The Wandering Fire

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  By means of a power Paul could scarcely grasp, a hole suddenly formed in the sea. Prydwen bounced and rocked, her timbers screaming, on the very lip of it. He saw the vortex whirling faster and faster, and as its wildness grew he saw that even the vast bulk of the Soulmonger was no proof against the weight of the roused sea.

  The monster was going down. The battle would be in the deep, and Paul knew this was for their sake. He watched the god, luminous and shimmering, hang suspended on a high wave overhead as he shaped the sucking whirlpool to draw the other undersea.

  The Soulmonger’s slimy scum-encrusted head came down. It was almost as large as the ship, Paul saw. He saw the huge lidless eyes up close, the man-sized teeth bared in fury.

  He saw Diarmuid dan Ailell leap from Prydwen’s deck to land on the flat plane of the monster’s head. He heard Coll cry out. The singing was all around them, even through the roaring of the sea. With disbelieving eyes, he saw the Prince slip, scramble for footing, then lurch over to stand between the eyes of Soulmonger and, with one mighty pull, tear free the white horn from its head.

  The pull overbalanced him. Paul saw the monster going down, the seas closing over it. As he fell, Diarmuid turned and leaped, twisting, towards Prydwen.

  To catch, one-handed, the rope Arthur Pendragon had sent flying out to him. They reeled him aboard against the pull of the closing sea. Paul turned just in time to see Liranan let fall the wave on which he’d hung and plummet down after the creature he was now allowed to fight because he had been summoned and compelled.

  The singing stopped.

  A thousand years, Paul thought, heartsick. Since first Rakoth had used Cader Sedat in the Bael Rangat. For a thousand years the Soulmonger had lurked in the ocean deeps, unable to be opposed. Invincibly vast.

  Paul was on his knees, weeping for the captured souls. For the voices of all the bright lios alfar who had set sail to their song, to find a world shaped by the Weaver for them alone.

  Not one of them would have gotten there, he now knew. For a thousand years the lios had set forth, singly and in pairs, over a moonless sea.

  To meet the Soulmonger of Maugrim. And become its voice.

  Most hated by the Dark, for their name was Light.

  A long while he wept, whose dry eyes had brought so much pain once and then, later, had been rain. After a time he became aware that there was a kind of light shining and he looked up. He was very weak, but Coll was on one side of him and Diarmuid, limping a little, was on the other.

  All the men of Prydwen—including Matt, he saw—were gathered at the starboard side. They made way for him in respectful silence. Passing to the rail, Paul saw Liranan standing on the surface of the sea, and the shining came from the moonlight caught and enhanced in the million droplets of his water robe.

  He and the god looked at each other; then Liranan spoke aloud. “He is dead.”

  A murmur rose and fell along the length of the ship.

  Paul thought of the singing and the bright lios in their small boats. A thousand years of setting sail to the high, sweet summons of their song. A thousand years, and none of them had known.

  He said coldly, “Ceinwen gave a horn. You could have warned them.”

  The sea god shook his head. “I could not,” he said. “We were enjoined when first the Unraveller came into Fionavar that we might not interfere of our own will. Green Ceinwen will have answer to make ere long, and for more than the gift of a horn, but I will not transgress against the Weaver’s will. He paused. “Even so, it has been a bitter grief. He is dead, brother. I did not think you could summon me. Sea stars will shine here again because of you.”

  Paul said, “I had help.”

  After another moment, Liranan, as Cernan had done long ago, bowed to him. Then the god disappeared into the darkness of the sea.

  Paul looked at Loren. He saw the tracks of tears on the mage’s face. “You know?” he asked. Loren nodded jerkily.

  “What?” said Diarmuid.

  They had to be told. Paul said, over the grief, “The singing was the lios alfar. The ones who sailed. They never got farther west than here, since the Bael Rangat. Not one of them.” Brendel, he was thinking. How will I tell Brendel?

  He heard the men of South Keep. Their helpless rage. It was Diarmuid he watched.

  “What did you go for?” he asked the Prince.

  “Yes, what?” Loren repeated.

  Diarmuid turned to the mage. “You didn’t see?” He released Paul’s arm and limped over to the steps leading up to the tiller. He came back with something that glittered white in the moonlight. He held it out to the mage.

  “Oh,” said Matt Sören.

  Loren said nothing. It was in his face.

  “My lord First Mage of Brennin,” Diarmuid said, holding his emotion rigidly in check. “Will you accept as a gift from me a thing of greatest worth? This is the staff of Amairgen Whitebranch that Lisen made for him so long ago.”

  Paul clenched his hands. So many levels of sorrow. It seemed that someone else hadn’t made it past this point either. Now they knew what had happened to the first and greatest of the mages.

  Loren took the staff and held it sideways, cradled in both his hands. For all its years in the sea, the white wood was unworn and unsullied, and Paul knew there was a power in it.

  “Wield it, Silvercloak!” he heard Diarmuid say. “Take revenge for him, for all the dead. Let his staff be used at Cader Sedat. For this did I bring it back.”

  Loren’s fingers closed tightly around the wood.

  “Be it so,” was all he said, but the sound of doom was in his voice.

  “Be it so now, then,” said a deeper voice. They turned. “The wind has shifted,” Arthur said.

  “North,” said Coll after a second.

  Arthur looked only at Loren. “We reach Cader Sedat by sailing due north into a north wind. Can you do this, mage?”

  Loren and Matt turned to each other as Paul had seen them do before. They exchanged an intensely private glance, unhurried, as if they had all the time in the world. Matt was desperately weary, he knew, and Loren had to be, as well, but he also knew it wasn’t going to matter.

  He saw the mage look up at Coll. He saw the bleakness of his smile. “Man your ship,” he heard Loren say, “and point her to the north.”

  They hadn’t noticed the dawn coming on. But as Coll and the men of South Keep sprang to obey, the sun leaped up behind them out of the sea.

  Then it was on their right, as Coll of Taerlindel grappled his ship over straight into the strong north wind. Loren had gone below. When he reappeared he was clad in the cloak of shifting silver hues that gave him his name. Tall and stern, his hour begun at last, his and Matt’s, he strode to Prydwen’s prow and he carried the staff of Amairgen Whitebranch. Beside him, equally stern, equally proud, walked Matt Sören, who had once been King under Banir Lök and had forsaken that destiny for the one that led him to this place.

  “Cenolan!” Loren cried. He extended the staff straight out in front of him. “Sed amairgen, sed remagan, den sedath iren!” He hurled the words out over the waves, and power surged through them like a greater wave. Paul heard a roar of sound, a rushing of winds as if from all the corners of the sea. They flowed around Prydwen as Liranan’s whirlpool had spun past her sides and, after a chaotic, swirling moment Paul saw that they were sailing on a hushed and windless sea, utterly calm, like glass, while on either side of them the wild winds raged.

  And ahead, not very far at all, lit by the morning sun, lay an island with a castle high upon it, and the island was slowly revolving in the glassy sea. The windows of the castle were begrimed and smeared and so, too, were its walls.

  “It shone once,” Arthur said quietly.

  From the very highest point of the castle a black plume of smoke was rising, straight as a rod, into the sky. The island was rocky and bare of vegetation.

  “It was green once,” Arthur said. “Cavall!”

  The dog was growling and straining
forward, his teeth bared. He quieted when Arthur spoke.

  Loren never moved. He held the staff rigidly before him. There were no guards. Soulmonger had been guard enough. When they came close, the spinning of the island stopped. Paul guessed that they were spinning with it now, but he had no idea where they were. It was not Fionavar, though, that much he understood.

  Coll ordered the anchors cast overboard.

  Loren lowered his arm. He looked at Matt. The Dwarf nodded once, then found a place to sit. They rode at anchor in the windless sea just offshore from Cader Sedat.

  “All right,” said Loren Silvercloak. “Diarmuid, Arthur, I don’t care how you do it, but this is what I need.”

  It is a place of death, Arthur had said to him. As they came near, Paul realized that it had been meant literally. There was a tomblike feel to the castle. The very doors—four of them, Arthur said—were set within the slopes of the grey mound from which Cader Sedat rose. The walls climbed high, but the entranceway went down into the earth.

  They stood before one of these great iron doors, and for once Paul saw Diarmuid hesitate. Loren and Matt had gone another way to another door. There were no guards to be seen. The deep silence was unsettling. Nothing lived near that place, Paul saw, and was afraid.

  “The door will open,” said Arthur quietly. “Getting out again was the hard thing, last time.”

  Diarmuid smiled then. He seemed about to say something, but instead he went forward and pushed on the door of Cader Sedat. It opened soundlessly. He stepped aside and, with a gesture, motioned Arthur to lead them. The Warrior drew a sword and went in. Forty of them followed him out of the sunlight into the dark.

  It was very cold; even Paul felt it. This chill went beyond the protection of Mörnir, and he was not proof against it. The dead, Paul thought, and then had another thought: this was the centre, where they were, everything spiralled around this island. Wherever it was. In whatever world.

  The corridors were dusty. Spider webs tangled them as they walked. There were branching hallways everywhere, and most of them led down. It was very dark, and Paul could see nothing along those corridors. Their own path led upward, on a slowly rising slant, and after what seemed a long time they rounded a corner and, not far off, saw a glow of greenish light.

  Very close to them, not five feet away, another corridor branched left, and up. From it, running, came a svart alfar.

  The svart had time to see them. Time to open his mouth. No time to scream. Six arrows ripped into him. He threw up his arms and died.

  Flat out, without thought, Paul dived. A guess, a glimpse. With one desperate hand outstretched he caught the flask the svart had carried before it could smash on the floor. He rolled as he landed, as silently as he could. They waited. A moment later Arthur nodded. No alarm had been raised.

  Paul scrambled to his feet and walked back to the others. Wordlessly, Diarmuid handed back his sword.

  “Sorry,” Paul murmured. He had tossed it without warning when he leaped.

  “I will bleed to death,” Diarmuid whispered, holding up the scratched hand with which he’d made the catch. “What was he carrying?”

  Paul handed over the flask. Diarmuid unstoppered it and sniffed at the neck. He lifted his head, mock astonishment visible even in the wan green light.

  “By the river blood of Lisen,” said the Prince softly. “South Keep wine!” And he raised the flask and took a long drink. “Anyone else?” he asked politely.

  There were, predictably, no takers, but even Arthur allowed himself a smile.

  Diarmuid’s expression changed. “Well done, Pwyll,” he said crisply. “Carde, get the body out of the hallway. My lord Arthur, shall we go look at a renegade mage?”

  In the shadows Paul thought he saw starlight flash for a moment in the Warrior’s eyes. He looked at Cavall, remembering something. In silence, he followed the two leaders down the last corridor. Near the end they dropped to their knees and crawled. Diarmuid made room for him, and Paul wriggled along on his belly and came up to the doorway beside the Prince. They lay there, the three of them, with the South Keep men behind, and looked out over a scene shaped to appall.

  Five steps led down from the arched doorway where they were. There were a number of other entrances to the huge chamber below. The roof was so high it was lost in darkness. The floor was illuminated, though: there were torches set around the walls, burning with the eerie green light they had seen from the corridor. The doorway they had reached was about midway along the Great Hall of Cader Sedat. At the head of the chamber, on a dais, stood Metran, once First Mage of Brennin, and beside him was the Cauldron of Khath Meigol over a roaring fire.

  It was huge. The Giants had made it, Paul remembered, and he would have been able to guess had he not known. It was black, as best as he could tell in the light, and there were words engraved on the outer rim of it, stained and coated with grime. At least fifteen svart alfar stood on a raised platform around it, and they were handling a net into which, one by one, others of their kind were laid and dropped, lifeless, into the boiling Cauldron.

  It was hard to see in the green light, but Paul strained his eyes and watched as one of the ugly creatures was withdrawn from the water. Carefully, the others swung him away from the steaming mouth of the Cauldron and then they stood him up.

  And Paul saw the one who had been dead a moment ago walk stumblingly, with others helping him, to stand behind another man.

  Denbarra, source to Metran. And looking at the slackjawed, drooling figure of the source, Paul understood what Loren had meant when he said Denbarra would have no choice in the matter anymore.

  There were well over a hundred svart alfar behind him mindlessly draining their lives to feed Metran’s power, as Denbarra mindlessly served as a conduit for them. Even as they watched, Paul saw two of the svarts drop where they stood. He saw them collected instantly by others, not part of the power web, and carried towards the Cauldron, and he saw others still, being led back from it to stand behind Denbarra.

  A loathing rose up in him. Fighting for control, he looked at last squarely on the mage who had made the winter Kevin had died to end.

  A stumbling, senile, straggly bearded figure Metran had seemed when they first arrived. A sham, all of it, a seamless, undetected sham to mask pure treachery. The man before them now stood in complete control amid the green lights and black Cauldron smoke. Paul saw that he didn’t look old anymore. He was slowly chanting words over the pages of a book.

  He hadn’t known he carried so much rage within himself.

  Impotent rage, it seemed.

  “We can’t do it,” he heard Diarmuid snarl as he grasped the same truth himself.

  “This is what I need,” Loren had said as Prydwen rode at anchor beside the island.

  In a way it hadn’t been much at all, and in another way it was everything. But then, Paul remembered thinking, they had not come here expecting to return.

  Metran would be doing two things, Loren had explained with a terseness alien to him. He would be pouring the vast preponderance of his enhanced power into building another assault on Fionavar. But some of his strength he would be holding back to form a shield around himself and his sources and the Cauldron. They need not expect to find many guards at all, if indeed there were any, because Metran’s shield—as Loren’s own, that had blocked the Soulmonger—would be guard enough.

  In order for Loren to have any hope of smashing the Cauldron, they had to get Metran to lower that shield. And there was only one thought that occurred to any of them—they would have to battle the svarts. Not those being used as sources, but the ones, and there would have to be a great many, who were there as support.

  If they could create enough chaos and panic among the svarts, Metran might just be moved to turn his defensive shield into an attacking pulse levelled at the South Keep invaders.

  “And when he does that,” Loren said grimly, “if I time it right and he doesn’t know I’m with you, Matt and I may have a chance
at the Cauldron.”

  No one said anything about what would happen when Metran’s might, augmented by the svart alfar and the inherent power of Cader Sedat, hit the South Keep men.

  There was, really, nothing to say. This was what they had come to do.

  And they couldn’t do it. With the wily caution of years of secret scheming, Metran had forestalled even this desperate stratagem. There were no support svart alfar they could attack. They could see the shield, a shimmering as of summer heat rising from fallow fields. It covered the entire front of the Hall, and all the svart alfar were behind it. Only an occasional runner, like the winebearer they had killed, would make a darting foray out from the Hall. And they couldn’t mount a threat against so few. They couldn’t do anything. If they charged down onto the floor, the svarts would have a laughing time picking them off with arrows from behind the shield. Metran wouldn’t even have to look up from his book.

  Frantically, Paul scanned the Hall, saw Diarmuid doing the same. To have come so far, for Kevin to have died to let them come, for Gereint to have hurled his very soul to them—and for this, for nothing! There were no doors behind the screen, no windows over the dais whereon the Cauldron stood, and Metran, and all the svart alfar.

  “The wall?” he murmured hopelessly. “In through the back wall?”

  “Five feet thick,” Diarmuid said. “And he’ll have shielded it, anyway.” Paul had never seen him look as now he did. He supposed he appeared the same way himself. He felt sick. He saw that he was shaking.

  He heard from just behind them Cavall whimper once, very softly.

  His sudden memory from the dark corridor came back. Quickly he looked past Diarmuid. Lying prone beyond the Prince, gazing back at Paul, was Arthur. Who said, a whisper of sound, “I think this is what Kim brought me for. I never see the end, in any case.” There was something unbearable in his face. Paul heard Diarmuid draw a sharp breath and he watched Arthur move back from the entrance so he could rise without being seen. Paul and the Prince followed.