoc shook his head in disgust. The source of his unhappiness was neither Pazunia’s heat nor its stench, but the state of his clothing. His boots had kept their shine for the three and a half centuries he’d been dead. Now they were dull and covered with grit. The heels were worn to nothing from the long march. Caradoc felt his silk doublet plastered to his sweat-soaked back and shook his head again. No doubt it would be stained when he left the Abyss and went back to Krynn.

Before he counted his next step aloud, Caradoc straightened his tunic and brushed off his boots. Then he paused and squinted into the distance. “I should be close,” he said, if only to hear his own once-human voice.

The weary traveler expected to see a hole yawning ahead in the ground, but nothing out of the ordinary was evident. Gaping portals in the ground were a regular feature of the landscape, the third type of landmark that broke the monotony of Pazunia. Caradoc had passed dozens, perhaps hundreds of such holes on his trek. Some leaked thin mist onto the plain. Others spewed forth tortured, anguished screams. Those portals had been unwelcome because they did not lead to the level of the Abyss where Caradoc’s business awaited him.

“Forty-nine thousand and sixty-nine,” he sighed and started off again. He did not hurry. Neither did he cease his counting. Lord Soth, his master, had given clear instructions about that. Ten thousand steady paces should be named for each head of a chromatic dragon, Caradoc repeated to himself. Only then would he stand before the portal that snaked down to Takhisis’s domain.

At last he announced, “Fifty thousand paces.”

As he named the last of the steps he had been ordered to make across the plains, he stopped. No portal stood before him. Caradoc shielded his eyes against the sun and looked into the sky. Perhaps the portal lay above the ground, for such things were not unheard of in Pazunia.

Nothing.

Caradoc stood in utter consternation. The wind gusting around him sounded like mournful moans, and the dust hissed like a dying man’s last breath.

“Fifty thousand,” he repeated. “Where’s the damnable portal?” He grabbed the chain around his neck, pulling the medallion of his office from under his doublet. A twisted rose-once red, now dark with rust-shone on the badge. “I am seneschal to Soth of Dargaard Keep. I seek entrance to the domain of the Queen of Darkness.”

Without warning, the parched plain cracked open, swallowing Caradoc. For a time he was lost in darkness, falling through a lightless void, but that soon passed. With dreamlike slowness, he floated past level after level of the Abyss. The sensation of flying was not so strange to him. The sights, smells, and sounds assailing him most certainly were.

A place of ice followed the layer of absolute darkness. Frozen rain slashed across the air, borne on bone-chilling gales. Cracked floes of ice stretched to the horizon, broken now and then by huge pillars of snow-encrusted rock. The wind howled and curled around the monoliths, making them as smooth as the ice at their feet. The outcroppings stirred. A pair of cold blue eyes slowly opened on each pillar, and the malevolent gazes followed Caradoc as he passed to the next level.

On a plain of rusting steel two armies were arrayed. They met at a vast front where bodies and parts of bodies tore at one another. The air was filled by a low, sickening moan of despair, and the sharp smell of rusted metal overpowered even the stink of blood and decaying flesh on the battlefield.

A multitude of gaunt, squat creatures with rubbery bodies massed on one side of the field. Beings twice their size herded the squat creatures toward the fighting. These larger tanar’ri appeared as giant snakes from the waist down, but they had the faces, shoulders, and breasts of human women. There the similarity ended, though, for they brandished razor-bladed weapons with each of their six arms.

Across the field of metal massed an army of equal proportion. Caradoc shivered as he recognized these pathetic creatures as manes. Mortals who spread chaos and evil while they lived became such things in the afterlife. Their skin was pale white, bloated like corpses left in a fetid river, and tiny carrion-eaters crawled over them. Vacant white eyes staring ahead, the manes were herded toward their enemies by a monstrous general. This towering tanar’ri had deep, dark red skin and wings made of uneven, scabrous scales. Its yellowed fangs dripped venom as it shouted commands. In one hand the general waved a whip with twenty thorny tails, in the other a sword of lightning.

Caradoc knew that, had his evil deeds in life been more heinous than the murder of Lord Soth’s first wife, he might now be part of that army. For the first time in three hundred and fifty years, he was glad he was damned to spend eternity as a ghost on Krynn. He closed his eyes and moved on.

Through places of darkness and places of light he passed, domains of fire, of air, of water. Once Caradoc entered a hot, humid realm. At first it was too dark to see anything, then his eyes adjusted. The world was filled with dripping, slimy fungus. Mushrooms climbed a thousand feet into the murky air, trailing ropes of leprous white vegetation. Puddles of gray slime oozed along the spongy floor, and purple masses sent forth long, groping tendrils. The realm was silent, but the decay filled Caradoc’s nose and mouth. Worst of all was the sense that some magnificent but perpetually evil power was watching from the silence. Though Caradoc never saw a glimmer in the murk, he knew some great being had watched him pass.

At last the seneschal Ceased his descent. He stood upon the roof of a shattered temple, its columns broken, its walls blackened from fire. The temple had once been the home of the Kingpriest of Istar on Krynn; now, Takhisis, the Queen of Darkness, used this fragment of the building as a portal to Krynn itself. From the temple she worked to defeat all that was good in the world of mortals. The irony of that was not lost on Caradoc; the kingpriest had wanted desperately to destroy all evil. Now his temple was a base for the most malevolent of gods.

“Perhaps the kingpriest is somewhere nearby, too,” Caradoc mused as he studied his surroundings.

Around the temple a mass of lost souls thronged, pushing to get close to the building. “Dragonqueen!” the masses cried. “We are your faithful. Let us aid you!”

Caradoc knew Takhisis would not answer, not just then, anyway. As Lord Soth had told him before his journey to the Abyss started, a mortal mage from Krynn was planning to challenge Takhisis in her own domain. Such a conflict was unprecedented; few mortals had power enough to contest a god in her home plane, especially one as mighty as Takhisis. Still, the conflict would divert the Dark Queen’s attention just long enough for Caradoc to locate the soul of a newly arrived woman named Kitiara Uth Matar.

He smiled in anticipation. Once he had recovered the soul and brought it to Dargaard Keep, Lord Soth would reward him. The death knight was a powerful servant of the evil gods, and he could petition Chemosh, Lord of the Undead, to revoke Caradoc’s curse. He could be alive once more. At least that was what Soth had promised.

A sudden thought awoke in Caradoc’s mind. What will I do if Soth refuses to honor the bargain? After a moment of contemplation, the smile returned to his face. There were ways to force the death knight into keeping his word.

The seneschal took his medal of office in his hands. “Reveal to me the shade of Highlord Kitiara,” Caradoc said.

Soft magical light radiated from the black rose on the medal’s front. The seneschal held the disk before him, and a sliver of radiance lanced out into the throng before the temple, revealing the woman he sought.