The 1st Chronicles of Thomas Covenant #2: The Illearth War (69 page)

She is his summoner-he will remain in the Land until her death. So it was when Drool Rockworm first called him.

“She’s still fighting?” Troy gaped at the idea. He seemed to regard it as the conclusive evidence of Covenant’s treachery. But then he turned to Mhoram and cried,

“We’ve got to help her!”

At this, Mhoram flinched. A wave of pain broke through his face. In a constricted voice, he asked, “How?”

“How?” Troy fumed. “Don’t ask me how. You’re the Lord! We have got to help her!”

The Lord pulled himself erect, clenched his staff for support. “We are fifty leagues from Rivenrock. A night and a day would pass before any Ranyhyn could carry us to the foot of the cliff. Then Bannor would be required to guide us into the mountain in search of the battle. Perhaps the effects of the battle have destroyed all approaches to it.

Perhaps they would destroy us. Yet if we gained the High Lord, we would have nothing to offer her but the frail strength of two Lords. With the Staff of Law, she far surpasses us. How can we help her?”

They faced each other-as if they met mind to mind across Troy’s eyelessness.

Mhoram did not falter under the Warmark’s rage. The hurt of his inadequacy showed clearly in his face, but he neither denied nor cursed at his weakness.

Though Troy trembled with urgency, he had to take his demand elsewhere.

He swung toward Covenant. “You!” he shouted stridently. “If you’re too much of a coward to do anything yourself, at least give me a chance to help her! Give me your ring! — I can feel it from here. Give it to me! Come on, you bastard. It’s her only chance.”

Kneeling on the dead, sabulous dirt of the Howe, Covenant looked up at Troy through the blood in his eyes. For a time, he was unable to answer. Troy’s adjuration seemed to drop on him like a rockfall. It swept away his last defense, and left bare his final shame. He should have been able to save Elena. He had the power; it pulsed like a wound on his wedding finger. But he had not used it. Ignorance was no excuse. His claim of futility no longer covered him.

The barren atmosphere of the Howe ached in his chest as he climbed to his feet.

Though he could hardly see where he was going, he started up the hill. The exertion made his head hurt as if there were splinters of bone jabbing his brain, and his heart quivered.

A silent voice cried out to him, No! No! But he ignored it. With his halfhand, he fumbled at the ring. It seemed to resist him-he had trouble gripping it but as he reached Troy he finally tore it from his finger. In a wet voice, as if his mouth were full of blood, he said,

“Take it. Save her.” He put the band in Troy’s hand.

The touch of the pulsing ring exalted Troy. Clenching his fingers around it, he turned, ran fearlessly to the hillcrest. He searched quickly with his ears, located the direction of Rivenrock, faced the battle. Like a titan, he swung his fist at the heavens; power

flamed from the white gold as if it were answering his passion. In a livid voice, he cried, “Elena! Elena!”

Then the tall white singer was at his side. The music took on a forbidding note that spread involuntary stasis like a mist over the hilltop. Everyone froze, lost the power of movement.

In the stillness, Caerroil Wildwood lifted his gnarled scepter. “No,” he trilled, “I cannot permit this. It is a breaking of Law. And you forget the price that is owed to me.

Perhaps when you have gained an incondign mastery over the wild magic, you will use it to recant the price.” With his scepter, he touched Troy’s upraised fist; the ring dropped to the ground. As it fell, all the heat and surge of its power faded. It looked like mere metal as it struck the lifeless earth, rolled lightly along the music, and stopped near Covenant’s feet.

“I will not permit it,” the singer continued. “The promise is irrevocable. In the names of the One Tree and the One Forest-in the name of the unforgiving Deep-I claim the price of my aid.” With a solemn gesture like the sound of distant horns, he touched his scepter to Troy’s head. “Eyeless one, you have promised payment. I claim your life.”

Lord Mhoram strove to protest. But the singer’s stasis held him. He could do nothing but watch as Troy began to change.

“I claim you to be my disciple,” the singer hummed. “You shall be Caer-Caveral, my help and hold. From me you shall learn the work of a Forestal, root and branch, seed and sap and leaf and all. Together we will walk the Deep, and I will teach you the songs of the trees, and the names of all the old, brave, wakeful woods, and the ancient forestry of thought and mood. While trees remain, we will steward together, cherishing each new sprout, and wreaking wood’s revenge on each hated human intrusion. Forget your foolish friend. You cannot succor her. CaerCaveral, remain and serve!”

The song molded Troy’s form. Slowly, his legs grew together. His feet began to send roots into the soil. His apparel turned to thick dark moss. He became an old stump with one last limb upraised. From his fist green leaves uncurled.

Softly, the singer concluded, “Together we will restore life to Gallows Howe.”

Then he turned toward the Lords and Covenant. The silver brilliance of his eyes increased, dimming even the orcrest fire; and he sang in a tone of dewy freshness: Ax and fire leave me dead.

I know the hate of hands grown bold. Depart to save your heart-sap’s red: My hate knows neither rest nor weal

As the words fluted through them, he disappeared into the music as if he had wrapped it about him and passed beyond the range of sight. But the warning melody lingered behind him like an echo in the air, repeating his command and repeating it until it could not be forgotten.

Gradually, like figures lumbering stiffly out of a dream, the people on the hilltop began to move again. Quaan and Amorine hastened to the mossy stump. Grief filled their faces. But they had endured too much, struggled too hard, in their long ordeal. They had no strength left for horror or protest. Amorine stared as if she could not comprehend what had happened, and tears glistened in Quaan’s old eyes. He called, “Hail, Warmark!” But his voice sounded weak and dim on the Howe, and he said no more..

Behind them, Lord Mhoram sagged. His hands trembled as he held up his staff in mute farewell. Lord Callindrill joined him, and they stood together as if they were leaning on each other.

Covenant dropped numbly to his knees to pick up his ring.

He reached for it like an acolyte bending his forehead to the ground, and when his fingers closed on it, he slid it into place on his wedding finger. Then, with both hands, he tried to wipe the blood out of his eyes.

But as he made the attempt, a blast from Rivenrock

staggered the air. The mountain groaned as if it were grievously wounded. The concussion threw him on his face in the dirt. Blackness filled the remains of his sight as if it were flooding into him from the barren Howe. And behind it he heard the blast howling like the livid triumph of fiends.

A long tremor passed through the Deep, and after it came an extended shattering sound, as if the whole cliff of Rivenrock were crumbling. People moved; voices called back and forth. But Covenant could not hear them clearly. His ears were deluged by tumult, a yammering, multitudinous yell of glee. And the sound came closer. It became louder and more immediate until it overwhelmed his eardrums, passed beyond the range of physical perception and shrieked directly into his brain.

After that, voices reached him obscurely, registered somehow through his overdriven hearing.

Bannor said, “Rivenrock bursts. There will be a great flood.”

Lord Callindrill said, “Some good will come of it. It will do much to cleanse the Wightwarrens under Mount Thunder.”

Lord Mhoram said, “Behold the Unbeliever de

parts. The High Lord has fallen.”

But these things surpassed him; he could not hold onto them. The black dirt of Gallows Howe loomed in his face like an incarnation of midnight. And around it, encompassing it, consuming both it and him, the fiendish scream scaled upward, filling his skull and chest and limbs as if it were grinding his very bones to powder. The howl overcame him, and he answered with a cry that made no sound.

TWENTY-SEVEN: Leper

THE shriek climbed, became .louder as it grew more urgent and damaging. He could feel it breaking down the barriers of his comprehension, altering the terrain of his existence. Finally he seemed to shatter against it; he fell against it from a great height, so that he broke on its remorseless surface. He jerked at the force of the impact. When he lay still again, he could feel the hardness pressing coldly against his face and chest.

Gradually he realized that the surface was damp, sticky. It smelled like clotting blood.

That perception carried him across a frontier. He found that he could distinguish between the flat, bitter, insulting shriek outside and the ragged hurt inside his head. With an agonizing effort, he moved one hand to rub the caked blood out of his eyes. Then, tortuously, he opened them.

His vision swam into focus like a badly smeared lens, but after a while he began to make out pieces of where he was. There was plenty of soulless yellow light. The legs of the sofa stood a few feet away across the thick defensive carpet. He was lying prostrate on the floor beside the coffee table as if he had fallen off a catafalque. With his left hand, he clutched something hard to his ear, something that shrieked brutally.

When he shifted his hand, he discovered that he was holding the receiver of the telephone. From it came the shriek the piercing wail of a phone left off its hook. The phone itself lay on the floor just out of reach.

A long, dumb moment passed before he regained

enough of himself to wonder how long ago Joan had hung up on him.

Groaning, he rolled to one side and looked up at a wall clock. He could not read it; his eyes were still too blurted. But through one window he could see the first light of an uncomfortable dawn. He had been unconscious for half the night.

He started to his feet, then slumped down again while pain rang in his head. He feared that he would lose consciousness once more. But after a while, the noise cleared, faded into the general scream of the phone. He was able to get to his knees.

He rested there, looking about him at the controlled orderliness of his living room.

Joan’s picture and his cup of coffee stood just where he had left them on the table. The jolt of his head on the table edge had not even spilled the coffee.

The sanctuary of the familiar place gave him no consolation. When he tried to concentrate on the room’s premeditated neatness, his gaze kept sliding back to the blood-dry, almost black-which crusted the carpet. That stain violated his safety like a chancre.

To get away from it, he gripped himself and climbed to his feet.

The room reeled as if he had fallen into vertigo, but he steadied himself on the padded arm of the sofa, and after a moment he regained most of his balance. Carefully, as if he were afraid of disturbing a demon, he placed the receiver back on its hook, then sighed deeply as the shriek was chopped out of the air. Its echo continued to ring in his left ear. It disturbed his equilibrium, but he ignored it as best he could. He began to move through the house like a blind man, working his way from support to support-sofa to doorframe to kitchen counter. Then he had to take several unbraced steps to reach the bathroom, but he managed to cross the distance without falling.

He propped himself on the sink, and rested again.

When he had caught his breath, he automatically ran water and lathered his hands-the first step in his rite of cleansing, a vital part of his defense against a relapse. For a time, he scrubbed his hands without

raising his head. But at last he looked into the mirror. The sight of his own visage stopped him. He gazed at himself out of raw, self-inflicted eyes, and recognized the face that Elena had sculpted. She had not placed a wound on the forehead of her carving, but his cut only completed the image she had formed of him. He could see a gleam of bone through the caked black blood which darkened his forehead and cheeks, spread down around his eyes, emphasizing them, shadowing them with terrible purposes. The wound and the blood on his gray, gaunt face made him look like a false prophet, a traitor to his own best dreams.

Elena! he cried thickly. What have I done?

Unable to bear the sight of himself, he turned away and glanced numbly around the bathroom. In the fluorescent lighting, the porcelain of the tub and the chromed metal of its dangerous fixtures glinted as if they had nothing whatever to do with weeping.

Their blank superficiality seemed to insist that grief and loss were unreal, irrelevant.

He stared at them for a long time, measuring their blankness. Then he limped out of the bathroom. Grimly, deliberately, he left his forehead uncleaned, untouched. He did not choose to repudiate the accusation written there.