Free Before The Mask by Michael Williams

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