Michael Williams - Before the Mask

"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.

"The Amarach again?" the mage asked, his hidden eyes narrowing, and Verminaard steeled himself for the lecture-how the stones were a child's toy and the desperate preoccupation of the old, who read them fearfully, imagining they could augur their own dates of death.

"It will be your undoing, Master Verminaard," the mage had always told him. "Forgo this clerical nonsense and attend to the hunt and the castle and your studies."

But not this time. For some reason, the mage's reply floated away from lectures. Lazily, with a slow, almost reptilian movement, he rose from the chair.

"And what might the runes tell you that good common sense would not?" he asked as Verminaard reached to his belt for the pouch that contained the carved stones.

"Common sense tells me to consult the runes, sir."

The mage smiled wearily. Verminaard opened the bag and poured the runestones into the mage's cupped hands.

"Think of the question, Master Verminaard," Cerestes said, lifting the stones over the lad's head.

Verminaard nodded solemnly and then, with his eyes closed, reached up and drew three stones. He dropped them to the floor, one after the other, in a coarse, almost careless manner.

Cerestes crouched over the stones and stared at the lad. "What is the question?" he asked again into the silence, as Verminaard fidgeted and looked to the window, where the stars seemed to weave and fade.

The lad inhaled and confessed his plan.

"There's a girl…"

"At twenty-one, there generally is," Cerestes observed dryly, and then remembered Takhisis's words. "Go on."

"I–I saw her at the edge of the stone bridge. On the day of the hunt and the ambush."

Cerestes nodded, his golden eyes suddenly fixed and intent. Heartened, Verminaard burst forth with the rest of his secret.

"She's been in my thoughts for a season, sir. She's the bandits' prisoner, for no man binds his ally."

"Aglaca might tell you otherwise," the mage observed sardonically, his intensity vanished and his eyes hooded and vague. "Or Abelaard. But you want to rescue this girl?"

"Read the runes, sir. Please?"

The mage turned to the stones at his feet, touching each with the tip of a bony finger as his hand moved slowly from left to right. "Birch. Thunder. The Hammer," he murmured, and glanced up at the lad. "If there were anything to this musty augury, Verminaard, I would take this as pleasant prospects indeed. Inspired by the woman, you make a journey of beginnings. At the final aspect is the Hammer-symbol both of the power of giants and the source of that power."

Verminaard's eyes widened. "It is as I imagined, then. I am destined to find her!"

Cerestes shook his head. "Caution, young master, caution. Remember the placement of the stones."

His hand repeated the pattern, moving slowly left to right, touching each stone in turn.

"That which was. That which is. That which is yet to be-not 'that which is sure to happen.' "

"I won't tell Father that you read the runes for me," Verminaard said, with a wide, wolfish smile.

Cerestes turned toward the window, hiding a similar smile of his own. The skull of Chemosh was brilliantly visible now, framed by stone and darkness and the deep purple western sky. It could not have been easier.

So it was that Verminaard of Nidus received the blessing of the mage and the veiled direction of the rune stones. He did not linger in Cerestes' chambers, for the hour was late and he had much to do on the morrow. Gathering the stones, he bowed respectfully and backed out the door as it closed softly.

The mage remained at the window, pondering the shifting stars and the cool eddies of night wind on the keep below him as it scattered straw and pale leaves. Cerestes' smile widened.

The game was beginning, and he did so relish a game. Already Takhisis had set her plans in motion, obscure to the mage for now, but he did not need the details yet.

The mysterious girl was on her way, and it was enough. From a distance, the unwitting lad was being drawn toward her, toward a shadowy form he had seen, or rather glimpsed, months ago on a cloudy mountain afternoon.

They would bring this woman to Castle Nidus, and with her safely beneath his roof, Cerestes was sure that it would take little time to uncover her secret.

But the road to Neraka was long and menacing. It crossed the high and desolate grasslands south of the castle, bending east through a narrow pass between foothills surrounding Mount Berkanth and the infamous Nerakan Forest. And even then, after perilous miles of travel, the journey was not over. A southward path took the traveler on between two volcanoes now smoldering and seething with new life. Only then would Verminaard reach the encampments that surrounded the city, and only then would his search for the girl begin in earnest.

In the heart of Neraka, where the Dark Queen was raising a hidden temple.

The mage backed away from the window and settled into his soft chair. The night had turned, and the stars seemed to tilt and beckon as the first birds of the morning awakened and the servants rose as well. The silence was broken by a tentative song from an aderyn perched somewhere on the battlements, followed by the lonely footsteps of a groom as he shuffled across the bailey to the stables.