many cups of wine or the stupor of rage that dulled his senses, but whatever the cause, the boyar didn’t seem to feel the blows. The Vistani struggled for the dirk still hidden in the small sack tied to her waist, but Donovich had unwittingly pinned the weapon beneath his bulk. She gasped futilely for air.
“Leave the woman alone.”
The voice that echoed hollowly in the room did not startle Magda as it did Arik. The barkeep spun about, for the words had come from the shadowed corner right behind him. There an armored figure stood, orange eyes glowing from inside his helmet. The stranger stank of charred cloth, and sooty ash clung to his ornate armor. Holding an obviously wounded right arm close to his chest, the knight grabbed the barkeep’s forehead and twisted his head sharply. The snap of Arik’s neck breaking was followed by the shattering of glass.
Intent on his victim, Donovich didn’t hear the commotion. Neither did he loosen his grip or turn his beady eyes away from the choking, red-faced Vistani pinned beneath him, even after the wave of cold had settled on his back. In fact, the boyar never saw Lord Soth raise his gauntleted left hand and lash out. Donovich’s skull caved in at the blow, and he collapsed, bleeding, on top of Magda.
The death knight lifted the boyar’s corpse and dropped it onto the floor. When Magda began to choke, her hands at her throat as if that might bring more air to her tortured lungs, Soth paid her little mind. Instead he knelt by Terlarm’s side.
The cleric came to slowly, but when his eyes could focus again, the death knight’s ancient, ruined armor-the armor of a Solamnic Knight-filled his vision. “Gilean preserve me!” he gasped.
“You know who I am?” Soth asked.
Nodding weakly, Terlarm raised himself on wobbly arms. Few on Krynn, especially those who lived in Palanthas, did not know the story of Lord Soth, the Knight of the Black Rose. Glancing about the room, Terlarm saw the bloody corpses of the villagers.
The cleric stuttered a few nonsensical phrases, then Soth held up a hand and silenced him. “You and four others were brought here from Palanthas thirty years ago,” the death knight noted. “In the time you have been in Barovia, have you ever heard tales of someone returning to Krynn?”
“They’re all dead,” he mumbled numbly. For a moment, Soth wasn’t certain if the cleric meant his four friends or the other patrons of the tavern. “There were five of us, all clerics or mages devoted to the Balance.” Spreading his arms, he glanced at his worn red robes. “One night we went for a walk by the harbor in Palanthas. A fog rolled in, a thick mist swallowed us, and when we stepped out of it, we were in this village.”
He smiled, then a mad giggle escaped his lips. “Keth and Bast and Fingelin, they all were killed by the watcher, the thing at the end of the dark tunnel. And Voldra…” He made a ritual symbol of blessing over his heart. “The castle took him. Now there’s only me.”
After a moment, Terlarm leaned forward and studied the death knight closely. “You are trapped here, too?” he asked, his eyes filled with tears. “Then I was correct all along! This place is a hell!” The cleric looked to the grimy ceiling and raised his hands. “Gilean, Master of the Balance, forgive me for my sins. At least tell me what crimes I have committed so I may atone for them. Perhaps then you’ll let me through the gate, past the watcher-”
There was an edge in the cleric’s words and a wildness in his eyes. The mention of a gate made Soth suddenly take notice of his rambling. “Gate?” the death knight repeated. “Have you discovered a way back to Krynn?”
Fear filled Terlarm’s eyes. “The Vistani told us of a way back home. They sold us the information for all the gold we had.” The madman frowned. “The gate was there, all right, but the watcher wouldn’t let us by. Only Voldra and I escaped. It killed all the others.”
“Where is it?” Soth growled.
“At the fork of the River Luna,” the cleric said softly, shrinking back from the death knight. “But the watcher-”
Soth laughed. “The watcher means nothing to me!”
“Lord Soth?” a soft voice said from behind the undead warrior. He turned to face Magda. The woman rubbed her bruised throat, and the claw marks on her shoulder from the gargoyle were bleeding again. Her voice hoarse, she added, “I can lead you to the fork in the river. I’ve heard stories about the gate that’s supposed to lie there.”
Soth studied her for a moment. Once free of Castle Ravenloft, Magda had revealed Strahd’s intention to use her as a spy. After what had happened in the keep, the woman was in danger from the count, so she had her reasons for aiding the death knight. She was set against Strahd, or so her battle with the gargoyle seemed to show, but that was not the main reason Soth believed her.
Magda had proven herself far stronger than the death knight would have suspected on the night he destroyed the Vistani camp. She had defied Strahd, defeated one of his minions, and now she had even overcome her fear of Soth. Such strength meant a great deal to the death knight. He had always found weaklings to be untrustworthy-like the treacherous Caradoc-but Magda was far from weak-willed. Still, he had learned enough in Barovia to know trust should never be given fully. “Go on,” he said guardedly.
“The storytellers in a few of the local tribes speak of a gate to other worlds,” she began. “It’s been there for a long time. One of my ancestors-a hero named Kulchek-escaped from Barovia through the same gate. Legend has it that some horrible guardian watches over it now, some… thing. ”
The cleric shook his head. “It had eyes and mouths, and it made us all see visions. Nothing we did could hurt it.” He hugged himself tightly. “First it bit off Keth’s arm. Blood. Oh, gods, blood everywhere…”
As the man rambled on, the death knight turned to Magda. “Does the River Luna run between here and Duke Gundar’s castle?” When she noted that it did, Soth said simply, “Let us start on our way, then.”
Before the death knight had even reached the exit, Magda had stripped Donovich and Arik of their purses. She took the barkeep’s shoes, too. The boots’ worn leather would offer little comfort, but the Vistani knew better than to begin a long trek barefoot. Finally, she retrieved the teardrop-shaped charm from the boyar’s pocket and slipped it into her sack. One never knew when such charms might come in handy.
“Please,” the cleric said, his hands knit together in supplication before Soth, “take me with you. Perhaps you will defeat the watcher.” He got to his knees. “Take me back to Palanthas.”
“Palanthas is gone,” the death knight noted. “I led the armies that sacked it a few days ago.” He turned his back on the cleric and pushed open the door.
The priest whimpered and tugged at the hem of his red robes. “It can’t be gone,” he said. “I won’t believe it. Palanthas has never been invaded. Its beautiful walls have never been breached, its towers…”
The death knight strode unimpeded through the streets of the village. Shutters banged closed and mothers hustled their ragged children inside their homes. Even the trade road into the mountains to the west remained strangely empty as the dead man and the Vistani left the village behind. Only once, a few miles along the Svalich Road, did Magda think she saw something following them, but when she stopped and studied their trail, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
Soth sat crosslegged at the mouth of a small cave, watching the rain fall in cold, swollen drops. It beat a jarring, staccato rhythm on the ground around the mouth of the cave. The death knight silently cursed the weather. The noise would make it difficult to hear anything creeping from the rocky crevices or scattered copses of trees nearby. It might even prevent him from hearing if the traps he’d set up were sprung during the night.
Turning his orange eyes to the nighttime forest, Soth scanned the inhospitable landscape for any sign of the trio of wolves that had begun to follow them almost immediately after they’d left the village almost two days past. The shaggy beasts had always remained just out of sight, exchanging piercing howls. Something else was tracking the duo as well. Magda had glimpsed it once, outside the village, and the death knight, too, had spotted a hairy, child-sized thing loping through the underbrush on the following day.
“Are they still out there?” Magda asked from deeper inside the cave.
“Yes,” Soth replied. “But the wolves will not attack me, and the other thing… We shall see.”
A pause followed. “Why hasn’t Strahd come after us?”
The death knight did not respond at first, for he truly did not know why the count had failed to chase them. The wolves were clearly his spies; they had led Soth toward the Vistani camp his first night in Barovia. “His reasons do not matter as long as we reach this portal near the river or the one in Duke Gundar’s castle.”
A wolf howled long and low in the distance. Closer to the cave, another answered, and a third yelped its
