Tanis lowered his hand toward his sword, a move that surprised Soth after his earlier cowardice. Dalamar placed slender fingers gently on the half-elf’s arm and said, “Do not interfere, Tanis. He does not care about us. He comes for one thing only.”
Dim candlelight illuminated the laboratory, revealing rows of black-bound spellbooks, ominously hissing vials and beakers, and huge stone tables reserved for larger, more frightening experiments. The portal through which Raistlin had already passed to encounter Takhisis stood on the opposite side of the room, away from Soth. The great circlet of steel was covered in gold and silver runes, and five carved dragons’ heads snarled around its edges. In a corner away from the portal, covered in a cloak, was the object of the death knight’s search. Kitiara! Soth’s undead heart leaped as he crossed the room with forceful steps. He drew back the cloak and knelt beside the corpse.
In death Kitiara Uth Matar appeared as beautiful to Soth as she had in life. Her bright brown eyes were frozen open in an expression of horror. Her night-blue dragonscale armor had been stripped away by the tower’s guardians, and her black, tight-fitting doublet was shredded, revealing her tan skin. The death knight hardly saw the bloody gash in her leg or the long scratches, purple from poison, that the guardians had inflicted. The charred hole burned into her chest, undoubtedly from some magical attack of Dalamar’s, troubled him for only an instant. The wounds mattered little as long as Kitiara’s body remained intact enough to house her revived soul.
The last embers of Kitiara’s mortal life were flickering out, yet her soul still hung over her body. A small, ghostly image of the general writhed in torment, attached to her corpse by a thin, yet brilliant cord of energy. “Let go of this life,” Soth murmured to Kitiara. The cord brightened as the soul clung desperately to mortal life. The cause was not fear, but love.
Soth turned to face his most hated adversary. “Release her to me, Tanis Half-Elven,” he said, his voice filling the laboratory. “Your love binds her to this plane. Give her up.”
The half-elf screwed a look of resolve onto his face and took a step forward. His hand was on the hilt of his sword. Before he could move closer to Soth, Dalamar warned, “He’ll kill you, Tanis. He’ll slay you without hesitation. Let her go to him. After all, I think perhaps he was the only one of us who ever truly understood her.”
The words of the outcast elf fanned the blaze of hatred in Soth’s heart; Kitiara was being kept from him by cowards and lackeys! The death knight’s orange eyes flared. “Understood her?” he rumbled. “Admired her! Like I myself, she was meant to rule, destined to conquer! But she was stronger than I was. She could throw aside love that threatened to chain her down. But for a twist of fate, she would have ruled all of Ansalon!”
Tanis gripped his sword more tightly. “No,” he said softly.
Dalamar grasped the half-elf's wrist and met his gaze. “She never loved you, Tanis,” he said without emotion. “She used you as she used us all, even him.” As Dalamar glanced toward Soth, Tanis started to speak. The dark elf cut him off. “She used you to the end, Half-Elven. Even now, she reaches from beyond, hoping you will save her.”
As Soth grasped his own sword, ready to strike Tanis down, the half-elf's face went slack. It was as if he had been granted a vision of Kitiara’s selfish soul. Tanis met the death knight’s fiery gaze as he released his grip on his sword. Lord Soth considered killing the half-elf anyway, just for giving Kitiara up without a fight; such a lapse proved again to Soth how unfit Tanis was to wear the armor of a Knight of the Rose.
He will have to live with this cowardice, the death knight decided as he turned to retrieve Kitiara’s corpse.
Her soul was gone.
Though Soth had hoped Kitiara would not try to escape him, he had foreseen this possibility long ago. Even as the death knight gathered her corpse up in Tanis’s bloodstained cloak, his seneschal journeyed across the Abyss to the domain of Takhisis. There the ghostly servant would capture the highlord’s soul and return it to Soth’s home.
Stepping into a shadowed corner of the laboratory, the body in his arms, Soth called a spell to mind that would transport him to his castle. With a single word, he opened a dark chasm at his feet. The void belched a blast of icy air into the room. With one withering glance at Tanis Half-Elven, who had shielded his face from the numbing cold, the death knight stepped into the gate and disappeared from the Tower of High Sorcery.
The dusty plains stretched infinitely in all directions, parched by a hell-born vermilion sun that never set, never moved in the sky. Siroccos that smelled of burned flesh pushed spinning clouds of grit across the blasted landscape. Occasionally these whirlwinds would merge into a shrieking tornado and reach up into the air. Such disturbances never lasted long. The sun beat them down with the same brooding might it used to oppress everything entering the domain of Pazunia.
“Forty-nine thousand and thirty-eight. Forty-nine thousand and thirty-nine.”
A lone being trudged across the wasteland, his shoulders hunched, his head cast down. Caradoc, for that was the poor soul’s name, did not need to lift his eyes to know that spread around him was an endless plain of dust. He had been walking for hours, perhaps days, through this netherworld that served as the threshold to the Abyss. Only three things broke the monotony of the place, and none of them were particularly welcome diversions.
Far from Caradoc, almost at the horizon, the river Styx crawled sullenly across Pazunia. Its banks were as treacherous as the rest of the land, for the river was by nature a thief, not a benefactor. Simply touching water drawn from the Styx robbed a man of all memory, and its swift currents had swept many a traveler in the netherworld to his doom.
“Forty-nine thousand and fifty-four.” Caradoc put his hand to his forehead. “No, wait. Forty-nine thousand and forty — four.”
Weird fortresses wrought of iron jutted from the dead earth in places, too. These were the forward outposts of the most powerful tanar’ri lords that dwelt in the six hundred and sixty-six layers of the Abyss, camps from which they could launch forays into the world of mortals. Horrifying guardians stood watch over these fortresses, protecting them from fiends serving rival tanar’ri lords. Still, attacks were frequent. Sounds from these bloody battles-metal ringing against metal, shrieks of the wounded fiends, and curses vile beyond belief-carried on the wind in Pazunia. Luckily for Caradoc, the fiends involved in the conflicts had little interest in a single traveler on the dusty plains, especially one who was already dead.
“Forty-nine thousand and sixty-eight,” he murmured kicking a small stone in his path.
Glancing down at his high black leather boots, Caradoc shook his head in disgust. The source of his unhappiness was neither Pazunia’s heat nor its stench, but the state of his clothing. His boots had kept their shine for the three and a half centuries he’d been dead. Now they were dull and covered with grit. The heels were worn to nothing from the long march. Caradoc felt his silk doublet plastered to his sweat-soaked back and shook his head again. No doubt it would be stained when he left the Abyss and went back to Krynn.
Before he counted his next step aloud, Caradoc straightened his tunic and brushed off his boots. Then he paused and squinted into the distance. “I should be close,” he said, if only to hear his own once-human voice.
The weary traveler expected to see a hole yawning ahead in the ground, but nothing out of the ordinary was evident. Gaping portals in the ground were a regular feature of the landscape, the third type of landmark that broke the monotony of Pazunia. Caradoc had passed dozens, perhaps hundreds of such holes on his trek. Some leaked thin mist onto the plain. Others spewed forth tortured, anguished screams. Those portals had been unwelcome because they did not lead to the level of the Abyss where Caradoc’s business awaited him.