Twenty-Four: Descent to Earthroot


COVENANT found that he was sweating. Despite the chill breeze, his forehead was damp. Moisture itched in his beard, and cold perspiration ran down his spine. Morin's submission left him feeling curiously depleted. For a moment, he looked up at the sun as if to ask it why it did not warm him.
Melenkurion's spires reached into the morning like fingers straining to bracket the sun. Their glaciered tips caught the light brilliantly; the reflected dazzle made Covenant's eyes water. The massive stone of the peaks intimidated him. Blinking rapidly, he forced his gaze back to High Lord Elena.
Through his sun blindness, he seemed to see only her brown, blond-raddled hair. The lighter tresses gleamed as if they were burnished. But as he blinked, his vision cleared. He made out her face. She was vivid with smiles. A new thrill of life lit her countenance with recovered hope. She did not speak, but her lips formed the one word, Beloved.
Covenant felt that he had betrayed her.
Morin and Bannor stood almost shoulder to shoulder behind her. Nothing in the alert poise of their balance, or in the relaxed readiness of their arms, expressed any surprise or regret at the decision they had made. Yet Covenant knew they had fundamentally alerted the character of their service to the Lords. He had exacted that from them. He wished he could apologize in some way which would have meaning to the Bloodguard.
But there was nothing he could say to them. They were too absolute to accept any gesture of contrition. Their solitary communion with their Vow left him no way in which to approach them. No apology was sufficient.
"The Power of Command," he breathed weakly. "Have mercy on me." Unable to bear the sight of Elena's relieved, triumphant, grateful smile, or of Amok's grin, he turned away and walked wearily out across the plateau toward Rivenrock's edge as if his feet were trying to learn again the solidity of the stone.
He moved parallel to the cleft, but stayed a safe distance from it. As soon as he could see a substantial swath of Garroting Deep beyond the cliff edge, he stopped. There he remained, hoping both that Elena would come to him and that she would not.
The prevailing breeze from the Forest blew into his face, and for the first time in many days he was able to distinguish the tang of the season. He found that the autumn of the Land had turned its corner, traveled its annual round from joy to sorrow. The air no longer gleamed with abundance and fruition, with ripeness either glad or grim. Now the breeze tasted like the leading edge of winter-a sere augury, promising long nights and barrenness and cold.
As he smelled the air, he realized that Garroting Deep had no fall color change. He could make out stark black stands where the trees had already lost their leaves, but no blazonry palliated the Deep's darkness. It went without transition or adornment from summer to winter. He sensed the reason with his eyes
and nose; the old Forest's angry clench of consciousness consumed all its strength and will, left it with neither the ability nor the desire to spend itself in mere displays of splendor.
Then he heard footsteps behind him, and recognized Elena's tread. To forestall whatever she wanted to tell him or ask him, he said, "You know, where I come from, the people who did this to a forest would be called pioneers-a very special breed of heroes, since instead of killing other human beings they concentrate on slaughtering nature itself. In fact, I know people who claim that all our social discomfort comes from the mere fact that we've got nothing left to pioneer."
"Beloved," she said softly, "you are not well. What is amiss?"
"Amiss?" He could not bring himself to look at her. His mouth was full of his bargain, and he had to swallow hard before he could say, "Don't mind me. I'm like that Forest down there. Sometimes I can't seem to help remembering."
In the silence, he sensed how little this answer satisfied her. She cared about him, wanted to understand him. But the rebirth of hope had restored the urgency of her duty. He knew that she could not spare the time to explore him now. He nodded morosely as she said, "I must go-the Land's need bears heavily upon me." Then she added, "Will you remain here -await my return?"
At last, he found the strength to turn and face her. He met the solemn set of her face, the displaced otherness of her gaze, and said gruffly, "Stay behind? And miss risking my neck again? Nonsense. I haven't had a chance like this since I was in Mount Thunder."
His sarcasm was sharper than he had intended, but she seemed to accept it. She smiled, touched him lightly on the arm with the fingers of one hand. "Come, then, beloved," she said. "The Bloodguard are prepared. We must depart before Amok places other obstacles in our way."
He tried to smile in return, but the uncertain muscles of his face treated the attempt like a grimace. Muttering at his failure, he went with her back to
ward the Bloodguard and Amok. As they walked, he watched her sidelong, assessed her covertly. The strain of the past three days had been pushed into the background; her forthright stride and resolute features expressed new purpose, strength. The resurgence of hope enabled her to discount mere exhaustion. But her knuckles were tense as she gripped the Staff, and her head was thrust forward at a hungry angle. She made Covenant's bargain lie unquiet in him, as if he were an inadequate and unbinding grave.
In his mind, he could still feel Rivenrock heaving. He needed steadier footing; nothing would save him if he could not keep his balance.
Vaguely, he observed that the First Mark and Bannor were indeed ready to travel. They had bound all the supplies into bundles, and had tied these to their backs with clingor thongs. And Amok sparkled with eagerness; visions seemed to caper in his gay hair. The three of them gave Covenant an acute pang of unpreparedness. He did not feel equal to whatever lay ahead of the High Lord's party. A pulse of anxiety began to run through his weary mood. There was something that he needed to do; he needed to try to recover his integrity in some way. But he did not know how.
He watched as the High Lord bade farewell to the Ranyhyn. They greeted her gladly, stamping their feet and nickering in pleasure at the prospect of activity after three days of patient waiting. She embraced each of the great horses, then stepped back, gripping the Staff, and saluted them in the Ramen fashion.
The Ranyhyn responded by tossing their manes. They regarded her with proud, laughing eyes as she addressed them.
"Brave Ranyhyn-first love of my life-I thank you for your service. We have been honored. But now we must go on foot for a time. If we survive our path, we will call upon you to carry us back to Revelstone in victory or defeat, we will need the broad backs of your strength.
"For the present, be free. Roam the lands your hearts and hooves desire. And if it should come to
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pass that we do not call-if you return unsummoned to the Plains of Ra-then, brave Ranyhyn, tell all your kindred of Myrha. She saved my life in the landslide, and gave her own for a lesser horse. Tell all the Ranyhyn that Elena daughter of Lena, High Lord by the choice of the Council, and holder of the Staff of Law, is proud of your friendship. You are the Tail of the Sky, Mane of the World."
Raising the Staff, she cried, "Ranyhyn! Hail!"
The great horses answered with a whinny that echoed off the face of Melenkurion Skyweir. Then they wheeled and galloped away, taking with them Covenant's mustang. Their hooves clattered like a roll of fire on the stone as they swept northward and out of sight around the curve of the mountain.
When Elena turned back toward her companions, her sense of loss showed clearly in her face. In a sad voice, she said, "Come. If we must travel without the Ranyhyn, then let us at least travel swiftly."
At once, she turned expectantly to Amok. The ancient youth responded with an ornate bow, and started walking jauntily toward the place where the Skyweir's cliff joined the cleft of the plateau.
Covenant tugged at his beard, and watched hopelessly as Elena and Morin followed Amok.
Then, as abruptly as gasping, he exclaimed, "Wait!" The fingers of his right hand tingled in his beard. "Hang on." The High Lord looked questioningly at him. He said, "I need a knife. And some water. And a mirror, if you've got one---I don't want to cut my throat."
Elena said evenly, "Ur-Lord, we must go. We have lost so much time-and the Land is in need."
"It's important," he snapped. "Have you got a knife? The blade of my penknife isn't long enough."
For a moment, she studied him as if his conduct were a mystery. Then, slowly, she nodded to Morin. The First Mark unslung his bundle, opened it, and took out a stone knife, a leather waterskin, and a shallow bowl. These be handed to the Unbeliever. At once, Covenant sat down on the stone, filled the bowl, and began to wet his beard.
He could feel the High Lord's presence as she stood directly before him-he could almost taste the tension with which she held the Staff-but he concentrated on scrubbing water into his whiskers. His heart raced as if he were engaged in something dangerous. He had a vivid sense of what he was giving up. But he was impelled by the sudden conviction that his bargain was false because it had not cost him enough. When he picked up the knife, he did so to seal his compromise with his fate.
Elena stopped him. In a low, harsh voice, she said, "Thomas Covenant."
The way she said his name forced him to raise his head.
"Where is the urgency in this?" She controlled her harshness by speaking quietly, but her indignation was tangible in her voice. "We have spent three days in delay and ignorance. Do you now mock the Land's need? Is it your deliberate wish to prevent this quest from success?"
An angry rejoinder leaped to his lips. But the terms of his bargain required him to repress it. He bent his head again, splashed more water into his beard. "Sit down. I'll try to explain."
The High Lord seated herself cross-legged before him.
He could not comfortably meet her gaze. And he did not want to look at Melenkurion Skyweir; it stood too austerely, coldly, behind her. Instead, he watched his hands as they toyed with the stone knife.
"All right," he said awkwardly. "I'm not the kind of person who grows beards. They itch. And they make me look like a fanatic. They- So I've been letting this one grow for a reason. It's a way of proving-a way to demonstrate so that even somebody as thickheaded and generally incoherent as I am can see it when I wake up in the real world and find that I don't have this beard I've been growing, then I'll know for sure that all this is a delusion. It's proof. Forty or fifty days' worth of beard doesn't just vanish. Unless it was never really there."
She continued to stare at him. But her tone changed.
She recognized the importance of his self-revelation. "Then why do you now wish to cut it away?"
He trembled to think of the risks he was taking. But he needed freedom, and his bargain promised to provide it. Striving to keep the fear of discovery out of his voice, he told her as much of the truth as he could afford.
"I've made another deal-like the one I made with the Ranyhyn. I'm not trying to prove that the' Land isn't real anymore." In the back of his mind, he pleaded, Please don't ask me anything else. I don't want to lie to you.
She probed him with her eyes. "Do you believe, then -do you accept the Land?"
In his relief, he almost sighed aloud. He could look at her squarely to answer this. "No. But I'm willing to stop fighting about it. You've done so much for me"
"Ah, beloved!" she breathed with sudden intensity. "I have done nothing-I have only followed my heart. Within my Lord's duty, I would do anything for you."
He seemed to see her affection for him in the very hue of her skin. He wanted to lean forward, touch her, kiss her, but the presence of the Bloodguard restrained him. Instead, he handed her the knife.
He was abdicating himself to her, and she knew it. A glow of pleasure filled her face as she took the knife. "Do not fear, beloved," she whispered. "I will preserve you."
Carefully, as if she were performing a rite, she drew close to him and began to cut his beard.
He winced instinctively when the blade first touched him. But he gritted himself into stillness, locked his jaw, told himself that he was safer in her hands than in his own. He could feel the deadliness of the keen edge as it passed over his flesh-it conjured up images of festering wounds and gangrene-but he closed his eyes, and remained motionless.
The knife tugged at his beard, but the sharpness of the blade kept the pull from becoming painful. And soon her fingers found his knotted jaw muscles. She stroked his clenching to reassure him. With an effort, he opened his eyes. She met his gaze as if she were
smiling through a mist of love. Gently, she tilted back his head, and cleaned the beard away from .his neck with smooth, confident strokes.
Then she was done. His bared flesh felt vivid in the air, and he rubbed his face with his hands, relishing the fresh texture of his cheeks and neck. Again, he wanted to kiss Elena. To answer her smile, he stood up and said, "Now I'm ready. Let's go."
She grasped the Staff of Law, sprang lightly to her feet. In a tone of high gaiety, she said to Amok, "Will you now lead us to the Seventh Ward?"
Amok beckoned brightly, as if he were inviting her to a game, and started once more toward the place where the cleft of Rivenrock vanished under Melenkurion Skyweir. Morin quickly repacked his bundle, and placed himself behind Amok; Elena and Covenant followed the First Mark; and Bannor brought up the rear.
In this formation, they began the last phase of their quest for the Power of Command.
They crossed the plateau briskly: Amok soon reached the juncture of cliff and cleft. There he waved to his companions, grinned happily, and jumped into the crevice.
Covenant gasped in spite of himself, and hurried with Elena to the edge. When they peered into the narrow blackness of the chasm, they saw Amok standing on a ledge in the opposite wall. The ledge began fifteen or twenty feet below and a few feet under the overhang of the mountain. It was not clearly visible. The blank stone and shadowed dimness of the cleft formed a featureless abyss. Amok seemed to be standing on darkness which led to darkness.
"Hellfire!" Covenant groaned as he looked down. He felt dizzy already. "Forget it. Just forget I ever mentioned it."
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"Come!" said Amok cheerfully. "Follow!" His voice sounded over the distant, subterreanean gush of the river. With an insouciant stride, he moved away into the mountain. At once, the gloom swallowed him completely.
Morin glanced at the High Lord. When she nodded,
he leaped into the cleft, landed where Amok had been standing a moment before. He took one step to the side, and waited.
"Don't. be ridiculous," Covenant muttered as if he were talking to the dank, chill breeze which blew out of the crevice. "I'm no Bloodguard. I'm just ordinary flesh and blood. I get dizzy when I stand on a chair. Sometimes I get dizzy when I just stand."
The High Lord was not listening to him. She murmured a few old words to the Staff, and watched intently as it burst into flame. Then she stepped out into the darkness. Morin caught her as her feet touched the ledge. She moved past him, and positioned herself so that the light of the Staff illuminated the jump for Covenant.
The Unbeliever found Bannor looking at him speculatively.
"Go on ahead," said Covenant. "Give me time to get up my courage. I'll catch up with you in a year or two." He was sweating again, and his perspiration stung the scraped skin of his cheeks and neck. He looked up at the mountain to steady himself, efface the effects of the chasm from his mind.
Without warning, Bannor caught him from behind, lifted him, and carried him to the cleft.
"Don't touch me!" Covenant sputtered. He tried to break free, but Bannor's grip was too strong. "By hell! I-!" His voice scaled into a yell as Bannor threw him over the edge.
Morin caught him deftly, and placed him, wideeyed and trembling, on the ledge at Elena's side.
A moment later, Bannor made the jump, and the First Mark passed Covenant and Elena to stand between her and Amok. Covenant watched their movements through a stunned fog. Numbly, he pressed his back against the solid stone; and stared into the chasm as if it were a tomb. Some time seemed to pass before he noticed the High Lord's reassuring hold on his arm.
"Don't touch me," he repeated aimlessly. "Don't touch me."
When she moved away, he followed her automatically, turning his back on the sunlight and open sky above the cleft.
He rubbed his left shoulder against the stone wall, and kept close to Elena, stayed near her light. The Staff s incandescence cast a viridian aura over the High Lord's party, and reflected garishly off the dark, flat facets of the stone. It illuminated Amok's path without penetrating the gloom ahead. The ledgenever more than three feet widemoved steadily downward. Above it, the ceiling of the cleft slowly expanded, took on the dimensions of a cavern. And the cleft itself widened as if it ran toward a prodigious hollow in the core of Melenkurion Skyweir.
Covenant felt the yawning rent in the mountain rock as if it were beckoning to him, urging him seductively to accept the drowsy abandon of vertigo, trust the chasm's depths. He pressed himself harder against the stone, and clung to Elena's back with his eyes. Around him, darkness- and massed weight squeezed the edges of the Staffs light. And at his back, he could hear the hovering vulture wings of his private doom. Gradually, he understood that he was walking into a crisis.
Underground) he rasped harshly at his improvidence. He could not forget how he had fallen into a crevice under Mount Thunder. That experience had brought him face-to-face with the failure of his old compromise, his bargain with the Ranyhyn. Hellfire) He felt he had done nothing to ready himself for an ordeal of caves.
Ahead of him, the High Lord followed Morin and Amok. They adjusted themselves to her pace, and she moved as fast as she safely could on the narrow ledge. Covenant was hard pressed to keep up with her. Her speed increased his apprehension; it made him feel that the rift was spreading its jaws beside him. He labored fearfully down the ledge. It demanded all his concentration.
He had no way to measure duration or distance had nothing with which to judge time except the accumulation of his fear and strain and weariness-but gradually the character of the cavern's ceiling changed. It spread out like a dome. After a while, Elena's fire
lit only one small arc of the stone. Around it, spectral shapes peopled the darkness. Then the rough curve of rock within the Staff's light became gnarled and pitted, like the slow clenching of a frown on the cave's forehead. And finally the frown gave way to stalactites. Then the upper air bristled with crooked old shafts and spikes-poised spears and misdriven nails-pending lamias-slow, writhed excrescences of the mountain's inner sweat. Some of these had fiat facets which reflected the Staff's fire in fragments, casting it like a chiaroscuro into the recessed groins of the cavern. And others leaned toward the ledge as if they were straining ponderously to strike the heads of the human interlopers.
For some distance, the stalactites grew thicker, longer, more intricate, until they filled the dome of the cavern. When Covenant mustered enough fortitude to look out over the crevice, he seemed to be gazing into a blue-lit, black, inverted forest-a packed stand of gnarled and ominous old trees with their roots in the ceiling. They created the impression that it was possible, on the sole trail of the ledge, for him to lose his way.
The sensation excoriated his stumbling fear. When Elena came abruptly to a stop, he almost hung his arms around her.
Beyond her in the Staffs velure light, he saw that a massive stalactite had angled downward and attached itself to the lip of the ledge. The stalactite hit there as if it had been violently slammed into place. Despite its ancientness, it seemed to quiver with the force of impact. Only a strait passage remained between the stalactite and the wall.
Amok halted before this narrow gap. He waited until his companions were close behind him. Then, speaking over his shoulder in an almost reverential tone, he said, "Behold Damelon's Door-entryway to the Power of Command. For this reason among others, none may approach the Power in my absence. The knowledge of this unlocking is contained in none of High Lord Kevin's Wards. And any who dare Damelon's Door without this unlocking will not find the
Power. They will wander forever torn and pathless in the wilderness beyond. Now hear me. Pass swiftly through the entryway when it is opened. It will not remain open long."
Elena nodded intently. Behind her, Covenant braced himself on her shoulder with his right hand. He had a sudden inchoate feeling that this was his last chance to turn back, to recant or undo the decisions which had brought him here. But the chance-if it was a chance-passed as quickly as it had come. Amok approached the Door.
With slow solemnity, the youth extended his right hand, touched the blank plane of the gap with his index finger. In silence he held his finger at that point, level with his chest.
A fine yellow filigree network began to grow in the air. Starting from Amok's fingertip, the delicate web of light spread outward in the plane of the gap. Like a skein slowly crystallizing into visibility, it expanded until it filled the whole Door.
Amok commanded, "Come," and stepped briskly through the web.
He did not break the delicate strands of light. Rather, he disappeared as he touched them. Covenant could see no trace of him on the ledge beyond the Door.
Morin followed Amok. He, too, vanished as he came in contact with the yellow web.
Then the High Lord started forward. Covenant stayed with her. He kept his grip on her shoulder; he was afraid of being separated from her. Boldly, she stepped into the gap. He held her and followed. When he touched the glistening network, he winced, but he felt no pain. A swift tingling like an instant of ants passed over his flesh as he crossed the gap. He could feel Bannor close behind him.
He found himself standing in a place different from the one he had expected.
As he looked around him, the web faded, vanished. But the Staff of Law continued to burn. Back through the gap, he could see the ledge and the stalactites and the chasm. But no chasm existed on this side of Dame
Ion's Door. Instead there stretched a wide stone floor in which stalactites and stalagmites stood like awkward colonnades, and a mottled ceiling hunched over the open spaces. Hushed stillness filled the air; a moment passed before Covenant realized that he could no longer hear the low background rumble of Melenkurion Skyweir's river.
With an encompassing gesture, Amok said formally, "Behold the Audience Hall of Earthroot. Here in ages long forgotten the sunless lake would rise in season to meet those who sought its waters. Now, as the Earthpower fades from mortal knowledge, the Audience Hall is unwet. Yet it retains a power of mazement, to foil those who are unready in heart and mind. All who enter here without the proper unlocking of Damelon's Door will be forever lost to life and use and name."
Grinning, he turned to Elena. "High Lord, brighten the Staff for a moment."
She seemed to guess his intention. She straightened as if she anticipated awe; eagerness seemed to gleam on her forehead. Murmuring ritualistically, she struck the Staff's heel on the stone. The Staff flared, and a burst of flame sprang toward the ceiling.
The result staggered Covenant. The surge of flame sparked a reaction in all the stalactites and stalagmites. They became instantly glittering and reflective. Light ignited on every column, resonated, rang in dazzling peals back and forth across the cave. It burned into his eyes from every side until he felt that. he was caught on the clapper of an immense bell of light. He tried to cover his eyes, but the clangor went on in his mind. Gasping, searching blindly for support, he began to founder.
Then Elena silenced the Staff. The clamoring light faded away, echoed into the distance like the aftermath of a clarion. Covenant found that he was on his knees with his hands clamped over his ears. Hesitantly, be looked up. All the reflections were gone; the columns had returned to their former rough illuster. As Elena helped him to his feet, he was muttering weakly, "By hell. By hell." Even her fond face, and the flat, unamazed countenances of the Bloodguard, could not
counteract his feeling that he no longer knew where he was. And when Amok led the High Lord's party onward, Covenant kept stumbling as if he could not find his footing on the stone.
After they left the perilous cavern, time and distance passed confusedly for him. His retinas retained a capering dazzle which disoriented him. He could see that the High Lord and Amok descended a slope which spread out beyond the range of the Staffs light like a protracted shore, a colonnaded beach left dry by the recession of a subterreanean sea. But his feet could not follow their path. His eyes told him that Amok led them directly down the slope, but his sense of balance registered alterations in direction, changes in the pitch and angle of descent. Whenever he closed his eyes, he lost all impression of straightness; he reeled on the uneven surface of a crooked trail.
He did not know where or how far he had traveled when Elena stopped for a brief meal. He did not know how long the halt lasted, or what distance he walked when it was over. All his senses were out of joint. When the High Lord halted again, and told him to rest, he sank down against a stalagmite and went to sleep without question.
In dreams he wandered like one of the lore who had improvidently braved Damelon's Door in search of Earthroot-he could hear shrill, stricken wails of loss as if he were crying for his companions, crying for himself-and he awoke to a complete confusion. The darkness made him think that someone had pulled the fuses of his house while he lay bleeding and helpless on the floor beside his coffee table. Numbly, he groped for the receiver of the telephone, hoping that Joan had not yet hung up on him. But then his fumbling fingers recognized the texture of stone. With a choked groan, he sprang to his feet in the midnight under Melenkurion Skyweir.
Almost at once, the Staff flamed. In the blue light, Elena arose to catch him with her free arm and clasp him tightly. "Beloved!" she murmured. "Ah, beloved. Hold fast. I am here." He hugged her achingly, pressed his face into her sweet hair until he could still his pain,
regain his self-command. Then he slowly released her. He strove to express his thanks with a smile, but it broke and fell into pieces in his face. In a raw, rasping voice, he said, "Where are we?"
Behind him, Amok fluted, "We stand in the Aisle of Approach. Soon we will gain Earthrootstair."
"What"-Covenant tried to clear his head-"what time is it?"
"Time has no measure under Melenkurion Skyweir," the youth replied imperviously.
"Oh, bloody hell." Covenant groaned at the echo he heard in Amok's answer. He had been told too often that white gold was the crux of the arch of Time.
Elena came to his relief. "The sun has risen to midmorning," she said. "This is the thirty-third day of our journey from Revelstone." As an afterthought, she added, "Tonight is the dark of the moon."
The dark of the moon, he muttered mordantly to himself. Have mercy- Terrible things happened when the moon was dark. The Wraiths of Andelain had been attacked by ur-viles- Atiaran had never forgiven him for that.
The High Lord seemed to see his thoughts in his face. "Beloved," she said calmly, "do not be so convinced of doom." Then she turned away and started to prepare a spare meal.
Watching her-seeing her resolution and personal force implicit even in the way she performed this simple task Covenant clenched his teeth, and kept the silence of his bargain.
He could hardly eat the food she handed to him. The effort of silence made him feel ill; holding down his passive lie seemed to knot his guts, make sustenance unpalatable. Yet he felt that he was starving. To ease his inanition, he forced down a little of the dry bread and cured meat and cheese. The rest he returned to Elena. He felt almost relieved when she followed Amok again into the darkness.
He went dumbly after her.
Sometime during the previous day, the High Lord's party had left behind the Audience Hall. Now they traveled a wide, featureless tunnel like a road through
the stone. Elena's light easily reached the ceiling and walls. Their surfaces were oddly smooth, as if they had been rubbed for long ages by the movement of something rough and powerful. This smoothness made the tunnel seem like a conduit or artery. Covenant distrusted it; he half expected thick, Laval ichor to come rushing up through it. As he moved, he played nervously with his ring, as if that small circle were the binding of his self-control.
Elena quickened her steps. He could see in her back that she was impelled by her mounting eagerness for the Power of Command.
At last, the tunnel changed. Its floor swung in a tight curve to the left, and its right wall broke off, opening into another crevice. This rift immediately became a substantial gulf. The stone shelf of the road narrowed until it was barely ten feet wide, then divided into rude steep stairs as it curved downward. In moments, the High Lord's party was on a stairway which spiraled around a central shaft into the chasm.
Many hundreds of feet below them, a fiery red glow lit the bottom of the gulf. Covenant felt that he was peering into an inferno.
He remembered where he had seen such light before. It was rocklight-radiated stone-shine like that which the Cavewights used under Mount Thunder.
The descent affected him like vertigo. Within three rounds of the shaft, his head was reeling. Only Elena's unwavering light, and his acute concentration as he negotiated the uneven steps, saved him from pitching headlong over the edge. But he was grimly determined not to ask either Elena or Bannor for help. He could afford no more indebtedness; it would nullify his bargain, tip the scales of payment against him. No! he muttered to himself as he lurched down the steps. No. No more. Don't be so bloody helpless. Save something to bargain with. Keep going. Distantly, he heard himself panting, "Don't touch me. Don't touch me."
A spur of nausea roweled him. His muscles bunched as if they were bracing for a fall. But he hugged his chest, and clung to Elena's light for support. Her flame bobbed above her like a tongue of courage.
Slowly its blue illumination took on a red tinge as she worked down toward the gulf's glow.
He made the descent grimly, mechanically, like a volitionless puppet stalking down the irregular steps of his designated end. Round by round, he approached the source of the rocklight. Soon the red illumination made the Staffs flame unnecessary, and High Lord Elena extinguished it. Ahead of her, Amok began to move more swiftly, as if he were impatient, jealous of all delays which postponed the resolution of his existence. But Covenant followed at his own pace, effectively unconscious of anything but the spiraling stairs and his imperious dizziness. He went down the last distance through a high wash of rocklight as numbly as if he were sleepwalking.
When he reached the flat bottom, he took a few wooden steps toward the lake, then stopped, covered his eyes against the deep, fiery, red light, and shuddered as if his nerves jangled on the edge of hysteria.
Ahead of him, Amok crowed jubilantly, "Behold, High Lord! The sunless lake of Earthroot! Unheavened sap and nectar of great Melenkurion Skyweir, the sire of mountains) Ah, behold it. The long years of my purpose are nearly done." His words echoed clearly away, as if they were seconded by scores of light crystal voices.
Drawing a tremulous breath, Covenant opened his eyes. He was standing on the gradual shore of a still lake which spread out before him as far as he could see. Its stone roof was high, hidden in shadows, but the lake was lit everywhere by rocklight burning in the immense pillars which stood up like columns through the lake--or like roots of the mountain reaching down to the water. These columns or roots were evenly spaced along and across the cavern; they were repeated regularly into the vast distance. Their rocklight, and the vibrant stillness of the lake, gave the whole place a cloistral air, despite its size. Earthroot was a place to make mere mortals humble and devout.
It made Covenant feel like a sacrilege in the sanctified and august temple of the mountains.
The lake was so still-it conveyed such an impression of weight, massiveness-that it looked more like fluid bronze than water, a liquid cover for the unfathomable abysses of the Earth. The rocklight gleamed on it as if it were burnished.
"Is this-?" Covenant croaked, then caught himself as his question ran echoing lightly over the water, restating itself without diminishment into the distance. He could not bring himself to go on. Even the low shuffling of his boots on the stone echoed as if it carried some kind of prophetic significance.
But Amok took up the question gaily. "Is the Power of Command here, in Earthroot?" The echoes laughed as he laughed. "No. Earthroot but partakes. The heart of the Seventh Ward lies beyond. We must cross over."
High Lord Elena asked the next question carefully, as if she, too, were timid in the face of the awesome lake. "How?"
"High Lord, a way will be provided. I am the way and the door-I have not brought you to a pathless end. But the use of the way will be in your hands. This is the last test. Only one word am I permitted to say: do not touch the water. Earthroot is strong and stern. It will take no account of mortal flesh."
"What must we do now?" she inquired softly to minimize the echoes.
"Now?" Amok chuckled. "Only wait, High Lord. The time will not be long. Behold! Already the way approaches."
He was standing with his back to the lake, but as he spoke he gestured behind him with one arm. As if in answer to this signal, a boat came into sight around a pillar some distance from the shore.
The boat was empty. It was a narrow wooden craft, pointed at both ends. Except for a line of bright reflective gilt along its gunwales and thwarts, it was unadorned-a clean, simple work smoothly formed of light brown wood, and easily long enough to seat five people. But it was unoccupied; no one rowed or steered it. Without making a ripple, it swung gracefully around the pillar, and glided shoreward. Yet in
Earthroot's sacramental air, it did not seem strange; it was a proper and natural adjunct of the bronze lake. Covenant was not surprised to see that it carried no oars.
He watched its approach as if it were an instrument of dread. It made his wedding ring itch on his finger. He glanced quickly at his hand, half expecting to see that the band glowed or changed color. The argent metal looked peculiarly vivid in the rocklight; it weighed heavily on his hand, tingled against his skin. But it revealed nothing. "Have mercy," he breathed as if he were speaking directly to the white gold. Then he winced as his voice tripped away in light echoes, spread by a multitude of crystal repetitions.
Amok laughed at him, and clear peals of glee joined the mimicry.
High Lord Elena was now too enrapt in Earthroot to attend Covenant. She stood on the shore as if she could already smell the Power of Command, and waited like an acolyte for the empty boat.
Soon the craft reached her. Silently, it slid its prow up the dry slope, and stopped as if it were ready, expectant.
Amok greeted it with a deep obeisance, then leaped lithely aboard. His feet made no sound as they struck the planks. He moved to the far end of the craft, turned, and seated himself with his arms on the gunwales, grinning like a monarch.
First Mark Morin followed Amok. Next, High Lord Elena entered the craft, and placed herself on a seat board near its middle. She held the Staff of Law across her knees. Covenant saw that his turn had come. Trembling, he walked down the shore to the wooden prow. Apprehension beat in his temples, but he repressed it. He clutched the gunwales with both hands, climbed into the craft. His boots thudded and echoed on the planks. As he sat down, he seemed to be surrounded by the clatter of unseemly burdens.
Bannor shoved the boat into the lake, and sprang immediately aboard. But by the time he had taken his seat, the boat had glided to a halt. It rested as if it
were fused to the burnished water a few feet from shore.
For a moment, no one moved or spoke. They sat bated and hushed, waiting for the same force which had brought the boat to carry it away again. But the craft remained motionless-fixed like a censer in the red, still surface of the lake.
The pulse in Covenant's head grew sharper. Harshly, he defied the echoes. "Now what do we do?"
To his surprise, the boat slid forward a few feet. But it stopped again when the repetitions of his voice died. Once again, the High Lord's party was held, trapped.
He stared about him in astonishment. No one spoke. He could see thoughts concentrate the muscles of Elena's back. He looked at Amok once, but the youth's happy grin so dismayed him that he tore his gaze away. The ache of his suspense began to seem unendurable.
Bannor's unexpected movement startled him. Turning, he saw that the Bloodguard had risen to his feet. He lifted his seat board from its slots.
For an oar! Covenant thought. He felt a sudden upsurge of excitement.
Bannor held the board in both hands, braced himself against the side of the boat, and prepared to paddle.
As the end of the board touched the water, some power grabbed it, wrenched it instantly from his grasp. It was snatched straight down into the lake. There was no splash or ripple, but the board vanished like a stone hurled into the depths.
Bannor gazed after it, and cocked one eyebrow as if he were speculating abstractly on the kind of strength which could so easily tear something away from a Bloodguard. But Covenant was not so calm. He gaped weakly, "Hellfire."
Again the boat moved forward. It coasted for several yards until the echoes of Covenant's amazement disappeared. Then it stopped, resumed its reverent stasis.
Covenant faced Elena, but he did not need to voice
his question. Her face glowed with comprehension. "Yes, beloved," she breathed in relief and triumph. "I see." And as the boat once more began to glide over the lake, she continued, "It is the sound of our voices which causes the boat to move. That is the use of Amok's way. The craft will seek its own destination. But to carry us it must ride upon our echoes."
The truth of her perception was immediately apparent. While her clear voice cast replies like ripples over Earthroot, the boat slid easily through the water. It steered itself between the pillars as if it were pursuing the lodestone of its purpose. Soon it had passed out of sight of Earthrootstair. But when she stopped speaking-when the delicate echoes had chimed themselves into silence-the craft halted again.
Covenant groaned inwardly. He was suddenly afraid that he would be asked to talk, help propel the boat. He feared that he would give his bargain away if he were forced into any kind of extended speech. In selfdefense, he turned the demand around before it could be directed at him. "Well, say something," he growled at Elena.
A light, ambiguous smile touched her lips-a response, not to him, but to some satisfying inner prospect. "Beloved," she replied softly, "we will have no difficulty. There is much which has not been said between us. There are secrets and mysteries and sources of power in you which I perceive but dimly. And in some ways I have not yet spoken of myself. This is a fit place for the opening of hearts. I will tell you of that Ranyhyn-ride which took the young daughter of Lena from Mithil Stonedown into the Southron Range, and there at the great secret horserite of the Ranyhyn taught her-taught her many things."
With a stately movement, she rose to her feet facing Covenant. She set the Staff of Law firmly on the planks, and lifted her head to the ceiling of Earthroot's cavern. "Ur-Lord Thomas Covenant," she said, and the echoes spread about her like a skein of gleaming rocklight, interweaving the burnished water, "Unbeliever and white gold wielder, Ringthane-beloved
-I must tell you of this. You have known Myrha. In her youth, she came to Lena my mother, according to the promise of the Ranyhyn. She carried me away to the great event of my girlhood. Thus you were the unknowing cause. Before this war reaches its end for good or ill, I must tell you what your promises have wrought."
Have mercy on me! he cried again in the obdurate incapacity of his heart. But he was too numb, too intimidated by the lake and the echoes, to stop her. He sat in mute dread, and listened as Elena told him the tale of her experience with the Ranyhyn. And all the time, the craft bore them on an oblique, intimate course between the lake pillars, floated them on the resonances of her voice as if it were ferrying them to a terrible shore.
Her adventure had occurred the third time that Lena her mother had allowed her to ride a Ranyhyn. During the two previous annual visits to Mithil Stonedown, dictated by the Ranyhyn promise to Covenant Ringthane, the old horse from the Plains of Ra had rolled his eyes strangely at the little girl as Trell her grandfather had boosted her onto its broad back. And the next year young Myrha took the old stallion's place. The mare gazed at Elena with that look of deliberate intention which characterized all the Ranyhyn -and Elena, sensing the Ranyhyn's offer without understanding it, gladly gave herself up to Myrha. She did not look back as the mare carried her far away from Mithil Stonedown into the mountains of the Southron Range.
For a day and a night, Myrha galloped, bearing Elena far south along mountain trails and over passes unknown to the people of the Land. At the end of that time, they gained a high valley, a grassy glen folded between sheer cliffs, with a rugged, spring-fed tam near its center. This small lake was mysterious, for its dark waters did not reflect the sunlight. And the valley itself was wondrous to behold, for it contained hundreds of Ranyhyn-hundreds of proud, glossy, starbrowed stallions and mares-gathered together for a rare and secret ritual of horses.
But Elena's wonder quickly turned to fear. Amid a chorus of wild, whinnied greetings, Myrha carried the little girl toward the lake, then shrugged her to the ground and dashed away in a flurry of hooves. And the rest of the Ranyhyn began to run around the valley. At first they trotted in all directions, jostling each other and sweeping by the child as if they were barely able to avoid crushing her. But gradually their pace mounted. Several Ranyhyn left the pounding mob to drink at the tare, then burst back into the throng as if the dark waters roiled furiously in their veins. While the sun passed overhead, the great horses sprinted and bucked, drank at the tam, rushed away to run again in the unappeasable frenzy of a dance of madness. And Elena stood among them, imperiled for her life by the savage flash and flare of hooves-frozen with terror. In her fear, she thought that if she so much as flinched she would be instantly trampled to death.
Standing there-engulfed in heat and thunder and abysmal fear as final as the end of life-she lost consciousness for a time. She was still standing when her eyes began to see again; she was erect and petrified in the last glow of evening. But the Ranyhyn were no longer running. They had surrounded her; they faced her, studied her with a force of compulsion in their eyes. Some were so close to her that she inhaled their hot, damp breath. They wanted her to do something-she could feel the insistence of their wills battering at her immobile fear. Slowly, woodenly, choicelessly, she began to move.
She went to the tare and drank.
Abruptly, the High Lord dropped her narration, and began to sing-a vibrant, angry, and anguished song which cast ripples of passion across the air of Earthroot. For reasons at which Covenant could only guess instinctively, she broke into Lord Kevin's Lament as if it were her own private and immedicable threnody.
Where is the Power that protects beauty from the decay of life? preserves truth pure of falsehood?
secures fealty from that slow stain of chaos which corrupts? How are we so rendered small by Despite? Why will the very rocks not erupt for their own cleansing, or crumble into dust for shame?
While echoes of the song's grief ran over the lake, she met Covenant's gaze for the first time since she had begun her tale.
"Beloved," she said in a low, thrilling voice, "I was transformed-restored to life. At the touch of those waters, the blindness or ignorance of my heart fell away. My fear melted, and I was joined to the communion of the Ranyhyn. In an instant of vision, I understood-everything. I saw that in honor of your promise I had been brought to the horserite of Kelenbhrabanal, Father of Horses-a Ranyhyn ritual enacted once each generation to pass on and perpetuate their great legend, the tale of mighty Kelenbhrabanal's death in the jaws of Fangthane the Render. I saw that the turmoiled running of the Ranyhyn was their shared grief and rage and frenzy at the Father's end.
"For Kelenbhrabanal was the Father of Horses, Stallion of the First Herd. The Plains of Ra were his demesne and protectorate. He led the Ranyhyn in their great war against the wolves of Fangthane.
"But the war continued without issue, and the stench of shed blood and rent flesh became a sickness in the Stallion's nostrils. Therefore he made his way to Fangthane. He stood before the Render, and said, `Let this war end. I smell your hate-I know that you must have victims, else in your passion you will consume yourself. I will be your victim. Slaughter me, and let my people live in peace. Appease your hate on me, and end this war.' And Fangthane agreed. So Kelenbhrabanal bared his throat to the Renders teeth, and soaked the earth with his sacrifice.
"But Fangthane did not keep his word-the wolves attacked again. The Ranyhyn were leaderless, heartstricken. They could not fight well. The remnant of
the Ranyhyn was compelled to flee into the mountains. They could not return to their beloved Plains until they had gained the service of the Ramen, and with that aid had driven the wolves away.
"Thus each generation of the Ranyhyn holds its horserite to preserve the tale of the Stallion-to hold pure in memory all their pride at his self-sacrifice, and all their grief at his death, and all their rage at the Despite which betrayed him. Thus they drink of the mind-uniting waters, and hammer out against the ground the extremity of their passion for one day and one night. And thus, when I had tasted the water of the tam, I ran and wept and raged with them throughout the long exaltation of that night. Heart and mind and soul and all, I gave myself to a dream of Fangthane's death."
Listening to her, clinging to her face with his eyes, Covenant felt himself knotted by the clench of unreleasable grief. She was the woman who had offered herself to him. He understood her passion now, understood the danger she was in. And her elsewhere glance was drawing into focus; already he could feel conflagrations blazing at the corners of her vision.
His dread of that focus gave him the impetus to speak. With his voice rent between fear and love, he wrenched out hoarsely, "What I don't understand is what Foul gets out of all this."

Twenty-Five: The Seventh Ward


FOR a long moment, High Lord Elena gripped the Staff of Law and glared down at him. Focus crackled on the verge of her gaze; it was about to lash out and scourge him. But then she seemed to recollect who he was. Slowly, the passion dimmed in her face,
went behind in inward veil. She lowered herself to her seat in the boat. Quietly, dangerously, she asked, "All this? Do you ask what Lord Foul gains from what I have told you?"
He answered her with quivering promptitude. Careless now of the illimitable range of implications with which the echoes multiplied his voice, he hastened to explain himself, ameliorate at least in this way the falseness of his position.
"That, too. You said it yourself-that old, unsufferable bargain I made with the Ranyhyn put you where you are. Never mind what I did to your mother. That, too. But it's really this time I'm thinking about. You summoned me, and we're on our way to the Seventh Ward-and I want to know what Foul gets out of it. He wouldn't waste a chance like this"
"This is no part of his intent," .she replied coldly. "The choice to summon you was mine, not his."
 "Right. That's the way he works. But what made
you decide to summon me? -I mean aside from the
fact that you were going to call me anyway at some
time or other because I have the simple misfortune to
wear a white gold wedding ring and have two fingers
missing. What made you decide then-when you
did?"
"Dukkha Waynhim gave us new knowledge of Fangthane's power."
"New knowledge, by hell!" Covenant croaked. "Do you think that was an accident? Foul released him." He shouted the word released, and its echoes jabbered about him like dire significances. "He released that poor suffering devil because he knew exactly what you would do about it. And he wanted me to be in the Land then, at that precise time, not sooner or later."
The importance of what he was saying penetrated her; she began to hear him seriously. But her voice remained noncommittal as she asked, "Why? How are his purposes served?"
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 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 Staffs 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 Staffs 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 youth'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 Fire-Lions 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 shout 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?"
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!"
The High Lord stopped. But she did not turn. The whole rigor of her back condensed into one question: Why?
"Don't you see it?" he gasped. "This is all some plot of Foul's. We're being manipulated-you're being manipulated. Something terrible is going to happen."
For a time, she remained silent while he ached. Then, in a tone of austere conviction, she said, "I cannot let pass this chance to serve the Land. I am forewarned. If this is Fangthane's best ploy to defeat us, it is also our best means to strike at him. I do not fear to measure my will against his. And I hold the Staff of Law. Have you not learned that the Staff is unsuited to his hands? He would not have delivered it to us if it were in any way adept for his uses. No. The Staff warrants me. Lord Foul cannot contrive my vision."
"Your vision!" Covenant extended his hands in pleading toward her. "Don't you see what that is? Don't you see where that comes from? It comes from me-from that unholy bargain I made with the Ranyhyn. A bargain that failed, Elena!"
"Yet it would appear that you bargained better than you knew. The Ranyhyn kept their promise they gave in return more than you could either foresee or control." Her answer seemed to block his throat, and into his silence she said, "What has altered you, Unbeliever? Without your help, we would not have gained this place. On Rivenrock you gave aid without stint or price, though my own anger imperiled you. Yet now you delay me. Thomas Covenant, you are not so craven."
"Craven? Hellfire! I'm a bloody coward!" Some of
his rage returned to him, and he sputtered through the sweat and tears that ran into his mouth, "All lepers are cowards. We have to be!"
At last, she turned toward him, faced him with the focus, the blazing holocaust, of her gaze. Its force ripped his balance away from him, and he sprawled in fragments on the stone. But he pushed himself up again. Driven by his fear of her and for her, he dared to confront her power. He stood tenuously, and abandoned himself, took his plunge.
"Manipulation, Elena," he rasped. "Pin talking about manipulation. Do you understand what that means? It means using people. Twisting them to suit purposes they haven't chosen for themselves. Manipulation. Not Foul's-mine! I've been manipulating you, using you. I told you rd made another bargain but I didn't tell you what it is. I've been using you to get myself off the hook. I promised myself that I would do everything I could to help you find this Ward. And in return I promised myself that I would do everything I could to make you take my responsibility. I watched you and helped you so that when you got here you would look exactly like that-so you would challenge Foul yourself without stopping to think about what you're doing--so that whatever happens to the Land would be your fault instead of mine. So that I could escape! Hell and blood, Elena! Do yon hear me? Foul is going to get us for sure!"
She seemed to hear only part of what he said. She bent her searing focus straight into him, and said, "Was there ever a time when you loved me?"
In as agony of protest, he half screamed, "Of course I loved you!" Then he mastered himself, put all his strength back into his appeal. "It never even occurred to me that I might be able to use you until until after the landslide. When I began to understand what you're capable of. I loved you before that. I love you now. I'm just an unconscionable bastard, and I used you, that's all. Now I regret it." With all the resources of his voice, he beseeched her, "Elena, please don't drink that stuff. Forget the Power of
Command and go back to Revelstone. Let the Council decide what to do about all this."
But the way in which her gaze left his face and burned around the walls of the cave told him that he had not reached her. When she spoke, she only confirmed his failure.
"I would be unworthy of Lordship if I failed to act now. Amok offered us the Seventh Ward because he perceived that the Land's urgent need surpassed the conditions of his creation. Fangthane is upon the Land now-he wages war now Land and life and all are endangered now. While any power or weapon lies within my grasp, I will not permit him!" Her voice softened as she added, "And if you have loved me, how can I fail to strive for your escape? You need not have bargained in secret. I love you. I wish to serve you. Your regret only strengthens what I must do."
Swinging back toward the trough, she raised the Staff's guttering flame high over her head, and shouted like a war cry, "Melenkurion abatha! Ward yourself well, Fangthane! I seek to destroy you!"
Then she stooped to the EarthBlood.
Covenant struggled frantically in her direction, but his feet scattered out from under him again, and he went down with a crash like a shock of incapacity. As she lowered her face to the trough, he shouted, "That's not a good answer! What happens to the Oath of Peace?"
But his cry did not penetrate her exaltation. Without hesitation, she took one steady sip of the Blood, and swallowed it.
At once, she leaped to her feet, stood erect and rigid as if she were possessed. She appeared to swell, expand like a distended icon. The fire of the Staff ran down the wood to her hands. Instantly, her whole form burst into flame.
"Elena!" Covenant crawled toward her. But the might of her blue, crackling blaze threw him back like a hard wind. He struck the tears from his eyes to see her more clearly. Within her enveloping fire, she was unharmed and savage.
While the flame burned about her, enfolded her from head to foot in fiery cerements, she raised her arms, lifted her face. For one fierce moment she stood motionless, trapped in conflagration. Then she spoke as if she were uttering words of flame.
"Come! I have tasted the EarthBlood! You must obey my will. The walls of death do not prevail. Kevin son of Loric! Come!"
No! howled Covenant, No! Don't! But even his inner cry was swamped by a great voice which shivered and groaned in the air so hugely that he seemed to hear it, not with his ears, but with the whole surface of his body.
"Fool! Desist!" Staggering waves of anguish poured from the voice. "Do not do this!"
"Kevin, hear me!" Elena shouted back in a transported tone. "You cannot refuse! The Blood of the Earth compels you. I have chosen you to meet my Command. Kevin, come!"
The great voice repeated, "Fool! You know not what you do!"
But an instant later, the ambience of the cave changed violently, as if a tomb had opened into it. Breakers of agony rolled through the air. Covenant winced at every surge. He braced himself where he knelt, and looked up.
The specter of Kevin Landwaster stood outlined in pale light before Elena.
He dwarfed her-dwarfed the cave itself. Monumentally upright and desolate, he was visible through the stone rather than within the cave. He towered over Elena as if he were part of the very mountain rock. He had a mouth like a cut, eyes full of the effects of Desecration, and on his forehead was a bandage which seemed to cover some mortal wound. "Release me!" he groaned. "I have done harm enough for one
50111."
 "Then serve me!" she cried ecstatically up to him.
"I offer you a Command to redeem that harm. You
are Kevin son of Loric, the waster of the Land. You
have known despair to its dregs you have tasted the
full cup of gall. That is knowledge and strength which no one living can equal.
"High Lord Kevin, I Command you to battle and defeat Lord Foul the Despiser! Destroy Fangthane! By the Power of the EarthBlood, I Command you."
The specter stared aghast at her, and raised his fists as if he meant to strike her. "Fool!" he repeated terribly.
The next instant, a concussion like the slamming of a crypt shook the cave. One last pulse of anguish pummeled the High Lord's party; Elena's flame was blown out like a weak candle; darkness flooded the cave.
Then Kevin was gone.
A long time passed. When Covenant regained consciousness, he rested wearily for a while on his hands and knees, glad of the darkness, and the reduced scale of the cave, and the specter's absence. But eventually he remembered Elena. Pushing himself to his feet, he reached toward her with his voice. "Elena? Come on. Elena? Let's get out of here."
At first, he received no response. Then blue fire flared as Elena lit the Staff. She was sitting like a wreck on the floor. When she turned her wan, spent face toward him, he saw that her crisis was over. All her exaltation had been consumed by the act of Command. He went to her, helped her gently to her feet. "Come on," he said again. "Let's go."
She shook her head vaguely, and said in an exhausted voice, "He called me a fool. What have I done?"
"I hope we never find out." A rough edge of sympathy made him sound harsh. He wanted to care for her, and did not know how. To give her time and privacy to gather her strength, he stepped away. As he glanced dully around the cave, he noticed Bannor, noticed the faint look of surprise in Bannor's face. Something in that unfamiliar expression gave Covenant a twist of apprehension. It seemed to be directed at him. He probed for an explanation by asking, "That was Kevin, wasn't it?"
Bannor nodded; the speculative surprise remained on his face.
"Well, at least it wasn't that beggar- At least now we know it wasn't Kevin who picked me for this."
Still Bannor's gaze did not change. It made Covenant feel uncomfortably exposed, as if there were something indecent about himself that he did not realize.
Confused, he turned back to the High Lord.
Suddenly, a silent blast like a howl of stone jolted the cave, made it tremble and jump like an earthquake. Covenant and Elena lost their footing, slapped against the floor. Morin's warning shout echoed flatly:
"Kevin returns!"
Then the buried tomb of the air opened again; Kevin's presence resonated against Covenant's skin. But this time the specter brought with him a ghastly reek of rotten flesh and attar, and in the background of his presence was the deep rumble of rock being crushed. When Covenant raised his head from the bucking floor, he saw Kevin within the stone furiously poised, fists cocked. Hot green filled the orbs of his eyes, sent rank steam curling up his forehead; and he dripped with emerald light as if he had just struggled out of a quagmire.
"Fool!" he cried in a paroxysm of anguish. "Damned betrayer! You have broken the Law of Death to summon me-you have unleashed measureless opportunities for evil upon the Earth-and the Despiser mastered me as easily as if I were a child! The Illearth Stone consumes me. Fight, fool! I am Commanded to destroy you!"
Roaring like a multitude of fiends, he reached down and clutched at Elena.
She did not move. She was aghast, frozen by the result of her great dare.
But Morin reacted instantly. Crying, "Kevin! Hold!" he sprang to her aid.
The specter seemed to hear Morin-hear and recognize who he was. An old memory touched Kevin, and he hesitated. That hesitation gave Morin time to reach Elena, thrust her behind him. When Kevin threw off his uncertainty, his fingers closed around Morin instead of the High Lord.
He gripped the Bloodguard and heaved him into the air.
Kevin's arm passed easily through the rock, but Morin could not. He crashed against the ceiling with tremendous force. The impact tore him from Kevin's grasp. But that impact was sufficient. The First Mark fell dead like a broken twig.
The sight roused Elena. At once, she realized her danger. She whirled the Staff swiftly about her head. Its flame sprang into brilliance, and a hot blue bolt lashed straight at Kevin.
The blast struck him like a physical blow, drove him back a step through the stone. But he shrugged off its effects. With a deep snarl of pain, he moved forward, snatched at her again.
Shouting frantically, "Melenkurion abatha!" she met his attack with the Staff. Its fiery heel seared his palm.
Again he recoiled, gripping his scorched fingers and groaning.
In that momentary reprieve, she cried strange invocations to the Staff, and swung its blaze around her three times, surrounding herself with a shield of power. When the specter grabbed for her once more, he could not gain a hold on her. He squeezed her shield, and his fingers dripped with emerald ill, but he could not touch her. Whenever he dented her defense, she healed it with the Staff's might.
Yelling in frustration and pain, he changed his tactics. He reared back, clasped his fists together, and hammered them at the floor of the cave. The stone jumped fiercely. The lurch knocked Covenant down, threw Bannor against the opposite wall.
A gasping shudder like a convulsion of torment shot through the mountain. The cave walls heaved; rumblings of broken stone. filled the air; power blared.
A crack appeared in the floor directly under Elena. Even before she was aware of it, it started to open. Then, like ravenous jaws, it jerked wide.
High Lord Elena dropped into the chasm.
Kevin pounced after her, and vanished from sight.
His howls echoed out of the cleft like the shrieking of a madman.
But even as they disappeared, their battle went on. Lords-fire spouted hotly up into the cave. The thunder of tortured stone pounded along the tunnel, and the cave pitched from side to side like a nausea in the guts of Melenkurion Skyweir. In his horror, Covenant thought that the whole edifice of the mountain was about to tumble.
Then he was snatched to his feet, hauled erect by Bannor. The Bloodguard gripped him with compelling fingers, and shouted at him through the tumult, "Save her!"
"I can't!" The pain of his reply made him yell. Bannor's demand rubbed so much salt into the wound of his essential futility that he could hardly bear it. "I cannot!"
"You must!" Bannor's grasp allowed no alternatives.
"How?" Waving his empty hands in Bannor's face, he cried, "With these?"
"Yes!" The Bloodguard caught Covenant's left hand, forced him to look at it.
On his wedding finger, his ring throbbed ferrule, pulsed with power and light like a potent instrument panting to be used.
For an instant, he gaped at the argent band as if it had betrayed him. Then forgetting escape, forgetting himself, forgetting even that he did not know how to exert wild magic, he pulled despairingly away from Bannor and stumbled toward the crevice. Like a man battering himself in armless impotence against a blank doom, he leaped after the High Lord.

Twenty-Six: Gallows Howe


BUT be failed before he began. He did not know how to brace himself for the kind of battle which raged below him. As he passed the rim of the crevice, he was hit by a blast of force like an eruption from within the rift. He was defenseless against it;. it snuffed out his consciousness like a frail flame.
Then for a time he rolled in darkness-ran in a blind, caterwauling void which pitched and broke over him until he staggered like a ship with sprung timbers. He was aware of nothing but the force which thrashed him. But something caught his hand, anchored him. At first he thought that the grip on his hand was Elena's-that she held him now as she had held him and kept him during the night after his summoning. But when he shook clear of the darkness, he saw Bannor. The Bloodguard was pulling him out of the crevice.
That sight-that perception of his failure-undid him. When Bannor set him on his feet, he stood listing amid the riot of battle-detonations, deep, groaning creaks of tormented stone, loud rockfalls-like an empty hulk, a cargoes hull sucking in death through a wound below its waterline. He did not resist or question as Bannor half carried him from the cave of the EarthBlood.
The tunnel was unlit except by the reflected glares of combat, but Bannor moved surely over the black rock. In moments, he brought his shambling charge to the waterfall. There he lifted the Unbeliever in his arms, and bore him like a child through the weight of the falls.
In the rocklight of Earthroot, Bannor moved even
more urgently.' He hastened to the waiting boat, installed  Covenant on one of the seats, then leaped aboard as he shoved out into the burnished lake. Without hesitation, he began to recite something in the native tongue of the Haruchai. Smoothly, the boat made its way among the cloistral columns.
But his efforts did not carry the craft far. Within a few hundred yards, its prow began to tug against its intended direction. He stopped speaking, and at once the boat swung off to one side. Gradually, it gained speed.
It was in the grip of a current. Standing in the center of Covenant's sightless gaze, Bannor cocked one eyebrow slightly, as if he perceived an ordeal ahead. For long moments, he waited for the slow increase of the current to reveal its destination.
Then in the distance he saw what caused the current. Far ahead of the craft, rocklight flared along a line in the lake like a cleft which stretched out of sight on both sides. Into this cleft Earthroot rushed and poured in silent cataracts.
He reacted with smooth efficiency, as if he had been preparing for this test throughout the long centuries of his service. First he snatched a coil of clingor from his pack; with it, he lashed Covenant to the boat. In answer to the vague question in Covenant's face, he replied, "The battle of Kevin and the High Lord has opened a crevice in the floor of Earthroot. We must ride the water down, and seek an outlet- below." He did not wait for a response. Turning, he braced his feet, gripped one of the gilt gunwales, and tore it loose. With this long, curved piece of wood balanced in his hands for a steering pole, he swung around to gauge the boat's distance from the cataract.
The hot line of the crevice was less than a hundred yards away now, and the boat slipped rapidly toward it, caught in the mounting suction. But Bannor made one more preparation. Bending toward Covenant, he said quietly, "Ur-Lord, you must use the orcrest." His voice echoed with authority through the silence.
Covenant stared at him without comprehension.
"You must. It is in your pocket. Bring it out."
For a moment, Covenant continued to stare. But at last the Bloodguard's command reached through his numbness. Slowly, he dug into his pocket, pulled out the smooth lucid stone. He held it awkwardly in his right hand, as if he could not properly grip it with only two fingers and a thumb.
The cataract loomed directly before the boat now, but Bannor spoke calmly, firmly. "Hold the stone in your left hand. Hold it above your head, so that it will light our way."
As Covenant placed the orcrest in contact with his troubled ring, a piercing silver light burst from the core of the stone. It flared along the gunwale in Bannor's hands, paled the surrounding rocklight. When Covenant numbly raised his fist, held the stone up like a torch, the Bloodguard nodded his approval. His face wore a look of satisfaction, as if all the conditions of his Vow had been fulfilled.
Then the prow of the boat dropped. Bannor and Covenant rode the torrent of Earthroot into the dark depths.
The water boiled and heaved wildly. But one end of the crevice opened into other caverns. The cataracts turned as they fell, and thrashed through the crevice as if it were an immense chute or channel. By the orcrest light, Bannor saw in time which way the water poured. He poled the boat so that it shot downward along the torrent.
 After that, the craft hurtled down the frenetic watercourse in a long nightmare of tumult, jagged rocks, narrows, sudden, heart-stopping falls, close death. The current tumbled, thundered, raced from cavern to cavern through labyrinthian gaps and tunnels and clefts in the fathomless bowels of Melenkurion Skyweir. Many times the craft disappeared under the fierce roil of the rush, but each time its potent wood capable of withstanding Earthroot-- bore it to the surface again. And many times Bannor and Covenant foundered in cascades that crashed onto them from above, but the water did not harm them-either it had lost its strength in the fall, or it was already diluted by other buried springs and lakes.
Through it all, Covenant held his orcrest high. Some last unconscious capacity for endurance kept his forgers locked and his arm raised. And the stone's unfaltering fire lighted the boat's way, so that, even in the sharpest hysteria of the current, Bannor was able to steer, avoid rocks and backwaters, fend around curves-preserve himself and the Unbeliever. The torrent's violence soon splintered his pole, but he replaced it with the other gunwale. When that was gone, he used a seat board as a rudder.
Straining and undaunted, he brought the voyage through to its final crisis.
Without warning, the boat shot down a huge flow into a cavern that showed no exit. The water frothed viciously, seeking release, and the air pressure mounted, became more savage every instant. A swift eddy caught the craft, swung it around and under the massive pour of water.
Helplessly, the boat was driven down.
Bannor clawed his way to Covenant. He wrapped his legs around Covenant's waist, snatched the orcrest from him. Clutching the stone as if to sustain himself with it, Bannor clamped his other hand over Covenant's nose and mouth.
He held that position as the boat sank.
The plunging weight of water thrust them straight under. Pressure squeezed them until Bannor's eyes pounded in their sockets, and his ears yowled as if they were about to rupture. He could feel Covenant screaming in his grasp. But he held his grip in the extremity of the last faithfulness-clung to the bright strength of the orcrest with one hand, and kept Covenant from breathing with the other.
Then they were sucked into a side tunnel, an outlet. Immediately, all the pressure of the trapped air and water hurled them upward. Covenant went limp; Bannor's lungs burned. But he retained enough alertness to swing himself upright as the water burst free. In a high, arching spout, it carried the two men into the cleft of Rivenrock, and sent them shooting out into the open morning of the Black River and Garroting Deep.
For a moment, sunshine and free sky and forest
reeled around Bannor, and fares of released pressure staggered across his sight. Then the fortitude of his Vow returned. Wrapping both arms around Covenant, he gave one sharp jerk which started the Unbeliever's lungs working again.
With a violent gasp, Covenant began breathing rapidly, feverishly. Some time passed before he showed any signs of consciousness, yet all the while his ring throbbed as if it were sustaining him. Finally, he opened his eyes, and looked at Bannor.
At once, he started to struggle weakly in his clingor bonds. Bannor appeared to him like one of the djinn who watches over the accursed. But then he lapsed. He recognized where he was-how he had arrived there-what he had left behind. He went on staring nakedly while Bannor untied the lines which lashed him to the boat.
Over the Bloodguard's shoulder, he could see the great cliff of Rivenrock-and behind it Melenkurion Skyweir-shrinking as the boat scudded downriver. From the cleft, turgid black smoke broke upward in gouts sporadically emphasized by battle flashes deep within the mountain. Muffled blasts of anguish rent the gut-rock, wreaking havoc in the very grave of the ages. Covenant felt he was floating away on a wave of ravage and destruction.
Fearfully, he looked down at his ring. To his dismay, he found that it still throbbed like an exclamation of purpose. Instinctively, he clasped his right hand over it, concealed it. Then he faced forward in the boat, turned away from Bannor and Rivenrock as if to protect his shame from scrutiny.
He sat huddled there, weak and staring dismally, throughout the swift progress of the day. He did not speak to Bannor, did not help him bail out the boat, did not look back. The current spewing from Rivenrock raised the Black River to near-flood levels, and the light Earthroot craft rode the rush intrepidly between glowering walls of forest. The morning sun glittered and danced off the dark water into Covenant's eyes-but he stared at it without blinking, as if even the protective reflex of his eyelids were exhausted.
And after that, nothing interfered with his sightless vision. The sodden food which Bannor offered to him he ate automatically, with his left hand concealed between his thighs. Midday and afternoon passed unrecognized, and when evening came he remained crouched on his seat, clenching his ring against his chest as if to protect himself from some final stab of realization.
Then, as dusk thickened about him, he became aware of the music. The air of the Deep was full of humming, of voiceless song-an eldritch melody which seemed to arise like passion from the faint throats of all the leaves. It contrasted sharply with the distant, storming climacteric of Melenkurion Skyweir, the song of violence which beat and shivered out of Rivenrock. Gradually, he raised his head to listen. The Deep song had an inflection of sufferance, as if it were deliberately restraining a potent melodic rage, sparing him.
In the light of the orcrest, he saw that Bannor was guiding the boat toward a high, treeless hill which rose against the night sky close to the south bank. The hill was desolate, bereft of life, as if its capacity to nourish even the hardiest plants had been irremediably scalded out of it. Yet it seemed to be the source of the Deep's song. The melody which wafted riverward from the hill sounded like a host of gratified furies.
He regarded the hill incuriously. He had no strength left to care about such places. All his waning sanity was focused on the sounds of battle from Melenkurion Skyweir-and on the grip which concealed his ring. When Bannor secured the boat, and took hold of his right elbow to help him ashore, Covenant leaned on the Bloodguard and followed his guidance woodenly.
Bannor went to the barren hill. Without question, Covenant began to struggle up it.
Despite his weariness, the hill impinged upon his awareness. He could feel its deadness with his feet as if he were shambling up n corpse. Yet it was eager death; its atmosphere was thick with the slaughter of enemies. Its incarnate hatred made his joints ache as
he climbed it. He began to sweat and tremble as if he were carrying the weight of an atrocity on his shoulders.
Then, near the hilltop, Bannor stopped him. The Bloodguard lifted the orcrest. In its light, Covenant saw the gibbet beyond the crest of the hill. A Giant dangled from it. And between him and the gibbet staring at him as if he were a concentrated nightmare -were people, people whom he knew.
Lord Mhoram stood there erect in his battle-grimed robe. He clasped his staff in his left hand, and his lean face was taut with vision. Behind him were Lord Callindrill and two Bloodguard. The Lord had a dark look of failure in his soft eyes. Quaan and Amorine were with him. And on Mhoram's right, supported by the Lord's right hand, was Hile Troy.
Troy had lost his sunglasses and headband. The eyeless skin of his skull was knotted as if he were straining to see. He cocked his head, moved it from side to side to focus his hearing. Covenant understood intuitively that Troy had lost his Land-born sight.
With these people was one man whom Covenant did not know. He was the singer-a tall, white-haired man with glowing silver eyes, who hummed to himself as if he were dewing the ground with melody. Covenant guessed without thinking that he was Caerroil Wildwood, the Forestal of Garroting Deep.
Something in the singer's gaze-something severe, yet oddly respectful-recalled the Unbeliever to himself. At last he perceived the fear in the faces watching him. He pushed himself away from Bannor's support, took the weight of all his burdens on his own shoulders. For a moment, he met the trepidation before him with a glare so intense that it made his forehead throb. But then, as he was about to speak, a fierce detonation from Rivenrock shook his bones, knocked him o$ balance. When he reached toward Bannor, he exposed the shame of his ring.
Facing Mhoram and Troy as squarely as he could, he groaned, "She's lost. I lost her." But his face twisted, and the words came brokenly between his lips, like fragments of his heart.
His utterance seemed to pale the music, making the muffled clamor from Rivenrock louder. He felt every blast of the battle like an internal blow. But the deadness under his feet became more and more vivid to him. And the gibbeted Giant hung before him with an immediacy he could not ignore. He began to realize that he was facing people who had survived ordeals of their own. He flinched, but did not fall, when their protests began-when Troy gave a strangled cry, "Lost? Lost?" and Mhoram asked in a stricken voice, "What has happened?"
Under the night sky on the lifeless hilltop-lit by the stars, and the twin gleams of Caerroil Wildwood's eyes, and the orcrest fire-Covenant stood braced on Bannor like a crippled witness against himself, and described in stumbling sentences High Lord Elena's plight. He made no mention of the focus of her gaze, her consuming passion. But he told all the rest-his bargain, Amok's end, the summoning of Kevin Landwaster, Elena's solitary fall. When he was done, he was answered by an aghast silence that echoed in his ears like a denunciation.
"I'm sorry," he concluded into the stillness. Forcing himself to drink the bitter dregs of his personal inefficacy, he added, "I loved her. I would have saved her if I could."
"Loved her?" Troy murmured. "Alone?" His voice was too disjointed to register the degree of his pain.
Lord Mhoram abruptly covered his eyes, bowed his head.
Quaan, Amorine, and Callindrill stood together as if they could not endure what they had heard alone.
Another blast from Rivenrock shivered the air. It snatched Mhoram's head up, and he faced Covenant with tears streaming down his cheeks. "It is as I have said," he breathed achingly. "Madness is not the only danger in dreams."
At this, Covenant's face twisted again. But he had nothing more to say; even the release of assent was denied him. However, Bannor seemed to hear something different in the Lord's tone. As if to correct an
injustice, he went to Mhoram. As he moved, he took from his pack Covenant's marrowmeld sculpture.
He handed the work to Mhoram. "The High Lord gave it to him as a gift."
Lord Mhoram gripped the bone sculpture tightly, and his eyes shone with sudden comprehension. He understood the bond between Elena and the Ranyhyn; he understood what the giving of such a gift to Covenant meant. A gasp of weeping swept over his face. But when it passed, it left his self-mastery intact. His crooked lips took on their old humane angle. When he turned to Covenant again, he said gently, "It is a precious gift."
Bannor's unexpected support, and Mhoram's gesture of conciliation, touched Covenant. But he had no strength to spare for either of them. His gaze was fixed on Hile Troy.
The Warmark winced eyelessly under repeated blows of realization, and within him a gale brewed. He seemed to see Elena in his mind-remember her, taste her beauty, savor all the power of sight which she had taught him. He seemed to see her useless, solitary end. "Lost?" he panted as his fury grew. "Lost? Alone?"
All at once, he erupted. With a livid howl, he raged at Covenant, "Do you call that love?! Leper! Unbeliever!"-he spat the words as if they were the most damning curses he knew-"This is all just a game for you! Mental tricks. Excuses. You're a leper! A moral leper! You're too selfish to love anyone but yourself. You have the power for everything, and you won't use it. You just turned your back on her when she needed you. You-despicable-leper! Leper!" He shouted with such force that the muscles of his neck corded. The veins in his temples bulged and throbbed as if he were about to burst with execration.
Covenant felt the truth of the accusation. His bargain exposed him to such charges, and Troy hit the heart of his vulnerability as if some prophetic insight guided his blindness. Covenant's right hand twitched in a futile fending motion. But his left clung to his chest as if to localize his shame in that one place.
When Troy paused to gather himself for another assault, Covenant said weakly, "Unbelief has got nothing to do with it. She was my daughter."
"What?!"
"My daughter." Covenant pronounced it like an indictment. "I raped Trell's child. Elena was his granddaughter."
"Your daughter." Troy was too stunned to shout. Implications like glimpses of depravity rocked him. He groaned as if Covenant's crimes were so multitudinous that he could not hold them all in his mind at one time.
Mhoram spoke to him carefully. "My friend-this is the knowledge which I have withheld from you. The withholding gave you unintended pain. Please pardon me. The Council feared that this knowledge would cause you to abominate the Unbeliever."
"Damn right," Troy panted. "Damn right."
Suddenly, his accumulated passion burst into action. Guided by a sure instinct, he reached out swiftly, snatched away Lord Mhoram's staff. He spun once to gain momentum, and leveled a crushing blow with the staff at Covenant's head.
The unexpectedness of the attack surpassed even Bannor. But he recovered, sprang after Troy, jolted him enough to unbalance his swing. As a result, only the heel of the staff clipped Covenant's forehead. But that sent him tumbling backward down the hill.
He caught himself, got - to his knees. When he raised a hand to his head, he found that he was bleeding profusely from a wound in the center of his forehead.
He could feel old hate and death seeping into him from the blasted earth. Blood ran down his cheeks like spittle.
The next moment, Mhoram and Quaan reached Troy. Mhoram tore the staff from his grasp; Quaan pinned his arms. "Fool)" the Lord rasped. "You forget the Oath of Peace. Loyalty is duel"
Troy struggled against Quaan. Rage and anguish mottled his face. "I haven't sworn any Oath! Let go of me!"
"You are the Warmark of the Warward," said Mhoram dangerously. "The Oath of Peace binds. But if you cannot refrain from murder for that reason, refrain because the Despiser's army is destroyed. Fleshharrower hangs dead on the gibbet of Gallows Howe."
"Do you call that victory? We've been decimated) What good is a victory that costs so much?" Troy's fury rose like weeping. "It would have been better if we'd lost! Then it wouldn't have been such a waste!" The passion in his throat made him gasp for air as if he were asphyxiating on the reek of Covenant's perfidy.
But Lord Mhoram was unmoved. He caught Troy by the breastplate and shook him. "Then refrain because the High Lord is not dead."
"Not?" Troy panted. "Not dead?"
"We hear her battle even now. Do you not comprehend the sound? Even as we listen, she struggles against dead Kevin. The Staff sustains her-and he has not the might she believed of him. But the proof of her endurance is here, in the Unbeliever himself. She is his summoner-he will remain in the Land until her death. So it was when Drool Rockworm first called him.
"She's still fighting?" Troy gaped at the idea. He seemed to regard it as the conclusive evidence of Covenant's treachery. But then he turned to Mhoram and cried, "We've got to help her!"
At this, Mhoram flinched. A wave of pain broke through his face. In a constricted voice, he asked, "How?"
"How?" Troy fumed. "Don't ask me how. You're the Lord! We have got to help her!"
The Lord pulled himself erect, clenched his staff for support. "We are fifty leagues from Rivenrock. A night and a day would pass before any Ranyhyn could carry us to the foot of the cliff. Then Bannor would be required to guide us into the mountain in search of the battle. Perhaps the effects of the battle have destroyed all approaches to it. Perhaps they would destroy us. Yet if we gained the High Lord, we
would have nothing to offer her but the frail strength of two Lords. With the Staff of Law, she far surpasses us. How can we help her?"
They faced each other-as if they met mind to mind across Troy's eyelessness. Mhoram did not falter under the Warmark's rage. The hurt of his inadequacy showed clearly in his face, but he neither denied nor cursed at his weakness.
Though Troy trembled with urgency, he had to take his demand elsewhere.
He swung toward Covenant. "You!" he shouted stridently. "If you're too much of a coward to do anything yourself, at least give me a chance to help her! Give me your ring!-I can feel it from here. Give it to me! Come on, you bastard. It's her only chance."
Kneeling on the dead, sabulous dirt of the Howe, Covenant looked up at Troy through the blood in his eyes. For a time, he was unable to answer. Troy's adjuration seemed to drop on him like a rockfall. It swept away his last defense, and left bare his final shame. He should have been able to save Elena. He had the power; it pulsed like a wound on his wedding finger. But he had not used it. Ignorance was no excuse. His claim of futility no longer covered him.
The barren atmosphere of the Howe ached in his chest as he climbed to his feet. Though he could hardly see where he was going, he started up the hill. The exertion made his head hurt as if there were splinters of bone jabbing his brain, and his heart quivered. A silent voice cried out to him, No! No! But he ignored it. With his halfhand, he fumbled at the ring. It seemed to resist him-he had trouble gripping it but as he reached Troy he finally tore it from his finger. In a wet voice, as if his mouth were full of blood, he said, "Take it. Save her." He put the band in Troy's hand.
The touch of the pulsing ring exalted Troy. Clenching his fingers around it, he turned, ran fearlessly to the hillcrest. He searched quickly with his ears, located the direction of Rivenrock, faced the battle. Like a titan, he swung his fist at the heavens; power
flamed from the white gold as if it were answering his passion. In a livid voice, he cried, "Elena! Elena!"
Then the tall white singer was at his side. The music took on a forbidding note that spread involuntary stasis like a mist over the hilltop. Everyone froze, lost the power of movement.
In the stillness, Caerroil Wildwood lifted his gnarled scepter. "No," he trilled, "I cannot permit this. It is a breaking of Law. And you forget the price that is owed to me. Perhaps when you have gained an incondign mastery over the wild magic, you will use it to recant the price." With his scepter, he touched Troy's upraised fist; the ring dropped to the ground. As it fell, all the heat and surge of its power faded. It looked like mere metal as it struck the lifeless earth, rolled lightly along the music, and stopped near Covenant's feet.
"I will not permit it," the singer continued. "The promise is irrevocable. In the names of the One Tree and the One Forest-in the name of the unforgiving Deep-I claim the price of my aid." With a solemn gesture like the sound of distant horns, he touched his scepter to Troy's head. "Eyeless one, you have promised payment. I claim your life."
Lord Mhoram strove to protest. But the singer's stasis held him. He could do nothing but watch as Troy began to change.
"I claim you to be my disciple," the singer hummed. "You shall be Caer-Caveral, my help and hold. From me you shall learn the work of a Forestal, root and branch, seed and sap and leaf and all. Together we will walk the Deep, and I will teach you the songs of the trees, and the names of all the old, brave, wakeful woods, and the ancient forestry of thought and mood. While trees remain, we will steward together, cherishing each new sprout, and wreaking wood's revenge on each hated human intrusion. Forget your foolish friend. You cannot succor her. CaerCaveral, remain and serve!"
The song molded Troy's form. Slowly, his legs grew together. His feet began to send roots into the soil. His apparel turned to thick dark moss. He became an old
stump with one last limb upraised. From his fist green leaves uncurled.
Softly, the singer concluded, "Together we will restore life to Gallows Howe." Then he turned toward the Lords and Covenant. The silver brilliance of his eyes increased, dimming even the orcrest fire; and he sang in a tone of dewy freshness:
Ax and fire leave me dead.
I know the hate of hands grown bold. Depart to save your heart-sap's red:
My hate knows neither rest nor weal
As the words fluted through them, he disappeared into the music as if he had wrapped it about him and passed beyond the range of sight. But the warning melody lingered behind him like an echo in the air, repeating his command and repeating it until it could not be forgotten.
Gradually, like figures lumbering stiffly out of a dream, the people on the hilltop began to move again. Quaan and Amorine hastened to the mossy stump. Grief filled their faces. But they had endured too much, struggled too hard, in their long ordeal. They had no strength left for horror or protest. Amorine stared as if she could not comprehend what had happened, and tears glistened in Quaan's old eyes. He called, "Hail, Warmark!" But his voice sounded weak and dim on the Howe, and he said no more. .
Behind them, Lord Mhoram sagged. His hands trembled as he held up his staff in mute farewell. Lord Callindrill joined him, and they stood together as if they were leaning on each other.
Covenant dropped numbly to his knees to pick up his ring.
He reached for it like an acolyte bending his forehead to the ground, and when his fingers closed on it, he slid it into place on his wedding finger. Then, with both hands, he tried to wipe the blood out of his eyes.
But as he made the attempt, a blast from Rivenrock
staggered the air. The mountain groaned as if it were grievously wounded. The concussion threw him on his face in the dirt. Blackness filled the remains of his sight as if it were flooding into him from the barren Howe. And behind it he heard the blast howling like the livid triumph of fiends.
A long tremor passed through the Deep, and after it came an extended shattering sound, as if the whole cliff of Rivenrock were crumbling. People moved; voices called back and forth. But Covenant could not hear them clearly. His ears were deluged by tumult, a yammering, multitudinous yell of glee. And the sound came closer. It became louder and more immediate until it overwhelmed his eardrums, passed beyond the range of physical perception and shrieked directly into his brain.
After that, voices reached him obscurely, registered somehow through his overdriven hearing.
Bannor said, "Rivenrock bursts. There will be a great flood."
Lord Callindrill said, "Some good will come of it. It will do much to cleanse the Wightwarrens under Mount Thunder."
 Lord Mhoram said, "Behold the Unbeliever de
parts. The High Lord has fallen."
But these things surpassed him; he could not hold onto them. The black dirt of Gallows Howe loomed in his face like an incarnation of midnight. And around it, encompassing it, consuming both it and him, the fiendish scream scaled upward, filling his skull and chest and limbs as if it were grinding his very bones to powder. The howl overcame him, and he answered with a cry that made no sound.

Twenty-Seven: Leper


THE shriek climbed, became .louder as it grew more urgent and damaging. He could feel it breaking down the barriers of his comprehension, altering the terrain of his existence. Finally he seemed to shatter against it; he fell against it from a great height, so that he broke on its remorseless surface. He jerked at the force of the impact. When he lay still again, he could feel the hardness pressing coldly against his face and chest.
Gradually he realized that the surface was damp, sticky. It smelled like clotting blood.
That perception carried him across a frontier. He found that he could distinguish between the flat, bitter, insulting shriek outside and the ragged hurt inside his head. With an agonizing effort, he moved one hand to rub the caked blood out of his eyes. Then, tortuously, he opened them.
His vision swam into focus like a badly smeared lens, but after a while he began to make out pieces of where he was. There was plenty of soulless yellow light. The legs of the sofa stood a few feet away across the thick defensive carpet. He was lying prostrate on the floor beside the coffee table as if he had fallen off a catafalque. With his left hand, he clutched something hard to his ear, something that shrieked brutally.
When he shifted his hand, he discovered that he was holding the receiver of the telephone. From it came the shriek the piercing wail of a phone left off its hook. The phone itself lay on the floor just out of reach.
A long, dumb moment passed before he regained
enough of himself to wonder how long ago Joan had hung up on him.
Groaning, he rolled to one side and looked up at a wall clock. He could not read it; his eyes were still too blurted. But through one window he could see the first light of an uncomfortable dawn. He had been unconscious for half the night.
He started to his feet, then slumped down again while pain rang in his head. He feared that he would lose consciousness once more. But after a while, the noise cleared, faded into the general scream of the phone. He was able to get to his knees.
He rested there, looking about him at the controlled orderliness of his living room. Joan's picture and his cup of coffee stood just where he had left them on the table. The jolt of his head on the table edge had not even spilled the coffee.
The sanctuary of the familiar place gave him no consolation. When he tried to concentrate on the room's premeditated neatness, his gaze kept sliding back to the blood-dry, almost black-which crusted the carpet. That stain violated his safety like a chancre. To get away from it, he gripped himself and climbed to his feet.
The room reeled as if he had fallen into vertigo, but he steadied himself on the padded arm of the sofa, and after a moment he regained most of his balance. Carefully, as if he were afraid of disturbing a demon, he placed the receiver back on its hook, then sighed deeply as the shriek was chopped out of the air. Its echo continued to ring in his left ear. It disturbed his equilibrium, but he ignored it as best he could. He began to move through the house like a blind man, working his way from support to support-sofa to doorframe to kitchen counter. Then he had to take several unbraced steps to reach the bathroom, but he managed to cross the distance without falling.
He propped himself on the sink, and rested again.
When he had caught his breath, he automatically ran water and lathered his hands-the first step in his rite of cleansing, a vital part of his defense against a relapse. For a time, he scrubbed his hands without
raising his head. But at last he looked into the mirror. The sight of his own visage stopped him. He gazed at himself out of raw, self-inflicted eyes, and recognized the face that Elena had sculpted. She had not placed a wound on the forehead of her carving, but his cut only completed the image she had formed of him. He could see a gleam of bone through the caked black blood which darkened his forehead and cheeks, spread down around his eyes, emphasizing them, shadowing them with terrible purposes. The wound and the blood on his gray, gaunt face made him look like a false prophet, a traitor to his own best dreams.
Elena! he cried thickly. What have I done?
Unable to bear the sight of himself, he turned away and glanced numbly around the bathroom. In the fluorescent lighting, the porcelain of the tub and the chromed metal of its dangerous fixtures glinted as if they had nothing whatever to do with weeping. Their blank superficiality seemed to insist that grief and loss were unreal, irrelevant.
He stared at them for a long time, measuring their blankness. Then he limped out of the bathroom. Grimly, deliberately, he left his forehead uncleaned, untouched. He did not choose to repudiate the accusation written there.

Chapter One: The Danger in Dreams


   Thomas Covenant was talking in his sleep. At times he knew what he was doing; the broken pieces of his voice penetrated his stupor dimly, like flickers of innocence. But he could not rouse himself-the weight of his exhaustion was too great. He babbled like millions of people before him, whole or ill, true or false. But in his case there was no one to hear. He would not have been more alone if he had been the last dreamer left alive.
   When the shrill demand of the phone cut through him, he woke up wailing.
   For a moment after he threw himself upright in bed, he could not distinguish between the phone and his own flat terror; both echoed like torment through the fog in his head. Then the phone rang again. It pulled him sweating out of bed, compelled him to shamble like a derelict into the living room, forced him to pick up the receiver. His numb, disease-cold fingers fumbled over the black plastic, and when he finally gained a grip on it, he held it to the side of his head like a pistol.
   He had nothing to say to it, so he waited in blankness for the person at the other end of the line to speak.
   A woman's voice asked uncertainly, "Mr. Covenant? Thomas Covenant?"
   "Yes," he murmured, then stopped, vaguely surprised by all the things he had with that one word admitted to be true.
   "Ah, Mr. Covenant," the voice said. "Megan Roman calling." When he said nothing, she added with a touch of acerbity, "Your lawyer. Remember?"
   But he did not remember; he knew nothing about lawyers. Numb mist confused all the links of his memory. Despite the metallic distortion of the connection, her voice sounded distantly familiar; but he could not identify it.
   She went on, "Mr. Covenant, I've been your lawyer for two years now. What's the matter with you? Are you all right?"
   The familiarity of her voice disturbed him. He did not want to remember who she was. Dully, he murmured, "It doesn't have anything to do with me."
   "Are you kidding? I wouldn't have called if it didn't have to do with you. I wouldn't have anything to do with it if it weren't your business." Irritation and discomfort scraped together in her tone.
   "No.'' He did not want to remember. For his own benefit, he strained to articulate, "The Law doesn't have anything to do with me. She broke it. Anyway, I- It can't touch me."
   "You better believe it can touch you. And you better listen to me. I don't know what's wrong with you, but-"
   He interrupted her. He was too close to remembering her voice. "No," he said again. "It doesn't bind me. I'm-outside. Separate. It can't touch me. Law is"-he paused for a moment, groped through the fog for what he wanted to say-"not the opposite of Despite."
   Then in spite of himself he recognized her voice. Through the disembodied inaccuracy of the phone line, he identified her.
   Elena.
   A sickness of defeat took the resistance out of him.
   She was saying, "-what you're talking about. I'm your lawyer, Megan Roman. And if you think the law can't touch you, you'd better listen to me. That's what I'm calling about."
   "Yes," he said hopelessly.
   "Listen, Mr. Covenant." She gave her irritation a free hand. "I don't exactly like being your lawyer. Just thinking about you makes me squirm. But I've never backed down on a client before, and I don't mean to start with you. Now pull yourself together and listen to me."
   "Yes.'' Elena? he moaned dumbly. Elena? What have I done to you?
   "All right. Here's the situation. That-unfortunate escapade of yours-Saturday night-has brought matters to a head. It- Did you have to go to a nightclub, Mr. Covenant? A nightclub, of all places?"
   "I didn't mean it." He could think of no other words for his contrition.
   "Well, it's done now. Sheriff Lytton is up in arms. You've given him something he can use against you. He spent Sunday evening and this morning talking to a lot of people around here. And the people he talked to talked to other people. The township council met at noon.
   "Mr. Covenant, this probably wouldn't have happened if everyone didn't remember the last time you came to town. There was a lot of talk then, but it'd calmed down for the most part. Now it's stirred up again. People want action.
   "The council intends to give them action. Our scrupulous local government is going to have your property rezoned. Haven Farm will probably be zoned industrial. Residential use will be prohibited. Once that's done, you can be forced to move. You'll probably get a fair price for the Farm-but you won't find any other place to live in this county."
   "It's my fault," he said. "I had the power, and I didn't know how to use it." His bones were full to the marrow with old hate and death.
   "What? Are you listening to me? Mr. Covenant, you're my client- for whatever that's worth. I don't intend to stand by and let this happen to you. Sick or not, you've got the same civil rights as anyone else. And there are laws to protect private citizens from-persecution. We can fight. Now I want''-against the metallic background noise of the phone, he could hear her gathering her courage-"I want you to come to my office. Today. We'll dig into the situation-arrange to appeal the decision, or file suit against it-something. We'll discuss all the ramifications, and plan a strategy. All right?"
   The sense of deliberate risk in her tone penetrated him for a moment. He said, "I'm a leper. They can't touch me."
   "They'll throw you out on your ear! Damn it, Covenant-you don't seem to understand what's going on here. You are going to lose your home. It can be fought-but you're the client, and I can't fight it without you."
   But her vehemence made his attention retreat. Vague recollections of Elena swirled in him as he said, "That's not a good answer." Absently, he removed the receiver from his ear and returned it to its cradle.
   For a long time, he stood gazing at the black instrument. Something in its irremediable pitch and shape reminded him that his head hurt.
   Something important had happened to him.
   As if for the first time, he heard the lawyer saying, Sunday evening and this morning. He turned woodenly and looked at the wall clock. At first he could not bring his eyes into focus on it; it stared back at him as if it were going blind. But at last he made out the time. The afternoon sun outside his windows confirmed it.
   He had slept for more than thirty hours.
   Elena? he thought. That could not have been Elena on the phone. Elena was dead. His daughter was dead. It was his fault.
   His forehead began to throb. The pain rasped his mind like a bright, brutal light. He ducked his head to try to evade it.
   Elena had not even existed. She had never existed. He had dreamed the whole thing.
   Elena! he moaned. Turning, he wandered weakly back toward his bed.
   As he moved, the fog turned crimson in his brain.
   When he entered the bedroom, his eyes widened at the sight of his pillow; and he stopped. The pillowcase was stained with black splotches. They looked like rot, some species of fungus gnawing away at the white cleanliness of the linen.
   Instinctively, he raised a hand to his forehead. But his numb fingers could tell him nothing. The illness that seemed to fill the whole inside of his skull began laughing. His empty guts squirmed with nausea. Holding his forehead in both hands, he lurched into the bathroom.
   In the mirror over the sink, he saw the wound on his forehead.
   For an instant, he saw nothing of himself but the wound. It looked like leprosy, like an invisible hand of leprosy clenching the skin of his forehead. Black crusted blood clung to the ragged edges of the cut, mottling his pale flesh like deep gangrene; and blood and fluid seeped through cracks in the heavy scabs. He seemed to feel the infection festering its way straight through his skull into his brain. It hurt his gaze as if it already reeked of disease and ugly death.
   Trembling fiercely, he spun the faucets to fill the sink. While water frothed into the basin, he hurried to lather his hands.
   But when he noticed his white gold ring hanging loosely on his wedding finger, he stopped. He remembered the hot power which had pulsed through that metal in his dream. He could hear Bannor, the Blood-guard who had kept him alive, saying, Save her! You must!-hear himself reply, I cannot! He could hear Hile Troy's shout, Leper! You're too selfish to love anyone but yourself. He winced as he remembered the blow which had laid open his forehead.
   Elena had died because of him.
   She had never existed.
   She had fallen into that crevice, fighting desperately against the specter of mad Kevin Landwaster, whom she had Commanded from his grave. She had fallen and died. The Staff of Law had been lost. He had not so much as lifted his hand to save her.
   She had never even existed. He had dreamed her while he lay unconscious after having hit his head on the edge of the coffee table.
   Torn between conflicting horrors, he stared at his wound as if it were an outcry against him, a two-edged denunciation. From the mirror it shouted to him that the prophecy of his illness had come to pass.
   Moaning, he pushed away, and rushed back toward the phone. With soapy, dripping hands, he fumbled at it, struggled to dial the number of Joan's parents. She might be staying with them. She had been his wife; he needed to talk to her.
   But halfway through the number, he threw down the receiver. In his memory, he could see her standing chaste and therefore merciless before him. She still believed that he had refused to talk to her when she had called him Saturday night. She would not forgive him for the rebuff he had helplessly dealt her.
   How could he tell her that he needed to be forgiven for allowing another woman to die in his dreams?
   Yet he needed someone-needed someone to whom he could cry out, Help me!
   He had gone so far down the road to a leper's end that he could not pull himself back alone.
   But he could not call the doctors at the leprosarium. They would return him to Louisiana. They would treat him and train him and counsel him. They would put him back into life as if his illness were all that mattered, as if wisdom were only skin-deep-as if grief and remorse and horror were nothing but illusions, tricks done with mirrors, irrelevant to chrome and porcelain and clean, white, stiff hospital sheets and fluorescent lights.
   They would abandon him to the unreality of his passion.
   He found that he was gasping hoarsely, panting as if the air in the room were too rancid for his lungs.
   He needed-needed.
   Dialing convulsively, he called Information and got the number of the nightclub where he had gone drinking Saturday night.
   When he reached that number, the woman who answered the phone told him in a bored voice that Susie Thurston had left the nightclub. Before he could think to ask, the woman told him where the singer's next engagement was.
   He called Information again, then put a long-distance call through to the place where Susie Thurston was now scheduled to perform. The switchboard of this club connected him without question to her dressing room.
   As soon as he heard her low, waifish voice, he panted thickly, "Why did you do it? Did he put you up to it? How did he do it? I want to know-''
   She interrupted him roughly. "Who are you? I don't know what the hell you're talking about. Who do you think you are? I didn't do nothing to you."
   "Saturday night. You did it to me Saturday night."
   "Buster, I don't know you from Adam. I didn't do nothing to you. Just drop dead, will you? Get off my phone."
   "You did it Saturday night. He put you up to it. You called me 'Berek.' '' Berek Halfhand-the long-dead hero in his dream. The people in his dream, the people of the Land, had believed him to be Berek Halfhand reborn-believed that because leprosy had claimed the last two fingers of his right hand. "That crazy old beggar told you to call me Berek, and you did it."
   She was silent for a long moment before she said, "Oh, it's you. You're that guy-the people at the club said you were a leper."
   "You called me Berek," Covenant croaked as if he were strangling on the sepulchral air of the house.
   "A leper," she breathed. "Oh, hell! I might've kissed you. Buster, you sure had me fooled. You look a hell of a lot like a friend of mine."
   "Berek," Covenant groaned.
   "What-'Berek'? You heard me wrong. I said, 'Berrett.' Berrett Williams is a friend of mine. He and I go 'way back. I learned a lot from him. But he was three-quarters crocked all the time. Anyway, he was sort of a clown. Coming to hear me without saying a thing about it is the sort of thing he'd do. And you looked-"
   "He put you up to it. That old beggar made you do it. He's trying to do something to me."
   "Buster, you got leprosy of the brain. I don't know no beggars. I got enough useless old men of my own. Say, maybe you are Berrett Williams. This sounds like one of his jokes. Berrett, damn you, if you're setting me up for something-"
   Nausea clenched in Covenant again. He hung up the phone and hunched over his stomach. But he was too empty to vomit; he had not eaten for forty-eight hours. He gouged the sweat out of his eyes with his numb fingertips, and dialed Information again.
   The half-dried soap on his fingers made his eyes sting and blur as he got the number he wanted and put through another long-distance call.
   When the crisp military voice said, "Department of Defense," he blinked at the moisture which filled his eyes like shame, and responded, "Let me talk to Hile Troy." Troy had been in his dream, too. But the man had insisted that he was real, an inhabitant of the real world, not a figment of Covenant's nightmare.
   "Hile Troy? One moment, sir." Covenant heard the riffling of pages briefly. Then the voice said, "Sir, I have no listing for anyone by that name."
   "Hile Troy," Covenant repeated. "He works in one of your-in one of your think tanks. He had an accident. If he isn't dead, he should be back to work by now."
   The military voice lost some of its crispness. "Sir, if he's employed here as you say-then he's security personnel. I couldn't contact him for you, even if he were listed here."
   "Just get him to the phone," Covenant moaned. "He'll talk to me."
   "What is your name, sir?"
   "He'll talk to me."
   "Perhaps he will. I still need to know your name."
   "Oh, hell!" Covenant wiped his eyes on the back of his hand, then said abjectly, "I'm Thomas Covenant."
   "Yes, sir. I'll connect you to Major Rolle. He may be able to help you."
   The line clicked into silence. In the background, Covenant could hear a running series of metallic snicks like the ticking of a deathwatch. Pressure mounted in him. The wound on his forehead throbbed like a scream. He clasped the receiver to his head, and hugged himself with his free arm, straining for self-control. When the line came to life again, he could hardly keep from howling at it.
   "Mr. Covenant?" a bland, insinuating voice said. "I'm Major Rolle. We're having trouble locating the person you wish to speak to. This is a large department--you understand. Could you tell me more about him?"
   "His name is Hile Troy. He works in one of your think tanks. He's blind." The words trembled between Covenant's lips as if he were freezing.
   "Blind, you say? Mr. Covenant, you mentioned an accident. Can you tell me what happened to this Hile Troy?"
   "Just let me talk to him. Is he there or not?"
   The major hesitated, then said, "Mr. Covenant, we have no blind men in this department. Could you give me the source of your information? I'm afraid you're the victim of-"
   Abruptly, Covenant was shouting, raging. "He fell out of a window when his apartment caught fire, and he was killed! He never even existed!''
   With a savage heave, he tore the phone cord from its socket, then turned and hurled it at the clock on the living-room wall. The phone struck the clock and bounced to the floor as if it were impervious to injury, but the clock shattered and fell in pieces.
   "He's been dead for days! He never existed!"
   In a paroxysm of fury, he lashed out and kicked the coffee table with one numb booted foot. The table flipped over, broke the frame of Joan's picture as it jolted across the rug. He kicked it again, breaking one of its legs. Then he knocked over the sofa, and leaped past it to the bookcases. One after another, he heaved them to the floor.
   In moments, the neat leper's order of the room had degenerated into dangerous chaos. At once, he rushed back to the bedroom. With stumbling fingers, he tore the penknife out of his pocket, opened it, and used it to shred the bloodstained pillow. Then, while the feathers settled like guilty snow over the bed and bureaus, he thrust the knife back into his pocket and slammed out of the house.
   He went down into the woods behind Haven Farm at a run, hurrying toward the secluded hut which held his office. If he could not speak of his distress, perhaps he could write it down. As he flashed along the path, his fingers were already twitching to type out: Help me help help help! But when he reached the hut, he found that it looked as if he had already been there. Its door had been torn from its hinges, and inside the hulks of his typewriters lay battered amid the litter of his files and papers. The ruin was smeared with excrement, and the small rooms stank of urine.
   At first, he stared at the wreckage as if he had caught himself in an act of amnesia. He could not remember having done this. But he knew he had not done it; it was vandalism, an attack on him like the burning of his stables days or weeks ago. The unexpected damage stunned him. For an odd instant, he forgot what he had just done to his house. I am not a violent man, he thought dumbly. I'm not.
   Then the constricted space of the hut seemed to spring at him from all the walls. A suffocating sensation clamped his chest. For the third time, he ached to vomit, and could not.
   Gasping between clenched teeth, he fled into the woods.
   He moved aimlessly at first, drove the inanition of his bones as fast as he could deep into the woodland with no aim except flight. But as sunset filled the hills, cluttered the trails with dusk, he bent his steps toward the town. The thought of people drew him like a lure. While he stumbled through the twilit spring evening, odd, irrational surges of hope jabbed his heart. At erratic intervals, he thought that the mere sight of a forthright, unrecriminating face would steady him, bring the extremities of his plight back within his grasp.
   He feared to see such a face. The implicit judgment of its health would be beyond his endurance.
   Yet he jerked unevenly on through the woods like a moth fluttering in half-voluntary pursuit of immolation. He could not resist the cold siren of people, the allure and pain of his common mortal blood. Help! He winced as each cruel hope struck him. Help me!
   But when he neared the town-when he broke out of the woods in back of the scattered old homes which surrounded like a defensive perimeter the business core of the small town-he could not muster the courage to approach any closer. The bright-lit windows and porches and driveways seemed impassable: he would have to brave too much illumination, too much exposure, to reach any door, whether or not it would welcome him. Night was the only cover he had left for his terrible vulnerability.
   Whimpering in frustration and need, he tried to force himself forward. He moved from house to house, searching for one, any one, which might offer him some faint possibility of consolation. But the lights refused him. The sheer indecency of thrusting himself upon unwitting people in their homes joined his fear to keep him back. He could not impose on the men and women who lived in sanctuary behind the brightness. He could not carry the weight of any more victims.
   In this way-dodging and ducking around the outskirts of the community like a futile ghost, a ghoul impotent to horrify-he passed the houses, and then returned as he had come, made his scattered way back to Haven Farm like a dry leaf, brittle to the breaking point, and apt for fire.
   At acute times during the next three days, he wanted to burn his house down, put it to the torch-make it the pyre or charnel of his uncleanness. And in many less savage moods, he ached to simply slit his wrists-open his veins and let the slow misery of his collapse drain away. But he could not muster the resolution for either act. Torn between horrors, he seemed to have lost the power of decision. The little strength of will that remained to him he spent in denying himself food and rest.
   He went without food because he had fasted once before, and that hunger had helped to carry him through a forest of self-deceptions to a realization of the appalling thing he had done to Lena, Elena's mother. Now he wanted to do the same; he wanted to cut through all excuses, justifications, digressions, defenses, and meet his condition on its darkest terms. If he failed to do this, then any conclusion he reached would be betrayed from birth, like Elena, by the inadequacy of his rectitude or comprehension.
   But he fought his bone-deep need for rest because he was afraid of what might happen to him if he slept. He had learned that the innocent do not sleep. Guilt begins in dreams.
   Neither of these abnegations surpassed him. The nausea lurking constantly in the pit of his stomach helped him to keep from food. And the fever of his plight did not let him go. It held and rubbed him like a harness; he seemed to have the galls of it on his soul. Whenever the penury of his resources threatened him, he gusted out of his house like a lost wind, and scudded through the hills for miles up and down the wooded length of Righters Creek. And when he could not rouse himself with exertion, he lay down across the broken furniture in his living room, so that if he dozed he would be too uncomfortable to rest deeply enough for dreams.
   In the process, he did nothing to care for his illness. His VSE-the Visual Surveillance of Extremities on which his struggle against leprosy depended-and other self-protective habits he neglected as if they had lost all meaning for him. He did not take the medication which had at one time arrested the spreading of his disease. His forehead festered; cold numbness gnawed its slow way up the nerves of his hands and feet. He accepted such things, ignored his danger. It was condign; he deserved it.
   Nevertheless, he fell into the same fey mood every evening. In the gloom of twilight, his need for people became unendurable; it drew him spitting and gnashing his teeth to the outer darkness beyond the home lights of the town. Night after night he tried to drive himself to the door of a home, any home. But he could not raise his courage high enough to accost the lights. People within a stone's throw of him remained as unattainable as if they occupied another world. Each night he was thrown back for companionship on the unrelieved aspect of his own weakness-and on the throbbing ache which filled his skull as the infection in his forehead grew.
   Elena had died because of him. She was his daughter, and he had loved her. Yet he had trapped her into death.
   She had never even existed.
   He could find no answer to it.
   Then, Thursday night, the pattern of his decline was broken for him. In the process of his futile ghosting, he became aware of sounds on the dark breeze. A tone rose and fell like a voice in oratory, and between its stanzas he heard singing. Disembodied in the darkness, the voices had a tattered, mournful air, like an invitation to a gathering of damned souls-verses and chorus responding in dolor to each other. Elena had been a singer, daughter of a family of singers. Fumbling his way through the benighted outskirts of the town, he followed the reft sorrow of the music.
   It led him past the houses, around the town, down the road to the barren field which served as a parade ground whenever the town celebrated a patriotic occasion. A few people were still hurrying toward the field as if they were late, and Covenant avoided them by staying off the road. When he reached the parade ground, he found that a huge tent had been erected in its center. All the sides of the tent were rolled up, so that the light of pressure lanterns shone vividly from under the canvas.
   People filled the tent. They were just sitting down on benches after singing, and during the movement, several ushers guided the latecomers to the last empty seats. The benches faced in tight rows toward a wide platform at the front of the tent, where three men sat. They were behind a heavy pulpit, and behind them stood a makeshift altar, hastily hammered together out of pine boards, and bleakly adorned by a few crooked candles and a dull, battered gold cross.
   As the people settled themselves on the benches, one of the men on the platform-a short fleshy man dressed in a black suit and a dull white shirt-got to his feet and stepped to the pulpit. In a sonorous, compelling voice, he said, "Let us pray."
   All the people bowed their heads. Covenant was on the verge of turning away in disgust, but the quiet confidence of the man's tone stayed him. He listened unwillingly as the man folded his hands on the pulpit and prayed gently:
   "Dear Jesus, our Lord and Saviour-please look down on the souls that have come together here. Look into their hearts, Lord-see the pain, and the hurt, and the loneliness, and the sorrow-yes, and the sin-and the hunger for You in their hearts. Comfort them, Lord. Help them, heal them. Teach them the peace and the miracle of prayer in Thy true name. Amen.''
   Together, the people responded, "Amen."
   The man's voice tugged at Covenant. He heard something in it that sounded like sincerity, like simple compassion. He could not be sure; he seemed to have learned what little he knew about sincerity in dreams. But he did not move away. Instead, while the people raised their heads from prayer, he moved cautiously forward into the light, went close enough to the tent to read a large sign posted at the side of the road. It said:
   The EASTER HEALTH Crusade-
   Dr. B. Sam Johnson
   revivalist and healer
   tonight through Sunday
   only.
   On the platform, another man approached the pulpit. He wore a clerical collar, and a silver cross hung from his neck. He pushed his heavy glasses up on his nose, and beamed out over the people. "I'm pleased as punch," he said, "to have Dr. Johnson and Matthew Logan here. They're known everywhere in the state for their rich ministry to the spiritual needs of people like us. I don't need to tell you how much we need reviving here-how many of us need to recover that healing faith, especially in this Easter season. Dr. Johnson and Mr. Logan are going to help us return to the matchless Grace of God."
   The short man dressed in black stood up again and said, "Thank you, sir." The minister hesitated, then left the pulpit as if he had been dismissed-cut off in the opening stages of a fulsome introduction-and Dr. Johnson went on smoothly: "My friends, here's my dear brother in Christ, Matthew Logan. You've heard his wonderful, wonderful singing. Now he'll read the Divine Word of God for us. Brother Logan."
   As he stepped to the pulpit, Matthew Logan's powerful frame towered over Dr. Johnson. Though he seemed to have no neck at all, the head resting on his broad shoulders was half a yard above his partner's. He flipped authoritatively through a massive black Bible on the pulpit, found his place, and bowed his head to read as if in deference to the Word of God.
   He began without introduction:
   " 'But if you will not hearken to me, and will not do all these commandments, but break my covenant, I will do this to you: I will appoint over you sudden terror, consumption, and fever that waste the eyes and cause life to pine away. And you shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it; those who hate you shall rule over you, and you shall flee when none pursues you. I will make your heavens like iron and your earth like brass; and your strength shall be spent in vain, for your land shall not yield its increase, and the trees of the land shall not yield their fruit.
   '' Then if you walk contrary to me, and will not hearken to me, I will bring more plagues upon you, sevenfold as many as your sins. And I will let loose the wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, and destroy your cattle, and make you few in number, so that your ways shall become desolate. I also will walk contrary to you, and I will bring a sword upon you, and shall execute vengeance for the covenant; and if you gather within your cities I will send pestilence among you, and you shall be delivered into the hand of the enemy.' "
   As Matthew Logan rolled out the words, Covenant felt their spell falling on him. The promise of punishment caught at his heart; it snared him as if it had been lying in ambush for his gray, gaunt soul. Stiffly, involuntarily, he moved toward the tent as the curse drew him to itself.
   'And if in spite of this you will not hearken to me, but walk contrary to me, then I will walk contrary to you in fury, and chastise you myself sevenfold for your sins. You shall eat the flesh of your sons, and you shall eat the flesh of your daughters. My soul will abhor you. I will lay your cities waste. I will scatter you among the nations, and I will unsheathe the sword after you; and your land shall be a desolation, and your cities shall be a waste.
   'Then the land shall pay for its sabbaths as long as it lies desolate Covenant ducked under an edge of the canvas and found himself standing beside an usher at the rear of the tent. The usher eyed him distrustfully, but made no move to offer him a seat. High on the platform at the other end, Matthew Logan stood like a savage patriarch leveling retribution at the bent, vulnerable heads below him. The curse gathered a storm in Covenant, and he feared that he would cry out before it ended. But Matthew Logan stopped where he was and flipped through the Bible again. When he found his new place, he read more quietly:
   " 'Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. But if we judged ourselves truly, we should not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are chastened so that we may not be condemned along with the world.' "
   Slapping the Bible closed, he returned stolidly to his seat.
   At once, Dr. B. Sam Johnson was on his feet. Now he seemed to bristle with energy; he could not wait to begin speaking. His jowls quivered with excitement as he addressed his audience.
   "My friends, how marvelous are the Words of God! How quick to touch the heart. How comforting to the sick, the downtrodden, the weak. And how easily they make even the purest of us squirm. Listen, my friends! Listen to the Word of the Apocalypse:
   " 'To the thirsty I will give water without price from the fountain of the water of life. He who conquers shall have this heritage, and I will be his God and he shall be my son. But as for the cowardly, the unbelievers, the polluted, as for murderers, fornicators, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their lot shall be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.'
   "Marvelous, marvelous Words of God. Here in one short passage we hear the two great messages of the Bible, the Law and the Gospel, the Old Covenant and the New. Brother Logan read to you first from the Old Testament, from the twenty-sixth chapter of Leviticus. Did you hear him, my friends? Did you listen with all the ears of your heart? That is the voice of God, Almighty God. He doesn't mince words, my friends. He doesn't beat around the bush. He doesn't hide things in fine names and fancy language. No! He says, if you sin, if you break My Law, I will terrify you and make you sick. I will make the land barren and attack you with plagues and pestilence. And if you still sin, I will make cannibals and cripples out of you. 'Then the land shall pay for its sabbaths as long as it lies desolate.'
   "And do you know what the Law is, my friends? I can summarize it for you in the Words of the Apocalypse. 'Thou shalt not be cowardly, or unbelieving, or polluted.' Never mind murder, fornication, sorcery, idolatry, lies. We're all good people here. We don't do things like that. But have you ever been afraid? Have you ever faltered just a bit in your faith? Have you ever failed to keep yourself clean in heart and mind? 'Then the land shall pay for its sabbaths as long as it lies desolate.' The Apostle Paul calls a spade a spade. He says, 'That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died.' But Jesus goes further. He says, 'Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.'
   "Do I hear you protesting? Do I hear some of you saying to yourselves, 'No one can be that good. I'm human. I can't be perfect.' You're right! Of course, you're right. But the Law of God doesn't care for your excuses. If you're lame, if you've got arthritis, if you're going blind or your heart is failing, if you're crippled, if you've got multiple sclerosis or diabetes or any other of those fancy names for sin, you can be sure that the curse of God is on you. But if you're healthy, don't think you're safe! You're just lucky that God hasn't decided to 'walk contrary to you in fury.' You can't be perfect, my friends. And the Law doesn't care how hard you tried. Instead of telling yourself what a valiant try you made, listen to the Bible. The Old Covenant says to you as plain as day, 'The leper who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head hang loose, and he shall cover his upper lip and cry, "Unclean, unclean." ' "
   He held his audience in the palm of his hand now. The orotund resonance of his voice swept them all together in one ranked assembly of mortality and weakness. Even Covenant forgot himself, forgot that he was an intruder in this canvas tabernacle; he heard so many personal echoes and gleams in the peroration that he could not resist it. He was willing to believe that he was accursed.
   "Ah, my friends," Dr. Johnson went on smoothly, "it's a dark day for us when illness strikes, when pain or dismemberment or bereavement afflict us, and we can no longer pretend we're clean. But I haven't told you about the Gospel yet. Do you remember Christ saying, 'He who loses his life for my sake shall find it' ? Did you hear Paul say, 'When we are judged by the Lord, we are chastened so that we may not be condemned along with the world'? Did you hear the writer of the Apocalypse say, 'He who conquers shall have this heritage, and I will be his God and he shall be my son'? There's another side, my friends. The law is only half of God's holy message. The other half is chastening, heritage, forgiveness, healing-the Mercy that matches God's Righteousness. Do I have to remind you that the Son of God healed everyone who asked Him? Even lepers? Do I have to remind you that He hung on a cross erected in the midst of misery and shame to pay the price of our sin for us? Do I have to remind you that the nails tore His hands and feet? That the spear pierced His side? That He was dead for three days? Dead and in hell?
   ''My friends, He did it for only one reason. He did it to pay for all our cowardly, unbelieving, unclean sabbaths, so that we could be healed. And all you have to do to get healed is to believe it, and accept it, and love Him for it. All you have to do is say with the man whose child was dying, 'I believe; help my unbelief!' Five little words, my friends. When they come from the heart, they're enough to pay for the whole Kingdom of Righteousness."
   As if on cue, Matthew Logan stood up and began singing in soft descant, "Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine." Against this background, Dr. Johnson folded his hands and said, "My friends, pray with me."
   At once, every head in the audience dropped. Covenant, too, bowed. But the wound on his forehead burned extravagantly in that position. He looked up again as Dr. Johnson said, "Close your eyes, my friends. Shut out your neighbors, your children, your parents, your mate. Shut out every distraction. Look inward, my friends. Look deep inside yourselves, and see the sickness there. Hear the voice of God saying, Thou art weighed in the balance, and found wanting.' Pray with me in your hearts.
   "Dear holy Jesus, Thou art our only hope. Only Thy Divine Mercy can heal the disease which riddles our courage, rots the fiber of our faith, dirties us in Thy sight. Only Thou canst touch the sickness which destroys peace, and cure it. We lay bare our hearts to Thee, Lord. Help us to find the courage for those five difficult, difficult words, 'I believe; help my unbelief!' Dear Lord, please give us the courage to be healed."
   Without a break, he raised his arms over the audience and continued, ' 'Do you feel His spirit, my friends? Do you feel it in your hearts? Do you feel the finger of His Righteousness probing the sick spot in your soul and body ? If you do, come forward now, and let me pray for health with you.''
   He bowed his head in silent supplication while he waited for the repentant to heed his call. But Covenant was already on his way down the aisle. The usher made a furtive movement to stop him, then backed off as several members of the audience looked up. Covenant stalked feverishly the length of the tent, climbed the rough wooden steps to the platform, and stopped facing Dr. Johnson. His eyes glistered as he said in a raw whisper, "Help me."
   The man was shorter than he had appeared to be from the audience. His black suit was shiny, and his shirt soiled from long use. He had not shaved recently; stiff, grizzled whiskers roughened his jowls and cheeks. His face wore an uncertain aspect-almost an expression of alarm-as Covenant confronted him, but he quickly masked it with blandness, and said in a tone of easy sonority, "Help you, son? Only God can help you. But I will joyfully add my prayers to the cry of any contrite heart." He placed a hand firmly on Covenant's shoulder. "Kneel, son, and pray with me. Let's ask the Lord for help together."
   Covenant wanted to kneel, wanted to submit to the commanding spell of Dr. Johnson's hand and voice. But his knees were locked with urgency and inanition. The pain in his forehead flamed like acid gnawing at his brain. He felt that if he bent at all he would collapse completely. "Help me," he whispered again. "I can't stand it."
   Dr. Johnson's face became stern at Covenant's resistance. "Are you repentant, son?" he asked gravely. "Have you found the sick spot of sin in your soul? Do you truly ache for Almighty God's Divine Mercy?"
   "I am sick,'' Covenant responded as if he were answering a litany. "I have committed crimes."
   "And do you repent? Can you say those five difficult words with all the honest pain of your heart?"
   Covenant's jaw locked involuntarily. Through clenched teeth, he said as if he were whimpering, "Help my unbelief."
   "Son, that's not enough. You know that's not enough." Dr. Johnson's sternness changed to righteous judgment. "Do not dare to mock God. He will cast you out forever. Do you believe? Do you believe in God's own health?"
   "I do"-Covenant struggled to move his jaw, but his teeth clung together as if they had been fused by despair-"I do not believe."
   Behind him, Matthew Logan stopped singing his descant. The abrupt silence echoed in Covenant's ears like ridicule. Abjectly, he breathed, "I'm a leper."
   He could tell by the curious, expectant faces in the first rows of the audience that the people had not heard him, did not recognize him. He was not surprised; he felt that he had been altered past all recognition by his delusions. And even in his long-past days of health he had never been associated with the more religious townspeople. But Dr. Johnson heard. His eyes bulged dangerously in their sockets, and he spoke so softly that his words barely reached Covenant. "I don't know who put you up to this but you won't get away with it."
   With hardly a pause, he began speaking for the people in the tent again. "Poor man, you're delirious. That cut is infected, and it's given you a bad fever." His public voice was redolent with sympathy. "I grieve for you, son. But it will take a great power of prayer to clear your mind so that the voice of God can reach you. Brother Logan, would you take this poor sick man aside and pray with him? If God blesses your efforts to lift his fever, he may yet come to repentance."
   Matthew Logan's massive hands closed like clamps on Covenant's biceps, The fingers ground into him as if they meant to crush his bones. He found himself propelled forward, almost carried down the steps and along the aisle. Behind him, Dr. Johnson was saying, "My friends, will you pray with me for this poor suffering soul ? Will you sing and pray for his healing with me?"
   In a covered whisper, Matthew Logan said near Covenant's ear, "We haven't taken the offering yet. If you do anything else to interrupt, I'll break both your arms."
   "Don't touch me!" Covenant snarled. The big man's treatment tapped a resource of rage which had been damned in him for a long time. He tried to struggle against Logan's grasp. "Get your hands off me."
   Then they reached the end of the aisle and ducked under the canvas out into the night. With an effortless heave, Brother Logan threw Covenant from him. Covenant stumbled and fell on the bare dirt of the parade ground. When he looked up, the big man was standing with fists on hips like a dark colossus between him and the light of the tent.
   Covenant climbed painfully to his feet, pulled what little dignity he could find about his shoulders, and moved away.
   As he shambled into the darkness, he heard the people singing, "Blessed Assurance.'' And a moment later, a pathetic childish voice cried, "Lord, I'm lame! Please heal me!"
   Covenant dropped to his knees and retched dryly. Some time passed before he could get up again and flee the cruel song.
   He went homeward along the main road, defying the townspeople to hurt him further. But all the businesses were closed, and the street was deserted. He walked like a flicker of darkness under the pale yellow streetlamps, past the high, belittling giant-heads on the columns of the courthouse-made his way unmolested out the end of town toward Haven Farm.
   The two miles to the Farm passed like all his hikes-measured out in fragments by the rhythm of his strides, a scudding, mechanical rhythm like the ticking of overstressed clockwork. The mainspring of his movement had been wound too tight; it was turning too fast, rushing to collapse. But a change had taken place in the force which drove him.
   He had remembered hate.
   He was spinning wild schemes for vengeance in his head when he finally reached the long driveway leading into Haven Farm. There in the cold starlight he saw a heavy sack sitting by his mailbox. A moment passed before he remembered that the sack contained food; the local grocery store delivered to him twice a week rather than face the risk that he might choose to do his shopping in person; and yesterday-Wednesday-had been one of the delivery days. But he had been so occupied with his restless fasting that he had forgotten.
   He picked up the sack without stopping to wonder why he bothered, and carried it down the driveway toward his house.
   But when he looked into the sack in the bright light of his kitchen, he found he had decided to eat. Vengeance required strength; there was nothing he could do to strike back against his tormentors if he were too weak to hold himself erect. He took a package of buns from the sack.
   The wrapping of the buns had been neatly cut on one side, but he ignored the thin slit. He tore off the plastic and threw it aside. The buns were dry and stiff from their exposure to the air. He took one and held it in the palm of his hand, gazed down at it as if it were a skull he had robbed from some old grave. The sight of the bread sickened him. Part of him longed for the clean death of starvation, and he felt that he could not lift his hand, could not complete his decision of retribution.
   Savagely, he jerked the bun to his mouth and bit into it.
   Something sharp caught between his lower lip and upper gum. Before he could stop biting, it cut him deeply. A keen shard of pain stabbed into his face. Gasping, he snatched back the bun.
   It was covered with blood. Blood ran like saliva down his chin.
   When he tore open the bun with his hands, he found a tarnished razor blade in it.
   At first, he was too astonished to react. The rusty blade seemed beyond comprehension; he could hardly believe the blood that smeared his hands and dropped to the floor from his jaw. Numbly, he let the bun fall from his fingers. Then he turned and made his way into the littered wreckage of his living room.
   His eyes were irresistibly drawn to Joan's picture. It lay faceup under the remains of the coffee table, and the glass of its frame was webbed with cracks. He pushed the table aside, picked up the picture. Joan smiled at him from behind the cracks as if she had been caught in a net of mortality and did not know it.
   He began to laugh.
   He started softly, but soon scaled upward into manic howling. Water ran from his eyes like tears, but still he laughed, laughed as if he were about to shatter. His bursts spattered blood over his hands and Joan's picture and the ruined room.
   Abruptly, he threw down the picture and ran from it. He did not want Joan to witness his hysteria. Laughing madly, he rushed from the house into the woods, determined even while he lost control of himself to take his final breakdown as far away from Haven Farm as possible.
   When he reached Righters Creek, he turned and followed it upstream into the hills, away from the dangerous lure of people as fast as his numb, awkward feet could carry him-laughing desperately all the while.
   Sometime during the night, he tripped; and when he found himself on the ground, he leaned against a tree to rest for a moment. At once, he fell asleep, and did not awaken until the morning sun was shining full in his face.
   For a time, he did not remember who or where he was. The hot white light of the sun burned everything out of his mind; his eyes were so dazzled that he could not make out his surroundings. But when he heard the thin, wordless cry of fear, he began to chuckle. He was too weak to laugh loudly, but he chuckled as if that were the only thing left in him.
   The thin cry repeated itself. Inspired by it, he managed a fuller laugh, and started to struggle to his feet. But the effort weakened him. He had to stop laughing to catch his breath. Then he heard the cry again, a child's shriek of terror. Supporting himself on the tree, he looked around, peering through his sun blindness at the dim shapes of the woods.
   Gradually, he became able to see. He was perched high on a hill in the woods. Most of the branches and bushes were bursting with green spring leaves. A few yards from him, Righters Creek tumbled gaily down the rocky hillside and wandered like a playful silver trail away among the trees. Most of the hill below him was free of brush because of the rockiness of the soil; nothing obscured his downward view.
   An odd splotch of color at the bottom of the hill caught his attention. With an effort, he focused his eyes on it. It was cloth, a light blue dress worn by a child-a little girl perhaps four or five years old. She stood half turned toward him, with her back pressed against the black, straight trunk of a tall tree. She seemed to be trying to push herself into the wood, but the indifferent trunk refused to admit her.
   She was screaming continuously now, and her cries begged at the anguish in his mind. As she yelled, she stared in unmasked terror at the ground two or three feet in front of her. For a moment, Covenant could not see what she was looking at. But then his ears discerned the low buzzing noise, and he picked out the ominous brown shaking of the rattle.
   The timber rattler was coiled less than a yard from the girl's bare legs. Its head bobbed as if it were searching for the perfect place to strike.
   He recognized her terror now. Before the shout had a chance to burst past his blood-caked lips, he pushed himself away from the tree and started running down the hill.
   The slope seemed interminably long, and his legs were hardly strong enough to sustain him. At each downward plunge, his muscles gave, and he almost fell to his knees. But the child's irrefusable fear held him up. He did not look at the snake. He fixed his eyes on her bare shins, concentrated himself on the importance of reaching her before the rattler's fangs jabbed into her flesh. The rest of her was blurred in his sight, as if she did not exist apart from her peril.
   With each shrill cry, she begged him to hurry.
   But he was not watching his footing. Before he had covered half the distance, he tripped-pitched headlong down the hill, tumbled and bounced over the rough rocks. For an instant, he protected himself with his arms. But then his head smacked against a broad facet of stone in the hillside.
   He seemed to fall into the stone, as if he were burying his face in darkness. The hard surface of it broke over him like a wave; he could feel himself plunging deep into the rock's granite essence.
   No! he cried. No! Not now!
   He fought it with every jot of his strength. But it surpassed him. He sank into it as if he were drowning in stone.

Two: Variol-son


   High Lord Mhoram sat in his private chambers deep in Revelstone. The unadorned gut-rock walls around him were warmly lit by small urns of graveling in each corner of the room, and the faint aroma of newly broken earth from the lore-glowing stones wrapped comfortably around him. But still he could feel the preternatural winter which was upon the land. Despite the brave hearth fires set everywhere by the Hirebrands and Gravelingases of Lord's Keep, a bitter chill seeped noticeably through the mountain granite of the city. High Lord Mhoram felt it. He could sense its effect on the physical mood of the great Giant-wrought Keep. On an almost subliminal level, Revelstone was huddling against the cold.
   Already, the first natural turnings of winter toward spring were a full cycle of the moon late. The middle night of spring was only fourteen days away, and still ice clung to the Land.
   Outside the wedge-shaped mountain plateau of the Keep, there was not much snow; the air was too cold for snow. It blew at Revelstone on a jagged, uncharacteristic wind out of the east, kicking a thin skiff of snow across the foothills of the plateau, blinding all the windows of the Keep under deep inches of frost and immobilizing with ice the lake at the foot of Furl Falls. Mhoram did not need to smell the Despite which hurled that wind across the Land to know its source.
   It came from Ridjeck Thome, Foul's Creche.
   As the High Lord sat in his chambers, with his elbows braced on the stone table and his chin propped on one palm, he was aware of that wind hissing through the background of his thoughts. Ten years ago, he would have said that it was impossible; the natural weather patterns of the Land could not be so wrenched apart. Even five years ago, after he had had time to assess and reassess the loss of the Staff of Law, he would have doubted that the Illearth Stone could make Lord Foul so powerful. But now he knew better, understood more.
   High Lord Elena's battle with dead Kevin Landwaster had taken place seven years ago. The Staff of Law must have been destroyed in that struggle. Without the Staff's innate support for the natural order of the Earth, one great obstacle was gone from the path of the Despiser's corrupting power. And the Law of Death had been broken; Elena had summoned Old Lord Kevin from beyond the grave. Mhoram could not begin to measure all the terrible implications of that rupture.
   He blinked, and his gold-flecked eyes shifted into focus on the carving which stood on the table two feet from the flat blade of his nose. The bone of the carving gleamed whitely in the light of the fire-stones. It was a marrowmeld sculpture, the last of Elena's anundivianyajna work. Bannor of the Bloodguard had preserved it, and had given it to Mhoram when they had come together on Gallows Howe in Garroting Deep. It was a finely detailed bust, a sculpting, of a lean, gaunt, impenetrable face, and its lines were tense with prophetic purpose. After Mhoram and the survivors of the Warward had returned to Revelstone from Garroting Deep, Bannor had explained the history of the bone sculpture.
   In fact, he had explained it in unaccustomed detail. His habitual Bloodguard reticence had given way almost to prolixity; and the fullness of his description had provided Mhoram with a first hint of the fundamental alteration which had taken place in the Bloodguard. And in turn that description had led circuitously to the great change in Mhoram's own life. By a curious logic of its own, it had put an end to the High Lord's power of prevision.
   He was no longer seer and oracle to the Council of Lords. Because of what he had learned, he caught no more glimpses of the future in dreams, read no more hints of distant happenings in the dance of the fire. The secret knowledge which he had gained so intuitively from the marrowmeld sculpture had blinded the eyes of his prescience.
   It had done other things to him as well. It had afflicted him with more hope and fear than he had ever felt before. And it had partly estranged him from his fellow Lords; in a sense, it had estranged him from all the people of Revelstone. When he walked the halls of the Keep, he could see in the sympathy and pain and doubt and wonder of their glances that they perceived his separateness, his voluntary isolation. But he suffered more from the breach which now obtained between him and the other Lords- Callindrill Faer-mate, Amatin daughter of Matin, Trevor son of Groyle, and Loerya Trevor-mate. In all their work together, in all the intercourse of their daily lives, even in all the mind melding which was the great strength of the new Lords, he was forced to hold that sickening hope and fear apart, away from them. For he had not told them his secret.
   He had not told them, though he had no justification for his silence except dread.
   Intuitively, by steps which he could hardly articulate, Elena's marrowmeld sculpture had taught him the secret of the Ritual of Desecration.
   He felt that there was enough hope and fear in the knowledge to last him a lifetime.
   In the back of his mind, he believed that Bannor had wanted him to have this knowledge and had not been able to utter it directly. The Bloodguard Vow had restricted Bannor in so many ways. But during the single year of his tenure as First Mark, he had expressed more than any Bloodguard before him his solicitude for the survival of the Lords.
   High Lord Mhoram winced unconsciously at the memory. The secret he now held had been expensive in more ways than one.
   There was hope in the knowledge because it answered the quintessential failure which had plagued the new Lords from the beginning-from the days in which they had accepted the First Ward of Kevin's Lore from the Giants, and had sworn the Oath of Peace. If it were used, the knowledge promised to unlock the power which had remained sealed in the Wards despite the best efforts of so many generations of Lords and students at the Loresraat. It promised mastery of Kevin's Lore. It might even show ur-Lord Thomas Covenant how to use the wild magic in his white gold   ring.
   But Mhoram had learned that the very thing which made Kevin's Lore powerful for good also made it powerful for ill. If Kevin son of Loric had not had that particular capacity for power, he would not have been able to Desecrate the Land.
   If Mhoram shared his knowledge, any Lord who wished to reinvoke the Ritual would not be forced to rely upon an instinctive distrust of life.
   That knowledge violated the Oath of Peace. To his horror, Mhoram had come to perceive that the Oath itself was the essential blindness, the incapacity which had prevented the new Lords from penetrating to the heart of Kevin's Lore. When the first new Lords, and all the Land with them, had taken the Oath, articulated their highest ideal and deepest commitment by forswearing all violent, destructive passions, all human instincts for murder and ravage and contempt-when they had bound themselves with the Oath, they had unwittingly numbed themselves to the basic vitality of the Old Lords' power. Therefore High Lord Mhoram feared to share his secret. It was a strength which could only be used if the wielders denied the most basic promise of their lives. It was a weapon which could only be used by a person who had cast down all defenses against despair.
   And the temptation to use that weapon would be strong, perhaps irrefusable. Mhoram did not need oracular dreams to foresee the peril which Lord Foul the Despiser was preparing for the defenders of the Land. He could feel it in the frigid winter wind. And he knew that Trothgard was already under attack. The siege of Revelwood was under way even while he sat in his private quarters, staring morosely at a marrowmeld sculpture.
   He could taste in his own mouth the desperation which had led High Lord Kevin to Kiril Threndor and the Ritual of Desecration. Power was dreadful and treacherous. When it was not great enough to accomplish its wielder's desires, it turned against the hands which held it. High Lord Elena's fate only repeated the lesson of Kevin Landwaster; he had possessed far more power than the new Lords could ever hope for, now that the Staff of Law was gone; and all his might had achieved nothing but his own ineluctable despair and the ruin of the Land. Mhoram feared to share that danger by revealing his secret. He was appalled to think he was in such peril himself.
   Yet this withholding of knowledge ran against every grain of his character. He believed intensely that the refusal to share knowledge demeaned both the denier and the denied. By keeping the secret to himself, he prevented Callindrill and Amatin and Trevor and Loerya and every Lorewarden or student of the Staff from finding within themselves the strength to refuse Desecration; he placed himself falsely in the position of a judge who had weighed them and found them wanting. For this reason ten years ago he had argued passionately against the Council's decision to withhold from Hile Troy the knowledge of Elena's parentage. That decision had lessened Troy's control over his own fate. Yet how could he, Mhoram, bear the responsibility of sharing his secret if that sharing led to the Land's destruction? Better that the evil should be done by the Despiser than by a Lord.
   When he heard the abrupt knock at his door, he said, "Enter," at once. He was expecting a message, and he knew from the sound of the knock who his visitor was. He did not look up from his contemplation of the sculpture as Warmark Quaan strode into the chamber and presented himself at the table.
   But Quaan remained silent, and Mhoram sensed that the old Warmark was waiting to meet his gaze. With an inward sigh, the High Lord raised his head. In Quaan's age- and sun-weathered face, he read that the news was not what they had hoped it would be.
   Mhoram did not offer Quaan a seat; he could see that the Warmark preferred to stand. They had sat together often enough in the past. After all the experiences they had shared, they were old comrades-though Quaan, who was twenty years younger than Mhoram, looked twenty years older. And the High Lord frequently found Quaan's blunt, soldierly candor soothing. Quaan was a follower of the Sword who had no desire to know any secrets of the Staff.
   Despite his seventy years, Quaan carried proudly the insignia of his office: the yellow breastplate with its twin black diagonal slashes, the yellow headband, and the ebony sword. His gnarled hands hung at his sides as if they were ready to snatch up weapons at any moment. But his pale eyes were disquieted.
   Mhoram met the Warmark's gaze steadily and said, "Well, my friend?"
   "High Lord," Quaan said brusquely, "the Loresraat has come."
   Mhoram could see that the Warmark had more to say than this. His eyes asked Quaan to continue.
   "All the Lorewardens and students have made the journey from Trothgard safely," Quaan responded. "The libraries of the Loresraat and the Wards have been brought here intact. All the visitors and those made homeless by the march of Satansfist's army through the Center Plains have come seeking sanctuary. Revelwood is besieged."
   He stopped again, and Mhoram asked quietly, "What word do the Lorewardens bring of that army?"
   "It is-vast, High Lord. It assaults the Valley of Two Rivers like a sea. The Giant-Raver Satansfist bears with him the-the same power which we saw in Fleshharrower at the battle of Doriendor Corishev. He easily overcame the river fords of the Rill and Llurallin. Revelwood will soon fall to him."
   The High Lord put a measure of sternness in his voice to counter Quaan's dismay. "We were forewarned, Warmark. When the Giant-Raver and his horde climbed Landsdrop to the north of the Plains of Ra, the Ramen sent word to us. Therefore the Loresraat has been preserved."
   Quaan braced one hand on his sword and said, "Lord Callindrill has remained in Revelwood."
   Mhoram winced in painful surprise.
   "He has remained to defend the tree city. With him are five Howard commanded by Hiltmark Amorine-also Sword-Elder Drinishok and Staff-Elder Asuraka."
   After the first jolt of the news, the High Lord's gold-flecked irises concentrated dangerously. "Warmark, the Council commanded that Revelwood should be defended only by those of the lillianrill who could not bear to abandon it. The Council commanded that the battle for the Land should take place here"-he slapped the table with his palm-"where we can exact the greatest possible price for our lives."
   "You and I are not at Revelwood," Quaan replied bluntly. "Who there could command Lord Callindrill to turn aside from his purpose? Amorine could not-you know this. They are bound together by the costs they bore at Doriendor Corishev. Nor could she leave him alone. Nor could she refuse the aid of the Elders."
   His voice was sharp in Hiltmark Amorine's defense, but he stopped when Mhoram with a distracted gesture waved all questions of anger aside. They remained together in silence for a moment. The High Lord felt an aching anticipation of grief, but he forced it down. His eyes wandered back to the bust on the table. Softly, he said, "Has this word been given to Faer Callindrill-mate?"
   "Corimini the Eldest of the Loresraat went to her at once. Callindrill studied with him, and he has known them both for many years. He apologized for not first paying his respects to the High Lord."
   Mhoram shrugged away the need for any apology. His helplessness to reach Callindrill hurt him. He was six days from Revelwood by horse. And he could not call upon the Ranyhyn. The Despiser's army had effectively cut Revelstone off from the Plains of Ra; any Ranyhyn that tried to answer a summons would almost certainly be slaughtered and eaten. All the High Lord could do was wait-and pray that Callindrill and his companions fled Revelwood before Satansfist encircled them. Two thousand warriors and the Hiltmark of the Warward, two of the leaders of the Lorewardens, one Lord-it was a terrible price to pay for Callindrill's bravado.
   But even as he thought this, Mhoram knew that Callindrill was not acting out of bravado. The Lord simply could not endure the thought that Revelwood might perish. Mhoram privately hoped Satansfist would let the tree stand-use it rather than destroy it. But Callindrill had no such hope. Ever since he had faltered during the battle of Doriendor Corishev, he had seen himself as a man who had disgraced his Lord's duty, failed to meet the challenge of the Land's need. He had seen himself as a coward. And now Revelwood, the fairest work of the new Lords, was under attack. Mhoram sighed again, and gently touched the bone of the marrowmeld with his fingers.
   In the back of his mind, he was readying his decision.
   "Quaan, my friend," he mused grimly, "what have we accomplished in seven years?"
   As if this signaled an end to the formal side of their conversation, Quaan lowered himself into a chair opposite Mhoram, and allowed his square shoulders to sag fractionally. "We have prepared for the siege of Revelstone with all our strength. We have restored the Warward somewhat-the ten Howards which survived have been increased to twenty-five. We have brought the people of the Center Plains here, out of Satansfist's way. We have stored food, weapons, supplies. The Gray Slayer will require more than a sea of ur-viles and Cavewights to break our hold here."
   "He has more, Quaan." Mhoram continued to stroke the strangely revealing face of the anundivian yajna bust. "And we have lost the Bloodguard."
   "Through no fault of ours.'' Quaan's pain at the loss made him sound indignant. He had fought side-by-side with the Bloodguard more than any other warrior in the Land. "We could not have known at that time, when the mission to Seareach was given to Korik and the Bloodguard, that the Gray Slayer would attack the Giants with the Illearth Stone. We could not have known that Korik would defeat a Raver and would attempt to bring a piece of the Stone here."
   "We could not have known," Mhoram echoed hollowly. After all, the end of his oracular dreams was not a great loss. Despite the myriad terrors he had beheld, he had not glimpsed or guessed at Lord Foul's attack on the Giants in time. "My friend, do you remember what Bannor told us concerning this sculpture?"
   "High Lord?"
   "He reported that Elena daughter of Lena carved it of Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever and white gold wielder-and that ur-Lord Covenant mistook it for the face of a Bloodguard." Banner had also reported that Covenant had forced him to tell Elena the name of the Power hidden in the Seventh Ward, so that she could meet the conditions for approaching that Power. But Mhoram was interested for the moment in the resemblance which High Lord Elena had worked into her carving. That had been the starting point, the beginning from which he had traveled to reach his secret knowledge. "She was a true Craftmaster of the bone-sculpting skill. She would not unwittingly have made such confusion possible."
   Quaan shrugged.
   Mhoram smiled fondly at the Warmark's unwillingness to hazard opinions beyond his competence. "My friend," he said, "I saw the resemblance, but could not decipher it. Ahanna daughter of Hanna aided me. Though she does not know the marrowmeld skill, she has an artist's eye. She perceived the meaning which Elena made here.
   "Quaan, the resemblance is that both ur-Lord Covenant the Unbeliever and Banner of the Bloodguard require absolute answers to their own lives. With the Bloodguard it was their Vow. They demanded of themselves either pure, flawless service forever or no service at all. And the Unbeliever demands-"
   "He demands,'' Quaan said sourly, "that his world is real and ours is not."
   Another smile eased Mhoram's somberness, then faded. "This demand for absolute answers is dangerous. Kevin, too, required either victory or destruction."
   The Warmark met Mhoram's gaze grimly for a moment before he said, "Then do not resummon the Unbeliever. High Lord, he will lay waste the Land to preserve his 'real' world."
   Mhoram cocked an eyebrow at Quaan, and his crooked lips tightened. He knew that the Warmark had never trusted Covenant, yet in this time of crisis any doubt was more important, less answerable. But before he could reply, urgent knuckles pounded at his door. The tight voice of a sentry hissed, "High Lord, come swiftly! High Lord!"
   Immediately, Mhoram stood and moved toward the door. As he strode, he banished all his reveries, and brought his senses into focus on the ambience of Revelstone, searching it for the cause of the sentry's distress.
   Quaan, reaching the door a step ahead of him, thrust it open. Mhoram hastened out into the bright, round courtyard.
   The whole high cavern of the court was clearly illuminated by the pale-yellow light which shone up through the stone floor, but Mhoram did not need to look up to any of the projecting coigns in the cavern walls to see why the sentry had called him. Lord Amatin stood in the center of the floor's inextinguishable light. She faced him with her back to her own chambers, as if she had been on her way toward him when the distress had come upon her.
   In her hands she gripped the lomillialor communication rod which the Loresraat had given to Revelstone seven years ago.
   She looked like a dark shadow against the bright floor, and in her hands the High Wood burned flamelessly, like a slit opening into a furnace. Small cold balls of sparks dropped in spurts from the wood. Mhoram understood instantly that she was receiving a message from whomever it was who held the other communication rod, the one at Revelwood.
   He snatched up his long, iron-heeled staff from its tripod outside his door and strode across the courtyard to Amatin. He knew from experience that the sending or receiving of lomillialor messages was an exhausting ordeal. Amatin would want his help. She was not physically strong, and knew it; when word of the Despiser's army had reached the Lords, she had transferred to Callindrill her responsibility for Revelwood-hers because of her passionate love for lore-because she believed she lacked the sheer bodily toughness to endure prolonged strain. Yet hidden within her slight waifish frame and grave eyes was a capacity for knowledge, a devotion to study, which no other Lord could match. The High Lord had often thought that she was better equipped and less likely to uncover his secret than anyone else in the Land.
   Now, silhouetted by the bright floor of the courtyard, she looked thin and frail-a mere image cast by the power in her hands. Her whole body trembled, and she held the lomillialor rod at arm's length as if to keep it as far from herself as possible without releasing it. She started to speak before Mhoram reached her.
   "Asuraka," she gasped. "Asuraka speaks." Her voice juddered like a branch in a high wind. "Satansfist. Fire. Fire! The tree! Ahh!" As she panted the words, she stared at Mhoram in wide dismay as if through him she could see flames chewing at the trunks of Revelwood.
   Mhoram stopped within reach of the High Wood and planted his staff like a command on the floor. Pitching his voice to penetrate her transfixion, he said, "Hold fast, Amatin. I hear."
   She ducked her head, trying to avoid what she saw, and words spattered past her lips as if someone had hurled a heavy boulder into the waters of her soul. "Fire! The bark burns. The wood burns. The Stone! Leaves, roots, fibers are consumed. Callindrill fights. Fights! Screams- the warriors scream. The south hall burns! Ah, my home!"
   Grimly, Mhoram clenched his fist around the center of the lomillialor rod. The power of the message stung him, jolted him from head to foot, but he gripped the smooth wood and forced the strength of his will into it. Through it, he reached Amatin, steadied her; and with her support he reversed the flow of power through the High Wood for an instant. Against the flood of Asuraka's emotion, he hissed toward her, "Flee!"
   The Staff-Elder heard. Through Amatin's lips, she cried back, "Flee? We cannot flee! Revelwood dies under us. We are surrounded. All the outer branches burn. Two trunks are aflame to their tops. Screams! Screams. Lord Callindrill stands in the viancome and fights. The central trunks burn. The net of the viancome burns. Callindrill!"
   "Water!" Mhoram dashed his words at Asuraka through the communication rod. "Call the rivers! Flood the valley!"
   For a moment, the pressure from Asuraka sagged, as if she had turned away from her rod. Mhoram breathed urgently, "Asuraka! Staff-Elder!" He feared that she had fallen in the fire. When she resumed her message, she felt distant, desolate.
   "Lord Callindrill called the rivers-earlier. Satansfist turned the flood aside. He-the Illearth Stone-" A new note of horror came into the weak voice which shuddered between Amatin's lips. "He resurrected the old death of Kurash Plenethor. Blasted rock and blood and bones and burned earth rose up through the ground. With old waste he walled Revelwood, and turned the water. How is it possible? Is Time broken? With one stroke of the Stone centuries of healing are rent asunder."
   Suddenly, Amatin stiffened in one shrill cry: "Callindrill!"
   The next instant, the lomillialor fell silent; the power dropped from it like a stricken bird. Lord Amatin staggered, almost fell to her knees. Mhoram caught her forearm to help her keep her feet.
   In the abrupt silence, the courtyard felt as dead and cold as a tomb. The atmosphere flocked with echoes of anguish like the noiseless beating of black wings. Mhoram's knuckles where he gripped his staff were strained and white.
   Then Amatin shuddered, took hold of herself. The High Lord stepped back and made himself aware of the other people in the court. He could feel their presences. Quaan stood a few paces behind him, and several sentries were scattered around the rim of the shining floor. A handful of spectators watched fearfully from the railed coigns in the walls of the cavity. But the High Lord turned from them all to his left, where Corimini the Eldest of the Loresraat stood with Faer Callindrill-mate. The Eldest held each of Faer's shoulders with an old wrinkled hand. Tears glistened under his heavy eyelids, and his long white beard quivered in grief. But Faer's bluff face was as blank and pale as bone sculpture.
   "Is he dead, then, High Lord?" she asked softly.
   "Death reaps the beauty of the world," replied Mhoram.
   "He burned."
   "Satansfist is a Raver. He hates all green growing things. I was a fool to hope that Revelwood might be spared."
   "Burned," she repeated.
   "Yes, Faer." He could find no words adequate for the ache in his heart. "He fought to preserve Revelwood."
   "High Lord, there was doubt in him-here." She pointed to her bosom. "He forgot himself."
   Mhoram heard the truth in her voice. But he could not let her bare statement pass. "Perhaps. He did not forget the Land."
   With a low moan, Lord Amatin turned and hastened painfully back to her chambers. But Faer paid no attention to her. Without meeting Mhoram's intent gaze, she asked, "Is it possible?"
   He had no answer for that question. Instead, he replied as if she had repeated Asuraka's cry. "The Law of Death had been broken. Who can say what is possible now?"
   "Revelwood," groaned Corimini. His voice trembled with age and sorrow. "He died bravely."
   "He forgot himself." Faer moved out of the Eldest's hands as if she had no use for his consolation. Turning away from the High Lord, she walked stiffly back to her rooms. After a moment, Corimini followed, blinking uselessly against his tears.
   With an effort, Mhoram loosened his grip on his staff, flexed his clawed fingers.
   Firmly, deliberately, he made his decision.
   His lips were tight and hard as he faced Quaan. "Summon the Council," he said as if he expected the Warmark to protest. "Invite the Lorewardens, and any of the rhadhamaerl and lillianrill who desire to come. We can no longer delay."
   Quaan did not mistake Mhoram's tone. He saluted the High Lord crisply, and at once began shouting orders to the sentries.
   Mhoram did not wait for the Warmark to finish. Taking his staff in his right hand, he strode off the bright floor and down the hallway which separated the apartments of the Lords from the rest of Revelstone. He nodded to the guards at the far end of the hall, but did not stop to answer their inquiring faces. Everybody he encountered had felt the disturbance of Revelstone's ambience, and their eyes thronged with anxiety. But he ignored them. They would have their answers soon enough. Sternly, he began to climb up through the levels of Lord's Keep toward the Close.
   Haste mounted around him as word of Asuraka's message spread through the walls of the city. The usual busyness of life which pulsed in the rock, concerting the rhythms of the Keep's inhabitants, gave way to an impression of focus, as if Revelstone itself were telling the people what had happened and how to respond. In this same way, the mountain rock had helped to order the lives of its denizens for generations, centuries.
   Deep in his aching heart, Mhoram knew that even this rock could come to an end. In all the ages of its existence, it had never been besieged. But Lord Foul was powerful enough now. He could tear these massive walls down, reduce the Land's last bastion to rubble. And he would begin the attempt soon.
   This, at least, Callindrill had understood clearly. The time had come for desperate hazards. And the High Lord was full to bursting with the damage Satansfist had already done in his long march from Ridjeck Thome. He had chosen his own risk.
   He hoped to turn the breaking of the Law of Death to the Land's advantage.
   He found himself hurrying, though he knew he would have to wait when he reached the Close. The pressure of decision impelled him. Yet when Trell hailed him from a side passage, he stopped at once, and turned to meet the approach of the big Gravelingas. Trell Atiaran-mate had claims which Mhoram could neither deny nor evade.
   Trell was traditionally dressed as a Stonedownor-over his light brown pants he wore a short tunic with his family symbol, a white leaf pattern, woven into its shoulders-and he had the broad, muscular frame which characterized the people of the rock villages; but the Stonedownors were usually short, and Trell was tall. He created an impression of immense physical strength, which was only augmented by his great skill in the rhadhamaerl lore.
   He approached the High Lord with his head lowered in an attitude of shyness, but Mhoram knew that it was not embarrassment which caused Trell to avoid meeting the eyes of other people. Another explanation glowered behind the thick intensity of Trell's red and gray beard and the graveling ruddiness of his features. Involuntarily, Mhoram shivered as if the wind of winter had found its way through Revelstone to his heart.
   Like the other rhadhamaerl, Trell had given his whole life to the service of stone. But he had lost his wife and daughter and granddaughter because of Thomas Covenant. The simple sight of Covenant seven years ago had driven him to damage the rock of the Keep; he had gouged his fingers into the granite as if it were nothing more than stiff clay.
   He avoided other people's eyes in an effort to conceal the conflicting hate and hurt which knotted themselves within him.
   He usually kept to himself, immersing himself in the stone labors of the Keep. But now he accosted the High Lord with an air of grim purpose.
   He said, "You go to the Close, High Lord." Despite the severity of his mien, his voice held an odd note of supplication.
   "Yes," Mhoram answered.
   "Why?"
   ' 'Trell Atiaran-mate, you know why. You are not deaf to the Land's need."
   Flatly, Trell said, "Do not."
   Mhoram shook his head gently. "You know that I must make this attempt."
   Trell pushed this statement aside with a jerk of his shoulders, and repeated, "Do not."
   ' Trell, I am High Lord of the Council of Revelstone. I must do what I can."
   "You will denounce-you will denounce the fall of Elena my daughter's daughter."
   "Denounce?" Trell's assertion surprised the High Lord. He cocked an eyebrow and waited for the Gravelingas to explain.
   "Yes!" Trell averred. His voice sounded awkward, as if in the long, low, subterranean songs of his rhadhamaerl service he had lost his familiarity with human speech; and he looked as if he were resisting an impulse to shout. ''Atiaran my wife said-she said that it is the responsibility of the living to justify the sacrifices of the dead. Otherwise their deaths have no meaning. You will undo the meaning Elena earned. You must not- approve her death."
   Mhoram heard the truth in Trell's words. His decision might well imply an affirmation, or at least an acceptance, of Elena's fall under Melenkurion Skyweir; and that would be bitter bread for Trell's distress to swallow. Perhaps this explained the inchoate fear which he sensed behind Trell's speech. But Mhoram's duty to the Land bound him straitly. So that Trell could not mistake him, he said, "I must make this attempt.'' Then he added gently, "High Lord Elena broke the Law of Death. In what way can I approve?"
   Trell's gaze moved around the walls, avoiding the face of the High Lord, and his heavy hands clutched his hips as if to prevent themselves from striking out-as if he did not trust what his hands might do if he failed to hold them down. "Do you love the Land?" he said in a thick voice. "You will destroy it."
   Then he met Mhoram's gaze, and his sore eyes gleamed with moist fire. "It would have been better if I had"-abruptly, his hands tore loose from his sides, slapped together in front of him, and his shoulders hunched like a strangler's-"crushed Lena my own daughter at birth."
   "No!" Mhoram affirmed softly. "No." He yearned to put his arms around Trell, to console the Gravelingas in some way. But he did not know how to untie Trell's distress; he was unable to loosen his own secret dilemma. "Hold Peace, Trell," he murmured. "Remember the Oath." He could think of nothing else to say.
   "Peace?" Trell echoed in ridicule or grief. He no longer seemed to see the High Lord. "Atiaran believed in Peace. There is no Peace." Turning vaguely from Mhoram, he walked away down the side passage from which he had come.
   Mhoram stared after him down the passage for a long moment. Duty and caution told him that he should have warriors assigned to watch the Gravelingas. But he could not bear to torment Trell with such an expression of distrust; that judgment might weaken the last clutch of Trell's self-control. And he, Mhoram, had seen men and women rise to victory from anguish as bad as Trell's.
   Yet the Gravelingas had not looked like a man who could wrest new wholeness out of the ruins of his old life. Mhoram was taking a grave risk by not acting in some way. As he started again toward the Close, the weight of his responsibilities bore heavily on him. He did not feel equal to the multitude of dooms he carried.
   The Lords possessed nothing of their own with which to fight the long cruel winter that fettered the Land.
   He strode down a long, torchlit corridor, climbed a spiral stairway, and approached one of the Lords' private entrances to the Close. Outside the door, he paused to gauge the number of people who had already gathered for the Council, and after a moment he heard Lord Amatin coming up the stair behind him. He waited for her. When she reached the landing where he stood, he saw that her eyes were red-rimmed, her forlorn mouth aggravated by tension. He was tempted to speak to her now, but he decided instead to deal with her feelings before the Council. If he were ever to reveal his secret knowledge, he would first have to prepare the ground for it. With a quiet, sympathetic smile, he opened the door for her and followed her into the Close.
   From the door, he and Amatin went down the steps to the Lords' table, which stood below the level of the tiered galleries in the high, round council hall. The hall was lit by four huge, lore-burning lillianrill torches set into the walls above the galleries, and by an open pit of graveling in the base of the Close, below and within the wide C of the table. Stone chairs for the Lords and their special guests waited around the outer edge of the table, facing in toward the open floor and the graveling pit; and at the head of the table was the high-backed seat of the High Lord.
   On the floor of the Close beside the graveling pit was a round stone table with a short silver sword stabbed halfway to the hilt in its center. This was the krill of Loric, left where Covenant had driven it seven years ago. In that time, the Lords had found no way to remove it from the stone. They left it in the Close so that anyone who wished to study the krill could do so freely. But nothing had changed except the clear white gem around which the guards and haft of the two-edged blade were forged.
   When Mhoram and Callindrill had returned from their plunge into Garroting Deep, they had found the gem lightless, dead. The hot fire which Covenant had set within it had gone out.
   It stood near the graveling like an icon of the Lords' futility, but Mhoram kept his thoughts away from it. He did not need to look around to learn who was already present in the Close; the perfect acoustics of the hall carried every low noise and utterance to his ears. In the first row of the gallery, above and behind the seats of the Lords, sat warriors, Hafts of the Warward, occupying the former places of the Bloodguard. The two Hearthralls, Tohrm the Gravelingas and Borillar the Hirebrand, sat with Warmark Quaan in their formal positions high in the gallery behind the High Lord's chair. Several Lorewardens had taken seats in tiers above the table; the weary dust of their flight from Revelwood was still on them, but they were too taut with the news of the tree's fall to miss this Council. And with them were virtually all the lillianrill of Lord's Keep. The burning of a tree struck at the very hearts of the Hirebrands, and they watched the High Lord's approach with pain in their eyes.
   Mhoram reached his seat but did not sit down immediately. As Lord Amatin moved to her place on the right side of the table, he felt a sharp pang at sight of the stone seat which Callindrill should have filled. And he could sense the remembered presence of the others who had occupied the High Lord's chair: Variol, Prothall, Osondrea, and Elena among the new Lords, Kevin, Loric, and Damelon of the Old. Their individual greatness and courage humbled him, made him realize how small a figure he was to bear such losses and duties. He stood on the brink of the Land's doom without Variol's foresight or Prothall's ascetic strength or Osondrea's dour intransigence or Elena's fire; and he had not power enough to match the frailest Lord in the weakest Council led by Kevin or Loric or Damelon or Berek Heartthew the Lord-Fatherer. Yet none of the remaining Lords could take his place. Amatin lacked physical toughness. Trevor did not believe in his own stature; he felt that he was not the equal of his fellow Lords. And Loerya was torn between her love for the Land and her desire to protect her own family. Mhoram knew that more than once she had almost asked him to release her from her Lordship, so that she could flee with her daughters into the relative sanctuary of the Westron Mountains.
   With Callindrill gone, High Lord Mhoram was more alone than he had ever been before.
   He had to force himself to pull out his chair and sit down.
   He waited for Trevor and Loerya in a private reverie, gathering his fortitude. Finally, the main doors of the Close opened opposite him, and the two Lords started down the broad steps, accompanying Eldest Corimini. He moved with slow difficulty, as if the end of Revelwood had exhausted the last elasticity of his thews, leaving him at the mercy of his age; and Trevor and Loerya supported him gently on either side. They helped him to a chair down the table from Amatin, then walked around and took their places on the High Lord's left.
   When they were seated, the Close grew quiet. All talking stopped, and after a brief shuffle of feet and positions, silence filled the warm yellow light of the torches and graveling. Mhoram could hear nothing but the low susurration of hushed breathing. Slowly, he looked around the table and the galleries. Every eye in the chamber was on him. Stiffening himself, he placed his staff flat on the table before him, and stood up.
   "Friends and servants of the Land," he said steadily, "be welcome to the Council of Lords. I am Mhoram son of Variol, High Lord by the choice of the Council. There are dire matters upon us, and we must take action against them. But first we must welcome the Lorewardens of the Loresraat. Corimini, Eldest of the Loresraat, be at home in Lord's Keep with all your people. You have brought the great school of lore safely to Revelstone. How may we honor you?"
   Corimini rose infirmly to his feet as if to meet the High Lord's salutation, but the diffusion of his gaze showed that his mind was elsewhere. "Faer," he began in a tremulous old voice, "Faer begs me to apologize for the absence of Callindrill her husband. He will be unable to attend the Council." Dislocation gathered in his tone while he spoke, and his voice trailed off as if he had forgotten what he meant to say. Slowly, his thoughts slipped out of contact with his situation. As he stood before the Council, the power of the lore which had preserved him for so long from the effects of age seemed to fail within him. After a moment, he sat down, murmuring aimlessly to himself, wandering in his mind like a man striving to comprehend a language he no longer knew. At last he found the word, "Revelwood." He repeated it several times, searching to understand it. Softly he began to weep.
   Tears burned the backs of Mhoram's eyes. With a quick gesture he sent two of the Lorewardens to Corimini's aid. They lifted him from his seat and bore him between them up the stairs toward the high wooden doors. "Take him to the Healers," Mhoram said thickly. "Find Peace for him. He has served the Land with courage and devotion and wisdom for more years than any other now living."
   The Lords came to their feet, and at once all the people in the Close stood. Together, they touched their right hands to their hearts, then extended the palms toward Corimini in a traditional salute. "Hail, Corimini," they said, "Eldest of the Loresraat. Be at Peace."
   The two Lorewardens took Corimini from the Close, and the doors shut behind them. Sadly, the people in the galleries reseated themselves. The Lords looked toward Mhoram with mourning in their eyes, and Loerya said stiffly, "This is an ill omen."
   Mhoram gripped himself with a stern hand. "All omens are ill in these times. Despite is abroad in the Land. For that reason we are Lords. The Land would not require us if there were no harm at work against it."
   Without meeting Mhoram's gaze, Amatin replied, "If that is our purpose, then we do not serve it.'' Her anger and pain combined to give her a tone of defiance. She held her palms flat on the table and watched them as if she were trying to push them through the stone. "Only Callindrill of all the Lords lifted his hand in Revelwood's defense. He burned in my place.''
   ' 'No!'' the High Lord snapped at once. He had hoped to deal with the issues before the Council on other terms, but now that Amatin had spoken, he could not back away. "No, Lord Amatin. You cannot take upon your shoulders responsibility for the death of Callindrill Faer-mate. He died in his own place, by his own choice. When you believed that you were no longer the Lord best suited to watch over Revelwood, you expressed your belief to the Council. The Council accepted your belief and asked Lord Callindrill to take that burden upon himself.
   "At the same time, the Council decided that the defenders of the Land should not spend themselves in a costly and bootless battle for Revel-wood." As he spoke, the tightness around his eyes expressed how hard, how poignantly hard, that decision had been to make. "The home of the Loresraat was not made for war, and could not be well defended. The Council decided for the sake of the Land that we must save our strength, put it to its best use here. Callindrill chose"-the authority of Mhoram's tone faltered for an instant-"Lord Callindrill Faer-mate chose otherwise. There is no blame for you in this."
   He saw the protest in her eyes and hastened to answer her. He did not want to hear her thought uttered aloud. "Further, I tell you that there is no blame for us in the wisdom or folly, victory or defeat, of the way we have elected to defend the Land. We are not the Creators of the Earth. Its final end is not on our heads. We are creations, like the Land itself. We are accountable for nothing but the purity of our service. When we have given our best wisdom and our utterest strength to the defense of the Land, then no voice can raise accusation against us. Life or death, good or ill-victory or destruction-we are not required to solve these riddles. Let the Creator answer for the doom of his creation."
   Amatin stared at him hotly, and he could feel her probing the estranged, secret place in his heart. Speaking barely above a whisper, she said, "Do you blame Callindrill then? There is no 'best wisdom' in his death."
   The misdirection of her effort to understand him pained the High Lord, but he answered her openly. "You are not deaf to me, Lord Amatin, I loved Callindrill Faer-mate like a brother. I have no wisdom or strength or willingness to blame him."
   "You are the High Lord. What does your wisdom teach you?"
   "I am the High Lord," Mhoram affirmed simply. "I have no time for blame."
   Abruptly, Loerya joined the probing. "And if there is no Creator? Or if the creation is untended?"
   "Then who is there to reproach us? We provide the meaning of our own lives. If we serve the Land purely to the furthest limit of our abilities, what more can we ask of ourselves?"
   Trevor answered, "Victory, High Lord. If we fail, the Land itself reproaches us. It will be made waste. We are its last preservers."
   The force of this thrust smote Mhoram. He found that he still lacked the courage to retort nakedly, Better failure than desecration. Instead, he turned the thrust with a wry smile and said, "The last, Lord Trevor? No. The Haruchai yet live within their mountain fastness. In their way, they know the name of the Earthpower more surely than any Lord. Ramen and Ranyhyn yet live. Many people of the South and North Plains yet live. Many of the Unfettered yet live. Caerroil Wildwood, Forestal of Garroting Deep, has not passed away. And somewhere beyond the Sunbirth Sea is the homeland of the Giants-yes, and of the Elohim and Bhrathair, of whom the Giants sang. They will resist Lord Foul's hold upon the Earth."
   "But the Land, High Lord! The Land will be lost! The despiser will wrack it from end to end.''
   At once, Mhoram breathed intensely, "By the Seven! Not while one flicker of love or faith remains alive!"
   His eyes burned into Trevor's until the Lord's protest receded. Then he turned to Loerya. But in her he could see the discomfortable fear for her daughters at work, and he refrained from touching her torn feelings. Instead, he looked toward Amatin and was relieved to see that much of her anger had fallen away. She regarded him with an expression of hope. She had found something in him that she needed. Softly, she said, "High Lord, you have discovered a way in which we may act against this doom."
   The High Lord tightened his hold upon himself. "There is a way." Raising his head, he addressed all the people in the Close. "My friends, Satansfist Raver has burned Revelwood. Trothgard is now in his hands. Soon he will begin to march upon us. Scant days remain before the siege of Revelstone begins. We can no longer delay.'' The gold in his eyes flared as he said, "We must attempt to summon the Unbeliever."
   At this, a stark silence filled the Close. Mhoram could feel waves of surprise and excitement and dread pouring down on him from the galleries. Warmark Quaan's passionate objection struck across his shoulders. But he waited in the silence until Lord Loerya found her voice to say, "That is impossible. The Staff of Law has been lost. We have no means for such a summoning." The soft timbre of her voice barely covered its hard core.
   Still Mhoram waited, looking toward the other Lords for answers to Loerya's claim. After a long moment, Trevor said hesitantly, "But the Law of Death has been broken."
   "And if the Staff has been destroyed," Amatin added quickly, "then the Earthpower which it held and focused has been released upon the Land. Perhaps it is accessible to us."
   "And we must make the attempt," said Mhoram. "For good or ill, the Unbeliever is inextricably linked to the Land's doom. If he is not here, he cannot defend the Land."
   "Or destroy it!" Quaan rasped.
   Before Mhoram could respond, Hearthrall Borillar was on his feet. He said in a rush, "The Unbeliever will save the Land."
   Quaan growled, "This is odd confidence, Hearthrall."
   "He will save," Borillar said as if he were surprised at his own temerity. Seven years ago, when he had met Covenant, he had been the youngest Hirebrand ever to take the office of Hearthrall. He had been acutely aware of his inexperience, and he was still deferential-a fact which amused his friend and fellow Hearthrall, Tohrm. "When I met the Unbeliever, I was young and timid-afraid." Tohrm grinned impishly at the implication that Borillar was no longer young and timid. "Ur-Lord Covenant spoke kindly to me.''
   He sat down again, blushing in embarrassment. But no one except Tohrm smiled, and Tohrm's smile was always irrepressible. It expressed only amused fondness, not mockery. The pitch of Borillar's conviction seemed to reproach the doubts in the Close. When Lord Loerya spoke again, her tone had changed. With a searching look at the young Hearthrall, she said, "How shall we make this attempt?"
   Mhoram gravely nodded his thanks to Borillar, then turned back to the Lords. "I will essay the summoning. If my strength fails, aid me." The Lords nodded mutely. With a final look around the Close, he sat down, bowed his head, and opened his mind to the melding of the Lords.
   He did so, knowing that he would have to hold back part of himself, prevent Trevor and Loerya and Amatin from seeing into his secret. He was taking a great risk. He needed the consolation, the sharing of strength and support, which a complete mind melding could give; yet any private weakness might expose the knowledge he withheld. And in the melding his fellow Lords could see that he did withhold something. Therefore it was an expensive rite. Each meld drained him because he could only protect his secret by giving fortitude rather than receiving it. But he believed in the meld. Of all the lore of the new Lords, only this belonged solely to them; the rest had come to them through the Wards of Kevin Landwaster. And when it was practiced purely, melding brought the health and heart of any Lord to the aid of all the others.
   As long as the High Lord possessed any pulse of life or thew of strength, he could not refuse to share them.
   At last, the contact was broken. For a moment, Mhoram felt that he was hardly strong enough to stand; the needs of the other Lords, and their concern for him, remained on his shoulders like an unnatural burden. But he understood himself well enough to know that in some ways he did not have the ability to surrender. Instead, he had an instinct for absolute exertions which frightened him whenever he thought of the Ritual of Desecration. After a momentary rest, he rose to his feet and took up his staff. Bearing it like a standard, he walked around the table to the stairs and started down toward the open floor around the graveling pit.
   As Mhoram reached the floor, Tohrm came down out of the gallery to join him. The Gravelingas's eyes were bright with humor, and he grinned as he said, "You will need far sight to behold the Unbeliever." Then he winked as if this were a jest. "The gulf between worlds is dark, and darkness withers the heart. I will provide more light."
   The High Lord smiled his thanks, and the Hearthrall stepped briskly to one side of the graveling pit. He bent toward the fire-stones, and at once seemed to forget the other people in the Close. Without another look at his audience, he softly began to sing.
   In a low rocky language known only to those who shared the rhadhamaerl lore, he hymned an invocation to the fire-stones, encouraging them, stoking them, calling to life their latent power. And the red-gold glow of the graveling reflected like a response from his face. After a moment, Mhoram could see the brightness growing. The reddish hue faded from the gold; the gold turned purer, whiter, hotter; and the new-earth aroma of the graveling rose up like incense in the Close.
   In silence, the three Lords stood, and the rest of the people joined them in a mute expression of respect for the rhadhamaerl and the Earthpower. Before them, the radiance of the pit mounted until Tohrm himself was pale in the light.
   With a slow, stately movement, High Lord Mhoram lifted his staff, held it in both hands level with his forehead.
   The summoning song of the Unbeliever began to run in his mind as he focused his thoughts on the power of his staff. One by one, he eliminated the people in the Close, and then the Close itself, from his awareness. He poured himself into the straight, smooth wood of his staff until he was conscious of nothing but the song and the light-and the illimitable implications of the Earthpower beating like ichor in the immense mountain-stone around him. Then he gathered as many strands of the pulse as he could hold together in the hands of his staff, and rode them outward through the warp and weft of Revelstone's existence. And as he rode, he sang to himself:
   There is wild magic graven in every rock,
   contained for white gold to unleash or control-
   gold, rare metal, not born of the Land,
   nor ruled, limited, subdued
   by the Law with which the Land was created-
   but keystone rather, pivot, crux
   for the anarchy out of which Time was made.
   The strands carried him out through the malevolent wind, so that his spirit shivered against gusts of spite; but his consciousness passed beyond them swiftly, passed beyond all air and wood and water and stone until he seemed to be spinning through the quintessential fabric of which actuality was made. For an interval without dimension in time and space, he lost track of himself. He felt that he was floating beyond the limits of creation. But the song and the light held him, steadied him. Soon his thoughts pointed like a compass to the lodestone of the white gold.
   Then he caught a glimpse of Thomas Covenant's ring. It was unmistakable; the Unbeliever's presence covered the chaste circlet like an aura, bound it, sealed up its power. And the aura itself ached with anguish.
   High Lord Mhoram reached toward that presence and began to sing:
   Be true, Unbeliever- Answer the call. Life is the Giver: Death ends all. The promise is truth, And banes disperse With promise kept: But soul's deep curse On broken faith And faithless thrall, For doom of darkness Covers all.
   Be true, Unbeliever- Answer the call. Be true.
   He caught hold of Covenant with his song and started back toward the Close.
   The efficacy of the song took much of the burden from him, left him free to return swiftly to himself, As he opened his eyes to the dazzling light, he almost fell to his knees. Sudden exhaustion washed over him; he felt severely attenuated, as if his soul had been stretched to cover too great a distance. For a time, he stood strengthless, even forgetting to sing. But the other Lords had taken up the song for him, and in the place of his power their staffs vitalized the summoning.
   When his eyes regained their sight, he beheld Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever and white gold wielder, standing half substantial in the light before him.
   But the apparition came no closer, did not incarnate itself. Covenant remained on the verge of physical presence; he refused to cross over. In a voice that barely existed, he cried, "Not now! Let me go!"
   The sight of the Unbeliever's suffering shocked Mhoram. Covenant was starving, he desperately needed rest, he had a deep and seriously untended wound on his forehead. His whole body was bruised and battered as if he had been stoned, and one side of his mouth was caked with ugly blood. But as bad as his physical injuries were, they paled beside his psychic distress. Appalled resistance oozed from him like the sweat of pain, and a fierce fire of will held him unincarnate. As he fought the completion of his summoning, he reminded Mhoram forcibly of dukkha, the poor Waynhim upon which Lord Foul had practiced so many torments with the Illearth Stone. He resisted as if the Lords were coercing him into a vat of acid and virulent horror.
   "Covenant!" Mhoram groaned. "Oh, Covenant." In his fatigue, he feared that he would not be able to hold back his weeping. "You are in hell. Your world is a hell."
   Covenant flinched. The High Lord's voice seemed to buffet him physically. But an instant later he demanded again, "Send me back! She needs me!"
   "We need you also," murmured Mhoram. He felt frail, sinewless, as if he lacked the thews and ligaments to keep himself erect. He understood now why he had been able to summon Covenant without the Staff of Law, and that understanding was like a hole of grief knocked in the side of his being. He seemed to feel himself spilling away.
   "She needs me!" Covenant repeated. The effort of speech made blood trickle from his mouth. "Mhoram, can't you hear me?"
   That appeal touched something in Mhoram. He was the High Lord; he could not, must not, fall short of the demands placed upon him. He forced himself to meet Covenant's feverish gaze.
   "I hear you, Unbeliever," he said. His voice became stronger as he spoke. "I am Mhoram son of Variol, High Lord by the choice of the Council. We need you also. I have summoned you to help us face the Land's last need. The prophecy which Lord Foul the Despiser gave you to pronounce upon the Land has come to pass. If we fall, he will have the command of life and death in his hand, and the universe will be a hell forever. Ur-Lord Covenant, help us! It is I, Mhoram son of Variol, who beseech you."
   The words struck Covenant in flurries. He staggered and quailed under the sound of Mhoram's voice. But his aghast resistance did not falter. When he regained his balance, he shouted again, "She needs me, I tell you! That rattlesnake is going to bite her! If you take me now, I can't help her,"
   In the back of his mind, Mhoram marveled that Covenant could so grimly deny the summoning without employing the power of his ring. Yet that capacity for refusal accorded with Mhoram's secret knowledge. Hope and fear struggled in the High Lord, and he had difficulty keeping his voice steady.
   "Covenant-my friend-please hear me. Hear the Land's need in my voice. We cannot hold you. You have the white gold-you have the power to refuse us. The Law of Death does not bind you. Please hear me. I will not require much time. After I have spoken, if you still choose to depart-I will recant the summoning. I will-I will tell you how to make use of your white gold to deny us."
   Again, Covenant recoiled from the assault of sound. But when he had recovered, he did not repeat his demand. Instead, he said harshly, "Talk fast. This is my only chance-the only chance to get out of a delusion is at the beginning. I've got to help her."
   High Lord Mhoram clenched himself, mustered all his love and fear for the Land, put it into his voice. ''Ur-Lord, seven years have passed since we stood together on Gallows Howe. In that time we have recovered from some of our losses. But since-since the Staff of Law was lost-the Despiser has been much more free. He has built a new army as vast as the sea, and has marched against us. Already he has destroyed Revelwood. Satansfist Raver has burned Revelwood and slain Lord Callindrill. In a very few days, the siege of Lord's Keep will begin.
   "But that does not complete the tale of our trouble. Seven years ago, we might have held Revelstone against any foe for seasons together. Even without the Staff of Law, we might have defended ourselves well. But- my friend, hear me-we have lost the Bloodguard."
   Covenant cowered as if he were being pounded by a rockfall, but Mhoram did not stop. "When Korik of the Bloodguard led his mission to the Giants of Seareach, great evils claimed the lives of the Lords Hyrim and Shetra. Without them-" Mhoram hesitated. He remembered Covenant's friendship with the Giant, Saltheart Foamfollower. He could not bear to torment Covenant by telling him of the Giants' bloody fate. "Without them to advise him, Korik and two comrades captured a fragment of the Illearth Stone. He did not recognize his danger. The three Bloodguard bore the fragment with them, thinking to carry it to Lord's Keep.
   "But the Illearth Stone is a terrible wrong in the Land. The three Bloodguard were not forewarned-and the Stone enslaved them. Under its power, they bore their fragment to Foul's Creche. They believed that they would fight the Despiser. But he made them his own." Again, Mhoram forbore to tell the whole story. He could not say to Covenant that the Bloodguard Vow had been subtly betrayed by the breaking of the Law of Death-or that the fine metal of the Bloodguard rectitude had been crucially tarnished when Covenant had forced Banner to reveal the name of the Power of Command. "Then he"-Mhoram still winced whenever he remembered what had happened-"he sent the three to attack Revelstone. Korik, Sill, and Doar marched here with green fire in their eyes and Corruption in their hearts. They killed many farmers and warriors before we comprehended what had been done to them.
   "Then First Mark Banner and Terrel and Runnik of the Bloodguard went to do battle with the three. They slew Korik and Sill and Doar their comrades, and brought their bodies to the Keep. In that way, we found''- Mhoram swallowed thickly-"we found that Lord Foul had cut off the last two fingers from the right hand of each of the three."
   Covenant cried out in pain, but Mhoram drove his point home hoarsely. "He damaged each Bloodguard to resemble you."
   "Stop!"

Covenant groaned. "Stop. I can't stand it."
   Still the High Lord continued. "When First Mark Banner saw how Korik and his comrades had been corrupted despite their Vow, he and all the Bloodguard abandoned their service. They returned to the mountain home of the Haruchai. He said that they had been conquered by Corruption, and could no longer serve any Vow.
   "My friend, without them-without the Staff of Law-without any immense army or dour-handed allies-we will surely fall. Only the wild magic can now come between us and Lord Foul's hunger."
   As Mhoram finished, Covenant's eyes looked as bleak as a wilder-land. The heat of his fever seemed to make any tears impossible. His resistance sagged briefly, and for an instant he almost allowed his translation into the Close to be completed. But then he raised his head to look at other memories. His refusal stiffened; he moved back until he almost vanished in the bright graveling light. "Mhoram, I can't," he said as distantly as if he were choking. "I can't. The snake- That little girl is all alone. I'm responsible for her. There's no one to help the child but me."
   From high in the opposite gallery, Mhoram felt a surge of anger as Quaan's old indignation at Covenant flared into speech. "By the Seven!" he barked. "He speaks of responsibility." Quaan had watched himself become old and helpless to save the Land, while Covenant neither aged nor acted, He spoke with a warrior's sense of death, a warrior's sense of the value in sacrificing a few lives to save many. "Covenant, you are responsible for us!"
   The Unbeliever suffered under Quaan's voice as he did under Mhoram's, but he did not turn to face the Warmark. He met Mhoram's gaze painfully and answered, "Yes, I know. I know. I am-responsible.
   But she needs me. There's no one else. She's part of my world, my real world. You're-not so real now. I can't give you anything now.'' His face twisted frantically, and his resistance mounted until it poured from him like agony. "Mhoram, if I don't get back to her she is going to die."
   The desolate passion of Covenant's appeal wrung Mhoram. Unconsciously, he gnawed his lips, trying to control with physical pain the strain of his conflicting compassions. His whole life, all his long commitments, seemed rent within him. His love for the Land urged him to deny the Unbeliever, to struggle now as if he were wrestling for possession of Covenant's soul. But from the same wellspring of his self arose an opposite urge, a refusal to derogate Covenant's sovereignty, Covenant's right to choose his own fate. For a time, the High Lord hesitated, trapped in the contradiction. Then slowly he lifted his head and spoke to the people in the Close as well as to Thomas Covenant.
   "No one may be compelled to fight the Despiser. He is resisted willingly, or not at all. Unbeliever, I release you. You turn from us to save life in your own world. We will not be undone by such motives. And if darkness should fall upon us, still the beauty of the Land endures. If we are a dream-and you the dreamer-then the Land is imperishable, for you will not forget.
   "Be not afraid, ur-Lord Thomas Covenant. Go in Peace."
   He felt a pressure of protest from Lord Loerya and some of the other spectators, but he overruled them with a commanding gesture. One by one, the Lords withdrew the power of their staffs while Tohrm lowered the graveling fire. Covenant began to fade as if he were dissolving in the abyss beyond the arch of Time.
   Then High Lord Mhoram recollected his promise to reveal the secret of the wild magic. He did not know whether or not Covenant could still hear him, but he whispered after the fading form, "You are the white gold."
   A moment later, he knew that the Unbeliever was gone. All sense of resistance and power had left the air, and the light of the graveling had declined to a more normal level. For the first time since the summoning began, Mhoram saw the shapes and faces of the people around him. But the sight did not last. Tears blinded him, and he leaned weakly on his staff as if only its stern wood could uphold him.
   He was full of grief over the strange ease with which he had summoned the Unbeliever. Without the Staff of Law, he should not have been able to call Covenant alone; yet he had succeeded. He knew why. Covenant had been so vulnerable to the summons because he was dying.
   Through his sorrow, he heard Trevor say, "High Lord-the krill-the gem of the krill came to life. It burned as it did when the Unbeliever first placed it within the table."
   Mhoram blinked back his tears. Leaning heavily on his staff, he moved to the table. In its center, Loric's krill stood like a dead cross-as opaque and fireless as if it had lost all possibility of light. A rage of grief came over Mhoram. With one hand, he grasped the hilt of the silver sword.
   A fleeting blue gleam flickered across its gem, then vanished.
   "It has no life now," he said dully.
   Then he left the Close and went to the sacred enclosure to sing for Covenant and Callindrill and the Land.

Three: The Rescue


   A cold wind blew through Covenant's soul as he struggled up out of the rock. It chilled him as if the marrow of his bones had been laid bare to an exhalation of cruel ice-cruel and sardonic, tinged with that faint yet bottomless green travail which was the antithesis of green things growing. But slowly it left him, slid away into another dimension. He became more conscious of the stone. Its granite impenetrability thickened around him; he began to feel that he was suffocating.
   He flailed his arms and legs, tried to reach toward the surface. But for a time he could not even be sure that his limbs were moving. Then a series of jolts began to hurt his joints. He sensed through his elbows and knees that he was thrashing against something hard.
   He was pounding his arms and legs at the hillside. Behind the muffled thuds and slaps he made, he could hear running water. The sun shone objectively somewhere beyond him. He jerked up his head.
   At first, he could not orient himself. A stream splashed vividly across his sight; he felt that he was peering at it from above, that the slope down which it ran was canted impossibly under him. But at last he realized that he was not looking downward. He lay horizontally across the slope. The hill rose above him on the right, dropped away on the left.
   He turned his head to search for the girl and the snake.
   His eyes refused to focus. Something pale gleamed in front of his face, prevented him from seeing down the hill.
   A thin, childish voice near him said, "Mister? Are you okay, mister? You fell down,"
   He was trying to see too far away. With an effort, he screwed his gaze closer, and at last found himself staring from a distance of a few inches at a bare shin. In the sunlight, it gleamed as pure and pale as if it had been anointed with chrism. But already it showed a slight swelling. And in the center of the swelling were two small red marks like paired pinpricks.
   "Mister?" the child said again. "Are you okay? The snake bit me. My leg hurts."
   The frigid winter he had left behind seemed to leap at him from the depths of his mind. He began to shiver. But he forced himself to disregard the cold, bent all his attention toward those two red fang marks. Without taking his eyes off them, he climbed into a sitting position. His bruises groaned at him, and his forehead throbbed sickly, but he ignored all the pain, discounted it as if it had nothing to do with him. His trembling hands drew the little girl toward him.
   Snakebite, he thought numbly. How do you treat snakebite?
   "All right," he said, then stopped. His voice shook unreassuringly, and his throat felt too dry to be controlled. He did not seem to know any comforting words. He swallowed hoarsely and hugged the child's thin bones to his chest. "All right. You're going to be all right. I'm here. I'll help you."
   He sounded grotesque to himself-ghoulish and useless. The cut in his lip and gum interfered with his articulation. But he ignored that, too. He could not afford the energy to worry about such things. A haze of fever parched his thoughts, and he needed all his strength to fight it, recollect the treatment for snakebite.
   He stared at the fang marks until he remembered. Stop the circulation, he said to himself as if he were stupid. Cut. Get out the poison.
   Jerking himself into movement, he fumbled for his penknife.
   When he got it out, he dropped it on the ground beside him, and hunted through the debris which littered his brain for something which he could use as a tourniquet. His belt would not do, he had no way to fasten it tightly enough. The child's dress had no belt. Her shoelaces did not look long enough.
   "My leg hurts," she said plaintively. "I want my mommy."
   "Where is she?" muttered Covenant.
   "That way." She pointed vaguely downstream. "A long way. Daddy spanked me and I snuck away."
   Covenant clutched the girl with one arm to keep her from moving, and thus hastened the spread of the venom. With his free hand, he tore at the lace of his left boot. But it was badly frayed and snapped in his hand. Hellfire! he groaned in chagrin. He was taking too long. Trembling, he started on the right bootlace.
   After a moment, he succeeded in removing it intact.
   "All right," he said unclearly. "I've got-got to do something about that bite. First I have to tie off your leg-so the poison won't spread. Then I have to cut your leg a little. That way the poison can get out, and it won't hurt you so much." He strove to sound calm. "Are you brave today?"
   She replied solemnly, "Daddy spanked me and I didn't cry. I ran away." He heard no trace of her earlier terror.
   "Good girl," he mumbled. He could not delay any longer; the swelling over her skin had increased noticeably, and a faint, blackish hue had started to stain her pale flesh. He wrapped his bootlace around her wounded leg above the knee.
   "Stand on your other leg, so this one can relax."
   When she obeyed, he pulled the lace tight until she let out a low gasp of pain. Then he tied it off. "Good girl," he said again. "You're very brave today."

With uncertain hands, he picked up his penknife and opened it.
   For a time, he quailed at the prospect of cutting her. He was shivering too badly; the sun's warmth went nowhere near the chill in his bones. But the livid fang marks compelled him. Gently, he lifted the child and seated her on his lap. With his left hand, he raised her leg until its swelling was only ten or twelve inches from his face. His penknife he gripped inadequately with the two fingers and thumb of his right hand.
   "If you don't look, you might not even feel it,'' he said, and hoped he was not lying.
   She acted as if the mere presence of an adult banished all her fears. "I'm not afraid," she replied proudly. "I'm brave today." But when Covenant turned so that his right shoulder came between her face and the sight of her leg, she caught her hands in his shirt and pressed her face against him.
   In the back of his mind, he could hear Mhoram saying, We have lost the Bloodguard. Lost the Bloodguard. Lost. Oh, Bannor! he moaned silently. Was it that bad?
   He clenched his teeth until his jaws ached, and the wound on his forehead pounded. The pain steadied him. It held him like a spike driven through his brain, affixing him to the task of the fang marks.
   With an abrupt movement, he slashed twice, cut an X across the swelling between the two red marks.
   The child let out a low cry, and went rigid, clinging to him fervidly.
   For an instant he stared in horror at the violent red blood which welled out of the cuts and ran across the pale leg. Then he dropped the knife as if it had burned him. Gripping her leg in both hands, he bent his mouth to the fang marks and sucked.
   The strain of stretching his lips tight over her shin made his mouth wound sting, and his blood mingled with hers as it trickled across the darkening stain of the swelling. But he ignored that as well. With all his strength, he sucked at the cuts. When he stopped to breathe, he rubbed the child's leg, trying to squeeze all of her blood toward the cuts. Then he sucked again.
   A nauseating dizziness caught hold of his head and made it spin. He stopped, afraid that he would faint. "All right, "he panted. "I'm finished. You're going to be all right." After a moment, he realized that the child was whimpering softly into the back of his shoulder. Quickly, he turned, put his arms around her, hugged her to him.'' You're going to be all right,'' he repeated thickly. "I'll take you to your mommy now." He did not believe that he had the strength to stand, much less to carry her any distance at all.
   But he knew that she still needed treatment; he could hardly have removed all the venom. And the cuts he had inflicted would have to be tended. She could not afford his weakness. With an effort that almost undid him, he lurched painfully to his feet, and stood listing on the hillside as if he were about to capsize.
   The child sniffled miserably in his arms. He could not bear to look at her, for fear that she would meet his gaze with reproach. He stared down the hill while he struggled to scourge or beg himself into a condition of fortitude.
   Through her tears, the child said, "Your mouth's bleeding."
   "Yes, I know," he mumbled. But that pain was no worse than the ache in his forehead, or the hurt of his bruises. And all of it was only pain. It was temporary; it would soon fall under the pall of his leprosy. The ice in his bones made him feel that the numbness of his hands and feet was already spreading. Pain was no excuse for weakness.
   Slowly, he unlocked one knee, let his weight start forward. Like a poorly articulated puppet, he lumbered woodenly down the hillside.
   By the time he reached the tree-it stood black and straight like a signpost indicating the place where the child had been bitten-he had almost fallen three times. His boots were trying to trip him; without laces to hold them to his feet, they cluttered every step he took. For a moment, he leaned against the tree, trying to steady himself. Then he kicked off his boots. He did not need them. His feet were too numb to feel the damage of hiking barefoot.
   "You ready?" he breathed. "Here we go." But he was not sure he made any sound. In the fever which clouded his thoughts, he found himself thinking that life was poorly designed; burdens were placed on the wrong people. For some obscure reason, he believed that in Banner's place he could have found some other answer to Korik's corruption. And Bannor would have been equal many times over to the physical task of saving this child.
   Then he remembered that Mhoram had not told him any news of the Giants in connection with Korik's mission. Sparked by the association, a vision of Gallows Howe cut through his haze. He saw again a Giant dangling from the gibbet of the Forestal,
   What had happened to the Giants?
   Gaping mutely as if the woods and the stream and the little girl in his arms astonished him, he pushed away from the black tree and began shambling along Righters Creek in the general direction of the town.
   As he moved, he forced open his caked lips to cry aloud, "Help!"
   The child had said that her parents were a long way away, but he did not know what distances meant to her. He did not know whether or not her parents were anywhere near the Creek. He did not even know how far he was from Haven Farm; the whole previous night was a blank hurt in his mind. But the banks of the stream offered him the most accessible route toward town, and he could think of nothing to do but move in that direction. The girl's pain was increasing. Her leg was blacker every time he looked at it, and she winced and whimpered at every jolt of his stiff stride. At intervals she moaned for her parents, and every moan made him gasp out like the jab of a goad, "Help!"
   But his voice seemed to have no authority, no carrying power; it dropped into silence after him like a stillborn. And the effort of shouting aggravated the injury to his mouth. Soon he could feel his lip swelling like the girl's leg, growing dark and taut and heavy with pain. He hugged her closer to him and croaked in grim, forlorn insistence, "Help! Help me!"
   Gradually, the heat of the sun made him sweat. It stung his forehead until his eyes blurred. But it did not touch the cold in his bones. His shivering mounted. Dizziness dismembered his balance, made him reel through the woods as if he were being driven by a tattered gale. Whenever he stepped on a pointed rock or branch, it gouged far enough up into his arches to hurt him. Several times, his joints folded sharply, and he plunged to his knees. But each time, the dark wound he carried pulled him upright again, and sent him forward, mumbling past his thick lip, "Help me."
   His own swelling seemed to take over his face like a tumor. Hot lances of pain thrust from it through his head every time the ground jarred him. As time passed, he could feel his heart itself trembling, quivering between each beat as it labored to carry the strain. The haze of his fever thickened until at odd moments he feared that he had lost his sight. In the blur, he quailed away from the dazzles of sunlight which sprang at him off the stream; but when the creek passed through shadows, it looked so cool and healing that he could hardly restrain himself from stumbling into it, burying his face in its anodyne.
   Yet all the while he knew he could not deviate from the strait path of his trek. If he failed to find help for the child, then everything he had already done for her would be useless, bereft of meaning. He could not stop. Her wound would not tolerate his futility. He saw too much of his lost son Roger in her bare shin. Despite the nails of pain which crucified him, he lurched onward.
   Then in the distance he heard shouts, like people wailing for someone lost. He jerked to a swaying halt on stiff legs, and tried to look around. But he seemed to have lost control of his head. It wobbled vainly on his neck, as if the weight of his swelling threw it out of joint, and he was unable to face it in the direction of the shouts.
   In his arms, the girl whimpered pitifully, "Mommy. Daddy."
   He fought his black tight pain to frame the word, Help. But no sound came between his lips. He forced his vocal cords to make some kind of noise.
   "Help me."
   It was no louder than a whisper.
   A sound like hoarse sobs shook him, but he could not tell whether they came from him or from the girl. Weakly, almost blindly, he straightened his arms, lifted the child outward as if he were offering her to the shouts.
   They became a woman's voice and took on words. "Karen! Here she is! Over here! Oh, Karen! my baby!" Running came toward him through the leaves and branches; it sounded like the blade of a winter wind cutting at him from the depths of his fever. At last he was able to see the people. A woman hurried down the side of a hill, and a man ran anxiously after her. "Karen!" the woman cried.
   The child reached out toward the woman and sobbed, "Mommy! Mommy!''
   An instant later, the burden was snatched from Covenant's arms. "Karen. Oh, my baby,'' the woman moaned as she hugged the child. "We were so frightened. Why did you run away? Are you all right?" Without a glance at Covenant, she said, "Where did you find her? She ran away this morning, and we've been frightened half to death.'' As if this needed some explanation, she went on, "We're camping over there a ways. Dave has Good Friday off, and we decided to camp out. We never thought she would run away."
   The man caught up with her, and she started speaking to the child again. "Oh, you naughty, naughty girl. Are you all right? Let me look at you."
   The girl kept sobbing in pain and relief as the woman held her at arm's length to inspect her. At once, the woman saw the tourniquet and the swelling and the cuts. She gave a low scream, and looked at Covenant for the first time.
   "What happened?" she demanded. "What've you done to her?" Suddenly, she stopped. A look of horror stretched her face. She backed away toward the man, and screamed at him, "Dave! It's that leper! That Covenant!"
   "What?" the man gasped. Righteous indignation rushed up in him. "You bastard!" he spat belligerently, and started toward Covenant.
   Covenant thought that the man was going to hit him; he seemed to feel the blow coming at him from a great distance. Watching it, he lost his balance, stumbled backward a step, and sat down heavily. Red pain flooded across his sight. When it cleared, he was vaguely surprised to find that he was not being kicked. But the man had stopped a dozen feet away; he stood with his fists clenched, trying not to show that he was afraid to come closer.
   Covenant struggled to speak, explain that the child still needed help. But a long, stunned moment passed before he was able to dredge words past his lips. Then he said in a tone of detachment completely at variance with the way he looked and felt, "Snakebite. Timber rattler. Help her."
   The effort exhausted him; he could not go on. He lapsed into silence, and sat still as if he were hopelessly waiting for an avalanche to fall on him. The man and woman began to recede from him, lose solidity, as if they were dissolving in the acid of his prostration. Vaguely, he heard the child moan, "The snake bit me, Mommy. My leg hurts."
   He realized that he still had not seen the child's face. But he had lost his chance. He had exercised too strenuously with snake venom in his blood. By degrees, he was slipping into shock.
   "All right, Mhoram," he mumbled wanly. "Come and get me. It's over now."
   He did not know whether he had spoken aloud. He could not hear himself. The ground under him had begun to ripple. Waves rolled through the hillside, tossing the small raft of hard soil on which he sat. He clung to it as long as he could, but the earthen seas were too rough. Soon he lost his balance and tumbled backward into the ground as if it were an undug grave.

Four: Siege


   Twelve days after the last charred trunks of Revelwood were consumed, reduced to ashes and trampled underfoot, Satansfist Raver, the right hand of the Gray Slayer, brought his vast, dolorous army to the stone gates of Lord's Keep. He approached slowly, though his hordes tugged forward like leashed wolves; he restrained the ravening of the ur-viles and Cavewights and creatures he commanded so that all the inhabitants of Trothgard, and of the lands between Revelwood and the North Plains, would have time to seek safety in the Keep. This he did because he wished all the humans he meant to slay to be gathered in one place. Every increase in the Keep's population would weaken its endurance by eating its stores of food. And crowds of people would be more susceptible than trained warriors or Lords to the fear he bore.
   He was sure of the outcome of his siege. His army was not as immense as the one which moksha Fleshharrower his brother had lost in Garroting Deep. In order to secure his hold upon the regions he had already mastered, he had left scores of thousands of his creatures behind along the Roams-edge River, throughout the valley which formed the south border of Andelain, and across the Center Plains. But the Despiser had lost little more than a third of his forces in that earlier war. And instead of wolves and kresh and unwieldy griffins, Satansfist had with him more of the lore-cunning, roynish, black, eyeless ur-viles, and more of the atrocious creatures which Lord Foul had raised up from the Great Swamp, Lifeswallower, from Sarangrave Flat, from the Spoiled Plains and the bosk of the Ruinwash-raised up and demented with the power of the Illearth Stone. In addition, the Giant-Raver had at his back a power of which the Lords of Revelstone had no conception. Therefore he was willing to prolong his approach to the Keep, so that he could hasten its eventual and irreparable collapse.
   Then, early on the twelfth day, a sky-shaking howl shot through his hordes as they caught their first sight of the mountain plateau of Revel-stone. Thousands of his creatures started to rush madly toward it through the foothills, but he knocked them back with the flail of his power. Ruling his army with a green scourge, he spent the whole day making his approach, placing his forces in position. When daylight at last drained away into night, his army was wrapped around the entire promontory of Revel-stone, from the westmost edge of its south wall to the cliffs of the plateau on the northwest. His encampment locked the Keep in a wide, round formation, sealing it from either flight or rescue, from forages for food or missions to unknown allies. And that night, Satansfist feasted on the flesh of prisoners who had been captured during his long march from Landsdrop.
   If any eyes in Revelstone had been able to penetrate the unbroken mass of clouds which frowned now constantly over the Land, they would have seen that this night was the dark of the moon on the middle night of spring. The Despiser's preternatural winter had clenched the Land for forty-two days.
   Satansfist had followed precisely the design which his master had given him for his march through the Upper Land.
   The next morning, he went to face the watchtower which fronted the long walls of Revelstone at their wedge point. He paid no attention to the intricate Giantish labor which had produced the pattern of coigns and oriels and walks and battlements in the smooth cliff-walls; that part of him which could have responded to the sight had long ago been extinguished by the occupying Raver. Without a second glance at the walls, or at the warriors who sentried the crenellated parapets, he strode around the promontory until he stood before the great stone gates in the base of the tower on its southeast side-the only entrance into Lord's Keep.
   He was not surprised to find that the gates were open. Though the Giantish passion for stonework had been quelled in his blood, he retained his knowledge of the Keep. He knew that as long as those massive, interlocking gates remained intact, they could close upon command, trapping anyone who dared enter the tunnel under the tower. While in the tunnel, attackers would be exposed to counterattack from defensive windows built into the roof of the passage. And beyond the tunnel was nothing but a courtyard, open only to the sky, and then another set of gates even stronger than the first. The tower itself could not be entered except by suspended crosswalks from the main Keep, or through two small doors from the courtyard. Lord's Keep had been well made. The Giant-Raver did not accept the dare of the open gates.
   Instead, he placed himself just close enough to the tower to taunt skilled archers, and shouted up at the stone walls in a voice that vibrated with malice and glee. "Hail, Lords! Worthy Lords! Show yourselves, Lordlings! Leave off cowering in your useless warrens, and speak with me. Behold! I come courteously to accept your surrender!"
   There was no answer. The tower, only half as high as the main Keep behind it, stood with its windows and battlements as silent as if it were uninhabited. A whimpering growl passed among the army as the creatures begged for a chance to charge through the open gates.
   "Hear me, little Lords!" he shouted. "See the toils of my strength wrapped around you. I hold your last lives in the palm of my hand. There is no hope for you unless you surrender yourselves and all to the mercy of the Despiser." Jeering barks from the ur-viles greeted this, and Satansfist grinned. "Speak, Lordlings! Speak or die!"
   A moment later two figures appeared atop the tower-one a warrior and the other a blue-robed Lord whom Satansfist recognized. At first they ignored the Giant. They went to the flagpole, and together raised High Lord's Furl, the azure oriflamme of the Council. Only after it was fluttering defiantly in the gelid wind did they step to the parapet and face Satansfist.
   "I hear you!" the Lord snapped. "I hear you, samadhi Raver. I know you, Sheol Satansfist. And you know me. I am Mhoram son of Variol, High Lord by the choice of the Council. Depart, Raver! Take your ill hordes with you. You have touched me. You know that I will not be daunted."
   Fury glinted in the Giant's eyes at the memory Mhoram invoked, but he placed his hand over the livid fragment of the Stone hidden under his jerkin, and gave Mhoram a sarcastic bow. "I know you, Mhoram," he replied. "When I placed my hand upon you in the labyrinth of Kurash Qwellinir, I knew you. You were too blind with folly and ignorance to feel a wise despair. Therefore I permitted your life-so that you would live to better knowledge. Are you yet blind? Have you no eyes to see that your effectless end at my hand is as sure as the arch of Time? Have you forgotten the Giants? Have you forgotten the Bloodguard? In the name of the Despiser, I will certainly crush you where you cower!"
   "Empty words," Mhoram retorted. "Bravado is easily uttered-but you will find it difficult of proof. Melenkurion abatha! Raver, begone! return to your forsaken master before the Creator forgets restraint, and wreaks a timeless vengeance upon you."
   The Giant laughed harshly. "Do not comfort yourself with lies, lordling. The arch of Time will be broken if the Creator seeks to strike through it-and then Lord Foul the Despiser, Satansheart and Soulcrusher, Corruption and Render, will be unloosed upon the universe! If the Creator tries to lift his hand, my brothers and I will feast upon his very soul! Surrender, fool! Learn to be daunted while groveling may still preserve your life. Perhaps you will be permitted to serve me as my hand slave."
   "Never!" High Lord Mhoram cried boldly. "We will never bow to you while one pulse of faith still beats in the Land. The Earthpower is yet strong to resist you. We will seek it until we have found the means to cast down you and your master and all his works. Your victories are hollow while one soul remains with breath enough to cry out against you!'' Raising his staff, he whirled it so that blue fire danced in the air about his head. Begone, samadhi Raver! Melenkurion abatha! Duroc minas mill kha-wl! We will never surrender!"
   Below him, Satansfist flinched under the power of the words. But an instant later, he sprang forward, snatching at his jerkin. With his piece of  Illearth Stone clenched and steaming in his fist, he hurled a gout of emerald force up at the High Lord. At the same time, hundreds of creatures broke from their ranks and charged toward the open gates.
   But Mhoram deflected the blast with his staff, sent it into the air over his head, where his own fiery power attacked it and consumed it. Then he ducked behind the concealment of the parapet. Over his shoulder, he called Warmark Quaan, "Seal the gates! Order the archers to slay any creatures which gain the courtyard. We cannot deal gently with this foe."
   Quaan was already on his way down the stairs into the complex passages of the tower, shouting orders as he ran to oversee the fray, Mhoram looked downward to assure himself that Satansfist had not passed through the gates. Then he hastened after Quaan.
   From the highest of the crosswalks above the courtyard, he surveyed the skirmish. Strong Woodhelvennin archers drove their shafts into the milling creatures from the battlements on both sides of the court, and the sound of weapons echoed out of the tunnel. In moments, the fighting would be done. Gritting his teeth over the shed blood, Mhoram left the conclusion the skirmish in Quaan's competent hands, and crossed the wooden span to the main Keep, where his fellow Lords awaited him.
   As he met the somber eyes of Trevor, Loerya, and Amatin, a sudden weariness came over him. Satansfist's threats came so close to the truth. He held his companions were inadequate for the task of using even those few powers and mysteries which they possessed. And he was no nearer to a resolution of his secret knowledge than he had been when he had summoned and lost Thomas Covenant. He sighed, allowed his shoulders to sag. To explain himself, he said, "I had not thought there were so many ur-viles in all the world." But the words were only tangential to what he  felt.
   Yet he could not afford such weariness. He was the High Lord. Trevor, Loerya, and Amatin had their own uncertainties, their own needs, which he could not refuse; he had already done them enough damage in the private dilemma of his heart. Drawing himself erect, he told them what he had seen and heard of the Raver and Lord Foul's army.
   When he was done, Amatin smiled wryly. "You affronted samadhi Raver. That was boldly done, High Lord."
   "I did not wish to comfort him with the thought that we believe him safe."
   At this, Loerya's gaze winced. "Is he so safe?" she asked painfully.
   Mhoram hardened. "He is not safe while there is heart or bone or Earthpower to oppose him. I only say that I know not how he may be fought. Let him discover my ignorance for himself."
   As she had so often in the past, Loerya once again attempted to probe his secret. "Yet you have touched Loric's krill and given it life. Your hand drew a gleam of blue from the gem. Is there no hope in this? The legends say that the krill of Loric Vilesilencer was potent against the peril of the Demondim."
   "A gleam," Mhoram replied. Even in the privacy of his own knowledge, he feared the strange power which had enabled him to spark the krill's opaque jewel. He lacked the courage to explain the source of his strength. "What will that avail?"
   In response, Loerya's face thronged with demands and protests, but before she could voice them, a shout from the courtyard drew the Lords' attention downward. Warmark Quaan stood on the flagstones amid the corpses. When Mhoram answered him, he saluted mutely with his sword.
   Mhoram returned the salute, acknowledging Quaan's victory. But he could not keep the hue of sadness from his voice as he said, "We have shed the first blood in this siege. Thus even those who oppose ill must wreak harm upon the victims of ill. Bear their bodies to the upland hills and burn them with purging fires, so that their flesh may recover its innocence in ashes. Then scatter their ashes over Furl Falls, as a sign to all the Land that we abhor the Despiser's wrong, not the slaves which he has made to serve his wrong."
   The Warmark scowled, loath to honor his enemies with such courtesy. But he promptly gave the orders to carry out Mhoram's instructions, Sagging again, Mhoram turned back to his fellow Lords. To forestall any further probing, he said, "The Giant knows he cannot breach these walls with swords and spears. But he will not stand idle, waiting for hunger to do his work. He is too avid for blood. He will attempt us. We must be prepared. We must stand constant watch within the tower-to counter any force which he may bring against us."
   Lord Trevor, eager for any responsibility which he believed to be within his ability, said, "I will watch."
   With a nod, Mhoram accepted. "Summon one of us when you are weary. And summon us all when Satansfist chooses to act. We must see him at work, so that we may learn our defense." Then he turned to a warrior standing nearby. "Warhaft, bear word to the Hearthralls Tohrm and Borillar. Ask the Hirebrands and Gravelingases of Lord's Keep to share the watch of the Lords. They also must learn our defense."
   The warrior saluted and walked briskly away. Mhoram placed a hand on Trevor's shoulder, gripped it firmly for a moment. Then, with one backward look at the winter-stricken sky, he left the balcony and went to his chambers.
   He intended to rest, but the sight of Elena's marrowmeld sculpture standing restlessly on his table disturbed him. It had the fanatic, vulnerable look of a man, chosen to be a prophet, who entirely mistakes his errand- who, instead of speaking to glad ears the words of hope with which he was entrusted, spends his time preaching woe and retribution to a wilderland. Looking at the bust, Mhoram had to force himself to remember that Covenant had rejected the Land to save a child in his own world. And the Unbeliever's ability to refuse help to tens of thousands of lives-to the Land itself-for the sake of one life was a capacity which could not be easily judged. Mhoram believed that large balances might be tipped by the weight of one life. Yet the face of the sculpture seemed at this moment taut with misapprehended purpose-crowded with all the people who would die so that one young girl might live.
   As he gazed at this rendition of Covenant's fate, High Lord Mhoram experienced again the sudden passion which had enabled him to draw a gleam from Loric's krill. Danger filled his eyes, and he snatched up the sculpture as if he meant to shout at it. But then the hard lines of his mouth bent, and he sighed at himself. With conflicting intensities in his face, he ore the anundivian yajna work to the Hall of Gifts, where he placed it in a position of honor high on one of the rude, rootlike pillars of the cavern, after that, he returned to his chambers and slept.
   He was awakened shortly after noon by Trevor's summons. His dreamless slumber vanished instantly, and he was on his way out of his rooms before the young warrior who brought the message was able to knock a second time. He hastened up out of the recesses of Revelstone toward the battlements over the gates of the main Keep, where he chanced upon Hearthrall Tohrm. Together, they crossed to the tower and climbed the stairs to its top. There they found Trevor Loerya-mate with Warmark Quaan and Hirebrand Borillar.
   Quaan stood between the Lord and the Hearthrall like an anchor to their separate tensions. Trevor's whole face was clenched white with apprehension, and Borillar's hands trembled on his staff with mixed dread and determination; but Quaan held his arms folded across his chest and frowned stolidly downward as if he had lost the capacity to be surprised by anything any servant of the Gray Slayer did. As the High Lord joined them, the old Warmark pointed with one tanned, muscular arm, and his rigid finger guided Mhoram's eyes like an accusation to a gathering of ur-viles before the gates of the tower.
   The ur-viles were within arrow reach, but a line of red-eyed Cavewights bearing wooden shields protected them by intercepting the occasional shafts which Quaan's warriors loosed from the windows of the tower. Behind this cover, the ur-viles were building.
   They worked with deft speed, and their construction quickly took shape in their midst. Soon Mhoram saw that they were making a catapult.
   Despite the freezing ire of Foul's wind, his hands began to sweat on his staff. As the ur-viles looped heavy ropes around the sprocketed winches at the back of the machine, lashed the ropes to the stiff throwing-arm, and sealed with flashes of black power a large, ominous iron cup to the end of the arm, he found himself tensing, calling all his lore and strength into readiness. He knew instinctively that the attackers did not intend to hurl rocks at Revelstone.
   The Demondim-spawn worked without instructions from Satansfist. He watched from a distance, but neither spoke nor moved. A score of them clambered over the catapult-adjusting, tightening, sealing it-and High Lord Mhoram marveled grimly that they could build so well without eyes. But they showed no need for eyes; noses were as discerning as vision. In a short time the finished catapult stood erect before Revelstone's tower.
   Then barking shouts chorused through the encampment, and a hundred ur-viles ran forward to the machine. On either side, a score of them formed wedges to concentrate their power and placed themselves so that their loremasters stood at the winches. Using their iron staves, the two loremasters began turning the sprockets, thus tightening the ropes and slowly bending the catapult's arm backward. The catapult dwarfed the creatures, but by focusing their strength in wedges, they were able to crank the winches and bend the arm. And while this was being done, the other ur-viles came together and made an immense wedge behind the catapult. Against the background of the frozen snow-scud, they looked like a spear point aimed at the heart of the Keep.
   With part of his mind, Mhoram observed that Lord Amatin now stood beside him. He glanced around for Loerya and saw her on a balcony of the main Keep. He waved his approval to her; if any holocaust struck the watchtower, all the Lords would not be lost. Then he cocked an eyebrow at Quaan, and when the Warmark nodded to indicate that the warriors were ready for any sudden orders, High Lord Mhoram returned his attention to the ur-viles.
   As the arm of the catapult was drawn back, Gravelingas Tohrm knelt at the parapet, spreading his arms and pressing his palms against the slow curve of the wall. In a dim, alien voice, he began to sing a song of granite endurance to the stone.
   Then the arm reached its fullest arc. Quivering as if it were about to splinter, it strained toward the tower. At once, it was locked into place with iron hooks. Its wide cup had been brought down to chest level directly in front of the loremaster who apexed the largest wedge.
   With a ringing clang, the loremaster struck its stave against the cup. Strength surged through scores of black shoulders; they emanated power as the loremaster labored over the cup. And thick, cruel fluid, as fiery as the vitriol which consumes flesh and obsidian and teak alike, splashed coruscating darkly from the stave into the waiting cup.
   The High Lord had seen human bodies fall into ash at the least touch of fluid like that. He turned to warn Quaan. But the old Warmark needed no warning; he also had watched warriors die in Demondim acid. Before Mhoram could speak, Quaan was shouting down the stairwell into the tower, ordering his warriors away from all the exposed windows and battlements.
   At Mhoram's side, Lord Amatin's slight form began to shiver in the wind. She held her staff braced before her as if she were trying to ward the cold away.
   Slowly, the loremaster's fluid filled the cup. It splashed and spouted like black lava, throwing midnight sparks into the air; but the lore of the ur-viles contained it, held its dark force together, prevented it from shattering the catapult.
   Then the cup was full.
   The ur-viles did not hesitate. With a hoarse, hungry cry, they knocked free the restraining hooks.
   The arm arced viciously forward, slapped with flat vehemence against the stop at the end of its throw.
   A black gout of vitriol as large as a Stonedownor home sprang through the air and crashed against the tower a few dozen feet below the topmost parapet.
   As the acid struck stone, it erupted. In lightless incandescence, it burned at the mountain rock like the flare of a dark sun. Tohrm cried out in pain, and the stone's agony howled under Mhoram's feet. He leaped forward. With Trevor and Amatin beside him, he called blue Lords-fire from his staff and flung it down against the vitriol.
   Together, the three staffs flamed hotly to counter the acid. And because the ur-viles could not replenish it, it fell apart in moments- dropped like pieces of hate from the wall, and seared the ground before it was extinguished.
   It left behind a long scar of corrosion in the stone. But it had not broken through the wall.
   With a groan, Tohrm sagged away from the parapet. Sweat ran down his face, confusing his tears so that Mhoram could not tell whether the Gravelingas wept from pain or grief or rage. "Melenkurion abatha!" he cried thickly. "Ah, Revelstone!"
   The ur-viles were already cranking their catapult into position for another throw.
   For an instant, Mhoram felt stunned and helpless. With such catapults, so many thousands of ur-viles might be able to tear Lord's Keep down piece by piece, reduce it to dead rubble. But then his instinct for resistance came to life within him. To Trevor and Amatin he snapped, "Those blasts must not touch the Keep. Join me. We will shape a Forbidding."
   Even as they moved away from him on either side to prepare between them as wide a defense as possible, he knew that these tactics would not suffice. Three Lords might be able to deflect the greatest harm of a few attacks, but they could not repulse the assault of fifteen or twenty thousand ur-viles. "Tohrm!" he commanded sharply. "Borillar!"
   At once, Hearthrall Tohrm began calling for more Gravelingases. But Borillar hesitated, searching around him uncertainly as if the urgency of the Situation interfered with his thinking, hid his own lore from him.
   "Calmly, Hirebrand," Mhoram said to steady him. "The catapults are of wood."
   Abruptly, Borillar spun and dashed away. As he passed Warmark Quaan, he cried, "Archers!" Then he was yelling toward the main Keep, "Hirebrands! Bring lor-liarill! We will make arrows!
   In a dangerously short time, the ur-viles had cocked their machine and were filling its cup with their black vitriol. They fired their next throw scant moments after Tohrm's rhadhamaerl reinforcements had positioned themselves to support the stone.
   At Mhoram's command, the Lords struck against the arcing gout of acid before it reached the tower. Their staffs flashed as they threw up a wall of fire across the acid's path.
   The fluid hit their fire with a force which shredded their Forbidding. The black acid shot through their power to slam against the tower wall. But the attack had spent much of its virulence. When it reached the stone, Tohrm and his fellow Gravelingases were able to withstand it.
   It shattered against the strength which they called up in the rock, and fell flaming viciously to the ground, leaving behind dark stains on the wall but no serious damage.
   Tohrm turned to meet High Lord Mhoram's gaze. Hot anger and exertion flushed the Hearthrall's face, but he bared his teeth in a grin which promised much for the defense of Revelstone.
   Then three of Quaan's archers joined the Lords, followed closely by two Hirebrands. The archers were tall Woodhelvennin warriors, whose slimness of form belied the strength of their bows. Warmark Quaan acknowledged them, and asked Borillar what he wanted them to do. In response, Borillar accepted from the Hirebrands six long, thin arrows. These were delicately rune-carved, despite their slenderness; their tips were sharpened to keen points; and their ends were fletched with light brown feathers. The Hearthrall gave two of them to each archer, saying as he did so, "This is lor-liarill, the rare wood called by the Giants of Seareach 'Gildenlode.' They-"
   "We are Woodhelvennin," the woman who led the archers said bluntly. ''Lor-liarill is known to us."
   "Loose them well," returned Borillar. "There are no others prepared. Strike first at the Cavewights."
   The woman looked at Quaan to see if he had any orders for her, but he waved her and her companions to the parapet. With smooth competence, the three archers nocked arrows, bent bows, and took aim at the catapult.
   Already, the ur-viles had pulled back its arm, and were busy rabidly refilling its iron cup.
   Through his teeth, Quaan said, "Strike now."
   Together, three bowstrings thrummed.
   Immediately, the defending Cavewights jerked up their shields, caught the arrows out of the air.
   The instant the arrows bit wood, they exploded into flame. The force of their impact spread fire over the shields, threw blazing shreds and splinters down onto the Cavewights. Yelping in surprise and pain, the dull-witted, gangling creatures dropped their shields and jumped away from the fire.
   At once, the archers struck again. Their shafts sped through the air and hit the catapult's throwing arm, just below the cup. The lor-liarill detonated instantly, setting the black acid afire. In sudden conflagration, the fluid's power smashed the catapult, scattered blazing wood in all directions. A score of ur-viles and several Cavewights fell, and the rest went scrambling beyond arrow range, leaving the pieces of the machine to burn themselves out.
   With a fierce grin, the Woodhelvennin woman turned to Borillar and said, "The lillianrill make dour shafts, Hearthrall."
   Borillar strove to appear dispassionate, as if he were accustomed to such success, but he had to swallow twice before he could find his voice to say, "So it would appear."
   High Lord Mhoram placed a hand of praise on the Hearthrall's shoulder. "Hirebrand, is there more lor-liarill which may be formed into such arrows?"
   Borillar nodded like a veteran. "There is more. All the Gildenlode keels and rudders which were made for the Giants-before- That wood may be reshaped."
   "Ask the Hirebrands to begin at once," said Mhoram quietly.
   Smiling broadly, Tohrm moved to stand beside Borillar. "Hearthrall, you have outdone me," he said in a teasing tone. "The rhadhamaerl will not rest until they have found a way to match this triumph of yours."
   At this, Borillar's dispassion broke into a look of wide pleasure. Arm in arm, he and Tohrm left the tower, followed by the other Hirebrands and Gravelingases.
   After bowing under a few curt words of praise from Quaan, the archers left also. He and the three Lords were left alone on the tower, gazing somberly into each other's eyes.
   Finally, Quaan spoke the thought that was in all their faces. "It is a small victory. Larger catapults may strike from beyond the reach of arrows. Larger wedges may make power enough to breach the walls. If several catapults are brought to the attack together, we will be sorely pressed to resist even the first throws."
   "And the Illearth Stone has not yet spoken against us," Mhoram murmured. He could still feel the force which had rent his defense tingling in his wrists and elbows. As an afterthought, he added, "Except in the voice of this cruel wind and winter."
   For a moment, he melded his mind with Trevor and Amatin, sharing his strength with them, and reminding them of their own resources. Then, with a sigh, Lord Amatin said, "I am of Woodhelvennin blood. I will assist Hearthrall Borillar in the making of these shafts. It will be slow work, and many of the lillianrill have other tasks."
   "And I will go to Tohrm," Trevor said. "I have no lore to match the rhadhamaerl. But it may be that a counter to this Demondim-bane can be found in the fire-stones."
   Mhoram approved silently, put his arm around the two Lords and hugged them. "I will stand watch,'' he said, "and summon Loerya when I am weary." Then he sent Quaan with them from the tower, so that the Warmark could ready his warriors for all the work they might have to do if the walls were harmed. Alone, the High Lord stood and faced the dark encampment of Satansfist's hordes-stood below the snapping Furl, which was already ragged in the sharp wind, planted the iron heel of his staff on the stone, and faced the encircling enemy as if his were the hand which held the outcome of the siege.
   In the gray dimness toward evening, the ur-viles built another catapult. Beyond the reach of arrows, they constructed a stronger machine, one capable of throwing their power across the additional ground. But High Lord Mhoram summoned no aid. When the black spew of corrosion was launched, it had farther to travel; it was beyond the command of its makers for a longer time. Mhoram's blue power lashed out at it as it reached the top of its arc. A fervid lightning of Lords-fire bolted into the vitriol, weakened its momentum, caused it to fall short. Splashing angrily, effectlessly, it crashed to the earth, and burned a morbid hole like a charnel pit in the frozen dirt.
   The ur-viles withdrew, returned to the garish watch fires which burned throughout the army for the sake of the misborn creatures that needed light. After a time, Mhoram rubbed the strain from his forehead, and called Lord Loerya to take his place.
   During the blind night, three more catapults were built in the safety of distance, then brought forward to attack Revelstone. None of them assaulted the tower; two of them threw at the walls of the main Keep from the north, one from the south. But each time the defenders were able to react quickly. The loremasters' exertion of power as they cocked the machines radiated a palpable impression up at the battlements, and this emanation warned the Keep of each new assault. Archers waiting with lor-liarill arrows raced to respond.
   They gained light to aim with by driving arrows into the ground near the catapults; in the sudden revealing fires, they destroyed two of the new threats as they had destroyed the first. But the third remained beyond bowshot, and attacked the south wall from a position out of Loerya's reach. Yet this assault was defeated also. In a moment of inspiration, the Haft commanding the archers ordered them to direct their shafts at the acid as it arced toward the Keep. The archers fired a dozen shafts in rapid succession into the gout of fluid, and succeeded in breaking it apart, so that it spattered against the stone in weaker pieces and did little harm.
   Fortunately, there were no more attacks that night. All the new Gildenlode arrows had been used, and the process of making more was slow and difficult. Throughout the next day also there were no attacks, though the sentries could see ur-viles building catapults in the distance. No move was made against Revelstone until deep in the chattering darkness of midnight. Then alarms rang through the Keep, calling all its defenders from their work or rest. In the wind-torn light of arrows aflame like torches in the frozen earth, the Lords and Hirebrands and Gravelingases and warriors and Lorewardens saw ten catapults being cranked into position beyond the range of the archers.
   Orders hummed through the stone of the Keep. Men and women dashed to take their places. In moments, a Lord or a team of defenders stood opposite each catapult. As the cups were filled, Revelstone braced itself for the onslaught of power.
   At the flash of a dank green signal from Satansfist, the ten catapults threw.
   The defense outlined Revelstone in light, cast so much bright orange, yellow, and blue fire from the walls that the whole plateau blazed in the darkness like a conflagration of defiance. Working together from the tower, Mhoram and Amatin threw bolts of power which cast down two of the vitriol attacks. From the plateau atop Revelstone, the Lords Trevor and Loerya used their advantage of height to help them each deflect one cupful of corrosion into the ground.
   Two of the remaining attacks were torn apart by Hearthrall Borillar's arrows. Using a piece of orcrest given to them by Hearthrall Tohrm, and a lomillialor rod obtained from Lord Amatin, teams of Lorewardens erected barriers which consumed most of the virulence in two assaults, prevented them from doing any irrecoverable damage.
   Gravelingases met the last two throws of the ur-viles. With one partner, Tohrm had positioned himself on a balcony directly in front of one catapult. They stood on either side of a stone vat of graveling, and sang a deep rhadhamaerl song which slowly brought their mortal flesh into harmony with the mounting radiance of the fire-stones. While the ur-viles filled the cup of the machine, Tohrm and his companion thrust their arms into the graveling, pushed their lore-preserved hands deep among the fire-stones near the sides of the vat. There they waited in the golden heat, singing their earthish song until the catapult threw and the vitriol sprang toward them.
   In the last instant, they heaved a double armful of graveling up at the black gout. The two powers collided scant feet above their heads, and the force of the impact knocked them flat on the balcony. The wet corrosion of the acid turned the graveling instantly to cinders, but in turn the rhadhamaerl might of the fire-stones burned away the acid before the last drop of it touched Tohrm or Revelstone.
   The other pair of Gravelingases were not so successful. They mistimed their countering heave, and as a result their graveling only stopped half the vitriol. Both men died in fluid fire which destroyed a wide section of the balcony.
   But instead of striking again, launching more attacks to wear down the defenses of the Keep, the ur-viles abandoned their catapults and withdrew-apparently satisfied with what they had learned about Revelstone's mettle.
   High Lord Mhoram watched them go with surprise in his face and cold dread in his heart. Surely the ur-viles had not been intimidated by the defense. If Satansfist chose now to change his tactics, it was because he had measured the weakness of Revelstone, and knew a better way to capitalize on it.
   The next morning, Mhoram saw the commencement of Satansfist's new strategy, but for two days after that he did not comprehend it. The Raver's hordes moved closer to Revelstone, placed themselves hardly a hundred yards from the walls, and faced the plateau as if they expected its defenders to leap willingly into their jaws. The ur-viles moved among the slavering creatures and Cavewights, and formed scores of wedges which seemed to point toward the very heart of Revelstone. And behind them Satansfist stood in a broad piece of open ground, openly wielding his Stone for the first time. But he launched no physical onslaught, offered the Keep no opportunity to strike or be stricken. Instead, his creatures dropped to their hands and knees, and glared hungrily at Revelstone like crouching preyers. The ur-vile loremasters set the tips of their staves in the ground, began a barking ululation or invocation which carried in shreds to the Keep through the tearing wind. And samadhi Raver, Sheol and Satansfist, squeezed his fragment of the Illearth Stone so that it ran with steam like boiling ice.
   As Mhoram watched, he could feel the upsurge of power on all sides; the exertion of might radiated at him until the skin of his cheeks stung under it despite the raw chill of the wind. But the besiegers took no other action. They held their positions in fierce concentration, scowling murderously as if they were envisioning the blood of their victims.
   Slowly, tortuously, they began to have an effect upon the ground of the foothills. From the unflickering green blaze of the Stone, a rank emerald hue spread to the dirt around Satansfist's feet and throbbed in the soil It encircled him, pulsing like a fetid heart, then sent crooked offshoots like green veins through the ground toward Revelstone. These grew with each savage throb, branched out until they reached the backs of the crouching hordes. At that point, red pain sickly tinged with green blossomed from the embedded tips of the loremasters' staves. Like Satansfist's emerald, the ill red grew in the ground like arteries or roots of hurt. It shone through the gray ice on the earth without melting it, and expanded with each throb of samadhi's central power until all of Revelstone was ringed in pulsing veins.
   The process of this growth was slow and deadly; by nightfall, the red-green harm was not far past the feet of the ur-viles; and after a long, lurid darkness, dawn found the veins just halfway to the walls. But it was implacable and sure. Mhoram could conceive no defense against it because he did not know what it was.
   During the next two days, the dread of it spread over Lord's Keep. People began to talk in whispers. Men and women hurried from place to place as if they feared that the city stone were turning against them. Children whimpered inexplicably, and winced at the sight of well-known faces. A thick atmosphere of fear and incomprehension hovered in Revel-stone like the spread wings of an alighting vulture. Yet Mhoram did not grasp what was being done to the city until the evening of the third day. Then by chance he approached Warmark Quaan unseen and unheard, and at the touch of his hand on Quaan's shoulder, the Warmark reeled away in panic, clawing at his sword. When his eyes finally recognized the High Lord, his face filled with a gray ash of misery, and he trembled like an overwhelmed novice.
   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 with 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 earned 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.
   "Foamfollower," he croaked. "I'm sorry."
   The Giant replied gently, "Peace, my friend. All that is past. Do not condemn yourself."
   "Hellfire." Covenant could not master his weakness. "What's happened to you?"
   "Ah, that is a long tale, full of Giantish episodes and apostrophes. I will save it until we have taken you to a place where we may aid you. You are ill enough to bandy stories with death itself."
   "You've been hurt," Covenant went on. But the intensity in Foam-follower's eyes stopped him.
   In mock sternness, the Giant commanded, "Be silent, Unbeliever. I will listen to no sad stories in this place.'' Gently, he cradled the wounded man in his arms, then said to Triock, "Follow carefully, Rockbrother. Our work has only begun. If you fall, I will be hard pressed to catch you."
   "Look to yourself,'' Triock replied gruffly. "I am not unaccustomed to stone-even stone as chill as this."
   "Well, then. Let us make what haste we can. We have endured much to come so far, you and I. We must not lose the ur-Lord now."
   Without waiting for an answer, he started down the rude stair of Kevin's Watch.
   Covenant turned his face to the Giant's breast. The breeze had a high lonely sound as it rustled past the cliff and eddied around Foamfollower; it reminded Covenant that the Watch stood more than four thousand feet above the foothills. But Foamfollower's heart beat with forthright confidence, and his arms felt unbreakable. At each downward step, a slight jolt passed through him, as if that foot had locked itself to the stair stone. And Covenant no longer possessed even strength enough for fear. He rode numbly in the Giant's hold until the hum of the wind increased, and Foamfollower dropped one step at a time into the cold sea of clouds.
   In moments, the sunlight was gone as if it had been irretrievably lost. The wind took on a raw, dry, cutting edge, too chill to be softened by moisture. Covenant and Foamfollower descended through dim vistaless air as icy as polar mist-cloud as thick and thetic as a fist clenched around the world. Under its pressure, Covenant felt icicles crawling up his spine toward the last warmth of life left in him.
   Then they reached the ledge at the base of Kevin's Watch. The precipice loomed darkly beside them as Foamfollower turned to the right and moved out along the ledge, but he stepped securely, as if he had no conception of falling. And shortly he left the exposed cliff-face, began to clamber along the trail into the mountains. After that, the last tension faded from the background of Covenant's mind. His weakness opened in him like a funereal lily, and the mist drew him into a wan, slumberous daze.
   For some time he lost track of where Foamfollower was going. He seemed to feel himself bleeding away into the gray air. Tranquillity like the peace of ice surrounded his heart. He no longer understood what Foamfollower was talking about when the Giant whispered urgently, "Triock, he fails. We must aid him now or not at all."
   "Yes," Triock agreed. He called commandingly, "Bring blankets and graveling! He must have warmth."
   "That will not suffice. He is ill and injured. He must have healing.
   Triock snapped, "I see him. I am not blind."
   "Then what can we do? I am helpless here-the Giants have no lore for cold. We suffer little from it."
   "Rub his limbs. Put your strength into him. I must think."
   Something rough began to batter Covenant, but the ice in him was impervious to it. Vaguely, he wondered why Foamfollower and Triock would not let him sleep.
   "Is there no hurtloam here?" asked the Giant.
   "At one time there was," Triock responded distantly. "Lena-Lena healed him in this same place-when he first came to the Land. But I am not a rhadhamaerl-I do not feel the secret flavors and powers of the Earth. And it is said that the hurtloam has-retreated-that it has hidden itself to escape the ill which is upon the Land. Or that this winter has slain it. We cannot succor him in that way."
   "We must help him. His very bones freeze."
   Covenant felt himself being shifted, felt blankets being wrapped around him. In the background of his haze, he thought he saw the kind yellow light of graveling. That pleased him; he could rest better if the gray fog did not dominate everything.
   After a moment, Triock said uncertainly, "It is possible that the power of the High Wood can help him."
   "Then begin!" the Giant urged.
   "I am no Hirebrand. I have no lillianrill lore-I have only studied this matter in the Loresraat for a year-after High Lord Mhoram gave the lomillialor to me. I cannot control its power."
   "Nevertheless! You must make the attempt."
   Triock protested. "The High Wood test of truth may quench the last flicker within him. Hale and whole, he might fail such testing."
   "Without it he will surely die."
   Triock snarled under his breath, then said grimly, "Yes. Yes, Rock-brother. You out see me. Keep life within him. I must prepare."
   In a mood of sadness, Covenant saw that the yellow light was receding into gray around him. He did not know how he could bear to lose it. Raw, reviling fog had no right to outweigh graveling in the balance of the Land. And there was no more hurtloam. No more hurtloam, he repeated with an unexpected pang. His sorrow turned to anger. By hell! Foul, he grated mutely, you can't do this. I won't let you. The hate for which he had been groping a night and a world earlier began to return to him. With the strength of anger, he pried his eyes open.
   Triock was standing over him. The Stonedownor held his lomillialor rod as if he meant to drive it like a spike between Covenant's eyes. In his hands, the white wood shone hotly, and steam plumed from it into the chill air. A smell of wood sap joined the loamy odor of the graveling.
   Muttering words that Covenant could not understand, Triock brought the rod down until its end touched the infected fever in his forehead.
   At first, he felt nothing from the contact; the lomillialor pulsed effectlessly on his wound as if he were immune to it. But then he was touched from another direction. An exquisite ache of heat cut through the ice in his left palm, spreading from the ring he wore. It sliced into him, then moved up through his wrist. It hurt him as if it were flaying cold and flesh °ff his bones, but the pain gave him a kind of savage pleasure. Soon his whole left arm was livid with excruciation. And under the heat his bruises reawoke, came back from the dead.
   When the hold of the ice had been broken that far, it began to give way in other places. Warmth from the blankets reached toward his battered ribs. The joints of his legs throbbed as if they had been kicked into consciousness. In moments, his forehead remembered its anguish.
   Then Triock transferred the tip of the High Wood from his forehead to the tight black swelling of his lip. At once, agony erupted within him, and he plunged into it as if it were solace.
   He returned to consciousness slowly, but when he opened his eyes he knew that he had become steadier. His wounds were not healed; both his forehead and mouth ached like goads embedded in his flesh, and his body moaned with bruises. But the ice no longer gnawed his bones. The swelling of his lip was reduced, and his sight had improved, as if the lenses of his eyes had been cleaned. Yet he felt a private grief at the numbness which clung to his hands and feet. His dead nerves had not yet rediscovered the health which he had learned to expect from the Land.
   But he was alive-he was in the Land-he had seen Foamfollower. He set aside the distress of his nerves for another time, and looked around him.
   He lay in a small, sheer valley nestled among the mountains behind Kevin's Watch. While he had been unconscious, the enshrouding sea of clouds had receded a few hundred feet, and now light snow filled the air like murmuring. Already an inch of it blanketed him. Something in the timbre of the snow gave him the impression that the time was late afternoon. But he was not concerned about time. He had been in this valley once before, with Lena.
   The memory of it contrasted starkly with what he saw. It had been a quiet, grassy place girdled with pines like tall sentinels guarding its quietude, and a sprightly brook flowing down its center. But now only bare, wasted earth showed through the thickening snow. The pines had been stripped naked and splintered by more winter than they could survive; and instead of water, a weal of ice ran through the valley like a scar already old.
   Covenant wondered painfully how long this weather would last.
   The implications of that question made him shiver, and he fought his tired frame into a sitting position so that he could lean closer to the pot of graveling. As he did so, he saw three figures sitting around another pot a short distance away. One of them observed his movement and spoke to the others. At once Triock stood and strode toward Covenant. He squatted near the Unbeliever, and studied him gravely before saying, "You have been grievously ill. My lore does not suffice to heal you. But I see that you are no longer dying."
   "You saved me," Covenant said as bravely as he could through the pain of his mouth and his inanition.
   "Perhaps. I am unsure. The wild magic has been at work in you." Covenant stared, and Triock went on: "It appeared that the lomillialor drew a response from the white gold of your ring. With that power, you surpass any test of truth I might give."
   My ring, Covenant thought dully. But he was not ready to deal with that idea, and he set it aside also. "You saved me," he repeated. "There are things I need to know."
   "Let them be. You must eat now. You have not taken food for many days." He looked around through the snow, then said, "Saltheart Foam-follower brings you aliantha."
   Covenant heard heavy feet moving across the frozen ground. A moment later Foamfollower knelt with a quiet smile beside him. Both his hands were full of viridian treasure-berries.
   Covenant looked at the aliantha. He felt he had forgotten what to do with them; he had been hungry for so long that hunger had become a part of him. But he could not refuse the offer behind the Giant's kind smile. Slowly, he reached out a numb hand and took one of the treasure-berries.
   When he slipped it past his lip and bit into it, the tangy salt-peach flavor which blossomed in his mouth seemed to refute all his reasons for fasting. And as he swallowed, he could feel nourishment rushing eagerly into him. He spit the seed into his palm; as if he were completing a ritual, he dropped it over his shoulder. Then he began to eat rapidly, wolfishly.
   He did not stop until Foamfollower's hands were empty. Sighing as if he longed for more, he sowed the last seed behind him.
   The Giant nodded approval and seated himself in a more relaxed position near the graveling. Triock followed his example. When they were both looking at him, Covenant said softly, " I won' t forget this." He could not think of any other way to express his thanks.
   Triock frowned sharply. He asked Foamfollower, "Does he threaten us now?"
   The Giant's cavernous eyes searched Covenant's face. He smiled wanly as he replied, "The Unbeliever has a mournful turn of speech. He does not threaten-he does not threaten us."
   Covenant felt a surge of grim gratitude for Foamfollower's understanding. He tried to smile in return, but the tightness of his lip prevented him. He winced at the effort, then pulled his blankets more closely around him. He sensed a depth of cold answers behind the questions he needed to ask.
   But he did not know how to ask them. Triock's bitter mouth and Foamfollower's scars intruded between him and his summoners; he feared that he was to blame for the tales they might tell him if he asked. Yet he had to know the answers, had to know where he stood. The first outlines of purpose were taking shape within him. He could not forget how this valley had looked when he had first seen it. And Mhoram had pleaded with him for help.
   Lamely, he began, "I didn't expect to turn up here. I thought Mhoram was going to call me back. But even he doesn't have the Staff of Law. How-how did you do it?"
   Triock answered in stiff tones, "Mhoram son of Variol, seer and oracle to the Council of Lords, came to Mithil Stonedown before the last war-the battle against Fleshharrower Raver. At that time, he gave to me the lomillialor rod which I have used today-and for the past three days. Because of his gift, I journeyed to the Loresraat, to study the uses of the High Wood. There I learned of High Lord Elena's fall-I-"
   He paused for a moment to lash down his passion, then went on. "In the years which followed, I waited for the reason of High Lord Mhoram's gift to be made plain. During that time, I fought with my people against the marauders of the Gray Slayer. Then the Giant Saltheart Foamfollower joined us, and we fought together through the South Plains. While winter increased upon the Land, we attacked and ran and attacked again, doing what damage we could to our vast foe. But at last word came to us that Revelwood had fallen-that great Revelstone itself was besieged. We left our battles, and returned to Mithil Stonedown and Kevin's Watch. With the lomillialor of High Lord Mhoram, and the strength of Saltheart Foam-follower, and the lore I brought from the Loresraat, we labored for three days, and in the end brought you to the Land. It was not easily done."
   Triock's flint voice sparked visions of desperation in Covenant's mind. To resist them, control them until he was ready for them, he asked, "But how? I thought only the Staff of Law-"
   "Much has been broken by the fall of High Lord Elena," Triock retorted. "The Land has not yet tasted all the consequences of that evil. But the Staff made possible certain expressions of power-and limited others. Now that limit is gone. Do you not feel the malice of this winter?"
   Covenant nodded with an ache in his eyes. His responsibility for Elena's end stung him, goaded him to ask another kind of question. "That doesn't tell me why you did it. After Lena-and Elena-and Atiaran''-he could not bring himself to be more specific-"and everything-you've got less reason than anyone in the world to want me back. Even Trell- Maybe Foamfollower here can forget, but you can't. If you were thinking it any louder, I could taste it."
   Bitterness clenched Triock's jaws, but his reply was sharp and ready, as if he had whetted it many times. "Yet Foamfollower is persuasive. The Land is persuasive. The importance which the Lorewardens see in you is persuasive. And Lena daughter of Atiaran still lives in Mithil Stonedown. In her last years, Atiaran Trell-mate said often that it is the duty of the living to make meaningful the sacrifices of the dead. But I wish to find meaning for the sacrifices of those who live. After-after the harm which you wrought upon Lena-she hid herself so that the harm would not be known-so that you would be left free to bear your prophecy to the Lords. That sacrifice requires meaning, Unbeliever."
   In spite of himself, in spite of his own expectations of hostility and recrimination, Covenant believed Triock. Elena had warned him; she had described the size of Triock's capabilities. Now he wondered where Triock found his strength. The man had been an unambitious Cattleherd. The girl he loved had been raped, and her bastard daughter had grown up to love the rapist. Yet because of them he had gone to the Loresraat, studied dangerous lore for which he had no desire or affinity. He had become a guerrilla fighter for the Land. And now he had summoned Covenant at the command of the Land's need and his own harsh sense of mercy. Thickly, Covenant muttered, "You've kept your Oath." He was thinking, I owe you for this, too, Foul.
   Abruptly, Triock got to his feet. The lines around his eyes dominated his face as he scrutinized Covenant. In a low voice, he said, "What will you do?"
   "Ask me later." Covenant was ashamed that he could not match Triock's gaze. "I'm not ready yet." Instinctively, he clasped his right hand over his ring, hiding it from consideration.
   "There is time," murmured Foamfollower. "You have a great need for rest."
   Triock said, "Choose soon. We must be on our way at dawn." Then he moved brusquely away through the mounting snow toward his two companions by the second pot of graveling.
   "He is a good man," Foamfollower said softly. "Trust him."
   Oh, I trust him, Covenant thought. How can I help it?
   Despite the warmth of his blankets, he began to shiver again.
   As he leaned still closer to the glowing fire-stones, he noticed the look of concern on Foamfollower's face. To forestall any expression of anxiety which would remind him how little he deserved the Giant's concern, he said hastily, "I still don't know what's happened to you. The Giants Were-I don't know what happened to them. And you- You've been outrageously hacked upon." In an effort to probe Foamfollower, he went on: "I'd tell you something funny. I was afraid of what you might d°--after all that business in Treacher's Gorge. I was afraid you might go back to your people and-and convince them to stop fighting, give it up.
   What do you think? Have I finally succeeded in telling you a story you can laugh at?"
   But he saw poignantly that he had not. Foamfollower bowed his head, covered his face with one hand. For a moment, the muscles of his shoulders tensed as if with his fingers he were squeezing the bones of his countenance into an attitude which he could not achieve in any other way. "Joy is in the ears that hear," he said in a voice muffled by his hand. "My ears have been too full of the noise of killing."
   Then he raised his head, and his expression was calm. Only a smoldering deep within the caves of his eyes revealed that he was hurt. "I am not yet ready to laugh over this matter. Were I able to laugh, I would not feel so-driven to slay Soulcrusher's creatures."
   "Foamfollower," Covenant murmured again, "what's happened to you?"
   The Giant gestured helplessly with both hands, as if he could not conceive any way to tell his story. "My friend, I am what you see. Here is a tale which lies beyond even my grasp, and I am a Giant-though you will remember that my people considered me uncommonly brief of speech. Stone and Sea! Covenant, I know not what to say. You know how I fought for the Quest for the Staff of Law. When Damelon Giantfriend's prophecy for my people came to pass, I found that I could not give up this fighting. I had struck blows which would not stop. Therefore I left Seareach, so that I would at least serve the Land with my compulsion.
   "But I did not go to the Lords. In my thoughts, the great rare beauty of Revelstone, Giant-wrought Lord's Keep, daunted me. I did not wish to stand in those brave halls while Soulcrusher's creatures raved in the Land. For that reason, I fight, and spend my days with people who fight. From the Northron Climbs to the Last Hills I have struck my blows. When I met Triock son of Thuler and his companions-when I learned that he holds a limb of the High Wood, descendant of the One Tree from which the Staff of Law was made-I joined him. In that way, I garnered my scars, and at last came here."
   "You've been around humans too long," muttered Covenant. "You haven't told me anything. What-? How-? I don't know where to begin."
   "Then do not begin, my friend. Rest." Foamfollower reached out and gently touched Covenant's shoulder. "You also have been too long among-people of another kind. You need days of rest which I fear you will not receive. You must sleep."
   To his surprise, Covenant found that he was capable of sleep. Warm drowsiness seeped into him from the blankets and the graveling light, spread outward from the aliantha in his blood. Tomorrow he would know better what questions to ask. He lay back on the cold ground and pulled the blankets about his ears.
   But as Foamfollower adjusted the blankets for him, he asked, "How much longer is this winter going to last?"
   "Peace, my friend," Foamfollower replied. "The Land's spring should have been born three full moons ago."
   A shudder of ice ran through Covenant. Bloody hell, Foul! he gritted. Hellfire!
   But in his reclining position he could not resist his long weariness. He fell asleep almost at once, thinking, Hellfire. Hell and blood.
   He lay in red, visionless slumber until sometime after dark he seemed to hear voices that awakened him slightly. Disembodied in his grogginess, they spoke across him as if he were a prostrate corpse.
   "You told him little of the truth," Triock said.
   And Foamfollower answered, "He has pain enough for one heart. How could I tell him?"
   "He must know. He is responsible."
   "No. For this he is not responsible."
   "Still he must know."
   "Even stone may break when it is too heavily burdened."
   "Ah, Rockbrother. How will you justify yourself if he turns against the Land?"
   "Peace, my friend. Do not torment me. I have already learned that I cannot be justified."
   Covenant listened incomprehendingly. When the voices drifted out of his awareness, he sank into wild dreams of purpose and savage restitution.