Amber and Ashes - Margaret Weis [30]
It was not likely Krell would come down here, but if he did, he would not find the door standing open, indicating someone had been snooping about. But by shutting the door, she shut off all the dim light from the granary, leaving her in complete darkness. She could see nothing in front of her or on either side. She shuffled her feet along the floor in an effort to avoid stumbling over some unseen obstacle. She hoped that she would not have to go far in the darkness.
She had not taken many steps when she noticed that the floor began to rise steeply.
“A ramp,” she said to herself, envisioning slaves pushing wheelbarrows filled with grain.
She continued up the ramp and walked straight into a door that started to swing open when her boot hit it. Her heart lurching, she grabbed for the door and held it shut. She’d caught a brief glimpse of what lay beyond that door—a courtyard, open to view. For all she knew, Krell might be out in that courtyard, taking an afternoon stroll.
If it was afternoon. Mina had lost all sense of time, and that was something else to worry about. She did not want to be caught alone with Krell on Storm’s Keep when night fell. Opening the door a crack, she peered out.
The parade ground, paved with cobblestones, was empty. It was vast and Mina recognized it from the map. The parade ground lay in the shadow of a tall tower, and now Mina knew exactly where she was. By its shape and location, the tower was the Central Tower, a massive structure that housed the main meeting rooms, dining halls, servant quarters. Lord Ariakan had his chambers in that Tower. There was also reputed to be a chamber that had led directly to the plane on which Takhisis had once dwelt. Not far from that was the Tower of the Lily, where the elite Knights of the Lily had their barracks, and at the opposite end of the fortress stood the Tower of the Skull, home to the arcane wing of the Dark Knights. Scattered about among the three were a number of outbuildings.
The flat, two-dimensional map Mina had viewed in the library of Palanthas had not conveyed the immensity of the fortress. She had not realized, on setting out, how big it was or how much ground it covered. And she had no idea in which building Krell had taken up residence. Gazing across the windswept expanse of the parade ground, Mina began to wonder if her idea of sneaking into the fort had been a good one.
“I could spend days wandering about this place searching for him,” she realized. “No food and no water. Not daring to sleep for fear Krell might murder me.”
All things considered, it might have been better for her to have taken her chances and confronted him on the stairs.
Mina shook her head, shook away doubt. “Chemosh brought me here. He will not forsake me.”
Her confidence bolstered, Mina gave the door a shove and started to step out of the door and walk across the parade ground.
And there was Krell, emerging from behind a wall, coming from the direction of the cliffs where she had last seen him.
Mina froze, not daring to move or breathe.
Krell walked right past her, not six feet away from her. If she had left her hiding place an eyeblink earlier, she would have blundered into him.
The death knight was hideous to look upon. The burning torment of his accursed life blazed red from the shadows of the eye slits of his ram’s skull helm. She knew that if he took off that helm, he would be more hideous still, for there was nothing beneath it. Nothing except the hole cut out of existence where his life had been, and that hole was blacker than the darkness inside a sealed tomb buried in a forgotten crypt.
His jointed and faceted armor—decorated with the skull and the lily—was stained with the blood Zeboim had drained from