Blod, Brock mouthed, not making a sound.
And then Dave knew. This was the one they’d spoken of before, the one who’d given the Cauldron to Maugrim and had been in Starkadh when Jennifer was taken there. He felt his own hatred rising, his own eyes going flinty and cold, as he looked back at the Dwarf by the fire. He tightened his grip on the axe.
But this was a reconnaissance, not a raid. Even as he stared at Blod, hungering for his death, he heard Levon’s soft whisper commanding them to turn back.
They never had a chance, though.
There came a sound to their right, a loud crashing at the edge of the clearing, and then sudden hoarse shouts of alarm very near them.
“Someone’s here!” a Dwarf guard screamed. Another one echoed the alarm.
Dave Martyniuk thought of his father blowing up bridges in darkest night in a darkest time.
He saw Brock rise, and Levon, weapons out.
He rose, hefting his axe. Saw Faebur’s strung bow, and Mabon’s long sword glint in the red light of the fire. For a moment he looked up. The moon was hidden, but there were stars up there between the banks of clouds, high above the trees, the fires, high above everything.
He stepped forward into the open, to have room to swing the axe. Levon was beside him. He exchanged one glance with the man he called his brother; there was time for nothing more. Then Dave turned toward the roused army of the Dwarves and prepared to send as many of them as he could into night before he died.
It was still dark when Sharra woke on the deck of Amairgen’s ship. A heavy fog lay over the sea, shrouding the stars. The moon had long since set.
She pulled Diarmuid’s cloak more tightly about herself; the wind was cold. She closed her eyes, not really wanting to be awake yet, to become fully aware of where she was. She knew, though. The creaking of the masts and the flap of the torn sails told her. And every few moments she would hear the sound of invisible footsteps passing: mariners dead a thousand years.
On either side of her Jaelle and Jennifer still slept. She wondered what time it was; the fog made it impossible to tell. She wished that Diarmuid were beside her, warming her with his nearness. She only had his cloak, though, damp with the mist. He’d been too scrupulous of her honor to lie anywhere near her, either on the ship or, before they’d boarded, on the beach below the Anor.
They had found a moment together, though, after Lancelot had gone into the woods alone, in the deceptively tranquil hour between twilight and full dark.
All tranquility was deceptive now, Sharra decided, huddling under the cloak and the blankets they’d given her. There were too many dimensions of danger and grief all around. And she’d learned new ones with the tale Diarmuid had unfolded as they walked along the northwest curving of the strand past the Anor, and saw—first time for both of them—the sheer Cliffs of Rhudh gleam blood-red in the last of the light.
He had told her of the voyage in a voice stripped of all its customary irony, of any inflections of mockery and irreverence. He spoke of the Soulmonger, and she held his hand in her own and seemed to hear, as backdrop to the musing fall of his voice, the sound of Brendel singing his lament again.
Then he told her of the moment in the Chamber of the Dead under Cader Sedat, the moment when, amid the ceaseless pounding of all the seas of all the worlds, Arthur Pendragon had wakened Lancelot from his death on the bed of stone.
Sharra lay on the boat, eyes closed, listening to wind and sea, remembering what he’d said. “Do you know,” he’d murmured, watching the Cliffs shade to a darker red, “that if you loved someone else, as well as me, I do not think I could have done that, to bring him back to you. I really don’t think I’m man enough to have done what Arthur did.”