Before the Mask

by Michael Williams

  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.

  / 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.