Before the Mask

Chapter 18

As he steered the horse toward the helpless man, his mace raised high for the killing blow, Verminaard saw something flash in the corner of his eye.

The last of the knights swooped by, a silver blur as rider and horse crossed in front of him. With a shrill whistle, the man leaned out of the saddle, stretching his sinewy arm toward his blinded companion. In one graceful, incredibly powerful movement, he caught up the injured man, lifting him onto the horse, and together they rode toward the open castle gates. Verminaard, astonished, pressed his horse hard behind them.

The Solamnic horse was now overburdened, but in the mile's gallop across the flatlands, Orlog's weariness made it hard for Verminaard to make up the distance. At last, sweeping wide around the hapless riders, Verminaard cut off the path to the castle bridge, and the Solamnic was forced to rein in his horse scarcely a hundred yards from the bailey walls. Resolutely the rider lowered his wounded companion and, rising in the saddle, faced Verminaard fearlessly.

"Good adversary," the Knight called out, raising his sword in the traditional Solamnic salute, "you have shown yourself strong in arms and enduring in battle. I give you the chance to show honor as well."

Listen to him! the Voice whispered as Nightbringer pulsed in Verminaard's hand. The Solamnic prattle of honor and code and oath is about to begin. Beware, my child: He will entangle you in honor.

Verminaard nodded. The Voice was right. He had seen the honor-mongers before, and he knew that their words carried poison and knives.

"My friend is injured," the knight continued. "He is blind and helpless. Allow him to pass over the drawbridge and into the bailey. Whatever quarrels you have with our country, our lord, and our Order, you and I can settle here on the plains, in full sight of my countrymen."

"Damn your country! Your lord and your Order be damned!" Verminaard roared, whirling the mace above his head until a dark spiral formed in the morning air, widening and widening until it covered the horses and riders, veiling the view of the garrison on the bailey walls like a thick, gloomy cloud. "As I see it, you've no grounds to bargain. Your companion stays where he is."

"So be it," the knight replied tersely. "Before these walls and the men assembled there, I say that you are a base, ignoble coward, and should the gods grant me the power to defeat you, you will be shown no mercy."

Verminaard sneered. "Oh, but I'll show mercy to you, Sir Knight. I shall prolong your miserable time of breath until the lord of the castle himself begs that I finish the job."

"Villain!" someone shouted from the castle walls, and from farther away, the shout was answered by another, the words indistinguishable, muffled by distance.

The raised hand of the knight stilled further outcry. "The lord of the castle begs to no brigand. If it must come again to sword and mace, then let it come, by Paladine and by Huma!"

"And let it come on foot," Verminaard declared, dismounting in a rustle of robes and a creak of black leather armor. "For I yearn to face you man to man and arm to arm, so that none will credit my victory to the stallion beneath me, nor your defeat to poor horse-mastery."

The knight dismounted as well, removing his shield from the back of the saddle and uncovering it so that the risen sun danced fitfully on the embossed white lance and black dragon that adorned its polished center.

Nightbringer shivered and hummed in Verminaard's hand.

Do not spare him, the Voice murmured with a new, frenzied urgency. Oh, do not spare him, Lord Verminaard, for he is the worst of our enemies and the fount of our suffering. Because of his line, we lie in darkness, and at the end of his descendants, we will breathe again!

"He will not be spared," Verminaard muttered, "for he stands between me and the lord of the castle."

As he approached the veiled knight, Verminaard knew that he faced the strongest fighter yet.

The man dropped into a swordsman's crouch, sidling gracefully to high ground, away from his wounded companion. Verminard lumbered after him, noisy and awkward afoot, but confident in his strength and his weapon and in the mysterious power that ran through the pulsing mace.

Their paths met on a little rise not fifty yards from the castle bridge. There, under the sight of Laca's archers, they circled each other twice and closed for the first attack.

The knight struck first, his saber switching and flashing like the tail of a snake. A quick backhand slash brought the blade across Verminaard's chest, furrowing effortlessly through the leather armor. Had the larger man not stepped back quickly, he would have been slain before the fight had really begun.

Backing away, gasping, Verminaard staggered down the rise, the knight in calm, relentless pursuit. The blade whistled by his ear once, twice, and he could barely stifle a whimper as he blocked a thrust with the handle of Nightbringer.

It was then, at the bottom of the rise, that sword locked with mace, steel with ancient stone. The knight pushed against Verminaard, his mailed face only inches from Verminaard's own, so that the young man could see the color of his enemy's eyes.

Blue. Pale blue like his own. Like Aglaca's.

Something in those eyes softened. Verminaard dug his heels in the dry, cracked earth and pushed, and the knight tumbled backward, landing with a rough clatter on the hard ground.

He was back to his feet at once, but the tide of the battle had changed. Verminaard knew now that he was stronger than the man before him, that for this time, at least, the quickness and skill of Solamnic swordsmanship fell short against the sheer brute power of muscle and rock.

With a jubilant shout, Verminaard brought the mace shrieking down at his pressed opponent, who scrambled free of the blow at the cost of a shattered shield. Reeling, his left arm limp and useless, the swordsman backed from the violet darkness and staggered up the rise once more, seeking the vantage of higher ground.

Now! the Voice urged again as the spiked head of

Nightbringer swirled, its stone surface roiling like black lava. He's yours if you strike now!

"Who are you?" the wounded knight rasped, weaving from pain and exertion.

Don't tell… don't tell. He will entangle you in honor…

"Verminaard of Nidus," the young man announced proudly. "I have come far to meet the lord of this castle and demand from him what is rightly mine."

The knight dropped his sword and fell to his knees. With his one good arm, he removed the helm and aven-tail. His blond hair was streaked with first gray, but his eyes were brilliant and young, as resolute as they had appeared nine years ago across the Bridge of Dreed.

Verminaard gasped. It was his own face, thirty years older.

"You!" he cried. "Laca Dragonbane!"

The man met his stare serenely. "What would you have from the lord of the castle, Verminaard of Nidus?"

Verminaard took a tentative step toward his blood father, then another. Laca rose slowly to his feet, turned his back on the approaching warrior, and walked calmly, almost casually to the side of the wounded knight.

"I would have the castle." Verminaard replied. "I would have the rest of my inheritance, Laca. And I would have vengeance on you for your years of silence, for my years of suffering at the hand of Daeghrefn for your deed."

Laca knelt silently by the blinded man, cradling the fellow's head in his lean, long-fingered hands. He glared up at the monstrous young man before him and spoke to him coldly, as though across a great chasm.

"You're a creature apart now, Verminaard of Nidus," he pronounced. "And you have made your choices." He lifted the helm from the face of the injured man. The clouded eyes rolled back in the head of the hapless man, who lay stunned and moaning in Laca's arms.

"Abelaard!" Verminaard roared. "No! No!"

The wounded man blinked pathetically at the sound of the voice, raising his bruised arm vaguely.

"No!" Verminaard shouted again, and fell to his knees, Nightbringer black and glittering in his hand.

He would strike something. Rock and wind… Laca… himself. He would end everything, here at the borders of Estwilde, and there would be nothing but night, and night upon night…

And a darkness rushed over him, and he saw and remembered nothing.

Laca watched the young man vanish in a swirl of black, engulfing fire. Clouds broke over the landscape, and for the first time in hours, sunlight spread over the bailey walls of Castle East Borders. Wearily the Lord of East Borders took the reins of the shivering Orlog and led the stallion back toward the injured Abelaard.

"Who… who was it, Uncle Laca?" the young man asked, rubbing his vacant and useless eyes.

"I don't know," Laca replied.

In the Khalkist Mountains, overlooking the Nerakan plains, overlooking Nidus and the razed forest to its south, Verminaard received a new and stern discipline at the hands of nature.

He awoke in a sunlit grotto high above Castle Nidus. The shriek of a raptor wakened him, and he sprawled blearily, painfully on the stone floor of the little cavern, breathing in the moist air, the odor of guano and mildew, and a dark, alien stench that underlay all these-something profound and fierce and reptilian.

He could not figure how he had come there, but he knew he was far from East Borders and close to home.

Nightbringer lay beside him, glowing with a cold, ebony fire. He shuddered at the memory of those flames on his arm, of the black oblivion, and most of all at the prospect of wielding the weapon again.

"No more," he whispered, his voice as dry and desolate as the vanished plains of Estwilde. "I shall bear you no more, fight no more."

And yet as he said the words, his hand reached for the handle of the mace and closed about it.

He did not know how he had come to that spot. He had knelt in Estwilde, raging and mourning, and the darkness had swept him away. And now he was miles from the fields of East Borders, where he could see the smoke rising from the hearth fires of his childhood home.

Though Nidus was in full view below him, it was a week before he considered returning there. He stayed in the grotto, in its deepest recesses, faring to the mouth of the cavern only at night, and then only when the hunger became overwhelming. Though the sun would not harm him, daylight was strange to him now-alien and unnerving, like darkness to a child.

Far better to stay in the dark awhile, he told himself as the red moon passed sullenly overhead on his second night in the cave. Better to abide here and mend and recover strength.

He ate what bitter roots he could forage from the spare highland terrain: knol and dioscor and the foul-tasting purple betys-chastise root, old Speratus had called it. And by night, the brown madfall beetles were sluggish and unaware. Their flesh was cold and slippery, but it was nutrient enough as long as he did not eat the poisonous tail.

Once he stood at the edge of a precipice, bathed eerily in the red glow of Lunitari, and tried to drop Nightbringer into the obscure and rocky darkness. It seemed fitting, as though dropping it into the darkness would make retrieval impossible if he was weak and returned for the mace. But the weapon fastened itself to his hand, glowing and droning, twisting like some monstrous black leech, and he told himself, Not yet. I can rid myself of it anytime, once my strength is returned. But not yet.

Yet he mistrusted his own thoughts, and so he tried once more. A shadowy pool lay in the nethermost reach of the cavern, so far from light that only the green glow of the vespertile bats lightened its black waters. The madfall beetles who dwelt by its banks had evolved for generations in the near-total darkness, eyeless now, their shells a pale, translucent pink. It seemed like the spot to leave Nightbringer, and for a moment, his heart leaped. There would be rest from all of this-from hunger and cold and from the consuming presence of the mace. He would find peace in the depths of this darkness.

But though Verminaard plunged his hand in the icy water and tried to release the weapon into the calm, deep pool, still the mace adhered to the skin of his hand. It glowed beneath the water, if glowed was the word, a deep, velvety blackness within the abject shadows of the pool.

He tried more drastic methods after that, but fire failed to damage the weapon, and his own paltry spellcraft was powerless against it. It could not be lost, nor could it be destroyed, it seemed, but the deeper truth came to him as the fruitless days passed.

It was a week before he admitted that he could not deliver himself from Nightbringer because he would not be delivered.

But by then he had other concerns, other callings. For Castle Nidus was drawing him as well, and he knew his long night of solitude was almost over. Soon the gates of the castle would open for him, and he would enter as a man utterly changed, brought into total compliance with the Lady's will.

He was the Arm of Takhisis, her champion in the black and flowing light.

Verminaard had found the drus berries earlier that morning. Crushed into a potion, they were the stuff of visionaries, carried in flasks by shaman and druid, by the scattered dark clerics of the Dragon Queen. Growing in the wild, untempered by waters or the alchemist's art, the raw berries offered wilder, more erratic visions. Sometimes more profound.

Or so Cerestes had told him in the long, magical studies of his childhood.

Now, following a long afternoon's meditation at the edge of the daylight, he ate a handful of the violet berries and crept back into the grotto. There he crouched on his massive haunches and waited for the visions and auguries to begin.

He drew forth the rune stones. He would know what She willed. The runes would tell him.

In the days of his solitude, the stones had been as constant a companion as Nightbringer. He felt their strong assurance in the pouch at his belt, and in the day, when he longed for the darkness and the serenity it brought, he would retire into the depths of the cave. There, in the protective shadows, he would clutch the stones like totems. But he had not cast them, had not even looked at them.

But now it was different. Now, in the red moonlight, where their edges glimmered like veins of gold, he called on the Amarach to bode and prophesy.

"Say me the truth, stones," he whispered. "No matter the laughter of soldiers, the scorn of the mages." Closing his eyes, he breathed a brief prayer to the Seven Dark Gods, to the Lady, and to the spirit of the runes, and cast three stones before him.

"That which was," he muttered. "That which is. That which is yet to be."

He opened his eyes and gaped in astonishment.

Blank. Blank. Blank. The same rune in all three positions.

Verminaard rubbed his eyes and looked again. He had not imagined it. The stark nothingness of the blank rune stared at him from past, present, and future.

"Blank," he muttered. "The absence of dark and light."

But there was only one blank rune in the set of stones! How could …

Quickly he rummaged through the discarded runes. Blank… blank… blank. The smooth face of each stone stared at him mockingly.

That night, in the rubble below the cavern, Verminaard danced beneath the full red moon, his tattered black robes brilliant in a bloody light.

The effect of the drus would not wear off until the next morning, and so the young man had set aside the runes and offered worship to the shapes of the dark gods in the stars overhead. He held up the mace to the tilting constellations, and he called for the old powers to course through the weapon and into his willing blood.

Let the covenant be renewed, he told himself, as it was in the cave of the Lady, when I took this mace. Then tomorrow night I shall return to Nidus. Aglaca and I have business to contract. For Lunitari is full, and he will be my general. Or I shall take the girl and destroy them both.

Verminaard blinked drunkenly and watched the stars pass over.

Hiddukel the Scales tilted angrily overhead, a memory of the old injustices, of the betrayals that had brought him to Nidus in infancy and his cold, neglected boyhood. Chemosh of the Yellow Robes brought the dead from the plains and the mountains, and Verminaard exulted at the battered ogres who trooped before his sight, at the knights, clad still in their dented and bloodied armor, who stared at him with milky, vacant eyes.

He laughed as well at the Hood of Morgion, the great mask of disease and decay, for he knew firsthand the deception of masks, and the eyes of his brother Abelaard were blind and vacant as well.

He exulted in the terrible red condor, Sargonnas of the Fires, and he remembered the fires in the forest and on the plains south of Nidus.

But finally the queen emerged in the black sky-the Lady of the Dragons, She of the Many Faces. He knelt and adored her, the black mace quivering in his hand, pulsing and burning. And in her presence, Verminaard of Nidus rose and began to dance.

Or perhaps Nightbringer drew him to his feet and turned him in a quickening spiral, there amid the black rubble and the burned country and the mouth of the grotto. He did not know whether his thoughts or those of the weapon ruled his body and heart.

But in the swirling moonlight, there on the hills that someday men would call the Dragon's Overlook, the Voice spoke again to him out of the heart of the mace.

Dance, my love, it urged him. Dance, my Lord Verminaard, ruler of armies… my love.