The One Tree

  Covenant was on his feet as if he had intended to rush to Kasreyn’s aid. Pressure for power and abomination of death shone from him like the onset of an involuntary ecstasy.

  Lifting back into human shape, Findail stepped away from the Kemper’s body. His visage was engraved with grief. Softly he said, “That which he bore was no son of his flesh. It was of the croyel—beings of hunger and sustenance which demnify the dark places of the Earth. Those who bargain thus for life or might with the croyel are damned beyond redemption.” His voice sounded like mist and tears. “Ring-wielder, are you content?”

  Covenant could not respond. He hung on the verge of eruption, had no choice but to flee the damage he was about to do. Fumbling for mastery, he went to the stairs. They seemed interminable. Yet somehow he withheld himself—a nerve-tearing effort he made more for Brinn’s sake than his own. So that Brinn would not die in the outcome.

  In the chamber below, he found the Haruchai. Brinn had choked the stair so effectively with fallen hustin that he had nothing to do except wait until the Guards farther down were able to clear their way.

  He looked a question at Covenant; but Covenant had no answer for him either. Trembling in every muscle, the Unbeliever unreined only enough wild magic to open the long dead gyre of the stairway. Then he went downward with Brinn and Findail behind him.

  Before he reached The Majesty, he lost control. Flame tore him out of himself. He became a blaze of destruction. The stairs lurched. Cracks leaped through the stone.

  Far above him, the top of Kemper’s Pitch began to crumble.

  TWENTY: Fire in Bhrathairealm

  Linden Avery could see and hear normally. Cail was steering her along a subterranean passage lit only at distant intervals by torches. The First and Honninscrave were ahead of her, following a woman who appeared to be the Lady Alif. Pitchwife and Seadreamer were nearby. Seadreamer cradled Ceer across his massive forearms. Vain moved like a shadow at the rear of the company. But Covenant was gone. Brinn and Findail were nowhere to be seen. Linden observed these facts as clearly as the light permitted. In a sense, she understood them. Her upper arms throbbed, especially where Cail had bruised her.

  But the reportage of her senses conveyed so little meaning that it might have been in an alien language. Covenant was gone. Behind what she saw and heard, behind her physical sensations, she was a child who had just lost a new friend; and nothing around her offered any solace for her grief.

  Because Cail drew her forward by the sore part of her arm, she went with him. But she was preoccupied with images like anticipations of bereavement, and that pain did not touch her.

  Later, the company arrived at a scene of destruction. A long chamber which had apparently been a Guard-room lay under the foundations of a section of the Sandhold’s outer wall. Now both were a jumbled slope of fallen wreckage leading toward the open night. Covenant was gone. The corpses of hustin sprawled or protruded at spots from the chaos the Sandgorgon had made. Stark against the stars, the rim of the Sandwall was visible through the breach.

  Without hesitation, the Lady Alif tried to climb the slope. But the ragged chunks of rock were too large for her. The First lifted the Lady onto her own strong back. Then she bounded upward.

  Honninscrave did the same with Linden. One of his huge hands locked her wrists together under his beard. His shoulders hurt her arms. She began remembering her father.

  In spite of his deformed chest and damaged head, Pitchwife ascended without difficulty. He was a Giant, familiar with stone and climbing. Call’s strength and balance compensated for his human stature. Vain was capable of anything. Only Seadreamer had trouble: holding Ceer, he did not have the assistance of his hands. But Pitchwife helped him. As rapidly as possible, the company went up into the night.

  When they reached the open sand within the Sandwall, the First set the Lady Alif down. Honninscrave lowered Linden to the ground. Now she saw that the hole in the First Circinate was matched by a breach in the Sandwall. Given time and freedom, the Sandgorgon could almost certainly have brought down the entire Sandhold. But apparently the thoughts of those beasts did not run to sustained destruction. Perhaps they had no thought of destruction at all, but simply broke down obstacles which stood between them and their obscure desires.

  In the distance rose the wail of sirens. Raw and shrill, like the crying of stone, the Sandhold’s outrage cut through the moonlight and the dark.

  But other cries were in Linden’s ears—her own screams as she begged at her dying father. Night had flooded her soul then, though her father had died in daylight. He had sat in a half-broken rocker in the attic with blood pouring like despair from his gashed wrists. She could smell the sweet reek of blood, feel her former nausea more explicitly than Call’s grasp on her arm. Her father had thrown the key out the window, enforcing his self-pity on her, denying her the power to save him. Darkness had risen at her out of the floorboards and the walls, out of his mouth—his mouth stretched black in fathomless abjection and triumph, the insatiable hunger for darkness. He had spattered blood like Hergrom’s on her. The attic which she had thought of as her personal haven had become horrible.

  The Lady Alif led the company westward, hastening toward the nearest stairs to the top of the Sandwall. She was too badly battered to sustain any pace faster than a quick walk. The First strode beside her. The chain Honninscrave carried clanked faintly over the scrunch and shuffle of feet. Repeatedly he surged ahead in his urgency for his ship. Cail drew Linden forward. Her steps were awkward on the sand, but the emptiness which had come upon her from Covenant made her helpless to resist. She was helpless to save her father. She had tried—tried everything her young mind had been able to conceive. In her last desperation, she had told him that she would not love him if he died. He had replied, You never loved me anyway. Then he had bled to death as if to demonstrate that his words were true: a lesson of darkness which had paralyzed her body for days afterward while it sank down into the roots of her being.

  Darkness. The light of a moon only one day from its full and already descending toward the west. Sirens. And then, in the shadow of the Sandwall, stairs.

  They were wide. The questers ascended them in a scant cordon around Linden and Cail, Seadreamer and Ceer. Linden’s exhausted flesh was not equal to this climb, this pace. But her past-locked mind made no effort to hang back against Cail’s insistence. Covenant was gone. Of all her companions, only Pitchwife seemed vulnerable to fatigue. The distortion of his chest cramped his lungs, exacerbated his movements, so that his respiration wheezed and his strides appeared to stagger. He might have been the only mortal friend Linden had.

  As she was drawn back into the moonlight, she stumbled involuntarily. Cail snatched her upright again like the shout which jerked across the Sandwall, piercing the ululation of the sirens anharmonically. “We are seen!” the Lady Alif panted. “Your pardon. I fear I have led you amiss.” Though she was struggling for breath, she bore herself bravely. “From the moment when I conceived the desire to exact from Kasreyn the price of my humiliation, all my choices have gone awry. We are discovered too soon.”

  “Covenant Giantfriend will obtain the payment you desire,” growled the First. She was staring toward the south. In answer to the shout, squat dark shapes had begun to appear there as hustin emerged from the inner passages of the Sandwall. “For the rest, have no fear.” Her fists anchored her courage to her new sword. “We are free in the night, with our way plain before us. We will live or die as we may, and no blame to you.”

  Like a glare of iron in the moonlight, she started toward the outer arm of the wall which led to Bhrathairain and the Harbor. The rest of the company followed as if she had become as certain as the long surge of the Sea.

  Dozens and then scores of the Guards came in pursuit, brandishing spears. They looked black and fatal against the pale stone. But they had been formed for strength rather than swiftness; and the company was able to remain ahead of them. For a short time, the child in Linden recov
ered a semblance of normalcy as her life settled into new patterns after her father’s death. Masked by the resilience of youth, she had lived as if the very bones of her personality had not been bent and reshaped by what had happened. Yet her mother’s continually reiterated self-pity and blame had eroded her as rocks were worn away by water. Pretending that she did not care, she had laid the foundation for all her later pretenses, all her denials. Even her commitment to the medical burden of life and death had taken the form of denial rather than affirmation.

  Covenant was gone. Her senses functioned normally, but she did not know that she was returning to herself slowly from the void where she had been left and lost by her efforts to save him. The company was nearing the arm of the Sandwall which formed the western courtyard between Bhrathairain and the Sandhold. And from that direction came pouring hustin like a flood along the top of the wall. Already the junction of the inner and outer walls was blocked.

  For a few strides, the First continued forward, narrowing the gap between her and the path she wished to take toward Bhrathairain Harbor. Then she halted so that the company would have a moment in which to prepare for battle.

  The Guards began closing rapidly. They made no sound except the clatter of their feet. They were creations of the Kemper’s will, lacking even the capacity for independent blood-lust or triumph. The Sandwall stood level with the rim of the First Circinate; but the Sandhold towered toward the stars for four more levels, dominating all that side of the firmament. There Kemper’s Pitch affronted the heavens. It seemed high beyond comprehension and as ineluctable as any doom. No flight could escape the purview of that eminence. Kasreyn’s lust for eternity was written where any eye might read it.

  Through the stone of the Pitch, Linden’s senses caught hints of white fire. They affected her like glimpses of her mother’s cancer. The sirens cried out like her mother’s terror.

  In a flat voice, Ceer demanded to be set down so that he would not hamper Seadreamer in the coming fight. At a nod from the First, Seadreamer lowered the injured Haruchai gently to his good leg.

  Around Linden, the Lady Alif, and Ceer, the four Giants and Cail placed themselves in a protective formation, at the points of a pentacle of combat.

  Linden saw what they were doing. But she understood only that they had turned their backs. The doctors had turned their backs on her mother. Not on her mother’s melanoma, which they fought with unremitting tenacity, careless of the battleground on which their struggle was waged. But to the older woman’s abjection they had been deaf and unheeding, as if they were unable to grasp the fact that she did not fear death as much as pain or slow suffocation. Her lungs were filling with a fluid which no postural drainage could relieve. She was afraid not of dying but of what dying cost, just as she had always been afraid of the cost of life.

  And there had been no one to listen to her except Linden herself. A girl of fifteen, with a black hunger where her soul should have been. Please, God, let me die. She had been alone in her mother’s room day after day because there had been no one else. Even the nurses had stopped coming, except as required by the doctors’ orders.

  The Lady Alif placed her back to Linden’s. Linden could not see any faces except Ceer’s and Vain’s. The Demondim-spawn was as blank as death. Sweat left trails of discounted pain down the sides of Ceer’s visage. Covenant was gone. In the moonlight, the hustin lost their human aspect, became beasts.

  The only sounds were the haste of heavy feet, the raw threat of the sirens, the First’s defiance. Then the massed Guards struck at both sides of the company at once.

  Their movements were sluggish and vague. Kasreyn’s mind was elsewhere, and they lacked precise instructions. Perhaps they could have destroyed the company immediately if they had simply stood back and thrown their spears. But they did not. Instead they charged forward, seeking combat hand-to-hand.

  The First’s blade shed faint lightning under the gleam of the moon. Honninscrave’s chain smashed about him like a bludgeon. Pitchwife rent a spear from the first hustin to assail him, then jabbed that razor-tip in the faces of his attackers. Seadreamer slapped weapons aside, stepped within range of the spears to fell Guards with both fists.

  Lacking the sheer bulk of the Giants, Cail could not match their blunt feats. But his swift precision surpassed the hustin. He broke the shafts in their hands, blinded their eyes, impelled them into collision with each other.

  Yet the top of the Sandwall thronged with Guards, and their numbers were irresistible. The First dealt out death around her, wielded her blade as suddenly as fire; but she could not prevent the gushing corpses from being thrust against her, could not keep the blood from making slick swaths under her feet. Honninscrave’s chain frequently tangled itself among the spears, and while he tore it free he was forced to retreat. Pitchwife held his position, but slew few hustin. And neither Seadreamer nor Cail could completely seal their sides of the defense. Guards threatened to break into the zone behind them.

  Kemper’s Pitch stood over the company as if Kasreyn’s attention were bent in that direction, slowly squeezing the questers in the fist of his malice. For an instant, abrupt wild magic made the high stone appear translucent; but it had no effect upon the hustin. The sirens screamed like the glee of ghouls.

  And a Guard slipped into the center of the defense.

  Charging massively forward, it aimed its spear at Linden.

  She did not move. She was snared by the old seduction of death—the preterite and immedicable conviction that any violence directed at her was condign, that she deserved the punishment she had always denied. Let me die! She had inherited that cry, and nothing would ever silence it. She deserved it. Her bereft gaze followed the advancing iron as if it were welcome.

  But then Ceer hopped in front of her. Half immobilized by the splints on his leg, the bindings around his shoulder, he could not defend her in any other way. Diving forward, he accepted the spear-tip in his belly.

  The blow drove him against her. They fell together to the stone.

  Savagely Seadreamer wheeled, broke the Guard’s back.

  Ceer sprawled across Linden’s legs. The weight of his life pinned her there. Blood tried to pour from his guts, but he jammed his fist into the wound. Around her, her companions fought at the edges of their lives, survived for moments longer because they were too stubborn to acknowledge defeat. Impressions of horror shone out of Kemper’s Pitch. But Linden was unable to lift her eyes from Ceer. The torn agony within him etched itself across her nerves. His features were empty of import; but his pain was as vivid as memory in her.

  His gaze focused on her face. It was acute with need. Moonlight burned like fever in his orbs. When he spoke, his voice was a whisper of blood panting between his lips.

  “Help me rise. I must fight.”

  She heard him—and did not hear him. Let me die! She had heard that appeal before, heard it until it had taken command of her. It had become the voice of her private darkness, her intimate hunger. The stone around her was littered with fallen spears, some whole, some broken. Unconsciously her hands found an iron-tipped section of wood as long as her forearm. When Gibbon-Raver had touched her, part of her had leaped up in recognition and lust: her benighted powerlessness had responded to power. And now that response came welling back from its fountainhead of violence. You never loved me anyway. Silence bereft her of the severe resolve which had kept that black greed under control. Power!

  Gripping the wood like a spike, she copied the decision which had shaped her life. Ceer lifted the fist from his belly too slowly to stop her. She raised both arms and tried to drive the spear-point down his throat.

  Cail kicked out at her. His foot caught the upper part of her right arm, where the bruises were deepest, made her miss her thrust and flop backward like a dismembered doll. The stone stunned her. For a moment, she could not breathe. Like her mother. Her head reeled as if she had been thrown into the sky. Her arm went numb from shoulder to fingertip.

  Sobbing fi
lled her mind. But to her outer hearing that grief sounded like the sharp dismay of animals. The hustin were wailing together—one loss in many throats. The fighting had stopped.

  Panting hugely, the First gasped, “Has she—?”

  Some of the Guards flung themselves from the parapet toward the Sandhold. Others shambled like cripples toward the nearest descents from the Sandwall. None of them remembered the company at all.

  “No,” replied Cail inflexibly. “Her intent failed. It is the wound which reaves him of life.” His voice held no possibility of forgiveness.

  Linden felt Ceer’s superficial weight being lifted from her legs. She did not know what she was saying. She possessed only a distant consciousness that there were words in her mouth.

  “You never loved me anyway.”

  Cail dragged her to her feet. His visage was adamantine in the moonlight. His hands vised her right arm; but she felt nothing there.

  The Giants were not looking at her. They stared up at Kemper’s Pitch as if they were entranced.

  High against the heavens, worms of white fire crawled through the stone, gnawing it inexorably to rubble. Already the top of the spire had begun to collapse. And moment by moment more of the Pitch crumbled, falling ponderously toward ruin. Wild magic glared against the dark dome of the sky. Havoc veined the base of Kasreyn’s tower like serpents.

  Through her teeth, the First breathed, “Thus have the hustin lost their master.”

  Faintly underfoot Linden sensed the plunge of the spire. And those vibrations were followed by other shocks as megalithic shards of stone crashed onto The Majesty.

  “Now,” Pitchwife coughed, “let us praise the name of Covenant Giantfriend—and pray that he may endure the destruction he has wrought. Surely The Majesty also will fall—and perhaps the Tier of Riches as well. Much will be lost, both lives and wealth.” His tone faded into an ache. “I will grieve for the Chatelaine, whom Kasreyn held in cruel thrall.”