White Gold Wielder

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  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.”

  Assuredly he was out of his mind. But his sarcasm shifted the Despiser toward him. Linden was left to the cunning tortures of her possessor. They slashed and flayed at her, showed her in long whipcuts all the atrocities an immortal could commit against her. But when Lord Foul’s gaze left her, she found that she was still able to cling. She was stubborn enough for that.

  “Ah,” the Despiser rumbled like the sigh of an avalanche, “at last my foeman stands before me. He does not grovel—but groveling has become needless. He has spoken words which may not be recalled. Indeed, his abasement is complete, though he is blind to it. He does not see that he has sold himself to a servitude more demeaning than prostration. He has become the tool of my Enemy, no longer free to act against me. Therefore he submits himself, deeming in his cowardice that here the burden of havoc and ruin will pass from him.” Soft laughter made the rocklight throb: mute shrieks volleyed from the walls. “He is the Unbeliever in all sooth. He does not believe that the Earth’s doom will at last be laid to his charge.

  “Thomas Covenant”—he took an avid step forward—“the spectacle of your puerile strivings gives me glee to repay my long patience, for your defeat has ever been as certain as my will. Were I to be foiled, the opportunity
belonged to your companion, not to you—and you see how she has availed herself of it.” With one strong, blurred arm, he made a gesture toward Linden that nearly unseated her reason. Again he laughed; but his laughter was devoid of mirth. “Had she seduced you of the ring—ah, then would I have been tested. But therefore did I choose her, a woman altogether unable to turn aside from my desires.

  “You are a fool,” he went on, “for you have known yourself doomed, and yet you have come to me. Now I require your soul.” The heat of his voice filled Linden’s lungs with suffocation. Moksha Jehannum shivered, hungry for violence and ravage. The Despiser sounded unquestionably sane—but that only made him more terrible. One of his hands—a bare smear across the Raver’s sight—seemed to curl into a fist; and Covenant was jerked forward, within Lord Foul’s reach. The walls spattered light like sobs, as if Mount Thunder itself were appalled.

  As soft as the whisper of death, the Despiser said, “Give the ring to me.”

  Linden believed that she would have obeyed in Covenant’s place. The command of that voice was absolute. But he did not move. His right arm hung at his side. The ring dangled as if it were empty of import—as if his numb finger within the band had no significance. His left fist closed and unclosed like the aggrieved labor of his heart. His eyes looked as dark as the loneliness of stars. Somehow he held his head up, his back straight—upright in conviction or madness.

  “Talk’s cheap. You can say anything you want. But you’re wrong, and you ought to know it. This time you’ve gone too far. What you did to Andelain. What you’re doing to Linden—” He swallowed acid. “We aren’t enemies. That’s just another lie. Maybe you believe it—but it’s still a lie. You should see yourself. You’re even starting to look like me.” The special gleam of his gaze reached Linden like a gift. He was irremediably insane—or utterly indomitable. “You’re just another part of me. Just one side of what it means to be human. The side that hates lepers. The poisonous side.” His certainty did not waver at all. “We are one.”

  His assertion made Linden gape at what he had become. But it only drew another laugh from the Despiser—a short, gruff bark of dismissal. “Do not seek to bandy truth and falsehood with me,” he replied. “You are too inane for the task. Lies would better serve the trivial yearning which you style love. The truth damns you here. For three and a half millennia I have mustered my will against the Earth in your absence, groveler. I am the truth. I. And I have no use for the sophistry of your Unbelief.” He leveled his voice at Covenant like the blade of an axe. Fragments of rocklight shot everywhere but could not bring his intense form into any kind of focus. “Give the ring to me.”

  Covenant’s visage slackened as if he were made ill by the necessity of his plight. But still he withheld submission. Instead he changed his ground.

  “At least let Linden go.” His stance took on an angle of pleading. “You don’t need her anymore. Even you should be satisfied with how much she’s been hurt. I’ve already offered her my ring once. She refused it. Let her go.”

  In spite of everything, he was still trying to spare her.

  Lord Foul’s response filled Kiril Threndor. “Have done, groveler.” Attar made the Raver ecstatic, wracked Linden. “You weary my long patience. She is forfeit to me by her own acts. Are you deaf to yourself? You have spoken words which can never be recalled.” Concentrated venom dripped from his outlines. As distinct as the breaking of boulders, he demanded a third time, “Give the ring to me.”

  And Covenant went on sagging as though he had begun to crumble. All his strength was gone. He could no longer pretend to hold himself upright. One by one, his loves had been stripped from him: he had nothing left. After all, he was only one ordinary man, small and human. Without wild magic, he was no match for the Despiser.

  When he weakly lifted his halfhand, began tugging the ring from his finger, Linden forgave him. No choice but to surrender it. He had done everything possible, everything conceivable, had surpassed himself again and again in his efforts to save the Land. That he failed now was cause for grief, but not for blame.

  Only his eyes showed no collapse. They burned like the final dark, the last deep midnight where no Sunbane shone.

  His surrender took no more than three heartbeats. One to raise his hand, take hold of the ring. Another to pull the band from his finger as if in voluntary riddance of marriage, love, humanity. A third to extend the immaculate white gold toward the Despiser.

  But extremity and striving made those three moments as long as agony. During them. Linden Avery pitted her ultimate will against her possessor.

  She forgave Covenant. He was too poignant and dear to be blamed. He had given everything that her heart could ask of him.

  But she did not submit.

  Gibbon had said. The principal doom of the Land is upon your shoulders. Because no one else had this chance to come between Covenant and his defeat. You are being forged as iron is forged to achieve the ruin of the Earth. Forged to fail here. Because you can see.

  Now she meant to determine what kind of metal had been made of her.

  Gibbon-Raver had also told her she was evil. Perhaps that was true. But evil itself was a form of power.

  And she had become intimately familiar with her possessor. From the furthest roots of its past, she felt springing its contempt for all things that had flesh and could be mastered—a contempt born of fear. Fear of any form of life able to refuse it. The Forests. Giants. The Haruchai. It was unquenchably hungry for immortal control, for the safety of sovereignty. All refusals terrified it. The logic of its failures led inexorably to death. If it could be refused, then it could also be slain.

  She had no way to understand the lost communal mind of the Forests. But Giants and Haruchai were another question. Though moksha Jehannum ripped and shrieked at her, she picked up the strands of what she knew and wove them to her purpose.

  The Giants and Haruchai had always been able to refuse. Perhaps because they had not suffered the Land’s long history of Ravers, they had not learned to doubt their autonomy. Or perhaps because they used little or no outward expressions of power, they comprehended more fully that true choice was internal. But whatever the explanation, they were proof against possession where the people of the Land were not. They believed in their capacity to make choices which mattered.

  That belief was all she needed.

  Moksha was frantic now, savage and brutal. It assailed every part of her that was able to feel pain. It desecrated her as if she were Andelain. It made every horrifying memory of her life incandescent before her: Nassic’s murder and Gibbon’s touch; the lurker of the Sarangrave; Kasreyn’s malign cunning; Covenant bleeding irretrievably to death in the woods behind Haven Farm. It poured acid into every wound which futility had ever inflicted upon her.

  And it argued with her. She could not choose: she had already made the only choice that signified. When she had accepted the legacy of her father and stuffed it in handsful of tissue down her mother’s throat, she had declared her crucial allegiance, her definitive passion—a passion in no way different than her possessor’s. Despite had made her what she was, a lost woman as ravaged as the Land, and the Sunbane dawning in her now would never set.

  But the sheer intensity of her hurt made her lucid. She saw the Raver’s lie. Only once had she tried to master death by destroying life. After that, all her striving had gone to heal those who suffered. Though she had been haunted and afraid, she had not been cruel. Suicide and murder were not the whole story. When the old man on Haven Farm had collapsed in front of her, the stink issuing from his mouth had sickened her like the foretaste of Despite; but she had willingly breathed and breathed that fetor in her efforts to save him.

  She was evil. Her visceral response to the dark might of her tormentors gave her the stature of a Raver. And yet her instinct for healing falsified moksha.

  That contradiction no longer paralyzed her. She accepted it.

  It gave her the power to choose.

&n
bsp; Squalling like a butchered thing, the Raver fought her. But she had entered at last into her true estate. Moksha Jehannum was afraid of her. Her will rose up in its shackles. Tested the iron of her possessor’s malice. Took hold of the chains.

  And broke free.

  Lord Foul had not yet grasped the ring. There was still an instant of space between his hand and Covenant’s. Rocklight yowled desire and triumph from the walls.

  Linden did not move. She had no time to think of that. Motionless as if she were still frozen, she hurled herself forward. With her Land-born health-sense, she sprang into Covenant, scrambled toward the fiery potential of his wedding band.

  Empowered by wild magic, she drew back his hand.

  At that, rage swelled Lord Foul: he sent out a flood of fury which should have washed her away. But she ignored him. She was sure that he would not touch her now—not now, while she held possession of Covenant and the ring. She was suddenly strong enough to turn her back upon the Despiser himself. The necessity of freedom protected her. The choice of surrender or defiance was hers to make.

  In the silent privacy of his mind, she faced the man she loved and took all his burdens upon herself.

  He could not resist her. Once before, he had beaten back her efforts to control him. But now he had no defense. With his own strength, she mastered him as completely as ever the Elohim or Kasreyn had mastered him.

  No evil! she breathed at him. Not this time. Her previous attempt to possess him had been wrong, inexcusable. She had read in him his intent to risk the Banefire, and she had reacted as if he meant to commit suicide. Instinctively she had tried to stop him. But then his life and the risk had been his alone. She had had no right to interfere.

  Now, however, he surrendered the Earth as well as himself. He was not simply risking his own life: he was submitting all life to certain destruction. Therefore she had the responsibility to intervene. The responsibility and the right.

  The right! she cried. But he made no answer. Her will occupied him completely.