The Power That Preserves

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 centre, 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 bell}. Elena was buried somewhere in the bowels of Melenkurion Sky weir, 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 grey dawn found him labouring 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.

No tentative or half-unready answer would satisfy his need.

He levered himself up, then slipped and fell, crying out unconsciously at the unfelt pain. For a moment, the winter roared in his ears like a triumphant predator. His breathing rasped him as if claws of cold had already torn his air passages and lungs. But he braced the spear on the hard earth again, and climbed up it hand over hand until he was erect. Then he lurched forward once more.

He forced himself up the hill and beyond it to a low ridge lying across his way like a minor wall. His arms trembled at the strain of bearing his weight, and his hands slipped repeatedly on the smooth shaft of the spear. The ascent almost defeated him. When he reached the top, air whooped brokenly in and out of his frostbitten lungs, and icy vertigo made the whole winterscape cant raggedly from side to side. He rested, leaning on the spear. His respiration was so difficult that he thought the frozen sweat and vapour on his face might be suffocating him. But when he tried to break it, it tore away like a protective scab, hurting his skin, exposing new nerves to the cold. He