When she was done, she turned her senses elsewhere, searching Revelstone’s ambience for some indication of how much of the night remained. She was not ready for dawn-or for whatever decision the Masters had reached. She needed a chance to think; to absorb what she had seen and heard, and to ward away her grief.
After a moment, Stave asked as though nothing profound had occurred, Will you return to your rooms, Chosen? There is yet time for rest.”
Linden shook her head. The Keep’s vast bulk muffled her discernment, but she felt that sunrise was still a few hours away. She might have enough time to prepare herself-
“If you don’t mind,” she said quietly. “I want to go to the Hall of Gifts.”
She wished to visit Grimmand Honninscrave’s cairn. Old wounds were safer company: she had learned how to endure them. And remembering them might enable her to forget the Mahdoubt’s fading, shattered laughter. She had failed the older woman. Now she sought a reminder that great deeds could sometimes be accomplished by those who lacked Thomas Covenant’s instinct for impossible victories.
Fortunately Stave did not demur. And the Masters made no objection. If they had ignored the Aumbrie since the fall of the Clave, they had probably given even less attention to the Hall of Gifts. Indeed, Linden doubted that any of them had entered the Hall for centuries, except perhaps to retrieve the arras which she had seen hanging in Roger’s and Jeremiah’s quarters. Her desire would not threaten them: they had made up their minds about her.
At Stave’s side, she left the forehall, escaping from new sorrows to old, and lighting her steps with the ripe corn and sunshine comfort of Staff-fire.
Her destination was deep in Revelstone’s gutrock: she remembered that. But she had not been there for ten years. And Revelstone’s size and complexity still surprised her. She and Stave descended long stairways and followed unpredictable passages until the air, chilled by the tremendous mass of impending granite, grew too cool for comfort; cold enough to remind her of winter and bitterness. She warmed herself with the Staff, however, and did not falter.
Like the cave of the EarthBlood, the Hall of Gifts was a place where Lord Foul’s servants had suffered defeat.
At last, Stave brought her to a set of wide doors standing open on darkness. From beyond them came an impression of broad space and old dust. As far as she knew, they had not been closed for three and a half thousand years.
Lifting her flame higher, Linden entered with her companion into the Hall.
It was a cavern wider than Revelstone’s forehall, and its ceiling rested far above her on the shoulders of massive columns. Here the Giants who had fashioned Lord’s Keep had worked with uncharacteristic crudeness, smoothing only the expanses of the floor, leaving raw stone for the columns and walls. Nevertheless the rough rock and the distant ceiling with its mighty and misshapen supports held a reverent air, clean in spite of the dust; an atmosphere as hushed and humbling as that of a cathedral.
She had never beheld this place as its makers had intended. It had been meant as a kind of sanctuary to display and cherish works of beauty or prophecy fashioned by the folk of the Land. Long ago, paintings and tapestries hung on the walls. Sculptures large and small were placed around the floor or affixed to the columns on ledges and shelves. Stoneware urns and bowls, some plain, others elaborately decorated, were interspersed with works of delicate wooden filigree. And a large mosaic entranced the floor near the centre of the space. In colours of viridian and anguish, glossy stones depicted High Lord Kevin’s despair at the Ritual of Desecration.
Until the time of the Clave, the Hall of Gifts had been an expression of hope for the future of the Land. That was the mosaic’s import: Revelstone had survived the Ritual with its promise intact.
For Linden, however, the cavern was a place of sacrifice and death.
When she had followed Covenant here to challenge Gibbon Raver, she had been full of battle and terror. Instead of looking around, she had watched the Giant Grimmand Honninscrave and the Sandgorgon Nom defeat Gibbon. Honninscrave’s death had enabled Nom to destroy samadhi Sheol. For the first time since their birth in a distant age, one of the three Ravers had been effectively slain, rent; removed from Lord Foul’s service. Yet samadhi had not entirely perished. Rather Nom had consumed the fragments of the Raver, achieving a manner of thought and speech which the Sandgorgons had never before possessed.
In gratitude, it seemed, Nom had raised a cairn over Honninscrave’s corpse, using the rubble of battle to honour the Master of Starfare’s Gem.
Linden had come here now to remember her loves.
The mound of broken stone which dominated the centre of the cavern was Honninscrave’s threnody. It betokened more than his own sacrifice: it expressed his brother’s death as well. And it implied other Giants, other friends. The First of the Search. Her husband, Pitchwife. Ready laughter. Open hearts. Life catenulated to life.
Link by link, Nom’s homage to Honninscrave brought Linden to Sunder and Hollian, whom she had loved dearly-and whom she did not intend to heed.
They beg of you that you do not seek them out. Doom awaits you in the company of the Dead. But where could she turn for insight or understanding, if not to the people who had enabled her to become who she was?
Everything came back to Thomas Covenant.
As she began to move slowly around the cairn, studying old losses and valour by the light of Law, brave souls accompanied her, silent as reverie, and generous as they had been in life. And Stave, too, walked with her. If he wondered at her purpose here-at the strangeness of her response to the Mahdoubt’s fate-he kept his thoughts to himself.
He could not know what she sought among the legacies of those who had died.
When she had completed two circuits of the mound and begun a third, she murmured, musing, “You and the Masters talked about the Mahdoubt. “She serves Revelstone”, you told me. “Naught else is certain of her”. And Galt had said, She is a servant of Revelstone. The name is her own. More than that we do not know. “Looking back, it’s hard to imagine that none of you even guessed who she was.”
Her mind was full of slippage and indirect connections. She was hardly aware that she had spoken aloud until Stave stiffened slightly at her side. “Chosen? I do not comprehend.” Subtle undercurrents perplexed his tone. “Are you troubled that you were not forewarned?”
“Oh, that.” Linden’s attention was elsewhere. “No. The Mahdoubt could have warned me herself. You all had your reasons for what you did.”
Honninscrave had died in an agony of violation far worse than mere physical pain. Like him, she had once been possessed by a Raver: she knew that horror. But the Giant had gone further. Much further. He had held Sheol; had contained the Raver while Nom killed him. In its own way, Honninscrave’s end daunted her as profoundly as Covenant’s surrender to Lord Foul.
She would not hesitate to trade her life for Jeremiah’s. Of course. He was her son: she had adopted him freely. But for that very reason, her willingness to die for him seemed trivial compared to Honninscrave’s self-expenditure, and to Covenant’s.
“What then is your query?” asked Stave.
She groped for a reply as if she were searching through the rubble of the cairn. “Everything seems to depend on me, but I’m fighting blind. I don’t know enough. There are too many secrets.” Too many conflicted intentions. Too much malice. “Your people don’t trust me. I’m trying to guess how deep their uncertainty runs.”