Before the Mask

by Michael Williams

  Five men. One of them Kenaz, his captain, lost somewhere near the center of the woods where the trails branched. And with all those dead or vanished men, Daeghrefn's own courage.

  For Daeghrefn was afraid. For the first time in his adult life, his legs trembled as he stood in the stirrups, the hair still bristling on the back of his neck. The fear was a kind of fire, too, spreading and expanding the longer he allowed it to dwell within him.

  Scarcely a moment ago, when the monster had tried to pull him from the horse, he had felt its grasp, smelled its hot, feral stink. It was no soldier, no swordsman meeting him blade to blade in the battle he knew and trusted. It was a monster, but more monstrous was the fear that had unmanned him.

  Galloping and screaming at the head of his squadron, he had ridden until the panic had ebbed, until his senses

  had left him and the hands of his men had steadied him in the saddle. Now, though the ogres were distant and the flames behind him, a new fear rose to undo him.

  The reins shook in his hand. For a moment, Daeghrefn longed for the Solamnic Order he had abandoned, for its rule of honor and courage, for Oath and Measure to compel him and uphold his collapsing spirit.

  But when he had banished knighthood, he had banished the shape of his courage.

  His rrten stared at him, eagerly awaiting his orders, but through the glass of his despair and terror, their features were distorted, and Daeghrefn looked on them as enemies, as usurpers.

  Now they are contemptuous, he thought. Now they are judging me. They will seek a new leader.

  "Enough waiting," he rasped, desperately trying to mask the rising panic in his voice. "The forest will go up like tinder before this fire." Daeghrefn nodded toward the approaching wall of flame. "So we had best get farther north, in sight of the castle. There the garrison can come to our aid."

  There. He had spoken like a commander, though his voice shook and his heart rattled. Steadied, Daeghrefn stared back toward the woods, his eyes smarting with smoke, and signaled to the men to move north, back to Nidus, across the smoky plains.

  The remaining men, five wide-eyed young archers from Estwilde, followed their commander toward a rise in the grasslands circled by a thin outcropping of evergreen. There, in the shade of fir and cedar, they dismounted, nervously readying their bows to cover the withdrawal of the rear guard.

  Robert alone was that rear guard.

  As the fire surged relentlessly toward him, the weathered seneschal remained at the edge of the woods. The red mare pawed and snorted nervously beneath his calming

  hand, but she stayed her ground amid harsh smoke and the harsher cries of the ogres.

  Robert counted two heartbeats until Daeghrefn had reached the rise. Then, just as the flames touched the borders of the forest, he wheeled his horse and galloped across the plains, headed for the line of archers with a hot wind coursing at his back.

  He saw the ogres then, the flanking column that waded through the rising smoke in a swift, hungry arch toward Daeghrefn's rear.

  Robert cried out, pointing and waving wildly, tottering in the saddle with the strength of his own gestures. Daeghrefn shielded his eyes and craned to hear.

  Then he understood.

  With a shout, the Lord of Nidus alerted his men, who scrambled awkwardly to their horses, dropping their weapons in panic. They were off in a gallop, a scant ten yards ahead of him, as Robert reached the rise and spurred his horse to catch up.

  At the sharp dig of spurs, the little roan mare bolted and bucked with a shrieking whinny. Clinging for a last desperate moment to the reins, Robert felt himself lifted from the saddle. The ground spun and tumbled and rushed toward him, and then the hard earth of the plains drove the breath from him.

  The mare caught up with the other horses and kept running.

  Dazed, Robert tried to rise and felt his leg buckle. Struggling painfully to his knees, he looked desperately north toward the retreating column of horsemen.

  "Daeghrefn!" he cried, and the foremost rider turned as the soldiers rode on past out of the smoke. "Daeghrefn! Help!"

  He could see the man dimly, standing in the stirrups. Then the ogres lumbered out of the vapor, and the Lord of Nidus wheeled and galloped away, shouting over his

  shoulder, "I'm sorry, Robert! I cannot help you where you are going."

  Robert fell to the hard earth. For a moment, lying on his back, he glimpsed the evening stars through the swirling smoke. The broken scale of Hiddukel reeled over him in the northern sky, the stars in the constellation painfully bright.

  So this is the end of service, Robert thought grimly, drawing his sword. But better this than to end as the lackey of a cowardly, heartless bastard.

  He glared toward the dwindling form of the rider, watched it vanish in the lower hills.

  The rumble and call of the ogres was closer now, and a dreadful sniffing rose from the lip of the haze, where two black, shapeless forms shifted and bent like vallenwoods in a high wind.

  Robert willed himself not to think of the stories. The ravaged caravans in the Throtl Gap, the children plucked from wagon beds, the village of two hundred in Taman Busuk, the gnawed, scattered bones found in the wreckage each time.

  If it is the end, it's best to go out fighting. I have nothing to lose. And perhaps I will be fortunate. Perhaps the fire will reach me before the ogres do.

  The smoke to the east glowed orange and red, and sharp tongues of flame shot through the blackness, making bizarre daylight of this frightful, burning evening. Robert lay back on the ground, clenching his teeth against the hammering pain in his leg.

  Suddenly all sight vanished into a purple, obliterating fog. It covered the rise where the seneschal lay, muffling all sound as well, so that the crackle of flames and the cry of the ogres reached him only as vibrations through the ground.

  Robert breathed deeply. No coughing, no sting to the eye.

  "Damned if it…" he began, then lost the words at the

  sight of the bare-footed, green-robed woman weaving through the smoke. Slowly, with the trust that arises only when one has seen a dozen battles, a thousand enemies, and has learned thereby to distinguish friends, the old veteran sheathed his sword and waited.

  In the swirling silence, the woman approached.

  As Verminaard, Aglaca, and Judyth skirted the eastern edge of the forest, keeping to the high ground of the foothills, they saw the ogres rushing down from the mountains after them.

  The monsters trailed fire and ash, shed sparks as they lumbered west through the burning woods and onto the devastated plains. They hastened toward the level country north of the Nerakan Forest, where a dark gap lay in the fire and smoke.

  Even from the heights, from the rocky highlands and from the back of his stallion, Verminaard couldn't discern what was happening down on the burning steppe. He reined Orlog to an uneasy halt and waited for the durable little mare to catch up, Judyth and Aglaca bent with weariness in the saddle.

  "There," the bigger lad pronounced, his hand sweeping the landscape around them-the bunched fires, the ogres, the smoke covering the country for miles. "If it were daylight and clear, I could see our way home."

  "But since it is as it is," Aglaca pondered cautiously, "where do we go from here?" He didn't trust his transformed companion, but the fire and assaulting ogres were a more obvious danger.

  And even after the worst had happened in the cave, there would still be a way to rescue his companion. There had to be.

  "We'll ride down into the midst of it," Verminaard said. A strange confidence had risen in him. In Takhisis's cavern, his uncertainties and pain had vanished. A black-hot bolt had shot through his hand, blistering him from fingertips to elbow, welding his fingers to the handle of the captured mace for a time.

  But that was nothing before the older injuries of lifelong fear, all the more terrible because they had continued to cripple and humiliate him. Strangely, his new wound did not hurt at all.

  In the short ride through the foothills,
the Voice had traveled beside him, coaxing, flattering, promising. The weapon that can harm you, it said, has not been forged by dwarf or ogre. It is far from you now, but your power is near.

  And then, when the northern grasslands opened for him, veiled and misted by smoke but stretching toward the old Battle Plain, toward Castle Nidus, the Voice returned again, and with it the greatest of its hushed and seductive vows.

  This smoke will spread, Lord Verminaard, and cover all kingdoms of the world . . . all kingdoms in a moment of time. And even the farthest ground that the smoke will cover can belong to you, for I can deliver that country and power and glory to those who worship me….

  He breathed in the acrid smoke exultantly. It was a heady promise, and the prospect of such dominion was sweet. Beneath him, the broad back of Orlog felt more powerful still.

  Could it be that the vision that had arrayed itself before him in the depths of the cave was already coming to pass?

  "… to pass through the fire."

  Verminaard started. Judyth and Aglaca sat beside him on the mare, and the girl was saying something, something he had lost in his revery.

  He turned to her politely, attentively, brushing the drooping hair from his eyes. She was not the girl he had

  imagined, and that really didn't matter anymore. None of his previous disappointments did. But she was lovely and dark, and she would do.

  "I beg your pardon, Lady Judyth," he replied, his voice husky and low.

  "The fire," Aglaca said impatiently. "It's a blazing wall between us and Nidus, and the ogres are stalking along it like wolves. If we expect to see your castle again, we'll have to pass through the fire."

  "Then that is just what we shall do," Verminaard said ¦ calmly, pointing toward the gap in the flame. "Follow me, and ask no questions."

  "But Verminaard …" Aglaca began.

  Verminaard glared at him. "Be ruled by me, Aglaca. Be ruled by me or be damned where you stand."

  Verminaard's confident words died swiftly when they reached the plain.

  From above, the fire had seemed navigable to him. There was an end to it, and borders, and the ogres that moved around it and through it were scattered and few in number.

  But now, the horses picked uncertainly around the southern edge of the rolling flames, and the path through the blaze seemed to have vanished in the short journey to the edge of the fire wall. The scorched ground smoldered beneath Orlog's hooves as the big stallion stepped gingerly from patch to patch of remaining green. The evening sky was smoke black and unreadable.

  As he rode down the spreading wave of flame, Judyth and Aglaca close behind, Verminaard's assurance continued to wither like the blackened grass in the fire wall's wake. At this distance, the choices were quick and

  baffling. The shouts of ogres came to him from the smoke, from the flames, from the charred woods behind, and he moved through a country of doubling echoes. Dodging through the black grass, foxes and rabbits, pheasant and squirrel, all panic-stricken, were driven by an instinct to flee, to burrow, to vanish, and the horses leapt and shied as the wild things scurried beneath them. Orlog leapt over fire-felled oak and aeterna, and for the first time since he had broken the beast in the high meadows north of Nidus, Verminaard could not control the black stallion beneath him. Twice Orlog veered dangerously north, until the flames rose like a battlement above them, and twice the big horse shied away, whinnying wildly and sidling through the seared undergrowth as the blazes broke around them, leaving them astound-ingly untouched.

  Where is the Voice now? Verminaard thought, clinging frantically to the reins. This is my country, my power and glory. It told me so.

  He looked back. Astride the mare, at the smoke's edge, Judyth peered calmly into the roiling fire. Aglaca sat behind her in the saddle, his wiry arms wrapped gently about her waist, but there was no gentleness in his eyes. Instead, he stared at Verminaard coldly, accusingly.

  Suddenly Judyth called out, pointing toward a gap in the flames. There, where the fire wavered and lapsed over a little rise, a cloud of purple smoke hovered and swirled.

  "Through that!" Judyth shouted. "Make haste!"

  With a shrill whistle, she snapped the reins against the mare's neck. The tough little beast snorted, wheeled, and raced toward the heart of the cloud, scattering sparks and fire-blackened clods in her wake.

  Verminaard gasped and started to call out, to stop her, but the mare flashed by before he could speak, could reach out, and he had to follow because Orlog had already made his own choice.

  The smoke rushed over them like water.

  For a moment, Aglaca held his breath, and then, as Judyth steered the mare through the whirling obscurity, he leaned back, opened his eyes, and breathed carefully.

  The air was bracing and moist, awash in an odor of lilac.

  "Where …" he whispered, but Judyth reached back and motioned to him for quiet.

  "Hush," she murmured over her shoulder. "There is danger in words. Someone ahead beckons us through the smoke."

  Verminaard strained to follow his companions, craning over Orlog's neck at the distant, dark shape of Aglaca's back, which vanished and reappeared, then vanished again in the thick, rolling smoke.

  It's stifling here, he thought. Blind and stifling, and smelling of ash. How can I follow when… when Judyth…

  Where is the Voice now?

  The smoke parted instantly around a green-robed woman.

  Instinctively Judyth tugged at the reins.

  But the woman was farther away than she had imagined, standing over a fallen man in a circle of foliage. Around her, the bright grass spread and waved, and a dozen violet flowers, various and tall, blossomed strangely on the scorched plain.

  The woman motioned gracefully, waving them on. Judyth felt that she knew the woman in green, that she should know her, but the smoke was rising again, and the face was fading, fading into the purple mist until all that remained was a pale arm gesturing, motioning, waving….

  "Go on," the woman called. "Follow."

  "How?" Judyth asked. "Where?"

  "You knew before. You'll know again."

  The pale hand swirled a shape from the smoke: a passage, whirling and doubling on itself like a folding tunnel, dwindling and fading slowly.

  Instinctively again, Judyth guided the mare through the passage, through a flurry of shape and image, out into starlight and air, Aglaca clinging desperately to her waist and Verminaard sputtering on his stallion as it burst through the smoke behind her.

  Still coughing, Verminaard rode on ahead, reoriented now, assured by faint stars and familiar terrain.

  With a deep breath, Judyth guided the mare onto the open plains. Aglaca shifted in the saddle, and Judyth felt suddenly safer.

  But she marveled as white Solinari peeked through the scattering smoke, marveled at what she had seen in the quiet, purple mists of the strange enchantress.

  A flower, she had seen. Or the shape of a flower.

  And within it, the shape of a mask.

  Chapter 12

  Cerestes watched from a high grove overlooking the castle as the fire raged toward Nidus.

  Again in human form and wearied from flight and the Change, he knelt amid cedar and taxus, his black robes wrapped closely about his shoulders. In cold, unblinking curiosity, he gazed out at the riders bursting through the edge of the flame, the standard of Nidus-black storm-crow on a red field-tattered and burning in the diminishing light.

  There were five of them left. Daeghrefn and four others. No sign of Robert.

  And the ogres were closing from west and east and north.

  Covered in mud and moss and dung from a long, oblivious sleep, a harsh battle cry now on their lips, yet another band of the monsters swarmed out of the foothills below him. They crashed down the hillside, skidding through rocks, uprooting small trees in their descent. They stopped only to gather weapons-huge felled branches, stones for slinging and hurling. A dozen of them lumbered onto the plain to join their advanc
ing brothers.

  Cerestes chuckled, brushing the ash from his hair. The creatures were considerably far from him now, but moving resolutely onto the plains, and the dark was coming. The dark, where human eyes would fail and falter, where the fire would cast long, deceptive shadows, in which an ogre could hide or the road itself could vanish.

  Night was the ally of monsters.

  "And night is lovely, and my friend as well," he murmured ecstatically as the red moon and the silver tilted over the smoke-blurred landscape, and black Nuitari rose between them. Cerestes stood in the copse of evergreens and breathed a low prayer to the black moon and Hid-dukel, to Zeboim and Chemosh and Sargonnas-to all the dark gods, even to the Lady herself.