Guy Gavriel Kay - The Darkest Road

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2024-12-03 0 0 582.98KB 225 页 5.9玖币
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PART I—The Lost Kanior
Chapter 1
“Do you know the wish of your heart?”
Once, when Kim Ford was an undergraduate, young for university and young
for her age, someone had asked her that question over cappuccino on a first
date. She’d been very impressed. Later, rather less young, she’d often smiled
at the memory of how close he’d come to getting her into bed on the strength
of a good line and a way with waiters in a chic restaurant. The question,
though, had stayed with her.
And now, not so much older but white-haired nonetheless, and as far away
from home as she could imagine being, Kim had an answer to that question.
The wish of her heart was that the bearded man standing over her, with
the green tattoos on his forehead and cheeks, should die an immediate and
painful death.
Her side ached where he had kicked her, and every shallow breath was a
lancing pain. Crumpled beside her, blood seeping from the side of his head,
lay Brock of Banir Tal. From where Kim lay she couldn’t tell if the Dwarf was
alive or not, and if she could have killed in that moment, the tattooed man
would be dead. Through a haze of pain she looked around. There were about
fifty men surrounding them on the high plateau, and most of them bore the
green tattoos of Eridu. Glancing down at her own hand she saw that the
Baelrath lay quiescent, no more than a red stone set in a ring. No power for
her to draw upon, no access to her desire.
It didn’t really surprise her. The Warstone had never, from the first,
brought anything but pain with its power, and how could it have been
otherwise?
“Do you know,” the bearded Eridun above her said, with harsh mockery,
“what the Dalrei have done down below?”
“What? What have they done, Ceriog?” another man asked, moving forward a
little from the circle of men. He was older than most of them, Kim saw. There
was grey in his dark hair, and he bore no sign of the green tattoo markings.
“I thought you might be interested,” the one named Ceriog said, and
laughed. There was something wild in the sound, very near to pain. Kim tried
not to hear it, but she was a Seer more than she was anything else, and a
premonition came to her with that laughter. She looked at Brock again. He had
not moved. Blood was still welling slowly from the wound at the side of his
head.
“I am interested,” the other man said mildly.
Ceriog’s laughter ended. “They rode north last night,” he said, “every
man among them, except the blind ones. They have left the women and children
undefended in the camp east of the Latham, just below us.”
There was a murmur among the listening men. Kim closed her eyes. What had
happened? What could have driven Ivor to do such a thing?
“What,” the older man asked, still quietly, “does any of that have to do
with us?”
Ceriog moved a step toward him. “You,” he said, contemptuously, “are more
than a fool. You are an outlaw even among outlaws. Why should any of us answer
questions of yours when you won’t even give us your name?”
The other man raised his voice very slightly. On the windless plateau it
carried. “I have been in the foothills and the mountains,” he said, “for more
years than I care to remember. For all of those years, Dalreidan is what I
have offered as my name. Rider’s Son is what I choose to call myself, and
until this day no man has seen fit to question it. Why should it matter to
you, Ceriog, if I choose not to shame my father’s grave by keeping his name as
part of my own?”
Ceriog snorted derisively. “There is no one here who has not committed a
crime, old man. Why should you be different?”
“Because,” said Dalreidan, “I killed a mother and child.”
Opening her eyes, Kim looked at him in the afternoon sunlight. There was
a stillness on the plateau—broken by Ceriog’s laughter. Again Kim heard the
twisting note in it, halfway between madness and grief.
“Surely,” Ceriog mocked, “that should have given you a taste for more!”
He flung his arms wide. “Surely we should all have a taste for death by now! I
had come back to tell you of women and boys for sport down below. I had not
thought to see a Dwarf delivered into my hands so soon.”
He did not laugh again. Instead, he turned to look down on the figure of
Brock, sprawled unconscious on the sun-baked stone of the plateau.
A sick foreboding swept over Kimberly. A recollection, though not her
own; Ysanne’s, whose soul was a part of her now. A memory of a legend, a
nightmare tale from childhood, of very great evil done, very long ago.
“What happened?” she cried, wincing with pain, desperate to know. “What
did they do?”
Ceriog looked at her. They all did. For the first time she met his eyes
and flinched away from the raw grief she read in them. His head jerked up and
down convulsively. “Faebur!” he cried suddenly. A younger light-bearded Eridun
stepped forward. “Play messenger again, Faebur. Tell the story one more time.
See if it improves with age. She wants to know what the Dwarves have done.
Tell her!”
She was a Seer. The threads of the Timeloom shuttled for her. Even as
Faebur began his flat-voiced recitation, Kim cut straight past his words to
the images behind them and found horror.
The background of the tale was known to her, though not less bitter for
that: the story of Kaen and Blod, the brothers who had led the Dwarves in
search, forty years ago, of the lost Cauldron of Khath Meigol. When the
Dwarfmoot had voted to aid them, Matt Sören, the young King, had thrown down
his scepter and removed the Diamond Crown and left the twin mountains to find
another fate entirely, as source to Loren Silvercloak.
Then, a year ago, the Dwarf now lying beside her, had come to Paras
Derval with tidings of great evil done: Kaen and Blod, unable to find the
Cauldron on their own and driven near to madness by forty years of failure,
had entered into an unholy alliance. With the aid of Metran, the treacherous
mage, they had finally unearthed the Cauldron of the Giants—and had paid the
price. It had been twofold: the Dwarves had broken the wardstone of Eridu,
thus severing the warning link of the five stones, and then they had delivered
the Cauldron itself into the hands of their new master, the one whose binding
under Rangat was to have been ensured by the linked ward-stones—Rakoth
Maugrim, the Unraveller.
All this she had known. Had known, too, that Metran had used the Cauldron
to lock in the killing winter that had ended five mornings ago, after the
night Kevin Laine had sacrificed himself to bring it to a close. What she
hadn’t known was what had happened since. What she now read in Faebur’s face
and heard him tell, feeling the images like lashes in her soul. The death rain
of Eridu.
“When the snow began to melt,” Faebur was saying, “we rejoiced. I heard
the bells ring in walled Larak, though I could not return there. Exiled in the
hills by my father, I too gave thanks for the end of the killing cold.” So had
she, Kim remembered. She had given thanks even as she mourned, hearing the
wailing of the priestesses at dawn outside the dark cave of Dun Maura. Oh, my
darling man.
“For three days,” Faebur went on, in the same detached, numb tones, “the
sun shone. The grass returned overnight, and the flowers. When the rain came,
on the fourth day, that too seemed natural, and cause for joy.
“Until, looking down from the high hills west of Larak, I heard the
screaming begin. The rain did not reach the hills, but I could see herdsmen
not far away on the slopes below, with their goats and kere, and I heard them
scream when the rain fell, and I saw huge black blisters form and break on
animals and men as they died.”
Seers could go—were forced by their gift to go—behind the words to the
images suspended in the coils of time. Try as she might, Kim’s second, inner
sight would not let her look away from the vision caught in Faebur’s words.
And being what she was, twinned soul with two sets of memories, she knew more,
even, than Faebur knew. For Ysanne’s childhood memories were hers, and clearer
now, and she knew the rain had been shaped once before in a distant time of
dark, and that the dead were deadly to those who touched them, and so could
not be buried.
Which meant plague. Even after the rain stopped.
“How long did it last?” she asked suddenly.
Ceriog’s harsh laughter told her her mistake and opened a new, deeper
vein of terror, even before he spoke. “How long?” he snapped, his voice
swirling erratically. “White hair should bring more wisdom. Look east, foolish
woman, up the valley of the Kharn. Look past Khath Meigol and tell me how long
it lasted!”
She looked. The mountain air was thin and clear, the summer sun bright
overhead. She could see a long way from that high plateau, almost to Eridu
itself.
She could see the rain clouds piled high east of the mountains.
The rain hadn’t ended. And she knew, as surely as she knew anything at
all, that, if unchecked, it would be coming their way; Over the Carnevon Range
and the Skeledarak, to Brennin, Cathal, the wide Plain of the Dalrei, and
then, of course, to the place where undying Rakoth’s most undying hatred lay—
to Daniloth, where dwelt the lios alfar.
Her thoughts, shrouded in dread, winged away west, far past the end of
land, out over the sea, where a ship was sailing to a place of death. It was
named Prydwen, she knew. She knew the names of many things, but not all
knowledge was power. Not in the face of what was falling from that dark sky
east of them.
Feeling helpless and afraid, Kim turned back to Ceriog. As she did, she
saw that the Baelrath was flickering on her hand. That, too, she understood:
the rain she had just been shown was an act of war, and the Warstone was
responding. Unobtrusively she turned the ring inward and closed her palm so it
would not be seen.
“You wanted to know what the Dwarves had done, and now you know,” Ceriog
said, his voice low and menacing.
“Not all the Dwarves!” she said, struggling to a sitting position,
gasping with the pain that caused. “Listen to me! I know more of this than
you. I—”
“Doubtless, you know more, traveling with one of them. And you shall tell
me, before we are done with you. But the Dwarf is first. I am very pleased,”
said Ceriog, “to see he is not dead.”
Kim whipped her head around. A cry escaped her. Brock moaned, his hands
moved slightly. Heedless of risk, she crawled over to help him. “I need clean
cloths and hot water!” she shouted. “Quickly!”
No one moved. Ceriog laughed. “It seems,” he said, “that you haven’t
understood me. I am pleased to see him alive, because I intend to kill him
with great care.”
She did understand and, understanding, could no longer hate—it seemed
that clear, uncomplicated wishes of the heart were not allowed for her. Which
wasn’t all that surprising, given who she was and what she carried.
She could no longer hate, nor could she hold back her pity for one whose
people were being so completely destroyed. But neither could she allow him to
proceed. He had come nearer, had drawn a blade. She heard a soft, almost
delicate rustle of anticipation among the watching outlaws, most of whom were
from Eridu. No mercy to be expected there.
She twisted the ring back outward on her finger and thrust her hand high
in the air.
“Harm him not!” she cried, as sternly as she could. “I am the Seer of
Brennin. I carry the Baelrath on my hand and a magegift vellin stone about my
wrist!”
She was also hellishly weak, with a brutal pain in her side, and no idea
whatsoever of how she could hold them off.
Ceriog seemed to have an intuition about that, or else was so goaded by
the presence of the dwarf that he was beyond deterrence. He smiled thinly,
through his tattoos and his dark beard.
“I like that,” he said, gazing at the Baelrath. “It will be a pretty toy
to carry for the hours we have left before the rains come west and we all turn
black and die. First, though,” he murmured, “I am going to kill the Dwarf very
slowly, while you watch.”
She wasn’t going to be able to stop him. She was a Seer, a summoner. A
storm crow on the winds of war. She could wake power, and gather it, and
sometimes to do so she could flame red and fly between places, between worlds.
She had two souls within her, and she carried the burden of the Baelrath on
her finger and in her heart. But she could not stop a man with a blade, let
alone fifty of them, driven mad by grief and fury and awareness of coming
death.
Brock moaned. Kim felt his life’s blood soaking through her clothing as
she held his head in her lap. She glared up at Ceriog. Tried one last time.
“Listen to me—” she began.
“While you watch,” he repeated, ignoring her.
“I think not,” said Dalreidan. “Leave them alone, Ceriog.”
The Eridun wheeled. A twisted light of pleasure shone in his dark face.
“You will stop me, old man?”
“I shouldn’t have to,” Dalreidan said calmly. “You are no fool. You heard
what she said: the Seer of Brennin. With whom else and how else will we stop
what is coming?”
The other man seemed scarcely to have heard. “For a Dwarf?” he snarled.
“You would intercede, now, for a Dwarf?” His voice skirled upward with growing
incredulity. “Dalreidan, this has been coming between us for a long time.”
“It need not come. Only hear reason. I seek no leadership, Ceriog. Only
to—”
“Only to tell the leader what he may or may not do!” said Ceriog
viciously. There was a frozen half second of stillness, then Ceriog’s arm
whipped forward and his dagger flew—
—over the shoulder of Dalreidan, who had dived and rolled and was up
again in a move the Plain had seen rehearsed from horseback for past a
thousand years. No one had seen his own blade drawn, nor had they seen it
thrown.
They did see it, all of them, buried in Ceriog’s heart. And an instant
later, after the shock had passed, they saw also that the dead Eridun was
smiling as might one who has found release from overmastering pain.
Kim was suddenly aware of the silence. Of the sun overhead, the finger of
the breeze, the weight of Brock’s head in her lap—details of time and place
made unnaturally vivid by the explosion of violence.
Which had come and was gone, leaving this stillness of fifty people in a
high place. Dalreidan walked over to retrieve his blade. His steps were loud
on the rocks. No one spoke. Dalreidan knelt and, pulling the dagger free,
cleaned it of blood on the dead man’s sleeve. Slowly he rose again and looked
around the ring of faces.
“First blade was his,” he said.
There was a stir, a loosening of strain, as if every man there had been
holding his breath.
“It was,” said an Eridun quietly, a man older even than Dalreidan
himself, with his green tattoos sunken deep in the wrinkles of his face.
“Revenge lies not in such a cause, neither by the laws of the Lion nor the
code of the mountains.”
Slowly, Dalreidan nodded his head. “I know nothing of the former and too
much of the latter,” he said, “but I think you will know that I had no desire
for Ceriog’s death, and none at all to take his place. I will be gone from
this place. I will be gone from this place within the hour.”
There was another stir at that. “Does it matter?” young Faebur asked.
“You need not go, not with the rain coming so soon.”
And that, Kim realized, brought things back round to her. She had
recovered from the shock—Ceriog’s was not the first violent death she’d seen
in Fionavar—and she was ready when all their eyes swung to where she sat.
“It may not come,” she said, looking at Faebur. The Baelrath was still
alive, flickering, but not intensely so.
“You are truly the Seer of Brennin?” he asked.
She nodded. “On a journey for the High King with this Dwarf, Brock of
Banir Tal. Who fled the twin mountains to bring us tidings of the treachery of
others.”
“A dwarf in the service of Ailell?” Dalreidan asked.
She shook her head. “Of his son. Ailell died more than a year ago, the
day the Mountain flamed. Aileron rules in Paras Derval.”
Dalreidan’s mouth crooked wryly. “News,” he said, “is woven slowly in the
mountains.”
“Aileron?” Faebur interjected. “We heard a tale of him in Larak. He was
an exile, wasn’t he?”
Kim heard the hope in his voice, the unspoken thought. He was very young;
the beard concealed it only partially. “He was,” she said gently. “Sometimes
they go back home.”
“If,” the older Eridun interposed, “there is a home to go back to. Seer,
can you stop the rain?”
She hesitated, looking beyond him, east to where the clouds were piled
high. She said, “I cannot, not directly. But the High King has others in his
service, and by the Sight I have I know that some of them are sailing even now
to the place where the death rain is being shaped, just as the winter was. And
if we stopped the winter, then—”
“—then we can end the rain!” a deep voice rumbled, low and fierce. She
looked down. His eyes were open.
“Oh, Brock!” she cried.
“Aboard that ship,” the Dwarf went on, speaking slowly but with clarity,
“will be Loren Silvercloak and my lord, Matt Sören, true King of the Dwarves.
If any people alive can save us, it is the two of them.” He stopped, breathing
heavily.
Kim held him close, overwhelmed for an instant with relief. “Careful,”
she said. “Try not to talk.”
He looked up at her. “Don’t worry so much,” he said. “Your forehead will
set in a crease.” She gave a little gasp of laughter. “It takes a great deal,”
he went on, “to kill a Dwarf. I need a bandage to keep the blood out of my
eyes, and a good deal of water to drink. Then, if I can have an hour’s rest in
the shade, we can go on.”
He was still bleeding. Kim found that she was crying and clutching his
burly chest far too hard. She loosened her grip and opened her mouth to say
the obvious thing.
摘要：

PARTI—TheLostKaniorChapter1“Doyouknowthewishofyourheart?”Once,whenKimFordwasanundergraduate,youngforuniversityandyoungforherage,someonehadaskedherthatquestionovercappuccinoonafirstdate.She’dbeenveryimpressed.Later,ratherlessyoung,she’doftensmiledatthememoryofhowclosehe’dcometogettingherintobedonthes...

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