The Illearth War
Page 45
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 gray background of scree and rubble. She and Myrha looked small in the deep sheer valley, but the conjunction of their colors 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 center.
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 labored 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. Plowing 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 imperiled 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 susurrus 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 honor 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 molded. 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.”
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.