In the shadows Paul thought he saw starlight flash for a moment in the Warrior’s eyes. He looked at Cavall, remembering something. In silence, he followed the two leaders down the last corridor. Near the end they dropped to their knees and crawled. Diarmuid made room for him, and Paul wriggled along on his belly and came up to the doorway beside the Prince. They lay there, the three of them, with the South Keep men behind, and looked out over a scene shaped to appal.
Five steps led down from the arched doorway where they were. There were a number of other entrances to the huge chamber below. The roof was so high it was lost in darkness. The floor was illuminated, though: there were torches set around the walls, burning with the eerie green light they had seen from the corridor. The doorway they had reached was about midway along the Great Hall of Cader Sedat. At the head of the chamber, on a dais, stood Metran, once First Mage of Brennin, and beside him was the Cauldron of Khath Meigol over a roaring fire.
It was huge. The Giants had made it, Paul remembered, and he would have been able to guess had he not known. It was black, as best as he could tell in the light, and there were words engraved on the outer rim of it, stained and coated with grime. At least fifteen svart alfar stood on a raised platform around it, and they were handling a net into which, one by one, others of their kind were laid and dropped, lifeless, into the boiling Cauldron.
It was hard to see in the green light, but Paul strained his eyes and watched as one of the ugly creatures was withdrawn from the water. Carefully, the others swung him away from the steaming mouth of the Cauldron and then they stood him up.
And Paul saw the one who had been dead a moment ago walk stumblingly, with others helping him, to stand behind another man.
Denbarra, source to Metran. And looking at the slack-jawed, drooling figure of the source, Paul understood what Loren had meant when he said Denbarra would have no choice in the matter any more.
There were well over a hundred svart alfar behind him, mindlessly draining their lives to feed Metran’s power, as Denbarra mindlessly served as a conduit for them. Even as they watched, Paul saw two of the svarts drop where they stood. He saw them collected instantly by others, not part of the power web, and carried toward the Cauldron, and he saw others still, being led back from it to stand behind Denbarra.
A loathing rose up in him. Fighting for control, he looked at last squarely on the mage who had made the winter Kevin had died to end.
A stumbling, senile, straggly bearded figure Metran had seemed when they first arrived. A sham, all of it, a seamless, undetected sham to mask pure treachery. The man before them now stood in complete control amid the green lights and black Cauldron smoke. Paul saw that he didn’t look old any more. He was slowly chanting words over the pages of a book.
He hadn’t known he carried so much rage within himself.
Impotent rage, it seemed,
“We can’t do it,” he heard Diarmuid snarl as he grasped the same truth himself.
“This is what I need,” Loren had said as Prydwen rode at anchor beside the island.
In a way it hadn’t been much at all, and in another way it was everything. But then, Paul remembered thinking, they had not come here expecting to return.
Metran would be doing two things, Loren had explained with a terseness alien to him. He would be pouring the vast preponderance of his enhanced power into building another assault on Fionavar. But some of his strength he would be holding back to form a shield around himself and his sources and the Cauldron. They need not expect to find many guards at all, if indeed there were any, because Metran’s shield—as Loren s own, that had blocked the Soulmonger— would be guard enough.
In order for Loren to have any hope of smashing the Cauldron, they had to get Metran to lower that shield. And there was only one thought that occurred to any of them— they would have to battle the svarts. Not those being used as sources, but the ones, and there would have to be a great many, who were there as support.