White Gold Wielder (72 page)

Because Sunder and Hollian were there.

In their human way, they contained as much Earthpower as the Hills; and they had fought. Linden saw how they had fought. The loveliness of what they were—and of what they served—was lambent about them. Already it had begun to regain the lost region.

Yes, she breathed to herself. Yes.

Across the wide leagues, she spoke a word to them that they would understand. Then she withdrew.

She feared the dismissal would take her while she was still too far from her body to bear the strain. As keen as a gale, the wind reached toward her. Too weary even to smile at what she had accomplished, she went wanly back through the rock toward Kiril Threndor and dissolution.

When she gained the cave, she saw in the faces of the Giants that she had already faded beyond their perceptions. Grief twisted Pitchwife’s visage: the First’s eyes streamed. They had no way of knowing what had happened—and would not know it until they found their way out of the Wightwarrens to gaze upon the free Land. But Linden could not bear to leave them hurt. They had given her too much. With her last power, she reached out and placed a silent touch of victory in their minds. It was the only gift she had left.

But it, too, was enough. The First started in wonder: unexpected gladness softened her face. And Pitchwife threw back his head to crow like a clean dawn, “Linden Avery! Have I not said that you are well Chosen?”

The long wind pulled through Linden. In moments, she would lose the Giants forever. Yet she clung to them. Somehow she lasted long enough to see the First pick up the Staff of Law.

Linden still held the ring; but at the last moment she must have dropped the Staff beside the dais. The First lifted it like a promise. “This must not fall to ill hands,” she murmured. Her voice was as solid as granite: it nearly surpassed Linden’s hearing. “I will ward it in the name of the future which Earthfriend and Chosen have procured with their lives. If Sunder or Hollian yet live, they will have need of it.”

Pitchwife laughed and cried and kissed her. Then he bent, lifted Covenant into his arms. His back. was strong and straight. Together he and the First left Kiril Threndor. She strode like a Swordmain, ready for the world. But he moved at her side with a gay hop and caper, as if he were dancing.

There Linden let go. The mountain towered over her, as imponderable as the gaps between the stars. It was heavier than sorrow, greater than loss. Nothing would ever heal what it had endured. She was only mortal; but Mount Thunder’s grief would go on without let or surcease, unambergrised for all time.

Then the wind took her, and she felt herself go out.

Out into the dark.

But when she was fully in the grip of the wind, she no longer felt its force. It reft her from the Land as if she were mist; but like mist she could not be hurt now. She had been battered numb. When the numbness passed, her pain would find its voice again and cry out. But that prospect had lost its power to frighten her. Pain was only the other side of love; and she did not regret it.

Yet for the present she was quiet, and the wind bore her gently across the illimitable dark. Her percipience was already gone, lost like the Land: she had no way to measure the spans of loneliness she traversed. But the ring—Covenant’s ring,
her
ring—lay in her hand, and she held it for comfort.

And while she was swept through the midnight between worlds, she remembered music—little snatches of a song Pitchwife had once sung. For a time, they were only snatches. Then their ache brought them together.

The song. made her think of her father.

He came back to her like Pitchwife’s voice, sprawling there in the old rocker while his last life bled away—driven to self-murder by the possession of Despite. His loathing of himself had grown so great that it had become a loathing of life. It had been like her mother’s religion, only able to prove itself true by imposing itself upon the people around it. But it had been false; and she thought of him now with regret and pity which she had never before been able to afford. He had been wrong about her: she had loved him dearly. She had loved both her parents, although she had been badly misled by her own bitterness.

In a curious way, that recognition made her ready. She was not startled or bereft when Covenant spoke to her out of the void.

“Thank you,” he said gruffly, husky with emotion. “There aren’t enough words for it anywhere. But thanks.”

The sound of his voice made tears stream down her face. They stung like sorrow on her cheeks. But she welcomed them and him.

“I know it’s been terrible,” he went on. “Are you all right?”

She nodded along the wind that seemed to rush without motion around her as if it had no meaning except loss. I think so. Maybe. It doesn’t matter. She only wanted to hear his voice while the chance lasted. She knew it would not last long. To make him speak again, she said the first words that occurred to her.

“You were wonderful. But how did you do it? I don’t have any idea how you did it.”

In response, he sighed—an exhalation of weariness and remembered pain, not of rue. “I don’t think I did it at all. All I did was
want
. The rest of it—

“Caer-Caveral made it possible. Hile Troy.” An old longing suffused his tone. “That was the ‘necessity’ he talked about. Why he had to give his life. It was the only way to open that particular door. So that Hollian could be brought back. And so that I wouldn’t be like the rest of the Dead—unable to act. He broke the Law that would’ve kept me from opposing Foul. Otherwise I would’ve been just a spectator.

“And Foul didn’t understand. Maybe be was too far gone. Or maybe he just refused to believe it. But he tried to ignore the paradox. The paradox of white gold. And the paradox of himself. He wanted the white gold—the ring. But I’m the white gold too. He couldn’t change that by killing me. When he hit me with my own fire, he did the one thing I couldn’t do for myself. He burned the venom away. After that, I was free.”

He paused for a moment, turned inward, “I didn’t know what was going to happen. I was just terrified that he would let me live until after he attacked the Arch.” Dimly she remembered the way Covenant had jibed at Lord Foul as if he were asking for death.

“We aren’t enemies, no matter what he says. He and I are one. But he doesn’t seem to know that. Or maybe he hates it too much to admit it. Evil can’t exist unless the capacity to stand against it also exists. And you and I are the Land—in a manner of speaking, anyway. He’s just one side of us. That’s his paradox. He’s one side of us. We’re one side of him. When he killed me, he was really trying to kill the other half of himself. He just made me stronger. As long as I accepted him—or accepted myself, my own power, didn’t try to do to him what he wanted to do to me—he couldn’t get past me.”

There he fell silent. But she had not been listening to him with any urgency. She had her own answers, and they sufficed. She listened chiefly to the sound of his voice, cared only that he was with her still. When he stopped, she groped for another question. After a moment, she asked him how the First and Pitchwife had been able to escape the Cavewights.

At that, a note like a chuckle gleamed along the wind. “Ah, that.” His humor was tinged with grimness; but she treasured it because she had never heard him come so close to laughter. “That I’ll take credit for.

“Foul gave me so much power. And it made me crazy to stand there and not be able to touch you. I had to do something. Foul knew what the Cavewights were doing all along. He let them do it to put more pressure on us. So I made something rise out of the Wightbarrow. I don’t know what it was—it didn’t last long. But while the Cavewights were bowing, the First and Pitchwife had a chance to get away. Then I showed them how to reach you.”

She liked his voice. Perhaps guilt as well as venom had been burned out of it. They shared a moment of companionship. Thinking about what he had done for her, she almost forgot that she would never see him alive again.

But then some visceral instinct warned her that the darkness was shifting—that her time with him was almost over. She made an effort to articulate her appreciation.

“You gave me what I needed. I should be thanking you. For all of it. Even the parts that hurt. I’ve never been given so many gifts. I just wish—”

Shifting and growing lighter. On all sides, the void modulated toward definition. She knew where she was going, what she would find when she got there; and the thought of it brought all her hurts and weaknesses together into one lorn outcry. Yet that cry went unuttered back into the dark. In mute surprise, she realized that the future was something she would be able to bear—

Just wish I didn’t have to lose you.

Oh, Covenant!

For the last time, she lifted her voice toward him, spoke to him as if she were a woman of the Land:

“Farewell, beloved.”

His response came softly, receding along the wind. “There’s no need for that. I’m part of you now. You’ll always remember.”

At the edge of her heart, he stopped. She was barely able to hear him.

“I’ll be with you as long as you live.”

Then he was gone. Slowly the gulf became stone against her face.

Light swelled beyond her eyelids. She knew before she raised her head that she had come back to herself in the ordinary dawn of a new day.

The air was cool. She smelled dew and springtime and cold ash and budding trees. And blood that was already dry.

For a long moment, she lay still and let the translation complete itself. Then she levered her arms under her.

At once, a forgotten pain labored in the bones behind her left ear. She groaned involuntarily, slumped again to the stone.

She would have been willing to lie still while she persuaded herself that the hurt did not matter. She was in no hurry to look at her surroundings. But as she slumped, unexpected hands came to her shoulders. They were not strong in the way she had learned to measure strength; but they gripped her with enough determination to lift her to her knees. “Linden,” a man’s care-aged voice breathed. “Thank God.”

Her eyes were slow to focus: her sight seemed to come back from a great distance. She was conscious of the dawn, the blurred gray stone, the barren hollow set like a bowl of death into the heart of the green woods. But gradually she made out Covenant’s form. He was stretched on the rock nearby, within the painted triangle of blood. The light stroked his dear face like a touch of annunciation.

From the center of his chest jutted the knife which had made everything else necessary.

The man holding her repeated her name. “I’m so sorry,” he murmured. “I never should’ve gotten you into this. We shouldn’t have let him keep her. But we didn’t know he was in this much danger.”

Slowly she turned her head and met the alarmed and wearied gaze of Dr. Berenford.

His eyes seemed to wince in their sockets, making the heavy pouches under them quiver. His old moustache drooped over his mouth. The characteristic wry dyspepsia of his tone was gone: it failed him here. Almost fearfully, he asked her the same question Covenant had asked. “Are you all right?”

She nodded as well as the pain in her skull allowed. Her voice scraped like rust in her throat. “They killed him.” But no words were adequate to her grief.

“I know.” He urged her into a sitting position. Then he turned away to snap open his medical bag. A moment later, she smelled the pungence of antiseptic. With reassuring gentleness, he parted her hair, probed her injury, began to cleanse the wound. But he did not stop talking.

“Mrs. Jason and her three kids came to my house. You probably saw her outside the courthouse the first day you were here. Carrying a sign that said, ‘Repent.’ She’s one of those people who thinks doctors and writers just naturally go to hell. But this time she needed me. Got me out of bed a few hours ago. All four of them—” He swallowed convulsively. “Their right hands were terribly burned. Even the kids.”

He finished tending her hurt, but did not move to face her. For a while, she stared sightlessly at the dead ash of the bonfire. But then her gaze returned to Covenant. He lay there in his worn T-shirt and old jeans as if no cerements in all the world could give his death dignity. His features were frozen in fear and pain—and in a kind of intensity that looked like hope. If Dr. Berenford had not been with her. she would have taken Covenant into her arms for solace. He deserved better than to lie so untended.

“At first she wouldn’t talk to me,” the older man went on. “But while I drove them to the hospital, she broke down. Somewhere inside her, she had enough decency left to be horrified. Her kids were wailing, and she couldn’t bear it. I guess none of them knew what they were doing. They thought God had finally recognized their righteousness. They all had the same vision, and they just obeyed it. They whipped themselves into a tizzy killing a horse to get the blood they used to mark his house. They weren’t sane anymore.

“Why they picked on him, I don’t know.” His voice shook. “Maybe because he wrote ‘unChristian’ books. She kept talking about ‘the maker of desecration.’ When he was forced to offer himself for sacrifice, the world would be purged of sin. Retribution and apocalypse. And Joan was his victim. She couldn’t be rescued any other way.” His bitterness mounted. “What a wonderful idea. How could they resist it? They thought they were saving the world when they put their hands in that fire.