A thousand, thousand fragments, like a heart. Paul looked at Loren.
He touched the kneeling man, once, as the mage had touched him before; then he walked away. Looking back, he saw that Loren had cast his cloak over his face.
He saw Arthur with Diarmuid and went over to them. The torches were lit now, all around the Hall. Arthur said, “We have time, all the time we need to take. Let us leave him for a while.”
Together the three of them walked with Cavall down the dark, moldering corridors of Cader Sedat. It was damp and cold. A chill, sourceless wind seemed to be blowing among the crumbling stones.
“You spoke of the dead?” Paul murmured.
“I did,” said Arthur. “Spiral Castle holds, below the level of the sea, the mightiest of the dead in all the worlds.” They turned. Another darker corridor.
“You spoke of waking them,” Paul said.
Arthur shook his head. “I cannot. I was trying to frighten him. They can only be wakened by name and, when last here, I was very young and I did not know—” He stopped, then, and stood utterly still.
No! Paul thought. It is enough. It has been enough, surely.
He opened his mouth to speak but found he could not. The Warrior took a slow breath, as if drawing it from his long past, from the core of his being. Then he nodded, once only, and with effort, as if moving his head against a weight of worlds.
“Come,” was all he said. Paul looked at Diarmuid, and in the darkness he saw the same stiff apprehension in the Prince’s face. They followed Arthur and the dog.
This time they went down. The corridor Arthur took sloped sharply, and they had to use the walls to keep their balance. The stones were clammy to the touch. There was light now, though, a faint phosphorescence of the corridor itself. Diarmuid’s white tunic gleamed in it.
They became aware of a steady pounding noise beyond the walls.
“The sea,” Arthur said quietly, and then stopped before a door Paul had not seen. The Warrior turned to the two of them. “You may prefer to wait out here,” he said.
There was a silence.
Paul shook his head. “I have tasted death,” he said.
Diarmuid smiled, a brief flash of his old smile. “One of us in there,” he said, “had best be normal, don’t you think?”
So they left the dog by the door and passed within, amid the incessant pounding of the sea on the walls.
There were fewer than Paul had thought there would be. It was not an overly large chamber. The floor was stone and without adornment. In the center stood a single pillar, and upon it one candle burned with a white flame that did not waver. The walls gleamed palely. Set around the room in alcoves dimly lit by the candle and the phosphorescence of the walls were perhaps twenty bodies lying on beds of stone. Only that many, Paul thought, from all the dead in all the worlds. Almost he walked over to look upon them, to see the faces of the chosen great, but a diffidence overtook him, a sense of intruding upon their rest. Then he felt Diarmuid’s hand on his arm, and he saw that Arthur was standing in front of one of the alcoves and that his hands were covering his face.
“It is enough!” Paul cried aloud and moved to Arthur’s side.
In front of them, as if asleep, save that he did not breathe, lay a man of more than middle height. His hair was black, his cheeks shaven. His eyes were closed, but wide-set under a high forehead. His mouth and chin were firm, and his hands, Paul saw, clasped the hilt of a sword and were very beautiful. He looked to have been a lord among men, and if he was lying in this place, Paul knew, he had been.
He also knew who this was.
“My lord Arthur,” said Diarmuid painfully, “you do not have to do this. It is neither written nor compelled.”
Arthur lowered his hands. His gaze never left the face of the man who lay on the stone.