White Gold Wielder

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  “That night.” An ache crept into her voice. “The first night we were on Starfare’s Gem. Before I finally figured out we had a Raver aboard. And that rat bit you.” He remembered: that bite had triggered a venom-relapse which had nearly destroyed the quest and the Search and the dromond before she found a way to penetrate it and treat him. “I had the most terrible nightmare.”

  Softly she described the dream. They had been in the woods behind Haven Farm; and he had taken Joan’s place at the mercy of Lord Foul’s misled band of fanatics; and she, Linden, had gone running down the hillside to save him. But never in all her life had she been able to stop the violence which had driven the knife into his chest. And from the wound had gushed more blood than she had ever seen. It had welled out of him as if a world had been slain with that one blow. As if the thrust of the knife had stabbed the very heart of the Land.

  She had been altogether unable to stanch it. She had nearly drowned in the attempt.

  The memory left her aghast in the unsteady light; but now she did not stop. She had been gnawing her questions for a long time and knew with frightening precision what she wanted to ask. Looking straight into Covenant’s consternation, she said, “On Kevin’s Watch, you told me there were two different explanations. External and internal. Like the difference between surgery and medicine. The internal one was that we’re sharing a dream. ‘Tied into the same unconscious process,’ you said.

  “That fits. If we’re dreaming, then naturally any healing that happens here is just an illusion. It couldn’t have any effect on the bodies we left behind—on our physical continuity back where we came from.

  “But what does it mean when you have a nightmare in a dream? Isn’t that some kind of prophecy?”

  Her directness surprised him. She had surpassed him; he could not follow without groping. His own dreams—Quickly he scrambled to protest, “Nothing’s that simple.” But then he had to pause. An awkward moment passed before he found a countering argument.

  “You had that dream under the influence of a Raver. You dreamed what it made you feel. Lord Foul’s prophecy—not yours. It doesn’t change anything.”

  Linden was no longer looking at him. She had bowed her head, braced her forehead in her palms; but her hands did not hide the silent tears streaming down her cheeks. “That was before I knew anything about power.” With an honesty that dismayed him, she exposed the root of her distress. “I could’ve saved Hamako. I could’ve saved them all. You were so close to erupting. I could’ve taken your wild magic and torn out that croyel’s heart. I’m no danger to the Arch of Time. None of them had to die.”

  Dread burned like shame across his face. He knew she spoke the truth. Her health-sense was still growing. Soon she would become capable of anything. He swallowed a groan. “Why didn’t you?”

  “I was watching you!” she flung back at him in sudden anguish. “Watching you tear your arm apart. I couldn’t think: about anything else.”

  The sight of her pain enabled him to take hold of himself, fight down his instinctive panic. He could not afford to be afraid. She needed something better from him.

  “I’m glad you didn’t,” he said. “Never mind what it would’ve done to me. I’m glad you didn’t for his sake.” Thinking of her mother, he added deliberately, “You let him achieve the meaning of his own life.”

  At that, her head jerked up; her gaze knifed at him. “He died!” she hissed like an imprecation too fierce and personal to be shouted. “He saved your life at least twice, and he spent his own life serving the Land you claim to care so much about, and the people that adopted him were nearly wiped off the face of the Earth, and he died!”

  Covenant did not flinch. He was ready now for anything she might hurl at him. His own nightmares were worse than this. And he would have given his soul for the ability to match Hamako. “I’m not glad he died. I’m glad he found an answer.”

  For a long moment, her glare held. But then slowly the anger frayed out of her face. At last, her eyes fell. Thickly she murmured, “I’m sorry. I just don’t understand. Killing people is wrong.” The memory of her mother was present to her as it was to Covenant. “But dear Christ! Saving them has got to be better than letting them die.”

  “Linden.” She clearly did not want him to say anything else. She had raised the fundamental question of her life and needed to answer it herself. But he could not let the matter drop. With all the gentleness he had in him, he said, “Hamako didn’t want to be saved. For the opposite reason that your father didn’t want to be saved. And he won.”

  “I know,” she muttered. “I know. I just don’t understand it.” As if to keep him from speaking again, she left the fire, went to get her blankets.

  He looked around at the mute, attentive faces of the Giants. But they had no other wisdom to offer him. He wanted intensely to be saved himself; but no one would be able to do that for him unless he surrendered his ring. He was beginning to think that his death would be welcome when it came.

  A short time later, the fire blew out. Mistweave tried to light it again and failed. But when Covenant finally went to sleep, he dreamed that the blaze had become violent enough to consume him.

  During the night, the wind died. The dawn was as clear as crystal; and the crags shone in the high, thin air as if no taint could reach them. A mood of impossible hope came over the companions as they labored toward the far end of the pass.

  Under other circumstances, the view from that eminence would have delighted them. Sunlight flashed through the pass to illumine the range as it tumbled downward in a dramatic succession of snow-bright crests and saw-backed arêtes, mighty heads fronting the heavens and spines sprawling toward lower ground. And beyond the bare foothills all the way to the southwestern horizon lay the high North Plains which led to Revelstone.

  But where the sun hit the Plains they looked as brown and battered as a desert.

  That in itself would not have wrenched the Giants to silence, raised Linden’s hands to her mouth, stifled Covenant’s breathing; for at this time of year the region below them might be naturally dry. But as soon as the sun touched the denuded waste, a green fur began to spread across it. Distance made teeming shoots and sprouts look like an unconscionably rapid pelt.

  With a curse, Covenant wheeled to scan the sun. But he could see no sign of the corona which should have accompanied the sudden verdure.

  “We’re under the fringe,” said Linden tonelessly. “I told you about that—the last time we crossed Landsdrop. We won’t see the aura until later.”

  Covenant had not forgotten her explanation. The Sunbane was a corruption of Earthpower, and it arose from the ground, from the deep roots of Mount Thunder where Lord Foul now made his home. But it was focused or triggered by the sun and manifested itself visibly there, in the characteristic penumbra of its phases and the power for perversion of its initial contact.

  Thickly he grated to his companions, “We’ll need stone for protection. It’s the first touch that does the damage.” He and Linden had been preserved by the alien leather of their footwear. The Haruchai and Vain had already shown that they were immune. Findail needed no advice on how to care for himself. But the Giants—Covenant could not bear that they might be at risk. “From now on—every day. We’ve got to have stone under us when the sun comes up.”

  The First nodded mutely. She and her people were still staring at the green mantle which thickened at every moment across the distant plains.

  That sight made Covenant long for Sunder and Hollian. The Graveler of Mithil Stonedown had left his home and people to serve as Covenant’s guide through the perils of the Sunbane; and his obdurate skill and providence, his self-doubting courage, had kept Covenant and Linden alive. And Hollian’s eh-Brand ability to foretell the phases of the Sunbane had been invaluable. Though he had Giants with him now, and Linden’s strength. Covenant felt entirely unready to face the Sunbane without the support of his former companions.

  And he wanted to know what had
happened to them. He had sent them from Seareach because they had believed that they had no clear role in the quest for the One Tree, no place among such mighty beings as Giants—and because he had loathed to leave the Clave uncontested during the unpredictable period of his absence. So he had given them the krill of Loric, the powerful blade which he had raised from Glimmermere. And he had laid upon them the charge of mustering resistance among the villages against the bloody requirements of the Clave. Accompanied only by Stell and Harn, armed with nothing more than their own knives, the krill, Sunder’s orcrest stone and Hollian’s lianar wand, and encouraged by the thin hope that they might eventually gain the aid of more Haruchai, the two lone Stonedownors had gone in sunlight and poignant valor to hazard their lives against the forces which ruled the Land.

  That memory outweighed any amount of unreadiness. The distant preternatural green swelling below him brought back the past with renewed vividness. Sunder and Hollian were his friends. He had come this far in the name of Revelstone and the Clave; but now he wanted keenly to rejoin the two Stonedownors.

  Rejoin or avenge.

  “Come on,” he rasped to his companions. “Let’s get down there.”

  The First gave him a measuring glance, as though she half distrusted the constant hardening of his attitude. But she was not a woman who hung back. With a stern nod, she sent him and Linden to the sleds. Then she turned and started down the steep, snowbound slope as if she, too, could not wait to confront the ill that had brought the Search here.

  Heaving Covenant’s sled into motion, Honninscrave let out a cry like a challenge and went plunging after the Swordmain.

  In the course of that one day, the company passed down out of the mountains, came to the foothills and the end of the snow. Careening at a mad pace which could only have been controlled by Giants, they sped from slope to slope, pausing only when the First needed to consider her best route. She seemed determined to regain the time lost by the arduous ascent of the range. Before noon, a band of green—the color of chrysoprase and Daphin’s eyes—closed around the sun like a garrote. But Covenant could not look at it. He was nearly blind with vertigo. He was barely able to cling to the rails of the sled and hold the contents of his stomach down.

  Then the ice and snow of the heights failed on the verge of a moiling chaos of vegetation which had already grown high enough to appear impenetrable. His head still reeling, Covenant considered himself fortunate that dusk prevented the First from tackling the verdure immediately. But the Swordmain was not insensitive to the nausea in his face—or the aggravated ache in Linden’s. While Mistweave and Honrinscrave prepared a camp, she passed a flask of diamondraught to the two humans, then left them alone to try to recover themselves.

  The liquor settled Covenant’s guts, but could not soften the wide, white outrage and dread of Linden’s stare. At intervals during the evening, Pitchwife and the First addressed comments to her; but her replies were monosyllabic and distant. The crouching vegetation spoke a language that only she could hear, consuming her attention. Unconscious of being watched, she chewed her lips as if she had lost her old severity and did not know how to recapture it.

  Her huddled posture—thighs pressed against her chest, arms hugged around her shins, chin braced on her knees—reminded him of a time many days ago, a time when they had begun traveling together, and she had nearly broken under the pressure of her first fertile sun. She had quailed into herself, protesting, I can’t shut it out. It’s too personal. I don’t believe in evil.

  She believed in evil now; but that only made the sensory assault of the Sunbane more intimate and unanswerable—as heinous as murder and as immedicable as leprosy.

  He tried to stay awake with her, offering her the support of his silent companionship. But she was still taut and unslumberous when the mortal pull of his dreams took him away. He went to sleep thinking that if he had possessed anything akin to her percipience the Land would not be in such danger—and she would not be so alone.

  Visions he could neither face nor shun seemed to protract the night; yet dawn and Cail’s rousing touch came too early. He awoke with a jerk and found himself staring at the dense growth. His companions were already up. While Pitchwife and Mistweave prepared a meal, and Honninscrave dismantled the sleds, the First studied the choked terrain, clenching a tuneless hum between her teeth. A gap among the peaks sent an early shaft of light onto the vegetation directly in front of the camp. The sun would touch the company soon.

  Covenant’s skin crawled as he watched the verdure writhe and grow. The contrast between the places where the sun hit and where it did not only made the effect more eerie and ominous. In the stony soil among the foothills, there were no trees. But the hardy, twisted shrubs were already as tall as trees; thistles and other weeds crowded the ground between the trunks; huge slabs of lichen clung to the rocks like scabs. And everything the sun touched grew so rapidly that it seemed animate—a form of helpless flesh tortured mercilessly toward the sky. He had forgotten how horrific the Sunbane truly was. He dreaded the moment when he would have to descend into that lush green anguish.

  Then the sunlight fell through the gap onto the company.

  At the last moment, the First, Honninscrave, and Pitchwife had found rocks on which to stand. Under Mistweave’s feet lay the stone with which he had formerly shielded his campfires from ice and snow.

  Distantly Linden nodded at the caution of the Giants. “Cail’s got something you don’t,” she murmured. “You need the protection.” But Vain and Findail required no defense; and Covenant and Linden had their footwear. Together they faced the onset of the sun.

  As it first crested the gap, the sun appeared normal. For that reason, at least this much of the foothills remained free of vegetation. Yet the company stayed motionless, suspended and silent in an anticipation like dread. And before their eyes the sun changed. A green aura closed around it, altering the light. Even the strip of bare ground between the end of the snow and the beginning of the vegetation took on an emerald timbre.

  Because of the winter which still held the mountains, the air was not warm. But Covenant found that he was sweating.

  Grimly Linden turned her back on the sun. The Giants went to their tasks. Vain’s constant, black, ambiguous smile betrayed no reaction. But Findail’s pain-marked face looked more aggrieved than ever. Covenant thought he saw the Elohim’s hands trembling.

  Shortly after the company had eaten, Honninscrave finished reducing the sleds to firewood. He and Mistweave packed their supplies into huge bundles for themselves and smaller ones for Pitchwife and the First. Soon Covenant’s companions were prepared to commence the day’s journey.

  “Giantfriend,” the First asked sternly, “is there peril for us here other than that which we have all witnessed?”

  Peril, he thought dumbly. If the Riders of the Clave don’t come this far north. And nothing else has changed. “Not under this sun,” he replied with sweat in his voice. “But if we stand still too long, we’ll have trouble moving again.”

  The Swordmain nodded. “That is plain.”

  Drawing her blade, she took two long steps down the hillside and began hacking tall thistles out of her way.

  Honninscrave followed her. With his bulk and muscle, he widened her path for the rest of the company.

  Covenant compelled himself to take his position at Pitchwife’s back. Cail followed between the Unbeliever and Linden. Then came Mistweave, with Vain and Findail inseparably behind him.

  In that formation, the failed quest for the One Tree met the atrocity of the Sunbane.

  For the morning and part of the afternoon, they managed a surprising pace. Monstrous scrub brush and weeds gave way to stands of immense, raw bracken clotted with clumps of grass; and every added degree of the sun’s arc made each frond and leaf and stem yearn more desperately upward, as frantic as the damned. Yet the First and Honninscrave forged ahead as fast as Covenant and Linden could comfortably walk. The air became warmer, noticeably mor
e humid, as the snows and elevation of the mountains were left behind. Although Covenant had added his robe to Pitchwife’s bundle, he perspired constantly. But his days in the range had toughened him somewhat; be was able to keep the pace.

  But toward midafternoon the company entered a region like a surreal madland. Juniper trees as contorted as ghouls sprawled thickly against each other, strangled by the prodigious vines which festooned them like the web of a gargantuan and insane spider. And between the vine stems and tree trunks the ground was profuse with lurid orchids that smelled like poison. The First struck one fierce blow against the nearest vine, then snatched back her green-slick blade to see if she had damaged it: the stem was as hard as ironwood. Around her, the trees and vines rustled like execration. In order to advance at all, the companions had to clamber and squirm awkwardly among the hindrances.

  Night caught them in the middle of the region, with no stone in sight and scarcely enough space for them to lay their blankets between the trunks. But when Cail roused the company the next morning, they found that he had somehow contrived to collect sufficient small rocks to protect two of the Giants. And the stone which Mistweave still carried could hold two more. Thus warded, they braced themselves to meet the sun.

  When its first touch filtered insidiously down through the choked trees, Covenant flinched; and Linden jerked a hand to her mouth to stifle a gasp.

  They could see only pieces of the sun’s aura. But those pieces were red. The color of pestilence.

  “Two days!” Covenant spat to keep himself from groaning. “It’s getting worse.”

  The First stared at him. Bitterly he explained that the Sunbane had formerly moved in a cycle of three days. Any shortening of that period meant that its power was increasing. And that meant—But he could not say such things aloud. The hurt of them went too deep. It meant that Sunder and Hollian had failed. Or that the na-Mhoram had found a source of blood as large as his malice. Or that Lord Foul was now confident of victory, and therefore the Clave no longer made any pretense of holding back the Sunbane.