White Gold Wielder

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  “It speaks in the manner of the Haruchai.” Faint lines of perplexity marked the space between Cail’s brows. “Its speech is alien—yet comprehensible.”

  His companions stared at him.

  “It says that it has rent the Raver. It does not say slain. The word is ‘to rend.’ The Raver has been rent. And the shreds of its being Nom has consumed.” With an effort, Cail smoothed the frown from his forehead. “Thus has the Sandgorgon gained the capacity for such speech.”

  Then the Haruchai faced Covenant, “Nom gives you thanks, ur-Lord.”

  Thanks, Covenant grieved. He had let Honninscrave die. Had failed to defeat Gibbon. He did not deserve thanks. And he had no time. All his time had been used up. It was too late for sorrow. His skin had a dark, sick underhue; his sense of himself was fraying away. A gale of blackness rose in him, and it demanded an answer. The answer he had learned in nightmares. From Linden and the First and Cail and Nom and fallen Honninscrave he turned away as if he were alone and walked like a mounting flicker of fire out of the Hall of Gifts.

  But when he put his feet to the stairs, a hand closed around his mind, and he stopped. Another will imposed itself on his, taking his choices from him.

  Please, it said. Please don’t.

  Though he had no health-sense and was hardly sane, he recognized Linden’s grasp. She was possessing him with her percipience.

  Don’t do this to yourself.

  Through the link between them, he knew that she was weeping wildly. But behind her pain shone a fervid passion. She would not permit him to end it this way. Not allow him to go willingly out of her life.

  I can’t let you.

  He understood her. How could he not? She was too vulnerable to everything. She saw that his control was almost gone. And his purpose must have been transparent to her; his desperation was too extreme to elude her discernment. She was trying to save him.

  You mean too much.

  But this was not salvation: it was doom. She had misinterpreted his need for her. What could she hope to do with him when his madness had become irremediable? And how would she be able to face the Despiser with the consequences of possession chained about her soul?

  He did not try to fight her with fire. He refused to risk harming her. Instead, he remembered the imposed silence of the Elohim and the delirium of venom. In the past, either defense had sufficed to daunt her. Now he raised them together, sought deliberately to close the doors of his mind, shut her out.

  She was stronger than ever. She had learned much, accepted much. She was acquainted with him in ways too intimate to be measured. She was crying hotly for him, and her desire sprang from the roots of her life. She clinched her will to his with a white grip and would not let him go.

  To shut her out was hard, atrociously hard. He had to seal off half of himself as well as all of her, silence his own deep yearning. But she still did not comprehend him. She still feared that he was driven by the same self-pity grown to malice which had corrupted her father. And she had been too badly hurt by the horror of Gibbon’s power and Honninscrave’s death to be clear about what she was doing. At last he was able to close the door, to leave her behind as he started up the stairs again.

  Lorn and aggrieved, her cry rose after him:

  “I love you!”

  It made him waver for a moment. But then be steadied himself and went on.

  Borne by a swelling flood of black fire, he made his way toward the sacred enclosure. Twice he encountered bands of Riders who opposed him frenetically, as if they could sense his purpose. But be had become untouchable and was able to ignore them. Instinct and memory guided him to the base of the huge cavity in the heart of Revelstone where the Banefire burned.

  It was here that the former inhabitants of the city had come together to share their communal dedication to the Land.

  Within its sheer cylinder were balconies where the people had stood to hear the Lords speak from the dais below them. But that dais was gone now, replaced by a pit from which the Banefire licked blood for food.

  At the nearest doorway he stopped. Findail stood there waiting for him.

  The yellow anguish of the Appointed’s eyes had not changed. His face was a wasteland of fear and old pain. But the anger with which he had so often denounced Covenant was gone. In its place, the Elohim emitted simple rue. Softly he said, “You are going to your death, ring-wielder. I comprehend you now. It is a valiant hazard. I cannot answer for its outcome—and I know not how I will prove worthy of you. But I will not leave you.”

  That touched Covenant as the rukhs of the Riders had not. It gave him the strength to go on into the sacred enclosure.

  There the Banefire met him, howling like the furnace of the sun. Its flames raged as high as the upper balconies where the immense iron triangle of the master-rukh now rested, channeling the power of the Sunbane to the Clave. Its heat seemed to char his face instantly, sear his lungs, cinder the frail life of his flesh and rave through him into the last foundation of his will. The fang-marks on his forearm burned like glee. Yet he did not halt or hesitate. He had set his feet to this path of his own volition; he accepted it completely. Pausing only to bring down the master-rukh in molten rain so that the surviving Riders would be cut off from their strength, he moved into the inferno.

  That is the grace which has been given to you.

  A small clear space like hope opened in his heart as he followed his dreams into the Banefire.

  To bear what must be borne.

  After a time, the blackness in him burned white.

  PART II

  Apotheosis

  ELEVEN: Aftermath

  Held upright and active only by the fierce pressure of her need, Linden Avery walked numbly down through the ways of Revelstone, following the mounting stream of water inward. She had just left Nom on the upland plateau, where the Sandgorgon tended the channel it had brunted through sheer rock and dead soil from the outflow of Glimmermere to the upper entrance of the Keep; and the tarn’s untainted waters now ran past her along a path prepared for it by the First, Pitchwife, and a few Haruchai.

  Pure in spite of the harsh ages of the Sunbane, those waters shone blue against the desert of the late afternoon sun until they began to tumble like rapids into Revelstone. Then torchlight glinted across their splashing rush so that they looked like the glee of mountains as they washed passages, turned at closed doors and new barricades, rolled whitely down stairways. The Giants were adept at stone, and they read the inner language of the Keep. The route they had designed led with surprising convolution and efficiency to Linden’s goal.

  It was an open door at the base of the sacred enclosure, where the Banefire still burned as if Thomas Covenant had never stood within its heart and screamed against the heavens.

  In rage and despair she had conceived this means of quenching the Clave’s power. When Covenant had turned away from the Hall of Gifts and his friends, she had seen where he was going; and she had understood him—or thought she understood. He meant to put an end to his life, so that he would no longer be a threat to what he loved. Like her father, possessed by self-pity. But, standing so near to Gibbon-Raver, she had learned that her own former visceral desire for death was in truth a black passion for power, for immunity from all death forever. And the way that blackness worked upon her and grew showed her that no one could submit to such hunger without becoming a servant of the Despiser. Covenant’s intended immolation would only seal his soul to Lord Foul.

  Therefore she had tried to stop him.

  Yet somehow he had remained strong enough to deny her. In spite of his apparently suicidal abjection, he had refused her completely. It made her wild.

  In the Hall, the First had fallen deep into the grief of Giants. Nom had begun to belabor a great grave for Honninscrave, as if the gift the Master had given Revelstone and the Land belonged there. Cail had looked at Linden, expecting her to go now to aid the rest of the company, care for the wounded. But she had left them all in order to
pursue Covenant to his doom. Perhaps she had believed that she would yet find a way to make him heed her. Or perhaps she had simply been unable to give him up.

  His agony within the Banefire had nearly broken her. But it had also given her a focus for her despair. She had sent out a mental cry which had brought Nom and Cail running to her with the First between them. At the sight of what Covenant was doing, the First’s visage had turned gray with defeat. But when Linden had explained how the Banefire could be extinguished, the First had come instantly back to herself. Sending Cail to rally their companions, she had sped away with Nom to find the upland plateau and Glimmennere.

  Linden had stayed with Covenant.

  Stayed with him and felt the excoriation of his soul until at last his envenomed power burned clean, and he came walking back out of the Banefire as if he were deaf and blind and newborn, unable in the aftermath of his anguish to acknowledge her presence or even know that she was there, that through her vulnerable senses she had now shared everything with him except his death.

  And as he had moved sightlessly past her toward some place or fate which she could no longer guess, her heart had turned to bitterness and dust, leaving her as desolate as the demesne of the Sunbane. She had thought that her passion was directed at him, at his rejection of her, his folly, his desperate doom; but when she saw him emerge from the Banefire and pass by her, she knew better. She had been appalled at herself—at the immedicable wrong of what she had tried to do to him. Despite her horror of possession, her revulsion for the dark ill which Lord Foul had practiced on Joan and the Land, her clear conviction that no one had the right to master others, suppress them, rule them in that way, she had reacted to Covenant’s need and determination as if she were a Raver. She had tried to save him by taking away his identity.

  There was no excuse. Even if he had died in the Banefire, or brought down the Arch of Time, her attempt would have been fundamentally evil—a crime of the spirit beside which her physical murder of her mother paled.

  Then for a moment she had believed that she had no choice but to take his place in the Banefire—to let that savage blaze rip away her offenses so that Covenant and her friends and the Land would no longer be in danger from her. Gibbon-Raver had said, The principal doom of the Land is upon your shoulders. And, You have not yet tasted the depths of your Desecration. If her life had been shaped by a miscomprehended lust for power, then let it end now, as it deserved. There was no one nearby to stop her.

  But then she had become aware of Findail. She had not seen him earlier. He seemed to have appeared in answer to her need. He had stood there before her, his face a hatchment of rue and strain; and his yellow eyes had ached as if they were familiar with the heart of the Banefire.

  “Sun-Sage,” he had breathed softly, “I know not how to dissuade you. I do not desire your death—though mayhap I would be spared much thereby. Yet consider the ring-wielder. What hope will remain for him if you are gone? How will he then refuse the recourse of the Earth’s ruin?”

  Hope? she had thought. I almost took away his ability to even know what hope is. Yet she had not protested. Bowing her head as if Findail had reprimanded her, she had turned away from the sacred enclosure. After all, she had no right to go where Covenant had gone. Instead, she had begun trying to find her way through the unfamiliar passages of Revelstone toward the upland plateau.

  Before long, Durris had joined her. Reporting that the resistance of the Clave had ended, and that the Haruchai had already set about fulfilling her commands, he had guided her up to the afternoon sunlight and the stream of Glimmermere.

  She had found the First and Nom together. Following the First’s instructions, Nom was bludgeoning a channel out of the raw rock. The beast obeyed her as if it knew what she wanted, understood everything she said—as if it had been tamed. Yet the Sandgorgon did not appear tame as it tore into the ground, shaping a watercourse with swift, exuberant ferocity. Soon the channel would be ready, and the clear waters of Glimmermere could be diverted from Furl Falls.

  Leaving Nom to Linden, the First went back into Revelstone to help the rest of the company. Shortly she sent another Haruchai upland to say that the hurts of Grim-fire and Courser-poison were responding to voure, vitrim, and diamondraught. Even Mistweave was out of danger. Yet there were many injured men and women who required Linden’s personal attention.

  But Linden did not leave the Sandgorgon until the channel was open and water ran eagerly down into the city and Nom had convinced her that it could be trusted not to attack the Keep once more. That trust came slowly: she did not know to what extent the rending of the Raver had changed Nom’s essential wildness. But Nom came to her when she spoke. It obeyed her as if it both understood and approved of her orders. Finally she lifted herself out of her desert enough to ask the Sandgorgon what it would do if she left it alone. At once, it went and began improving the channel so that the water flowed more freely.

  Then she was satisfied. And she did not like the openness of the plateau. The wasted landscape on all sides was too much for her. She seemed to feel the desert sun shining straight into her, confirming her as a place of perpetual dust. She needed constriction, limitation—walls and requirements of a more human scale—specific tasks that would help her hold herself together. Leaving the Sandgorgon to go about its work in its own way, she followed the water back into Revelstone.

  Now the rapid chattering torchlight-spangled current drew her in the direction of the Banefire.

  Durris remained beside her; but she was hardly aware of him. She sensed all the Haruchai as if they were simply a part of Revelstone, a manifestation of the Keep’s old granite. With the little strength she still possessed, she focused her percipience forward, toward the fierce moil of steam where the Banefire fought against extinction. For a time, the elemental passion of that conflict was so intense that she could not see the outcome. But then she heard more clearly the chuckling eagerness with which Glimmermere’s stream sped along its stone route; and she knew the Banefire would eventually fail.

  In that way, the upland tarn proved itself a thing of hope.

  But hope seemed to have no meaning anymore. Linden had never deluded herself with the belief that the quenching of the Banefire would alter or weaken the Sunbane. Ages of bloodshed had only fed the Sunbane, only accelerated its possession of the Land, not caused it or controlled it.

  When Covenant had fallen into despair after the loss of the One Tree, she had virtually coerced him to accept the end of the Clave’s power as an important and necessary goal. She had demanded commitments from him, ignoring the foreknowledge of his death as if it signified nothing and could be set aside, crying at him, If you’re going to die, do something to make it count! But even then she had known that the Sunbane would still go on gnawing its way inexorably into the heart of the Earth. Yet she had required this decision of him because she needed a concrete purpose, a discipline as tangible as surgery on which she could anchor herself against the dark. And because anything had been preferable to his despair.

  But when she had wrested that promise from him, he had asked, What’re you going to do? And she had replied, I’m going to wait, as if she had known what she was saying. My turn’s coming. But she had not known how truly she spoke—not until Gibbon had said to her, You have not yet tasted the depths of your Desecration, and she had reacted by trying to possess the one decent love of her life.

  Her turn was coming, all right. She could see it before her as vividly as the savage red steam venting like shrieks from all the doors of the sacred enclosure. Driven to commit all destruction. The desert sun lay within her as it lay upon the Land; soon the Sunbane would have its way with her altogether. Then she would indeed be a kind of Sun-Sage, as the Elohim avowed—but not in the way they meant.

  An old habit which might once have been a form of self-respect caused her to thrust her hands into her hair to straighten it. But its uncleanness made her wince. Randomly she thought that she should have gone to Glimmerm
ere for a bath, made at least that much effort to cleanse—or perhaps merely disguise—the grime of her sins. But the idea was foolish, and she dismissed it. Her sins were not ones which could be washed away, even by water as quintessentially pure as Glimmermere’s. And while the Banefire still burned, and the company still needed care, she could not waste time on herself.

  Then she reached the wet fringes of the steam. The Banefire’s heat seemed to condense on her face, muffling her perceptions; but after a moment she located the First and Pitchwife. They were not far away. Soon they emerged from the crimson vapor as if Glimmermere’s effect upon the Banefire restored them to life.

  Pitchwife bore the marks of battle and killing. His grotesque face was twisted with weariness and remembered hurt. It looked like the visage of a man who had forgotten the possibility of mirth. Yet he stood at his wife’s side; and the sight tightened Linden’s throat. Weeps as no Haruchai has ever wept. Oh, Pitchwife, she breathed to him mutely. I’m sorry.

  The First was in better shape. The grief of Honninscrave’s end remained in her eyes; but with Pitchwife beside her she knew how to bear it. And she was a Swordmain, trained for combat. The company had achieved a significant victory. To that extent, the Search she led had already been vindicated.

  Somehow, they managed to greet Linden with smiles. They were Giants, and she was important to them. But a dry desert wind blew through her because she could not match them. She did not deserve such friends.

  Without preamble, the First gestured toward the sacred enclosure. “It is a bold conception, Chosen, and worthy of pride. With mounting swiftness it accomplishes that which even the Earthfriend in his power—” But then she stopped, looked more closely at Linden. Abruptly her own rue rose up in her, and her eyes welled tears. “Ah, Chosen,” she breathed. “The fault is not yours. You are mortal, as I am—and our foe is malign beyond endurance. You must not—”

  Linden interrupted the First bitterly. “I tried to possess him. Like a Raver. I almost destroyed both of us.”