From the line of his shoulders to the flex of his knees, his entire body was covered with wasps.
Great yellow wasps, as big as Covenant's thumb.
When the light touched them, they began to snarl.
For one hideous moment, they writhed where they were; and the Rider wore them as if he were one of the Sunbane-warped, made savage and abominable by corruption. Then the swarm launched itself at Covenant.
In that instant, the world went black. Venom crashed against his heart like the blow of a sledgehammer.
Black fire; black poison; black ruin. The flame raging from his ring should have been as pure and argent as the metal from which it sprang; but it was not, was not. It was an abyss that yawned around him, a gulf striding through the air and the ground and the Keep to consume them, swallow the world and leave no trace. And every effort he made to turn the dark fire white, force it back to the clean pitch of its true nature, only raised the blaze higher, widened the void. Swiftly, it became as huge as the hillside, hungry for ruin.
Linden was not shouting at him. If she had torn her heart with screams, he would not have been able to hear her. She was too far away, and the gathering cataclysm of his power filled all his senses. Yet he heard her in his mind-heard her as she had once cried to him across the Worm's aura and the white ring's eruption, This is what Foul wants! — felt the remembered grasp of her arms as she had striven to wrest him back from doom. If he let his conflagration swell, they would all die, she and the others he loved and the Land he treasured, all of them ripped out of life and meaning by blackness.
The strain of self-mastery pushed him far beyond himself. He was driven to a stretched and tenuous desperation from which he would never be able to turn back-a hard, wild exigency that he would have to see through to its conclusion for good or ill, ravage or restitution. But the simple knowledge that he would not be able to turn back and did not mean to try enabled him to strangle the destruction pouring from him.
Abruptly, his vision cleared-and he had not been stung. Thousands of small, charred bodies still smoked on the bare ground. Not one of the wasps was left to threaten him.
The Rider remained standing with his mouth open and his eyes white, miraculously unscathed and astonished.
Covenant felt no triumph: he had gone too far for triumph. But he was certain of himself now, at least for the moment. To the Rider, he said, “Tell Gibbon he had his chance.” His voice held neither doubt nor mercy. "Now I'm coming in after him.”
Slowly, the astonishment drained from the man's face. His frenzy and glee seemed to collapse as if he had suffered a relapse of mortality. Yet he remained a Rider of the Clave, and he knew his enemy. All the Land had been taught to believe that Covenant was a betrayer. The man looked human and frail, reduced by failure; but he did not recant his faith.
“You surpass me, Halfhand.” His voice shook. “You have learned to wield-and to restrain. But you have come to havoc the long service of our lives, and we will not permit you. Look to your power, for it will not aid you against us,”
Turning as if he were still able to dismiss Covenant from consideration, he followed the echoes of his feet back into the tunnel under the watchtower.
Covenant watched him go and cursed the mendacity which enabled Lord Foul to take such men and women, people of native courage and dedication, and convince them that the depredations of the Clave were virtuous. Revelstone was full of individuals who believed themselves responsible for the survival of the Land. And they would be the first to die. The Despiser would sacrifice them before hazarding his truer servants.
Yet even for them Covenant could not stop now. The fire still raved within him. He had not quenched it. He had only internalized it, sealed its fury inside himself. If he did not act on it, it would break out with redoubled vehemence, and he would never be able to contain it again.
Violence taut in his muscles, he started stiffly down the hillside toward his friends.
They began the ascent to meet him. Anxiously, they studied the way he moved as if they had seen him emerge from the teeth of hell and could hardly believe it.
Before he reached them, he heard the flat thunder of hooves.
He did not stop: he was wound to his purpose and unbreachable. But he looked back up at Revelstone over his shoulder.
Between the broken gates came Riders mounted on Coursers, half a dozen of them pounding in full career down the slope. The Sunbane-bred Coursers were large enough to carry four or five ordinary men and woman, would have been large enough to support Giants. They had malicious eyes, the faces and fangs of sabertooths, shaggy pelts, and poisoned spurs at the back of each ankle. And the Riders held their rukhs high and bright with flame as they charged. Together they rushed downward as if they believed they could sweep the company off the hillside, Yet for all their fury and speed they looked more like a charade than a true assault. The Banefire made them dangerous; but they were only six, and they were hurling themselves against ten Haruchai, four Giants, the Appointed of the Elohim, and four humans whose strength had not yet been fully measured Covenant himself had already killed Deliberately, he left the charge to his companions and walked on.
Behind him, the Coursers suddenly went wild.
Sunder had snatched out his Sunstone and the krill; but now he did not draw his power from the sun. Instead, he tapped the huge beam of the Banefire. And he was acquainted with Coursers. At one time, he had learned to use a rukh in order to master a group of the beasts: he knew how to command them. Fierce red flarings shot back and forth through the krill’s white light as he threw his force at the attack; but he did not falter, The impact of his countervailing instructions struck chaos into the Coursers. Two of them fell trying to lunge in several directions simultaneously. A third stumbled over them. The others attacked the fallen, tried to kill them.
Reft of control, the Riders sprawled to the hard ground. One was crushed under the massive body of a Courser. Another received a dangerous spur slash. She cried out to her comrades for help; but they were already in flight back toward the Keep, bearing the broken Rider for his blood. Weakly, she struggled after them.
Sunder ordered the Coursers out into the desert so that the Clave would not be able to use them again. But two of them squealed with pain when they tried to obey: they had broken legs. Gripping her falchion in both fists, the First stalked up to the maimed beasts and slew them.
Then Sunder, Linden, and Pitchwife approached Covenant The Graveler was panting heavily. “Gibbon does not put forth his full strength. I am not the equal of six Riders.” Yet there was a grim pride in his tone. At last he had struck an effective blow against the Clave.
“He's trying to provoke you,” Linden warned. “You almost didn't pull back in time. You've got to be careful.” Fear of Ravers twisted her face into a scowl.
“Earthfriend,” breathed Pitchwife, “what will you do?
There is a madness upon Grimmand Honninscrave. We will not be long able to withhold him.”
But Covenant made no reply. His legs were trembling now, and he could not stop what he was doing or turn aside. He headed toward a blunt boulder jutting from the lower slope of the foothill. When he reached it, he struggled up onto its crown, defying the way the wide landscape below and about him sucked at his balance. All his limbs felt leaden with suppressed devastation. From horizon to horizon, the desert sun had almost finished its work. In the low places of the terrain lay ponds of sludge which had once been trees and brush and vines, but every slope and rise was burned to dust and death. The thought that he would have to damage Revelstone was intolerable. Sheer grief and self-loathing would break him if he set his hand to that stone. Yet the necessity was inescapable. The Clave and the Banefire could not be permitted to go on. His heart quivered at the conflict of his fears-fear of harming the Keep and of not harming it, fear of himself, of the risk he meant to take; his desire to avoid killing and his need to protect his friends. But he had already chosen his path. Now he started down it.
Trembling as if he were on the verge of deflagration, he spoke the name he had been hoarding to himself ever since he had begun to understand the implications of what he meant to do.
The name of a Sandgorgon.
“Nom.”
Ten: The Banefire
CLEARLY through the sudden shock of the company, he heard Linden gasp. There was no wind, nothing to soften the arid pressure of the sun. Below him, the terrain was falling into the paradoxical purity of desecration. The cleanliness of extermination. No wonder fire was so hard to resist. His balance seemed to spin out of him into the flat brown sky. He had not eaten or slept since the previous day. Perhaps it was inanition which made the horizons cant to one side as if they were about to sail away. Inanition or despair.
But Pitchwife and Cail caught him, lowered him from the boulder; and Linden came to him in a blur of vertigo. He had never been good at heights. He knew that she was saying his name, yet he felt unable to hear her. Her face was impossible to focus. She should have been protesting, A Sandgorgon? Are you out of your mind? What makes you think you can control it? But she was not. Her hands gripped his shoulders roughly, then flinched away. This time, her gasp was like a cry. “You-!” she began. But the words would not come. “Oh, Covenant'“
The First's voice cut through the wild reel of the hills. “What harms him?” All his friends were crowded around him and spinning. He saw Mhoram and Foamfollower, Banner and Elena-and Caer-Caveral- all there as if they deserved better from him “What has transpired to harm him?” They had met him in Andelain and given him everything they dared; and this was the result. He was caught on a wheel that had no centre. “Chosen, you must speak!”
“He's on fire.” Linden's tone was wet with tears. “The venom's on fire. We'd already be dead, but he's holding it inside. As long as he can. Until it eats its way out.”
The First cursed, then snapped a command that Covenant failed to hear. A moment later, Pitchwife's heat-impervious hands lifted a bowl of diamondraught to Covenant's mouth.
Its potent smell stung his nostrils with panic. Diamondraught would restore him. Perhaps it would restore his self-mastery as well. Or it might fuel the Maze of his suppressed power. He could not take the chance.
Somehow, he slowed the spin. Clarity was possible. He could not afford to fail. And he would not have to hang on long; only until he reached the culmination of his nightmares. It was possible. When he was certain of the faces hovering around him, he said as if he were suffocating, “Not diamondraught. Metheglin.”
The First glared doubt at him; but Linden nodded. “He's right,” she said in a rush. “He has to keep his balance. Between strength and weakness. Diamondraught is too strong.”
People were moving: Hollian and Mistweave went away, came back at once with a pouch of the Land's thick mead. That Covenant drank, sparingly at first, then more deeply as he felt his grasp on the conflagration hold. By degrees, the vertigo frayed out of him. His friends were present and stable. The ground became solid again. The sun rang in his eyes, clanged against his temples, like Lord Foul's silent laughter; and his face streamed with the sweat of desperation. But as the metheglin steadied him, he found that he was at least able to bear the heat.
With Pitchwife's help, he gained his feet. Squinting, he turned to the east and thrust his gaze out into the shimmering desert.
“Will it come?” the First asked no one in particular. “The wide seas intervene, and they are no slight barrier.”
“Kasreyn said it would.” Linden bit her lips to control her apprehension, then continued, “He said, 'Distance has no meaning to such power.' ” Covenant remembered that. The Sandgorgons answer their release swiftly. That was how Hergrom had been killed. But Covenant had already summoned Nom once at Linden's instigation; and he had not been slain. And Nom had not gone back to Sandgorgons Doom. Therefore why should the beast answer him now? He had no reason for such a wild hope-no reason at all except the fact that Nom had bowed to him when he had refrained from killing it.
But the east was empty, and the haze closed against him like a curtain. Even the eyes of the Giants discerned no sign of an answer.
Abruptly, Call's uninflected voice broke the silence, “Ur-Lord, behold.”
With one arm, he pointed up the hillside toward Revelstone.
For an instant Covenant believed that the Haruchai wanted him to observe the immense hot vermeil shaft of the Banefire. With sun-echoes burning white and brown across his sight, he thought the sizzling beam looked stronger now, as though Gibbon-Raver were feeding it furiously to arm the Clave for combat. Killing the captured villagers and Haruchai as fast as their blood could be poured onto the floor of the sacred enclosure where the Banefire burned.
At the idea, the spots flaring against the backs of his eyes turned black. His restraint slipped. The fang-marks on his forearm hurt as if they had been reopened.
But then he saw the Riders at the base of the tower. Four of them: two holding up their rukhs to master a Haruchai they had brought with them; two equipped with knives and buckets.
They intended to shed then mind-bound prisoner in full view of Covenant and the company.
Covenant let out a shout that made the air throb. But at the same time he fought for control, thinking, No, No. He's trying to provoke me. The blackness in him writhed. He refused it until it subsided.
“Honninscrave.” The First sounded almost casual, as if the sight of atrocities made her calm. “Mistweave. It is my thought that we need not permit this.”
Half the Haruchai had started upward at a sprint. She made no effort to call them back. Stooping to the dirt, she picked up a rock larger than her palm; and in the same motion she hurled it at the Riders.
Striking the wall behind them, it burst in a shower of splinters that slashed at them like knives.
Instantly, Honninscrave and Mistweave followed the First's example. Their casts were so accurate that one of the Riders had a leg smashed, another was ripped by a hail of rebounding fragments. Their companions were compelled to release the Haruchai so that they could use their rukhs to defend themselves.
While the four Riders retreated into the tunnel, their captive turned on them. Suddenly free of their coercion, he slew the injured men. Then he pivoted disdainfully on his heel and strode down the slope to meet his people. He was bleeding from several cuts inflicted by sharp pieces of stone, but he bore himself as if he were unscathed.
Covenant hated killing. He had chosen his path in an effort to spare as many lives as possible. But as he watched the released Haruchai walking toward him like pure and utter dispassion, a dire grin twisted the comers of his mouth. In that moment, he became more dangerous to Gibbon and the Clave than any host of warriors or powers, When he looked toward the east again, he saw a plume of dust rising through the haze.
He did not doubt what it was. Nothing but a Sandgorgon could travel with enough swift strength to raise that much dust.
Mutely, Linden moved to his side as if she wanted to take his arm and cling to it for support. But the dark peril he radiated kept her from touching him.
Mistweave watched the dust with growing amazement Pitchwife muttered inanely to himself, making pointless jests that seemed to ease his trepidation. The First grinned like a scimitar. Of the Giants, only Honninscrave did not study the beast's approach. He stood with his head bowed and his arms manacled across his chest as if throwing stones at the Riders had whetted his hunger for violence.
Unexpectedly, Findail spoke. He sounded weary, worn thin by the prolonged burden of his responsibility; but some of the bitterness was gone from his voice. “Ring-wielder,” he said, “your purpose here is abominable and should be set aside. Those who hold the Earth in their hands have no justification for vengeance. Yet you have found a wise way to the accomplishment of your ends. I implore that you entrust them to this beast. You little comprehend what you have summoned.”
Covenant ignored the Elohim. Linden glanced at the Appointed. Sunder and
Hollian gazed at him in confusion. But none of the companions spoke.
Nom had become visible at the arrow point of the advancing dust.
Albino against the desiccated waste, the beast approached at a startling pace. Its size was not commensurate with its might: it was only a few hands taller than Covenant, only a little more thickly built than the Haruchai; yet given time and concentrated attention and freedom it was capable of reducing the entire gutrock wedge of Revelstone to wreckage It had a strange gait, suited to deserts: its knees were back-bent like a bird's to utilize the full thrust of the wide pads of its feet. Lacking hands, its arms were formed like battering-rams.
And it had no face. Nothing defined its hairless head except the faint ridges of its skull under its hide and two covered slits like gills on either side.
Even to Covenant's unpenetrating sight, the Sandgorgon looked as pure and uncontestable as a force of nature-a hurricane bound into one savage form and avid for a place to strike.
It came running as if it meant to hurl itself at him.
But at the last it stopped in a thick nimbus of dust, confronted him across a scant stretch of bare dirt. For a moment, it trembled as it had trembled when he had defeated it in direct combat and it had not known how to hold back its elemental fury even to save its own life. Service was an alien concept to its brute mind; violence made more sense. Sweat blurred the edges of his vision as he watched the beast quiver for decision. Involuntarily, he held his breath. A few small flames slipped past his control and licked at his forearm until he beat them back.
Nom's trembling mounted-and abruptly subsided. Lowering itself to the ground, the beast placed its forehead in the dirt at Covenant's feet.
Slowly, he let pent air leak away through his teeth. A muffled sigh of relief passed through the company. Linden covered her face momentarily, then thrust her fingers through her hair as if she were trying to pull courage up out of her alarm.
“Nom,” he said, and his voice shook. “Thanks for coming.”
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