A pause. Now was I treated to the sight of a formidable pile of stones, a castle much, much larger and more elaborate than my own. In this I sensed an emerging theme. All things here were grander than anything I had, bigger, better, more powerful. It smacked of a very familiar insecurity.

  Passing within the castle walls, things blurred again until I was stopped before two huge doors that parted open in a stately manner, then my vision was teased forward at a walking pace. A long wide approach through a marble lined room flanked by carved marble columns took me to a gigantic throne, and without surprise I looked upon Azalin standing before it with an unmistakable air of proprietorship in his pose.

  From the look on his face he was very aware of my presence. I had already assumed he'd been the one to draw me here, showing me things which he wanted me to know about along the way.

  My view of him and the room dropped unexpectedly, until I realized he was forcing me (in a way) to bow low before him. I suppose it was too much to expect that he would be past such pettiness. He caused me to remain in that position, possibly thinking, even hoping I would struggle against him.

  As the time was right for it, I increased my force of will, allowing me to hear what was going on, taking it for granted that Azalin would be able to pick up on my thoughts as though I were speaking aloud. Magic on this high of a ranking made nearly everything possible.

  "Are you quite done feeding your conceit or am I supposed to remain staring at the carpet all night?" I asked, sounding quite thoroughly bored.

  "Why do you not fight me?" He was almost purring, quite a feat with that harsh voice of his.

  "It is not worth the effort."

  He released his restriction on me, and my view expanded to include him again. I would have really preferred the carpet; it was much less overdressed.

  "I felt your presence last night, but only faintly," he said. "This time you were much more focused, more easy to control."

  Control? Is that what he thought? I had best pay close attention to see if his deeds were an actual reflection of his wishes or mere air.

  "I only wanted to find to where you'd withdrawn after your latest failure," I said.

  "Not a failure!" he snapped. "I opened the door between this plane and Oerth, breached the barrier of Mists. With impressive results." He gestured wide at the palace surrounding him.

  "Yet we are here, prisoners still. I would call that an unequivocal failure."

  "I achieved the breach once and shall do so again, for, as you have seen, here I have improved my position considerably."

  He seemed most anxious to get a reaction about his new home, which meant he was still impressed with it. For all I knew the whole thing could have been an illusion such as he had wrapped about himself.

  "Gilded bars in a cage do not change the fact that it's still cage," I informed him. "We are both trapped here yet, and it looks to remain that way indefinitely unless by some other blunder you accidentally manage to stumble upon a genuine escape."

  It was really all too easy to bait him.

  He was fairly incoherent for some moments, spitting out this curse or that, listing my innumerable faults against his innumerable injuries, and generally giving vent to all sorts of pent-up resentments. Of course, he could hardly cover nearly forty years of it without finally choking on his own venom. At which point I interrupted again.

  "I do have a question to ask: are you trapped within this land as I am within my own?"

  He met this with silence, his red gaze burning at me. Answer enough.

  "I thought as much."

  "You don't think at all, Von Zarovich."

  Since he had already been reduced to simplistic, petty jibes I knew my deduction was correct.

  "There is one other thing: since you are so pleased with your achievement in enlarging our prison, perhaps you can tell me how much you recall of our sojourn to Mordent. Or should I say how little?"

  Again he made no reply

  "I see, memory a bit vague then?"

  "How much do you recall?" he asked haughtily.

  "More than you apparently."

  "The incident is unimportant."

  I let him hear a brief laugh from me. He did not react outwardly, but I could almost see the spinning of his mind as he wondered how much more I might know than he. When it came to state craft, the art of bluffing is not to be overlooked or underestimated.

  "I have more important matters to concern me—such as the rule of Darkon," he stated loftily. He pointed to his chest with a gloved hand. "I am absolute lord here."

  "Congratulations, it must be very gratifying."

  "All of Darkon acknowledges my lordship without question."

  "Are you complaining about the population's lack of intelligence? You will get no sympathy from me."

  "Fool! This is my land! Mine! This means the agreement you tricked me into when first I came—"

  Tricked?

  "—is no longer in effect. Our pact is dissolved. I hereby issue you formal challenge."

  "To what?" I knew this was coming but had to make him say it.

  "To war."

  "That should be amusing. How do you plan to lead an army across a boundary you yourself cannot pass? Or will we just settle for standing within sight of each other and hurl abuse while doing a bit of fist shaking? It might provide for an evening's entertainment, but—"

  "I shall send my armies to crush Barovia like an overripe fruit."

  "Indeed?"

  "I will repay you in full for my forced servitude."

  Forced?

  "The thousand humiliations I suffered from you, the leash you nearly strangled me with, all those years, all those insults will be accounted for."

  "Your time would be better served trying to complete your experiments. Sooner or later you will have to get lucky."

  "Oh, I will experiment—on you, Von Zarovich."

  "If you kill me, Barovia will cease to exist."

  "You flatter yourself."

  "Yet you have believed that, else you'd have tried to kill me before."

  "There are more lands here now than Barovia, so I care not what happens to your pitiful little patch of mud."

  "Those other lands—including yours—are all attached to Barovia. It is at the center of all. If it ceases to be—"

  "It will have no effect upon them."

  "You don't know that. But we both know as each of these lands appeared they formed themselves to match Barovia's topography where they touched, not the other way around. They are like lichen upon a stone; take the stone away—"

  "Spare me the logic, Von Zarovich. Your argument is an insult to my intelligence; you have no evidence upon which to base it."

  "It is more substantial than anything you could ever offer in refute."

  "You cannot prove a negative."

  "Try testing this one and you may continue on just long enough to regret it," I said. "If you kill me, you destroy everything, including your precious Darkon." I had no idea if this was true, extrapolating my link with Barovia to include the other lands that had come to this plane, but there was no harm in making the attempt. "You will ultimately destroy yourself."

  His laughter, something I'd rarely ever heard, scrabbled through my mind like bones rolling over a stone floor. "But I won't really kill you, Von Zarovich. You are going to be my slave, as I was yours."

  If Azalin thought himself a slave while in Barovia, then he had wildly overlooked the true meaning of the word.

  I could point out to him that he had ever been my guest and mention the time and trouble to which I'd gone to see that he received all he wanted for his comfort and work, but I knew he wouldn't listen. Once he had decided on something, he persisted with it—no matter how erroneous his judgment. But then, his arrogance was boundless. When it came to his faults, his pride was quite my favorite; it made him so easy to manipulate.

  The prospect of being his slave did trouble me, though, as there was the chance he could achieve such a goal. And I doubted that I would enjoy the same privileged life he had been granted in Barovia. There was one weak point to his threat, however.

  "I should be interested in seeing how you could possibly manage to bring me across the border," I murmured.

  He snorted. "There may be no need to bother. If it proves immediately impractical, I should be more than content to watch your sufferings from afar."

  "Not for very long, I'm sure. It will eventually grate at you that you cannot personally see to whatever inconvenience you wish to heap upon me. Then perhaps you'll realize you still very much need me for the advanced spell work you must do to truly escape."

  "Pah! I shall train others for such menial tasks."

  "You wouldn't be able to trust them. Once they'd reached so high a degree of training, they would be too much of a threat to you."

  "I can command loyalty if need be; you aren't the only one who can inspire it."

  "Sycophants always make the worst assistants."

  "They will obey me or die."

  "Oh, I'm sure that threat will do much to calm them to the point of being able to work without making mistakes. Can you not see how you need someone like me, someone who is not afraid of you—"

  "Liar. Even you fear me."

  "Now who is flattering himself?" I said lightly, but allowed venom into my voice as I continued. "Do not mistake disgust for fear, Firan Zal'honan. I say again: you still need me to carry out the spell work you are unable to learn… lich."

  That struck a nerve. A terrible, almighty sensitive one. Just as I had intended. His face worked, and his gloved hands formed into fists, and had I actually been in the room with him he would have probably leapt upon me then and there. Though it was imagination only, I thought I felt the force of his loathing for me roll out from him in palpable waves.

  He straightened to a regal pose and spread his arms wide. His figure shimmered and the illusion he maintained ceased to exist. I saw him in reality for the first time in many decades, and the passage of time had done nothing to improve his looks, quite the contrary.

  "Then look upon my true form. Von Zarovich!" he thundered, his voice smashing into my brain like a hammer. I couldn't help shuddering from the physical discomfort and hoped that nothing of my reaction was reaching him lest he take it as a show of weakness. "Look upon me and despair!"

  I waited until the paroxysm passed so that my inner voice would be strong again, then put another note of boredom into it. "Except for the gaudy robes—which I also suspect to be illusion—you're still no more than a dressed-up version of one of your own zombies… slightly more cognizant, of course. I'll give you that much, but hardly worth inspiring me to despair."

  The last thing I heard was his ear-splitting shriek of fury.

  The next thing I knew was coming back to my senses in an unpleasantly familiar way: lying flat on hard stone, every muscle in my body stiff and bruised, and my head in a state best left out of the damage enumeration altogether, since when it came to pain it was beyond anything so trivial as the rest of the list.

  I wisely chose not to move for a considerable period until I was certain that my brain was not actually seeping from my ears like wax melting off a candle. That fact ascertained—I felt the area carefully just to be sure—I most cautiously rose to take stock of things.

  Happily, I had not been blasted back to my aerie, sparing me another flight home. Whatever he'd done had merely thrown me across the room to slam into an all-too-solid wall—with predictable results upon my person. The agony behind my eyes, though, had more to do with my mental contact with him than anything else. I had pressed him too far—not wise, but quite instructive. He now knew that I had discovered his true name. Though I still had not unearthed the proper method to use it against him, he didn't know that.

  My chief concern was for the crystal ball, which fortunately appeared to be unharmed by the lash of magic that had funneled through it. That was of great relief. When I felt strong enough I sat before it once more and focused my mind on the view from Mount Krezk, looking northeast to the pass between it and Mount Baratak. If Azalin sent an army across it would be at this point. He had some small experience as a military commander and though not nearly a match for my own, even he would see this area as the natural doorway into Barovia from Darkon.

  All appeared to be clear and quiet in the midnight darkness, at least on my side of the invisible boundary. Not so for the other. I perceived something in motion on the land, but whatever was moving was too far away for me to discern it. Swooping low, I covered the miles in but an instant to let myself seem to stand on the edge of the border. Here I paused, pressing myself forward only gradually, testing for traps or triggers, for any kind of barrier Azalin might have set up to prevent me from crossing. When nothing sprang up for me, I continued on swiftly over the sparse grass.

  Rising high to see better, I halted my progress. No need to go farther; I looked down at Azalin's army and felt a thrill of cold fear flutter through me.

  Below me was another of Darkon's burial grounds, a village of the dead, but none there now lay at peace. The earth fairly roiled with activity as the bodies lying beneath it struggled and clawed and scrabbled and finally tore free of its embrace. A dozen, a hundred, two hundred and more were busily defying the natural order of things by standing in ragged lines all facing toward Barovia. Once assembled, they began to stalk, stump, or shamble toward the border, neither fast nor slow, but steadily and untiring.

  They were not armed, except for those who had been warriors in life and had been buried with their weapons, their only clothing either decayed finery or tattered shrouds over their bones. The most potent weapon, though, was their own fearful appearance. Who has not at least once shivered at suddenly beholding a grinning skull? One might get accustomed to the sight, but this… to see such a dire gathering, so many of them, all upright and marching forward with dread purpose would send the stoutest of souls away screaming in terror.

  Azalin had not been making an idle boast when he'd said all in Darkon acknowledged his rule, all did—even the dead.

  The war, war such as I had never known, had come at last.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Strahd's Narrative Continues

  I did not have much time. Quickly gathering what I thought I might need, then making the travel casting, I took myself to a place where I could enlist immediate help for what was to come.

  The Wachter holdings were closest to the Krezk pass. Fortunate, for they had ever been loyal to the house of Von Zaorovich. This dated back to the very beginning when Victor Wachter had served me well in defending Castle Ravenloft against that thrice-damned Dilisnya traitor. I had released Victor from my service, though he still had served as a boyar in his district. Decades later his daughter Lovina had helped me in delivering my final punishment to the bastard betrayer, and since that point the family had always prospered under my protection. Not that they were perfect, each generation possessed its aberrations, but on the whole they were competent and trustworthy in their duties.

  The current head of the family was Yersinia Wachter, the several times great grand-daughter of Lovina. She was in her mid-sixties now, a widow with an uncanny ability to stay even with the complicated ebb and flow of Barovian politics, yet at the same time she managed to keep clear of its attendant parlor battles, scandal, and occasional assassinations. She would eventually pass the rule and responsibility of their district on to her son, Aldrick, and it was to be hoped that for the family's survival he had inherited his mother's diplomatic skills.

  Like nearly all Barovians, their custom was to retire early with the sun, so the place was locked fast when I appeared within the high thick walls of their estate. I hurried across the beautifully kept grounds and seized the bell pull for the main entry, setting up a clamor suitable for the emergency.

  The results were predictable with the usual fear, puzzlement, and sorting out what exactly was going on. Things went much more swiftly when Aldrick's face appeared at one of the windows and I could shout up to him and identify myself. I could have appeared within the house, but that would have been overdoing things. They were in enough of an uproar at this untoward intrusion of Lord Strahd himself turning up on their doorstep in full battle gear with pressing business.

  As I suspected, their memories had altered to match the changes in the land, and they were quite aware of Darkon's presence on their northern borders. Over the months Yersinia had had the foresight to keep a close watch on things and step up the drills for the motley volunteers in the militia under her charge. She had perhaps fifty, mostly the young people from well-to-do families near her estate. They'd been in need of some interesting activity and playing at soldier was the fashion in these fallen days. Inexperienced, completely untested fighters used to the comforts of wealth were my army. They would have to do.

  Aldrick, a stolid man in his forties, was responsible for the actual running of the volunteers, most of whom were presently scattered in their various homes, tucked up safe in bed for the night. I quickly explained to him and Yersinia about the approaching situation and the absolute need for haste. They were appalled, of course, and for a few teetering moments unable to do more than stand and stare at each other in mutual dismay for this monumental shift of circumstance. The idea of anyone invading Barovia was a nearly unfathomable concept to them, and the unknown is always daunting. There was no time for this sort of nonsense, though, and with a few sharp words I pushed them into action.

  With Yersinia's authority behind him and mine behind hers, Aldrick gathered his senses together and set about collecting as many of the militia as he could, not an easy task considering the horror Barovians have about being out after dark. He was not the man Victor was, but only for lack of anything worthy to develop his talents. He did know to delegate tasks and once he had notified a half dozen of those closest, he sent them out to bring in the rest.

  It took well over an hour; I tried not to chafe at the delay. It could only be expected due to their lack of experience, but it was still difficult to keep my temper in check. I had to remind myself of the bitter fact that they were hardly more than children. I couldn't help but recall the primed legions I had commanded when first I'd marched in to take Barovia. These lesser offspring would have been hard pressed to pass muster as their boot-polishing apprentices. But that was then; this was now.