James Lowder - Knight of the Black Rose

The death knight probed the night with his unblinking eyes. Azrael was correct. Magda had fled. “Can you find her?” he asked, something akin to disappointment in his voice.

Grinning ferally, the werebadger dropped his hands to the ground and sniffed the air. “Don’t bother dispatching the skeletons,” he said. “She’s got a medallion that makes her invisible to ’em.” That said, he disappeared into the maze of boulders, sniffing the gravel.

The moon had disappeared by the time Azrael returned, but he found Soth standing in exactly the same spot, in just the same position he had left him in earlier. The werecreature was in dwarf form again, and a large, swollen bruise covered the right side of his face. “She tricked me, mighty lord,” he said humbly. “I followed her scent into a blind alley, but it was only her clothes. She’d left ’em there to draw me in.” He bowed his head. “Before I could even turn around, she dropped off a boulder and hit me with that damned club. She knocked me out.”

“Do not trouble yourself over it,” Soth said after a moment. “She has earned her freedom. Besides, she knows little that would be of value to our enemies.”

Azrael gingerly touched his swollen face. “She could warn Gundar of your plan,” he noted.

Soth roused himself from his reverie. “That is not like her,” he replied. “She would put herself in great danger by contacting Gundar-if he is the madman he seems to be. That would be quite foolish, and Magda is no fool.” He paused, pondering her disappearance. “Besides, these are not lands to be traveled alone. She will likely be dead by the time the moon rises again.”

At the sight of the wounded dwarf, a smile came to Soth’s lips. He pointed at the purpled bruise and added, “Though I wonder what creature might be strong enough to best her.”

The soft, rhythmic sobbing reminded Soth of the cooing of a dove. He looked up from the keep’s account books, sparing his wife the briefest of glances. “If you cannot control yourself, go into another room, Isolde.”

The elfmaid stopped crying and raised herself ponderously from the bed. Any movement was an effort these days-for she was far along with child-but Soth knew that the tears had not been caused by the strain of the pregnancy. A blue-black welt marred Isolde’s perfect white cheek. Soth winced inwardly at the sight; she had deserved some punishment for her strident nagging, he reassured himself, but perhaps I struck her a bit too hard.

“I don’t know how you can stand yourself anymore, Soth,” she said as she reached the door.

The lord of Dargaard stood quickly, trembling with anger. The feeble remorse that had colored his thoughts a moment earlier was gone, replaced by a cold rage. With a curse, he snatched the leaded glass ink pot from the desk and hurled it at his wife. She ducked out of the room just as the glass hit the door. The ink splattered across the whitewashed walls, and a shower of tiny glass shards rained upon the floor. The sharp sound, Soth mused, was like the laughter of the harlots who had occupied a cell near him in Palanthas’s jail.

He tried to calm himself, but murder was all that he could think of. Caradoc had disposed of Lady Gadria. Perhaps he should do the same with Isolde…

“Gods,” Soth shouted, disgusted with the bloody thoughts, “have I fallen this far?”

The answer stared at him from across the room. Disheveled and scowling, Soth’s image returned his gaze from the full-length mirror that had been the priest’s wedding gift. The disgraced knight found himself drawn to that reflection, mesmerized by the man who stood before him.

His face was haggard and drawn, his blue eyes ringed by dark circles. Waves of unkempt hair hung to his shoulders. His mustache was similarly untrimmed. It framed his mouth but did not hide the split lip he’d gotten the previous night. Like the other men in the besieged keep, Soth drank even more than usual, wine being easier to come by than water after almost two months of captivity. After a long bout of drinking with his retainers, he’d slipped on an ice-slicked stone in the bailey and landed facedown on the frozen ground.

That was what his knights told him, at least. He didn’t really remember.

Soth’s shoulders were stooped from exhaustion. When he wasn’t drinking, he was manning the walls. Not that the Solamnics could reach the keep’s outer curtain; the gorge stood in their way, and any who attempted to lay the foundations for a bridge were driven off with arrows. However, each night the attackers catapulted flaming pitch into Dargaard. It took hours to put out the fires, but the flames always took another house or storage building or wagon before dying out.

Lord Soth knew that exhaustion and hunger and boredom were the besieging Solamnics’ most valued allies; the knights under Sir Ratelif had been camped outside Dargaard’s walls for weeks, but they had accomplished little if one tallied only the physical damage. In fact, with winter now hard upon the land, it seemed as if the keep would be able to wait out the siege. The lawful knights had established a blockade, however, and with each passing hour, Dargaard’s supplies dwindled.

Disheartened, Soth reached for a cloth to cover the mirror. When his hand got close to the glass, he saw something that fanned his anger.

Blotches of ink covered his fingers like the marks of some horrid plague. Soth, loving adventure as much as he did, had never been one for keeping accounts and ledgers. That was what he paid Caradoc and others to do. In the last few weeks, however, he’d become obsessed with maintaining a careful record of their limited rations of food and drink. Now Soth rubbed his ink-stained fingers together, but the black marks wouldn’t come off.

“They’ve forced me to become a clerk,” he snarled, dropping the heavy cloth over the mirror.

He looked at his hands again. His fingers had spent more time wrapped around a mug of wine or a quill pen than a sword’s hilt in the last month. Even though the Measure proscribed daily weapons exercise for all Knights of Solamnia, Soth had done very little in that regard since his trial in Palanthas. Nor was that the only ritual he’d abandoned. Upon joining the Order of the Sword, all knights fasted one day out of seven; Soth could not remember when he’d skipped a meal last, not by choice. He’d also failed to follow the Order’s rules regarding drink and gambling and the chivalrous treatment of women.

These were all minor transgressions when compared to Soth’s failure to worship his deities, those powers that watched over all Knights of Solamnia. Habbakuk, Kiri-Jolith, and especially Paladine protected the Order. It was the ideals these gods personified that drove each knight on to greater and greater deeds. Yet Soth had not visited the keep’s chapel since the siege had begun. In fact, he had stopped praying to Paladine, patron of the Knights of the Rose, on the day he first made secret love to Isolde. Even the sacred vows he’d exchanged with the elfmaid on their wedding day had been said for the sake of convenience alone; if Paladine had heard them, it was not because Soth desired it.

The disgraced knight’s first thought was to blame Isolde for his sorry state. Perhaps she had bewitched him somehow, turning him against the Code and the Measure. But he knew that wasn’t true. She had pleaded with him almost daily from the start of the siege, begged him to raise his voice to the gods and ask for a quest. Only then might he make atonement for the sins he’d committed.

“Isolde!” he shouted, hurrying from the room. The sound of his voice echoed through the halls, but no one came running. Soth had stormed through the keep many times in the last few weeks, drunk and shouting for his wife; those in the castle knew better than to get in his way.