White Gold Wielder (40 page)

With both arms, it hit the floor so hard that the entire center of the Hall bucked and spattered like a sheet of water.

The mosaic cracked across its face, lifted in pieces, fell apart. Shrieking rage, Gibbon staggered to regain his balance, then cocked back his crozier to deliver a blast which would fry Nom’s flesh from its bones.

But he was maddened by strain and death-lust, and his blow required a moment’s preparation. He did not see the chief result of Nom’s attack.

That blow sent a fracture from wall to wall—a split which passed directly through the place where Honninscrave knelt in the stone. His bonds were shattered as if that had been Nom’s intent.

With a roar, Honninscrave charged the na-Mhoram.

Gibbon was too intensely focused on Nom, too precariously poised. He could not react in time. His human flesh had no defense as Honninscrave struck him a blow which seemed to crush his bones. His crozier clattered across the floor, rang against the base of a column, and lay still, deprived of fire.

The First cried Honninscrave’s name; but her voice appeared to make no sound in the stunned Hall.

For a moment, Honninscrave remained hunched and panting over Gibbon’s corpse. Covenant had time for one clear thought: You can’t kill a Raver that way. You can only kill the body.

Then the Master turned toward his companions; and Covenant nearly broke. He did not need Linden’s percipience to see what had happened, did not need to hear her anguished whisper. He had witnessed such horrors before. And Honninscrave’s plight was plain.

He stood as if he were still himself. His fists clenched as if he knew what he was doing. But his face was flowing like an hallucination, melting back and forth between savage glee and settled
Grim
resolve. He was Grimmand Honninscrave, the Master of Starfare’s Gem. And he was
samadhi
Sheol, the Raver that had led the Clave in Gibbon’s body.

At war with each other.

The entire battle was internal. Red flared into his eyes and glazed away. Grins bared his teeth, were fought back. Snarling laughter choked in his throat. When he spoke, his voice cracked and seized under the strain.

“Thomas Covenant.”

At once, his voice scaled upward out of control, crying,

“Madman! Madman!”

He forced it down again. “Earthfriend. Hear me.” The effort seemed to tear the muscles of his face. Helpless with power, Covenant watched in fever as Honninscrave wrestled for possession of his soul. Through his teeth, the Giant articulated like a death-gasp, “Heed the bidding of your despair. It must be done.”

At once, several piercing shrieks burst from him—the Raver’s staccato anguish, or Honninscrave’s. “Help him,” Linden panted, “Help him. Dear God.” But there was nothing anybody could do. She alone had the capacity to interfere in such a struggle—and if she made the attempt, Covenant meant to stop her. If
samadhi
Sheol sprang from Honninscrave to her, it would have access to the wild magic through her.

Retching for air, Honninscrave gained the mastery.

“You must slay me.” The words bled from his lips, but they were distinct and certain. His face turned murderous, then regained its familiar lines. “I will contain this Raver while you slay me. In that way, it also will be slain. And I will be at peace.”

Sheol writhed for freedom; but Honninscrave held.

“I beg of you.”

Covenant let out a groan of fire; but it went nowhere near the Giant. The First gripped her sword in both fists until her arms trembled; but her tears blinded her, and she could not move. Cail folded his arms across his chest as if he were deaf.

Linden was savage with suppressed weeping. “Give me a knife. Somebody give me a knife. Oh God damn you all to hell. Honninscrave.” But she had no knife, and her revulsion would not let her go any closer to the Raver.

Yet Honninscrave was answered.

By Nom, the Sandgorgon of the Great Desert.

The beast waited a moment for the others to act, as if it understood that they all had to pass through this crisis and be changed. Then it padded over to Honninscrave, its strange knees tense with strength. He watched it come while the Raver in him gibbered and yowled. But he was the Master now in a way which surpassed
samadhi
Sheol, and his control did not slip.

Slowly, almost gently, Nom placed its arms around his waist. For an instant, his eyes gazed toward his companions and yearned as if he wished to say farewell—wished poignantly at the last that he had found some way to go on living. Then, with a wrench as unexpected as an act of kindness, the Sandgorgon crumpled him to the floor.

As if he were not in tears, Covenant thought dumbly, You can’t kill a Raver that way. But he was not sure anymore. There were mysteries in the world which even Lord Foul could not corrupt.

Linden gave a gasp as if her own bones had broken. When she raised her head, her eyes were bright and hungry for the power to exact retribution.

Stiffly the First started toward the body of her friend.

Before she reached him, Nom turned; and Cail said as if even his native dispassion were not proof against surprise, “The Sandgorgon speaks.”

Covenant could not clear his sight. All his peripheral vision was gone, blackened by imminent combustion.

“It speaks in the manner of the
Haruchai
.” Faint lines of perplexity marked the space between Cail’s brows. “Its speech is alien—yet comprehensible.”

His companions stared at him.

“It says that it has rent the Raver. It does not say slain. The word is ‘to rend.’ The Raver has been rent. And the shreds of its being Nom has consumed.” With an effort, Cail smoothed the frown from his forehead. “Thus has the Sandgorgon gained the capacity for such speech.”

Then the
Haruchai
faced Covenant, “Nom gives you thanks, ur-Lord.”

Thanks, Covenant grieved. He had let Honninscrave die. Had failed to defeat Gibbon. He did not deserve thanks. And he had no time. All his time had been used up. It was too late for sorrow. His skin had a dark, sick underhue; his sense of himself was fraying away. A gale of blackness rose in him, and it demanded an answer. The answer he had learned in nightmares. From Linden and the First and Cail and Nom and fallen Honninscrave he turned away as if he were alone and walked like a mounting flicker of fire out of the Hall of Gifts.

But when he put his feet to the stairs, a hand closed around his mind, and he stopped. Another will imposed itself on his, taking his choices from him.

Please
, it said.
Please don’t
.

Though he had no health-sense and was hardly sane, he recognized Linden’s grasp. She was possessing him with her percipience.

Don’t do this to yourself
.

Through the link between them, he knew that she was weeping wildly. But behind her pain shone a fervid passion. She would not permit him to end it this way. Not allow him to go willingly out of her life.

I can’t let you
.

He understood her. How could he not? She was too vulnerable to everything. She saw that his control was almost gone. And his purpose must have been transparent to her; his desperation was too extreme to elude her discernment. She was trying to save him.

You mean too much
.

But this was not salvation: it was doom. She had misinterpreted his need for her. What could she hope to do with him when his madness had become irremediable? And how would she be able to face the Despiser with the consequences of possession chained about her soul?

He did not try to fight her with fire. He refused to risk harming her. Instead, he remembered the imposed silence of the
Elohim
and the delirium of venom. In the past, either defense had sufficed to daunt her. Now he raised them together, sought deliberately to close the doors of his mind, shut her out.

She was stronger than ever. She had learned much, accepted much. She was acquainted with him in ways too intimate to be measured. She was crying hotly for him, and her desire sprang from the roots of her life. She clinched her will to his with a white grip and would not let him go.

To shut her out was hard, atrociously hard. He had to seal off half of himself as well as all of her, silence his own deep yearning. But she still did not comprehend him. She still feared that he was driven by the same self-pity grown to malice which had corrupted her father. And she had been too badly hurt by the horror of Gibbon’s power and Honninscrave’s death to be clear about what she was doing. At last he was able to close the door, to leave her behind as he started up the stairs again.

Lorn and aggrieved, her cry rose after him:

“I love you!”

It made him waver for a moment. But then be steadied himself and went on.

Borne by a swelling flood of black fire, he made his way toward the sacred enclosure. Twice he encountered bands of Riders who opposed him frenetically, as if they could sense his purpose. But be had become untouchable and was able to ignore them. Instinct and memory guided him to the base of the huge cavity in the heart of Revelstone where the Banefire burned.

It was here that the former inhabitants of the city had come together to share their communal dedication to the Land.

Within its sheer cylinder were balconies where the people had stood to hear the Lords speak from the dais below them. But that dais was gone now, replaced by a pit from which the Banefire licked blood for food.

At the nearest doorway he stopped. Findail stood there waiting for him.

The yellow anguish of the Appointed’s eyes had not changed. His face was a wasteland of fear and old pain. But the anger with which he had so often denounced Covenant was gone. In its place, the
Elohim
emitted simple rue. Softly he said, “You are going to your death, ring-wielder. I comprehend you now. It is a valiant hazard. I cannot answer for its outcome—and I know not how I will prove worthy of you. But I will not leave you.”

That touched Covenant as the
rukhs
of the Riders had not. It gave him the strength to go on into the sacred enclosure.

There the Banefire met him, howling like the furnace of the sun. Its flames raged as high as the upper balconies where the immense iron triangle of the
master
-
rukh
now rested, channeling the power of the Sunbane to the Clave. Its heat seemed to char his face instantly, sear his lungs, cinder the frail life of his flesh and rave through him into the last foundation of his will. The fang-marks on his forearm burned like glee. Yet he did not halt or hesitate. He had set his feet to this path of his own volition; he accepted it completely. Pausing only to bring down the
master
-
rukh
in molten rain so that the surviving Riders would be cut off from their strength, he moved into the inferno.

That is the grace which has been given to you
.

A small clear space like hope opened in his heart as he followed his dreams into the Banefire.

To bear what must be borne
.

After a time, the blackness in him burned white.

Held upright and active only by the fierce pressure of her need, Linden Avery walked numbly down through the ways of Revelstone, following the mounting stream of water inward. She had just left Nom on the upland plateau, where the Sandgorgon tended the channel it had brunted through sheer rock and dead soil from the outflow of Glimmermere to the upper entrance of the Keep; and the tarn’s untainted waters now ran past her along a path prepared for it by the First, Pitchwife, and a few
Haruchai
.

Pure in spite of the harsh ages of the Sunbane, those waters shone blue against the desert of the late afternoon sun until they began to tumble like rapids into Revelstone. Then torchlight glinted across their splashing rush so that they looked like the glee of mountains as they washed passages, turned at closed doors and new barricades, rolled whitely down stairways. The Giants were adept at stone, and they read the inner language of the Keep. The route they had designed led with surprising convolution and efficiency to Linden’s goal.

It was an open door at the base of the sacred enclosure, where the Banefire still burned as if Thomas Covenant had never stood within its heart and screamed against the heavens.

In rage and despair she had conceived this means of quenching the Clave’s power. When Covenant had turned away from the Hall of Gifts and his friends, she had seen where he was going; and she had understood him—or thought she understood. He meant to put an end to his life, so that he would no longer be a threat to what he loved. Like her father, possessed by self-pity. But, standing so near to Gibbon-Raver, she had learned that her own former visceral desire for death was in truth a black passion for power, for immunity from all death forever. And the way that blackness worked upon her and grew showed her that no one could submit to such hunger without becoming a servant of the Despiser. Covenant’s intended immolation would only seal his soul to Lord Foul.

Therefore she had tried to stop him.

Yet somehow he had remained strong enough to deny her. In spite of his apparently suicidal abjection, he had refused her completely. It made her wild.

In the Hall, the First had fallen deep into the grief of Giants. Nom had begun to belabor a great grave for Honninscrave, as if the gift the Master had given Revelstone and the Land belonged there. Cail had looked at Linden, expecting her to go now to aid the rest of the company, care for the wounded. But she had left them all in order to pursue Covenant to his doom. Perhaps she had believed that she would yet find a way to make him heed her. Or perhaps she had simply been unable to give him up.

His agony within the Banefire had nearly broken her. But it had also given her a focus for her despair. She had sent out a mental cry which had brought Nom and Cail running to her with the First between them. At the sight of what Covenant was doing, the First’s visage had turned gray with defeat. But when Linden had explained how the Banefire could be extinguished, the First had come instantly back to herself. Sending Cail to rally their companions, she had sped away with Nom to find the upland plateau and Glimmennere.