The death knight had reached the hall now, and Inza bowed to him respectfully as he approached. "There is the White Rose to consider, mighty lord," the Vistana said. "When I read your fortune in the tarroka cards, her presence loomed large. Come, let me show you."

She led Lord Soth to the dais. There, upon the seat of the throne itself, lay nine cards arranged in a cross. They were large and crammed to the borders with intricate drawings. Soth could see the red tinge to the ink, even in the gloom shrouding the platform. This deck had been crafted with pigments mixed with blood.

The card at the center of the cross was a knight outfitted in plate armor, roses and kingfishers graven upon the breastplate. There could be no mistaking the figure for anyone but Soth, though the rendering depicted him before his damnation. "It was my mother's deck," Inza explained. "Who else would she portray upon the master card of swords? It is the suit of warriors."

The Vistana pointed to the two cards arrayed below the Warrior. The first depicted a ghost rising from a crypt. "This is your near past," Inza said. "A force arises to collect an old debt, to remind you of old obligations you have forgotten. The card below it is your distant past: the Innocent."

"There are no innocents in my past," Soth said.

"The card can signify someone who was powerless to defend herself at a particular moment in time, someone you might have taken advantage of," Inza noted. "She might have been quite formidable otherwise. Both these cards depict the Rose, I think. From what my mother told me, you think she is some warrior from your past, someone with a score to settle."

"Kitiara," Soth said.

While no innocent, Kitiara had been helpless, dying, when the death knight took her body from the Tower of High Sorcery. She feared him then, feared that he would raise her from the grave as his eternal consort. That had been his intent, of course. Had he not been dragged from Krynn into this nether-realm, it was an intent he would have fulfilled.

"Perhaps," Soth murmured. "Perhaps."

"Your adversaries are easier to identify," Inza said. She gestured to the first card on the Warrior's right. "The Traitor. It can be only Azrael. Behind him is the Charlatan. This woman is your real foe. See the picture-she hides behind a mask, a false identity like this White Rose of yours."

Soth indicated the rest of the cards with a sweep of his hand. "Do these tell me what they plan or how I may stop them?" he asked.

Inza suppressed a smile. She had arranged the cards with just that purpose in mind, to direct Lord Soth as she required. But when she looked down at the remaining four-the cards revealing Soth's allies and his future-a wave of fear washed over her. They were not the ones she had so carefully chosen.

"Well?" Soth said impatiently.

"These cards to the Warrior's left are the forces that fight on your side," she said, desperately trying to forge a suitable meaning for them in her thoughts. "Though you may not recognize their actions, they are important to you."

She lifted the first card, the two of coins. "The Philanthropist. Someone who gives unselfishly, seeking no return but the act itself." Another card, stuck to the first, dropped onto the ground. It was the eight of glyphs, the Bishop. "This person is bound by some rigid code. Or perhaps there are two allies who are connected somehow, one who gives, the other who enforces a code."

The next card, the one that revealed Soth's most important ally, was supposed to have been the four of stars, the Abjurer. The connection of the card's image-a raven-haired woman with a crystal ball-to Inza herself would have been obvious, even to Soth. But the card laid out was the Myrmidon. The unarmed, unarmored figure faced three men shrouded in mist, uncertain of their identity as friend or foe.

"Your other ally seems to be me," she lied. "The figure is helpless, surrounded by threatening figures: my situation in the forest before you came to my aid."

The remaining two cards foretold events to come. The near future was dominated by the Beast, symbolizing anger and fury. The Donjon, with its lone figure trapped within a moonlit tower ^resembling Nedragaard Keep, indicated the distant future. Were Inza trying to interpret the fortune correctly, she would have suggested that anger might continue Soth's imprisonment. Instead, she told him just the opposite. "If you give in to your fury and slay the Beast," she announced solemnly, "you will break free from your prison."

"Then your cards confirm the course upon which I have already decided." Soth turned and strode from the dais. "I want them slaughtered to the last man," the death knight told his skeletal minions. "The banshees will ride alongside us. Let them ready their chariots of bone."

The skeletal warriors shuffled out to the undead horses already milling in the courtyard. Inza called out to Soth as he was about to follow them. "Surely a coward such as Azrael would not place himself in harm's way."

"Of course not. He is hiding somewhere, probably at the Lake of Sounds, eavesdropping on the fight he should be leading."

"The Lake of Sounds!" Inza exclaimed. "If he and the Rose know about that place then the battle is already lost!"

"What are you saying?"

"The salt shadows that killed my mother are spawned from that place," Inza explained frantically, "but they are the least of its dangers. There are rituals using the lake's water that could grant someone control over all the shadows in Sithicus."

Soth did not reply. Instead he drew his sword and stepped into the darkness near the throne. An instant later he returned. His orange eyes blazed in fury. The cold radiating from him made Inza gasp at its intensity. "The way is blocked. He has sealed the area around the mine to me."

"They have begun!" Inza moaned. "You only have a few hours. They'll try to complete the rite late in the afternoon, when the day's shadows are longest."

"They cannot bar me from the mine for long," Soth rumbled, already heading back to the shadows.

"There is some small magic I can perform," Inza shouted after him. "It will help shield the keep from whatever dark sorcery Azrael and the Rose conjure."

"Protect yourself however you see fit," Soth replied, even as he vanished once more into the darkness.

The death knight did not see Inza throw open her wooden trunk, did not glimpse the large black bottle, swaddled like an infant, that rested within. However, he felt a shiver of apprehension as he emerged from the shadow of a massive outcropping on the road just outside Veidrava.

The death knight strode boldly into the open. As he marched toward the mine, his own shadow ranged beside him. He could not help but glance now and then at the wavering image. There was power in such things as shadows, he knew, as there was in the true names of plants and animals. Though a thing of fell sorcery himself, Soth disliked such magic. It seemed cowardly somehow, the stuff of assassins, not warriors.

He mused upon that subject even as he passed through the abandoned mining camp, which already looked as if it had been that way for a decade. Rats scurried incautiously between the hovels. Insects clustered on the window sills. Carrion crows searched for scraps on two corpses hanging at the camp's crossroads. They eyed Soth warily as he passed, trying to decide if he was a rival for the few bits of gristle left on the well-picked bodies.

The anger that had hurried the death knight from Nedragaard had diminished somewhat by the time he passed Ambrose's store. Rage had resolved into a cold determination. The mine's towers lay ahead, their shadows reaching down the hill to beckon him. If Inza was correct, his enemies would attempt the rite soon, before the shadows began to merge. Soth did not hurry his stride. He was lord of this domain. They could not escape him.