Before The Mask (14 page)

Even from the heights, from the rocky highlands and from the back of his stallion,
Verminaard couldn't discern what was happening down on the burning steppe. He reined Orlog
to an uneasy halt and waited for the durable little mare to catch up, Judyth and Aglaca
bent with weariness in the saddle.

“There,” the bigger lad pronounced, his hand sweeping the landscape around themthe bunched
fires, the ogres, the smoke covering the country for miles. “If it were daylight and
clear, I could see our way home.”

“But since it is as it is,” Aglaca pondered cautiously, “where do we go from here?” He
didn't trust his transformed companion, but the fire and assaulting ogres were a more
obvious danger.

And even after the worst had happened in the cave, there would still be a way to rescue
his companion. There had to be.

“We'll ride down into the midst of it,” Verminaard said. A strange confidence had risen in
him. In Takhisis's cavern, his uncertainties and pain had vanished. A black-hot bolt had
shot through his hand, blistering him from fingertips to elbow, welding his fingers to the
handle of the captured mace for a time.

But that was nothing before the older injuries of lifelong fear, all the more terrible
because they had continued to cripple and humiliate him. Strangely, his new wound did not
hurt at all.

In the short ride through the foothills, the Voice had traveled beside him, coaxing,
flattering, promising. The weapon that can harm you, it said, has not been forged by dwarf
or ogre. It is far from you now, but your power is near.

And then, when the northern grasslands opened for him, veiled and misted by smoke but
stretching toward the old Battle Plain, toward Castle Nidus, the Voice returned again, and
with it the greatest of its hushed and seductive vows.

This smoke will spread, Lord Verminaard, and cover all kingdoms of the world . . . all
kingdoms in a moment of time. And even the farthest ground that the smoke will cover can
belong to you, for I can deliver that country and power and glory to those who worship
me....

He breathed in the acrid smoke exultantly. It was a heady promise, and the prospect of
such dominion was sweet. Beneath him, the broad back of Orlog felt more powerful still.

Could it be that the vision that had arrayed itself before him in the depths of the cave
was already coming to pass?

“... to pass through the fire.”

Verminaard started. Judyth and Aglaca sat beside him on the mare, and the girl was saying
something, something he had lost in his revery.

He turned to her politely, attentively, brushing the drooping hair from his eyes. She was
not the girl he had

imagined, and that really didn't matter anymore. None of his previous disappointments did.
But she

was lovely and dark, and she would do. “I beg your pardon, Lady Judyth,” he replied, his
voice husky and low.

“The fire,” Aglaca said impatiently. “It's a blazing wall between us and Nidus, and the
ogres are stalking along it like wolves. If we expect to see your castle again, we'll have
to pass through the fire.”

“Then that is just what we shall do,” Verminaard said ? calmly, pointing toward the gap in
the flame. “Follow me, and ask no questions.”

“But Verminaard ...” Aglaca began.

Verminaard glared at him. “Be ruled by me, Aglaca. Be ruled by me or be damned where you
stand.”

Verminaard's confident words died swiftly when they reached the plain.

From above, the fire had seemed navigable to him. There was an end to it, and borders, and
the ogres that moved around it and through it were scattered and few in number.

But now, the horses picked uncertainly around the southern edge of the rolling flames, and
the path through the blaze seemed to have vanished in the short journey to the edge of the
fire wall. The scorched ground smoldered beneath Orlog's hooves as the big stallion
stepped gingerly from patch to patch of remaining green. The evening sky was smoke black
and unreadable.

As he rode down the spreading wave of flame, Judyth and Aglaca close behind, Verminaard's
assurance continued to wither like the blackened grass in the fire wall's wake. At this
distance, the choices were quick and

baffling. The shouts of ogres came to him from the smoke, from the flames, from the
charred woods behind, and he moved through a country of doubling echoes. Dodging through
the black grass, foxes and rabbits, pheasant and squirrel, all panic-stricken, were driven
by an instinct to flee, to burrow, to vanish, and the horses leapt and shied as the wild
things scurried beneath them. Orlog leapt over fire-felled oak and aeterna, and for the
first time since he had broken the beast in the high meadows north of Nidus, Verminaard
could not control the black stallion beneath him. Twice Orlog veered dangerously north,
until the flames rose like a battlement above them, and twice the big horse shied away,
whinnying wildly and sidling through the seared undergrowth as the blazes broke around
them, leaving them astound-ingly untouched.

Where is the Voice now? Verminaard thought, clinging frantically to the reins. This is my
country, my power and glory. It told me so.

He looked back. Astride the mare, at the smoke's edge, Judyth peered calmly into the
roiling fire. Aglaca sat behind her in the saddle, his wiry arms wrapped gently about her
waist, but there was no gentleness in his eyes. Instead, he stared at Verminaard coldly,
accusingly.

Suddenly Judyth called out, pointing toward a gap in the flames. There, where the fire
wavered and lapsed over a little rise, a cloud of purple smoke hovered and swirled.

“Through that!” Judyth shouted. “Make haste!”

With a shrill whistle, she snapped the reins against the mare's neck. The tough little
beast snorted, wheeled, and raced toward the heart of the cloud, scattering sparks and
fire-blackened clods in her wake.

Verminaard gasped and started to call out, to stop her, but the mare flashed by before he
could speak, could reach out, and he had to follow because Orlog had already made his own
choice.

The smoke rushed over them like water.

For a moment, Aglaca held his breath, and then, as Judyth steered the mare through the
whirling obscurity, he leaned back, opened his eyes, and breathed carefully.

The air was bracing and moist, awash in an odor of lilac. “Where ...” he whispered, but
Judyth reached back and motioned to him for quiet.

“Hush,” she murmured over her shoulder. “There is danger in words. Someone ahead beckons
us through the smoke.”

Verminaard strained to follow his companions, craning over Orlog's neck at the distant,
dark shape of Aglaca's back, which vanished and reappeared, then vanished again in the
thick, rolling smoke.

It's stifling here, he thought. Blind and stifling, and smelling of ash. How can I follow
when... when Judyth...

Where is the Voice now? The smoke parted instantly around a green-robed woman.
Instinctively Judyth tugged at the reins.

But the woman was farther away than she had imagined, standing over a fallen man in a
circle of foliage. Around her, the bright grass spread and waved, and a dozen violet
flowers, various and tall, blossomed strangely on the scorched plain.

The woman motioned gracefully, waving them on. Judyth felt that she knew the woman in
green, that she should know her, but the smoke was rising again, and the face was fading,
fading into the purple mist until all that remained was a pale arm gesturing, motioning,
waving....

“Go on,” the woman called. “Follow.”

“How?” Judyth asked. “Where?”

“You knew before. You'll know again.”

The pale hand swirled a shape from the smoke: a passage, whirling and doubling on itself
like a folding tunnel, dwindling and fading slowly.

Instinctively again, Judyth guided the mare through the passage, through a flurry of shape
and image, out into starlight and air, Aglaca clinging desperately to her waist and
Verminaard sputtering on his stallion as it burst through the smoke behind her.

Still coughing, Verminaard rode on ahead, reoriented now, assured by faint stars and
familiar terrain.

With a deep breath, Judyth guided the mare onto the open plains. Aglaca shifted in the
saddle, and Judyth felt suddenly safer.

But she marveled as white Solinari peeked through the scattering smoke, marveled at what
she had seen in the quiet, purple mists of the strange enchantress.

A flower, she had seen. Or the shape of a flower. And within it, the shape of a mask.

Again in human form and wearied from flight and the Change, he knelt amid cedar and taxus,
his black robes wrapped closely about his shoulders. In cold, unblinking curiosity, he
gazed out at the riders bursting through the edge of the flame, the standard of Nidusblack
storm-crow on a red fieldtattered and burning in the diminishing light.

There were five of them left. Daeghrefn and four others. No sign of Robert. And the ogres
were closing from west and east and north.

Covered in mud and moss and dung from a long, oblivious sleep, a harsh battle cry now on
their lips, yet another band of the monsters swarmed out of the foothills below him. They
crashed down the hillside, skidding through rocks, uprooting small trees in their descent.
They stopped only to gather weaponshuge felled branches, stones for slinging and hurling.
A dozen of them lumbered onto the plain to join their advancing brothers.

Cerestes chuckled, brushing the ash from his hair. The creatures were considerably far
from him now, but moving resolutely onto the plains, and the dark was coming. The dark,
where human eyes would fail and falter, where the fire would cast long, deceptive shadows,
in which an ogre could hide or the road itself could vanish.

Night was the ally of monsters.

“And night is lovely, and my friend as well,” he murmured ecstatically as the red moon and
the silver tilted over the smoke-blurred landscape, and black Nuitari rose between them.
Cerestes stood in the copse of evergreens and breathed a low prayer to the black moon and
Hid-dukel, to Zeboim and Chemosh and Sargonnasto all the dark gods, even to the Lady
herself.

He had seen Takhisis's tower in far Neraka, the black stone and scaffolding heaped at the
foot of its surrounding walls when the enchantments broke and the ogres fled. It was a
setback, a slowing of her plans, but only a brief one. The tower was almost completegrown
out of rock, out of earth, out of nothing. The walls were an afterthought, scarcely
necessary when strong magic ruled in Neraka.

Cerestes had seen enough to know. The devices of the Dark Queen were well under way, but
they could still be disrupted with a clever mind and a subtle tongue. His own safety lay
in continuing to

serve her for now, to seem strong and resolute as her captain in the waking world. The
time would come, and the secret of the runes would

come to himbut not now, not yet. Open rebellion seemed thin and futile, like the hopes of
these horsemen on the darkening plain.

He laughed again at that prospect. It looked as though Daeghrefn had found disaster within
sight of his own fortress. But there was always the garrisona hundred stout men in Nidus's
walls, who, on seeing the danger to their lord and master, would ...

What would they do? What indeed?

The world was filled with unfaithful servants, he mused ironically. And sometimes it
seemed that they were the safe ones, huddling and skulking behind the walls while their
masters stood in the open and braved the approaching peril.

Braved the fires and the ogres.

But if the fire raged further and the ogres ran riot, Daeghrefn would not fall alone.
Somewhere behind the flames wandered the mace-wielder, and the druidess's girl was with
him, and the other lad.

Softly, insistently, the Voice spoke to him now, low and melodious and achingly feminine.
Those three cannot perish on the plains, it said. They must not fall into the clutches of
the ogres.

“I know,” he replied, whispering a quick spell of veiling. Then he stood in the midst of
the evergreen grove, his face shadowed by the crisp-smelling darkness, his deepest
thoughts concealed in a layer of spellcraft. “What would you have me do, Lady?” he asked
aloud to the wind and the night.

It is time, the Voice proclaimed as the branches rustled with a warm breeze, upon it the
smell of lilac. But beneath that sweet and lulling smell lay the sharp, disturbing odor of
fire and carrion, so that Cerestes reeled for a moment, wondering if the smoke had risen
from the plains or if he had imagined the gruesome smell on the air.

Or if, on the wings of the night, the breath of the god- dess had passed over him. It is
time, she repeated, and he knew what she meant. Time to show yourself.

“But they will fear me as well,” he protested. “The mace-wielder. His companions.” The
mace-wielder understands me, Takhisis explained. And I am the Queen of Dragons.

Mystified, Cerestes nodded. And though he was weary of changing and longed for a form that
was ever the same, he answered her call. He focused his will past pain and fear, past the
barriers that the mind sets for the body's limits and boundaries, and his thoughts rocked
in a white-hot ecstasy. His bones stretched and thickened. Scales erupted on his
blistering arms, and he groaned with the fresh pain of metamorphosis, with the remembered
pain of a thousand years of waiting for this moment.

All who wandered the plains would look upon the dragon, and the will of the Dark Queen
would be done.

Daeghrefn shielded his eyes against the heat and the rush of smoke. One of the menMozer,
he believedtugged at his cape, shouted something loud and urgent and indecipherable, but
it was lost in the roar of the flames, the whinny of horses, the fierce war cries of the
ogres.

A half-mile's ride north toward Nidus had brought them up against yet another wall of
fire. Yet another band of ogres had arranged themselves in the flatlands south of the
castle, so that Daeghrefn and his men were caught between two converging parties of the
enemy.

“Lord Daeghrefn!” Mozer shouted insistently, tugging again.

With the back of his hand, the Lord of Nidus slapped away the sniveling wretch, then
guided his horse to yet

another rise in the midst of the plainsa small, bare moraine glittering with black
obsidian.

The men followed him numbly onto the rise. Graaf, Mozer, Tangaard, and Gundlingthey were
the survivors, all who remained of the proud dozen who had set off for Neraka.

“What now, sir?” Graaf shouted above the din. He was the sensible one. The veteran.

“The north is thick with ogres,” Graaf continued. “There's a score of 'em between us and
the castle, and a brace of 'em alone would be a handful for five tired men.”

“I am aware of the tactics, Sergeant,” Daeghrefn answered hotly, his mind on the fire
coursing relentlessly over the plains behind them. They had passed through it twice, and
the second time Aschraf had fallen from the saddle. As the flames engulfed him, the
soldier had tried to rise. But he stumbled, and the blood burst from his face, and he
stretched his dying hand pitifully toward his commander, a flame on the tip of each finger.

Daeghrefn shook his head and banished the thought.

Gundling spoke now, a rough voice to his left, his Est-wilde accent still thick after a
dozen years at Nidus. Something about “more” and “last hopes.”

Daeghrefn looked to Gundling. For a brief, nightmarish moment, he saw Aschraf's face,
mottled and fire-sheared. Then he blinked, and Gundling stared at him, his beard singed
and blackened.

Gundling was pointing to Castle Nidus, where twenty more of the monsters were circling and
menacing, hurling rocks wildly at the old black battlements.

Daeghrefn looked toward the eastern foothills. Perhaps there was still a way to get to the
highlands, circle the castle, and approach from the northern side. There was a rise he
remembered ... a copse of evergreen ...

As he looked toward the jagged silhouettes of the trees framed against the white of
Solinari, Daeghrefn saw the

dragon's dark wings rise above the black aeterna, and the hillside shook, and the tall
pines snapped like kindling.

“Lord Daeghrefn, what do we do?” Gundling shouted, his eyes on his commander. “Lord
Daeghrefn? Lord Daeghrefn!”

When Daeghrefn froze in the saddle on the fiery plain, it was not from fear of ogre or
flame, but from a darker cause. He would never remember the dragon itselfthe dark web of
wings passing over the moonbut he would remember the fear always.

And he would think, as a man who believes in neither monsters nor gods, that the fear was
again of his own making.

Verminaard galloped over the blackened plain, moonlight glimmering on his uplifted mace.

At a distance, he saw the ogres, milling around a small group of soldiers atop South
Moraine. It was defensible ground, and the men had bows, but the ogres were closing on
them slowly, batting at the arrows. The men were few and the weapons paltry against such
monsters. The soldiers wouldn't hold out much longer.

“Verminaard!” Aglaca shouted. “It's your father's squadron!”

Verminaard looked more closeJy at the stone-tattered standard nodding above the horse
soldiers, a black raven on a red field.

The black mace whistled and droned in his scorched hand, and he was suddenly filled with
surety and power. Here was an enemy he could fight!

With a shout, he turned Orlog toward the milling ogres and lifted the mace above his head.
Exuberant and wild, he swung the weapon in a wide arc. Black fire flashed

before the mace head, and its wake painted a wide stream of darkness, a blackness against
which the depths of a starless night sky seemed afire.

Two hulking ogres, bound for the battle at the moraine, turned at the sound of Orlog's
hoofbeats. Verminaard galloped toward them, mace uplifted, and before the first of them
could raise its club, he brought the weapon flashing down upon the monster's shoulder.

“Midnight!” he cried, as the Voice in the cave had instructed.

The air rained blood and black fire. The ogre shrieked, its skin curling and blackening,
and it fell to its scabious knees in the high grass. Its eyes, suddenly and strangely
blinded, rolled white and terrified toward the slate-gray sky, where the stars of Morgion
shone coldly above the fiery bloodbath.

The second ogre leapt away with a shout, crossing swiftly before Judyth's charging mare
and stumbling and sliding through the rock-littered grass on its way back to the smoke and
safety. Verminaard veered to follow it, spurring Orlog swiftly across the field in
pursuit. The ogre reeled and tried to bring up its weapon, but the mace descended again
with a crash, and the monster bellowed as the darkness encircled it.

Verminaard shouted again, held the dripping mace aloft, then steered the black stallion
toward the rise, toward the ogres, and toward his father. Caught up in the blind rush, the
roaring swirl of the mace, and the chaos of fire and noise, Judyth whistled shrilly, and
the mare followed Orlog, picking her way over the few remaining spots of unburned ground.

Now the ogres loomed before them, hulking, ash-covered shapes lurching from the smoke,
their weapons raised as they charged toward the rattled party. Judyth had heard the
stories the knights told back in Solamnia how the monsters strayed out of the mountains,
ravaging

livestock, caravans, occasional drowsy villages. One of them, it was said, was a fighting
match for five men, ten of them for a whole company of knights.

But here on the plain there were twenty . . . thirty . .. forty against a mere eight men.

She looked toward the castle, where yet another score advanced, beating their breasts and
roaring, pummeling the ground with stone, axe, and club.

There were far and away too many. It was a massacre in the making.

Judyth brought the mare to a struggling halt twenty yards from the gathering monsters as
two ogres, rushing out from the smoke, closed ground rapidly, their stony teeth chattering
in fury. Aglaca leapt from the saddle as the girl grabbed vainly for his arm. He twisted
through the air like a cyclone, shouting and kicking out at the nearest ogre, who toppled
forward, choking from a crushing blow to its windpipe. Aglaca hurdled onto the shoulders
of the other ogre, a big fellow with a club the size of a fence rail, who swatted at him
vainly, like a bear fending off a darting wasp. And then Aglaca slammed an elbow to the
side of the monster's baffled face and sprang back for the saddle while the ogre staggered
and dropped to its knees, its head and shoulder in a new and grotesque arrangement.

“Judyth! Ride toward those three!” Aglaca shouted, pointing toward a trio of ogres in the
gathering smoke.

Judyth did not stop to question. With a shrill whistle and a slap of the reins against the
mare's withers, she goaded the willing little beast to a gallop.

The ogres were caught unaware. The smallest raised its club and bellowed, but Aglaca was
plunging from the saddle before the weapon descended, his sinewy arms wrapped about the
creature's wrist, his weight pulling the thing over backward. The ogre reeled, teetered,
then suddenly, surprisingly, flew through the air, as the young

Solamnic tossed it over his shoulder with a levering move he had learned from L'Indasha
Yman. Crashing into its two oncoming companions, who fell dazed to the hard,
fire-blackened earth, the monster roared, grunted, and lay still.

“Take the horse, Judyth!” Aglaca shouted. “Ride for the castle! They're bound for
Daeghrefn. Perhaps we can hold them off until”

“It'll be too late!” she protested. ' Aglaca nodded. “All the more reason to stand with
the soldiers,” he declared calmly. She stared down at him, reached for him, tried to speak.

Then overhead, a dark shape eclipsed the white moon, and the plains themselves shadowed
for a breath. Judyth paled.

“Don't look up!” she shouted at Aglaca, shielding his eyes with her hand. In front of
them, Verminaard, the ogres, and the horsemen from Nidus stared into the night sky, where
the dragon swooped and vanished in smoke and cloud. A long moment passed.

“Wh-what was that?” Aglaca asked, still holding her gaze. “I'm not sure,” Judyth replied,
“but I know we shouldn't look on it directly.” “But look now,” Aglaca said. “What, in the
name of Pal-adine...”