“Surely,” Ceriog mocked, “that should have given you a taste for more!” He flung his arms wide. “Surely we should all have a taste for death by now! I had come back to tell you of women and boys for sport down below. I had not thought to see a Dwarf delivered into my hands so soon.”
He did not laugh again. Instead, he turned to look down on the figure of Brock, sprawled unconscious on the sun-baked stone of the plateau.
A sick foreboding swept over Kimberly. A recollection, though not her own; Ysanne’s, whose soul was a part of her now. A memory of a legend, a nightmare tale from childhood, of very great evil done, very long ago.
“What happened?” she cried, wincing with pain, desperate to know. “What did they do?”
Ceriog looked at her. They all did. For the first time she met his eyes and flinched away from the raw grief she read in them. His head jerked up and down convulsively. “Faebur!” he cried suddenly. A younger light-bearded Eridun stepped forward. “Play messenger again, Faebur. Tell the story one more time. See if it improves with age. She wants to know what the Dwarves have done. Tell her!”
She was a Seer. The threads of the Timeloom shuttled for her. Even as Faebur began his flat-voiced recitation, Kim cut straight past his words to the images behind them and found horror.
The background of the tale was known to her, though not less bitter for that: the story of Kaen and Blod, the brothers who had led the Dwarves in search, forty years ago, of the lost Cauldron of Khath Meigol. When the Dwarfmoot had voted to aid them, Matt Sören, the young King, had thrown down his scepter and removed the Diamond Crown and left the twin mountains to find another fate entirely, as source to Loren Silvercloak.
Then, a year ago, the Dwarf now lying beside her, had come to Paras Derval with tidings of great evil done: Kaen and Blod, unable to find the Cauldron on their own and driven near to madness by forty years of failure, had entered into an unholy alliance. With the aid of Metran, the treacherous mage, they had finally unearthed the Cauldron of the Giants—and had paid the price. It had been twofold: the Dwarves had broken the wardstone of Eridu, thus severing the warning link of the five stones, and then they had delivered the Cauldron itself into the hands of their new master, the one whose binding under Rangat was to have been ensured by the linked ward-stones—Rakoth Maugrim, the Unraveller.
All this she had known. Had known, too, that Metran had used the Cauldron to lock in the killing winter that had ended five mornings ago, after the night Kevin Laine had sacrificed himself to bring it to a close. What she hadn’t known was what had happened since. What she now read in Faebur’s face and heard him tell, feeling the images like lashes in her soul. The death rain of Eridu.
“When the snow began to melt,” Faebur was saying, “we rejoiced. I heard the bells ring in walled Larak, though I could not return there. Exiled in the hills by my father, I too gave thanks for the end of the killing cold.” So had she, Kim remembered. She had given thanks even as she mourned, hearing the wailing of the priestesses at dawn outside the dark cave of Dun Maura. Oh, my darling man.
“For three days,” Faebur went on, in the same detached, numb tones, “the sun shone. The grass returned overnight, and the flowers. When the rain came, on the fourth day, that too seemed natural, and cause for joy.
“Until, looking down from the high hills west of Larak, I heard the screaming begin. The rain did not reach the hills, but I could see herdsmen not far away on the slopes below, with their goats and kere, and I heard them scream when the rain fell, and I saw huge black blisters form and break on animals and men as they died.”
Seers could go—were forced by their gift to go—behind the words to the images suspended in the coils of time. Try as she might, Kim’s second, inner sight would not let her look away from the vision caught in Faebur’s words. And being what she was, twinned soul with two sets of memories, she knew more, even, than Faebur knew. For Ysanne’s childhood memories were hers, and clearer now, and she knew the rain had been shaped once before in a distant time of dark, and that the dead were deadly to those who touched them, and so could not be buried.
Which meant plague. Even after the rain stopped.
“How long did it last?” she asked suddenly.
Ceriog’s harsh laughter told her her mistake and opened a new, deeper vein of terror, even before he spoke. “How long?” he snapped, his voice swirling erratically. “White hair should bring more wisdom. Look east, foolish woman, up the valley of the Kharn. Look past Khath Meigol and tell me how long it lasted!”
She looked. The mountain air was thin and clear, the summer sun bright overhead. She could see a long way from that high plateau, almost to Eridu itself.
She could see the rain clouds piled high east of the mountains.
The rain hadn’t ended. And she knew, as surely as she knew anything at all, that, if unchecked, it would be coming their way; Over the Carnevon Range and the Skeledarak, to Brennin, Cathal, the wide Plain of the Dalrei, and then, of course, to the place where undying Rakoth’s most undying hatred lay—to Daniloth, where dwelt the lios alfar.
Her thoughts, shrouded in dread, winged away west, far past the end of land, out over the sea, where a ship was sailing to a place of death. It was named Prydwen, she knew. She knew the names of many things, but not all knowledge was power. Not in the face of what was falling from that dark sky east of them.
Feeling helpless and afraid, Kim turned back to Ceriog. As she did, she saw that the Baelrath was flickering on her hand. That, too, she understood: the rain she had just been shown was an act of war, and the Warstone was responding. Unobtrusively she turned the ring inward and closed her palm so it would not be seen.
“You wanted to know what the Dwarves had done, and now you know,” Ceriog said, his voice low and menacing.
“Not all the Dwarves!” she said, struggling to a sitting position, gasping with the pain that caused. “Listen to me! I know more of this than you. I—”
“Doubtless, you know more, traveling with one of them. And you shall tell me, before we are done with you. But the Dwarf is first. I am very pleased,” said Ceriog, “to see he is not dead.”
Kim whipped her head around. A cry escaped her. Brock moaned, his hands moved slightly. Heedless of risk, she crawled over to help him. “I need clean cloths and hot water!” she shouted. “Quickly!”
No one moved. Ceriog laughed. “It seems,” he said, “that you haven’t understood me. I am pleased to see him alive, because I intend to kill him with great care.”
She did understand and, understanding, could no longer hate—it seemed that clear, uncomplicated wishes of the heart were not allowed for her. Which wasn’t all that surprising, given who she was and what she carried.
She could no longer hate, nor could she hold back her pity for one whose people were being so completely destroyed. But neither could she allow him to proceed. He had come nearer, had drawn a blade. She heard a soft, almost delicate rustle of anticipation among the watching outlaws, most of whom were from Eridu. No mercy to be expected there.
She twisted the ring back outward on her finger and thrust her hand high in the air.
“Harm him not!” she cried, as sternly as she could. “I am the Seer of Brennin. I carry the Baelrath on my hand and a magegift vellin stone about my wrist!”
She was also hellishly weak, with a brutal pain in her side, and no idea whatsoever of how she could hold them off.
Ceriog seemed to have an intuition about that, or else was so goaded by the presence of the dwarf that he was beyond deterrence. He smiled thinly, through his tattoos and his dark beard.