sparks showered down upon him and lances of lightning flashed around his head. None burned as brightly as Soth's eyes. 'Vengeance!' he cried, and threw his entire being into the assault.
Blue-white light played upon the invisible barrier, revealing its form as a gigantic dome. Soth drove the rift even wider, and a tear stole up from the ground to the dome's peak. With a sound like every tree in the Fumewood splitting from root to crown at the same moment, the barrier tore open. A faint radiance lingered for a moment, a ghost of the sorcerous wall. Then that, too, faded.
Soth pushed himself forward, moving as much by instinct as any conscious thought. He strode through the breach in the keep's outer shell, stalked through the bailey to the double doors leading to the main hall. Elves and men cowered at his passing, but he paid them no heed. His only interest was the woman who had betrayed him, the faithless Vistana.
Not so with his minions. The skeletal warriors and the banshees set about slaughtering every trespasser that crossed their paths. The massacre continued until the bailey was choked with the dead and dying, and the besiegers who thought Nedragaard Keep impossible to invade learned that it was even more difficult to escape.
The Knight of the Black Rose found Inza in the main hall. She was crouched before the throne like a cornered animal. Her green eyes narrowed to slits when she saw the death knight and heard the clamor of battle in the courtyard. She drew Novgor, the ever-sharp dagger of Kulchek the Wanderer, and brandished it. 'This will shear your thorns as readily as any rose's, giorgio? she warned.
Soth paused. With an edge of mocking laughter in his voice, he said, 'An ill considered admission, witch. If the blade is enchanted, the Measure allows me to use my own magic to even the fight.'
With one finger, Soth traced a symbol in the air. The glyph hung there, glittering with a fire the same hue as the death knight's burning gaze. Before it could speed toward Inza arixi deliver Soth's gift of agony, though, a single white rose slashed down from the gallery and dispersed it.
'I don't think Vinas Solamnus had creatures such as you in mind when he wrote the Measure, Loren,' the White Rose said. She stood in the musicians' gallery overlooking the main hall, the Bloody Cobbler on her left, the Whispering Beast to her right. 'Your mocking references cannot stain that most treasured code of knightly virtue. In making them, you only demean yourself further-if that's possible.'
Soth did not reply. He stood and waited as the Rose descended the curving stairs. As she did, the Beast slipped over the gallery's rail and dropped down onto the rotting throne behind Inza. The Vistana turned, ready to lash out with Novgor. The sudden pressure of a silver shoemaker's knife at her own throat made her freeze.
'Nice blade,' the Cobbler said cheerfully. His wounds and bruises had healed, it seemed, at least those that were visible. His face was hidden behind his pale mask, but Inza could hear his voice clearly enough when he added, 'Put it away before I lop your head off.'
At the center of the hall, by the wreckage of the triple-ringed chandelier, Lord Soth bowed stiffly to the White Rose. She returned the courtesy with an equally artificial curtsy.
'I never thought to see you again, Isolde,' said the death knight.
The White Rose nodded slightly, only a hint of a sad smile visible in the darkness of her hood. 'Nor I you, my husband.'
The orb in Ganelon's hand flared to life, radiating light that cut through the Black Chapel like a thousand shining scythes. The bodiless salt shadows curled under the blaze of sunlight. Their perpetual hiss became a gasp of pain, a statement of agony rivaled only by Azrael's intermittent howls.
A look of surprise flashed onto Ogier's face. It was much the same as the expression of good-natured bewilderment his friends had seen there all his life-so close, in fact, that it made Ganelon's heart ache to see it. That baffled look was the first thing the light melted. The big man's white curls were next, just before the rest of his shadow-tainted flesh burned away.
Kern, too, burned under the orb's intense light. Ganelon caught a glimpse of him as he scrambled from behind the altar. He might have been using Ogier to shield his escape from the chapel, but Ganelon knew somehow that the soft-hearted cynic was trying at the last to push the big man from harm's way. The ashes of the two friends mingled on the dirty chapel floor.
Only Ambrose withstood the light long enough to speak. The bitter, hate-filled face of the thing possessing him softened. For just an instant, the kindly man Ganelon had loved so dearly returned. 'Clever boy,' he said in his wheezing voice. Then Ambrose was gone, consumed by the sunlight.
The orb's light faded, then faltered. Ganelon dropped the blackened crystal into the ashes. With trembling hands he tore into the duffel once more, searching for the silver knife. There might still be time to kill Azrael, to save Helain and everyone else from eternal slavery.
But Ganelon had already ensured their freedom. The poppy seeds he had secreted in the items Azrael used for the rite, the flesh and the greenery he had tossed into the vat, were not enough to kill the werebadger. They were, however, sufficient to taint the drink, to force his body to reject it.
Even as the roiling mass of darkness threatened to burst the dwarf like an overfull wineskin, he vomited it up.
The captured shadows poured from Azrael, bleeding from his nose and mouth, seeping from his eyes and ears. They filled the Black Chapel, each one echoing the dwarfs tortured scream. Ganelon felt himself lifted by that sea of darkness. It bore him along the tunnel and up the mine's main shaft.
Dazed, still clutching the shabby duffel that contained everything he owned in the world, Ganelon found himself lying in the ruins of Veidrava's Engine House. How much time had passed he wasn't certain. A geyser of shadow still rose up from the pit. The darkness was amassing in the sky high overhead, merging with the shad ows spewed up from the Great Chasm a hundred miles to the west.
The last of the darkness rose into the heavens. For a time, the gathered shadows hung motionless, their bulk blotting out the triple moons that shone in the twilight sky. Finally, the ebon mass shuddered and began to fall.
To Ganelon, it resembled nothing so much as a mountain hurled from the stars.
Nedragaard Keep was burning.
Screams sounded from the tower's upper floors. The clash of steel in the bailey had been replaced by the shriek and thud of blazing bodies plummeting from the battlements. It was little consolation, but the corpses met their shadows as they struck the ground.
The mountain of darkness had burst apart upon impact, hurtling the individual shadows back to their originators. It was the unstable nature of the massed darkness that prevented it from doing even more damage to the Sithican countryside. Still, the spectral mountain had laid low the Land of Spectres, and it would be years before it recovered fully.
Through it all, Soth and Isolde stood silent at the center of Nedragaard's main hall. They regarded each other with eyes that saw through the centuries, to a time when they had been the still point at the center of another cataclysm. Like Azrael's foiled scheme, that disaster, too, had been within Soth's power to prevent, but his rage had mastered his mind and his heart, just as it had on the outskirts of Veidrava.
'I think it's time for you to run along, little girl,' the Whispering Beast said to Inza. He slid down into the throne, caressed the Vistana's thigh with one stinking, outstretched foot. 'Too bad, too. We could have had fun.' He playfully nibbled one of the severed ears hanging at his chest.
'She has other playmates waiting for her,' the Bloody Cobbler said. He thrust Inza off the dais. She landed in a fighting crouch, dagger already plucked from her boot. 'You'll want to save that for outside,' noted the Cobbler. 'They're waiting.'
'They know what you've done,' the Beast added, 'to the giant, the Wanderers, your mother, all of it.'
'Everyone will know,' chimed the Cobbler. 'For ever and ever. Sithicus is going to be like that soon.'
A tremor shook the tower, and a rain of stone and dust showered the main hall. The Cobbler held his hand out as if testing for rain. The Beast leaped from the throne. He crouched in a fighting stance mimicking Inza's. 'Off with
