The town of Neraka was a vagabond place, makeshift and dirty.
The decent mountain folk who had peopled it first, goatherds and humble, ingenious farmers, had been forced out over the years by a constant flow of brigands and highwaymen, cutthroats and ne'er-do-wells of all countries and races. There it would have ended, the village dying out on its own when plunder grew scarce, were it not for the building that sprouted in its midst.
For Takhisis had chosen the place, in the way that she always chose-quietly and secretly, in a place where the black obsidian foundations of the temple would raise no alarm. For when she returned to the world and restored her dominion, Neraka was to be the heart of her empire.
And already that heart was beginning to beat.
As Aglaca and Verminaard approached from the north over the flat volcanic plain, the spire of the temple was the first thing they saw. Gnarled like an ancient oak in the heart of the town, it twisted amid half-finished city walls, clouding the southern sky with its bulk and with the strange, shimmering aura of darkness that surrounded it.
Outside the temple walls, the builders' scaffolding, and the ramshackle guardhouses, a hundred fires littered the surrounding village, the black smoke of smithy and kitchen and shrine intermingling with the foul smell of tannery and slaughterhouse. Beyond the village itself, in the outlying plains, scores of squat black tents lay scattered almost randomly, above them an array of pennants and banners-white and black closest to Verminaard, but blue and yellow, red and green in the distance, each adorned with the scowling face of a dragon, each waving in the shifting mountain winds.
The two young men crouched not fifty yards from the northernmost encampment. There, shielded by the tall grass, they ate sparingly from the raw vegetables Aglaca had sensibly gathered from the garden above the cave.
"I feel like a rabbit," Verminaard muttered. "Hidden in the grass eating radishes."
Aglaca snickered and shook his head. Then, rising until he could see over the top of the grass, he peered solemnly toward the army of banners.
"I had no idea the bandits were so plentiful," he declared. "It's no wonder Daeghrefn hasn't killed them all yet."
"Enough of the bandits. Where now?" Verminaard asked. "Where is she?"
Aglaca looked at him curiously. "I can't tell amid all these flags and commotions. We'll have to scout it out, keeping our distances and wits about us and our ears open as well as our eyes. Not even bandits can hide her from us forever."
But it seemed long indeed, as the lads skirted the outlying camps.
No sooner had they started to move west, in a wide counterclockwise circle about the village, than their pres ence was masked by yet another thick mist. Out of nowhere it rose again, rolling over the city until only the towers of the temple were visible through the dense fog, and the colors of the banners were muted, lost in a dozen layers of gray.
It was no ragtag group of bandits that they circled, no disorganized band of cutthroats. Around Neraka was assembling the makings of an army, and judging from the languages and accents and dialects that carried to them through the fog, it was an army gathered from far and exotic places-from Sanction and Estwilde, but also from Kern and from other places where the accents were even stranger. They were far from alert, and far from ready, but the numbers were great and growing.
"See? Aglaca whispered. "Some of them are only now pitching tents. This is a time of arrivals, but what they're arriving/or is a mystery."
"Whatever it is," Verminaard observed, "my father should know. He'll not take to a huge Nerakan army at his doorstep."
"Nor will they take to him, I'd reckon," Aglaca agreed. "Perhaps the girl can tell us."
"If I ever find her," Verminaard muttered gloomily. "Perhaps this whole business has been unwise."
Then the Voice came to him, its inflections as soft and mysterious as the fog, its tones more melodious, more feminine than ever before.
Unwise? Of course not. You have traveled this far this well, and the prison is at hand. The Pen, they call it, on the western grounds, in the midst of the green encampment.
Be ruled by me. Despite the fog and the sentries and the perils ahead of you, I am here to guide you.
"But there are so many of them," Verminaard protested aloud, his voice shrill and thin in the foggy air. Aglaca looked back at him in alarm and signaled for silence.
The day will come, the Voice continued, quietly and alluringly, when you will be thankful for their numbers. You will come back here, Verminaard of Nidus, and all this power I will give you, and the glory of it, for it is given to me of old, and in my power to give it to whomever I please…
"Stay behind me," Aglaca whispered sharply. "And stay down where you belong!"
Verminaard blinked stupidly, his thoughts drawn from the maze of the Voice by his companion's warning. He found himself standing full upright in the waist-high grass, an easy target had the fog been thinner and the sentries more alert.
Instantly he crouched, but the Voice was not through with him.
Be ruled by me, it intoned. These things are mine to give, for the smallest of favors. I shall show you this as the hours unfold.
"No," Aglaca said flatly, to nothing and no one, his back to Verminaard. The older lad turned toward him in astonishment, and looking over his shoulder, Aglaca grinned sheepishly.
"Just that voice again, Verminaard," he admitted. "Come to me with another set of lies. Guess I forgot myself in the quarrel."
"Enough of voices," Verminaard declared. "We need to find the girl. This fog can't last forever."
It can if a dragon wields it, Ember thought, coiled not a hundred yards from the young men, his thoughts masked against intrusion and his wings moving slowly, cyclically, fanning the fog he had summoned magically as it spread through the landscape, darkening and thickening.
Takhisis's commands were convenient, the dragon mused. How better to take the girl than to have Verminaard and Aglaca do it for him?
He smiled, baring his many rows of long teeth. His golden eyes glittered as he searched the mist, then found Verminaard and Aglaca again as they stooped in the grass and waited. It would not be long before they found the Pen.
His scales rippled red and gold and red with a fierce anticipation. It was all falling into place.
Only this voice troubled him. Aglaca spoke of it now freely and often, and to hear him tell it, you would think he argued with it daily. It might be hallucination, born of his loneliness at Castle Nidus, but the dragon suspected otherwise.
It might be what prompted Aglaca when, in the guise of the mage Cerestes, Ember had offered the young man magic. Perhaps this voice had urged Aglaca to refuse those studies.
The other one seemed oblivious to the coaxing of this voice-of any voice. Then again, he was dense and stubborn, not the kind to be won by words and argument. Aglaca was the brains and Verminaard the muscle of this quest, and, masked by this magical fog, it would not be long until the girl was in their hands. Then, in the safety of Nidus, in the trust of her rescuers, her lips would open to a kindly dark mage named Cerestes. She would tell him of druids and runes and magnificent strategies, never knowing she spoke those words into the ears of a dragon.
He would know before all of them. Before Verminaard and Daeghrefn, to be sure, but before Aglaca as well. And therefore, before Laca's spies and Laca himself…
And before Takhisis. Before the Dark Queen knew, and found the missing rune, and the stone, and the key to her worldly kingdom.
He would sound the girl and the rune, the lads and the grounds of the temple he faced, dark in the midst of the fog he had engendered. He would sound them all, and when the Dragon Queen's mission failed at the gates of her own temple, he would be the lord of the mountains and the lands that lay beyond them. The clerics would answer to him, and it would be his governing voice in the ears of the rich and powerful, not some thin, insinuating babble in the mind of a lone Solamnic boy.