Michael Williams - Before the Mask

So this is the end of service, Robert thought grimly, drawing his sword. But better this than to end as the lackey of a cowardly, heartless bastard.

He glared toward the dwindling form of the rider, watched it vanish in the lower hills.

The rumble and call of the ogres was closer now, and a dreadful sniffing rose from the lip of the haze, where two black, shapeless forms shifted and bent like vallenwoods in a high wind.

Robert willed himself not to think of the stories. The ravaged caravans in the Throtl Gap, the children plucked from wagon beds, the village of two hundred in Taman Busuk, the gnawed, scattered bones found in the wreckage each time.

If it is the end, it's best to go out fighting. I have nothing to lose. And perhaps I will be fortunate. Perhaps the fire will reach me before the ogres do.

The smoke to the east glowed orange and red, and sharp tongues of flame shot through the blackness, making bizarre daylight of this frightful, burning evening. Robert lay back on the ground, clenching his teeth against the hammering pain in his leg.

Suddenly all sight vanished into a purple, obliterating fog. It covered the rise where the seneschal lay, muffling all sound as well, so that the crackle of flames and the cry of the ogres reached him only as vibrations through the ground.

Robert breathed deeply. No coughing, no sting to the eye.

"Damned if it…" he began, then lost the words at the sight of the bare-footed, green-robed woman weaving through the smoke. Slowly, with the trust that arises only when one has seen a dozen battles, a thousand enemies, and has learned thereby to distinguish friends, the old veteran sheathed his sword and waited.

In the swirling silence, the woman approached.

As Verminaard, Aglaca, and Judyth skirted the eastern edge of the forest, keeping to the high ground of the foothills, they saw the ogres rushing down from the mountains after them.

The monsters trailed fire and ash, shed sparks as they lumbered west through the burning woods and onto the devastated plains. They hastened toward the level country north of the Nerakan Forest, where a dark gap lay in the fire and smoke.

Even from the heights, from the rocky highlands and from the back of his stallion, Verminaard couldn't discern what was happening down on the burning steppe. He reined Orlog to an uneasy halt and waited for the durable little mare to catch up, Judyth and Aglaca bent with weariness in the saddle.

"There," the bigger lad pronounced, his hand sweeping the landscape around them-the bunched fires, the ogres, the smoke covering the country for miles. "If it were daylight and clear, I could see our way home."

"But since it is as it is," Aglaca pondered cautiously, "where do we go from here?" He didn't trust his transformed companion, but the fire and assaulting ogres were a more obvious danger.

And even after the worst had happened in the cave, there would still be a way to rescue his companion. There had to be.

"We'll ride down into the midst of it," Verminaard said. A strange confidence had risen in him. In Takhisis's cavern, his uncertainties and pain had vanished. A black-hot bolt had shot through his hand, blistering him from fingertips to elbow, welding his fingers to the handle of the captured mace for a time.

But that was nothing before the older injuries of lifelong fear, all the more terrible because they had continued to cripple and humiliate him. Strangely, his new wound did not hurt at all.

In the short ride through the foothills, the Voice had traveled beside him, coaxing, flattering, promising. The weapon that can harm you, it said, has not been forged by dwarf or ogre. It is far from you now, but your power is near.

And then, when the northern grasslands opened for him, veiled and misted by smoke but stretching toward the old Battle Plain, toward Castle Nidus, the Voice returned again, and with it the greatest of its hushed and seductive vows.

This smoke will spread, Lord Verminaard, and cover all kingdoms of the world… all kingdoms in a moment of time. And even the farthest ground that the smoke will cover can belong to you, for I can deliver that country and power and glory to those who worship me…

He breathed in the acrid smoke exultantly. It was a heady promise, and the prospect of such dominion was sweet. Beneath him, the broad back of Orlog felt more powerful still.

Could it be that the vision that had arrayed itself before him in the depths of the cave was already coming to pass?

"… to pass through the fire."

Verminaard started. Judyth and Aglaca sat beside him on the mare, and the girl was saying something, something he had lost in his revery.

He turned to her politely, attentively, brushing the drooping hair from his eyes. She was not the girl he had imagined, and that really didn't matter anymore. None of his previous disappointments did. But she was lovely and dark, and she would do.

"I beg your pardon, Lady Judyth," he replied, his voice husky and low.

"The fire," Aglaca said impatiently. "It's a blazing wall between us and Nidus, and the ogres are stalking along it like wolves. If we expect to see your castle again, we'll have to pass through the fire."

"Then that is just what we shall do," Verminaard said ¦ calmly, pointing toward the gap in the flame. "Follow me, and ask no questions."

"But Verminaard…" Aglaca began.

Verminaard glared at him. "Be ruled by me, Aglaca. Be ruled by me or be damned where you stand."

Verminaard's confident words died swiftly when they reached the plain.

From above, the fire had seemed navigable to him. There was an end to it, and borders, and the ogres that moved around it and through it were scattered and few in number.

But now, the horses picked uncertainly around the southern edge of the rolling flames, and the path through the blaze seemed to have vanished in the short journey to the edge of the fire wall. The scorched ground smoldered beneath Orlog's hooves as the big stallion stepped gingerly from patch to patch of remaining green. The evening sky was smoke black and unreadable.

As he rode down the spreading wave of flame, Judyth and Aglaca close behind, Verminaard's assurance continued to wither like the blackened grass in the fire wall's wake. At this distance, the choices were quick and baffling. The shouts of ogres came to him from the smoke, from the flames, from the charred woods behind, and he moved through a country of doubling echoes. Dodging through the black grass, foxes and rabbits, pheasant and squirrel, all panic-stricken, were driven by an instinct to flee, to burrow, to vanish, and the horses leapt and shied as the wild things scurried beneath them. Orlog leapt over fire-felled oak and aeterna, and for the first time since he had broken the beast in the high meadows north of Nidus, Verminaard could not control the black stallion beneath him. Twice Orlog veered dangerously north, until the flames rose like a battlement above them, and twice the big horse shied away, whinnying wildly and sidling through the seared undergrowth as the blazes broke around them, leaving them astound-ingly untouched.

Where is the Voice now? Verminaard thought, clinging frantically to the reins. This is my country, my power and glory. It told me so.

He looked back. Astride the mare, at the smoke's edge, Judyth peered calmly into the roiling fire. Aglaca sat behind her in the saddle, his wiry arms wrapped gently about her waist, but there was no gentleness in his eyes. Instead, he stared at Verminaard coldly, accusingly.

Suddenly Judyth called out, pointing toward a gap in the flames. There, where the fire wavered and lapsed over a little rise, a cloud of purple smoke hovered and swirled.

"Through that!" Judyth shouted. "Make haste!"

With a shrill whistle, she snapped the reins against the mare's neck. The tough little beast snorted, wheeled, and raced toward the heart of the cloud, scattering sparks and fire-blackened clods in her wake.