Before the Mask

Chapter 5

side of the bridge and, risking the arrows that whined and clattered on the stones behind them, lurched angrily toward the homeward side of the gorge like a long, armored serpent.

Slowly they moved toward the bandits, toward the ragged men who now discarded their bows and drew forth long knives and rusty maces. When Verminaard reached solid ground, there were ten of his party ahead, swords locked with their Nerakan adversaries, and the drift of battle was already shifting toward Daeghrefn, toward the commander of Castle Nidus.

Verminaard looked behind him. Aglaca leapt off the stone bridge and found safer footing, but past him lay a sprawl of bodies. A dozen of Daeghrefn's men slumped, dead or dying, on the stone bridge, and three more had fallen into the gorge. Fifteen in all, a dreadful blow to the castle garrison.

Ahead of the young men, the Nerakans made another vicious assault. Crouching and sidling like maniacal crabs, they would have been ludicrous if it hadn't been for their long knives, sharp and glittering. Daeghrefn's men backed unsteadily to the bridge, their shields raised again and their swords waving fruitlessly. Another man fell to Nerakan knives-Edred, it was, and he called out only once as the bandits swarmed over him. Soon the whole party, from Daeghrefn down to Verminaard and Aglaca, were huddled together behind their horses at the edge of the gorge, their feet slipping in rubble, their swords held narrowly before them. They braced themselves against the Nerakans, who regrouped not twenty feet from their makeshift lines, preparing for yet another charge.

Cramped against Aglaca on one side, with Robert on the other, Verminaard looked over his shoulder, past the huddle of horses to the bridge. There, amid the cluttered corpses, the first Nerakan archers had set foot on the rocky span.

Far behind them, on the other side of the chasm, a girlish form burst forth from the rocks, galloping on a roan mare, chased by two mounted bandits. Hooded and slight, her red robes kirtled around her thighs, she seemed diminished, almost elflike before her two hulking pursuers.

On her right leg was a prisoner's tattoo, the hand-sized silhouette of a dragon's black head.

The girl raised her hands toward the battle, and Verminaard noticed the ropes that bound her wrists together.

A captive, he thought. And a lovely one. She is blond and fair, I'm sure…

What am I thinking of, here at sword's point? He shook his head to fling loose the distracting thoughts as the men around him stumbled forward. Overtaken by the bandits, the girl and her horse moved into the rocks. When Verminaard looked back, she was gone.

Finally the bandits had taken account of numbers. They were turning, retreating before Daeghrefn's superior forces, and the Lord of Nidus's troops were driving them, pressing in with their swords and shouting the names of the fallen.

Over the rocks and the gravel they chased the Nerakans, leaving the bridge, rushing up the mountain pass until the bandits vanished among the branching paths and the crags of the towering cliff face.

Just ahead of Verminaard and Aglaca, drawing his sword and casting his bulky shield aside, old Robert shouted and redoubled his pursuit of a scraggly, bearded Nerakan, who ducked into a tight passage and vanished.

"Follow me!" the seneschal cried, and when Aglaca hesitated, the veteran turned and scowled at him comically.

"After me, Lord Aglaca!" Robert rumbled. "Lest that sword of yours is good only for slicing beetles in the garden!"

Recklessly the old man pivoted and lurched after the retreating Nerakan, and Verminaard and Aglaca, soon lost amid the maze of rock and rubble, followed.

Verminaard's thoughts outpaced his feet, and he fell behind. The girl… I should have rescued her, burst back over the bridge like a questing knight. I could have found the way amid the archers and carried her off from her captors. She would have…

He blinked stupidly. It was the Voice that spoke to him now, entirely enmeshed with his own thoughts. Ahead, Robert turned, slipped between two narrow rocks…

And immediately there came an outcry, the sound of too many voices. Instead of one Nerakan, there were three.

Bursting through the narrow passage after Aglaca, Verminaard saw the old seneschal hemmed in by a pair of bandits. One had forced him against a black rock face, while another, dagger in hand, had scrambled into the rocks above. He was coiled like an adder, waiting his chance to strike. The third, crouched not ten feet away, produced a poniard from a long sleeve and drew back to throw it.

With a ringing cry, Aglaca sprang toward the rocks, his feet and short sword whirling. The perched Nerakan started, lost his footing as he clutched vainly for the rock face, and fell, breaking his neck. Aglaca's small sword broke the arcing poniard in midair, and he was on its owner in an instant. Verminaard circled the struggling pair, sword at the ready but somehow locked out of the combat. Robert took the second man down with a neat cut to his hamstring.

Aglaca wrestled gamely with the bandit, who was far larger and stronger. The Solamnic couldn't get leverage to use his sword. All the while, the dark Voice continued to Stir Verminaard's deepest imagining…

Let them be. What if the bandit wins? Surely Laca would do nothing to Abelaard if his son met with… an accident of battle. And Aglaca brought it on himself with his arrogant refusal to cast the ceremonial spear…

Verminaard stopped, the sword tilted uncertainly in his hand. The bandit rolled free, braced his back against the obsidian rock face, and, setting his feet to Aglaca's chest, launched the lad into the air with a compact, powerful push of his legs.

Aglaca rattled against the far wall of the passage, his sword loosed and clattering across the rock floor. Stunned by the blow, he groped vainly for the long knife at his belt. The bellowing Nerakan leapt to his feet, skidding crazily over gravel, and sprang toward the Solamnic lad, another glinting poniard seeking his throat.

Aglaca's senses cleared, and he found the hilt of his knife. In the split second after the bandit left his feet, the boy drew the weapon, raised it swiftly and certainly…

And met the bandit's last charge as he tumbled fiercely upon Aglaca's blade. The bandit's mouth went slack, and his eyes grew wide. Aglaca gazed up at him, coolly and straight on, until he slumped over in a heap.

Robert, meanwhile, had disposed of his hamstrung opponent. Dazed, kneeling in the rubble, he gathered himself and weaved dizzily to his feet, looking with amazement at the young man who had come to his rescue.

Verminaard, his weapon shamefully clean, shrank into the shadows, hoping somehow that the darkness would swallow him, hide him from blaming eyes…

"You surely plucked those two off of me, Master Aglaca," the seneschal muttered.

Aglaca smiled and dusted off his breastplate and tunic. Dripping with sweat and scraped by his scuffle among the rocks, he leaned against a large stone until he had gathered balance and breath. "They weren't much different from any other kind of pest, Robert/' he replied with a chuckle. Robert, too, broke into a laugh as he recalled his previous taunt. As the battle tension drained from them, they noticed Verminaard, who stood between the narrow rocks, drawn sword still frozen in his hand.

Say nothing, the Voice urged. Whatever you do, do not say it…, They do not know you were here. He has no idea…

Verminaard did as he was told.

The Solamnic lad looked Verminaard over carefully, then wiped his brow. "So at last you found us, Verminaard!" he said curiously. "'Twas tight quarters here. We could've used your arm."

"Indeed we could," Robert grumbled, eyeing him skeptically. He could have sworn he'd seen Verminaard earlier in the fray. Hobbling a bit from the basting he had suffered at the hands of the Nerakans, he limped past the young man back onto the mountain trail, headed toward the bridge and the rest of his companions.

"No matter," Aglaca quickly added, his voice cheerful and melodious. "No matter, because, as you see, there was no harm in your delay, no bruise in your waiting."

They found Daeghrefn not far from the bridge, gathering his men and reckoning his losses.

Of the forty retainers who had embarked on the morning's hunt with the Lord of Nidus, only two dozen remained. Osman, of course, had fallen in the encounter with the centicore. The Nerakan ambush had killed fifteen of Daeghrefn's finest troops.

When two of the retainers, rough farm boys from Kern, returned from the chase bearing two Nerakan heads on pikes, Daeghrefn turned away and said nothing, for he shared their bitterness and anger. Aside from that pair of especially unfortunate bandits and the three slain by Aglaca and Robert, the skirmish had brought no recompense for Daeghrefn's forces. The Nerakans had vanished into the rocks, leaving dead men and disarray on the paths behind them.

And the girl, Verminaard thought, standing in the background while Robert told Daeghrefn how Aglaca had shown mettle and speed in the struggle with the bandits. Whoever she was… bound and captive and … and in deep distress, I know.

Daeghrefn nodded brusquely at Robert's speech. Aglaca might be Laca's son, but despite the ancient quarrel, the boy had conducted himself with exceptional gallantry. He glanced from the disheveled, amiable Solamnic youth to the other, the darker, larger, and decidedly unfa-tigued presence, who sat atop his horse now, lost in a labyrinth of thought.

Verminaard didn't notice that Daeghrefn had looked at him, for his mind was elsewhere, high on the far and sunlit side of the stone bridge.

Had I but the chance to prove it, she… she would…

He couldn't imagine what would happen.

Trapped in his own reflections, communing with the dark Voice that arose from his thoughts and from somewhere deeper than his thoughts, he rode back to Castle Nidus, trailing the column.

From the battlements of Castle Nidus, sentries watched the approach of Daeghrefn's beaten line of riders. Almost at once, the sharper-eyed among them began to count, and counted again, as two dozen men rode in from the waning light of the foothills, torches already lifted against the oncoming evening.

Quickly, with rising apprehension, the sentries alerted the castle. Soon, with murmurings and rumor, everyone assembled in the bailey yard. There the kitchen sweep shifted from foot to foot next to the old astrologer from Estwilde, and the falconer leaned uneasily against the wall of the keep, exchanging hushed words with the cook. None had foreseen this grim news. Never had a routine hunt been so disastrous, and only twice before had the Nerakans attacked anyone this close to Nidus.

Aglaca turned over the day's unhappy events in his mind and knew that it would be a long time before he could go home to East Borders. Eight long years past… how many more to go until some sort of peace would release him from Nidus? His youth was being poured out in the gebo-naud, and by now he should have attained his knighthood. Or maybe even his most secret desire-to serve Paladine with all his being.

Perhaps Daeghrefn had been right about his needing a guard to keep him from answering the call of East Borders. Like the dead of the day, Aglaca had not chosen his fate nor his company.

Perched at the mouth of a high cave, almost a mile above the three lofty turrets of the castle, there was one who understood more clearly. Cerestes shielded his golden eyes against the red slant of sun and counted the approaching troops. Then his gaze narrowed and focused, and the birds around the mouth of the cavern hushed in a sort of fearful expectancy.

This time he could count the holes in the tattered foremost banner. Eagerly his sight raced down the column.

Good. Aglaca and Verminaard both were there.

Satisfied, he stalked into the growing darkness, into an enormous circular chamber, void of light and wind and silent except for the perpetual dripping of water somewhere even farther back in the cave.

It was the appointed spot. She had told him in a dream, when he had begged her again to reveal his purpose in this place. Though the years in Daeghrefn's service were not long as his kind measured time, she had kept him beyond his patience.

Softly at first, insinuating her voice with the slow, rhythmic music of the water, she came to him, the Dark Queen Takhisis, foremost in the evil pantheon, her voice as intimate as his own thoughts.

So this is how it is for them, Cerestes mused. For Aglaca and Verminaard, to whom she has spoken since childhood. How they hear her voice in their own imaginings.

This is no game, the goddess reminded him, her voice louder now, sweet and low-pitched like the distant murmur of bees, like the sound of the night over Godshome. What care you for their hearing, for the soft persuasions that bring them to me? Those are mine and theirs. Are they aught of your concern?

"Of course not," Cerestes replied, knowing her question was no question, but a grim reminder of his boundaries.

Deep in the recesses of the cavern, the sound of the water ceased. He was alone now, with his thoughts and her quiet and sinuous voice.

Become yourself, cleric, Takhisis urged. Reveal your true self before your queen.

Cerestes coughed and glanced nervously toward the faint sliver of light behind him.

Oh, we are alone, she soothed. Those below are far too concerned with ambush and accident, rapt in the counting of their little deaths. None have followed you here.

"Are you sure?" he asked, and regretted his words at once.

In the depths of the cavern, the darkness roiled and swirled.

This is no time for questions, the Lady said, and her darkness surged to surround Cerestes. The void tugged at him, molding him, drawing him from his body into an older, more familiar shape, forsaken for years. A green half-light sweated from the walls, and he saw the floor of the chamber, the rows of stalagmites like jagged teeth, the litter of broken bones and charcoal.

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 cleric-not 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 druidess-regarding 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.

I 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 Chapter 6 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 challenge-a 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 Life-the 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 lecture-how 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."

"I–I 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 Hammer-symbol 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 be-not '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 herself-used 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 well-better, 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.

And since She seemed resolved to test the youths by allowing them this adventure, Cerestes could not seize the girl himself…

And since one of the lads, no doubt, would be the Dark Lady's cleric, and the dragon queen paid him in a harder currency…

And there was the matter of the missing rune. And finally of a temple in Neraka.

He would see that temple, he resolved, but not for Takhisis's sake. In the temple's obsidian stones lay secrets as mysterious as those housed in the sixteenth and hidden rune. But these were different secrets-of worldly architecture, of politics and power and the strategies of a hun-. dred dark clerics who awaited the arrival of their mistress.

A dragon's eye could translate those secrets-the simple intrigues of humans to whom the goddess had not yet come.

And then, with Takhisis safely imprisoned behind the portal, he would sound the runes, find the green gem-stone, and remove it from her grasp forever. Perhaps he would have it made into a ring of power, a symbol of his own new order.

Cerestes murmured in obscure anticipation, a veil of spells like smoke enshrouding his face. He was a rune himself, a blank rune, he thought, his imagination more fanciful as he crossed over, at last, into sleep.

He was, after all, a dragon. A superior being. He could fashion a prophecy of his own, and what he desired would come to pass.

Verminaard checked his plan again.

The groom's son was bribed, as well as the sentries at the east gate.

Two horses would await him in the stable-one for himself, and one for the returning girl-and the east gate of the castle would remain mysteriously open and unguarded for an hour after midnight.

It was orchestrated completely and carefully, and yet Verminaard fidgeted through the sparse meal in the early evening at the silent, somber table with Daeghrefn and Aglaca, Robert and the mage. He hovered nervously above the cold food, certain that all eyes were upon him, all thoughts uncovering his secret quest.

He cursed himself for having been foolish enough to confide in others. Left to his own, Daeghrefn could spend days, weeks without even once speaking to him. Verminaard could travel all the way to the Icewall and back, a journey of some nine hundred miles coming and going, and be assured that Daeghrefn would not notice.

But perhaps the mage had warned the Lord of Nidus. Or Aglaca had told, naturally, in some meddlesome concern for his safety. Though Verminaard had clued neither of them that this was the appointed night, he feared they might know, for the insinuating Voice, silent for so long as he had arranged his adventure, had begun to goad him late last evening that this night-with the banked clouds and the summer winds dying-would be ideal for unseen travel.

Perhaps someone else heard the same Voice, the same goading?

And yet they seemed unperturbed, seated in their high-backed chairs, the yellow light from the hearth dancing over Cerestes' wine cup, over Aglaca's glittering knife as he set it to the venison and carved gracefully, deftly, with the Solamnic manners that nine years at Castle Nidus had not shaken from him.

The mage and Aglaca finished their meals and excused themselves. Verminaard pushed back his chair as well, intent on following Aglaca, but a cold stare from

Daeghrefn stopped him before he completely stood, and it was a long moment until Robert rose, muttered something to Lord Nidus about "talJage" and "archer's pay," and the two older men retired to the fireside, a ledger and another bottle of wine set between them.

Backing at last from the chamber, Verminaard glanced one more time at the grayed heads bowed over the castle records. The tilting light magnified his father's shadow until Daeghrefn seemed to fill the hall with a thin, indefinite darkness, through which the lean hounds stalked, scavenging under the table. It was a shadow that seemed to follow the lad down the corridor and up the stairs to his quarters, where a huddled shape under the blankets told him that Aglaca had already fallen off to sleep.

Quietly he draped his heavy cloak over his shoulder, slowly buckled on his sword and knife, and took up his bow. Then there was the little jeweled risting dagger Aglaca had given him after the gebo-naud. It was two days' ride to Neraka, and he had thought it better to forage for food along the way than to risk calling attention to himself by taking provisions from Robert's closely monitored larders. He withdrew the sack of runes from beneath his mattress, holding his breath as the stones clicked together loudly in the leather bag.

Aglaca did not stir, but lay in a leaden silence-a thick, invulnerable sleep.

Verminaard leaned over the edge of Aglaca's bed and stared perplexedly at the draped form, heavily covered and blanketed on a night unseasonably warm. He and the Solamnic youth had spent most of their time together in silence or argument and rivalry, in the long foraging hunts through the highlands and mock combat of Robert's demanding lists. Verminaard, much the larger and stronger of the two, managed to baste Aglaca thoroughly in tests of strength, and Aglaca still refused outright to compete in Cerestes' classroom, stoically scorning the instructions of the dark mage.

"There is no defeat in you," Verminaard whispered, then caught himself, surprised at the respect in his voice. Quietly, angrily, he unsheathed and tossed Aglaca's small gift dagger onto the foot of the bed.

In the eight years Verminaard had held it, the magic Aglaca had claimed for the weapon had yet to show itself. Protection against evil indeed! He had never seen the blade do its work, never seen it glow with the fierce and arcane light of real enchanted weaponry. If it hadn't protected him against the lesser evils of Castle Nidus, what good would it be on the dark roads through the mountains?

After all, it was only a small knife, a child's gaudy toy. And he was about a man's business, traveling south to Neraka in the dead of night.

Verminaard stood uncomfortably and strode to the door. The corridor was dark and damp, and he removed his boots to take the stairs silently, attentive to every sound in the castle-the resettling of beams, the murmur of deep voices from downstairs, and the rustle and growl of the dogs in the great hall. Twice he had to wait, holding his breath in the dark recesses of the corridors as sentries passed by. It seemed like hours until he stepped into the night air, into the bailey, and raced across the castle courtyard to the stables against the east wall.

He would bid it all good-bye gladly-castle and garrison and especially Daeghrefn. A new freedom lay before him, frightening him and inspiring him at the same time, and Verminaard longed to embrace it as he moved toward a solitary light waving in the shadows of the east tower.

The stable door was open and the stalls lit dimly by that lonely lantern, just as the bribed boy had promised. Verminaard slipped through the door and closed it behind him, starting for a moment at the hooded form that stood between the stalls, tightening the cinch on a black mare's saddle.

Young Frith, it seemed, was intent on earning his illicit pay. In the adjoining stall, Verminaard's black stallion Orlog stood saddled and set for the coming journey.

Verminaard inspected the boy's work.

"Good," he breathed. "Very good. Frith, you saddle a horse for a knight. When I return, I'll see to it that your lot rises with my father."

"See to your own lot," the hood replied, and turned to face him with a crooked smile and dancing eyes.

"Aglaca!" Verminaard exclaimed much too loudly. Then, angrily clutching the youth by the hood, he threw him roughly to the floor of the stall.