Before the Mask

by Michael Williams

  "Could you even pick her out, Verminaard?"

  "What?" he shouted, spinning in the saddle, losing his balance, clutching frantically at the reins and the saddle horn as he leaned, rocked …

  . . . and steadied, gasping in fright and anger, glaring coldly at Aglaca, who had somehow managed to hoist both himself and his pack onto the other horse.

  "Would you know this girl if they set ten Nerakan women before you?"

  "Of course! Now let me-"

  "What color are her eyes?" Aglaca was persistent, intent on an embarrassing truth.

  "Go back to bed!"

  "What color are her eyes, Verminaard?"

  "Well, I know they'll be the color of sea or sky-but I suppose you've seen them?" Verminaard spat, his horse prancing, turning in tight circles. He wanted to strike the lad, knock him from the saddle and be on his way, but already the doubts were rising, the great misgiving he had tried to hide from himself….

  It had been misty that day. He had seen her from a great distance.

  "What color are her eyes, damn it?" Verminaard roared, and the keep erupted in a flurry of lights and shouts and barking.

  "Make for the gate!" Aglaca cried.

  They were out into the night before the bleary garrison had mustered to find them. Galloping swiftly over the rocky trail, stone and gravel flying from the horses' hooves, they kept a reckless pace. Finally, in a stretch of country where the trail opened into the grassy flatland, Aglaca overtook Verminaard, who gradually, reluctantly, slowed Orlog to a trot, then a walk.

  Behind them, the towers of Castle Nidus were lost in the distance and in a strange dark wall of clouds that had descended-or must have descended-from somewhere in the clear night sky. Peering back over his shoulder, Aglaca gave a low whistle.

  "We've come far in a short spell, Master Verminaard," he observed wryly, giving the mare's flank a soft, reassuring pat.

  Verminaard regarded his companion coldly. "How did you know, Aglaca?" he asked.

  "Know?"

  "That I was leaving for Neraka tonight? I told no one of the time."

  "That you did not." Aglaca guided his mare to a high green patch of harrowgrass, where she bent amiably and began to graze. "But by your deeds I knew. Cleaned boots, for the first time in a month. Two capes draped over the foot of the bed, and your old gloves for travel. If anyone ever prepared for the road, and prepared obviously and visibly, it was you, Verminaard of Nidus."

  His face burning, Verminaard followed Aglaca, guiding his stallion slowly over the dry ground. The beast snatched at the nourishing harrowgrass eagerly as Aglaca recounted the events of the day-how Verminaard had sharpened his blades and restrung his bow, how he had passed by the stable twice, looking in on the well-being of the horses.

  "And finally," the lad continued, dismounting from the mare and drawing forth a strip of quith-pa, the dried fruit of elven travelers, "you steered even farther away from Robert and Daeghrefn than usual, as if Daeghrefn would actually attend to anything you'd a mind to do."

  Verminaard nodded, eyeing the quith-pa wistfully. Already the romance of foraging had passed away, and the real hunger of the trail had set in.

  He was soft, he knew-scarcely two hours from Castle Nidus, but he would gladly trade his sword for some dried fruit.

  "Where's your dagger?"

  Aglaca's question shocked him.

  Wordlessly he dismounted, letting the moment pass. He muttered something about "forgotten," about "hurried departures" and "I prefer my sword, for that matter". Aglaca said nothing, but regarded him quietly.

  "I hope your 'hurried departure' didn't keep you from bringing that second cloak," he observed, nodding toward the cloud bank to the north, rising out of the coun-

  try they had left behind. "There's a storm following us. North to south, fast, with sheets of water and a day-long dark. Should be here about midmorning, by the way those nightbirds flew over."

  Verminaard frowned. How did Aglaca know all this weather lore and counsel?

  Aglaca smiled and vaulted into the saddle as though he had left some mysterious heaviness at the gates of Castle Nidus. "So you'd best have a rain-fast cloak on your person, Verminaard, or the two of us should find a cave or a copse very soon-a dry place to wait out the wind."

  Verminaard lifted himself back onto Orlog and led the way toward the foothills and the rocky ground above the great Nerakan forest. Aglaca paused for a moment, watching his companion ride ahead.

  "Where is your dagger indeed?" he whispered. Sadly, he brought the small glittering blade from beneath his cloak and held it aloft in the pale light of Solinari.

  "It will protect you from evil, brother Verminaard," the Solamnic youth declared. "Even if I have to wield it."

  The promised storm never reached them, but the dark clouds did.

  For an hour or so, the lads rode at the head of a cold, moist wind as tendrils of ashen fog reached out and passed over them. The temperature dropped rapidly, and soon their breath misted and the flanks of the trotting horses steamed in the brisk new weather.

  But there was still no rain, and a shadowy midday passed as Verminaard and Aglaca kept moving south, where the forest abutted a steep ridge of mountains, on the other side of which, Aglaca promised, lay the Plains of Neraka and the settlement itself.

  All around them, the clouds thickened, covering the rock face, descending in a thick fog that blotted the sun entirely. They rode through a swimming grayness, the trail ahead lost, until Verminaard surrendered guidance to Orlog, letting the reins go slack as the stallion waded his way through the narrow passage. Aglaca followed closely, his mare's nose inches from Orlog's switching tail.

  There were tales about the mountain bandits, how they bred for keen eyesight and could follow unwary travelers through storm and fog. How they called to their intended victims from the sides of the road. Hidden in mist and obscurity, they would cry out deceptively, like wounded men or lost babies.

  Verminaard rose in the saddle, his hand resting uneasily on his sword. Twice he started at noises in the mist, at the sudden, flurried wingbeat of rooks and then at something large crashing blindly through the high aeterna foliage in the foothills. He had assured himself that the sounds meant nothing-were nothing, indeed, beyond the weav-ings of his own fears and imaginations-when the Voice came to him again, as though it rose to greet him out of the chill and the fog …

  … or the fog itself was speaking.

  Excellent, Lord Verminaard, it said, the old familiar accents sugary with praise. Verminaard glanced quickly behind him, but Aglaca's head was turned, his shoulders relaxed.

  He did not hear the Voice. Good.

  Of course he does not hear, Lord Verminaard, the Voice broke in, low and musical and neither masculine nor feminine, as usual. Why should I let him hear what passes between us? He could not… understand. He is different, but it is much more than that. You understand, don't you? How singling you out was … all I could do?

  Verminaard nodded dimly, then looked'back uneasily through the mist at his companion.

  fust look at him, coaxed the Voice, and the fog seemed to play with Aglaca's angular features, molding his face to the soft roundness of a child's. He hasn't an inkling. Nor does he have the instruments. The faculties.

  Verminaard blinked. Aglaca had always seemed clever enough to him. There was a certain blessing on the boy, a certain art like that of the runemaster's risting, where a humble stone is transformed to something magical with a quick stroke of the carving knife. And Aglaca could take a defeat-in the lists, in the hunt, wherever defeat was handed him-and turn it toward graciousness, to where defeat was no longer humiliating, and the victory no longer mattered as much, either.

  But these are new circumstances, the Voice insisted, rising in pitch, in volume, drowning out his charitable thoughts. And this time the victory matters-matters more than anything and anyone, yes, because it is this victory that can make your name.

  "Verminaard? Slow your horse," Aglaca urg
ed. "This little mare's not used to following the likes of Orlog."

  All of your mistakes and misdeeds, the Voice persisted, higher in pitch and more penetrating, will be set right if you bring back the girl. Your father's favor is won, yes, and the esteem of the garrison-of Robert and the mage and the rest of them. What need will you have of runestones then, with your future assured and seamless and joyous?

  The reins shook in Verminaard's hands. It was too good, this prophecy, too good….

  Too good if you fail to do this alone, the Voice continued, a faint hum at the edge of hearing, for if the child helps you, whom will your father credit for the rescue? And whom the mage?

  And whom the girl, for that matter?

  "Wait!" Aglaca shouted as Verminaard urged Orlog to sudden speed on the trail ahead, vanishing into the gray fog.

  Aglaca's voice faded behind him, the strained shouts of "Verminaard!" echoing in the maze of rock and cliff and entangled forest. At times, it seemed as though there were two or three voices clamoring in the mist.

  Good, Verminaard thought, steering Orlog through the precarious fog. Let him find his own way back to Nidus. Or let him find worse, for all I care. Neraka is mine, and the girl. I don't need him to find the way.

  Was it his own thought, or was it the Voice, returned to him and muffled by murk and distance until he could no longer distinguish it from his own musings?

  He reached for the pouch of runes at his belt. They rattled reassuringly as Orlog passed through a passage of rubble and pine, and the trail narrowed and sloped southeast, weaving into the foothills, shadowed by the black looming form of Mount Berkanth.

  Instinctively Verminaard touched the hilt of his sword. He could see better now. He was in the heart of bandit country, in the rocky highlands where the crack Nerakan cavalry patroled-worse by far than the bandits, and the horror of huntsman and horseman from Nidus all the way to the grasslands of Estwilde and Throt. Once no more than competent brigands, they were disciplined now and far more deadly, their numbers increasing as a great and unfathomable power pushed them to raids more and more daring, more and more successful.

  He coughed nervously. It was a time that he wished for company. The Voice was utterly gone.

  Steering the stallion over the sloping ground, he traveled by instinct, offering prayers to the gods of darkness. Takhisis he asked for safe passage, and Sargonnas the Consort, Hiddukel and Chemosh and Zeboim and the others until the names failed him. Then, with a deeper

  and more basic instinct, he drew his sword, resting the blade across the swell of the saddle.

  Instantly, almost as a perverse answer to his prayers, shadows flitted through the mist around him, dark horsemen at the edge of his sight-some scarcely ten yards from where he trembled atop Orlog. Verminaard heard the snort and whinny of horses, a hushed flurry of what seemed to be command and instruction in a cant of Common speech and a language he did not understand-a rocky tongue, full of hard consonants and gutturals.

  The shapes milled about at a threatening distance. Had they carried torches, as regular cavalry often did in a fog, he would have been discovered at once.

  Bandits again. For surely they were the ones encircling him, lightless in the way of brigand riders, their destination west-through the forest, no doubt, then north to the high plains of Taman Busuk beyond. Soon their paths would cross his, and no fog would conceal that he was a stranger, and alone, and bearing the emblems of Castle Nidus.

  For a moment, he froze in the saddle, paralyzed by fear and indecision. They would raise his head on a pike; they would torture him and leave him for dead on the high plains.

  Where was Aglaca when you needed his wits?

  Desperately Verminaard reversed his path. If he doubled back and rode among them, veiled by murk and distance, the bandits might assume he was one of them. They would be less likely to investigate, and the fog might give him enough time to figure an escape.

  * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

  It was then that the fog dissolved around the shape, and Verminaard saw that it was no rider but a high outcropping of rock-a stone dolmen set five thousand years ago by the original inhabitants of the high Nerakan plains. He shook with relief.

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

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

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

  "Where are you?" someone cried in front of him. The horses stopped around him.

  See? I have already sent your help … your salvation….

  "Where are you, Verminaard?" came the cry again.

  Aglaca. Lost and wandering.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He tried not to think of those.

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

  Suddenly what he had thought was the rock moved forward, lifted its gloved hand. Verminaard gasped, fumbled for his sword, and …

  "Thank the gods it's you, Verminaard!" Aglaca exclaimed.

  "Aglaca! What… how …"

  The Solamnic lad laughed merrily, slapping Verminaard on the shoulder affectionately.

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

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

  He sat back in the saddle and beamed.

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

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