Michael Williams - Before the Mask

"Did you find anything to use for a fire?" Verminaard asked curtly, his attention drawn back to the rubble on the floor of the cave. Aglaca vexed him with all this knowledge of plants and weeds and flowers. It was unseemly, irregular to him. Gruffly he waved his companion away. Better to burn what wood he could find in the cavernchairs, perhaps, or the oaken bucket-than to wait while Aglaca dawdled, his nose again in the lilies.

His gaze returned to the bucket again. It was somehow the center of the cave, the focal point of the strange familiarity that seemed to inhabit the place. He approached it cautiously. A wizard might live here, and wizards were known to charge an item with fire, with venom, with destructive spells, so that when the unwary hand touched it, flame would course through the bones and poison through the veins. A thousand years after a wizard's departure or death, the spell could arise to ignite or corrupt.

This bucket had all the signs. A line of ragged marks along the rim-not weathering or chipping, but the intentional carvings of a knowing hand.

Verminaard listened for the Voice. Whatever it was that spoke to him no doubt had a storehouse of lore and magic.

But again the Voice was silent.

Verminaard swore softly and looked into the bottom of the pail. He blinked and looked again.

There was something about the swirl of the damp wood grain in the bottom of the bucket that seemed to shimmer and change. For a moment, it was a spiral, a swirl, then it seemed like the dark matrix at the hub of a spider's web, like the hagall rune, which promised misfortune and crisis.

And then, as though he gazed into the proverbial crystals and orbs at the Tower of High Sorcery, he thought he saw a rocky landscape, like the Khalkists but even darker, more severe, a hand reaching out to him from the depths of the swirling wood, reaching, grasping, failing…

Verminaard shook his head and looked again. The hand and the webbing, the rocks and the rune had all passed from sight, merely a trick of light on the water-stained wood of the bucket. Aglaca called again from outside, something about columbines.

But the back of the cave drew Verminaard now. A small mound in a shadowy corner, more humble and less mysterious than the bucket, but very compelling. Quietly, with a single glance over his shoulder, he crept toward the shadows and the strange construction.

Dirt and stones. Someone was buried here.

An unfathomable sadness passed over the young man as he knelt beside the gravesite. Something just below his memory stirred, a warmth and a faint, fragile peace…

"Verminaard!" Aglaca shouted a third time, and the thoughts fled suddenly. With a growl of impatience, Verminaard started off to find him.

As he moved toward the mouth of the cave, a glitter in the straw caught his eye. He knelt and picked up a small pendant, the silver chain broken, the thumb-sized gem-stone sparkling. Rubbing the stone with the hem of his tunic, Verminaard marveled at the midnight purple of the thing, a color halfway between violet and blue. There was no feel of magic or omen about the pendant, but it might turn a pretty penny from some courtier at Nidus.

Or make a gift for a mysterious young woman.

He thought little more of it, dropping it in the bag with the rune stones. It clicked and rolled against them softly, the sound as if someone deep in the cavern had opened a hidden door. Verminaard shrugged and hastened up the trail to the garden, where Aglaca crouched above a fan-shaped plant, his gaze intent on the solitary flower that bloomed from its solitary scape.

"See?" Aglaca said, beaming, cupping the unplucked blossom delicately in his hand. He motioned Verminaard closer.

"Delightful," the larger youth declared flatly, his eyes elsewhere, alert to danger from predator or bandit.

"It's a beautiful peach color, and its eye zone is an odd sort of purple… and this marking-the face, or maybe it looks more like a mask. And the flower is a perfect triangle," Aglaca insisted, but Verminaard wasn't listening.

"There must be a better place to stay the night, Aglaca. We should move on before the darkness overtakes us."

"I don't understand, Verminaard."

There's a haunt to the cave, he wanted to say. Some… presence. I don't know if it's friendly or hostile, but that bucket in there…

Don't tell him, the Voice urged, rising from the cave's mouth, as if the black, glinting mountain itself was speaking. You know how the ignorant laugh at your lore and runes and signs. Speak of defense. Of the depth of the cave…

"The cave goes back forever," Verminaard said dutifully. "It burrows through the mountain, I'd wager, and with no telling how many branches and chambers and passages. Dangerous things could hide in those depths, and I'm not going to risk your safety again."

He forced a grimaced smile at his irritating companion, who smiled in response.

"The danger of that's a slim one, Verminaard. The roots of the drasil tree go down a hundred feet, maybe more. They grow over caves to… well, I suppose it's to feed the roots or something-some kind of nourishment they need in the cavern air. They know enough to grow through the rock, but not enough to stop growing. The back of that cave is probably atangle with 'em, like a cage or a baffle. Nothing bigger than a man could navigate it, and a small man indeed, no match for you."

"But there could be something else," Verminaard murmured. "Something unreckoned in your botany. Scorpions, maybe. Some kind of cave viper."

Aglaca frowned. "It's getting dark. And there's-"

Verminaard did not wait. "We'll go at once. You are my responsibility, after all."

He had almost convinced himself with his own excuses.

But still the cave and the little garden haunted him as he and Aglaca saddled and rode south, and the dark vanished over his shoulder in the unsettling red of a Khalkist sunset. The place haunted him still as he warmed himself at the night's campfire, the light muffled deftly by Aglaca against the eyes of beasts and bandits and worse.

It would haunt him through the morning as they passed the south edge of the Nerakan Forest-the Blood Grove, where it was said that the victims of banditry hung, dried and blackened like unpicked grapes, and wild cats scuttled along the woodland trails in even more unspeakable foraging.

Dark and deep, serenaded the Voice, which seemed to beckon from the shadowy woods. Dark and deep, and the desolate secrets hanging in decay, in decay and forgetfulness…

Is it not an ending place for enemies? Tor unloving and unlovely fathers?

Verminaard hearkened to the Voice, to its bottomless seduction. He vividly imagined Daeghrefn swinging slowly from the black branches of a drooping, rotting aeterna tree, the air aswarm with kites, with raptors…

"No!" he exclaimed, wrenching his thoughts back to sunlight, to breathing, to the cool Nerakan plains and the spreading grasslands.

To Aglaca, riding beside him on the mare, who regarded him with alarm and concern, he muttered, "It's nothing. I must have… must have fallen asleep. Don't bother yourself."

"It's a voice, isn't it?" Aglaca asked quietly, leaning across the saddle.

"A voice? Don't be foolish." His own reply sounded shrill, frightened.

Aglaca slowed the mare, brought her to a halt. Verminaard swore softly, reined in the stallion, and guided him gently back to the spot where Aglaca waited, his face cloudy and solemn.

"Foolish it may be to you, Verminaard," Aglaca said, his words still unnaturally hushed, "but I've heard a voice myself sometimes, and maybe I'm gone a bit to the wayside from staring at the red moon for too long, but that voice has told me things best never spoken. And best never listened to."

"Then don't listen," Verminaard blurted. Then quietly, more cautiously, "What does it tell you?"