White Gold Wielder Page 24

  At once, a shaft of vermeil power from the orcrest shot straight toward the hidden heart of the sun. Sizzling furiously, the beam pierced the drizzle and the thunderheads to tap the force of the Sunbane directly. And the krill shone forth as if its light could cast back the rain.

  In a snarl of torrents and heavy thunder, the storm swept over the hilltop. The strait red shaft of the orcrest seemed to call down lightning like an affront to the heavens. But Sunder stood without flinching, unscathed by any fire.

  On the company, no rain fell. Wind slashed the region; thunder crashed; lightning ran like screams across the dark. But Sunder’s power formed a pocket in the storm, a zone free of violence.

  He was doing what the Clave had always done, using the Sunbane to serve his own ends. But his exertion cost no blood. No one had been shed to make him strong.

  That difference sufficed for Covenant. With a Grim gesture, he urged his companions into motion.

  Quickly they ranged themselves around Sunder. With Hollian to guide him, the Graveler turned toward the southwest. Holding his orcrest and the krill clasped together so that they flamed like a challenge, he started in the direction of Revelstone. His protection moved with him, covering all the company.

  By slow degrees, a crimson hue crept into the brightness of the krill, tinging the light as if the core of the gem had begun to bleed; and long glints of silver streaked the shaft of Sunbane-fire. But Sunder shifted his hands, separated the two powers slightly to keep them pure. As he did so, his zone contracted somewhat, but not enough to hamper the company’s progress.

  They were scourged by wind. Mud clogged their strides, made every step treacherous. Streams frothing down the hillsides beat against their legs, joined each other to form small rivers and tried to sweep the travelers away. Time and again, Covenant would have fallen without Cail’s support. Linden clung severely to Fole’s shoulder. All the world had been reduced to a thunderous wall of water—an impenetrable downpour lit by vermeil and argent, scored by lightning. No one tried to speak; only the Giants would have been able to make themselves heard. Yet Sunder’s protection enabled the company to move faster than the Sunbane had ever permitted.

  Sometime during the day, two gray, blurred shapes appeared like incarnations of the storm and entered the rainless pocket, presented themselves to Covenant. They were Haruchai. When he had acknowledged them, they joined his companions without a word.

  The intensity with which Linden regarded Sunder told Covenant something he already knew: the Graveler’s mastery of two such disparate periapts was a horrendous strain on him. Yet he was a Stonedownor. The native toughness of his people had been conditioned by generations of survival under the ordeal of the Sunbane. And his sense of purpose was clear. When the day’s journey finally ended, and he let his fires fall, he appeared so weary that he could hardly stand—but he was no more defeated by fatigue than Covenant, who had done nothing except labor through nearly ten leagues of mire and water. Not for the first time, Covenant thought that the Graveler was more than he deserved.

  As the wind whipped the clouds away to the west, the company made camp in an open plain which reminded Covenant of the strict terrain near Revelstone. In a bygone age, that region had been made fruitful by the diligence of its farmers and cattleherds—and by the beneficent power of the Lords. Now everything was painfully altered. He felt that he was on the verge of the Clave’s immediate demesne—that the company was about to enter the ambit of the na-Mhoram’s Keep.

  Nervously he asked Hollian what the next day’s sun would be. In response, she took out her slim lianar wand. Its polished surface gleamed like the ancient woods of the Land as she held it up in the light of the campfire.

  Like Sunder’s left forearm, her right palm was laced with old scars—the cuts from which she had drawn blood for her foretellings. But she no longer had any need of blood. Sunder smiled and handed her the wrapped krill. She uncovered it only enough to let one white beam into the night. Then, reverently, like a woman who had never learned anything but respect for her own abilities, she touched her lianar to the light.

  And flame grew like a plant from the wood. Delicate shoots waved into the air; buds of filigree fire bloomed; leaves curled and opened. Without harming her or the wood, flame spread around her like a growth of mystery.

  It was as green and tangy as springtime and new apples.

  At the sight, Covenant’s nerves tightened involuntarily.

  Hollian did not need to explain to him and Linden what her fire meant. They had witnessed it several times in the past. But for the benefit of the watching, wide-eyed Giants, she said quietly, “The morrow will bring a fertile sun.”

  Covenant glanced at Linden. But she was studying the Haruchai, scrutinizing them for any sign of peril. However, Sunder had said that Gibbon’s grasp extended only a day’s journey beyond the gates of Revelstone; and when Linden at last met Covenant’s gaze she shook her head mutely.

  Two more days, he thought. One until that Raver can reach us. Unless he decides to try his Grim again. The ill that you deem most terrible. That night, nightmares stretched him until he believed he would surely snap. They had all become one virulent vision, and in it his fire was as black as venom.

  In the pre-green gloom of dawn, another pair of Haruchai arrived to join the company. Their faces were as stony and magisterial as the mountains where they lived; and yet Covenant received the dismaying impression that they had come to him in fear. Not fear of death, but of what the Clave could make them do.

  Their plight is an abomination. He accepted them. But that was not enough. Bannor had commanded him to redeem them.

  When the sun rose, it tinged the stark bare landscape a sick hue that reminded him of the Illearth Stone.

  Six days had passed since the desert sun had melted every vestige of vegetation off the Upper Land. As a result, all the plain was a wilderness. But the ground was so water-soaked that it steamed wherever the sun touched it; and the steam seemed to raise fine sprouts of heather and bracken with the suddenness of panic. Where the dirt lay in shadow, it remained as barren as naked bones; but elsewhere the uncoiling green stems grew desperately, flogged by the Sunbane and fed by two days of rain. In moments, the brush had reached the height of Covenant’s shins. If he stood still much longer, he might not be able to move at all.

  But ahead of him, the Westron Mountains thrust their ragged snowcaps above the horizon. And one promontory of the range lay in a direct line with Sunder’s path. Perhaps Revelstone was already visible to the greater sight of the Giants.

  If it were, they said nothing about it. Pitcbwife watched the preternatural heath with a look of nausea. Mistweave’s doubt had assumed an aspect of belligerence, as if he resented the way Fole had supplanted him at Linden’s side—and yet believed that he could not justify himself. The First hefted her longsword, estimating her strength against the vegetation. Only Honninscrave studied the southwest eagerly; but his clenched visage revealed nothing except an echo of his earlier judgment: This is the world which my brother purchased with his soul. Do you consider such a world worthy of life?

  However, the First was not required to cut the company’s way. Sunder used his Sunstone and the krill as the Riders used their rukhs, employing the Sunbane to force open a path. With vermeil fire and white light, the Graveler crushed flat the growth ahead of the company, plowed a way through it. Unhindered by torrents and streams and mire, the travelers were able to increase the previous day’s pace.

  Before the heather and bracken grew so tall that they blocked Covenant’s view of the mountains, he glimpsed a red beam like Sunder’s standing from the promontory toward the sun. With an inward shiver, he recognized it. To be visible from that distance, it would have to be tremendous.

  The shaft of the Banefire.

  Then the writhing brush effaced all the southwest from sight.

  For a time, the tight apprehension of that glimpse occupied all his attention. The Banefire. It seemed to dwarf him.
He had seen it once, devouring blood with a staggering heat and ferocity that had filled the high cavity of the sacred enclosure. Even at the level where the Readers had tended the master-rukh, that conflagration had hit him with an incinerating force, burning his thoughts to ashes. The simple memory of it made him flinch. He could hardly believe that even rampant wild magic would be a match for it. The conflict between such powers would be fierce enough to shatter mountains. And the Arch of Time? He did not know the answer.

  But by midmorning Sunder began to stumble; and Covenant’s attention was wrenched outward. The Graveler used his periapts as if together they formed a special kind of rukh; but they did not. The rukhs of the Riders drew their true strength straight from the master-rukh and the Banefire, and so each Rider needed only enough personal exertion to keep open a channel of power to Revelstone; the Banefire did the rest. But Sunder wielded the Sunbane and the krill directly.

  The effort was exhausting him.

  Linden read his condition at a glance. “Give him diamondraught,” she muttered stiffly. Her rigid resistance to the ill of the vegetation made her sound distant, impersonal. “And carry him. He’ll be all right. If we take care of him.” After a moment, she added, “He’s stubborn enough to stand it.”

  Sunder smiled at her wanly. Pallor lay beneath the shade of his skin; but as he sipped the Giantish liquor he grew markedly stronger. Yet he did not protest when Honninscrave hoisted him into the air. Sitting with his back against the Master’s chest, his legs bent over the Giant’s arms, he raised his powers again; and the company resumed its trek.

  Shortly after noon, two more Haruchai joined Covenant, bringing to ten the number of their people ranged protectively on either side of him and his companions.

  He saluted them strictly; but their presence only made him more afraid. He did not know how to defend them from Gibbon.

  And his fear increased as Sunder grew weaker. Even with Sunstone and krill, the Graveler was only one lone man.

  While the obstacles swarming in front of him were simply bracken and heather, he was able to furrow them as effectively as any Rider. But then the soil changed: the terrain became a jungle of mad rhododendron, jacaranda, and honeysuckle. Through that tangle he could not force his way with anything like the direct accuracy which the Banefire made possible. He had to grope for the line of least resistance; and the jungle closed behind the travelers as if they were lost.

  The sun had fallen near the Westron Mountains, and the light had become little more than a filtered gloom, when Linden and Hollian gasped simultaneously, “Sunder!”

  Honninscrave jerked to a halt. The First wheeled to stare at the Graveler. Covenant’s throat constricted with panic as he scrambled forward at Linden’s back.

  The Master set Sunder down as the company crowded around them. At once, Sunder’s knees buckled. His arms shook with a wild ague.

  Covenant squeezed between the First and Pitchwife to confront the Graveler. Recognition whitened Hollian’s face, made her raven hair look as stark as a dirge. Linden’s eyes flicked back and forth between the Sunstone and the krill.

  The vermeil shaft springing from his orcrest toward the setting sun had a frayed and charred appearance, as if it were being consumed by a hotter fire. And in the core of the krill’s clear gem burned a hard knot of blackness like a canker.

  “The na-Mhoram attempts to take him!” Hollian panted desperately. “How can he save himself, when he is so sorely weary?”

  Sunder’s eyes were fixed on something he could no longer see. New lines marked his ashen face, cut by the acid sweat that slicked his skin. Tremors knotted in his muscles. His expression was as naked and appalled as a seizure.

  “Put them down!” Linden snapped at him, pitching her voice to pierce his fixation. “Let go! Don’t let him do this to you!”

  The corners of Sunder’s jaw bulged dangerously. With a groan as if he were breaking his own arm, he forced down the Sunstone, dropped it to the ground. Instantly its crimson beam vanished: the orcrest relapsed to elusive translucence.

  But the blackness at the center of the krill swelled and became stronger.

  Grimly Sunder clinched his free hand around the blade’s wrappings. Heat shone from the metal. Bowing his head, he held the krill in a grip like fever and fought to throw off the Clave’s touch—fought with the same human and indefeasible abandon by which he had once nearly convinced Gibbon that Covenant was dead.

  Linden was shouting, “Sunder! Stop! It’s killing you!” But the Graveler did not heed her.

  Covenant put out his halfhand. Fire spattered from his ring as if the simple proximity of Gibbon’s power made the silver-white band unquenchable.

  Findail’s protest rang across the jungle. Covenant ignored it. Sunder was his friend, and he had already failed too often. Perhaps he was not ready to test himself against the Clave and the Banefire. Perhaps he would never be ready. But he did not hesitate. Deliberately he took hold of the krill. With the strength of fire, he lifted the blade from Sunder’s grasp as if the Graveler’s muscles had become sand.

  But when he closed wild magic around the krill, all his flame went black.

  Midnight conflagration as hungry as hate burst among the company, tore through the trees. A rage of darkness raved out of him as if at last the venom had triumphed, had become the whole truth of his power.

  For an instant, he quailed. Then Linden’s wild cry reached him.

  Savage with extremity, he ripped his fire out of the air, flung it down like a tapestry from the walls of his mind. The krill slipped between his numb fingers, stuck point first in the desecrated soil.

  Before he could move, react, breathe, try to contain the horror clanging in his heart like the carillon of despair, a heavy blow was struck behind him; and Cail reeled through the brush.

  Another blow: a fist like stone. Covenant pitched forward, slammed against the rough trunk of a rhododendron, and sprawled on his back, gasping as if all the air had been taken out of the world. Glints of sunset came through the leaves like emerald stars, spun dizzily across his vision.

  Around him, fighting pounded among the trees. But it made no sound. His hearing was gone. Linden’s stretched shout was mute; the First’s strenuous anger had no voice.

  Galvanized by frenzy, Hollian dragged Sunder bodily out of the way of the battle. She passed in front of Covenant, blocked his view for a moment. But nothing could block the bright, breathless vertigo that wheeled through him, as compulsory and damning as the aura of the Worm.

  Cail and the Giants were locked in combat with Harn, Durris, and the rest of the Haruchai.

  The movements of the attackers were curiously sluggish, imprecise. They did not appear to be in control of themselves. But they struck with the full force of their native strength—blows so hard that even the Giants were staggered. Pitchwife went down under the automatic might of Fole and another Haruchai. Swinging the flat of her falchion, the First struggled to her husband’s aid. Honninscrave leveled one of the Haruchai with each fist. Cail’s people no longer had the balance or alertness to avoid his massive punches. But the attackers came back to their feet as if they were inured to pain and assailed him again. Mistwave bearhugged one Haruchai, knocked another away with a kick. But the Haruchai struck him a blow in the face that made his head crack backward, loosened his grasp.

  Moving as stiffly as a man in a geas. Harn pursued Cail through the battle. Cail eluded him easily; but Harn did not relent. He looked as mindless as Durris, Fole, and the others.

  They had been mastered by the Clave.

  Slowly the vertigo spinning across Covenant’s sight came into focus; and he found himself staring at the krill. It stood in the dirt like a small cross scant feet from his face. Though fighting hit and tumbled everywhere, no one touched Loric’s eldritch blade.

  Its gem shone with a clear, clean argence; no taint marred the pure depths of the jewel.

  Gibbon’s attempt on it had been a feint—a way of distracting the company u
ntil he could take hold of all the Haruchai.

  All except Cail.

  With the dreamy detachment of anoxia, Covenant wondered why Cail was immune.

  Abruptly the knotting of his muscles eased. He jerked air into his lungs, biting raw hunks of it past the stunned paroxysm which had kept him from breathing; and sound began to leech back into the jungle—the slash of foliage, the grunt and impact of effort. For a moment, there were no voices; the battle was fought in bitter muteness. But then, as if from a great distance, he heard Linden call out, “Cail! The merewives! You got away from them!”

  Covenant heaved himself up from the ground in time to see Cail’s reaction.

  With the suddenness of a panther, Cail pounced on Harn. Harn was too torpid to counter effectively. Ducking under Harn’s blunt blows, Cail knocked him off balance, then grabbed him by the shoulder and hip, snatched him into the air. Harn lacked the bare self-command to twist aside as Cail plunged him toward a knee raised and braced to break his back.

  Yet at the last instant Harn did twist aside. When Brinn and Cail had been caught in the trance of the merewives, Linden had threatened to snap Brinn’s arm; and that particular peril had restored him to himself. Harn wrenched out of Cail’s grasp, came to his feet facing his kinsman.

  For a moment, they gazed at each other impassively, as if nothing had happened. Then Harn nodded. He and Cail sprang to the aid of the Giants.

  Still coughing for air. Covenant propped himself against a tree and watched the rest of the fight.

  It did not last long. When Cail and Harn had broken Fole and Durris free of Gibbon’s hold, the four of them were soon able to rescue the remaining six.

  Pitchwife and Mistweave picked their battered bodies out of the brush. The First glared sharply about her, holding her sword ready. Honninscrave folded his arms over his chest to contain the startling force of his own rage. But the Haruchai ignored the Giants. They turned away to face each other, speaking mind-to-mind with the silent dispassion of their people. In spite of what had just happened, they did not appear daunted or dismayed.