Before The Mask (5 page)

Verminaard, at the huntsman's right, fumed and crouched in the saddle as though he rode
into a powerful, icy head wind. He had been betrayed by this soft western lad who rode to
Osman's left faithless Aglaca, who had refused the comradeship of the casting, then
demanded the glory of the hunt.

His hunthis place of honor, his chance to be noble and courageous, to distinguish himself
before Daeghrefn. Aglaca and these nursemaids! They didn't belong here beside him. For a
moment, he wished that Aglaca alone accompanied him. The plateaus of Taman Busuk were
treacherous country, filled with crevasses and cul-de-sacs, where a horse could stumble, a
young man could fall....

Verminaard pulled himself from the bloody revery. In the passing months, the murderous
thoughts had come more often, more wildly. There were a thousand mishaps waiting for a
Solamnic, a thousand deceptions and enemies. Verminaard dreamed of those awful moments,

savored them until the dream dissolved before the cold truth of the gebo-naudany
misfortune that befell Aglaca could be visited on Abelaard in Solamnia.

And he would not let misfortune befall his brother.

In a heedless gloom, Verminaard kept his big black stallion in steady stride with Osman's
roan. The landscape passed by him in a featureless, angry fog.

Aglaca, on the other side, prayed long and silently to Paladine, to Mishakal, and to
Kiri-Jolith of the hunt, as his father Laca had taught him before he was old enough to
hold a spear. Let the hunting be good, he beseeched the gods, and the kill clean and
noble. And let each huntsman return to his

hearth and his family, at the close of the day.

Smiling ruefully at the Solamnic, Verminaard eyed the massive company. They'll just be in
my way, he thought, visions of the centicore entering his mind. The beast was slow-witted,
ill-tempered, and nearsighted, but if it turned, grunting and lowering its tusks and
gathering speed for a headlong and witless charge, the hunt changed radically. Then his
companions would be a hindrance, his armor inadequate, his horse too slow, and all that
remained between him and the gigantic, thick-skinned boar and its three-foot tusks was his
couched lance, strong arm, and nerve.

It was an encounter Verminaard awaited eagerly. He spurred his horse to ride ahead of
Aglaca, ahead of Osman. At twenty, Verminaard was burly and strong, and physical courage
came easily for him. And, apparently recognizing it, his father had put him in a place of
honor in the vanguard of the hunt, where he would most likely see the first action.

An icy rain pummeled the column of horsemen as they rode north across the browned,
awakening plains toward Taman Busuk. The tips of their long, barbed spears dipped and rose
with the swell and fall of the trail. When they reached the high plains, the horsemen
fanned out

and rode four or five abreast, separating into squadrons carefully assigned by Lord
Daeghrefn.

Riding in the foremost and smallest squadron, Verminaard leaned back on the iron arson of
his saddle and inhaled the moist, chilly air. It was lowland breathing herethicker, more
nourishing than the air at the timber-line where Castle Nidus kept its formidable watch.
Aglaca, riding beside him, seemed suddenly more animate, suddenly more at home in the
saddle and the journey.

They rested the horses in a narrow notch between two cliff facesa glittering passage where
the noonday sun flickered on black obsidian, porous volcanic rubble, and a little mountain
pool still crusted with the winter's ice. Dismounting, Verminaard drank deeply of the drus
flask at his belt- the visionary's potion that Cerestes said was the door to prophecy for
servants of the Dragon Queen.

Then he drew forth again the bag of runes, rankling at the mage's insistence that auguring
one's own future was impossible. He was sure self-augury could be done, some way, somehow.
Especially now, vitalized by the drus potion: The carvings on the stones seemed to shimmer
like veins of light.

“Osman,” he called, and the huntsman, whetting his knife by a fallen log, looked up with a
frown. “Not the runes, if you please, young master. I don't take to auguries, nor to that
mage of yours.”

“They have nothing to do with him,” Verminaard lied. The mage had given him the stones
when he saw that the lad was curious. “They're fostered under the red moon under Lunitari.
All oracles are, because they're all neutral.”

That much was true. Prophecy was a neutral thing. What you made of it was good or evil.
And when you read the stones for someone else ... well, sometimes you discovered the
things that really concern you. The things

that pertain directly to you.

Reluctantly Osman approached the young man. He mistrusted Verminaard's superstition, his
preoccupation with dark ritual and ceremony. Being a bluff, commonsen-sical man, Osman had
little love for the confusing auguries Verminaard constantly and eagerly placed in front
of him.

Better the father, who believed in nothing, than this hex of a lad before him.

“Ask about the hunt, Osman,” Verminaard urged. “Ask how your company will fare.”

Osman cleared his throat, looking at Aglaca for rescue. The other lad knelt by his horse,
smiled, and shook his head as he tightened the flank cinch of the saddle. He was not about
to enter the fuss over symbol and omen.

“I expect we'll find out shortly enough, Master Verminaard,” the huntsman replied, turning
coolly back to the log.

Angrily Verminaard cast the runes himself. The flat, irregular stones scattered from his
hands. It was an old Nerakan reading he triedthree stones in a sequence, determining the
present, the immediate future, and the outcome of the event. The cryptic silver lines
seemed to scatter, to flicker on the ground like edged fire.

Aglaca, meanwhile, rose and led one of the horses to the little pool. Leaning to break the
ice so that the animal might drink, the youth was astonished to see another face, dark and
serene, staring back at him from the glazed surface of the water.

“Great Paladine!” he breathed in astonishment.

It was the dark-eyed woman, regarding him serenely. Leaves hung in her auburn hair, and a
curious amber light played over her forehead, as though she stared into the setting sun.

Her eyes widened. She smiled in brief recognition, then vanished into the smoky whirl of
the ice. Now Aglaca saw an image of himself, sword drawn amid an alcove of

granite and rubble. Verminaard stood behind him in the vision, his weapon sheathed and
idle. Aglaca stepped back and gasped, trying to make sense of the revelation.

It was then that the horses started and shied, their nostrils flaring at the whiff of
something sharp and musty on the rising wind. Osman leapt to the saddle, followed
instantly by Aglaca and the rest of the troopers. Standing in the stirrups, the huntsman
scanned the featureless fields. Finally, like an old Plainsman visionary, Osman pointed to
where the high grass thrashed and quivered, like the surface of a lake when something
large and unfathomable rises from its depths and parts the shallow waters.

“There,” Osman announced calmly, gesturing toward the moving furrow on the horizon. “A
small one, but worthy of the hunt.”

Verminaard scooped up the runes and pulled himself into the saddle. His companions already
raced ahead of him, their horses spurred to a brisk trot toward the northern horizon,
where his centicore rumbled and his glory would come thrashing through the high grass.

Their horses were good ones, swift and tireless. By mid-morning, the centicore was clearly
in sight, lumbering ahead of them, its stout legs churning with a slow and ceaseless power.

It was an ugly thing, Verminaard agreed, as he had been told it would be. Its thick skin
was armored with dried mud and algae, its arm-length tail bulbous and spiked like a mace.
As tall as a man at its shoulders, the centicore was a young one, no doubt, since its
horns were smooth and unscarred. An

old folktale said that to meet

its stare was death, that the very rocks of the Khalkist foothills were the remains of
hapless hunters who had been turned to stone by its gaze.

Of course, Daeghrefn maintained that the legends were nonsense. He had killed two
centicores himself, and both times, he claimed, he had looked the thing full in the face
as he took its life. There was no magic in the creature, Daeghrefn said, no power except
the fear prompted by the wild imaginings of the mountain peoples.

Osman was one of those mountain folk, however, and as the horsemen closed on the
centicore, he ordered the young men to each side of the plodding creature. With a grunt,
the monster lurched into a small box canyon between two cliff faces. After all, Daeghrefn
had appointed the huntsman as a guardian of sorts, and if the centicore turned to charge,
the lads would be at its flanks, at a safe distance from its swiveling horns and its
legendary gaze, and the shortsighted focus of its anger would fall on Osman and the
troopers alone.

Circling to the right of the beast, his horse brushing against the rock face, Verminaard
leveled his lance. The horse quivered nervously beneath him, the foul smell of the beast
thick in the moist, windless air. Verminaard stood up in the stirrups, locked his legs at
the knees, and leaned forward in the saddle.

To his left, skidding over the black volcanic rubble, the centicore reached the rocky
cul-de-sac. Slowly and stupidly the beast turned, facing Verminaard. In that time two
seconds, perhaps three their eyes locked in the shadow of the cliff walls, and the boy saw
the dull, shallow stare of the beast, its eyes as drab as wet slate.

It barely knows I am here, he thought exultantly. And now as it turns, I shall charge it
and ... Then something flickered deep in the eyes of the monster. Verminaard weaved above
the saddle. For a moment,

he believed he had imagined that strange, cold light that seemed to emerge from the heart
of the beast, chilling yet beckoning him with some deeply malignant pressure. And yet it
was not imagined, was not his own superstitious promptings, for how could his own mind
freeze him, confuse him, and fascinate him so?

Verminaard blinked and fumbled his lance. The language of that light was something he
almost knew, as though the thoughts of the beast had reached out across half the canyon
and across a thousand years, embracing his thoughts and beginning a long and cold
instruction. And yet he was not sure what it meant. The look had been cloudy, elusive, as
indecipherable finally as the runes he tried vainly to read.

I shall charge it, he thought. I shall drive it into precious Aglaca.

His thoughts wrenched back to the moment, and he spurred his stallion. The beast turned
and fled him, rumbling through the rough, gravelly stretch toward the other wall of the
canyon where Aglaca waited, his lance leveled, his horse calm and steady.

Now! Verminaard thought, goading his horse after the barreling centicore. Now, while the
thing is intent on Aglaca!

It would be a tough kill for an untried lad. The centicore lumbered toward Aglaca, its
mouth agape, its horns swiveling like scythes. Aglaca blinked nervously and steadied his
trembling lance, drawing again on his extraordinary courage as the monster closed the
distance by half, the plodding strides gaining fluidity until the beast moved surprisingly
fast over the gravelly edges of the cul-de-sac.

Then, unexpectedly, Osman rode between the lad and the charging animal. The older man had
seen disaster unfolding from his post at the mouth of the cul-de-sac, and he realized at
once that the post he had taken, chosen

because it was the most likely place the beast would charge, was barely close enough to
rescue the imperiled Solamnic youth. He spurred his horse over the gravel, shouting and
whistling to distract the monster, and he reached Aglaca not a moment too soon, turning to
face the centicore and raising his lance to receive its charge. The soft flesh at its
breast lay exposed by the centicore's reckless assault, and all the veteran huntsman had
to do was hold the lance as the creature drove itself upon the tapered shaft, then return
with his seventh kill. His deeds would be sung in Castle Nidus, in the villages among the
foothills, and by huntsmen as far away as Sanction and Zhakar.

So the hunt would have ended, had not Verminaard's pursuit distracted the beast.

Wheeling awkwardly on its forelegs, scattering gravel and earth as it turned, the
centicore stumbled toward the charging youth. Alarmed, seeing the danger to his master's
son, Osman spurred his horse forward, riding beside the centicore, seeking a soft spot, a
vulnerable place in the filthy array of scales along the monster's back.

Suddenly the beast lashed out with its thick, macelike tail. The barb whistled through the
air and crashed into the side of Osman's helmet with a ring that Robert's pursuing column
heard a hundred yards from the mouth of the canyon.

Osman toppled from the saddle and fell heavily to the ground. For a moment, he tried to
rise, his arms extended weakly above his lolling head, but then he shivered and lay still
just as Verminaard's lance drove deeply, with a crackling of gristle and bone, into the
breast of the centicore.

The impact of lance against the monster thrusted the young man back into the bracings of
his saddle, and the breath fled from him as the air spangled with red light. He remembered
only falling and being caught by the cords.

Then he remembered nothing at all.

Aglaca was kneeling beside him when Verminaard came to his senses. The huge hulk of the
centicore lay not ten yards away, the broken lance embedded deep in its vitals. The
shadows of horsemen surrounded him, and as he tried to stand, the seneschal Robert grabbed
him under the arms, lifting him and bracing him.

“What happened here?” Daeghrefn's sharp voice asked, like a distant humming in his ears.