Riding in the foremost and smallest squadron, Verminaard leaned back on the iron arson of his saddle and inhaled the moist, chilly air. It was lowland breathing here-thicker, more nourishing than the air at the timber-line where Castle Nidus kept its formidable watch. Aglaca, riding beside him, seemed suddenly more animate, suddenly more at home in the saddle and the journey.
They rested the horses in a narrow notch between two cliff faces-a glittering passage where the noonday sun flickered on black obsidian, porous volcanic rubble, and a little mountain pool still crusted with the winter's ice. Dismounting, Verminaard drank deeply of the drus flask at his belt-the visionary's potion that Cerestes said was the door to prophecy for servants of the Dragon Queen.
Then he drew forth again the bag of runes, rankling at the mage's insistence that auguring one's own future was impossible. He was sure self-augury could be done, some way, somehow. Especially now, vitalized by the drus potion: The carvings on the stones seemed to shimmer like veins of light.
'Osman,' he called, and the huntsman, whetting his knife by a fallen log, looked up with a frown.
'Not the runes, if you please, young master. I don't take to auguries, nor to that mage of yours.'
'They have nothing to do with him,' Verminaard lied. The mage had given him the stones when he saw that the lad was curious. 'They're fostered under the red moon- under Lunitari. All oracles are, because they're all neutral.'
That much was true. Prophecy was a neutral thing. What you made of it was good or evil. And when you read the stones for someone else… well, sometimes you discovered the things that really concern you. The things that pertain directly to you.
Reluctantly Osman approached the young man. He mistrusted Verminaard's superstition, his preoccupation with dark ritual and ceremony. Being a bluff, commonsen-sical man, Osman had little love for the confusing auguries Verminaard constantly and eagerly placed in front of him.
Better the father, who believed in nothing, than this hex of a lad before him.
'Ask about the hunt, Osman,' Verminaard urged. 'Ask how your company will fare.'
Osman cleared his throat, looking at Aglaca for rescue. The other lad knelt by his horse, smiled, and shook his head as he tightened the flank cinch of the saddle. He was not about to enter the fuss over symbol and omen.
'I expect we'll find out shortly enough, Master Verminaard,' the huntsman replied, turning coolly back to the log.
Angrily Verminaard cast the runes himself. The flat, irregular stones scattered from his hands. It was an old Nerakan reading he tried-three stones in a sequence, determining the present, the immediate future, and the outcome of the event. The cryptic silver lines seemed to scatter, to flicker on the ground like edged fire.
Aglaca, meanwhile, rose and led one of the horses to the little pool. Leaning to break the ice so that the animal might drink, the youth was astonished to see another face, dark and serene, staring back at him from the glazed surface of the water.
'Great Paladine!' he breathed in astonishment.
It was the dark-eyed woman, regarding him serenely. Leaves hung in her auburn hair, and a curious amber light played over her forehead, as though she stared into the setting sun.
Her eyes widened. She smiled in brief recognition, then vanished into the smoky whirl of the ice. Now Aglaca saw an image of himself, sword drawn amid an alcove of granite and rubble. Verminaard stood behind him in the vision, his weapon sheathed and idle.
Aglaca stepped back and gasped, trying to make sense of the revelation.
It was then that the horses started and shied, their nostrils flaring at the whiff of something sharp and musty on the rising wind. Osman leapt to the saddle, followed instantly by Aglaca and the rest of the troopers. Standing in the stirrups, the huntsman scanned the featureless fields. Finally, like an old Plainsman visionary, Osman pointed to where the high grass thrashed and quivered, like the surface of a lake when something large and unfathomable rises from its depths and parts the shallow waters.
'There,' Osman announced calmly, gesturing toward the moving furrow on the horizon. 'A small one, but worthy of the hunt.'
Verminaard scooped up the runes and pulled himself into the saddle. His companions already raced ahead of him, their horses spurred to a brisk trot toward the northern horizon, where his centicore rumbled and his glory would come thrashing through the high grass.
Their horses were good ones, swift and tireless. By mid-morning, the centicore was clearly in sight, lumbering ahead of them, its stout legs churning with a slow and ceaseless power.
It was an ugly thing, Verminaard agreed, as he had been told it would be. Its thick skin was armored with dried mud and algae, its arm-length tail bulbous and spiked like a mace. As tall as a man at its shoulders, the centicore was a young one, no doubt, since its horns were smooth and unscarred. An old folktale said that to meet its stare was death, that the very rocks of the Khalkist foothills were the remains of hapless hunters who had been turned to stone by its gaze.
Of course, Daeghrefn maintained that the legends were nonsense. He had killed two centicores himself, and both times, he claimed, he had looked the thing full in the face as he took its life. There was no magic in the creature, Daeghrefn said, no power except the fear prompted by the wild imaginings of the mountain peoples.
Osman was one of those mountain folk, however, and as the horsemen closed on the centicore, he ordered the young men to each side of the plodding creature. With a grunt, the monster lurched into a small box canyon between two cliff faces. After all, Daeghrefn had appointed the huntsman as a guardian of sorts, and if the centicore turned to charge, the lads would be at its flanks, at a safe distance from its swiveling horns and its legendary gaze, and the shortsighted focus of its anger would fall on Osman and the troopers alone.
Circling to the right of the beast, his horse brushing against the rock face, Verminaard leveled his lance. The horse quivered nervously beneath him, the foul smell of the beast thick in the moist, windless air. Verminaard stood up in the stirrups, locked his legs at the knees, and leaned forward in the saddle.
To his left, skidding over the black volcanic rubble, the centicore reached the rocky cul-de-sac. Slowly and stupidly the beast turned, facing Verminaard. In that time- two seconds, perhaps three-their eyes locked in the shadow of the cliff walls, and the boy saw the dull, shallow stare of the beast, its eyes as drab as wet slate.
It barely knows I am here, he thought exultantly. And now as it turns, I shall charge it and…
Then something flickered deep in the eyes of the monster.
Verminaard weaved above the saddle. For a moment, he believed he had imagined that strange, cold light that seemed to emerge from the heart of the beast, chilling yet beckoning him with some deeply malignant pressure. And yet it was not imagined, was not his own superstitious promptings, for how could his own mind freeze him, confuse him, and fascinate him so?
Verminaard blinked and fumbled his lance. The language of that light was something he almost knew, as though the thoughts of the beast had reached out across half the canyon and across a thousand years, embracing his thoughts and beginning a long and cold instruction. And yet he was not sure what it meant. The look had been cloudy, elusive, as indecipherable finally as the runes he tried vainly to read.
I shall charge it, he thought. I shall drive it into precious Aglaca.
His thoughts wrenched back to the moment, and he spurred his stallion. The beast turned and fled him, rumbling through the rough, gravelly stretch toward the other wall of the canyon where Aglaca waited, his lance leveled, his horse calm and steady.
Now! Verminaard thought, goading his horse after the barreling centicore. Now, while the thing is intent on Aglaca!
It would be a tough kill for an untried lad. The centicore lumbered toward Aglaca, its mouth agape, its horns swiveling like scythes. Aglaca blinked nervously and steadied his trembling lance, drawing again on his extraordinary courage as the monster closed the distance by half, the plodding strides gaining fluidity until the beast moved surprisingly fast over the gravelly edges of the cul-de-sac.
Then, unexpectedly, Osman rode between the lad and the charging animal. The older man had seen disaster unfolding from his post at the mouth of the cul-de-sac, and he realized at once that the post he had taken, chosen because it was the most likely place the beast would charge, was barely close enough to rescue the imperiled Solamnic youth. He spurred his horse over the gravel, shouting and whistling to distract the monster, and he reached Aglaca not a moment too soon, turning to face the centicore and raising his lance to receive its charge. The soft flesh at its breast lay exposed by the centicore's reckless assault, and all the veteran huntsman had to do was
