THE POWER THAT PRESERVES

by default

  With a groan of insight, Mhoram understood Revelstone's plight. Dread of the unknown was only the surface of the peril. As he threw his arms around Quaan's trembling, he saw that the red-green veins of power in the ground were not a physical danger; rather, they were a vehicle for the raw emotional force of the Despiser's malice-a direct attack on the Keep's will, a corrosive hurled against the moral fabric of Revelstone's resistance.

  Fear was growing like a fatal disease in the heart of Lord's Keep. Under the influence of those lurid veins, the courage of the city was beginning to rot.

  It had no defense. The lillianrill and rhadhamaerl could build vast warming fires within the walls. The Lorewardens could sing in voices that shook helplessly brave songs of encouragement and victory. The Warward could drill and train until the warriors had neither leisure nor stamina for fear. The Lords could flit throughout the city like blue ravens, carrying the light of courage and support and intransigence wherever they went, from gray day to blind night to gray day again. The Keep was not idle. As time dragged its dread-aggravated length along, moved through its skeletal round with an almost audible clatter of fleshless bones, everything that could be done was done. The Lords took to moving everywhere with their staffs alight, so that their bright azure could resist the erosion of Revel-stone's spirit. But still the veined, bloody harm in the ground multiplied its aegis over the city. The malignance of tenscore thousand evil hearts stifled all opposition.

  Soon even the mountain rock of the plateau seemed to be whimpering in silent fear. Within five days, some families locked themselves in their rooms and refused to come out; they feared to be abroad in the city. Others fled to the apparent safety of the upland hills. Mad fights broke out in the kitchens, where any cook or food handler could snatch up a knife to slash at sudden gusts of terror. To prevent such outbursts, Warmark Quaan had to station Eoman in every kitchen and refectory.

  But though he drove them as if he had a gaunt specter of horror clinging to his shoulders, he could not keep even his warriors from panic. This fact he was finally forced to report to the High Lord, and after hearing it, Mhoram went to stand his watch on the tower. Alone there, he faced the night which fell as heavily as the scree of despair against the back of his neck, faced the unglimmering emerald loathsomeness of the Stone, faced the sick, red-green veined fire-and hugged his own dread within the silence of his heart. If he had not been so desperate, he might have wept in sympathy for Kevin Landwaster, whose dilemma he now understood with a keenness that cut him to the bone of his soul.

  Sometime later-after the darkness had added all its chill to Lord Foul's winter, and the watch fires of the encampment had paled to mere sparks beside samadhi Raver's loud, strong lust for death, Loerya Trevor-mate came to the tower, bearing with her a small pot of graveling which she placed before her when she sat on the stone, so that the glow lit her drawn face. The uplift of her visage cast her eyes into shadow, but still Mhoram could see that they were raw with tears.

  "My daughters"-her voice seemed to choke her-"my children- they-- You know them, High Lord," she said as if she were pleading. "Are they not children to make a parent proud?"

  "Be proud," Mhoram replied gently. "Parents and children are a pride to each other."

  "You know them, High Lord," she insisted. "My joy in them has been large enough to be pain. They- High Lord, they will no longer eat. They fear the food-they see poison in the food. This evil maddens them.''

  "We are all maddened, Loerya. We must endure."

  "How endure? Without hope-? High Lord, it were better if I had not borne children."

  Gently, quietly, Mhoram answered a different question. "We cannot march out to fight this evil. If we leave these walls, we are ended. There is no other hold for us. We must endure."

  In a voice suffused with weeping, Loerya said, "High Lord, summon the Unbeliever."

  "Ah, sister Loerya-that I cannot do. You know I cannot. You know that I chose rightly when I released Thomas Covenant to the demands of his own world. Whatever other follies have twisted the true course of my life, that choice was not folly."

  "Mhoram!" she beseeched thickly.

  "No. Loerya, think what you ask. The Unbeliever desired to save a life in his world. But time moves in other ways there. Seven and forty years have passed since he came first to Revelstone, yet in that time he has not aged even three cycles of the moon. Perhaps only moments have gone by for him since his last summoning. If he were called again now, perhaps he would still be prevented from saving the young child who needs him."

  At the mention of a child, sudden anger twisted Loerya's face. "Summon him!" she hissed. "What are his nameless children to me? By the Seven, Mhoram! Summon-!"

  "No." Mhoram interrupted her, but his voice did not lose its gentleness . "I will not. He must have the freedom of his own fate-it is his right. We have no right to take it from him-no, even the Land's utterest need does not justify such an act. He holds the white gold. Let him come to the Land if he wills. I will not gainsay the one true bravery of my unwise life.''

  Loerya's anger collapsed as swiftly as it had come. Wringing her hands over the graveling as if even the hope of warmth had gone out of them, she moaned, "This evening my youngest-Yolenid-she is hardly more than a baby-she shrieked at the sight of me." With an effort, she raised her streaming eyes to the high Lord, and whispered, "How endure?"

  Though his own heart wept for her, Mhoram met her gaze. "The alternative is Desecration." As he looked into the ragged extremity of her face, he felt his own need crying out, urging him to share his perilous secret. For a moment that made his pulse hammer apprehensively in his temples, he knew that he would answer Loerya if she asked him. To warn her, he breathed softly, "Power is a dreadful thing."

  A spark of inchoate hope lit her eyes. She climbed unsteadily to her feet, brought her face closer to his and searched him. The first opening of a meld drained the surfaces of his mind. But what she saw or felt in him stopped her. His cold doubt quenched the light in her eyes, and she receded from him. In an awkward voice that carried only a faint vibration of bitterness, she said, "No, Mhoram. I will not ask. I trust you or no one. You will speak when your heart is ready."

  Gratitude burned under Mhoram's eyelids. With a crooked smile, he said, "You are courageous, sister Loerya."

  "No." She picked up her graveling pot and moved away from him. "Though it is no fault of theirs, my daughters make me craven.'' Without a backward glance, she left the High Lord alone in the lurid night.

  Hugging his staff against his chest, he turned and faced once more the flawless green wrong of the Raver's Stone. As his eyes met that baleful light, he straightened his shoulders, drew himself erect, so that he stood upright like a marker or witness to Revelstone's inviolate rock.

  [FIVE] Lomillialor

  The weight of mortality which entombed Covenant seemed to press him deeper and deeper into the obdurate stuff of the ground. He felt that he had given up breathing-that the rock and soil through which he sank sealed him off from all respiration-but the lack of air gave him no distress; he had no more need for the sweaty labor of breathing. He was plunging irresistibly, motionlessly downward, like a man falling into his fate.

  Around him, the black earth changed slowly to mist and cold. It lost none of its solidity, none of its airless weight, but its substance altered, became by gradual increments a pitch-dark fog as massive and unanswerable as the pith of granite. With it, the cold increased. Cold and winter and mist wound about him like cerements.

  He had no sense of duration, but at some point he became aware of a chill breeze in the mist. It eased some of the pressure on him, loosened his cerements. Then an abrupt rift appeared some distance away. Through the gap, he saw a fathomless night sky, unredeemed by any stars. And from the rift shone a slice of green light as cold and compelling as the crudest emerald.

  The cloud rift rode the breeze until it crossed over him. As it passed, he saw standing behind the heavy clouds a full moon livid wit
h green force, an emerald orb radiating ill through the heavens. The sick green light caught at him. When the rift which exposed it blew by him and away into the distance, he felt himself respond. The authority, the sovereignty, of the moon could not be denied: he began to flow volitionlessly through the mist in the wake of the rift.

  But another force intervened. For an instant, he thought he could smell the aroma of a tree's heart sap, and pieces of song touched him through the cold: be true . . . answer . . . soul's deep curse . . .

  He clung to them, and their potent appeal anchored him. The darkness of the mist locked around him again, and he went sinking in the direction of the song.

  Now the cold stiffened under him, so that he felt he was descending on a slab, with the breeze blowing over him. He was too chilled to move, and only the sensation of air in his chest told him that he was breathing again. His ribs and diaphragm worked, pumped air in and out of his lungs automatically. Then he noticed another change in the mist. The blank, wet, blowing night took on another dimension, an outer limit; it gave the impression that it clung privately to him, leaving the rest of the world in sunlight. Despite the cloud, he could sense the possibility of brightness in the cold breeze beyond him. And the frigid slab grew harder and harder under him, until he felt he was lying on a catafalque with a cairn of personal darkness piled over him.

  The familiar song left him there. For a time, he heard nothing but the hum of the breeze and the hoarse, lisping sound made by his breath as it labored past his swollen lip and gum. He was freezing slowly, sinking into icy union with the stone under his back. Then a voice near him panted, "By the Seven! We have done it."

  The speaker sounded spent with weariness and oddly echoless, forlorn. Only the hum of the wind supported his claim to existence; without it, he might have been speaking alone in the uncomprehended ether between the stars.

  A light voice full of glad relief answered, "Yes, my friend. Your lore serves us well. We have not striven in vain these three days."

  "My lore and your strength. And the lomillialor of High Lord Mhoram. But see him. He is injured and ill."

  "Have I not told you that he also suffers?"

  The light voice sounded familiar to Covenant. It brought the sunshine closer, contracted the mist until it was wholly within him, and he could feel cold brightness on his face.

  "You have told me," said the forlorn man. "And I have told you that I should have killed him when he was within my grasp. But all my acts go astray. Behold-even now the Unbeliever comes dying to my call."

  The second speaker replied in a tone of gentle reproof, "My friend, you-''

  But the first cut him off. "This is an ill-blown place. We cannot help him here."

  Covenant felt hands grip his shoulders. He made an effort to open his eyes. At first he could see nothing; the sunlight washed everything out of his sight. But then something came between him and the sun. In its shadow, he blinked at the blur which marred all his perceptions.

  "He awakens," the first voice said. "Will he know me?"

  "Perhaps not. You are no longer young, my friend."

  "Better if he does not," the man muttered. "He will believe that I seek to succeed where I once failed. Such a man will understand retribution."

  "You wrong him. I have known him more closely. Do you not see the greatness of his need for mercy?"

  "I see it. And I also know him. I have lived with Thomas Covenant in my ears for seven and forty years. He receives mercy even now, whether or not he comprehends it."

  "We have summoned him from his rightful world. Do you call this mercy?"

  In a hard voice, the first speaker said, "I call it mercy."

  After a moment, the second sighed. "Yes. And we could not have chosen otherwise. Without him, the Land dies."

  "Mercy?" Covenant croaked. His mouth throbbed miserably.

  "Yes!" the man bending over him averred. "We give you a new chance to resist the ill which you have allowed upon the Land."

  Gradually, Covenant saw that the man had the square face and broad shoulders of a Stonedownor. His features were lost in shadow, but woven into the shoulders of his thick, fur-lined cloak was a curious pattern of crossed lightning-a pattern Covenant had seen somewhere before. But he was still too bemused with fog and shock to trace the memory.

  He tried to sit up. The man helped him, braced him in that position. For a moment, his gaze wandered. He found that he was on a circular stone platform edged by a low wall. He could see nothing but sky beyond the parapet. The cold blue void held his eyes as if it were beckoning to him; it appealed to his emptiness. He had to wrestle his gaze into focus on the Stonedownor.

  From this angle, the sun illuminated the man's face. With his gray-black hair and weathered cheeks, he appeared to be in his mid-sixties, but age was not his dominant feature. His visage created a self-contradictory impression. He had a hard, bitter mouth which had eaten sour bread for so long that it had forgotten the taste of sweetness, but his eyes were couched in fine lines of supplication, as if he had spent years looking skyward and begging the sun not to blind him. He was a man who had been hurt and had not easily borne the cost.

  As if the words had just penetrated through his haze, Covenant heard the man say, Should have killed him. A man wearing a pattern of crossed lightning on his shoulders had once tried to kill Covenant-and had been prevented by Atiaran Trell-mate. She had invoked the Oath of Peace.

  "Triock?" Covenant breathed hoarsely. "Triock?"

  The man did not flinch from Covenant's aching gaze. "I promised that we would meet again."

  Hellfire, Covenant groaned to himself. Hell and blood. Triock had been in love with Lena daughter of Atiaran before Covenant had ever met her.

  He struggled to get to his feet. In the raw cold, his battered muscles could not raise him; he almost fainted at the exertion. But Triock helped him, and someone else lifted him from behind. He stood wavering, clinging helplessly to Triock's support, and looked out beyond the parapet.

  The stone platform stood in empty air as if it were afloat in the sky, riding the hum of the breeze. In the direction Covenant faced, he could see straight to the farthest horizon, and that horizon was nothing but a sea of gray clouds, a waving, thick mass of blankness like a shroud over the earth. He wobbled a step closer to the parapet, and saw that the deep flood covered everything below him. The platform stood a few hundred feet above the clouds as if it were the only thing in the world on which the sun still shone.

  But a promontory of mountains jutted out of the gray sea on his left. And when he peered over his shoulder past the man who supported him from behind, he found another promontory towering over him on that side; a flat cliff-face met his view, and on either side of it a mountain range strode away into the clouds.

  He was on Kevin's Watch again, standing atop a stone shaft which joined that cliff-face somewhere out of sight below him.

  For a moment, he was too surprised to be dizzy. He had not expected this; he had expected to be recalled to Revelstone. Who in the Land beside the Lords had the power to summon him? When he had known Triock, the man had been a Cattleherd, not a wielder of lore. Who but the Despiser could make such a summons possible?

  Then the sight of the long fall caught up with him, and vertigo took the last strength from his legs. Without the hands which held him, he would have toppled over the parapet.

  "Steady, my friend," Triock's companion said reassuringly. "I will not release you. I have not forgotten your dislike of heights." He turned Covenant away from the wall, supporting him easily.

  Covenant's head rolled loosely on his neck, but when the Watch stopped reeling around him, he forced himself to look toward Triock. "How?" he mumbled thickly. "Who-where did you get the power?"

  Triock's lips bent in a hard smile. To his companion, he said, "Did I not say that he would understand retribution? He believes that even now I would break my Oath for him." Then he directed the bitterness of his mouth at Covenant. "Unbeliever, you have earne
d retribution. The loss of High Lord Elena has caused-"

  "Peace, my friend,'' the other man said. "He has pain enough for the present. Tell him no sad stories now. We must bear him to a place where we may succor him."

  Again, Triock looked at Covenant's injuries. "Yes," he sighed wearily. "Pardon me, Unbeliever. I have spent seven and forty years with people who cannot forget you. Be at rest-we will preserve you from harm as best we may. And we will answer your questions. But first we must leave this place. We are exposed here. The Gray Slayer has many eyes, and some of them may have seen the power which summoned you."

  He slid a smooth wooden rod under his cloak, then said to his companion, "Rockbrother, can you bear the Unbeliever down this stair? I have rope if you desire it."

  His companion laughed quietly. "My friend, I am a Giant. I have not lost my footing on stone since the first sea voyage of my manhood. Thomas Covenant will be secure with me."

  A Giant? Covenant thought dumbly. For the first time, he noticed the size of the hands which supported him. They were twice as big as his. They turned him lightly, lifted him into the air as if he were weightless.

  He found himself looking up into the face of Saltheart Foamfollower.

  The Giant did not appear to have changed much since Covenant had last seen him. His short, stiff iron beard was grayer and longer, and deep lines of care furrowed his forehead, on which the mark of the wound he had received at the battle of Soaring Woodhelven was barely visible; but his deep-set eyes still flashed like enthusiastic gems from under the massive fortification of his brows, and his lips curled wryly around a smile of welcome. Looking at him, Covenant could think of nothing except that he had not said good-bye to the Giant when they had parted in Treacher's Gorge. Foamfollower had befriended him-and he had not even returned that friendship to the extent of one farewell. Shame pushed his eyes from Foamfollower's face. He glanced down the Giant's gnarled, oaklike frame. There he saw that Foamfollower's heavy leather jerkin and leggings were tattered and rent, and under many of the tears were battle scars, both old and new. The newest ones hurt him as if they had been cut into his own flesh.