White Gold Wielder (58 page)

At that, a stinging pang burst from him. But it was not denial. She read it exactly. It was fear. Fear of her recognition. Fear of what she might do with the knowledge.

“Don’t say it like that,” he whispered. “You don’t understand.” He appeared to be groping for some name with which to conjure her, to compel acquiescence—or at least an abeyance of judgment “You said you trusted me.”

“You’re right,” she answered, grieving and weeping and raging all at once. “I don’t understand.”

She could not bear any more. Whirling from him, she fled into the rain. He cried after her as if something within him were being torn apart; but she did not stop.

Sometime in the middle of the night, the drizzle took on the full force of a summer storm. A cold, hard downpour pelted the Hills: wind sawed at the boughs and brush. But Linden did not seek shelter. She did not want to be protected. Covenant had already taken her too far down that road, warded her too much from the truth. Perhaps he feared her—was ashamed of what he meant to do and so sought to conceal it. But during the dark night of Andelain she did him the justice of acknowledging that he had also tried to protect her for her own sake—first from involvement in Joan’s distress and the Land’s need, then from the impact of Lord Foul’s evil, then from the necessary logic of his death. And now from the implications of his despair. So that she would be free of blame for the loss of the Earth.

She did him that justice. But she hated it. He was a classic case: people who had decided on suicide and had no wish to be saved typically became calm and certain before taking their lives. Sheer pity for him would have broken her heart if she had been less angry.

Her own position would have been simpler if she could have believed him evil. Or if she had been sure that he had lost his mind. Then her only responsibility would have been to stop him at whatever cost. But the most terrible aspect of her dilemma was that his fused certainty betrayed neither madness nor malice to her health-sense. In the grip of an intent which was clearly insane or malign, he appeared more than ever to be the same strong, dangerous, and indomitable man with whom she had first fallen in love. She had never been able to refuse him.

Yet Kevin had loved the Land as much as anyone, and his protest beat at her like the storm.
When evil rises in its full power, it surpasses truth and may wear the guise of good without fear
.

Evil or crazy. Unless she fought her way into him, wrestled his deepest self-conceptions away from him and looked at them, she had no way to tell the difference.

But once before when she had entered him, trying to bring him back from the silence imposed on his spirit by the
Elohim
, he had appeared to her in the form of Marid—an innocent man made monstrous by a Raver and the Sunbane. A tool for the Despiser.

Therefore she fled him, hastened shivering and desperate among the Hills. She could not learn the truth without possessing him. And possession itself was evil. It was a kind of killing, a form of death. She had already sacrificed her mother to the darkness of her unhealed avarice for the power of death.

She did not seek shelter because she did not want it. She fled from Covenant because she feared what a confrontation with him would entail. And she kept on walking while the storm blew and rushed around her because she had no alternative. She was traveling eastward, toward the place where the sun would rise—toward the high crouched shoulders and crown of Mount Thunder.

Toward Lord Foul.

Her aim was as grim as lunacy—yet what else could she do? What else but strive to meet and outface the Despiser before Covenant arrived at his crisis? There was no other way to save him without possessing him—without exposing herself and him and the Land to the hot ache of her capacity for blackness.

That’s right, she thought. I can do it I’ve earned it.

She knew she was lying to herself. The Despiser would be hideously stronger than any Raver; and she had barely survived the simple proximity of
samadhi
Sheol. Yet she persisted. In spite of the night, and of the storm which sealed away the moon and the stars, she saw as clearly as vision that her past life was like the Land, a terrain possessed by corruption. She had let the legacy of her parents denude her of ordinary health and growth, had allowed a dark desire to rule her days like a Raver. In a sense, she had been possessed by hate from the moment when her father had said to her,
You never loved me anyway
—a hatred of life as well as of death. But then Covenant had come into her existence as he had into the Land, changing everything. He did not deserve despair. And she had the right to confront the Despite which had warped her, quenched her capacity for love, cut her off from the vitality of living. The right and the necessity.

Throughout the night, she went on eastward. Gradually the storm abated, sank back to a drizzle and then blew away, unveiling a sky so star-bedizened and poignant that it seemed to have been washed clean. The slim curve of the moon setting almost directly behind her told her that her path was true. The air was cold on her sodden clothes and wet skin: her hair shed water like shivers down her back. But Andelain sustained her. Opulent under the unfathomable heavens, it made all things possible. Her heart lifted against its burdens. She kept on walking.

But when she crossed a ridge and met the first clear sight of the sunrise, she stopped—froze in horror. The slopes and trees were heavy with raindrops; and each bead caught the light in its core, echoing back a tiny piece of daybreak to the sun, so that all the grass and woods were laced with gleams.

Yellow gleams fatally tinged by vermilion.

The sun wore a halo of pestilence as the Sunbane rose over the Hills.

It was so faint that only her sight could have discerned it. But it was there. The rapine of the Land’s last beauty had begun.

For a long moment, she remained still, surprised into her old paralysis by the unexpected swiftness with which the Sunbane attacked Andelain’s residual Law. She had no power. There was nothing she could do. But her heart scrambled for defenses—and found one. Her friends lacked her Land-bred senses. They would not see the Sunbane rising toward them; and so the Giants would not seek stone to protect themselves. They would be transformed like Marid into creatures of destruction and self-loathing.

She had left them leagues behind, could not possibly return to warn them in time. But she had to try. They needed her.

Abandoning all other intents, she launched herself in a desperate run back the way she had come.

The valley below the ridge was still deep in shadow. She was racing frenetically, and her eyes were slow to adjust. Before she was halfway down the hillside, she nearly collided with Vain.

He seemed to loom out of the crepuscular air without transition, translated instantly across the leagues. But as she reeled away from him, staggered for balance, she realized that he must have been trailing her all night. Her attention had been so focused on her thoughts and Andelain that she had not felt his presence.

Behind him in the bottom of the valley were Covenant, the First, and Pitchwife. They were following the Demondim-spawn.

After two nights without rest. Covenant looked haggard and febrile. But determination glared from his strides. He would not have stopped to save his life—not with Linden traveling ahead of him into peril. He did not look like the kind of man who could submit to despair.

But she had no time to consider his contradictions. The sun was rising above the ridge. “The Sunbane!” she cried. “It’s here! Find stone!”

Covenant did not react. He appeared too weary to grasp anything except that he had found her again. Pitchwife stared dismay at the ridgecrest. But the First immediately began to scan the valley for any kind of rock.

Linden pointed, and the First saw it: a small, hoary out-cropping of boulders near the base of the slope some distance away. At once, she grabbed her husband by the arm and pulled him at a run in that direction.

Linden glanced toward the sun, saw that the Giants would reach the stones with a few moments to spare.

In reaction, all her strength seemed to wash out of her. Covenant was coming toward her, and she did not know how to face him. Wearily she slumped to the grass. Everything she had tried to define for herself during the night had been lost. Now she would have to bear his company again, would have to live in the constant presence of his wild purpose. The Sunbane was rising in Andelain for the first time. She covered her face to conceal her tears.

He halted in front of her. For a moment, she feared that he would be foolish enough to sit down. But he remained standing so that his boots would ward him against the sun. He radiated fatigue, lamentation, and obduracy.

Stiffly he said, “Kevin doesn’t understand. I have no intention of doing what he did. He raised his own hand against the Land. Foul didn’t enact the Ritual of Desecration alone. He only shared it. I’ve already told you I’m never going to use power again. Whatever happens, I’m not going to be the one who destroys what I love.”

“What difference does that make?” Her bitterness was of no use to her. All the severity with which she had once endured the world was gone and refused to be conjured back. “You’re giving up. Never mind the Land. There’re still three of us left who want to save it. We’ll think of something. But you’re abandoning yourself.” Do you expect me to forgive you for that?

“No.” Protest made his tone ragged. “I’m not. There’s just nothing left I can do for you anymore. And I can’t help the Land. Foul took care of that long before I ever got here.” His gall was something she could understand. But the conclusion he drew from it made no sense. “I’m doing this for myself. He thinks the ring will give him what he wants. I know better. After what I’ve been through, I know better. He’s wrong.”

His certainty made him impossible to refute. The only arguments she knew were the ones she had once used to her father, and they had always failed. They had been swallowed in darkness—in self-pity grown to malice and hosting forth to devour her spirit. No argument would suffice.

Vaguely she wondered what account of her flight he had given the Giants.

But to herself she swore, I’m going to stop you. Somehow. No evil was as great as the ill of his surrender. The Sunbane had risen into Andelain. It could never be forgiven.

Somehow.

Later that day, as the company wended eastward among the Hills, Linden took an opportunity to drift away from Covenant and the First with Pitchwife. The malformed Giant was deeply troubled. His grotesque features appeared aggrieved, as if he had lost the essential cheer which preserved his visage from ugliness. Yet he was plainly reluctant to speak of his distress. At first, she thought that this reluctance arose from a new distrust of her. But as she studied him, she saw that his mood was not so simple.

She did not want to aggravate his unhappiness. But he had often shown himself willing to be pained on behalf of his friends. And her need was exigent. Covenant meant to give the Despiser his ring.

Softly, so that she would not be overheard, she breathed, “Pitchwife, help me. Please.”

She was prepared for the dismal tone of his reply, but not for its import. “There is no help,” he answered. “She will not question him.”

“She—?” Linden began, then caught herself. Carefully, she asked, “What did he say to you?”

For an aching moment, Pitchwife was still. Linden forced herself to give him time. He would not look at her. His gaze wandered the Hills morosely, as if already they had lost their luster. Without her senses, he could not see that Andelain had not yet been damaged by the Sunbane. Then, sighing, he mustered words out of his gloom.

“Rousing us from sleep to hasten in your pursuit, he announced your belief that it is now his intent to destroy the Land. And Gossamer Glowlimn my wife will not question him.

“I acknowledge that he is the Earthfriend—worthy of all trust. But have you not again and again proven yourself alike deserving? You are the Chosen, and for the mystery of your place among us we have been accorded no insight. Yet the
Elohim
have named you Sun-Sage. You alone possess the sight which proffers hope of healing. Repeatedly the burdens of our Search have fallen to you—and you have borne them well. I will not believe that you who have wrought so much restoration among the Giants and the victims of the Clave have become in the space of one night mad or cruel. And you have withdrawn trust from him. This is grave in all sooth. It must be questioned. But she is the First of the Search. She forbids.

“Chosen—” His voice was full of innominate pleading, as if he wanted something from her and did not know what it was. “It is her word that we have no other hope than him. If he has become untrue, then all is lost. Does he not hold the white ring? Therefore we must preserve our faith in him—and be still. Should he find himself poised on the blade-edge of his doom, we must not overpush him with our doubt.

“But if he must not be called to an accounting, what decency or justice will permit you to be questioned? I will not do it, though the lack of this story is grievous. If you are not to be equally trusted, you must at least be equally left in silence.”

Linden did not know how to respond. She was distressed by his troubled condition, gratified by his fairness, and incensed by the First’s attitude. Yet would she not have taken the same position in the Swordmain’s place? If Kevin Landwaster had spoken to someone else, would she not have been proud to repose her confidence in the Unbeliever? But that recognition only left her all the more alone. She had no right to try to persuade Pitchwife to her cause. Both he and his wife deserved’ better than that she should attempt to turn them against each other—or against Covenant. And yet she had no way to test or affirm her own sanity except by direct opposition to him.

Even in his fixed weariness and determination, he was so dear to her that she could hardly endure the acuity of her desire for him.

A fatigue and defeat of her own made her stumble over the uneven turf. But she refused the solace of Pitchwife’s support. Wanly, she asked him, “What are you going to do?”