“There were five guardian peoples named, one thousand years ago before the Mountain. Four are here today: Brennin and Cathal, the Dalrei and the lios alfar. None of our wardstones turned red, yet Rakoth is free. We had no warning at all. The circle was broken, my friends, and so—,” he hesitated, then spoke aloud the thought they all shared, “—and so we must beware of Eridu.”
Eridu, Kim thought, remembering it from Eilathen’s whirling vision. Wild, beautiful land where lived a race of dark, fierce, violent men.
And the Dwarves. She turned, to see Matt Sören gazing at Brendel with an impassive face.
“That is my first counsel,” the lios continued. “The other is more to the point. If Rakoth is but newly free, then even with his power, black Starkadh cannot be raised again for some time. He has announced himself too soon. We must attack before that fortress anchors his might in the Ice again. I say to all of you that we should go forth from this Council and carry war to the Unraveller ourselves. We bound him once, and we will do so again!”
He was a flame; he fired them all with the burning in him. Even Jaelle, Kevin saw, had a blaze of color in her face.
“No one,” said Aileron, rising again, “could have spoken more clearly my own thought. What say the Dalrei?”
In the now charged ambience, Levon walked forward, uncomfortable but not abashed, and Dave felt a surge of pride to hear his new brother say, “Never in our long history have the Riders failed the High Kingdom in time of need. I can say to you all that the sons of Revor will follow the sons of Conary and Colan into the Riik Barrens and beyond against Maugrim. Aileron, High King, I pledge my life to you, and my sword; do with them what you will. The Dalrei shall not fail you.”
Quietly Tore stepped forward. “And I,” he said. “My life, my sword.”
Stern and erect, Aileron nodded to them, accepting it. He looked a king, Kevin thought. In that moment he came into it.
“And Cathal?” Aileron asked, turning to Galienth. But it was another voice that answered him.
“A thousand years ago,” said Sharra, daughter of Shalhassan, heir of Shalhassan, “the men of the Garden Country fought and died in the Bael Rangat. They fought at Celidon and among the tall trees of Gwynir. They were at Sennett Strand when the last battle began and at Starkadh when it ended. They will do as much again.” Her bearing was proud before them all, her beauty dazzling. “They will fight and die. But before I accede to this counsel of attack, there is another voice I would hear. Throughout Cathal the wisdom of the lios alfar is a byword, but so, too, and often it has been said with a woven curse, is the knowledge of the followers of Amairgen. What say the mages of Brennin? I would hear the words of Loren Silvercloak.”
And with a jolt of dismay, Kevin realized that she was right. The mage hadn’t said a thing. He had barely made his presence known. And only Sharra had noticed.
Aileron, he saw, seemed to have followed the same line of thought. He wore a sudden expression of concern.
And even now, Loren was hesitating. Paul gripped Kevin’s arm. “He doesn’t want to speak,” Schafer whispered. “I think I’m going to—”
But whatever intervention he had planned was forestalled, for there came then a loud hammering on the great doors at the end of the hall, and as they turned, startled, the doors were opened, and a figure walked with two of the palace guard between the high pillars towards them all. He walked with the flat, halting steps of absolute exhaustion, and as he drew nearer, Kevin saw that it was a Dwarf.
In the loud silence, it was Matt Sören who stepped forward. “Brock?” he whispered.
The other Dwarf did not speak. He just kept walking and walking, as if by willpower alone, until he had come the length of the Great Hall to where Matt stood. And there he dropped to his knees at last, and in a voice of rawest grief, cried aloud, “Oh, my king!”
In that moment the one eye of Matt Sören truly became a window to his soul. And in it they all saw a hunger unassuageable, the deepest, bitterest, most forsaken longing of the heart.
“Why, Matt?” Kim remembered asking after her tranced vision of Calor Diman on that first walk to Ysanne’s lake. “Why did you leave?”
And now, it seemed they were to learn. A chair had been set for Brock before the throne, and he had collapsed into it. It was Matt who spoke, though, as they gathered around the two Dwarves.
“Brock has a tale to tell,” Matt Sören said in his deep tones, “but I fear it will mean little to you unless I first tell you mine. It seems the time for privacy is past. Listen, then.
“In the time of the passing of March, King of the Dwarves, in his one-hundred-and-forty-seventh year, only one man could be found who would assay the test of full moon night by Calor Diman, the Crystal Lake, which is how we choose our King, or have the powers choose him for us.
“Know you that he who would rule under the twin mountains must first lie at full moon night beside the lake. If he lives to see the dawn and is not mad, he is crowned under Banir Lok. It is a dark ordeal, though, and many of our greatest warriors and artisans have been broken shards when the sun rose on their vigil.”
Kim began to feel the first pulsings of a migraine behind her eyes. Blocking it as best she could, she focused hard on what Matt was saying.
“When March, to whom I was sister-son, died, I gathered what courage I had—a youthful courage it was, I confess—and according to the ritual, I shaped a crystal of my own devising and dropped it as a token of intention in Crystal Lake on new moon night.
“Two weeks later the door from Banir Tal, which is the one entrance to the meadow by Calor Diman, was opened for me and then bolted behind my back.”
Matt’s voice had dropped almost to a whisper. “I saw the full moon rise above that lake,” he said. “I saw many things besides. I… did not go mad. In the end I offered and was bound to the waters. They crowned me King two days after.”
It was building up to a grandfather of a headache, Kim realized. She sat down on the steps before the throne and put her head in her hands, listening, straining to concentrate.
“I did not fail by the lake,” Matt said, and they could all hear the bitterness, “but in every other way I did fail, for the Dwarves were not what once we had been.”
“Not your fault,” Brock murmured, looking up. “Oh, my lord, truly not your fault.”
Matt was silent a moment, then shook his head in rejection. “I was King,” he said shortly. Just like that, Kevin thought. He looked at Aileron.
But Matt was continuing. “Two things the Dwarves have always had,” he said. “A knowledge of secret things in the earth, and a lust to know more.
“In the last days of King March, a faction formed within our halls around two brothers, foremost of our artisans. Their desire, which became a passion and then, in the first weeks of my reign, a crusade, was to find and unlock the secrets of a dark thing: the Cauldron of Khath Meigol.”
A murmur rose in the hall at that. Kim had her eyes closed; there was a lot of pain, and the light was hurting now, lancing against her eyeballs. She bent all her will to Matt. What he was saying was too important to lose because of a headache.
“I ordered them to stop,” the Dwarf said. “They did, or so I thought. But then I found Kaen, the older, combing the oldest books again, and his brother had gone away without my leave. I grew wrathful then, and in my folly and pride I called a gathering of all Dwarves in the Moot Hall and demanded they choose between Kaen’s desires and my own, which were to let the black thing lie where it was lost, while we moved from spells and powers of the old ways and sought the Light I had been shown by the lake.