They had been climbing all morning, and the rough going was not made easier by the pain in Kim’s side where Ceriog had kicked her. She was silent, though, and kept going, head down, watching the path and the long legs of Faebur climbing in front of her. Dalreidan was leading them; Brock, who had to be hurting far more than she was, brought up the rear. No one spoke. The trail was difficult enough without wasting breath on words, and there was, really, not a great deal to say.
She had dreamt again the night before, in the outlaw camp not far from the plateau where they had been captured. Ruana’s deep chanting ran through her sleep. It was beautiful, but she found no comfort in that beauty—the pain was too great. It twisted through her and, what was worse, a part of it came from her. There was smoke in the dream again, and the caves. She saw herself with lacerations on her arms but, again, no blood was flowing. No blood in Khath Meigol. The smoke drifted in the starlit, firelit night. Then there was another light, as the Baelrath blazed into life. She felt it as a burning, as guilt and pain, and in the midst of that flaming she watched herself looking up into the sky above the mountains and she saw the red moon ride again and she heard a name.
In the morning, heavily wrapped in her thoughts, she had let Brock and Dalreidan make arrangements for their departure, and in silence all morning and into the afternoon she had climbed upwards and east towards the sun.
Towards the sun.
She stopped abruptly. Brock almost ran into her from behind. Shielding her eyes, Kim gazed beyond the mountains as far as she could, and then a cry of joy escaped her. Dalreidan turned, and Faebur. Wordlessly, she pointed. They spun back to look.
“Oh, my King!” cried Brock of Banir Tal. “I knew you would not fail!”
Over Eridu the rain clouds were gone. Sunlight streamed from a sky laced only with the thin, benevolent cirrus clouds of a summer’s day.
Far to the west, in the spinning place of Cader Sedat, the Cauldron of Khath Meigol lay shattered in a thousand pieces and Metran of the Garantae was dead.
Kim felt the shadows of her dream dissolve as hope flared within her like the brilliant sun. She thought of Kevin in that moment. There was sorrow in the memory, there always would be, but now there was joy as well, and a burgeoning pride. The summer had been his gift—the green grass, the birdsong, the mild seas that had allowed Prydwen to sail and the men who sailed her to do this thing.
There was a keen brightness in Dalreidan’s face as he turned back to look at her. “Forgive me,” he said. “I doubted.”
She shook her head. “So did I. I had terrible dreams of where they had to go. There is a miracle in this. I do not know how it was done.”
Brock had come up to stand beside her on the narrow trail. He said nothing, but his eyes were shining beneath the bandage Kim had wrapped about his wound. Faebur, though, had his back to them, still gazing to the east. Looking at him, Kim sobered quickly.
At length he, too, turned to look at her, and she saw the tears in his eyes. “Tell me something, Seer,” he said, sounding older, far, than his years. “If an exiled man’s people are all dead, does his exile end or does it go on forever?”
She struggled to frame a reply and found none. It was Dalreidan who answered. “We cannot unsay the falling of that rain, or lengthen the cut threads of those who have died,” he said gently. “It is in my heart, though, that in the face of what Maugrim has done no man is an exile anymore. Every living creature on this side of the mountains has received a gift of life this morning. We must use that gift, until the hour comes that knows our name, to deal such blows as we can against the Dark. There are arrows in your quiver, Faebur. Let them sing with the names of your loved ones as they fly. It may not seem like a true recompense, but it is all we can do.”
“It is what we must do,” said Brock softly.
“Easy for a Dwarf to say!” snarled Faebur, rounding on him.
Brock shook his head. “Harder by far than you could know. Every breath I draw is laden with the knowledge of what my people have done. The rain will not have fallen under the twin mountains, but it fell in my heart and it is raining there still. Faebur, will you let my axe sing with your arrows in mourning for the people of the Lion in Eridu?”
The tears had dried on Faebur’s face. His chin was set in a hard, straight line. He had aged, Kim thought. In a day, in less than a day he seemed to have aged so much. For what seemed to her a very long time he stood motionless, and then slowly and deliberately he extended a hand to the Dwarf. Brock reached up and clasped it between both of his own.
She became aware that Dalreidan was looking at her.
“We go on?” he asked gravely.
“We go on,” she said, and even as she spoke the dream came back, with the chanting and the smoke, and the name written in Dana’s moon.
To the south and far below, the Kharn River flashed through its gorge in the evening light. They were so high that an eagle hovering over the river was below them, its wings shining in the sunlight that slanted down the gorge from the west. All around them lay the mountains of the Carnevon Range, the peaks white with snow even in midsummer. It was cold, this high up and with the day waning; Kim was grateful for the sweater they had given her in Gwen Ystrat. Lightweight and wonderfully warm, it was a testimonial to the value accorded all the cloth arts in this, the first of all the Weaver’s worlds.
Even so, she shivered.
“Now?” Dalreidan asked, his voice carefully neutral. “Or would you like to camp here until morning?”
The three of them looked at her, waiting. It was her decision to make. They had guided her to this place, had helped her through the hardest parts of the climb, had rested when she had needed to rest, but now they had arrived, and all the decisions were hers.
She looked past her companions to the east. Fifty paces away the rocks looked exactly as they did where she was standing now. The light fell upon them the same way, with the same softening as evening came to the mountains. She had expected something different, some sort of change: a shimmering, shadows, a sharpening of intensity. She saw none of these, yet she knew, and the three men with her knew, that the rocks fifty paces to the east lay within Khath Meigol.
Now that she was here she longed with all her heart to be anywhere else. To be graced with the wings of the eagle below, that she might sweep away on the evening breeze. Not from Fionavar, not from the war, but far from the loneliness of this place and the dream that had led her here. Within herself she reached for, and found, the tacit presence that was Ysanne. She took comfort in that. She was never truly alone; there were two souls within her, now and always. Her companions had no such solace, though, had no dreams or visions to guide them. They were here because of her, and only because of her, and they were looking now for her to lead them. Even as she stood, hesitating, the shadows were slowly climbing the slopes of the ravine.
She drew a breath and slowly let it out. She was here to repay a debt, and one that was not hers alone. She was also here because she bore the Baelrath in a time of war, and there was no one else in any world who could make manifest the Seer’s dream she’d had, however dark it was.
However dark. It had been night in the dream, with fires in front of the caves. She looked down and saw the stone flickering like a tongue of flame on her hand.
“Now,” she said to the others. “It will be bad in the dark, I know, but it won’t be that much better in the morning, and I don’t think we should wait.”
They were very brave, all three of them. Without a word spoken they made room for her to fall into line after Faebur, with Brock behind; and Dalreidan led them into Khath Meigol.
Even with the vellin shielding her she felt the impact of magic as they passed into the country of the Giants, and the form the magic took was fear. They are not ghosts, she told herself, over and over. They are alive. They saved my life. Even so, even with the vellin, she felt terror brushing her mind with the quick wings of night moths. The two men and the Dwarf with her had no green vellin bracelets to guard them, no inner voices to reassure, yet none of them made a sound and none broke stride. Humbled by their courage, she felt her own heart flame with resolution, and as it did the Baelrath burned brighter on her hand.
She quickened her pace and moved past Dalreidan. She had brought them to this place, a place where no man should ever have had to come. It was her turn to lead them now, for the Warstone knew where to go.
For almost two hours they walked in the gathering darkness. It was full night under the summer stars when Kim saw smoke and the distant blaze of bonfires and heard the raucous laughter of svart alfar. And with the brutal mockery of that sound she found, suddenly, that her fears, which had walked with her until now, were gone. She had arrived, and the enemy ahead of her was known and hated and in the caves beyond those ridges of stone the Giants were imprisoned and were dying.
She turned and saw by starlight and the glow of her ring that her companions’ faces were grim now, not with strain but with anticipation. Silently Brock unslung his axe, and Faebur notched an arrow to his bow. She turned to Dalreidan. He had not yet drawn a sword or unslung his own bow. “There will be time,” he whispered, answering her unspoken question, scarcely a breath in the night air. “Shall I find us a place where we can look?”
She nodded. Calmly, silently, he moved past her again and began picking his way among the strewn boulders and loose rocks towards the fires and the laughter. Moments later the four of them lay prone above a plateau. Sheltered by upthrust teeth of rock, they looked down, sickened, on what the glow of the bonfires revealed.
There were two caves set into the mountainside, with high vaulted entrances and runic lettering carved over the arches. It was dark in the caves and they could not see within. From one of them, though, if they strained to hear past the laughter of the svart alfar, they could make out the sound of a single deep voice chanting slowly.
The light came from two huge fires on the plateau, set directly before each of the caves in such a fashion that the smoke of their burning was drawn inwards. There was another fire just over the ridge east of them, and Kim could make out the glow and the rising smoke of a fourth about a quarter of a mile away, to the northeast. There were no others to be seen. Four caves then, four sets of prisoners dying of starvation and smoke.
And four bands of svart alfar. Around each of the bonfires below them, about thirty of the svarts were gathered, and there were a handful of the nightmare urgach, as well. About a hundred and fifty of them, then, if the same numbers held true beyond the ridges. Not a very great force, in truth, but more than enough, she knew, to subdue and hold the Paraiko, whose pacifism was the very essence of their being. All that the svarts had to do, under the guidance of the urgach, was keep the fires burning and refrain from shedding blood. Then they could claim their reward.
Which they were doing now, even as she watched. On each of the pyres below lay the huge body, charred and blackened, of a Paraiko. Every few moments one of the svart alfar would dart close enough to the roaring flames to thrust in a sword and cut for himself a piece of roasted flesh.
Their reward. Kim’s stomach heaved in revulsion and she had to close her eyes. It was an unholy scene, a desecration in the worst, the deepest sense. Beside her she could hear Brock cursing under his breath in a steady invocation, bitter and heartfelt.
Meaningless words, whatever scant easing they might afford. And the curses of the Paraiko themselves, which might have been unleashed had any one of them been killed directly, had been forestalled. Rakoth was too clever, too steeped in the shaping of evil, his servants too well trained, for the bloodcurse to have been set free.
Which meant that another sort of power would have to be invoked. And so here she was, drawn by a savesong chanted and the burden of a Seer’s dream, and what, in the Weaver’s name, was she to do? She had three men beside her, three men alone, however brave they might be. From the moment she and Brock had left Morvran, everything in her had been focused on getting to this plateau, knowing that she had to do so, with never a thought until now about what she could do when she arrived.
Dalreidan touched her elbow. “Look,” he whispered.
She opened her eyes. He wasn’t looking at the caves or the fires or the ridges beyond with their own smoke. Reluctantly, as always, she followed his gaze to the ring on her own hand and saw the Baelrath vividly aflame. With a real grief she saw that the fire at the heart of the Warstone was somehow twinned to the hue and shape of the hideous fires below.
It was deeply unsettling, but when had there been anything reassuring or easy about the ring she bore? In every single thing she had ever done with the Baelrath there was pain. In its depths she had seen Jennifer in Starkadh and carried her, screaming, into the crossing. She had awakened a dead King at Stonehenge against his will. She had summoned Arthur on the summit of Glastonbury Tor to war and bitterest grief again. She had released the Sleepers by Pendaran on the night Finn took the Longest Road. She was an invoker, a war cry in darkness, a storm crow, truly that, on the wings of a gathering storm. She was a gatherer indeed, a summoner. She was—
She was a summoner.
There was a scream, and then a raucous burst of laughter down below. An urgach, for sport, had hurled a svart alfar, one of the smaller green ones, onto the blazing fire. She saw, but hardly registered it. Her eyes went back to the stone, to the flame coiled in the depths of it, and there she read a name, the same name she had seen written across the face of the moon in her dream. Reading it, she remembered something: how the Baelrath had blazed in answering light on the night that Dana’s red full moon had ridden through the sky over Paras Derval.
She was a summoner, and now she knew what she had to do. For with the name written in the ring had come knowledge that had not lain in the dream. She knew who this was and knew, also, what the price of her calling would be. But this was Khath Meigol in a time of war, and the Paraiko were dying in the caves. She could not harden her heart, there was too much pity there, but she could steel her will to do what had to be done and shoulder the grief as one more among many.
She closed her eyes again. It was easier in darkness, a way of hiding, almost. Almost, but not truly. She drew a breath and then within her mind, not aloud, she said, Imraith-Nimphais.
Then she led her companions back down and away from the fires to wait, knowing it would not be long.
Tabor’s watch was not until the end of the night, and so he had been asleep. Not anymore. She was in the sky over the camp, and she had called his name, and for the first time ever he heard fear in the creature of his fast.
He was wide awake, instantly, and dressing as quickly as he could.
Wait, he sent. I do not want to frighten them. I will meet you on the Plain.
No, he heard. She was truly afraid. Come now. There is no time!
She was descending, even as he went outside. He was confused, and a little afraid himself, for he had not summoned her, but even with that, his heart lifted to see the beauty of her as she came down, her horn shining like a star, her wings folding gracefully as she landed.
She was trembling. He stepped forward and put his arms about her, laying his head against hers. Easy, my love, he sent, projecting all the reassurance he could. I am here. What has happened?
I was called by name, she sent, still trembling.
A shocked surge of anger ran through him, and a deeper fear of his own that he fought to master and conceal. He could conceal nothing from her, though, they were bonded too deeply. He drew a ragged breath. Who?
I do not know her. A woman with white hair, but not old. A red ring on her hand. How does she know my name?
His own hands moved ceaselessly, gentling her. Anger was still there, but he was Ivor’s son and Levon’s brother, both of whom had seen her, and so he knew who this was. She is a friend, he sent. We must go to her. Where?
The wrong question, though it had to be asked. She told him, and with the naming of that place fear was in both of them again. He fought it and helped her do the same. Then he mounted her, feeling the joy of doing so in the midst of everything else. She spread her wings, and he prepared to fly—
“Tabor!”
He turned. Liane was there, in a white shift brought back from Gwen Ystrat. She seemed eerily far away. Already. And he had not even taken flight. “I must go,” he said, forming the words carefully. “The Seer has called us.”
“Where is she?”
He hesitated. “In the mountains.” His sister’s hair, snarled in tangles of sleep, lay loose on her back. Her feet were bare on the grass; her eyes, wide with apprehension, never left his own.
“Be careful,” she said. “Please.” He nodded, jerkily. Beneath him, Imraith-Nimphais, restless to be gone, flexed her wings. “Oh, Tabor,” whispered Liane, who was older than he but didn’t sound it, “please come back.”
He tried to answer that. It was important that he try; she was crying. But words would not come. He raised one hand, in a gesture that had to encompass far too much, and then they were in the sky and the stars blurred before their speed.
Kim saw a streak of light in the west. She raised her hand, with the ring glowing on her finger, and a moment later the power she had summoned descended. It was dark, and the clearing where they waited was rough and narrow, but nothing could mar the race of the creature that landed beside her. She listened for alarms raised east of them but heard nothing: why should a falling star in the mountains be cause for concern?
But this was not a falling star.
It was a deep red through the body, the colour of Dana’s moon, the colour of the ring she carried. The great wings folded now, it stood restlessly on the stones, seeming almost to dance above them. Kim looked at the single horn. It was shining and silver, and the Seer in her knew how deadly it was, how far beyond mere grace this gift of the Goddess was.
This double-edged gift. She turned her gaze to the rider. He looked very much like his father, only a little like Levon. She had known he was only fifteen, but seeing it came as a shock. He reminded her, she realized abruptly, of Finn.
Very little time had passed since the summoning. The waning moon had barely risen above the eastern reaches of the range. Its silver touched the silver of the horn. Beside Kim, Brock stood watchfully, and Faebur, his tattoos glowing faintly, was on her other side. Dalreidan had withdrawn a little way, though, back into the shadows. She was not surprised, though she sorrowed for that, too. This meeting would have to be a hard thing for the exiled Rider. She’d had no choice though. Just as she had none now, and there was deeper cause for sorrow written in the eyes of the boy.
He sat quietly, waiting for her to speak.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it with all her heart. “I have some idea of what this does to you.”
He tossed his head impatiently, in a gesture like his brother’s. “How did you know her name?” he asked, low, because of the laughter nearby, but challenging. She heard both the anger and the anxiety.
She shouldered her own power. “You ride a child of Pendaran’s grove and the wandering moon,” she said. “I am a Seer and I carry the Wandering Fire. I read her name in the Baelrath, Tabor.” She had dreamt it, too, but she didn’t tell him that.
“No one else is to know her name,” he said. “No one at all.”
“Not so,” she replied. “Gereint does. The shamans always know the totem names.”
“He’s different,” Tabor said, a little uncertainly.
“So am I,” said Kim, as gently as she could. He was very young, and the creature was afraid. She understood how they felt. She had come crashing, she and her wild ring, into the midst of an utterly private communion the two of them shared. She understood, but the night of which she had dreamt was passing, and she didn’t know if she had time to assuage them properly, or even what to say.
Tabor surprised her. He might be young, but he was the Aven’s son, and he rode a gift of Dana. With calm simplicity he said, “Very well. What are we to do in Khath Meigol?”
Slay, of course. And take the consequences upon themselves. Was there an easy way to say it? She knew of none. She told them who was here, and what was taking place, and even as she spoke she saw the head of the winged creature lift and her horn begin to shine more brightly yet.
Then she was done. There was nothing more to tell. Tabor nodded to her, once; then he and the creature he rode seemed to change, to coalesce. She was near to them, and a Seer. She caught a fragment of their inner speech. Only a fragment, then she took her mind away. Bright one, she heard and, We must kill, and, just before she pulled away, … only each other at the last.
Then they were in the air again and Dana’s creature’s wings were spread and she turned, killingly bright, to flash down on the plateau and suddenly the servants of the Dark were not laughing anymore. Kim’s three companions were already running for their vantage point again and she followed them as quickly as she could, stumbling over the rocks and loose stones.
Then she was there and watching how stunningly graceful death could be. Again and again Imraith-Nimphais descended and rose, the horn—with a cutting edge now—stabbing and slashing until the silver was so coated with blood it looked like the rest of her. One of the urgach rose before her, enormous, a two-handed sword upraised. With the preternatural skill of the Dalrei, Tabor veered his mount at full speed, up and to one side in the air, and the sharp edge of the horn sliced through the top of the urgach’s head. It was all like that. They were elegant, blindingly swift, utterly lethal.
And it was destroying them both, Kim knew.
A myriad of griefs, and no time to deal with them: even as she watched, Imraith-Nimphais was soaring again, east to the next bonfire.
One of the svart alfar had been shamming death. Quickly it rose and began running west across the plateau.
“Mine,” said Faebur quietly. Kim turned. She saw him draw an arrow and whisper something over its long shaft. She saw him notch it to his bow and draw, and she saw the moonlit arrow, loosed, flash into the throat of the running svart and drop it in its tracks.
“For Eridu,” said Brock of Banir Tal. “For the people of the Lion. A beginning, Faebur.”
“A beginning,” Faebur echoed softly.
Nothing else moved on the plateau. The fires still roared; their crackling was the only sound. Over the ridge a distant screaming could be heard, but even as she picked her way down the loose slope towards the caves those sounds, too, abruptly ceased. Kim glanced over, instinctively, in time to see Imraith-Nimphais rise and flash north towards the last of the bonfires.
Making her way carefully amid the carnage and around the searing heat of the two fires she stopped before the larger of the caves.
She was here, and had done what she’d come to do, but she was weary and hurting, and it was not a time for joy. Not in the face of what had happened, in the presence of those two blackened bodies on the pyres. She looked down at the ring finger of her right hand: the Baelrath lay quiescent, mute. It was not finished, though. In her dream she had seen it burning on this plateau. There was more to come in the weaving of this night. What, she knew not, but the workings of power were not yet ended.
“Ruana,” she cried, “this is the Seer of Brennin. I have come to the savesong chanted and you are free.”
She waited, and the three men with her. The fires were the only sound. A flaw of wind blew a strand of hair into her eyes; she pushed it back. Then she realized that the wind was Imraith-Nimphais descending, as Tabor brought her down to stand behind the four of them. Kim glanced over and saw the dark blood on the horn. Then there was a sound from the cave and she turned back.
Out of the blackness of the archway and through the rising smoke the Paraiko came. Only two of them at first, one carrying the body of the other in his arms. The figure that moved out from the smoke to stand before them was twice the height of long-legged Faebur of Eridu. His hair was as white as Kimberly’s, and so was his long beard. His robe, too, had been white once, but it was begrimed now with smoke and dust and the stains of illness. Even so, there was a gravity and a majesty to him that surmounted time and the unholy scene amid which they stood. In his eyes as he surveyed the plateau Kim read an ancient, ineffable pain. It made her own griefs seem shallow, transitory.
He turned to her. “We give thanks,” he said. The voice was soft, incongruously so for one so enormous. “I am Ruana. When those of us who yet live are gathered we must do kanior for the dead. If you wish you may name one of your number to join us and seek absolution for all of you for this night’s deeds of blood.”
“Absolution?” growled Brock of Banir Tal. “We saved your lives.”
“Even so,” said Ruana. He stumbled a little as he spoke. Dalreidan and Faebur sprang forward to help him with his burden. “Hold!” Ruana cried. “Drop your weapons, you are in peril.”
Nodding his understanding, Dalreidan let fall his arrows and his sword, and Faebur did the same. Then they went forward again and, straining with the effort, helped Ruana lower the other Giant gently to the ground.
There were more coming now. From Ruana’s cave two women emerged supporting a man between them. Six, in all, came out from the other cave, sinking to the earth as soon as they were clear of the smoke. Looking east, Kim saw the first of the contingent from over the ridge coming to join them on the plateau. They moved very slowly, and many were supported and some were carried by others. None of them spoke.
“You need food,” she said to Ruana. “How can we aid you?”
He shook his head. “After. The kanior must be first, it has been so long delayed. We will do the rites as soon as we are gathered.” Others appeared now, from the northeast, from the fourth fire, moving with the same slow, strength-conserving care and in absolute silence. They were all clad in white, as Ruana was. He was neither the oldest nor the largest of them, but he was the only one who had spoken, and the others were gathering around the place where he stood.
“I am not leader,” he said, as if reading Kim’s thoughts. “There has been no leader among us since Connla transgressed in the making of the Cauldron. I will chant the kanior, though, and do the bloodless rites.” His voice was infinitely mild. But this, Kim knew, was someone who had been strong enough to find her in the very heart of Rakoth’s designs, and strong enough to shield her there.
He scanned the ranks of those who had come. “This is full numbering?” he asked. Kim looked around. It was hard to see amid the shadows and the smoke, but there were perhaps twenty-five of the Paraiko gathered on the plateau. No more than that.
“Full numbering,” a woman said.
“Full.”
“Full numbering, Ruana,” a third voice echoed, plangent with sorrow. “There are no more of us. Do the kanior, too long delayed, lest our essence be altered and Khath Meigol shed its sanctity.”
And it was in that moment that Kim had her first premonition, as the dark webs of her Seer’s dream began to spin clear. She felt her heart clench like a fist and her mouth go dry.
“Very well,” Ruana said. And then, to her again, with utmost courtesy, “Do you want to choose someone to join with us? For what you have done it will be allowed.”
Kim said shakily, “If expiation is needed, it is mine to seek. I will do the bloodless rites with you.”
Ruana looked down on her from his great height, then he glanced at each of the others in turn. She heard Imraith-Nimphais move nervously behind her under the weight of the Giant’s gaze.
“Oh, Dana,” Ruana said. Not an invocation. The words were addressed as to a coeval. Words of reproach, of sorrow. He turned back to Kimberly. “You speak truly, Seer. I think it is your place. The winged one needs no dispensation for doing what Dana created her to do, though I must grieve for her birthing.”
Again, Brock challenged him, looking up a long way. “You summoned us,” the Dwarf said. “You chanted your song to the Seer, and we came in answer. Rakoth is free in Fionavar, Ruana of the Paraiko. Would you have us all lie down in caves and grant him dominion?” The passionate words rang in the mountain air.
There came a low sound from the assembled Paraiko.
“Did you summon them, Ruana?” It was the voice of the first woman who had spoken, the one from the cave over the ridge.
Still looking at Brock, Ruana said, “We cannot hate. Were Rakoth, whose voice I heard in my chanting, obliterated utterly from the tale of time, my heart would sing until I died. But we cannot make war. There is only passive resistance in us. It is part of our nature, the way killing and grace are woven into the creature that flew to save us. To change would be to end what we are and to lose the bloodcurse, which is the Weaver’s gift to us in compensation and defence. Since Connla bound Owein and made the Cauldron we have not left Khath Meigol.”
His voice was still low, but it was deeper now than when he had first walked from the cave; it was halfway to the chanting that Kim knew was coming. Something else was coming, too, and she was beginning to know what it would be.
Ruana said, “We have our own relationship with death, have had it since first we were spun on the Loom. You know it means death, and a curse, to shed our blood. There is more that you do not know. We lay down in the caves, because there was nothing else we could do, being what we are.”
“Ruana,” came the woman’s voice again, “did you summon them?”
And now he turned to her, slowly, as if bearing a great burden.
“I did, Iera. I am sorry. I will chant it in the kanior and seek absolution with the rites. Failing which, I will leave Khath Meigol as Connla did, that the transgression might lie on my shoulders alone.”
He raised his hands then, high over his head in the moonlight, and no more words were spoken, for the kanior began. It was a chant of mourning and a woven spell. It was unimaginably old, for the Paraiko had walked in Fionavar long before the Weaver had spun even the lios alfar or the Dwarves into the Tapestry, and the bloodcurse had been a part of them from the beginning, and the kanior which preserved it.
It began with a low humming, almost below the threshold of hearing, from the Giants gathered around Ruana. Slowly, he lowered his hands and motioned Kim to come forward beside him. As she did so she saw that room had been made for Dalreidan, Faebur, and Brock in the circle surrounding them. Tabor and his winged creature remained outside the ring.
Ruana sank to his knees and motioned for Kim to do the same. He folded his hands in his lap and then, suddenly, he was in her mind.
I will carry the dead, she heard him say within. Whom would you give to me?
Her pulse was slowing, dragged by the low sounds coming from those around them. Her hands shook a little in her lap. She clasped them together, very tightly, and gave him Kevin and then Ysanne: who they were and what they had done.
Ruana’s expression did not change, nor did he move, but his eyes widened a little as he absorbed what she sent to him, and then, within her mind, not speaking aloud, he said, I have them, and they are worthy. Grieve with me.
Then he lifted his voice in lament.
Kim never forgot that moment. Even with what followed after, the memory of the kanior stayed clear within her, the sorrow and the cleansing of sorrow.
I will carry the dead, Ruana had said, and now he proceeded to do so. With the textured richness of his voice he gathered them both, Kevin and then Ysanne, and drew them into the circle to be mourned. As the humming grew stronger, his own chanting twined through it and about it, a thread on a loom of sound, names offered to the mountain night, and into the ring began to come the images of the Paraiko who had died in the caves: Taieri, Ciroa, Hinewai, Caillea, and more, so many more. All of them approached to be gathered there, to stand in the place where Kim knelt to be reclaimed for this moment by the woven power of the song. Kim was weeping, but the tears of her heart fell soundlessly, that nothing might mar what Ruana shaped.
And in that moment he went even deeper; he claimed more. His voice growing stronger yet, he reached back through the tumbling ribbon of years and began to gather the Paraiko from the very beginning of days, all of them who had lived in their deep peacefulness, shedding no blood, and had, in the fullness of their time, died to be mourned.
And to be mourned now, again, as Ruana of Khath Meigol reached back for them, spreading the ambit of his mighty soul to encompass the loss of all the dead amid the carnage and the fires of that night. Kneeling so near, Kim watched him do it through her falling tears. Watched him try to shape a solace for sorrow, to rise above what had been done to them, with this majestic affirmation of what the Paraiko were. It was a kanior of kaniors, a lament for every single one of the dead.
And he was doing it. One after another they came, the ghosts of all the Paraiko in all the years, crowding into the wide circle of mourning for one last time on this night of deepest grief for deepest wrong done to their people. Kim understood, then, the source of the tales of ghosts in Khath Meigol, for there were ghosts in this place when the kanior rites were done. And on this night the pass in the mountains became a realm, truly, of the dead. Still they came, and still Ruana grew, forcing his spirit to grow great enough to reach for them, to carry them all with his song.
Then his voice went deeper yet, with a new note spun within it, and Kim saw that one had come into the circle who was taller than any Giant there, whose eyes, even from beyond the world, were brighter than any other’s, and she knew from Ruana’s song that this was Connla himself, who had transgressed in binding Owein, and again in making the Cauldron. Connla, who had gone forth from Khath Meigol alone in voluntary exile from his people to be reclaimed on this night when every one of them was being reclaimed and mourned anew.
Kim saw Kevin there, honoured among those gathered. And she saw Ysanne, insubstantial even among ghosts, for she had gone farther away than any of them, had gone so far, with her own sacrifice, that Kim scarcely grasped how Ruana had managed to bring even her shadow back to this place.
And at length there came a time when no new figures were drifting into the ring. Kim looked at Ruana as he swayed slowly back and forth, his eyes closed with the weight of all he was carrying. She saw his hands close tightly in his lap as his voice changed one last time, as it went deeper yet, found access to even purer sorrow.
And one by one, into the humbling amplitude of his soul, he summoned the dead svart alfar and the urgach who had imprisoned his people and slain them and devoured them when they were dead.
Kim had never known an act to match the grandeur of what Ruana did in that moment. It was an assertion, utter and irrefutable, of his people’s identity. A clear sound in the wide dark of the night, proclaiming that the Paraiko were still without hate, that they were equal to and greater than the worst of what Rakoth Maugrim could do. That they could endure his evil, and absorb it, and rise above it in the end, continuing to be what they had always been, never less than such and never slaves of the Dark.
Kim felt purified in that moment, transfigured by what Ruana was shaping, and when she saw his eyes open and come to rest upon her, even as he sang, she knew what was to come and fearing nothing in his presence she watched him lift a finger and, using it like a blade, lay open the skin on his face and arms in long, deep cuts.
No blood flowed. None at all, though the skin curled back from the gashes he had made and she could see the nerves and arteries exposed within.
He looked at her. With no fear in her, none at all, in a spirit of mourning and expiation, Kim raised her own hands and drew her fingernails along her cheeks and then down the veins of her forearms, feeling the skin slice open to her touch. She was a doctor, and she knew that this could kill.
It did not. No blood welled from her wounds, either, though her tears were falling still. Tears of sorrow and now of gratitude as well, that Ruana had offered her this, had been strong enough to shape a magic so profound that even she, who was not one of the Paraiko, and who carried grief and guilt running so deep, might find absolution in the bloodless rites amid the presence of the dead.
Even as Ruana’s voice lifted in the last notes of his kanior, Kim felt her gashes closing, and looking down on her arms she saw the skin knit whole and unscarred, and she gave thanks from the wellspring of her being for what he had given her.
Then she saw the Baelrath burning.
Nothing had ever been worse, not even the summoning of Arthur from his rest in Avalon among the summer stars. The Warrior had been doomed by the will of the Weaver to his long fate of summoning and grief, to restitution through all the years and worlds for having the children slain. She had shattered his rest with that terrible name cried out upon the Tor, and her own heart had almost shattered with the pain of it. But she had not shaped his doom; that had been done long ago. She and the Baelrath had created nothing, had changed nothing. She had only compelled him, in sorrow, to do what he was bound by his destiny to do.
This was different, and unimaginably worse, for with the flaming of the ring the image of her dream was made real, and Kim finally knew why she was here. To free the Paraiko, yes, but not only for that. How could it have been so, in time of war, and being who she was? She had come here drawn by the ring, and the Baelrath was a summoning power. It was wild, allowing no compunction or pity, knowing only the demands of war, the dictates of absolute need.
She was in Khath Meigol to draw the Giants forth. In the most transcendent moment of their long history, the hour of their most triumphant assertion of what they were, she had come to change them: to strip them of their nature and the defences that came with it; to corrupt them; to bring them out to war. Notwithstanding the peace woven into their essence. Notwithstanding the glory of what Ruana had just done, the balm he had offered her soul, the honour he had bestowed upon her two loved ones among the dead.
Notwithstanding everything. She was what she was, and the stone was wild, and it demanded that the Paraiko be undone so they might come to war against Maugrim. What they could do, she knew not. Such healing clarity was not granted her. That would, she thought, with corrosive bitterness, have made things too easy, wouldn’t it?
Nothing was to be made easy for her—or for any of them, she amended inwardly. She thought of Arthur. Of Paul on the Summer Tree. Of Ysanne. Of Kevin in the snow before Dun Maura. Of Finn, and Tabor behind her now. Then she thought of Jennifer in Starkadh, and Darien, and she spoke.
“Ruana, only the Weaver, and perhaps the gods, know whether I will ever be granted forgiveness for what I now must do.” After the sonority of the kanior her voice sounded high and harsh. It seemed to bruise the silence. Ruana looked down on her, saying nothing, waiting. He was very weak; she could see the weariness etched into his features.
They would all be ravaged by weakness and hunger, she knew. Easy prey, the inward bitterness added. She shook her head, as if to drive those thoughts away. Her mouth was dry when she swallowed. She saw Ruana look at the Baelrath. It was alive, driving her.
She said, “You may yet wish you had never chanted the savesong to bring me here. But it might be that the Warstone would have drawn me to this place, even had you kept silent. I do not know. I do know that I have come not only to set you free, but to bring you down, by the power I bear, to war against Rakoth Maugrim.”
There was a sound from the Paraiko gathered around them, but watching only Ruana, she saw that his grave eyes did not change. He said, very softly, “We cannot go to war, Seer. We cannot fight, nor can we hate.”
“Then I must teach you!” she cried, over the grief rising within her, as the Warstone blazed more brilliantly than it ever had before.
There was real pain. Looking at her hand she saw it as within a writhing nest of flame, brighter than the bonfires, too fierce, almost, to look upon. Almost. She had to look, and she did. The Baelrath was her power, wild and merciless, but hers was the will and the knowledge, the Seer’s wisdom needed to turn the power to work. It might seem as if the stone were compelling her, but she knew that was not truly so. It was responding—to need, to war, to the half-glimpsed intuitions of her dreams—but it needed her will to unleash its power. So she shouldered the weight, accepted the price of power, and looking into the heart of the fire enveloping her hand she cast a mental image into it and watched as the Baelrath threw it back, incarnate, suspended in the air within the circle of the Paraiko. An image that would teach the Giants how to hate and so break them of their sanctity.
An image of Jennifer Lowell, whom they knew now to be Guinevere, naked and alone in Starkadh before Maugrim. They saw the Unraveller then, huge in his hooded cloak, faceless save for his eyes. They saw his maimed hand, they watched him hold it over her body so that the black dripping blood might burn her where it fell, and Kimberly’s own burning seemed as nothing before what she saw. They heard Jennifer speak, so blazingly defiant in that unholy place that it could break the heart to hear, and they heard him laugh and fall upon her in his foulness. They watched him begin to change his shapes, and they heard what was said and understood that he was tearing her mind apart to find avenues for torture.
It went on for a very long time. Kim felt wave after wave of nausea rising within her, but she forced herself to watch. Jennifer had been there, had lived through this and survived it, and the Paraiko were being stripped of their collective soul through the horror of this image. They could not look away, the power of the Baelrath compelled them, and so she would watch it, too. A penance, in the most trivial sense she knew. Seeking expiation where none could possibly come. But she watched. She saw Blöd the Dwarf when he was drawn into the image, and she grieved for Brock, being forced to see this ultimate betrayal.
She saw it all, through to the end.
Afterwards, it was utterly silent in Khath Meigol. She could not hear anyone breathe. Her own numbed, battered soul longed for sound. For birdsong, water falling, the laughter of children. She needed light. Warmer, kinder light than the red glow of the fires, or the mountain stars, or the moon.
She was granted none of these. Instead she was made conscious of something else. From the moment they had entered Khath Meigol there had been fear: an awareness of the presence of the dead in all their inviolate sanctity, guarding this place with the bloodcurse that was woven into them.
Not anymore.
She did not weep. This went too far beyond sorrow. It touched the very fabric of the Tapestry on the Loom. She held her right hand close to her breast; it was blistered and painful to the touch. The Baelrath smouldered, embers seeming to glow far down in its depths.
“Who are you?” Ruana asked, and his voice broke on the words. “Who are you to have done this deed unto us? Better we had died in the caves.”
It hurt so much. She opened her mouth, but no words came.
“Not so,” a voice replied for her. It was Brock, loyal, steadfast Brock of Banir Tal. “Not so, people of the Paraiko.” His voice was weak when he began, but grew in strength with every word. “You know who she is, and you know the nature of what she carries. We are at war, and the Warstone of Macha and Nemain summons at need. Would you value your peacefulness so highly that you granted Maugrim dominion? How long would you survive if we went away from here and were destroyed in war? Who would remember your sanctity when all of you and all of us were dead or slaves?”
“The Weaver would,” Ruana replied gently.
It stopped Brock, but only for a moment. “So, too, would Rakoth,” he said. “And you have heard his laughter, Ruana. Had the Weaver shaped your destiny to be sacrosanct and inviolate, could you have been changed by the image we have seen tonight? Could you hate the Dark as now you do? Could you have been brought into the army of Light, as now you are? Surely this is your true destiny, people of Khath Meigol. A destiny that allows you to grow when the need is great, however bitter the pain. To come forth from hiding in these caves and make one with all of us, in all the Weaver’s worlds afflicted by the Dark.”
He ended ringingly. There was silence again. Then: “We are undone,” came a voice from the circle of the Giants.
“We have lost the bloodcurse.”
“And the kanior.” A wailing rose up, heartrending in its grief and loss.
“Hold!” Another voice. Not Ruana. Not Brock. “People of the Paraiko,” said Dalreidan, “forgive me this presumption, but I have a question to ask of you.”
Slowly, the wailing died away. Ruana inclined his head towards the outlaw from the Plain. “In what you did tonight,” Dalreidan asked, “in the very great thing you did tonight did you not sense a farewell? In the kanior that gathered and mourned every Paraiko that ever was, could you not find a sign from the Weaver who shaped you that an ending to something had come?”
Holding her breath, clutching her burned hand, Kim waited. And then Ruana spoke.
“I did,” he said, as a sigh like a wind in trees swept over the bare plateau. “I did sense that when I saw Connla come, how bright he was. The only one of us who ever stepped forward to act in the world beyond this pass, when he bound the Hunt to their long sleep, which our people called a transgression, even though Owein had asked him to do so. And then he built the Cauldron to bring his daughter back from death, which was a wrong beyond remedy and led him to his exile. When I saw him tonight, how mighty he was among our dead, I knew that a change was come.”
Kim gasped, a cry of relief torn from her pain.
Ruana turned to her. Carefully he rose, to tower over her in the midst of the ring. He said, “Forgive me my harshness. This will have been a grief for you, as much as for us.”
She shook her head, still unable to speak.
“We will come down,” he said. “It is time. We will leave this place and play a part in what is to come. But hear me,” he added, “and know this for truth: we will not kill.”
And with that, finally, words came to her. She, too, rose to her feet. “I do know it for truth,” she replied, and it was the Seer of Breenin who spoke now. “I do not think you are meant to. You have changed, but not so much as that, and not all your gifts, I think, are lost.”
“Not all,” he echoed gravely. “Seer, where would you have us go? To Brennin? Andarien? To Eridu?”
“Eridu is no more.” Faebur spoke for the first time. Ruana turned to him. “The death rain fell there for three days, until this morning. There will be no one left in any of the places of the Lion.”
Watching Ruana, Kim saw something alter deep in his eyes. “I know of that rain,” he said. “We all do. It is a part of our memories. It was a death rain that began the ruin of Andarien. It only fell for a few hours then. Maugrim was not so strong.”
Fighting his weariness with a visible effort, he drew himself up very straight.
“Seer, this is the first role we will play. There will be plague with the rain, and no hope of return to Eridu until the dead are buried. But the plague will not harm the Paraiko. You were not wrong: we have not lost all of what the Weaver gave to us. Only the bloodcurse and the kanior, which were shaped of the peace in our hearts. We have other magics, though, and most of them are ways of dealing with death, as Connla’s Cauldron was. We will go east from this place in the morning, to cleanse the raindead of Eridu, that the land may live again.”
Faebur looked up at him. “Thank you,” he whispered. “If any of us live through the dark of these days, it will not be forgotten.” He hesitated. “If, when you come to the largest house in the Merchant’s Street of Akkaïze, you find lying there a lady, tall and slender, whose hair would once have gleamed the colour of wheat fields in sunlight … her name will have been Arrian. Will you gather her gently for my sake?”
“We will,” said Ruana, with infinite compassion. “And if we meet again, I will tell you where she lies.”
Kim turned and walked from the circle. They parted to make way for her, and she went to the edge of the plateau and stood, her back to everyone else, gazing at the dark mountains and the stars. Her hand was blistered and painful to the touch, and her side ached from yesterday. The ring was utterly spent; it seemed to be slumbering. She needed sleep herself, she knew. There were thoughts chasing each other around in her head, and something else, not clear enough yet to be a thought, was beginning to take shape. She was wise enough not to strain for the Sight that was coming, so she had walked towards darkness to wait.
She heard voices behind her. She did not turn, but they were not far away, and she could not help but hear.
“Forgive me,” Dalreidan said, and coughed nervously. “But I heard a story yesterday that the women and children of the Dalrei had been left alone in the last camp by the Latham. Is this so?”
“It is,” Tabor replied. His voice sounded remote and thin, but he answered the exile with courtesy. “Every Rider on the Plain went north to Celidon. An army of the Dark was seen sweeping across Andarien three nights ago. The Aven was trying to outrace them to the Adein.”
Kim had known nothing of this. She closed her eyes, trying to calculate the distance and the time, but could not. She offered an inner prayer to the night. If the Dalrei were lost, everything the rest of them did might be quite meaningless.
“The Aven!” Dalreidan exclaimed softly. “We have an Aven? Who?”
“Ivor dan Banor,” Tabor said, and Kim could hear the pride. “My father.” Then, after a moment, as the other remained silent, “Do you know him?”
“I knew him,” said Dalreidan. “If you are his son, you must be Levon.”
“Tabor. Levon is my older brother. How do you know him? What tribe are you from?”
In the silence that followed, Kim could almost hear the older man struggle with himself. But, “I am tribeless,” was all he said. His footsteps receded as he walked back towards the circle of Giants.
She was not alone, Kim thought, in carrying sorrows tonight. The conversation had disturbed her, stirring up yet another nagging thread at the corner of her awareness. She turned her thoughts inwards again, reaching for quiet.
“Are you all right?”
Imraith-Nimphais moved silently; Tabor’s voice coming so near startled her. This time she did turn, grateful for the kindness in the question. She was painfully aware of what she had done to them. And the more so when she looked at Tabor. He was deathly pale, almost another ghost in Khath Meigol.
“I think so,” she said. “And you?”
He shrugged, a boy’s gesture. But he was so much more, had been forced to be so much more. She looked at the creature he rode and saw that the horn was clean again, shining softly in the night.
He followed her glance. “During the kanior,” he said, wonder in his voice, “while Ruana chanted, the blood left her horn. I don’t know how.”
“He was absolving you,” she said. “The kanior is a very great magic.” She paused. “It was,” she amended, as the truth hit home. She had ended it. She looked back towards the Paraiko. Those who could walk were bringing water from over the ridge—there had to be a stream or a well—to the others. Her companions were helping them. As she watched, she began, finally, to cry.
And suddenly, astonishingly, as she wept, Imraith-Nimphais lowered her beautiful head, careful of the horn, and nuzzled her gently. The gesture, so totally unexpected, opened the last floodgates of Kim’s heart. She looked up at Tabor through her tears and saw him nod permission; then she threw her arms about the neck of the glorious creature she had summoned and ordered to kill, and laying her head against that of Imraith-Nimphais, she let herself weep.
No one disturbed them, no one came near. After some time, she didn’t know how long, Kim stepped back. She looked up at Tabor. He smiled. “Do you know,” he said, “that you cry as much as my father does?”
For the first time in days she laughed, and Ivor’s son laughed with her. “I know,” she gasped. “I know I do. Isn’t it terrible?”
He shook his head. “Not if you can do what you did,” he said quietly. As abruptly as it had surfaced, the boyishness was gone. It was Imraith-Nimphais’s rider who said, “We must go. I am guarding the camps and have been too long away.”
She had been stroking the silken mane. Now she stepped back, and as she did so, the Sight that had been eluding her, drifting at the edges of her mind, suddenly coalesced enough for her to see where she had to go. She looked at the Baelrath; it was dulled and powerless. She wasn’t surprised. This awareness came from the Seer in her, the soul she shared with Ysanne.
She hesitated, looking up at Tabor. “I have one thing more to ask of you. Will she carry me? I have a long way to travel, and not enough time.”
His glance was distanced already, but it was level and calm. “She will,” he said. “You know her name. We will carry you, Seer, anywhere you must go.”
It was time, then, to make her farewells. She looked over and saw that her three guides were standing together, not far away.
“Where shall we go?” Faebur asked.
“To Celidon,” she answered. A number of things were coming clearer even as she stood here, and there was urgency in her. “There was a battle, and it is there that you will find the army, those who survived.”
She looked at Dalreidan, who was hesitating, hanging back. “My friend,” she said, in the hearing of all of them, “you said words to Faebur this morning that rang true: no one in Fionavar is an exile now. Go home, Dalreidan, and take your true name on the Plain. Tell them the Seer of Brennin sent you.”
For a moment he remained frozen, resisting. Then he nodded slowly. “We will meet again?” he asked.
“I hope,” she said, and stepped forward to embrace him, and then Faebur as well. She looked at Brock. “And you?” she asked.
“I will go with them,” he answered. “Until my own King comes home I will serve the Aven and the High King as best I can. Will you be careful, Seer?” His voice was gruff.
She moved closer and out of habit checked the bandage she’d wrapped about his head. Then she bent and kissed him on the lips. “You, too,” she whispered. “My dear.”
At the very last she turned to Ruana, who had been waiting for her. They said nothing aloud.
Then in her mind she heard him murmur: The Weaver hold your thread fast in his hand, Seer.
It was what, more than anything else, she had needed to hear—this last forgiveness where she had no right to any. She looked up at his great, white-bearded patriarch’s head, at the wise eyes that had seen so much. And yours, she replied, in silence. Your thread, and that of your people.
Then she walked slowly back to where Tabor waited, and she mounted behind him upon Imraith-Nimphais, and told him where it was she had to go, and they flew.
There were hours yet before dawn when he set her down. Not at a place of war but in the one place in Fionavar where she had known a moment’s peace. A quiet place. A lake like a jewel, with moonlight glancing along it. A cottage by the lake.
He was in the air again, hovering, as soon as she dismounted. He wanted to be back, she knew. His father had given him a task and she had drawn him from it, twice now.
“Thank you,” she said. There was nothing more she could think of to say. She raised a hand in farewell.
As he did the same she saw, grieving, that the moonlight and the stars were shining through him. Then Imraith-Nimphais spread her wings, and she and her rider were gone. Another star for a moment, and then nothing at all.
Kim went into the cottage.