If Linden were not at Revelstone, then he would need the Clave's help to locate Santonin. And he would have to pay for that help with cooperation and vulnerability.
Yanking at his beard as if he could pull wisdom from the skin of his face, he glared at Memla's back and groped for prescience. But he could not see past his fear that he might indeed be forced to surrender his ring.
No. Not that. Please. He gritted his teeth against his chill dread. The future was a leper's question, and he had been taught again and again that the answer lay in single-minded dedication to the exigencies of the present. But he had never been taught how to achieve single-mindedness, how to suppress his own complex self-contradictions.
Finally, he dozed. His slumber was fitful. The night was protracted by fragmentary nightmares of suicide-glimpses of a leper's self-abandonment that terrified him because they came so close to the facts of his fate, to the manner in which he had given himself up for Joan. Waking repeatedly, he strove to elude his dreams; but whenever he faded back toward unconsciousness, they renewed their ubiquitous grasp.
Some time before dawn, Memla roused herself. Muttering at the stiffness in her bones, she used a few faggots to restore the fire, then set a stoneware bowl Ml of water in the flames to heat. While the water warmed, she put her forehead in the dirt toward Revelstone and mumbled orisons in a language Covenant could not understand.
Vain ignored her as if he had been turned to stone.
When the water was hot enough, she used some of it to lave her hands, face, and neck. The rest she offered to Covenant. He accepted. After the night he had just spent, he needed to comfort himself somehow. While he performed what ablutions he could, she took food for breakfast from one of her sacks.
He declined her viands. True, she had done nothing to threaten him. But she was a Rider of the Clave. While he still had vitrim left, he was unwilling to risk her food. And also, he admitted to himself, he wanted to remind her of his distrust. He owed her at least that much candour.
She took his refusal sourly. “The night has not taught you grace,” she said. “We are four days from Revelstone, Halfhand. Perhaps you mean to live on air and dust when the liquid in your pouch fails.”
“I mean,” he articulated, “to trust you exactly as much as I have to, and no more.”
She scowled at his reply, but made no retort.
Soon dawn approached. Moving briskly now, Memla packed away her supplies. As soon as she had tied up her sacks, bound her bundles together by lengths of rope, she raised her head, and barked, “Din!”
Covenant heard the sound of hooves. A moment later, Memla's Courser came trotting out of the dusk.
She treated it with the confidence of long familiarity. Obeying her brusque gesture, Din lowered itself to its belly. At once, she began to load the beast, heaving her burdens across the middle of its back so that they hung balanced in pairs. Then, knotting her fingers in its long hair, she pulled herself up to perch near its shoulders.
Covenant hesitated to follow. He had always been uncomfortable around horses, in part because of their strength, in part because of their distance from the ground; and the Courser was larger and more dangerous than any horse. But he had no choice. When Memla snapped at him irritably, he took his courage in both hands, and heaved himself up behind her.
Din pitched to its feet. Covenant grabbed at the hair urgently to keep himself from falling. A spasm of vertigo made everything reel as Memla turned Din to face the sunrise.
The sun broke the horizon in brown heat. Almost at once, haze began to ripple the distance, distorting all the terrain. His memories of the aid the Waynhim had given him conflicted with his vertigo and with his surprise at Memla's immunity.
Answering his unspoken question, she said, “Din is a creature of the Sunbane. His body wards us as stone does.” Then she swung her beast in the direction of Revelstone.
Din's canter was unexpectedly smooth; and its hair gave Covenant a secure hold. He began to recover his poise. The ground still seemed fatally far away; but it no longer appeared to bristle with falling. Ahead of him, Memla sat cross-legged near the Courser's shoulders, trusting her hands to catch her whenever she was jostled off balance. After a while, he followed her example. Keeping both fists constantly clutched in Din's coat, he made himself as secure as he could.
Memla had not offered Vain a seat. She had apparently decided to treat him exactly as he treated her. But Vain did not need to be carried by any beast. He loped behind Dm effortlessly and gave no sign that he was in any way aware of what he was doing.
Covenant rode through the morning in silence, clinging to the Courser's back and sipping vitrim whenever the heat made him dizzy. But when Memla resumed their journey after a brief rest at noon, he felt a desire to make her talk. He wanted information; the wilderness of his ignorance threatened him. Stiffly, he asked her to explain the Rede of the Clave.
“The Rede!” she ejaculated over her shoulder. “Halfhand, the time before us is reckoned in days, not turnings of the moon.”
“Summarize,” he retorted. “If you don't want me dead, then you want my help. I need to know what I'm dealing with.”
She was silent.
Deliberately, he rasped, “In other words, you have been lying to me.”
Memla leaned abruptly forward, hawked and spat past Din's shoulder. But when she spoke, her tone was subdued, almost chastened. “The Rede is of great length and complexity, comprising all the accumulated knowledge of the Clave in reference to life in the Land, and to survival under the Sunbane. It is the task of the Riders to share this knowledge throughout the Land, so that Stonedown and Woodhelven may endure.”
Right, Covenant muttered. And to kidnap people for their blood.
“But little of this knowledge would have worth to you,” she went on. "You have sojourned scatheless under the Sunbane. What skills it to tell you of the Rede?
“Yet you desire comprehension. Halfhand, there is only one matter which the bearer of the white ring need understand. It is the triangle.” She took the rukh from her robe, showed it to him over her shoulder. “The Three Corners of Truth. The foundation of all our service.”
To the rhythm of Din's strides, she began to sing:
“Three the days of Sunbane's bale:
Three the Rede and sooth:
Three the words na-Mhoram spake:
Three the Corners of Truth.”
When she paused, he said, “What do you mean-'three the days'? Isn't the Sunbane accelerating? Didn't each sun formerly last for four or five days, or even more?”
“Yes,” she replied impatiently, "beyond doubt. But the soothreaders have ever foretold that the Clave would hold at three-that the generations-long increase of our power and the constant mounting of the Sunbane would meet and match at three days, producing balance. Thus we hope now that in some way we may contrive to tilt the balance to our side, sending the Sunbane toward decline. Therefore the na-Mhoram desires your aid.
“But I was speaking of the Three Corners of Truth,” she continued with asperity before Covenant could interrupt again. "This knowledge at least you do require. On these three facts the Clave stands, and every village lives.
"First, there is no power in Land or life comparable to the Sunbane. In might and efficacy, the Sunbane surpasses all other puissance utterly.
"Second, there is no mortal who can endure the Sunbane. Without great knowledge and cunning, none can hope to endure from one sun to the next. And without opposition to the Sunbane, all life is doomed. Swift or slow, the Sunbane will wreak entire ruin.
"Third, there is no power sufficient to oppose the Land's doom, except power which is drawn from the Sunbane itself. Its might must be reflected against it-No other hope exists. Therefore does the Clave shed the blood of the Land, for blood is the key to the Sunbane. If we do not unlock that power, there will be no end to our perishing.
“Hear you, Halfhand?” Memla demanded. “I doubt not that in your sojourn you have met muc
h reviling of the Clave. Despite all our labour, Stonedown and Woodhelven must believe that we exact their blood for pleasure or self.” To Covenant's ears, her acidity was the gall of a woman who instinctively abhorred her conscious convictions. “Be not misled! The cost is sore to us. But we do not flinch from it because it is our sole means to preserve the Land. If you must cast blame, cast it upon a-Jeroth, who incurred the just wrath of the Master-and upon the ancient betrayers, Berek and his ilk, who leagued with a-Jeroth.”
Covenant wanted to protest. As soon as she mentioned Berek as a betrayer, her speech lost its persuasiveness. He had never known Berek Halfhand; the Lord-Fatherer was already a legend when Covenant had entered the Land. But his knowledge of the effects of Berek's life was nearly two score centuries more recent than Memla's. Any set of beliefs which counted Berek a betrayer was founded on a lie; and so any conclusions drawn from that foundation were false. But he kept his protest silent because he could conceive of no way to demonstrate its accuracy. No way short of victory over the Sunbane.
To spare himself a pointless argument, he said, “I'll reserve judgment on that for a while. In the meantime, satisfy my curiosity. I've got at least a dim notion of who a-Jeroth is. But what are the Seven Hells?”
Memla was muttering sourly to herself. He suspected that she resented his distrust precisely because it was echoed by a distrust within herself. But she answered brusquely, “They are rain, desert, pestilence, fertility, war, savagery, and darkness. But I believe that there is also an eighth. Blind hostility.”
After that, she rebuffed his efforts to engage her in any more talk.
When they halted for the night, he discarded his empty pouch and accepted food from her. And the next morning, he did what he could to help her prepare for the day's journey.
Sitting on Din, she faced the sunrise. It crested the horizon like a cynosure in green; and she shook her head. “A fertile sun,” she murmured. “A desert sun wreaks much ruin, and a sun of rain may be a thing of great difficulty. A sun of pestilence carries peril and abhorrence. But for those who must journey, no other sun is as arduous as the sun of fertility. Speak not to me under this sun, I adjure you. If my thoughts wander, our path will also wander.”
By the time they had covered half a league, new grass blanketed the ground. Young vines crawled visibly from place to place: bushes unfolded buds the colour of mint.
Memla raised her rukh. Uncapping the hollow sceptre, she decanted enough blood to smear her hands. Then she started chanting under her breath. A vermilion flame, pale and small in the sunlight, burned within the open triangle.
Under Din's hooves, the grass parted along a straight line stretching like a plumb toward Revelstone. Covenant watched the parting disappear into the distance. The line bared no ground; but everything nearby-grass, shrubs, incipient saplings-bent away from it as if an invisible serpent were sliding northwestward through the burgeoning vegetation.
Along the parting, Din cantered as if it were incapable of surprise.
Memla's chant became a low mumble. She rested the end of her rukh on Din's shoulders; but the triangle and the flame remained erect before her. At every change in the terrain, the verdure thickened, compressing whole seasons into fractions of the day. Yet her line remained open. Trees shunned it; copses parted as if they had been riven by an axe; bushes edging the line had no branches or leaves on that side.
When Covenant looked behind him, he saw no trace of the path; it closed the moment Memla's power passed. As a result, Vain had to fend for himself. But he did so with characteristic disinterest, slashing through grass and brush at a run, crashing thickets, tearing across briar patches which left no mark on his black skin. He could not have seemed less conscious of difficulty. Watching the Demondim-spawn, Covenant did not know which amazed him more: Memla's ability to create this path; or Vain's ability to travel at such speed without any path.
That night, Memla explained her line somewhat. Her rukh, she said, drew on the great Banefire in Revelstone, where the Clave did its work against the Sunbane, and the Readers tended the master-rukh. Only the power for the link to the master-rukh came from her; the rest she siphoned from the Banefire. So the making of her path demanded stern concentration, but did not exhaust her. And the nearer she drew to Revelstone, the easier her access to the Banefire became. Thus she was able to form her line again the next day, defying the resistance of huge trees, heather and bracken as high as Din's shoulders, grass like thickets and thickets like forests.
Yet Vain was able to match the Courser's pace. He met the sharper test of each new league as if no size or density of vegetation could ever estimate his limits. And the third day made no change. It intensified still more the extravagance of the verdure, but did not hamper the nonchalant ease with which he followed Din. Time and again, Covenant found himself craning his neck, watching Vain's progress and wondering at the sheer unconscious force it represented.
But as the afternoon passed, his thoughts turned from Vain, and he began to look ahead. The mammoth jungle concealed any landmarks the terrain might have offered, but he knew that Revelstone was near. All his anxiety, dread, and anticipation returned to him; and he fought to see through the thronging foliage as if only an early glimpse of the ancient Keep would forewarn him of the needs and hazards hidden there.
But he received no forewarning. Late in the afternoon, Memla's path started up a steep hillside. The vegetation suddenly ended on the rock of the foothills. Revelstone appeared before Covenant as if in that instant it had been unfurled from the storehouse of his most vivid memories.
The Courser had arrived athwart the great stone city, Giant-wrought millennia ago from the gutrock of the plateau. Out of the farthest west, mountains came striding eastward, then, two leagues away on Covenant's left, dropped sheer to the upland plateau, still a thousand feet and more above the foothills. The plateau narrowed to form a wedged promontory half a league in length; and into this promontory the ancient Giants had delved the immense and intricate habitation of Revelstone.
The whole cliff-face before Covenant was coigned and fortified, lined with abutments and balconies, punctuated by oriels, architraves, embrasures, from a level fifty or a hundred feet above the foothills to the rim of the plateau. On his left, Revelstone gradually faded into native rock; but on his right, it filled the promontory to the wedge-tip, where the watchtower guarded the massive gates of the Keep.
The tremendous and familiar size of the city made his heart ache with pride for the Giants he had loved-and with sharp grief, for those Giants had died in a body, slain by a Raver during the war against Lord Foul's Illearth Stone. He had once heard that there was a pattern graven into the walls of Revelstone, an organization of meaning too huge for un-Giantish minds to grasp; and now he would never have it explained to him.
But that was not all his grief. The sight of Revelstone recalled other people, friends and antagonists, whom he had hurt and lost: Trell Atiaran-mate; Hile Troy, who had sold his soul to a Forestal so that his army might survive; Saltheart Foamfollower; Elena. High Lord Mhoram. Then Covenant's sorrow turned to anger as he considered that Mhoram's name was being used by a Clave which willingly shed innocent blood.
His wrath tightened as he studied Revelstone itself. Mania's line ran to a point in the middle of the city; and from the plateau above that point sprang a prodigious vermeil beam, aimed toward the heart of the declining sun. It was like the Sunbane shaft of Sunder's orcrest; but its sheer size was staggering. Covenant gaped at it, unable to conceive the number of lives necessary to summon so much power. Revelstone had become a citadel of blood. He felt poignantly that it would never be clean again.
But then his gaze caught something in the west, a glitter of hope. There, halfway between Revelstone and the Westron Mountains, lay Furl Falls, where the overflow of Glimmermere came down the cliff to form the White River. And the Falls held water; tumbling spray caught the approaching sunset, and shone. The land had been eighteen days without a sun of rain,
and six of them had been desert; yet the springs of Glimmermere had not failed.
Gripping anger and hope between his teeth, Covenant set himself to face whatever lay ahead.
Memla gave a sigh of accomplishment, and lowered her rukh. Turning Din's head with a muttered command, she sent the beast trotting toward the gates under the southeast face of the tower.
The watchtower was barely half the height of the plateau, and its upper reaches stood independent of the main Keep, joined only by wooden crosswalks. Covenant remembered that a courtyard lay open to the sky within the granite walls which sealed the base of the tower to the Keep; and the megalithic stone gates under the watchtower were repeated beyond the courtyard, so that Revelstone possessed a double defence for its only entrance. But as he approached the tower, he was shocked to see that the outer gates lay in rubble. Sometime in the distant past, Revelstone had needed its inner defence.
The abutments over the ruined gates were deserted, as were the fortifications and embrasures above it; the whole tower seemed empty. Perhaps it was no longer defensible. Perhaps the Clave saw no need to fear the entry of strangers. Or perhaps this air of desertion was a trap to catch the unwary.
Memla headed directly into the tunnel, which led to the courtyard; but Covenant slipped off Din's back, lowering himself by handholds of hair. She stopped, looked back at him in surprise. “Here is Revelstone,” she said. “Do you not wish to enter?”
“First things first.” His shoulders were tight with apprehension. “Send the na-Mhoram out here. I want him to tell me in person that I'll be safe.”
“He is the na-Mhoram!” she snapped indignantly. “He does not come or go according to the whims of others.”
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