Michael Williams - Before the Mask

She felt for the purple pendant around her neck, but it wasn't there. She vaguely remembered tearing the clasp in her recent haste, somewhere in the cave. There was no help for it now. She would have to brave the flames without Paladine's protective gift.

L'Indasha slung her skirts up over her arm and raced down the hillside, this time catching her bare legs and feet on every thornbush she ran through. Another fire. Another burning. Another darkness.

Daeghrefn wheeled in the saddle, shouting vain orders to his confused search party.

The fire storm had surged all around him, rushing over the plains and into the forest like a devouring wind. The plume of his helmet was charred and smoking, and the mane of his stallion brittle and tipped with ash. He had called to Reginn, to Asa, called desperately to his captain Kenaz, but they had vanished behind a wall of smoke. Beside him, five young guardsmen sat their horses unsteadily, their eyes fixed on the commander, awaiting orders, strength, assurance. Robert, mounted on a skittish roan mare, watched the thickest part of the smoke, the column to their south, in which dark, hulking shapes turned and doubled and danced amid the burning trees.

What had begun as a simple search for Aglaca and Ver-minaard had come to disaster just as they emerged from the Nerakan Forest, intending to follow the foothills south to the borders of the settlement.

Then the fire had rushed on them like something out of the Rending, like the images in a shaman's vision. Daegh-refn's column had scattered, a dozen crack soldiers bolting from heat and curling flame, and he had led them back through the forest, groping toward open country and the castle beyond, toward thinning smoke and clear skies and unimpeded breathing…

And then, surging through the flame, their filthy hides blackened and smoldering, the ogres rushed at the soldiers through the trees and drove them toward the plains. Thunar fell at once, Nidus's best swordsman pulled from his horse, and a breath later Ullr fell, torn in the terrible hands of monsters. Daeghrefn himself had lurched in the saddle, clinging desperately to his stallion's brittle mane, one foot precariously in the stirrup, as a huge ogre, crashing through smoke and undergrowth, scored his leg with its filthy, ragged claws.

It was fear that had righted him atop the horse, a desperate scrabbling animal fear that had surged from somewhere beneath his skin, rushing over him like the fire storm, rushing over his shouts and tears and finally his screams as he kicked the horrible, drooling thing away, as the ogre's fingers clutched and loosened on his ankle, and the horse quickened under him and suddenly, mercifully, he was clear of the monster and regained the saddle in the heaving smoke.

Before the fire and in the heart of the flames, the ogres danced ecstatically, their madness propelled by the fury they had ignited.

Now Daeghrefn's men regrouped on a rocky rise on the plains to the north of the forest's edge. The hard flatlands stretched around them, ending in smoke, in flame, in a border of ignited trees. As the flames approached through the crackling and toppling conifers-and with the flames, the ogres-the Lord of Nidus counted his losses.

Five men. One of them Kenaz, his captain, lost somewhere near the center of the woods where the trails branched. And with all those dead or vanished men, Daeghrefn's own courage.

For Daeghrefn was afraid. For the first time in his adult life, his legs trembled as he stood in the stirrups, the hair still bristling on the back of his neck. The fear was a kind of fire, too, spreading and expanding the longer he allowed it to dwell within him.

Scarcely a moment ago, when the monster had tried to pull him from the horse, he had felt its grasp, smelled its hot, feral stink. It was no soldier, no swordsman meeting him blade to blade in the battle he knew and trusted. It was a monster, but more monstrous was the fear that had unmanned him.

Galloping and screaming at the head of his squadron, he had ridden until the panic had ebbed, until his senses had left him and the hands of his men had steadied him in the saddle. Now, though the ogres were distant and the flames behind him, a new fear rose to undo him.

The reins shook in his hand. For a moment, Daeghrefn longed for the Solamnic Order he had abandoned, for its rule of honor and courage, for Oath and Measure to compel him and uphold his collapsing spirit.

But when he had banished knighthood, he had banished the shape of his courage.

His rrten stared at him, eagerly awaiting his orders, but through the glass of his despair and terror, their features were distorted, and Daeghrefn looked on them as enemies, as usurpers.

Now they are contemptuous, he thought. Now they are judging me. They will seek a new leader.

"Enough waiting," he rasped, desperately trying to mask the rising panic in his voice. "The forest will go up like tinder before this fire." Daeghrefn nodded toward the approaching wall of flame. "So we had best get farther north, in sight of the castle. There the garrison can come to our aid."

There. He had spoken like a commander, though his voice shook and his heart rattled. Steadied, Daeghrefn stared back toward the woods, his eyes smarting with smoke, and signaled to the men to move north, back to Nidus, across the smoky plains.

The remaining men, five wide-eyed young archers from Estwilde, followed their commander toward a rise in the grasslands circled by a thin outcropping of evergreen. There, in the shade of fir and cedar, they dismounted, nervously readying their bows to cover the withdrawal of the rear guard.

Robert alone was that rear guard.

As the fire surged relentlessly toward him, the weathered seneschal remained at the edge of the woods. The red mare pawed and snorted nervously beneath his calming hand, but she stayed her ground amid harsh smoke and the harsher cries of the ogres.

Robert counted two heartbeats until Daeghrefn had reached the rise. Then, just as the flames touched the borders of the forest, he wheeled his horse and galloped across the plains, headed for the line of archers with a hot wind coursing at his back.

He saw the ogres then, the flanking column that waded through the rising smoke in a swift, hungry arch toward Daeghrefn's rear.

Robert cried out, pointing and waving wildly, tottering in the saddle with the strength of his own gestures. Daeghrefn shielded his eyes and craned to hear.

Then he understood.

With a shout, the Lord of Nidus alerted his men, who scrambled awkwardly to their horses, dropping their weapons in panic. They were off in a gallop, a scant ten yards ahead of him, as Robert reached the rise and spurred his horse to catch up.

At the sharp dig of spurs, the little roan mare bolted and bucked with a shrieking whinny. Clinging for a last desperate moment to the reins, Robert felt himself lifted from the saddle. The ground spun and tumbled and rushed toward him, and then the hard earth of the plains drove the breath from him.

The mare caught up with the other horses and kept running.

Dazed, Robert tried to rise and felt his leg buckle. Struggling painfully to his knees, he looked desperately north toward the retreating column of horsemen.

"Daeghrefn!" he cried, and the foremost rider turned as the soldiers rode on past out of the smoke. "Daeghrefn! Help!"

He could see the man dimly, standing in the stirrups. Then the ogres lumbered out of the vapor, and the Lord of Nidus wheeled and galloped away, shouting over his shoulder, "I'm sorry, Robert! I cannot help you where you are going."

Robert fell to the hard earth. For a moment, lying on his back, he glimpsed the evening stars through the swirling smoke. The broken scale of Hiddukel reeled over him in the northern sky, the stars in the constellation painfully bright.