Here now was that declaration again. The words were faint, just as they had been in Dargaard Keep. The original inscription had been worn down by Soth's fingertips, which he traced over them year after year as he marched to the highest platform to watch the sun set on the Dargaard Mountains. Nedragaard had always lacked this detail. Yet it was in the right place, in a child's awkward scrawl. His awkward scrawl.
Soth had been so caught up in his concerns with Invidia and the White Rose, he'd failed to notice how closely the keep was beginning to resemble its original on Krynn. He'd called the place Nedragaard because of the small but noticeable flaws that differentiated it from Dargaard. Ruined doors hung where there should have been ones intact. Hallways extended a few paces too far or stopped a few paces too soon. The oath Soth had carved on that landing had always been missing. Until now. Those flaws, along with the more substantial imperfections brought on by the death knight's inattention, were apparently being corrected.
As he pushed aside some rubble that marked the stair's end, a cold wind tugged at Soth's cloak. Ignoring the chill that surely signaled the coming of winter, the death knight stepped onto the keep's highest vantage. From the ruins of the tower's upper floors, he surveyed the fortress's defenses.
The shadows that filled the Great Chasm were roiling, as they did on some bright mornings, almost as if the sunshine made them angry. This day they swirled with particular ferocity against the high cliffs that surrounded the keep on three sides. The darkness lapped, too, at the shores of the isthmus that connected it to the chasm's eastern cliff.
Or rather, had once connected it to the shore. Just outside Nedragaard Keep's front gate, a group of undead ogres were even now completing the task of drawing in the wooden bridge. A thirty-foot gap between the crumbled outer wall and the isthmus gaped blackly.
The reason for this defensive precaution milled on the chasm's eastern shore. A massive force, at least a thousand Invidian troops, had claimed the overgrown garden-graveyard there. More were straggling south along the Chasm Road. Soth could hear the ragged cheer that went up from the army as each wayward company arrived.
A banshee rose up before Soth. The sunlight made it appear even more insubstantial than normal, less a spectre than the memory of one. It was joined by a second, then a third. Leedara, Marantha, and Gisela, his three primary tormentors, the leaders of the shrieking host, stood before him.
"The wolves are at your door," Marantha began.
"They have claimed the graveyard, claimed your buried dead," Gisela added.
Leedara, whose phantasmal form still gaped from the wound Inza had inflicted upon her, hovered directly before the master of Nedragaard. "Your dead are all you have, withered rose. Lose them, and lose yourself."
"There is no chance I'll be defeated," the Knight of the Black Rose said smugly. He gestured to the east and the south. "In Sithicus, the living and the dead heed my battle cry. Even now my fleshy army comes to drive the curs from our stoop."
They totaled twice the Invidian thousand, elves from the east and a ragtag army of miners and farmers from the south. At Soth's bidding, Azrael had mustered the troops. They were intended as an invasion force, a sword point the death knight meant for Malocchio Aderre's throat. If they had to fight first on Sithican soil, all the better. The slaughter of the invaders would harden them and give them a taste for Invidian blood.
Soth watched in anticipation as the elves fanned out, forming their favored order of battle. The miners, too, arrayed themselves for the clash to come. Their lines were irregular, befitting the assortment of picks and flails and axes with which they armed themselves. The difference in formations mattered little. Soth was certain either army could easily break the siege.
A cry went up from the garden-graveyard, the fitting place where the three armies met. It was not the clamor of war Soth heard, nor the outraged roar of the dying. It was a cheer of fellowship. The three armies were now one.
The siege of Nedragaard Keep had begun.
Fifteen
The tripartite army's cry of unity reverberated from the walls of Nedragaard Keep, echoed across the Great Chasm, and finally faded. The leaders of the three allied forces stood for a moment, bathed in the glow of fellowship, before turning to consider the seemingly inviolable fortress looming before them. The good cheer fled, and the relief at having finally ended their long marches soured into exhaustion.
It was Gerhard, commander of the miners and farmers from the south, who gave voice to the question vexing them all. "Well," he asked gruffly, "now what do we do?"
"The isthmus is too narrow for any large-scale frontal assault," noted the elven general Ulrisch, an effete nobleman from Har-Thelen. "Perhaps we could mount a sneak attack from the chasm and have a few dozen men attempt to gain access to the keep from below. They could reset the bridge, allowing the rest of-"
"Who'd be idiot enough to climb down into those shadows?" interrupted Gerhard.
"Why, your miners, of course," the elf sniffed. "They're used to the dark. Besides, all those stories about the chasm are silly. It's just another hole in the ground."
"Well, then, your elves can go," Gerhard snapped. "It's your idea, after all."
The commander of the former Invidian forces, a particularly gruesome ogre named Onkar, snorted his amusement. He immediately scratched furiously at the gaping hole where his nose once had been. Snorting always made the tattered flesh there quiver.
"What for do you think we carry all this wood?" Onkar asked, gesturing to the heaps of timber piled at the center of the garden-graveyard. As each company of ogres and mercenaries arrived from the north, jingling with the gold and silver Azrael had used to buy their loyalty, they dutifully deposited more logs and beams onto the stack. There was enough there now to construct the frame for a fairly large house.
"Siege engines," the elf noted, "Of course. That would have been my next suggestion. Only we have nothing to hurl at the keep."
"Elves," Gerhard grumbled. "We have plenty of elves."
Onkar removed his foot from the large granite headstone upon which he had planted it. The stone was ornately carved, inscribed with the name Gelbmartin and the badge belonging to the lord steward of the keep. The ogre reached down and yanked it from the ground. "These make good crash," he said. "When we run out, we dig up the dead guys and fling them, too."
Gerhard and Ulrisch stared at the brute. "Crude, but creative," the elf said at last. "You supervise the stockpiling of the… missiles, Onkar, and we two will begin construction of the catapults." He encircled Gerhard's shoulder with an arm and steered him away from the brute. "Let us discuss the division of labor."
When they were safely out of earshot, the elf murmured, "Is there anything about this situation you find odd?"
Gerhard shrugged. "Odd? Like you pointy-eared wine sippers showing some spine for once-that kind of odd?"
With an exasperated grimace on his face, Ulrisch rolled up his shirt sleeve. His arm was a mass of scars from elbow to wrist. "I was captured by my Iron Hills kin. They flayed my arm, and a few other parts of my body you wouldn't care to see, before I managed to escape." He let the sleeve slip back into place.
Gerhard patted the politska's silver axe hanging at his belt. "I've peeled a few people in my day, too. None of 'em escaped, of course. Still, you're all right by me if you stood up to that sort of torture."
"I'm so glad," the elf said blandly, "but you still haven't answered my original question." At the blank look on Gerhard's face, Ulrisch prompted, "Our situation. Do you find anything odd about it? Where, for example, is Azrael?"