Before The Mask (7 page)

He saw his hands, as well, as they began the painful metamorphosis that the Lady
commanded, as the red webbing sprouted between his fingers and the fingers themselves grew
into long claws with a crackling of bone and tendon. Once he cried out, as always he did
when the Change first swept over him, but the cry had already passed beyond human, into a
terrible shriek, like the tearing of metal. The muscles of his legs bunched and doubled,
his ribs buckled and tugged as wings burst

forth from his back, and he was growing now, yes, Cerestes was growing, into what he had
always been, would always be. The red of his scales blackened in the green light of the
chamber, in the familiar blood and the burning that marked this metamorphosis. And the
laughter of Takhisis rang so loudly in his mind that he covered his receded ears,
imagining that the noise had burst out of his thoughts and rung the cavern walls.

As the noise subsided, Cerestes slowly curled in the middle of the chamber. He began to
enlarge, his dorsal bones scraping, pressing against the far wall of the cavern. Soon the
light from the entrance was blocked out entirely by his huge, bulking body.

Sternly, as the pain settled in his wings, in his enormous haunches, in-the long tail that
had burst from the base of

his spine, the voice of the Lady echoed all around him. On the chamber ceiling, reflecting
among legions of startled bats, amid the shimmering droop of stalactites, a single golden
eye stared mercilessly down upon the coiled red dragon that was Cerestes.

You are no longer Cerestes, the Lady soothed, but you are once again Ember, and entirely
my creature....

“Tis a painful Change, Majesty,” Ember protested, his voice dry and grating, speaking now
in a draconic language of hisses and hard consonants. His voice was like the rattle of the
bats' wings.

'Painful-' The voice of the Dragonqueen was icy, mocking. How painful do you think it was
for Speratus, the Red Robe, when I arranged your . .. promotion to Daeghrefn's wizard? If
you're squeamish when it comes to the pain, Ember, and the Change itself is painful, then
perhaps you should never change again.

Ember squirmed uneasily. The form of Cerestes was his veil, his protective guise in a
world in which the dragons could not yet force their presence. For eight years, he had
walked in human form.

Oh, yes, Takhisis continued, smelling his thoughts as if they were a faint whiff of blood.
Imagine being always yourself, coiled here like a giant serpent, like the dale worm of
centuries past, unable to escape. Prey to your own hungers, perhaps, or to the lances of
name-eager knights.

“Do with me what you will, m'Lady,” the dragon rumbled, shutting his thoughts to her with
a brief, powerful spell of masking. He stirred on the chamber floor, his confined
movements dislodging rocks and old guano, startling the bats, who launched into the
darkness with piping cries, their leathery wings brushing against Ember in their whirling
flight.

Very well. Keep your thoughts from me. Let it not be said that the Dark Queen ...
intrudes, Takhisis conceded ironically. I shall pry no further, though if I willed it so,
that spell of yours

would be thin as as ... as ...

“Gossamer?” Ember asked, with a dark, toothsome smile. It was good that she stopped at the
masking spell. He could feel no encroachments, no attempts by her sharp, mysterious sight
to pierce the veils of his own magic.

Perhaps she could not even do it. Not while she hovered in the abyss, awaiting a chance at
entry to this plane.

Yes. Until they found the green gemstone, the goddess waited behind the portal, a poor
version of what she was yet to be.

You have asked again why I sent you here. Well, I have fires for you to start, she said.
And all the fires begin with those two.

“Verminaard and Aglaca?” Ember asked, his cloaked thoughts racing. “What would you have me
do?”

Continue in your role as mage. Reveal to none that you are my clericnot yet, at least.
Continue to tutor Aglaca and Verminaard; nurture them. But become more than their teacher.
Be now their confidant, the eyes that shape their world.

One will be your companion in the years to come, when we are stronger and more numerous in
this hostile country.

One will be your companion.

Ember opened a golden eye, regarding the light at the ceiling of the chamber with
curiosity and dread.

“Which one, Your Highness?” he asked, his rough voice laced with suspicion. They will
choose. Aglaca and Verminaard. In this world, there is room for only one of them.

And they might have already chosen. The larger is the more pliable, the smaller more
spirited. Verminaard will be the easier won, Aglaca the prouder trophy. But they will
choose. I shall provide the occasion.

“Why these two?” Ember asked, and in the long silence that followed, he heard the air buzz
and crackle, like the sound in the sky at the beginning of lightning. He feared he had
angered her, insulted her, and yet, after a long pause, she chose to tell him.

Laca. I've a long grudge against Laca. How better to pay him back, and the cursed Order...

“And if the other one is chosen,” Ember added slyly, “what greater blow to the Order than
to have your servant fathered by the great rebel Daeghrefn!”

Takhisis was silent. In the depths of the cavern, Ember heard his last words echoing, the
echo circling and catching itself until echo flowed over echo and the dark recesses of the
mountain bristled with tangling voices and words: other one... chosen .. .father...

I shall provide the occasion, Takhisis said, breaking the settling silence. First the
girl. Then the other . . . circumstances.

“What girl?” Ember asked eagerly, his long, branched tongue flickering excitedly, hotly
into the darkness. “You told me of no girl, m'Lady.”

Why, the one that Paladine has chosen. The one he sends to the druidessregarding the
runes. Or so I believe.

“The runes?” Ember asked, closing his eyes, struggling for a note of idleness, of
indifference. "I

thought they were only a game. Indeed, I've kept Verminaard busy with them when his
questions annoyed me."

And indeed they are but a game, Takhisis answered. Tor now, that is. Until the blank rune
is sounded.

Ember opened the other double-lidded eye. In the slanted light of the chamber, his gaze
was golden and scheming.

“The blank rune?” he asked. “So the old legend is true?” Paladine has hidden it too long.
Since the time of... Huma.

Ember masked a smile. The Lady still stumbled on the name of the Solamnic hero whose lance
had driven her back into the Abyss.

He has hidden it so long, Takhisis continued, that they teach the mages that the blank
stone is a substitute, a replacement in case another stone is lost or damaged.

“Indeed,” Cerestes conceded. “So I have told Ver-minaard, who rummages in rune lore
constantly.”

So I have seen, Takhisis said. Perhaps the time will come when all the runes will lie
before him, the blank rune adorned with its symbols....

“What then?” The dragon was eager, hungry for the forbidden knowledge. “What then, Lady?”

Then we shall wield the greatest of oracles, Takhisis purred. The augury that has lain
silent and broken because the rune was blank, its symbol forgotten.

All of this time, it seems, L'Indasha Yman has kept the secret.

L'Indasha Yman? Of the druids? Ember thought. And she has not used this power? Takhisis is
lying. Or she is holding something back.

The girl, Takhisis said, her deep voice lazing over the words. She's something to do with
the runes . . . with the sounding. I know it.

Ember shifted uneasily in the cramped chamber, awaiting the connection between the girl
and the runes that Takhisis seemed about to make.

When I... came here, there were things forbidden me. Things he hid from me in my
banishment. Things I have forgotten as well. So you must continue to learn for me, to do
for me .. .for now.

That ice in her voice, Ember thought. She knows more, and she is not telling. But with
these runes ...

The Nerakans have her now, Takhisis informed him. They intend her for my temple's first
sacrifice, because of her lavender eyes. But they will not destroy her, nor will they
keep, her forever.

“Suppose they find her secrets before . .. before we do, m'Lady? Nerakans have a way of
gathering secrets.”

The voice of the goddess rose softly after another long, uncomfortable silence. The
Nerakans are my servants. They will not rebel. But if they do, and if they dare to sound
the rune ...

All of the gods will know it at once. And whom, my dear Cerestes, do the hundred clerics
worship? Who controls armies in Sanction and Estwilde? All that the Nerakans would augur
in the runes are their own deaths.

“This ... quarrel with Laca,” the dragon offered, shifting the ground of the talk. Will
cost him a son, Takhisis interrupted. Of that I am certain. “But what of the other? This
Verminaard”

Is no less the son of Laca Dragonbane, fool! the Dark Queen announced sharply. The cavern
walls seemed to recede, and the dragon began the slow transformation back to his human
form, back to the dark mage Cerestes.

He should have known. The silence as to Verminaard's birth. Daeghrefn's cruelty and marked
prejudice against the boy. The lack of physical resemblance between father and son.

Astonished at the Lady's tidings, Cerestes suddenly felt frail, baffled and cold, as a
whole cloudy history of deceit and betrayals formed at the edge of his understanding,
something he needed to know, needed to use.

/ will use one, Takhisis said and chuckled. The other is ... dispensable. Lord Laca has
left me an abundance of sons, and I shall need only one of them. For the blood ofHuma runs
through Laca Dragonbane, and Huma's line is tied with the sounding of the rune. I need
just one of Huma's line. He will be the last survivor.

“B-But how, Highness? How do the young ones fit?” Cerestes asked. But the goddess was not
telling. The dark eye above him faded, and the exhausted mage lay at the center of the
chamber, his black robes, tattered and split by the Change, scattered to the far corners
of the cavern. Again the uncovered slant of light glowed silver and gray from the mouth of
the cave, and the mage rose blearily and crouched at the edge of light, stitching his
robes back together with spells.

/ shall win, Takhisis prophesied, her voice no more than a whisper of thought or memory,
no matter what anyone chooses, I shall be triumphant. Go now and do my bidding,
Cerestes....

Verminaard could not forget the girl.

At night, in the midst of his meditations, her hooded form and the black tattoo on her leg
haunted him, as did his fleeting view of her as her horse turned on the far side of the
stone bridge and she rode away, bound to the saddle and guarded by bandits. When Aglaca
bent to his devotions, Verminaard would draw forth the Amarach runes, turning them
intently in his hand as if some new symbol on the ancient stones would appear to give him
a clue as to her name, her origins....

Why the bandits held her as captive.

He had no idea why she drew him so, but he thought of her all his waking hours, and
especially when he was sup-

posed to be at his studies.

Not long after the hunt, through Cerestes' suggestive power, Daeghrefn appointed the mage
official tutor to the boys. It was an acknowledgement rather than a promotion, but now
Cerestes began their instruction in earnest, with rigorous classes in higher astronomy,
mathematics, and ceremony. As Verminaard scratched on parchment the phases of the black
moon and learned more powerful dark spells, Cerestes quarreled with Aglaca, who was now
forced to attend the lectures but sat stubbornly in the corner, still refusing to give
himself to the new mysteries.

In the midst of this new academic pressure, Verminaard found his mind wandering,
wool-gathering in long, adventurous fantasies in which he rescued the girl from dragons,
from ogres, from other dangers.

The mage would rap the table, and Verminaard's thoughts would return grudgingly to the
castle's solar, to the sunlit classroom made suddenly strange by his own imagination and
consuming dreams. Aglaca, poring over his botanicals rather than the books of spellcraft,
would regard him with concern, and Cerestes would scowl and point to the text. Verminaard
would renew his attention with energy, with promises....

And in a matter of minutes, he would be lost once more in thoughts of the girl.

Once, in high summer, when the images of her were still unmanageably strong, he boasted to
Aglaca all he had imagined.

It was late evening, one of those summer nights when the darkness itself delays and the
world seems to hover in a half-light until nigh onto midnight, an evening when
nightingales keep awake the restless. After a few minutes of practicing a slow, graceful
fighting kick, Aglaca had stretched against the battlement and asked him unsettling
questions.

Had he seen her eyes? The expression on her face? What color was her hair? He smiled at
Verminaard's stammer, his dodging answers. “I suppose you could draw her portrait, then?”
Verminaard retorted coldly.

Not ten yards away, three ravens settled ominously on the crenels, and Aglaca shivered and
turned away. “I saw little more than you, Verminaard, though I'd wager I could pick her
out by the way she sits a horse.”

He looked out over the battlements toward the reddening west as the sun settled on the
Solamnic foothills.

“'Tis summer again, Verminaard,” he continued, his voice distant and softer still,
scarcely audible over the boding and rustling of the roosting birds. “And when the summer
comes, dreams spill over into waking hours. My father told me to beware that time. 'High
summer smoke and deception, light sickness,' he called it.”

“A right poet, your father is,” Verminaard grumbled, catching only the final phrase. “But
I've enough of his verse and your cautions for this long season.”

Aglaca lifted an eyebrow. When Verminaard began to grumble and declare, it was always a
sign of recklessness and challengea ride on a hunt, perhaps, or a climb up a sheer rock
face. He was predictable, and though the shape of the deed might change, Aglaca knew a
deed was coming, that Verminaard was sick of shadows, eager for the tumult of chase and
discovery.

Aglaca smiled to himself and shielded his eyes against the last reddening flood of
sunlight.

The deed was coming, and he did not mind at all.

For the druidess had withdrawn since his battle with the Nerakans; she said she had taught
him all she could. And now what had he at Nidus but this long captivity and the dark
lessons he refused to learn? And unsettled thoughts of his own.

“And therefore the poetry shall be set aside,”

Verminaard declared, his voice hushed to a whisper, drawing Aglaca toward him by the
collar, his grip firm and commanding. “When the season turns and the night isn't so
blasted short, I'm off to Neraka to find her.”

Aglaca smiled calmly into a face the very image of his own.

Verminaard consulted the runes for a plan and an auspicious night. In the solitude of his
quarters, crouched over a table in the dim candlelight, he pondered the Circle of Lifethe
six irregular rune stones set in a sanctioned pattern centuries old, reflecting the
energies of the past and indicating the challenges ahead.

Let the others laugh at him. Let Robert and Daeghrefn and even Aglaca call the runes
childishness and nonsense.

The laughter would change when he found the key to prophecy.

Solemnly Verminaard set the stones before him, and gazed long and deeply at the scarred
lines along their faces, banishing thoughts of the girl, of his father's anger, of the
perils of Neraka.

Yet again the stones were silent. The old proverb held, he thought sourly, that a man
cannot read his own future in the runes.

It was that proverb, that surrounding silence, that brought Verminaard to Cerestes.

The mage reclined on a soft chair, his feet propped on the windowsill and his gaze fixed
on the constellation Hiddukel, which tilted in the black sky out his window.

Verminaard held his breath as he entered the room. Cerestes' presence always daunted him,
and the gap in the upper sky once filled by the stars of Takhisis, three thousand years
vanished, seemed to beckon him as he

inched to the center of the room. Now that he was there, asking the mage to read the runes
for him seemed forward and disrespectful, and the young man shifted from foot to foot,
glancing awkwardly back toward the door.

The mage sighed, tilting an astrolabe toward the constellation. "What's your pleasure,
young

master?" he asked, his voice sinuous and low and echoing unexpectedly in the small and
cluttered room, as though Verminaard remembered it less from the classroom than from
somewhere in a half- forgotten dream.

He did not know, nor could he figure how the mage had climbed to this place of power. Long
years back, an eleventh-hour substitute in a hurried ritual, Cerestes was now one of
Daeghrefn's chief advisors, trusted as much as the Lord of Nidus trusted anyone.

He was also the one man in all the castle Verminaard could trust with the plan he had
hatched with Aglaca earlier that month.

“I would have you read me the runes, sir,” he replied, glancing one last wistful time
toward the door behind him, closing slowly of its own volition.

“The Amarach again?” the mage asked, his hidden eyes narrowing, and Verminaard steeled
himself for the lecturehow the stones were a child's toy and the desperate preoccupation
of the old, who read them fearfully, imagining they could augur their own dates of death.

“It will be your undoing, Master Verminaard,” the mage had always told him. “Forgo this
clerical nonsense and attend to the hunt and the castle and your studies.”

But not this time. For some reason, the mage's reply floated away from lectures. Lazily,
with a slow, almost reptilian movement, he rose from the chair.

“And what might the runes tell you that good common sense would not?” he asked as
Verminaard reached to his belt for the pouch that contained the carved stones.

“Common sense tells me to consult the runes, sir.”

The mage smiled wearily. Verminaard opened the bag and poured the runestones into the
mage's cupped hands.

“Think of the question, Master Verminaard,” Cerestes said, lifting the stones over the
lad's head.

Verminaard nodded solemnly and then, with his eyes closed, reached up and drew three
stones. He dropped them to the floor, one after the other, in a coarse, almost careless
manner.

Cerestes crouched over the stones and stared at the lad. “What is the question?” he asked
again into the silence, as Verminaard fidgeted and looked to the window, where the stars
seemed to weave and fade.

The lad inhaled and confessed his plan. “There's a girl...”

“At twenty-one, there generally is,” Cerestes observed dryly, and then remembered
Takhisis's words. “Go on.”

“II saw her at the edge of the stone bridge. On the day of the hunt and the ambush.”

Cerestes nodded, his golden eyes suddenly fixed and intent. Heartened, Verminaard burst
forth with the rest of his secret.

“She's been in my thoughts for a season, sir. She's the bandits' prisoner, for no man
binds his ally.”

“Aglaca might tell you otherwise,” the mage observed sardonically, his intensity vanished
and his eyes hooded and vague. “Or Abelaard. But you want to rescue this girl?”

“Read the runes, sir. Please?”

The mage turned to the stones at his feet, touching each with the tip of a bony finger as
his hand moved slowly from left to right. “Birch. Thunder. The Hammer,” he murmured, and
glanced up at the lad. "If there were anything to this musty augury, Verminaard, I would
take this as pleasant prospects indeed. Inspired by the woman, you make a journey of
beginnings. At the final aspect is the Hammersymbol both of the power of giants and

the source of that power.“ Verminaard's eyes widened. ”It is as I imagined, then. I am
destined to find her!“ Cerestes shook his head. ”Caution, young master, caution. Remember
the placement of the stones.“ His hand repeated the pattern, moving slowly left to right,
touching each stone in turn. ”That which was. That which is. That which is yet to benot
'that which is sure to happen.' “ ”I won't tell Father that you read the runes for me,"
Verminaard said, with a wide, wolfish smile.

Cerestes turned toward the window, hiding a similar smile of his own. The skull of Chemosh
was brilliantly visible now, framed by stone and darkness and the deep purple western sky.
It could not have been easier.

So it was that Verminaard of Nidus received the blessing of the mage and the veiled
direction of the rune stones. He did not linger in Cerestes' chambers, for the hour was
late and he had much to do on the morrow. Gathering the stones, he bowed respectfully and
backed out the door as it closed softly.

The mage remained at the window, pondering the shifting stars and the cool eddies of night
wind on the keep below him as it scattered straw and pale leaves. Cerestes' smile widened.

The game was beginning, and he did so relish a game. Already Takhisis had set her plans in
motion, obscure to the mage for now, but he did not need the details yet.

The mysterious girl was on her way, and it was enough. From a distance, the unwitting lad
was being drawn toward her, toward a shadowy form he had seen, or rather glimpsed, months
ago on a cloudy mountain afternoon.

They would bring this woman to Castle Nidus, and with her safely beneath his roof,
Cerestes was sure that it would take little time to uncover her secret.

But the road to Neraka was long and menacing. It crossed the high and desolate grasslands
south of the castle, bending east through a narrow pass between foothills surrounding
Mount Berkanth and the infamous Nerakan Forest. And even then, after perilous miles of
travel, the journey was not over. A southward path took the traveler on between two
volcanoes now smoldering and seething with new life. Only then would Verminaard reach the
encampments that surrounded the city, and

only then would his search for the girl begin in earnest. In the heart of Neraka, where
the Dark Queen was raising a hidden temple.

The mage backed away from the window and settled into his soft chair. The night had
turned, and the stars seemed to tilt and beckon as the first birds of the morning awakened
and the servants rose as well. The silence was broken by a tentative song from an aderyn
perched somewhere on the battlements, followed by the lonely footsteps of a groom as he
shuffled across the bailey to the stables.

Cerestes closed his eyes for a moment, drifting on the soft fading of the night. The runes
had encouraged the lad, as Cerestes knew they would. It was why he had invented the
obscure and hopeful reading, spinning a story out of the flat and meaningless stones.

He laughed scornfully at human foolishness. Until the blank rune was sounded, its symbol
recovered, a man might as well read his fingernails for augury.

Cerestes rose from the chair and glided to the center of the room.

It might be as Takhisis claimed, he thought, casting a spell to mask his thoughts in case
others perhaps even the Dark Queen herselfused the night and his dream

state to pry into his thought. Perhaps the girl had been chosen by Paladine to carry,
somehow, the secret of the vanished rune. If that were true, then she carried a powerful
knowledge, the key to an omniscient oracle. Armed with that oracle, Takhisis could find
the green gemstone, the last component to the portal she was building in Neraka. It was
the cornerstone to her temple, and once it was in place, she could return to the world of
Krynn, to the bright and agreeable world she had once poisoned and sullied, that she would
again cover with her own abiding darkness.

But the same oracle in another's hand could stop her entry entirely.

And establish a darkness of his own.

And what, indeed, might be accomplished with both of Huma's kin?

Cerestes smiled and knelt by the hearth, idly tracing the patterns of the runes in the
ashes of the hearthstone.

Birch. Thunder. Hammer. They could apply to him as wellbetter, in fact, than to a lad's
moonstruck plans of rescue.

He stilled his rising excitement, gathering his robes and curling up on the hearth. He lay
there like a sleeping cat, like a coiled serpent.

Once again, he told himself, the blank rune's faces were still missing. And until they
were restored, all auguries were in vain. And yet the stark symbols of Verminaard's
reading occupied his thoughts when he closed his eyes___

Birch. Thunder. Hammer.

He drifted off to a deep dragon's sleep that would rest him well by the afternoon. He
would awaken by the hearth, his black robes chalked and smeared with ashes, his heart
resolved to follow

Verminaard to Neraka.

For after all, Verminaard and Aglaca must be protected, since Daeghrefn paid Cerestes'
wages. Surely Takhisis would agree.