Michael Williams - Before the Mask

"That I'm exceptional," Aglaca replied, with a strange half-smile, "and in a way that no one else is exceptional. It's a heady wine that voice pours, telling me that it talks to me alone, and that some arrangement in time and space has brought me, and me alone, to high degree and to great position. It tells me darker things, too-that my father has abandoned me, that he and your father consider me only a pawn in some long, political game, but it does not matter what the voice says, because I choose not to believe it. I believe what my father said before I left: that he loved me no matter what."

Verminaard sniffed, goading Orlog to a trot, heading south over the Nerakan plains. But his thoughts wandered back down a blind tunnel, at the end of which the Voice lay coiled in the depths of his memory, and the coveted words of the Voice were deeper, more sweet than Aglaca's thickheaded skepticism.

He would choose not to believe as well. But he would choose not to believe Aglaca. And so he changed the line of talk altogether. "What color are her eyes, for the last time?"

Aglaca fumbled for an image, for words of hue and light, and then he had it. "They are exactly the color of that lily's eye," he said gleefully.

Verminaard ground his teeth and swore Aglaca's doom, silently, on all the dark gods. Savagely he spurred Orlog forward.

"Wait for me!" Aglaca shouted, urging the mare to a gallop. "Wait for me, Verminaard!"

Already Verminaard was racing into the flatlands of the Nerakan plateau.

The town of Neraka was a vagabond place, makeshift and dirty.

The decent mountain folk who had peopled it first, goatherds and humble, ingenious farmers, had been forced out over the years by a constant flow of brigands and highwaymen, cutthroats and ne'er-do-wells of all countries and races. There it would have ended, the village dying out on its own when plunder grew scarce, were it not for the building that sprouted in its midst.

For Takhisis had chosen the place, in the way that she always chose-quietly and secretly, in a place where the black obsidian foundations of the temple would raise no alarm. For when she returned to the world and restored her dominion, Neraka was to be the heart of her empire.

And already that heart was beginning to beat.

As Aglaca and Verminaard approached from the north over the flat volcanic plain, the spire of the temple was the first thing they saw. Gnarled like an ancient oak in the heart of the town, it twisted amid half-finished city walls, clouding the southern sky with its bulk and with the strange, shimmering aura of darkness that surrounded it.

Outside the temple walls, the builders' scaffolding, and the ramshackle guardhouses, a hundred fires littered the surrounding village, the black smoke of smithy and kitchen and shrine intermingling with the foul smell of tannery and slaughterhouse. Beyond the village itself, in the outlying plains, scores of squat black tents lay scattered almost randomly, above them an array of pennants and banners-white and black closest to Verminaard, but blue and yellow, red and green in the distance, each adorned with the scowling face of a dragon, each waving in the shifting mountain winds.

The two young men crouched not fifty yards from the northernmost encampment. There, shielded by the tall grass, they ate sparingly from the raw vegetables Aglaca had sensibly gathered from the garden above the cave.

"I feel like a rabbit," Verminaard muttered. "Hidden in the grass eating radishes."

Aglaca snickered and shook his head. Then, rising until he could see over the top of the grass, he peered solemnly toward the army of banners.

"I had no idea the bandits were so plentiful," he declared. "It's no wonder Daeghrefn hasn't killed them all yet."

"Enough of the bandits. Where now?" Verminaard asked. "Where is she?"

Aglaca looked at him curiously. "I can't tell amid all these flags and commotions. We'll have to scout it out, keeping our distances and wits about us and our ears open as well as our eyes. Not even bandits can hide her from us forever."

But it seemed long indeed, as the lads skirted the outlying camps.

No sooner had they started to move west, in a wide counterclockwise circle about the village, than their pres ence was masked by yet another thick mist. Out of nowhere it rose again, rolling over the city until only the towers of the temple were visible through the dense fog, and the colors of the banners were muted, lost in a dozen layers of gray.

It was no ragtag group of bandits that they circled, no disorganized band of cutthroats. Around Neraka was assembling the makings of an army, and judging from the languages and accents and dialects that carried to them through the fog, it was an army gathered from far and exotic places-from Sanction and Estwilde, but also from Kern and from other places where the accents were even stranger. They were far from alert, and far from ready, but the numbers were great and growing.

"See? Aglaca whispered. "Some of them are only now pitching tents. This is a time of arrivals, but what they're arriving/or is a mystery."

"Whatever it is," Verminaard observed, "my father should know. He'll not take to a huge Nerakan army at his doorstep."

"Nor will they take to him, I'd reckon," Aglaca agreed. "Perhaps the girl can tell us."

"If I ever find her," Verminaard muttered gloomily. "Perhaps this whole business has been unwise."

Then the Voice came to him, its inflections as soft and mysterious as the fog, its tones more melodious, more feminine than ever before.

Unwise? Of course not. You have traveled this far this well, and the prison is at hand. The Pen, they call it, on the western grounds, in the midst of the green encampment.

Be ruled by me. Despite the fog and the sentries and the perils ahead of you, I am here to guide you.

"But there are so many of them," Verminaard protested aloud, his voice shrill and thin in the foggy air. Aglaca looked back at him in alarm and signaled for silence.

The day will come, the Voice continued, quietly and alluringly, when you will be thankful for their numbers. You will come back here, Verminaard of Nidus, and all this power I will give you, and the glory of it, for it is given to me of old, and in my power to give it to whomever I please…

"Stay behind me," Aglaca whispered sharply. "And stay down where you belong!"

Verminaard blinked stupidly, his thoughts drawn from the maze of the Voice by his companion's warning. He found himself standing full upright in the waist-high grass, an easy target had the fog been thinner and the sentries more alert.

Instantly he crouched, but the Voice was not through with him.

Be ruled by me, it intoned. These things are mine to give, for the smallest of favors. I shall show you this as the hours unfold.

"No," Aglaca said flatly, to nothing and no one, his back to Verminaard. The older lad turned toward him in astonishment, and looking over his shoulder, Aglaca grinned sheepishly.

"Just that voice again, Verminaard," he admitted. "Come to me with another set of lies. Guess I forgot myself in the quarrel."

"Enough of voices," Verminaard declared. "We need to find the girl. This fog can't last forever."

It can if a dragon wields it, Ember thought, coiled not a hundred yards from the young men, his thoughts masked against intrusion and his wings moving slowly, cyclically, fanning the fog he had summoned magically as it spread through the landscape, darkening and thickening.

Takhisis's commands were convenient, the dragon mused. How better to take the girl than to have Verminaard and Aglaca do it for him?

He smiled, baring his many rows of long teeth. His golden eyes glittered as he searched the mist, then found Verminaard and Aglaca again as they stooped in the grass and waited. It would not be long before they found the Pen.