White Gold Wielder

  The power they emanated should have abashed Covenant, though it was not on the same scale as Kevin’s. But he had no percipience with which to taste their peril. Or perhaps his ruinous intent called that danger by another name. His whole body seemed to yearn toward them as if they had come to comfort him.

  To shore up his resolve, so that he would not falter from the destruction of the Earth.

  And why not? In that way they would be granted rest from the weary millennia of their vigil.

  Must, Linden thought. The alternative was altogether terrible. Yes. Her clothes soaked, her hair damp and heavy against her neck, she strode down into the gathering; and her rage shaped the night.

  Covenant’s Dead were potent and determined. At one time, she would have been at their mercy. But now her passion dominated them all. They turned toward her and fell silent in mingled surprise, pain, refusal. Bannor’s face closed against her. Elena’s was sharp with consternation. Mhoram and Foamfollower looked at her as if she cast their dreams into confusion.

  But only Covenant spoke. “Linden!” he breathed thickly, like a man who had just been weeping. “You look awful. What’s happened to you?”

  She ignored him. Stalking through the drizzle, she went to confront his friends.

  They shone a ghostly silver that transcended moonlight. The rain fell through their incorporeal forms. Yet their eyes were keen with the life which Andelain’s Earthpower and the breaking of the Law of Death made possible for them. They stood in a loose arc before her. None of them quailed.

  Behind her, Covenant’s loss and love and incomprehension poured into the night But they did not touch her. Kevin had finally opened her eyes, enabled her to see what the man she loved had become.

  She met the gazes of the Dead one by one. The flat blade of Mhoram’s nose steered him between the extremes of his vulnerability and strength. Elena’s eyes were wide with speculation, as if she were wondering what Covenant saw in Linden. Bannor’s visage wore the same dispassion with which Brinn had denounced her after the company’s escape from Bhrathairealm. The soft smile that showed through Foamfollower’s jutting beard underscored his concern and regret.

  For a fraction of a moment, Linden nearly faltered. Foamfollower was the Pure One who had redeemed the jheherrin. He had once walked into lava to aid Covenant. Elena had been driven into folly at least in part by her love for the man who had raped her mother. Bannor had served the Unbeliever as faithfully as Brinn or Cail. And Mhoram— Linden and Covenant had embraced in his bed as if it were a haven.

  But it had not been a haven. She had been wrong about that, and the truth appalled her. In her arms in Mhoram’s bed, Covenant had already decided on desecration—had already become certain of it. It is his intent to place the white ring into Lord Foul’s hand. After he had sworn that he would not. Anguish surged up in her. Her cry ripped fiercely across the rain.

  “Why aren’t you ashamed?”

  Then her passion began to blow like a high wind. She fanned it willingly, wanted to snuff out, punish, eradicate if she could the faces silver-lit and aghast in front of her.

  “Have you been dead so long that you don’t know what you’re doing anymore? Can’t you remember from one minute to the next what matters here? This is Andelain! He’s saved your souls at least once. And you want him to destroy it!

  “You.” She jabbed accusations at Elena’s mixed disdain and compassion. “Do you still think you love him? Are you that arrogant? What good have you ever done him? None of this would’ve happened if you hadn’t been so eager to rule the dead as well as the living.”

  Her denunciation pierced the former High Lord. Elena tried to reply, tried to defend herself; but no words came. She had broken the Law of Death. The blame of the Sunbane was as much hers as Covenant’s. Stricken and grieving, she wavered, lost force, and went out, leaving a momentary afterglow of silver in the rain.

  But Linden had already turned on Bannor.

  “And you. You with your bloody self-righteousness. You promised him service. Is that what you call this? Your people are sitting on their hands in Revelstone when they should be here! Hollian was killed because they didn’t come with us to fight those ur-viles. Caer-Caveral is dead and it’s only a matter of lime before Andelain starts to rot. But never mind that. Aren’t you satisfied with letting Kevin ruin the Land once?” She flung the back of her hand in Covenant’s direction. “They should be here to stop him!”

  Bannor had no answer. He cast a glance like an appeal at Covenant; then he, too, faded away. Around the hollow, the darkness deepened.

  Fuming, Linden swung toward Foamfollower.

  “Linden, no,” Covenant grated. “Stop this.” He was close to fire. She could feel the burning in his veins. But his demand did not make her pause. He had no right to speak to her. His Dead had betrayed him—and now he meant to betray the Land.

  “And you. Pure One! You at least I would’ve expected to care about him more than this. Didn’t you learn anything from watching your people die, seeing that Raver rip their brains out? Do you think desecration is desirable?” The Giant flinched. Savagely she went on, “You could’ve prevented this. If you hadn’t given him Vain. If you hadn’t tried to make him think you were giving him hope, when what you were really doing was teaching him to surrender. You’ve got him believing he can afford to give in because Vain or some other miracle is going to save the world anyway. Oh, you’re Pure all right. Foul himself isn’t that Pure.”

  “Chosen—” Foamfollower murmured, “Linden Avery—” as if he wanted to plead with her and did not know how. “Ah, forgive. The Landwaster has afflicted you with this pain. He does not comprehend. The vision which he lacked in life is not supplied in death. The path before you is the way of hope and doom, but he perceives only the outcome of his own despair. You must remember that he has been made to serve the Despiser. The ill of such service darkens his spirit. Covenant, hear me. Chosen, forgive!”

  Shedding gleams in fragments, he disappeared into the dark.

  “Damnation!” Covenant rasped. “Damnation!” But now his curses were not directed at Linden. He seemed to be swearing at himself. Or at Kevin.

  Transported out of all restraint, Linden turned at last to Mhoram.

  “And you,” she said, as quiet as venom. “You. They called you ‘seer and oracle.’ That’s what I’ve heard. Every time I turn around, he tells me he wishes you were with him. He values you more than anyone.” Her anger and grief were one, and she could not contain them. Fury that Covenant had been so misled; tearing rue that he trusted her too little to share his burdens, that he preferred despair and destruction to any love or companionship which might ease his responsibilities. “You should have told him the truth.”

  The Dead High Lord’s eyes shone with silver tears—yet he did not falter or vanish. The regret he emitted was not for himself: it was for her. And perhaps also for Covenant. An aching smile twisted his mouth. “Linden Avery”—he made her name sound curiously rough and gentle—“you gladden me. You are worthy of him. Never doubt that you may justly stand with him in the trial of all things. You have given sorrow to the Dead. But when they have bethought themselves of who you are, they will be likewise gladdened. Only this I urge of you: strive to remember that he also is worthy of you.”

  Formally he touched his palms to his forehead, then spread his arms wide in a bow that seemed to bare his heart. “My friends!” he said in a voice that rang, “I believe that you will prevail!”

  Still bowing, he dissolved into the rain and was gone.

  Linden stared after him dumbly. Under the cool touch of the drizzle, she was suddenly hot with shame.

  But then Covenant spoke. “You shouldn’t have done that.” The effort he made to keep himself from howling constricted his voice. “They don’t deserve it.”

  In response, Kevin’s Must! shouted through her, leaving no room for remorse. Mhoram and the others belonged to Covenant’s past, not hers. They had dedicated themselves to the
ruin of everything for which she had ever learned to care. From the beginning, the breaking of the Law of Death had served only the Despiser. And it served him still.

  She did not turn to Covenant. She feared that the mere shape of him, barely discernible through the dark, would make her weep like the Hills. Harshly she replied, “That’s why you did it, isn’t it. Why you made the Haruchai stay behind. After what Kevin did to the Bloodguard, you knew they would try to stop you.”

  She felt him strive for self-mastery and fail. He had met his Dead with an acute and inextricable confusion of pain and joy which made him vulnerable now to the cut of her passion. “You know better than that,” he returned. “What in hell did Kevin say to you?”

  Bitter as the breath of winter, she rasped, “ ‘I’ll never give him the ring. Never.’ How many times do you think you said that? How many times did you promise—?” Abruptly, she swung around, her arms raised to strike out at him—or to ward him away. “You incredible bastard!” She could not see him, but her senses picked him precisely out of the dark. He was as rigid and obdurate as an icon of purpose carved of raw granite hurt. She had to rage at him in order to keep herself from crying out in anguish. “Next to you, my father was a hero. At least he didn’t plan to kill anybody but himself.” Black echoes hosted around her, making the night heinous. “Haven’t you even got the guts to go on living?”

  “Linden.” She felt intensely how she pained him, how every word she spat hit him like a gout of vitriol. Yet instead of fighting her he strove for some comprehension of what had happened to her. “What did Kevin say to you?”

  But she took no account of his distress. He meant to betray her. Well, that was condign: what had she ever done to deserve otherwise? But his purpose would also destroy the Earth—a world which in spite of all corruption and malice still nurtured Andelain at its heart, still treasured Earthpower and beauty. Because he had given up. He had walked into the Banefire as if he knew what he was doing—and he had let the towering evil burn the last love out of him. Only pretense and mockery were left.

  “You’ve been listening to Findail,” she flung at him. “He’s convinced you it’s better to put the Land out of its misery than to go on fighting. I was terrified to tell you about my mother because I thought you were going to hate me. But this is worse. If you hated me, I could at least hope you might go on fighting.”

  Then sobs thronged up in her. She barely held them back. “You mean everything to me. You made me live again when I might as well have been dead. You convinced me to keep trying. But you’ve decided to give up.” The truth was as plain as the apprehension which etched him out of the wet dark. “You’re going to give Foul your ring.”

  At that, a stinging pang burst from him. But it was not denial. She read it exactly. It was fear. Fear of her recognition. Fear of what she might do with the knowledge.

  “Don’t say it like that,” he whispered. “You don’t understand.” He appeared to be groping for some name with which to conjure her, to compel acquiescence—or at least an abeyance of judgment “You said you trusted me.”

  “You’re right,” she answered, grieving and weeping and raging all at once. “I don’t understand.”

  She could not bear any more. Whirling from him, she fled into the rain. He cried after her as if something within him were being torn apart; but she did not stop.

  Sometime in the middle of the night, the drizzle took on the full force of a summer storm. A cold, hard downpour pelted the Hills: wind sawed at the boughs and brush. But Linden did not seek shelter. She did not want to be protected. Covenant had already taken her too far down that road, warded her too much from the truth. Perhaps he feared her—was ashamed of what he meant to do and so sought to conceal it. But during the dark night of Andelain she did him the justice of acknowledging that he had also tried to protect her for her own sake—first from involvement in Joan’s distress and the Land’s need, then from the impact of Lord Foul’s evil, then from the necessary logic of his death. And now from the implications of his despair. So that she would be free of blame for the loss of the Earth.

  She did him that justice. But she hated it. He was a classic case: people who had decided on suicide and had no wish to be saved typically became calm and certain before taking their lives. Sheer pity for him would have broken her heart if she had been less angry.

  Her own position would have been simpler if she could have believed him evil. Or if she had been sure that he had lost his mind. Then her only responsibility would have been to stop him at whatever cost. But the most terrible aspect of her dilemma was that his fused certainty betrayed neither madness nor malice to her health-sense. In the grip of an intent which was clearly insane or malign, he appeared more than ever to be the same strong, dangerous, and indomitable man with whom she had first fallen in love. She had never been able to refuse him.

  Yet Kevin had loved the Land as much as anyone, and his protest beat at her like the storm. When evil rises in its full power, it surpasses truth and may wear the guise of good without fear.

  Evil or crazy. Unless she fought her way into him, wrestled his deepest self-conceptions away from him and looked at them, she had no way to tell the difference.

  But once before when she had entered him, trying to bring him back from the silence imposed on his spirit by the Elohim, he had appeared to her in the form of Marid—an innocent man made monstrous by a Raver and the Sunbane. A tool for the Despiser.

  Therefore she fled him, hastened shivering and desperate among the Hills. She could not learn the truth without possessing him. And possession itself was evil. It was a kind of killing, a form of death. She had already sacrificed her mother to the darkness of her unhealed avarice for the power of death.

  She did not seek shelter because she did not want it. She fled from Covenant because she feared what a confrontation with him would entail. And she kept on walking while the storm blew and rushed around her because she had no alternative. She was traveling eastward, toward the place where the sun would rise—toward the high crouched shoulders and crown of Mount Thunder.

  Toward Lord Foul.

  Her aim was as grim as lunacy—yet what else could she do? What else but strive to meet and outface the Despiser before Covenant arrived at his crisis? There was no other way to save him without possessing him—without exposing herself and him and the Land to the hot ache of her capacity for blackness.

  That’s right, she thought. I can do it I’ve earned it.

  She knew she was lying to herself. The Despiser would be hideously stronger than any Raver; and she had barely survived the simple proximity of samadhi Sheol. Yet she persisted. In spite of the night, and of the storm which sealed away the moon and the stars, she saw as clearly as vision that her past life was like the Land, a terrain possessed by corruption. She had let the legacy of her parents denude her of ordinary health and growth, had allowed a dark desire to rule her days like a Raver. In a sense, she had been possessed by hate from the moment when her father had said to her, You never loved me anyway—a hatred of life as well as of death. But then Covenant had come into her existence as he had into the Land, changing everything. He did not deserve despair. And she had the right to confront the Despite which had warped her, quenched her capacity for love, cut her off from the vitality of living. The right and the necessity.

  Throughout the night, she went on eastward. Gradually the storm abated, sank back to a drizzle and then blew away, unveiling a sky so star-bedizened and poignant that it seemed to have been washed clean. The slim curve of the moon setting almost directly behind her told her that her path was true. The air was cold on her sodden clothes and wet skin: her hair shed water like shivers down her back. But Andelain sustained her. Opulent under the unfathomable heavens, it made all things possible. Her heart lifted against its burdens. She kept on walking.

  But when she crossed a ridge and met the first clear sight of the sunrise, she stopped—froze in horror. The slopes and trees were heavy with raindrop
s; and each bead caught the light in its core, echoing back a tiny piece of daybreak to the sun, so that all the grass and woods were laced with gleams.

  Yellow gleams fatally tinged by vermilion.

  The sun wore a halo of pestilence as the Sunbane rose over the Hills.

  It was so faint that only her sight could have discerned it. But it was there. The rapine of the Land’s last beauty had begun.

  For a long moment, she remained still, surprised into her old paralysis by the unexpected swiftness with which the Sunbane attacked Andelain’s residual Law. She had no power. There was nothing she could do. But her heart scrambled for defenses—and found one. Her friends lacked her Land-bred senses. They would not see the Sunbane rising toward them; and so the Giants would not seek stone to protect themselves. They would be transformed like Marid into creatures of destruction and self-loathing.

  She had left them leagues behind, could not possibly return to warn them in time. But she had to try. They needed her.

  Abandoning all other intents, she launched herself in a desperate run back the way she had come.

  The valley below the ridge was still deep in shadow. She was racing frenetically, and her eyes were slow to adjust. Before she was halfway down the hillside, she nearly collided with Vain.

  He seemed to loom out of the crepuscular air without transition, translated instantly across the leagues. But as she reeled away from him, staggered for balance, she realized that he must have been trailing her all night. Her attention had been so focused on her thoughts and Andelain that she had not felt his presence.

  Behind him in the bottom of the valley were Covenant, the First, and Pitchwife. They were following the Demondim-spawn.

  After two nights without rest. Covenant looked haggard and febrile. But determination glared from his strides. He would not have stopped to save his life—not with Linden traveling ahead of him into peril. He did not look like the kind of man who could submit to despair.