White Gold Wielder (71 page)

Linden turned back to the Demondim-spawn.

For no sufficient reason, she found that she was sure of him. Or perhaps she had become sure of herself. White fire curled up and down her right arm, plumed toward her shoulder, accentuated the strong rush of her life. He was rigid and murderous, blind to any concerns but his own. But because he had been given to Covenant by Foamfollower—because he had bowed to her once—because he had saved her life—and because he had met with anger the warping of his makers—she did what he asked.

When she put her arms around his neck and Findail’s, the
Elohim
flinched. But his people had Appointed him to this peril, and their will held. At the last instant, he raised his head to meet his personal Würd.

In that instant. Linden became a staggering concussion of power which she had not intended and could not control.

But the blast had no outward force: it cast no light or fire, flung no fury. It might have been invisible to the Giants. All its energy was directed inward.

At the two strange beings hugged in her arms.

Filled with white passion, her embrace became the crucible in which Vain and Findail melted and were made new.

Findail, the tormented
Elohim
: Earthpower incarnate. Amoral, arrogant, and self-complete, capable of everything. Sent by his people to redeem the Earth at any cost. To obtain the ring for himself if he could. And if he could not, to pay the price of failure.

This price.

And Vain, the Demondim-spawn: artificially manufactured by ur-viles. More rigid than gutrock, less tractable than bone. Alive to his inbred purpose and cruelly insensate to every other need or value or belief.

In Linden’s clasp, empowered by wild magic, their opposite bodies bled together. While she held them, they began to merge.

Findail’s fluid Earthpower. Vain’s hard, perfect structure. And between them, the old definition forged into the heels of the Staff of Law. The
Elohim
lost shape, seemed to flow through the Demondim-spawn. Vain changed and stretched toward the iron bands which held his right wrist and left ankle.

His forearm shed its bark, gleamed like new wood. And the wood grew, spread out across the transformation, imposed its form upon the merging.

When she understood what was happening. Linden poured herself into the apotheosis. Wild magic supplied the power, but that was not enough. Vain and Findail needed more from her. Vain had been so perfectly made that he attained the stature of natural Law, brought to beauty all the long self-loathing of the ur-viles. But he had no ethical imperative, no sense of purpose beyond this climax. Findail’s essence supplied the capacity for use, the strength which made Law effective. But he could not give it meaning: the
Elohim
were too self-absorbed. The transformation required something which only the human holder of the ring could provide.

She gave the best answer she had. Fear and distrust and anger she set aside: they had no place here. Exalted by white fire, she shone forth her passion for health and healing, her Land-born percipience, the love she had learned for Andelain and Earthpower. By herself, she chose the meaning she desired and made it true.

In her hands, the new Staff began to live.

Living Law filled the bands of lore: living power shone in every fiber of the wood. The old Staff had been rune-carved to define its purpose. But this Staff was alive, almost sentient: it did not need runes.

As her fingers closed around the wood, she was swept away in a flood of possibility.

Almost without transition, her health-sense became as huge as the mountain. She tasted Mount Thunder’s tremendous weight and ancientness, felt the slow, wracked breathing of the stone. Cavewights scurried like motes through the unmeasured catacombs. Far below her, two Ravers cowered among the banes and creatures of the depths. Somewhere above them, the few surviving ur-viles watched Kiril Threndor in a reflective pool of acid and barked vindication at Vain’s success. Spouting lava cast its heat onto her bare cheek. A myriad passages, dens, offal-pits, and charnels ached emptily and stank because the river which should have run through Treacher’s Gorge was dry, supplied no water to wash the Wightwarrens. At the peak, Fire-Lions crouched, waiting in eternal immobility for the invocation to life.

And still her range increased. Wild magic and Law carried her outward. Before she could clarify half her perceptions, they reached beyond the mountain, went out to the Land.

The sun was rising. Though she stood in Kiril Threndor as if she were entranced, she felt the Sunbane dawn over her.

It was insanely intense. She had become too vulnerable: it stabbed along her nerves like the life-thrust of a hot knife, pierced her heart with venom like a keen fang. At once, she snatched herself back toward shelter—recoiled as if she were reeling to the cave where the Giants watched her in wide astonishment and Covenant lay dead upon the floor.

A fertile sun. Visceral fever gripped her. Sunder and Hollian had abhorred the sun of pestilence more than any other. But for Linden the fertile sun was the worst. It was ill beyond bearing, and everything it touched became a sob of anguish.

Echoes of her fire licked the walls. One long crack marked the floor. Something precious had been broken here. The First and Pitchwife stared at her as if she had become wonderful.

She had so little time left. She needed time, needed peace and rest and solace in which to muster courage. But the pressure of her dismissal continued to build. And the Staff of Law multiplied that force. Summons and return acted by rules which the Staff affirmed. Only her fist on the ring and her grip on the dean wood—only her clenched will—held her where she was.

She knew what she would have to do.

The prospect appalled her.

But she had already borne so much, and it would all be rendered meaningless if she faltered now. She did not have to fail. This was why she had been chosen. Because she was fit to fulfill Covenant’s last appeal. It was too much—and yet it was hardly enough to repay her debts. Why should she fail? The mere thought that she would have to let the Sunbane touch her and touch her made her guts writhe, sent nausea beating down her veins. Horror raised mute cries of protest. In a sense, she would have to become the Land—to expose herself as fully as the Land to the Sunbane’s desecration. It would be like being locked again in the attic with her dying father while dark glee came hosting against her—like enduring again her mother’s abject blame until she was driven to the point of murder. But she had survived those things. She had found her way through them to a life worthy of more respect than she had ever given it. And the old man whose life she had saved on Haven Farm had given her a promise to sustain her.

Ah, my daughter, do not fear. You will not fail, however he may assail you. There is also love in the world
.

Because she needed at least one small comfort for herself, she turned to the Giants.

They had not moved. They had no eyes to see what was happening. But indomitability still shone in the First’s face. No grime or bloodshed could mar her iron beauty. She looked as acute as an eagle. And when he met Linden’s gaze. Pitchwife grinned as if she were the last benison he would ever need.

With the Staff of Law and the white ring. Linden caressed the fatigue out of the First’s limbs, restored her Giantish strength. The rupture in Pitchwife’s lungs Linden effaced, healing his respiration. Then, so that she would be able to trust herself later, she unbent his spine, restructured the bones in a way that allowed him to stand straight, breathe normally.

But after that she had no more time. The wind between the worlds keened constantly across the background of her thoughts, calling her away. She could not refuse it much longer.

Be true
.

Deliberately she opened her senses and went by her own choice back out into the Sunbane.

Its power was atrocious beyond belief; and the Land lay broken under it—broken and dying, a helpless body slain like Covenant in her worst nightmare, the knife driven by an astonishing violence which had brought up more blood than she had ever seen in her life. And from that wound corruption welled upward.

Nothing could stop it. It ate at the ground like venom. The wound grew wider with every sunrise. The Land had been stabbed to its vitals. Murder spewed across the sodden hillsides, clogged the dry riverbeds, gathered and reeked in every hollow and valley. Only the heart of Andelain remained unruined; but even there the sway of slaughter grew. The very Earth was bleeding to death. Linden had no way to save herself from drowning.

That was the truth of the Sunbane. It could never be stanched. She was a fool to make the attempt.

But she held wild magic clenched like bright passion in her right fist; and her left hand gripped the living Staff. Both were hers to wield. Guided by her health-sense—by the same vulnerability which let the Sunbane run through her like a riptide, desecrating every thew of her body, every ligament of her will—she stood within her mind on the high slopes of Mount Thunder and set herself to do battle with perversion.

It was a strange battle, weird and terrible. She had no opponent. Her foe was the rot Lord Foul had afflicted upon the Earthpower; and without him the Sunbane had neither mind nor purpose. It was simply a hunger which fed on every form of nature and health and life. She could have fired her huge forces blast after blast and struck nothing except the ravaged ground, done no hurt to anything not already lost. Only scant moments after dawn, green sprouts of vegetation stretched like screams from the soil.

And beyond this fertility lurked rain and pestilence and desert in erratic sequence, waiting to repeat themselves over and over again, always harder and faster, until the foundations of the Land crumbled. Then the Sunbane would be free to spread.

Out to the rest of the Earth.

But she had learned from Covenant—and from the Raver’s possession. She did not attempt to attack the Sunbane. Instead she called it to herself, accepted it into her personal flesh.

With white fire, she absorbed the Land’s corruption.

At first, the sheer pain and horror of it excruciated her hideously. One shrill cry as hoarse as terror ripped her throat, rang like Kevin’s despair over the wide landscape below her, echoed and echoed in Kiril Threndor until the Giants were frantic, unable to help her. But then her own need drove her to more power.

The Staff flamed so intensely that her body should have been burned away. Yet she was not hurt. Rather, the pain she had taken upon herself was swept from her—cured and cleansed, and sent spilling outward as pure Earthpower. With Law, she healed herself.

She hardly understood what she was doing: it was an act of exaltation, chosen by intuition rather than conscious thought. But she saw her way now with the reasonless clarity of joy. It could be done: the Land could be redeemed. With all the passion of her thwarted heart, all the love she had learned and been given, she plunged into her chosen work.

She was a storm upon the mountain, a barrage of determination and fire which no eyes but hers could have witnessed. From every league and hill and gully and plain of the Land, every slope of Andelain and cliff of the peaks, every southern escarpment and northern rise, she drew ruin into herself and restored it to wholeness, then sent it back like silent rain, analystic and invisible.

Her spirit became the medicament that cured. She was the Sun-Sage, the Healer, Linden Avery the Chosen, altering the Sunbane with her own life.

It fired green at her like the sickness of emeralds. But she understood intimately the natural growth and decay of plants. They found their Law in her, their lush or hardy order, their native abundance or rarity; and then the green was gone.

Blue volleyed thunderously at her head, then lost the Land as she accepted every drop of water and flash of violence.

The brown of deserts came blistering around her, scorched her skin. But she knew the necessity of heat—and the restriction of climate. She felt in her bones the rhythm of rise and fall, the strict and vital alternation of seasons, summer and winter. The desert fire was cooled to a caress by the Staff and emitted gently outward again.

And last, the red of pestilence, as scarlet as disease, as stark as adders. It swarmed against her like a world full of bees, shot streaks of blood across her vision. In spite of herself, she was fading, could not keep from being hurt. But even pestilence was only a distortion of the truth. It had its clear place and purpose. When it was reduced, it fit within the new Law which she set forth.

Sun-Sage and ring-wielder, she restored the Earthpower and released it upon the wracked body of the Land.

She could not do everything. Already she had made herself faint with self-expenditure, and the ground sprawling below her to the horizons reeled. She had nothing left with which she might bring back the Land’s trees and meadows and crops, its creatures and birds. But she had done enough. She knew without questioning the knowledge that seeds remained in the soil—that even among the wrecked treasures of the Waynhim were things which might yet produce fruit and young—that the weather would be able to find its own patterns again. She saw birds and animals still flourishing in the mountains to the west and south, where the Sunbane had not reached: they would eventually return. The people who stayed alive in their small villages would be able to endure.

And she saw one more reason for hope, one more fact that made the future possible. Much of Andelain had been preserved. Around its heart, it had mustered its resistance—and had prevailed.