Майкл Уильямс: Before the Mask

The druidess peered deeply into a bucket of cinder-clouded ice, rapt in her winter auguries. Somewhere out in the mountain passes—somewhere north and west, she could tell by the smoky crazing of the ice—someone was trudging through the biting snow, through the plunging cold and the rising night. Darkness would soon overtake him, whoever he was. And with the darkness, the infamous Breath of Neraka—the murderous mountain night winds. On nights such as this, the Breath of Neraka was cruel… merciless. Horses froze in midstride. Trails vanished in sudden avalanches. Once, not long after she had moved here, the high winds had sealed an entire party of bandits in an impenetrable shell of ice. And that was part of it, too—part of L’Indasha Yman’s unsettled vigil in the oncoming night. Between the cold and the brigands, this was deadly country, these mountains between Neraka and the plains of Estwilde, mountains that encircled the shrines of the ancient gods.

What was it the old texts had said?

Forbidding. Impossible passage .

And yet someone was trying to pass.

The wind switched directions near the entrance to the cave. Dry snow whirled in thin columns, spiraling upward into the darkness as two icy gusts seemed to war for the waning light. Then one gave way to the other, and the snow began to settle and drift as total darkness sealed over the Nerakan passes. L’Indasha pored over the ice. It was her particular divination—the old word for it something like gelemancy, something about the memory within ice. She kept the bucket of clean water by the mouth of the cave, and on cold nights, when it glazed over, it captured the past and the present in glittering strata. Tonight the ice was difficult to read. The sudden wind had brought ashes from old fires, the obscuring haze of cinders and burning. The black particles had gathered and settled in the ice to hide the greater part of the vision, and they were melting it very quickly.

Carefully the druidess brushed at the blemished surface of the ice, and she saw two broad paths through the mountains—one from Estwilde, the other from Gargath. Nothing else. And even that vision was fading, the ice now etched and buoyant. He is nearby. He is almost here. I know it, she told herself. Ah. More than one of them, I think. L’Indasha’s fingertips tingled and pricked. She drew up her shawl and bent lower over the bucket to see more clearly. Half a mile from the Nerakan road, wandering aimlessly north through the barren trees and the knee-deep snow, a man lurched into view.

Solamnic. She could tell by the insignia. Cloaked thinly against the terrible weather, dressed in useless armor. He was wandering, clearly lost, just far enough from the trail to be very near her cave. The wind ripped through his robes. His beard, his gloves, and the leather lacings of his breastplate were crusted and stiff with ice, as though he had been carved from the mountain or born of the winter sky. Solamnic, the druidess repeated to herself, lifting her eyes from the oracular ice. Probably searching for bandits. Following the sword and that pitiful code of his—bloody vows of honor and life. Let him go. She was no fool to meddle in the workings of pride and vainglory.

As she watched, the knight passed into shadow and cloud, lost at the edge of her auguries. Let him go. Let him freeze in foolhardiness, along with his troops and followers….

Followers . Almost at once, she dismissed her scorn and resentment. No matter his foolishness and Solamnic vanities, she thought, it is a merciless night for them.

Then, as though her compassion itself had summoned them, the other two staggered into her view. Two smaller forms desperately followed the knight, their gilded, embroidered clothing already tattered by the rending wind. Then the ice abruptly cleared, the cinders dropped to the bottom of the bucket, and the vision went black.

The druidess reached for her cloak and, with a brief pass of her hand and an ancient, dry mutter, deftly lighted a torch. The green light flashed and rose and steadied in her grasp. It was a dim fire, scarcely a guide on a night like this, but the magic would keep it aglow in the terrible wind.

Daeghrefn turned to see where they were. The wind struck him full in the face, stinging the back of his throat and leaving him breathless.

In the swirl of snow and shadow behind him, he could see his family barely outlined—woman and boy, shadows against the dark sky. Abelaard was struggling bravely, of course. He guided the woman, coaxing and urging her, but the stiff wind staggered them both, and the woman stumbled, pulling the lad backward into the snow. A strange, cold peace passed over Daeghrefn as the wind switched directions, as the stragglers labored to their feet.

The woman is weakening. Upright or fallen, she is nothing to me now. If the gods will that she survive the storm, she will do so. But my son walks beside her, and he will live through this night. By Oath and Measure, that much is true. I shall see to it with the last of my own strength. Daeghrefn tried to double his fists, but his frozen gloves would not crease. The screaming wind switched direction again—this time from due east, lancing from the top of the range down mountainside and foothill, rattling branches in the desolate Nerakan Forest and plunging straight into the path of the dazed and snow-baffled knight. He gasped and cursed, staggered again in the snow. And then the torchlit form was in front of him, a dark outline of human or goblin or …

Clumsy as an old, besotted man, he groped with useless and disobedient fingers for his sword.

“No,” said the voice at the heart of the shadow. “Come to shelter.” It was the voice of a woman, unfamiliar and young, strangely accented with the sharp, fluid music of Lemish.

“Begone!” the knight shouted.

“Don’t be a fool!” the shadow urged, gesturing sweepingly in the blinding snow. Now she was motioning him somewhere … somewhere to the south … to shelter….

“No!” Daeghrefn roared. “He’ll not have this victory as well!”

“Don’t be a fool,” repeated the shadow.

She extended her hand toward the struggling knight.

Again, Daeghrefn’s hand grappled for the ice-crusted hilt of his sword. “Begone!” he hissed, the exclamation lost in the roar of the wind. He grunted and shouted as he tried to draw the blade, but the sword hung frozen at his belt, sealed to the sheath by an absurdly thick layer of ice. He would have struggled there forever, until the snow took him or the shadow descended, had not Abelaard called to him over the clamoring storm.

“May we stop, Father?” the lad shouted, his voice thin and uncertain. “May we stop? We’re very tired and cold.”

It was a druidess, of course, who led them out of the blinding snow and into the warmth and shadow and dodging light of a nearby cavern. The heat from the fire smarted on Daeghrefn’s storm-burned skin. Blinking stupidly in the sudden brightness, he glanced from wall to cavern wall, where cascades of dried lavender and rosemary hung amid comfrey and foxglove, alongside mushrooms as gnarled and black as severed hands. Two cats, lean and ancient, wrestled solemnly in a shadowy corner. The place smelled of forest, of the deep glades of Lemish and elf country.

He should have known the woman was a druidess, Daeghrefn told himself. Celebrant of the dead gods and the dead year. Instantly his caution magnified. If druidess she was, there was danger in her. They were never what they seemed, with their woodsense and muttering and their irritating mysteries. He had heard they stole babies. Now there was a thought.

“Why?” asked the druidess L’Indasha Yman, shaking the snow from her robes. She was younger than he expected. Quite lovely, for that matter—auburn-haired and tall and dark-eyed as well. The cave light did not reveal the finer details of her face, and his eyes were too frost- and wind-burned to study her clearly. He crouched by the fire and extended his hands, regarding the druidess warily. His eyes played over the soft, dark skin of her neck, the purple pendant at her throat that filtered the firelight as stained glass catches the sun. He would not trust beauty such as this. It was entangling, beguiling…. L’Indasha noticed the stormcrow brooch, ice-encrusted, that held the man’s cape uncertainly about his throat.