White Gold Wielder (67 page)

“Take me to Foul,” he said. He had lost his mind. This was not despair: it was too fierce for despair. It was madness. The Banefire had cost him his sanity. “I’ll give him the ring.”

His gaze lanced straight into Linden. If she had owned a voice, she would have cried out.

He was smiling like a sacrifice.

Then she found that she did not have to watch him. The Raver could not require consciousness of her. Its memories told her that most of its victims had simply fled into mindlessness. The moral paralysis which had made her so accessible to
moksha
Jehannum would protect her now, not from use but from awareness. All she had to do was let go her final hold upon her identity. Then she would be spared from witnessing the outcome of Covenant’s surrender.

With glee and hunger, the Raver urged her to let go. Her consciousness fed it, pleased it, sharpened its enjoyment of her violation. But if she lapsed, it would not need exertion to master her. And she would be safe at last—as safe as she had once been in the hospital during the blank weeks after her father’s suicide—relieved from excruciation, inured to pain—as safe as death.

There were no other choices left for her to make.

She refused it. With the only passion and strength that remained to her, she refused it.

She had already failed in the face of Joan’s need—been stricken helpless by the mere sight of Marid’s desecration. Gibbon’s touch had reft her of mind and will. But since then she had learned to fight.

In the cavern of the One Tree, she had grasped power for the first time and had used it, daring herself against forces so tremendous—though amoral—that terror of them had immobilized her until Findail had told her what was at stake. And in the Hall of Gifts— There
samadhi
Sheol’s nearness had daunted her, misled her, tossed her in a whirlwind of palpable ill: she had hardly known where she stood or what she was doing. But she had not been stripped of choice.

Not
, she insisted, careless of whether the Raver heard her. Because she had been needed. By all her friends. By Covenant before the One Tree. if not in the Hall of Gifts. And because she had experienced the flavor of efficacy, had gripped it to her heart and recognized it for what it was. Power: the ability to make choices that mattered. Power which came from no external source, but only from her own intense self.

She would not give it up. Covenant needed her still, though the Raver’s mastery of her was complete and she had no way to reach him.
I’ll give him the ring
. She could not stop him. But if she let herself go on down the blind road of her paralysis, there would be no one left to so much as wish him stopped. Therefore she bore the pain.
Moksha
Jehannum crowded every nerve with nausea, filled every heartbeat with vitriol and dismay, shredded her with every word and movement. Yet she heeded the call of Covenant’s fierce eyes and flagrant intent. Consciously she clung to herself and refused oblivion, remained where the Raver could hurt her and hurt her, so that she would be able to watch.

And try.

“Will you?” chortled her throat and mouth. “You are belatedly come to wisdom, groveler.” She raged at that epithet: he did not deserve it. But
moksha
only mocked him more trenchantly. “Yet your abasement has been perfectly prophesied. Did you fear for your life among the Cavewights? Your fear was apt. Anile as the Dead, they would have slain you—and blithely would the ring have been seduced from them. From the moment of your summoning, all hope has been folly! All roads have led to the Despiser’s triumph, and all struggles have been vain. Your petty—”

“I’m sick of this,” rasped Covenant. He was hardly able to stay on his feet—and yet the sheer force of his determination commanded the Ravers, sent an inward quailing through them. “Don’t flatter yourselves that I’m going to break down here.” Linden felt
moksha
’s trepidation and shouted at it, Coward! then gritted her teeth and gagged for bare life as its fury crashed down on her. But Covenant could not see what was happening to her, the price she paid for defiance. Grimly he went on, “You aren’t going to get my ring. You’ll be lucky if he even lets you live when he’s finished with me.” His eyes flashed, as hard as hot marble. “Take me to him.”

“Most assuredly, groveler,”
moksha
Jehannum riposted. “I tremble at your will.”

Tearing savagery across the grain of Linden’s clinched consciousness, the Raver turned her, sent her forward along the clear spine of the chasm.

Behind her, the two creatures—both ruled now by
moksha
’s brother—set themselves at Covenant’s back. But she saw with the senses of the Raver that they did not hazard touching him.

He followed her as if he were too weak to do more than place one foot in front of the other—and too strong to be beaten.

The way seemed long: every step, each throb of her heart was interminable and exquisite agony. The Raver relished her violation and multiplied it cunningly. From her helpless brain,
moksha
drew images and hurled them at her, made them appear more real than Mount Thunder’s imponderable gutrock. Marid with his fangs. Joan screaming like a predator for Covenant’s blood, wracked by a Sunbane of the soul. Her mother’s mouth, mucus drooling at the corners—phlegm as rank as putrefaction from the rot in her lungs. The incisions across her father’s wrists, agape with death and glee. There was no end to the ways she could be tortured, if she refused to let go. Her possessor savored them all.

Yet she held. Stubbornly, uselessly, almost without reason, she clung to who she was, to the Linden Avery who made promises. And in the secret recesses of her heart she plotted
moksha
Jehannum’s downfall.

Oh, the way seemed long to her! But she knew, had no defense against knowing, that for the Raver the distance was short and eager, little more than a stone’s throw along the black gulf. Then the dank light of Covenant’s guards picked out a stairway cut into the left wall. It was a rude ascent, roughly hacked from the sheer stone immemorially long ago and worn blunt by use; but it was wide and safe. The Raver went upward with strong strides, almost jaunty in its anticipation. But Linden watched Covenant for signs of vertigo or collapse.

His plight was awful. She felt his bruises aching in the bones of his skull, read the weary limp of his pulse. Sweat like fever or failure beaded on his forehead. An ague of exhaustion made all his movements awkward and imprecise. Yet he kept going, as rigid of intent as he had been on Haven Farm when he had walked into the woods to redeem his ex-wife. His very weakness and imbalance seemed to support him.

He was entirely out of his mind; and Linden bled for him while
moksha
Jehannum raked her with scorn.

The stairway was long and short. It ascended for several hundred feet and hurt as if it would go on forever without surcease. The Raver gave her not one fragment or splinter of respite while it used her body as if she had never been so healthy and vital. But at last she reached an opening in the wall, a narrow passage-mouth with rocklight reflecting from its end. The stairs continued upward; but she entered the tunnel. Covenant followed her, his guards behind him in single file.

Heat mounted against her face until she seemed to be walking into fire; but it meant nothing to
moksha
. The Raver was at home in dire passages and brimstone. For a while, all the patients she had failed to help, all the medical mistakes she had made beat about her mind, accusing her like furies. In the false name of life, she was responsible for so much death. Perhaps she had employed it for her own ends. Perhaps she had introduced pain and loss to her victims, needing them to suffer so that she would have power and life.

Then the passage ended, and she found herself in the place where Lord Foul had chosen to wield his machinations.

Kiril Threndor. Heart of Thunder.

Here Kevin Landwaster had come to enact the Ritual of Desecration. Here Drool Rockworm had recovered the lost Staff of Law. It was the dark center of all Mount Thunder’s ancient and fatal puissance.

The place where the outcome of the Earth would be decided.

She knew it with
moksha
Jehannum’s knowledge. The Raver’s whole spirit seemed to quiver in lust and expectation.

The cave was large, a round, high chamber. Entrances gaped like mute cries, stretched in eternal pain, around its circumference. The walls glared rocklight in all directions. They were shaped entirely into smooth, irregular facets which cast their illumination like splinters at Linden’s eyes. And that sharp assault was whetted and multiplied by a myriad keen reflections from the chamber’s ceiling. There the stone gathered a dense cluster of stalactites, as bright and ponderous as melting metal. Among them swarmed a chiaroscuro of orange-red gleamings.

But no light seemed to touch the figure that stood on a low dais in the middle of the time-burnished floor. It rose there like a pillar, motionless and immune to revelation. It might have been the back of a statue or a man: perhaps it was as tall as a Giant. Even the senses of the Raver saw nothing certainly. It appeared to have no color and no clear shape or size. Its outlines were blurred as if they transcended recognition. But it radiated power like a shriek through the echoing rocklight.

The air reeked of sulfur—a stench so acrid that it would have brought tears to her eyes if it had not given such pleasure to her possessor. But under that rank odor lay a different scent, a smell more subtle, insidious, and consuming than any brimstone. A smell on which
moksha
fed like an addict.

A smell of attar. The sweetness of the grave.

Linden was forced to devour it as if she were reveling.

The force of the figure screamed into her like a shout poised to bring down the mountain, rip the vulnerable heart of the Land to rubble and chaos.

Covenant stood a short distance away from her now, dissociating his plight from hers so that she would not suffer the consequences of his company. He had no health-sense. And even if his eyes had been like hers, he might not have been able to discern what was left of her—might not have seen the way she cried out to have him beside her. She knew everything to which he was blind, everything that could have made a difference to him. Everything except how in his battered weakness he had become strong enough to stand there as though he were indefeasible.

With moksha’s perceptions, she saw the two creatures and the Raver which controlled them leave the chamber. They were no longer needed. She saw Covenant look at her and form her name, trying mutely to tell her something that he could not say and she could not hear. The light flared at her like a shattered thing, stone trapped in the throes of fragmentation, the onset of the last collapse. The stalactites shed gleams and imminence as if they were about to plunge down on her. Her unbuttoned shirt seemed to let attar crawl across her breasts, teasing them with anguish. Heat closed around her faint thoughts like a fist.

And the figure on the dais turned.

Even
moksha
Jehannum’s senses failed her. They were a blurred lens through which she saw only outlines that dripped and ran, features smeared out of focus. She might have been trying to gauge the figure past the high, hot intervention of a bonfire. But it resembled a man. Parts of him suggested a broad chest and muscular arms, a patriarchal beard, a flowing robe. Tall as a Giant, puissant as a mountain, and more exigent than any conflagration of bloodshed and corruption, he turned; and his gaze swept Kiril Threndor—swept her and Covenant as if with a blink he could have brushed them out of existence.

His eyes were the only precise part of him.

She had seen them before.

Eyes as bitter as fangs, carious and cruel: eyes of deliberate force, rabid desire: eyes wet with venom and insatiation. In the woods behind Haven Farm, they had shone out of the blaze and pierced her to the pit of her soul, measuring and disdaining every aspect of her as she had crouched in fright. They had required paralysis of her as if it were the first law of her existence. When she had unlocked her weakness, run down the hillside to try to save Covenant, they had fixed her like a promise that she would never be so brave again, never rise above her mortal contradictions. And now with infinitely multiplied and flagrant virulence they repeated that promise and made it true. Reaching past
moksha
Jehannum to the clinched relict of her consciousness, they confirmed their absolute commandment.

Never again.

Never.

In response, her voice said, “He has come to cede his ring. I have brought him to your will,” and chortled like a burst of involuntary fear. Even the Raver could not bear its master’s direct gaze and sought to turn that baleful regard aside.

But for a moment Lord Foul did not look away. His eyes searched her for signs of defiance or courage. Then he said, “To you I do not speak.” His voice came from the rocklight and the heat, from the reek of attar and the chiaroscuro of the stalactites—a voice as deep as Mount Thunder’s bones and veined with savagery. Orange-red facets glittered and glared in every word. “I have not spoken to you. There was no need—is none. I speak to set the feet of my hearers upon the paths I design for them, but your path has been mine from the first. You have been well bred to serve me, and all your choices conduce to my ends. To attain that which I have desired from you has been a paltry exercise, scarce requiring effort. When I am free”—she heard a grin in the swarming reflections—“you will accompany me, so that your present torment may be prolonged forever. I will gladly mark myself upon such flesh as yours.”

With her mouth, the Raver giggled tense and sweating approval. The Despiser’s gaze nailed dismay into her. She was as abject as she had ever been, and she tried to wail; but no sound came.

Then she would have let go. But Covenant did not. His eyes were midnight with rage for her: his passion refused to be crushed. He looked hardly capable of taking another step—yet he came to her aid.

“Don’t kid yourself,” he snapped like a jibe. “You’re already beaten, and you don’t even know it. All these threats are just pathetic.”