Michael Williams - Before the Mask

Verminaard gasped and started to call out, to stop her, but the mare flashed by before he could speak, could reach out, and he had to follow because Orlog had already made his own choice.

The smoke rushed over them like water.

For a moment, Aglaca held his breath, and then, as Judyth steered the mare through the whirling obscurity, he leaned back, opened his eyes, and breathed carefully.

The air was bracing and moist, awash in an odor of lilac.

"Where…" he whispered, but Judyth reached back and motioned to him for quiet.

"Hush," she murmured over her shoulder. "There is danger in words. Someone ahead beckons us through the smoke."

Verminaard strained to follow his companions, craning over Orlog's neck at the distant, dark shape of Aglaca's back, which vanished and reappeared, then vanished again in the thick, rolling smoke.

It's stifling here, he thought. Blind and stifling, and smelling of ash. How can I follow when… when Judyth…

Where is the Voice now?

The smoke parted instantly around a green-robed woman.

Instinctively Judyth tugged at the reins.

But the woman was farther away than she had imagined, standing over a fallen man in a circle of foliage. Around her, the bright grass spread and waved, and a dozen violet flowers, various and tall, blossomed strangely on the scorched plain.

The woman motioned gracefully, waving them on. Judyth felt that she knew the woman in green, that she should know her, but the smoke was rising again, and the face was fading, fading into the purple mist until all that remained was a pale arm gesturing, motioning, waving…

"Go on," the woman called. "Follow."

"How?" Judyth asked. "Where?"

"You knew before. You'll know again."

The pale hand swirled a shape from the smoke: a passage, whirling and doubling on itself like a folding tunnel, dwindling and fading slowly.

Instinctively again, Judyth guided the mare through the passage, through a flurry of shape and image, out into starlight and air, Aglaca clinging desperately to her waist and Verminaard sputtering on his stallion as it burst through the smoke behind her.

Still coughing, Verminaard rode on ahead, reoriented now, assured by faint stars and familiar terrain.

With a deep breath, Judyth guided the mare onto the open plains. Aglaca shifted in the saddle, and Judyth felt suddenly safer.

But she marveled as white Solinari peeked through the scattering smoke, marveled at what she had seen in the quiet, purple mists of the strange enchantress.

A flower, she had seen. Or the shape of a flower.

And within it, the shape of a mask.

Cerestes watched from a high grove overlooking the castle as the fire raged toward Nidus.

Again in human form and wearied from flight and the Change, he knelt amid cedar and taxus, his black robes wrapped closely about his shoulders. In cold, unblinking curiosity, he gazed out at the riders bursting through the edge of the flame, the standard of Nidus-black storm-crow on a red field-tattered and burning in the diminishing light.

There were five of them left. Daeghrefn and four others. No sign of Robert.

And the ogres were closing from west and east and north.

Covered in mud and moss and dung from a long, oblivious sleep, a harsh battle cry now on their lips, yet another band of the monsters swarmed out of the foothills below him. They crashed down the hillside, skidding through rocks, uprooting small trees in their descent. They stopped only to gather weapons-huge felled branches, stones for slinging and hurling. A dozen of them lumbered onto the plain to join their advancing brothers.

Cerestes chuckled, brushing the ash from his hair. The creatures were considerably far from him now, but moving resolutely onto the plains, and the dark was coming. The dark, where human eyes would fail and falter, where the fire would cast long, deceptive shadows, in which an ogre could hide or the road itself could vanish.

Night was the ally of monsters.

"And night is lovely, and my friend as well," he murmured ecstatically as the red moon and the silver tilted over the smoke-blurred landscape, and black Nuitari rose between them. Cerestes stood in the copse of evergreens and breathed a low prayer to the black moon and Hid-dukel, to Zeboim and Chemosh and Sargonnas-to all the dark gods, even to the Lady herself.

He had seen Takhisis's tower in far Neraka, the black stone and scaffolding heaped at the foot of its surrounding walls when the enchantments broke and the ogres fled. It was a setback, a slowing of her plans, but only a brief one. The tower was almost complete-grown out of rock, out of earth, out of nothing. The walls were an afterthought, scarcely necessary when strong magic ruled in Neraka.

Cerestes had seen enough to know. The devices of the Dark Queen were well under way, but they could still be disrupted with a clever mind and a subtle tongue. His own safety lay in continuing to serve her for now, to seem strong and resolute as her captain in the waking world. The time would come, and the secret of the runes would come to him-but not now, not yet. Open rebellion seemed thin and futile, like the hopes of these horsemen on the darkening plain.

He laughed again at that prospect. It looked as though Daeghrefn had found disaster within sight of his own fortress. But there was always the garrison-a hundred stout men in Nidus's walls, who, on seeing the danger to their lord and master, would…

What would they do? What indeed?

The world was filled with unfaithful servants, he mused ironically. And sometimes it seemed that they were the safe ones, huddling and skulking behind the walls while their masters stood in the open and braved the approaching peril.

Braved the fires and the ogres.

But if the fire raged further and the ogres ran riot, Daeghrefn would not fall alone. Somewhere behind the flames wandered the mace-wielder, and the druidess's girl was with him, and the other lad.

Softly, insistently, the Voice spoke to him now, low and melodious and achingly feminine. Those three cannot perish on the plains, it said. They must not fall into the clutches of the ogres.

"I know," he replied, whispering a quick spell of veiling. Then he stood in the midst of the evergreen grove, his face shadowed by the crisp-smelling darkness, his deepest thoughts concealed in a layer of spellcraft. "What would you have me do, Lady?" he asked aloud to the wind and the night.

It is time, the Voice proclaimed as the branches rustled with a warm breeze, upon it the smell of lilac. But beneath that sweet and lulling smell lay the sharp, disturbing odor of fire and carrion, so that Cerestes reeled for a moment, wondering if the smoke had risen from the plains or if he had imagined the gruesome smell on the air.

Or if, on the wings of the night, the breath of the god dess had passed over him.

It is time, she repeated, and he knew what she meant.

Time to show yourself.

"But they will fear me as well," he protested. "The mace-wielder. His companions."

The mace-wielder understands me, Takhisis explained. And I am the Queen of Dragons.

Mystified, Cerestes nodded. And though he was weary of changing and longed for a form that was ever the same, he answered her call. He focused his will past pain and fear, past the barriers that the mind sets for the body's limits and boundaries, and his thoughts rocked in a white-hot ecstasy. His bones stretched and thickened. Scales erupted on his blistering arms, and he groaned with the fresh pain of metamorphosis, with the remembered pain of a thousand years of waiting for this moment.

All who wandered the plains would look upon the dragon, and the will of the Dark Queen would be done.

Daeghrefn shielded his eyes against the heat and the rush of smoke. One of the men-Mozer, he believed-tugged at his cape, shouted something loud and urgent and indecipherable, but it was lost in the roar of the flames, the whinny of horses, the fierce war cries of the ogres.