"I would have the castle." Verminaard replied. "I would have the rest of my inheritance, Laca. And I would have vengeance on you for your years of silence, for my years of suffering at the hand of Daeghrefn for your deed."
Laca knelt silently by the blinded man, cradling the fellow's head in his lean, long-fingered hands. He glared up at the monstrous young man before him and spoke to him coldly, as though across a great chasm.
"You're a creature apart now, Verminaard of Nidus," he pronounced. "And you have made your choices." He lifted the helm from the face of the injured man. The clouded eyes rolled back in the head of the hapless man, who lay stunned and moaning in Laca's arms.
"Abelaard!" Verminaard roared. "No! No!"
The wounded man blinked pathetically at the sound of the voice, raising his bruised arm vaguely.
"No!" Verminaard shouted again, and fell to his knees, Nightbringer black and glittering in his hand.
He would strike something. Rock and wind… Laca… himself. He would end everything, here at the borders of Estwilde, and there would be nothing but night, and night upon night…
And a darkness rushed over him, and he saw and remembered nothing.
Laca watched the young man vanish in a swirl of black, engulfing fire. Clouds broke over the landscape, and for the first time in hours, sunlight spread over the bailey walls of Castle East Borders. Wearily the Lord of East Borders took the reins of the shivering Orlog and led the stallion back toward the injured Abelaard.
"Who… who was it, Uncle Laca?" the young man asked, rubbing his vacant and useless eyes.
"I don't know," Laca replied.
In the Khalkist Mountains, overlooking the Nerakan plains, overlooking Nidus and the razed forest to its south, Verminaard received a new and stern discipline at the hands of nature.
He awoke in a sunlit grotto high above Castle Nidus. The shriek of a raptor wakened him, and he sprawled blearily, painfully on the stone floor of the little cavern, breathing in the moist air, the odor of guano and mildew, and a dark, alien stench that underlay all these-something profound and fierce and reptilian.
He could not figure how he had come there, but he knew he was far from East Borders and close to home.
Nightbringer lay beside him, glowing with a cold, ebony fire. He shuddered at the memory of those flames on his arm, of the black oblivion, and most of all at the prospect of wielding the weapon again.
"No more," he whispered, his voice as dry and desolate as the vanished plains of Estwilde. "I shall bear you no more, fight no more."
And yet as he said the words, his hand reached for the handle of the mace and closed about it.
He did not know how he had come to that spot. He had knelt in Estwilde, raging and mourning, and the darkness had swept him away. And now he was miles from the fields of East Borders, where he could see the smoke rising from the hearth fires of his childhood home.
Though Nidus was in full view below him, it was a week before he considered returning there. He stayed in the grotto, in its deepest recesses, faring to the mouth of the cavern only at night, and then only when the hunger became overwhelming. Though the sun would not harm him, daylight was strange to him now-alien and unnerving, like darkness to a child.
Far better to stay in the dark awhile, he told himself as the red moon passed sullenly overhead on his second night in the cave. Better to abide here and mend and recover strength.
He ate what bitter roots he could forage from the spare highland terrain: knol and dioscor and the foul-tasting purple betys-chastise root, old Speratus had called it. And by night, the brown madfall beetles were sluggish and unaware. Their flesh was cold and slippery, but it was nutrient enough as long as he did not eat the poisonous tail.
Once he stood at the edge of a precipice, bathed eerily in the red glow of Lunitari, and tried to drop Nightbringer into the obscure and rocky darkness. It seemed fitting, as though dropping it into the darkness would make retrieval impossible if he was weak and returned for the mace. But the weapon fastened itself to his hand, glowing and droning, twisting like some monstrous black leech, and he told himself, Not yet. I can rid myself of it anytime, once my strength is returned. But not yet.
Yet he mistrusted his own thoughts, and so he tried once more. A shadowy pool lay in the nethermost reach of the cavern, so far from light that only the green glow of the vespertile bats lightened its black waters. The madfall beetles who dwelt by its banks had evolved for generations in the near-total darkness, eyeless now, their shells a pale, translucent pink. It seemed like the spot to leave Nightbringer, and for a moment, his heart leaped. There would be rest from all of this-from hunger and cold and from the consuming presence of the mace. He would find peace in the depths of this darkness.
But though Verminaard plunged his hand in the icy water and tried to release the weapon into the calm, deep pool, still the mace adhered to the skin of his hand. It glowed beneath the water, if glowed was the word, a deep, velvety blackness within the abject shadows of the pool.
He tried more drastic methods after that, but fire failed to damage the weapon, and his own paltry spellcraft was powerless against it. It could not be lost, nor could it be destroyed, it seemed, but the deeper truth came to him as the fruitless days passed.
It was a week before he admitted that he could not deliver himself from Nightbringer because he would not be delivered.
But by then he had other concerns, other callings. For Castle Nidus was drawing him as well, and he knew his long night of solitude was almost over. Soon the gates of the castle would open for him, and he would enter as a man utterly changed, brought into total compliance with the Lady's will.
He was the Arm of Takhisis, her champion in the black and flowing light.
Verminaard had found the drus berries earlier that morning. Crushed into a potion, they were the stuff of visionaries, carried in flasks by shaman and druid, by the scattered dark clerics of the Dragon Queen. Growing in the wild, untempered by waters or the alchemist's art, the raw berries offered wilder, more erratic visions. Sometimes more profound.
Or so Cerestes had told him in the long, magical studies of his childhood.
Now, following a long afternoon's meditation at the edge of the daylight, he ate a handful of the violet berries and crept back into the grotto. There he crouched on his massive haunches and waited for the visions and auguries to begin.
He drew forth the rune stones. He would know what She willed. The runes would tell him.
In the days of his solitude, the stones had been as constant a companion as Nightbringer. He felt their strong assurance in the pouch at his belt, and in the day, when he longed for the darkness and the serenity it brought, he would retire into the depths of the cave. There, in the protective shadows, he would clutch the stones like totems. But he had not cast them, had not even looked at them.
But now it was different. Now, in the red moonlight, where their edges glimmered like veins of gold, he called on the Amarach to bode and prophesy.
"Say me the truth, stones," he whispered. "No matter the laughter of soldiers, the scorn of the mages." Closing his eyes, he breathed a brief prayer to the Seven Dark Gods, to the Lady, and to the spirit of the runes, and cast three stones before him.
"That which was," he muttered. "That which is. That which is yet to be."
He opened his eyes and gaped in astonishment.
Blank. Blank. Blank. The same rune in all three positions.
Verminaard rubbed his eyes and looked again. He had not imagined it. The stark nothingness of the blank rune stared at him from past, present, and future.
"Blank," he muttered. "The absence of dark and light."
But there was only one blank rune in the set of stones! How could …