THE POWER THAT PRESERVES

by default

  "We will burn."

  "We will endure!"

  Tohrm met Mhoram's demand for a long moment. Then he groaned. He could not refuse to give himself for the sake of the Keep' s stone. " If you are with me," he said silently through the roar.

  Mhoram whirled to Amatin. "Tohrm and I will go into the Close. You must preserve us from the fire. Put your power around us-protect us."

  She nodded distractedly, pushed a damp strand of hair out of her face. "Go," she said weakly. "Already the table melts."

  The High Lord saw that she was right. Before their eyes, the table slumped into magma, poured down to the lowest level of the Close and into the pit around Trell's feet.

  Mhoram called his power into readiness and rested the shaft of his staff on Tohrm's shoulder. Together, they faced the Close, waited while Amatin built a defense around them. The sensation of it swarmed over their skin like hiving insects, but it kept back the heat.

  When she signaled to them, they started down into the Close as if they were struggling into a furnace.

  Despite Amatin's protection, the heat slammed into them like the fist of a cataclysm. Tohrm's tunic began to scorch. Mhoram felt his own robe blackening. All the hair on their heads and arms shriveled. But the High Lord put heat out of his mind; he concentrated on his staff and Tohrm. He could feel the Hearthrall singing now, though he heard nothing but the deep, ravenous howl of the blaze. Tuning his power to the pitch of Tohrm's song, he sent all his resources running through it.

  The savage flames backed slightly away from them as they moved, and patches of unburned rock appeared like stepping-stones under Tohrm's feet. They walked downward like a gap in the hell of Trell's rage.

  But the conflagration sealed behind them instantly. As they drew farther from the doors, Amatin's defense weakened; distance and flame interfered. Mhoram's flesh stung where his robe smoldered against it, and his eyes hurt so badly that he could no longer see. Tohrm's song became more and more like a scream as they descended. By the time they reached the level of the pit, where Loric's krill still stood embedded in its stone, Mhoram knew that if he did not take his strength away from Tohrm and use it for protection they would both roast at Trell's feet.

  "Trell!" Tohrm screamed soundlessly. "You are a Gravelingas of the rhadhamaerl! Do not do this!"

  For an instant, the fury of the inferno paused. Trell looked at them, seemed to see them, recognize them.

  "Trell!"

  But he had fallen too far under the power of his own holocaust. He pointed a rigid, accusing finger, then stooped to the graveling and heaved a double armful of fire at them.

  At the same moment, a thrill of strength ran through Mhoram. Amatin's protection steadied, stiffened. Though the force of Trell's attack knocked Tohrm back into Mhoram's arms, the fire did not touch them. And Amatin's sudden discovery of power called up an answer in the High Lord. With a look like joy gleaming in his eyes, he swept aside all his self-restraints and turned to his secret understanding of desecration. That secret contained might-might which the Lords had failed to discover because of their Oath of Peace-might which could be used to preserve as well as destroy. Despair was not the only unlocking emotion. Mhoram freed his own passion and stood against the devastation of the Close.

  Power coursed vividly in his chest and arms and staff. Power made even his flesh and blood seem like invulnerable bone. Power shone out from him to oppose Trell's ill. And the surge of his strength restored Tohrm. The Hearthrall regained his feet, summoned his lore; with all of his and Mhoram's energy, he resisted Trell.

  Confronting each other, standing almost face to face, the two Gravelingases wove their lore-secret gestures, sang their potent rhadhamaerl invocations. While the fire raged as if Revelstone were about to crash down upon them, they commanded the blaze, wrestled will against will for mastery of it.

  Tohrm was exalted by Mhoram's support. With the High Lord's power resonating in every word and note and gesture, renewing him, fulfilling his love for the stone, he bent back the desecration. After a last convulsive exertion, Trell fell to his knees, and his fire began to fail.

  It ran out of the Close like the recession of a tide-slowly at first, then faster, as the force which had raised it broke. The heat declined; cool fresh air poured around Mhoram from the airways of the Keep. Sight returned to his scorched eyes. For a moment, he feared that he would lose consciousness in relief.

  Weeping with joy and grief, he went to help Tohrm lift Trell Atiaran-mate from the graveling pit. Trell gave no sign that he felt them, knew in any way that they were present. He looked around with hollow eyes, muttering brokenly, "Intact. There is nothing intact. Nothing." Then he covered his head with his arms and huddled into himself on the floor at Mhoram's feet, shaking as if he needed to sob and could not.

  Tohrm met Mhoram's gaze. For a long moment, they looked into each other's faces, measuring what they had done together. Tohrm's features had the burned aspect of a wilderland, a place that would never grin again. But his emotion was clear and clean as he murmured at last, "We will grieve for him. The rhadhamaerl will grieve. The time has come for mourning."

  From the top of the stairs, an excited voice cried, "High Lord! The dead! They have all fallen into sand! Satansfist has exhausted this attack. The gates hold!"

  Through his tears, Mhoram looked around the Close. It was badly damaged. The Lords' table and chairs had melted, the steps were uneven, and most of the lower tiers had been misshaped by the fire. But the place had survived. The Keep had survived. Mhoram nodded to Tohrm. "It is time."

  His sight was so blurred with tears that he seemed to see two blue-robed figures moving down the stairs toward him. He blinked his tears away, and saw that Lord Loerya was with Amatin.

  Her presence explained the protection which had saved him and Tohrm; she had joined her strength to Amatin's.

  When she reached him, she looked gravely into his face. He searched her for shame or distress but saw only regret. "I left them with the Unfettered One at Glimmermere," she explained quietly. "Perhaps they will be safe. I returned-when I found courage."

  Then something at Mhoram's side caught her attention. Wonder lit her face, and she turned him so that he was looking at the table which held Loric's krill.

  The table was intact.

  In its center, the gem of the krill blazed with a pure white fire, as radiant as hope.

  Mhoram heard someone say, "Ur-Lord Covenant has returned to the Land." But he could no longer tell what was happening around him. His tears seemed to blind all his senses.

  Following the light of the gem, he reached out his hand and clasped the krill's haft. In its intense heat, he felt the truth of what he had heard. The Unbeliever had returned.

  With his new might, he gripped the krill and pulled it easily from the stone. Its edges were so sharp that when he held the knife in his hand he could see their keenness. His power protected him from the heat.

  He turned to his companions with a smile that felt like a ray of sunshine on his face.

  "Summon Lord Trevor," he said gladly. "I have-a knowledge of power that I wish to share with you."

  [TWELVE] Amanibhavam

  Hate.

  It was the only thought in Covenant's mind. The weight of things he had not known crushed everything else.

  Hate.

  He clung to the unanswered question as he pried himself with the spear up over the rim of the hollow and hobbled down beyond the last ember-light of Pietten's fire.

  Hate.

  His crippled foot dragged along the ground, grinding the splintered bones of his ankle together until beads of excruciation burst from his pores and froze in the winter wind. But he clutched the shaft of the spear and lurched ahead, down that hillside and diagonally up the next. The wind cut against his right cheek, but he paid no attention to it; he turned gradually toward the right because of the steepness of the hill, not because he had any awareness of direction. When the convolution of the next slope bent him northward agai
n, away from the Plains of Ra and his only friends, he followed it, tottered down it, fluttering in the wind like a maimed wildman, thinking only:

  Hate.

  Atiaran Trell-mate had said that it was the responsibility of the living to make meaningful the sacrifices of the dead. He had a whole Land full of death to make meaningful. Behind him, Lena lay slain in her own blood, with a wooden spike through her bell}. Elena was buried somewhere in the bowels of Melenkurion Sky weir, dead in her private apocalypse because of his manipulations and his failures. She had never even existed. Ranyhyn had been starved and slaughtered. Banner and Foamfollower might be dead or in despair. Pietten and Hile Troy and Trell and Triock were all his fault. None of them had ever existed. His pain did not exist. Nothing mattered except the one absolute question.

  He moaned deep in his throat, "Hate?"

  Nothing could have any meaning without the answer to that question. Despite its multitudinous disguises, he recognized it as the question which had shaped his life since the day he had first learned that he was subject to the law of leprosy. Loathing, self-loathing, fear, rape, murder, leper outcast unclean-they were all the same thing. He hobbled in search of the answer.

  He was totally alone for the first time since the beginning of his experiences in the Land.

  Sick gray dawn found him laboring vaguely northeastward-poling himself feverishly with the spear, and shivering in the bitter ague of winter. The dismal light seemed to rouse parts of him. He plunged into the shallow lee of a hillside and tried to take the measure of his situation.

  The shrill wind gibed around him as he plucked with diseased and frozen fingers at his pant leg. When he succeeded in moving the fabric, he felt a numb surprise at the dark discoloration of his flesh above the ankle. His foot sat at a crooked angle on his leg, and through the crusted blood he could see slivers of bone protruding against the thongs of his sandals.

  The injury looked worse than it felt. Its pain grated in his knee joint dully, gouged aches up through his thigh to his hip, but the ankle itself was bearable. Both his feet had been frozen senseless by the cold. And both were jabbed and torn and painlessly infected like the feet of a pilgrim. He thought blankly that he would probably lose the broken one. But the possibility carried no weight with him; it was just another part of his experience that did not exist.

  There were things that he should have been doing for himself, but he had no idea what they were. He had no conception of anything except the central need which drove him. He lacked food, warmth, knowledge of where he was or where he was going. Yet he was already urgent to be moving again. Nothing but movement could keep his lifeblood circulating -nothing but movement could help him find his answer.

  No tentative or half-unready answer would satisfy his need.

  He levered himself up, then slipped and fell, crying out unconsciously at the unfelt pain. For a moment, the winter roared in his ears like a triumphant predator. His breathing rasped him as if claws of cold had already torn his air passages and lungs. But he braced the spear on the hard earth again, and climbed up it hand over hand until he was erect. Then he lurched forward once more.

  He forced himself up the hill and beyond it to a low ridge lying across his way like a minor wall. His arms trembled at the strain of bearing his weight, and his hands slipped repeatedly on the smooth shaft of the spear. The ascent almost defeated him. When he reached the top, air whooped brokenly in and out of his frostbitten lungs, and icy vertigo made the whole winterscape cant raggedly from side to side. He rested, leaning on the spear. His respiration was so difficult that he thought the frozen sweat and vapor on his face might be suffocating him. But when he tried to break it, it tore away like a protective scab, hurting his skin, exposing new nerves to the cold. He let the rest of his frozen mask remain, and stood panting until at last his vision began to clear.

  The hard barren region ahead of him was so dreary, so wilderlanded by Foul's cruelty, that he could hardly bear to look at it. It was gray cold and dead from horizon to horizon under the gray dead clouds-not the soft comfortable gray of twilit illusions, of unstark colors blurring like consolation or complacency into each other, but rather the gray of disconsolation and dismay, paradoxically dull and raw, numb and poignant, a gray like the ashen remains of color and sap and blood and bone. Gray wind drove gray cold over the gray frozen hills; gray snow gathered in thin drifts under the lees of the gray terrain; gray ice underscored the black, brittle, leafless branches of the trees barely visible in the distance on his left, and stifled the gray, miserable current of the river almost out of sight on his right; gray numbness clutched at his flesh and soul. Lord Foul the Despiser was everywhere.

  Then for a time he remembered his purpose. He set his ice-muzzled teeth into the teeth of the cold and hobbled down from the ridge straight toward the source of the winter. Half blinded by the opposition of the wind, he stumped unheeding past slight shelters and straggling aliantha, thrust his tattered way among the hills, dragging his frozen foot like an accusation he meant to bring against the Despiser.

  But gradually the memory faded, lapsed from his consciousness like everything else except his reiterating interrogation of hate. Some inchoate instinct kept him from wending downward toward the river, but all other sense of direction deserted him. With the wind angling against his right cheek, he struggled slowly upward, upward, as if it were only in climbing that he could keep himself erect at all.

  As the morning passed, he began to fall more often. He could no longer retain his grip on the spear; his hands were too stiff, too weak, and a slick sheen of ice sweat made the spear too slippery. Amid the crunch of ice and his own panting cries, he slipped repeatedly to the ground. And after several convulsive efforts to go on, he lay face down on the ruined earth with his breath rattling in his throat, and tried to sleep.

  But before long he moved again. Sleep was not what he wanted; it had no place in the one focused fragment of his consciousness. Gasping thickly, he levered himself to his knees. Then, with an awkward abruptness, as if he were trying to take himself by surprise, he put weight on his broken ankle.

  It was numb enough. Pain jabbed the rest of his leg, and his foot twisted under him. But his ankle was numb enough.

  Ignoring the fallen spear, he heaved erect, tottered-and limped extremely into motion again.

  For a long time, he went on that way, jerking on his broken ankle like a badly articulated puppet commanded by clumsy fingers. He continued to fall; he was using two hunks of ice for feet, and could not keep his balance when the hillsides became too steep. And these slopes grew gradually worse. For some reason, he tended unevenly to his left, where the ground rose up to meet black trees; so more and more often he came to ascents and descents that affected him like precipices, though they might have seemed slight enough to a healthy traveler. He went up them on hands and knees, clawing against the hard ground for handholds, and plunged rolling helplessly down them like one of the damned.

  But after each fall he rested prone in the snow like a penitent, and after each rest he staggered or crawled forward once more, pursuing his private and inevitable apotheosis, though he was entirely unable to meet it.

  As the day waned into afternoon, his falls came more and more often. And after falling he lay still and listened to the air sob in and out of his lungs as if the breaking of his ankle had fractured some essential bone in him, some obdurate capacity for endurance-as if at last even numbness failed him, proved in some way inadequate, leaving him at the mercy of his injury. By degrees he began to believe that after all his dream was going to kill him.

  Sometime in the middle of the afternoon, he slipped, rolled, came to rest on his back. He could not muster the strength to turn over. Like a pinned insect, he struggled for a moment, then collapsed into prostrate sleep-trapped there between the iron heavens and the brass earth.

  Dreams roiled his unconsciousness, giving him no consolation. Again and again, he relived the double-fisted blow with which he had stabbed Piet
ten. But now he dealt that fierce blow at other hearts-Llaura, Mane-thrall Rue, Elena, Joan, the woman who had been killed protecting him at the battle of Soaring Woodhelven-why had he never asked anyone her name? In dreams he slew them all. They lay around him with gleams of light shining keenly out of their wounds like notes in an alien melody. The song tugged at him, urged-but before he could hear it, another figure hove across his vision, listing like a crippled frigate. The man was dressed in misery and violence. He had blood on his hands and the love of murder in his eyes, but Covenant could not make out his face. Again he raised the knife, again he drove it with all his might into that vulnerable breast. Only then did he see that the man was himself.

  He lurched as if the blank sky had struck him, and flopped over onto his chest to hide his face, conceal his wound.

  When he remembered the snow in which he lay, he got quavering to his feet and limped on into the late afternoon.

  Before long, he came to a hillside he could not master. He flung himself at it, limped and crawled at it as hard as he could. But he was exhausted and crippled. He turned left and stumbled along the slope, seeking a place where he could ascend, but then inexplicably he found himself rolling downward. When he tumbled to a stop at the bottom, he rested for a while in confusion. He must have crossed the top without knowing it. He hauled himself up again, gasping, and went on.

  The next hill was no better. But he had to master it. When he could not drive himself upward any farther, he turned to the left again, always left and up, though for some strange reason this seemed to take him down toward the river.

  After a short distance he found a trail in the snow.

  Part of him knew that he should be dismayed, but he felt only relief, hope. A trail meant that someone had passed this way-passed recently, or the wind would have effaced the marks. And that someone might help him.

  He needed help. He was freezing, starving, failing. Under its crust of scab and ice, his ankle was still bleeding. He had reached the infinitude of his impotence, his inefficacy, the point beyond which he could not keep going, could not believe, envision, hope that continuation, life, was possible. He needed whoever or whatever had made that trail to decide his fate for him.