The Illearth War

Twenty One: Lena's Daughter

TROY had called Thomas Covenant's Unbelief a bluff. But Covenant was not playing a mental game. He was a leper. He was fighting for his life.

Unbelief was his only defence against the Land, his only way to control the intensity, the potential suicide, of his response to the Land. He felt that he had lost every other form of self-protection. And without self protection he would end up like the old man he had met in the leprosarium-crippled and fetid beyond all endurance. Even madness would be preferable. If he went mad, he would at least be insulated from knowing what was happening to him, blind and deaf and numb to the vulturine disease that gnawed his flesh.

Yet as he rode westward away from Revelwood with High Lord Elena, Amok, and the two Bloodguard, in quest of Kevin Landwaster's Seventh Ward, he knew that he was changing. By fits and starts, his ground shifted under him; some potent, subtle Earthpower altered his personal terrain. Unstable footing shrugged him toward a precipice. And he felt helpless to do anything about it.

The most threatening aspect of his immediate situation was Elena. Her nameless inner force, her ancestry, and her strange irrefusability both disturbed and attracted him. As they left the Valley of Two Rivers, he was already cursing himself for accepting her invitation. And yet she had the power to sway him. She tangled his emotions, and pulled unexpected strands of assent out of the knot.

This was not like his other acquiescences. When Lord Mhoram had asked him to go with the Warward, he had agreed because he completely lacked alternatives. He urgently needed to keep moving, keep searching for an escape. No similar reasoning vindicated him when the High Lord had asked him to accompany her. He felt that he was riding away from the crux of his dilemma, the battle against Lord Foul — evading it like a coward. But in the moment of decision he had not even considered refusing. And he sensed that she could draw him farther. Hopelessly, without one jot or tittle of belief to his name, he could be made to follow her, even if she went to attack the Despiser himself. Her beauty, her physical presence, her treatment of him, ate away portions of his armour, exposing his vulnerable flesh.

Travelling through the crisp autumn of Trothgard, he watched her alertly, timorously.

High and proud on the back of Myrha, her Ranyhyn, she looked like a crowned vestal, somehow both powerful and fragile-as if she could have shattered his bones with a glance, and yet would have fallen from her seat at the touch of a single hurled handful of mud. She daunted him.

When Amok appeared beside her as if concretized abruptly out of blank air, she turned to speak with him. They exchanged greetings, and bantered pleasantly like old friends while Revelwood fell into the distance behind them. Amok's reticence on the subject of his Ward did not prevent him from gay prolixity in other matters. Soon he was singing and talking happily as if his sole function were to entertain the High Lord.

As Amok whiled away the morning, Covenant gazed over the countryside around him.

The party of the quest rode easily up out of the lowlands of Trothgard. They travelled a few points south of westward, roughly paralleling the course of the Rill River toward the Westron Mountains. The western edge of Trothgard, still sixty or sixty-five leagues away, was at least three thousand feet higher than the Valley of Two Rivers, and the whole region slowly climbed toward the mountains. Already the High Lord's party moved into the gradual uprise. Covenant could feel their relaxed ascent as they rode through woodlands anademed in autumn, ablaze with orange, yellow, gold, red leaf-flames, and over lush grassy hillsides, where the scars of Stricken Stone's ancient wars had been effaced by thick heather and timothy like healthy new flesh over the wounds, green with healing.

He was barely able to sense the last hints of Trothgard's convalescence. Under the mantling growth of grass and trees, all the injuries of Kevin's last war had not been undone. From time to time, the riders passed near festering barren patches which still refused all repair, and some of the hills seemed to lie awkwardly, like broken bones imperfectly set. But the Lords had laboured to good effect. The air of Trothgard was tangy, animate, vital. Very few of the trees showed that their roots ran down into once-desecrated soil. The new Council of Lords had found a worthy way to spend their lives.

Because of what it had suffered, Trothgard touched Covenant's heart. He found that he liked it, trusted it. At times as the day passed into afternoon, he wished that he was not going anywhere. He wanted to roam Trothgard destinationless, preferably alone-without any thought of Wards or rings or wars. He would have welcomed the rest.

Amok seemed a fit guide for such sojourns. The bearer of the Seventh Ward moved with a sprightly, boyish stride which disguised the fact that the pace he set was not a lazy one. And his good spirits bubbled irrepressibly. He sang long songs which he claimed to have learned from the faery Elohim- songs so alien that Covenant could distinguish neither words nor sentences, and yet so curiously suggestive, so like moonlight in a forest, that they half entranced him. And Amok told intimate tales of the stars and heavens, describing merrily the sky dance as if he had pranced in it himself. His happy voice complemented the clear, keen evening air and the sunset conflagration of the trees, interwove his listeners like an incantation, a mesmerism.

Yet in the twilight of Trothgard, he disappeared suddenly, gestured himself out of visibility, leaving the High Lords' party alone.

Covenant was startled out of his reverie. “Where-?”

“Amok will return,” answered Elena. In the gloaming, he could not tell if she were looking at him or through him or into him or in spite of him. “He has only left us for the night. Come, ur-Lord,” she said as she dropped lightly down from Myrha's back. “Let us rest.”

Covenant followed her example, released his mount to Bannor's care. Myrha and the other two Ranyhyn galloped away, stretching their legs after a day's walking. Then Morin went to the Rill for water while Elena began to make camp. She produced a small urn of graveling, and' used the fire-stones to cook a frugal meal for herself and Covenant. Her face followed the motion of her hands, but her vision's strange otherness was far distant, as if in the earthy light she read of events on the opposite edge of the Land.

Covenant watched her; in the performance of even the simplest chores she fascinated him. But as he studied her lithe form, her sure movements, her bifurcated gaze, he was trying to regain a grip on himself, trying to recover some sense of where he stood with her. She was a mystery to him. Out of all the strong and knowledgeable people of the Land, she had chosen him to accompany her. He had raped her mother-and still she had chosen him. In Glimmermere she had kissed-The memory made his heart hurt. She had chosen him. But not out of anger or desire for retribution-not for any reason that Trell would have approved. He could see in her smiles, hear in her voice, feel in her ambience that she intended him no harm. Then why? From what secret forgetfulness or passion did her desire for his company spring? He needed to know. And yet he was half afraid of the answer.

After supper, when he sat drinking his ration of springwine across the pot of graveling from Elena, he mustered his courage to question her. Both Bloodguard had withdrawn from the campsite, and he was relieved that he did not have to contend with them. Rubbing his fingers through his beard, remembering the peril of physical sensations, he began by asking her if she had learned anything from Amok.

She shook her head unconcernedly, and her hair haloed her head in the graveling light. “We are surely several days from the location of the Seventh Ward. There will be time enough for the questioning of Amok.”

He accepted this, but it did not meet his need. Tightening his hold on himself, he asked her why she had chosen him.

She gazed at him or through him for several moments before she replied. “Thomas Covenant, you know that I did not choose you. No Lord of Revelstone chose you. Drool Rockworm performed your first summoning, and he was guided by the Despiser. In that way, we are your victims, just as you are his. It may be as Lord Mhoram believes-perhaps the Land's Creator also chose. Or perhaps the dead Lords-perhaps High Lord Kevin himself wields some influence from beyond his lost grave. But I made no choice.” Then her tone changed, and she went on, “Yet had I chosen—

Covenant interrupted her. “That isn't what I meant. I know why this is happening to me. It's because I'm a leper. A normal person would just laugh-No, what I meant is, why did you ask me to come with you looking for the Seventh Ward? Surely there were other people you could have chosen.”

Gently, she returned, “I do not understand this disease which causes you to be a-leper. You describe a world in which the innocent are tormented. Why are such things done? Why are they permitted?”

“Things aren't so different here. Or what did you think it was that happened to Kevin? But you're changing the subject. I want to know why you picked me.” He winced at the memory of Troy's chagrin when the High Lord had announced her choice.

“Very well, ur-Lord,” she said with a tone of reluctance. “If this question must be answered, I will answer it. There are many reasons for my choice. Will you hear them?"

“Go ahead.”

“Ah, Unbeliever. At times I think that Warmark Troy is not so blind. The truth-you evade the truth. But I will give you my reasons. First, I prepare for the chances of the future. If at the last you should come to desire the use of your white gold, with the Staff of Law I am better able to aid you than any other. I do not know the wild magic's secret-but there is no more discerning tool than the Staff. And if at the last you should turn against the Land, with the Staff I will be able to resist you. We possess nothing else which can hope to stand against the power of white gold.

“But I seek other goals also. You are no warrior-the Warward will meet great peril, where only power and skill in combat may hope to preserve life. I do not wish to risk your death. You must be given time to find your own reply to yourself. And for myself I seek companionship. Neither Warmark Troy nor Lord Mhoram can be spared from the war. Do you desire more explanation?”

He sensed the incompleteness of her response, and forced himself to pursue it despite his fear. With a grimace of distaste for the pervasive irrectitude of his conduct in the Land, he said deliberately, “Companionship? After all I've done. You're remarkably tolerant.”

“I am not tolerant. I do not make choices without consulting my own heart.”

For a moment, he faced squarely the implications of what she said. It was what he had both wanted and feared to hear. But then a complex unwillingness, composed of sympathy and dread and self-judgment, deflected him. It made his voice rough as he said, “You're breaking Trell's heart. And your mother's.”

Her face stiffened. “Do you accuse me of Trell's pain?”

“I don't know. He would be following us if he had any hope left. Now he knows for sure that you're not even thinking about punishing me.”

He stopped, but the sight of the pain he had given her made him speak again, rush to answer replies, counteraccusations, that she had not uttered. “As for your mother-I've got no right to talk. I don't mean about what I did to her. That's something I can at least understand. I was in such-penury- and she seemed so rich.

“No, I' mean about the Ranyhyn-those Ranyhyn that went to Mithil Stonedown every year. I made a bargain with them. I was trying to find some solution some way to keep myself from going completely insane. And they hated me. They were just like the Land-they were big and powerful and superior and they loathed me.” He rasped that word loathed, as if he were echoing, Leper outcast unclean! "But they reared to me-a hundred of them. They were driven-

“So I made a bargain with them. I promised that I wouldn't ride-wouldn't force one of them to carry me. And I made them promise-I was trying to find some way to keep all that size and power and health and fidelity from driving me crazy. I made them promise to answer if I ever called them. And I made them promise to visit your mother.”

“Their promise remains.” She said this as if it gave her a deep pride.

He sighed. “That's what Rue said. But that's not the point. Do you see? I was trying to give her something, make it up to her somehow. But that doesn't work. When you've hurt someone that badly, you can't go around giving them gifts. That's arrogant and cruel.” His mouth twisted at the bitter taste of what he had done. "I was really just trying to make myself feel better.

“Anyway, it didn't work. Foul can pervert anything. By the time I got to the end of the Quest for the Staff of Law, things were so bad that no bargain could have saved me.”

Abruptly, he ran out of words. He wanted to tell Elena that he did not accuse her, could not accuse her-and at the same time a part of him did accuse her.

That part of him felt that Lena's pain deserved more loyalty.

But the High Lord seemed to understand this. Though her elsewhere gaze did not touch him, she replied to his thought. “Thomas Covenant, you do not altogether comprehend Lena my mother. I am a woman-human like any other. And I have chosen you to be my companion on this quest. Surely my choice reveals my mother's heart as well as my own. I am her daughter. From birth I lived in her care, and she taught me. Unbeliever, she did not teach me any anger or bitterness toward you.”

“No!” Covenant breathed. “No.” No! Not her, too! A vision of blood darkened his sight-the blood on Lena's loins. He could not bear to think that she had forgiven him, she!

He turned away. He felt Elena watching him, felt her presence reaching toward him in an effort to draw him back. But he could not face her. He was afraid of the emotions that motivated her; he did not even name them to himself. He lay down in his blankets with his back to her until she banked the graveling for the night and settled herself to sleep.

The next morning, shortly after dawn, Morin and Bannor reappeared. They brought Myrha and Covenant's mount with them. He roused himself, and joined Elena in a meal while the Bloodguard packed their blankets. And soon after they had started westward again, Amok became visible at the High Lord's side.

Covenant was in no mood for any more of Amok's spellbinding. And he had made a decision during the night. There was a risk he had to take-a dangerous gesture that he hoped might help him recover some kind of integrity. Before the youth could begin, Covenant clenched himself to contain the sudden hammering of his heart, and asked Amok what he knew about white gold.

“Much and little, Bearer,” Amok answered with a laugh and a bow. “It is said that white gold articulates the wild magic which destroys peace. But who is able to describe peace?”

Covenant frowned. “You're playing word games. I asked you a straight question. What do you know about it?”

“Know, Bearer? That is a small word-it conceals the magnitude of its meaning. I have heard what I have been told, and have seen what my eyes have beheld, but only you bear the white gold. Do you call this knowledge?”

“Amok,” Elena came to Covenant's aid, “is white gold in some way interwoven with the Seventh Ward? Is white gold the subject or key of that Ward?”

“Ah, High Lord, all things are interwoven.” The youth seemed to relish his ability to dodge questions. “The Seventh Ward may ignore white gold, and the master of white gold may have no use for the Seventh Ward-yet both are power, forms and faces of the one Power of life. But the Bearer is not my master. He shadows but does not darken me. I respect that which he bears, but my purpose remains.”

Elena's response was firm. “Then there is no need to evade his questions. Speak of what you have heard and learned concerning white gold.”

“I speak after my fashion, High Lord. Bearer, I have heard much and learned little concerning white gold. It is the girding paradox of the arch of Time, the undisciplined restraint of the Earth's creation, the absent bone of the Earthpower, the rigidness of water and the flux of rock. It articulates the wild magic which destroys peace. It is spoken of softly by the Bhrathair, and named in awe by the Elohim, though they have never seen it. Great Kelenbhrabanal dreams of it in his grave, and grim Sandgorgons writhe in voiceless nightmare at the touch of its name. In his last days, High Lord Kevin yearned for it in vain. It is the abyss and the peak of destiny.”

Covenant sighed to himself. He had feared that he would receive this kind of answer. Now he would have to go further, push his question right to the edge of his dread. In vexation and anxiety he rasped, “That's enough-spare me. Just tell me how white gold-” For an instant he faltered. But the memory of Lena compelled him. “-how to use this bloody ring.”

“Ah, Bearer,” Amok laughed, “ask the Sunbirth Sea or Melenkurion Skyweir. Question the fires of Gorak Krembal, or the tinder heart of Garroting Deep. All the Earth knows. White gold is brought into use like any other power-through passion and mystery, the honest subterfuge of the heart.”

“Hellfire,” Covenant growled in an effort to disguise his relief. He did not like to admit to himself how glad he was to remain ignorant on this subject. But that ignorance was vital to his self-defence. As long as he did not know how to use the wild magic, he could not be blamed for the fate of the Land. In a secret and perfidious part of his heart, he had risked his question only because he trusted Amok to give him an unrevealing answer. Now he felt like a liar. Even his attempts at integrity were flawed. But his relief was greater than his self-distaste.

That relief enabled him to change the subject, attempt a normal conversation with the High Lord. He felt as awkward as a cripple; he had not conversed casually with another person since before the onset of his leprosy. But Elena responded willingly, even gladly; she welcomed his attention. Soon he no longer had to search for leading questions.

For some time, their talk floated on the ambience of Trothgard. As they climbed westward through the hills and woodlands and moors, the autumn air grew crisper. Birds roved the countryside in deft flits and soars. The cheerful sunlight stretched as if it might burst at any moment into sparkles and gleams. In it, the fall colours became dazzling. And the riders began to see more animals-rabbits and squirrels, plump badgers, occasional foxes. The whole atmosphere seemed to suit High Lord Elena. Gradually, Covenant came to understand this aspect of Lordship. Elena was at home in Trothgard. The healing of Kurash Plenethor became her.

In the course of his questions, she avoided only one subject-her childhood experiences with the Ranyhyn. Something about her young rides and initiations was too private to be treated under the open sky. But on other topics she replied without constraint. She allowed herself to be led into talk of her years in the Loresraat, of Revelwood and Trothgard, of Revelstone and Lordship and power. He sensed that she was helping him, allowing him, cooperating, and he was grateful. In time, he no longer felt maimed during the pauses in their conversation.

The next day passed similarly. But the day after that, this unthreatened mood eluded him. He lost his facility. His tongue grew stiff with remembered loneliness, and his beard itched irritably, like a reminder of peril. It's impossible, he thought. None of this is happening to me. Deliberately, driven by his illness, and by all the survival disciplines he had lost, he raised the question of High Lord Kevin.

“I am fascinated by him,” she said, and the core of stillness in her voice sounded oddly like the calm in the eye of a storm. “He was the highest of all Berek Heartthew's great line-the Lord most full of dominion in all the Land's known or legended history. His fidelity to the Land and the Earthpower knew neither taint nor flaw. His friendship with the Giants was a matter for a fine song. The Ranyhyn adored him, and the Bloodguard wove their Vow because of him. If he had a fault, it was in excessive trust-yet how can E trust be counted for blame? At the first, it was to his honour that the Despiser could gain Lordship from him-Lordship, and access to his heart. Was not Fangthane witnessed and approved by the orcrest and lomillialor tests of truth? Innocence is glorified by its vulnerability.

“And he was not blind. In the awful secret of his doubt, he refused the summons which would have taken him to his death in Treacher's Gorge. In his heart-wrung foresight or prophecy, he made decisions which preserved the Land's future. He prepared his Wards. He provided for the survival of the Giants and the Ranyhyn and the Bloodguard. He warned the people. And then with his own hand he destroyed

“Thomas Covenant, there are some who believe that the Ritual of Desecration expressed High Lord

Kevin's highest wisdom. They are few, but eloquent. The common understanding holds that Kevin strove to achieve that paradox of purity through destruction and failed, for he and all the works of the Lords were undone, yet the Despiser endured. But these few argue that the final despair or madness with which Kevin invoked the Ritual was a necessary sacrifice, a price to make possible ultimate victory. They argue that his preparations and then the Ritual forcing both health and ill to begin their work anew-were enacted to provide us with Fangthane's defeat. In this argument, Kevin foresaw the need which would compel the Despiser to summon white gold to the Land."

“He must have been sicker than I thought,” Covenant muttered. “Or maybe he just liked desecrations.”

“Neither, I think,” she replied tartly, sternly. “He was a brave and worthy man driven to extremity. Any mortal or unguarded heart may be brought to despair-for this reason we cling to the Oath of Peace. And for this same reason High Lord Kevin fascinates me. He avowed the Land, and defiled it-in the same breath affirmed and denounced.” Her voice rose on the inner wind of her emotion. "How great must have been his grief? And how great his power had he only survived that last consuming moment-if, after beholding the Desecration, and hearing the Despiser's glee, he had lived to strike one more blow!

“Thomas Covenant, I believe that there is immeasurable strength in the consummation of despair strength beyond all conceiving by an unholocausted soul. I believe that if High Lord Kevin could speak from beyond the grave, he would utter a word which would unmarrow the very bones of Lord Foul's Despite.”

“That's madness!” Covenant gasped thickly. Elena's gaze wavered on the edge of focus, and he could not bear to look at her. “Do you think that some existence after death is going to vindicate you after you've simply extirpated life from the Earth? That was exactly Kevin's mistake. I tell you, he is roasting in hell!”

“Perhaps,” she said softly. To his surprise, the storm implied in her voice was gone. “We will never possess such knowledge-and should not need it to live our lives. But I find a danger in Lord Mhoram's belief that the Earth's Creator has chosen you to defend the Land. It is in my heart that this does not account for you.

“However, I have thought at times that perhaps our dead live in your world. Perhaps High Lord Kevin now restlessly walks your Earth, searching a voice which may utter his word here.”

Covenant groaned; Elena's suggestion dismayed him. He heard the connection she drew between Kevin Landwaster and himself. And the implications of that kinship made his heart totter as if it were assailed by potent gusts of foreboding. As they rode onward, the new silence between them glistened like white eyes of fear.

This mood grew stronger through that day and the next. The magnitude of the issues at stake numbed Covenant; he did not have the hands to juggle them. He withdrew into silence as if it were a chrysalis, an armour for some special vulnerability or metamorphosis. An obscure impulse like a memory of his former days with Atiaran prompted him to drop away from Elena's side and ride behind her. At her back, he followed Amok into the upper reaches of Trothgard.

Then, on the sixth day, the thirteenth since he had left Revelstone, he came to himself again after a fashion. Scowling thunderously, he raised his head, and saw the Westron Mountains ranging above him. High Lord Elena's party was nearing the southwest corner of Trothgard, where the Rill River climbed up into the mountains; and already the crags and snows of the range filled the whole western sky. Trothgard lay unrolled behind him like the Lords' work exposed for review; it beamed in the sunlight as if it were confident of approbation. Covenant frowned at it still more darkly, and turned his attention elsewhere.

The riders moved near the rim of the canyon of the Rill. The low, incessant rush of its waters, unseen below the edge of the canyon, gave Trothgard a dimension of sound like a subliminal humming made by the mountains and hills. All the views had a new suggestiveness, a timbre of implication. It reminded Covenant that he was climbing into one of the high places of the Land-and he did not like high places. But he clenched his frown to anchor the involuntary reactions of his face, and returned to Elena's side. She gave him a smile which he could not return, and they rode on together toward the mountains.

Late that afternoon, they stopped, made camp beside a small pool near the edge of the canyon. Water came splashing out of the mountainside directly before them, and collected in a rocky basin before pouring over the rim toward the Rill. That pool could have served as a corner marker for Trothgard. Immediately south of it was the Rill's canyon; on the west, the mountains seemed to spring abruptly out of the ground, like a frozen instant of ambuscade; and Kurash Plenethor lay draped northeastward across the descending terrain. The aggressive imminence of the mountains contrasted vividly with the quiet panoply of Trothgard-and that contrast, multiplied by the lambent sound of the unseen Rill, gave the whole setting a look of surprise, an aspect or impression of suddenness. The atmosphere around the pool carried an almost tangible sense of boundary.

Covenant did not like it. The air contained too much crepuscular lurking. It made him feel exposed. And the riders were not forced to stop there; enough daylight remained for more travelling. But the High Lord had decided to camp beside the pool. She dismissed Amok, sent the two Bloodguard away with the Ranyhyn and Covenant's horse, then set her pot of graveling on a flat rock near the pool, and asked Covenant to leave her alone so that she could bathe.

Snorting as if the very air vexed him, he stalked off into the lee of a boulder where he was out of sight of the pool. He sat with his back to the stone, hugged his knees, and gazed down over Trothgard. He found the woodland hills particularly attractive as the mountain shadow began to fall across them. The peaks seemed to exude an austere dimness which by slow degrees submerged Trothgard's lustre. Through simple size and grandeur, they exercised precedence. But he preferred Trothgard. It was lower and more human.

Then the High Lord interrupted his reverie. She had left her robe and the Staff of Law on the grass by her graveling. Wrapped only in a blanket, and drying her hair with one corner of it, she came to join him. Though the blanket hung about her thickly, revealing even less of her supple figure than did her robe, her presence felt more urgent than ever. The simple movement of her limbs as she seated herself at his side exerted an unsettling influence over him. She demanded responses. He found that his chest hurt again, as it had at Glimmermere.

Striving to defend himself against an impossible tenderness, he flung away from the boulder, walked rapidly toward the pool. The itching of his beard reminded him that he also seeded a bath. The High Lord remained out of sight; Bannor and Morin were nowhere around. He dropped his clothes by the graveling pot, and went to the pool.

The water was as cold as snow, but he thrust himself into it like a man exacting penance, and began to scrub at his flesh as if it were stained. He attacked his scalp and cheeks until his fingertips tingled, then submerged himself until his lungs burned. But when he pulled himself out of the water and went to the graveling for warmth, he found that he had only aggravated his difficulties. He felt whetted, more voracious, but no cleaner.

He could not understand Elena's power over him, could not control his response. She was an illusion, a figment; he should not be so attracted to her. And she should not be so willing to attract him. He was already responsible for her; his one potent act in the Land had doomed him to that. How could she not blame him?

Moving with an intemperate jerkiness, he dried himself on one of the blankets, then draped it by the pot to dry, and began to dress. He put on his clothes fiercely, as if he were girding for battle-laced and hauled and zipped and buckled himself into his sturdy boots, his T-shirt, his tough, protective jeans. He checked to be sure that he still carried his penknife and Hearthrall Tohrm's orcrest in his pockets.

When he was properly caparisoned, he went back through the twilight toward the High Lord. He stamped his feet to warn her of his approach, but the grass absorbed his obscure vehemence, and he made no more noise than an indignant spectre.

He found her standing a short distance downhill from the boulder. She was gazing out over Trothgard with her arms folded across her chest, and did not turn toward him as he drew near. For a time, he stood two steps behind her. The sky was still too sun-pale for stars, but Trothgard lay under the premature gloaming of the mountains. In the twilight, the face of the Lords' promise to the Land was veiled and dark.

Covenant twisted his ring, wound it on his finger as if he were tightening it to the pitch of some outbreak. Water from his wet hair dripped into his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was harsh with a frustration that he could neither relieve nor repress.

“Hellfire, Elena! I'm your father!”

She gave no sign that she had heard him, but after a moment she said in a low, musing tone, "Triock son of Thuler would believe that you have been honoured. He would not utter it kindly-but his heart would speak those words, or hold that thought. Had you not been summoned to the Land, he might have wed Lena my mother. And he would not have taken himself to the Loresraat, for he had no yearning for knowledge-the stewardship of Stonedownor life would have sufficed for him. But had he and Lena my mother borne a child who grew to become High Lord of the Council of Revelstone, he would have felt honoured-both elevated and humbled by his part in his daughter.

“Hear me, Thomas Covenant. Triock Thuler-son of Mithil Stonedown is my true father-the parent of my heart, though he is not the sire of my blood. Lena my mother did not wed him, though he begged her to share her life with him. She desired no other sharing-the life of your child satisfied her. But though she would not share her life, he shared his. He provided for her and for me. He took the place of a son with Trell Lena's father and Atiaran her mother.

“Ah, he was a dour parent. His heart's love ran in broken channels-yearning and grief and, yes, rage against you were diminishless for him, finding new paths when the old were turned or dammed. But he gave to Lena my mother and to me all a father's tenderness and devotion. Judge of him by me, Thomas Covenant. When dreaming of you took Lena's thoughts from me-when Atiaran lost in torment her capacity to care for me, and called to herself all Trell her husband's attention-then Triock son of Thuler stood beside me. He is my father.”

Covenant tried to efface his emotions with acid. “He should have killed me when he had the chance.”

She went on as if she had not heard him. “He shielded my heart from unjust demands. He taught me that the anguishes and furies of my parents and their parents need not wrack or enrage me-that I was neither the cause nor the cure of their pain. He taught me that my life is my own-that I could share in the care and consolation of wounds without sharing the wounds, without striving to be the master of lives other than my own. He taught me this-he who gave his own life to Lena my mother.

“He abhors you, Thomas Covenant. And yet without him as my father I also would abhor you.”

“Are you through?” Covenant grated through the clench of his teeth. “How much more do you think I can stand?”

She did not answer aloud. Instead, she turned toward him. Tears streaked her cheeks. She was silhouetted against the darkening vista of Trothgard, as she stepped up to him, slipped her arms about his neck, and kissed him.

He gasped, and her breath was snatched into his lungs. He was stunned. A black mist filled his sight as her lips caressed his.

Then for a moment he lost control. He repulsed her as if her breath carried infection. Crying, “Bastard!” he swung, backhanded her face with all his force.

The blow staggered her.

He pounced after her. His fingers clawed her blanket, tore it from her shoulders.

But his violence did not daunt her. She caught her balance, did not flinch or recoil. She made no effort to cover herself. With her head high, she held herself erect and calm; naked, she stood before him as if she were invulnerable.

It was Covenant who flinched. He quailed away from her as if she appalled him. “Haven't I committed enough crimes?” he panted hoarsely. “Aren't you satisfied?”

Her answer seemed to spring clean and clear out of the strange otherness of her gaze. “You cannot ravish me, Thomas Covenant. There is no crime here. I am willing. I have chosen you.”

“Don't!” he groaned. “Don't say that!” He flung his arms about his chest as if to conceal a hole in his armour. “You're just trying to give me gifts again. You're trying to bribe me.”

“No. I have chosen you. I wish to share life with you.”

“Don't!” he repeated. “You don't know what you're doing. Don't you understand how desperately I–I-?”

But he could not say the words, need you. He choked on them. He wanted her, wanted what she offered him more than anything. But he could not say it. A passion more fundamental than desire restrained him.

She made no move toward him, but her voice reached out. “How can my love harm you?”

“Hellfire!” In frustration, he spread his arms wide like a man baring an ugly secret. “I'm a leper! Don't you see that?” But he knew immediately that she did not see, could not see because she lacked the knowledge or the bitterness to perceive the thing he called leprosy. He hurried to try to explain before she stepped closer to him and he was lost. “Look. Look!” He pointed at his chest with one accusing finger. “Don't you understand what I'm afraid of? Don't you comprehend the danger here? I'm afraid I'll become another Kevin! First I'll start loving you, and then I'll learn how to use the wild magic or whatever, and then Foul will trap me into despair, and then I'll be destroyed. Everything will be destroyed. That's been his plan all along. Once I start loving you or the Land or anything, he can just sit back and laugh! Bloody hell, Elena! Don't you see it?”

Now she moved. When she was within arm's reach, she stopped, and stretched out her hand. With the tips of her fingers, she touched his forehead as if to smooth away the darkness there. “Ah, Thomas Covenant,” she breathed gently, “I cannot bear to see you frown so. Do not fear, beloved. You will not suffer Kevin Landwaster's fate. I will preserve you.”

At her touch, something within him broke. The pure tenderness of her gesture overcame him. But it was not his restraint which broke; it was his frustration. An answering tenderness washed through him. He could see her mother in her, and at the sight he suddenly perceived that it was not anger which made him violent toward her, not anger which so darkened his love, but rather grief and self-despite. The hurt he had done her mother was only a complex way of hurting himself-an expression of his leprosy. He did not have to repeat that act.

It was all impossible, everything was impossible, she did not even exist. But at that moment he did not care. She was his daughter. Tenderly, he stooped, retrieved her blanket, wrapped it around her shoulders. Tenderly, he held her face in his hands, touched her sweet face with the impossible aliveness of his fingers. He stroked away the salt pain of her tears with his thumbs, and kissed her forehead tenderly.

Twenty Two: Anundivian Yajna

THE next morning, they left Trothgard, and rode into the unfamiliar terrain of the mountains. Half a league into the range, Amok brought them to a bridge of native stone which spanned the narrowing river-gorge of the Rill. To ameliorate his own dread of heights as well as to steady his mount, Covenant led his horse across. The bridge was wide, and the Bloodguard bracketed him with their Ranyhyn; he had no difficulty.

From there, Amok guided the High Lord's party up into the recesses of the peaks.

Beyond the foothills, his path became abruptly demanding-precipitous, rugged, and slow. He was reduced to a more careful pace as he led the riders along valleys as littered and wracked as wrecks-up treacherous slides and scree falls which lay against cliffs and cola and coombs as if regurgitated out of the mountain gut-rock- down ledges which traversed weathered stone fronts like scars. But he left no doubt that he knew his way. Time and again he walked directly to the only possible exit from a closed valley, or found the only horse-worthy trail through a rockfall, or trotted without hesitation into a crevice which bypassed a blank peak. Through the rough-hewn bulk and jumble of the mountains, he led the High Lord with the obliqueness of a man threading an accustomed maze.

For the first day or so, his goal seemed to be simply to gain elevation. He took the riders scrambling upward until the cold appeared to pour down on them from the ice tips of the tallest peaks. Thinner air gave

Covenant visions of scaling some inaccessible and remorseless mountain, and he accepted a thick half-robe from Bannor with a shiver which was not caused by the chill alone.

But then Amok changed directions. As if he were finally satisfied by the icy air and the pitch of the mountain-scapes, he sought no more altitude. Instead, he began to follow the private amazement of his trail southward. Rather than plunging deeper into the Westron Mountains, he moved parallel to their eastern borders. By day, he guided his companions along his unmarked way, and at night he left them in sheltered glens and wombs and gorges, where there were unexpected patches of grass for the mounts, to deal as they saw fit with the exhilarating or cruel cold. He did not seem to feel the cold himself. With his thin apparel fluttering against his limbs, he strode ahead in unwearied cheerfulness, as if he ware impervious to fatigue and ice. Often he had to hold himself back so that the Ranyhyn and Covenant's mustang could keep pace with him.

The two Bloodguard were like him-unaffected by cold or altitude. But they were Haruchai, born to these mountains. Their nostrils distended at the vapoury breath of dawn or dusk. Their eyes roamed searchingly over the sunward crags, the valleys occasionally bedizened with azure terns, the hoary glaciers crouching in the highest cots, the snow-fed streams. Though they wore nothing but short robes, they never shivered or gasped at the cold. Their wide foreheads and flat cheeks and confident poise betrayed no heart upsurge, no visceral excitement. Yet there was something clear and passionate in their alacrity as they watched over Elena and Covenant and Amok.

Elena and Covenant were not so immune to the cold. Their susceptibility clung to them, made them eager for each new day's progress toward warmer southern air. But their blankets and extra robes were warm. The High Lord did not appear to suffer. And as long as she did not suffer, Covenant felt no pain. Discomfort he could ignore. He was more at peace than he had been for a long time.

Since they had left Trothgard-since he had made the discovery which enabled him to love her without despising himself-he had put everything else out of his mind and concentrated on his daughter. Lord Foul, the Warward, even this quest itself, were insubstantial to him. He watched Elena, listened to her, felt her presence at all times. When she was in the mood to talk, he questioned her readily, and when she was not he gave her silence. And in every mood he was grateful to her, poignantly moved by the offer she had made-the offer he had refused.

He could not help being conscious of the fact that she was not equally content. She had not made her offer lightly, and seemed unwilling to understand his refusal. But the sorrow of having given her pain only sharpened his attentiveness toward her. He concentrated on her as only a man deeply familiar with loneliness could. And she was not blind to this. After the first few days of their mountain trek, she again relaxed in his company, and her smiles expressed a frankness of affection which she had not permitted herself before. Then he felt that he was in harmony with her, and he travelled with her gladly. At times he chirruped to his horse as if he enjoyed riding it.

But in the days that followed, a change slowly came over her-a change that had nothing to do with him. As time passed-as they journeyed nearer to the secret location of the Seventh Ward-she became increasingly occupied by the purpose of her quest. She questioned Amok more often, interrogated him more tensely. At times, Covenant could see in the elsewhere stare of her eyes that she was thinking of the war-a duty from which she had turned aside-and there were occasional flashes of urgency in her voice as she strove to ask the questions that would unlock Amok's mysterious knowledge.

This was a burden that Covenant could not help her bear. He knew none of the crucial facts himself. The days passed; the moon expanded to its full, then declined toward its last quarter, but she made no progress. Finally, his desire to assist her in some way led him to speak to Bannor.

In a curious way, he felt unsafe with the Bloodguard-not physically, but emotionally. There was a tension of disparity between himself and Bannor. The Haruchai's stony gaze had the magisterial air of a man who did not deign to utter his judgment of his companions. And Covenant had other reasons to feel uncomfortable with Bannor. More than once, he had made Bannor bear the brunt of his own bootless outrage. But he had nowhere else to turn. He was entirely useless to Elena.

Since his days in Revelstone, he had been alert to a fine shade of discrepancy in the Bloodguard's attitude toward Amok-a discrepancy which had been verified but not explained in Revelwood. However, he did not know how to approach the subject. Extracting information from Bannor was difficult; the Bloodguard's habitual reserve baffled inquiry. And Covenant was determined to say nothing which might sound like an offense to Bannor's integrity. Bannor had already proved his fidelity in the Wightwarrens under Mount Thunder.

Covenant began by trying to find out why the Bloodguard had seen fit to send only Bannor and Morin to protect the High Lord on her quest. He was acutely aware of his infacility as he remarked, “I gather you don't think we're in any great danger on this trip.”

“Danger, ur-Lord?” The repressed lilt of Bannor's pronunciation seemed to imply that anyone protected by the Bloodguard did not need to think of danger.

“Danger,” Covenant repeated with a touch of his old asperity. “It's a common word these days”

Bannor considered for a moment, then said, “These are mountains. There is always danger.”

“Such as?”

“Rocks may fall. Storms may come. Tigers roam these low heights. Great eagles hunt here. Mountains” — Covenant seemed to hear a hint of satisfaction in Bannor's tone-“are perilous.”

“Then why-Bannor, I would really like to know why there are only two of your Bloodguard here.”

“Is there need for more?”

"If we're attacked by tigers, or whatever? Or what if there's an avalanche? Are two of you enough?"

“We know mountains,” Bannor replied flatly. “We suffice.”

This assertion was not one that Covenant could contradict. He made an effort to approach what he wanted to know in another way, though the attempt took him onto sensitive ground-terrain he would rather have avoided. "Bannor, I feel as if I'm slowly getting to know you Bloodguard. I can't claim that I understand-but I can at least recognize your devotion. I know what it looks like. Now I get the feeling that something is going on here-something- inconsistent. Something I don't recognize.

“Here we are climbing through the mountains, where anything could happen. We're following Amok who knows where, even though we've got next to no idea what he's doing, never mind why he's doing it. And you're satisfied that the High Lord is safe when she's only got two Bloodguard to protect her. Didn't you learn anything from Kevin?”

“We are the Bloodguard,” answered Bannor stolidly. “She is safe-as safe as may be.”

“Safe?” Covenant protested.

“A score or a hundredscore Bloodguard would not make her more safe.”

“I admire your confidence.”

Covenant winced at his own sarcasm, paused for a moment to reconsider his questions. Then he lowered his head as if he meant to batter Bannor's resistance down with his forehead, and said bluntly, “Do you trust Amok?”

“Trust him, ur-Lord?” Bannor's tone hinted that the question was inane in some way. “He has not led us into hazard. He has chosen a good way through the mountains. The High Lord elects to follow him. We do not ask for more.”

Still Covenant felt the lurking presence of something unexplained. “I tell you, it doesn't fit,” he rasped in irritation. "Listen. It's a little late in the day for these inconsistencies. I've sort of given up-they don't do me any good anymore. If it's all the same to you, I'd rather hear something that makes sense.

“Bannor, you-Bear with me. I can't help noticing it. First there was something I don't understand, something-out of pitch-about the way you Bloodguard reacted to Amok when he came to Revelstone. You-I don't know what it was. Anyway, at Revelwood you didn't exactly jump to help Troy when he caught Amok. And after that-only two Bloodguard! Bannor, it doesn't make sense.”

Bannor was unmoved. “She is the High Lord. She holds the Staff of Law. She is easily defended.”

That answer foiled Covenant. It did not satisfy him, but he could think of no way around it. He did not know what he was groping for. His intuition told him that his questions were significant, but he could not articulate or justify them in any utile way. And he reacted to Bannor's trenchant blankness as if it were some kind of touchstone, a paradoxically private and unavoidable criterion of rectitude. Bannor made him aware that there was something not altogether honest about his own accompaniment of the High Lord.

So he withdrew from Bannor, returned his attention to Elena. She had had no better luck with Amok, and her air of escape as she turned toward Covenant matched his. They rode on together, hiding their various anxieties behind light talk of mutual commiseration.

Then, during the eleventh evening of their sojourn in the mountains, she expressed an opinion to him. As if the guess were hazardous, she said, “Amok leads us to Melenkurion Skyweir. The Seventh Ward is hidden there.” And the next day-the eighteenth since they had left Revelwood, and the twenty-fifth since the War Council of the Lords-the rhythm of their trek was broken.

The day dawned cold and dull, as if the sunlight were clogged with grey cerements. A troubled smell shrouded the air. Torn fragments of wind flapped back and forth across the camp as Elena and Covenant ate their breakfast, and far away they could hear a flat, detonating sound like the retort of balked canvas on unlashed spars. Covenant predicted a storm. But the First Mark shook his head in flat denial, and Elena said, “This is not the weather of storms.” She glanced warily up at the peaks as she spoke. “There is pain in the air. The Earth is afflicted.”

“What's happening?” A burst of wind scattered Covenant's voice, and he had to repeat his question at a shout to make himself heard. “Is Foul going to hit us here?”

The wind shifted and lapsed; she was able to answer normally. “Some ill has been performed. The Earth has been assaulted. We feel its revulsion. But the distance is very great, and time has passed. I feel no peril directed toward us. Perhaps the Despiser does not know what we do.” In the next breath, her voice hardened. “But he has used the Illearth Stone. Smell the air! There has been malice at work in the Land”

Covenant began to sense what she meant. Whatever amassed these clouds and roiled this wind was not the impassive natural violence of a storm. The air seemed to carry inaudible shrieks and hints of rot, as if it were blowing through the aftermath of an atrocity. And on a subliminal level, almost indiscernible, the high bluff crags seemed to be shuddering.

The atmosphere made him feel a need for haste. But though her face was set in grim lines, the High Lord did not hurry. She finished her meal, then carefully packed the food and graveling away before calling to Myrha. When she mounted, she summoned Amok.

He appeared before her almost at once, and gave her a cheerful bow. After acknowledging him with a nod, she asked him if he could explain the ill in the air.

He shook his head, and said, “High Lord, I am no oracle.” But his eyes revealed his sensitivity to the atmosphere; they were bright, and a sharp gleam lurking behind them showed for the first time that he was capable of anger. A moment later, however, he turned his face away, as if he did not wish to expose any private part of himself. With a flourishing gesture, he beckoned for the High Lord to follow him.

Covenant swung into his mount's clingor saddle, and tried to ignore the brooding ambience around him. But he could not resist the impression that the ground under him was quivering. Despite all his recent experience, he was still not a confident rider-he could not shed his nagging distrust of horses-and he worried that he might fulfil the prophecy of his height fear by falling off his mount.

Fortunately, he was spared cliff ledges and exposed trails. For some time, Amok's path ran along the spine of a crooked rift between looming mountain walls. The enclosed valley did not challenge Covenant's uncertain horsemanship. But the muffled booming in the air continued to grow. As morning passed, the sound became clearer, echoed like brittle groans off the sheer walls.

Early in the afternoon, Amok led the riders around a final bend. Beyond it, they found an immense landslide. Great, scalloped wounds stood opposite each other high in the walls, and the jumbled mass of rock and scree which had fallen from both sides was piled up several hundred feet above the valley floor.

It completely blocked the valley.

This was the source of the detonations. There was no movement in the huge fall; it had an old look, as if its formation had been forgotten long ago by the mountains. But tortured creaks and cracks came from within it as if its bones were breaking.

Amok walked forward, but the riders halted. Morin studied the blockage for a moment, then said, “It is impassable. It breaks. Perhaps on foot we might attempt it at its edges. But the weight of the Ranyhyn will begin a new fall.” Amok reached the foot of the slide, and beckoned, but Morin said absolutely, “We must find another passage.”

Covenant looked around the valley. “How long will that take?”

“Two days. Perhaps three.”

“That bad? You would think this trip wasn't long enough already. Are you sure that isn't safe? Amok hasn't made any mistakes yet.”

“We are the Bloodguard,” Morin said.

And Bannor explained, 'This fall is younger than Amok."

“Meaning it wasn't here when he learned his trail? Damnation!” Covenant muttered. The landslide made his desire for haste keener.

Amok came back to them with a shade of seriousness in his face. “We must pass here,” he said tolerantly, as if he were explaining something to a recalcitrant child.

Morin said, “The way is unsafe.”

“That is true,” Amok replied. “There is no other.” Turning to the High Lord, he repeated, “We must pass here.”

While her companions had been speaking, Elena had gazed speculatively up and down the landfall. When Amok addressed her directly, she nodded her head, and responded, “We will.”

Morin protested impassively, “High Lord”

“I have chosen,” she answered, then added, “It may be that the Staff of Law can hold the fall until we have passed it.”

Morin accepted this with an emotionless nod. He took his mount trotting back away from the slide, so that the High Lord would have room in which to work. Bannor and Covenant followed. After a moment, Amok joined them. The four men watched her from a short distance.

She made no complex or strenuous preparations. Raising the Staff, she sat erect and tall on Myrha's back for a moment, faced the slide. From Covenant's point of view, her blue robe and the Ranyhyn's glossy coat met against the mottled grey background of scree and rubble. She and Myrha looked small in the deep sheer valley, but the conjunction of their colours and forms gave them a potent iconic appearance. Then she moved.

Singing a low song, she advanced to the foot of the slide. There she gripped the Staff by one end, and lowered the other to the ground. It appeared to pulse as she rode along the slide's front, drawing a line in the dirt parallel to the fall. She walked Myrha to one wall, then back to the other. Still touching the ground with the Staff, she returned to the centre.

When she faced the slide again, she lifted the Staff, and rapped once on the line she had drawn.

A rippling skein of verdigris sparks flowed up the fall from her line. They gleamed like interstices of power on every line or bulge of rock that protruded from the slope. After an instant, they disappeared, leaving an indefinite smell like the aroma of orchids in the air.

The muffled groaning of the fall faded somewhat.

“Come,” the High Lord said. “We must climb at once. This Word will not endure.”

Briskly, Morin and Bannor started forward. Amok loped beside them. He easily kept pace with the Ranyhyn.

As he looked upward, Covenant felt nausea like a presage in his guts. His jaw muscles knotted apprehensively. But he slapped his mount with his heels, and rode at the moaning fall.

He caught up with the Bloodguard. They took positions on either side of him, followed Elena and Amok onto the slope.

The High Lord's party angled back and forth up the slide. Their climbing balanced the danger of delay against the hazard of a direct attack on the slope. Covenant's mustang laboured strenuously, and its struggles contrasted with the smooth power of the Ranyhyn. Their hooves kicked scuds of shale and scree down the fail, but their footing was secure, confident. There were no mishaps. Before long, Covenant stood on the rounded V atop the slide.

He was not prepared for what lay beyond the blockage. Automatically, he had expected the south end of the valley to resemble the north. But from the ridge of the landslide, he could see that the huge scalloped wounds above him were too big to be explained by the slide as it appeared from the north.

Somewhere buried directly below him, the valley floor plunged dramatically. The two avalanches had interred a precipice. The south face of the slide was three or four times longer than the north. Far below him, the valley widened into a grassy bottom featured by stands of pine and a stream springing from one of the walls. But to reach that alluring sight, he had to descend more than a thousand feet down the detonating undulation of the slide.

He swallowed thickly. “Bloody hell. Can you hold that?”

“No,” Elena said bluntly. “But what I have done will steady it. And I can take other action-if the need arises.”

With a sharp nod, she started Amok down the slope.

Bannor told Covenant to stay close behind him, then eased his Ranyhyn over the edge after Amok. For a moment, Covenant felt too paralyzed by prophetic trepidation to move. His dry, constricted throat and awkward tongue could not form words. Hellfire, he muttered silently. Hellfire.

He abandoned himself, pushed his mustang after Bannor.

Part of him knew that Morin and then Elena followed him, but he paid no attention to them. He locked his eyes on Bannor's back and tried to cling there for the duration of the descent.

Before he had gone a hundred feet, the skittishness of his mount drove everything else from his mind. Its ears flinched as if it were about to shy at every new groan within the fall. He heaved and sawed at the reins in an effort to control the horse, but he only aggravated its distress. Faintly, he could hear himself mumbling, “Help. Help.”

Then a loud boom like the crushing of a boulder shivered the air. A swath of slide jumped and shifted. The rubble under Covenant began to slip.

His mount tried to spring away from the shift. It shied sideways, and started straight down the slope.

Its lunge only precipitated the slide. Almost at once, the mustang was plunging in scree that poured over its knees.

It struggled to escape downward. Each heave increased the weight of rubble piling against it.

Covenant clung frantically to the clingor saddle. He fought to pull the horse's head aside, make his mount angle out of the slide's main force. But the mustang had its teeth on the bit now. He could not turn it.

Its next plunge buried it to its haunches in the quickening rush of rubble. Covenant could hear Elena shouting stridently. As she yelled, Bannor's Ranyhyn sprang in front of him. Ploughing through the scree, it threw its weight against his mount. The impact almost unseated him, but it deflected his horse. Guided by Bannor, the Ranyhyn shoved against the horse, forced it to fight toward the cliff.

But the avalanche was already moving too heavily. A small boulder struck the mustang's rump; the horse fell. Covenant sprawled down the slope out of Bannor's reach. The rubble tumbled him over and over, but for a moment he managed to stay above it. He got his feet under him, tried to move across the slide.

Through the gathering roar of the fall, he heard Morin shout, “High Lord!” The next instant, she flashed by him, riding Myrha straight down the outer edge of the slide. Fifty feet below him, she swung into the avalanche. With a wild cry, she whirled the Staff of Law and struck the fall.

Fire blazed up through the slide. Like a suddenly clenched fist, the rubble around Covenant stopped moving. His own momentum knocked him backward, but he jumped up again in time to meet Bannor as the Bloodguard landed his Ranyhyn on the small patch of steady ground. Bannor caught Covenant with one hand, swung him across the Ranyhyn's back, charged away out of the slide.

When they reached the relatively still ground against the cliff wall, Covenant saw that Elena had saved him at the risk of herself. The stasis which she had applied to the slipping tons of the avalanche was not large enough to include her own position. And an instant later, that stasis broke. An extra breaker of rubble dropped toward her.

She had no second chance to wield the Staff. Almost at once, the wave of scree crashed over her and Myrha.

An instant later, she appeared downhill from Myrha.

The Ranyhyn's great strength momentarily sheltered her.

But the fall piled against Myrha's chest. And Covenant's mustang, still madly fighting the slide, hurtled toward the Ranyhyn. Instinctively, Covenant tried to run back into the avalanche to help Elena. But Bannor held him back with one hand.

He started to struggle, then stopped as a long clingor rope flicked out over the slide and caught the High Lord's wrist. With his Ranyhyn braced against the wall below Covenant and Bannor, First Mark Morin flung out his line, and the adhesive leather snared Elena. She reacted immediately. “Flee!” she yelled to Myrha, then clutched the Staff and heaved against the waist-deep flow of scree as Morin pulled her to safety.

Though the great mare was battered and bleeding, she had other intentions. With a tremendous exertion, she lunged out of the mustang's path. As the screaming horse tumbled past, she turned and caught its reins in her teeth.

For one intense moment, she held the mustang, hauled it to its feet, swung it in the direction of the wall.

Then the avalanche swept them down a steep bulge. The sudden plunge sank her. With a rushing cry, the weight of the landslide poured over her.

Somehow, the mustang kept its feet, struggled on down the slope. But Myrha did not reappear.

Covenant hugged his stomach as if he were about to retch. Below him, Elena cried, “Myrha! Ranyhyn!” The passion in her voice appalled him. Several moments passed before he realized that his rescue had carried his companions more than two-thirds of the way down the slide.

“Come,” Bannor said flatly. “The balance has broken. There will be more falls. We are imperilled here.” His efforts had not even quickened his breathing.

Numbly, Covenant sat behind Bannor as his Ranyhyn picked its way along the wall to the High Lord and Morin. Elena looked stricken, astonished with grief. Covenant wanted to throw his arms around her, but the Bloodguard gave him no chance. Bannor took him on down the slope, and Morin followed with the High Lord riding emptily at his back.

They found Amok awaiting them on the grass at the bottom of the valley. His eyes held something that resembled concern as he approached the High Lord and helped her to dismount. “Pardon me,” he said quietly. “I have brought you pain. What could I do? I was not made to be of use in such needs.”

“Then begone,” Elena replied harshly. “I have no more use for you this day.”

Amok's gaze constricted as if the High Lord had hurt him. But he obeyed tier promptly. With a bow and a wave, he wiped himself out of sight.

Dismissing him with a grimace, Elena turned toward the landslide. The piled rubble creaked and retorted more fiercely now, promising other slides at any moment, but she ignored the hazard to kneel at the foot of the scree. She bent forward as if she were presenting her back to a whip, and tears streaked her voice as she moaned, “Alas, Ranyhyn! Alas, Myrha! My failure has slain you.”

Covenant hurried to her. He ached to throw his arms around her, but her grief restrained him. With an effort, he said, “It's my fault. Don't blame yourself. I should know how to ride better.” Hesitantly, he reached out and stroked her neck.

His touch seemed to turn her pain to anger. She did not move, but she screamed at him, “Let me be! This is indeed your doing. You should not have sent the Ranyhyn to Lena my mother.”

He recoiled as if she had struck him. At once, his own instinctive ire flamed. The panic of his fall had filled his veins with a tinder that burned suddenly. Her quick recrimination changed him in an instant. It was as if the peace of his past days had been transformed abruptly into umbrage and leper's vehemence. He was mute with outrage. Trembling, he turned and stalked away.

Neither Bannor nor Morin followed him. Already they were busy tending the cuts and abrasions of their Ranyhyn and his mustang. He strode past them, went on down the valley like a scrap of frail ire fluttering helplessly along the breeze.

After a while, the dull detonations of the landslide began to fade behind him. He kept on walking. The smell of the grass tried to beguile him, and within the pine stands a consoling susurrous and gloom, a soft, quiet, sweet rest, beckoned him. He ignored them, paced by with a jerky, mechanical stride. Thick anger roiled his brain, drove him forward. Again! he cried to himself. Every woman he loved-! How could such a thing happen twice in the same life?

He went on until he had covered almost a league. Then he found himself beside a trilling stream. Here the bottom of the valley was uneven on both sides of the brook. He searched along it until he found a grass-matted gully from which he could see nothing of the valley's northward reach. There he threw himself down on his stomach to gnaw the old bone of his outrage.

Time passed. Soon shadows crossed the valley as the sun moved toward evening. Twilight began as if it were seeping out of the ground between the cliffs. Covenant rolled over on his back. At first, he watched with a kind of dour satisfaction as darkness climbed the east wall. He felt ready for the isolation of night and loss.

But then the memory of Joan returned with redoubled force. It stung him into a sitting position. Once again, he found himself gaping at the cruelty of his delusion, the malice which tore him away from Joan-for what? Hellfire! he gasped. The gloaming made him feel that he was going blind with anger. When he saw Elena walking into the gully toward him, she seemed to move through a haze of leprosy.

He looked away from her, tried to steady his sight against the failing light on the eastern cliff; and while his face was averted, she approached, seated herself on the grass by his feet. He could feel her presence vividly. At first she did not speak. But when he still refused to meet her gaze, she said softly, “Beloved. I have made a sculpture for you.”

With an effort, he turned his head. He saw her bent forward, with a hopeful smile on her lips. Both her hands extended toward him a white object that appeared to be made of bone. He paid no attention to it; his eyes slapped at her face as if that were his enemy.

In a tone of entreaty, she continued, “I formed it for you from Myrha's bones. I cremated her-to do her what honour I could. Then from her bones I formed this. For you, beloved. Please accept it.”

He glanced at the sculpture. It caught his unwilling interest. It was a bust. Initially, it appeared too thick to have been made from any horse's bone. But then he saw that four bones had been in some way fused together and moulded. He took the work from her hands to view it more closely. The face interested him. Its outlines were less blunt than in other marrowmeld work he had seen. It was lean and gaunt and impenetrable-a prophetic face, taut with purpose. It expressed someone he knew, but a moment passed before he recognized the countenance. Then, gingerly, as if he feared to be wrong, he said, “It's Bannor. Or one of the other Bloodguard.”

“You tease me,” she replied. “I am not so poor a crafter.” There was a peculiar hunger in her smile. “Beloved, I have sculpted you.”

Slowly, his ire faded. After all, she was his daughter, not his wife. She was entitled to any reproach that seemed fit to her. He could not remain angry with her. Carefully, he placed the bust on the grass, then reached out toward her and took her into his arms as the sun set.

She entered his embrace eagerly, and for a time she clung to him as if she were simply glad to put their anger behind them. But gradually he felt the tension of her body change. Her affection seemed to become grim, almost urgent. Something taut made her limbs hard, made her fingers grip him like claws. In a voice that shook with passion, she said, “This also Fangthane would destroy.”

He lifted his cheek from her hair, moved her so that he could see her face.

That sight chilled him. Despite the dimness of the light, her gaze shocked him like an immersion in polar seas.

The otherness of her sight, the elsewhere dimension of its power, had focused, concentrated until it became the crux of something savage and illimitable. A terrible might raved out of her orbs. Though her gaze was not directed at him, it bored through him like an auger. When it was gone, it left a bloody weal across him.

It was a look of apocalypse.

He could not think of any other name for it but hate.

Twenty Three: Knowledge

THE sight sent him stumbling up the gully away from her. He had trouble keeping himself erect; he listed as if a gale had left him aground somewhere. He heard her low cry, “Beloved!” but he could not turn back. The vision made his heart smoke like dry ice, and he needed to find a place where he could huddle over the pain and gasp alone.

For a time, smoke obscured his self-awareness. He ran into Bannor, and fell back as if he had smashed against a boulder. The impact surprised him. Bannor's flat mien had the force of a denunciation. Instinctively, he recoiled. “Don't touch me!” He lurched off in another direction, stumbled through the night until he had placed a steep hill between himself and the Bloodguard. There he sat down on the grass, wrapped his arms around his chest, and made a deliberate effort to weep.

He could not do it. His weakness, his perpetual leprosy, dammed that emotional channel; he had spent too long unlearning the release of grief. And the frustration of failure made him savage. He brimmed with old, unresolved rage. Even in delusion, he could not escape the trap of his illness. Leaping to his feet, he shook his fists at the sky like a reefed and lonely galleon firing its guns in bootless defiance of the invulnerable ocean. Damnation)

But then his self-consciousness returned. His anger became bitterly cold as he bit off his shout, clamped shut that outlet for his fury. He felt that he was waking up after a blind sleep. Snarling extremely between his teeth, he stalked away toward the stream.

He did not bother to take off his clothes. Fiercely, he dropped flat on his face in the water as if he were diving for some kind of cauterization or release in the glacial frigidity of the brook.

He could not endure the cold for more than a moment; it burned over all his flesh, seized his heart like a convulsion. Gasping, he sprang up and stood shuddering on the rocky streambed. The water and the breeze sent a ravenous ache through his bones, as if cold consumed their marrow. He left the stream.

The next instant, he saw Elena's gaze again, felt it sear his memory. He halted. A sudden idea threw back the chill. It sprang practically full-grown into view as if it had been maturing for days in the darkness of his mind, waiting until he was ready.

He realized that he had access to a new kind of bargain-an arrangement or compromise distantly similar, but far superior, to the one which he had formed with the Ranyhyn. They were too limited; they could not meet his terms, fulfil the contract he had made for his survival. But the person with whom he could now bargain was almost ideally suited to help him.

It was just possible that he could buy his salvation from the High Lord.

He saw the difficulties at once. He did not know what the Seventh Ward contained. He would have to steer Elena's apocalyptic impulse through an unpredictable future toward an uncertain goal. But that impulse was something he could use. It made her personally powerful-powerful and vulnerable, blinded by obsession-and she held the Staff of Law. He might be able to induce her to take his place, assume his position at the onus of Lord Foul's machinations. He might be able to lead her extravagant passion to replace his white gold at the crux of the Land's doom. If he could get her to undertake the bitter responsibility which had been so ineluctably aimed at him, he would be free. That would remove his head from the chopping block of this delusion. And all he had to do in return was to place himself at Elena's service in any way which would focus rather than dissipate her inner drives keep her under control until the proper moment.

It was a more expensive bargain than the one he had made with the Ranyhyn. It did not allow him to remain passive; it required him to help her, manipulate her. But it was justified. During the Quest for the Staff of Law, he had been fighting merely to survive an impossibly compelling dream. Now he understood his true peril more clearly.

So much time had passed since he had thought freedom possible that his heart almost stopped at the thrill of the conception. But after its first excitement, he found that he was shivering violently. His clothes were completely soaked.

Aching with every move, he started back toward the gully and the High Lord.

He found her sitting despondent and thoughtful beside a bright campfire. She wore one blanket over her robe; the others were spread out by the blaze for warmth. When he entered the gully, she looked up eagerly. He could not meet her eyes. But she did not appear to notice the chagrin behind his blue lips and taut forehead. Snatching up a warm blanket for him, she drew him close to the fire. Her few low comments were full of concern, but she asked him nothing until the games had beaten back his worst shivers. Then, shyly, as if she were inquiring where she stood in relation to him, she reached up and kissed him.

He returned the caress of her lips, and the movement seemed to carry him over an inner hurdle. He found that he could look at her now. She smiled softly; the voracious power of her gaze was lost again in its elsewhere otherness. She appeared to accept his kiss at its surface valuation. She hugged him, then seated herself beside him. After a moment, she asked, “Did it surprise you to learn that I am so vehement?”

He tried to excuse himself. “I'm not used to such things. You didn't give me fair warning.”

“Pardon me, beloved,” she said contritely. Then she went on. “Were you very dismayed-by what you have beheld in me?”

He thought for a while before he said, “I think if you ever looked at me that way I would be as good as dead.”

“You are safe,” she assured him warmly.

“What if you change your mind?”

“Your doubt chastises me. Beloved, you are part of my life and breath. Do you believe that I could set you aside?”

“I don't know what to believe.” Ids tone expressed vexation, but he hugged her again to counteract it. “Dreaming is like-it's like being a slave. Your dreams come out of all the parts of you that you don't have any control over. That's why-that's why madness is the only danger.”

He was grateful that she did not attempt to argue with him. When the shivering was driven from his bones, he became incontestably drowsy. As she put him to bed, wrapped him snugly in his blankets by the campfire, the only thing which kept him from trusting her completely was the conviction that his bargain contained something dishonest.

For the most part, he forgot that conviction during the next three days. His attention was clouded by a low fever which he seemed to have caught from his plunge in the stream. Febrile patches appeared on his obdurately pale cheeks; his forehead felt clammy with sweat and cold; and his eyes glittered as if he were in the grip of a secret excitement. From time to time, he dozed on the back of his battered mount, and awoke to find himself babbling deliriously. He could not always remember what he had said, but at least once he had insisted maniacally that the only way to stay well was to be perpetually awake. No antiseptic could cleanse the wounds inflicted in dreams. The innocent did not dream.

When he was not mumbling in half-sleep, he was occupied with the trek itself.

The High Lord's party was nearing some kind of destination.

The morning after the landslide had dawned into crisp sunshine-a clear vividness like an atonement for the previous day's distress. When Amok had appeared to lead the High Lord onward, Elena had whistled as if she were calling Myrha, and another Ranyhyn had answered the summons. Covenant had watched it gallop up the valley with amazement in his face. The fidelity of the Ranyhyn toward their own choices went beyond all his conceptions of pride or loyalty. The sight had reminded him of his previous bargain-a bargain which both Elena and Rue had said was still kept among the great horses. But then he had struggled up on his mustang, and other matters had intruded on his fever tinged thoughts. He had retained barely enough awareness to place Elena's marrowmeld gift in Bannor's care.

After the riders had followed Amok out of the valley, Covenant caught his first glimpse of Melenkurion Skyweir. Though it was still many leagues almost due southeast of him, the high mountain lifted its twin, icebound peaks above the range's rugged horizon, and its glaciers gleamed blue in the sunlight as if the sky's azure feet were planted there. Elena's guess seemed correct: Amok's ragged, oblique trail tended consistently toward the towering Skyweir. It vanished almost immediately as Amok led the riders into the lee of-another cliff, but it reappeared with increasing frequency as the day passed. By the following noon, it dominated the southeastern horizon.

But at night Covenant did not have the mountains veering around him. He could not see Melenkurion Skyweir. And after the evening meal, his fever abated somewhat. Freed from these demands and drains upon his weakened concentration, he came to some vague terms with his bargain.

It did not need her consent; he knew this, and berated himself for it. Once the thrill of hope had faded into fever and anxiety, he ached to tell her what he had been thinking. And her attentiveness to him made him ache worse. She cooked special healing broths and stews for him; she went out of her way to supply him with aliantha. But his emotions toward her had changed. There was cunning and flattery in his responses to her tenderness. He was afraid of what would happen if he told her his thoughts.

When he lay awake late at night, shivering feverishly, he had a bad taste of rationalization in his mouth. Then it was not embarrassment or trust which kept him from explaining himself. His jaws were locked by his clinging need for survival, his rage against his own death.

Finally, his fever broke. Late in the afternoon of the third day-the twenty-first since the High Lord's party had left Revelwood-a sudden rush of sweat poured over him, and a tight inner cord seemed to snap. He felt himself relaxing at last. That night, he fell asleep while Elena was still discussing the ignorance or failure of comprehension which kept her from learning anything from Amok.

A long, sound sleep restored his sense of health, and the next morning he was able to pay better attention to his situation. Riding at Elena's side, he scrutinized Melenkurion Skyweir. It stood over him like an aegis, shutting out the whole southeastern dawn. With a low surge of apprehension, he judged that the High Lord's party would probably arrive there before this day was done. Carefully, he asked her about the Skyweir.

“I can tell you little,” she replied. "It is the tallest mountain known to the Land, and its name shares one of the Seven Words. But Kevin's Lore reveals little of it. Perhaps there is other knowledge in the other Wards, but the First and Second contain few hints or references. And in our age the Lords have gained nothing of their own concerning this place. None have come so close to the Skyweir since people returned to the Land after the Ritual of Desecration.

"It is in my heart that these great peaks mark a place of power-a place surpassing even Gravin Threndor. But I have no evidence for this belief apart from the strange silence of Kevin's Lore. Melenkurion Skyweir is one of the high places of the Land-and yet the First and Second Wards contain no knowledge of it beyond a few old maps, a fragment of one song, and two unexplained sentences which, if their translation is not faulty, speak of command and blood. So,“ she said wryly, ”my failure to unlock Amok is not altogether surprising."

This brought her back to a contemplation of her ignorance, and she lapsed into silence. Covenant tried to think of a way to help her. But the effort was like trying to see through a wall of stone; he had even less of the requisite knowledge. If he intended to keep his side of the bargain, he would have to do so in some other way.

He believed intuitively that his chance would come.

In the meantime, he settled himself to wait for Amok to bring them to the mountain.

Their final approach came sooner than he had expected. Amok took them down a long col between two blunt peaks, then into a crooked ravine that continued to descend while it shifted toward the east. By noon they had lost more than two thousand feet of elevation. There the ravine ended, leaving them on a wide, flat, barren plateau which clung to the slopes of the great mountain. The plateau ran east and south as far as Covenant could see around Melenkurion Skyweir. The flat ground looked like a setting, a base for the fifteen or twenty thousand feet of its matched spires. And east of the plateau were no mountains at all.

The Ranyhyn were eager for a run after long days of constricted climbing, and they cantered out onto the flat rock. With surprising fleetness, Amok kept ahead of them. He laughed as he ran, and even increased his pace. The Ranyhyn stretched into full stride, began to gallop in earnest, leaving Covenant's mustang behind. But still Amok's prancing step outran them. Gaily, he led the riders east and then south down the centre of the plateau.

Covenant followed at a more leisurely gait. Soon he was passing along the face of the first peak. The plateau here was several hundred yards wide, and it extended southward until it curved west out of sight beyond the base of the second peak. The spires joined each other a few thousand feet above the plateau, but the line of juncture between them remained clear, as if the two sides differed in texture. At the place where this line touched the plateau, a cleft appeared in the flat rock. This crevice ran straight across the plateau to its eastern edge.

Ahead of Covenant, the Ranyhyn had ended their gallop near the rim of the crevice. Now Elena trotted down its length toward the outer edge of the plateau. Covenant swung his mustang in that direction, and joined her there.

Together, they dismounted, and he lay down on his stomach to peer over the precipice. Four thousand feet below the sheer cliff, a dark, knotted forest spread out as far as he could see. The woods brooded over its rumpled terrain-a thick-grown old blanket of trees which draped the foot of the Westron Mountains as if to conceal, provide the solace of privacy for, a rigid and immediate anguish. And northeastward across this covered expanse ran the red-black line of the river which spewed from the base of the cleft. Inaudible in the distance, it came moiling out of the rock and slashed away through the heart of the forest. The river looked like a weal in the woods, a cut across the glowering green countenance. This scar gave the hurt, rigid face an expression of ferocity, as if it dreamed of rending limb from limb the enemy which had scored it.

Elena explained the view to Covenant. “That is the Black River,” she said reverently. She was the first new Lord ever to see this sight. “From this place, it flows a hundred fifty leagues and more to join the Mithil on its way toward Andelain. Its spring is said to lie deep under Melenkurion Skyweir. We stand on Rivenrock, the eastern porch or portal of the great mountain. And below us is Garroting Deep, the last forest in the Land where a Forestal still walks where the maimed consciousness of the One Forest still holds communion with itself.” For a moment, she breathed the brisk air. Then she added, “Beloved, I believe that we are not far from the Seventh Ward.”

Pushing himself back from the edge, he climbed unsteadily to his feet. The breeze seemed to carry vertigo up at him from the precipice. He waited until he was several strides from the edge before he replied, "I hope so. For all we know, that war could be over by now. If Troy's plans didn't work, Foul might be halfway to Revelstone."

“Yes. I, too, have felt that fear. But my belief remains that the Land's future will not be won in war. And that battle is not in our hands. We have other work.”

Covenant studied the distance of her eyes, measuring the risk of offending her, then said, “Has it occurred to you that you might not be able to unlock Amok?”

“Of course,” she returned sharply. “I am not blind.”

“Then what will you do, if he doesn't talk?”

“I hold the Staff of Law. It is a potent key. When Amok has guided us to the Seventh Ward, I will not be helpless.”

Covenant looked away with a sour expression on his face. He did not believe that it would be that easy.

At Elena's side, he walked back along the crevice toward the two Bloodguard and Amok. The afternoon was not far gone, but already Melenkurion Skyweir's shadow stretched across Rivenrock. The shadow thickened the natural gloom of the cleft, so that it lay like a fault of darkness across the plateau. At its widest, it was no more than twenty feet broad, but it seemed immeasurably deep, as if it went straight down to the buried roots of the mountain. On an impulse, Covenant tossed a small rock into the cleft. It bounced from wall to wall on its way down; he counted twenty-two heartbeats before it fell beyond hearing. Instinctively, he kept himself a safe distance from the crevice as he went on toward Bannor and Morin.

The two Bloodguard had unpacked the food, and Covenant and Elena made a light meal for themselves. Covenant ate slowly, as if he were trying to postpone the next phase of the quest. He foresaw only three alternatives-up the mountain, down the crevice, across the cleft-and they all looked bad to him. He did not want to do any kind of climbing or jumping; the simple proximity of precipices made him nervous. But when he saw that the High Lord was waiting for him, he recollected the terms of his bargain. He finished what he was eating, and tried to brace himself for whatever Amok had in mind.

Gripping the Staff of Law firmly, Elena turned to her guide. “Amok, we are ready. What should be done with the Ranyhyn? Will you have us ride or walk?”

“That is your choice, High Lord,” said Amok with a grin. “If the Ranyhyn remain, they will not be needed. If they depart, you will be forced to resummon them.”

“Then we must walk to follow you now?”

“Follow me? I have said nothing of leaving this place.”

“Is the Seventh Ward here?” she asked quickly.

“No.”

“Then it is elsewhere.”

“Yes, High Lord.”

“If it is elsewhere, we must go to it.”

“That is true. The Seventh Ward cannot be brought to you.”

“To go to it, we must walk or ride.”

“That also is true.”

“Which?”

As he listened to this exchange, Covenant felt a quiet admiration for the way in which Elena tackled Amok's vagueness. Her past experience appeared to have taught her how to corner the youth. But with his next answer he eluded her.

“That is your choice,” he repeated. “Decide and go.”

“Do you not lead us?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I act according to my nature. I do what I have been created to do.”

“Amok, are you not the way and the door of the Seventh Ward?”

“Yes, High Lord.”

“Then you must guide us.”

“No.”

“Why not?” she demanded again. “Are you capricious?” Covenant heard a hint of desperation in her tone.

Amok replied in mild reproof, "High Lord, I have been created for the purpose I serve. If I appear wilful, you must ask my maker to explain me."

“In other words,” Covenant interjected heavily, “we're stuck without the other four Wards. This is Kevin's way of protecting-whatever it is. Without the clues he planted with such cleverness in the other Wards, we're up against a blank wall.”

“The krill of Loric came to life,” said Amok. “That is the appointed word. And the Land is in peril. Therefore I have made myself accessible. I can do no more. I must serve my purpose.”

The High Lord searched him for a moment, then said sternly, “Amok, are my companions unsuitable to your purpose in some way?”

“Your companions must suit themselves. I am the way and the door. I do not judge those who seek.”

“Amok”-she hung fire, and her lips moved silently as if she were reciting a list of choices-“are there conditions to be met before you can guide us onward?”

Amok bowed in recognition of her question, and answered with a chuckle, “Yes, High Lord.”

“Will you guide us to the Seventh Ward when the conditions are met?”

“That is the purpose of my creation.”

“What are your conditions?”

“There is only one. If you desire more, you must conceive them without my aid.”

“What is your condition, Amok?”

The youth gazed impishly askance at Elena. “High Lord,” he said in a tone of soaring glee, “you must name the power of the Seventh Ward.”

She gaped at him for an instant, then exclaimed, “Melenkurion! You know I lack that knowledge.”

He was unmoved. “Then perhaps it is well that the Ranyhyn have not departed. They can bear you to Revelstone. If you gain wisdom there, you may return. You will find me here.” With a bow of infuriating insouciance, he waved his arms and vanished.

She stared after him and clenched the Staff as if she meant to strike the empty air of his absence. Her back was to Covenant; he could not see what was happening in her face, but the tension of her shoulders made him fear that her eyes were drawing into focus. At that thought, blood pounded in his temples. He reached out, tried to interrupt or distract her.

His touch caused her to swing around toward him. Her face looked emaciated-her flesh was tight over the pale intensity of her skull-and she seemed astonished, as if she had just discovered her capacity for panic. But she did not move into his arms. She halted, deliberately closed her eyes. The bones of her jaw and cheeks and forehead concentrated on him.

He felt an abyss opening in his mind.

He did not comprehend the black, yawning sensation. Elena stood before him in the shadow of Melenkurion Skyweir like an icon of gleaming bone robed in blue; but behind her, behind the solid stone of Rivenrock, darkness widened like a crack across the cistern of his thoughts. The rift sucked at him; he was losing himself.

The sensation came from Elena.

Suddenly, he understood. She was attempting to meld her mind with his.

A glare of fear shot through the sable vertigo which drained him. It illuminated his peril; if he abandoned himself to the melding, she would learn the truth about him. He could not afford such a plunge, could never have afforded it. Crying, No! he recoiled, staggered back away from her within himself.

The pressure eased. He found that his body was also retreating. With an effort, he stopped, raised his head.

Elena's eyes were wide with disappointment and grief, and she leaned painfully on the Staff of Law. “Pardon me, beloved,” she breathed. “I have asked for more than you are ready to give.” For a moment, she remained still, gave him a chance to respond. Then she groaned, “I must think,” and turned away. Supporting herself with the Staff, she moved slowly along the cleft toward the outer edge of the plateau.

Shaken, Covenant sat straight down on the rock, and caught his head in his hands. Conflicting emotions tore at him. He was dismayed by his narrow escape, and angry at his weakness. To save himself, he had hurt Elena. He thought that he should go to her, but something in the focused isolation of her figure warned him not to intrude. For a time, he gazed at her with an ache in his heart. Then he climbed to his feet, muttering at the needless air, “He could've had the decency to tell us-at least before she lost her Ranyhyn.”

To his surprise, the First Mark answered, “Amok acts according to the law of his creation. He cannot break that law merely to avoid pain.”

Covenant threw up his hands in disgust. Fulminating uselessly, he stalked away across the plateau.

He spent the remainder of the afternoon roving restlessly from place to place across Rivenrock, searching for some clue to the continuation of Amok's trail. After a while, he calmed down enough to understand Morin's comment on Amok. Morin and Bannor were the prisoners of their Vow; they could speak with authority about the exigencies of an implacable law. But if the Bloodguard sympathized with Amok, that was just one more coffin nail in the doom of the High Lord's quest.

Covenant's effectlessness was another such nail. He could hear the inflated fatuity of his bargain mocking him now. How could he help Elena? He did not even know enough to grasp the issues Amok raised. Though his disconsolate hiking covered a wide section of the plateau, he learned nothing of any significance. The barren stone was like his inefficacy-irreducible and binding. While the last sunlight turned to dust in the sky, he bent his steps toward the graveling glow which marked the High Lord's camp. He was brooding on the familiar idea that futility governed his very existence.

He found Elena beside her pot of graveling. She looked both worn and whetted, as if the pressure on her ground down her individuality, fitted her to the pattern of her Lord's duty. Resolution gleamed in the honed patina of her bones. She had accepted all the implications of her burden.

Covenant cleared his throat awkwardly. “What have you got? Have you figured it out?”

In a distant voice, she asked, “How great is your knowledge of Warmark Troy's battle plan?”

“I know generally what he's trying to do-nothing specific:”

“If his plan did not fail, the battle began yesterday.”

He considered for a moment, then inquired carefully, “Where does that leave us?”

“We must meet Amok's condition.”

He gestured his incomprehension. “How?”

“I do not know. But I believe that it may be done.”

“You're missing four Wards.”

“Yes,” she sighed. “Kevin clearly intended that we should gain the Seventh Ward only after mastering the first Six. But Amok has already violated that intent. Knowing that we have not comprehended Loric's krill, he still returned to us. He saw the Land's peril, and returned. This shows some freedom-some discretion. He is not explicitly bound by his law at all points.”

She paused, and after a moment Covenant said, “Offhand, I would say that makes him dangerous. Why would he drag us all the way out here when he knew we would get stuck-unless he was trying to distract you from the war?”

"Amok intends no betrayal. I hear no malice in

To penetrate her abstraction, he snapped, “You can be fooled. Or are you forgetting that Kevin even accepted Foul as a Lord?”

Steadily, Elena replied, “Perhaps the first Six Wards do not contain the name of this power. Perhaps they teach only the way in which Amok may be brought to speak its name himself.”

“In that case-”

“Amok guided us here because in some way it is possible for us to meet his condition.”

“But can you find the right questions?”

“I must. What other choice exists for me? I cannot rejoin the Wayward now.”

Her voice had a dull finality, as if she were passing sentence on herself. Early the next morning, she called Amok.

He appeared, grinning boyishly. She gripped the Staff of Law in both hands and braced it on the rock before her.

In the dawn under Melenkurion Skyweir, they began to duel for access to the Seventh Ward.

For two days, High Lord Elena strove to wrest the prerequisite name from Amok. During the second day, a massive storm brooded on the southeastern horizon, but it did not approach Rivenrock, and everyone ignored it. While Covenant sat twisting his ring around his finger, or paced restlessly beside the combatants, or wandered muttering away at intervals to escape the strain, she probed Amok with every question she could devise. At times, she worked methodically; at others, intuitively. She elaborated ideas for his assent or denial. She forced him to recite his answers at greater and greater length. She led him through painstaking rehearsals of known ground, and launched him with all her accuracy toward the unknown. She built traps of logic for him, tried to fence him into contradictions. She sought to meld her mind with his.

It was like duelling with a pool of water. Every slash and counter of her questions touched him as if she had slapped a pond with the flat of her blade. His answers splashed at every inquiry. But when she strove to catch him on her need's point, she passed through him and left no mark. Occasionally he allowed himself a laughing riposte, but for the most part he parried her questions with his accustomed cheerful evasiveness. Her toil earned no success. By sunset, she was trembling with frustration and suppressed fury and psychic starvation. The very solidity of Rivenrock seemed to jeer at her.

In the evenings, Covenant comforted her according to the terms of his bargain. He said nothing of his own fears and doubts, his helplessness, his growing conviction that Amok was impenetrable; he said nothing about himself at all. Instead, he gave her his best attention, concentrated on her with every resource he possessed.

But all his efforts could not touch the core of her distress. She was learning that she did not suffice to meet the Land's need, and that was a grief for which there was no consolation. Late at night, she made muffled grating noises, as if she ground her teeth to keep herself from weeping. And in the morning of the third day-the thirty-second since she had left Revelstone-she neared the end of her endurance. Her gaze was starved and hollow, and it had an angle of farewell.

Thickly, Covenant asked her what she was going to do.

“I will appeal.” Her voice had a raw, flagellated sound. She looked as frail as a skeleton-mere brave, fragile bones standing in the path of someone who, for all his boyish gaiety, was as unmanageable as an avalanche. A presage like an alarm in his head told Covenant that her crisis was at hand. If Amok did not respond to her appeals, she might turn to the last resort of her strange inner force.

The violence of that possibility frightened him. He caught himself on the verge of asking her to stop, give up the attempt. But he remembered his bargain; his brain raced after alternatives.

He accepted her argument that the answer to Amok's condition must be accessible. But he believed that she would not find it; she was approaching the problem from the wrong side. Yet it seemed to be the only side. Kicking at the rubbish which clogged his mind, he tried to imagine other approaches.

While his thoughts scrambled for some kind of saving intuition, High Lord Elena took her stance, and summoned Amok. The youth appeared at once. He greeted her with a florid bow, and said, “High Lord, what is your will today? Shall we set aside our sparring, and sing glad songs together?”

“Amok, hear me.” Her voice grated. Covenant could hear depths of self-punishment in her. “I will play no more games of inquiry with you.” Her tone expressed both dignity and desperation. “The need of the Land will permit no more delay. Already, there is war in the distance-bloodshed and death. The Despiser marches against all that High Lord Kevin sought to preserve when he created his Wards. This insisting upon conditions is false loyalty to his intent. Amok, I appeal. In the name of the Land, guide us to the Seventh Ward.”

Her supplication seemed to touch him, and his reply was inordinately grave. “High Lord, I cannot. I am as I was made to be. Should I make the attempt, I would cease to exist.”

“Then teach us the way, so that we may follow it alone.”

Amok shook his head. “Then also I would cease to exist.”

For a moment, she paused as if she were defeated. But in the silence, her shoulders straightened. Abruptly, she lifted the Staff of Law, held it horizontally before her like a weapon. “Amok,” she commanded, “place your hands upon the Staff.”

The youth looked without flinching into the authority of her face. Slowly, he obeyed. His hands rested lightly between hers on the rune-carved wood.

She gave a high, strange cry. At once, fire blossomed along the Staff; viridian flames opened from all the wood. The blaze swept over her hands and Amok's; it intensified as if it were feeding on their fingers. It hummed with deep power, and radiated a sharp aroma like the smell of duress.

“Kevin-born Amok!” she exclaimed through the hum. “Way and door to the Seventh Ward! By the power of the Staff of Law-in the name of High Lord Kevin son of Loric who made you-I adjure you. Tell me the name of the Seventh Ward's power!”

Covenant felt the force of her command. Though it was not levelled at him-though he was not touching the Staff-he gagged over the effort to utter a name he did not know.

But Amok met her without blinking, and his voice cut clearly through the flame of the Staff. “No, High Lord. I am impervious to compulsion. You cannot touch me.”

“By the Seven!” she shouted. “I will not be denied!” She raged as if she were using fury to hold back a scream. “Melenkurion abatha! Tell me the name!”

“No,” Amok repeated.

Savagely, she tore the Staff out of his hands. Its flame gathered, mounted, then sprang loudly into the sky like a bolt of thunder.

He gave a shrug, and disappeared.

For a long, shocked moment, the High Lord stood frozen, staring at Amok's absence. Then a shudder ran through her, and she turned toward Covenant as if she had the weight of a mountain on her shoulders. Her face looked like a wilderland. She took two tottering steps, and stopped to brace herself on the Staff. Her gaze was blank; all her force was focused inward, against herself.

“Failed,” she gasped. “Doomed.” Anguish twisted her mouth. “I have doomed the Land”

Covenant could not stand the sight. Forgetting all his issueless thoughts, he hurried to say, “There's got to be something else we can do.”

She replied with an appalling softness. Tenderly, almost caressingly, she said, “Do you.believe in the white gold? Can you use it to meet Amok's condition?” Her voice had a sound of madness. But the next instant, her passion flared outward. With all her strength, she pounded the Staff against Rivenrock, and cried, “Then do so!”

The power she unleashed caused a wide section of the plateau to lurch like a stricken raft. The rock bucked and plunged; seamless waves of force rolled through it from the Staff.

The heaving knocked Covenant off his feet. He stumbled, fell toward the cleft.

Almost at once, Elena regained control over herself. She snatched back the Staffs power, shouted to the Bloodguard. But Bannor's reflexes were swifter. While the rock still pitched, he bounded surefootedly across it and caught Covenant's arm.

For a moment, Covenant was too stunned to do anything but hang limply in Bannor's grip. The High Lord's violence flooded through him, sweeping everything else out of his awareness. But then he noticed the pain of Bannor's grasp on his arm. He could feel something prophetic in the ancient strength with which Bannor clenched him, kept him alive. The Bloodguard had an iron grip, surer than the stone of Rivenrock. When he heard Elena moan, `Beloved! Have I harmed you?“ he was already muttering half aloud, ”Wait. Hold on. I've got it."

His eyes were closed. He opened them, and discovered that Bannor was holding him erect. Elena was nearby; she flung her arms around him and hid her face in his shoulder. He said, “I've got it.” She ignored him, started to mumble contrition into his shoulder. To stop her, he said sharply, “Forget it. I must be losing my mind. I should have figured this out days ago.”

Finally she heard him. She released him and stepped back. Her ravaged face stiffened. She caught her breath between her teeth, pushed a hand through her hair. Slowly, she became a Lord again. Her voice was unsteady but lucid as she said, “What have you learned?”

Bannor released Covenant also, and the Unbeliever stood wavering on his own. His feet distrusted the stone, but he locked his knees, and tried to disregard the sensation. The problem was in his brain; all his preconceptions had shifted. He wanted to speak quickly, ease Elena's urgent distress. But he had missed too many clues. He needed to approach his intuition slowly, so that he could pull all its strands together.

He tried to clear his head by shaking it. Elena winced as if he were reminding her of her outburst. He made a placating gesture toward her, and turned to confront the Bloodguard. Intently, he scrutinized the blank metal of their faces, searched them for some flicker or hue of duplicity, ulterior purpose, which would verify his intuition. But their ancient, sleepless eyes seemed to conceal nothing, reveal nothing. He felt an instant of panic at the idea that he might be wrong, but he pushed it down, and asked as calmly as he could, “Bannor, how old are you?”

“We are the Bloodguard,” Bannor replied. “Our Vow was sworn in the youth of Kevin's High Lordship.”

“Before the Desecration?”

“Yes, ur-Lord.”

“Before Kevin found out that Foul was really an enemy?”

“Yes”

“And you personally, Bannor? How old are you?”

“I was among the first Haruchai who entered the Land. I shared in the first swearing of the Vow.”

“That was centuries ago.” Covenant paused before he asked, “How well do you remember Kevin?”

“Step softly,” Elena cautioned. “Do not mock the Bloodguard.”

Bannor did not acknowledge her concern. He answered the Unbeliever inflexibly, “We do not forget.”

“I suppose not,” Covenant sighed. “What a hell of a way to live.” For a moment, he gazed away toward the mountain, looking for courage. Then, with sudden harshness, he went on, “You knew Kevin when he made his Wards. You knew him and you remember. You were with him when he gave the First Ward to the Giants. You were with him when he hid the Second in those bloody catacombs under Mount Thunder. How many times did you come here with him, Bannor?”

The Bloodguard cocked one eyebrow fractionally. “High Lord Kevin made no sojourns to Rivenrock or Melenkurion Skyweir.”

That answer rocked Covenant. “None?” His protest burst out before he could stop it. “Are you telling me you've never been here before?”

“We are the first Bloodguard to stand on Rivenrock,” Bannor replied flatly.

“Then how-? Wait. Hold on.” Covenant stared dizzily, then hit his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Right. If the Ward is some kind of natural phenomenon-like the Illearth Stone-if it isn't something he put here-Kevin wouldn't have to come here to know about it. Loric or somebody could have told him. Loric could have told anybody.”

He took a deep breath to steady himself. `But everybody who might have known about it died in the Desecration. Except you."

Bannor blinked at Covenant as if his words had no meaning.

“Listen to me, Bannor,” he went on. "A lot of things are finally starting to make sense. You reacted strangely-when Amok turned up at Revelstone that first time. You reacted strangely when he turned up at

Revelwood. And you let the High Lord herself follow him into the mountains with just two Bloodguard to protect her. Just two, Bannor! And when we end up stuck here on this godforsaken rock, Morin has the actual gall to apologize for Amok. Hellfire! Bannor, you should have at least told the High Lord what you know about this Ward. What kind of loyal do you think you are?"

Elena cautioned Covenant again. But her tone had changed; his thinking intrigued her.

“We are the Bloodguard,” Bannor said. “You cannot raise doubt against us. We do not know Amok's intent.”

Covenant heard the slight stress which Bannor placed on the word know. To his own surprise, he felt a sudden desire to take Bannor at his word, leave what the Bloodguard knew alone. But he forced himself to ask, “Know, Bannor? How can you not know? You've trusted him too much for that.”

Bannor countered as he had previously, “We do not trust him. The High Lord chooses to follow him. We do not ask for more.”

“The hell you don't.” His effort of self-compulsion made him brutal. "And stop giving me that blank look. You people came to the Land, and you swore a Vow to protect Kevin. You swore to preserve him or at least give your lives for him and the Lords and Revelstone until Time itself came to an end if not forever, or why are you bereft even of the simple decency of sleep? But that poor desperate man outsmarted you. He actively saved you when he destroyed himself and everything else he merely believed in. So there you were, hanging from your Vow in empty space as if all the reasons in the world had suddenly disappeared.

"And then! Then you get a second chance to do your Vow right when the new Lords come along. But what happens? Amok turns up out of nowhere, and there's a war on against Foul himself-and what do you do? You let this creation of Kevin's lead the High Lord away as if it were safe and she didn't have anything better to do.

"Let me tell you something, Bannor. Maybe you don't positively know Amok. You must have learned some kind of distrust from Kevin. But you sure as hell understand what Amok is doing. And you approve!“ The abrupt ferocity of his own yell stopped him for an instant. He felt shaken by the moral judgments he saw in Bannor. Thickly, he continued, ”Or why are you risking her for the sake of something created by the only man who has ever succeeded in casting doubt on your incorruptibility?"

Without warning, Amok appeared. The youth's arrival startled Covenant, but he took it as a sign that he was on the right track. With a heavy sigh, he said, “Why in the name of your Vow or at least simple friendship didn't you tell the High Lord about Amok when he first showed up?”

Bannor's gaze did not waver. In his familiar, awkward, atonal inflection, he replied, "Ur-Lord, we have seen the Desecration. We have seen the fruit of perilous lore. Lore is not knowledge. Lore is a weapon, a sword or spear. The Bloodguard have no use for weapons. Any knife may turn and wound the hand which wields it. Yet the Lords desire lore. They do work of value with it. Therefore we do not resist it, though we do not touch it or serve it or save it.

“High Lord Kevin made his Wards to preserve his lore-and to lessen the peril that his weapons might fall into unready hands. This we approve. We are the Bloodguard. We do not speak of lore. We speak only of what we know.”

Covenant could not go on. He felt that he had already multiplied his offenses against Bannor too much. And he was moved by what Bannor said, despite the Bloodguard's flat tone.

But Elena had learned enough to pursue his reasoning. Her voice was both quiet and authoritative as she said, "First Mark-Bannor- the Bloodguard must make a decision now. Hear me. I am Elena, High Lord by the choice of the Council. This is a question of loyalty. Will you serve dead Kevin's wisdom, or will you serve me? In the past, you have served two causes, the dead and the living. You have served both well. But here you must choose. In the Land's need, there is no longer any middle way. There will be blood and blame upon us all if we allow Corruption to prevail."

Slowly, Bannor turned toward the First Mark. They regarded each other in silence for a long moment. Then Morin faced the High Lord with a magisterial look in his eyes. “High Lord,” he said, "we do not know the name of the Seventh Ward's power. We have heard many names-some false, others dead. But one name we have heard only uttered in whispers by High Lord Kevin and his Council.

“'That name is the Power of Command.”

When Amok heard the name, he nodded until his hair seemed to dance with glee.

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, blonde-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, travelled 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 colour 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 splendour.

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 toward 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 honoured. 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 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.”

“Come!” said Amok cheerfully. “Follow!” His voice sounded over the distant, subterranean 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, wide-eyed 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 ledge-never more than three feet wide-moved 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 laboured 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 foresta 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 DameIon'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 clangour went on in his mind. Gasping, searching blindly for support, he began to founder.

Then Elena silenced the Staff. The clamouring 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 illustre. 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 subterranean 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 travelled 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 travelled 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 spiralled 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 rowelled 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 spiralling 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 colour. 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 self-defence, 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 centre. 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, star-browed 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, imperilled 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 honour 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, heart-stricken. 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 sometime 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 splendour 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 odour 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 centre-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 odour 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 centre of the tunnel.

“Behold,” Amok said quietly. “Behold the Blood of the Earth. Here I fulfil 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 fulfil 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 odour 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; grey 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 defence. 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 imperilled 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 I’d made another bargain-but I didn't tell you what it is. I've been using-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 you 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 an 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 spectre 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 spectre 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 pummelled 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 spectre’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 spectre 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 spectre 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 spectre 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 defence, 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 defenceless 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 centre 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 off 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 clamour 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, savour 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 levelled 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 centre 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 defence, 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 sceptre. “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 sceptre, 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 sceptre 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 succour her. Caer-Caveral, remain and serve!”

The song moulded 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:

Axe 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 departs. 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 defence 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 grey, 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.