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.

If they could create enough chaos and panic among the svarts, Metran might just be moved to turn his defensive shield into an attacking pulse leveled at the South Keep invaders.

“And when he does that,” Loren said grimly, “if I time it right and he doesn’t know I’m with you, Matt and I may have a chance at the Cauldron.”

No one said anything about what would happen when Metran’s might, augmented by the svart alfar and the inherent power of Cader Sedat, hit the South Keep men.

There was, really, nothing to say. This was what they had come to do.