Michael Williams - Before the Mask

By dark instinct, the ogres moved to the spot of the chanting, where the spell that had contained them was first broken. They reached the Pen and milled together, gaping at one another, uprooting tent posts and wattled walls in their dull uncertainty.

Then one of them-grizzled and small for his race- lifted his face and smelled the switching wind.

"Horse!" he cried out, his broken mouth salivating at the prospect of food. "Horse… and young humans!"

With an exultant, rumbling cry, the ancient ogre rushed toward the green flags, and the rest of the monsters followed.

Ember heard the outcry of the sentries-the name "Judyth" rising like an alarm out of the smoke-and fanned his wings contentedly as the magical fog redoubled over the city and the plains, mingling with the smoke and casting the town into a thick and abiding darkness.

They had her now. Ember was certain. And they would need cover of shadow and cloud to mask their path west through the mountains.

The dragon stirred and rumbled. He had done all he could. He would return to Castle Nidus and await their arrival. There he would be Cerestes again, handsome and witty and learned for the benefit of the captive girl. He would charm the rune-wielder, and he would sound her like the lost rune, rist her in his intricate thoughts and plans until she told him everything she had learned at the feet of the druids.

He would steal her out from the watch of the young humans.

And when he had learned her heart, he would also learn the heart of all the runes.

The dragon lumbered into the sky, rose above the maze of fog into the clear mountain air, and turned his golden eyes to the northwest and to Castle Nidus, abuzz with rumors and vanishments of its own.

Two days into the lads' journey, their absence had become unbearable to the seneschal Robert. He had coaxed, wheedled, and finally berated the master of the castle. Lord Daeghrefn, lost in memories of betrayal and winter, finally stirred at the harsh words of his retainer and noticed that the young men were indeed missing.

"Where would they take those horses for this long, Robert?" he bellowed, stalking down the halls of the castle toward the entrance, the bailey, and the stable beyond them. With a growl, he swept a torch from its sconce on the wall. The brand struck the floor, sputtered, and went out, and Robert coughed behind him.

"Two days is a long time in the saddle if you're hunting, sir. I fear the worst: that they've decided to be heroes, as young men are prone to decide, and that they've taken off toward Neraka with some quest a-brewing."

"Then it's Verminaard's fault!" Daeghrefn stormed, wheeling to face Robert at the sunlit door to the bailey. "What if something happens to Aglaca?"

"Sir?"

"If Aglaca falls in some harebrained escapade, then Abelaard's life is forfeit!"

Robert hesitated. "I reckon that's the rules of the gebo-naud, but I don't think-"

"Where's the fool who helped them with the horses?" Daeghrefn shouted, and made for the distant stable.

Frith was long gone by the time Daeghrefn burst through the stable doors.

He had seen it coming for an hour or two. The young masters were not yet back, though Master Verminaard had sworn they would need the horses only for a night. There was tumult in the keep, and the loudest voice belonged to old Daeghrefn-Lord Stormcrow himself.

Finally Frith's father had been summoned to the council hall. It could mean only one thing.

"They don't summon a groom for matters of state," Frith mumbled to himself, wrapping a cheese and a loaf of bread in his other clean pair of stockings. "It's punishments they're after, punishments and blame, and they'll know before they ask him that Pa don't know a thing.

"But I do." He tucked the woolen package under his arm. The cheese had already begun to smell.

"Whoof!" Frith exclaimed, shifting his burden at once. "Great Reorx forbid 'em to think of the hounds!"

Silently he slipped from the stable atop a swift little gray, figuring that Daeghrefn couldn't kill him but once. Passing through the gate, he coaxed the horse north, toward the shelter of the mountain passes in the long direction of Gargath. The castle dwindled behind him, and he would never return to it, never know that the lads would come home safely, with a mysterious girl in tow, and that Daeghrefn's anger would blow over within a week.

Nor would young Frith discover, until he was much older and the passage of twelve winters had softened the distant news, that his father would be put to death by a furious Daeghrefn for the high crime of not keeping track of his son.

But at the moment Aglaca declared his plan to Ver-minaard, before the Nerakan guards discovered the missing girl and Ember rose above the fog, almost at the same moment that the groom's son Frith decided to flee Castle Nidus, the largest of all the plans was evolving in the depths of the Abyss.

Takhisis watched everything, even forseeing some of it, her golden eye lazing from guard to dragon, from questing lad to stable groom, and her thoughts raced over actions and words to make sense of what would come next.

They are like runes, she decided-Aglaca, Verminaard, the captive girl, Daeghrefn, and the dragon. Somehow they had converged, had all come together in this little rescue story.

Takhisis smiled. It was her task to read convergences. That which was. That which is. That which might become.

Daeghrefn was simple. The wild, immutable force of anger. Whenever he showed in the arrangement, it became volatile… explosive.

The dragon was Daeghrefn's opposite. Ever calm and outwardly serene, laborate and involved, Ember's thoughts turned in on themselves, knotting and entangling until he suspected his own suspicions, deceived himself with his own lies.

The boys were opposites as well. When they glared at one another-in anger, in rivalry, or even in rare agreement-it was as though they looked into a mirror, each the image of the other. Such are brothers, she thought affectionately. But when Verminaard's left hand raised, Aglaca's right hand countered, so that each was the other reversed.

And in rune lore, the Dark Lady remembered, the sign reversed is its opposite as well: The Sun rune reversed foretold darkness, the reversed Harvest rune foretold famine.

Balances. It was all balances. So she had known for ten thousand years, and the little commotions of mortals followed the same vast pattern.

But the girl was different. Unmatched, unpaired, and so far unreadable, she had come from the west, urged on by Paladine's guiding hand. Takhisis could not read her, could not yet discover her mystery or her opposite.

Perhaps she was the blank rune.

The shaman's magic that encircled the Pen had been a test for the girl: a primitive spell, easily broken by mage and by cleric as well, if there were clerics left to break it, but since the girl had done it, she was even more than Takhisis had figured.

For the time being, Takhisis would watch. The girl was more useful alive and free. If she was the blank rune-and when before had the Dark Lady been mistaken? — Judyth would lead Takhisis to L'Indasha Yman, to the secret of the augury.

The girl was the lapwing, the lure that would draw the druidess from hiding.

It would have to be done carefully, this strategy. As soon as Judyth reached Castle Nidus, Takhisis would have the mage cast a warding spell far stronger than the one encircling the Pen in Neraka. She would aid him in the casting, breathe power into his paltry skills so that no enchanter-not even the skillful L'Indasha Yman-could pass through the warding undetected.

No, the druidess would not disrupt these plans. Eventually Judyth would go to her, and when that time came, Takhisis's spies would follow. She would find the druidess, sound the rune, and through the restored prophecies, Takhisis would discover yet another stone-green and priceless and hidden for a century-that would complete the circle of her temple, would bring into being the promised towers in the depth of her dreams.