Michael Williams
Before the Mask
Prologue
In the small patch of cold sunlight on the hill above the cape, the druidess L'Indasha Yman bent to the spring planting with a worn-out spade and a weary heart. For three thousand years, winters had ended in jubilation for her. When she set the season's first seed into the newly turned ground or found the first shoot of returning growth in her daylilies, she would forget utterly the cold, the storms, her hunger for green, for bloom.
But this year, the winter would not leave. This spring, there was little pleasure for her in the promise of the seeds, and her labor in the garden today was producing mostly scratches and blisters.
"There's the rub," she mused aloud, looking down at the splintering oak handle of the spade. "I should have mended you long ago. Five hundred years of gardens can be too much even for oak."
And too much for me, she thought. I will go on and on and keep the Secret and all the world will change, is changing-but in me now there is no change. My life is a removal. But I chose it full knowing.
She turned to a clump of daylilies and sat back on her heels, peering into the lavender blue face of an early bloom. At Paladine's command, she had planted these everywhere she lived or traveled. They were her particular love in the green kingdoms, for every morning, there was a new, extravagant grace and outpouring of beauty in their flowers, a grace and beauty that would last only for the day. She traced the triangular bloom with her finger and left a trail of silver light in the air.
To her surprise, the light spread, filtering through the careful rows of emerging sunflowers to the distant new leaves of the encircling vallenwoods, until the garden was aglow in silver and white.
"Cheer up," said a voice from the lavender-blue heart of the lily. "All of this mutter about loneliness and beauty that will fade is matter for bards, not gardeners."
L'Indasha smiled. "I've missed you. How long has it been?"
"But a day," the lily replied. "You've just been listening to your own world-weary drone. I was here yesterday, but you didn't look at me. See that shriveled flower to my immediate left? I waited all day in there for you to sit down and stop moping. Two bees and a grasshopper came by, though."
The eye of the lily winked at the druidess, and then she felt a hand on her shoulder.
Whirling about and rocking backward, she looked full in the face of a kindly old man, white-haired and bearded, a silver triangle pinned to the crown of his broad-brimmed hat. A gaudy purplish smear colored one side of his nose.
"Lord Paladine," L'Indasha began reverently. "You-"
The old man raised a finger to his lips.
"Hush," he breathed. "You'll wake the neighbors."
"I just wanted to tell you that-"
"Shh." The old man sat down on the freshly hoed furrow, his silver robes swirling with sun and shade. "A change has come," he announced quietly, smiling. "I'm sending you a companion. Some help."
"Some help?"
"Oh, not that there's aught wrong with the work you've done. I'm really very pleased. Thirty centuries, and Takhi-sis has not unmasked the rune. It's a splendid job, my dear. Worth enduring this long, wearisome immortality."
He held up the daylily bloom, now somehow missing its blue-purple center. He grinned.
L'Indasha cleared her throat. "Lord Paladine, I simply wanted to tell you…"
"Your helper is coming," he went on, "coming by a roundabout way. Well, very roundabout-twenty years in the doing. These things take time-growth-due season, you know. But that will be clear to you soon enough. And when help arrives, there will be important choices to make."
"Twenty years?" the druidess asked apprehensively. Twenty years seemed like days, even hours, after her vigil of three millennia. "How? Why?"
Lord Paladine waved his hand. "The Dark Lady's spies are everywhere. So my devices move slowly and quietly these days." He pointed to an overhanging vallenwood. "Like the growth of a large tree."
"I see," the druidess replied. "Rushed and suspicious eyes will not notice."
Lord Paladine nodded. "You be patient as well. Remember how I love you."
"How much shall I tell when the helper comes?"
L'Indasha asked. "Surely not everything."
"Oh, goodness, no!" the old fellow exclaimed. "It'd take forever, and my borscht recipe would get out!"
L'Indasha chuckled. "As if anyone would want it."
"Well, perhaps not," he mused, "but someone wants the Secret. More than at any time since I first hid the symbols on the faceless rune from her-from all the world- and entrusted them and that Keeper's pendant to you."
L'Indasha glanced down at the blue-purple stone about her neck. The warding stone that kept the Keeper.
Then all merriment vanished in Paladine's bright eyes. "Double your vigilance. Plant against famine and fire and the next winter. The barren season will last a very long time indeed. Unless…"
"Unless?"
Paladine crouched beside the druidess. "Unless the ages are accomplished," he whispered. "Soon the faceless rune will have two faces. They will be opposites, and they will be the same. If they balance each other, work together in their opposition, your job will be done. They can receive the Secret from you and defeat darkness forever. For they are Huma's kin."
"Children," the druidess breathed. "From the line of Huma… it will be full circle then. So these are the last of my quiet days."
The old man nodded and rose. The sunlight faded and dappled as a roiling cloud bank moved overhead. In the distance, heat lightning flashed, followed by a low rumble. "Provide. The storm is coming."
He turned to go, but L'Indasha beckoned him gently once again.
"Lord Paladine…?"
"Yes?" he asked.
"You have lily on your nose."
Chapter 1
The winter of the old man's warning came even more quickly than she had expected, collapsing the autumn of that peaceful year into a matter of days, freezing the unfallen leaves to their branches.
This day, from her sheltering cavern, L'Indasha Yman kept vigil with the rising new storm. Harsh winds from the west-from Taman Busuk-whipped through the Khalkist Mountains, bringing dark, churning clouds and the faint, watery smell of winter lightning.
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 geletnancy, 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.