The One Tree

staring at her in despair. Kasreyn stood near Covenant with his ocular held ready, his hands trembling as if they could no longer suppress their caducity. But behind what she saw and heard, she wailed like a foretaste of her coming life. She was a child in a field of flowers, and the older boy she adored had left her. The love had gone out of the sunlight, leaving the day bereft as if all joy were dead.

Yet she saw him-saw the boy in the man, Thomas Covenant-as life and will spread back into his limbs. She saw him take hold of himself, lift his head. All her senses functioned normally. She could do nothing but wail as he turned toward Kasreyn, exposed himself to the Kemper's geas. He was still too far away from himself to make any defence.

But before the Kemper was able to use his ocular, the instructions she had left in Covenant reached him. He looked straight at Kasreyn and obeyed her.

Distinctly, he articulated one clear word:

“Nom.”

PART III. LOSS

Ninteen: Thaumaturge

THAT name seemed to stun the air, appalling the very stone of the Sandhold.

From a great and lonely distance, Covenant watched Kasreyn of the Gyre recoil. The Kemper dropped his eyepiece. Dismay and rage crumpled his old face. But he could not call back the word Covenant had spoken. An anguish of indecision gripped him for a moment, paralyzing him. Then the old fear rose up in him, and he fled to preserve his life.

He flung the iron door shut behind him, thrust the bolts into place. But those metallic sounds meant nothing to Covenant. He was perfectly aware of his situation. All his senses had been functioning normally: he recognized his peril, understood the plight of his companions, knew what had to be done. Yet he was scarcely sentient. The gap between action and impact, perception and consequence, was slow to close. Consciousness welled up in him from the contact which Linden had forged; but the distance was great and could not be filled instantly.

At first, the recovery seemed swift. The bonds connecting him to his adolescence, then his young manhood, healed themselves in a surge of memory which felt like fire — annealment and cautery in one. And that fire rapidly became the numinous intensity with which he had given himself to writing and marriage. But then his progress slowed. With Joan on Haven Farm, before the publication of his novel and the birth of their son, he had felt that his luminescence was the most profound energy of life. But it had proven itself hollow at the core. His bestseller had been little more than an inane piece of self-congratulation. And his marriage had been destroyed by the blameless crime of leprosy.

After that, the things he recollected made him writhe.

His violent and involuntary isolation, his imposed self-loathing, had driven him deep into the special madness of lepers. He had stumbled into the Land as if it were the final summation and crisis of his life. Almost at once, he had raped the first person who befriended him. He had tormented and dismayed people who helped him. Unwittingly, he had walked the path Lord Foul marked out for him-had not turned aside from that doom until the consequences of his own actions came back to appal him. And then he might have achieved ruin instead of restitution, had he not been supported at every turn by people like Mhoram and Bannor and Foamfollower, people whose comprehension of love and valour far surpassed his own. Even now, years later, his heart cried out against the harm he had done to the Land, to the people of the Land-against the paucity with which he had finally served them.

His voice echoed in the dank constriction of the cell. His companions strained toward him as he knelt like abjection on the cold stone. But he had no attention to spare for them.

And he was not abject. He was wounded, yes; guilty beyond question; crowded with remorse. But his leprosy had given him strength as well as weakness. In the thronehall of Foul's Creche, confronting the Despiser and the Illearth Stone, he had found the eye of his paradox. Balanced between the contradictions of self- abhorrence and affirmation, of Unbelief and love-acknowledging and refusing the truth of the Despiser-he had come into his power. He felt it within him now, poised like the moment of clarity which lay at the heart of every vertigo. As the gap closed, he resumed himself.

He tried to blink his eyes free of tears. Once again, Linden had saved him. The only woman he had met in more than eleven years who was not afraid of his illness. For his sake, she had insisted time after time on committing herself to risks, situations, demands she could neither measure nor control. The stone under his hands and knees felt unsteady; but he meant to climb to his feet. He owed her that. He could not imagine the price she must have paid to restore him.

When he tried to stand, the whole cell lurched. The air was full of distant boomings like the destruction of granite. A fine powder sifted through the torchlight, hinting at cracks in the ceiling. Again, the floor shifted. The cell door rang with stress.

A voice said flatly, “The Sandgorgon comes.” Covenant recognized Brinn's characteristic dispassion.

“Thomas Covenant.” No amount of iron self-command could conceal the First's dismay. “Giantfriend! Has the Chosen slain you? Has she slain us all? The Sandgorgon. comes!”

He was unable to answer her with words. Words had not come back to him yet. Instead, he replied by planting his feet widely, lifting himself erect against the visceral trembling of the stone. Then he turned to face the door.

His ring hung inert on his half-hand. The venom which triggered his wild magic had been quiescent for long days; and he was too recently returned to himself. He could not take hold of his power. Yet he was ready. Linden had provided for this necessity by the same stroke with which she had driven Kasreyn away.

Findail sprang to Covenant's side. The Elohim's distress was as loud as a yell, though he did not shout. “Do not do this.” Urgency etched his words across the trembling. “Will you destroy the Earth?” His limbs strained with suppressed need. “The Sun-Sage lusts for death. Be not such a fool. Give the ring to me.”

At that, the first embers of Covenant's old rage warmed toward fire.

The distant boomings went on as if parts of the Sandhold had begun to collapse; but the peril was much closer. He heard heavy feet slapping the length of the outer corridor at a run.

Instinctively, he flexed his knees for balance and battle.

The feet reached the door, paused.

Like a groan through his teeth, Pitchwife said, “Gossamer Glowlimn, I love you.”

Then the cell door crumpled like a sheet of parchment as Nom hammered down and through it with two stumped arms as mighty as battering rams.

While metallic screaming echoed in the dungeon, the Sandgorgon stood hunched under the architrave. From the elevation of the doorway, the beast appeared puissant enough to tear the entire Sandhold stone from stone. Its head had no face, no features, betrayed nothing of its feral passion. Yet its attention was cantered remorselessly on Covenant.

Leaping like a roar down into the chamber, the beast charged as if it meant to drive him through the back wall.

No mortal flesh and bone could have withstood that onslaught. But the Despiser's venom had only been rendered quiescent by the Elohim. It had not been purged or weakened. And the Sandgorgon itself was a creature of power.

In the instant before Nom struck, Thomas Covenant became an eruption of white flame.

Wild magic: keystone of the Arch of Time: power that was not limited or subdued by any Law except the