Why the lake's voices were only audible after its fetid water had been sipped didn't concern him. Azrael only knew that the place was more useful than any network of spies. One gulp and he could listen in on anyone he wished-well, not quite anyone. For some reason the White Rose, the Bloody Cobbler, and the Whispering Beast all remained beyond the reach of this magic.

Like everything else concerning that trio, this was a matter for concern, but one he assumed would be rectified soon enough. The dark resided in the vast, black expanse of the Lake of Sounds, and Azrael always trusted the dark. It was a voice in the dark that had prompted him to taste the waters on the day he discovered this lifeless shore. Just as it had given him Soth, it had given him access to all those voices, all that information.

And the dark used that cacophony now to pass along a message to Azrael, a message he had been expecting. The voice of the dark did not cut through the babble. It rode upon the mundane utterances, touching individual words, juxtaposing phrases that had already been spoken.

"They're not going to like this at the mine."

"Pay attention when I'm talking to you, young man."

"Why does it always have to be about you, Ginnie?"

"We're supposed to meet them on the border at noon. You coming?"

"Are they now?" Azrael said. He focused his thoughts, winnowing away all but two familiar voices.

"He's a beast," Magda said. "Below your notice."

He could hear a slight breathlessness in her voice. It wasn't prompted by a fear of the meeting about to take place, but by the cold. The dwarf smiled. She really is getting old, he thought, when a chill as mild as today's makes her shiver.

Soth's response was a low rumble of impatience, but Magda pressed her point anyway. "Azrael should not be trusted, cannot be trusted."

The dwarf's smile broadened into a grin at the irony of the situation, and his coarse laughter filled the purple twilight hanging over the Lake of Sounds. In the reverberations the dark was laughing, too, but Azrael was too caught up in his own mirth to hear that laughter's mocking tone.

The wind whispered around Magda's deceptively slight frame and tugged at strands of her graving hair. It was no more than a breeze, the chill breath of a dying day, but she shivered nonetheless. The cold reminded her body of old battles, skirmishes long since fought and wounds not quite healed. At home she would have cloaked herself in her favorite shawl, but she'd left the wrap back at her vardo. It wouldn't do to meet Lord Aderre swaddled like some feeble old grandmother-though Magda had to admit she felt at least twice her fifty-one years tonight.

Soth's presence did not help matters. He radiated the unrelenting cold of the grave. Magda kept a discreet distance from the death knight, but it helped little.

She glanced at her silent companion. How much worse for him? she wondered. The ache of five hundred years wracks his bones, and no hope of death to free him from it.

The Vistana shook her head. It was a trap to pity the dead man. He'd brought his fate upon himself, was even proud of that fact. That self-destructive urge ran strong in Soth. It colored every decision he made, right down to his choice of Azrael as seneschal to his domain.

"He's a beast," Magda said without preamble. "Below your notice."

Soth's only reply was a low rumble of impatience.

That was not enough to make the Vistana let the matter drop. Pulling a few errant lengths of hair away from her mouth, she continued.

"Azrael should not be trusted, cannot be trusted." A measure of aggravation crept into her voice. "You must know, after all these years, just what manner of beast he is. Yet you continue to keep him by your side."

Magda had tried to break their vigil's silence many times in the past hour. She was cold and weary, and the quiet only let her focus on those discomforts. She was also unnerved by the situation. Any Vistana would have been.

Magda and Soth stood at the center of a stone bridge that spanned an offshoot of the Musarde, the feeble little waterway known as the Widow's Tears. At the far end of that bridge lay Malocchio Aderre's domain, a land that was death to all Vistani. Despite her powers, despite her years of battling the terrifying creatures that roamed the Sithican night, Magda would not have come here had Soth not requested her presence.

Requested? Magda frowned. It was no request that brought her to the perilous place, but a demand. She could have refused, of course, could have made the master of Nedragaard pay dearly for the impertinence. But Soth had been correct in noting a show of solidarity was important now. It might keep Malocchio at bay, at least for a little while.

Restless, Magda paced a little on the rough-hewn stones that comprised the bridge between the two lands. She paused to see what it was that had captured her hound's attention. Sabak snuffled intently at a dark blotch. Bloodstains. They were too fresh to have been washed away by storms or licked clean by scavengers.

Magda did not know of the battle that had occurred on that spot, how a gallant animal had tried to carry its master across the bridge to safety, but the bloodstains told that tale to Sabak, and more. The hound lapped at the gore, sniffed furiously at the tiny bits of horseflesh that remained on the bridge. In that admixture of fear and blood and sweat, he recognized the scent of the one animal his hound's heart was able to hate: Azrael.

A low, deadly growl issued from Sabak's throat, echoed off the bridge and across the valley. The angry rumble seemed to be endless. Not even the dense forest could contain it.

Her nerves on edge already, Magda had no patience for whatever nonsense Sabak was up to. She made the shortest of whistles. The dog's ears pricked up instantly. After only a moment's hesitation, which was a moment longer than he normally took to answer her summons, the giant hound padded silently to stand at Magda's right side.

She rested her hand at his shoulders and unconsciously traced patterns in his coarse, gray-white fur with her fingertips. This motion soothed both woman and beast.

Lord Soth's dead voice broke that momentary respite. "I might ask the same question of you, Magda Ilyanova Kulchevich."

At Magda's puzzled expression, he continued: "You asked why I allow a beast such as Azrael to serve me. Yet you keep a creature as fierce and unpredictable by your side." He pointed to Sabak, who regarded the death knight without the slightest hint of fear. "Your own child wishes the hound dead. Is there any other member of your troupe who does not walk in fear of the creature?"

"No."

"Surely your daughter has warned you that the hound might turn its teeth on you."

"She has."

"Yet you keep the beast with you, and demand your people accept him-despite their fear."

Magda nodded, but she had lost the thread of the discussion. Her attention was focused instead on Soth himself. The topic seemed to have fanned some spark in him. His words held a passion she had last heard in him years ago, on their trek through Strahd's domain.

"Azrael is the same to me," Soth continued. "He is my beast, and useful-despite his need of housebreaking."

Sabak snorted at a fly buzzing around his snout. For all the world, it sounded like a huff of laughter.

Finally, the death knight leaned close to Magda and said, "We both know too well that we would slay our beasts in a moment, should they turn against us."

Soth seemed willing to continue the conversation, but a distant thunder shook the forest to the north. Birds burst up from the tree line and raced across the red-gold sky. Through her boot heels, Magda felt the rolling tread of a group of large creatures. She glanced at her companions. Both Soth and Sabak remained utterly still, as if they'd been carved from the bridge's stone. Magda was not so calm; her pulse quickened and a flush suffused her cheeks.