The Illearth War

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  For a moment, he shied away from what he was thinking. “How should I know? If I knew, I might be able to fight it somehow. Aside from the idea that I’m supposed to destroy the Land—” But Elena’s grave attention stopped him. For her sake, he mustered his courage. “Well, look at what’s happened because of me. I did something to Loric’s krill—therefore Amok showed up—therefore you’re going to try to unlock the Seventh Ward. It’s as neat as clockwork. If you’d summoned me sooner, then when we got to this point you wouldn’t be under such pressure to use lore you don’t understand. And if all this had happened later, you wouldn’t have come here at all—you would have been too busy fighting the war.

  “As for me”—he swallowed and looked away for an instant, then took a step closer to the root of his bargain—“this is the only way I can possibly get off the hook. If things had gone differently, there would have been a lot more pressure on me—from everywhere—to learn how to use this ring. And Joan—But this way you’ve been distracted—you’re thinking about the Seventh Ward instead of wild magic or whatever. And Foul doesn’t want me to learn what white gold is good for. I might use it against him.

  “Don’t you see it? Foul put us right where we are. He released dukkha so that we would be right here now. He must have a reason. He likes to destroy people through the things that make them hope. That way he can get them to desecrate—No wonder this is the dark of the moon.” He was poignantly conscious of the way in which he endangered his own cause as he concluded softly, “Elena, the Seventh Ward might be the worst thing that has happened yet.”

  But she had her answer ready. “No, beloved. I do not believe it. High Lord Kevin formed his Wards in a time before his wisdom fell into despair. Fangthane’s hand is not in them. It may be that the Power of Command is perilous—but it is not ill.”

  Her statement did not convince him. But he did not have the heart to protest. The echoes placed too much stress on even his simplest words. Instead, he sat gazing morosely at her feet while he scratched at the itch of his wedding band. As the echoes died—as the boat slid gently to a stop in the water—he felt that he had missed a chance for rectitude.

  For a time, no voice arose to move the boat. Covenant and Elena sat in silence, studying their private thoughts. But then she spoke again. Softly, reverently, she recited the words of Lord Kevin’s Lament. The boat glided onward again.

  Shortly the craft rounded another column, and Covenant found himself staring at a high, sparkling, silent waterfall ahead. Its upper reaches disappeared into the shadows of the cavern’s ceiling. But the torrents which poured noiselessly down its ragged surface caught the fiery rocklight at thousands of bright points, so that the falls looked like a cascade of hot, rich, red gems.

  The boat flowed smoothly on Elena’s recitation toward a rock levee at one side of the waterfall, and slid up into place. At once, Amok leaped from the craft, and stood waiting for his companions on the edge of Earthroot. But for a moment they did not follow him. They sat spellbound by the splendor and silence of the falls.

  “Come, High Lord,” the youth said. “The Seventh Ward is nigh. I must bring my being to an end.” His tone matched the unwonted seriousness of his countenance.

  Elena shook her head vaguely, as if she were remembering her limitations, her weariness and lack of knowledge. And Covenant covered his eyes to block out the disconcerting noiseless tumble and glitter of the falls. But then Morin stepped up onto the levee, and Elena followed him with a sigh. Gripping the gunwales with both hands, Covenant climbed out of the craft. When Bannor joined them, the High Lord’s party was complete.

  Amok regarded them soberly. He seemed to have aged during the boat ride. The cheeriness had faded from his face, leaving his ancient bones uncontradicted. His lips moved as if he wished to speak. But he said nothing. Like a man looking for support, he gazed briefly at each of his companions. Then he turned away, went with an oddly heavy step toward the waterfall. When he reached the first wet rocks, he scrambled up them, and stepped into the plunging water.

  With his legs widely braced against the weight of the falls, he looked back toward his companions. “Do not fear,” he said through the silent torrent. “This is merely water as you have known it. Earthroot’s potency springs from another source. Come.” With a beckoning gesture, he disappeared under the falls.

  At this, Elena stiffened. The nearness of the Seventh Ward filled her face. Discarding her fatigue, she hastened behind Morin toward the waterfall.

  Covenant followed her. Wracked, weary, full of uncomprehending dread, he nevertheless could not hang back now. As Elena pushed through the cascade and passed out of sight, he thrust himself up the wet jumble of rocks, began to crouch toward the falls. Spray dashed into his face. The rocks were too slick for him; he was forced to crawl. But he kept moving to evade Bannor’s help. Holding his breath, he burrowed into the water as if it were an avalanche.

  It almost flattened him; it pounded him like the accumulated weight of his delusion. But as he propped himself up against it—as the falls drenched him, filled his eyes and mouth and ears—he felt some of its vitality. It attacked him like an involuntary ablution, a cleansing performed as the last prerequisite of the Power of Command. It scrubbed at him as if it meant to peel his bones. But the water’s force missed his face and chest. It laid bare all his nerves, but failed to purify the marrow of his unfitness. A moment later, he crawled raw and untransmogrified into the darkness beyond the waterfall.

  Quivering he shook his head, blew the water out of his mouth and nose. His hands told him that he was on flat stone, but it felt strange, both dry and slippery. It resisted solid contact with his palms. And he could see nothing, hear no scuffles or whispers from his companions. But his sense of smell reacted violently. He found himself in an air so laden with force that it submerged every other odor of his life. It swamped him like the stink of gangrene, burned him like the reek of brimstone, but it bore no resemblance to these or any other smells he knew. It was like the polished, massive expanse of Earthroot—like the immensity of the rocklit cavern—like the continual, adumbrated weight of the waterfall—like the echoes—like the deathless stability of Melenkurion Skyweir. It reduced his restless consciousness to the scale of mere brief flesh.

  It was the smell of Earthpower.

  He could not stand it. He was on his knees before it, with his forehead pressed against the cold stone and his hands clasped over the back of his neck.

  Then he heard a low, flaring noise as Elena lit the Staff of Law. Slowly he raised his head. The sting of the air filled his eyes with tears, but he blinked at them, and looked about him.

  He was in a tunnel which ran straight and lightless away from the falls. Down its center—out of the distance and into the falls—flowed a small stream less than a yard wide. Even in the Staff’s blue light, the fluid of this stream was as red as fresh blood. This was the source of the smell—the source of Earthroot’s dangerous potency. He could see its concentrated might.

  He pushed to his feet, scrambled toward the tunnel wall; he wanted to get as far as possible from the stream. His boots slipped on the black stone floor as if it were glazed with ice. He had to struggle to keep his balance. But he reached the wall, pressed himself against it. Then he looked toward Elena.

  She was gazing as if with bated breath down the tunnel. A rapt, exultant expression filled her face, and she seemed taller, elevated in stature by her grasp on the Staff of Law—as if the Staff’s flame fed a fire within her, a blaze like a vision of victory. She looked like a priestess, an enactor of hallowed and effective rites, approaching the occult ground of her strength. The very gaps of her elsewhere gaze were crowded with exalted and savage possibilities. They made Covenant forget the uncomfortable power of the air, forget the tears which ran from his eyes like weeping, and step forward to warn her.

  At once, he lost his footing, barely managed to avoid a fall. Before he could try again, he heard Amok say, “Come. The end is at hand.” The you
th’s speech sounded as spectral as an invocation of the dead, and High Lord Elena started down the tunnel in answer to his summons. Quickly Covenant looked around, found Bannor behind him. He caught hold of Bannor’s arm as if he meant to demand, Stop her! Don’t you see what she’s going to do? But he could not say it; he had made a bargain. Instead he thrust away, tried to hurry after Elena.

  He could find no purchase for his feet. His boots skidded off the stone; he seemed to have lost his sense of balance. But he scrabbled grimly onward. With an intense effort of will, he relaxed the force of his strides, pushed less sharply against the ground. As a result, he gained some control over his movements, contrived to keep pace with the High Lord.

  But he could not catch her. And he could not watch where she was going; his steps required too much concentration. He did not look up until the assailing odor took a leap which almost reduced him to his knees again. Tears flooded his eyes so heavily that they felt irretrievably blurred, bereft of focus. But the smell told him that he had reached the spring of the red stream.

  Through his tears, he could see Elena’s flame guttering.

  He squeezed the water out of his eyes, gained a moment in which to make out his surroundings. He stood behind Elena in a wider cave at the tunnel’s end. Before him, set into the black stone end-wall like an exposed lode-facet, was a rough, sloping plane of wet rock. This whole plane shimmered; its emanations distorted his ineffectual vision, gave him the impression that he was staring at a mirage, a wavering in the solid stuff of existence. It confronted him like a porous membrane in the foundation of time and space. From top to bottom, it bled moisture which dripped down the slope, collected in a rude trough, and flowed away along the center of the tunnel.

  “Behold,” Amok said quietly. “Behold the Blood of the Earth. Here I fulfill the purpose of my creation. I am the Seventh Ward of High Lord Kevin’s Lore. The power to which I am the way and the door is here.” As he spoke, his voice deepened and emptied, grew older. The weary burden of his years bent his shoulders. When he continued, he seemed conscious of a need for haste, a need to speak before his old immunity to time ran out.

  “High Lord, attend. The air of this place unbinds me. I must complete my purpose now.”

  “Then speak, Amok,” she replied. “I hear you.”

  “Ah, hear,” said Amok in a sad, musing tone, as if her answer had dropped him into a reverie. “Where is the good of hearing, if it is not done wisely?” Then he recollected himself. In a stronger voice, he said, “But hear, then, for good or ill. I fulfill the law of my creation. My maker can require no more of me.

  “High Lord, behold the Blood of the Earth. This is the passionate and essential ichor of the mountain rock—the Earthpower which raises and holds peaks high. It bleeds here—perhaps because the great weight of Melenkurion Skyweir squeezes it from the dense rock—or perhaps because the mountain is willing to lay bare its heart’s-blood for those who need and can find it. Whatever the cause, its result remains. Any soul who drinks of the EarthBlood gains the Power of Command.”

  He met her intense gaze, and went on, “This Power is rare and potent—and full of hazard. Once it has been taken in from the Blood, it must be used swiftly—lest its strength destroy the drinker. And none can endure more than a single draft—no mortal thew and bone can endure more than a single swallow of the Blood. It is too rare a fluid for any cup of flesh to hold.

  “Yet such hazards do not explain why High Lord Kevin himself did not essay the Power of Command. For this Power is the power to achieve any desired act—to issue any command to the stone and soil and grass and wood and water and flesh of life, and see that command fulfilled. If any drinker were to say to Melenkurion Skyweir, ‘Crumble and fall,’ the great peaks would instantly obey. If any drinker were to say to the FireLions of Mount Thunder, ‘Leave your bare slopes, attack and lay waste Ridjeck Thome,’ they would at once strive with all their strength to obey. This Power can achieve anything which lies within the scope of the commanded. Yet High Lord Kevin did not avail himself of it.

  “I do not know all the purposes which guided his heart when he chose to leave the EarthBlood untasted. But I must explain if I can the deeper hazards of the Power of Command.”

  Amok spoke in a tone of deepening, spectral hollowness, and Covenant listened desperately, as if he were clinging with raw, bruised fingers to the precipice of Amok’s words. Hot things hammered in his veins, and tears like rivulets of fire ran unstanchably down his sweating cheeks. He felt that he was suffocating on the smell of EarthBlood. His ring itched horribly. He could not keep his balance; his footing constantly oozed from under him. Yet his perceptions went beyond all this. His flooded senses stretched as if they were at last thrusting their heads above water. As Amok spoke of deeper hazards, Covenant became aware of a new implication in the cave.

  Through the brunt of the Blood, he began to smell something wrong, something ill. It crept insidiously across the whelming odor like an oblique defiance which seemed to succeed in spite of the immense force which it opposed, undercut, betrayed. But he could not locate its source. Either the Power of Command itself was in some way false, or the wrong was elsewhere, making itself apparent slowly through the dense air. He could not tell which.

  No one else appeared to notice the subtle reek of ill. After a short, tired pause, Amok continued his explication.

  “The first of these hazards—first, but perhaps not foremost—is the one great limit of the Power. It holds no sway over anything which is not a natural part of the Earth’s creation. Thus it is not possible to Command the Despiser to cease his warring. It is not possible to Command his death. He lived before the arch of Time was forged—the Power cannot compel him.

  “This alone might have given Kevin pause. Perhaps he did not drink of the Blood because he could not conceive how to levy any Command against the Despiser. But there is another and subtler hazard. Here any soul with the courage to drink may give a Command—but there are few who can foresee the outcome of what they have enacted. When such immeasurable force is unleashed upon the Earth, any accomplishment may recoil upon its accomplisher. If a drinker were to Command the destruction of the Illearth Stone, perhaps the Stone’s evil would survive uncontained to blight the whole Land. Here the drinker who is not also a prophet risks self-betrayal. Here are possibilities of Desecration which even High Lord Kevin in his despair left slumbering and untouched.”

  The stench of wrong grew in Covenant’s nostrils, but still he could not identify it. And he could not concentrate on it; he had a question which he fevered to ask Amok. But the tenebrous atmosphere clogged his throat, stifled him.

  While Covenant struggled for breath, something happened to Amok. During his speech, his tone had become older and more cadaverous. And now, in the pause after his last sentence, he suddenly lurched as if some taut cord within him snapped. He staggered a step toward the trough of Blood. A moment passed before he could straighten his stance, raise his head again.

  A look of fear or pain or grief widened his eyes, and around them lines of age spread visibly, as if his skin were being crumpled. The soft flesh of his cheeks eroded; gray ran through his hair. Like a dry sponge, he soaked up his natural measure of years. When he spoke again, his voice was weak and empty. “I can say no more. My time is ended. Farewell, High Lord. Do not fail the Land.”

  Convulsively Covenant gasped out his question. “What about the white gold?”

  Amok answered across a great gulf of age, “White gold exists beyond the arch of Time. It cannot be Commanded.”

  Another inward snapping shook him; he jerked closer to the trough.

  “Help him!” croaked Covenant. But Elena only raised the Staff of Law in a mute, fiery salute.

  With an age-palsied exertion, Amok thrust himself erect. Tears ran through the wrinkled lattice of his cheeks as he lifted his face toward the roof of the cave, and cried in a stricken voice, “Ah, Kevin! Life is sweet, and I have lived so short a time! Must I pass away?”<
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  A third snapping shuddered him like an answer to his appeal. He stumbled as if his bones were falling apart, and tumbled into the trough. In one swift instant, the Blood dissolved his flesh, and he was gone.

  Covenant groaned helplessly, “Amok!” Through the blur of his own ineffectual tears, he gaped at the red, flowing rill of EarthBlood. Imbalance poured into him from the stone, mounted in his muscles like vertigo. He lost all sense of where he was. To steady himself, he reached out to grasp Elena’s shoulder.

  Her shoulder was so hard and intense, so full of rigid purpose, that it felt like naked bone under the fabric of her robe. She was poised on the verge of her own climax; her passion was tangible to his touch.

  It appalled him. Despite the dizziness which unanchored his mind, he located the source of the nameless reek of wrong.

  The ill was in Elena, in the High Lord herself.

  She seemed unconscious of it. In a tone of barely controlled excitement, she said, “Amok is gone—his purpose is accomplished. Now there must be no more delay. For the sake of all the Earth, I must drink and Command.” To Covenant’s ears, she sounded rife with hungry conclusions—so packed with needs and duties and intents that she was about to shatter.

  The realization caught him like a damp hand on the back of his neck, forced him inwardly to his knees. When she stepped out of his grasp, moved toward the trough of Blood, he felt that she had torn away his last defense. Elena! he wailed silently, Elena! His cries were cries of abjection.

  For a moment, he knelt within himself as if he were in the grip of a vision. Dizzily he saw all the manifest ways in which he was responsible for Elena—all the ways in which he had caused her to be who and what and where she was. His duplicity was the cause—his violence, his futility, his need. And he remembered the apocalypse hidden in her gaze. That was the ill. It made him shudder in anguish. He watched her through his blur of tears. When he saw her bend toward the trough, all of him leaped up in defiance of the slick rock, and he cried out hoarsely, “Elena! Don’t! Don’t do it!”