“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.
