Power That Preserves Read online

  The strain of stretching his lips tight over her shin made his mouth wound sting, and his blood mingled with hers as it trickled across the darkening stain of the swelling. But he ignored that as well. With all his strength, he sucked at the cuts. When he stopped to breathe, he rubbed the child’s leg, trying to squeeze all of her blood toward the cuts. Then he sucked again.

  A nauseating dizziness caught hold of his head and made it spin. He stopped, afraid that he would faint. “All right,” he panted. “I’m finished. You’re going to be all right.” After a moment, he realized that the child was whimpering softly into the back of his shoulder. Quickly he turned, put his arms around her, hugged her to him. “You’re going to be all right,” he repeated thickly. “I’ll take you to your mommy now.” He did not believe that he had the strength to stand, much less to carry her any distance at all.

  But he knew that she still needed treatment; he could hardly have removed all the venom. And the cuts he had inflicted would have to be tended. She could not afford his weakness. With an effort that almost undid him, he lurched painfully to his feet, and stood listing on the hillside as if he were about to capsize.

  The child sniffled miserably in his arms. He could not bear to look at her, for fear that she would meet his gaze with reproach. He stared down the hill while he struggled to scourge or beg himself into a condition of fortitude.

  Through her tears, the child said, “Your mouth’s bleeding.”

  “Yes, I know,” he mumbled. But that pain was no worse than the ache in his forehead, or the hurt of his bruises. And all of it was only pain. It was temporary; it would soon fall under the pall of his leprosy. The ice in his bones made him feel that the numbness of his hands and feet was already spreading. Pain was no excuse for weakness.

  Slowly he unlocked one knee, let his weight start forward. Like a poorly articulated puppet, he lumbered woodenly down the hillside.

  By the time he reached the tree—it stood black and straight like a signpost indicating the place where the child had been bitten—he had almost fallen three times. His boots were trying to trip him; without laces to hold them to his feet, they cluttered every step he took. For a moment, he leaned against the tree, trying to steady himself. Then he kicked off his boots. He did not need them. His feet were too numb to feel the damage of hiking barefoot.

  “You ready?” he breathed. “Here we go.” But he was not sure he made any sound. In the fever which clouded his thoughts, he found himself thinking that life was poorly designed; burdens were placed on the wrong people. For some obscure reason, he believed that in Banner’s place he could have found some other answer to Korik’s corruption. And Bannor would have been equal many times over to the physical task of saving this child.

  Then he remembered that Mhoram had not told him any news of the Giants in connection with Korik’s mission. Sparked by the association, a vision of Gallows Howe cut through his haze. He saw again a Giant dangling from the gibbet of the Forestal.

  What had happened to the Giants?

  Gaping mutely as if the woods and the stream and the little girl in his arms astonished him, he pushed away from the black tree and began shambling along Righters Creek in the general direction of the town.

  As he moved, he forced open his caked lips to cry aloud, “Help!”

  The child had said that her parents were a long way away, but he did not know what distances meant to her. He did not know whether or not her parents were anywhere near the Creek. He did not even know how far he was from Haven Farm; the whole previous night was a blank hurt in his mind. But the banks of the stream offered him the most accessible route toward town, and he could think of nothing to do but move in that direction. The girl’s pain was increasing. Her leg was blacker every time he looked at it, and she winced and whimpered at every jolt of his stiff stride. At intervals she moaned for her parents, and every moan made him gasp out like the jab of a goad, “Help!”

  But his voice seemed to have no authority, no carrying power; it dropped into silence after him like a stillborn. And the effort of shouting aggravated the injury to his mouth. Soon he could feel his lip swelling like the girl’s leg, growing dark and taut and heavy with pain. He hugged her closer to him and croaked in grim, forlorn insistence, “Help! Help me!”

  Gradually the heat of the sun made him sweat. It stung his forehead until his eyes blurred. But it did not touch the cold in his bones. His shivering mounted. Dizziness dismembered his balance, made him reel through the woods as if he were being driven by a tattered gale. Whenever he stepped on a pointed rock or branch, it gouged far enough up into his arches to hurt him. Several times, his joints folded sharply, and he plunged to his knees. But each time, the dark wound he carried pulled him upright again, and sent him forward, mumbling past his thick lip, “Help me.”

  His own swelling seemed to take over his face like a tumor. Hot lances of pain thrust from it through his head every time the ground jarred him. As time passed, he could feel his heart itself trembling, quivering between each beat as it labored to carry the strain. The haze of his fever thickened until at odd moments he feared that he had lost his sight. In the blur, he quailed away from the dazzles of sunlight which sprang at him off the stream; but when the creek passed through shadows, it looked so cool and healing that he could hardly restrain himself from stumbling into it, burying his face in its anodyne.

  Yet all the while he knew he could not deviate from the strait path of his trek. If he failed to find help for the child, then everything he had already done for her would be useless, bereft of meaning. He could not stop. Her wound would not tolerate his futility. He saw too much of his lost son Roger in her bare shin. Despite the nails of pain which crucified him, he lurched onward.

  Then in the distance he heard shouts, like people wailing for someone lost. He jerked to a swaying halt on stiff legs, and tried to look around. But he seemed to have lost control of his head. It wobbled vainly on his neck, as if the weight of his swelling threw it out of joint, and he was unable to face it in the direction of the shouts.

  In his arms, the girl whimpered pitifully, “Mommy. Daddy.”

  He fought his black tight pain to frame the word, Help. But no sound came between his lips. He forced his vocal cords to make some kind of noise.

  “Help me.”

  It was no louder than a whisper.

  A sound like hoarse sobs shook him, but he could not tell whether they came from him or from the girl. Weakly, almost blindly, he straightened his arms, lifted the child outward as if he were offering her to the shouts.

  They became a woman’s voice and took on words. “Karen! Here she is! Over here! Oh, Karen! my baby!” Running came toward him through the leaves and branches; it sounded like the blade of a winter wind cutting at him from the depths of his fever. At last he was able to see the people. A woman hurried down the side of a hill, and a man ran anxiously after her. “Karen!” the woman cried.

  The child reached out toward the woman and sobbed, “Mommy! Mommy!”

  An instant later, the burden was snatched from Covenant’s arms. “Karen. Oh, my baby,” the woman moaned as she hugged the child. “We were so frightened. Why did you run away? Are you all right?” Without a glance at Covenant, she said, “Where did you find her? She ran away this morning, and we’ve been frightened half to death.” As if this needed some explanation, she went on, “We’re camping over there a ways. Dave has Good Friday off, and we decided to camp out. We never thought she would run away.”

  The man caught up with her, and she started speaking to the child again. “Oh, you naughty, naughty girl. Are you all right? Let me look at you.”

  The girl kept sobbing in pain and relief as the woman held her at arm’s length to inspect her. At once, the woman saw the tourniquet and the swelling and the cuts. She gave a low scream, and looked at Covenant for the first time.

  “What happened?” she demanded. “What’ve you done to her?” Suddenly she stopped. A look of horror stretched her face.
She backed away toward the man, and screamed at him, “Dave! It’s that leper! That Covenant!”

  “What?” the man gasped. Righteous indignation rushed up in him. “You bastard!” he spat belligerently, and started toward Covenant.

  Covenant thought that the man was going to hit him; he seemed to feel the blow coming at him from a great distance. Watching it, he lost his balance, stumbled backward a step, and sat down heavily. Red pain flooded across his sight. When it cleared, he was vaguely surprised to find that he was not being kicked. But the man had stopped a dozen feet away; he stood with his fists clenched, trying not to show that he was afraid to come closer.

  Covenant struggled to speak, explain that the child still needed help. But a long, stunned moment passed before he was able to dredge words past his lips. Then he said in a tone of detachment completely at variance with the way he looked and felt, “Snakebite. Timber rattler. Help her.”

  The effort exhausted him; he could not go on. He lapsed into silence, and sat still as if he were hopelessly waiting for an avalanche to fall on him. The man and woman began to recede from him, lose solidity, as if they were dissolving in the acid of his prostration. Vaguely he heard the child moan, “The snake bit me, Mommy. My leg hurts.”

  He realized that he still had not seen the child’s face. But he had lost his chance. He had exercised too strenuously with snake venom in his blood. By degrees, he was slipping into shock.

  “All right, Mhoram,” he mumbled wanly. “Come and get me. It’s over now.”

  He did not know whether he had spoken aloud. He could not hear himself. The ground under him had begun to ripple. Waves rolled through the hillside, tossing the small raft of hard soil on which he sat. He clung to it as long as he could, but the earthen seas were too rough. Soon he lost his balance and tumbled backward into the ground as if it were an undug grave.

  FOUR: Siege

  Twelve days after the last charred trunks of Revelwood were consumed, reduced to ashes and trampled underfoot, Satansfist Raver, the right hand of the Gray Slayer, brought his vast, dolorous army to the stone gates of Lord’s Keep. He approached slowly, though his hordes tugged forward like leashed wolves; he restrained the ravening of the ur-viles and Cavewights and creatures he commanded so that all the inhabitants of Trothgard, and of the lands between Revelwood and the North Plains, would have time to seek safety in the Keep. This he did because he wished all the humans he meant to slay to be gathered in one place. Every increase in the Keep’s population would weaken its endurance by eating its stores of food. And crowds of people would be more susceptible than trained warriors or Lords to the fear he bore.

  He was sure of the outcome of his siege. His army was not as immense as the one which moksha Fleshharrower his brother had lost in Garroting Deep. In order to secure his hold upon the regions he had already mastered, he had left scores of thousands of his creatures behind along the Roamsedge River, throughout the valley which formed the south border of Andelain, and across the Center Plains. But the Despiser had lost little more than a third of his forces in that earlier war. And instead of wolves and kresh and unwieldy griffins, Satansfist had with him more of the lore-cunning, roynish, black, eyeless ur-viles, and more of the atrocious creatures which Lord Foul had raised up from the Great Swamp, Lifeswallower, from Sarangrave Flat, from the Spoiled Plains and the bosque of the Ruinwash—raised up and demented with the power of the Illearth Stone. In addition, the Giant-Raver had at his back a power of which the Lords of Revelstone had no conception. Therefore he was willing to prolong his approach to the Keep, so that he could hasten its eventual and irreparable collapse.

  Then, early on the twelfth day, a sky-shaking howl shot through his hordes as they caught their first sight of the mountain plateau of Revelstone. Thousands of his creatures started to rush madly toward it through the foothills, but he knocked them back with the flail of his power. Ruling his army with a green scourge, he spent the whole day making his approach, placing his forces in position. When daylight at last drained away into night, his army was wrapped around the entire promontory of Revelstone, from the westmost edge of its south wall to the cliffs of the plateau on the northwest. His encampment locked the Keep in a wide, round formation, sealing it from either flight or rescue, from forages for food or missions to unknown allies. And that night, Satansfist feasted on the flesh of prisoners who had been captured during his long march from Landsdrop.

  If any eyes in Revelstone had been able to penetrate the unbroken mass of clouds which frowned now constantly over the Land, they would have seen that this night was the dark of the moon on the middle night of spring. The Despiser’s preternatural winter had clenched the Land for forty-two days.

  Satansfist had followed precisely the design which his master had given him for his march through the Upper Land.

  The next morning, he went to face the watchtower which fronted the long walls of Revelstone at their wedge point. He paid no attention to the intricate Giantish labor which had produced the pattern of coigns and oriels and walks and battlements in the smooth cliff-walls; that part of him which could have responded to the sight had long ago been extinguished by the occupying Raver. Without a second glance at the walls, or at the warriors who sentried the crenellated parapets, he strode around the promontory until he stood before the great stone gates in the base of the tower on its southeast side—the only entrance into Lord’s Keep.

  He was not surprised to find that the gates were open. Though the Giantish passion for stonework had been quelled in his blood, he retained his knowledge of the Keep. He knew that as long as those massive, interlocking gates remained intact, they could close upon command, trapping anyone who dared enter the tunnel under the tower. While in the tunnel, attackers would be exposed to counterattack from defensive windows built into the roof of the passage. And beyond the tunnel was nothing but a courtyard, open only to the sky, and then another set of gates even stronger than the first. The tower itself could not be entered except by suspended crosswalks from the main Keep, or through two small doors from the courtyard. Lord’s Keep had been well made. The Giant-Raver did not accept the dare of the open gates.

  Instead he placed himself just close enough to the tower to taunt skilled archers, and shouted up at the stone walls in a voice that vibrated with malice and glee. “Hail, Lords! Worthy Lords! Show yourselves, Lordlings! Leave off cowering in your useless warrens, and speak with me. Behold! I come courteously to accept your surrender!”

  There was no answer. The tower, only half as high as the main Keep behind it, stood with its windows and battlements as silent as if it were uninhabited. A whimpering growl passed among the army as the creatures begged for a chance to charge through the open gates.

  “Hear me, little Lords!” he shouted. “See the toils of my strength wrapped around you. I hold your last lives in the palm of my hand. There is no hope for you unless you surrender yourselves and all to the mercy of the Despiser.” Jeering barks from the ur-viles greeted this, and Satansfist grinned. “Speak, Lordlings! Speak or die!”

  A moment later two figures appeared atop the tower—one a warrior and the other a blue-robed Lord whom Satansfist recognized. At first they ignored the Giant. They went to the flagpole, and together raised High Lord’s Furl, the azure oriflamme of the Council. Only after it was fluttering defiantly in the gelid wind did they step to the parapet and face Satansfist.

  “I hear you!” the Lord snapped. “I hear you, samadhi Raver. I know you, Sheol Satansfist. And you know me. I am Mhoram son of Variol, High Lord by the choice of the Council. Depart, Raver! Take your ill hordes with you. You have touched me. You know that I will not be daunted.”

  Fury glinted in the Giant’s eyes at the memory Mhoram invoked, but he placed his hand over the livid fragment of the Stone hidden under his jerkin, and gave Mhoram a sarcastic bow. “I know you, Mhoram,” he replied. “When I placed my hand upon you in the labyrinth of Kurash Qwellinir, I knew you. You were too blind with folly and ignorance to fe
el a wise despair. Therefore I permitted your life—so that you would live to better knowledge. Are you yet blind? Have you no eyes to see that your effectless end at my hand is as sure as the arch of Time? Have you forgotten the Giants? Have you forgotten the Bloodguard? In the name of the Despiser, I will certainly crush you where you cower!”

  “Empty words,” Mhoram retorted. “Bravado is easily uttered—but you will find it difficult of proof. Melenkurion abatha! Raver, begone! Return to your forsaken master before the Creator forgets restraint, and wreaks a timeless vengeance upon you.”

  The Giant laughed harshly. “Do not comfort yourself with lies, lordling. The arch of Time will be broken if the Creator seeks to strike through it—and then Lord Foul the Despiser, Satansheart and Soulcrusher, Corruption and Render, will be unloosed upon the universe! If the Creator tries to lift his hand, my brothers and I will feast upon his very soul! Surrender, fool! Learn to be daunted while groveling may still preserve your life. Perhaps you will be permitted to serve me as my hand slave.”

  “Never!” High Lord Mhoram cried boldly. “We will never bow to you while one pulse of faith still beats in the Land. The Earthpower is yet strong to resist you. We will seek it until we have found the means to cast down you and your master and all his works. Your victories are hollow while one soul remains with breath enough to cry out against you!” Raising his staff, he whirled it so that blue fire danced in the air about his head. Begone, samadhi Raver! Melenkurion abatha! Duroc minas mill khabaal! We will never surrender!”

  Below him, Satansfist flinched under the power of the words. But an instant later, he sprang forward, snatching at his jerkin. With his piece of Illearth Stone clenched and steaming in his fist, he hurled a gout of emerald force up at the High Lord. At the same time, hundreds of creatures broke from their ranks and charged toward the open gates.