White Gold Wielder (68 page)

Assuredly he was out of his mind. But his sarcasm shifted the Despiser toward him. Linden was left to the cunning tortures of her possessor. They slashed and flayed at her, showed her in long whipcuts all the atrocities an immortal could commit against her. But when Lord Foul’s gaze left her, she found that she was still able to cling. She was stubborn enough for that.

“Ah,” the Despiser rumbled like the sigh of an avalanche, “at last my foeman stands before me. He does not grovel—but groveling has become needless. He has spoken words which may not be recalled. Indeed, his abasement is complete, though he is blind to it. He does not see that he has sold himself to a servitude more demeaning than prostration. He has become the tool of my Enemy, no longer free to act against me. Therefore he submits himself, deeming in his cowardice that here the burden of havoc and ruin will pass from him.” Soft laughter made the rocklight throb: mute shrieks volleyed from the walls. “He is the Unbeliever in all sooth. He does not believe that the Earth’s doom will at last be laid to his charge.

“Thomas Covenant”—he took an avid step forward—“the spectacle of your puerile strivings gives me glee to repay my long patience, for your defeat has ever been as certain as my will. Were I to be foiled, the opportunity belonged to your companion, not to you—and you see how she has availed herself of it.” With one strong, blurred arm, he made a gesture toward Linden that nearly unseated her reason. Again he laughed; but his laughter was devoid of mirth. “Had she seduced you of the ring—ah, then would I have been tested. But therefore did I choose her, a woman altogether unable to turn aside from my desires.

“You are a fool,” he went on, “for you have known yourself doomed, and yet you have come to me. Now I require your soul.” The heat of his voice filled Linden’s lungs with suffocation.
Moksha
Jehannum shivered, hungry for violence and ravage. The Despiser sounded unquestionably sane—but that only made him more terrible. One of his hands—a bare smear across the Raver’s sight—seemed to curl into a fist; and Covenant was jerked forward, within Lord Foul’s reach. The walls spattered light like sobs, as if Mount Thunder itself were appalled.

As soft as the whisper of death, the Despiser said, “Give the ring to me.”

Linden believed that she would have obeyed in Covenant’s place. The command of that voice was absolute. But he did not move. His right arm hung at his side. The ring dangled as if it were empty of import—as if his numb finger within the band had no significance. His left fist closed and unclosed like the aggrieved labor of his heart. His eyes looked as dark as the loneliness of stars. Somehow he held his head up, his back straight—upright in conviction or madness.

“Talk’s cheap. You can say anything you want. But you’re wrong, and you ought to know it. This time you’ve gone too far. What you did to Andelain. What you’re doing to Linden—” He swallowed acid. “We aren’t enemies. That’s just another lie. Maybe you believe it—but it’s still a lie. You should see yourself. You’re even starting to look like me.” The special gleam of his gaze reached Linden like a gift. He was irremediably insane—or utterly indomitable. “You’re just another part of me. Just one side of what it means to be human. The side that hates lepers. The poisonous side.” His certainty did not waver at all. “We are one.”

His assertion made Linden gape at what he had become. But it only drew another laugh from the Despiser—a short, gruff bark of dismissal. “Do not seek to bandy truth and falsehood with me,” he replied. “You are too inane for the task. Lies would better serve the trivial yearning which you style love. The truth damns you here. For three and a half millennia I have mustered my will against the Earth in your absence, groveler. I am the truth.
I
. And I have no use for the sophistry of your Unbelief.” He leveled his voice at Covenant like the blade of an axe. Fragments of rocklight shot everywhere but could not bring his intense form into any kind of focus. “Give the ring to me.”

Covenant’s visage slackened as if he were made ill by the necessity of his plight. But still he withheld submission. Instead he changed his ground.

“At least let Linden go.” His stance took on an angle of pleading. “You don’t need her anymore. Even you should be satisfied with how much she’s been hurt. I’ve already offered her my ring once. She refused it. Let her go.”

In spite of everything, he was still trying to spare her.

Lord Foul’s response filled Kiril Threndor. “Have done, groveler.” Attar made the Raver ecstatic, wracked Linden. “You weary my long patience. She is forfeit to me by her own acts. Are you deaf to yourself? You have spoken words which can never be recalled.” Concentrated venom dripped from his outlines. As distinct as the breaking of boulders, he demanded a third time, “Give the ring to me.”

And Covenant went on sagging as though he had begun to crumble. All his strength was gone. He could no longer pretend to hold himself upright. One by one, his loves had been stripped from him: he had nothing left. After all, he was only one ordinary man, small and human. Without wild magic, he was no match for the Despiser.

When he weakly lifted his halfhand, began tugging the ring from his finger, Linden forgave him.
No choice but to surrender it
. He had done everything possible, everything conceivable, had surpassed himself again and again in his efforts to save the Land. That he failed now was cause for grief, but not for blame.

Only his eyes showed no collapse. They burned like the final dark, the last deep midnight where no Sunbane shone.

His surrender took no more than three heartbeats. One to raise his hand, take hold of the ring. Another to pull the band from his finger as if in voluntary riddance of marriage, love, humanity. A third to extend the immaculate white gold toward the Despiser.

But extremity and striving made those three moments as long as agony. During them. Linden Avery pitted her ultimate will against her possessor.

She forgave Covenant. He was too poignant and dear to be blamed. He had given everything that her heart could ask of him.

But she did not submit.

Gibbon had said.
The principal doom of the Land is upon your shoulders
. Because no one else had this chance to come between Covenant and his defeat.
You are being forged as iron is forged to achieve the ruin of the Earth
. Forged to fail here.
Because you can see
.

Now she meant to determine what kind of metal had been made of her.

Gibbon-Raver had also told her she was evil. Perhaps that was true. But evil itself was a form of power.

And she had become intimately familiar with her possessor. From the furthest roots of its past, she felt springing its contempt for all things that had flesh and could be mastered—a contempt born of fear. Fear of any form of life able to refuse it. The Forests. Giants. The
Haruchai
. It was unquenchably hungry for immortal control, for the safety of sovereignty. All refusals terrified it. The logic of its failures led inexorably to death. If it could be refused, then it could also be slain.

She had no way to understand the lost communal mind of the Forests. But Giants and
Haruchai
were another question. Though
moksha
Jehannum ripped and shrieked at her, she picked up the strands of what she knew and wove them to her purpose.

The Giants and
Haruchai
had always been able to refuse. Perhaps because they had not suffered the Land’s long history of Ravers, they had not learned to doubt their autonomy. Or perhaps because they used little or no outward expressions of power, they comprehended more fully that true choice was internal. But whatever the explanation, they were proof against possession where the people of the Land were not. They believed in their capacity to make choices which mattered.

That belief was all she needed.

Moksha
was frantic now, savage and brutal. It assailed every part of her that was able to feel pain. It desecrated her as if she were Andelain. It made every horrifying memory of her life incandescent before her: Nassic’s murder and Gibbon’s touch; the lurker of the Sarangrave; Kasreyn’s malign cunning; Covenant bleeding irretrievably to death in the woods behind Haven Farm. It poured acid into every wound which futility had ever inflicted upon her.

And it argued with her. She could not choose: she had already made the only choice that signified. When she had accepted the legacy of her father and stuffed it in handsful of tissue down her mother’s throat, she had declared her crucial allegiance, her definitive passion—a passion in no way different than her possessor’s. Despite had made her what she was, a lost woman as ravaged as the Land, and the Sunbane dawning in her now would never set.

But the sheer intensity of her hurt made her lucid. She saw the Raver’s lie. Only once had she tried to master death by destroying life. After that, all her striving had gone to heal those who suffered. Though she had been haunted and afraid, she had not been cruel. Suicide and murder were not the whole story. When the old man on Haven Farm had collapsed in front of her, the stink issuing from his mouth had sickened her like the foretaste of Despite; but she had willingly breathed and breathed that fetor in her efforts to save him.

She was evil. Her visceral response to the dark might of her tormentors gave her the stature of a Raver. And yet her instinct for healing falsified
moksha
.

That contradiction no longer paralyzed her. She accepted it.

It gave her the power to choose.

Squalling like a butchered thing, the Raver fought her. But she had entered at last into her true estate.
Moksha
Jehannum was afraid of her. Her will rose up in its shackles. Tested the iron of her possessor’s malice. Took hold of the chains.

And broke free.

Lord Foul had not yet grasped the ring. There was still an instant of space between his hand and Covenant’s. Rocklight yowled desire and triumph from the walls.

Linden did not move. She had no time to think of that. Motionless as if she were still frozen, she hurled herself forward. With her Land-born health-sense, she sprang into Covenant, scrambled toward the fiery potential of his wedding band.

Empowered by wild magic, she drew back his hand.

At that, rage swelled Lord Foul: he sent out a flood of fury which should have washed her away. But she ignored him. She was sure that he would not touch her now—not now, while she held possession of Covenant and the ring. She was suddenly strong enough to turn her back upon the Despiser himself. The necessity of freedom protected her. The choice of surrender or defiance was hers to make.

In the silent privacy of his mind, she faced the man she loved and took all his burdens upon herself.

He could not resist her. Once before, he had beaten back her efforts to control him. But now he had no defense. With his own strength, she mastered him as completely as ever the
Elohim
or Kasreyn had mastered him.

No evil! she breathed at him. Not this time. Her previous attempt to possess him had been wrong, inexcusable. She had read in him his intent to risk the Banefire, and she had reacted as if he meant to commit suicide. Instinctively she had tried to stop him. But then his life and the risk had been his alone. She had had no right to interfere.

Now, however, he surrendered the Earth as well as himself. He was not simply risking his own life: he was submitting all life to certain destruction. Therefore she had the responsibility to intervene. The responsibility and the right.

The
right
! she cried. But he made no answer. Her will occupied him completely.

She seemed to meet him where they had met once before, when she had surrendered herself to save him from the silence of the
Elohim
—in a field of flowers, under an inviolate sky, a clean sun. But now she recognized that field as one of the rich leas of Andelain, bordered by hills and woods. And he was no longer young. He stood before her exactly as he stood before the Despiser—altogether untouchable, his face misshaped by bruises he did not deserve, his body nearly prostrate with exhaustion, the old knife-cut in the center of his shirt gaping. His eyes were fixed on her, and they flamed hot midnight, the final extremity of the heavens.

No smile in the world could have softened his gaze.

He stood there as if he were waiting for her to search him, catechize him, learn the truth. But she failed to close the gulf between them. She ran and ran toward him, aching to fling her arms around him at last; but the field lay as still as the sunlight, and his eyes shone darkness at her, and all her strength brought her no nearer. She knew that if she reached him she would understand—that the vision or despair which he had found in the Banefire would be communicated to her—that his certainty would become comprehensible. He was certain, as sure as white gold. But she could not approach him. He met her appeal with the indefeasible
Don’t touch me
of leprosy or ascension, apotheosis.

His refusal made grief well up in her like the wail of a lost child.

Then she wanted to turn and hurl all her newfound force at the Despiser, wanted to call up white fire and scourge him from the face of the Earth.
Some infections have to be cut out. Why else do you have all that power?
She could do it. He had hurt Covenant so deeply that she was no longer able to reach him. In her anguish she was greedy for fire. She possessed him heart and limb—and his left hand held the ring, gripped it on the brink of detonation. She was capable of that. If no other hope remained, and she could not touch her love, then let it be she who fought, she who ravaged, she who ruled. Let Lord Foul learn the nature of what he had forged!

Yet Covenant’s gaze held her as if she were sobbing, too weak to do anything except weep. He said nothing, offered her nothing. But the purity of his regard did not let her turn. How could he speak, do anything other than repudiate her? She had taken his will from him—had dehumanized him as thoroughly as if she were a Raver and relished his helplessness. And yet he remained human and desirable and stubborn, as dear as life to her. Perhaps he was mad. But was she not something worse?