Stephen Donaldson - The Power That Preserves

“We are all maddened, Loerya. We must endure.”

“How endure? Without hope-? High Lord, it were better if I had not borne children.”

Gently, quietly, Mhoram answered a different question. “We cannot march out to fight this evil. If we leave these walls, we are ended. There is no other hold for us. We must endure.”

In a voice suffused with weeping, Loerya said, “High Lord, summon the Unbeliever.”

“Ah, sister Loerya-that I cannot do. You know I cannot. You know that I chose rightly when I released Thomas Covenant to the demands of his own world. Whatever other follies have twisted the true course of my life, that choice was not folly.”

“Mhoram!” she beseeched thickly.

“No. Loerya, think what you ask. The Unbeliever desired to save a life in his world. But time moves in other ways there. Seven and forty years have passed since he came first to Revelstone, yet in that time he has not aged even three cycles of the moon. Perhaps only moments have gone by for him since his last summoning. If he were called again now, perhaps he would still be prevented from saving the young child who needs him.”

At the mention of a child, sudden anger twisted Loerya’s face. “Summon him!” she hissed. “What are his nameless children to me? By the Seven, Mhoram! Summon-!”

“No.” Mhoram interrupted her, but his voice did not lose its gentleness. “I will not. He must have the freedom of his own fate-it is his right. We have no right to take it from him-no, even the Land’s utterest need does not justify such an act. He holds the white gold. Let him come to the Land if he wills. I will not gainsay the one true bravery of my unwise life.”

Loerya’s anger collapsed as swiftly as it had come. Wringing her hands over the graveling as if even the hope of warmth had gone out of them, she moaned, “This evening my youngest — Yolenid — she is hardly more than a baby-she shrieked at the sight of me.” With an effort, she raised her streaming eyes to the high Lord, and whispered, “How endure?”

Though his own heart wept for her, Mhoram met her gaze. “The alternative is Desecration.” As he looked into the ragged extremity of her face, he felt his own need crying out, urging him to share his perilous secret. For a moment that made his pulse hammer apprehensively in his temples, he knew that he would answer Loerya if she asked him. To warn her, he breathed softly, “Power is a dreadful thing.”

A spark of inchoate hope lit her eyes. She climbed unsteadily to her feet, brought her face closer to his and searched him. The first opening of a meld drained the surfaces of his mind. But what she saw or felt in him stopped her. His cold doubt quenched the light in her eyes, and she receded from him. In an awkward voice that carried only a faint vibration of bitterness, she said, “No, Mhoram. I will not ask. I trust you or no one. You will speak when your heart is ready.”

Gratitude burned under Mhoram’s eyelids. With a crooked smile, he said, “You are courageous, sister Loerya.”

“No.” She picked up her graveling pot and moved away from him. “Though it is no fault of theirs, my daughters make me craven.” Without a backward glance, she left the High Lord alone in the lurid night.

Hugging his staff against his chest, he turned and faced once more the flawless green wrong of the Raver’s Stone. As his eyes met that baleful light, he straightened his shoulders, drew himself erect, so that he stood upright like a marker or witness to Revelstone’s inviolate rock.

THE weight of mortality which entombed Covenant seemed to press him deeper and deeper into the obdurate stuff of the ground. He felt that he had given up breathing-that the rock and soil through which he sank sealed him off from all respiration-but the lack of air gave him no distress; he had no more need for the sweaty labour of breathing. He was plunging irresistibly, motionlessly downward, like a man falling into his fate.

Around him, the black earth changed slowly to mist and cold. It lost none of its solidity, none of its airless weight, but its substance altered, became by gradual increments a pitch-dark fog as massive and unanswerable as the pith of granite. With it, the cold increased. Cold and winter and mist wound about him like cerements.

He had no sense of duration, but at some point he became aware of a chill breeze in the mist. It eased some of the pressure on him, loosened his cerements. Then an abrupt rift appeared some distance away. Through the gap, he saw a fathomless night sky, unredeemed by any stars. And from the rift shone a slice of green light as cold and compelling as the crudest emerald.

The cloud rift rode the breeze until it crossed over him. As it passed, he saw standing behind the heavy clouds a full moon livid with green force, an emerald orb radiating ill through the heavens. The sick green light caught at him. When the rift which exposed it blew by him and away into the distance, he felt himself respond. The authority, the sovereignty, of the moon could not be denied: he began to flow volitionlessly through the mist in the wake of the rift.

But another force intervened. For an instant, he thought he could smell the aroma of a tree’s heart sap, and pieces of song touched him through the cold: be true… answer… soul’s deep curse …

He clung to them, and their potent appeal anchored him. The darkness of the mist locked around him again, and he went sinking in the direction of the song.

Now the cold stiffened under him, so that he felt he was descending on a slab, with the breeze blowing over him. He was too chilled to move, and only the sensation of air in his chest told him that he was breathing again. His ribs and diaphragm worked, pumped air in and out of his lungs automatically. Then he noticed another change in the mist. The blank, wet, blowing night took on another dimension, an outer limit; it gave the impression that it clung privately to him, leaving the rest of the world in sunlight. Despite the cloud, he could sense the possibility of brightness in the cold breeze beyond him. And the frigid slab grew harder and harder under him, until he felt he was lying on a catafalque with a cairn of personal darkness piled over him.

The familiar song left him there. For a time, he heard nothing but the hum of the breeze and the hoarse, lisping sound made by his breath as it laboured past his swollen lip and gum. He was freezing slowly, sinking into icy union with the stone under his back. Then a voice near him panted, “By the Seven! We have done it.”

The speaker sounded spent with weariness and oddly echoless, forlorn. Only the hum of the wind supported his claim to existence; without it, he might have been speaking alone in the uncomprehended ether between the stars.

A light voice full of glad relief answered, “Yes, my friend. Your lore serves us well. We have not striven in vain these three days.”

“My lore and your strength. And the lomillialor of High Lord Mhoram. But see him. He is injured and ill.”

“Have I not told you that he also suffers?”

The light voice sounded familiar to Covenant. It brought the sunshine closer, contracted the mist until it was wholly within him, and he could feel cold brightness on his face.

“You have told me,” said the forlorn man. “And I have told you that I should have killed him when he was within my grasp. But all my acts go astray. Behold-even now the Unbeliever comes dying to my call.”

The second speaker replied in a tone of gentle reproof, “My friend, you-”

But the first cut him off. “This is an ill-blown place. We cannot help him here.”

Covenant felt hands grip his shoulders. He made an effort to open his eyes. At first he could see nothing; the sunlight washed everything out of his sight. But then something came between him and the sun. In its shadow, he blinked at the blur which marred all his perceptions.