Before The Mask (11 page)

your idea and your doing, and who leads the girl forth? And why does he lead her?

The Voice repeated the questions again and again, each time more softly until they merged
entirely with Ver-minaard's thoughts, and the lad forgot the Voice altogether, asking the
questions himself as he reached out to help the girl through the last of the knotted
entanglements.

“Thank you,” she breathed, and brushed back her hood. Behind her, a stalactite crashed to
the cavern floor.

For the first time, Verminaard looked into the face of the girl he had dreamt of and
pursued through two seasons. Her dark hair shone like obsidian in the guttering lamplight;
it was not the spun gold he had imagined. And though her skin was flawless, the touch of
her hand like fine silk or velvet, that hand was dark, not porcelain or alabaster as the
poems had told him it would be, should be.

And the eyes. Deep and lavender, a strange blue, bright and fathomless. Like the eye of
that daylily. She was not the girl he had imagined at all.

Behind her, a rockslide opened the cavern to a shifting, misty light from above. She
shoved Verminaard toward the cave entrance and shouted as he staggered back in amazement.

“Don't stand there gawking or we'll all be crushed! Get us out of here!”

They emerged from the cavern just as it collapsed behind them. Verminaard wheeled about,
open- mouthed, as the passage behind him caved in with a dusty crash, the plateau
collapsing, concentrically spreading all the way to

the base of the Nerakan walls, toppling tents and lean-tos and makeshift cottages in a
matter of seconds.

He could barely speak. His order that they move quickly to retrieve the horses came as a
dry, croaking sound in a landscape of deafening noise. They hurried toward the wooded rise
where Orlog and the mare nervously waited, and did not look behind again as the tower
itself quaked and the first fires sparked in the town of Neraka.

They did not look back, but not far from the green encampment, another penthis one
fashioned of stone and timbertoppled when the ogres pushed against it. There were two
dozen of them, freed from ensorcellment by the chanting of Judyth and Aglaca, and they
were joined by thirty others whose chains had burst on the scaffolding near the walls.
Drowsily, stupidly, as though they had freshly awakened, the monsters tramped through the
fallen tents, gathering torches as they wandered, weaving in dangerous circles and rapidly
igniting more thatch and wood. They were dark and hulking in the torchlight, draped in
skins and furs, their own sallow hides and blue-black hair glistening in the rising flames
as the fires spread through the settlement.

By dark instinct, the ogres moved to the spot of the chanting, where the spell that had
contained them was first broken. They reached the Pen and milled together, gaping at one
another, uprooting tent posts and wattled walls in their dull uncertainty.

Then one of themgrizzled and small for his race lifted his face and smelled the switching
wind.

“Horse!” he cried out, his broken mouth salivating at the prospect of food. “Horse ... and
young humans!”

With an exultant, rumbling cry, the ancient ogre rushed toward the green flags, and the
rest of the monsters followed.

Ember heard the outcry of the sentriesthe name “Judyth” rising like an alarm out of the
smoke and fanned his wings contentedly as the magical fog redoubled over the city and the
plains, mingling with the smoke and casting the town into a thick and abiding darkness.

They had her now. Ember was certain. And they would need cover of shadow and cloud to mask
their path west through the mountains.

The dragon stirred and rumbled. He had done all he could. He would return to Castle Nidus
and await their arrival. There he would be Cerestes again, handsome and witty and learned
for the benefit of the captive girl. He would charm the rune-wielder, and he would sound
her like the lost

rune, rist her in his intricate thoughts and plans until she told him everything she had
learned at the feet of the druids.

He would steal her out from the watch of the young humans. And when he had learned her
heart, he would also learn the heart of all the runes.

The dragon lumbered into the sky, rose above the maze of fog into the clear mountain air,
and turned his golden eyes to the northwest and to Castle Nidus, abuzz with rumors and
vanishments of its own.

Two days into the lads' journey, their absence had

become unbearable to the seneschal Robert. He had coaxed, wheedled, and finally berated
the master of the castle. Lord Daeghrefn, lost in memories of betrayal and winter, finally
stirred at the harsh words of his retainer and noticed that the young men were indeed
missing.

“Where would they take those horses for this long, Robert?” he bellowed, stalking down the
halls of the castle toward the entrance, the bailey, and the stable beyond them. With a
growl, he swept a torch from its sconce on the wall. The brand struck the floor,
sputtered, and went out, and Robert coughed behind him.

“Two days is a long time in the saddle if you're hunting, sir. I fear the worst: that
they've decided to be heroes, as young men are prone to decide, and that they've taken off
toward Neraka with some quest a-brewing.”

“Then it's Verminaard's fault!” Daeghrefn stormed, wheeling to face Robert at the sunlit
door to the bailey. “What if something happens to Aglaca?”

“Sir?”

“If Aglaca falls in some harebrained escapade, then Abelaard's life is forfeit!”

Robert hesitated. “I reckon that's the rules of the gebo-naud, but I don't think”

“Where's the fool who helped them with the horses?” Daeghrefn shouted, and made for the
distant stable.

Frith was long gone by the time Daeghrefn burst through the stable doors.

He had seen it coming for an hour or two. The young masters were not yet back, though
Master Verminaard had sworn they would need the horses only for a night. There was tumult
in the keep, and the loudest voice belonged to old DaeghrefnLord Stormcrow himself.

Finally Frith's father had been summoned to the council hall. It could mean only one thing.

“They don't summon a groom for matters of state,” Frith mumbled to himself, wrapping a
cheese and a loaf of bread in his other clean pair of stockings. "It's punishments they're
after, punishments and blame, and they'll know before they ask him that Pa don't know a
thing.

“But I do.” He tucked the woolen package under his arm. The cheese had already begun to
smell.

“Whoof!” Frith exclaimed, shifting his burden at once. “Great Reorx forbid 'em to think of
the hounds!”

Silently he slipped from the stable atop a swift little gray, figuring that Daeghrefn
couldn't kill him but once. Passing through the gate, he coaxed the horse north, toward
the shelter of the mountain passes in the long direction of Gargath. The castle dwindled
behind him, and he would never return to it, never know that the lads would come home
safely, with a mysterious girl in tow, and that Daeghrefn's anger would blow over within a
week.

Nor would young Frith discover, until he was much older and the passage of twelve winters
had softened the distant news, that his father would be put to death by a furious
Daeghrefn for the high crime of not keeping track of his son.

But at the moment Aglaca declared his plan to Ver-minaard, before the Nerakan guards
discovered the missing girl and Ember rose above the fog, almost at the same moment that
the groom's son Frith decided to flee Castle Nidus, the largest of all the plans was
evolving in the depths of the Abyss.

Takhisis watched everything, even forseeing some of it,

her golden eye lazing from guard to dragon, from questing lad to stable groom, and her
thoughts raced over actions and words to make sense of what would come next.

They are like runes, she decidedAglaca, Verminaard, the captive girl, Daeghrefn, and the
dragon. Somehow they had converged, had all come together in this little rescue story.

Takhisis smiled. It was her task to read convergences. That which was. That which is. That
which might become.

Daeghrefn was simple. The wild, immutable force of anger. Whenever he showed in the
arrangement, it became volatile ... explosive.

The dragon was Daeghrefn's opposite. Ever calm and outwardly serene, laborate and
involved, Ember's thoughts turned in on themselves, knotting and entangling until he
suspected his own suspicions, deceived himself with his own lies.

The boys were opposites as well. When they glared at one anotherin anger, in rivalry, or
even in rare agreementit was as though they looked into a mirror, each the image of the
other. Such are brothers, she thought affectionately. But when Verminaard's left hand
raised, Aglaca's right hand countered, so that each was the other reversed.

And in rune lore, the Dark Lady remembered, the sign reversed is its opposite as well: The
Sun rune reversed foretold darkness, the reversed Harvest rune foretold famine.

Balances. It was all balances. So she had known for ten thousand years, and the little
commotions of mortals followed the same vast pattern.

But the girl was different. Unmatched, unpaired, and so far unreadable, she had come from
the west, urged on by Paladine's guiding hand. Takhisis could not read her, could not yet
discover her mystery or her opposite.

Perhaps she was the blank rune.

The shaman's magic that encircled the Pen had been a test for the girl: a primitive spell,
easily broken by mage and by cleric as well, if there were clerics left to break it, but
since the girl had done it, she was even more than Takhisis had figured.

For the time being, Takhisis would watch. The girl was more useful alive and free. If she
was the blank runeand when before had the Dark Lady been mistaken?Judyth would lead
Takhisis to L'Indasha Yman, to the secret of the augury.

The girl was the lapwing, the lure that would draw the druidess from hiding.

It would have to be done carefully, this strategy. As soon as Judyth reached Castle Nidus,
Takhisis would have the mage cast a warding spell far stronger than the one encircling the
Pen in Neraka. She would aid him in the casting, breathe power into his paltry skills so
that no enchanternot even the skillful L'Indasha Ymancould pass through the warding
undetected.

No, the druidess would not disrupt these plans. Eventually Judyth would go to her, and
when that time came, Takhisis's spies would follow. She would find the druidess, sound the
rune, and through the restored prophecies, Takhisis would discover yet another stone-green
and priceless and hidden for a centurythat would complete the circle of her temple, would
bring into being the promised towers in the depth of her dreams.

She turned again on the hot darkwind, watching and waiting.

Verminaard could not believc, as the three of them retrieved tbe horses and rode west in
the lifting fog, that he and Aglaca had rescued the right girl.

He looked back at this Judyth twice. She was seated behind Aglaca on the mare. Dark hair,
dark skin, the fiery blue-lavender eyes Aglaca had promised.

And the black tattoo, the dragon's head, he had seen on her right leg that day at the
bridge.

And yet she was not at all the girl he had expected. Again he asked himself, Where is the
blonde hair, the pale eyes, the temperament mild and grateful? She should have been near
death defenseless.

But Judyth was lovely and tall and pleasant, with a

sharp mind and an assurance that had guided the three of them through even the thickest
fog. She had steered them by scattered memories, recalling blasted trees and clusters of
rocks she had seen but once or twice, and from those paltry landmarks, she directed them
generally toward the Nerakan Forest and the Jelek Path.

Verminaard had doubted her at first, but then, when the mist subsided, he looked back.
Dwindling into the distance was the village of Neraka, the afternoon sun blazing clearly
on the right side of Takhisis's dark tower.

A hundred small fires burned on the battlements and walls, spreading rapidly through the
outlying encampments.

“There's a fire spreading through the town!” he called to his companions, and Aglaca
wheeled the mare about. Standing in the stirrups, Judyth gazed over Aglalca's head into
the distance, her gemstone eyes bright and sharp.

“Ogres,” she declared, her voice calm and strangely musical. “It's as I reckoned. Our
incantation freed them as well. Best keep at the path we've chosen. That should be the
Nerakan forest, far ahead and to our right.”

Verminaard followed her gesture and saw a gray-green mass on the far horizon. The girl was
right after all. They were northward bound indeed.

He glanced once again at her leg. Yes, it was the same leg, all right.

For the last mile or so, even before the fog had cleared entirely, Judyth and Aglaca had
engaged in quiet conversation. Verminaard had caught bits of it from his seat atop Orlog.
Judyth prattled contentedly about things remote and Solamnic, and Aglaca joined in with a
flurry of questions, his voice rising dangerously above a whisper, cracking with
excitement in the thin, crisp air.

“Around the Great Library of Palanthas,” Judyth explained as Aglaca guided the mare
through a heap of

fallen rock, “there are over a hundred kinds of roses planted. Some never cease to bloom.”

“Are there blue daisies? The medicinal ones?” Aglaca asked eagerly. “How about nard and
black iris?”

Verminaard muttered something hot, indecipherable.

Judyth turned and looked at the hulking figure on the black stallion. Her face set in a
cold frown, she clutched the front of her robe tightly against the cool mountain winds.
This Verminaard is handsome, she thought. Those blue eyes, and those shoulders, and arms
like drasil trees. Though he's cut badly on the right armprobably in the tunnel. I'll see
to it later if he'll let me. There's something about him that's so stormy and melancholy,
though. It makes you...

Verminaard rumbled through his clenched teeth. “Perhaps if the two of you could cease this
talk of libraries and roses long enough to spot high ground,” he said, “you could make
yourselves useful on the long road home.”

Judyth looked away. Amazing blue eyes, yes, but a voice sharp and critical.

“That's easy enough, Verminaard,” Aglaca answered cheerily. “And with a hard ride behind
us and the good mare double-burdened, you're wise to be looking for rest this early in the
evening.”

They rode on in a stunted silence for an hour or so, with only the lofty cry of raptors as
accompaniment, and then, as the sun started to set and the sky to darken, the muffled,
distant hoot of an owl sounded in the bordering trees of the Nerakan Forest. And a new
rumbling, deep and even more distant, arose on the plains behind them. In the last of the
gloaming, they reached a rise and looked back to the south, where a dozen torches spread
over the wide plains, moving steadily and tirelessly north.

“Cavalry,” Verminaard observed.

Judyth shook her head. "Ogres. Your idea of high ground looks better and better. Traveling
over the rocks

will cover our tracks better than traveling through grassland.“ ”D'you think" Aglaca began.

“No. They're probably not after us,” Judyth explained. “Or if they were, they've been
distracted by other sounds and smells by now. Ogres are notoriously stupid, and I saw
enough of them in Neraka to know their reputation's earned. It's a hunt, surely, but a
random and disorganized one. We're safe if we're out of their way. Besides,” she
concluded, drawing a pouch from her belt, “your arm needs mending, Verminaard.”

The riders took to a high, rocky path veering toward the stark, obsidian cliffs that lined
the western border of the Nerakan plains. They rode a mile more in the diminishing light,
until Aglaca reined the mare to a halt at the mouth of a little box canyon, an inlet in
the rocks not thirty feet across, bordered by scrub plants and rubble and a solitary high
trail that meandered up the cliffside.

“Look ahead of us!” Aglaca exclaimed, pointing toward a spot in the shadow of the rock
face. “That's out of the way, I'd reckon. It's a campsite ready madean abandoned bed of
rushes and a smothered fire not two days old.”

He leaned forward and peered at the ground. “And some sort of stone arrangement. I'm not
sure what it's here for, but it's as fresh as the fire by the markings around it.”

Judyth studied it as well, her gaze following Aglaca's pointing finger. “Stones? Oh. 'Tis
a pair of warding signsno more. Logr and Yr. Water and yew bow, journey and protection.
Quite common around here. Travelers and bandits set 'em alike, though I cannot remember
seeing the two of these ever placed together.”

“I saw two placed side by side at the edge of the garden at Nidus,” Aglaca observed. "Kaun
and Kaun. Sore and sore. Made Lord Daeghrefn break out in hives when he

passed between 'em. I took it as the old gardener's work.“ ”But these runes mark a serious
business," Judyth said.

Aglaca nodded, his eyes on the lush greenery around the warding. Roses and comfrey,
rosemary and marrow the red symbol of love amid herbs of healing, memory, and the
banishment of melancholy. “Tis a blessed place indeed,” he whispered.

Unconcerned with the vegetation, Verminaard craned toward the stones, marveling at the
rune signs.

“What was a good campsite so recently is probably still a good place to stay the night,”
Judyth observed cautiously, scanning the horizon for any sign of bandits, of pursuit.

“That's not always the case, girl,” Verminaard said testily. “Why do you think the site
was abandoned?”

“No dramatic reason,” Judyth declared, regarding the big lad calmly. “Someone moved on.
D'you plan to stay here two nights? Or are we bound elsewhere on the morrow?”

Aglaca hid a smile and slipped from the mare. Approaching the campsite, he crouched before
the extinguished fire and whistled appreciatively.

“Somebody knows the full particulars of camping,” he observed, looking up wide-eyed at his
two companions. “No more than a handful of wood, and this fire burned through the night!”

“How do you know?” Verminaard asked sullenly, dismounting from the weary stallion.

“Didn't go to get more wood,” Aglaca replied solemnly, pointing at the tracks around the
fire. “So it's my guess that this was enough.”

“We can't have a fire, you know,” said Judyth. “The ogres will see it.” “Trust me,” Aglaca
said. “I can kindle a fire that an eagle couldn't spot.” Verminaard glared at the young
Solamnic. Preening for the girl, he was, and charming her with his glib, western airs.

Sullenly he stepped aside. The time would come when strength would avail. Then those
lavender eyes would turn to him, and the story would be different.

There was something about the campsite, a smell of flowers and aeterna and some strange
and exotic attar that hinted at a deep, cryptic wisdom. Verminaard fidgeted, shifting from
foot to foot as he stood watch, and Aglaca kindled the fire with a quiet, almost secretive
reverence. Only Judyth seemed unaffected, merrily mixing an herb tea made from some nearby
berries and leaves. “A bracer,” she claimed, “after a long journey.” All the while, and
even as she cleaned and stitched Verminaard's wounded shoulder, she continued to regale
Aglaca with quiet stories of fabled Palanthasof the High Clerist's Tower, of the Tower of
High Sorcery, and the winding streets that linked district after district of Solamnia's
aristocracy as the thin spirals of a spider's web link its anchoring spokes and radials.

“I wouldn't want to go west,” Verminaard offered, rubbing at his newly stitched shoulder
despite Judyth's advice, as the darkness deepened. “Too much pomp and Solamnic ceremony.”

“You lie. It's because Daeghrefn no longer believes in the Order,” Aglaca declared flatly.

“And what of that?” Verminaard asked defensively, turning toward his companion, who knelt
by Judyth as the tea steeped, their faces radiant, bathed in the last rays of the
westering sun.

“Nothing, Verminaard. Sorry. It's been a long time, and I'm missing the Order a bit myself
. . . and my father, and home on the East Borders.”

“Well, gather yourself, Aglaca,” Verminaard said coldly. "You're not the first to be
exiled, you know. And all this talk of Solamnia and Palanthas and Oath and Measure is

more than annoying after a while."

“Then don't listen,” Judyth declared calmly, smiling, her gaze fastened defiantly on this
big, boorish blond oaf who seemed to rankle at the joy of others. “Simply stand there and
look out for ogres.”

Flushed and silent, Verminaard backed away. Then he turned with a contemptuous smile,
intent

again on a man's business. He would stand watch. They were not fit for it.

It was then he began to hear Solamnic.

“Est othas calathansas bara ...” Judyth began, and off raced a new and alien conversation,
the pair of Solamnics by the fire masked in the old language, its liquid sounds and its
musical, sudden vowels. Judyth's stifled laughter rang in the outpouring of words, and
Aglaca, delighted to hear once again the sounds of his home, of the Order, of his father's
tongue, laughed with her. It was the happiest he had been in nearly ten years.

Verminaard tried to listen, and recognized a word now and then. But it felt as if the fog
had returned, as if his senses were muffled and shut. From the time when Daeghrefn had
left the Solamnic Order, that language had been forbidden in Castle Nidus, and the few
simple verbs he had learned from Aglaca's attendants and from a rare Solamnic emissary
served him ill in the swift conversation.

It was all he could take. Muttering, he stuffed his belongings in the saddlebagthe Amarach
runes, the quith-pa, the purple pendantand took off on foot toward high ground.

Let them band together to shut him out, in the affected, gossipy fashion of courtier or
knave. He had better things to do! Adventures to seek on the harsh Nerakan plains, where a
stout arm availed more than some urbane knowledge of manners and far-flung places and
pretty words!

There were better women elsewheremore agreeable and compliant.

He could scarcely believe it when he looked back and saw how far he was from the camp. The
little canyon below shielded them from the plains in the rising Ner-akan night. The sun
was well gone and the afterglow fading fast. He had traveled a good two hundred feet or so
up the sheer mountain trail, amid scrubby aeterna and the little deciduous plants the
mountain folk called broucherei....

“Damn it!” he exclaimed. “They have me studying foliage now!” His gaze shot up the rock
face to a plateau, void of the lush, surrounding vegetation, where four drasil trees stood
in a circle, stark and black against the last of the light, like a sign from the gods.

“There's the entrance,” Verminaard said to himself, stooping to enter the mouth of the
cave. A quartet of bats flashed by his ears, chattering, and he shivered as one touched
his face.

He had made up his mind when he recognized the trees and finally remembered that they
always grew above caverns. He would go into the cavego there aloneand find his way past
the thick arrangement of roots and tendrils, exploring the dark as far as his courage
would take him.

“Which is much farther than Aglaca would go,” he muttered, and he crouched in the palpable
gloom, moving slowly into the depths of the cave.

It wasn't long before the Voice reached him, familiar and embracing, as it had always
been, but there was something new in its suggestion, some haunting note of urgency that
Verminaard had never heard before. For the first time, he paused and wondered whether he
should go on.

Enough of the day, the low, feminine voice intoned, almost singing, as Verminaard caught
his breath and sank to his knees, leaning against the moist wall of the cavern. Enough of
the treachery of sun, the little deceits of the stars in their courses. Leave them behind,
Prince Verminaard, lord of a thousand leagues and the scion of dragons....

Undefined shapes flitted through the shadows ahead, spectral, robed figures mingling with
the darkness, their voices mixing with the low insect drone of sound he had first heard in
the depths of the Nerakan caverns, a sound like the high-pitched humming from the ruins
about God-shome. He stood, his knees shaking, and breathed a prayer to Hiddukel, to
Zeboim, to Takhisis.

And at the finish of the third prayer, it was as though the Lady herself had reached forth
and embraced him. In the warm darkness, he traveled deeper into the cave, past the
insubstantial shapes.

He gathered strength and courage with each stride.