Майкл Уильямс: Before the Mask

Verminaard shuddered as the power of the words coursed over him, binding him as they did his father, his brother, and the pale Solamnics. This Aglaca was his brother now, his blood by oath until the Nerakans were subdued.

He was sure he would not like the boy.

Suddenly Verminaard felt dizzy. His sight flickered, failed him, and he weaved on his wobbly legs. In front of him, the bridge seemed to vanish, and with it the ceremony—the boys and the black-robed celebrant. All Verminaard could see was darkness and a wavering point of light at the furthermost edge of the gloom. Slowly the light expanded, and he saw a blond youth on a dark, windy battlement, a lithe, blue-eyed, older image of himself.

Not me, he thought. A twin … my mirror image.

Not Abelaard, but still my brother.

The young man in the vision gestured toward him. His lips moved desperately in a soundless incantation, and Verminaard felt weaker, felt power drain from him….

And then the vision ended in cold sunset and the high, thin air of the mountains. Cerestes lifted his hands from the lads at the center of the bridge, and black lightning danced across his arms. What has happened? Verminaard asked himself, his thoughts a confusing swirl. Desperately he sought the Voice—its advice, its melodious assurances.

Only silence.

Shaken, Verminaard looked about. All eyes were trained on the arch of the bridge. He breathed another prayer to any listening god and turned back toward Cerestes.

From that point on, the ceremony was a ritual of its own silence. The boys turned, faced each other, and removed the ornamental tabards that covered their tunics. Solemnly they exchanged the thin garments, Aglaca wobbling again for a brief, nightmarish moment. Then slowly, almost reverently, each lad undertook to put on the other’s tabard.

Verminaard smiled a bit then. Abelaard was at least four years older than the Solamnic boy and hardened by the hunt and the mountain climates. Aglaca’s tabard was much too small for him, so after a brief, halfhearted attempt, he draped the garment over his shoulder and began to walk toward the Solamnic column on the western side of the gorge.

Laca’s knights opened their ranks in a silent welcome.

It was now Aglaca’s turn. Lost in the red folds of Abelaard’s tabard, the boy waded carefully across the bridge, the garment trailing on the stones so that he looked like a gnomish enchanter, like an alchemist whose concoctions had backfired. A sharp wind buffeted him, and he drew his hood closer. Steadily now, his steps gaining assurance the closer he came, Aglaca approached Daeghrefn on the narrow span. Behind him, Cerestes performed the last of the ceremonial rites. Breathing a prayer to Hiddukel, the old god of deals and transactions, the mage knelt and drew an obscure sign with his finger. Verminaard peered from his place, straining to see. This mage had great power, he could tell. But Cerestes was too far from him, the gestures too veiled and intricate to see clearly. The clouds in the gorge rose to cover the mage, and for a moment, he seemed larger, darker in the thickening mist.

You could do such things as well, Lord Verminaard , the Voice soothed and tempted. Raise clouds and magnify and bring down the bridling dark. You could rival the great spell-masters, Lord Verminaard, and write your name in the gray, metallic swirl of fog and dangerous rumor …. Verminaard listened and, bathed in dark suggestions, felt almost comforted, even though Abelaard was gone.

From out of the mist, Aglaca approached, the mage emerging from the cloud behind him, slender and stooped, diminished from the monstrous shadow he had cast at the end of the ceremony. But Cerestes was strangely unwearied, his gold eyes glittering like the metallic swirl he had conjured from the depths. It was all Verminaard could do to draw his eyes away from the mage, to rest his gaze on the Solamnic hostage.

“M’Lord Aglaca,” Cerestes announced. “May I present your … host, Lord Daeghrefn of Nidus.” The boy bowed politely, and Daeghrefn extended his hand.

“May your presence remind us … of one who is away,”

Lord Nidus announced, his voice thick with emotion, “and of the alliance his bravery affirms.”

“1 shall endeavor to be worthy of your honor and graciousness,” Aglaca replied and turned to greet Verminaard.

“And you,” he said, brushing back his hood, “will be my new brother in the war to come, alliance of my alliance.”

Dumbstruck, Verminaard gazed into the face of the Solamnic boy. It was a revelation—the pale eyes, the thin nose, the white-blond hair and brow. It was his own face, his mirror image. Somewhere deep in the mountains—whether from west or east, they could not tell for the echoes—the oracles of Godshome began to murmur and hum, and the druidess L’Indasha Yman looked up from her icy augury and nodded.

“I shall… study your friendship as well, Master Verminaard,” Aglaca declared politely, eyeing the other boy with cautious curiosity. He shifted from foot to foot, awaiting the courtly reply, the Solamnic greeting that traditionally followed an offer of service and goodwill.

Verminaard said nothing.

His young face was unreadable, like hard mountain stone obscured by mist and distance. Despite Robert’s nudgings and coaxings, he refused to speak to the guest. He held his silence even as Daeghrefn’s party returned on the high, snaking road east from the Jelek Pass, to where Castle Nidus awaited them.

Along the way, Aglaca reasoned with himself. Daeghrefn’s family did not do things like his own. There was no Measure, little ceremony. Perhaps it was what his father had said—that the garrison of Nidus was half-barbaric, little better than the Nerakans. Or perhaps Verminaard mourned his brother. He could understand that. Aglaca wished he, too, were home again, with his friends and his dogs, wished that this new and forbidding duty had not befallen him. Then there was the vision that had come to Aglaca on the Bridge of Dreed—the pale, muscular young man . .. the mace descending.

So it will be, unless you take this matter in your own hands , Aglaca Dragonbane, coaxed the Voice, low and seductive, neither man nor woman.

It came to him as always, with murky promises and dire threats. As always, he ignored its urgings. But he did speculate until the last hour of the night, after the long dinner that was his uncomfortable welcome to the East, to the Khalkist Mountains, and to his new family.

Daeghrefn was the first to be seated, as was his custom. Ignoring his standing guests—the small party of family, servants, and courtiers—the knight slumped into the huge oaken chair at the head of the table. He was distracted by the flicker of the fire in the hearth, the rustle of pigeons in the cobwebbed rafters of the hall.

It was a shabby chamber indeed—dusty and disorderly, inclined toward ruin. The Lord of Nidus had only a small staff of servants, and attended more to his falcons and wine than he did to the upkeep of house and grounds.

The wine, poured by the steward into a faceted crystal goblet, was a vintage from a dozen summers past. The goblet was the last of ten, a wedding gift to Daeghrefn from Lord Gunthar Uth Wistan, its nine mates broken in neglect over the twelve years since the death of Daeghrefn’s wife. Last of a line it was, and when the knight lifted it and the light glanced off its facets and sparkled through the amber wine, Daeghrefn remembered a night more than a dozen years earlier—a night of fires and wine and a hundred reflecting facets….

It was bad almost from the start. The smell of a blizzard in the foothills, and cold daunting all but the hardiest travelers. Laca’s wife, a bit further along than Daeghrefn’s, was in her quarters, attended by midwives and physicians as the awaited day drew nigh. Daeghrefn had been glad of the extended visit, of Laca’s warm guest hall, of reunions with his old friend after seven months’ absence, and of the eager anticipation with which both men awaited the births of their children, most especially Laca’s first. Over dinner, with the wine abundant and the conversation ranging, Daeghrefn had almost forgotten the unsettling weather and wind and the strange disruptions among the castle servants. Four-year-old Abelaard was sprawled over the knee of the man he called “Uncle Laca.” Daeghrefn’s wife was reserved and quiet as usual around the outgoing Solamnics, and she was heavy with his own child—the second-born, whom he intended to raise toward Paladine’s clergy. After a few cups, the words had come forth idly—Laca’s speculation that in some families hair and eyes “turned sport,” that despite Daeghrefn’s dark coloring and the night-black eyes of his wife, the child she was carrying could be “as fair as … a thanoi hunter … a high elf….