Thomas Covenant 02: The Illearth War

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  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, fulfill 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 tel
l 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 center 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 r
ecollected 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 willful, 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.”