were engaged in something dangerous. He had a vivid sense of what he was giving up. But he was impelled by the sudden conviction that his bargain was false because it had not cost him enough. When he picked up the knife, he did so to seal his compromise with his fate.
Elena stopped him. In a low, harsh voice, she said, “Thomas Covenant.”
The way she said his name forced him to raise his head.
“Where is the urgency in this?” She controlled her harshness by speaking quietly, but her indignation was tangible in her voice. “We have spent three days in delay and ignorance. Do you now mock the Land's need? Is it your deliberate wish to prevent this quest from success?”
An angry rejoinder leaped to his lips. But the terms of his bargain required him to repress it. He bent his head again, splashed more water into his beard. “Sit down. I'll try to explain.”
The High Lord seated herself cross-legged before him.
He could not comfortably meet her gaze. And he did not want to look at
“All right,” he said awkwardly. “I'm not the kind of person who grows beards. They itch. And they make me look like a fanatic. They-So I've been letting this one grow for a reason. It's a way of proving-a way to demonstrate so that even somebody as thickheaded and generally incoherent as I am can see it when I wake up in the real world and find that I don't have this beard I've been growing, then I'll know for sure that all this is a delusion. It's proof. Forty or fifty days' worth of beard doesn't just vanish. Unless it was never really there.”
She continued to stare at him. But her tone changed.
She recognized the importance of his self-revelation. “Then why do you now wish to cut it away?”
He trembled to think of the risks he was taking. But he needed freedom, and his bargain promised to provide it. Striving to keep the fear of discovery out of his voice, he told her as much of the truth as he could afford.
“I've made another deal-like the one I made with the Ranyhyn. I'm not trying to prove that the' Land isn't real anymore.” In the back of his mind, he pleaded, Please don't ask me anything else. I don't want to lie to you.
She probed him with her eyes. “Do you believe, then-do you accept the Land?”
In his relief, he almost sighed aloud. He could look at her squarely to answer this. “No. But I'm willing to stop fighting about it. You've done so much for me”
“Ah, beloved!” she breathed with sudden intensity. “I have done nothing-I have only followed my heart. Within my Lord's duty, I would do anything for you.”
He seemed to see her affection for him in the very hue of her skin. He wanted to lean forward, touch her, kiss her, but the presence of the Bloodguard restrained him. Instead, he handed her the knife.
He was abdicating himself to her, and she knew it. A glow of pleasure filled her face as she took the knife. “Do not fear, beloved,” she whispered. “I will preserve you.”
Carefully, as if she were performing a rite, she drew close to him and began to cut his beard.
He winced instinctively when the blade first touched him. But he gritted himself into stillness, locked his jaw, told himself that he was safer in her hands than in his own. He could feel the deadliness of the keen edge as it passed over his flesh-it conjured up images of festering wounds and gangrene-but he closed his eyes, and remained motionless.
The knife tugged at his beard, but the sharpness of the blade kept the pull from becoming painful. And soon her fingers found his knotted jaw muscles. She stroked his clenching to reassure him. With an effort, he opened his eyes. She met his gaze as if she were smiling through a mist of love. Gently, she tilted back his head, and cleaned the beard away from.his neck with smooth, confident strokes.
Then she was done. His bared flesh felt vivid in the air, and he rubbed his face with his hands, relishing the fresh texture of his cheeks and neck. Again, he wanted to kiss Elena. To answer her smile, he stood up and said, “Now I'm ready. Let's go.”
She grasped the Staff of Law, sprang lightly to her feet. In a tone of high gaiety, she said to Amok, “Will you now lead us to the Seventh Ward?”
Amok beckoned brightly, as if he were inviting her to a game, and started once more toward the place where the cleft of Rivenrock vanished under
In this formation, they began the last phase of their quest for the Power of Command.
They crossed the plateau briskly: Amok soon reached the juncture of cliff and cleft. There he waved to his companions, grinned happily, and jumped into the crevice.
Covenant gasped in spite of himself, and hurried with Elena to the edge. When they peered into the narrow blackness of the chasm, they saw Amok standing on a ledge in the opposite wall. The ledge began fifteen or twenty feet below and a few feet under the overhang of the mountain. It was not clearly visible. The blank stone and shadowed dimness of the cleft formed a featureless abyss. Amok seemed to be standing on darkness which led to darkness.
“Hellfire!” Covenant groaned as he looked down. He felt dizzy already. “Forget it. Just forget I ever mentioned it.”
“Come!” said Amok cheerfully. “Follow!” His voice sounded over the distant, subterranean gush of the river. With an insouciant stride, he moved away into the mountain. At once, the gloom swallowed him completely.
Morin glanced at the High Lord. When she nodded, he leaped into the cleft, landed where Amok had been standing a moment before. He took one step to the side, and waited.
“Don't be ridiculous,” Covenant muttered as if he were talking to the dank, chill breeze which blew out of the crevice. “I'm no Bloodguard. I'm just ordinary flesh and blood. I get dizzy when I stand on a chair. Sometimes I get dizzy when I just stand.”
The High Lord was not listening to him. She murmured a few old words to the Staff, and watched intently as it burst into flame. Then she stepped out into the darkness. Morin caught her as her feet touched the ledge. She moved past him, and positioned herself so that the light of the Staff illuminated the jump for Covenant.
The Unbeliever found Bannor looking at him speculatively.
“Go on ahead,” said Covenant. “Give me time to get up my courage. I'll catch up with you in a year or two.” He was sweating again, and his perspiration stung the scraped skin of his cheeks and neck. He looked up at the mountain to steady himself, efface the effects of the chasm from his mind.
Without warning, Bannor caught him from behind, lifted him, and carried him to the cleft.
“Don't touch me!” Covenant sputtered. He tried to break free, but Bannor's grip was too strong. “By hell! I-!” His voice scaled into a yell as Bannor threw him over the edge.
Morin caught him deftly, and placed him, wide-eyed and trembling, on the ledge at Elena's side.
A moment later, Bannor made the jump, and the First Mark passed Covenant and Elena to stand between her and Amok. Covenant watched their movements through a stunned fog. Numbly, he pressed his back against the solid stone; and stared into the chasm as if it were a tomb. Some time seemed to pass before he noticed the High Lord's reassuring hold on his arm.
“Don't touch me,” he repeated aimlessly. “Don't touch me.”
When she moved away, he followed her automatically, turning his back on the sunlight and open sky above the cleft.
He rubbed his left shoulder against the stone wall, and kept close to Elena, stayed near her light. The Staff s incandescence cast a viridian aura over the High Lord's party, and reflected garishly off the dark, flat facets of the stone. It illuminated Amok's path without penetrating the gloom ahead. The ledge-never more than three feet wide-moved steadily downward. Above it, the ceiling of the cleft slowly expanded, took on the dimensions of a cavern. And the cleft itself widened as if it ran toward a prodigious hollow in the core of
Covenant felt the yawning rent in the mountain rock as if it were beckoning to him, urging him seductively to accept the drowsy abandon of vertigo, trust the chasm's depths. He pressed himself harder against the stone, and clung to Elena's back with his eyes. Around him, darkness-and massed weight squeezed the edges of the Staffs light. And at his back, he could hear the hovering vulture wings of his private doom. Gradually, he understood that he was walking into a crisis.
