White Gold Wielder

worse than this. And he would have given his soul for the ability to match Hamako. “I'm not glad he died. I'm glad he found an answer.”

For a long moment, her glare held. But then slowly the anger frayed out of her face. At last, her eyes fell. Thickly, she murmured, “I'm sorry. I just don't understand. Killing people is wrong.” The memory of her mother was present to her as it was to Covenant. “But dear Christ! Saving them has got to be better than letting them die.”

“Linden.” She clearly did not want him to say anything else. She had raised the fundamental question of her life and needed to answer it herself. But he could not let the matter drop. With all the gentleness he had in him, he said, 'Hamako didn't want to be saved. For the opposite reason that your father didn't want to be saved. And he won.”

“I know,” she muttered. “I know. I just don't understand it.” As if to keep him from speaking again, she left the fire, went to get her blankets.

He looked around at the mute, attentive faces of the Giants. But they had no other wisdom to offer him. He wanted intensely to be saved himself; but no one would be able to do that for him unless he surrendered his ring. He was beginning to think that his death would be welcome when it came.

A short time later, the fire blew out. Mistweave tried to light it again and failed. But when Covenant finally went to sleep, he dreamed that the blaze had become violent enough to consume him.

During the night, the wind died. The dawn was as clear as crystal; and the crags shone in the high, thin air as if no taint could reach them. A mood of impossible hope came over the companions as they laboured toward the far end of the pass.

Under other circumstances, the view from that eminence would have delighted them. Sunlight flashed through the pass to illumine the range as it tumbled downward in a dramatic succession of snow-bright crests and saw-backed aretes, mighty heads fronting the heavens and spines sprawling toward lower ground. And beyond the bare foothills all the way to the south-western horizon lay the high North Plains which led to Revelstone.

But where the sun hit the Plains they looked as brown and battered as a desert.

That in itself would not have wrenched the Giants to silence, raised Linden's hands to her mouth, stifled Covenant's breathing; for at this time of year the region below them might be naturally dry. But as soon as the sun touched the denuded waste, a green fur began to spread across it. Distance made teeming shoots and sprouts look like an unconscionably rapid pelt.

With a curse, Covenant wheeled to scan the sun. But he could see no sign of the corona which should have accompanied the sudden verdure.

“We're under the fringe,” said Linden tonelessly. “I told you about that-the last time we crossed Landsdrop. We won't see the aura until later.”

Covenant had not forgotten her explanation. The Sunbane was a corruption of Earthpower, and it arose from the ground, from the deep roots of Mount Thunder where Lord Foul now made his home. But it was focused or triggered by the sun and manifested itself visibly there, in the characteristic penumbra of its phases and the power for perversion of its initial contact.

Thickly, he grated to his companions, “We'll need stone for protection. It's the first touch that does the damage.” He and Linden had been preserved by the alien leather of their footwear. The Haruchai and Vain had already shown that they were immune. Findail needed no advice on how to care for himself. But the Giants-Covenant could not bear that they might be at risk. 'From now on-every day. We've got to have stone under us when the sun comes up.”

The First nodded mutely. She and her people were still staring at the green mantle which thickened at every moment across the distant plains.

That sight made Covenant long for Sunder and Hollian. The Graveler of Mithil Stonedown had left his home and people to serve as Covenant's guide through the perils of the Sunbane; and his obdurate skill and providence, his self-doubting courage, had kept Covenant and Linden alive. And Hollian's eh-brand ability to foretell the phases of the Sunbane had been invaluable. Though he had Giants with him now, and Linden's strength Covenant felt entirely unready to face the Sunbane without the support of his former companions.

And he wanted to know what had happened to them. He had sent them from Seareach because they had believed that they had no clear role in the quest for the One Tree, no place among such mighty beings as Giants- and because he had loathed to leave the Clave uncontested during the unpredictable period of his absence. So he had given them the krill of Loric, the powerful blade which he had raised from Glimmermere. And he had laid upon them the charge of mustering resistance among the villages against the bloody requirements of the Clave. Accompanied only by SteII and Harn, armed with nothing more than their own knives, the krill, Sunder's orcrest stone and Hollian's Iianar wand, and encouraged by the thin hope that they might eventually gain the aid of more Haruchai, the two lone Stonedownors had gone in sunlight and poignant valour to hazard their lives against the forces which ruled the Land.

That memory outweighed any amount of unreadiness. The distant preternatural green swelling below him brought back the past with renewed vividness. Sunder and Hollian were his friends. He had come this far in the name of Revelstone and the Clave; but now he wanted keenly to rejoin the two Stonedownors.

Rejoin or avenge.

“Come on,” he rasped to his companions. 'Let's get down there.”

The First gave him a measuring glance, as though she half distrusted the constant hardening of his attitude. But she was not a woman who hung back. With a stern nod, she sent him and Linden to the sleds. Then she turned and started down the steep, snowbound slope as if she, too, could not wait to confront the ill that had brought the Search here.

Heaving Covenant's sled into motion, Honninscrave let out a cry like a challenge and went plunging after the Swordmain.

In the course of that one day, the company passed down out of the mountains, came to the foothills and the end of the snow. Careening at a mad pace which could only have been controlled by Giants, they sped from slope to slope, pausing only when the First needed to consider her best route. She seemed determined to regain the time lost by the arduous ascent of the range. Before noon, a band of green-the colour of chrysoprase and Daphin's eyes-closed around the sun like a garrotte. But Covenant could not look at it He was nearly blind with vertigo. He was barely able to cling to the rails of the sled and hold the contents of his stomach down.

Then the ice and snow of the heights failed on the verge of a moiling chaos of vegetation which had already grown high enough to appear impenetrable. His head still reeling, Covenant considered himself fortunate that dusk prevented the First from tackling the verdure immediately But the Swordmain was not insensitive to the nausea in his face-or the aggravated ache in Linden's. While Mistweave and Honninscrave prepared a camp, she passed a flask of diamondraught to the two humans, then left them alone to try to recover themselves.

The liquor settled Covenant's guts, but could not soften the wide, white outrage and dread of Linden's stare. At intervals during the evening, Pitchwife and the First addressed comments to her; but her replies were monosyllabic and distant The crouching vegetation spoke a language that only she could hear, consuming her attention. Unconscious of being watched, she chewed her lips as if she had lost her old severity and did not know how to recapture it.

Her huddled posture-thighs pressed against her chest, arms hugged around her shins, chin braced on her knees-reminded him of a time many days ago, a time when they had begun travelling together, and she had nearly broken under the pressure of her first fertile sun. She had quailed into herself, protesting, I can't shut it out. It's too personal. I don't believe in evil.

She believed in evil now; but that only made the sensory assault of the Sunbane more intimate and unanswerable-as heinous as murder and as immedicable as leprosy.

He tried to stay awake with her, offering her the support of his silent companionship. But she was still taut and unslumberous when the mortal pull of his dreams took him away. He went to sleep thinking that if he had possessed anything akin to her percipience the Land would not be in such danger-and she would not be so alone.