Before the Mask

Chapter 19

From the top of the tower, he could see the faces of thec gods.

Daeghrefn knew that they all were watching-twenty sets of eyes in the blackness of the firmament, all eternally fixed upon this castle, this tower, this circle of candle and torch.

How foolish he had been not to believe in them!

For they sang in the stars and rustled in the stones of the tower. And none of them forgave him, for Verminaard had told them terrible things.

Daeghrefn had coveredthe mirror in his chambers, draping the polished glass with black cloth, as though the castle were in mourning. It was a precaution, he told himself. He had set the mirror by the window years a" go, to illumine the bare interiors of his bedroom with reflected moonlight, but his invention had now turned dangerous. Now the gods could watch him in it, mark his reflection always in the mirror as he passed by, and his presence anywhere in the deep interiors of the tower.

Daeghrefn shivered and looked over the pass at Eira Goch, west into the black face of the Khalkists. Estwilde was miles away, on the other side of the range-or so his men insisted. But Daeghrefn knew otherwise. At night, when the black moon shone on the slopes of the mountains, the entire country crept eastward, its boundaries swelling over Jelek, over the forgotten ruins of Gods-home…

The dry steppes of Estwilde were moving at night, and Laca was at the head of the armies-pale-eyed Laca, traitor for these twenty years.

Laca was not content to steal sons. He would steal Abe-laard's inheritance as well.

Daeghrefn leaned against the tower walls, turning south now toward the fire-blackened forest. Holding aloft a sputtering torch, he peered into the shadowy, moonlit wasteland. There would be no aid from that direction, nor from beyond. What help could he expect from a band of Nerakans he had fought for nine years? Their leader-a cutthroat named Hugin-had vowed to "skewer the Stormcrow on a pike and carry him like a flapping standard through his own gates."

He had overheard that vow in a dream. So it had to be true. And Verminaard planned to join with the bandits.

Daeghrefn covered his ears. The incessant whine from the mountains-shrill and maddening, like a choir of gnats-had begun again. The gods were mocking him, he was sure. Soon Nidus would be alone on the plains of Neraka, crushed between two armies and sapped from within by an ungrateful boy.

There was no escape to the north, where Gargath lay, sacred to the dwarves and gnomes. He would find no refuge among the worshipers of Reorx, for none of the gods forgave him.

But there was always the east. The high peaks of Berkanth and Minith Luc, and beyond a high green plain, no doubt untouched by the ogres' fire, where a man could lose himself for years, could vanish until the gods themselves could not find him. He looked hopefully toward the eastern foothills, where Solinari was on the rise in the autumn sky.

Someone was dancing on the rocky cliffs above the castle, framed by the silver light of the moon. He held something aloft-something glittering and black.

Daeghrefn leaned over the parapet, craning for a better look. For a moment, he thought it was Kiri-Jolith himself, the ancient god of battles, or perhaps black Nuitari rising out of the silver heart of his sister.

Then he saw that the figure held up a mace, and he knew who it was, dancing alone in the eastern mountains. "Verminaard!" he spat. "May the Dark Seven devour you!"

Frightened, fascinated, Daeghrefn leaned out even farther, until the bailey seemed to spin below him. He strained beyond the torchlight into the chilling dark, and he watched as the shadow rose to cover the moon, to block out the light with its black, leathery wings…

Then he remembered the druidess's prophecy: This child will eclipse your own darkness.

And the moon was engulfed in Verminaard's shadow. Alone on the parapet, awash in the thin light of torches and candles, the Lord of Nidus shrank against the stone walls, his hands shaking. In the firelight, he cast no shadow, and it occurred to him that his shadow would not return, that he had no substance left to summon it.

I am becoming transparent, he thought, a wild laugh rising to his lips. Transparent, like madfall beetles in the cavern depths. He held up his hands, examining them closely. They were blue and cadaverous, blanching as he watched.

Daeghrefn staggered into his chambers, crying aloud as he jostled the mirror. He wheeled, tore the cloth from the glass, and glared at his own reflection.

His hair was straw-pale, and his eyes were light blue- the color of vacant skies.

"It is my pleasure to come at the bidding of the Lord of Nidus," Judyth began formally, and" the haunted eyes pivoted toward her. "And to offer him tonic and balm for his malady."

"Then Verminaard sent you? And you treat with him? For he is the Lord of Nidus. Or so they are all saying."

Judyth did not answer. Nervously she fingered the pendant at her throat.

Daeghrefn cleared his throat and rose painfully from his chair. He was hooded, and he shied away from the light as he spoke. Judyth felt as if she were talking to a wraith, to a walking dead man.

"You're with Verminaard often," Daeghrefn said. "You were there at his birth."

"Sir?" Judyth asked, immediately confused. But she answered cautiously, "I see him little of late."

That much was true. Twice she had seen Verminaard from the window of Aglaca's quarters as he paced over the battlements in the moonlight-a cloaked shadow gripping that black, infernal mace. He kept his distance now, Aglaca said-from the castle garrison, from the soldiers, from all his old companions-and Judyth had begun to wonder if the hew Lord of Nidus wasn't as mad as the old one who stood before her, muttering of fire and snow and conspiracy.

"Even so," Daeghrefn replied oddly, as though he had read her thoughts. He turned toward the fire and braced himself against the back of the chair, which creaked and teetered beneath him. "What does he want, druidess?" "1… I don't understand, sir. And my name is Judyth." "It's a simple question, really. What does Verminaard want?"

Judyth shifted uncomfortably on her stool. "I don't know, sir."

"Are you with him?"

"I beg your pardon?" Daeghrefn's questions were vague and needling. Judyth felt suddenly hot and itchy, as though she were dressed in wool under high summer sunlight.

"Are you part of the mutiny, damn it!"

He was much too loud. The voices in the hallway stopped abruptly, and Judyth imagined the soldiers who had escorted her to Daeghrefn's chambers now crouched at the door outside, listening as their commander further unraveled.

"No, sir. I would not conspire against you."

"So there is a conspiracy. I knew it! What have you heard, then?"

I must leave his presence, Judyth thought. I must get word to the west, regardless of soldiers and mages and dragons. Nidus is fast becoming a madhouse.

She started to stand, but Daeghrefn's menacing stare fixed her to her seat. He slipped into the shadows, crouching behind a statue of great Zivilyn, a spreading vallen-wood carved from veined marble.

"I have heard little, sir," Judyth replied uneasily. "Bits and snatches, but no more than that. Actually, I'm not certain. I have only just met him."

"You met him on a snowy night twenty years ago, in a cave south of here. Do not lie to me. And you said then, druidess, you said then, that his darkness would eclipse my own. Look upon your curse, woman!" He emerged from behind the marble tree, and he threw back his hood.

Judith quietly gazed upon the dark skin, though somewhat paler for his confinement in the tower, the dark hair, and the wild, dark eyes.

"Don't you see what he's done?" Daeghrefn insisted. "What you've done? I should have killed you both that night. Had it not been for Abelaard…"

Daeghrefn snorted and turned back toward the fire. Quietly, after a long, uncomfortable silence, Judyth rose.

"I shall be leaving now, sir. That is, if you have no more questions."

"You know much more than you are saying," the Lord of Nidus declared calmly, solemnly. "Do you remember how cold it was?"

" 'How cold', sir?"

"The night of his birth. In the mountains south of here. Before the fire."

Judith glanced nervously toward the door. Daeghrefn was shifting from time to time, place to place. For a brief, nightmarish moment, Judyth lost sight of him in the shadows. Then suddenly he was standing before the little chapel altar, a candle in his hand. His eyes gleamed brilliantly, like twin flames.

"Oh, I know who you are. This innocence and Lord Daeghrefn, sir serves you ill, druidess. I thought you were long dead, but, no, Robert failed me. He was worthless, and it is good that I left him on the plains. Though perhaps you fooled him as well. I know that your kind can change shape, altering like the seasons or like clouds in the summer sky, though I recognized you at once by the pendant around your neck."

"I still do not understand, sir." Judyth covered the purple stone at her throat.

"The old stories are right," Daeghrefn pronounced, turning to face the altar. "The druids do steal babies."

"Steal babies, sir?"

"They take the promised son, the second child whose birth you await with joy for seven long months, and in its stead they leave… a night-grown changeling." He laughed bitterly.

"I do not-"

"So you have said!" Daeghrefn roared. Then softly, almost wonderingly, he continued. "I saw him dancing last night in the eastern hills, where the little copse of evergreen… where, on the night of the fire…"

He fell silent. Judyth cleared her throat and waited for words that did not come as a minute passed, then another. Finally she backed from the room, leaving the Lord of Nidus staring into the fire.

As he looked at the flickering flames, Daeghrefn remembered another fire, another burning. Suddenly, as though the Abyss had opened to receive him, his thoughts were consumed again with a vision of dark, spreading wings.

Two figures walked the walls of Castle Nidus that night.

On the southwest corner of the battlements, Aglaca kept a lonely vigil, watching the walls, the towers, and the bailey for a sign of his old companion. He had slipped his guards by the stables, but it was nothing new. A lazy pair, they would no doubt wait for him to return, knowing he was going nowhere without Judyth, without all his belongings, left in the room he had stayed in since he was twelve years old.

Resting for a moment against the stone crenelations, the Solamnic youth gazed toward Eira Goch, veiled in a deep western darkness, and smiled as he remembered how he had pointed out the pass to Verminaard from their bedroom window ten years ago, on the night after the gebo-naud.

Verminaard had known the name of the place and its history, but he could not locate it in the dark. Aglaca had given Verminaard the dagger then, and though the little weapon lay polished and well kept in the room upstairs, the promise of their friendship had suffered far worse over the years.

It seemed somehow fitting. Fitting and circular. Aglaca would have to find the pass for Verminaard again- another kind of pass, through another kind of darkness.

For the last three weeks, Verminaard had kept to himself. No one knew where he was quartered, nor had any in the garrison-from aged Graaf down to Tangaard and young Phillip-spoken with the new Lord of Nidus. All of them, however, had glimpsed him at twilight, walking these very battlements.

Pacing in the moonlight. Clutching the mace.

The men were afraid to approach him.

Aglaca was not afraid, but he waited as well, as the dark form stalked the battlements. For Aglaca did not relish new meetings with Verminaard, nor the prospects of being asked again to become the new Marshal of Nidus, second-in-command of a bleak legion of bandits and mercenaries.

No. His part of the story did not lie in war and conquest.

That evening, standing on the cold battlements of Nidus, Aglaca had at last understood that the story he was in was not really his own. It was not an easy thing to admit, even for a gentle and generous soul such as Aglaca, but after he had spoken with the old man in the garden, it came to him quietly that his was only a small part in a great unfolding tale. While he had spent his time in Nidus, hostage in a pact of lesser nobles, large, ungovernable forces had wrestled and warred in the mountains, over the entire continent of Ansalon-throughout all Krynn, for that matter. At stake in their vast contest was history itself, for whichever side in the struggle emerged victorious, the world Aglaca had known would all be changed in a moment.

He knew as well, and with a strange serenity and relief, that his role in the coming history, one way or another, would be over soon. Soon the songs that the old man had taught him would come of age. They were dangerous and volatile words, a god's magic to distract the mage and save his friend. After the magic was spent, Aglaca could never use it again. Then he would walk a path even more dangerous and volatile as Verminaard made a choice of his own.

But Aglaca would try the spell and brave the danger to free Verminaard from his own gebo-naud with Night-bringer and the goddess who gave the weapon life.

"So be it," Aglaca whispered, and a warm, unseasonable wind rose from the western slopes. "I am almost eager for it to begin."

But where was the mage? And where was Verminaard?

A strange shadow over his shoulder caused the young man to turn toward the western tower. There, atop the battlements, a cloaked figure stepped into the moonlight. He recognized the strides at once-the broad shoulders and the hair as fair as his own.

Aglaca crouched at once, hiding in the shadows of the crenelations.

At the moment the moonbeam touched his robes, Verminaard began to shimmer with an eerie black light. The robes seemed to expand, to double in on one another, folding and boiling like a distant stormy ocean. For a moment, his face seemed to lengthen, his skin to dapple and scale.

Then, in a dizzying swirl of color and light, he became the mage Cerestes. He lifted his hands to the east, to the foothills above the castle, where the old copse of evergreens had risen before the fire.

Aglaca shook his head. He had been watching the change with fascination, as a small defenseless animal watches the hypnotic nod and weave of the neidr snake. So the man he had seen on the battlements was not Verminaard at all but the dark mage in disguise.

Then where was Verminaard?

Low in the eastern sky, a black shadow crossed over the face of Lunitari. "The hollow moon," Cerestes said, his voice carrying eerily in the night air. The mage began to chant, his hands weaving gracefully, gesturing toward the foothills, toward a patch of darkness gliding there in the moonlight, moving swiftly toward the castle.

Slipping along the shadows of the battlements, Aglaca drew nearer and nearer the black-clad mage. He stopped in astonishment at the tower walls as a new voice rose out of the chanting, low and feminine, familiar from the days of his childhood, when he had fought its soft insinuations.

It was the Voice in the cave, the taunting voice of the goddess. Cerestes mouthed the words, but it was the Voice who spoke through him.

And out on the foothills, the approaching darkness took solid form-the broad shoulders… the fair hair. Verminaard was approaching, and a dark magic was ready to meet him.

Aglaca took a deep breath. Best to bind Cerestes now, while his thoughts were elsewhere and his energies linked to the dark and distant hill. Best do it quickly as well, for his own chant was a long one, one verse for each of the moons. He breathed a quick prayer to Paladine that the saying of these words would not consume him, for had not the old man spoken of their dangerous and volatile power?

He was no enchanter. But for this one time, the words were his to speak.

" 'By the lights of Paladine/ " he began,

"And Solinari's silver glow,

Let the words unite and bind

Light above to light below;

Let candle, torch, and lantern shine.

By the lights of Paladine."

Cerestes stood upright, his long meditation on the Lady- on the chants that would bind the returning Verminaard- brought to a sudden halt.

The tips of his fingers burned, as they always did when the Light Gods threatened, and Cerestes knew the disturbance for what it was.

Swiftly, urgently, he wheeled and sniffed the air, his heightened senses tasting the mustiness of the tower, the smoky, autumnal bailey, the sharp animal stench of the stables.

Where was the chanter?

His keen ears gathered the whir of a cricket near the seneschal's quarters, the call of an owl in the garden, something scuttling in the battlements of the western tower. Where? Where?

Already his senses were fading, binding to human limits, the keen draconic eyesight dwindling into blurs of distant shadow as the far walls seemed to vanish before his straining gaze.

Then, from the wall below, at last he heard the voice. He heard the second verse begin.

"In Gilean's red and balanced light, Let light before match light behind,

And Lunitari charge the night With shadows human and confined. Let eyes define the edge of sight In Gilean's red and balanced light."

Something moved in the shadow of the western wall.

Cerestes shielded his eyes and looked down, but the dark had encroached, and he could not see the chanter. His fingers burned horribly, and he rushed for the stairwell, cold panic propelling his steps onto the battlements.

Quickly. Before the third verse.

He teetered precariously on the narrow ramparts, stumbling and clutching the walls as he raced toward the chanter.

He was too late. The verse had already begun.

"Back into Nuitari's gloom,

Let all rough magic now depart…"

Cerestes breathed an old, evil incantation, and black fire settled in his hand. With a muted outcry, he hurled the fireball at the sound of the voice and staggered on when the chant continued…

Aglaca felt the hot wind brush by his face, heard the wall shatter behind him. Still he continued, his memory holding the last words of the song, untouched by the heat and burning as a dark fire encircled him, rose, then suddenly began to fade.

"Let centuries of night entomb

The dark maneuverings of the heart…"

The ramparts beneath him rumbled and shook. Aglaca leapt to the tower, clutching the mortared stone, scrambling up the face of the wall. The mage leaned over the battlement, and red fire flashed from his hands.

Aglaca clutched the base of a tower window, and with a somersault that the druidess taught him in the garden, vaulted gracefully onto the sill. The fire rushed by him, and he leapt into the open room, an unoccupied guest chamber, and raced up the stairs to the roof of the tower.

Aglaca opened the oaken door to the roof, and the stars swelled, and the cold air rushed over him. At the battlements, the mage wheeled about, his eyes flaming with rage, his hands raised for yet another spell.

Remember the last lines, Aglaca told himself, rolling out of the way of a black bolt of lightning that shattered the door behind him. By all the gods, remember!

And then the Voice came to him, one final time, soft and seductive and brimming with promises.

It is all yours, Aglaca Dragonbane. Cease your chanting and release my servant, and it is all yours…

The walls seemed to fall away, though Aglaca knew it was a vision. Before him lay a continent waiting, from Kern in the farthermost east, to Estwilde and Throt, to Solamnia and Coastlund, then west to Ergoth and San-crist, the island kingdoms…

It is all yours, Lord Aglaca. All this power I shall give you, and the glory of it…

Aglaca laughed. "I have heard it before," he muttered, "and it did not move me then. You cannot stop me!" Rebuffed by his laughter, the dark insinuations fled from his thoughts. His voice strong with faith and assurance now, Aglaca pronounced the song's end in the shrieking, pummeling darkness of Cerestes' futile spellcraft.

"Let darkest magic flee, consumed By Nuitari's ravenous gloom."

Cerestes panted before him on the battlements. The mage looked smaller in the moonlight, his handsome features drawn and wearied, his once-golden eyes as depth-less and dull as firebrick.

"Do not gloat, Solamnic," he threatened, his voice strangely high, thin, void of resonance. "The dragon is confined within me, but I have not been idle in my human form. A formidable mage stands before you, and a thousand magicks wait at my bidding."

"Try one of them," Aglaca urged. "Try your most powerful spell, Cerestes."

The mage lifted his hajnd, ready to cast a fireball, and breathed the old incantation.

Nothing happened.

"You cannot do it," Aglaca replied calmly. "Us as simple as that. Your magic has left you, sorcerer, and we stand here man to man."

"But the one who approaches has power, Solamnic," Cerestes said. "You have not accounted for Verminaard, nor for the mace Nightbringer, which he holds like his own dark heart. You will lose, Aglaca. My spells may fail, my magic falter, but you will lose."

"He will decide that," Aglaca said. "Verminaard will choose."

"Oh, very good, Solamnic." The mage leered. "I would have it no other way. And we will not wait long."

He pointed to the east, where Verminaard moved quickly from the moonlit foothills, trailing a swath of blackness behind him as he turned toward Castle Nidus.

"I have no dragonsight," Cerestes hissed. "You have taken that from me as well. But it can be restored by Verminaard. Here he comes, riding the crest of the absolute night, and I can see far enough to know him."