White Gold Wielder

Stonedownor did not mean to survive.

Ten Waynhim had given their gift. Hamako's skin had begun to burn like tinder in the freezing air. But he did not pull back, and his companions did not stop.

At his back, the battle was going badly Covenant's attention had been fixed on Hamako: he had not seen how the arghuleh had contrived to split the wedge. But the formation was in two pieces now, each struggling to focus its halved strength, each unable to break through the ice to rejoin the other. More Waynhim had fallen; more were falling. Ice crusted the Giants so heavily that they seemed hardly able to move. They fought heroically; but they were no match for beasts which could be brought back from death. Soon sheer fatigue would overcome them, and they would be lost for good and all.

“Go!” Covenant panted to Cail. Icicles of blood splintered from his elbow when he moved his arm. “Help them!”

But the Haruchai did not obey. In spite of the ancient friendship between the Giants and his people, his face betrayed no flicker of concern. His promise of service had been made to Covenant rather than to the First; and Brinn had commanded him to his place.

Hellfire! Covenant raged. But his ire was directed at himself. He could tear his flesh until it fell from the bones; but he could not find his way out of the snare Lord Foul had set for him.

Fifteen Waynhim had given blood to Hamako. Sixteen. Now the Stonedownor's radiance was so bright that it seemed to tug involuntary fire from Covenant's ring. The effort of withholding it reft him of balance and vision. Pieces of mid night wheeled through him. He did not see the end of the Waynhim gift. could not witness the manner in which Bamako bore it.

But as that power withdrew toward the arghuleh, Covenant straightened his legs, pushed himself out of Cail's grasp, and sent his gaze like a cry after the Stonedownor.

Half naked in the low sunlight and the tremendous cold, Bamako shone like a cynosure as he flashed through the ice-beasts. The sheer intensity of his form melted the nearest attackers as if a furnace had come among them. From place to place within the fray he sped, clearing a space around the Giants, opening the way for the Waynhim to reform their wedge; and behind him billowed dense clouds of vapour which obscured him and the battle, made everything uncertain.

Then Linden shouted, “There!”

All the steam burned away, denaturing so fiercely that the ice seemed to become air without transition and the scene of the combat was as vivid as the waste. Scores of arghuleh still threw themselves madly against the wedge. But they had stopped using their ice to support each other. And some of them were attacking their fellows, tearing into each other as if the purpose which had united them a moment ago had been forgotten.

Beyond the chaos, Hamako stood atop the leader of the arghuleh. He had vaulted up onto the high back of the strangely doubled beast and planted himself there, pitting his power squarely against the creature and its croyel.

The beast did not attempt to topple him, bring him within reach of its limbs and maws. And he struck no blows. Their struggle was simple: fire against ice, white heat against white cold. He shone like a piece of the clean sun; the arghule glared bitter chill. Motionless, they aimed what they had become at each other; and the entire plain rang and blazed to the pitch of their contest.

The strain of so much quintessential force was too much for Hamako's mortal flesh to sustain. In desperate pain, he began to melt like a tree under the desert avatar of the Sunbane. His legs slumped; the skin of his limbs spilled away; his features blurred. A cry that had no shape stretched his mouth.

But while his heart beat he was still alive-tempered to his purpose and indomitable. The focus of his given heat did not waver for an instant. All the losses he had suffered, all the loves which had been taken from him came together here; and he refused defeat. In spite of the ruin which sloughed away his flesh, he raised his arms, brandished them like sodden sticks at the wide sky.

And the double creature under him melted as well. Both arghule and croyel collapsed into water and slush until their deaths were inseparable from his-one stained pool slowly freezing on the faceless plain.

With an almost audible snap, the unnatural cold broke. Most of the arghuleh went on trying to kill each other until the rhysh drove them away; but the power they had brought with them was gone.

Linden was sobbing openly, though all her life she had taught herself to keep her grief silent. “Why?” she protested through her tears. “Why did they let him do it?”

Covenant knew why. Because Hamako had been twice bereft, when no man or woman or Waynhim should have had to endure such loss so much as once.

As the sun went down in red and rue beyond the western line of the escarpment Covenant closed his eyes, hugged his bloody arm to his chest, and listened to the lamentation of the Waynhim rising into the dusk.

Seven: Physician's Plight

THOUGH the night was moonless, the company resumed its journey shortly after the Waynhim had finished caring for their dead. The Giants were unwilling to submit to their weariness; and the pain Covenant shared with Linden made him loath to remain anywhere near the place of Hamako's end. While Mistweave prepared a meal. Linden treated Covenant's arm, washing it with vitrim, wrapping it in find bandages. Then she required him to drink more diamondraught than he wanted. As a result, he could hardly keep himself awake as the company left the region of the last rhyshyshim. While several Waynhim guided the Giants up the escarpment, he strove against sleep. He knew what his dreams were going to be.

For a time, the hurt in his forearm helped him. But once the Giants had said their long, heart-felt farewells to the Waynhim, and had settled into a steady gait, striding south-westward as swiftly as the dim starlight permitted, he found that even pain was not enough to preserve him from nightmares.

In the middle of the night, he wrenched himself out of a vision of Hamako which had made him sweat anguish. With renewed fervour, he fought the effect of the diamondraught.

“I was wrong,” he said to the empty dark. Perhaps no one heard him over the muffled sound of the runners in the snow. He did not want anyone to hear him. He was not speaking to be heard. He only wanted to fight off sleep, stay away from dreams. “I should've listened to Mhoram.”

The memory was like a dream: it had the strange immanence of dreaming. But he clung to it because it was more tolerable than Bamako's death.

When High Lord Mhoram had tried to summon him to the Land for the last battle against Lord Foul, he, Covenant, had resisted the call. In his own world, a small girl had just been bitten by a timber-rattler- a lost child who needed his help. He had refused Mhoram and the Land in order to aid that girl.

And Mhoram had replied, Unbeliever, I release you. You turn from us to save life in your own world. We will not be undone by such motives. And if darkness should fall upon us, still the beauty of the Land endures for you will not forget. Go in Peace.

“I should've understood,” Covenant went on, addressing no one but the cold stars. “I should've given Seadreamer some kind of caamora. Should've found some way to save Bamako. Forget the risk. Mhoram took a terrible risk when he let me go. But anything worth saving won't be destroyed by choices like that.”

He did not blame himself. He was simply trying to hold back nightmares of fire. But he was human and weary, and only the blankets wrapped around him held any warmth at all. Eventually, his dreams returned.

He could not shake the image of Bamako's weird immolation.

Without hope, he slept until sunrise. When he opened his eyes, he found that he was stretched out, not in the sled, but in blankets on the snow-packed ground. His companions were with him, though only Cail, Pitchwife,