Before The Mask by Michael Williams Page A

the roosting birds. “And when the summer
     comes, dreams spill over into waking hours. My father told me to beware that time. 'High
     summer smoke and deception, light sickness,' he called it.”
    “A right poet, your father is,” Verminaard grumbled, catching only the final phrase. “But
     I've enough of his verse and your cautions for this long season.”
    Aglaca lifted an eyebrow. When Verminaard began to grumble and declare, it was always a
     sign of recklessness and challengea ride on a hunt, perhaps, or a climb up a sheer rock
     face. He was predictable, and though the shape of the deed might change, Aglaca knew a
     deed was coming, that Verminaard was sick of shadows, eager for the tumult of chase and
     discovery.
    Aglaca smiled to himself and shielded his eyes against the last reddening flood of
     sunlight.
    The deed was coming, and he did not mind at all.
    For the druidess had withdrawn since his battle with the Nerakans; she said she had taught
     him all she could. And now what had he at Nidus but this long captivity and the dark
     lessons he refused to learn? And unsettled thoughts of his own.
    “And therefore the poetry shall be set aside,”
    Verminaard declared, his voice hushed to a whisper, drawing Aglaca toward him by the
     collar, his grip firm and commanding. “When the season turns and the night isn't so
     blasted short, I'm off to Neraka to find her.”
    Aglaca smiled calmly into a face the very image of his own.
    Verminaard consulted the runes for a plan and an auspicious night. In the solitude of his
     quarters, crouched over a table in the dim candlelight, he pondered the Circle of Lifethe
     six irregular rune stones set in a sanctioned pattern centuries old, reflecting the
     energies of the past and indicating the challenges ahead.
    Let the others laugh at him. Let Robert and Daeghrefn and even Aglaca call the runes
     childishness and nonsense.
    The laughter would change when he found the key to prophecy.
    Solemnly Verminaard set the stones before him, and gazed long and deeply at the scarred
     lines along their faces, banishing thoughts of the girl, of his father's anger, of the
     perils of Neraka.
    Yet again the stones were silent. The old proverb held, he thought sourly, that a man
     cannot read his own future in the runes.
    It was that proverb, that surrounding silence, that brought Verminaard to Cerestes.
    The mage reclined on a soft chair, his feet propped on the windowsill and his gaze fixed
     on the constellation Hiddukel, which tilted in the black sky out his window.
    Verminaard held his breath as he entered the room. Cerestes' presence always daunted him,
     and the gap in the upper sky once filled by the stars of Takhisis, three thousand years
     vanished, seemed to beckon him as he
    inched to the center of the room. Now that he was there, asking the mage to read the runes
     for him seemed forward and disrespectful, and the young man shifted from foot to foot,
     glancing awkwardly back toward the door.
    The mage sighed, tilting an astrolabe toward the constellation. "What's your pleasure,
     young
    master?" he asked, his voice sinuous and low and echoing unexpectedly in the small and
     cluttered room, as though Verminaard remembered it less from the classroom than from
     somewhere in a half- forgotten dream.
    He did not know, nor could he figure how the mage had climbed to this place of power. Long
     years back, an eleventh-hour substitute in a hurried ritual, Cerestes was now one of
     Daeghrefn's chief advisors, trusted as much as the Lord of Nidus trusted anyone.
    He was also the one man in all the castle Verminaard could trust with the plan he had
     hatched with Aglaca earlier that month.
    “I would have you read me the runes, sir,” he replied, glancing one last wistful time
     toward the door behind him, closing slowly of its own volition.
    “The Amarach again?” the mage asked, his hidden eyes narrowing, and Verminaard steeled
     himself for the