Knight of the Black Rose

SEVEN

The sound of the count’s voice flushed a rat from its hiding place on the landing that spread out just ahead of the vampire and the death knight. The bloated, mangy creature squinted at the pair in the stairwell. Its beady eyes shone red in the faint light from Strahd’s candelabra.

“Ah,” the count said, genuinely pleased, “you do your job well.”

After a long, wavering squeal, the rat waddled ponderously to a crack in the masonry. Strahd, satisfied with the report he’d just received, continued walking into a small hallway off the landing. “The rats are but one of the things that guard my home,” he said to Lord Soth casually.

Soth had become increasingly aware of quiet, steady sobbing as he followed Strahd. At first it seemed like one voice, but as they moved through the castle he realized it was people crying out together.

The noise emanated from the corridor that branched to Soth’s left. Pools of putrid water fouled its floor, and black beetles the size of the pommel on the death knight’s sword scurried everywhere. From behind the decaying wooden doors lining both sides of the hall, weeping and pleading melded into one mournful chorus.

These were the first signs of human life the fallen knight had detected in his tour through Castle Ravenloft. The place was huge but seemingly as bereft of people as Soth’s own keep. If Dargaard had its collection of banshees and skeletal warriors, Strahd’s keep was home mostly to rats and spiders and very little else-at least little that the death knight had seen.

In all, the place struck Soth as a monument to decay. Paintings and statues filled many rooms, but all the artwork had been ravaged by time. Strahd had pointed out the keep’s chapel, a huge room that once had housed a magnificent collection of stained glass windows. Now the windows were broken or boarded over. The chapel itself was littered with shattered benches, its altar unused.

Strahd looked behind him and saw his guest staring into the hallway that contained his larder. The vampire frowned and unlocked the iron-braced door before him. “This way, if you please, Lord Soth. I want you to meet a man who holds information you’ll find most intriguing.” The death knight forced his attention away from the pleading of Strahd’s victims and followed his host into a large room. The door closed with a resounding thud.

“Good evening, Ambassador Pargat,” the vampire lord said. He held his candelabra up high, but its light was too feeble to illuminate the entire room. “I have brought you a visitor.”

Wary of treachery, Soth tensed and gripped the hilt of his sword. There was no telling what the room housed.

Strahd frowned. “He must be sleeping.” When he saw the death knight’s militant stance, he added, “Have no fear, Lord Soth. The ambassador can do no one harm as he is now.”

At a word from the vampire, torches all along the walls of the large room burst into flame. Apart from the doors standing at the center of three of the chamber’s sides, nothing man-made adorned the cold stone walls. Lichen and green-tinted ichor oozed from between the blocks and pooled on the floor. A few spider webs, as big as Soth and as geometrically precise as Palanthas’s streets, clouded the corners. If the spiders were larger than normal, the death knight could not tell, for they remained hidden. That the unseen web-builders were unusual seemed confirmed by the good-sized rats that hung in the webs, paralyzed and encased in silk.

The ambassador lay at the room’s center, surrounded by a framework of metal as intricate as the giant spider webs. The device squatted on eight legs wrought of thick steel. Bands of silver stretched between these legs, suspending the man above the floor and holding his limbs fully extended. A series of weights, pulleys, and counterweights hung over the prisoner, attached to a bronze axe blade and a bristling array of daggers, some silver, some bronze.

“I repeat: Good evening, Ambassador Pargat.”

The prisoner started awake and mumbled something incomprehensible. Again Strahd frowned, hard lines creasing his face. “Is that the best you can do? I’m afraid it’s not good enough by half.”

Ambassador Pargat began to whimper pitiably as the lord of Castle Ravenloft glided to his side. The vampire placed the candelabra on the floor, then stroked his chin in thought. “Ah,” he exclaimed at last. “We’ve damaged your tongue, have we?” He idly fingered the razor-edged silver blade that hung over Pargat’s face. “I should have foreseen this problem.”

As the vampire removed the bloodstained silver blade and exchanged it for a fresh bronze one, Lord Soth came forward to examine the torture device. When the ambassador saw the newcomer standing over him he pleaded and cursed and whined. Soth could not understand the man’s garbled words, but his meaning was clear by the desperate panic in his eyes.

Strahd absently gestured toward the prisoner. “Lord Soth, this is Ambassador Pargat. He is a messenger from Duke Gundar, who rules a bordering duchy called-creatively enough-Gundarak.”

A thin man and not very tall, Ambassador Pargat seemed, nonetheless, quite strong; the metal framework groaned when he pulled against it. The manacles Strahd had placed around his wrists, waist, and ankles were composed of an odd sort of webbed steel, more flexible than chains, but just as effective. Pargat’s buttonless white shirt was shredded, and its blood-rimmed holes revealed a few wounds, pink, healthy skin elsewhere. The same was true of his ravaged leather boots and breeches. All the holes were aligned with the blades that hung threateningly from the frame.

“I do not enjoy torture,” Strahd said apologetically. He stood back and seemed to reflect.

Soth was certain the count was admiring his own handiwork. “It looks to be an ingenious creation,” the death knight said.

With a ragged sigh. Ambassador Pargat stopped pleading.

“It is quite simple, really,” the count began, warming instantly to the topic. “The weights and pulleys move the blades. They can keep the machine in operation for hours without anyone here to maintain it.”

The vampire circled the metal frame, fussing over the blades and adjusting the tension on the weights. “You may have noticed some of the blades are silver, others merely bronze. That is because Ambassador Pargat is a lycanthrope, a wererat to be precise.” He shifted to the prisoner’s head and ran a gloved hand along his cheek.

Soth touched one of the ambassador’s wounds, making the man flinch and choke back a scream. “The silver blades cause him pain, the others cannot because of his unnatural healing abilities as a werecreature.”

“Just so.”

Now Soth circled the machine. “And you take a silver blade away for every piece of information he gives you?”

A smile slithered across Strahd’s features. “Just the opposite. For every item about his master he reveals, I add a silver blade. Sooner or later the pain or the sheer number of wounds will kill him.” He stroked the prisoner’s blood-caked hair. “I’m certain Pargat would like it to be sooner. This gives him… incentive to reveal all he knows quickly. Correct, Ambassador?”

Pargat’s words were incomprehensible, but the tone identified them as a string of curses. “How rude,” Strahd said with mock indignation. Pointedly he replaced the bronze blade over the prisoner’s left eye with a silver one.

Soth studied the man’s features. Pargat’s pale blue eyes were watery, his thin face taut with pain. His nostrils flared, making his thin nose look deformed and his wispy mustache bristle like whiskers. A large, gaping slice in his cheek revealed white, broken teeth and the remains of his tongue. Whenever the man tried to speak, the wound bubbled with saliva and blood. “What information does this man have that might interest me in the least?” Soth asked.

Placing a hand on the death knight’s arm, Strahd smiled. “There is but one way for you to escape this hellish place, and that is through a portal-a rare gateway between this and some other world. Ambassador Pargat knows the location of one of these rare gateways.”

“This man knows of a portal back to Krynn?”

“He knows the location of a portal that leads from this netherworld,” Strahd corrected. “I do not know what lies on the other side of the gateway. Still, a being of your resources should have little trouble getting back to Krynn-once you escape the duchies, that is.”

The vampire ran a finger along the edge of the bronze axe blade that hung over Pargat’s throat. It swung back and forth on a well-oiled track. “I know the portal stands somewhere in Duke Gundar’s castle. When the ambassador sees fit to tell me its exact location, I will replace this blade with one of silver. His life and his torment will be ended almost instantly.”

“How long has he been here?” Soth asked.

“Three days,” Strahd answered. He watched his prisoner’s features, scanning them for signs of weakness. “Gundar sent him to deliver an ultimatum regarding some mundane mercantile matter-freedom of movement for tradesmen or some similar drivel.”

The death knight shook his head and turned away. “If he has not revealed what you want to know after three days of torture, he will not break.”

“You are too hasty, Lord Soth,” the count said, picking up the candelabra again. “On the first day, the machine ran for only a few minutes. The second, for an hour. Tonight, I will let it run for several hours.” The vampire turned to the prisoner. “Then you will probably fall unconscious from the pain, but have no fear, I will not let you die.”

Without looking at Pargat, Strahd pulled the lever that set the machine in motion. “Come, Lord Soth. We will return in a little while to see if the blades jog his memory.”

The death knight stole a glance over his shoulder as he followed his host from the room. With a shudder, the frame began to move, lowering and raising the blades with clocklike precision. The axe head swung like a pendulum, slicing into Pargat’s throat, and the newly placed silver blade dug into his eye. The prisoner screeched and arched his back, not to avoid the blades, but to push them deeper in hopes of causing himself a mortal wound.

As the door closed behind Soth and Strahd, the vampire smiled. “I let Pargat sleep because sleep is very much like death. If he yearns for sleep’s respite from pain, he will tell me what I want to know all the sooner so he can rest eternally.”

“Can’t you cast a spell to read his mind?”

Shaking his head, the count started down the hall. “Duke Gundar, or his son, to be more precise, is a mage of no small skill. They’ve never been foolish enough to send anyone here without magical protection from such spells.” He shook his head. “The first ambassador exploded most unfortunately when I tried to question him magically.”

As the count turned down the door-lined hallway, Soth asked, “Is Magda in one of these rooms?”

“She rests comfortably upstairs,” the vampire replied. He studied the death knight, a hint of surprise in his dark eyes. “Why do you ask? Is she important to you?”

“Hardly,” the death knight replied emotionlessly. “Curiosity only.”

“Of course,” Strahd said, a bit too quickly. He moved to the last of the doors and stopped.

Soth followed, stepping over the puddles of filth and masses of beetles that covered the floor. Since Strahd and Soth both moved silently, the pitiable cries of the cell’s inmates were all the more clarion in the hall.

“Why have you forsaken me, Gods of Light?” one woman cried.

“No,” a man with a low, gravelly voice called out. “We’ll find a way out. Only one of us needs to escape. Let’s work together.” When no one responded to his call, he futilely repeated it over and over.

From behind another wooden door, a man sobbed uncontrollably. Every few seconds a burst of words erupted from the room, spoken in a language the death knight had never heard before.

“In here, Lord Soth,” the count said from the open door at the hall’s end.

The tiny room beyond was barren save for a small table, a stool, and an empty fireplace. Strahd placed the candelabra upon the rickety table, revealing a wizened old man, his sightless white eyes searching the cell in vain. He sat upon the stool and probed the air with scarred, bloody fingertips. His parched lips moved soundlessly.

“You asked earlier how I came to know so much about you,” Strahd began as he entered the cell. With stately elegance he moved to one dripping wall. “This is Voldra, a mystic of some competence, though mute, deaf, and blind to the mundane world around him.”

The vampire whispered a command, and a small door opened in the stone. A crystal ball, as milky white as Voldra’s eyes and long, scraggly beard, rested inside the secret alcove. “With this,” the count explained, lifting the ball gingerly with one gloved hand, “Voldra can tell me things about those who serve me and those who work against me.”

“Can he tell us more about this Duke Gundar or the portal that lies in his castle?”

“Urrr,” the mystic moaned when the crystal ball came in contact with his bony fingers. He began to weave a pattern over the crystal, smudging the glass with blood from his fingers.

“He is starved for contact with the outer world,” Strahd said, then added matter-of-factly, “The wounds he gained during his latest attempt to claw his way out of the cell.”

The death knight and the vampire watched Voldra as he traced an intricate design upon the glass. After a time, Strahd retrieved a quill and parchment from the hidden alcove and placed them on the table. “He will answer your question, though he did not hear it. I don’t quite understand how his powers work, but I am usually quite pleased with the information he provides.”

Shuddering violently, the old mystic grabbed the pen and wrote a brief message. His hands shook, and the effort of penning each word seemed to tax his whole frame. When Voldra finished, he slumped forward in exhaustion.

The count pulled the paper out from under the old man’s thin arm and read it aloud:

“ ‘The blood of a child who was never an innocent opens the door in Castle Hunadora. Madness is not weakness, so beware the undying son.’ ”

Strahd crumpled the parchment. “This is hardly useful,” he sighed and lifted the old man from the stool. Voldra hung limp in the vampire’s grasp like a rag doll in the hands of a small child. “Let us try again, shall we?”

The count set the mystic in front of the crystal ball, and the man wearily set about the task of calling forth a better answer to his captor’s query. “This is the same message Voldra offered the last time I had him search for information regarding the portal,” Strahd explained, tossing the parchment into the empty fireplace. “It tells me nothing new. The problem is distance, I believe. The farther Voldra is from the object or person he’s attempting to divine, the more nebulous and rambling the message he produces.”

Soth walked to the fireplace and retrieved the message. After reading the note, he let it drop to the filthy floor. “Is the child the mystic mentioned known to you?”

Glancing at Voldra, who was still weaving his pattern over the orb, the master of Castle Ravenloft nodded. “The child is Gundar’s son. To open the portal, one must enter the duke’s home-the Castle Hunadora to which Voldra referred-and spill his or his son’s blood. The blood is the key somehow. The important question is: Where in the castle does the gateway stand?”

“How do you know their blood will open the portal?” the death knight asked.

“Legend, information gained from ambassadors and refugees from Gundarak, Vistani lore, Voldra’s rambling.” The vampire wrapped himself in his cloak and stretched luxuriously, like a bat waking after a long day’s sleep. “So many sources cannot be wrong.”

A silence covered the room as both the count and the death knight considered the rewards the venture against Duke Gundar offered. For his part, Lord Soth wondered if this might truly be his road back to Krynn, back to Kitiara. With Caradoc dead, he would need to search for the tanar’ri lord who held the general’s soul, but that did not matter. Nothing would prevent him from recapturing her life force and resurrecting her as his immortal consort.

The vampire’s mind curled around evil plans, too. For many, many years, Strahd and Gundar had exchanged unpleasantries. The count made it a policy to murder every ambassador sent by the duke, and the duke returned the insult in kind. It had become a perverse sort of challenge to the dark lords to offer up an envoy who would not die too easily; of course, they sent men on these journeys with whom they were fatally displeased. That coy game was growing stale to the count.

The cries of the prisoners and the sound of Voldra’s fingers rubbing along the glass underscored his thoughts. For a time, the mystic continued to create his pattern with steady, mechanical movements. Suddenly his hands slid with urgency over the orb. He fumbled for the pen and began to scrawl a note. Like before, Voldra’s thin frame shook as the answer forced its way through him to the blank page.

“His answer is much longer this time,” Strahd noted. The vampire and the death knight hovered over the old man, waiting for him to complete his scribbling. When Voldra at last sank to the tabletop, drained of energy, the count lifted the parchment.

“ ‘Success will cost you everything,’ ” the vampire read. He squinted at the page, unable to decipher a few words. “There are a few unreadable scribbles, then it continues: ‘End at the beginning, and…’ ”

Strahd again turned the paper so the light from the candelabra illuminated the scrawled message. The paper cast a huge shadow against the far wall, but the vampire-like all his kind-did not. “I fear a second reading with no rest wore Voldra out. Most of this is impossible to read.” He glanced at Soth and added, “The only other thing I can make out is the last line: ‘The general with the crooked smile is lost to you forever.’ ”

The death knight stiffened and, without preamble, snatched the page from Strahd’s hands. He read what he could of the message, and, as the count had foretold, it ended with a clearly legible conclusion. The general with the crooked smile, he fumed. That was Kitiara!

“You said he could divine something about the duke’s castle, about the location of the portal?” Soth rumbled as he tore the paper in two.

Strahd leaned against the table with feline grace and steepled his slender, gloved fingers. “Voldra answers whatever question is most pressing to the people close at hand. I take it, then, you know this general?”

With a lightning quickness, the death knight snatched the crystal ball from the table. He raised it over his head and dashed it against the filthy stone floor. A brilliant flash lit the room, and a thunderclap shook the table, rattling the door on its iron hinges. When the twisting, noxious cloud of multicolored haze dissipated, Soth and Strahd stood face to face.

“You fool!” Strahd shouted. “That crystal cannot be replaced!” He gestured to the old man. Voldra’s beard and hair had been burned away, and much of his right side was blackened from the explosion. “Without the crystal, he’s of little use to me.”

Soth folded his arms across his chest. “I do not approve of others plumbing my thoughts,” he said flatly. “I killed the Vistani witch for that offense. The old man is no different. If you say he’s unable to scry without the crystal, then he’s of less use to me. I would enjoy killing him.”

“Your enjoyment means nothing,” the vampire hissed. He dropped to one knee beside Voldra and curled his long fingers around the old man’s neck. A wheezing breath escaped the mystic’s lips, then the count twisted Voldra’s head savagely, breaking his neck. Strahd never took his eyes from Soth.

When the lord of Castle Ravenloft stood again, his face was flushed with fury. “I am the master of this domain, Soth, and I hold the key to your escape. If you want to return to Krynn, if you wish to see your crook-smiled general again, you should remember who your betters are.”

Soth’s gauntleted hand struck the tabtetop, and the worm-eaten wood shattered into hundreds of fragments. The candelabra clattered to the floor, the candles extinguished. “On Krynn I am a favored servant of the dark goddess, Takhisis,” he said, taking a step toward Strahd in the darkness. “There she is my master. In Barovia, I recognize no one as my superior.”

The death knight swung hard at the count’s head. Before Soth’s gauntlet rose halfway to its target, the vampire caught his wrist. Strahd held Soth fast, and the two dead men locked gazes. From the corridor, the prisoners’ voices howled at the disturbance.

Soth’s left hand began to move in a quick, rhythmic pattern. “Do not even think to use a spell against me,” Strahd hissed, tightening his grip on the death knight’s wrist. The armor buckled slightly at the pressure. “I have studied magic for many mortal lifetimes, and I know spells that will cause you great suffering.”

After a moment, when the tension had gone out of Soth’s arm, the vampire released him. Strahd pulled his cloak around himself again, and the angry color faded from his cheeks. “There have been other travelers from Krynn in these halls,” the count murmured, a trace of amusement in his voice. “In fact, Voldra and four others arrived in Barovia twenty-five-no, thirty years ago. They came from a city named Palanthas.”

Soth stood numbly, listening to the count. He had been human the last time he’d been equally matched by a foe, and that awareness chilled him to his soulless core.

“Voldra called himself a ‘Mage of the Red Robes’,” Strahd continued, his eyes glittering in the darkness, “and he said he was a servant of the great god Gilean, Patriarch of Neutrality. This Gilean must be a rival to Takhisis, eh?” The vampire’s cloak flowed behind him as he swooped down on the mystic’s corpse. “Gilean did not send his hosts to punish me when I ripped out Voldra’s tongue. His bearers will not come to Castle Ravenloft to carry the dead man’s body-or his soul-away to his eternal reward.”

Strahd stood, then uncovered the candelabra and candles in the debris. At a word the stubby pillars of yellow wax burst into flame. “The gods of Krynn mean nothing here, death knight. You will serve me, or you will never escape this place.”

In the silence that followed, the cries of the prisoners could be heard again, distinctly.

“Why have you forsaken me, Gods of Light?” a woman shouted hoarsely.

“Only one of us needs to escape,” a man called in a low, gravelly voice. “Let’s work together.”

The vampire stifled a sudden yawn. “I will take your silence as a sign of your consent. A wise choice.”

Shaking off his shock at the vampire’s power, the death knight kicked Voldra’s corpse absently. “What did you do with the other four from Palanthas? Are they in your larder, too?”

Strahd tilted his head. “Voldra was the only one of any use to me. The others I let wander in the duchy as they wished.” He rubbed his chin pensively. “One of them is still alive, a fat cleric named Terlarm. He lives in the village.”

The master of Castle Ravenloft glided to the door. “I am afraid we will have to continue our chat this evening, Lord Soth. It is getting close to sunrise, and I’m afraid I am a bit fatigued by our… discussion.” He turned his back on the death knight and disappeared into the hallway.

The stench of Voldra’s burned flesh filling his nose and the wailing of the captives pounding in his ears, Lord Soth remained in the tiny cell. He was indeed far from home, cut off from Takhisis, cut off from the banshees and skeletal warriors who had always done his bidding in the past. Yet the death knight had never been one to accept servitude easily.

A rat peered tentatively into the room from the doorway. It watched Soth with black, beady eyes and twitched its nose probingly at him. As Soth moved toward it, the carrion-fattened creature crouched slightly but did not run.

“Does Strahd think me so beaten his vermin spies do not fear me?” Soth whispered softly. He raised a boot and crushed the rat with a single kick. The creature’s death squeal was echoed by a dozen of its kin in various parts of the hall. That attack, the death knight knew, would be reported to Strahd as an act of defiance. It would matter little; Soth intended to do far worse before the sun set.