The Wandering Fire Part 3

"Fat chance," said Kimberly.

The doorbell rang. In a moment they were standing all around her, anxious, disheveled, half asleep. She looked up. They were waiting, but the waiting was over; she had seen an island and a lake like gla.s.s.

"Who's coming with me to England?" she asked, with brittle, false brightness in her voice.

All of them went. Even Dave, who'd had to virtually quit his articling job to get away on twenty-four hours' notice. A year ago he'd carried a packet of Evidence notes into Fionavar with him, so determined was he to succeed in the law. He'd changed so much; they all had. After seeing Rangat throw up that unholy hand, how could anything else seem other than insubstantial?

Yet what could be more insubstantial than a dream? And it was a dream that had the five of them hurtling overseas on a 747 to London and, in a Renault rented at Heathrow and driven erratically and at speed by Kevin Laine, to Amesbury beside Stonehenge.

Kevin was in a fired-up mood. Released at last from the waiting, from months of pretending to take an interest in the tax, real estate, and civil-procedure courses that preceded his call to the Bar, he gunned the car through a roundabout, ignored Dave's spluttering, and skidded to a stop in front of an ancient hotel and tavern called, of course, the New Inn.

He and Dave handled the baggage-none of them had more than carry-ons-while Paul registered. On the way in they pa.s.sed the entrance to the bar-crowded at lunchtime-and he caught a glimpse of a cute, freckled barmaid.

"Do you know," he told Dave, as they waited for Paul to arrange for the rooms, "I can't remember the last time I was laid?"

Dave, who couldn't either, with greater justification, grunted. "Get your mind out of your pants, for once."

It was frivolous, Kevin supposed. But he wasn't a monk and couldn't ever pretend to be. Diarmuid would understand, he thought, though he wondered if even that dissolute Prince would comprehend just how far the act of love carried Kevin, or what he truly sought in its pursuit. Unlikely in the extreme, Kevin reflected, since he himself didn't really know.

Paul had the keys to two adjacent rooms. Leaving Kimberly, at her own insistence, alone in one of the rooms, the four others drove the mile west to join the tour buses and pocket cameras by the monument. Once there, even with the daytime tackiness, Kevin sobered. There was work to be done, to prepare for what would happen that night.

Dave had asked on the plane. It had been very late, the movie over, lights dimmed. Jennifer and Paul had been asleep when the big man had come over to where Kevin and Kim were sitting, awake but not speaking. Kim hadn't spoken the whole time, lost in some troubled country born of dream.

"What are we going to do there?" Dave had asked her diffidently, as if fearing to intrude.

And the white-haired girl beside him had roused herself to say, "You four will have to do whatever it takes, to give me enough time."

"For what?" Dave had said.

Kevin, too, had turned his head to look at Kim as she replied, far too matter-of-factly, "To raise a King from the dead and make him surrender a name. After that I'll be on my own."

Kevin had looked past her then, out the window, and seen stars beyond the wing; they were flying very high over deep waters.

"What time is it?" Dave asked for the fifth time, fighting a case of nerves.

"After eleven," said Paul, continuing to fidget with a spoon. They were in the saloon bar of the hotel; he, Dave, and Jen at the table, Kevin, unbelievably, chatting up the waitress over by the bar. Or not, actually, unbelievably; he'd known Kevin Laine a long time.

"When the h.e.l.l is she coming down?" Dave had an edge in his voice, a real one, and Paul could feel anxiety building in himself as well. It was going to be a very different place at night, he knew, with the crowds of the afternoon gone. Under stars, Stonehenge would move back in time a long way. There was a power here still, he could feel it, and he knew it would be made manifest at night.

"Does everyone know what they have to do?" he repeated.

"Yes, Paul," said Jennifer, surprisingly calm. They'd worked out their plans over dinner after returning from the monument. Kim hadn't left her room, not since they'd arrived.

Kevin strolled back to the table, with a full pint of beer.

"Are you drinking?" Dave said sharply.

"Don't be an idiot. While you two have been sitting here doing nothing, I've gotten the names of two of the guards out there. Len is the big bearded one, and there's another named Dougal, Kate says."

Dave and Paul were silent.

"Nicely done," said Jennifer. She smiled slightly.

"Okay," said Kim, "let's go." She was standing by the table in a bomber jacket and scarf. Her eyes were a little wild below the locks of white hair and her face was deathly pale. A single vertical line creased her forehead. She held up her hands; she was wearing gloves.

"It started to glow five minutes ago," she said.

And so she had come to the place and it was time indeed, here, now, to manifest herself, to show forth the Baelrath in a crimson blaze of power. It was the Warstone, found, not made, and very wild, but there was a war now, and the ring was coming into its force, carrying her with it past the high shrouded stones, the fallen one, and the tilting one, to the highest lintel stone. Beside which she stopped.

There was shouting behind her. Very far behind her. It was time. Raising her hand before her face Kimberly cried out in a cold voice, far from what she sounded like when allowed to be only herself, only Kim, and said into stillness, the waiting calm of that place, words of power upon power to summon its dead from beyond the walls of Night.

"Damae Pendragon! Sed Baelrath riden log verenth. Pendragon rabenna, nisei damae!"

There was no moon yet. Between the ancient stones, the Baelrath glowed brighter than any star. It lit the giant teeth of rock luridly. There was nothing subtle or mild, nothing beautiful about this force. She had come to coerce, by the power she bore and the secret she knew. She had come to summon.

And then, by the rising of a wind where none had been before, she knew she had.

Leaning forward into it, holding the Baelrath before her, she saw, in the very center of the monument, a figure standing on the altar stone. He was tall and shadowed, wrapped in mist as in a shroud, only half incarnated in the half-light of star and stone. She fought the weight of him, the drag; he had been so long dead and she had made him rise.

No s.p.a.ce for sorrow here, and weakness shown might break the summoning. She said: "Uther Pendragon, attend me, for I command your will!"

"Command me not, I am a King!" His voice was high, stretched taut on a wire of centuries, but imperious still.

No s.p.a.ce for mercy. None at all. She hardened her heart. "You are dead," she said coldly, in the cold wind. "And given over to the stone I bear."

"Why should this be so?"

The wind was rising. "For Ygraine deceived, and a son falsely engendered." The old, old telling.

Uther drew himself to his fullest height, and he was very tall above his tomb. "Has he not proven great beyond all measure?"

And thus: "Even so," said Kimberly, and there was a soreness in her now that no hardening could stay. "And I would call him by the name you guard."

The dead King spread his hands to the watching stars. "Has he not suffered enough?" the father cried in a voice that overrode the wind.

To this there was no decent reply, and so she said, "I have no time, Uther, and he is needed. By the burning of my stone I compel you-what is the name?"

She could see the sternness of his face, and steeled her own that he might read no irresolution there. He was fighting her; she could feel the earth pulling him away, and down.

"Do you know the place?" Uther Pendragon asked.

"I know."

And in his eyes, as if through mist or smoke, she saw that he knew this was so, and with the Baelrath would master him. Her very soul was turning over with the pain of it. So much steel she could not be, it seemed.

He said, "He was young when it happened, the incest, and the rest of it. He was afraid, because of the prophecy. Can they not have pity? Is there none?"

What was she that the proud Kings of the dead should beseech her so? "The name!" said Kimberly into the keening of the wind, and she raised the ring above her head to master him.

And, mastered, he told her, and it seemed as if stars were falling everywhere, and she had brought them tumbling down from heaven with what she was.

She was sheer red, she was wild, the night could not hold her. She could rise, even now, to come down as red moonlight might fall, but not here. In another place.

It was high. High enough to have once been an island in a lake like gla.s.s. Then the waters had receded all over Somerset, leaving a plain where waters had been, and a seven-ridged hill high above that plain. But when a place has been an island the memory of water lingers, and of water magic, no matter how far away the sea may be, or how long ago it fell away.

And so it was with Glas...o...b..ry Tor, which had been called Avalon in its day and had seen three queens row a dying king to its sh.o.r.e.

So much of the filtered legends had been close to true, but the rest was so far off it carried its own grief with it. Kim looked around the summit of the Tor and saw the thin moon rise in the east above the long plain. The Baelrath was beginning to fade even as she watched, and with it the power that had carried her here.

There was a thing to do while it yet burned, and raising the ring she turned, a beacon in the night, back to face Stonehenge, so many miles away. She reached out as she had done once before, though it was easier now, she was very strong tonight, and she found the four of them, gathered them together, Kevin and Paul, Jennifer and Dave, and before the Warstone faded, she sent them to Fionavar with the last red wildness Stonehenge had engendered.

Then the light she bore became only a ring on her finger, and it was dark on the windy summit of the Tor.

There was enough moonlight for her to make out the chapel that had been erected there some seven hundred years ago. She was s.h.i.+vering, now, and not only with cold. The burning ring had lifted her, given her resolution beyond her ordinary reach. Now she was Kimberly Ford only, or it seemed that way, and she felt daunted here on this ancient mound that yet gave scent of sea wind here in the midst of Somerset.

She was about to do something terrible, to set once more in motion the workings of a curse so old it made the wind seem young.

There had been a mountain though, in the northland of Fionavar, and once it had held a G.o.d prisoner. Then there had been a detonation so vast it could only mean one thing, and Rakoth the Unraveller had been no longer bound. There was so much power coming down on them, and if Fionavar was lost then all the worlds would fall to Maugrim, and the Tapestry be torn and twisted on the Worldloom past redress.

She thought of Jennifer in Starkadh.

She thought of Ysanne.

With the ring quiescent on her hand, no power in her but the name she knew, terrible and merciless, she drew upon her need for strength in that high dark place and spoke in her own voice the one word that the Warrior needs must answer to: "Childslayer!"

Then she closed her eyes, for the Tor, the whole Somerset Plain, seemed to be shaking with an agonized convulsion. There was a sound: wind, sorrow, lost music. He had been young and afraid, the dead father had said-and the dead spoke truth or lay silent-Merlin's prophecy had tolled a knell for the s.h.i.+ning of the dream, and so he had ordered the children slain. Oh, how could one not weep? All the children, so that his incestuous, marring, foretold seed might not live to break the bright dream. Little more than a child himself he had been, but a thread had been entrusted to his name, and thus a world, and when the babies died...

When the babies died the Weaver had marked him down for a long unwinding doom. A cycle of war and expiation under many names, and in many worlds, that redress be made for the children and for love.

Kim opened her eyes and saw the low, thin moon. She saw the stars of spring hang brightly overhead, and she was not wrong in thinking they were brighter than they had been before.

Then she turned and, in the celestial light, saw that she was not alone in that high enchanted place.

He was no longer young. How could he have been young after so many wars? His beard was dark, though flecked with grey, and his eyes not yet fixed in time. She thought she saw stars in them. He leaned upon a sword, his hands wrapped around the hilt as if it were the only certain thing in the wide night, and then he said in a voice so gentle and so weary it found her heart, "I was Arthur here, my lady, was I not?"

"Yes," she whispered.

"I have carried other names elsewhere."

"I know." She swallowed. "This is your true name, though, your first."

"Not the other?"

Oh, what was she? "Not that. I will never tell it, or speak it again. I give you an oath."

Slowly he straightened. "Others will, though, as others have before."

"I cannot do anything to alter that. I only summoned because of our need."

He nodded. "There is war here?"

"In Fionavar."

At that he drew himself up: not so tall as his father had been, yet majesty lay about him like a cloak, and he lifted his head into the rising wind as if hearing a distant horn.

"Is this the last battle, then?"

"If we lose, it will be."

On the words, he seemed to coalesce, as if acceptance ended his pa.s.sage from wherever he had been. There were no longer stars in the depths of his eyes; they were brown, and kind, and of the broad, tilled earth.

"Very well," said Arthur.

And that mild affirmation was what, finally, broke Kimberly. She dropped to her knees and lowered her face to weep.

A moment later she felt herself lifted, effortlessly, and wrapped in an embrace so encompa.s.sing she felt, on that lonely elevation, as if she had come home after long voyaging. She laid her head on his broad chest, felt the strong beating of his heart, and took comfort even as she grieved.

After a time he stepped back. She wiped away her tears and saw, without surprise, that the Baelrath was aglow again. She was aware, for the first time, of how weary she felt, with so much power channeling itself through her. She shook her head: no time, none at all, to be weak. She looked at him.

"Have I your forgiveness?"

"You never needed it," Arthur said. "Not half as much as I need all of yours."

"You were young."

"They were babies," he said quietly. And then, after a pause, "Are they there yet, the two of them?"

And the hurting in his voice laid bare for her, for the first time, the true nature of how he had been cursed. She should have known, it had been there to see. For the children and for love.

"I don't know," she said, with difficulty.

"They always are," he said, "because I had the babies killed."

There was no answer to make, and she didn't trust her voice in any case. Instead she took him by the hand, and holding high the Baelrath once again with the last strength she had, she crossed with Arthur Pendragon, the Warrior Condemned, to Fionavar and war.

PART II

OWEIN.