One Tree (52 page)

Now no visions came out of his depths to appall her. She had surrendered so completely that nothing remained to cause her dismay. Instead she felt the layers of her independent self being stripped away. Severity and training and medical school were gone, leaving her fifteen and loss-ridden, unable at that time to conceive of any answer to her mother’s death. Grief and guilt and her mother were gone, so that she seemed to contain nothing except the cold unexpungeable horror and accusation of her father’s suicide. Then even suicide was gone, and she stood under a clean sun in fields and flowers, full of a child’s capacity for happiness, joy, love. She could have fallen that way forever.

The sunlight spread its wings about her, and the wind ruffled her hair like a hand of affection. She shouted in pleasure. And her shout was answered. A boy came toward her across the fields. He was older than she—he seemed much older, though he was still only a boy, and the Covenant he would become was nothing more than an implication in the lines of his face, the fire of his eyes. He approached her with a shy half-smile. His hands were open and whole and accessible. Caught in a whirl of instinctive exaltation, she ran toward him with her arms wide, yearning for the embrace which would transform her.

But when she touched him, the gap was bridged, and his emptiness flooded into her. At once, she could see everything, hear everything. All her senses functioned normally. Her companions had fallen silent: they were staring at her in despair. Kasreyn stood near Covenant with his ocular held ready, his hands trembling as if they could no longer suppress their caducity. But behind what she saw and heard, she wailed like a foretaste of her coming life. She was a child in a field of flowers, and the older boy she adored had left her. The love had gone out of the sunlight, leaving the day bereft as if all joy were dead.

Yet she saw him—saw the boy in the man, Thomas Covenant—as life and will spread back into his limbs. She saw him take hold of himself, lift his head. All her senses functioned normally. She could do nothing but wail as he turned toward Kasreyn, exposed himself to the Kemper’s
geas
. He was still too far away from himself to make any defense.

But before the Kemper was able to use his ocular, the instructions she had left in Covenant reached him. He looked straight at Kasreyn and obeyed her.

Distinctly he articulated one clear word:

“Nom.”

That name seemed to stun the air, appalling the very stone of the Sandhold.

From a great and lonely distance, Covenant watched Kasreyn of the Gyre recoil. The Kemper dropped his eyepiece. Dismay and rage crumpled his old face. But he could not call back the word Covenant had spoken. An anguish of indecision gripped him for a moment, paralyzing him. Then the old fear rose up in him, and he fled to preserve his life.

He flung the iron door shut behind him, thrust the bolts into place. But those metallic sounds meant nothing to Covenant. He was perfectly aware of his situation. All his senses had been functioning normally: he recognized his peril, understood the plight of his companions, knew what had to be done. Yet he was scarcely sentient. The gap between action and impact, perception and consequence, was slow to close. Consciousness welled up in him from the contact which Linden had forged; but the distance was great and could not be filled instantly.

At first, the recovery seemed swift. The bonds connecting him to his adolescence, then his young manhood, healed themselves in a surge of memory which felt like fire—annealment and cautery in one. And that fire rapidly became the numinous intensity with which he had given himself to writing and marriage. But then his progress slowed. With Joan on Haven Farm, before the publication of his novel and the birth of their son, he had felt that his luminescence was the most profound energy of life. But it had proven itself hollow at the core. His bestseller had been little more than an inane piece of self-congratulation. And his marriage had been destroyed by the blameless crime of leprosy.

After that, the things he recollected made him writhe.

His violent and involuntary isolation, his imposed self-loathing, had driven him deep into the special madness of lepers. He had stumbled into the Land as if it were the final summation and crisis of his life. Almost at once, he had raped the first person who befriended him. He had tormented and dismayed people who helped him. Unwittingly he had walked the path Lord Foul marked out for him—had not turned aside from that doom until the consequences of his own actions came back to appall him. And then he might have achieved ruin instead of restitution, had he not been supported at every turn by people like Mhoram and Bannor and Foamfollower, people whose comprehension of love and valor far surpassed his own. Even now, years later, his heart cried out against the harm he had done to the Land, to the people of the Land—against the paucity with which he had finally served them.

His voice echoed in the dank constriction of the cell. His companions strained toward him as he knelt like abjection on the cold stone. But he had no attention to spare for them.

And he was not abject. He was wounded, yes; guilty beyond question; crowded with remorse. But his leprosy had given him strength as well as weakness. In the thronehall of Foul’s Creche, confronting the Despiser and the Illearth Stone, he had found the eye of his paradox. Balanced between the contradictions of self-abhorrence and affirmation, of Unbelief and love—acknowledging and refusing the truth of the Despiser—he had come into his power. He felt it within him now, poised like the moment of clarity which lay at the heart of every vertigo. As the gap closed, he resumed himself.

He tried to blink his eyes free of tears. Once again, Linden had saved him. The only woman he had met in more than eleven years who was not afraid of his illness. For his sake, she had insisted time after time on committing herself to risks, situations, demands she could neither measure nor control. The stone under his hands and knees felt unsteady; but he meant to climb to his feet. He owed her that. He could not imagine the price she must have paid to restore him.

When he tried to stand, the whole cell lurched. The air was full of distant boomings like the destruction of granite. A fine powder sifted through the torchlight, hinting at cracks in the ceiling. Again the floor shifted. The cell door rang with stress.

A voice said flatly, “The Sandgorgon comes.” Covenant recognized Brinn’s characteristic dispassion.

“Thomas Covenant.” No amount of iron self-command could conceal the First’s dismay. “Giantfriend! Has the Chosen slain you? Has she slain us all? The Sandgorgon comes!”

He was unable to answer her with words. Words had not come back to him yet. Instead he replied by planting his feet widely, lifting himself erect against the visceral trembling of the stone. Then he turned to face the door.

His ring hung inert on his half-hand. The venom which triggered his wild magic had been quiescent for long days; and he was too recently returned to himself. He could not take hold of his power. Yet he was ready. Linden had provided for this necessity by the same stroke with which she had driven Kasreyn away.

Findail sprang to Covenant’s side. The
Elohim
’s distress was as loud as a yell, though he did not shout. “Do not do this.” Urgency etched his words across the trembling. “Will you destroy the Earth?” His limbs strained with suppressed need. “The Sun-Sage lusts for death. Be not such a fool. Give the ring to me.”

At that, the first embers of Covenant’s old rage warmed toward fire.

The distant boomings went on as if parts of the Sandhold had begun to collapse; but the peril was much closer. He heard heavy feet slapping the length of the outer corridor at a run.

Instinctively he flexed his knees for balance and battle.

The feet reached the door, paused.

Like a groan through his teeth, Pitchwife said, “Gossamer Glowlimn, I love you.”

Then the cell door crumpled like a sheet of parchment as Nom hammered down and through it with two stumped arms as mighty as battering rams.

While metallic screaming echoed in the dungeon, the Sandgorgon stood hunched under the architrave. From the elevation of the doorway, the beast appeared puissant enough to tear the entire Sandhold stone from stone. Its head had no face, no features, betrayed nothing of its feral passion. Yet its attention was centered remorselessly on Covenant.

Leaping like a roar down into the chamber, the beast charged as if it meant to drive him through the back wall.

No mortal flesh and bone could have withstood that onslaught. But the Despiser’s venom had only been rendered quiescent by the
Elohim
. It had not been purged or weakened. And the Sandgorgon itself was a creature of power.

In the instant before Nom struck, Thomas Covenant became an eruption of white flame.

Wild magic: keystone of the Arch of Time: power that was not limited or subdued by any Law except the inherent strictures of its
wielder. High Lord Mhoram had said like a prophecy of fire,
You are the white gold
, and Covenant fulfilled those words. Incandescence came upon him. Argent burst from him as if from the heart of a silver furnace.

At his side, Findail cried in protest, “
No
!”

The Sandgorgon crashed into Covenant. Impact and momentum knocked him against the wall. But he hardly felt the attack. He was preserved from pain or damage by white fire, as if that flame had become the outward manifestation of his leprosy, numbing him to the limitations of his mortality. A man with living nerves might have felt the power too acutely to let it mount so high: Covenant had no such restraint. The venom was avid in him. The fang-scars on his forearm shone like the eyes of the Despiser. Almost without thought or volition, he buffered himself against Nom’s assault.

The Sandgorgon staggered backward.

Like upright magma, he flowed after it. Nom dealt out blows that would have pulverized monoliths. Native savagery multiplied by centuries of bitter imprisonment hammered at Covenant. But he responded with blasts like the fury of a bayamo. Chunks of granite fell from the ceiling and burst into dust. Cracks webbed the floor. The architrave of the door collapsed, leaving a gap like a wound to the outer corridor. Findail’s protests sounded like the wailing of rocks.

Covenant continued to advance. The beast refused to retreat farther. He and Nom wrapped arms around each other and embraced like brothers of the same doom.

The Sandgorgon’s strength was tremendous. It should have been able to crush him like a bundle of rotten twigs. But he was an avatar of flame, and every flare lifted him higher into the ecstasy of venom and rage. He had already become so bright that his companions were blinded. Argence melted and evaporated falling stone, enlarging the dungeon with every hot beat of his heart. He had been so helpless! Now he was savage with the desire to strike back. This Sandgorgon had slain Hergrom, crippled Ceer. And Kasreyn had set that harm in motion. Kasreyn! He had tortured Covenant when Covenant had been utterly unable to defend himself; and only Hergrom’s intervention had saved him from death—or from a possession which would have been worse than death. Fury keened in him; his outrage burned like the wrath of the sun.

But Nom was not to blame. The beast was cunning, hungry for violence; but it lived and acted only at the whim of Kasreyn’s power. Kasreyn, and again Kasreyn. Images of atrocity whirled through Covenant. Passion made him as unanswerable as a volcano.

He felt Nom weakening in his arms. Instinctively he lessened his own force. The poison in him was newly awakened, and he could still restrain it. He did not want to kill.

At once, the Sandgorgon put out a new surge of strength that almost tore him in half.

But Covenant was too far gone in power to fail. With wild magic, he gripped the beast, bound it in fetters of flame and will. It struggled titanically, but without success. Clenching it, he extricated himself from its arms and stepped back.

For a long moment, Nom writhed, pouring all the ancient ferocity of its nature into an effort for freedom. But it could not break him.

Slowly it appeared to understand that it had finally met a man able to destroy it. It stopped fighting. Its arms sank to its sides. Long quiverings ran through its muscles like anticipations of death.

By degrees, Covenant relaxed his power, though he kept a handful of fire blazing from his ring. Soon the beast stood free of flame.

Pitchwife began to chuckle like a man who had been brought back from the edge of hysteria. Findail gazed at Covenant as if he were uncertain of what he was seeing. But Covenant had no time yet for anything except the Sandgorgon. With tentative movements, Nom tested its release. Surprise aggravated its quivering. Its head jerked from side to side, implying disbelief. Carefully as if it feared what it was doing, it raised one arm to aim a blow at Covenant’s head.

Covenant clenched his fist, sending a spew of fire into the ring he had created above him. But he did not strike. Instead, he fought his rusty voice into use.

“If you don’t kill me, you won’t have to go back to the Doom.”

Nom froze as if it understood him. Trembling in every muscle, it lowered its arm.

A moment later, the beast surprised him by sinking to the floor. Its quivering grew stronger, then began to subside. Deliberately the Sandgorgon touched its forehead to the stone near Covenant’s feet like an offer of service.

Before Covenant could react, Nom rose erect again. Its blank face revealed nothing. Turning with animal dignity, it climbed to the broken doorway, picked its way without hesitation through the rubble of the architrave, and disappeared down the passage.

In the distance, the sounds of collapsing stone had receded; but at intervals an occasional dull thud reached the cell, as if a section of wall or ceiling had fallen. Nom must have done serious damage on the way inward.

Abruptly Covenant became aware of the brightness of his fire. It pained his sight as if his orbs had relapsed to normalcy. He reduced his power until it was only a small flame on his ring. But he did not release it entirely. All of
Bhrathairealm
lay between the company and Starfare’s Gem; and he did not mean to remain a prisoner any longer. Memories of Revelstone came back to him—helplessness and venom in revulsion. In the aftermath of the soothtell, he had killed twenty-one members of the na-Mhoram’s Clave. The fang-marks on his forearm continued to gleam at him. He became suddenly urgent as he turned to look at his companions.