Before The Mask (10 page)

“I had no idea the bandits were so plentiful,” he declared. “It's no wonder Daeghrefn
hasn't killed them all yet.”

“Enough of the bandits. Where now?” Verminaard asked. “Where is she?”

Aglaca looked at him curiously. “I can't tell amid all these flags and commotions. We'll
have to scout it out, keeping our distances and wits about us and our ears open as well as
our eyes. Not even bandits can hide her from us forever.”

But it seemed long indeed, as the lads skirted the outlying camps.

No sooner had they started to move west, in a wide counterclockwise circle about the
village, than their pres-

ence was masked by yet another thick mist. Out of nowhere it rose again, rolling over the
city until only the towers of the temple were visible through the dense fog, and the
colors of the banners were muted, lost in a dozen layers of gray.

It was no ragtag group of bandits that they circled, no disorganized band of cutthroats.
Around Neraka was assembling the makings of an army, and judging from the languages and
accents and dialects that carried to them through the fog, it was an army gathered from
far and exotic places from Sanction and Estwilde, but also from Kern and from other places
where the accents were even stranger. They were far from alert, and far from ready, but
the numbers were great and growing.

“See? Aglaca whispered. ”Some of them are only now pitching tents. This is a time of
arrivals, but

what they're arriving/or is a mystery."

“Whatever it is,” Verminaard observed, “my father should know. He'll not take to a huge
Nerakan army at his doorstep.”

“Nor will they take to him, I'd reckon,” Aglaca agreed. “Perhaps the girl can tell us.”
“If I ever find her,” Verminaard muttered gloomily. “Perhaps this whole business has been
unwise.”

Then the Voice came to him, its inflections as soft and mysterious as the fog, its tones
more melodious, more feminine than ever before.

Unwise? Of course not. You have traveled this far this well, and the prison is at hand.
The Pen, they call it, on the western grounds, in the midst of the green encampment.

Be ruled by me. Despite the fog and the sentries and the perils ahead of you, I am here to
guide you.

“But there are so many of them,” Verminaard protested aloud, his voice shrill and thin in
the foggy air. Aglaca looked back at him in alarm and signaled for silence.

The day will come, the Voice continued, quietly and

alluringly, when you will be thankful for their numbers. You will come back here,
Verminaard of Nidus, and all this power I will give you, and the glory of it, for it is
given to me of old, and in my power to give it to whomever I please....

“Stay behind me,” Aglaca whispered sharply. “And stay down where you belong!”

Verminaard blinked stupidly, his thoughts drawn from the maze of the Voice by his
companion's warning. He found himself standing full upright in the waist-high grass, an
easy target had the fog been thinner and the sentries more alert.

Instantly he crouched, but the Voice was not through with him.

Be ruled by me, it intoned. These things are mine to give, for the smallest of favors. I
shall show you this as the hours unfold.

“No,” Aglaca said flatly, to nothing and no one, his back to Verminaard. The older lad
turned toward him in astonishment, and looking over his shoulder, Aglaca grinned
sheepishly.

“Just that voice again, Verminaard,” he admitted. “Come to me with another set of lies.
Guess I forgot myself in the quarrel.”

“Enough of voices,” Verminaard declared. “We need to find the girl. This fog can't last
forever.”

It can if a dragon wields it, Ember thought, coiled not a hundred yards from the young
men, his thoughts masked against intrusion and his wings moving slowly, cyclically,
fanning the fog he had summoned magically as it spread through the landscape, darkening
and thickening.

Takhisis's commands were convenient, the dragon mused. How better to take the girl than to
have Verminaard and Aglaca do it for him?

He smiled, baring his many rows of long teeth. His golden eyes glittered as he searched
the mist, then found Verminaard and Aglaca again as they stooped in the grass and waited.
It would not be long before they found the Pen.

His scales rippled red and gold and red with a fierce anticipation. It was all falling
into place.

Only this voice troubled him. Aglaca spoke of it now freely and often, and to hear him
tell it, you would think he argued with it daily. It might be hallucination, born of his
loneliness at Castle Nidus, but the dragon suspected otherwise.

It might be what prompted Aglaca when, in the guise of the mage Cerestes, Ember had
offered the young man magic. Perhaps this voice had urged Aglaca to refuse those studies.

The other one seemed oblivious to the coaxing of this voiceof any voice. Then again, he
was dense and stubborn, not the kind to be won by words and argument. Aglaca was the
brains and Verminaard the muscle of this quest, and, masked by this magical fog, it would
not be long until the girl was in their hands. Then, in the safety of Nidus, in the trust
of her rescuers, her lips would open to a kindly dark mage named Cerestes. She would tell
him of druids and runes and magnificent strategies, never knowing she spoke those words
into the ears of a dragon.

He would know before all of them. Before Verminaard and Daeghrefn, to be sure, but before
Aglaca as well. And therefore, before Laca's spies and Laca himself....

And before Takhisis. Before the Dark Queen knew, and found the missing rune, and the
stone, and the key to her worldly kingdom.

He would sound the girl and the rune, the lads and the grounds of the temple he faced,
dark in the midst of the fog he had engendered. He would sound them all, and when the
Dragon Queen's mission failed at the gates of

her own temple, he would be the lord of the mountains and the lands that lay beyond them.
The clerics would answer to him, and it would be his governing voice in the ears of the
rich and powerful, not some thin, insinuating babble in the mind of a lone Solamnic boy.

The dragon purred, a low, rumbling sound that the lads and the sentries beyond mistook for
thunder, for a rising storm out of the north.

This is a comedy of mirrors, the goddess thought, reclining in the warm, swirling night
winds of the Abyss.

Around her lay darkness on darkness, darkness layering darkness until those places where
light had fled entirely seemed hazy, almost luminous, compared to places darker still that
surrounded them a gloom not only of shadows but of spirit.

But Takhisis was laughing now, her low, melodious laugh echoing in the great surrounding
void. A comedy of mirrors, when one character watches another, who in turn watches a third
watching a fourth, and all of this observed by the audience itself, watching from beyond
the play's little world of spies and intruders.

Ember certainly did not know she watched him as he crouched, flightless and stupid, in the
high, foggy grasslands. Let him approach her temple; let him see what he would see.

She would win, regardless of what he discovered.

As for the lads, they knew her only fleetingly, when what they called “the Voice” came to
them, and she told them dark, unimaginable things. One would be hers, twisted from his
high bloodline to her desire and design.

There would be no room for the other. Turning in the perpetual blackness, fluttering her

pennons, she dropped straight down ten thousand fathoms, plummeting, falling, dreaming,
until at length she floated amid a wild, universal hubbub of stunning sounds, of
disembodied voices all confused, borne through the hollow dark. She laughed amidst the
chaos of noise, and she thought of Laca.

His pedigreed line, aflourish since the Age of Light, would end in a traitorous son.

It would be the last drop of Huma's blood, she thought. With one of the twowhether
Verminaard or Aglaca, she cared not which, though she had begun to suspect which one it
would bethe line would end.

She thought of Huma and shivered. Thought of the bright lance exploding in her chest, the
incandescent swirl of darkness and the crackle of the firmament as the lance thrust her
into the negative plane of dark and chaos, of the Jiight winds that whirled about her,
buoying and buffeting her, and of the continual whining and whirring of these voices at
the edge of nothingness, the hysterical gnatsong of the damned.

She had destroyed him in their battle, but at the great cost of three thousand years of
banishment. She had destroyed him, brotherless and heirless, and for centuries, she had
dreamt, believing that his line had died against her in that final battle, there at the
end of the Second Dragon War.

But there were the cousins, and the cousins had sons. Laca had been the last. Distant in
descent and in blood, but Huma's kin nonetheless. And then there was Aglaca.

And along with Aglaca, there was the visit of Laca to Nidus, beneath the roof of his old
friend Daeghrefn, with whose comely wife he forgot all loyalty, all honor and Oath and
Measure, if for only a bright morning....

So with Aglaca, there was the child Verminaard, fair of hair and blue-eyed, the opposite
of Daeghrefn, but the image of his real father. ;

So Huma's line had branched again. Almost as though it had scattered to elude her, to
distract her from her three-millennia search. But she had located them bothboth of Laca's
sonsand time, circumstance, and her own devices had brought them together at last.

And before she chose between themor rather, before one of them chose herthere was the
matter of the girl.

For a while, Takhisis had let the Nerakans hold the girl. Surely that softhearted wretch
L'Indasha would reveal herself and come to the rescuein a hostile country where the veils
Paladine had cast over her whereabouts would no longer protect her.

But weeks had passed, and there had been no sign of the druidess. So she had turned to
Laca's sons: They would bring her the girlthey and that scheming subordinate of hers, who
fanned the fog unwittingly, veiling their movements to the Nerakan guards.

Once they had brought the girl to Nidus, the sounding would begin. Something in the girl's
thoughts resisted all probing, and her dreams were opaque and unfathomable.

No doubt Paladine had veiled her as well.

But the girl would leave Nidus eventually, and her path would lead to L'Indasha Yman, to
the secret of the blank rune. Then all the ingredients would fall into placethe mysterious
Judyth of Solamnia, the immortal druidess, and the last of Huma's line.

The last of Huma's line. In whatever role he would play. She would sound him soon, try him
in the darkness of her own choosing. Oh, yes. The ingredients were all there. It would all
make sense when Takhisis gathered them. Of that she was sure.

The voices wailed and gibbered around her in a chaos of laments. The Queen of the Dragons
extended her sable wings.

The time would come when the rune was blank no longer, but inscribed with its long-lost
opposing symbols,

and when the last rune was added to the others, their prophetic powers would be perfect.
She would find the green keystone to the Temple then, for the restored runes would see
through allthrough centuries of stone and through the clouded chaos of history. The runes
were knowledge, and with that knowledge, Takhisis could open the portals to the world. And
return to govern it.

She spread her wings and turned in a hot, dry wind, rising to the lip of the Abyss, to the
glazed and dividing firmament beyond which she could not travel. It looked forbidding,
mysterious, like thick ice on a bottomless pool. There, in the heart of nothing, Takhisis
banked and glided, aloft on the wafting current and her own dark strategies.

As the Voice had told Verminaard, tbe Pen lay to the west, in an encampment amid a forest
of green banners.

He crept closer, almost to the banners themselves, where he could hear the sniffling and
coughing of a rheumy sentry. Aglaca followed gamely, crouching in the shadow of a large
green pavilion, peering across the campground at the Nerakan stockade.

“I've never seen anything of this sort,” Aglaca marveled. “The stockade is a living
thing.” Verminaard gave the stockade a second look.

Sure enough, the Pen was alive and growinga tight circle of small-boled trees, so close
together that a mouse could barely pass between the trunks. Their branches

spread and intertwined, forming a netted canopy that kept out the rain, no doubt, and most
of the sunlight. Near the Pen's narrow entrance, the sentries paced, and the air seemed to
bristle and crackle before them.

Aglaca smiled. “It's easier than I thought.” Verminaard shot him a puzzled look.

“Those are drasil trees,” the young Solamnic explained. “Remember the ones above the cave
in the mountains?”

Verminaard did not.

With a sigh, Aglaca continued, leaning back into the darkness. “Once again, they grow over
caves. That's the point. This whole area must sit atop a cavernperhaps a system of
caverns. When we find an entrance, it will be simple. We'll come up under the Pen and
burrow her out.”

“Won't that be hard to do? To break through all that cavern rock?” Verminaard still did
not understand.

“The trees have already done that for us,” Aglaca replied delightedly. “The system of
roots has broken it to gravelly soil, I'd wager. The two of us, at work for a couple of
hours with sword and knife, could hack a hole big enough to draw out the girlto draw out
her entourage, if need be. Then it's back to where we left the horses, and on to Nidus
before the Nerakans know they've been ... undermined.”

The caves were easy enough to find.

And Aglaca was right: The whole plateau was riddled with tunnels and fissures. The tunnels
branched and burgeoned, forming an intricate network that spread roughly westward, toward
the Nerakan walls, the center of town, and the temple itself.

Aglaca led the way. It seemed that he had a dwarf's

underground sense, weaving through the dark, perplexing tunnel system, his hands extended
before him. Rejecting blind passages almost by instinct, he would feel at an opening,
shake his head and pass by.

Deep within the tunnels, Aglaca withdrew a tinderbox and a small lamp from a pouch at his
belt. Crouching quietly and suddenly, so that Verminaard almost stumbled over him in the
gloom, the Solamnic youth lit the lamp deftly and held it aloft.

The darkness dispelled a little. Amid confusion and discord, rubble and guano, strange,
translucent crickets whirred and stalked blindly over the glistening stone walls and the
ancient cobwebbed beams that supported the tunnels ahead.

“I had no idea they were ...” Verminaard began. But the depth and extent of the caverns
baffled him.

Another sound, high and melodious, filtered to the young men like a chorus of a thousand
distant voices, the harmonies so intricate that the music itself teetered on the edge of
chaos. Beautiful though it was, the sound was distracting, and Verminaard shielded his
ears.

“What is it?” he whispered, but Aglaca only shook his head. “You should know. It's the
sound of spellcraft,” the smaller youth explained. "Something surrounds

the Pena shell of energy or light. Since we can't pass around it or through it, we're on
our way under it and up to the girl."

“How do you know, Aglaca?” Verminaard slipped narrowly through a latticework of thick
roots. “You don't listen when it comes to magic.”

“I don't listen to Cerestes,” Aglaca corrected mysteriously and handed the lamp to his
companion.

Though he was thoroughly lost by now, turned about in the tunnels, and though each passage
was indistinguishable from the last, Verminaard could tell that, slowly but

directly, Aglaca was guiding them somewhere. Resentfully he held the lamp aloft, giving
the smaller lad the light to see by.

The rescue had been Verminaard's idea, after all, planned over runes and misgivings in the
dark nights of Castle Nidus, and now this interloperthis hostagehad seized command with
his cleverness and know-how.

I am no oracle, he thought. And yet I see the lay of this tunnelhow this venture will be
reported to the ears of those at home, and who will receive the glory for the rescue.

He glared at Aglaca, who bent down a tunnel, nodded, and motioned to Verminaard excitedly,
urgently.

“Here it is!” he whispered. His blue eyes caught for a moment in the torchlight,
flickering a bright, unexplain-able red. “Drasil roots. Looks to be a circle of 'em, like
a ring of mushrooms. We're directly under the Pen, I'll wager. It's all digging and a
straight climb from here, Verminaard. Set the lamp where it gives the most light.”

Verminaard's enmity vanished with the news. Thoughts of the girl returned like a fresh
wind in the damp and musty cavern. Verminaard wedged the lamp into a crack in the tunnel
wall, split by one of the drasil roots in its blind plummet through both ceiling and floor
of the cave. Taking up his sword, he sprang compliantly to Aglaca's side, ready to hack
and dig and fight anything that stood between him and the captured girl.

He was so close now to realizing his daydreams. She would be a beauty of unparalleled
fairness. Verminaard had had his share of serving girls and milkmaids, but none of them
would be like this creature. Her eyes would be pale blue stars and her silky hair the
color of flax. She would know him immediately for the one who'd planned and propelled her
rescue, and she would be forever grateful so grateful that she would never wish to speak
to another man. The way she would say

his name would “Verminaard! I said you can start anytime! Where have you been?” “You
wouldn't understand. And don't get pushy with me.”

It was only a matter of minutes before the roots knotted above them, as thick as cords, as
fingers, tendrils snagging their weapons, dulling them in a maddening, fibrous web.
Verminaard thrashed vainly at the snarl of root and dirt and rock that seemed to open for
him and engulf him as he climbed past the more slender roots to ankle-thick, leg-thick
monstrosities that broke through the rock above and below, searching blindly for air and
water and sustenance.

Slowly the network of roots surrounded them. It seemed like an underground stockade, a
mirror image of the Pen that stood directly above.

“We could work like loggers for a week down here,” Aglaca muttered, “and still be no
closer to squeezing those shoulders of yours through this tangle.”

Verminaard gasped for breath and wiped his dirty brow. Between the dust and his exertion,
the air in the cavern was slowly becoming unbreathable.

“We'll go back to the surface. Fight our way in,” said Verminaard, moving back the way
he'd come.

“Nonsense,” Aglaca replied. “You saw their numbers. And there are ogres as wellI could
smell them through the fog. I'll bet they're penned up nearby, no doubt enchanted into
service to build the wall around the temple. Prisoners or not, they'll fight for the
bandits rather than help us out. No, between the brigands and their servants, this is
still the best of entries.”

Verminaard winced and twisted his foot out of a long tendril.

Aglaca grinned slyly. “Listen. I spoke only of loggers,” he said. “Not of burglars.”

Verminaard scowled. He was doing it again. A plan was hatching in that ever so clever
Solamnic brain something complicated and intricate, no doubt, rife with twists and
illusions, masks and double-talk. Sheathing his sword, his hands still numb from hacking
at the roots, he sat on the cavern floor, awaiting a long explanation.

He was surprised at how simple it was. But he did not like it one whit.

And his thoughts dwelt on the woman pent above them, and the charms and imagined deceits
of Aglaca Dragonbane.

Hagalaz and Isa, two young bandit sentries, stood watch at the narrow opening to the Pen.
It was no more than a small gap in the drasil trees, curtained of late by their courtly
sergeant, who respected the captive's dignity and modesty.

Now was the time when the curtain most availed the girl, as the servingwomen brought in
the pitchers of warm water, poured it into the hostage's tub, then backed courteously from
the living enclosure, their heads bowed and the pitchers empty. Shortly, the men could
hear the girl moving behind the thick canvas. She muttered to herself, and it sounded like
two voices in the Pen, like a hushed conversation, but that was nothing new. Judyth of
Solan-thus always talked to herself, or murmured incantation, or prayed to her foreign
gods.

The thoughts of the guards were scarcely on her prayers. Instead, they were concluding a
long speculation as to what the Lady Judyth wore beneath that purple cloak and riding
tunic, each sentry goading the other to inch aside the curtain and peer in on the girl as
she undressed for her bath.

The speculation was merely cultural, they told themselves. It could be of interest to the
Nerakan wives and mothers as to how a wealthy Solamnic girl might dress, especially since
she hailed from one of the more ancient and honored cities of that western country.

The interest was academic, they told themselves, at least for now, while the sergeant's
orders were strict. The temple clerics had told him not to lay a hostile hand on the girl.
Not until Takhisis had given them a sign as to her fate.

So for now, the interest was academic, and their attentions as well. They winked in a most
scholarly fashion, holding their breath as they quietly peeked through the curtain. It was
a far better job than guarding a foul-smelling band of fifty ogres.

Aglaca climbed higher through the tough entanglements, hands clutching at coarse, sandy
root, the leavings of guano, and silt and gravelly dust. Finally, balanced a dozen feet
above Verminaard, he could reach no farther. The crumbling ceiling of the cave dipped
directly above, and the sound of the girl's muffled words reached him through the thin
layer of dirt and rock.

He gritted his teeth and began to digslowly and cautiously at first, but with rising
urgency as he heard the murmuring cease, heard the girl's voice clearly for the first
time: “What in the name of Branchala ...”

Then there was light, and the torn edge of a wooden tub hovering over him. The water
swirled and trickled above him, yet he remained dry.

“By Paladine!” he breathed.

The water pooled and was caught on some strange shimmering tension in the air. It was like
looking at a rain-

storm through glass or ice, and for a moment, Aglaca thought that indeed it was glass
above him. He weaved a moment on his ladder of rough roots, clutching for purchase in the
fractured dark.

“Whowho are you?” the girl whispered, peering through the puddle. He recognized the face,
the lavender gown she clutched to her breast, the brilliant blue-lavender eyes.

“Y-Your rescuer, by Paladine's grace! We are two. The other waits below,” he muttered
triumphantly and vaulted toward the light.

It was then that he discovered the magical shell that lay between him and the astonished
girl. The spell-charged air snared him, pushed him back. He fell back into the roots with
a crash and an oath, staring stupidly up at her. His hands crackled with sparks as he
clutched for balance, and his hair stood on end.

“Do you think a simple line of trees could keep me in?” the girl hissed to Aglaca. “Or
keep the guardsmen out, if they fancied to trouble me? The priests in that temple have
magicked the Pen with a glyph of warding.”

“Glyph of warding?” “An old sign, it is. Charged with shamanic conjury when the black moon
rises.”

Aglaca swallowed. This hostage girl knew magic beyond his wildest dreams. “How do we .. .”
he began, but a quick wave of her hand urged him to silence.

“I know the countercharm,” she whispered. “I didn't go guileless into the mountains, but I
need another voice for the casting.”

“Another voice? Why?”

“No time. Speak after me. Then stand back. There's a big leak in this bathtub. You're
partway under it.”

Blushing, his eyes averted and his legs lodged in a chaos of roots, the lad waited for
Judyth to dress, then repeated the spinning, incomprehensible Elvish that she

spoke to him. It was a brief verse, its vowels dancing in subtle arrangements, and twice
the girl had to stop him, correct him, and start him again in the strange incantation.

But the third time it worked.

In triumph and relief, Aglaca repeated the last line, and the air above him stirred and
snapped. A deluge of soapy water tumbled from the broken tub, and Judyth, now fully
dressed in the lavender robe, slipped through the wet hole and clutched her rescuer about
the waist.

“Hurry!” she ordered through clenched teeth, untangling her sleeve from a stray root
tendril. “You've freed more than a damsel in distress.”

Verminaard had waited sullenly in the cavern, clutching an oozing shoulder wound he had
received from backing into a sharp broken root. Then he heard her voice hushed and
melodious and low, not the high-stringed harp music he had imaginedand it was suddenly
drowned by a rumble overhead, a tumult of shouting and screaming and the crashing sound of
buildings and lean-tos shaking and toppling.

Judyth quickly descended into the torchlight, Aglaca leading her carefully over and around
the latticework of roots. They were both wet, dripping with soapy water, and it would be
much later before Verminaard discovered the reason.

Verminaard stepped back indignantly.

It was your plan, the Voice insinuated. Your plan, and a good one, conceived in d noble
spirit. . . the'stuff of heroism, all For a moment, the Voice paused and garbled, as
though at the edge of an unpronounceable word. Then it continued. All Huma and lances and
glorious victory. It was