James Lowder - Knight of the Black Rose

After a moment, Mikel seemed to recognize his master. He inclined his head and stood aside as the death knight crossed to the breach. Before Soth reached that vantage, he turned to Mikel. “Have you seen Caradoc this day?”

A painfully long pause followed the question, then Sir Mikel nodded haltingly. His bones rubbed together with the noise of stone grinding against stone.

“You saw him this morning, before he ventured into the Abyss on my errand?”

Again Mikel nodded.

“Have you seen him since I returned from Palanthas with the dragon highlord’s body?”

Another pause, and the skeletal warrior shook his head. No spark shone in the voids that were his eye sockets; no expression broke his petrified rictus.

The death knight looked to the sky, darkening by degrees into night. The three moons that watched over Krynn were just beginning to reveal themselves in the heavens. Solinari, the silver-white moon of good magic, was but a sliver in the sky. The symbol of neutrality, Lunitari, shone fully, casting an eerie, blood-red radiance onto the mountains surrounding Dargaard on three sides. The third moon was visible only to creatures of evil like Soth. Nuitari gave off a sort of negative light, a black, putrid glow that shone most fully upon things of darkness.

The stars, too, were beginning to twinkle to life against the velvet sky that stretched from horizon to horizon. Each of the twenty-one gods of Krynn were represented in the heavens by a constellation, a planet, or a moon. The stars denoting Paladine, the Father of Good, were seen as a brave silver dragon. These pinpoints of light, called the Valiant Warrior, stood in opposition to the five-headed dragon known as the Queen of Darkness. In the past, these avatars of godly power had mirrored the deities’ struggles, their triumphs and their defeats. Soth looked to the five-headed dragon now for some sign of the battle that had occurred-or was still occurring-between Takhisis and Raistlin Majere.

The Queen of Darkness was spread across the sky, coiled and ready to strike the Valiant Warrior. Nothing had changed.

“The battle must be over,” Soth rumbled. “Takhisis has defeated the mage.” He turned away from the breach and faced the skeletal Sir Mikel. “I order you to watch the stars, especially the constellation known as the Queen of Darkness. Do you understand?”

The undead knight shuffled to the breach. With preternatural slowness he presented his eyeless sockets to the heavens.

“If the stars break from their natural course, you are to find me,” Soth added and stormed from the place.

The death knight started back through the musty, darkened hallways. With each step he rued the fact he’d trusted his seneschal to retrieve Kitiara’s soul. None of his servants possessed the power to defeat the guardians at the Tower of High Sorcery, so Soth had been forced to go after the highlord’s corpse himself. And of his minions, only Caradoc was intelligent enough to survive a trek across the Abyss. Now it appeared the ghost had either failed or had double-crossed the death knight.

Soth roughly pushed a door from his path, the blow splintering the ancient wood. “Caradoc will regret that his curse requires him to return to Dargaard Keep,” the death knight hissed.

He paused and pondered that truth. There was one place to which the seneschal must return, whether he had succeeded or not with his errand. Soth decided to wait for Caradoc there. His pace quickened as he moved up the stone stairs, higher into the tower that served as the keep’s main building.

Caradoc had been caught up in the curse that doomed Soth to unlife. In life, the seneschal had been a grasping, ambitious man, who had helped his master’s career in any way necessary. He had spread scandalous rumors about any rival who challenged Soth’s position in knightly society. When the Knights’ Council had questioned his master’s claims to certain good deeds, the seneschal bore false witness to uphold Soth’s version. He had even murdered for Soth, taking a dagger to the lord’s first wife while she slept. Even as the fire struck Dargaard, Caradoc had been forging financial records in Soth’s private study. It was there that his bones still rested.

After climbing a number of steps that would have easily winded a strong, mortal man, Soth came upon a landing. The platform was broken away from the wall, and a rift in the stonework floor revealed empty air. The hole plunged downward a dozen feet to the next landing. The frame that once housed the door to the study was partially collapsed. Soth had to step over a large, shattered block of masonry to enter.

Compared to the disarray of the rest of Dargaard, the study was clean, even tidy. The layer of dirt, broken stone, and dust clinging so thickly to the other rooms’ floors was strangely absent. Missing, too, were any fragments from the missing door or the heavy wooden furniture that had once filled the room. A single tapestry covered one wall. Upon the broad, bright field of the cloth, elves clashed against elves. The tapestry depicted the Kinslayer Wars that had rocked the elven nations hundreds of years past. On the floor below the tapestry lay a skeleton.

The room’s single window admitted light from the moons. Red as new-spilled blood, Lunitari colored Caradoc’s fleshless remains and pushed pools of darkness into the study’s corners. Soth walked to the skeleton and frowned. Like the rest of the room, Caradoc’s bones were clean. The decaying flesh had been carefully pulled from them, not gnawed away by the few vermin that inhabited the keep. Its arms had been folded across its chest, giving the skeleton a deceptive look of peace that none of Dargaard’s other inhabitants ever possessed.

Soth knew it must have taken his seneschal years to compose the corpse and clear the debris from the room. Part of Caradoc’s curse-like that of most ghosts-was that his wraithlike body allowed him little contact with the physical world; to move even the smallest pieces of stone would require intense concentration. As in life, though, the ghostly seneschal was overly concerned with his appearance, and it was clear he wanted his remains to be presentable. He had even covered his skull with a silken cloth in the fashion of ancient Solamnic funerals. The death knight bent to pick up the veil.

“That cloth once belonged to Kitiara herself, my lord,” came a trembling voice from behind Soth. “I stole it from her one night when she stayed at the keep.”

The death knight spun about. There, in the shadowy corner near the doorway, cowered Caradoc. “Where is she?” Soth asked quietly.

The seneschal floated from the darkness. The moonlight painted him crimson. “My lord…” he began, then paused as the death knight took a step toward him. “As you can see, I made the journey you requested.”

Caradoc spread his arms wide, gesturing at himself. Though the ghost’s form was transparent, Soth could see that his garments were rumpled and stained. Phantom dust still clung to his boots. “The plains of Pazunia seemed to stretch on forever, and the portal-”

“Where is Kitiara’s soul?” Soth growled impatiently, again moving toward his servant. “Where is your medal of office?”

Bowing his head, Caradoc replied, “We had a bargain, my lord. You promised you would plead my case with Chemosh, that you would convince the Lord of the Undead to make me human.”

“I have not forgotten my promise,” the death knight said, the lie coming easily to his scorched lips. He pointed to the ghost. “The promise will be revoked unless you tell me where Kitiara’s soul is.”

The ghost knew that, had his legs been flesh and blood, they would have crumpled beneath him at the fear he felt. Caradoc looked at the fiery gaze of Lord Soth, forced steel into his voice, and stood tall. “Forgive me, my lord, but I have seen you break your word too many times in the last three and a half centuries. I want-”