Spectre Of The Black Rose

Four

Azrael trusted the dark.

It had spoken to him many times over the years, in many different places, and while the dark always told the truth, it never used the same voice twice. Sometimes its voice was masculine, sometimes feminine. Occasionally it was strident, more often sonorous and vibrant. The dark told Azrael things he should know and, more importantly, things he should do.

The first time he listened to the dark was in far-off Brigalaure, on the day he caved in his father's skull with a hammer. Azrael's mother had banished him from her workshop for shattering a priceless lava opal, just as his father had dismissed him from the family forge a month earlier for causing a fire. He had no chance of landing an apprenticeship after those disasters, but his father still insisted that he pay for both the gem's replacement and the forge's restoration.

In the midst of the resulting argument, the old dwarf shouted at his wastrel son, "What's wrong with you?" for what very well could have been the thousandth time. Bored beyond belief, Azrael decided to do something he'd never done before: He attempted to answer the question.

The priests had always said the quickest path to solving such unsolvable questions was "soul searching," so the young dwarf did just that. He turned his vision inward, to hunt for what he imagined his soul to be. If there were something wrong with him, as his father seemed so convinced, surely the flaw could be found here. But Azrael didn't find his soul. He found only the dark.

It whispered to him in a voice that sounded very much like his own, only without the edge of anger and resentment he'd grown so accustomed to hearing from himself. He'd long ago forgotten exactly what the dark said to him. He knew, though, that the words had made more sense than anything his parents or the clan priests or anyone else had ever told him. So he acted upon them.

Azrael liked to think the blow came as a particular surprise to his father, since the old man always said his son was never any good with tools.

The dark didn't tell him to complete the slaughter of his family. It didn't have to. Azrael understood the instant his father's corpse finally stopped jerking and twitching that he had found his calling. The blunt fingers his mother had always disparaged as useless for any sort of delicate craft work proved more than adequate to snap her neck. He might not be strong enough to work a bellows for hours on end, but his kin were too slow and muscle-bound to catch him when he fled into the narrow tunnels that channeled waste from the vast underground city.

The dark spoke to him again in the lightless labyrinths outside the city, as he hid from the Politskara, those much-feared police who were hunting him for the murders of his family and anyone else he'd managed to ambush in the months since his father's demise. In return for a promise to destroy beautiful Brigalaure and all who dwelled within her jeweled walls, the dark gifted Azrael with lycanthropy. He'd heard of werebeasts before, but the stories told about them always referred to their powers as a curse. Azrael couldn't imagine why. The transformation was agonizing at first, but he'd grown accustomed to the pain. At times he even enjoyed it-and the abilities he gained were well worth the discomfort. Only once did Azrael wonder if the dark had betrayed him. After a year or more of hunting the hapless inhabitants of Brigalaure, the werebadger grew bored. He fought the boredom, for it seemed to him a sign of ingratitude, but couldn't banish the taint from his thoughts. The dark, he knew, could most certainly read his mind.

It was at a moment when the boredom was strongest that the dark transported Azrael from Brigalaure to the cursed domains through which he had roamed ever since. At first he bemoaned his fate, certain his boredom had earned the dark's wrath. It had offered him no choice in the matter of his relocation. One moment he crouched in a cavern outside Brigalaure, wondering about the mist that suddenly surrounded him. The next instant he stood in a dreary land called, appropriately enough, Forlorn.

He loathed that land, which lacked Brigalaure's beauty and its happy population-not that he valued either thing for itself. Without beauty, he had nothing to defile. To a people who know little of joy, fear and pain are merely a slight degradation of their usual monotonous melancholy.

His subsequent home in Gundarak proved to be no improvement at all. The vampire lord who ruled that place practiced the sort of sweeping, unsophisticated butchery that left Azrael little to do. The careless carnage also offended his nascent aesthetic sensibilities. If murder were an art, Duke Gundar was a hack of the lowest order. Being surrounded by the duke's clumsy slaughter day after day, Azrael was so profoundly unhappy that he even considered ending his own life.

It was then that the dark, silent for so long, spoke to him once more.

Half-heard whispers, voices from the moon-shadow of a corpse-dangled tree, led him from Gundar's domain into the realm of Barovia. Joy and terror mingled there in startling ways. The master of that place, Count Strahd von Zarovich, painted both emotions across his land with broad, bold strokes. When the sun shone, the happiness of the Barovians was almost palpable. When night descended, fear washed across the land and replaced the day's bright colors with a thousand somber hues. This, the dark told Azrael, was the sort of world he could fashion.

Finally, the dark provided the dwarf with the means to that end. The dark gave him Lord Soth. Azrael hadn't recognized their meeting's true purpose, not at first anyway. He only recognized Soth's raw power and quickly cast himself in the role of servant. It was a natural mistake.

In his homeland, the Knight of the Black Rose had been a murderer on a scale Azrael could scarcely imagine. Given the chance to prevent a world-rattling cataclysm, Soth refused. He let his anger and his jealously turn him from his gods-given mission. As a result, thousands upon thousands perished. This was a crime worthy of infamy, one that made Azrael's few dozen murders seem paltry.

Or so it had seemed at the time.

Now, after years of watching the death knight loiter on the throne like so much discarded scrap metal, Azrael thought differently. Soth was weak, incapable of ruling his domain. Even his crimes betrayed his deficiencies. He had not murdered those countless victims of Krynn's Cataclysm. Rather, he merely allowed them to die. He could no more claim credit for those lives than Azrael could add the victims of the White Fever to his tally.

With that recognition of his master's weakness Azrael came to an even more profound realization: Soth was a pawn. The dark was using him to provide its true heir a kingdom, a suitable canvas upon which Azrael could paint his masterpiece of terror. The domain of Sithicus might have formed around Soth, but it was intended for him. All he needed to do was usurp control of the kingdom from its inattentive lord. That was just what he planned to do.

First, though, he would deal with a stone that had been rattling about in his boot for decades.

"No one is to open this," the dwarf said. He patted the lid of the chest that lay in the middle of Ambrose's shop. "Someone does and I'll chop 'em up for Nabon's dinner, right?"

Ambrose nodded glumly. "I wish you'd find another way. Involving me in a double cross of the Vistani-"

"I've watched over you since the accident, haven't I?" the dwarf replied. He reached up to pinch one of Ambrose's fat cheeks. "No fear, shopkeep. They won't blame you for the tainted goods. 'Sides, I've got too much time invested in you to let a troupe of half-wit pickpockets and whores slit your throat."

Ambrose turned away, shoulders slouched. "I wish they would," he muttered.

"Wouldn't do a bit of good," Azrael said flatly as he climbed onto the chest. He laid a rough hand on Ambrose's shoulder and spun him around. With one fat-fingered hand he grabbed the man's face and drew it close to his own. "You're not thinking of doing anything stupid, are you?"

The reply Ambrose managed to spit out was garbled, but it satisfied Azrael. The dwarf pushed the shopkeep away.

"Smart man," Azrael rumbled. "That girl up there is counting on you, shopkeep. You cross me and I've got no reason to stop the pit bosses from putting her to work." A leer split his ugly face. "I'm certain they could find something for her to do. Her mind may be shot, but she ain't half bad looking-for a human."

The reference to Helain silenced Ambrose. With a snort of laughter, Azrael leapt down from the trunk. His iron-shod boots had blighted the intricately carved foliage on the lid with scratches. "Just tend to your business, shopkeep, and know that you're on the right side in this little game."

"I still don't know what you're trying to win," Ambrose said.

"The only stakes that matter," Azrael replied. "Everything."

The dwarf left Ambrose to await Inza's arrival. As he headed for the door and the chill afternoon beyond, he snatched a fistful of salted meat strips from ajar on the counter. The stuff was wretchedly tough, with a taste like mummified dog flesh. Azrael loved it.

Humming through a mouthful of the unappealing stuff, he surveyed the locus of suffering that was the Veidrava Salt Mine. Down the road from Ambrose's store squatted the miners' hovels. The buildings huddled together on the broken hillside. They were situated far from the tree line, ostensibly to make them easier to defend. The miners knew, however, that the isolation simply made the buildings easier to police. Even now, the armed and armored riders circled the shanty town like wolves around a stranded flock. The soldiers' eyes, and their crossbows, were turned toward the buildings, not the forest.

The steady thud of the rock crusher and the other, more erratic sounds from the mine itself drowned out any noise coming from the squalid camp. Azrael couldn't hear the screaming infants or the drunken brawls, but he could smell them. He breathed in the stench of piss and blood and despair as someone else might enjoy a wine's bouquet. He held the foulness in his lungs and savored it as he did everything about the mine.

There was something about Azrael that thrived at Veidrava. It was more than a vague inclination for the place, more than some mental sympathy. A spiritual sort might have attributed the feeling to a resonance of the locale with his soul. But Azrael knew with certainty-and more than a little relief-that he lacked any sort of spiritual essence.

Still, Azrael could almost feel something inside him writhing blissfully with each bleak sunset, fattening itself on the strife and misery and chaos that preyed upon the land and, in particular, his mine. It was the dark, he supposed, some little piece of it he carried with him. Usually, though, any such metaphysical musings were swept away by the awful rapture Azrael leeched from the suffering around him.

In search of just such agony, Azrael turned his back on the workers' homes and headed up the hillside to the mine. The lowering sun made the place look unearthly, full of twisted shadows. Towers and buildings reared up from the broken earth. Ropes hung between their roofs, while wooden sluices crawled between them closer to the ground. A thick saline dust covered everything-the towers, the tin-roofed warehouse, even the watchmen making their slow circuit of the grounds.

Azrael nodded a greeting to one of the pit bosses as he headed for the building closest to the main shaft. It was a hulking block with walls constructed of seamless, windowless slabs of wood. The miners called the building the Engine House. No one but Azrael and his most trusted pit bosses ever went inside. The workers who had built the place in only three days lay in a mass grave not far away. Most of the miners assumed it sheltered some wondrous mechanical works that powered the elevator and the water screw and the rock grinder. The assumption was both correct and mistaken.

The Engine House did indeed contain the mine's primary source of power, but that source was not mechanical. Machines do not weep.

The din of clanking chains and thundering hammers usually masked that sound to anyone passing the Engine House. But Azrael could hear it clearly enough after he clambered through the short earthen tunnel that served as the Engine House's only entrance. There, in the foul and cacophonous half-light, sat a giant. He'd sat in that spot for five years, since the Engine House was first constructed around him. Iron bars pinned his legs to the ground at angles that were painful even to see. Even without the restraints, those filth-caked limbs were clearly useless to him.

"Nabon! Stop blubbering," the dwarf shouted. "You'll rust up the works."

The giant continued to sob, even as he cranked a massive wheel with one hand and reeled in a chain with the other. Thinking the brute might not have heard him, Azrael grabbed a whip that hung conveniently by the tunnel. It took three lashes to draw Nabon's attention and two more to get him to cease his work.

"But the lift," the giant began. Nabon glanced at a pillar marked with various cryptic symbols; a rusty arrow waved between two of those marks. "They're stuck between tunnels."

"Don't talk back," growled Azrael. He snapped the whip as close to the goliath's face as it would reach, which was the center of his chest. "You do what I tell you, when I tell you."

"Yes, great Sorrow."

The dwarf grinned at the honorific. It was one Nabon himself had coined for Azrael-the Sorrow of Sithicus. The dwarf had liked it so much that he'd ordered his pit bosses to use it. The title had since spread to the elves, and even the Vistani. Only the humans seemed reluctant to use it; they couldn't understand how someone would consider the label an honorific at all.

"I'm going down to the chapel," the dwarf announced.

Nabon stopped reeling in the chain. Somewhere close by, a massive hammer silenced.

"What are you doing?" Azrael shrieked. "Keep the crusher going. Let go of the lift."

Nabon hesitated. Azrael waited three heartbeats, then tossed his whip aside. From the shadows he retrieved a huge maul. The mallet's head was studded with metal, its wood blotched with gore. He wielded the thing exclusively against the giant's legs, though the blows did more to crush his soul than his already mangled limbs.

Once, Nabon had been a wayfarer, a traveler with no particular destination. The journey's pleasure had been his only desire, and he indulged that pleasure for weeks and months and years on end. He kept to the secret trails and hidden paths that wound through all the dark domains, ways so desolate that even a giant could walk them unseen. He harmed no one. He asked for nothing but the freedom to travel.

Azrael wished that he could take credit for capturing the brute, but that distinction belonged to another. The dwarf had to be content with reaping the benefits of that treacherous act. He had also discovered that the quickest way to break the giant's spirit was to break his legs. Nabon hoped to take to the road again someday. That hope, more than any chain or threat of violence, bent his kind heart to Azrael's twisted whims, for the dwarf promised to heal those shattered legs, but only if Nabon followed his commands.

Advancing upon the giant, Azrael raised the maul. "I'll mash your shins to paste, Nabon. Let the lift fall."

The giant closed his eyes, as if that might somehow mute the horror of what he was about to do. It didn't. He opened his hand and let the wheel spin, faster and faster, until it stopped with a sickening abruptness. The lift had struck the bottom of the shaft. Anyone inside was surely dead.

When Nabon finally opened his eyes once more the tears were gone. Those blue orbs might have been stone for all the life they displayed. Mechanically he hauled the crusher chain with one callused hand. He held out the other, palm up, and said flatly. "What would you have me do now, my Sorrow?"

"Much better," the dwarf said. "You can stop the crusher. I'm going down to the chapel."

He waited for Nabon to ready the special lift, a gate-fronted black box that only Azrael used. The dwarf stepped inside, slid the wrought-iron gate closed, and took a seat on the padded bench. Nabon slid back the trap door that opened to the main shaft. Sound welled up from the pit like water from a tainted spring. Cries and clatter from the resting place of the ruined lift mingled with the more mundane clamor-the thud of countless picks and hammers, the braying of mules, the shouts and curses of the miners as they went about their backbreaking labor.

Azrael luxuriated in the noise and the darkness as the lift began its descent. He had no fear that Nabon would drop him. The possibility was as remote to him as the miners rising up in revolt or Ambrose turning against him. They feared him too much for that. More importantly, he left them enough hope to stave off total despair. They'd be dangerous if they thought they had nothing left to lose, but he had no intention of letting them realize that.

The lift came to a smooth stop at a cross shaft. The landing was dark, strewn with debris. Neither proved any obstacle to the dwarf, who trod through the rubble as easily as someone else might cross an open field lit by the noon sun. The landing quickly narrowed to a tunnel even more choked with rotting beams and broken tools.

Niches had been carved into the walls every few yards. They were carefully wrought from the salt-thick walls, with sconces chiseled to resemble flowers and other sun-loving things that had no place so far below ground. The sconces held no candles. Darkness had claimed this tunnel since the last human miner passed this way almost a decade ago.

After a time, the tunnel opened into a broad hallway. Here the rubble of shattered wood and crumbled stone had been swept away. The walls and floor became smooth and level. The simple sconces were now elaborate statuary of hounds and harts and more exotic creatures, all hewn from salt. Carvings covered the entire ceiling-scudding clouds and high-flying hawks intended to lend the illusion of open sky. In torchlight, the effect was overwhelming; a quirk in the composition of the salt dome here made the rock glow blue.

Azrael scarcely glanced around him as he stomped down the hallway toward the arched portal at its far end. He hadn't yet found the time to renovate the statues and the ceiling. Too much of the place's original intent lingered; its identity as an island of beauty within the bleakness of Veidrava made the dwarf distinctly uncomfortable.

Not so with the chamber that lay beyond. Azrael felt at home there.

As the dwarf entered the room, braziers sparked to life. The feeble flames they contained were not his doing, but the remnant of some ancient magic that had long outlived its maker. Even the dim light cast by the magical fires was enough to make Azrael's eyes smart after so long in the lightless tunnel.

The vast, vaulted room had once been a chapel. An observant visitor might still recognize the detritus of its sanctified past. In the room's center stood a scarred and stained block that once served as an altar. Like everything else in the chapel, it had been carved from salt. Half-melted forms that had once been benches were arrayed everywhere in neat little rows; the rounded masses seemed like supplicants bent before the blighted sacrificial table. Repulsive human forms, the vestiges of statues, lined both walls. The once-beatific heroes of the faith were reduced to grotesqueries that even the most debased human god would banish from its temple.

The wavering light sent shadows slithering up the walls and shooting across the floor. The sinuous shapes appeared to follow Azrael, to trail him across the room in ways no earthly shadow could. They seemed detached somehow from the objects that had formed them.

"I don't have time for you now," the dwarf said. The silent chapel offered a response, a susurrus that someone unfamiliar with the cursed place might have mistaken for a cold breeze. Azrael, however, knew this place and its denizens quite well.

"Soon enough you'll all be free of here," he announced. "By year's end, you'll all have your own forms."

He exited the chapel through a rough-hewn tunnel opposite from where he'd entered. In his wake, the shadows danced obscenely across the forsaken altar and the deformed statues. Even after the magical fires dimmed and sputtered out, shapes darker than the chapel's lightless murk moved through the darkness and schemed in voices few sane men had ever heard.

Beyond the chapel, a narrow tunnel wound deeper and deeper into the earth. Something large had burrowed here, with claws that cut through salt and stone like garden soil. The work impressed even Azrael, and he was pleased to make use of the tunnel system and the network of chambers it connected.

The chambers made ideal storage for the seneschal's hoard. Boxes, chests, bags, even a few small coffins intended for child victims of the plague were lodged in the hollows, each crammed full of gold and silver. It had taken Azrael two decades to pilfer this loot from the peasants and skim it from the mine's profits. But he did not cast a loving eye over the gold as he strolled along the tunnel; the dwarf had long prided himself on a disinterest in precious metals atypical for his kind. No, he valued the currencies only for what they would buy-and these coins were earmarked for a purchase few could imagine.

Azrael knew the sight of all that money, more than enough for his purposes, should have made him happy. He knew, too, that the Vistani would soon be out of his way-the only one that mattered, anyway. He had made Ambrose squirm, Nabon suffer, and he was on his way to his favorite spot in all of Sithicus, a site that usually filled his heart with glee. All that wasn't enough to make him forget that Soth had risen from his throne.

"Damn him," the dwarf muttered. A scowl stole across his features as soon as he realized what he'd said. The grim expression quickly became a smile. "Heh. Too late."

A weird purple glow at the end of the tunnel let Azrael know that he had reached his final destination. The air grew thick with the smell of brine, more overpowering here than in the rest of the mine. A chill dampness suffused the air. It wrapped itself around the dwarf like wet cerements.

Azrael emerged from the tunnel on the shore of a vast underground lake. High overhead, stalactites glowed with a violet light. The radiance was born of a moss that clung to the rock. The sickly plant seemed to thrive nowhere else in the mine, making it useless as a light source. Azrael had found it brewed down to a serviceable poison, though, one that caused a hysteria in its victims that was quite amusing to watch.

The water was black and still, a dark sheet of glass stretching to the horizon. Azrael cupped a hand and dipped it into the lake. The water looked black even in his palm. It had a strange feel to it, too. The liquid was heavier and more solid than water should be. Still, he did not hesitate as he lowered his face and slurped up the awful stuff.

Each swallow made his teeth ache and his temples throb with pain. The water burned like molten tar as it coursed down his throat. That awful heat had barely filled his gut when he heard the first voices. He sat down before they overwhelmed him.

The fragments were unconnected, a swarm of words that filled Azrael's mind. Questions without answers, cries of joy, agonized screams, the keening of the banshees at Nedragaard Keep- from all across the domain these sounds came to him. He focused and began to filter out the dull stuff of everyday life. The dwarf didn't care about the drivel people spouted over the breakfast table or lovers' inane pillow talk. He wanted to hear fear-

"Quick, Tomas, hide! They've got swords!"

Or sorrow-

"I can't face another day like this."

Or, better still, words edged with madness-

"Dead, eh? No bother. We've still got a use for your corpse, my dear."

Azrael listened for a time, letting the grief and pain of Sithicus fill his mind. He'd stumbled across this place a decade ago, not long after the Great Rift opened on the surface. The tremors that accompanied that event collapsed the chapel's back wall and revealed the tunnel that led him here. He assumed that this Lake of Sounds, as he had come to call it, was somehow linked to the rift, that the gaping rent gathered up the cries and whispers and funneled them here.

The cacophony had threatened to overwhelm his mind that first day, but he mastered it. And from that chaos he had forged a clarity of mind that left him immune to the confusion plaguing the domain. He alone could remember his past with crystal clarity-and the pasts of anyone else he cared to remember, too. For when Soth and the rest of the land raised their voices in confession to close the domain's borders, Azrael could hear and recall later the sins they proclaimed.

Why the lake's voices were only audible after its fetid water had been sipped didn't concern him. Azrael only knew that the place was more useful than any network of spies. One gulp and he could listen in on anyone he wished-well, not quite anyone. For some reason the White Rose, the Bloody Cobbler, and the Whispering Beast all remained beyond the reach of this magic.

Like everything else concerning that trio, this was a matter for concern, but one he assumed would be rectified soon enough. The dark resided in the vast, black expanse of the Lake of Sounds, and Azrael always trusted the dark. It was a voice in the dark that had prompted him to taste the waters on the day he discovered this lifeless shore. Just as it had given him Soth, it had given him access to all those voices, all that information.

And the dark used that cacophony now to pass along a message to Azrael, a message he had been expecting. The voice of the dark did not cut through the babble. It rode upon the mundane utterances, touching individual words, juxtaposing phrases that had already been spoken.

"They're not going to like this at the mine."

"Pay attention when I'm talking to you, young man."

"Why does it always have to be about you, Ginnie?"

"We're supposed to meet them on the border at noon. You coming?"

"Are they now?" Azrael said. He focused his thoughts, winnowing away all but two familiar voices.

"He's a beast," Magda said. "Below your notice."

He could hear a slight breathlessness in her voice. It wasn't prompted by a fear of the meeting about to take place, but by the cold. The dwarf smiled. She really is getting old, he thought, when a chill as mild as today's makes her shiver.

Soth's response was a low rumble of impatience, but Magda pressed her point anyway. "Azrael should not be trusted, cannot be trusted."

The dwarf's smile broadened into a grin at the irony of the situation, and his coarse laughter filled the purple twilight hanging over the Lake of Sounds. In the reverberations the dark was laughing, too, but Azrael was too caught up in his own mirth to hear that laughter's mocking tone.