Before The Mask (9 page)

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The bandits ambled into the forest, the sheer vallenwoods and tall evergreens black
against the fog. Riding among

them, Verminaard crouched in the saddle, his hood drawn over his eyes.

Was the fog dwindling again? He saw a dark shape to his left. A rider had stopped, waiting
for him. He gripped his sword more tightly.

The moment was on him. Would he fight like his father, like Robertlike Aglaca, for that
matter? Or would he back away as he had done at the stone bridge two seasons ago, when
bravery and skill might have brought him the girl to begin with?

Grimly he resolved to fight through the lot of them or to die in the attempt. His hand
shook on the pommel of the sword as he prepared to engage the man.

It was then that the fog dissolved around the shape, and Verminaard saw that it was no
rider but a

high outcropping of rocka stone dolmen set five thousand years ago by the original
inhabitants of the high Nerakan plains. He shook with relief.

Past the rock and into the thickening maze of the forest the bandits continued. Their
voices swirled around Verminaard in a navigator's nightmare as sound dropped into
confusion and the lad moved blindly, fearfully, his only guidance his fast-fading hope of
escape.

It is like the Abyss, he thought, where the soul is unraveled and eaten.

Nonsense, the Voice comforted, rising from the black rocks and bathing him in a cold and
soothing flow of words. For there is no Abyss beyond the black recesses of the self, none
but in your own imagining. Be a man! Be your father and steel yourself against these few!
For the time will come... .

“Where are you?” someone cried in front of him. The horses stopped around him. See? I have
already sent your help ... your salvation.... “Where are you, Verminaard?” came the cry
again. Aglaca. Lost and wandering.

A bandit twenty feet in front of him rose in the saddle and sniffed the air. Breathing a
low, harsh curse in Nerakan, he tugged at the man nearest him.

“Straight on the Jelek trail, I'll wager,” the bandit hissed, gesturing dramatically at
the wide path branching west through the trees ahead. “Whoever it is, the fog has turned
the poor fool about, and he's set for the worst we can give.”

His companion laughed wickedly, and from all points behind Verminaard, horses seemed to
emerge from the labyrinth of fog and shadow, moving west toward the end of the pass and
the desperate, vulnerable voice that drew them like hunting wolves.

Verminaard brought Orlog to a halt as the last of the bandits passed scarcely a dozen feet
to his right. Breathing a prayer to Hiddukel and Sargonnas, the young man sat motionless
until the horseman passed into the mist and vanished.

The Voice had brought Aglaca back to him. Verminaard was sure of that. And the cry of the
Solamnic youth had drawn the bandits away, into the fog and forest.

Perhaps they would overtake Aglaca. Perhaps he would escape them. Well, Aglaca was clever,
resourceful. Maybe he would survive.

Verminaard suppressed a malicious smile. And then, for a moment, Abelaard crossed his
mindhis father's pact with Laca and the reprisals that would come if Aglaca did not return.

He tried not to think of those.

The horse-sized obsidian rock that had startled him so loomed close again on his left.
Verminaard smiled again. Another hundred yards and he would be clear of the woods, back on
the open foothills.

Suddenly what he had thought was the rock moved forward, lifted its gloved hand. Verminaard

gasped, fumbled for his sword, and ... “Thank the gods it's you, Verminaard!” Aglaca
exclaimed. “Aglaca! What... how ...” The Solamnic lad laughed merrily, slapping Verminaard
on the shoulder affectionately.

"When Orlog started and carried you off, I thought it might be days until we found each
other. And then ... by Paladine! The bandits! I guided the mare behind a stone about a
hundred yards east of here and quieted her. She's a good horsecalm and amiable, with
scarcely a sniff or a snort as the whole column passed within a stone's throw of me.

“I saw you in front of them, and it looked as if you needed some help. So when they all
had gone by, I shouted for you into the forest, and ... well, the peculiar echoes in there
must have done even better than I'd hoped, because here you are, and they'rewell, they're
somewhere else.”

He sat back in the saddle and beamed.

Wordlessly, his mind a jumble of guilt and anger and simple perplexity, Verminaard sniffed
and nodded. Things were back as they had been before the fog, before the Voice's prophecy,
before his attempt to leave Aglaca in the dark isolation of the Khalkists.

He was stuck with him, stuck with the annoying cheer and the even more annoying
clevernessand the road to Neraka was clearing before him.

At least for the time being.

Slowly the horses moved east up the rise, and a wind rose from the south, scattering the
fog from their path.

“Look at the sky!” Aglaca noted, pointing to a gray gap in the clouds. “Here I thought it
was only fog. But it's gloaming as well. We've passed a day back and forth, you and I.
Thanks be to Paladine that we found one another by nightfall!”

“What color are her eyes?” Verminaard pressed as he and Aglaca steered the horses up a
narrow path along the rock face, searching for high shelter away from the night and its
predators, animal and human.

“It's hard to explain, Verminaard,” the boy replied. “Oh, lookit's a cave of some sort. I
figured as much. There's drasil trees aplenty sprouted on the plateau up there, and I've
never known a cut path to lead to outright nowhere.”

“A cave, you say?” Verminaard forgot all eyes and colors in the prospect. “What kind of”

“Bats for certain,” Aglaca interrupted. "Spiders near the mouth, and those strange blind
crickets in the darkness, if

it goes back far enough past the entrance. Perhaps a bear.“ He stared at Verminaard in
mock fear. ”Though that's unlikely, with all the maneuvering he'd have to do in the
rootmaze. But if a bear sets

upon us, at least there are two of us this time."

This time? Verminaard thought, his mind racing guiltily back to the fight with the bandits
on the bridge. What does he know? What does he suspect?

Were it not for the bats fluttering into the mountain evening, the cave would have seemed
comfortable, even pleasant. Rushes were strewn at its mouth, and its occupant had left not
long ago at all and intended to return, judging from the lack of dust and cobweb, the
fresh, fragrant straw, and the brooms neatly stacked outside the opening.

“Let's go in,” Verminaard urged, stepping toward the overhanging rock. “It's someone's
dwelling,” Aglaca objected, squinting into the darkness.

“Then you can sleep outside,” Verminaard replied coldly. He stepped inside and foraged for
serviceable kindling. Aglaca stood hesitantly at the cave mouth, then climbed the rock
face to higher ground and a lookout point.

As Verminaard rummaged through straw and stacked crockery, he picked up a pitcher and
examined it with a growing, uneasy sense that he had been here, or had at least seen these
very things before.

“Look, Verminaard!” Aglaca exclaimed from the cave mouth. “Carrots and radishes! There's a
little garden just above here. Not a sunlit acre, what with the shade from the drasil
trees, but surprisingly good soil for this rocky country! I don't know how they did it,
not at this height. There are late tomatoes as well, and the whole plot is bordered in day
lilies! Some of them are blooming! You really should come and see! One has a face in it”

“Did you find anything to use for a fire?” Verminaard asked curtly, his attention drawn
back to the rubble on the floor of the cave. Aglaca vexed him with all this knowledge of
plants and weeds and flowers. It was unseemly, irregular to him. Gruffly he waved his
companion away. Better to burn what wood he could find in the cavern chairs, perhaps, or
the oaken bucketthan to wait while Aglaca dawdled, his nose again in the lilies.

His gaze returned to the bucket again. It was somehow the center of the cave, the focal
point of the strange familiarity that seemed to inhabit the place. He approached it
cautiously. A wizard might live here, and wizards were known to charge an item with fire,
with venom, with destructive spells, so that when the unwary hand touched it, flame would
course through the bones and poison through the veins. A thousand years after a wizard's
departure or death, the spell could arise to ignite or corrupt.

This bucket had all the signs. A line of ragged marks along the rimnot weathering or
chipping, but the intentional carvings of a knowing hand.

Verminaard listened for the Voice. Whatever it was that spoke to him no doubt had a
storehouse of lore and magic.

But again the Voice was silent. Verminaard swore softly and looked into the bottom of the
pail. He blinked and looked again.

There was something about the swirl of the damp wood grain in the bottom of the bucket
that seemed to shimmer and change. For a moment, it was a spiral, a swirl, then it seemed
like the dark

matrix at the hub of a spider's web, like the hagall rune, which promised misfortune and
crisis.

And then, as though he gazed into the proverbial crystals and orbs at the Tower of High
Sorcery, he thought he saw a rocky landscape, like the Khalkists but even darker,

more severe, a hand reaching out to him from the depths of the swirling wood, reaching,
grasping, failing....

Verminaard shook his head and looked again. The hand and the webbing, the rocks and the
rune had all passed from sight, merely a trick of light on the water-stained wood of the
bucket. Aglaca called again from outside, something about columbines.

But the back of the cave drew Verminaard now. A small mound in a shadowy corner, more
humble and less mysterious than the bucket, but very compelling. Quietly, with a single
glance over his shoulder, he crept toward the shadows and the strange construction.

Dirt and stones. Someone was buried here.

An unfathomable sadness passed over the young man as he knelt beside the gravesite.
Something just below his memory stirred, a warmth and a faint, fragile peace....

“Verminaard!” Aglaca shouted a third time, and the thoughts fled suddenly. With a growl of
impatience, Verminaard started off to find him.

As he moved toward the mouth of the cave, a glitter in the straw caught his eye. He knelt
and picked up a small pendant, the silver chain broken, the thumb-sized gem-stone
sparkling. Rubbing the stone with the hem of his tunic, Verminaard marveled at the
midnight purple of the thing, a color halfway between violet and blue. There was no feel
of magic or omen about the pendant, but it might turn a pretty penny from some courtier at
Nidus.

Or make a gift for a mysterious young woman.

He thought little more of it, dropping it in the bag with the rune stones. It clicked and
rolled against them softly, the sound as if someone deep in the cavern had opened a hidden
door. Verminaard shrugged and hastened up the trail to the garden, where Aglaca crouched
above a fan-shaped plant, his gaze intent on the solitary flower that bloomed from its
solitary scape.

“See?” Aglaca said, beaming, cupping the unplucked blossom delicately in his hand. He
motioned Verminaard closer.

“Delightful,” the larger youth declared flatly, his eyes elsewhere, alert to danger from
predator or bandit.

“It's a beautiful peach color, and its eye zone is an odd sort of purple . . . and this
markingthe face, or maybe it looks more like a mask. And the flower is a perfect
triangle,” Aglaca insisted, but Verminaard wasn't listening.

“There must be a better place to stay the night, Aglaca. We should move on before the
darkness overtakes us.”

“I don't understand, Verminaard.”

There's a haunt to the cave, he wanted to say. Some ... presence. I don't know if it's
friendly or hostile, but that bucket in there ...

Don't tell him, the Voice urged, rising from the cave's mouth, as if the black, glinting
mountain itself was speaking. You know how the ignorant laugh at your lore and runes and
signs. Speak of defense. Of the depth of the cave...

“The cave goes back forever,” Verminaard said dutifully. “It burrows through the mountain,
I'd wager, and with no telling how many branches and chambers and passages. Dangerous
things could hide in those depths, and I'm not going to risk your safety again.”

He forced a grimaced smile at his irritating companion, who smiled in response.

“The danger of that's a slim one, Verminaard. The roots of the drasil tree go down a
hundred feet, maybe more. They grow over caves to ... well, I suppose it's to feed the
roots or somethingsome kind of nourishment they need in the cavern air. They know enough
to grow through the rock, but not enough to stop growing. The back of that cave is
probably atangle with 'em, like a cage or a baffle. Nothing bigger than a man could
navigate it, and a small man indeed, no match for you.”

“But there could be something else,” Verminaard murmured. “Something unreckoned in your
botany. Scorpions, maybe. Some kind of cave viper.” Aglaca frowned. “It's getting dark.
And there's” Verminaard did not wait. “We'll go at once. You are my responsibility, after
all.” He had almost convinced himself with his own excuses.

But still the cave and the little garden haunted him as he and Aglaca saddled and rode
south, and the dark vanished over his shoulder in the unsettling red of a Khalkist sunset.
The place haunted him still as he warmed himself at the night's campfire, the light
muffled deftly by Aglaca against the eyes of beasts and bandits and worse.

It would haunt him through the morning as they passed the south edge of the Nerakan
Forestthe Blood Grove, where it was said that the victims of banditry hung, dried and
blackened like unpicked grapes, and wild cats scuttled along the woodland trails in even
more unspeakable foraging.

Dark and deep, serenaded the Voice, which seemed to beckon from the shadowy woods. Dark
and deep, and the desolate secrets hanging in decay, in decay and forgetfulness....

Is it not an ending place for enemies? Tor unloving and unlovely fathers?

Verminaard hearkened to the Voice, to its bottomless seduction. He vividly imagined
Daeghrefn swinging slowly from the black branches of a drooping, rotting aeterna tree, the
air aswarm with kites, with raptors.. . .

“No!” he exclaimed, wrenching his thoughts back to sunlight, to breathing, to the cool
Nerakan plains and the spreading grasslands.

To Aglaca, riding beside him on the mare, who regarded him with alarm and concern, he
muttered, “It's nothing. I must have . . . must have fallen asleep. Don't bother yourself.”

“It's a voice, isn't it?” Aglaca asked quietly, leaning across the saddle. “A voice? Don't
be foolish.” His own reply sounded shrill, frightened.

Aglaca slowed the mare, brought her to a halt. Verminaard swore softly, reined in the
stallion, and guided him gently back to the spot where Aglaca waited, his face cloudy and
solemn.

“Foolish it may be to you, Verminaard,” Aglaca said, his words still unnaturally hushed,
“but I've heard a voice myself sometimes, and maybe I'm gone a bit to the wayside from
staring at the red moon for too long, but that voice has told me things best never spoken.
And best never listened to.”

“Then don't listen,” Verminaard blurted. Then quietly, more cautiously, “What does it tell
you?”

“That I'm exceptional,” Aglaca replied, with a strange half-smile, “and in a way that no
one else is exceptional. It's a heady wine that voice pours, telling me that it talks to
me alone, and that some arrangement in time and space has brought me, and me alone, to
high degree and to great position. It tells me darker things, toothat my father has
abandoned me, that he and your father consider me only a pawn in some long, political
game, but it does not matter what the voice says, because I choose not to believe it. I
believe what my father said before I left: that he loved me no matter what.”

Verminaard sniffed, goading Orlog to a trot, heading south over the Nerakan plains. But
his thoughts wandered back down a blind tunnel, at the end of which the Voice lay coiled
in the depths of his memory, and the coveted words of the Voice were deeper, more sweet
than Aglaca's thickheaded skepticism.

He would choose not to believe as well. But he would choose not to believe Aglaca. And so
he changed the line of talk altogether. “What color are her eyes, for the last time?”

Aglaca fumbled for an image, for words of hue and light, and then he had it. “They are
exactly the color of that lily's eye,” he said gleefully.

Verminaard ground his teeth and swore Aglaca's doom, silently, on all the dark gods.
Savagely he spurred Orlog forward.

“Wait for me!” Aglaca shouted, urging the mare to a gallop. “Wait for me, Verminaard!”
Already Verminaard was racing into the flatlands of the Nerakan plateau. The town of
Neraka was a vagabond place, makeshift and dirty.

The decent mountain folk who had peopled it first, goatherds and humble, ingenious
farmers, had been forced out over the years by a constant flow of brigands and highwaymen,
cutthroats and ne'er-do-wells of all countries and races. There it would have ended, the
village dying out on its own when plunder grew scarce, were it not for the building that
sprouted in its midst.

For Takhisis had chosen the place, in the way that she always chosequietly and secretly,
in a place where the black obsidian foundations of the temple would raise no alarm. For
when she returned to

the world and restored her dominion, Neraka was to be the heart of her empire.

And already that heart was beginning to beat.

As Aglaca and Verminaard approached from the north over the flat volcanic plain, the spire
of the temple was the first thing they saw. Gnarled like an ancient oak in the heart of
the town, it twisted amid half-finished city walls, clouding the southern sky with its
bulk and with the strange, shimmering aura of darkness that surrounded it.

Outside the temple walls, the builders' scaffolding, and the ramshackle guardhouses, a
hundred fires littered the

surrounding village, the black smoke of smithy and kitchen and shrine intermingling with
the foul smell of tannery and slaughterhouse. Beyond the village itself, in the outlying
plains, scores of squat black tents lay scattered almost randomly, above them an array of
pennants and banners white and black closest to Verminaard, but blue and yellow, red and
green in the distance, each adorned with the scowling face of a dragon, each waving in the
shifting mountain winds.

The two young men crouched not fifty yards from the northernmost encampment. There,
shielded by the tall grass, they ate sparingly from the raw vegetables Aglaca had sensibly
gathered from the garden above the cave.

“I feel like a rabbit,” Verminaard muttered. “Hidden in the grass eating radishes.”

Aglaca snickered and shook his head. Then, rising until he could see over the top of the
grass, he peered solemnly toward the army of banners.