Had it in fact defended Covenant from hurt?
“As you see,” Kasreyn said, “he is uninjured.” A slight tremble of age and ire afflicted his voice. “Despite your thought of me, I have sought only his succor. Had this Haruchai not foiled me with his presence and needless bloodshed, your Thomas Covenant would have been restored to you whole and well. But no trustworthiness can withstand your suspicion. Your doubt fulfills itself, for it prevents me from accomplishing that which would teach you the honesty of my intent.”
Linden spun on him. Her relief recoiled into fury. “You bastard. If you’re so goddamn trustworthy, why did you do all this?”
“Chosen.” Indignation shone through the rheum of his eyes. “Do any means exist by which I could have persuaded you to concede Thomas Covenant to me alone?”
With all the strength of his personality, he projected an image of offended virtue. But Linden was not daunted. The discrepancy between his stance and his hunger was palpable to her. She was angry enough to tell him what she saw, expose the range of her sight. But she had no time. Heavy feet rang on the iron stairs. Behind the reek of death in the air, she felt hustin surging upward. As Brinn drew Covenant from the stair, she turned to warn her companions. They did not need the warning. The Giants and Haruchai had already poised themselves in defensive positions around the room.
But the first individual who appeared from the stairwell was not one of the hustin. It was Rant Absolain.
The Lady Alif was at his back. She had taken the time to cover herself with a translucent robe.
Behind them came the Guards.
When she saw the fallen husta, the Lady Alif’s face betrayed an instant of consternation. She had not expected this. Reading her, Linden guessed that the Favored had roused the gaddhi in an effort to further frustrate Kasreyn’s plans. But the dead Guard changed everything. Before the Lady mastered her expression, it gave away her realization that she had made a mistake.
With a sting of apprehension, Linden saw what the mistake was.
The gaddhi did not glance at Kasreyn. He did not notice his guests. His attention was locked to the dead Guard. He moved forward a step, two steps, stumbled to his knees in the dark blood. It splattered thickly, staining his linen. His hands fluttered at the husta’s face. Then he tried to turn the Guard over onto its back; but it was too heavy for him. His hands came away covered with blood. He stared at them, gazed blindly up at the crowd around him. His mouth trembled. “My Guard.” He sounded like a bereaved child. “Who has slain my Guard?”
For a moment, the lucubrium was intense with silence. Then Hergrom stepped forward. Linden felt peril thronging in the air. She tried to call him back. But she was too late. Hergrom acknowledged his responsibility to spare his companions from the gaddhi’s wrath.
Hustin continued to arrive. The Giants and Haruchai held themselves ready; but they were weaponless and outnumbered.
Slowly Rant Absolain’s expression focused on Hergrom. He arose from his knees, dripping gouts of blood. For a moment, he stared at Hergrom as if he were appalled by the depth of the Haruchai’s crime. Then he said, “Kemper.” His voice was a snarl of passion in the back of his throat. Grief and outrage gave him the stature he had lacked earlier. “Punish him.”
Kasreyn moved among the Guards and questers, went to stand near Rant Absolain. “O gaddhi, blame him not.” The Kemper’s self-command made him sound telic rather than contrite. “The fault is mine. I have made many misjudgments.”
At that, the gaddhi broke like an over-stretched rope.
“I want him punished!” With both fists, he hammered at Kasreyn’s chest, pounding smears of blood into the yellow robe. The Kemper recoiled a step; and Rant Absolain turned to hurl his passion at Hergrom. “That Guard is mine! Mine! Then he faced Kasreyn again. “In all Bhrathairealm, I possess nothing! I am the gaddhi, and the gaddhi is only a servant!” Rage and self-pity writhed in him. “The Sandhold is not mine! The Riches are not mine! The Chatelaine attends me only at your whim!” He stooped to the dead husta and scooped up handfuls of the congealing fluid, flung them at Kasreyn, at Hergrom. A gobbet trickled and fell from Kasreyn’s chin, but he ignored it. “Even my Favored come to me from you! After you have used them!” Rant Absolain’s fists jerked blows through the air. “But the Guard is mine! They alone obey me without looking first to learn your will!” With a shout, he concluded, “I want him punished!”
Rigid as madness, he faced the Kemper. After a moment, Kasreyn said, “O gaddhi, your will is my will.” His tone was suffused with regret. As he stepped slowly, ruefully, toward Hergrom, the tension concealed within his robe conveyed a threat. “Hergrom—” Linden began. Then her throat locked on the warning. She did not know what the threat was.
Her companions braced themselves to leap to Hergrom’s aid. But they, too, could not define the threat.
The Kemper stopped before Hergrom, studied him briefly. Then Kasreyn lifted his ocular to his left eye. Linden tried to relax. The Haruchai had already proven themselves impervious to the Kemper’s geas. Hergrom’s flat orbs showed no fear.
Gazing through his eyepiece, Kasreyn reached out with careful unmenace and touched his index finger to the center of Hergrom’s forehead.
Hergrom’s only reaction was a slight widening of his eyes.
The Kemper dropped both hands, sagged as if in weariness or sorrow. Without a word, he turned away. The Guards parted for him as he went to the chair where Covenant had been bound. There he seated himself, though he could not lean back because of the child he carried. With his fingers, he hid his face as if he were mourning.
But to Linden the emotion he concealed felt like glee.
She was unsure of her perception. The Kemper was adept at disguising the truth about himself. But Rant Absolain’s reaction was unmistakable. He was grinning in fierce triumph.
His mouth moved as if he wanted to say something that would crush the company, demonstrate his own superiority; but no words came to him. Yet his passion for the Guards sustained him. He might indeed have been a monarch as he moved away. Commanding the hustin to follow him, he took the Lady Alif by the hand and left the lucubrium.
As she started downward, the Lady cast one swift look like a pang of regret toward Linden. Then she was gone, and the Guards were thumping down the iron stairs behind her. Two of them bore their dead fellow away.
None of the questers shifted while the hustin filed from the chamber. Vain’s bland ambiguous smile was a reverse image of Findail’s alert pain. The First stood with her arms folded over her chest, glaring like a hawk. Honninscrave and Seadreamer remained poised nearby. Brinn had placed Covenant at Linden’s side, where the four Haruchai formed a cordon around the people they had sworn to protect.
Linden held herself rigid, pretending severity. But her sense of peril did not abate.
The Guards were leaving. Hergrom had suffered no discernible harm. In a moment, Kasreyn would be alone with the questers. He would be in their hands. Surely he could not defend himself against so many of them. Then why did she feel that the survival of the company had become so precarious?
Brinn gazed at her intently. His hard eyes strove to convey a message without words. Intuitively she understood him.
The last husta was on the stairs. The time had almost come. Her knees were trembling. She flexed them slightly, sought to balance herself on the balls of her feet.
The Kemper had not moved. From within the covert of his hands, he said in a tone of rue, or cleverly mimicked rue, “You may return to your rooms. Doubtless the gaddhi will later summon you. I must caution you to obey him. Yet I would you could credit that I regret all which has transpired here.”
The moment had come. Linden framed the words in her mind. Time and again, she had dreamed of slaying Gibbon-Raver. She had even berated Covenant for his restraint in Revelstone. She had said, Some infections have to be cut out. She had believed that. What was power for, if not to extirpate evil? Why else had she become who she was?
But now the decision was upon her—and she could not speak. Her heart leaped with fury at everything Kasreyn had done, and still she could not speak. She was a doctor, not a killer. She could not give Brinn the permission he wanted.
His mien wore an inflectionless contempt as he turned his back on her. Mutely he referred his desires to the leadership of the First.
The Swordmain did not respond. If she were aware of her opportunity, she elected to ignore it. Without a word to the Kemper or her companions, she strode to the stairs.
Linden gave a dumb groan of relief or regret, she did not know which.
A faint frown creased Brinn’s forehead. But he did not hesitate. When Honninscrave had followed the First, Brinn and Hergrom took Covenant downward. At once, Cail and Ceer steered Linden toward the stairs. Seadreamer placed himself like a bulwark behind the Haruchai. Leaving Vain and Findail to follow at their own pace, the company descended from Kemper’s Pitch. Clenched in a silence like a fist, they returned to their quarters in the Second Circinate.
Along the way, they encountered no Guards. Even The Majesty was empty of hustin.
The First entered the larger chamber across the hall from the bedrooms. While Linden and the others joined the Swordmain, Ceer remained in the passage to ward the door.
Brinn carefully placed Covenant on one of the settees. Then he confronted the First and Linden together. His impassive voice conveyed a timbre of accusation to Linden’s hearing.
“Why did we not slay the Kemper? There lay our path to safety.”
The First regarded him as if she were chewing her tongue for self-command. A hard moment passed between them before she replied, “The hustin number four score hundred. The Horse, fifteen score. We cannot win our way with bloodshed.”
Linden felt like a cripple. Once again, she had been too paralyzed to act; contradictions rendered her useless. She could not even spare herself the burden of supporting Brinn.
“They don’t mean anything. I don’t know about the Horse. But the Guards haven’t got any minds of their own. They’re helpless without Kasreyn to tell them what to do.”
Honninscrave looked at her in surprise. “But the gaddhi said—”
“He’s mistaken.” The cries she had been stifling tore at the edges of her voice. “Kasreyn keeps him like a pet.”
“Then is it also your word,” asked the First darkly, “that we should have slain this Kemper?”
Linden failed to meet the First’s stare. She wanted to shout, Yes! And, No. Did she not have enough blood on her hands?
“We are Giants,” the Swordmain said to Linden’s muteness. “We do not murder.” Then she turned her back on the matter.
But she was a trained fighter. The rictus of her shoulders said as clearly as an expostulation that the effort of restraint in the face of so much peril and mendacity was tearing her apart.
A blur filled Linden’s sight. Every judgment found her wanting. Even Covenant’s emptiness was an accusation for which she had no answer.
What had Kasreyn done to Hergrom?
The light and dark of the world were invisible within the Sandhold. But eventually servants came to the chamber, announcing sunrise with trays of food. Linden’s thoughts were dulled by fatigue and strain; yet she roused herself to inspect the viands. She expected treachery in everything. However, a moment’s examination showed her that the food was clean. Deliberately she and her companions ate their fill, trying to prepare themselves for the unknown.
With worn and red-rimmed eyes, she studied Hergrom. From the brown skin of his face to the vital marrow of his bones, he showed no evidence of harm, no sign that he had ever been touched. But the unforgiving austerity of his visage prevented her from asking him any questions. The Haruchai did not trust her. In refusing to call for Kasreyn’s death, she had rejected what might prove the only chance to save Hergrom.
Some time later, Rire Grist arrived. He was accompanied by another man, a soldier with an atrabilious mien whom the Caitiffin introduced as his aide. He greeted the questers as if he had heard nothing concerning the night’s activities. Then he said easily, “My friends, the gaddhi chooses to pleasure himself this morning with a walk upon the Sandwall. He asks for your attendance. The sun shines with wondrous clarity, granting a view of the Great Desert which may interest you. Will you come?”
He appeared calm and confident. But Linden read in the tightness around his eyes that the peril had not been averted.
The bitterness of the First’s thoughts was plain upon her countenance: Have we choice in the matter? But Linden had nothing to say. She had lost the power of decision. Her fears beat about her head like dark wings, making everything impossible. They’re going to kill Hergrom!
Yet the company truly had no choice. They could not fight all the gaddhi’s Guards and Horse. And if they did not mean to fight, they had no recourse but to continue acting out their role as Rant Absolain’s guests. Linden’s gaze wandered the blind stone of the floor, avoiding the eyes which searched her, until the First said to Rire Grist, “We are ready.” Then in stiff distress she followed her companions out of the room.
The Caitiffin led them down to the Sandhold’s massive gates. In the forecourt of the First Circulate, perhaps as many as forty soldiers were training their mounts, prancing and curveting the destriers around the immense, dim hall. The horses were all dark or black, and their shod hooves struck sparks into the shadows like the crepitation of a still-distant prescience. Rire Grist hailed the leader of the riders in a tone of familiar command. He was sure of himself among them. But he took the company on across the hall without pausing.
When they reached the band of open ground which girdled the donjon, the desert sun hit them a tangible blow of brightness and heat. Linden had to turn away to clear her sight. Blinking, she looked up at the dusty-tinged sky between the ramparts, seeking some relief for her senses from the massy oppression of the Sandhold. But she found no relief. There were no birds. And the banquettes within the upper curve of the wall were marked at specific intervals with hustin.
Cail took her arm, drew her after her companions eastward into the shadow of the wall. Her eyes were grateful for the dimness; but it did not ease the way the arid air scraped at her lungs. The sand shifted under her feet at every step, leeching the strength from her legs. When the company passed the eastern gate of the Sandwall, she felt an impossible yearning to turn and run.
Talking politely about the design and construction of the wall, Rire Grist led the company around the First Circinate toward a wide stair built into the side of the Sandwall. He was telling the First and Honninscrave that there were two such stairs, one opposite the other beyond the Sandhold—and that there were also other ways to reach the wall from the donjon, through underground passages. His tone was bland; but his spirit was not.
A shiver like a touch of fever ran through Linden as he started up the stairs. Nevertheless she followed as if she had surrendered her independent volition to the exigency which impelled the First.
The stairs were broad enough for eight or ten people at once. But they were steep, and the effort of climbing them in that heat drew a flush across Linden’s face, stuck her shirt to her back with sweat. By the time she reached the top, she was breathing as if the dry air were full of needles.
Within its parapets, the ridge of the Sandwall was as wide as a road and smooth enough for horses or wains to travel easily. From this vantage, Linden was level with the rim of the First Circinate and could see each immense circle of the Sandhold rising dramatically to culminate in the dire shaft of Kemper’s Pitch.
On the other side of the wall lay the Great Desert.
As Rire Grist had said, the atmosphere was clear and sharp to the horizons. Linden felt that her gaze spanned a score of leagues to the east and south. In the south, a few virga cast purple shadows across the middle distance; but they did not affect the etched acuity of the sunlight.
Under that light, the desert was a wilderness of sand—
as white as salt and bleached bones, and drier than all the world’s thirst. It caught the sun, sent it back diffused and multiplied. The sands were like a sea immobilized by the lack of any tide heavy enough to move it. Dunes serried and challenged each other toward the sky as if at one time the ground itself had been lashed to life by the fury of a cataclysm. But that orogeny had been so long ago that only the skeleton of the terrain and the shape of the dunes remembered it. No other life remained to the Great Desert now except the life of wind—intense desiccating blasts out of the deep south which could lift the sand like spume and re-carve the face of the land at whim. And this day there was no wind. The air felt like a reflection of the sand, and everything Linden saw in all directions was dead.
But to the southwest there was wind. As the company walked along the top of the Sandwall, she became aware that in the distance, beyond the virga and the discernible dunes, violence was brewing. No, not brewing: it had already attained full rage. A prodigious storm galed around itself against the horizon as if it had a cyclone for a heart. Its clouds were as black as thunder, and at intervals it sent out lurid glarings like shrieks.
Until the Giants stopped to look at the storm, she did not realize what it was.
Sandgorgons Doom.
Abruptly she was touched by a tremor of augury, as if even at this range the storm had the power to reach out and rend—
The gaddhi and his women stood on the southwest curve of the Sandwall, where they had a crystal view of the Doom. Nearly a score of hustin guarded the vicinity.
They were directly under the purview of Kemper’s Pitch.
Rant Absolain hailed the questers as they approached. A secret excitement sharpened his welcome. He spoke the common tongue with a heartiness that rang false. On behalf of the company, Rire Grist gave appropriate replies. Before he could make obeisance, the gaddhi summoned him closer, drawing the company among the Guards. Quickly Linden scanned the gathering and discovered that Kasreyn was not present.
Free of his Kemper, Rant Absolain was determined to play the part of a warm host. “Welcome, welcome,” he said fulsomely. He wore a long ecru robe designed to make him appear stately. His Favored stood near him, attired like the priestesses of a love-god. Other young women were there also; but they had not been granted the honor of sharing the gaddhi’s style of dress. They were decked out in raiment exquisitely inappropriate to the sun and the heat. But the gaddhi paid no attention to their obvious beauty; he concentrated in his guests. In one hand, he held an ebony chain from which dangled a large medallion shaped to represent a black sun. He used it to emphasize the munificence of his gestures as he performed.
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