“Not stupid at all,” said Loren quietly. “You took a chance by speaking, but they needed to hear what you could do.”
Kim looked over at him with sudden dismay. His eyes narrowed at the sight of her consternation.
“What is it?” he whispered, careful not to be overheard.
Kim said nothing. Only withdrew her right hand slowly from its pocket, so that he could see what, clearly, he hadn’t seen before—the terrible absence of fire, the Baelrath gone.
He looked, and then he closed his eyes. She put her hand back in her pocket.
“When?” Loren asked, his voice thin and stretched.
“When we were ambushed. I felt it being taken. I woke this morning without it.”
Loren opened his eyes and looked at the stage, at Kaen. “I wonder,” he murmured. “I wonder how he knew.”
Kim shrugged. It hardly seemed to matter at this point. What mattered was that, as things stood, Kaen had been quite accurate in what he’d told the Dwarves. If the army was west of the mountains, there was nothing they could do to stop them now from fighting among the legions of the Dark.
Loren seemed to read her thoughts, or else they were his own as well. He said, “It is not over yet. In part, because of what you did. That was brightly woven, Kimberly—you blunted a thrust of Kaen’s, and you may have bought us time to do something.” He paused. His expression changed, became diffident and strained.
“Actually,” he amended, “you may have bought Matt time, and perhaps yourself. There isn’t much of anything I can do anymore.”
“That isn’t true,” Kim said, with all the conviction she could muster. “Wisdom carries its own strength.”
He smiled faintly at the platitude and even nodded his head. “I know. I know it does. Only it is a hard thing, Kim, it is a very hard thing to have known power for forty years and to have none of it now, when it matters so much.”
To this, Kim, who had carried her own power for only a little over a year and had fought it for much of that time, could find nothing to say.
There was no time for her to reply, in any case. The rustle of sound in the Hall rose swiftly higher and then, as swiftly, subsided into a stiff, tense silence.
In that silence the Dwarfmoot filed soberly back to their stone seats on the stage. For the third time Miach came forward to stand beside Kaen and Matt, facing the multitude in the seats above.
Kim glanced at Loren, rigid beside her. She followed the tall man’s gaze to his friend of forty years. She saw Mart’s mouth move silently. Weaver at the Loom, she thought, echoing the prayer she read on the Dwarf’s lips.
Then, wasting no time, Miach spoke. “We have listened to the speech of the word-striving and to the silence of the Dwarves. Hear now the rendering of the Dwarfmoot of Banir Lok. Forty years ago in this Hall, Matt, now also called Sören, threw down the symbols of his Kingship. There was no equivocation in what he did, no mistaking his intention to relinquish the Crown.”
Kim would have sold her soul, both her souls, for a glass of water. Her throat was so dry it hurt to swallow.
Miach went on, soberly, “At that same time did Kaen assume governance here under the mountains, nor was he challenged in this, nor has he been until this day. Even so, despite the urging of the Moot, Kaen chose not to make a crystal for the Lake or to pass a full moon night beside her shores. He never became our King.
“There is then, over and above all else, the Moot has decided, one question that must be answered in this striving. It has long been said in these mountain halls—so long it is now a catchphrase for us—that Calor Diman never surrenders her Kings. It was said today by Matt Sören, and the Moot heard him say it before we came forth for the judging. That, we have now decided, is not the question at issue here.”
Kim, desperately struggling to understand, to anticipate, saw Kaen’s eyes flash with a swiftly veiled triumph. Her heart was a drum, and fear beat the rhythm of it.
“The question at issue,” said Miach softly, “is whether the King can surrender the Lake.”
The silence was absolute. Into it, he said, “It has never happened before in all the long history of our people that a King in these halls should do what Matt did long ago, or seek to do what he strives for now. There are no precedents, and the Dwarfmoot has decreed that it would be presumption for us to decide. All other questions—the disposition of our armies, everything we shall do henceforth—are contained in this one issue: who, truly, is our leader now? The one who has governed us forty years with the Dwarfmoot at his side, or the one who slept by Calor Diman and then walked away?
“It is, the Dwarfmoot decrees, a matter for the powers of Calor Diman to decide. Here then is our judgment. There are now six hours left before sunset. Each of you, Matt and Kaen, will be guided to a chamber with all the tools of the crystal maker’s craft. You will each shape whatsoever image you please, with such artistry as you may command. Tonight, when darkness falls, you shall ascend the nine and ninety steps to the meadow door that leads from Bank Tal to Calor Diman, and you shall cast your artifices into the Crystal Lake. I will be there, and Ingen, also, from the Moot. You may each name two to come with you to bear witness on your behalf. The moon is not full. This is not properly a night for the naming of a King, but neither has anything such as this ever confronted us before. We will leave it to the Lake.”
A place more fair than any in all the worlds, Matt Sören had named Calor Diman long ago, before the first crossing. They had been still in the Park Plaza Hoteclass="underline" five people from Toronto, en route to another world for two weeks of partying at a High King’s celebrations.
A place more fair…
A place of judgment. Of what might be final judgment.
Chapter 11
That same day, as the Dwarves of the twin mountains prepared for the judgment of their Lake, Gereint the shaman, cross-legged on the mat in his dark house, cast the net of his awareness out over Fionavar and vibrated like a harp with what he sensed.
It was coming to a head, all of it, and very soon.
From that remote elbow of land east of the Latham he reached out, an old brown spider at the center of his web, and saw many things with the power of his blinding.
But not what he was looking for. He wanted the Seer. Feeling helplessly removed from what was happening, he sought the bright aura of Kimberly’s presence, groping for a clue to what was shuttling on the loom of war. Tabor had told him the morning before that he had flown the Seer to a cottage by a lake near Paras Derval, and Gereint had known Ysanne for much of his life and so knew where this cottage was.
But when he reached to that place he found only the ancient green power that dwelt beneath the water, and no sign of Kim at all. He did not know—he had no way of knowing—that since Tabor had set her down beside that shore, she had already gone, by the tapped power of the avarlith, to Lisen’s Tower, and from there that same night, with the red flaming of her own wild magic, over the mountains to Banir Lok.
And over the mountains he could not go, unless he sent his soul traveling, and he was too recently returned from journeying out over the waves to do that again so soon.
So she was lost to him. He felt the presence of other powers, though, lights on a map in the darkness of his mind. The other shamans were all around him, in their houses much like his own, here beside the Latham. Their auras were like the trace flickerings of lienae at night, erratic and insubstantial. There would be no aid or comfort there. He was preeminent among the shamans of the Plain, and had been since his blinding. If any of them were to have a role yet to play in what was to come, it would have to be him, for all his years.