White Gold Wielder (23 page)

The reaction of the wedge was almost immediate. Suddenly all the Waynhim pivoted to the left; and that corner of the formation became their apex. Sweeping Hamako along, they drove for the breach the Giants had made in the attack.

The
arghuleh
were slow to understand what was happening. The wedge was half free of the fray before the ice-beasts turned to try to prevent the retreat.

Pitchwife went down under two
arghuleh
. Honninscrave and Mistweave sprang to his aid like sledgehammers, yanked him out of the wreckage. A net took hold of the First. The leader of the wedge scored it to shreds. Frenetically the Waynhim and the Giants struggled toward Covenant.

They were not swift enough to outrun the
arghuleh
. In moments, they would be engulfed again.

But the Waynhim had understood the Giants. Abruptly the wedge parted, spilling Hamako and a score of companions in Covenant’s direction. Then the
rhysh
reclosed their formation and attacked again.

With the help of the Giants, the wedge held back the
arghuleh
while Hamako and his comrades sped toward Covenant and Linden.

Covenant started shouting at Hamako before the Stonedownor neared him; but Hamako stopped a short distance away, silenced Covenant with a gesture. “You have done your part, ring-wielder,” he panted as his people gathered about him. “The name of the
croyel
is known among the Waynhim.” He had to raise his voice: the creatures were chanting a new invocation. “We lacked only the knowledge that the force confronting us was indeed
croyel
.” An invocation Covenant had heard before. “What must be done is clear. Come no closer.”

As if to enforce his warning, Hamako drew a stone dirk from his belt.

Recognition stung through Covenant. He was familiar with that knife. Or one just like it. It went with the invocation. He tried to call out, Don’t! But the protest failed in his mouth. Perhaps Hamako was right. Perhaps only such desperate measures could hope to save the embattled
rhysh
.

With one swift movement, the Stonedownor drew a long incision across the veins on the back of his hand.

The cut did not bleed. At once, he handed the dirk to a Waynhim. Quickly it sliced the length of its palm, then passed the knife to its neighbor. Taking hold of Hamako’s hand, the Waynhim pressed its cut to his. While the invocation swelled, the two of them stood there, joined by blood.

When the Waynbim stepped back, Hamako’s eyes were acute with power.

In this same way, his
rhysh
had given Covenant the strength to run without rest across the whole expanse of the Center Plains in pursuit of Linden, Sunder, and Hollian. But that great feat had been accomplished with the vitality of only eight Waynhim; and Covenant had barely been able to contain so much might. There were twenty creatures ranged around Hamako.

The second had already completed its gift.

One by one, his adopted people cut themselves for him, pressed their blood into him. And each infusion gave him a surge of energy which threatened to burst his mortal bounds.

It was too much. How could one human being hope to hold that much power within the vessel of ordinary thew and tissue? Watching, Covenant feared that Hamako would not survive.

Then he remembered the annealed grief and determination he had seen in Hamako’s eyes; and he knew the Stonedownor did not mean to survive.

Ten Waynhim had given their gift. Hamako’s skin had begun to burn like tinder in the freezing air. But he did not pull back, and his companions did not stop.

At his back, the battle was going badly. Covenant’s attention had been fixed on Hamako: he had not seen how the
arghuleh
had contrived to split the wedge. But the formation was in two pieces now, each struggling to focus its halved strength, each unable to break through the ice to rejoin the other. More Waynhim had fallen; more were falling. Ice crusted the Giants so heavily that they seemed hardly able to move. They fought heroically; but they were no match for beasts which could be brought back from death. Soon sheer fatigue would overcome them, and they would be lost for good and all.

“Go!” Covenant panted to Cail. Icicles of blood splintered from his elbow when he moved his arm. “Help them!”

But the
Haruchai
did not obey. In spite of the ancient friendship between the Giants and his people, his face betrayed no nicker of concern. His promise of service had been made to Covenant rather than to the First; and Brinn had commanded him to his place.

Hellfire! Covenant raged. But his ire was directed at himself. He could tear his flesh until it fell from the bones; but he could not find his way out of the snare Lord Foul had set for him.

Fifteen Waynhim had given blood to Hamako. Sixteen. Now the Stonedownor’s radiance was so bright that it seemed to tug involuntary fire from Covenant’s ring. The effort of withholding it reft him of balance and vision. Pieces of midnight wheeled through him. He did not see the end of the Waynhim gift, could not witness the manner in which Hamako bore it.

But as that power withdrew toward the
arghuleh
, Covenant straightened his legs, pushed himself out of Cail’s grasp, and sent his gaze like a cry after the Stonedownor.

Half naked in the low sunlight and the tremendous cold, Hamako shone like a cynosure as he flashed through the ice-beasts. The sheer intensity of his form melted the nearest attackers as if a furnace had come among them. From place to place within the fray he sped, clearing a space around the Giants, opening the way for the Waynhim to reform their wedge; and behind him billowed dense clouds of vapor which obscured him and the battle, made everything uncertain.

Then Linden shouted, “There!”

All the steam burned away, denaturing so fiercely that the ice seemed to become air without transition and the scene of the combat was as vivid as the waste. Scores of
arghuleh
still threw themselves madly against the wedge. But they had stopped using their ice to support each other. And some of them were attacking their fellows, tearing into each other as if the purpose which had united them a moment ago had been forgotten.

Beyond the chaos, Hamako stood atop the leader of the
arghuleh
. He had vaulted up onto the high back of the strangely doubled beast and planted himself there, pitting his power squarely against the creature and its
croyel
.

The beast did not attempt to topple him, bring him within reach of its limbs and maws. And he struck no blows. Their struggle was simple: fire against ice, white heat against white cold. He shone like a piece of the clean sun; the
arghule
glared bitter chill. Motionless they aimed what they had become at each other; and the entire plain rang and blazed to the pitch of their contest.

The strain of so much quintessential force was too much for Hamako’s mortal flesh to sustain. In desperate pain, he began to melt like a tree under the desert avatar of the Sunbane. His legs slumped; the skin of his limbs spilled away; his features blurred. A cry that had no shape stretched his mouth.

But while his heart beat he was still alive—tempered to his purpose and indomitable. The focus of his given heat did not waver for an instant AU the losses he had suffered, all the loves which had been taken from him came together here; and he refused defeat. In spite of the ruin which sloughed away his flesh, he raised his arms, brandished them like sodden sticks at the wide sky.

And the double creature under him melted as well. Both
arghule
and
croyel
collapsed into water and slush until their deaths were inseparable from his—one stained pool slowly freezing on the faceless plain.

With an almost audible snap, the unnatural cold broke. Most of the
arghuleh
went on trying to kill each other until the
rhysh
drove them away; but the power they had brought with them was gone.

Linden was sobbing openly, though all her life she had taught herself to keep her grief silent. “Why?” she protested through her tears. “Why did they let him do it?”

Covenant knew why. Because Hamako had been twice bereft, when no man or woman or Waynhim should have had to endure such loss so much as once.

As the sun went down in red and rue beyond the western line of the escarpment. Covenant closed his eyes, hugged his bloody arm to his chest, and listened to the lamentation of the Waynhim rising into the dusk.

Though the night was moonless, the company resumed its journey shortly after the Waynhim had finished caring for their dead. The Giants were unwilling to submit to their weariness; and the pain Covenant shared with Linden made him loath to remain anywhere near the place of Hamako’s end. While Mistweave prepared a meal, Linden treated Covenant’s arm, washing it with
vitrim
, wrapping it in firm bandages. Then she required him to drink more
diamondraught
than he wanted. As a result, he could hardly keep himself awake as the company left the region of the last
rhyshyshim
. While several Waynhim guided the Giants up the escarpment, he strove against sleep. He knew what his dreams were going to be.

For a time, the hurt in his forearm helped him. But once the Giants had said their long, heart-felt farewells to the Waynhim, and had settled into a steady gait, striding southwestward as swiftly as the dim starlight permitted, he found that even pain was not enough to preserve him from nightmares.

In the middle of the night, he wrenched himself out of a vision of Hamako which had made him sweat anguish. With renewed fervor, he fought the effect of the
diamondraught
.

“I was wrong,” he said to the empty dark. Perhaps no one heard him over the muffled sound of the runners in the snow. He did not want anyone to hear him. He was not speaking to be heard. He only wanted to fight off sleep, stay away from dreams. “I should’ve listened to Mhoram.”

The memory was like a dream: it had the strange immanence of dreaming. But he clung to it because it was more tolerable than Hamako’s death.

When High Lord Mhoram had tried to summon him to the Land for the last battle against Lord Foul, he, Covenant, had resisted the call. In his own world, a small girl had just been bitten by a timber-rattler—a lost child who needed his help. He had refused Mhoram and the Land in order to aid that girl.

And Mhoram had replied
, Unbeliever, I release you. You turn from us to save life in your own world. We will not be undone by such motives. And if darkness should fall upon us, still the beauty of the Land endures—for you will not forget. Go in Peace
.

“I should’ve understood,” Covenant went on, addressing no one but the cold stars. “I should’ve given Seadreamer some kind of
caamora
. Should’ve found some way to save Hamako. Forget the risk. Mhoram took a terrible risk when he let me go. But anything worth saving won’t be destroyed by choices like that.”

He did not blame himself. He was simply trying to hold back nightmares of fire. But he was human and weary, and only the blankets wrapped around him held any warmth at all. Eventually his dreams returned.

He could not shake the image of Hamako’s weird immolation.

Without hope, he slept until sunrise. When he opened his eyes, he found that he was stretched out, not in the sled, but in blankets on the snow-packed ground. His companions were with him, though only Cail, Pitchwife, Vain, and Findail were awake. Pitchwife stirred the fagots of a small fire, watching the flames as if his heart were somewhere else.

Above him loomed a ragged cliff, perhaps two hundred feet high. The sun had not yet reached him; but it shone squarely on the bouldered wall, giving the stones a faint red hue like a reminder that beyond them lay the Sunbane.

While Covenant slept, the company had camped at the foot of Landsdrop.

Still groggy with
diamondraught
, he climbed out of his blankets, cradling his pain-stiff arm inside his robe next to the scar in the center of his chest. Pitchwife glanced at him absently, then returned his gaze to the fire. For the first time in many long days of exposure, no ice crusted the twisting lines of his visage. Though Covenant’s breath steamed as if his life were escaping from him, he was conscious that the winter had become oddly bearable—preferable to what lay ahead. The small fire was enough to steady him.

Left dumb by dreams and memories, Covenant stood beside the deformed Giant. He found an oblique comfort in Pitchwife’s morose silence. Surely Cail’s flat mien contained no comfort. The
Haruchai
were capable of grief and admiration and remorse; but Cail kept whatever he felt hidden. And in their opposite ways Vain and Findail represented the antithesis of comfort. Vain’s makers had nearly exterminated the Waynhim. And Findail’s yellow eyes were miserable with the knowledge he refused to share.

He could have told Hamako’s
rhysh
about the
croyel
. Perhaps that would not have altered Covenant’s plight—or Hamako’s. But it would have saved lives.

Yet when Covenant looked at the
Elohim
, he felt no desire to demand explanations. He understood Findail’s refusal to do anything which might relieve the pressure of his, Covenant’s, culpability. The pressure to surrender his ring.

He did not need explanations. Not yet. He needed vision, percipience. He wanted to ask the Appointed, Do you think she’s up to it? Is she that strong?

However, he already knew the answer. She was not that strong. But she was growing toward strength as if it were her birthright. Only her preterite self-contradictions held her back—that paralysis which gripped her when she was caught between the horror of what her father had done to her and the horror of what she had done to her mother, between her fundamental passions for and against death. And she had a better right to the wild magic than he did. Because she could see.

Around him, his companions began to stir. The First sat up suddenly, her sword in her hands: she had been dreaming of battle. As he rose stiffly to his feet, Honninscrave’s eyes looked strangely like Hamako’s, as if he had learned something
Grim
and sustaining from the example of the Stonedownor. Mistweave shambled upright like an image of confusion, a man baffled by his own emotions. The release and clarity of fighting the
arghuleh
had met some of his needs, but had not restored his sense of himself.