White Gold Wielder

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  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.

  NINETEEN: Hold Possession

  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.

  “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 imponder
able 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.