White Gold Wielder t2cotc-3 Read online

  Suddenly Honninscrave looked upward; and his gaze struck foreboding into Covenant's maimed empathy. His eyes under his heavy brows were fierce with extremity, and the new-cut lines around them were as intense as scars. “Therefore have I come to you,” he said slowly, as if he could not see Covenant quailing. “I desire a restitution which is not within my power to perform. My fault must be assuaged.

  “It is the custom of our people to give our dead to the sea. But Cable Seadreamer my brother has met his end in horror, and it will not release him. He is like the Dead of The Grieve, damned to his anguish. If his spirit is not given its caamora”- for an instant, his voice broke- “he will haunt me while one stone of the Arch of Time remains standing upon another.”

  Then his gaze fell to the floor. “Yet there is no fire in all the world that I can raise to give him surcease. He is a Giant. Even in death, he is immune to flame.”

  At that Covenant understood; and all his dreads came together in a rush; the apprehension which had crouched in him since Honninscrave had first said, If you do not release him; the terror of his doom, to destroy the Earth himself or to surrender it for destruction by ceding his ring to Lord Foul. The Despiser had said. The ill that you deem most terrible is upon you. Of your own volition you will give the white gold into my hand. Either that or bring down the Arch of Time. There was no way out. He was beaten. Because he had kept the truth from Linden, seeking to deny it. And Honninscrave asked — !

  “You want me to cremate him?” Clenched fear made him harsh. “With my ring? Are you out of your mind?”

  Honninscrave winced. “The Dead of The Grieve-” he began.

  “No!” Covenant retorted. He had walked into a bonfire to save them from their reiterated hell; but risks like that were too great for him now. He had already caused too much death. “After I sink the ship, I won't be able to stop!”

  For a moment, even the sounds of the sea fell still, shocked by his vehemence. The Giantship seemed to be losing headway. The light of the lantern flickered as if it were going out. Perhaps there were shouts like muffled lamentations in the distance Covenant could not be sure. His senses were condemned to the surface of what they perceived. The rest of the dromond was hidden from him.

  If the Master heard anything, he did not react to it. His head remained bowed. Moving heavily, like a man hurt in every limb, he climbed to his feet. Though the hammock hung high above the floor, he stood head and shoulders over the Unbeliever; and still he did not meet Covenant's glare. The lantern was below and behind him as he took one step closer. His face was shadowed, dark and fatal.

  In a wan and husky voice, he said, “Yes, Giantfriend.” The epithet held a tinge of sarcasm. “I am gone from my mind. You are the ring-wielder, as the Elohim have said. Your power threatens the Earth. What import has the anguish of one or two Giants in such a plight? Forgive me.”

  Then Covenant wanted to cry out in earnest, torn like dead Kevin Landwaster between love and defeat. But loud feet had come running down the companionway outside his cabin, had already reached his door. The door sprang open without any protest from Cail. A crewmember thrust her head past the threshold.

  “Master, you must come.” Her voice was tight with alarm. “We are beset by Nicor.”

  Two: Leper's Ground

  HONNINSCRAVE left the cabin slowly, like a, man responding by habit, unconscious of the urgency of the summons. Perhaps he no longer understood what was happening around him. Yet he did respond to the call of his ship.

  When the Master reached the companionway, Cail closed the door behind him. The Haruchai seemed to know instinctively that Covenant would not follow Honninscrave.

  Nicor! Covenant thought, and his heart laboured. Those tremendous serpent-like sea beasts were said to be the offspring of the Worm of the World's End. Starfare's Gem had passed through a region crowded with them near the Isle of the One Tree. They had been indifferent to the dromond then. But now? With the Isle gone and the Worm restive?

  And what could one stone vessel do against so many of those prodigious creatures? What could Honninscrave do?

  Yet the Unbeliever did not leave his hammock. He stared at the dark ceiling and did not move. He was beaten, defeated. He dared not take the risk of confronting the Giantship's peril. If Linden had not intervened at the One Tree, he would already have become another Kevin, enacting a Ritual of Desecration to surpass every other evil. The threat of the Nicor paled beside the danger he himself represented.

  Deliberately, he sought to retreat into himself. He did not want to know what transpired outside his cabin. How could he endure the knowledge? He had said, I'm sick of guilt — but such protests had no meaning. His very blood had been corrupted by venom and culpability. Only the powerless were truly innocent, and he was not powerless. He was not even honest The selfishness of his love had brought all this to pass.

  Yet the lives at stake were the lives of his friends, and he could not close himself to the dromond's jeopardy. Starfare's Gem rolled slightly in the water as if it had lost all headway. A period of shouts and running had followed Honninscrave's departure, but now the Giantship was silent. With Linden's senses, he would have been able to read what was happening through the stone itself; but he was blind and bereft, cut off from the essential spirit of the world. His numb hands clutched the edges of the hammock.

  Time passed. He was a coward, and his dreads swarmed darkly about him as if they were born in the shadows above his head. He gripped himself with thoughts of ruin, held himself still with curses. But Honninscrave’s face kept coming back to him: the beard like a growth of pain from his cheeks, the massive brow knuckled with misery, the hands straining Covenant's friend. Like Foamfollower. My brother has met his end in horror. It was intolerable that such needs had to be refused. And now the Nicor — !

  Even a beaten man could still feel pain. Roughly, he pulled himself into a sitting position. His voice was a croak of coercion and fear as be called out, "Cail”

  The door opened promptly, and Cail entered the cabin.

  The healed wound of a Courser spur marked his left arm from shoulder to elbow like the outward sign of his fidelity; but his visage remained as impassive as ever. “Ur-Lord?” he asked flatly. His dispassionate tone gave no hint that he was the last Haruchai left in Covenant's service.

  Covenant stifled a groan. "What the hell's going on out there?”

  In response. Cail's eyes shifted fractionally. But still his voice held no inflection. “I know not.”

  Until the previous night, when Brinn had left the quest to take up his role as ak-Haru Kenaustin Ardenol, Cail had never been alone in his chosen duty; and the mental interconnection of his people had kept him aware of what took place around him. But now he was alone. Brinn's defeat of the former Guardian of the One Tree had been a great victory for him personally, and for the Haruchai as a people; but it left Cail isolated in a way that no one who had not experienced such mind sharing could measure. His blunt I know not silenced Covenant like an admission of frailty.

  Cail Covenant tried to say. He did not want to leave the Haruchai in that loneliness. But Brinn had said, Cail will accept my place in your service until the word of the Bloodguard Banner has been carried to its end. And no appeal or protest would sway Cail from the path Brinn had marked out for him Covenant remembered Banner too poignantly to believe that the Haruchai would ever judge themselves by any standards but their own.

  Yet his distress remained. Even lepers and murderers were not immune to hurt. He fought down the thickness in his throat and said, “I want my old clothes. They're in her cabin.”

  Cail nodded as if he saw nothing strange in the request. As he left, he closed the door quietly after him.

  Covenant lay back again and clenched his teeth. He did not want those clothes, did not want to return to the hungry and unassuaged life he had lived before he had found Linden's love. But how else could he leave his cabin? Those loathed and necessary garments represented the only honesty left to him
. Any other apparel would be a lie.

  However, when Cail returned he was not alone. Pitchwife entered the chamber ahead of him; and at once Covenant forgot the bundle Cail bore. The deformity which bent Pitchwife's spine, hunching his back and crippling his chest, made him unnaturally short for a Giant: his head did not reach the level of the hammock. But the irrepressibility of his twisted face gave him stature. He was alight with excitement as he limped forward to greet Covenant “Have I not said that she is well Chosen?” he began without preamble. “Never doubt it, Giantfriend! Mayhap this is but one wonder among many, for surely our voyage has been rife with marvels. Yet I do not dream to see it surpassed. Stone and Sea, Giantfriend! She has taught me to hope again.”

  Covenant stared in response, stung by an inchoate apprehension. What new role had Linden taken upon herself, when he still had not told her the truth?

  Pitchwife's eyes softened. “But you do not comprehend as how should you, who have not seen the sea loom with Nicor under the stars, not heard the Chosen sing them to peace.”

  Still Covenant did not speak. He had no words for the complex admixture of his pride and relief and bitter loss. The woman he loved had saved the Giantship, And he, who had once defeated the Despiser in direct combat he no longer signified.

  Watching Covenant's face, Pitchwife sighed to himself. In a more subdued manner, he went on, “It was an act worthy of long telling, but I will briefen it. You have heard that the Giants are able to summon Nicor upon occasion. Such a summons we wrought on your behalf, when last the venom-sickness of the Raver possessed you.” Covenant had no memory of the situation. He had been near death in delirium at the time. But he had been told about it. "Yet to the Nicor we do not speak. They lie beyond our gift of tongues. The sounds which may summon them we have learned from our generations upon the sea. But those sounds we make blindly, uncertain of their meaning. And a Giantship which enters a sea of Nicor in their wrath has scant need of summons.”

  A small smile quirked his mouth; but he did not stop. “It was Linden Avery the Chosen who found means to address them for our survival. Lacking the plain might of arm for her purpose, she called Galewrath Storesmaster with her and went below, down to the bottommost hull of the dromond. There through the stone she read the ire of the Nicor- and gave it answer. With her hands she clapped a rhythm which Galewrath echoed for her, pounding it with hammers upon the hull.”

  Then for a moment the Giant's enthusiasm resurged. “And she was heeded!” he crowed. “The Nicor parted about us, bearing their anger into the south. We have been left without scathe!” His hands gripped the edge of the hammock, rocked it as if to make Covenant hear him. “There is yet hope in the world. While we endure, and the Chosen and the Giantfriend remain among us, there is hope!”

  But Pitchwife's claim was too direct Covenant flinched from it. He had wronged too many people and had no hope left for himself. A part of him wanted to cry out in protest. Was that what he would have to do in the end? Give Linden his ring, the meaning of his life, when she had never seen the Land without the Sunbane and did not know how to love it? Weakly, he muttered, “Tell that to Honninscrave. He could use some hope.”

  At that, Pitchwife's eyes darkened. But he did not look away. “The Master has spoken of your refusal. I know not the good or ill of these matters, but the word of my heart is that you have done what you must-and that is well. Do not think me ungrieved by Seadreamer’s fall or the Master's hurt. Yet the hazard of your might is great. And who can say how the Nicor would answer such fire, though they have passed us by? None may Judge the doom which lies upon you now. You have done well in your way.”

  Pitchwife's frank empathy made Covenant's eyes burn. He knew acutely that he had not done well. Pain like Honninscrave's should not be refused, never be refused. But the fear and the despair were still there, blocking everything. He could not even meet Pitchwife's gaze.

  “Ah, Giantfriend,” Pitchwife breathed at last. “You also are grieved beyond bearing. I know not how to solace you.” Abruptly, he stooped, and one hand lifted a leather flask into the hammock. “If you find no ease in my tale of the Chosen, will you not at the least drink diamondraught and grant your flesh rest? Your own story remains to be told. Be not so harsh with yourself.”

  His words raised memories of dead Atiaran in Andelain. The mother of the woman he had raped and driven mad had said with severe compassion. In punishing yourself, you come to merit punishment. This is Despite. But Covenant did not want to think about Atiaran. Find no ease- Belatedly, he pictured Linden in the depths of the dromond, holding the survival of the Search in her hands. He could not bear the rhythm of her courage, but he saw her face. Framed by her wheaten hair, it was acute with concentration, knotted between the brows, marked on either side of the mouth by the consequences of severity-and beautiful to him in every bone and line.

  Humbled by what she had done to save the ship, he raised the flask to his lips and drank.

  When he awoke, the cabin was full of afternoon sunshine, and the pungent taste of diamondraught lingered on his tongue. The Giantship was moving again. He remembered no dreams. The impression he bore with him out of slumber was one of blankness, a leper's numbness carried to its logical extreme. He wanted to roll over and never wake up again.

  But as he glanced blearily around the sun-sharp cabin, he saw Linden sitting in one of the chairs beside the table.

  She sat with her head bowed and her hands open in her lap, as if she had been waiting there for a long time. Her hair gleamed cleanly in the light, giving her the appearance of a woman who had emerged whole from an ordeal-refined, perhaps, but not reduced. With an inward moan, he recollected what the old man on Haven Farm had said to her. There is also love in the world. And in Andelain dead Elena, Covenant's daughter, had urged him, Care for her, beloved, so that in the end she may heal us all. The sight of her made his chest contract. He had lost her as well. He had nothing left.

  Then she seemed to feel his gaze on her. She looked up at him, automatically brushing the tresses back from her face; and he saw that she was not unhurt. Her eyes were hollow and flagrant with fatigue; her cheeks were pallid; and the twinned lines running past her mouth from either side of her delicate nose looked like they had been left there by tears as well as time. A voiceless protest gathered in him. Had she been sitting here with him ever since the passing of the Nicor? When she needed so much rest?

  But a moment after he met her gaze she rose to her feet A knot of anxiety or anger marked her brows. Probing him with her health-sense, she stepped closer to the hammock. What she saw made her mouth severe.

  “Is that it?” she demanded. “You've decided to give up?”

  Mutely, Covenant flinched. Was his defeat so obvious?

  At once, a look of regret changed her expression. She dropped her eyes, and her hands made an aimless half gesture as if they were full of remembered failure. “I didn't mean that,” she said. "That isn't what I came to say. I wasn't sure I should come at all. You've been so hurt-I wanted to give you more time.”

  Then she lifted her face to him again, and he saw her sense of purpose sharpen. She was here because she had her own ideas — about hope as well as about him. “But the First was going to come, and I thought I should do it for her.” She gazed into him as if she sought a way to draw him down from his lonely bed. “She wants to know where we're going.”

  Where — ? Covenant blinked pain at her. She had not withdrawn her question: she had simply rephrased it. Where? A spasm of grief gripped his heart. His doom was summed up in that one grim word. Where could he go? He was beaten. All his power had been turned against him. There was nowhere left for him to go — nothing left for him to do. For an instant, he feared he would break down in front of her, bereft even of the bare dignity of solitude.

  She was saying, “We've got to go somewhere. The Sunbane is still there. Lord Foul is still there. We've lost the One Tree, but nothing else has changed. We can't just sail in circles for the rest of our
lives.” She might have been pleading with him, trying to make him see something that was already plain to her.

  But he did not heed her. Almost without transition, his hurt became resentment. She was being cruel, whether she realized it or not. He had already betrayed everything he loved with his mistakes and failures and lies. How much more responsibility did she wish him to assume? Bitterly, he replied, “I hear you saved us from the Nicor. You don't need me.”

  His tone made her wince. “Don't say that!” she responded intensely. Her eyes were wide with awareness of what was happening to him. She could read every outcry of his wracked spirit. “I need you.”

  In response, he felt his despair plunging toward hysteria. It sounded like the glee of the Despiser, laughing in triumph. Perhaps he had gone so far down this road now that he was the Despiser, the perfect tool or avatar of Lord Foul's will. But Linden's expostulation Jerked him back from the brink. It made her suddenly vivid to him too vivid to be treated this way. She was his love, and be had already hurt her too much.

  For a moment, the fall he had nearly taken left him reeling. Everything in the cabin seemed imprecise, overburdened with sunlight. He needed shadows and darkness in which to hide from all the things that surpassed him. But Linden still stood there as if she were the centre around which his head whirled. Whether she spoke or remained silent, she was the one demand he could not refuse. Yet he was altogether unready to tell her the truth he had withheld. Her reaction would be the culmination of all his dismay. Instinctively, he groped for some way to anchor himself, some point of simple guilt or passion to which he might cling. Squinting into the sunshine, he asked thickly, “What did they do about Seadreamer?”