the light of Solinari, how wrong they are, how foolishly they try to expel me from their ranks. My honor is my life,” Soth whispered, “and I will have my life back once again.”
A sharp snap, like a bowstring breaking, made the remembered image waver in the death knight’s mind. His eyes focused on the drab cave and the bleak landscape beyond. The early morning sun flared through breaks in the swirling clouds. The rain had stopped. Silence shrouded the copses of hardy trees and stolid outcropping of granite, then the noise came again-a quick, sharp cracking sound.
Soth got to his feet, his injured sword arm dangling at his side. The noise came a third time. It’s the traps, the death knight realized. Something has stumbled across the traps. “Wake up, Magda.”
The Vistani came awake instantly and snatched up her silver dagger. Without a word, she followed the death knight out of the cave and into the dawn.
Cautiously they approached the first trap, a simple snare Soth had rigged near the largest copse of firs. A wolf, its throat torn open, its mangy fur matted with its own blood, lay sprawled over the trap. The scenes at the other two snares were the same. The bodies of the wolves that had been following them lay butchered over the deliberately disturbed traps.
The death knight examined the third beast’s wounds; the ragged, gaping tears in its throat had been made, not by a blade, but by another animal’s teeth and claws. Yet no mindless beast could have purposefully set off the traps so.
“Lord Soth,” Magda called, kneeling on the other side of the dead wolf.
She pointed to a muddy patch near the snare. A set of small boot prints trailed through the muddy ground up to the wolf's corpse. Next came an area of watery muck where any prints had been obliterated. “The footprints lead up to the wolf, but I can’t find any leading away from it,” the woman said, puzzled.
Soth searched the ground, then pointed something out to the Vistani. Another set of prints did indeed lead away from the slaughtered wolf, but ones not made by boots. After leaving the body, the creature had walked away from the area on two legs, but legs that ended in paws with long, curled claws.
TEN
“I never believe anything told to me by bards or historians,” Lord Soth said. “For every sentence of truth they proffer, they demand you accept a dozen lies.” He marched off down the rain-washed road, his boots leaving no prints in the muddy ground.
Magda sighed with exasperation and hurried after the death knight. The boots she’d taken from one of the dead men at the tavern were soaked with water and covered in muck. “The tales told by Vistani storytellers are different,” she said when she reached the knight’s side. “Not every word is true, of course, but often they hold more truth than fiction. There might be some fact that could aid us in defeating the guardian and passing through the portal.”
Without even bothering to look at his companion, the death knight said, “Where I come from, I am the subject of many tales. I have been told, too, that historians often chronicle my life in great detail.” He shook his head. “Never have I revealed my soul to a storyteller or a scribe, and long dead are any who shared of the adventures I lived when the heart still beat within my chest. How, then, can anyone claim to know my story?”
“There are ways for stories to pass from father to son,” Magda noted, her voice full of resolve. “And if you were once a mortal man, you likely shared a tale or two with friends or fellow knights. You-”
The death knight stopped. “Yes, I once shared stories of my knightly adventures with my fellows,” he rumbled. “In fact, my order required knights seeking advancement not only to achieve a feat of great heroism, but to relate that worthy deed before his peers.” Laughing bitterly, he added, “If one story out of ten told by warriors seeking higher rank in the Knights of Solamnia were true, Krynn would have been a paradise beyond compare from their great works.”
Magda was quiet for a time, seemingly cowed by the death knight’s cynicism. At last, though, she gathered her courage and asked, “Was there no truth in the tales you told?”
It was Soth who now fell silent. The exchanges between the death knight and the young woman had been marked by such sparring since early the previous day. The discovery of the wolves’ carcasses had put them both on edge. A full day and a night had dragged past since they had discovered the corpses in the death knight’s snares, and neither he nor Magda had seen any further sign of the foe or benefactor who had slain the beasts.
As Soth and Magda walked on, the late morning sun appeared from behind a thundercloud, covering the landscape with a blanket of bright sunshine. A few mammoth, gray-hued knots still rolled across the sky, threatening to plunge the day into the half-darkness of a storm. In the gnarled trees lining the path, a few small birds took up their songs, though the throaty cawing of crows was a more frequent sound along the trail.
The rutted, muddy road wound deeper and deeper into the foothills of Mount Ghakis. The snowcapped mountain loomed always on the left, and far, far to the right the River Luna sparkled silver and blue on its way through the thick, tangled forest. Few traveled the lonesome byway Magda had chosen for their trek, and Soth was glad for that. Only a single group of Vistani, though no kin of Madame Girani’s, had appeared on the road. At the sight of them, Magda had hurried into the trees more swiftly than Soth. After the caravans had passed, she told the death knight that Strahd’s intention to slaughter those in her tribe would be known by all the gypsies in Barovia by now. She had as much to fear from the Vistani as from any of the vampire lord’s more horrific minions.
A mile, then twice that distance, passed as the morning dragged into afternoon. While he walked, the death knight flexed his hand to exercise his wounded wrist. The bones had knit some, and flesh was beginning to fill in the gash from the dragon’s bite.
“Tell your tale,” Soth noted softly.
“What?” Magda said. “You want me to tell the story now?”
“There might be a kernel of truth in it. That fragment could help us overcome the guardian, if indeed there is such a creature.” The words were spoken as fact, without apology, without conceding that Magda had been correct. “Tell your tale,” Soth repeated.
The young woman cleared her throat, and anyone studying her carefully would have seen that she stood a little straighter, walked with more of a spring in her step. It was not that the death knight had been swayed by something she’d said, though the weight of that victory was not lost on her. It was the ancient Vistani tale itself that lent her pride. “Kulchek was a wanderer,” Magda began, “a subtle thief and great lover who held the reins of his destiny tightly in his own hands.
“He traveled through Barovia in the days before he bested the giant and won the hand of the giant’s daughter, before he passed through the corridor of blades to steal the goldsmith’s wares, even before he killed the nine boyars who tried to enslave him.” The young woman smiled warmly. “He is a great hero of my people, you see, my lord? Madame Girani shared Kulchek’s bloodline. So I do, too.”
“What does this have to do with the portal?” Soth asked irritably.
“It has been a long time since you heard a bard tell a story,” she noted, unoffended by her audience’s impatience. “If you don’t understand Kulchek, you won’t get anything out of his trip through the gate.”
The Vistani took Soth’s silence for an acceptance of that fact, so she started off again on her circuitous tale.
“As I said, Kulchek traveled through Barovia in the days before his famous feats. It was his curse, you see, that he could never sleep in the same spot twice. In lands he favored, he moved his bed each night, until there was nowhere new for him to rest. Then he had to move on. In that fashion, he lived in many lands and wandered through many countries.
“At his side was Sabak, the faithful hound whose feet left burning prints in solid stone when he was on the prowl. In his hand Kulchek carried Gard, the cudgel he had fashioned from the tree at the peak of the highest of all mountains. Because the tree grew so near the gods themselves, its wood could not be cut by any blade but one. That blade, the dagger Novgor, Kulchek secreted in his boot.”
By now Magda had fallen into the pattern of the tale as it had been taught to her by the storytellers who went from tribe to tribe amongst the Vistani. That the tale had been meant to be repeated to travelers on the road quickly became apparent to Soth, for its language possessed a rhythm that mirrored a slow but steady walking pace. Occasionally the woman would add a personal comment or ask a rhetorical question, breaking the rhythm. In
