"I won't tell Father that you read the runes for me," Verminaard said, with a wide, wolfish smile.

Cerestes turned toward the window, hiding a similar smile of his own. The skull of Chemosh was brilliantly visible now, framed by stone and darkness and the deep purple western sky. It could not have been easier.

So it was that Verminaard of Nidus received the blessing of the mage and the veiled direction of the rune stones. He did not linger in Cerestes' chambers, for the hour was late and he had much to do on the morrow. Gathering the stones, he bowed respectfully and backed out the door as it closed softly.

The mage remained at the window, pondering the shifting stars and the cool eddies of night wind on the keep below him as it scattered straw and pale leaves. Cerestes' smile widened.

The game was beginning, and he did so relish a game. Already Takhisis had set her plans in motion, obscure to the mage for now, but he did not need the details yet.

The mysterious girl was on her way, and it was enough. From a distance, the unwitting lad was being drawn toward her, toward a shadowy form he had seen, or rather glimpsed, months ago on a cloudy mountain afternoon.

They would bring this woman to Castle Nidus, and with her safely beneath his roof, Cerestes was sure that it would take little time to uncover her secret.

But the road to Neraka was long and menacing. It crossed the high and desolate grasslands south of the castle, bending east through a narrow pass between foothills surrounding Mount Berkanth and the infamous Nerakan Forest. And even then, after perilous miles of travel, the journey was not over. A southward path took the traveler on between two volcanoes now smoldering and seething with new life. Only then would Verminaard reach the encampments that surrounded the city, and only then would his search for the girl begin in earnest.

In the heart of Neraka, where the Dark Queen was raising a hidden temple.

The mage backed away from the window and settled into his soft chair. The night had turned, and the stars seemed to tilt and beckon as the first birds of the morning awakened and the servants rose as well. The silence was broken by a tentative song from an aderyn perched somewhere on the battlements, followed by the lonely footsteps of a groom as he shuffled across the bailey to the stables.

Cerestes closed his eyes for a moment, drifting on the soft fading of the night. The runes had encouraged the lad, as Cerestes knew they would. It was why he had invented the obscure and hopeful reading, spinning a story out of the flat and meaningless stones.

He laughed scornfully at human foolishness. Until the blank rune was sounded, its symbol recovered, a man might as well read his fingernails for augury.

Cerestes rose from the chair and glided to the center of the room.

It might be as Takhisis claimed, he thought, casting a spell to mask his thoughts in case others-perhaps even the Dark Queen herself-used the night and his dream

state to pry into his thought. Perhaps the girl had been chosen by Paladine to carry, somehow, the secret of the vanished rune. If that were true, then she carried a powerful knowledge, the key to an omniscient oracle. Armed with that oracle, Takhisis could find the green gemstone, the last component to the portal she was building in Neraka. It was the cornerstone to her temple, and once it was in place, she could return to the world of Krynn, to the bright and agreeable world she had once poisoned and sullied, that she would again cover with her own abiding darkness.

But the same oracle in another's hand could stop her entry entirely.

And establish a darkness of his own.

And what, indeed, might be accomplished with both of Huma's kin?

Cerestes smiled and knelt by the hearth, idly tracing the patterns of the runes in the ashes of the hearthstone.

Birch. Thunder. Hammer. They could apply to him as well-better, in fact, than to a lad's moonstruck plans of rescue.

He stilled his rising excitement, gathering his robes and curling up on the hearth. He lay there like a sleeping cat, like a coiled serpent.

Once again, he told himself, the blank rune's faces were still missing. And until they were restored, all auguries were in vain. And yet the stark symbols of Verminaard's reading occupied his thoughts when he closed his eyes___

Birch. Thunder. Hammer.

He drifted off to a deep dragon's sleep that would rest him well by the afternoon. He would awaken by the hearth, his black robes chalked and smeared with ashes, his heart resolved to follow Verminaard to Neraka.

For after all, Verminaard and Aglaca must be protected, since Daeghrefn paid Cerestes' wages. Surely Takhisis would agree.

And since She seemed resolved to test the youths by allowing them this adventure, Cerestes could not seize the girl himself….

And since one of the lads, no doubt, would be the Dark Lady's cleric, and the dragon queen paid him in a harder currency…

And there was the matter of the missing rune. And finally of a temple in Neraka.

He would see that temple, he resolved, but not for Takhisis's sake. In the temple's obsidian stones lay secrets as mysterious as those housed in the sixteenth and hidden rune. But these were different secrets-of worldly architecture, of politics and power and the strategies of a hun-. dred dark clerics who awaited the arrival of their mistress.

A dragon's eye could translate those secrets-the simple intrigues of humans to whom the goddess had not yet come.

And then, with Takhisis safely imprisoned behind the portal, he would sound the runes, find the green gem-stone, and remove it from her grasp forever. Perhaps he would have it made into a ring of power, a symbol of his own new order.

Cerestes murmured in obscure anticipation, a veil of spells like smoke enshrouding his face. He was a rune himself, a blank rune, he thought, his imagination more fanciful as he crossed over, at last, into sleep.

He was, after all, a dragon. A superior being. He could fashion a prophecy of his own, and what he desired would come to pass.

Verminaard checked his plan again.

The groom's son was bribed, as well as the sentries at the east gate.

Two horses would await him in the stable-one for himself, and one for the returning girl-and the east gate of the castle would remain mysteriously open and unguarded for an hour after midnight.

It was orchestrated completely and carefully, and yet Verminaard fidgeted through the sparse meal in the early evening at the silent, somber table with Daeghrefn and Aglaca, Robert and the mage. He hovered nervously above the cold food, certain that all eyes were upon him, all thoughts uncovering his secret quest.