Verminaard did not wait. "We'll go at once. You are my responsibility, after all."
He had almost convinced himself with his own excuses.
But still the cave and the little garden haunted him as he and Aglaca saddled and rode south, and the dark vanished over his shoulder in the unsettling red of a Khalkist sunset. The place haunted him still as he warmed himself at the night's campfire, the light muffled deftly by Aglaca against the eyes of beasts and bandits and worse.
It would haunt him through the morning as they passed the south edge of the Nerakan Forest-the Blood Grove, where it was said that the victims of banditry hung, dried and blackened like unpicked grapes, and wild cats scuttled along the woodland trails in even more unspeakable foraging.
Dark and deep, serenaded the Voice, which seemed to beckon from the shadowy woods. Dark and deep, and the desolate secrets hanging in decay, in decay and forgetfulness….
Is it not an ending place for enemies? Tor unloving and unlovely fathers?
Verminaard hearkened to the Voice, to its bottomless seduction. He vividly imagined Daeghrefn swinging slowly from the black branches of a drooping, rotting aeterna tree, the air aswarm with kites, with raptors.. . .
"No!" he exclaimed, wrenching his thoughts back to sunlight, to breathing, to the cool Nerakan plains and the spreading grasslands.
To Aglaca, riding beside him on the mare, who regarded him with alarm and concern, he muttered, "It's nothing. I must have . . . must have fallen asleep. Don't bother yourself."
"It's a voice, isn't it?" Aglaca asked quietly, leaning across the saddle.
"A voice? Don't be foolish." His own reply sounded shrill, frightened.
Aglaca slowed the mare, brought her to a halt. Verminaard swore softly, reined in the stallion, and guided him gently back to the spot where Aglaca waited, his face cloudy and solemn.
"Foolish it may be to you, Verminaard," Aglaca said, his words still unnaturally hushed, "but I've heard a voice myself sometimes, and maybe I'm gone a bit to the wayside from staring at the red moon for too long, but that voice has told me things best never spoken. And best never listened to."
"Then don't listen," Verminaard blurted. Then quietly, more cautiously, "What does it tell you?"
"That I'm exceptional," Aglaca replied, with a strange half-smile, "and in a way that no one else is exceptional. It's a heady wine that voice pours, telling me that it talks to me alone, and that some arrangement in time and space has brought me, and me alone, to high degree and to great position. It tells me darker things, too-that my father has abandoned me, that he and your father consider me only a pawn in some long, political game, but it does not matter what the voice says, because I choose not to believe it. I believe what my father said before I left: that he loved me no matter what."
Verminaard sniffed, goading Orlog to a trot, heading south over the Nerakan plains. But his thoughts wandered back down a blind tunnel, at the end of which the Voice lay coiled in the depths of his memory, and the coveted words of the Voice were deeper, more sweet than Aglaca's thickheaded skepticism.
He would choose not to believe as well. But he would choose not to believe Aglaca. And so he changed the line of talk altogether. "What color are her eyes, for the last time?"
Aglaca fumbled for an image, for words of hue and
light, and then he had it. "They are exactly the color of that lily's eye," he said gleefully.
Verminaard ground his teeth and swore Aglaca's doom, silently, on all the dark gods. Savagely he spurred Orlog forward.
"Wait for me!" Aglaca shouted, urging the mare to a gallop. "Wait for me, Verminaard!"
Already Verminaard was racing into the flatlands of the Nerakan plateau.
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.