'Feh,' Soth snorted. 'You stall for time.' His sword scraped from its scabbard.
'Magda was carrying a white rose,' Azrael offered desperately. 'It was a symbol of her allegiance. The flower can be grown nowhere in Sithicus but the Iron Hills, in the territory controlled by the Thorns. That's proof she met with the rebels.'
Soth sheathed his sword and paced along the stony shelf. 'She handed me the flower as she died,' he said at last.
Azrael nodded. 'She wanted you to think the Rose might help you escape this place. That was her intent all along, to make you a party to your own destruction. It's the only way they could defeat you, mighty lord.'
Emboldened by the death knight's hesitation, Azrael struggled to his feet. He slipped his chain of office from his neck and held it out to Soth. Head lowered, he said, 'I thought I was doing my duty in sending the shadows against her.'
Sardonic laughter escaped Soth's lips. Another seneschal had spoken similar words of contrition, in a time and place far removed from Sithicus. Back in the days when Soth's heart still beat, before his damnation to eternal unlife, he had confronted that minion with the disappearance of his first wife. The Knights of Solamnia had accused Soth of murdering Lady Gladria, to clear the path to his bed for the elf maid with whom he had betrayed his marriage vows.
'A hundred times I'd heard you voice a wish that the woman be gone,' Caradoc had said. He, too, had presented Soth his chain of office. 'I thought I was doing my duty in sending her away.'
Soth had been unable to deny that he'd secretly longed for Gladria's demise, that Caradoc had only acted upon desires he himself had been incapable of acting upon. The man had merely done what he thought best for his lord, for the land.
So, too, with Azrael. The dwarf could see Magda's treachery where he had been blind. He should have seen the white rose as a sign of her alliance with the rebels. Instead, he had misinterpreted it as a sign of hope. And hope is something better left to fools and madmen in Sithicus, Soth reminded himself bitterly.
'I no longer have need of a seneschal,' the death knight said. He took the heavy chain, letting it dangle from his mailed fist. 'The office seems to corrupt whoever holds it. There is another mantle for you to wear, Azrael-one to which you are much more suited.'
'Anything, mighty lord.'
'Devote yourself, and whatever agents you can muster, to the eradication of the White Rose's allies. She is a general, a clever one, but a general is nothing without troops.'
'And the Rose herself?'
'I will deal with her when the time comes,' Soth replied.
Azrael turned to go, but the death knight held up a restraining hand. 'Do not mistake this stay of execution for a pardon,' Soth said coldly. He tightened his fist and crushed the heavy chain. 'Know that my gaze will be upon you as you do my bidding. You are my minion, Azrael. Reach above that station again, and your death agonies will be legend, even in Sithicus.'
Glumly, Azrael nodded.
'Good.' Soth dropped the broken chain. The metallic clank rang out over the lake. 'You will explain this place to me,' he said, turning to the water. 'I can see that it might be quite useful.'
Azrael chronicled how he had discovered the lake and explained the water's properties. He failed to mention that the dark spoke to him in special ways, that those voices told him of the palace he would raise upon the ruins of Soth's crumbling keep. The death knight's anger and the narrowness of the dwarf's escape had engendered a new caution in him, even a little fear. But he did not fear anything enough to betray the dark.
When the dwarf had gone, Soth removed his helmet and his right gauntlet. Cautiously he dipped two fingers into the lake and touched the salty liquid to his scarred, scabrous lips. Voices filled his ears, a riot of sound more staggering than the banshees' keening. The babble overwhelmed him, and he sat stunned on the stony shore.
Finally, Soth's consciousness found an anchor: his name. Someone in the domain had spoken the death knight's name.
Slowly, warily, the master of Nedragaard Keep gained control of the clamor. He listened for hours as his subjects spoke of him, as he would many times in the coming days. From those confused, fractured exchanges he plucked bits of his story that he had forgotten. These divers tales could not completely mend the death knight's ravaged memory; there was too much of his life that the peasants did not know. Yet each new breach that was filled, every gap bridged, let him realize how much of himself he had lost and made him all the more certain he would recover every bit of his forgotten life.
Evening at Veidrava usually found the day-shift miners and their spouses at Ambrose's store. The place was more than a market; it was a meeting hall and tavern, even a hospital when circumstances demanded. On most nights, people crowded together in knots, trading tales of woe or laughing at execrable jokes. The men congregated at the makeshift bar Ambrose set up in the empty area used for gatherings and weddings and such. They talked of the pit. The women milled in the store proper, poking through the knicknacks and sundries, discussing life aboveground. Grubby children dashed between the two camps, and everywhere else, until Kern or Ogier or one of the other 'regulars' chased them outside.
That was before Azrael commenced his hunt for agents of the White Rose.
The dwarf had always been an unwelcome presence at the mine. He was brutal and prompted the pit bosses to be the same. The seneschal had ears in every wall, it seemed. Sometimes he would recite the most intensely private conversations as if he had been right in the room when they'd been spoken.
Now, though, Azrael and his police-the Politskara, he called them-loomed large over every aspect of life at Veidrava. He recruited the most vicious of the pit bosses, the toughest miners, and most feared soldiers. It was their job to root out traitors. They suspected everyone of subversion, of secretly supporting the White Rose and her Thorns. When they found the least bit of evidence to support that suspicion, people simply disappeared.
The workers and their families feared the Politskara like nothing Ambrose had ever seen. Worse, they'd come to mistrust their friends and neighbors. Old grudges prompted brothers to inform on their brothers, wives to turn in their husbands. Almost no one came to Ambrose's now. It was better to stay at home and wait for the reign of terror to end.
This night only a half-dozen or so stalwart souls lingered at the store. Ambrose, Kern, and Ogier hunched over the bar, arguing their way through a game of Stones and Bones. The three were all but inseparable and had been ever since they'd first gone down the pit together. Only Ambrose's accident kept them apart during the day. The other two still went down the mine, as they had every sunrise for the past thirty years.
Ganelon slumped against the store's counter, fighting off boredom. Two women were picking over Ambrose's supply of cloth, and a rag-clad little girl, some maltreated miner's child, wandered in and out of the aisles. Ganelon suspected she was hiding from someone by the way she looked over her shoulder at every odd noise. She also kept the hood of her threadbare cloak pulled up around her fine-boned face. Probably on the run from some drunken lout of a father, Ganelon mused. Still, he watched her carefully, in case her skittishness proved the sign of an inexperienced thief.
A sudden cough of Ambrose's phlegmy laughter startled Ganelon out of his scrutiny.
'Here's a first,' Ambrose wheezed. 'Ogier comes out the victor in a battle of wits!'
The big man nodded proudly. 'That's a bottle of Malaturno you owe me,' Ogier said. The prize was a dear one, wine from an obscure Invidian vineyard.
Kern still stared down at the remnants of the game. 'Bleat away,' he said, tugging at his thin beard. His foul mood radiated from him like heat from a well-banked stove. 'I still think you've pulled the wool over my eyes somewhere here, Sheep.'
Ogier's thick head of curls, now gone white with age, had inspired that nickname. His gentleness made it stick. From Kern's lips, though, the name was a direct comment upon Ogier's low intelligence. The big man's smile drooped into a pout.
Kern regretted the insult the moment he saw its effect upon his friend. 'Two bottles,' he offered. 'If you think you're a big enough boy to handle that much-and Ambrose can provide the goods.'
A decade past, Kern might have trekked across the border himself for the prize. He always was the most
