Before The Mask (16 page)

A thing with pale eyes and pale hair, blocking out the sunlight. And again he was afraid.
Of the fires and the ogres, of the men in his garrison. Of Verminaard. And of something
else he could not remember.

Verminaard burst into the moonlight of the bailey, a bitter oath on his lips. He fought
his way through the ipomoea, the perennial morning glory whose vines plagued the castle
and garrison in a spreading, entangling joke. Wrestling himself free of the tenacious
plant, the young man looked up to curse the moons and the constellations.

He let the words die in his throat when he saw Cerestes ' on the battlements, gazing south
over the plains.

In that moment and from that vantage, there in the tangling light of Solinari and
Lunitari, the twining moons, silver and red, it seemed to Verminaard that the mage's

skin was almost insubstantial. It shimmered and glowed with a strange translucence,
shifting in a luminous cloud until Cerestes seemed a cloud himself, then a shadow, then a
dwindling black light on the crenels, like the light Verminaard had seen in the cave where
he found the mace.

Then suddenly Cerestes emerged, and thin ebony lightning danced over his sleeves, on his
hands, on his fingers...

And the shadow he cast on the tower walls was reptilian, enormous, disproportionate even
for moon-crazed battlements.

Verminaard gasped, recalling the shadow on the moon.

And then Cerestes looked like himself once more, the black robe shimmering faintly, almost
shabby now in the clouded moonlight.

Only strange light, Verminaard thought. Or weariness from my battle yesterday. Or a simple
magic on a cloud-struck nighta spell for sleep, perhaps, or to augur the fitful stars. The
young man climbed the ladder to stand by his tutor.

“Out at the edge of sight,” Cerestes said, forgoing greeting as though he had known
Verminaard was there all along, “there's still a fire. See? If you look long enough toward
the South Moraine ...”

Verminaard stared across the darkening plain. He could see no fire from where he stood,
but then Cerestes' eyesight had always been better than his.

Expressionlessly the mage turned to his pupil.

“The real courage came when you trusted Night-bringer,” he explained quietly.

Verminaard frowned. “Nightbringer?”

Cerestes nodded. “The'mace. 'Nightbringer' is the name it went by in Godshome. Powerful it
is, but how would you know? How would you believe in it without courage?”

The lad smiled wider.

“I know what you mean, Cerestes,” he said. "When Father left the Order .. . stopped
believing in it... they say he changed. I don't remember the time, but Abelaard said that
a sort of daring left him when Daeghrefn left the old gods, and that in its place was
something . .. small. Something not at all, perhaps.

“But 'Nightbringer,' you say? The name of the mace is 'Nightbringer' ? ”

Cerestes nodded. “We had heard of it for years, knew it would be found by a chosen one, by
a special one ...”

Verminaard's ears felt hot. He looked to the sky, where the last vestiges of smoke had
faded and dispersed, and the clouds parted over the red moon Lunitari. There was something
Aglaca had told him long ago, something about the Voice, about why he refused to believe
it.

Verminaard could not remember. “And that's me, I suppose?” he asked. “The chosen one?”

“They spoke of you in Godshome,” Cerestes replied, and something had deepened in his
voice, choiring and resonating, until Verminaard realized there were two voices speaking:
the old familiar voice he had heard in the classroom, at table, and on the battlements
until this night, this moment, and another voice below thata Voice even more familiar,
more intimate, low and musical and

feminineand together the voices praised him, reassured him.

“You are the mace-wielder, the chosen one. Unto you will fall this castle, this country,
and the mountains from the foothills of Estwilde to the peaks of the Doom Range and the
breathless heights of Berkanth.”

Cerestes shimmered as he spoke, and his skin seemed to ripple and change. And then he was
strangely diminished in the cloud and spell light.

“Your rule,” he said, his voice as dry and thin as the

scorched grass at the foot of the castle wall, “begins tonight. Your father is no father,
but weak and distracted and lost.”

And Cerestes told him the story of that night years ago. Of Laca's transgressions with
Daeghrefn's wife . . . and that Verminaard's true father was Laca Dragonbane, Lord of East
Borders.

“I knew it all along,” Verminaard replied, masking his astonishment, averting his eyes.
“Notnot that my father was Laca. I didn't know that. But that he was not, could not be
Daeghrefn.”

It was Cerestes' turn to smile.

“Then there's prophecy in you as well, Lord Verminaard. Father or no father, Nidus is
yoursnot by blood, but by virtue and might. Soon there will be worlds elsewhere to
conquer. But now, in the wake of your victory, there are smaller and sweeter conquests as
well.”

Verminaard glanced at him curiously.

Cerestes returned the look as his smile broadened to a leer. “When you took up the mace,
you traded one girl for another. But the first one is still therethe first fruits of your
power, if you'd have her. Go to her, lad. If you are not too late with your caution and
false kindness, there is still a chance that she will be yours, and yours tonight. After
all, she saw Nightbringer in your victorious hand.”

It was something Verminaard had not considered. He had been too busy with rescues, with
caverns and ogres and fires. But now the girl seemed like the first and best prospect.
Verminaard's eyes grew bright, and he threw back his head and laughed harshly.

Cerestes had seen the look before on the face of young mennot courting swains bearing
sonnets and flowers, but the young raiders at the borders of the enemy, bearing arms into
unprotected country.

As the first of Daeghrefn's soldiers nodded with wine and the late hour, Aglaca pushed
away from the table.

He had eaten little, drunk less. The events of the last nights and days had been
unsettling. Now was a time for moonlight and fresh air. A walk in the bailey would clear
his senses and leave behind the smoke and noise.

Silently he crossed the dark courtyard. The silver harp of Branchala, a score of white
stars, shone in the cloud-crossed sky, and he passed by the dimly lit stable, where the
new groom struggled with the uneasy horses.

In the shadow of the southern wall, something turned slowly, a pale garment catching the
edge of the moonlight. Instinctively Aglaca reached for his dagger. Then Judyth stepped
from the shadows and stared calmly at him, her remarkable eyes charged with reflected
starlight. Gazing into them for a brief, breathless moment, Aglaca saw the blue in the
depths of lavender.

“What should we do about Verminaard?” she began. “II saw him storm up to the battlements.
He'll kill Daeghrefn, if not now, eventually. And then what shall we”

Aglaca stepped forward and gently placed a finger to her lips. He pulled her back into the
shadows, out of the sight of sentries and dangerous rivals.

“Nothing,” he whispered. “For we can do nothing. 'Tis a struggle between son and father.
It began long before I came. Who knows when and how it will end?”

“But you saw what Verminaard did.”

“That and worse,” Aglaca conceded. “But we can do nothing yet, except ward against a
growing evil.”

He handed Judyth the little dagger.

“I think of Verminaard getting the hero's portion,” Judyth muttered hotly, slipping the
weapon up her sleeve,

“then I think of you, going about acts of kindness instead of butchery. How you helped
those helpless men to horse, risking yourself at each moment. An ogre could have wakened,
could have risen up and”

“You did the same, Lady Judyth,” Aglaca said, brushing her hair from her eyes. “Entirely
the same, in the prospect of the same fire and ogres.” “But you were the one in the
tunnels.” “And you showed me how to master the warding.” They laughed, and Aglaca thought
it was good that there were shadows here, that Judyth could not see his face grow red.

“I suppose we both have earned the true hero's portion,” he murmured. Slowly he wrapped
his arms about her waist and drew her closer.

Her eyes closed in the dark, and her lips parted.

Descending from the battlements, Verminaard heard muffled laughter from the shadows below.

He stopped on the ladder, caution giving way to curiosity. After all, sounds such as these
promised no ambush, no escaping hostage or prisoner. Quietly, holding his breath, he
leaned forward on the ladder ...

And saw the couple kissing, embracing, the girl's dark hair caught in a thin shaft of
moonlight. Dark hair, dark skin...

He imagined the lavender eyes, the tattoo, and he knew who it was that stood with her in
the dark beneath the walls. For a moment, he reeled on the ladder, and the thoughts of
murder that rose through the heart of his anger were murky and monstrous, as deep as the
caverns that spawned them.

I shall not forget this, Aglaca, he thought. And he

perched there, huddled in blackness like a roosting raven until the couple walked across
the bailey back toward the lamplit keep.

Robert had expected the mending to take weeks, perhaps months, given his age and the
severity of the broken bone. But within two days, the bones had knitted, and in a week's
time he was walking warily, unsteadily, and with a hardwood cane, but walking nonetheless.

L'Indasha had carried and dragged him above the worst of the fire, to a small cave in the
foothills due east of the Neraka Forest. The cave itself was pleasant enough, bright and
neat and well settled. In its recesses, surrounded by a cage of drasil roots, a fresh
underground spring bubbled and spouted, and the druidess's storesbarrels of dried fruit
and waybread wrapped in moist, preservative vallen-

wood leaveshad escaped the burning when the ogres' fires razed the countryside. The stores
served L'Indasha and her guest as their sole source of food while Robert was immobilized
and the forest began to heal.

In that same week, as Robert grew stronger, L'Indasha had grown increasingly distressed.
Robert had watched as the woman's bright auburn hair became muted and brown, as though she
were enduring a kind of gloomy autumn of the heart. Her once-bright eyes grew dull and
lifeless, and her skin seemed to tighten, to become almost transparent, until one
afternoon, three days after the fire, the seneschal believed she would just dwindle away.
He feared that the next morning would find him disabled and alone on the hilltop, his only
companion and guardian fallen like a dried leaf.

That had been a week ago. There were signs of late that L'Indasha was now recovering, but
from what ailment, what mishap, Robert could only guess.

At first he had thought it was the strange and lingering discomforts of an unknown
intrusion, for when L'Indasha had brought him back to the cave, she discovered that
someone else had been there. While she tended to Robert's leg, the druidess had fretted
over the disarray that someone had wrought amid the kindling and stores, and oddly enough,
the seneschal thoughtseemed even more concerned about a wooden bucket that had been moved.
Finally, and as the last insult, she had discovered that some prized piece of jewelry, a
pendant with a purple stone, was missing.

It was a day or two before Robert gently inquired and found that her anger and sorrow had
more to do with the fire in the forest and foothills than with burglary or trespass.

“It makes sense now,” he said to her. “After all, don't you druids worship trees?” “Of
course not,” she said. "We love them and tend

them, but they are only our responsibility, not our gods. They and all the other life of
the land. My gardens. The flowers. You see, when a tree dies, it takes a whileseveral
days, even when the damage is severe and sudden. The agony is constant until the roots go.
And what fell to the fire a week ago was the show of my life's work. How would you feel?"

Robert thought of South Moraine and of the departing horsemen. “I see,” he murmured. And
he did.

On the eighth day, she examined his leg, her strong, gentle fingers coursing from ankle to
knee, and her own hollow countenance showed a little color and life once more as she
pronounced him mended.

“Mended, that is. Not healed,” she insisted. “You'll do the healing yourselfwith walk and
exercise and a change in heart from fear to certainty.”

“Will you walk with me, Lady?” the seneschal asked with a grin. “I mean .. . seeing as
it's medicinal and all? Perhaps I could be of some use to you as well.”

So they began their walks as the seneschal's leg grew stronger and the spirit of the
druidess was restored in the soft rains and new undergrowth of the repairing land.

But little was left of the grove-covered foothills to the east. The fire had climbed
practically to the height of the mountains, and except for the steepest peaksBerkanth, for
example, and Minith Luc the foliage was blasted to the timberline, and the big trees would
take years to recover or return.

Perhaps he had never understood the druids before now, Robert thought, glancing often at
the woman who walked beside him, turning away as her intent brown eyes locked with his.
All the talk he had heard in Nidus of tree worship, of entombing enemies in hollow logs,
of stealing babies seemed like rumor and foolishness now. For what he saw in this woman
was none of the mystical,

green treachery against which a generation of mages had warned him. She was instead a
keeper of life, a seneschal of the land.

He thought again of Daeghrefn, of the riders vanishing into the smoke, of the words hurled
coldly at him from horseback: I'm sorry, Robert! I cannot help you where you are going.

“Are you alone?” he continued to ask, and asked again one day as they stood on a bare
obsidian rise overlooking the plains. There, scarce a fortnight before, he had been left
for dead by his commander. “Are you alone, L'Indasha Yman?”

Her hairbright auburn again, as though the last days had been but a fitful, nightmarish
dream was bound with dried holly. She looked up at him, her dark eyes hooded and elusive.
She thought of the promise the god had made her twenty years before. “Not for long,” she
murmured. “Or so says Paladine.”

Robert nodded. He leaned against his cane and climbed a step along the rising trail. “And
when does your... visitor arrive?” “I had been told,” the druidess replied, “to expect her
any day.” “Her?”

“Yes. I believe my visitor is a woman, sent to help me with a wearisome task,” L'Indasha
said mysteriously. Then, turning toward Robert, she regarded him with a level, disarming
directness.

“Do you remember the young woman who passed through the smoke that afternoon on the South
Moraine, when you lay on the field of battle? She is the one. At least, I think she is.
But I found her only to lose her, it seems.”

“I remember little of her, m'Lady,” the seneschal replied with an ironic smile. He bent
and rubbed his leg. "I must allow that my thoughts were elsewhere at the

timeon fire and ogres and what in the devouring name of Hiddukel was happening in that
purple smoke. But I am certain of the young men who rode with her. If they were homeward
bound, they're no doubt in Castle Nidus."

“I believe I am healed now,” Robert said the next morning. The druidess glanced up alertly
from a caldron.

“Healed, not merely mended,” the seneschal continued with a smile. “I expect I've imposed
on your hospitality too long.”

“Where will you go?” L'Indasha asked.

“I'm not sure. Not back to Nidus.” He rose carefully and walked without aid to the mouth
of the cavern. Below, at the edge of the forest, there was more green than blackness and
ruin, and to the south, the faint song of a larkenvale. L'Indasha's work had not been in
vain, he noted, and more than ever he longed to stay with her, to see through the greening
of a thousand things.

“You offered to be of service not long ago,” L'Indasha said, seeming to read his thoughts.
“And there's a journey I must makenot an easy one, but you say you're healed now.”

Robert leaned against the stone and smiled. “Nidus?”

L'Indasha shook her head from side to side. “From here, I can feel the power of Cerestes'
warding spell about the castle. If I were to go to Nidus, the Lady would know at once of
my presence. She would have me, and the girl's life would be forfeit.”

Robert nodded. “Nidus or Neraka or the ends of the earth, my offer of service stands.
Where might we be heading?”

“North . .. then up,” the druidess announced, standing and dusting off her green robes. In
the new light of the morning, she looked even younger, as though over the last week she
had shed twenty years. “To the slopes of Berkanth, that mountain sacred to Paladine. Then
a rocky climb to ice.”

L'Indasha picked up the wooden bucket. “I can take this along now that I've your arm to
aid with the carrying.”

Robert's face reddened, and he looked away.

“Wherever my helper is,” L'Indasha declared, “in Nidus or Neraka or at the edges of the
earth, it is on Berkanth I shall find that help. Take the provisions, if you would.
They're in the linen sack near the back of the cave. And the blankets beside them as well.
It will be cold traveling.”

Robert obeyed compliantly as the druidess brushed by him and up the narrow trail above the
cavern.

With a shrug, lifting the belongings to his shoulder, he followed, crossing the charred
garden as the druidess took to the rocky path between obsidian cliffs, on her way to
Berkanth, toward the highlands and the longer view.

To the north, in the hills above Nidus, Cerestes as well was upward bound.

Takhisis had summoned him as he lay drowsing in his study. She appeared as a dark presence
at the edge of his dream, her voice, low and melodious, twined with his breathing until
the mage thought she had called from his heart.

He awoke in a sweat, sprawled across the sunlit table amid papers and vials. Come to the
grotto, the Lady had commanded. I have need ofyou.

And so, in the hours before sunset, he had wakened and slipped into the foothills, to the
same small grotto that had marked their place of communion in an earlier time. There, in
the bare circular chamber, in a silence broken only by the distant dripping of water and
the rustle of the returning bats, the mage knelt on the stone floor, awaiting the Change
and the goddess.

Above all, stay calm, he told himself, casting forth the flurry of spells to mask his
thoughts from the prying goddess.

What have I thought ill of her? She does not know ... not yet. I did her bidding. I saved
Verminaard andiiis companions from the ogres.

How could she know?

My loyalties will give me time with this Judyth. The girl will trust herself to me, and
Takhisis will approve it all. Who better to discover what knowledge Judyth hidesa goddess
who veils herself in blackness and golden eyes and sinister voices in the night? Or a
kindly mage, a scholar, a tutor to the young of the castle?

Why, eventually, I shall be the only one Judyth can trust.

And I will use her trust for myself alone.

Cerestes smiled as his thoughts dipped and vanished behind a dozen intricate veils of
magic.

It began as it always had, with Takhisis's voice low and resonant in the dark reaches of
the cave and with the single glowing eye in the midst of the darkness.

Become yourself, Ember, she commanded again. Show yourself before your queen.

What followed was the old tugging of air, the first moldings of the spell soft and
electric against his legs and shoulders. He felt, as always, the pain, and he cried out as

always, but it would be over soon, he would be Ember again. And then he began to grow, to
push against the walls of the cavern, to fill the chamber with his scales and wings and
enormity, blocking the light from the passage to the cavern entrance....

Suddenly he realized something was wrong. He continued to grow, or the walls were closer,
or ...

He felt the crackle of tendon and bone as his spine twisted in the cold grip of the rock.
Frightened, smothering, the dragon struggled against tons of stone, against the layers and
pressures of the planet itself, which descended on him, tightening, grinding.

Now! the goddess proclaimed, all softness gone from her voice. The rumble of the earth
took on her words, and the words passed suddenly from the congested rock around him to a
place inside him, and she spoke from the depths of his thoughts and heart.

All this time, my Ember, you have fancied to mask your thoughts of rebellion. "No, he
thought. That's not it. That's not...

The rocks shoved in on him, and he gasped for breath.

Silence1, the goddess commanded. You who followed them to Neraka to spy on my tower. You
who have plotted from rune stone togemstone,from druidess to Solamnic hostage to whosoever
serves your purpose...

This is what it was like, the dragon thought hysterically, absently. This is how they felt
when she entered their minds, when she ...

Attend to me, Ember! Takhisis commanded, and the dragon's scales glazed and blistered.
Ember shrieked aloud, and the sound shook the mountain, but the rocks rested firmly upon
him.

Do you believe you are the only one of your kind?

Ember could not reply. His forelegs bunched against his heaving chest, the air in the
chamber dwindling ... dwindling. ...

Could you imagine, even for a moment, that I could not summon a dozen of your kind to
replace you?

He shrieked again, but the sound was lost in the rock and the spiraling echo of the
goddess's voice.

I could crush you now. A thousand years from this day, when my followers excavate these
hills, they will find your skeleton and speculate... and marvel....

And you will float in a windless abyss of your own, eaten daily by the jaws ofHiddukel and
burned endlessly by the terrible judgments ofSargonnas and Morgion....

No! the dragon thought. Please, no! What would you have me

Simply obey, the goddess urged, her voice sinking back into a muffled music. "77s all I've
ever askedsimple obedience. In exchange for which my boundless favor is yours.

Oh, yes. Oh, yes, immortal Lady, mistress of my thoughts and my heart and my every
immutable action. I shall obey until the last. Your devoted servant I will be now and in
times to come, and ... and ...

And in return receive my favor, which is more generous than you can imagine. Ember held
his breath. Had the rock around him suddenly begun to shift, to loosen?

For if you follow my commands, and if you accompany Lord Verminaard in the perilous path
from novice to Dragonlord ...

Yes? Yes? Your wish, Your Infinite Majesty .. . Silence. If you follow my commands, I
shall let you govern the man. Govern?

He must not know it. As Dragonlord, he will think he commands you. But let it not be said
that your cleverness went unnoticed because of your treachery. I am no fool, my Ember, and
I see that under the guise of servitude, of servility, you intended to rule me. So you
intended once. So you will no longer intend.