Before The Mask (13 page)

In a swath five miles from west to east, the summer-dry grasslands were burning in a mad
and relentless blaze.

High up the slanting hills, where prickly gorse grew into tbick nuts that shepherds
sometimes skirted for miles, L'Indasha Yman moved deftly through the tangles of thorn and
yellow bloom toward Mount Berkanth, where the ice never thawed.

Of late, the ice of her augury, still holding through careful attention and the deepness
of her cave well, had shown a black tower growing, almost as if it were alive, attended by
scores of chained ogres. And this morning she had discovered someone near that tower,
barely visible and only for an instant, shielded from view by some kind of warding.

The one Paladine had sent.

In L'Indasha's excitement, she had looked too long at the vision, and her chances of
exactly locating the girl had melted away. Emptying the bucket and taking up a light,
oaken bowl instead, she had raced from her cave toward the permanent frost of arid
Berkanth to try to catch another ice-augured vision and find the violet-eyed helper.

Fatigued from the intense concentration and speed the trek required, the precarious
footing and the high switching winds, the druidess stopped to rest and check her progress.
She was now just above the timberline, where the forest gave way to rugged, short alpine
vegetation. While the climb was

steeper, the view was at last unhindered. Her breath steamed in the cool, thin air. It was
a long, precipitous way down the side of this nameless rise, the highest of the Nerakan
foothills. The plains spread out and away in voluptuous green waves below the trees.
Several miles to the south, smoke danced over tents and banners. L'Indasha stared in
shocked wonder when the cloud feathered away and revealed the twisted, spiring shape of
the black tower of her vision, in the midst of the huts, barracks, and pigpens.

The druidess wrapped her green robes closer and stared out at the smoke and flames rising
from the village. The sky was nearly dark. That tower was no Nerakan invention, if she
knew Nerakans, but the construction of darker and more powerful forces. She made a quick
decision. She must get there somehow, in secret, and bring out the girl. A warding would
no doubt surround the captive, but breaking it would be no hindrance once she deciphered
its pattern. The journey would take some thought and planningand nourishment; it had
already been a very long day.

Digging through her pockets for a bit of food, she found only the last of the daylilies
from yesterday's dividing and replanting. It was an undersized fan, with only a couple of

decent leaves, but the vigor of the little plant had kept it firm and healthy despite its
sojourn in her pocket. She marveled at the strength of life in its greener forms and
started to return the lily to her rpbes; there would be time to plant it later. But as she
closed her hand over the sprig, a remembrance of Paladine's words came to her: Plant
against famine and fire.

She dropped to the ground and quickly began to sing the sowing prayer over the plant and
its lofty new home. Only a moment later, she was dusting off the mountain soil from her
hands and knees, and the runtish daylily was settled within a protective circle of stones.

As L'Indasha turned to mark the place in her mind, she froze at what she now saw out on
the dark plains. The tiny puff of smoke had become a huge billowing thundercloud, and
bright fire lashed at the edge of the grasslands. Two horses raced down from higher ground
southeast, galloping obliquely along the edge of the fire, their riders low in the saddle.
Behind them, swarming like queenless bees, a great many ogres lumbered in pursuit. From
the NorthNidus?through the smoke to the edge of her sight, the druidess could see a small
party riding toward the forest. Two dozen men or so, their torchmen wearing red standards,
all no doubt unaware of what ill wind blew before them.

She felt for the purple pendant around her neck, but it wasn't there. She vaguely
remembered tearing the clasp in her recent haste, somewhere in the cave. There was no help
for it now. She would have to brave the flames without Paladine's protective gift.

L'Indasha slung her skirts up over her arm and raced down the hillside, this time catching
her bare legs and feet on every thornbush she ran through. Another fire. Another burning.
Another darkness.

Daeghrefn wheeled in the saddle, shouting vain orders to his confused search party.

The fire storm had surged all around him, rushing over the plains and into the forest like
a devouring wind. The plume of his helmet was charred and smoking, and the mane of his
stallion brittle and tipped with ash. He had called to Reginn, to Asa, called desperately
to his captain Kenaz, but they had vanished behind a wall of smoke. Beside him, five young
guardsmen sat their horses unsteadily, their eyes fixed on the commander, awaiting orders,
strength, assurance. Robert, mounted on a skittish roan mare, watched the thickest part of
the smoke, the column to their south, in which dark, hulking shapes turned and doubled and
danced amid the burning trees.

What had begun as a simple search for Aglaca and Ver-minaard had come to disaster just as
they emerged from the Nerakan Forest, intending to follow the foothills south to the
borders of the settlement.

Then the fire had rushed on them like something out of the Rending, like the images in a
shaman's vision. Daegh-refn's column had scattered, a dozen crack soldiers bolting from
heat and curling flame, and he had led them back through the forest, groping toward open
country and the castle beyond, toward thinning smoke and clear skies and unimpeded
breathing....

And then, surging through the flame, their filthy hides blackened and smoldering, the
ogres rushed at the soldiers through the trees and drove them toward the plains. Thunar
fell at once, Nidus's best swordsman pulled from his horse, and a breath later Ullr fell,
torn in the terrible hands of monsters. Daeghrefn himself had lurched in the saddle,
clinging desperately to his stallion's brittle mane, one foot precariously in the stirrup,
as a huge ogre, crashing through smoke and undergrowth, scored his leg with

its filthy, ragged claws.

It was fear that had righted him atop the horse, a desperate scrabbling animal fear that
had surged from somewhere beneath his skin, rushing over him like the fire storm, rushing
over his shouts and tears and finally his screams as he kicked the horrible, drooling
thing away, as the ogre's fingers clutched and loosened on his ankle, and the horse
quickened under him and suddenly, mercifully, he was clear of the monster and regained the
saddle in the heaving smoke.

Before the fire and in the heart of the flames, the ogres danced ecstatically, their
madness propelled by the fury they had ignited.

Now Daeghrefn's men regrouped on a rocky rise on the plains to the north of the forest's
edge. The hard flatlands stretched around them, ending in smoke, in flame, in a border of
ignited trees. As the flames approached through the crackling and toppling conifersand
with the flames, the ogres the Lord of Nidus counted his losses.

Five men. One of them Kenaz, his captain, lost somewhere near the center of the woods
where the trails branched. And with all those dead or vanished men, Daeghrefn's own
courage.

For Daeghrefn was afraid. For the first time in his adult life, his legs trembled as he
stood in the stirrups, the hair still bristling on the back of his neck. The fear was a
kind of fire, too, spreading and expanding the longer he allowed it to dwell within him.

Scarcely a moment ago, when the monster had tried to pull him from the horse, he had felt
its grasp, smelled its hot, feral stink. It was no soldier, no swordsman meeting him blade
to blade in the battle he knew and trusted. It was a monster, but more monstrous was the
fear that had unmanned him.

Galloping and screaming at the head of his squadron, he had ridden until the panic had
ebbed, until his senses

had left him and the hands of his men had steadied him in the saddle. Now, though the
ogres were distant and the flames behind him, a new fear rose to undo him.

The reins shook in his hand. For a moment, Daeghrefn longed for the Solamnic Order he had
abandoned, for its rule of honor and courage, for Oath and Measure to compel him and
uphold his collapsing spirit.

But when he had banished knighthood, he had banished the shape of his courage.

His rrten stared at him, eagerly awaiting his orders, but through the glass of his despair
and terror, their features were distorted, and Daeghrefn looked on them as enemies, as
usurpers.

Now they are contemptuous, he thought. Now they are judging me. They will seek a new
leader.

“Enough waiting,” he rasped, desperately trying to mask the rising panic in his voice.
“The forest will go up like tinder before this fire.” Daeghrefn nodded toward the
approaching wall of flame. “So we had best get farther north, in sight of the castle.
There the garrison can come to our aid.”

There. He had spoken like a commander, though his voice shook and his heart rattled.
Steadied, Daeghrefn stared back toward the woods, his eyes smarting with smoke, and
signaled to the men to move north, back to Nidus, across the smoky plains.

The remaining men, five wide-eyed young archers from Estwilde, followed their commander
toward a rise in the grasslands circled by a thin outcropping of evergreen. There, in the
shade of fir and cedar, they dismounted, nervously readying their bows to cover the
withdrawal of the rear guard.

Robert alone was that rear guard.

As the fire surged relentlessly toward him, the weathered seneschal remained at the edge
of the woods. The red mare pawed and snorted nervously beneath his calming

hand, but she stayed her ground amid harsh smoke and the harsher cries of the ogres.

Robert counted two heartbeats until Daeghrefn had reached the rise. Then, just as the
flames touched the borders of the forest, he wheeled his horse and galloped across the
plains, headed for the line of archers with a hot wind coursing at his back.

He saw the ogres then, the flanking column that waded through the rising smoke in a swift,
hungry arch toward Daeghrefn's rear.

Robert cried out, pointing and waving wildly, tottering in the saddle with the strength of
his own gestures. Daeghrefn shielded his eyes and craned to hear.

Then he understood.

With a shout, the Lord of Nidus alerted his men, who scrambled awkwardly to their horses,
dropping their weapons in panic. They were off in a gallop, a scant ten yards ahead of
him, as Robert reached the rise and spurred his horse to catch up.

At the sharp dig of spurs, the little roan mare bolted and bucked with a shrieking whinny.
Clinging for a last desperate moment to the reins, Robert felt himself lifted from the
saddle. The ground spun and tumbled and rushed toward him, and then the hard earth of the
plains drove the breath from him.

The mare caught up with the other horses and kept running. Dazed, Robert tried to rise and
felt his leg buckle. Struggling painfully to his knees, he looked

desperately north toward the retreating column of horsemen.

“Daeghrefn!” he cried, and the foremost rider turned as the soldiers rode on past out of
the smoke. “Daeghrefn! Help!”

He could see the man dimly, standing in the stirrups. Then the ogres lumbered out of the
vapor, and the Lord of Nidus wheeled and galloped away, shouting over his

shoulder, “I'm sorry, Robert! I cannot help you where you are going.”

Robert fell to the hard earth. For a moment, lying on his back, he glimpsed the evening
stars through the swirling smoke. The broken scale of Hiddukel reeled over him in the
northern sky, the stars in the constellation painfully bright.

So this is the end of service, Robert thought grimly, drawing his sword. But better this
than to end as the lackey of a cowardly, heartless bastard.

He glared toward the dwindling form of the rider, watched it vanish in the lower hills.

The rumble and call of the ogres was closer now, and a dreadful sniffing rose from the lip
of the haze, where two black, shapeless forms shifted and bent like vallenwoods in a high
wind.

Robert willed himself not to think of the stories. The ravaged caravans in the Throtl Gap,
the children plucked from wagon beds, the village of two hundred in Taman Busuk, the
gnawed, scattered bones found in the wreckage each time.

If it is the end, it's best to go out fighting. I have nothing to lose. And perhaps I will
be fortunate. Perhaps the fire will reach me before the ogres do.

The smoke to the east glowed orange and red, and sharp tongues of flame shot through the
blackness, making bizarre daylight of this frightful, burning evening. Robert lay back on
the ground, clenching his teeth against the hammering pain in his leg.

Suddenly all sight vanished into a purple, obliterating fog. It covered the rise where the
seneschal lay, muffling all sound as well, so that the crackle of flames and the cry of
the ogres reached him only as vibrations through the ground.

Robert breathed deeply. No coughing, no sting to the eye. “Damned if it...” he began, then
lost the words at the

sight of the bare-footed, green-robed woman weaving through the smoke. Slowly, with the
trust that arises only when one has seen a dozen battles, a thousand enemies, and has
learned thereby to distinguish friends, the old veteran sheathed his sword and waited.

In the swirling silence, the woman approached.

As Verminaard, Aglaca, and Judyth skirted the eastern edge of the forest, keeping to the
high ground of the foothills, they saw the ogres rushing down from the mountains after
them.

The monsters trailed fire and ash, shed sparks as they lumbered west through the burning
woods and onto the devastated plains. They hastened toward the level country north of the
Nerakan Forest,

where a dark gap lay in the fire and smoke.