White Gold Wielder (66 page)

When he understood that she was not talking about the Cavewights and Drool—that she was trying to say something rise entirely—Covenant stumbled. His throbbing arm struck the wall of the passage, and he nearly lost his balance. Pain made his arm dangle as if it were being dragged down by the inconceivable weight of his ring. She was talking about the hope which he had never admitted to himself—the hope that if he died he, too, might be brought back.

“Linden—” He did not wish to speak, to argue with her. They had so little time left. Fire gnawed up and down his arm. He needed to husband his determination. But she had already gone too far in his name. Swallowing his weakness, he said, “I don’t want to be resurrected.”

She did not look at him. Roughly he went on, “You’re going to go back to your own life. Sometime soon. And I won’t get to go with you. You know it’s too late to save me. Not back there. Where we come from, that kind of thing doesn’t happen. Even if I’m resurrected, I won’t get to go with you.

“If I can’t go with you”—he told her the truth as well as he could—“I’d rather stay with my friends. Mhoram and Foamfollower.” Elena and Bannor. Honninscrave. And the wait for Sunder and Hollian would not seem long to him.

She refused to hear him. “Maybe not,” she rasped. “Maybe we can still get back in time. I couldn’t save you before because your spirit wasn’t there—your will to live. If you would just stop giving up, we might still have a chance.” Her voice was husky with thwarted yearning. “You’re bruised and exhausted. I don’t know how you stay on your feet. But you haven’t been stabbed yet.” Her gaze flashed toward the faint scar in the center of his chest. “You don’t have to die.”

But he saw the grief in her eyes and knew that she did not believe her own protestation.

He drew her to a halt. With his good hand, he wrested his wedding band from its finger. His touch was cold and numb, as if he had no idea what he was doing. Fervent and silent as a prayer, he extended the ring toward her. Its unmarred argent cast glints of the wavering torchlight.

At once, tears welled in her eyes. Streaks of reflected fire flowed down the lines which severity and loss had left on either side of her mouth. But she gave the ring no more than a glance. Her gaze clung to his countenance. “No,” she whispered. “Not while I can still hope.”

Abruptly she moved on down the passage.

Sighing rue and relief like a man who had been reprieved or damned and did not know the difference—did not care if there were no difference—he thrust the ring back into place and followed her.

The tunnel became as narrow as a mere crack in the rock, then widened into a complex of junctions and chambers. The torch barely lit the walls and ceiling: it revealed nothing of what lay ahead. But from one passage came a breeze like a scent of evil that made Linden wince; and she turned that way. Covenant’s hearing ached as he struggled to discern the sounds of pursuit or danger. But he lacked her percipience: he had to trust her.

The tunnel she had chosen angled downward until he thought that even vertigo would not be strong enough to keep him upright. Darkness and stone piled tremendously around him. The torch continued to burn down. It was half consumed already. Somewhere beyond the mountain, the Land lay in day or night; but he had lost all conception of time. Time had no meaning here, in the lightless unpity of Lord Foul’s demesne. Only the torch mattered—and Linden’s pale-knuckled grasp on the brand—and the fact that he was not alone. For good or ill, redemption or ruin, he was not alone. There was no other way.

Without warning, the walls withdrew, and a vast impression of space opened above his head. Linden stopped, searched the dark. When she lifted the torch, he saw that the tunnel had emerged from the stone, leaving them at the foot of a blunt gutrock cliff. Chill air tingled against his cheek. The cliff seemed to go straight up forever. She looked at him as if she were lost. The scant fire made her eyes appear hollow and brutalized.

A short distance from the tunnel’s opening rose a steep slope of shale, loam, and refuse—too steep and yielding to be climbed. He and Linden were in the bottom of a wide crevice. Something high up in the dark had collapsed any number of millennia ago, filling half the floor of the chasm with debris.

Memories flocked at him out of the enclosed night: recognitions ran like cold sweat down his spine. All his skin felt clammy and diseased. This looked like the place— The place where he had once fallen, with an ur-vile struggling to bite off his ring and no light anywhere, nothing to defend him from the ambush of madness except his stubborn insistence on himself. But that defense was no longer of any use. Kiril Threndor was not far away. Lord Foul was close.

“This way.” Linden gestured toward the left, along the sheer wall. Her voice sounded dull, half stupefied by the effort of holding onto her courage. Her senses told her things that appalled her. Though his own perceptions were fatally truncated, he felt the potential for hysteria creep upward in her. But instead of screaming she became scarcely able to move. How virulent would Lord Foul be to nerves as vulnerable as hers? Covenant was at least protected by his numbness. But she had no protection, might as well have been naked. She had known too much death. She hated it—and ached to share its sovereign power. She believed that she was evil.

In the unsteady torchlight, he seemed to see her already falling into paralysis under the pressure of Lord Foul’s emanations.

Yet she still moved. Or perhaps the Despiser’s will coerced her. Dully she walked in the direction she had indicated.

He joined her. All his joints were stiff with pleading. Hang on. You have the right to choose. You don’t have to be trapped like this. Nobody can take away your right to choose. But he could not work the words into his locked throat. They were stifled by the accumulation of his own dread.

Dread which ate at the rims of his certainty, eroded the place of stillness and conviction where he stood. Dread that he was wrong.

The air was as damp and dank as compressed sweat. Shivering in the chill atmosphere, he accompanied Linden along the bottom of the chasm and watched the volition leak out of her until she was barely moving.

Then she stopped. Her head slumped forward. The torch hung at her side, nearly burning her hand. He prayed her name, but she did not respond. Her voice trickled like blood between her lips:

“Ravers.”

And the steep slope beside them arose as if she had called it to life.

Two of them: creatures of scree and detritus from the roots of the mountain. They were nearly as tall as Giants, but much broader. They looked strong enough to crush boulders in their massive arms. One of them struck Covenant a stone blow that scattered him to the floor. The other impelled Linden to the wall.

Her torch fell; guttered and went out. But the creatures did not need that light. They emitted a ghastly lumination that made their actions as vivid as atrocities.

One stood over Covenant to prevent him from rising. The other confronted Linden. It reached for her. Her face stretched to scream, but even her screams were paralyzed. She made no effort to defend herself.

With a gentleness worse than any violence, the creature began to unbutton her shirt.

Covenant gagged for breath. Her extremity was more than he could bear. Every inch of him burned for power. Suddenly he no longer cared whether his attacker would strike him again. He rolled onto his chest, wedged his knees under him, tottered to his feet. His attacker raised a threatening arm. He was battered and frail, barely able to stand. Yet the passion raging from him halted the creature in mid-blow, forced it to retreat a step. It was a Raver, sentient and accessible to fear. It understood what his wild magic would do, if he willed.

His halfhand trembling, he pointed at the creature in front of Linden. It stopped at the last buttons. But it did not turn away.

“I’m warning you.” His voice spattered and scorched like hot acid. “Foul’s right about this. If you touch her, I don’t care what else I destroy. I’ll rip your soul to atoms. You won’t live long enough to know whether I break the Arch or not.”

The creature did not move. It seemed to be daring him to unleash his white gold.

“Try me,” he breathed on the verge of eruption. “Just try me.”

Slowly the creature lowered its arms. Backing carefully, it retreated to stand beside its fellow.

A spasm went through Linden. All her muscles convulsed in torment or ecstasy. Then her head snapped up. The dire glow of the creatures flamed from her eyes.

She looked straight at Covenant and began to laugh.

The laughter of a ghoul, mirthless and cruel.

“Slay me then, groveler!” she cried. Her voice was as shrill as a shriek. It echoed hideously along the crevice. “Rip my soul to atoms! Perchance it will pleasure you to savage the woman you love as well!”

The Raver had taken possession of her, and there was nothing in all the world that he could do about it.

He nearly fell then. The supreme evil had come upon her, and he was helpless.
The ill that you deem most terrible
. Even if he had groveled entirely, abject and suppliant, begging the Ravers to release her, they would only have laughed at him. Now in all horror and anguish there was no other way—could be no other way. He cried out at himself, at his head to rise, his legs to uphold him, his back to straighten. Seadreamer! he panted as if that were the liturgy of his conviction, his fused belief. Honninscrave. Hamako. Hile Troy. All of them had given themselves. There was no other way.

“All right,” he grated. The sound of his voice in the chasm almost betrayed him to rage; but he clamped down his wild magic, refused it for the last time. “Take me to Foul. I’ll give him the ring.”

No way except surrender.

The Raver in Linden went on laughing wildly.

She was not laughing.

Laughter came out of her mouth. It sprang from her corded throat to scale like gibbering up into the black abyss. Her lungs drew the air which became malice and glee. Her face was contorted like the vizard of a demon—or the rictus of her mother’s asphyxiation.

But she was not laughing. It was not Linden Avery who laughed.

It was the Raver.

It held possession of her as completely as if she had been born for its use, formed and nurtured for no other purpose than to provide flesh for its housing, limbs for its actions, lungs and throat for its malign joy. It bereft her of will and choice, voice and protest. At one time, she had believed that her hands were trained and ready, capable of healing—a physician’s hands. But now she had no hands with which to grasp her possessor and fight it. She was a prisoner in her own body and the Raver’s evil.

And that evil excoriated every niche and nerve of her being. It was heinous and absolute beyond bearing. It consumed her with its memories and purposes, crushed her independent existence with the force of its ancient strength. It was the corruption of the Sunbane mapped and explicit in her personal veins and sinews. It was the revulsion and desire which had secretly ruled her life, the passion for and against death. It was the fetid halitus of the most diseased mortality condensed to its essence and elevated to the transcendence of prophecy, promise, suzerain truth—the definitive commandment of darkness.

All her life, she had been vulnerable to this. It had thronged into her from her father’s stretched laughter, and she had confirmed it by stuffing it down her mother’s abject throat. Once she had flattered herself that she was like the Land under the Sunbane, helplessly exposed to desecration. But that was false. The Land was innocent.

She was
evil
.

Its name was
moksha
Jehannum, and it brought its past with it. She remembered now as if all its actions were her own. The covert ecstasy with which it had mastered Marid—the triumph of the blow that had driven hot iron into Nassic’s human back, and the rich blood frothing at the heat of the blade—the cunning which had led
moksha
to betray its possession of Marid to her new percipience, so that she and Covenant would be condemned and Marid would be exposed to the perverting sun. She remembered bees. Remembered the apt mimesis of madness in the warped man who had set a spider to Covenant’s neck. She might as well have done those things herself.

But behind them lay deeper crimes. Empowered by a piece of the Illearth Stone, she had mastered a Giant. She had named herself Fleshharrower and had led the Despiser’s armies against the Lords. And she had tasted victory when she had trapped the defenders of the Land between her own forces and the savage forest of Garroting Deep—the forest which she hated, had hated for all the long centuries, hated in every green leaf and drop of sap from tree to tree—the forest which should have been helpless against ravage and fire, would have been helpless if some outer knowledge had not intervened, making possible the interdict of the Colossus of the Fall, the protection of the Forestals.

Yet she had been tricked into entering the Deep, and so she had fallen victim to the Deep’s guardian, Caerroil Wildwood. Unable to free herself, she had been slain in torment and ferocity on Gallows Howe, and her spirit had been sorely pressed to keep itself alive.

For that reason among many others,
moksha
Jehannum was avid to exact retribution. Linden was only one small morsel to the Raver’s appetite. Yet her possessor savored the pleasure her futile anguish afforded. Her body it left unharmed for its own use. But it violated her spirit as fundamentally as rape. And it went on laughing.

Her father’s laughter, pouring like a flood of midnight from the old desuetude of the attic; a throng of nightmares in which she foundered; triumph hosting out of the dire cavern and plunge which had once been his frail mouth.
You never loved me anyway
. Never loved him—or anyone else. She had not mustered the bare decency to cry aloud as she strangled her mother, drove that poor sick woman terrified and alone into the last dark.

This was what Joan had felt, this appalled and desperate horror which made no difference of any kind, could not so much as muffle the sound of malice. Buried somewhere within herself, Joan had watched her own fury for Covenant’s blood, for the taste of his pain. And now Linden looked out at him as if through
moksha
Jehannum’s eyes, heard him with ears that belonged to the Raver. Lit only by the ghoulish emanations of the creatures, he stood in the bottom of the crevice like a man who had just been maimed. His damaged arm dangled at his side. Every line of his body was abused with need and near-prostration. The bruises on his face made his visage appear misshapen, deformed by the pressures building inside him, where the wild magic was manacled. Yet his eyes gleamed like teeth, focused such menace toward the Ravers that
moksha
Jehannum’s brother had not dared to strike him again.