at least, they wished it to appear.
In his days as a Rose Knight, highest order of the fabled Knights of Solamnia, Lord Soth had ridden down a hundred such knavish bands. Their tactics inevitably hinged upon the same simple notion: Given a fleeing enemy, a soldier will always pursue. Soth had seen talented warriors do just that, their bloodlust stirred by their enemy's apparent weakness. He'd even laid ambushes himself that depended upon that sort of short-sightedness in his adversary. But he had never, in his years of life or unlife, been taken in by such a ruse.
As Soth and his warriors entered the canyon, he raised his sword and waved it twice. He and three of his skeletal soldiers charged ahead, hard upon the heels of the fleeing ogres and human mercenaries. The remainder of the patrol split into two bands of five. Without breaking pace, without the slightest hesitation, they stormed up the steep canyon walls.
The Invidian archers hidden atop the canyon, perched behind boulders and scrub trees, raised their bows. Most never fired a shot. The sight of the dead riders ascending the sheer rock cliffs was too much for them. They dropped their weapons and fled, turning the staged rout into an actual one.
The swords of the skeletal warriors ran red with Invidian blood. The dead men offered no mercy, untouched by the screams of the dying. They went about this grisly work as they did everything- dispassionately, with a murderous mechanical efficiency. The victory, the battle, it all meant nothing. Yet every one of those former stalwarts knew that it should stir his heroic heart. Such was their curse.
Soth, too, left a trail of corpses in his wake. Like his companions, he felt no exhilaration from the conflict. These sell-swords were feeble adversaries, unworthy of his blade. If these were the best troops Malocchio could muster, the war would be a short one.
The master of Nedragaard and his thirteen loyal retainers pursued the remainder of the Invidians until they were within sight of the border. Too many remained, and they were too widely scattered, for Soth and the others to kill them all before they crossed back to their homeland. The death knight reined in his horse. Sheathing his gore- spattered sword, he began to sing in a voice as deep as a bottomless chasm. His mournful dirge of oaths betrayed, destinies abandoned, filled the Sithican night.
The skeletal warriors ceased their pursuit, threw back their heads, and joined in the chant. Their voices rattled like ancient paper as they added the catalogue of their sins to their master's. Lust, greed, pride-they confessed to these and more. The worst of their crimes, the one that bound them forever to the Knight of the Black Rose, was idolatry. In life, they had honored Lord Soth above all else. In death, they shared his awful fate, forever damned alongside the one they had mistaken for a god among men.
Throughout Sithicus, others added to the song. They were, like Soth himself, unconscious of the things they confessed, unable to hear the secret vices their neighbors admitted. The dirge gathered at the border. There, the accumulated sins blossomed into a wall of spectral roses that touched the heavens.
Then the flowers withered and vanished.
The few surviving soldiers from the raiding party raced across the border to safety. Soth, sitting dazed upon his decaying steed, watched them go. He'd felt the song's undoing. More disturbing still, he'd also heard the dirge clearly in the instant before it was silenced. The awful weight of those confessions, the indisputable truth of those countless dark deeds, pressed down upon him still.
Slowly, the death knight approached the border.
From a distance the boundary resembled a low stone wall. As the death knight drew closer, he recognized it as a barrier of bloody human skulls. They were lined along the border in both directions as far as the eye could see. Small and large, ancient and recent, the skulls faced Sithicus. Their empty eye sockets regarded the land and its lord with the utter detachment of the truly dead.
Soth dismounted and warily approached the barrier. He saw now that the skulls were not simply smeared with gore but covered with words penned in blood. The script was cramped, but delicate. He lifted one of the skulls and began to read.
The gods granted Soth enough self-knowledge to see how low he'd fallen…
The death knight dashed the skull to pieces on the ground. He picked up another. It, too, held a fragment of his history.
For failing in his quest, for letting his own child burn to death before his eyes, Soth's elf maid bride called a curse down upon the once-noble knight…
So it was with every one of the skulls. Someone had gathered Soth's history and turned it against him, even as the death knight himself grew confident that his past was once more under his control. This wasn't the work of Malocchio Aderre; the skulls were on Sithican soil, beyond his reach. That meant someone within the domain. The White Rose, then.
Soth paused. Such sorcery was far beyond Kitiara's abilities. But if not her, who? What other powers had set themselves against him?
A shadow of uncertainty darkened Soth's already desolate thoughts. With it came a sensation the death knight had all but forgotten. For the first time in centuries, Lord Soth felt the icy touch of fear.
Eleven
Ganelon awoke bathed in late afternoon sunlight, nestled in a bower strewn with white rose petals. Their heady perfume lay heavy upon his senses. He thought to sit up, but a lethargy inspired by the roses' bouquet overwhelmed him. With a sigh, he let himself sink deeper into the verdure.
He tried to recall how he'd come to this place. Bird song and distant laughter chased away the vague thoughts before they could coalesce into memories. It didn't matter. He was safe here.
'As it should be,' said a cool, lovely voice. 'You are only truly safe with someone who loathes you absolutely.'
At the sound of Helain's voice the drowsiness lifted from Ganelon. Heart racing, the young man struggled from the sylvan bed. His leg brace foiled his attempt to stand quickly, and for just an instant, sunlight dazzled his eyes. When his vision cleared, he saw her.
She sat upon the green, her face aglow with madness. The smile upon her face was so wide that her dry lips cracked and bled. For all its prominence, though, that smile was empty. So, too, were her beautiful blue eyes, which stared blankly down at the thing cradled in her lap.
One of Helain's hands rested upon his scabrous cheek. The other stroked her own tangled red hair. 'You freed me,' she said as she bent to kiss the creature's chancred lips.
A cry of horror finally welled up from Ganelon's soul. 'Helain!' he wailed.
Helain gasped and shrank bank. Chuckling, the creature raised its misshapen head from her lap. 'Ah, roused at last,' the thing said, glancing down at its own swollen crotch in case the double entendre had eluded Ganelon. It hadn't.
As he looked upon the creature's corrupt visage, the memories flooded back-poor lost Bratu, capture by the Vistani, Inza's magic and the torture she'd promised when that sorcery failed to make him break the oath he'd sworn to the Bloody Cobbler. This creature had rescued him, pulled him through the shadows even as the Vistana raised the red-hot poker to his face. The Whispering Beast. He and Helain were in the hands of the Whispering Beast.
'G-Get away from her,' the young man stammered.
The Beast pushed himself to a crouch. Helain immediately threw her arms around his sunken chest. 'What makes you think she wants to be left alone?' he asked. 'I doubt she was ever this affectionate with you, little boy. If she was, it was wasted effort.'
With one filthy hand, the Whispering Beast broke Helain's clinging embrace. He stood, revealing himself in all his hideousness.
He was starvation thin, taller than any man Ganelon had ever seen. Stringy hair covered his entire frame, gray-white where dirt and excrement hadn't matted it. Arms that seemed to bend the wrong way hung down past his knees. The hands at the ends of those misshapen limbs were graced with slender fingers that constantly twitched and traced vulgar patterns in the air. Those agile digits hinted at the most horrible thing about the Beast. Underlying the corruption were the faint remnants of a beauty so profound it could not be hidden by any amount of
