White Gold Wielder

aside. He headed toward a blunt boulder jutting from the lower slope of the foothill. When he reached it, he struggled up onto its crown, defying the way the wide landscape below and about him sucked at his balance. All his limbs felt leaden with suppressed devastation. From horizon to horizon, the desert sun had almost finished its work. In the low places of the terrain lay ponds of sludge which had once been trees and brush and vines, but every slope and rise was burned to dust and death. The thought that he would have to damage Revelstone was intolerable. Sheer grief and self-loathing would break him if he set his hand to that stone. Yet the necessity was inescapable. The Clave and the Banefire could not be permitted to go on. His heart quivered at the conflict of his fears-fear of harming the Keep and of not harming it, fear of himself, of the risk he meant to take; his desire to avoid killing and his need to protect his friends. But he had already chosen his path. Now he started down it.

Trembling as if he were on the verge of deflagration, he spoke the name he had been hoarding to himself ever since he had begun to understand the implications of what he meant to do.

The name of a Sandgorgon.

“Nom.”

Ten: The Banefire

CLEARLY through the sudden shock of the company, he heard Linden gasp. There was no wind, nothing to soften the arid pressure of the sun. Below him, the terrain was falling into the paradoxical purity of desecration. The cleanliness of extermination. No wonder fire was so hard to resist. His balance seemed to spin out of him into the flat brown sky. He had not eaten or slept since the previous day. Perhaps it was inanition which made the horizons cant to one side as if they were about to sail away. Inanition or despair.

But Pitchwife and Cail caught him, lowered him from the boulder; and Linden came to him in a blur of vertigo. He had never been good at heights. He knew that she was saying his name, yet he felt unable to hear her. Her face was impossible to focus. She should have been protesting, A Sandgorgon? Are you out of your mind? What makes you think you can control it? But she was not. Her hands gripped his shoulders roughly, then flinched away. This time, her gasp was like a cry. “You-!” she began. But the words would not come. “Oh, Covenant'“

The First's voice cut through the wild reel of the hills. “What harms him?” All his friends were crowded around him and spinning. He saw Mhoram and Foamfollower, Banner and Elena-and Caer-Caveral- all there as if they deserved better from him “What has transpired to harm him?” They had met him in Andelain and given him everything they dared; and this was the result. He was caught on a wheel that had no centre. “Chosen, you must speak!”

“He's on fire.” Linden's tone was wet with tears. “The venom's on fire. We'd already be dead, but he's holding it inside. As long as he can. Until it eats its way out.”

The First cursed, then snapped a command that Covenant failed to hear. A moment later, Pitchwife's heat- impervious hands lifted a bowl of diamondraught to Covenant's mouth.

Its potent smell stung his nostrils with panic. Diamondraught would restore him. Perhaps it would restore his self-mastery as well. Or it might fuel the Maze of his suppressed power. He could not take the chance.

Somehow, he slowed the spin. Clarity was possible. He could not afford to fail. And he would not have to hang on long; only until he reached the culmination of his nightmares. It was possible. When he was certain of the faces hovering around him, he said as if he were suffocating, “Not diamondraught. Metheglin.”

The First glared doubt at him; but Linden nodded. “He's right,” she said in a rush. “He has to keep his balance. Between strength and weakness. Diamondraught is too strong.”

People were moving: Hollian and Mistweave went away, came back at once with a pouch of the Land's thick mead. That Covenant drank, sparingly at first, then more deeply as he felt his grasp on the conflagration hold. By degrees, the vertigo frayed out of him. His friends were present and stable. The ground became solid again. The sun rang in his eyes, clanged against his temples, like Lord Foul's silent laughter; and his face streamed with the sweat of desperation. But as the metheglin steadied him, he found that he was at least able to bear the heat.

With Pitchwife's help, he gained his feet. Squinting, he turned to the east and thrust his gaze out into the shimmering desert.

“Will it come?” the First asked no one in particular. “The wide seas intervene, and they are no slight barrier.”

“Kasreyn said it would.” Linden bit her lips to control her apprehension, then continued, “He said, 'Distance has no meaning to such power.' ” Covenant remembered that. The Sandgorgons answer their release swiftly. That was how Hergrom had been killed. But Covenant had already summoned Nom once at Linden's instigation; and he had not been slain. And Nom had not gone back to Sandgorgons Doom. Therefore why should the beast answer him now? He had no reason for such a wild hope-no reason at all except the fact that Nom had bowed to him when he had refrained from killing it.

But the east was empty, and the haze closed against him like a curtain. Even the eyes of the Giants discerned no sign of an answer.

Abruptly, Call's uninflected voice broke the silence, “Ur-Lord, behold.”

With one arm, he pointed up the hillside toward Revelstone.

For an instant Covenant believed that the Haruchai wanted him to observe the immense hot vermeil shaft of the Banefire. With sun-echoes burning white and brown across his sight, he thought the sizzling beam looked stronger now, as though Gibbon-Raver were feeding it furiously to arm the Clave for combat. Killing the captured villagers and Haruchai as fast as their blood could be poured onto the floor of the sacred enclosure where the Banefire burned.

At the idea, the spots flaring against the backs of his eyes turned black. His restraint slipped. The fang- marks on his forearm hurt as if they had been reopened.

But then he saw the Riders at the base of the tower. Four of them: two holding up their rukhs to master a Haruchai they had brought with them; two equipped with knives and buckets.

They intended to shed then mind-bound prisoner in full view of Covenant and the company.

Covenant let out a shout that made the air throb. But at the same time he fought for control, thinking, No, No. He's trying to provoke me. The blackness in him writhed. He refused it until it subsided.

“Honninscrave.” The First sounded almost casual, as if the sight of atrocities made her calm. “Mistweave. It is my thought that we need not permit this.”

Half the Haruchai had started upward at a sprint. She made no effort to call them back. Stooping to the dirt, she picked up a rock larger than her palm; and in the same motion she hurled it at the Riders.

Striking the wall behind them, it burst in a shower of splinters that slashed at them like knives.

Instantly, Honninscrave and Mistweave followed the First's example. Their casts were so accurate that one of the Riders had a leg smashed, another was ripped by a hail of rebounding fragments. Their companions were compelled to release the Haruchai so that they could use their rukhs to defend themselves.

While the four Riders retreated into the tunnel, their captive turned on them. Suddenly free of their coercion, he slew the injured men. Then he pivoted disdainfully on his heel and strode down the slope to meet his people. He was bleeding from several cuts inflicted by sharp pieces of stone, but he bore himself as if he were unscathed.

Covenant hated killing. He had chosen his path in an effort to spare as many lives as possible. But as he watched the released Haruchai walking toward him like pure and utter dispassion, a dire grin twisted the comers of his mouth. In that moment, he became more dangerous to Gibbon and the Clave than any host of warriors or powers, When he looked toward the east again, he saw a plume of dust rising through the haze.