Before the Mask Read online

  Daeghrefn covered his ears as L'Indasha rushed to attend the woman. And then, as suddenly as it began, the scream cut off. One of the cats yawned in the cave's far corner.

  L'Indasha's face was grim. The woman's pulse fluttered

  and faded, then surged again as she cried out in agony. Reaching for the kettle, for soothing herbs-for anything-the druidess cast her eyes on the bucket by the mouth of the cave.

  The last of the moonlight played almost cruelly over the ice. On the glazed surface of the water, the light took the form of thick stone, the snow like white robes swirling around a distant childbed….

  Another child. Another child was being born tonight. It was the other face, the brother to this bastard child. Somewhere, in some warm and nurturing country. But this poor woman lay moaning in an icy cavern, her first son young and helpless, her husband unbalanced and venomous. . . . L'Indasha Yman fought down her anger and bent to the work of the night.

  Huma's kin were being born.

  Somewhat later, in the uncanny silence, something in the depths of the cavern stirred from its hibernation with a stifled, painful cry. Daeghrefn strained to make out the distant sound as the creature scuttled deeper into the cave, where its cry echoed and redoubled back.

  "… and you have all but killed her! The child was not ready. It is turned about wrong and cannot come forth!"

  He startled. It was L'Indasha Yman shouting in his ear. | How long had she been there railing at him-some gibberish about the woman, about the child she was bearing? Daeghrefn closed his ears to the wailing, to the druidess's words. He turned toward the mouth of the cave, put his back to his son and the two women, and reckoned out an old impartial calendar.

  Too soon. The wretch had said too soon. Yes, it was. He had found her out much too soon. She had thought to fool

  him, but-

  "I need your help!" the druidess shouted, penetrating his icy wall of silence, her voice colder still.

  "Ask your gods," Daeghrefn insisted, his back to her.

  The druidess sighed. Daeghrefn seated himself at the cave's entrance. Silent, unmoved by her incessant pleas for help in the lifting and pushing, by the rustle and clamor of Abelaard's clumsy assistance, the knight drew his sword and stared into the wheeling snow. The moonlight broke fitfully through the mountainous clouds, silver on red, and for a moment, he thought he saw the strange black magelight of Nuitari.

  An hour passed, or more.

  Finally the cry of the infant broke in the stormy air. It was muted, desperate, as though the newborn child had fallen into the depths of the cave.

  "You have a son," the haggard druidess announced coldly, holding a swaddled thing toward the fire for warmth.

  "I have a son?" Daeghrefn replied sardonically. "That is no news. He followed me to this cavern. He served you bravely, where even a midwife would have faltered."

  There was a long silence.

  "What will you name this child?" the druidess asked.

  Daeghrefn stared more deeply, more intently, into the storm. Name the child? He turned the sword over in his palm. Why should he even keep it, let alone name it?

  Triumphant, exhausted, Abelaard took the baby from L'Indasha and presented it to Daeghrefn. "He's beautiful, don't you think, Father? What will you call him?"

  When he heard the boy's voice, Daeghrefn sheathed the sword. Abelaard was here. He could not kill the baby. But he would find a way to leave it with this sorceress-good payment for her trouble, he mused. So now was the time for omens, for auguries of his own, for the naming was Daeghrefn's by the Measure, no matter who was the

  child's father. Its mother was, still and all, his wife. And, more importantly, Abelaard's mother.

  Daeghrefn set down the sword and steepled his hands, still stiff and red from the cold.

  Yes, now was the time for names. A time to answer his wife in kind for her cruelty and betrayals. He thought of ice, of loneliness, of forbidding passage….

  Winterheart? Hiddukel?

  He smiled spitefully at the second of the names. God of injustice. The broken balance.

  But, no. There was a certain evil grandeur to the names of the dark gods. He would confer no grandeur on this child.

  As if it had been summoned, a large tomcat, lean and ragged, slinked out of the inclement darkness, snow spangling its half-frozen fur. Daeghrefn regarded the creature in horrified fascination. This is the omen, he thought. The name is about to come to me. The cat carried something large and limp in its mouth-a dripping entanglement of matted fur and dirt and torn flesh.

  A winter kill. A rat or a mole, perhaps. Something tunneling blindly beneath the snow, scratched from the hard earth, chittering and scrabbling in its dark nest.

  Daeghrefn closed his eyes, warmed by his bloody imaginings. "Verminaard," he announced proudly. "The child's name is Verminaard. For he is vermin, dwelling in darkness and filth like his damned father."

  L'Indasha's eyes widened in amazement. Quietly she mpved to Abelaard's side. A shriek from Daeghrefn's wife pierced through the hush, through the knight's pronouncements and curses.

  "Ah, no!" The druidess turned sharply, a new trouble in her voice.

  Daeghrefn sat silently, his eyes closed. From the commotion, from the druidess's whispered instructions to the lad, the knight imagined the scene unfolding behind him.

  The druidess knelt above the woman, her ministrations frantic and swift. But soon, inevitably, she sighed, her hands slowing, her touch more benediction than healing. Sorrowfully she pushed the boy and the baby away, gesturing toward a straw mattress in a candlelit alcove off the main cavern.

  Abelaard lingered above his dying mother for a moment, his eyes dull and unreadable. A well-schooled Solamnic youth, he did as he was told, his emotions veiled behind the stern tutelage of his masters. And yet he was only a child, and for a moment, he bent low, his stubby fingers cradling the head of his newborn brother, and reached down to touch his mother's whitened cheek with the back of his hand. Then, with a soft and nonsensical whisper, he carried the baby to the alcove and settled onto the straw, wrapping a thin wool blanket about the both of them. Soon the infant nestled against his brother and slept deeply and silently.

  "She's dead," L'Indasha announced scarcely an hour later. " 'Gone to Huma's breast,' as your Order says. What will you do now?"

  Daeghrefn sniffed disgustedly, his eyes fixed on the wintry landscape beyond the cave entrance. The storm was swelling, the wind rising. The red moon Lunitari peeked from behind the racing clouds, flooding the snow with a staining crimson light.

  The knight turned slowly, the side of his face bathed in the hovering torchlight. For a moment, he looked like a skeletal wraith, like the Death Knight of the old legends, through whose hands had slipped the power to turn back the Cataclysm.

  "And who are you to question me, idolater?" he mur-

  mured, his voice low and menacing, like the humming of distant bees or the high whirring sound of the rocks over Godshome. "You have no claim on me or on my son." He gestured vaguely toward Abelaard, his sword waving grotesquely in the mingling light of the fire and the spinning moons. "You have no claim on any of us. Not even that dead harlot's get," he concluded venomously and stepped suddenly toward the fire, brushing the snow from his mantle.

  L'Indasha inwardly shrank from the knight. Instinct told her to fly, to scatter elusive magic and escape in the confusion, to burrow into the sheltering dark…. But she squarely faced the knight and fought back with words calculated to wound.

  "This child will eclipse your own darkness," she proclaimed, holding the baby above the firelight, holding him out to Daeghrefn. Her voice rang in the ancient inflections of druidic prophecy and sheer rage. "And his hand will strike your name. But I will not tell you the rest."

  Daeghrefn laughed harshly. It was ridiculous druidic babble. Then her blazing eye caught his.

  Her anger was real.

  Daeghrefn held her gaze. Dire things passed briefly through his mind, and for a
moment, the sword turned in his hand, the melted snow beading ominously on the sheath's carved raven. He would make her retract it. He would bury the blade in …

  No. He would send Robert back here to … clean out this cave.

  "So?" he said, shaking his head slowly, distractedly, his eye passing over the new child's fair hair and creamy skin. He beckoned for Abelaard. The boy approached him, stopping only to take the baby from the druidess and hold him cautiously in his shivering, thin arms.

  "Druidic nonsense," the knight whispered. Then louder, his voice cold and assured, he added, "Put on

  your cloak, Abelaard, and leave the child." He stared bale-fully at the druidess. "We must be off for Nidus while there's aught of the night to travel. It's still a good walk home, by my reckoning."

  The boy put on his garment, but he would not give the baby back to the druidess. "I've looked forward to a brother for so long, Father. Please. We must take care of him."

  Daeghrefn could refuse Abelaard nothing short of this request. Nothing short, but not this.

  "No," he replied.

  The druidess stepped forward and placed her hand on Abelaard's shoulder, an idea forming as she spoke.

  "No, Daeghrefn," she began, a dry warning in her voice. "You'll keep this child and keep him well. If you leave him-or worse-all those in your command will know of your cuckolding. And who would follow such a man? You cannot be undone before them, can you?"

  Daeghrefn's dark eyes locked onto L'Indasha's, and she knew she had won his undying hatred.

  And the baby's life.

  "Nidus is ten miles from here," she urged, calmly holding his vacant stare. "You have seen our weather. You have challenged the storm enough for tonight."

  Daeghrefn broke his gaze and removed his boots. For a moment, L'Indasha's hopes rose, until she realized he was only drying them by the fire, preparing for the long trek through the mountains.

  "You have heard the stories," she began quietly, "about these mountains in the winter."

  "I've no time for lore," Daeghrefn objected.

  L'Indasha persisted. She told Daeghrefn about the frozen horses, the dozens of travelers irrecoverably lost. She told him of the bandits, sealed in ice like insects in a million years of amber. All the while her touch was light on the shoulder of the boy. Daeghrefn did not listen, but

  Abelaard did.

  As she knew he would.

  And it was enough. When Daeghrefn drew on his boots and walked to the mouth of the cave, Abelaard remained by the fire. "Father?" he asked, his voice thin and uncertain.

  Daeghrefn turned to him warily.

  "Can't we just wait out the night here?" Abelaard pleaded. "We left Laca's castle ten days ago. We're away from the bad place now. Tomorrow we can all go home. The baby, too. Please, Father."

  As he looked into Abelaard's hollow eyes, something in the knight seemed to turn and soften. It was sudden and unforeseen, as a line of troops will break in the midst of a pitched battle. Daeghrefn's shoulders slumped, and slowly he removed his sodden gloves.

  "I suppose," he began, "that a night's stay could not altogether harm us, Abelaard. But just one night, mind you. We'll be home at Nidus on the morrow, regardless of storm or cold."

  "One night is all you will need," the druidess said, for the lad's encouragement more than Daeghrefn's information. "Storms blow over quickly here, and there will be sun and a clear path come morning."

  "We're off to Nidus regardless," the knight insisted, staring into the fire.

  L'Indasha buried the dead woman at the far end of a side cavern, deep in the soft clay floor, while Daeghrefn huddled in blankets around the fire and Abelaard fed the newborn something the druidess had mixed and warmed for him.

  When she finished singing the funeral prayers, they all

  slept. Twice in the night L'Indasha stirred-once at the roar of wind across the high plateau/carrying the cry of a dozen lost travelers beyond her help in the hills of Est-wilde, and once when the baby awoke and whimpered. It was the baby's cry that brought her to full waking. It began softly and rose steadily until she heard Abelaard's voice join with it awkwardly, singing a Solamnic lullaby. The child's voice was small and fragile amid the roar of wind tumbling through the surrounding hills.

  May. your gods keep you, L'Indasha thought, a modest spell shielding her ears against the plaintive sounds of the children in the center of the cave. If your gods can do anything, may they keep you in the days to come.

  Chapter 2

  Thc Bridge of Dreed arched narrowly over the canyon, a dark, knobby spine against the bright autumn sunset. It was the northernmost of three bridges across the gorge. The southern two were made of vallenwood and were old as the Cataclysm. But this structure was far older, a narrow stone footpath, one man's width, that had spanned the great chasm for as long as the histories recalled and the legends remembered. At its very top, a level, slightly wider area had provided this ceremony a perfect platform.

  Barely twelve years old, Verminaard shifted nervously in the saddle. Of course, he had heard much about this place. Indeed, he had seen the Bridge of Dreed once

  before, from a distance, when he and his brother had been goat hunting in the high reaches above Daeghrefn's castle. It had seemed menacing even then-a black, crooked bow spanning the gorge from east to west. Abelaard had pointed it out to him, then steered him to lower ground as the younger lad glanced back at the ancient structure, his thoughts filled with legends of how the world was made.

  The finger of Reorx, the forge god. A handle for the mountains he had raised in the Age of Dreams, as the stories told.

  Two years after that hunt, and much closer now, the bridge looked no less grand and precarious. It arched from one side of the gorge to the other, and, below, there was a breathtaking drop of three hundred feet to the ragged igneous rocks on the chasm floor. The stones were littered with brush, dead wood, and old bones.

  He would walk that narrow span of rock and exchange places with Laca's son. He would live in a foreign land and learn to be a knight, for his father said Laca still kept to the Order.

  It was a place for solemn oaths indeed, the boy thought. And he closed his eyes amid the company, the armed men around him oblivious to his silent prayer.

  He prayed that his knighthood would come in another way, that the two quarrelsome fathers-their rift as old as the night just before his birth, as wide as the spreading chasm before him-would knit their discord in the face of the coming war. That Daeghrefn would go back to the Order. Surely the organized Nerakan army, impelled from somewhere in the dark heart of the mountains, would persuade Laca of East Borders and Daeghrefn of Nidus to relent, to trust each other at last. Couldn't they join swords in good faith, without the approaching dance of deal and transaction? Couldn't they postpone the swapping of sons until the Nerakans were subdued?

  He prayed he would do his father proud in this

  exchange. But he knew his prayers tumbled like loose stones into the chasm below him, away from the starry hand of Paladine, from the eyes of Majere and Kiri-Jolith-far from the various gods Daeghrefn once revered and worshiped….

  Then renounced, when he left the Order.

  Daeghrefn stood behind the boy, masking his smile due to the solemnity that would follow. It was perfect, this gebo-naud, a prime arrangement of fortune and war and politics. As the years had passed, the Lord of Nidus feared more and more that the secret of his cuckoldry would be guessed by the other knights. As Verminaard grew, the boy looked the very picture of Laca.

  Who had played nicely into his hands with this treaty and exchange.

  He would be rid of Verminaard, Daeghrefn thought with a grim contentment. And Laca would have his own bastard visited on him. It could not have been better arranged. ,

  Verminaard started. You will bid your brother farewell today, the Voice told him. Oh, yes, farewell, for you will not see him again, though good riddance will it be. And you will be the elder, the scion, your father's eventual heir.
<
br />   It always took him by surprise, that sinuous suggesting. The Voice had been with him for years-for as long as he could remember. Melodious and haunting, its tone neither masculine nor feminine, it would merge with his own thoughts and rise suddenly into hearing, its suggestions always a mixture of despair and grief and a strange, dark longing. He had never spoken to his father about it. Daeghrefn would not hold with voices.

  What does this mean? Verminaard puzzled, wrestling as always with the Voice's dark prompting. It is an exchange of noble hostages, not a giving away!

  And as always, the Voice was silent when he argued, slipping back into some dark recess, some alcove of mem-

  ory, leaving him alone to bicker and wrestle with its insinuations. I will return! Verminaard assured himself. But the Voice was gone, leaving him to his rising dread and misgiving.