Thomas Covenant 03: Power That Preserves (37 page)

The words chilled Mhoram’s heart, but he replied to meet the pain and faltering in the warrior’s face. “His Oath of Peace was broken. He lost self-trust, and fell into despair. This is the shadow of the Gray Slayer upon him.”

After a moment, the warrior said hesitantly, “I have heard—it is said—is this not the Unbeliever’s doing?”

“Perhaps. In some measure, the Unbeliever is Lord Foul’s doing. But Trell’s despair is also in part my doing. It is Trell’s own doing. The Slayer’s great strength is that our mortal weakness may be so turned against us.”

He spoke as calmly as he could, but before he was within a hundred yards of the Close, he began to feel the heat of the flames. He had no doubt that this was the source of the other ill Tohrm had sensed. Hot waves of desecration radiated in all directions from the council chamber. As he neared the high wooden doors, he saw that they were smoldering, nearly aflame, and the walls shimmered as if the stone were about to melt. He was panting for breath, wincing against the heat, even before he reached the open doorway and looked down into the Close.

An inferno raged within it. Floor, tables, seats—all burned madly, spouted roaring flames like a convulsion of thunder. Heat scorched Mhoram’s face, crisped his hair. He had to blink tears away before he could peer down through the conflagration to its center.

There Trell stood in the graveling pit like the core of a holocaust, bursting with flames and hurling great gouts of fire at the ceiling with both fists. His whole form blazed like incarnated damnation, white-hot torment striking out at the stone it loved and could not save.

The sheer power of it staggered Mhoram. He was looking at the onset of a Ritual of Desecration. Trell had found in his own despair the secret which Mhoram had guarded so fearfully, and he was using that secret against Revelstone. If he were not stopped, the gates would only be the first part of the Keep to break, the first and least link in a chain of destruction which might tear the whole plateau to rubble.

He had to be stopped. That was imperative. But Mhoram was not a Gravelingas, had no stone-lore to counter the might which made this fire possible. He turned to Tohrm.

“You are of the
rhadhamaerl
!” he shouted over the raving of the fire. “You must silence this flame!”

“Silence it?” Tohrm was staring, aghast, into the blaze; he had the stricken look of a man witnessing the ravage of his dearest love. “Silence it?” He did not shout; Mhoram could only comprehend him by reading his lips. “I have no strength to equal this. I am a Gravelingas of the
rhadhamaerl
—not Earthpower incarnate. He will destroy us all.”

“Tohrm!” the High Lord cried. “You are the Hearthrall of Lord’s Keep! You or no one can meet this need!”

Tohrm mouthed soundlessly, “How?”

“I will accompany you! I will give you my strength—I will place all my power in you!”

The Hearthrall’s eyes rolled fearfully away from the Close and hauled themselves by sheer force of will into focus on the High Lord’s face.

“We will burn.”

“We will endure!”

Tohrm met Mhoram’s demand for a long moment. Then he groaned. He could not refuse to give himself for the sake of the Keep’s stone. “If you are with me,” he said silently through the roar.

Mhoram whirled to Amatin. “Tohrm and I will go into the Close. You must preserve us from the fire. Put your power around us—protect us.”

She nodded distractedly, pushed a damp strand of hair out of her face. “Go,” she said weakly. “Already the table melts.”

The High Lord saw that she was right. Before their eyes, the table slumped into magma, poured down to the lowest level of the Close and into the pit around Trell’s feet.

Mhoram called his power into readiness and rested the shaft of his staff on Tohrm’s shoulder. Together they faced the Close, waited while Amatin built a defense around them. The sensation of it swarmed over their skin like hiving insects, but it kept back the heat.

When she signaled to them, they started down into the Close as if they were struggling into a furnace.

Despite Amatin’s protection, the heat slammed into them like the fist of a cataclysm. Tohrm’s tunic began to scorch. Mhoram felt his own robe blackening. All the hair on their heads and arms shriveled. But the High Lord put heat out of his mind; he concentrated on his staff and Tohrm. He could feel the Hearthrall singing now, though he heard nothing but the deep, ravenous howl of the blaze. Tuning his power to the pitch of Tohrm’s song, he sent all his resources running through it.

The savage flames backed slightly away from them as they moved, and patches of unburned rock appeared like stepping-stones under Tohrm’s feet. They walked downward like a gap in the hell of Trell’s rage.

But the conflagration sealed behind them instantly. As they drew farther from the doors, Amatin’s defense weakened; distance and flame interfered. Mhoram’s flesh stung where his robe smoldered against it, and his eyes hurt so badly that he could no longer see. Tohrm’s song became more and more like a scream as they descended. By the time they reached the level of the pit, where Loric’s krill still stood embedded in its stone, Mhoram knew that if he did not take his strength away from Tohrm and use it for protection they would both roast at Trell’s feet.

“Trell!” Tohrm screamed soundlessly. “You are a Gravelingas of the
rhadhamaerl
! Do not do this!”

For an instant, the fury of the inferno paused. Trell looked at them, seemed to see them, recognize them.

“Trell!”

But he had fallen too far under the power of his own holocaust. He pointed a rigid, accusing finger, then stooped to the graveling and heaved a double armful of fire at them.

At the same moment, a thrill of strength ran through Mhoram. Amatin’s protection steadied, stiffened. Though the force of Trell’s attack knocked Tohrm back into Mhoram’s arms, the fire did not touch them. And Amatin’s sudden discovery of power called up an answer in the High Lord. With a look like joy gleaming in his eyes, he swept aside all his self-restraints and turned to his secret understanding of desecration. That secret contained might—might which the Lords had failed to discover because of their Oath of Peace—might which could be used to preserve as well as destroy. Despair was not the only unlocking emotion. Mhoram freed his own passion and stood against the devastation of the Close.

Power coursed vividly in his chest and arms and staff. Power made even his flesh and blood seem like invulnerable bone. Power shone out from him to oppose Trell’s ill. And the surge of his strength restored Tohrm. The Hearthrall regained his feet, summoned his lore; with all of his and Mhoram’s energy, he resisted Trell.

Confronting each other, standing almost face to face, the two Gravelingases wove their lore-secret gestures, sang their potent
rhadhamaerl
invocations. While the fire raged as if Revelstone were about to crash down upon them, they commanded the blaze, wrestled will against will for mastery of it.

Tohrm was exalted by Mhoram’s support. With the High Lord’s power resonating in every word and note and gesture, renewing him, fulfilling his love for the stone, he bent back the desecration. After a last convulsive exertion, Trell fell to his knees, and his fire began to fail.

It ran out of the Close like the recession of a tide—slowly at first, then faster, as the force which had raised it broke. The heat declined; cool fresh air poured around Mhoram from the airways of the Keep. Sight returned to his scorched eyes. For a moment, he feared that he would lose consciousness in relief.

Weeping with joy and grief, he went to help Tohrm lift Trell Atiaran-mate from the graveling pit. Trell gave no sign that he felt them, knew in any way that they were present. He looked around with hollow eyes, muttering brokenly, “Intact. There is nothing intact. Nothing.” Then he covered his head with his arms and huddled into himself on the floor at Mhoram’s feet, shaking as if he needed to sob and could not.

Tohrm met Mhoram’s gaze. For a long moment, they looked into each other’s faces, measuring what they had done together. Tohrm’s features had the burned aspect of a wilderland, a place that would never grin again. But his emotion was clear and clean as he murmured at last, “We will grieve for him. The
rhadhamaerl
will grieve. The time has come for mourning.”

From the top of the stairs, an excited voice cried, “High Lord! The dead! They have all fallen into sand! Satansfist has exhausted this attack. The gates hold!”

Through his tears, Mhoram looked around the Close. It was badly damaged. The Lords’ table and chairs had melted, the steps were uneven, and most of the lower tiers had been misshaped by the fire. But the place had survived. The Keep had survived. Mhoram nodded to Tohrm. “It is time.”

His sight was so blurred with tears that he seemed to see two blue-robed figures moving down the stairs toward him. He blinked his tears away, and saw that Lord Loerya was with Amatin.

Her presence explained the protection which had saved him and Tohrm; she had joined her strength to Amatin’s.

When she reached him, she looked gravely into his face. He searched her for shame or distress but saw only regret. “I left them with the Unfettered One at Glimmermere,” she explained quietly. “Perhaps they will be safe. I returned—when I found courage.”

Then something at Mhoram’s side caught her attention. Wonder lit her face, and she turned him so that he was looking at the table which held Loric’s
krill
.

The table was intact.

In its center, the gem of the
krill
blazed with a pure white fire, as radiant as hope.

Mhoram heard someone say, “Ur-Lord Covenant has returned to the Land.” But he could no longer tell what was happening around him. His tears seemed to blind all his senses.

Following the light of the gem, he reached out his hand and clasped the
krill
’s haft. In its intense heat, he felt the truth of what he had heard. The Unbeliever had returned.

With his new might, he gripped the
krill
and pulled it easily from the stone. Its edges were so sharp that when he held the knife in his hand he could see their keenness. His power protected him from the heat.

He turned to his companions with a smile that felt like a ray of sunshine on his face.

“Summon Lord Trevor,” he said gladly. “I have—a knowledge of power that I wish to share with you.”

TWELVE:
Amanibhavam

Hate
.

It was the only thought in Covenant’s mind. The weight of things he had not known crushed everything else.

Hate
.

He clung to the unanswered question as he pried himself with the spear up over the rim of the hollow and hobbled down beyond the last ember-light of Pietten’s fire.

Hate
.

His crippled foot dragged along the ground, grinding the splintered bones of his ankle together until beads of excruciation burst from his pores and froze in the winter wind. But he clutched the shaft of the spear and lurched ahead, down that hillside and diagonally up the next. The wind cut against his right cheek, but he paid no attention to it; he turned gradually toward the right because of the steepness of the hill, not because he had any awareness of direction. When the convolution of the next slope bent him northward again, away from the Plains of Ra and his only friends, he followed it, tottered down it, fluttering in the wind like a maimed wildman, thinking only:

Hate
.

Atiaran Trell-mate had said that it was the responsibility of the living to make meaningful the sacrifices of the dead. He had a whole Land full of death to make meaningful. Behind him, Lena lay slain in her own blood, with a wooden spike through her belly. Elena was buried somewhere in the bowels of
Melenkurion
Skyweir, dead in her private apocalypse because of his manipulations and his failures. She had never even existed. Ranyhyn had been starved and slaughtered. Banner and Foamfollower might be dead or in despair. Pietten and Hile Troy and Trell and Triock were all his fault. None of them had ever existed. His pain did not exist. Nothing mattered except the one absolute question.

He moaned deep in his throat, “Hate?”

Nothing could have any meaning without the answer to that question. Despite its multitudinous disguises, he recognized it as the question which had shaped his life since the day he had first learned that he was subject to the law of leprosy. Loathing, self-loathing, fear, rape, murder, leper outcast unclean—they were all the same thing. He hobbled in search of the answer.

He was totally alone for the first time since the beginning of his experiences in the Land.

Sick gray dawn found him laboring vaguely northeastward—poling himself feverishly with the spear, and shivering in the bitter ague of winter. The dismal light seemed to rouse parts of him. He plunged into the shallow lee of a hillside and tried to take the measure of his situation.

The shrill wind gibed around him as he plucked with diseased and frozen fingers at his pant leg. When he succeeded in moving the fabric, he felt a numb surprise at the dark discoloration of his flesh above the ankle. His foot sat at a crooked angle on his leg, and through the crusted blood he could see slivers of bone protruding against the thongs of his sandals.

The injury looked worse than it felt. Its pain grated in his knee joint dully, gouged aches up through his thigh to his hip, but the ankle itself was bearable. Both his feet had been frozen senseless by the cold. And both were jabbed and torn and painlessly infected like the feet of a pilgrim. He thought blankly that he would probably lose the broken one. But the possibility carried no weight with him; it was just another part of his experience that did not exist.

There were things that he should have been doing for himself, but he had no idea what they were. He had no conception of anything except the central need which drove him. He lacked food, warmth, knowledge of where he was or where he was going. Yet he was already urgent to be moving again. Nothing but movement could keep his lifeblood circulating —nothing but movement could help him find his answer.