There were tales about the mountain bandits, how they bred for keen eyesight and could follow unwary travelers through storm and fog. How they called to their intended victims from the sides of the road. Hidden in mist and obscurity, they would cry out deceptively, like wounded men or lost babies.
Verminaard rose in the saddle, his hand resting uneasily on his sword. Twice he started at noises in the mist, at the sudden, flurried wingbeat of rooks and then at something large crashing blindly through the high aeterna foliage in the foothills. He had assured himself that the sounds meant nothing-were nothing, indeed, beyond the weav-ings of his own fears and imaginations-when the Voice came to him again, as though it rose to greet him out of the chill and the fog …
… or the fog itself was speaking.
Excellent, Lord Verminaard, it said, the old familiar accents sugary with praise. Verminaard glanced quickly behind him, but Aglaca's head was turned, his shoulders relaxed.
He did not hear the Voice. Good.
Of course he does not hear, Lord Verminaard, the Voice broke in, low and musical and neither masculine nor feminine, as usual. Why should I let him hear what passes between us? He could not… understand. He is different, but it is much more than that. You understand, don't you? How singling you out was … all I could do?
Verminaard nodded dimly, then looked'back uneasily through the mist at his companion.
fust look at him, coaxed the Voice, and the fog seemed to play with Aglaca's angular features, molding his face to the soft roundness of a child's. He hasn't an inkling. Nor does he have the instruments. The faculties.
Verminaard blinked. Aglaca had always seemed clever enough to him. There was a certain blessing on the boy, a certain art like that of the runemaster's risting, where a humble stone is transformed to something magical with a quick stroke of the carving knife. And Aglaca could take a defeat-in the lists, in the hunt, wherever defeat was handed him-and turn it toward graciousness, to where defeat was no longer humiliating, and the victory no longer mattered as much, either.
But these are new circumstances, the Voice insisted, rising in pitch, in volume, drowning out his charitable thoughts. And this time the victory matters-matters more than anything and anyone, yes, because it is this victory that can make your name.
"Verminaard? Slow your horse," Aglaca urged. "This little mare's not used to following the likes of Orlog."
All of your mistakes and misdeeds, the Voice persisted, higher in pitch and more penetrating, will be set right if you bring back the girl. Your father's favor is won, yes, and the esteem of the garrison-of Robert and the mage and the rest of them. What need will you have of runestones then, with your future assured and seamless and joyous?
The reins shook in Verminaard's hands. It was too good, this prophecy, too good….
Too good if you fail to do this alone, the Voice continued, a faint hum at the edge of hearing, for if the child helps you, whom will your father credit for the rescue? And whom the mage?
And whom the girl, for that matter?
"Wait!" Aglaca shouted as Verminaard urged Orlog to sudden speed on the trail ahead, vanishing into the gray fog.
Aglaca's voice faded behind him, the strained shouts of "Verminaard!" echoing in the maze of rock and cliff and entangled forest. At times, it seemed as though there were two or three voices clamoring in the mist.
Good, Verminaard thought, steering Orlog through the precarious fog. Let him find his own way back to Nidus. Or let him find worse, for all I care. Neraka is mine, and the girl. I don't need him to find the way.
Was it his own thought, or was it the Voice, returned to him and muffled by murk and distance until he could no longer distinguish it from his own musings?
He reached for the pouch of runes at his belt. They rattled reassuringly as Orlog passed through a passage of rubble and pine, and the trail narrowed and sloped southeast, weaving into the foothills, shadowed by the black looming form of Mount Berkanth.
Instinctively Verminaard touched the hilt of his sword. He could see better now. He was in the heart of bandit country, in the rocky highlands where the crack Nerakan cavalry patroled-worse by far than the bandits, and the horror of huntsman and horseman from Nidus all the way to the grasslands of Estwilde and Throt. Once no more than competent brigands, they were disciplined now and far more deadly, their numbers increasing as a great and unfathomable power pushed them to raids more and more daring, more and more successful.
He coughed nervously. It was a time that he wished for company. The Voice was utterly gone.
Steering the stallion over the sloping ground, he traveled by instinct, offering prayers to the gods of darkness. Takhisis he asked for safe passage, and Sargonnas the Consort, Hiddukel and Chemosh and Zeboim and the others until the names failed him. Then, with a deeper
and more basic instinct, he drew his sword, resting the blade across the swell of the saddle.
Instantly, almost as a perverse answer to his prayers, shadows flitted through the mist around him, dark horsemen at the edge of his sight-some scarcely ten yards from where he trembled atop Orlog. Verminaard heard the snort and whinny of horses, a hushed flurry of what seemed to be command and instruction in a cant of Common speech and a language he did not understand-a rocky tongue, full of hard consonants and gutturals.
The shapes milled about at a threatening distance. Had they carried torches, as regular cavalry often did in a fog, he would have been discovered at once.
Bandits again. For surely they were the ones encircling him, lightless in the way of brigand riders, their destination west-through the forest, no doubt, then north to the high plains of Taman Busuk beyond. Soon their paths would cross his, and no fog would conceal that he was a stranger, and alone, and bearing the emblems of Castle Nidus.
For a moment, he froze in the saddle, paralyzed by fear and indecision. They would raise his head on a pike; they would torture him and leave him for dead on the high plains.
Where was Aglaca when you needed his wits?
Desperately Verminaard reversed his path. If he doubled back and rode among them, veiled by murk and distance, the bandits might assume he was one of them. They would be less likely to investigate, and the fog might give him enough time to figure an escape.