Before the Mask

by Michael Williams

Aglaca's eyes narrowed as he watched the jubilant Verminaard tying himself to the saddle, bracing his back, trying to hide a boyish grin beneath a mask of feigned calm. Daeghrefn knew better than this: He was a skilled huntsman and swordsman, and though a renegade, he had not forgotten his Solamnic training in strategy and field command.

  Of all people, Daeghrefn would know …

  And he did know. Of course he did.

  "I beg your pardon, sir," the Solamnic youth ventured. He set his foot to the stirrup of a horse readied for him as Daeghrefn turned in the saddle to regard him distantly, indifferently. "I would that you might… let me ride with Verminaard."

  Robert looked nervously at his lord.

  It had to work, Aglaca thought. Regardless of this strange disregard for his son, Daeghrefn would not risk Aglaca in a foolish gamble. Were Laca to receive word that his son had fallen in the hunt, Abelaard's life would be forfeit to the gebo-naud.

  Aglaca was the best protection Verminaard could have.

  Daeghrefn did not flinch at the boy's request. Directly, his face unreadable, he regarded the upstart as though appraising terrain or a suit of tournament armor.

  "Do not forget, Master Aglaca," the Lord of Nidus replied, his scolding mild and quiet, "that you are not as much a guest in our midst as you are . . . captive to an agreement between Nidus and East Borders. I cannot let you ride in the vanguard, for you might use the occasion to escape. Worse still, you might suffer an injury."

  "I am twenty, sir," Aglaca persisted. "Twenty, and skilled with weaponry you, in your kindness, have allowed me to practice."

  "True enough," Daeghrefn conceded. "Better than your burly lump of a companion, by all accounts."

  Verminaard winced, but his face returned swiftly to its impassive, unreadable mask.

  "As for your misgivings regarding escape, Lord Daeghrefn …" Aglaca continued. "If I gave you my word, sir? As the son of a Solamnic Knight?"

  Daeghrefn sneered. "You could not imagine how little such promises mean to me, boy. But if you must ride at the point, Osman rides with you, and a squadron of twelve men. In case the call of East Borders becomes too strong."

  Aglaca hid a satisfied smile. The game was his for now. Daeghrefn had conceded on the fear that spies, who he suspected were constantly in his garrison, might relay Aglaca's disappointment to his father. Had Verminaard alone been placed in the vanguard, no escort would accompany him. By riding at the front of the column,

  Aglaca had assured Verminaard's protection: Osman was a veteran huntsman and a loyal sort, and his dozen troopers would protect them both.

  As the young men and their escort rode forth at the head of the hunt, the castle and its settlement dwindled to a scattering of tents and standards in the southern fields. Cerestes raised his hands in the Litany of Farewells. Then a red mist rose about him, and he vanished in a flurry of faded banners and fragmented light. Back to Castle Nidus, they supposed.

  Taciturn, windburnt Osman rode between the two young men, his face as dark as weathered oak. His eyes, black and brilliant, scanned the terrain for spoor and hoofprints.

  Verminaard, at the huntsman's right, fumed and crouched in the saddle as though he rode into a powerful, icy head wind. He had been betrayed by this soft western lad who rode to Osman's left-faithless Aglaca, who had refused the comradeship of the casting, then demanded the glory of the hunt.

  His hunt-his place of honor, his chance to be noble and courageous, to distinguish himself before Daeghrefn. Aglaca and these nursemaids! They didn't belong here beside him. For a moment, he wished that Aglaca alone accompanied him. The plateaus of Taman Busuk were treacherous country, filled with crevasses and cul-de-sacs, where a horse could stumble, a young man could fall….

  Verminaard pulled himself from the bloody revery. In the passing months, the murderous thoughts had come more often, more wildly. There were a thousand mishaps waiting for a Solamnic, a thousand deceptions and enemies. Verminaard dreamed of those awful moments,

  savored them until the dream dissolved before the cold truth of the gebo-naud-any misfortune that befell Aglaca could be visited on Abelaard in Solamnia.

  And he would not let misfortune befall his brother.

  In a heedless gloom, Verminaard kept his big black stallion in steady stride with Osman's roan. The landscape passed by him in a featureless, angry fog.

  Aglaca, on the other side, prayed long and silently to Paladine, to Mishakal, and to Kiri-Jolith of the hunt, as his father Laca had taught him before he was old enough to hold a spear. Let the hunting be good, he beseeched the gods, and the kill clean and noble. And let each huntsman return to his hearth and his family, at the close of the day.

  Smiling ruefully at the Solamnic, Verminaard eyed the massive company. They'll just be in my way, he thought, visions of the centicore entering his mind. The beast was slow-witted, ill-tempered, and nearsighted, but if it turned, grunting and lowering its tusks and gathering speed for a headlong and witless charge, the hunt changed radically. Then his companions would be a hindrance, his armor inadequate, his horse too slow, and all that remained between him and the gigantic, thick-skinned boar and its three-foot tusks was his couched lance, strong arm, and nerve.

  It was an encounter Verminaard awaited eagerly. He spurred his horse to ride ahead of Aglaca, ahead of Osman. At twenty, Verminaard was burly and strong, and physical courage came easily for him. And, apparently recognizing it, his father had put him in a place of honor- in the vanguard of the hunt, where he would most likely see the first action.

  An icy rain pummeled the column of horsemen as they rode north across the browned, awakening plains toward Taman Busuk. The tips of their long, barbed spears dipped and rose with the swell and fall of the trail. When they reached the high plains, the horsemen fanned out

  and rode four or five abreast, separating into squadrons carefully assigned by Lord Daeghrefn.

  Riding in the foremost and smallest squadron, Verminaard leaned back on the iron arson of his saddle and inhaled the moist, chilly air. It was lowland breathing here-thicker, more nourishing than the air at the timber-line where Castle Nidus kept its formidable watch. Aglaca, riding beside him, seemed suddenly more animate, suddenly more at home in the saddle and the journey.

  They rested the horses in a narrow notch between two cliff faces-a glittering passage where the noonday sun flickered on black obsidian, porous volcanic rubble, and a little mountain pool still crusted with the winter's ice. Dismounting, Verminaard drank deeply of the drus flask at his belt-the visionary's potion that Cerestes said was the door to prophecy for servants of the Dragon Queen.

  Then he drew forth again the bag of runes, rankling at the mage's insistence that auguring one's own future was impossible. He was sure self-augury could be done, some way, somehow. Especially now, vitalized by the drus potion: The carvings on the stones seemed to shimmer like veins of light.

  "Osman," he called, and the huntsman, whetting his knife by a fallen log, looked up with a frown.

  "Not the runes, if you please, young master. I don't take to auguries, nor to that mage of yours."

  "They have nothing to do with him," Verminaard lied. The mage had given him the stones when he saw that the lad was curious. "They're fostered under the red moon- under Lunitari. All oracles are, because they're all neutral."

  That much was true. Prophecy was a neutral thing. What you made of it was good or evil. And when you read the stones for someone else … well, sometimes you discovered the things that really concern you. The things

  that pertain directly to you.

  Reluctantly Osman approached the young man. He mistrusted Verminaard's superstition, his preoccupation with dark ritual and ceremony. Being a bluff, commonsen-sical man, Osman had little love for the confusing auguries Verminaard constantly and eagerly placed in front of him.

  Better the father, who believed in nothing, than this hex of a lad before him.

  "Ask about the hunt, Osman," Verminaard urged. "Ask how your company will
fare."

  Osman cleared his throat, looking at Aglaca for rescue. The other lad knelt by his horse, smiled, and shook his head as he tightened the flank cinch of the saddle. He was not about to enter the fuss over symbol and omen.

  "I expect we'll find out shortly enough, Master Verminaard," the huntsman replied, turning coolly back to the log.

  Angrily Verminaard cast the runes himself. The flat, irregular stones scattered from his hands. It was an old Nerakan reading he tried-three stones in a sequence, determining the present, the immediate future, and the outcome of the event. The cryptic silver lines seemed to scatter, to flicker on the ground like edged fire.

  Aglaca, meanwhile, rose and led one of the horses to the little pool. Leaning to break the ice so that the animal might drink, the youth was astonished to see another face, dark and serene, staring back at him from the glazed surface of the water.

  "Great Paladine!" he breathed in astonishment.

  It was the dark-eyed woman, regarding him serenely. Leaves hung in her auburn hair, and a curious amber light played over her forehead, as though she stared into the setting sun.

  Her eyes widened. She smiled in brief recognition, then vanished into the smoky whirl of the ice. Now Aglaca saw an image of himself, sword drawn amid an alcove of

  granite and rubble. Verminaard stood behind him in the vision, his weapon sheathed and idle.

  Aglaca stepped back and gasped, trying to make sense of the revelation.

  It was then that the horses started and shied, their nostrils flaring at the whiff of something sharp and musty on the rising wind. Osman leapt to the saddle, followed instantly by Aglaca and the rest of the troopers. Standing in the stirrups, the huntsman scanned the featureless fields. Finally, like an old Plainsman visionary, Osman pointed to where the high grass thrashed and quivered, like the surface of a lake when something large and unfathomable rises from its depths and parts the shallow waters.

  "There," Osman announced calmly, gesturing toward the moving furrow on the horizon. "A small one, but worthy of the hunt."

  Verminaard scooped up the runes and pulled himself into the saddle. His companions already raced ahead of him, their horses spurred to a brisk trot toward the northern horizon, where his centicore rumbled and his glory would come thrashing through the high grass.

  Their horses were good ones, swift and tireless. By mid-morning, the centicore was clearly in sight, lumbering ahead of them, its stout legs churning with a slow and ceaseless power.

  It was an ugly thing, Verminaard agreed, as he had been told it would be. Its thick skin was armored with dried mud and algae, its arm-length tail bulbous and spiked like a mace. As tall as a man at its shoulders, the centicore was a young one, no doubt, since its horns were smooth and unscarred. An old folktale said that to meet

  its stare was death, that the very rocks of the Khalkist foothills were the remains of hapless hunters who had been turned to stone by its gaze.

  Of course, Daeghrefn maintained that the legends were nonsense. He had killed two centicores himself, and both times, he claimed, he had looked the thing full in the face as he took its life. There was no magic in the creature, Daeghrefn said, no power except the fear prompted by the wild imaginings of the mountain peoples.

  Osman was one of those mountain folk, however, and as the horsemen closed on the centicore, he ordered the young men to each side of the plodding creature. With a grunt, the monster lurched into a small box canyon between two cliff faces. After all, Daeghrefn had appointed the huntsman as a guardian of sorts, and if the centicore turned to charge, the lads would be at its flanks, at a safe distance from its swiveling horns and its legendary gaze, and the shortsighted focus of its anger would fall on Osman and the troopers alone.

  Circling to the right of the beast, his horse brushing against the rock face, Verminaard leveled his lance. The horse quivered nervously beneath him, the foul smell of the beast thick in the moist, windless air. Verminaard stood up in the stirrups, locked his legs at the knees, and leaned forward in the saddle.

  To his left, skidding over the black volcanic rubble, the centicore reached the rocky cul-de-sac. Slowly and stupidly the beast turned, facing Verminaard. In that time- two seconds, perhaps three-their eyes locked in the shadow of the cliff walls, and the boy saw the dull, shallow stare of the beast, its eyes as drab as wet slate.

  It barely knows I am here, he thought exultantly. And now as it turns, I shall charge it and …

  Then something flickered deep in the eyes of the monster.

  Verminaard weaved above the saddle. For a moment,

  he believed he had imagined that strange, cold light that seemed to emerge from the heart of the beast, chilling yet beckoning him with some deeply malignant pressure. And yet it was not imagined, was not his own superstitious promptings, for how could his own mind freeze him, confuse him, and fascinate him so?

  Verminaard blinked and fumbled his lance. The language of that light was something he almost knew, as though the thoughts of the beast had reached out across half the canyon and across a thousand years, embracing his thoughts and beginning a long and cold instruction. And yet he was not sure what it meant. The look had been cloudy, elusive, as indecipherable finally as the runes he tried vainly to read.

  I shall charge it, he thought. I shall drive it into precious Aglaca.

  His thoughts wrenched back to the moment, and he spurred his stallion. The beast turned and fled him, rumbling through the rough, gravelly stretch toward the other wall of the canyon where Aglaca waited, his lance leveled, his horse calm and steady.

  Now! Verminaard thought, goading his horse after the barreling centicore. Now, while the thing is intent on Aglaca!

  It would be a tough kill for an untried lad. The centicore lumbered toward Aglaca, its mouth agape, its horns swiveling like scythes. Aglaca blinked nervously and steadied his trembling lance, drawing again on his extraordinary courage as the monster closed the distance by half, the plodding strides gaining fluidity until the beast moved surprisingly fast over the gravelly edges of the cul-de-sac.

  Then, unexpectedly, Osman rode between the lad and the charging animal. The older man had seen disaster unfolding from his post at the mouth of the cul-de-sac, and he realized at once that the post he had taken, chosen

  because it was the most likely place the beast would charge, was barely close enough to rescue the imperiled Solamnic youth. He spurred his horse over the gravel, shouting and whistling to distract the monster, and he reached Aglaca not a moment too soon, turning to face the centicore and raising his lance to receive its charge. The soft flesh at its breast lay exposed by the centicore's reckless assault, and all the veteran huntsman had to do was hold the lance as the creature drove itself upon the tapered shaft, then return with his seventh kill. His deeds would be sung in Castle Nidus, in the villages among the foothills, and by huntsmen as far away as Sanction and Zhakar.

  So the hunt would have ended, had not Verminaard's pursuit distracted the beast.

  Wheeling awkwardly on its forelegs, scattering gravel and earth as it turned, the centicore stumbled toward the charging youth. Alarmed, seeing the danger to his master's son, Osman spurred his horse forward, riding beside the centicore, seeking a soft spot, a vulnerable place in the filthy array of scales along the monster's back.

  Suddenly the beast lashed out with its thick, macelike tail. The barb whistled through the air and crashed into the side of Osman's helmet with a ring that Robert's pursuing column heard a hundred yards from the mouth of the canyon.

  Osman toppled from the saddle and fell heavily to the ground. For a moment, he tried to rise, his arms extended weakly above his lolling head, but then he shivered and lay still just as Verminaard's lance drove deeply, with a crackling of gristle and bone, into the breast of the centicore.

  The impact of lance against the monster thrusted the young man back into the bracings of his saddle, and the breath fled from him as the air spangled with red light. He remembered only falling an
d being caught by the cords.

  Then he remembered nothing at all.

  Aglaca was kneeling beside him when Verminaard came to his senses. The huge hulk of the centicore lay not ten yards away, the broken lance embedded deep in its vitals. The shadows of horsemen surrounded him, and as he tried to stand, the seneschal Robert grabbed him under the arms, lifting him and bracing him.

  "What happened here?" Daeghrefn's sharp voice asked, like a distant humming in his ears.

  "The centicore is dead, sir," Aglaca volunteered. "And it was Verminaard's brave charge that killed it."

  "And not only the centicore," Daeghrefn declared icily. "Osman has fallen to the same rash assault. Attend to his body and leave the centicore here for the ravens and kites. The beast is a shameful kill."

  Verminaard could not believe his bad fortune.

  He'd had scarcely a second's exulting, scarcely a moment to look across the churned and broken ground to the steamy, hulking body of the beast, to revel in his courageous act.