Майкл Уильямс - Before the Mask

In the heart of Neraka, where the Dark Queen was raising a hidden temple. The mage backed away from the window and settled into his soft chair. The night had turned, and the stars seemed to tilt and beckon as the first birds of the morning awakened and the servants rose as well. The silence was broken by a tentative song from an aderyn perched somewhere on the battlements, followed by the lonely footsteps of a groom as he shuffled across the bailey to the stables. Cerestes closed his eyes for a moment, drifting on the soft fading of the night. The runes had encouraged the lad, as Cerestes knew they would. It was why he had invented the obscure and hopeful reading, spinning a story out of the flat and meaningless stones.

He laughed scornfully at human foolishness. Until the blank rune was sounded, its symbol recovered, a man might as well read his fingernails for augury.

Cerestes rose from the chair and glided to the center of the room.

It might be as Takhisis claimed, he thought, casting a spell to mask his thoughts in case others—perhaps even the Dark Queen herself—used the night and his dream state to pry into his thought. Perhaps the girl had been chosen by Paladine to carry, somehow, the secret of the vanished rune. If that were true, then she carried a powerful knowledge, the key to an omniscient oracle. Armed with that oracle, Takhisis could find the green gemstone, the last component to the portal she was building in Neraka. It was the cornerstone to her temple, and once it was in place, she could return to the world of Krynn, to the bright and agreeable world she had once poisoned and sullied, that she would again cover with her own abiding darkness.

But the same oracle in another’s hand could stop her entry entirely.

And establish a darkness of his own.

And what, indeed, might be accomplished with both of Huma’s kin?

Cerestes smiled and knelt by the hearth, idly tracing the patterns of the runes in the ashes of the hearthstone.

Birch. Thunder. Hammer. They could apply to him as well—better, in fact, than to a lad’s moonstruck plans of rescue.

He stilled his rising excitement, gathering his robes and curling up on the hearth. He lay there like a sleeping cat, like a coiled serpent.

Once again, he told himself, the blank rune’s faces were still missing. And until they were restored, all auguries were in vain. And yet the stark symbols of Verminaard’s reading occupied his thoughts when he closed his eyes___

Birch. Thunder. Hammer.

He drifted off to a deep dragon’s sleep that would rest him well by the afternoon. He would awaken by the hearth, his black robes chalked and smeared with ashes, his heart resolved to follow Verminaard to Neraka.

For after all, Verminaard and Aglaca must be protected, since Daeghrefn paid Cerestes’ wages. Surely Takhisis would agree.

And since She seemed resolved to test the youths by allowing them this adventure, Cerestes could not seize the girl himself….

And since one of the lads, no doubt, would be the Dark Lady’s cleric, and the dragon queen paid him in a harder currency…

And there was the matter of the missing rune. And finally of a temple in Neraka. He would see that temple, he resolved, but not for Takhisis’s sake. In the temple’s obsidian stones lay secrets as mysterious as those housed in the sixteenth and hidden rune. But these were different secrets—of worldly architecture, of politics and power and the strategies of a hun-. dred dark clerics who awaited the arrival of their mistress.

A dragon’s eye could translate those secrets—the simple intrigues of humans to whom the goddess had not yet come.

And then, with Takhisis safely imprisoned behind the portal, he would sound the runes, find the green gem-stone, and remove it from her grasp forever. Perhaps he would have it made into a ring of power, a symbol of his own new order.

Cerestes murmured in obscure anticipation, a veil of spells like smoke enshrouding his face. He was a rune himself, a blank rune, he thought, his imagination more fanciful as he crossed over, at last, into sleep.

He was, after all, a dragon. A superior being. He could fashion a prophecy of his own, and what he desired would come to pass.

Verminaard checked his plan again.

The groom’s son was bribed, as well as the sentries at the east gate.

Two horses would await him in the stable—one for himself, and one for the returning girl—and the east gate of the castle would remain mysteriously open and unguarded for an hour after midnight. It was orchestrated completely and carefully, and yet Verminaard fidgeted through the sparse meal in the early evening at the silent, somber table with Daeghrefn and Aglaca, Robert and the mage. He hovered nervously above the cold food, certain that all eyes were upon him, all thoughts uncovering his secret quest.

He cursed himself for having been foolish enough to confide in others. Left to his own, Daeghrefn could spend days, weeks without even once speaking to him. Verminaard could travel all the way to the Icewall and back, a journey of some nine hundred miles coming and going, and be assured that Daeghrefn would not notice.

But perhaps the mage had warned the Lord of Nidus. Or Aglaca had told, naturally, in some meddlesome concern for his safety. Though Verminaard had clued neither of them that this was the appointed night, he feared they might know, for the insinuating Voice, silent for so long as he had arranged his adventure, had begun to goad him late last evening that this night—with the banked clouds and the summer winds dying—would be ideal for unseen travel.

Perhaps someone else heard the same Voice, the same goading?

And yet they seemed unperturbed, seated in their high-backed chairs, the yellow light from the hearth dancing over Cerestes’ wine cup, over Aglaca’s glittering knife as he set it to the venison and carved gracefully, deftly, with the Solamnic manners that nine years at Castle Nidus had not shaken from him. The mage and Aglaca finished their meals and excused themselves. Verminaard pushed back his chair as well, intent on following Aglaca, but a cold stare from Daeghrefn stopped him before he completely stood, and it was a long moment until Robert rose, muttered something to Lord Nidus about “tallage” and “archer’s pay,” and the two older men retired to the fireside, a ledger and another bottle of wine set between them.

Backing at last from the chamber, Verminaard glanced one more time at the grayed heads bowed over the castle records. The tilting light magnified his father’s shadow until Daeghrefn seemed to fill the hall with a thin, indefinite darkness, through which the lean hounds stalked, scavenging under the table. It was a shadow that seemed to follow the lad down the corridor and up the stairs to his quarters, where a huddled shape under the blankets told him that Aglaca had already fallen off to sleep. Quietly he draped his heavy cloak over his shoulder, slowly buckled on his sword and knife, and took up his bow. Then there was the little jeweled risting dagger Aglaca had given him after the gebo-naud. It was two days’ ride to Neraka, and he had thought it better to forage for food along the way than to risk calling attention to himself by taking provisions from Robert’s closely monitored larders. He withdrew the sack of runes from beneath his mattress, holding his breath as the stones clicked together loudly in the leather bag.

Aglaca did not stir, but lay in a leaden silence—a thick, invulnerable sleep. Verminaard leaned over the edge of Aglaca’s bed and stared perplexedly at the draped form, heavily covered and blanketed on a night unseasonably warm. He and the Solamnic youth had spent most of their time together in silence or argument and rivalry, in the long foraging hunts through the highlands and mock combat of Robert’s demanding lists. Verminaard, much the larger and stronger of the two, managed to baste Aglaca thoroughly in tests of strength, and Aglaca still refused outright to compete in Cerestes’ classroom, stoically scorning the instructions of the dark mage.