The stars, too, were beginning to twinkle to life against the velvet sky that stretched from horizon to horizon. Each of the twenty-one gods of Krynn were represented in the heavens by a constellation, a planet, or a moon. The stars denoting Paladine, the Father of Good, were seen as a brave silver dragon. These pinpoints of light, called the Valiant Warrior, stood in opposition to the five-headed dragon known as the Queen of Darkness. In the past, these avatars of godly power had mirrored the deities’ struggles, their triumphs and their defeats. Soth looked to the five-headed dragon now for some sign of the battle that had occurred-or was still occurring-between Takhisis and Raistlin Majere.
The Queen of Darkness was spread across the sky, coiled and ready to strike the Valiant Warrior. Nothing had changed.
“The battle must be over,” Soth rumbled. “Takhisis has defeated the mage.” He turned away from the breach and faced the skeletal Sir Mikel. “I order you to watch the stars, especially the constellation known as the Queen of Darkness. Do you understand?”
The undead knight shuffled to the breach. With preternatural slowness he presented his eyeless sockets to the heavens.
“If the stars break from their natural course, you are to find me,” Soth added and stormed from the place.
The death knight started back through the musty, darkened hallways. With each step he rued the fact he’d trusted his seneschal to retrieve Kitiara’s soul. None of his servants possessed the power to defeat the guardians at the Tower of High Sorcery, so Soth had been forced to go after the highlord’s corpse himself. And of his minions, only Caradoc was intelligent enough to survive a trek across the Abyss. Now it appeared the ghost had either failed or had double-crossed the death knight.
Soth roughly pushed a door from his path, the blow splintering the ancient wood. “Caradoc will regret that his curse requires him to return to Dargaard Keep,” the death knight hissed.
He paused and pondered that truth. There was one place to which the seneschal must return, whether he had succeeded or not with his errand. Soth decided to wait for Caradoc there. His pace quickened as he moved up the stone stairs, higher into the tower that served as the keep’s main building.
Caradoc had been caught up in the curse that doomed Soth to unlife. In life, the seneschal had been a grasping, ambitious man, who had helped his master’s career in any way necessary. He had spread scandalous rumors about any rival who challenged Soth’s position in knightly society. When the Knights’ Council had questioned his master’s claims to certain good deeds, the seneschal bore false witness to uphold Soth’s version. He had even murdered for Soth, taking a dagger to the lord’s first wife while she slept. Even as the fire struck Dargaard, Caradoc had been forging financial records in Soth’s private study. It was there that his bones still rested.
After climbing a number of steps that would have easily winded a strong, mortal man, Soth came upon a landing. The platform was broken away from the wall, and a rift in the stonework floor revealed empty air. The hole plunged downward a dozen feet to the next landing. The frame that once housed the door to the study was partially collapsed. Soth had to step over a large, shattered block of masonry to enter.
Compared to the disarray of the rest of Dargaard, the study was clean, even tidy. The layer of dirt, broken stone, and dust clinging so thickly to the other rooms’ floors was strangely absent. Missing, too, were any fragments from the missing door or the heavy wooden furniture that had once filled the room. A single tapestry covered one wall. Upon the broad, bright field of the cloth, elves clashed against elves. The tapestry depicted the Kinslayer Wars that had rocked the elven nations hundreds of years past. On the floor below the tapestry lay a skeleton.
The room’s single window admitted light from the moons. Red as new-spilled blood, Lunitari colored Caradoc’s fleshless remains and pushed pools of darkness into the study’s corners. Soth walked to the skeleton and frowned. Like the rest of the room, Caradoc’s bones were clean. The decaying flesh had been carefully pulled from them, not gnawed away by the few vermin that inhabited the keep. Its arms had been folded across its chest, giving the skeleton a deceptive look of peace that none of Dargaard’s other inhabitants ever possessed.
Soth knew it must have taken his seneschal years to compose the corpse and clear the debris from the room. Part of Caradoc’s curse-like that of most ghosts-was that his wraithlike body allowed him little contact with the physical world; to move even the smallest pieces of stone would require intense concentration. As in life, though, the ghostly seneschal was overly concerned with his appearance, and it was clear he wanted his remains to be presentable. He had even covered his skull with a silken cloth in the fashion of ancient Solamnic funerals. The death knight bent to pick up the veil.
“That cloth once belonged to Kitiara herself, my lord,” came a trembling voice from behind Soth. “I stole it from her one night when she stayed at the keep.”
The death knight spun about. There, in the shadowy corner near the doorway, cowered Caradoc. “Where is she?” Soth asked quietly.
The seneschal floated from the darkness. The moonlight painted him crimson. “My lord…” he began, then paused as the death knight took a step toward him. “As you can see, I made the journey you requested.”
Caradoc spread his arms wide, gesturing at himself. Though the ghost’s form was transparent, Soth could see that his garments were rumpled and stained. Phantom dust still clung to his boots. “The plains of Pazunia seemed to stretch on forever, and the portal-”
“Where is Kitiara’s soul?” Soth growled impatiently, again moving toward his servant. “Where is your medal of office?”
Bowing his head, Caradoc replied, “We had a bargain, my lord. You promised you would plead my case with Chemosh, that you would convince the Lord of the Undead to make me human.”
“I have not forgotten my promise,” the death knight said, the lie coming easily to his scorched lips. He pointed to the ghost. “The promise will be revoked unless you tell me where Kitiara’s soul is.”
The ghost knew that, had his legs been flesh and blood, they would have crumpled beneath him at the fear he felt. Caradoc looked at the fiery gaze of Lord Soth, forced steel into his voice, and stood tall. “Forgive me, my lord, but I have seen you break your word too many times in the last three and a half centuries. I want-”
“You will demand nothing of me!” Soth shouted and lunged forward.
The ghost evaded the death knight’s mailed hand as it reached for him. He flew across the room to the open window. “Harm me and you will never have her.”
Forcing the fury swelling inside him to subside, Lord Soth faced his seneschal. “Fly out the window if you’d like, Caradoc. I know your curse requires you to return to your corpse eventually.” He raised a hard-soled boot over the skull beneath the tapestry. “Your next threat brings my heel down.”
The ghost froze. He valued nothing so much as the bones that had once housed his soul, and the hope that he might one day be raised from undeath had impelled him to keep his corpse clean and intact. “Wait! Please!”
Soth stood perfectly still, his boot resting lightly on the veiled bones. “Come here.”
Reluctantly the ghost floated toward his master. “I reached Takhisis’s domain as the battle still raged between the Dark Queen and the mortal mage,” he noted as he drew close to Soth.
The death knight placed his foot on the floor once more. “Good,” he said. “Did you locate the soul of Kitiara Uth Matar?”