Before the Mask

Chapter 8

"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, look-it'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 cavernchairs, perhaps, or the oaken bucket-than 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 rim-not 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 marking-the 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 something-some 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 Forest-the 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, too-that 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 chose-quietly 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.

"I had no idea the bandits were so plentiful," he declared. "It's no wonder Daeghrefn hasn't killed them all yet."

"Enough of the bandits. Where now?" Verminaard asked. "Where is she?"

Aglaca looked at him curiously. "I can't tell amid all these flags and commotions. We'll have to scout it out, keeping our distances and wits about us and our ears open as well as our eyes. Not even bandits can hide her from us forever."

But it seemed long indeed, as the lads skirted the outlying camps.

No sooner had they started to move west, in a wide counterclockwise circle about the village, than their pres ence was masked by yet another thick mist. Out of nowhere it rose again, rolling over the city until only the towers of the temple were visible through the dense fog, and the colors of the banners were muted, lost in a dozen layers of gray.

It was no ragtag group of bandits that they circled, no disorganized band of cutthroats. Around Neraka was assembling the makings of an army, and judging from the languages and accents and dialects that carried to them through the fog, it was an army gathered from far and exotic places-from Sanction and Estwilde, but also from Kern and from other places where the accents were even stranger. They were far from alert, and far from ready, but the numbers were great and growing.

"See? Aglaca whispered. "Some of them are only now pitching tents. This is a time of arrivals, but what they're arriving/or is a mystery."

"Whatever it is," Verminaard observed, "my father should know. He'll not take to a huge Nerakan army at his doorstep."

"Nor will they take to him, I'd reckon," Aglaca agreed. "Perhaps the girl can tell us."

"If I ever find her," Verminaard muttered gloomily. "Perhaps this whole business has been unwise."

Then the Voice came to him, its inflections as soft and mysterious as the fog, its tones more melodious, more feminine than ever before.

Unwise? Of course not. You have traveled this far this well, and the prison is at hand. The Pen, they call it, on the western grounds, in the midst of the green encampment.

Be ruled by me. Despite the fog and the sentries and the perils ahead of you, I am here to guide you.

"But there are so many of them," Verminaard protested aloud, his voice shrill and thin in the foggy air. Aglaca looked back at him in alarm and signaled for silence.

The day will come, the Voice continued, quietly and alluringly, when you will be thankful for their numbers. You will come back here, Verminaard of Nidus, and all this power I will give you, and the glory of it, for it is given to me of old, and in my power to give it to whomever I please…

"Stay behind me," Aglaca whispered sharply. "And stay down where you belong!"

Verminaard blinked stupidly, his thoughts drawn from the maze of the Voice by his companion's warning. He found himself standing full upright in the waist-high grass, an easy target had the fog been thinner and the sentries more alert.

Instantly he crouched, but the Voice was not through with him.

Be ruled by me, it intoned. These things are mine to give, for the smallest of favors. I shall show you this as the hours unfold.

"No," Aglaca said flatly, to nothing and no one, his back to Verminaard. The older lad turned toward him in astonishment, and looking over his shoulder, Aglaca grinned sheepishly.

"Just that voice again, Verminaard," he admitted. "Come to me with another set of lies. Guess I forgot myself in the quarrel."

"Enough of voices," Verminaard declared. "We need to find the girl. This fog can't last forever."

It can if a dragon wields it, Ember thought, coiled not a hundred yards from the young men, his thoughts masked against intrusion and his wings moving slowly, cyclically, fanning the fog he had summoned magically as it spread through the landscape, darkening and thickening.

Takhisis's commands were convenient, the dragon mused. How better to take the girl than to have Verminaard and Aglaca do it for him?

He smiled, baring his many rows of long teeth. His golden eyes glittered as he searched the mist, then found Verminaard and Aglaca again as they stooped in the grass and waited. It would not be long before they found the Pen.

His scales rippled red and gold and red with a fierce anticipation. It was all falling into place.

Only this voice troubled him. Aglaca spoke of it now freely and often, and to hear him tell it, you would think he argued with it daily. It might be hallucination, born of his loneliness at Castle Nidus, but the dragon suspected otherwise.

It might be what prompted Aglaca when, in the guise of the mage Cerestes, Ember had offered the young man magic. Perhaps this voice had urged Aglaca to refuse those studies.

The other one seemed oblivious to the coaxing of this voice-of any voice. Then again, he was dense and stubborn, not the kind to be won by words and argument. Aglaca was the brains and Verminaard the muscle of this quest, and, masked by this magical fog, it would not be long until the girl was in their hands. Then, in the safety of Nidus, in the trust of her rescuers, her lips would open to a kindly dark mage named Cerestes. She would tell him of druids and runes and magnificent strategies, never knowing she spoke those words into the ears of a dragon.

He would know before all of them. Before Verminaard and Daeghrefn, to be sure, but before Aglaca as well. And therefore, before Laca's spies and Laca himself…

And before Takhisis. Before the Dark Queen knew, and found the missing rune, and the stone, and the key to her worldly kingdom.

He would sound the girl and the rune, the lads and the grounds of the temple he faced, dark in the midst of the fog he had engendered. He would sound them all, and when the Dragon Queen's mission failed at the gates of her own temple, he would be the lord of the mountains and the lands that lay beyond them. The clerics would answer to him, and it would be his governing voice in the ears of the rich and powerful, not some thin, insinuating babble in the mind of a lone Solamnic boy.

The dragon purred, a low, rumbling sound that the lads and the sentries beyond mistook for thunder, for a rising storm out of the north.

This is a comedy of mirrors, the goddess thought, reclining in the warm, swirling night winds of the Abyss.

Around her lay darkness on darkness, darkness layering darkness until those places where light had fled entirely seemed hazy, almost luminous, compared to places darker still that surrounded them-a gloom not only of shadows but of spirit.

But Takhisis was laughing now, her low, melodious laugh echoing in the great surrounding void. A comedy of mirrors, when one character watches another, who in turn watches a third watching a fourth, and all of this observed by the audience itself, watching from beyond the play's little world of spies and intruders.

Ember certainly did not know she watched him as he crouched, flightless and stupid, in the high, foggy grasslands. Let him approach her temple; let him see what he would see.

She would win, regardless of what he discovered.

As for the lads, they knew her only fleetingly, when what they called "the Voice" came to them, and she told them dark, unimaginable things. One would be hers, twisted from his high bloodline to her desire and design.

There would be no room for the other.

Turning in the perpetual blackness, fluttering her pennons, she dropped straight down ten thousand fathoms, plummeting, falling, dreaming, until at length she floated amid a wild, universal hubbub of stunning sounds, of disembodied voices all confused, borne through the hollow dark. She laughed amidst the chaos of noise, and she thought of Laca.

His pedigreed line, aflourish since the Age of Light, would end in a traitorous son.

It would be the last drop of Huma's blood, she thought. With one of the two-whether Verminaard or Aglaca, she cared not which, though she had begun to suspect which one it would be-the line would end.

She thought of Huma and shivered. Thought of the bright lance exploding in her chest, the incandescent swirl of darkness and the crackle of the firmament as the lance thrust her into the negative plane of dark and chaos, of the Jiight winds that whirled about her, buoying and buffeting her, and of the continual whining and whirring of these voices at the edge of nothingness, the hysterical gnatsong of the damned.

She had destroyed him in their battle, but at the great cost of three thousand years of banishment. She had destroyed him, brotherless and heirless, and for centuries, she had dreamt, believing that his line had died against her in that final battle, there at the end of the Second Dragon War.

But there were the cousins, and the cousins had sons. Laca had been the last. Distant in descent and in blood, but Huma's kin nonetheless. And then there was Aglaca.

And along with Aglaca, there was the visit of Laca to Nidus, beneath the roof of his old friend Daeghrefn, with whose comely wife he forgot all loyalty, all honor and Oath and Measure, if for only a bright morning…

So with Aglaca, there was the child Verminaard, fair of hair and blue-eyed, the opposite of Daeghrefn, but the image of his real father.;

So Huma's line had branched again. Almost as though it had scattered to elude her, to distract her from her three-millennia search. But she had located them both-both of Laca's sons-and time, circumstance, and her own devices had brought them together at last.

And before she chose between them-or rather, before one of them chose her-there was the matter of the girl.

For a while, Takhisis had let the Nerakans hold the girl. Surely that softhearted wretch L'Indasha would reveal herself and come to the rescue-in a hostile country where the veils Paladine had cast over her whereabouts would no longer protect her.

But weeks had passed, and there had been no sign of the druidess. So she had turned to Laca's sons: They would bring her the girl-they and that scheming subordinate of hers, who fanned the fog unwittingly, veiling their movements to the Nerakan guards.

Once they had brought the girl to Nidus, the sounding would begin. Something in the girl's thoughts resisted all probing, and her dreams were opaque and unfathomable.

No doubt Paladine had veiled her as well.

But the girl would leave Nidus eventually, and her path would lead to L'Indasha Yman, to the secret of the blank rune. Then all the ingredients would fall into place-the mysterious Judyth of Solamnia, the immortal druidess, and the last of Huma's line.

The last of Huma's line. In whatever role he would play. She would sound him soon, try him in the darkness of her own choosing. Oh, yes. The ingredients were all there. It would all make sense when Takhisis gathered them. Of that she was sure.

The voices wailed and gibbered around her in a chaos of laments. The Queen of the Dragons extended her sable wings.

The time would come when the rune was blank no longer, but inscribed with its long-lost opposing symbols, and when the last rune was added to the others, their prophetic powers would be perfect. She would find the green keystone to the Temple then, for the restored runes would see through all-through centuries of stone and through the clouded chaos of history. The runes were knowledge, and with that knowledge, Takhisis could open the portals to the world. And return to govern it.

She spread her wings and turned in a hot, dry wind, rising to the lip of the Abyss, to the glazed and dividing firmament beyond which she could not travel. It looked forbidding, mysterious, like thick ice on a bottomless pool. There, in the heart of nothing, Takhisis banked and glided, aloft on the wafting current and her own dark strategies.