White Gold Wielder t2cotc-3

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  His struggle was terrible to behold. He could have effaced the Cavewights with a simple thought-and brought down the Arch of Time, or desecrated it with venom. He was willing to sacrifice himself. But his friends! Their peril rent at him. For the space of one heart-beat, she thought he would destroy everything to save the First and Pitchwife. So that they would not die like Foamfollower for him.

  Yet he withheld-clamped his ripped and wailing spirit in a restraint as inhuman as his purpose. His features hardened; his gaze became bleak and desolate, like the Land under the scourge of the Sunbane. “You're right,” he muttered softly. “This is pathetic.”

  Straightening his back, he started down the tunnel.

  She clinched his numb half-hand and fled with him into darkness. Cries and blows shouted after them, echoed and were swallowed by the Wightwarrens.

  As the reflected rocklight faded, they reached an intersection Covenant veered instinctively to the right; but she took the leftward turning because it felt less travelled. Almost at once. she regretted her choice. It did not lead away from the light. Instead, it opened into a wide chamber with fissures along one side that admitted the shining of the molten lake. Sulphur and heat clogged the air. Two more tunnels gave access to the chamber; but they did not draw off the accumulated reek.

  The roadway along the rim of the abyss was visible through the fissures. This chamber had probably been intended to allow Mount Thunder's denizens to watch the road without being seen.

  The First and Pitchwife were no longer upon the rim. They had retreated into the tunnel after Linden and Covenant. Or they had fallen—

  Linden's senses shrilled an alarm. Too late: always too late. Bitterly, she wheeled to face the Cavewights that thronged into the chamber from all three entrances.

  She and her companions must have been spotted from this covert when they first made their way past the abyss. And the brief time they had spent watching Vain and Findail had given the Cavewights opportunity to spring this trap.

  In the tunnel Linden and Covenant had used, the First and Pitchwife appeared, battling tremendously to reach their friends. But most of the Cavewights hurried to block the Giants’ way. The Swordmain and her husband were beaten back.

  Pitchwife's inchoate cry wrung Linden's heart. Then he and the First were forced out of sight. Cavewights rushed in pursuit.

  Brandishing cudgels and axes, the rest of the creatures advanced on Covenant and Linden.

  He thrust her behind him. took a step forward. Rocklight limned his desperate shoulders. “I'm the one you want.” His voice was taut with suppression and wild magic. “I'll go with you. Leave her alone.”

  Rapt and grim, the Cavewights gave no sign that they beard turn. Their eyes smouldered.

  “If you hurt her,” he gritted, “I’ll tear you apart.” One of them grabbed him, manacled both his wrists in a huge fist Another raised his club and levelled a crushing blow at Linden's head.

  She ducked. The truncheon whipped through her hair, almost touched her skull. Launching herself from the wall, she dodged toward Covenant.

  The Cavewights seemed slow. awkward. For a moment, they did not catch her.

  Somehow, Covenant twisted his wrists free. He snatched his knife from his belt, began slashing frenetically about him. A Cavewight howled, hopped back. But the blade was deep in the creature's ribs, and Covenant's half-hand failed of its If grip; the knife was ripped from him.

  Weaponless, he spun toward Linden. His face stretched as if he wanted to cry out. Forgive!

  The Cavewights surrounded him. They did not use their cudgels or axes: apparently, they wanted him alive. With their fists, they beat him until he fell.

  Linden tried to reach him. She was avid for power, futile without it. Her arms and legs were useless against the Cavewights. They laughed coarsely at her struggles. Wildly, she groped for Covenant's ring with her health-sense, tried to take hold of it. The infernal air choked her lungs. Bottomless and hungry through the fissures came the boiling of the molten lake. Vain and Findail had fallen. The First and Pitchwife were lost Covenant lay like a sacrifice on the stone. She had nothing left—

  She was still groping when a blow came down gleefully on the bone behind her left ear. At once, the world turned over and sprawled into darkness.

  Eighteen: No Other Way

  THOMAS Covenant lay face down on the floor. It pressed like flat stone against his battered cheek. Bruises malformed the bones of his visage. Though he wanted nothing but peace and salvation, he had become what he was by violence-the consequences of his own acts. From somewhere in the distance arose a throaty murmuring, incessant and dire, like a litany of invocation, dozens of voices repeating the same word or name softly, but with different cadences, at varying speeds. They were still around him, the people who had come to bereave him. They were taunting his failure.

  Joan was gone.

  Perhaps he should have moved, rolled over, done something to soften the pain. But the effort was beyond him. All his strength was sand and ashes. And be had never been physically strong. They had taken her from him without any trouble at all. It was strange, he reflected abstractly, that someone who had as little to brag of as he did spent so much time trying to pretend he was immortal. He should have known better. God knew he had been given every conceivable opportunity to outgrow his arrogance.

  Real heroes were not arrogant. Who could have called Berek arrogant? Or Mhoram? Foamfollower? The list went on and on, all of them humble. Even Hile Troy had finally given up his pride. Only people like Covenant himself were arrogant enough to believe that the outcome of the Earth depended on their purblind and fallible choices. Only people like himself. And Lord Foul. Those who were capable of Despite and chose to refuse it And those who did not Linden had told him any number of times that he was arrogant.

  That was why he had to defeat Lord Foul-why the task devolved on him alone.

  Any minute now, he told himself. Any minute now he was going to get up from the floor of his house and go exchange himself for Joan. He had put it off long enough. She was not arrogant-not really. She did not deserve what had happened to her. She had simply never been able to forgive herself for her weaknesses, her limitations.

  Then he wanted to laugh. It would have done him a world of good to laugh. He was not so different from Joan after all. The only real difference was that he had been summoned to the Land while it was still able to heal him-and while he was still able to know what that meant He was sane-if he was sane-by grace, not by virtue.

  In a sense, she actually was arrogant. She placed too much importance on her own faults and failures. She had never learned to let them go.

  He had never learned that lesson either. But he was trying. Dear God, he was trying. Any minute now, he was going to take her place in Lord Foul's fire. He was going to let everything go.

  But somehow the floor did not feel right. The murmurous invocation that filled his ears and his lungs and his bones called on a name that did not sound like the Despiser's. It perplexed him, seemed to make breathing difficult. He had forgotten something.

  Wearily, he opened his eyes, blinked at the blurring of his vision, and remembered where he was.

  Then be thought that surely his heart would fail. His bruises throbbed in his skull. He had received them from Cavewights, not from Joan's captors. He did not have long to live.

  He lay near the centre of a large cave with rough walls and a ragged ceiling. The air smelled thickly of rocklight, which burned from special stones set into the walls at careless intervals. The cave was crudely oval in shape; it narrowed at both ends to dark, unattainable tunnels. The odour of the rocklight was tinged with a scent of ancient mouldering-rot so old that it had become almost clean again.

  It came from a large, high mound nearby. The heap looked like a barrow, as if something revered had been buried there. But it was composed entirely of bones. Thousands of skeletons piled in one place. Most of them had been set there so long ago that they had decomposed
to fine grey dust, no longer of interest even to maggots. But the top of the mound was more recent. None of the skeletons were whole: all had been either broken in death or dismembered afterward. Even the newer ones had been cleaned of flesh. However, a few of them still oozed from the marrow.

  They were not human bones, or ur vile. Cavewight, then. Apparently, the creatures that the First and Pitchwife had slain had already been added to the mound.

  The murmuring went on without let, as if dozens or hundreds of predators were growling to themselves. He felt that sound like the touch of panic in his vitals. Some name was being repeated continuously, whispered or muttered at every pitch and pace; but he could not distinguish it. Heat and sound and rocklight squeezed sweat from the sore bones of his head.

  He was surrounded by Cavewights. Most of them squatted near the walls, their knees jutting at their ears, their hot eyes glowing. Others appeared to be dancing about the mound, stork-like and graceless on their long legs. Their hands attacked the air like spades. They all murmured and murmured, incantatory and hypnotic. He had no idea what they were saying, or how much longer he would be lulled, snared.

  He was afraid-so afraid that his fear became a kind of lucidity. Not afraid for himself. He had met that particular terror in the Banefire and burned it to purity. These creatures were only Cavewights, the weak-minded and malleable children of Mount Thunder's gutrock, and Lord Foul had mastered them long ago. They could hardly hope to come between Covenant and the Despiser. Though the way to it was hard, his purpose was safe.

  But in a small clear space against one wall sat Linden. He saw her with the precision of his fear. Her right shoulder leaned on the stone. With her arms, she hugged her knees to her chest like a lorn child. Her head was bowed; her hair had fallen forward, hiding her face. But the side of her neck was bare. It gleamed, pale and vulnerable, in the red-orange illumination.

  Black against the pallor, dried blood marked her skin. It led in a crusted trail from behind her left ear down to the collar of her shirt.

  She, too-! A tremor of grief went through him. She, too, had been made to match the physical condition of the body she had left behind in the woods behind Haven Farm. They did not have much time left.

  He would have cried out, if he had possessed the strength. Not much time-and to spend it like this! He wanted to hold her in his arms, make her understand that he loved her-that no death or risk of ruin could desecrate what she meant to him. Lena had once tried to comfort him by singing. The soul in which the flower grows survives. He wanted—

  But perhaps the blow she had been struck had been harder than either of them had realized, and she also was about to die. Killed like Seadreamer because she had tried to save him. And even if she did not die, she would believe that she had lost him to despair. In Andelain, EIena had told him to Care for her. So that in the end she may heal us all. He had failed at that as at so many other things.

  Linden. He tried to say her name, but no sound came. A spasm of remorse twisted his face, made his bruises throb. Ignoring the pain, the fathomless ache of his exhaustion, he levered his elbows under him and strove to pry his weakness off the stone.

  A rough kick pitched him onto his back, closer to the mound of bones. Gasping, he looked up into the leer of a Cavewight.

  “Be still, accursed!” the creature spat. "Punishment comes. Punishment and apocalypse! Do not hasten it.”

  Cavorting grotesquely on his gangly limbs, he resumed his muttering and danced away.

  Covenant wrestled for breath and squirmed onto his side to look toward Linden again.

  She was facing him now, had turned toward him when the Cavewight spoke. Her visage was empty of blood, of hope. The gaze she cast at him, was stark with abuse and dumb pleading. Her hands clasped each other uselessly. Her eyes seemed as dark and hollow as wounds.

  She must have looked like that when she was a child, locked in the attic with her father while he died.

  He fought for his voice, croaked her name through the manifold invocation of the Cavewights. But she did not appear to hear him. Slowly, she dropped her head, lowered her gaze to the failure of her hands.

  He could not go to her. He hardly knew where he might find enough strength to stand. And the Cavewights would not let him move. He had no way to combat them except with his ring-the wild magic he could not use. He and she were prisoners completely. And there was no name that either of them might call upon for rescue..

  No name except the Despiser's.

  Covenant hoped like madness that Lord Foul would act quickly.

  But perhaps Lord Foul would not act. Perhaps he permitted the Cavewights to work their will, hoping that Covenant would once again be forced to power. Perhaps he did not understand-was incapable of understanding-the certainty of Covenant's refusal.

  The throaty chant of the Cavewights was changing: the incessant various repetitions were shifting toward unison. One creature started a slightly sharper inflection, a more specific cadence; and his immediate neighbours fell into rhythm with him. Cavewight by Cavewight, the unison spread until the invoked name took Covenant by surprise, jolted alarm through him.

  He knew that name.

  Drool Rockworm.

  More than three millennia ago. Drool Rockworm of the Cavewights had recovered the lost Staff of Law-and had conceived a desire to rule the Earth. But he had been too unskilled in lore to master what he had found. In seduction or folly, he had turned to the Despiser for knowledge. And Lord Foul had used the Cavewight for his own purposes.

  Drool Rockworm.

  First he had persuaded Drool to summon Covenant, luring the Cavewight with promises of white gold. Then he had snatched Covenant away, sent the Unbeliever instead to the Council of Lords. And the Lords had responded by challenging Drool's power. Sneaking into the Wightwarrens, they had taken the Staff from him, had called down the Fire-Lions of Mount Thunder to destroy him.

  Thus armed, they had thought themselves victorious. But they had only played into the Despiser's bands. They had rid him of Drool, thereby giving him access to the terrible bane he desired-the Illearth Stone. And from that time forward the Cavewights had been forced to serve him like puppets.

  Drool Rockworm.

  The name vibrated like add in the air. The rocklight throbbed. All the Cavewights held themselves still. Their laval eyes focused on what they were invoking.

  Beside Covenant, an eerie glow began to leak from the mound of bones. Sick red flames licked like swamp-fire around the pile. Fragments of bone seemed to waver and melt as if they were passing into hallucination.

  Suddenly, he no longer believed that these creatures served the Despiser.

  Drool Rockworm!

  “Covenant.” Linden's voice reached between the beats of the name. She had come out of herself, drawn by what the Cavewights were doing. “There's something- ” Fiercely, she struggled to master her despair. “They're bringing it to life.”

  Covenant winced in dismay. But he did not doubt her. The Law that protected the living had been broken. Any horror might now be summoned past the barrier of death, given the will-and the power. The mound squirmed with fires and gleamings like a monstrous cocoon, decay and dust in the throes of birth.

  Then one of the Cavewights moved. He strode across the chant toward Covenant. “Rise, accursed,” he demanded. His eyes were as feral as his grin. “Rise for blood and torment”

  Covenant stared whitely up at him, did not obey.

  “Rise!” the creature raged. With one spatulate hand, he grabbed Covenant's arm and nearly dislocated it yanking him to his feet.

  Covenant bit down panic and pain. “You're going to regret this!” He had to shout to make himself heard. The invocation pounded in his chest “Foul wants me! Do you think you can defy him and get away with it?”

  “Hal” barked the Cavewight as if he were close to ecstasy. “We are too wily! He does not know us. We have learned. Learned. Him so wise.” For an instant, all the voices shared his contempt. Drool Roc
kworm! “He is blind. Believes we have not found you.” The creature spat wildness instead of laughter.

  Then he wrenched Covenant around to face the mound. Linden groaned Covenant's name. He heard a thud as one of the creatures silenced her. His arm was gripped by fingers that knew how to break stone.

  Flames began to writhe like ghouls across the mound, casting anguish toward the roof of the cave.

  “Witness!” the Cavewight grated. “The Wightbarrow!”

  The invocation took on a timbre of lust.

  “We have served and served. Forever we have served. Chattel. Fodder. Sacrifice. And no reward. Do this. Do that Dig. Run. Die. No reward. None!

  “Now he pays. Punishment and apocalypse.

  The Cavewights’ virulence staggered Covenant. The muscles of his arm were being crushed. But he shut his mind to everything else. Groping for a way to save Linden's life if not his own, he protested hoarsely, “How? He's the Despiser He’ll tear your hearts out!”

  But the Cavewights were beyond fear. “Witness!” Covenant's captor repeated. “See it Fire. Life! The Wightbarrow of Drool Rockworm!”

  Drool Rockworm, hammered the chant. Drool Rockworm! “From the dead. We have learned. Bloodshed. Sunbane. Law broken. The blood of the accursed!” He almost capered in his exultation. “You!”

  His free hand clasped a long spike of rock like a dagger.

  In litany, he shouted, “Blood brings power! Power brings life! Drool Rockworm rises! Drool takes ring! Ring crashes Despiser! Cavewights are free! Punishment and apocalypse!”

  Brandishing his spike at Covenant's face, he added, “Soon. You are the accursed. Bringer of ruin. Your blood shed upon the Wightbarrow.” The side of the spike stroked Covenant's stiff cheek. “Soon.”

  Covenant heard Linden pant as she struggled for breath, No Other Way “Bones- ” He winced, expecting her to be hit again. But still she tried to make him hear her. “The bones- ”

  Her voice was congested with effort and intention; but he had no idea what she meant.