Without warning, the walls withdrew, and a vast impression of space opened above his head. Linden stopped, searched the dark. When she lifted the torch, he saw that the tunnel had emerged from the stone, leaving them at the foot of a blunt gutrock cliff. Chill air tingled against his cheek. The cliff seemed to go straight up forever. She looked at him as if she were lost. The scant fire made her eyes appear hollow and brutalized.
A short distance from the tunnel's opening rose a steep slope of shale, loam, and refuse-too steep and yielding to be climbed. He and Linden were in the bottom of a wide crevice. Something high up in the dark had collapsed any number of millennia ago, filling half the floor of the chasm with debris.
Memories flocked at him out of the enclosed night: recognitions ran like cold sweat down his spine. All his skin felt clammy and diseased. This looked like the place-The place where he had once fallen, with an ur vile struggling to bite off his ring and no light anywhere, nothing to defend him from the ambush of madness except his stubborn insistence on himself. But that defence was no longer of any use. Kiril Threndor was not far away. Lord Foul was close-
“This way.” Linden gestured toward the left, along the sheer wall. Her voice sounded dull, half stupefied by the effort of holding onto her courage. Her senses told her things that appalled her. Though his own perceptions were fatally truncated, he felt the potential for hysteria creep upward in her. But instead of screaming she became scarcely able to move. How virulent would Lord Foul be to nerves as vulnerable as hers? Covenant was at least protected by his numbness. But she had no protection, might as well have been naked. She had known too much death. She hated it-and ached to share its sovereign power. She believed that she was evil.
In the unsteady torchlight, he seemed to see her already falling into paralysis under the pressure of Lord Foul's emanations.
Yet she still moved. Or perhaps the Despiser's will coerced her. Dully, she walked in the direction she had indicated.
He joined her. All his joints were stiff with pleading. Hang on. You have the right to choose. You don't have to be trapped like this. Nobody can take away your right to choose. But he could not work the words into his locked throat. They were stifled by the accumulation of his own dread.
Dread which ate at the rims of his certainty, eroded the place of stillness and conviction where he stood. Dread that he was wrong—
The air was as damp and dank as compressed sweat. Shivering in the chill atmosphere, he accompanied Linden along the bottom of the chasm and watched the volition leak out of her until she was barely moving.
Then she stopped. Her head slumped forward. The torch hung at her side, nearly burning her hand. He prayed her name, but she did not respond. Her voice trickled like blood between her lips:
“Ravers.”
And the steep slope beside them arose as if she had called it to life.
Two of them: creatures of scree and detritus from the roots of the mountain. They were nearly as tall as Giants, but much broader. They looked strong enough to crush boulders in their massive arms. One of them struck Covenant a stone blow that scattered him to the floor. The other impelled Linden to the wall.
Her torch fell, guttered and went out. But the creatures did not need that light. They emitted a ghastly lumination that made their actions as vivid as atrocities.
One stood over Covenant to prevent him from rising. The other confronted Linden. It reached for her. Her face stretched to scream, but even her screams were paralyzed. She made no effort to defend herself.
With a gentleness worse than any violence, the creature began to unbutton her shirt.
Covenant gagged for breath. Her extremity was more than he could bear. Every inch of him burned for power. Suddenly, he no longer cared whether his attacker would strike him again. He rolled onto his chest, wedged his knees under him, tottered to his feet. His attacker raised a threatening arm. He was battered and frail, barely able to stand. Yet the passion raging from him halted the creature in mid-blow, forced it to retreat a step. It was a Raver, sentient and accessible to fear. It understood what his wild magic would do, if he willed.
His half-hand trembling, he pointed at the creature in front of Linden. It stopped at the last buttons. But it did not turn away.
“I'm warning you.” His voice spattered and scorched like hot acid. “Foul's right about this. If you touch her, I don't care what else I destroy. I'll rip your soul to atoms. You won't live long enough to know whether I break the Arch or not.”
The creature did not move. It seemed to be daring him to unleash his white gold.
“Try me,” he breathed on the verge of eruption. “Just try me.”
Slowly, the creature lowered its arms. Backing carefully, it retreated to stand beside its fellow.
A spasm went through Linden. All her muscles convulsed in torment or ecstasy. Then her head snapped up. The dire glow of the creatures flamed from her eyes.
She looked straight at Covenant and began to laugh.
The laughter of a ghoul, mirthless and cruel.
“Slay me then, groveller!” she cried. Her voice was as shrill as a shriek. It echoed hideously along the crevice. “Rip my soul to atoms!” Perchance it will pleasure you to savage the woman you love as well!
The Raver had taken possession of her. and there was nothing in all the world that he could do about it.
He nearly fell then. The supreme evil had come upon her, and he was helpless. The ill that you deem most terrible-. Even if he had grovelled entirely, abject and suppliant, begging the Ravers to release her, they would only have laughed at him. Now in all horror and anguish there was no other way-could be no other way. He cried out at himself, at his head to rise, his legs to uphold him, his back to straighten. Seadreamer! he panted as if that were the liturgy of his conviction, his fused belief. Honninscrave. Hamako. Hile Troy. All of them had given themselves. There was no other way.
“All right,” he grated. The sound of his voice in the chasm almost betrayed him to rage; but he clamped down his wild magic, refused it for the last time, “Take me to Foul. I'll give him the ring.”
No way except surrender.
The Raver in Linden went on laughing wildly.
Nineteen: Hold Possession
SHE was not laughing.
Laughter came out of her mouth. It sprang from her corded throat to scale like gibbering up into the black abyss. Her lungs drew the air which became malice and glee. Her face was contorted like the vizard of a demon-or the rictus of her mother's asphyxiation.
But she was not laughing. It was not Linden Avery who laughed.
It was the Raver.
It held possession of her as completely as if she had been born for its use, formed and nurtured for no other purpose than to provide flesh for its housing, limbs for its actions, lungs and throat for its malign joy. It bereft her of will and choice, voice and protest At one time, she had believed that her hands were trained and ready, capable of healing-a physician's hands. But now she had no hands with which to grasp her possessor and fight it. She was a prisoner in her own body and the Raver's evil.
And that evil excoriated every niche and nerve of her being. It was heinous and absolute beyond bearing. It consumed her with its memories and purposes, crushed her independent existence with the force of its ancient strength. It was the corruption of the Sunbane mapped and explicit in her personal veins and sinews. It was the revulsion and desire which had secretly ruled her life, the passion for and against death. It was the fetid halitus of the most diseased mortality condensed to its essence and elevated to the transcendence of prophecy, promise, suzerain truth-the definitive commandment of darkness.