The Darkest Road

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  He said, very softly, “I asked you, a long time ago, to save some of your words of praise for Ysanne’s lake against the time when you might see this place.”

  “It is past beauty,” she replied. “Beyond any words I might offer. But I am very much afraid, Matt.”

  “I know. I am, as well. If I do not show it, it is because I have made my peace with whatever judgment is to come. What I did forty years ago I did in the name of Light. It may still have been an act of evil. Such things have happened before and will happen again. I will abide by the judging.”

  She had never seen him like this. She felt humbled in his presence. Behind Matt, Miach was whispering something to Ingen, and then he motioned Loren to approach, and Kaen’s companion, carrying their crystals wrapped in cloth.

  Matt said, “It is time now, I think. And it may be an ending to my time. I have something for you, first.”

  He lowered his head and brought a hand up to the patch over his lost eye. She saw him lift the patch and, for the first time, she caught a glimpse of the ruined socket behind. Then something white fell out, and he caught it in the palm of his hand. It was a tiny square of soft cloth. Matt opened it—to show her the Baelrath gleaming softly in his hand.

  Kim let out a wordless cry.

  “I am sorry,” Matt said. “I know you will have been tormented by fear of who had it, but I have had no chance to speak with you. I took it from your hand when we were first attacked by the doorway to Banir Lok. I thought it would be best if I… kept an eye on it until we knew what was happening. Forgive me.”

  She swallowed, took the Warstone, put it on. It flared on her finger, then subsided again. She said, reaching for the tone that used to come so easily to her, “I will forgive you anything and everything from now until the Loom’s last thread is woven, except the wretched pun.”

  His mouth crooked sideways. She wanted to say more, but there really wasn’t time. It seemed that there had never been enough time. Miach was calling to them. Kim sank to her knees in the deep, cold grass and Matt embraced her with infinite gentleness. Then he kissed her once, on the lips, and turned away.

  She followed him back to where the others stood. There was power on her hand now, and she could feel it responding to the magic of this place. Slowly, gradually, but there was no mistaking it. And suddenly, now that it was hers again, she remembered some of the things the Baelrath had caused her to do. There was a price to power. She had been paying it all along, and others had been paying it with her: Arthur, Finn, Ruana and the Paraiko. Tabor.

  Not a new grief but sterner, now, and sharper. She had no chance to think about it. She came up to stand beside Loren, in time to hear Miach speak, with a hushed gravity.

  “You will not need to be told that there is no history for this. We are living through days that have no patterns to draw upon. Even so, the Dwarftnoot has taken counsel, and this is what shall be done, with six of us to witness a judgment between two.”

  He paused to draw breath. There was no stir of wind in the mountain bowl. The cold night air was still, as if waiting, and still, too, were the starry waters of the Lake.

  Miach said, “You will each unveil your crystal fashionings that we may take note of them and what they might mean, and then you will cast them together into the waters and we will wait for a sign from the Lake. If there is fault found with this, speak to it now.” He looked at Kaen.

  Who shook his head. “No fault,” he said, in the resonant, beautiful voice. “Let he who turned away from his people and from Calor Diman seek to avoid this hour.” He looked handsome and proud in his black cloak, with the golden and blue brooch holding it about him.

  Miach looked to Matt.

  “No fault,” said Matt Sören.

  Nothing more. When, Kim thought, a lump in her throat, had he ever wasted a word in all the time she’d known him? Legs spread wide, hands on his hips, he seemed to be as one with the rocks all around them, as enduring and as steadfast.

  And yet he had left these mountains. She thought of Arthur in that moment, and the children slain. She grieved in her heart for the sins of good men, caught in a dark world, longing for light.

  The question at issue, Miach had said in Seithr’s Hall, is whether the King can surrender the Lake.

  She didn’t know. None of them did. They were here to find out.

  Miach turned back to Kaen and nodded. Kaen walked over to his companion, who held up his hands, the covered crystal within them, and with a sweeping, graceful motion Kaen drew the cloth away.

  Kim felt as if she’d been punched in the chest. Tears sprang to her eyes. Her breath was torn away and she had to fight for some time before it came back. And all the while she was inwardly cursing the terrible unfairness, the corruscating, ultimate irony of this—that someone so twisted with evil, with deeds so very black laid down at the door of his heart, should have so much beauty at his command.

  He had shaped, out of crystal, in miniature, the Cauldron of Khath Meigol.

  It was exactly as she had seen it, in her long, dark mind journey from the Temple in Gwen Ystrat. When she had ventured so far into the blackness of Rakoth’s designs that she could never have come back without Ruana’s chanting to shield her and give her a reason to return.

  It was exactly the same, but with everything reversed, somehow. The black Cauldron she had seen, the source of the killing winter in midsummer and then the death rain that had unpeopled Eridu, was now a glittering, delicate, ineffably glorious thing of crystalline light, even to the runic lettering around the rim and the symmetrical design at the base. Kaen had taken the image of that dark, shattered Cauldron and made of it a thing that caught the starlight as brightly as did the Lake.

  It was a thing to be longed for, to be heartachingly desired by every single one of the Weaver’s mortal children in all the worlds of time. Both for itself, and for what it symbolized: the return from death, from beyond the walls of Night, the passionate yearning of all those fated to die that there might be a coming back or a going on. That the ending not be an ending.

  Kim looked at the Dwarf who had done this, saw him gaze at his own creation, and understood in that moment how he could have come to release Maugrim and surrender the Cauldron into his hand. Kaen’s, she realized, was the soul of an artist carried too far. The search, the yearning for knowledge and creation taken to the point where madness began.

  Using the Cauldron would have meant nothing to such a one: it was the finding that mattered, the knowledge of where it was. It was all abstract, internalized, and so all-consuming that nothing could be allowed to stand between the searcher and his long desire. Not a thousand deaths or tens of thousands, not a world given over to the Dark or all the worlds given over.

  He was a genius, and mad. He was self-absorbed to the point where that could no longer be separated from evil, and yet he held this beauty within himself, pitched to a level Kim had never thought to see or ever imagined could be seen.

  She didn’t know how long they stood transfixed by that shining thing. At length Miach gave a small, almost an apologetic cough. He said, “Kaen’s gift has been considered.” His voice was husky, diffident. Kim couldn’t even blame him. Had she been able to speak, that, too, would have been her tone, even with all she knew.

  “Matt Sören?” Miach said.

  Matt walked over to Loren. For a moment he paused before the man for whom he had forsaken these mountains and this Lake. A look passed between the two of them that made Kimberiy turn away for a moment, it was so deeply private, speaking to so many things that no one else had a right to share. Then Matt quietly drew the cloth from his own fashioning.

  Loren was holding a dragon in his hands.

  It bore the same relationship to Kaen’s dazzling artistry that the stone door at the top of the stairs did to the magnificent archways that led into Seithr’s Hall. It was roughly worked, all planes and sharp angles, not polished. Where Kaen’s cauldron glittered brilliantly in the starlight, Matt’s crafted dr
agon seemed dull beside it. It had two great, gouged eyes, and its head was turned upward at an awkward, straining angle.

  And yet Kim couldn’t take her eyes off it. Nor, she was aware, had any of the others there, not even Kaen, whose quick chuckle of derision had given way to silence.

  Looking more closely, Kim saw that the roughness was entirely deliberate, a matter of decision, not inability or haste. The line of the dragon’s shoulder, she saw, would have been a matter of moments to smooth down, and the same was true of the sharp edge of the averted neck. Matt had wanted it this way.

  And slowly she began to understand. She shivered then, uncontrollably, for there was power in this beyond words, rising from the soul and the heart, from an awareness not sourced in the conscious mind. For whereas Kaen had sought—and found—a form to give expression to the beauty of this place, to catch and transmute the stars, Matt had reached for something else.

  He had shaped an approach—no more than that—to the ancient, primitive power Kim had sensed as they mounted the stairs and had been overwhelmingly conscious of from the moment they had come into the meadow.

  Calor Diman was infinitely more than a place of glory, however much it was that. It was hearthstone, bedrock, root. It encompassed the roughness of rock and the age of earth and the cold depths of mountain waters. It was very dangerous. It was the heart of the Dwarves, and the power of them, and Matt Sören, who had been made King by a night in this high meadow, knew that better than anyone alive, and his Grafting for the Lake bore witness to it.

  None of them there could know it, and the one man who might have told them had died in Gwen Ystrat to end the winter, but there was a cracked stone bowl of enormous antiquity lying, even then, beside a chasm in Dana’s cave at Dun Maura. And that bowl embodied the same unthinking awareness of the nature of ancient power that Matt Sören’s dragon did.

  “You did this before,” said Miach quietly. “Forty years ago.”

  “You remember?” Matt asked.

  “I do. It was not the same.”

  “I was young then. I thought I might strive to equal in crystal the truth of what I was shaping. I am older now, and some few things I have learned. I am glad of a chance to set matters right before the end.”

  There was a grudging respect in Miach’s eyes, and in Ingen’s as well, Kim saw. In Loren’s face was something else: an expression that combined somehow a father’s pride, and a brother’s, and a son’s.

  “Very well,” Miach said, straightening as much as his bent years would allow. “We have considered both of your craftings. Take them and cast them forth, and may the Queen of Waters grant her guidance to us now.”

  Matt Sören took his dragon then, and Kaen his shining crystal cauldron, and the two of them went, side by side, away from the six who would watch. And they came, in the silence of that night, under the stars but not yet the late-rising moon, to the shore of Calor Diman, and there they stopped.

  There were stars mirrored in the Lake, and high overhead, and then a moment later there were two more shining things above the water, as both Dwarves who had come to be judged threw their crystal gifts in arcs out over the Lake.

  And they fell, both of them, with splashes that echoed in the brooding stillness, and disappeared in the depths of Calor Diman.

  There were, Kim saw with a shiver, no ripples at all to ruffle the water and so mark the place where they fell.

  Then came a time of waiting, a time outside of time, so charged with the resonances of that place it seemed to go on forever, to have been going on since first Fionavar was spun onto the Loom, Kimberly, for all her dreaming, all her Seer’s gifts, had no hint of what they were waiting to see, what form the Lake’s answer was to take. Never taking her eyes from the two Dwarves by the water, she reached within and found her own twin soul, searching for a reply to the question she could not answer. But neither, it seemed, could the part of her that was Ysanne. Not even the old Seer’s dreams or her own vast store of knowledge were equal to this: the Dwarves had guarded their secret far too well.

  And then, even as Kim was thinking this, she saw that Calor Diman was moving.

  Whitecaps began to take shape in the center of the Lake, and with them there suddenly came a sound, high and shrill, a wailing, haunted cry unlike anything she’d ever heard. Loren, beside her, murmured something that must have been a prayer. The whitecaps became waves and the wailing sound grew higher and higher, and then so too did the waves, and suddenly they were rushing hugely from the agitated heart of the dark water toward the shore, as if Calor Diman were emptying her center.

  Or rising from it.

  And in that moment the Crystal Dragon came.

  Understanding burst in Kimberly then, and with it a sense, after the fact, as so many times before, that it should have been obvious all along. She had seen the enormous sculpture of a dragon dominating the entrance of Seithr’s Hall. She had seen Matt’s crafting and heard what he and Miach had said to each other. She had known there was more than beauty in this place. She had been aware of magic, ancient and deep.

  This was it. This crystalline, shimmering Dragon of the Lake was the power of Calor Diman. It was the heart of the Dwarves, their soul and their secret, which she and Loren had now been allowed to see. A fact, she was grimly aware, that made their deaths doubly certain if Kaen should prevail in what was coming.

  She forced her mind from that thought. All around her everyone else, including Loren, had knelt. She did not. Not clearly understanding the impulse that kept her on her feet—pride, but more than that—she met the shining eyes of the Crystal Dragon as they fell upon her, and she met them with respect but as an equal.

  It was hard, though. The Dragon was unimaginably beautiful. Creature of mountain meadow and the icy depths of mountain waters, it glittered, almost translucent in the starlight, rising from the agitated waves high above the kneeling figures of the two Dwarves on the banks of Calor Diman.

  Then it spread its wings, and Kimberly cried aloud in wonder and awe, for the wings of the Dragon dazzled and shone with a myriad of colors like gems in infinite variety, a play of light in the meadow bowl of night. She almost did sink to her knees then, but again something kept her on her feet, watching, her heart aching.

  The Dragon did not fly. It held itself suspended, half within the water, half rising from it. Then it opened its mouth, and flame burst forth, flame without smoke, like the torches on the walls within the mountain; blue-white flame, through which the stars could still be seen.

  The fire died. The Dragon’s wings were still. A silence, cold and absolute, like the silence that might have lain at the very beginning of time, wrapped the meadow. Kim saw one of the Dragon’s claws slowly emerge, glittering, from the water. There was something clutched in its grasp. Something the Crystal Dragon suddenly tossed, with what seemed to her to be contemptuous disdain, on the grass by the Lake.

  She saw what it was.

  “No,” she breathed, the sound torn from her like flesh from a wound. Discarded on the grass, glinting, lay a miniature crafting of a crystal dragon.

  “Wait!” Loren whispered sharply, rising to his feet. He touched her hand. “Look.”

  Even as she watched, she saw the Dragon of Calor Diman raise a second claw, holding a second object. And this was a cauldron, of shining, scintillant beauty, and this object too the Dragon threw away, to lie sparkling on the blue-green grass.

  She didn’t understand. She looked at Loren. There was a curious light in his eyes.

  He said, “Look again, Kim. Look closely.”

  She turned back. Saw Matt and Kaen kneeling by the Lake. Saw the Dragon shining above them. Saw stars, subsiding waves, dark mountain crags. Saw a crystal cauldron tumbled on the grass and a small crafted dragon lying beside it.

  Saw that the dragon discarded there was not the one Matt had just offered to the Lake.

  And in that moment, as hope blazed in her like the Dragon’s blue-white fire, Kim saw something else come up from Cal
or Diman. A tiny creature exploded from the water, furiously beating wings holding it aloft. A creature that now shone more brilliantly than it ever had before, with eyes that dazzled in the night, no longer dark and lifeless.

  It was the heart’s crafting Matt had offered, given life by the Lake. Which had accepted his gift.

  There was a flurry of motion. Kaen scrambled forward on his knees. He reclaimed his cauldron. Rose to his feet, holding it outstretched beseechingly. “No!” he pleaded. “Wait!”

  He had time for nothing more. Time ended for him. In that high place of beauty which was so much more than that, power suddenly made manifest its presence for a moment only, but a moment was enough. The Dragon of the Lake, the guardian of the Dwarves, opened its mouth, and flame roared forth a second time.

  Not up into the mountain air, not for warning or display. The Dragonfire struck Kaen of Banir Lok where he stood, arms extended, offering his rejected gift again, and it incinerated him, consumed him utterly. For one horrifying instant Kim saw his body writhing within the translucent flame, and then he was gone. There was nothing left at all, not even the cauldron he had made. The blue-white fire died, and when it did Matt Sören was kneeling alone, in the stunned silence of aftermath, by the shore of the Lake.

  She saw him reach out and pick up the sculpted dragon lying beside him, the one, Kim now realized—seeing what Loren had grasped from the first—that he had shaped forty years ago, when the Lake had made him King. Slowly Matt rose to stand facing the Dragon of Calor Diman. It seemed to Kim that there was a tinted brightness to the air.

  Then the Dragon spoke. “You should not have gone away,” it said with an ancient sorrow.

  So deep a sadness after so wild a blaze of power. Matt lowered his head.

  “I accepted your gift that night,” the Dragon said, in a voice like a mountain wind, cold and clear and lonely. “I accepted it, because of the courage that lay beneath the pride of what you offered me. I made you King under Banir Lok. You should not have gone away.”