“I do not know. No one has ever paid the toll and lived to tell me about it,” she explained impatiently. As she reached toward the dwarf with a long-fingered hand, she added, “Now, cease your prattle. It has been many years since anyone has passed along the path, and my hound and I have need of sustenance.”
The death knight was standing behind the keeper, but it was clear he was not going to lift a hand to help Azrael. He was on his own. As the shadow woman’s fingers drew closer to his chest, the werebadger stepped sideways, to the very edge of the lighted path.
“There is nothing to either side of the path,” the keeper noted. She reached down and stroked the mastiff's broad skull. “If you leave the light, you will be lost in the darkness until I bring you out.”
Azrael cursed and sprang forward, directly at the woman and the mastiff. Like Soth’s blade, the werebadger’s assault did the keeper no harm, but his powerfully muscled legs drove him into the heart of the shadow creature.
The next thing Azrael knew, he was engulfed in darkness, falling at an incredible speed toward some unseen doom. He screamed, but no sound came from his mouth. He flailed his arms and legs but could feel no movement other than the inexorable pull of gravity. In fact, he could no longer feel pain from his blasted shoulder. Perhaps, he realized with a shock, I’m dead.
He felt the touch of long, slender fingers against his shoulder, and his descent slowed. Next, a burst of blue light cut into his right eye like a needle; his left was still blind from the lightning bolt. A scream-his own, he noted with odd detachment-filled his ears, and the pain from his wounds throbbed to life. When his vision returned, Azrael found himself sprawled on the path. The keeper stood over him, her mastiff at her side. The dog had its mouth open, and ropes of dark saliva dripped from its jaws.
Azrael glanced down at his body. To his surprise, he had reverted back to his dwarven form. “W-What happened?” he gasped.
“You got a taste of what lies to either side of the path,” the guardian said. “No more stalling, now. Give me your soul.”
She thrust her fingers into the dwarf's chest. They felt like daggers of ice to Azrael, but the more he struggled against them, the more the coldness spread inside him. “It must be here!” the keeper cried. She buried her arm up to the elbow in his chest. At her side, the mastiff howled its hunger.
At last the shadow woman stood back. “I have never seen this,” she said sadly. “You are living, yet you have no soul.” The shadow mastiff slunk into the darkness to wait for another soul to fill its shriveled guts.
Shivering and gasping from her icy touch, Azrael stared at the keeper. “Im-m-m-agine that,” he stuttered. He slapped his arms around his chest to bring the feeling back, then stopped. The keeper’s touch had been painfully cold, but the numbness it had left behind was preferable to his burns.
Azrael staggered to his feet and looked up the path to the wrought iron gate. Soth was gone. “How long ago did he leave?” the dwarf wailed, rushing past the keeper. The death knight’s disregard for him did not surprise Azrael. In fact, he expected callous treatment from such powerful beings. But he had not endured the long journey to be abandoned without a fight; Soth was obviously destined for great things, and Azrael wanted to be part of them.
She shrugged. “When you disappeared, he left without a word. Perhaps he thought you dead. You weren’t gone very long, though, so he still might be near the other side of the portal.”
The dwarf ran to the gate, but before he pushed it open, he glanced back to the shadow woman. “Where does this lead?” he asked.
The keeper stood on the verge of the darkness beyond the path, her slender form stooped in disappointment, her horned head dipped in sorrow. “I do not know.” she whispered. “No one has ever returned to tell me, and I cannot leave this realm to find out for myself.”
Azrael shoved the gate wide. It creaked open on stiff hinges, and a rush of warm air blew past the dwarf. As swiftly as the darkness had engulfed him earlier, he found himself in a deserted alley, standing in front of a toppled rain barrel. He looked in wonder into the barrel’s mouth; he could see a faint image of the wrought iron gate in the water pooled inside. With the portal hidden this well, little wonder few people knew of its existence.
The water also reflected Azrael’s features back at him, so that for the first time he saw the lightning bolt’s effects. The sideburn and mustache were gone from the left side of his face, his left eye was closed tightly, and his shoulder was still hunched and twisted. His arm felt a little stronger, but the burns on his chest, side, and face hurt terribly. The loss of his hair bothered him more than the pain. By tomorrow, he would feel a lot better; his preternatural healing abilities were common to lycanthropes, from what he’d heard. For some reason, though, his hair took a long time to grow back.
When Azrael looked down at the sorry state of his brocatelle tunic-in tatters from the lightning bolt and stained with Medraut’s blood-he wished his clothing would mend itself as quickly as his body. He would simply have to steal something as soon as he found Lord Soth.
The narrow alley in which the dwarf found himself ran between two buildings, a bakery and a butcher shop. The aromas of freshly baked bread and recently slaughtered animals made the werebadger’s stomach growl. He pushed thoughts of food aside-as best he could, at least-and studied his surroundings.
The walls framing the alley tilted together as they rose higher, and the windows on the third stories practically opened onto one another. Above that, the buildings’ roofs met, allowing only a trickle of sunlight through. In one direction, the alley led to a dead end. In the other, it opened onto a busy marketplace. Below each window, puddles dotted the unpaved ground, stinking with garbage and the contents of chamber pots. It was, in short, like the alleys in most sizable towns-dark and dirty.
“Gods of light preserve us!” someone shouted from the marketplace.
A woman’s scream rang out, long and shrill, followed by exclamations of fright. They’ve spotted me, Azrael decided, but when he looked toward the marketplace, he saw the commotion was caused by something else.
He hurried to the alley’s mouth and scanned the frightened mob. Two hundred people crowded the square, though many of them rushed toward the wide thoroughfares leading away from the marketplace. Others pushed into the shops bordering the square. Tents collapsed as men and women jostled their supports. Carts were overturned, and baskets of food were spilled, their contents flowing across the dusty cobblestone square. Fletchers and bakers and peddlers of all sorts of goods fled from the figure in ancient, blackened armor who stood in the market’s center.
A wide grin crossed Azrael’s face. The keeper of the portal had been correct: Lord Soth hadn’t gone far.
The death knight lashed out at people indiscriminately. His sword carved a bloody furrow in one man’s back, then he caved in another’s skull with his mailed fist. A dozen or more corpses lay at his feet.
“Is this how he treats the people of Krynn?” the dwarf whispered. He looked at the crowd, but the reason for the death knight’s fury did not present itself immediately. No one seemed to be challenging Soth, though one of the corpses did wear the garish uniform of a guardsman.
The sight of that uniform made Azrael’s heart skip a beat. The blue jacket with gold buttons and epaulets; the black pants and high leather boots; the short, flat-topped hat with the black raven spreading its wings across its front-this soldier’s garb was familiar to him. It belonged to the watch in the town of Vallaki. And if they were in Vallaki…
The dwarf shuddered. The reason for Soth’s ravings crystallized in his mind.
The portal had returned them to the duchy of Barovia.
The Old Svalich Road remained strangely clear for the two days it took Soth and Azrael to march east from Vallaki to Castle Ravenloft. They both knew Strahd would hear about the slaughter the death knight had perpetrated in the quiet fishing town. Yet no one challenged their progress, even though the switchbacks and blind turns that allowed the road to climb the foothills of Mount Ghakis made it a perfect location for an ambush.
Of course, the wolves followed their every move from a distance, disappearing into the forest if Azrael tried to catch up with them. The death knight cared little about the beasts, though he knew they were conveying information back to the count. The dwarf found them a challenge, and he sometimes passed an hour stalking the wolves. While he was skilled as a hunter, they were beyond his abilities.
“Strahd will be expecting us, of course,” Azrael said as he trudged along the road. “Do you have a surprise for him, mighty lord? I mean, if you don’t mind me asking, of course.” When Soth didn’t reply, he shrugged and scanned the bushes for any sign of the wolves. The death knight had grown ominously silent since their return to Barovia. It was all Azrael could do to get him to speak four times in a day.
