The Illearth War

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  A silent clap of surprise echoed in the Close. Around the table, the Lords gaped in astonishment. Then Verement smacked the stone with the flat of his hand, and barked, “By the Seven! This whelp mocks us.”

  “I think not,” answered Elena.

  Lord Mhoram nodded wearily, and sighed his agreement. “Our ignorance mocks us.”

  Quickly Trevor asked, “Mhoram, do you know Amok? Have you seen him?”

  Lord Loerya seconded the question, but before Mhoram could gather his strength to respond, Lord Callindrill leaned forward to ask, “Amok, why were you made? What purpose do you serve?”

  “I wait,” said the boy. “And I answer.”

  Callindrill accepted this with a glum nod, as if it proved an unfortunate point, and said nothing more. After a pause, the High Lord said to Amok, “You bear knowledge, and release it in response to the proper questions. Have I understood you aright?”

  In answer, Amok bowed, shaking his head so that his gay hair danced like laughter about his head.

  “What knowledge is this?” she inquired.

  “Whatever knowledge you can ask for, and receive answer.”

  At this, Elena glanced ruefully around the table. “Well, that at least was not the proper question,” she sighed. “I think we will need to know Amok’s knowledge before we can ask the proper questions.”

  Mhoram looked at her and nodded.

  “Excellent!” Verement’s retort was full of suppressed ferocity. “So ignorance increases ignorance, and knowledge makes itself unnecessary.”

  Covenant felt the force of Verement’s sarcasm. But Lord Amatin ignored it. Instead she asked the youth, “Why have you come to us now?”

  “I felt the sign of readiness. The krill of Loric came to life. That is the appointed word. I answer as I was made to do.”

  As he mentioned the krill, Amok’s inner cradled glory and dread seemed to become more visible. The sight gave Covenant a pang. Is this my fault, too? he groaned. What have I gotten myself into now? But the glimpse was mercifully brief; Amok’s boyish good humor soon veiled it again.

  When it was past, Lord Mhoram climbed slowly to his feet, supporting himself on his staff like an old man. Standing beside the High Lord as if he were speaking for her, he said, “Then you have— Amok, hear me. I am seer and oracle for this Council. I speak words of vision. I have not seen you. You have come too soon. We did not give life to the krill. That was not our doing. We lack the lore for such work.”

  Amok’s face became suddenly grave, almost frightened, showing for the first time some of the antiquity of his skull. “Lack the lore? Then I have erred. I have misserved my purpose. I must depart; I will do great harm else.”

  Quickly, he turned, slipped with deceptive speed between the Bloodguard, and darted up the stairs.

  When he was halfway to the doors, everyone in the Close lost sight of him. He vanished as if they had all taken their eyes off him for an instant, allowing him to hide. The Lords jumped to their feet in amazement. On the stairs, the pursuing Bloodguard halted, looked rapidly about them, and gave up the chase.

  “Swiftly!” Elena commanded. “Search for him! Find him!”

  “What is the need?” Crowl replied flatly. “He is gone.”

  “That I see! But where has he gone? Perhaps he is still in Revelstone.”

  But Crowl only repeated, “He is gone.” Something in his certitude reminded Covenant of Bannor’s subdued, unusual excitement. Are they in this together? he asked himself. My purpose? The words repeated dimly in his mind. My purpose?

  Through his mystification, he almost did not hear Troy whisper, “I thought—for a minute—I thought I saw him.”

  High Lord Elena paid no attention to the Warmark. The attitude of the Bloodguard seemed to baffle her, and she sat down to consider the situation. Slowly she spread about her the melding of the Council, one by one bringing the minds of the other Lords into communion with her own. Callindrill shut his eyes, letting a look of peace spread over his face, and Trevor and Loerya held hands. Verement shook his head two or three times, then acquiesced when Mhoram touched him gently on the shoulder.

  When they all were woven together, the High Lord said, “Each of us must study this matter. War is near at hand, and we must not be taken unaware by such mysteries. But to you, Lord Amatin, I give the chief study of Amok and his secret knowledge. If it can be done, we must seek him out and learn his answers.”

  Lord Amatin nodded with determination in her small face.

  Then, like an unclasping of mental hands, the melding ended, and an intensity which Covenant could sense but not join faded from the air. In silence, the Lords took up their staffs, and began to leave.

  “Is that it?” Covenant muttered in surprise. “Is that all you’re going to do?”

  “Watch it, Covenant,” Troy warned softly.

  Covenant shot a glare at the Warmark, but his black sunglasses seemed to make him impervious. Covenant turned toward the High Lord. “Is that all?” he insisted. “Don’t you even want to know what’s going on here?”

  Elena faced him levelly. “Do you know?”

  “No. Of course not.” He wanted to add, to protest, But Bannor does. But that was something else he could not say. He had no right to make the Bloodguard responsible. Stiffly he remained silent.

  “Then do not be too quick to judge,” Elena replied. “There is much here that requires explanation, and we must seek answers in our own way if we hope to be prepared.”

  Prepared for what? he wanted to ask. But he lacked the resolution to challenge the High Lord; he was afraid of her eyes. To escape the situation, he brushed past Bannor and horned out of the Close ahead of the Lords and Troy.

  But back in his rooms he found no relief for his frustration. And in the days that followed, nothing happened to give him any relief. Elena, Mhoram, and Troy were as absent from his life as if they were deliberately avoiding him. Bannor answered his aimless questions courteously, curtly, but the answers shed no light. His beard grew until it was thick and full, and made him look to himself like an unraveled fanatic; but it proved nothing, solved nothing. The full of the moon came and went, but the war did not begin; there arrived no word from the scouts, no signs, no insights. Around him, Revelstone palpably trembled in the clench of its readiness; everywhere he went, he heard whispers of tension, haste, urgency, but no action was taken. Nothing. He roamed for leagues in Lord’s Keep as if he were treading a maze. He drank inordinate quantities of springwine, and slept the sleep of the dead as if he hoped that he would never be resurrected. At times he was even reduced to standing on the northern battlements of the city to watch Troy and Quaan drill the Warward. But nothing happened.

  His only oasis in this static and frustrated wilderland was given to him by Lord Callindrill and his wife, Faer. One day, Callindrill took the Unbeliever to his private quarters beyond the floor-lit courtyard, and there Faer provided him with a meal which almost made him forget his plight. She was a hale Stonedownor woman with a true gift for hospitality. Perhaps he would have been able to forget—but she studied the old suru-pa-maerl craft, as Lena had done, and that evoked too many painful memories in him. He did not visit long with Faer and her husband.

  Yet before he left, Callindrill had explained to him some of the oddness of his current position in Revelstone. The High Lord had summoned him, Callindrill said, when the Council had agreed that the war could begin at any moment, when any further postponement of the call might prove fatal. But Warmark Troy’s battle plans could not be launched until he knew which of two possible assault routes Lord Foul’s army would take. Until the Warmark received clear word from his scouts, he could not afford to commit his Eowards. If he risked a guess, and guessed wrong, disaster would result. So Covenant had been urgently summoned, and yet now was left to himself, with no demands upon him.

  In addition, the Lord went on, there was another reason why he had been summoned at a time which now appeared to have been premature. Warmark Troy ha
d argued urgently for the summons. This surprised Covenant until Callindrill explained Troy’s reasoning. The Warmark had believed that Lord Foul would be able to detect the summons. So by means of Covenant’s call Troy had hoped to put pressure on the Despiser, force him, because of his fear of the wild magic, to launch his attack before he was ready. Time favored Lord Foul because his war resources far surpassed those of the Council, and if he prepared long enough he might well field an army that no Warward could defeat. Troy hoped that the ploy of summoning Covenant would make the Despiser cut his preparations short.

  Lastly, Callindrill explained in a gentle voice, High Lord Elena and Lord Mhoram were in fact evading the Unbeliever. Covenant had not asked that question, but Callindrill seemed to divine some of the causes of his frustration. Elena and Mhoram, each in their separate ways, felt so involved in Covenant’s dilemma that they stayed away from him in order to avoid aggravating his distress. They sensed, said Callindrill, that he found their personal appeals more painful than any other. The possibility that he might go to Seareach had jolted Elena. And Mhoram was consumed by his work on the krill. Until the war bereft them of choice, they refrained as much as possible from imposing upon him.

  Well, Troy warned me, Covenant muttered to himself as he left Callindrill and Faer. He said that they’re scrupulous. After a moment, he added sourly, I would be better off if all these people would stop trying to do me favors.

  Yet he was grateful to Faer and her husband. Their companionly gestures helped him to get through the next few days, helped him to keep the vertiginous darkness at bay. He felt that he was rotting inside, but he was not going mad.

  But he knew that he could not stand it much longer. The ambience of Revelstone was as tight as a string about to snap. Pressure was building inside him, rising toward desperation. When Bannor knocked at his door one afternoon, he was so startled that he almost cried out.

  However, Bannor had not come to announce the start of the war. In his flat voice, he asked Covenant if the Unbeliever would like to go hear a song.

  A song, he echoed numbly. For a moment, he was too confused to respond. He had not expected such a question, certainly not from the Bloodguard. But then he shrugged jerkily. “Why not?” He did not stop to ask what had prompted Bannor’s unusual initiative. With a scowl, he followed the Bloodguard out of his suite.

  Bannor took him up through the levels of the Keep until they were higher in the mountain than he had ever been before. Then the wide passage they followed rounded a corner, and came unexpectedly into open sunlight. They entered a broad, roofless amphitheater. Rows of stone benches curved downward to form a bowl around a flat center stage; and behind the topmost row the stone wall rose straight for twenty or thirty feet, ending in the flat of the plateau, where the mountain met the sky. The afternoon sun shone into the amphitheater, drenching the dull white stone of the stage and benches and wall with warmth and light.

  The seats were starting to fill when Bannor and Covenant arrived. People from all the occupations of the Keep, including farmers and cooks and warriors, and the Lords Trevor and Loerya with their daughters, came through several openings in the wall to take seats around the bowl. But the Bloodguard formed the largest single group. Covenant estimated roughly that there were a hundred of them on the benches. This vaguely surprised him. He had never seen more than a score of the Haruchai in one place before. After looking around for a while, he asked Bannor, “What song is this, anyway?”

  “Lord Kevin’s Lament,” Bannor replied dispassionately.

  Then Covenant felt that he understood. Kevin, he nodded to himself. Of course the Bloodguard wanted to hear this song. How could they be less than keenly interested in anything which might help them to comprehend Kevin Landwaster?

  For it was Kevin who had summoned Lord Foul to Kiril Threndor to utter the Ritual of Desecration. The legends said that when Kevin had seen that he could not defeat the Despiser, his heart had turned black with despair. He had loved the Land too intensely to let it fall to Lord Foul. And yet he had failed; he could not preserve it. Torn by his impossible dilemma, he had been driven to dare that Ritual. He had known that the unleashing of that fell power would destroy the Lords and all their works, and ravage the Land from end to end, make it barren for generations. He had known that he would die. But he had hoped that Lord Foul would also die, that when at last life returned to the Land it would be life free of Despite. He chose to take that risk rather than permit Lord Foul’s victory. Thus he dared the Despiser to join him in Kiril Threndor. He and Lord Foul spoke the Ritual, and High Lord Kevin Landwaster destroyed the Land which he loved.

  And Lord Foul had not died. He had been reduced for a time, but he had survived, preserved by the law of Time which imprisoned him upon the Earth—so the legends said. So now all the Land and the new Lords lay under the consequences of Kevin’s despair.

  It was not surprising that the Bloodguard wanted to hear this song—or that Bannor had asked Covenant to come hear it also.

  As he mused, Covenant caught a glimpse of blue from across the amphitheater. Looking up, he saw High Lord Elena standing near one of the entrances. She, too, wanted to hear this song.

  With her was Warmark Troy.

  Covenant felt an urge to go join them, but before he could make up his mind to move, the singer entered the amphitheater. She was a tall, resplendent woman, simply clad in a crimson robe, with golden hair that flew like sparks about her head. As she moved down the steps to the stage, her audience rose to its feet and silently gave her the salute of welcome. She did not return it. Her face bore a look of concentration, as if she were already feeling her song.

  When she reached the stage, she did not speak, said nothing to introduce or explain or identify her song. Instead, she took her stance in the center of the stage, composed herself for a moment as the song came over her, then lifted her face to the sun and opened her throat.

  At first, her melody was restrained, arid and angular—only hinting at burned pangs and poignancies.

  I stood on the pinnacle of the Earth:

  Mount Thunder,

  its Lions in full flaming mane,

  raised its crest no higher

  than the horizons that my gaze commanded;

  the Ranyhyn,

  hooves unfettered since the Age began,

  galloped gladly to my will;

  iron-thewed Giants

  from beyond the sun’s birth in the sea

  came to me in ships as mighty as castles,

  and cleft my castle from the

  raw Earth rock

  and gave it to me out of pure friendship

  a handmark of allegiance and fealty

  in the eternal stone of Time;

  the Lords under my Watch labored

  to find and make manifest

  the true purpose of the Earth’s Creator,

  barred from His creation by the very

  power of that purpose—

  power graven into the flesh and bone of the Land

  by the immutable Law of its creation:

  how could I stand so,

  so much glory and dominion comprehended

  by the outstretch of my arms—

  stand thus,

  eye to eye with the Despiser,

  and not be dismayed?

  But then the song changed, as if the singer opened inner chambers to give her voice more resonance. In high, arching spans of song, she gave out her threnody—highlighted it and underscored it with so many implied harmonies, so many suggestions of other accompanying voices, that she seemed to have a whole choir within her, using her one throat for utterance.

  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 c
leansing,

  or crumble into dust for shame?

  Creator!

  When You desecrated this temple,

  rid Yourself of this contempt by

  inflicting it upon the Land,

  did You intend that beauty and truth should pass utterly from the Earth?

  Have You shaped my fate into the Law of life?

  Am I effectless?

  Must I preside over,

  sanction,

  acknowledge with the bitter face of treachery,

  approve

  the falling of the world?

  Her music ached in the air like a wound of song. And as she finished, the people came to their feet with a rush. Together they sang into the fathomless heavens:

  Ah, Creator!

  Timelord and Landsire!

  Did You intend

  that beauty and truth should pass utterly

  from the Earth?

  Bannor stood, though he did not join the song. But Covenant kept his seat, feeling small and useless beside the community of Revelstone. Their emotion climaxed in the refrain, expending sharp grief and then filling the amphitheater with a wash of peace which cleansed and healed the song’s despair, as if the united power of the singing alone were answer enough to Kevin’s outcry. By making music out of despair, the people resisted it. But Covenant felt otherwise. He was beginning to understand the danger that threatened the Land.

  So he was still sitting, gripping his beard and staring blankly before him, when the people filed out of the amphitheater, left him alone with the hot brightness of the sun. He remained there, muttering grimly to himself, until he became aware that Hile Troy had come over to him.

  When he looked up, the Warmark said, “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  Gruffly Covenant responded, “I didn’t expect to see you.” But he was only obliquely thinking about Troy. He was still trying to grapple with Kevin.

  As if he could hear Covenant’s thoughts, the Warmark said, “It all comes back to Kevin. He’s the one who made the Seven Wards. He’s the one who inspired the Bloodguard. He’s the one who did the Ritual of Desecration. And it wasn’t necessary—or it wasn’t inevitable. He wouldn’t have been driven that far if he hadn’t already made his big mistake.”