If the tavern talk Gesmas had heard in his travels was to be believed, a leader had gathered together the Iron Hills bands into an army set on driving Soth from Sithicus. This warlord was known only by a symboclass="underline" the White Rose. Some within the domain saw the White Rose as a savior. Most understood that commoners would little concern a warrior powerful enough to threaten Lord Soth. These wise folk kept to their own business and hoped any war that broke out would be a brief one. Each new day of Soth's neglect undermined those hopes a little more.
The mere presence of Azrael's escort, dead men astride decaying mounts, marked Sithicus as different from all the places Gesmas had explored on his missions for Lord Aderre. Necromancy and creatures that cheated the grave were factors to be countered in all those places. There were wild, disreputable yarns in some of the kingdoms hereabouts that identified a particular nobleman or general, or even the domain's ruler, as a monster- a vampire, werebeast, or sorcerer of the most vile sort. The world, at least according to these macabre tales, was full of malevolent powers and corrupt souls.
Some of these legends were true, though few who knew their veracity lived for long. Enough were obviously false-drunken inventions or misinformation spread by the tyrants themselves-to allow the peasants in most domains to delude themselves about their strange and sinister environs. In Sithicus, though, the unnatural was so conspicuous, so brazen in announcing its existence, that Gesmas wondered how anyone slept at night.
If Azrael were to be believed, the only thing Sithicans truly feared was him. "I'm their only nightmare," he said whenever the conversation touched upon the horrors of the place.
The third time the dwarf offered up that bit of braggadocio, Gesmas couldn't hold his tongue.
"What about the Whispering Beast?" he asked. "Or the Bloody Shoemaker?"
"Cobbler," Azrael corrected with a snarl. "The Bloody Cobbler. They're both bogeymen, children's stories."
Gesmas almost repeated Azrael's own comment about the importance of stories in Sithicus, but thought better of it. It was foolish and unnecessary to provoke a response. The tension in the dwarf's shoulders, his white-knuckled grip on the reins, told the spy that his captor was lying. It was the same sort of fearful reaction the names had provoked in all but the most reckless locals, and even they would not offer much about the creatures beyond a line or two of fractured verse. That the Beast and the Cobbler frightened a thing like Azrael, a bogeyman in his own right, was reason enough for Gesmas to wonder at their power.
Before the prisoner could summon the courage to ask again about the two horrors, Azrael slowed the carriage to a relatively sane speed. Gesmas levered himself to a sitting position. Groaning at the pain from his ribs, he peered out of the trap.
The road here skirted the Great Chasm, so close that the wheels kicked stones into the rift. The vast scar ran for nearly one hundred miles, north to south, through the heart of Sithicus. It gaped as wide as five miles across in some places, narrowing to less than a mile only at its ends. Light wouldn't penetrate the chasm, even when the sun shone directly overhead. Only sickly, leafless trees grew along its perimeter. They thrust up from the earth like sorry scarecrows to warn travelers away from the rift. With good reason.
The darkness of the Great Chasm quivered with excitement at the approach of the trap and the dead riders trailing it. Each hoofbeat sent a ripple across the gloom. The rattle of tusk and fang from Azrael's carriage was answered deep within the murk by a famished gnashing of teeth.
Gesmas noticed none of this, though he was an observant man. His attention had been drawn to a more astonishing sight: Nedragaard Keep.
A peninsula like the cupped hand of a giant turned to stone held aloft Soth's ruined castle. Granite crags rose up on three sides, fingers picketing the keep from the chasm's greedy darkness. The marvel sheltered within that stony grasp resembled a massive stone rose. The domed central tower had been designed to approximate a tightly closed bud. On all sides, lattice-work bridges led from the main keep to landings opened like leaves. But the rose that housed Lord Soth was blighted. The crimson-tinged stones had been blackened by some ancient blaze. The walls had been breached, the bridges and landings shattered.
The longer Gesmas studied the keep, the harder it became to focus on details. A flickering light drew his attention to a window high up in the tower. One moment, the window appeared intact- a huge circle of stained glass lit from within. The next, it was simply gone. Gesmas blinked and rubbed his eyes. He scanned the tower's face. Nothing. It wasn't that the light had gone out in the room, abandoning the window to darkness. The tower itself had changed somehow. He tried to recall the window's exact location, but the castle blurred in his thoughts until he could no longer remember what he'd been trying to do.
The road swept away from the chasm's brink, passing through an elaborate garden and a large graveyard. Time and neglect had obliterated the boundaries between the two. Weeds covered the graves. Climbing roses, their blooms as black as the unseen moon overhead, entangled memorial statues and stormed the walls of crypts long ago robbed of their dead. The wind hissed through trees of overripe fruit. The gusts mixed the tang of a harvest gone to rot with the smothering fume of grave mold.
"Last chance to come up with a better lie about your mission here," Azrael shouted as the carriage passed through a crumbling gatehouse and onto the isthmus that led to the castle. "Soth finds spies annoying, but bards make him angry."
The wind picked up suddenly, shifted to the west. It howled now like an enraged animal-no, carried the howls of something unhinged with fury from within the keep itself.
"Th-that sound," Gesmas stammered. "Is it Soth?"
"You'd better hope not."
An extensive section of the castle's outer curtain and the ground beneath it had slid into the chasm, leaving a break in the isthmus that was now spanned by a wooden bridge. The carriage rattled across the planks and into the bailey. On platforms overlooking the courtyard, a trio of armored dead men kept ceaseless, senseless watch, Gesmas could not imagine what purpose their patrol served. A general would have to be mad to lead an army against Nedragaard.
The sound Gesmas had taken for the howl of a single creature fragmented into several distinct voices. Each member of the unseen chorus proclaimed its outrage in shrieks that echoed in the night:
"He hears us still!"
"He attends us not!"
"The fire-blasted rose has turned inward, away from us, away from his damnation."
"But he will stir, sisters. The first dark in the light's hollow will wake. Once more will he feel our song's lash upon his unbeating heart."
An apparition manifested in the open doorway. The ghostly figure was slim and clad in a flowing gown. Her face was that of an elven maiden, composed with sharp angles that would have been unattractive on a human. On elves, though, the features hinted at a sort of geometric perfection. Gesmas felt a weight on his heart that had nothing to do with his injuries.
"He is here," the apparition announced in a soft voice, so unlike the piercing shrieks that rang through the hall behind her. "It is time."
"It's time when I say so," Azrael snapped. The dwarf walked through the phantom as if it were nothing more than an errant patch of mist.
The face that had been so lovely a moment before was now a mask of fury. The gentle curves and perfect angles were gone, replaced by a riot of sharp teeth. "Eater of dirt!" the banshee wailed. "We will make you suffer!"