startling the lone figure who occupied it.
“My lord,” Caradoc said. The ghost bowed, but his broken neck made the gesture look more comic than courtly.
Strahd gestured for the seneschal to rise. “Lord Soth has arrived,” the vampire murmured, a hint of malicious glee in his words. “He is everything you said he would be.”
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.”
