The Wandering Fire (4 page)

“Car coming!” Paul cried sharply.

They flattened themselves on the cold, mucky ground till the headlights went by. Then Kevin rose and he too vaulted over the fence. This part was easy, but the ground was pressure-sensitive farther in, they knew, and an alarm would sound in the guards’ underground room when they walked that far.

Paul jogged up and neatly cleared the fence. He and Kevin exchanged a glance. Despite the immensity of what they were about to do, Kevin felt a surge of exhilaration. It was a joy to be
doing
something again.

“All right,” he said, low and in control. “Jen, you’re with me. Prepare to be sexy as hell. Dave and Paul—you know what to do?” They nodded. He turned to Kim. “All set, sweetheart. Do your thing. And—”

He stopped. Kim had removed her gloves. The Baelrath on her right hand was very bright; it seemed like a thing alive. Kim raised it overhead.

“May all the powers of the dead forgive me for this,” she said and let the light carry her foward past the crumbling Heelstone to Stonehenge.

On a night at the beginning of spring she had taken the second step at last. It had been so long in coming she had begun to despair, but how did one command a dream to show itself? Ysanne had never taught her. Nor had the Seer’s gift of so much else offered this one thing to her. Dreamer of the dream, she now was, but there was much waiting involved and never, ever, had Kimberly been called a patient person.

Over and over though the summer of their return and the long winter that followed—and was not over yet, though April had come—she had seen the same image tumble through her nights, but she knew it now. She had known this first step on the road to the Warrior since a night in Paras Derval. The jumbled stones and the wind over the grass were as famliar as anything had ever been to her, and she knew where they were.

It was the time that had confused her, or it would have been easy despite the blurring of the vision in those first dreams when she was young in power: she had seen it not as it now was, but as it had been three thousand years ago.

Stonehenge. Where a King lay buried, a giant in his day, but small, small, beside the one whose secret name he held sacrosanct beyond the walls of death.

Sacrosanct except now, at last, from her. As ever, the nature of this power overwhelmed her with sorrow: not even the dead might have rest from her, it seemed, from Kimberly Ford with the Baelrath on her hand.

Stonehenge, she knew. The starting point. The hidden Book of Gortyn she had found under the cottage by the lake, and in it she had found—easily, because Ysanne was within her—the words that would raise the guardian dead from his long resting place.

But she had needed one thing more, for the dead man had been mighty and would not give up this secret easily: she had needed to know the other place, the next one, the last. The place of summoning.

And then, on a night in April, she did.

It would have misled her again, this long-sought image, had not she been prepared for the tricks that time might play. The Seers walked in their dreams along loops spun invisibly in the Weaver’s threading through the Loom, and they had to be prepared to see the inexplicable.

But this she was ready for, this image of an island, small and green, in a lake calm as glass under a just-risen crescent moon. A scene of such surpassing peacefulness that she would have wept a year ago to know the havoc she would wreak when she came.

Not even a year ago, not so much even. But she had changed, and though there was sorrow within her—deep as a stone and as permanent—there was too much need, and the delay had been too long to allow her the luxury of tears.

She rose from her bed. The Warstone flickered with a muted, presaging light. It was going to blaze soon, she knew. She would carry fire on her hand. She saw by the kitchen clock that it was four in the morning. She also saw Jennifer sitting at the table, and the kettle was coming to a boil.

“You cried out,” her roommate said. “I thought something was happening.”

Kim took one of the other chairs. She tightened her robe about her. It was chilly in the house, and this traveling always left her cold. “It did,” she said, wearily.

“You know what you have to do?”

She nodded.

“Is it all right?”

She shrugged. Too hard to explain. She had an understanding, of late, as to why Ysanne had withdrawn in solitude to her lake. There were two lights in the room: one on the ceiling and the other on her hand. “We’d better call the guys,” she said.

“I already have. They’ll be here soon.”

Kim glanced sharply at her. “What did I say in my sleep?”

Jennifer’s eyes were kind again; they had been since Darien was born. “You cried out for forgiveness,” she said.
She would drag the dead from their rest and the undead to their doom
.

“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 glass.

“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 passed 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 hell 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 space 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 space 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?”