Dipping lower, I brushed over the tree tops to the line of the border, and it was indeed a line. The Barovian forests, where they butted against it, stopped abruptly, along with the snow, though the lay of the land continued unaltered. A hill remained a hill, but trees grew thick on one side, while long grasses and low shrubs covered the other. Much of their growth was pressed in a permanent bend in the direction of the wind, which must have been very strong to be so obvious at this height to me. No trees were in evidence anywhere in this desolation, though the vegetation looked formidable enough to offer concealment for any number of nasty surprises.

I moved closer and followed the edge from one side to the other, about thirty miles of it, and saw no sign of habitation. It looked to be as deserted as Forlorn, but until proven otherwise, I would assume there were hidden dangers here as well. At either end of our borders the imprisoning Mists rose high.

A faint movement on the Barovian side caught my notice, and I focused and swept down upon it. Azalin. With a small pack train.

I wondered how he had found out. Perhaps he'd set up some sort of magical warning against just such an occurrence.

Forced to travel overland, he had to have begun early this morning, which gave me an estimate of when the new land had appeared for he was nearly to the border. He must have taken an ice sled from Vallaki and let the prevailing winds carry him swiftly along the length of Lake Zarovich. Though sometimes dangerous, that would have cut quite a few miles and hours from his trip. Winter travel in Barovia is neither easy nor safe. He would then have to skirt two out-flung spurs of Baratak by toiling through nearly trackless forest. A journey of twenty miles would take nearly the whole day. Even now he was only just making his way along a winding path that would lead to a saddle ridge linking one portion of Baratak to another. Half of it lay in Barovia and half sloped down into the new land.

I put my crystal safely away and made some spell preparations against whatever unknown loomed ahead, then performed the very useful travel casting. By the time Azalin toiled up the summit of the saddle, I was already there and waiting, wrapped snug in my cloak while the night winds tossed drifts of snow around me. He could not feel the cold himself, of course, but the snow was a nuisance to him and his tired animals.

He made no comment about my sudden appearance in his path, but annoyance was in every line of his posture. How much easier it would be for him to use this particular traveling spell, only he was unable to do so. I was always cordial, pretending not to notice his limitation, something that always irked him. One would think after all this time that he'd have accepted the fact and be over the aggravation. I ever kept the advantage by not gifting him with copper wands charged with it, indeed; I acted as though the idea had not even occurred to me.

He dismounted and tied the reins to a tree, then toiled up the last yards to stand a few paces distant, looking down the opposing slope.

"Have you tried crossing into it?" he asked after taking a good look around.

"Yes. I cannot."

"The same as Forlorn," he stated.

"When did you notice this new presence?"

"At dawn. I began riding then."

"Does it look familiar to you?"

"No."

"Any ideas why and how it came to be here?"

He made a throwing away motion with one gloved hand, as if to dismiss me and my questions, his gaze still riveted ahead. Unless I read him wrong, he looked hungry. The sating of appetite would be far more complicated for him than for me. His greedy lust was for knowledge, something not always easily obtained. This plane of existence in this pocket of reality was ever stingy with its secrets.

Our mutual silence lengthened. After all these years we did not have that much to say to each other. We already long knew what things upon which we agreed; the rest usually devolved into pointless bickering about which we were both quite bored. He finally turned back to his horses, going to the pack animal and tugging at the ties of something large and bulky strapped to its back. The cloth-shrouded bundle dropped heavily to the snow in a familiar way. Shroud was an excellent description, for it did cover a body.

Azalin threw back the rough fabric, revealing the ragged form of a man dead for about a month. I dimly recognized the face as belonging to a drunken thief who'd tried to break into a house in Vallaki one night during the last new moon. Unfortunately for him, I'd caught him in mid-invasion and administered my justice accordingly. He'd been very drunk, else he wouldn't have been so foolish as to be out after sunset. So soaked was his blood with cheap wine it had given me a pleasant period of lightheadedness that I hadn't felt in many decades; that was the only reason I recalled his features out of so many thousands of others.

Azalin must have stopped at the Vallaki burial grounds along his way to make a disintemment.

I watched him proceed with the raising ritual. It's a complicated process, but he had honed it to a fine art with much practice and was very quick about it. Not long after, the thing began to ponderously twitch with a parody of life. It sat up with a groan as month old air rushed out its gaping mouth. Considering the appearance of the corpse, I was glad that breathing was no longer a necessity for me.

The dead thief woodenly rose, shedding clumps of snow and earth and trudged toward the border, with Azalin in its wake. He stopped at the edge, but his zombie continued on under his direction, breaking past the last drift of Barovian snow and plodding through the long, wind-blown grasses.

"Wherever this land's origin, it must not have been winter there," I observed.

He did not reply, his concentration focused on the zombie. Its white, sightless eyes were open, and Azalin would be using them to magically see what was within its range of view. He was linked to the thing in a similar manner as I employed when using my crystal ball.

The zombie continued down until it reached a flat valley running between the land saddle and the foot-hills of the huge mountain.

"What do you see?" I asked, for the creature was becoming too distant for me to clearly follow its progress.

Azalin took his time replying. "Nothing of interest," he finally muttered. "Grass and brush. It's very windy."

That I knew already. The pervasive winds did not assault us, though, seeming content to remain on that side of the border. The snow was something else again, making a creeping foray into the new land. If it was winter in Barovia, then it would be winter everywhere else as well.

Azalin abruptly shook his head and dropped back a few steps. I watched him narrowly, for he was not one to exhibit weakness at any time. He recovered and pushed forward until he was right on the border; for all the world he looked like a hungry child peering into a bake shop window.

"What is happening?" I demanded, getting the strong feeling that something was wrong.

He made an unintelligible snarl and continued to stare down the path his zombie had trod in the grass. I also looked long and hard, but even my night vision brought me no sign of his creature.

"I've lost contact with it," he said after a moment. For him to admit any kind of weakness was highly unusual. "I'm going to follow it in."

Here he glanced at me, almost as if to seek permission, but more to get my reaction to his announcement. This was as close as he'd come to a reference to the Forlorn incident. After that unpleasant business with the goblyns, he'd shown no further interest in quitting Barovia for its neighbor, which was of some relief to me. The last thing I wanted was for him to take charge of his own land.

Dare I take the risk once again? Perhaps he would find this place more hospitable and set himself up as its ruler.