Michael Williams - Before the Mask

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.

At least for the time being.

Slowly the horses moved east up the rise, and a wind rose from the south, scattering the fog from their path.

"Look at the sky!" Aglaca noted, pointing to a gray gap in the clouds. "Here I thought it was only fog. But it's gloaming as well. We've passed a day back and forth, you and I. Thanks be to Paladine that we found one another by nightfall!"

"What color are her eyes?" Verminaard pressed as he and Aglaca steered the horses up a narrow path along the rock face, searching for high shelter away from the night and its predators, animal and human.

"It's hard to explain, Verminaard," the boy replied. "Oh, look-it's a cave of some sort. I figured as much. There's drasil trees aplenty sprouted on the plateau up there, and I've never known a cut path to lead to outright nowhere."

"A cave, you say?" Verminaard forgot all eyes and colors in the prospect. "What kind of-"

"Bats for certain," Aglaca interrupted. "Spiders near the mouth, and those strange blind crickets in the darkness, if it goes back far enough past the entrance. Perhaps a bear." He stared at Verminaard in mock fear. "Though that's unlikely, with all the maneuvering he'd have to do in the rootmaze. But if a bear sets upon us, at least there are two of us this time."

This time? Verminaard thought, his mind racing guiltily back to the fight with the bandits on the bridge. What does he know? What does he suspect?

Were it not for the bats fluttering into the mountain evening, the cave would have seemed comfortable, even pleasant. Rushes were strewn at its mouth, and its occupant had left not long ago at all and intended to return, judging from the lack of dust and cobweb, the fresh, fragrant straw, and the brooms neatly stacked outside the opening.

"Let's go in," Verminaard urged, stepping toward the overhanging rock.

"It's someone's dwelling," Aglaca objected, squinting into the darkness.

"Then you can sleep outside," Verminaard replied coldly. He stepped inside and foraged for serviceable kindling. Aglaca stood hesitantly at the cave mouth, then climbed the rock face to higher ground and a lookout point.

As Verminaard rummaged through straw and stacked crockery, he picked up a pitcher and examined it with a growing, uneasy sense that he had been here, or had at least seen these very things before.

"Look, Verminaard!" Aglaca exclaimed from the cave mouth. "Carrots and radishes! There's a little garden just above here. Not a sunlit acre, what with the shade from the drasil trees, but surprisingly good soil for this rocky country! I don't know how they did it, not at this height. There are late tomatoes as well, and the whole plot is bordered in day lilies! Some of them are blooming! You really should come and see! One has a face in it-"