Eleven: The Ritual of Desecration

AFTER Loerya left him, High Lord Mhoram stayed on the tower for the rest of the night. He kept himself warm against the bitter wind by calling up a flow of power through his staff from time to time and watched in silent dread as the pronged veins of malice in the ground pulsed at Revelstone like sick, green-red lava oozing its way into the Keep’s courage. The ill might which spread from samadhi Raver’s Stone and the staves of the ur-viles lit the night garishly; and at irregular intervals, fervid sparks writhed upward when the attack met resistance in the rock of the foothills.

Though it moved slowly, the hungry agony of the attack was now only scant yards from Revelstone’s walls. Through his feet, Mhoram could feel the Keep moaning in silent immobility, as if it ached to recoil from the leering threat of those veins.

But that was not why Mhoram stood throughout the long night exposed to the immedicable gall of the wind. He could have sensed the progress of the assault from anywhere in the Keep, just as he did not need his eyes to tell him how close the inhabitants of the city were to gibbering collapse. He watched because it was only by beholding Satansfist’s might with all his senses, perceiving it with all his resources in all its horror, that he could deal with it.

When he was away from the sight, dread seemed to fall on him from nowhere, adumbrate against his heart like the knell of an unmotivated doom. It confused his thoughts, paralyzed his instincts. Walking through the halls of Revelstone, he saw faces grey with inarticulate terror, heard above the constant, clenched mumble of sobs children howling in panic at the sight of their parents, felt the rigid moral exhaustion of the stalwart few who kept the Keep alive—Quaan, the three Lords, most of the Lorewardens, lillianrill, and rhadhamaerl. Then he could hardly master the passion of his futility, the passion which urged him to strike at his friends because it blamed him for failing the Land. A wild hopelessness moved in him, shouldered its way toward the front of his responses. And he alone of all the Lords knew how to make such hopelessness bear fruit.

But alone on the watchtower, with Satansfist’s army revealed below him, he could clarify himself, recognize what was being done to Revelstone. The winter and the attack assumed a different meaning. He no longer accused himself; he knew then that no one could be blamed for being inadequate in the face of such unanswerable malevolence. Destruction was easier than preservation, and when destruction had risen high enough, mere men and women could not be condemned if they failed to throw back the tide. Therefore he was able to resist his own capacity for desecration. His eyes burned like yellow fury at the creeping attack, but he was searching for defences.

The aspect of the assault which most daunted him was its unwavering ferocity. He could see that the ur-viles maintained their part of the power by rotating their positions, allowing each wedge and loremaster to rest in turn. And he knew from experience that Lord Foul’s strength—his own prodigious might making use of the Illearth Stone—was able to drive armies mad, push them to greater savagery than their flesh could bear. But Satansfist was only one Giant, one body of mortal thew and bone and blood. Even a Giant-Raver should not have been able to sustain such an extravagant exertion for so long.

In addition, while samadhi concentrated on his attack, he might reasonably have been expected to lose some of his control over his army. Yet the whole horde, legion after legion, remained poised around Revelstone . Each creature in its own way bent the lust of its will at the Keep. And the emerald expenditure of samadhi’s strength never blinked. Clearly, Lord Foul supported his army and its commander with might so immense that it surpassed all Mhoram’s previous conceptions of power.

He could see no hope for Revelstone anywhere except in the cost of that unwavering exertion. The defenders would have to hope and pray that Satansfist’s aegis broke before they did. If they could not contrive to endure the Raver’s attack, they were doomed.

When Mhoram returned to the hollow stone halls in the first, grey, dim ridicule of dawn, he was ready to strive for that endurance.

The hushed, tight wave of panic that struck him as he strode down the main passage into the Keep almost broke his resolve. He could feel people grinding their teeth in fear behind the walls on either side of him. Shouts reached him from a far gallery; two parties had banded together to defend themselves from each other. Around a bend he surprised a hungry group that was attempting to raid one of the food storerooms; the people believed that the cooks in the refectories were preparing poison.

His anger blazed up in him, and he surged forward, intending to strike them where they stood in their folly. But before he reached them, they fell into panic and fled from him as if he were a ghoul. Their retreat left two of Quaan’s warriors standing guard in front of the storeroom as if they were watching each other rather than the supplies. Even these two regarded Mhoram with dread.

He mastered himself, forced a smile onto his crooked lips, said a few encouraging words to the guards. Then he hastened away.

He saw now that Revelstone was at the flash point of crisis. To help it, he had to provide the city with something more than moments of temporary aid. Grimly, he ignored the other needs, the multitudes of fear, which cut at his awareness. As he strode along passages and down stairways, he used his staff to summon Hearthrall Tohrm and all the Gravelingases. He put his full authority into the command, so that as many rhadhamaerl as possible might resist their panic and answer.

When he reached the bright floor of the courtyard around which the Lords’ chambers were situated, he felt a brief surge of relief to see that Tohrm and a dozen Gravelingases were already there, and more were on their way. Soon a score of the rhadhamaerl—nearly all the Keep’s masters of stone-lore—stood on the shining rock, waiting to hear him.

For a moment, the High Lord gazed at the men, wincing inwardly at their misery. They were Gravelingases of the rhadhamaerl, and were being hurt through the very stone around them. Then he nodded sharply to himself. This was the right place for him to begin; if he could convince these men that they were able to resist Satansfist’s ill, they would be able to do much for the rest of the city.

With an effort that strained the muscles of his face, he smiled for them. Tohrm answered with an awkward grin which quickly fell into apprehension again.

“Gravelingases,” Mhoram began roughly, “we have spent too long each of us alone enduring this ill in small ways. We must put our strength together to form a large defence.”

“We have obeyed your orders,” one man muttered sullenly.

“That is true,” Mhoram returned. “Thus far we have all given our strength to encourage the people of Revelstone. You have kept your graveling fires bright, as I commanded. But wisdom does not always come swiftly. Now I see with other eyes. I have listened more closely to the voice of the Keep. I have felt the rock itself cry out against this evil. And I say now that we must resist in other ways if Revelstone is to endure.

“We have mistaken our purpose. The Land does not live for us—we live for the Land. Gravelingases, you must turn your lore to the defence of the stone. Here, in this place”—he touched the radiant floor with the heel of his staff—“slumbers power that perhaps only a rhadhamaerl may comprehend. Make use of it. Make use of any possible lore—do here together whatever must be done. But find some means to seal the heart-rock of Revelstone against this blight. The people can provide for themselves if Revelstone remains brave.”

As he spoke, he realized that he should have understood these things all along. But the fear had numbed him, just as it had icebound the Gravelingases. And like him they now began to comprehend. They shook themselves, struck their hands together, looked around them with preparations rather than dread in their eyes. Tohrm’s lips twitched with their familiar grin.

Without hesitation, High Lord Mhoram left the Gravelingases alone to do their work. As he walked along the tunnel away from the courtyard, he felt like a man who had discovered a new magic.

He directed his steps toward one of the main refectories, whose chief cook he knew to be a feisty, food-loving man not prone to either awe or fear; and as he moved, he sent out more summonses, this time calling his fellow Lords and Hearthrall Borillar’s Hirebrands. Amatin and Trevor answered tensely, and Borillar sent a half-timid sign through the walls. But a long moment passed before Loerya answered, and when her signal came it was torpid, as if she were dazed with dismay. Mhoram hoped that the rhadhamaerl could make themselves felt soon, so that people like Loerya might not altogether lose heart; and he climbed up through the levels of the Keep toward the refectory as if he were surging through viscous dread.

But as he neared the kitchen, he saw a familiar figure dodge away into a side passage, obviously trying to avoid him. He swung around the corner after the man, and came face to face with Trell Atiaran-mate.

The big man looked feverish. His greying beard seemed to bristle hotly, his sunken cheeks were flushed, and his dull, hectic eyes slid away from Mhoram’s gaze in all directions, as if he could not control their wandering. He stood under Mhoram’s scrutiny as if he might break and run at any moment.

“Trell Gravelingas,” Mhoram said carefully, “the other rhadhamaerl are at work against this ill. They need your strength.”

Trell’s gaze flicked once across Mhoram’s face like a lash of anger. “You wish to preserve Revelstone so that it will be intact for the Despiser’s use.” He filled the word intact with so much bitterness that it sounded like a curse.

At the accusation, Mhoram’s lips tightened. “I wish to preserve the Keep for its own sake.”

The roaming of Trell’s eyes had an insatiable cast, as if they were afraid of going blind. “I do not work well with others,” he said dimly after a moment. Then, without transition, he became urgent. “High Lord, tell me your secret.”

Mhoram was taken aback. “My secret?”

“It is a secret of power. I must have power.”

“For what purpose?”

At first, Trell squirmed under the question. But then his gaze hit Mhoram again. “Do you wish Revelstone intact?” Again, intact spat like gall past his lips. He turned sharply and strode away.

For an instant, Mhoram felt a cold hand of foreboding on the back of his neck, and he watched Trell go as if the big Gravelingas trailed plumes of calamity. But before he could grasp the perception, Revelstone’s ambience of dread clouded it, obscured it. He did not dare give Trell his secret knowledge. Even a Gravelingas might be capable of invoking the Ritual of Desecration.

With an effort, he remembered his purpose, and started again toward the refectory.

Because he had been delayed, all the people he had summoned were waiting for him. They stood ineffectively among the forlorn tables in the great, empty hall, and watched his approach with trepidation, as if he were a paradoxically fatal hope, a saving doom. “High Lord,” the chief cook began at once, quelling his fear with anger, “I cannot control these useless sheep disguised as cooks. Half have deserted me, and the rest will not work. They swing knives and refuse to leave the corners where they hide.”

“Then we must restore their courage.” Despite the scare Trell had given him, Mhoram found that he could smile more easily. He looked at the Lords and Hirebrands. “Do you not feel it?”

Amatin nodded with tears in her eyes. Trevor grinned.

A change was taking place under their feet.

It was a small change, almost subliminal. Yet soon even the Hire-brands could feel it. Without either heat or light, it warmed and lit their hearts.

On a barely palpable level, the rock of Revelstone was remembering that it was obdurate granite, not susceptible sandstone.

Mhoram knew that this change could not be felt everywhere in the Keep—that all the strength of the rhadhamaerl would never suffice to throw back the lurid dread of Satansfist’s attack. But the Gravelingases had made a start. Now anyone who felt the alteration would know that resistance was still possible.

He let his companions taste the granite for a moment. Then he began the second part of his defence. He asked Hearthrall Borillar for all the healing wood essence —the rillinlure —he could provide, and sent the other Hirebrands to help the chief cook begin working again. “Cook and do not stop,” he commanded. “The other refectories are paralyzed. All who seek food must find it here.”

Borillar was doubtful. “Our stores of rillinlure will be swiftly consumed in such quantities of food. None will remain for the future of this siege.”

“That is as it must be. Our error has been to conserve and portion our strength against future perils. If we fail to endure this assault, we will have no future.” When Borillar still hesitated, Mhoram went on: “Do not fear, Hearthrall. Satansfist himself must rest after such an exertion of power.”

After a moment, Borillar recognized the wisdom of the High Lord’s decision. He left to obey, and Mhoram turned to the other Lords. “My friends, to us falls another task. We must bring the people here so that they may eat and be restored.”

“Send the Warward,” said Loerya. Her pain at being away from her daughters was plainly visible in her face.

“No. Fear will cause some to resist with violence. We must call them, make them wish to come. We must put aside our own apprehension, and send a call like a melding through the Keep, so that the people will choose to answer.”

“Who will defend Revelstone—while we work here ?” Trevor asked.

“The peril is here. We must not waste our strength on useless watching. While this attack continues, there will be no other. Come. Join your power to mine. We, the Lords, cannot permit the Keep to be thus broken in spirit.”

As he spoke, he drew a fire bright and luminescent from his staff. Tuning it to the ambience of the stone, he set it against one wall so that it ran through the rock like courage, urging all the people within its range to lift up their heads and come to the refectory.

At his back, he felt Amatin, Trevor, then Loerya following his example. Their Lords-fire joined his; their minds bent to the same task. With their help, he pushed dread away, shared his own indomitable conviction, so that the appeal which radiated from them into Revelstone carried no flaw or dross of fear.

Soon people began to answer. Hollow-eyed like the victims of nightmares, they entered the refectory—accepted steaming trays from the chief cook and the Hirebrands—sat at the tables and began to eat. And when they had eaten, they found themselves ushered to a nearby hall, where the Lorewardens enjoined them to sing boldly in the face of defeat:

Berek! Earthfriend!—help and weal, 

Battle—aid against the foe!

Earth gives and answers Power’s peal,

Ringing, Earthfriend! help and heal! 

Clean the Land from bloody death and woe!

More and more people came, drawn by the music, and the Lords, and the reaffirmation of Revelstone’s granite. Supporting each other, carrying their children, dragging their friends, they fought their fear and came because the deepest impulses of their hearts responded to food, music, rillinlure, rock—to the Lords and the life of Revelstone.

After the first influx, the Lords took turns resting so that fatigue would not make their efforts waver. When the rillinlure gave out, the Hirebrands provided special fires for the returning cooks, and joined their own lore to the call of the Lords. Quaan’s warriors gave up all pretence of guarding the walls, and came to help the cooks—clearing tables, cleaning pots and trays, carrying supplies from the storerooms.

Now the city had found a way to resist the dread, and it was determined to prevail. In all, less than half of Revelstone’s people responded. But they were enough. They kept Lord’s Keep alive when the very air they breathed reeked of malice.

For four days and four nights, High Lord Mhoram did not leave his post. He rested and ate to sustain himself, but he stayed at his station by the refectory wall. After a time, he hardly saw or heard the people moving around him. He concentrated on the stone, wrought himself to the pitch of Revelstone, to the pulse of its existence and the battle for possession of its life rock. He saw as clearly as if he were standing on the watchtower that Satansfist’s livid power oozed close to the outer walls and then halted—hung poised while the Keep struggled against it. He heard the muffled groaning of the rock as it fought to remember itself. He felt the exhaustion of the Gravelingases. All these things he took into himself, and against the Despiser’s wrong he placed his unbreaking will.

And he won.

Shortly before dawn on the fifth day, the onslaught broke like a tidal wave collapsing out to sea under its own weight. For a long stunned moment, Mhoram felt jubilation running through the rock under his feet and could not understand it. Around him, people gaped as if the sudden release of pressure astounded them. Then, swept together by a common impulse, he and everyone else dashed toward the outer battlements to look at the siege.

The ground below them steamed and quivered like wounded flesh, but the malevolence which had stricken it was gone. Satansfist’s army lay prostrate from overexertion in its encampments. The Giant-Raver himself was nowhere to be seen.

Over all its walls from end to end, Revelstone erupted in the exultation of victory. Weak, hoarse, ragged, starving voices cheered, wept, shouted raucous defiance as if the siege had been beaten. Mhoram found his own vision blurred with relief. When he turned to go back into the Keep, he discovered Loerya behind him, weeping happily and trying to hug all three of her daughters at once. At her side, Trevor crowed, and tossed one of the girls giggling into the air.

“Rest now, Mhoram,” Loerya said through her joy. “Leave the Keep to us. We know what must be done.”

High Lord Mhoram nodded his mute gratitude and went wearily away to his bed.

Yet even then he did not relax until he had felt the Warward resume its defensive stance—felt search parties hunting through the Keep for the most blighted survivors of the assault—felt order slowly reform the city like a mammoth being struggling out of chaos. Only then did he let himself flow with the slow pulse of the gut-rock and lose his burdens in sleep—secure in the confidence of stone.

By the time he awoke the next morning, Lord’s Keep had been returned as much as possible to battle-readiness. Warmark Quaan brought a tray of breakfast to him in his private quarters, and reported the news of the city to him while he ate.

Thanks to its training, and to exceptional service by some of the Hafts and Warhafts, the Warward had survived essentially unscathed. The Gravelingases were exhausted, but well. The Lorewardens and Hirebrands had suffered only chance injuries from panic-stricken friends. But the people who had not answered the Lords’ summons had not fared so well. Search parties had found several score dead, especially in ground-level apartments near the outer walls. Most of these people had died of thirst, but some were murdered by their fear-mad friends and neighbours. And of the hundreds of other survivors, four—or fivescore appeared irreparably insane.

After the search had ended, Lord Loerya had taken to the Healers all those who were physically and mentally damaged, as well as those who seemed to remember having committed murder. She was assisting the Healers now. In other ways, Revelstone was swiftly recovering. The Keep was intact.

Mhoram listened in silence, then waited for the old Warmark to continue. But Quaan fell studiously silent, and the High Lord was forced to ask, “What of the Raver’s army?”

Quaan spat in sudden vehemence. “They have not moved.”

It was true. Satansfist’s hordes had retreated to their encampment and fallen into stasis as if the force which animated them had been withdrawn.

In the days that followed, they remained essentially still. They moved enough to perform the bare functions of their camp. They received dark supply wains from the south and east. From time to time, an indefinite flicker of power ran among them —a half-hearted whip keeping surly beasts under control. But none of them approached within hailing distance of the Keep. Samadhi Raver did not show himself. Only the unbroken girdle of the siege showed that Lord Foul had not been defeated.

For five days—ten—fifteen—the enemy lay like a dead thing around Revelstone. At first, some of the more optimistic inhabitants of the city argued that the spirit of the attackers had been broken. But Warmark Quaan did not believe this, and after one long look from the watchtower, Mhoram agreed with his old friend.

Satansfist was simply waiting for Revelstone to eat up its supplies, weaken itself, before he launched his next assault.

As the days passed, High Lord Mhoram lost his capacity to rest. He lay tense in his chambers and listened to the mood of the city turn sour.

Slowly, day by day, Lord’s Keep came to understand its predicament. The Giants who had delved Revelstone out of the mountain rock thousands of years ago, in the age of Damelon, had made it to be impregnable; and all its inhabitants had lived from birth with the belief that this intention had succeeded. The walls were granite, and the gates, unbreakable. In a crisis the fertile upland plateau could provide the Keep with food. But the Despiser’s unforeseen, unforeseeable winter had laid the upland barren; crops and fruit could not grow, cattle or other animals could not live, in the brazen wind. And the storerooms had already supplied the city since the natural onset of winter.

For the first time in its long history, Revelstone’s people saw that they might starve.

In the initial days of waiting, the Lords began a stricter rationing of the supplies. They reduced each person’s daily share of food until everyone in Revelstone felt hungry all the time. They organized the refectories more stringently, so that food would not be wasted. But these measures were palpably inadequate. The city had many thousand inhabitants; even on minimal rations they consumed large portions of the stores every day.

Their earlier elation ran out of them like water leaking into parched sand. The wait became first stupefying, then heavy and ominous, like pent thunder, then maddening. And High Lord Mhoram found himself yearning for the next attack. He could fight back against an attack.

Gradually, the cold grey days of suspense began to weaken the Keep’s discretion, its pragmatic sense. Some of the farmers—people whose lifework had been taken from them by the winter—crept out to the upland hills around Glimmermere, sneaking as if they were ashamed to be caught planting futile rows of seeds in the frozen earth.

Lord Trevor began to neglect some of his duties. At odd times, he forgot why he had become a Lord, forgot the impulse which had made him a Lord in defiance of his lack of belief in himself; and he shirked normal responsibilities as if he were inexplicably afraid of failure. Loerya his wife remained staunch in her work, but she became distracted, almost furtive, as she moved through the Keep. She often went hungry so that her daughters could have more food. Whenever she saw the High Lord, she glared at him with a strange resentment in her eyes.

Like Loerya, Lord Amatin grew slowly distant. At every free moment she plunged into a feverish study of the First and Second Wards, searching so hard for the unlocking of mysteries that when she went back to her public duties her forehead looked as sore as if she had been battering it against her table.

Several Hirebrands and Gravelingases took to carrying fire with them wherever they went, like men who were going incomprehensibly blind. And on the twentieth day of the waiting, Warmark Quaan abruptly reversed all his former decisions; without consulting any of the Lords, he sent a party of scouts out of the Keep toward Satansfist’s camp. None of them returned.

Still the Raver’s army lay like dormant chains, constricting the heart of Revelstone.

Quaan berated himself to the High Lord. ” I am a fool,” he articulated severely, “an old fool. Replace me before I am mad enough to send the Warward itself out to die.”

“Who can replace you?” Mhoram replied gently. “It is the Despiser’s purpose to make mad all the defenders of the Land.”

Quaan looked around him as if to measure with his eyes the chill of Revelstone’s travail. “He will succeed. He requires no weapon but patience.”

Mhoram shrugged. “Perhaps. But I think it is an unsure tactic. Lord Foul cannot foretell the size of our stores—or the extent of our determination.”

“Then why does he wait?”

The High Lord did not need to be a seer to answer this question. “Samadhi Raver awaits a sign—perhaps from us—perhaps from the Despiser.”

Glowering at the thought, Quaan went back to his duties. And Mhoram returned to a problem which had been nagging at him. For the third time, he went in search of Trell.

But once again he could not locate the tormented Gravelingas. Trell must have secreted himself somewhere. Mhoram found no trace, felt no emanation, and none of the other rhadhamaerl had seen the big Stonedownor recently. Mhoram ached at the thought of Trell in hiding, gnawing in cataleptic isolation the infested meat of his anguishes. Yet the High Lord could not afford either the time or the energy to dredge all Revelstone’s private places for the sake of one embittered Gravelingas. Before he had completed even a cursory search, he was distracted by a group of Lorewardens who had irrationally decided to go and negotiate a peace with the Raver. Once again, he was compelled to put aside the question of Trell Atiaran-mate.

On the twenty-fourth day, Lord Trevor forsook his duties altogether.

He sealed himself in his study like a penitent, and refused all food and drink. Loerya could get no response from him, and when the High Lord spoke to him, he said nothing except that he wished his wife and daughters to have his ration of food.

“Now even I am a cause of pain to him,” Loerya murmured with hot tears in her eyes. “Because I have given some of my food to my daughters, he believes that he is an insufficient husband and father, and must sacrifice himself.” She gave Mhoram one desperate glance, like a woman trying to judge the cost of abdication, then hurried away before he could reply.

On the twenty-fifth day, Lord Amatin strode up to Mhoram and demanded without preface or explanation that he reveal to her his secret knowledge.

“Ah, Amatin,” he sighed, “are you so eager for burdens?”

She turned at once and walked fragilely away as if he had betrayed her.

When he went to stand his solitary watch on the tower, a dull vermeil mood was on him, and he felt that he had in fact betrayed her; he had withheld dangerous knowledge from her as if he judged her unable to bear it. Yet nowhere in his heart could he find the courage to give his fellow Lords the key to the Ritual of Desecration. That key had a lurid, entrancing weight. It urged him to rage at Trevor, pummel the pain from Loerya’s face, shake Amatin’s frail shoulders until she understood, call down fire from the hidden puissance of the skies on Satansfist’s head—and refused to let him speak.

On the twenty-seventh day, the first of the storerooms was emptied. Together, the chief cook and the most experienced Healer reported to Mhoram that the cold and infirm would begin to die of hunger in a few days.

When he went to his chambers to rest, he felt too cold to sleep. Despite the warm graveling, Lord Foul’s winter reached through the stone walls at him as if the grey, unfaltering wind were tuned to his most vulnerable resonances. He lay wide-eyed on his pallet like a man in a fever of helplessness and imminent despair.

The next night he was snatched off his bed shortly after midnight by the sudden thrill of trepidation which raced through the walls like a flame in the extreme tinder of the Keep’ s anticipation. He was on his way before any summons could reach him; with his staff clenched whitely in his hand, he hastened toward the highest eastward battlements of the main Keep. He focused on Quaan’s dour presence, found the Warmark on a balcony overlooking the watchtower and the night soot of Satansfist’s army.

As Mhoram joined him, Quaan pointed one rigid arm like an indictment away toward the east. But the High Lord did not need Quaan’s gesture; the sight seemed to spring at him out of the darkness like a bright abomination on the wind.

Running from the east toward Revelstone was a rift in the clouds, a break that stretched out to the north and south as far as Mhoram could see. The rift appeared wide, assertive, but the clouds behind it were as impenetrable as ever.

It was so clearly visible because through it streamed light as green as the frozen essence of emerald.

Its brightness made it seem swift, but it moved like a slow, ineluctable tide across the ice-blasted fields beyond the foothills. Its green, radiant swath swept like a blaze of wrong over the ground, igniting invisible contours into brilliance and then quenching them again. Mhoram watched it in stunned silence as it lit the Raver’s army and rushed on into the foothills of the plateau. Like a tsunami of malignant scorn, it rolled upward and broke across the Keep.

People screamed when they saw the full emerald moon leering evilly at them through the rift. The High Lord himself flinched, raised his staff as if to ward off a nightmare. For a horrific moment while the rift moved, Lord Foul’s moon dominated the clear, starless abysm of the sky like an incurable wound, a maiming of the very Law of the heavens. Emerald radiance covered everything, drowned every heart and drenched Revelstone’s every upraised rock in the tic, green defeat.

Then the rift passed; sick light slid away into the west. Lord’s Keep sank like a broken sea-cliff into irreparable night.

“Melenkurion!” Quaan panted as if he were suffocating. “Melenkurion!”

Slowly, Mhoram realized that he was grimacing like a cornered madman. But while the darkness crashed and echoed around him, he could not relax his features; the contortion clung to his face like the grin of a skull. A long, taut time seemed to pass before he thought to peer through the night at Satansfist’s army.

When at last he compelled himself to look, he saw that the army had come to life. It sloughed off its uneasy repose and began to seethe, bristling in the darkness like reanimated lust.

“Ready the Warward,” he said, fighting an unwonted tremor in his rough voice. “The Raver has been given his sign. He will attack.”

With an effort, Warmark Quaan brought himself back under control and left the balcony, shouting orders as he moved.

Mhoram hugged his staff to his chest and breathed deeply, heavily. At first, the air shuddered in his lungs, and he could not pull the grimace off his face. But slowly he untied his muscles, turned his tension into other channels. His thoughts gathered themselves around the defence of the Keep.

Calling on the Hearthralls and the other Lords to join him, he went to the tower to watch what samadhi Raver was doing.

There, in the company of the two shaken sentries, he could follow the Raver’s movements. Satansfist held his fragment of the Illearth Stone blazing aloft, an oriflamme of gelid fire, and its stark green illumination revealed him clearly as he moved among his forces, barking orders in a hoarse, alien tongue. Without haste he gathered ur-viles about him until their midnight forms spread out under his light like a lake of black water. Then he forged them into two immense wedges, one on either side of him, with their tips at his shoulders, facing Revelstone. In the garish Stone light, the loremasters looked like roynish, compact power, fatal and eager. Waves of other creatures fanned out beyond them on either side as they began to approach the Keep.

Following the Raver’s fire, they moved deliberately straight out of the southeast toward the knuckled and clenched gates at the base of the watchtower.

High Lord Mhoram tightened his grip on his staff and tried to prepare himself for whatever might happen.

At his back, he felt Lord Amatin and Hearthrall Borillar arrive, followed shortly by Tohrm and then Quaan. Without taking his eyes off Satansfist’s approach, the Warmark reported.

“I have ordered two Howard into the tower. More would serve no purpose—they would block each other. Half are archers. They are good warriors,” he added unnecessarily, as if to reassure himself, “and all their Hafts and Warhafts are veterans of the war against Fleshharrower.

” The archers bear lor-liarill shafts. They will begin at your signal.”

Mhoram nodded his approval. “Tell half the archers to strike when the Raver enters arrow range. Hold the rest for my signal.”

The Warmark turned to deliver these instructions, but Mhoram abruptly caught his arm. A chill tightened the High Lord’s scalp as he said, “Place more archers upon the battlements above the court of the Gilden. If by some great ill Satansfist breaches the gates, the defenders of the tower will require aid. And—stand warriors ready to cut loose the crosswalks from the Keep.”

“Yes, High Lord.” Quaan was a warrior and understood the necessity for such orders. He returned Mhoram’s grip firmly, like a clasp of farewell, then left the top of the tower.

“Breach the gates?” Borillar gaped as if the mere suggestion amazed him. “How is it possible?”

“It is not possible,” Tohrm replied flatly.

“Nevertheless we must prepare.” Mhoram braced his staff on the stone like a standard, and watched samadhi Sheol’s approach.

No one spoke while the army marched forward. It was already less than a hundred yards below the gates. Except for the dead rumble of its myriad feet on the frozen ground, it moved in silence, as if it were stalking the Keep—or as if in spite of their driven hunger many of its creatures themselves dreaded what Satansfist meant to do.

Mhoram felt that he had only moments left. He asked Amatin if she had seen either Trevor or Loerya.

“No.” Her whispered answer had an empty sound, like a recognition of abandonment.

Moments later, a flight of arrows thrummed from one of the upper levels of the tower. They were invisible in the darkness, and Satansfist gave no sign that he knew they had been fired. But the radiance of the Illearth Stone struck them into flame and knocked them down before they were within thirty feet of him.

Another flight, and another, had no effect except to light the front of the Raver’s army, revealing in lurid green and orange the deadly aspect of its leaders.

Then samadhi halted. On either side of him, the ur-viles trembled. He coughed his orders. The wedges tightened. Snarling, the Cavewights and other creatures arranged themselves into formations, ready to charge.

Without haste or hesitation, the Giant-Raver clenched his fist, so that iridescent steam plumed upward from his fragment of the Stone.

Mhoram could feel the Stone’s power mounting, radiating in tumid waves against his face.

Abruptly, a bolt of force lashed from the Stone and struck the ground directly before one of the loremasters. The blast continued until the soil and rock caught fire, burned with green flames, crackled like firewood. Then samadhi moved his bolt, drew it over the ground in a wide, slow arc toward the other loremaster. His power left behind a groove that flamed and smouldered, flared and groaned in earthen agony.

When the arc was complete, it enclosed Satansfist from side to side—a half-circle of emerald coals standing in front of him like a harness anchored by the two ur-vile wedges.

Remembering the vortex of trepidation with which Fleshharrower had attacked the Warward at Doriendor Corishev, Mhoram strode across the tower and shouted up at the Keep, “Leave the battlements! All but the warriors must take shelter! Do not expose yourselves lest the sky itself assail you!” Then he returned to Lord Amatin’s side.

Below him, the two great loremasters raised their staves and jabbed them into the ends of the arc. At once, Demondim vitriol began to pulse wetly along the groove. The green flames turned black; they bubbled, spattered, burst out of the arc as if Satansfist had tapped a vein of EarthBlood in the ground.

By the time Warmark Quaan had returned to the tower, Mhoram knew that samadhi was not summoning a vortex. The Raver’s exertion was like nothing he had ever seen before. And it was slower than he had expected it to be. Once the ur-viles had tied themselves to the arc, Satansfist started to work with his Stone. From its incandescent core, he drew a fire that gushed to the ground and poured into the groove of the arc. This force combined with the black fluid of the ur-viles to make a mixture of ghastly potency. Soon black-green snake-tongues of lightning were flicking into the air from the whole length of the groove, and these bursts carried to the onlookers a gut-deep sense of violation, as if the rocky foundations of the foothills were under assault—as if the Despiser dared traduce even the necessary bones of the Earth.

Yet the power did nothing except grow. Tongues of lightning leaped higher, joined together, became gradually but steadily more brilliant and wrong. Their violence increased until Mhoram felt that the nerves of his skin and eyes could endure no more—and went on increasing. When dawn began to bleed into the night at Satansfist’s back, the individual tongues had merged into three continuous bolts striking without thunder into the deepest darkness of the clouds.

The High Lord’s throat was too dry; he had to swallow roughly several times before he could muster enough moisture to speak. “Hearthrall Tohrm”—still he almost gagged on the words—“they will attack the gates. This power will attack the gates. Send any Gravelingases who will go to the aid of the stone.”

Tohrm started at the sound of his name, then hurried away as if he were glad to remove himself from the baleful glare of the arc.

While grey daylight spread over the siege, the three unbroken bolts jumped and gibbered maniacally, raged at the silent clouds, drew closer to each other. Behind them, the army began to howl as the pressure became more and more unendurable.

Lord Amatin dug her thin fingers into the flesh of Mhoram’s arm. Quaan had crossed his arms over his chest, and was straining against himself to keep from shouting. Borillar’s hands scrubbed fervidly over his features in an effort to erase the sensation of wrong. His staff lay useless at his feet. The High Lord prayed for them all and fought his dread.

Then, abruptly, the Raver whirled his Stone and, roaring, threw still more power into the arc.

The three great columns of lightning sprang together, became one.

The earth shook with thunder in answer to that single, prodigious bolt. At once, the lightning vanished, though samadhi and the ur-viles did not withdraw their power from the arc.

The thunder continued; tremors jolted the ground. In moments, the tower was trembling as if its foundations were about to crack open and swallow it.

Immensely, tortuously, the ground of the foothills began to shift. It writhed, jerked, cracked; and through the cracks, stone shapes thrust upward. To his horror, Mhoram saw the forms of humans and Giants and horses rip themselves out of the earth. The forms were blunt, misshapen, insensate; they were articulated stone, the ancient fossilized remains of buried bodies.

The memory of Asuraka’s cry from Revelwood echoed in Mhoram’s ears: He resurrected the old death!

By hundreds and then thousands, the stone shapes heaved up out of the ground. Amid the colossal thunder of the breaking earth, they thrust free of their millennia—long graves and lumbered blindly toward the gates of Revelstone.

“Defend the tower!” Mhoram cried to Quaan. “But do not waste lives. Amatin! Fight here! Flee if the tower falls. I go to the gates.”

But when he spun away from the parapet, he collided with Hearthrall Tohrm. Tohrm caught hold of him, stopped him. Yet in spite of the High Lord’s urgency, a long moment passed before Tohrm could bring himself to speak.

At last, he wrenched out, “The tunnel is defended.”

“Who?” Mhoram snapped.

“The Lord Trevor ordered all others away. He and Trell Gravelingas support the gates.”

“Melenkurion!” Mhoram breathed. “Melenkurion abatha!” He turned back to the parapet.

Below him, the dead, voiceless shapes had almost reached the base of the tower. Arrows flew at them from hundreds of bows, but the shafts glanced uselessly off the earthen forms and fell flaming to the ground without effect.

He hesitated, muttering to himself in extreme astonishment. The breaking of the Law of Death had consequences beyond anything he had imagined. Thousands of the gnarled shapes were already massed and marching, and at every moment thousands more struggled up from the ground, writhed into motion like lost souls and obeyed the command of Sheol Satansfist’s power.

But then the first shape set its hands on the gates, and High Lord Mhoram sprang forward. Whirling his staff, he sent a blast down the side of the tower, struck the dead form where it stood. At the impact of his Lords-fire, it shattered like sandstone and fell into dirt.

At once, he and Lord Amatin set to work with all their might. Their staffs rang and fired, rained blue strength like hammer blows down on the marching shapes. And every blow broke the dead into sand. But every one that fell was replaced by a score of others. Across all the terrain between the watchtower and Satansfist’s arc, the ground heaved and buckled, pitching new forms into motion like beings dredged up from the bottommost muck of a lifeless sea. First one by one, then by tens, scores, fifties, they reached the gates and piled against them.

Through the stone, Mhoram could feel the strain on the gates mounting. He could feel Trevor’s fire and Trell’s mighty subterranean song supporting the interlocked gates, while hundreds, thousands, of the blind, mute forms pressed against them, crushed forward in lifeless savagery like an avalanche leaping impossibly up out of the ground. He could feel the groaning retorts of pressure as if the bones of the tower were grinding together. And still the dead came, shambling out of the earth until they seemed as vast as the Raver’s army and as irresistible as a cataclysm. Mhoram and Amatin broke hundreds of them and had no effect.

Behind the High Lord, Tohrm was on his knees, sharing the tower’s pain with his hands and sobbing openly, “Revelstone! Oh, Revelstone, alas! Oh, Revelstone, Revelstone!”

Mhoram tore himself away from the fighting, caught hold of Tohrm’s tunic, hauled the Hearthrall to his feet. Into Tohrm’s broken face, he shouted, “Gravelingas! Remember who you are! You are the Hearthrall of Lord’s Keep.”

“I am nothing!” Tohrm wept. “Ah! the Earth —!”

“You are Hearthrall and Gravelingas! Hear me—I, High Lord Mhoram, command you. Study this attack—learn to know it. The inner gates must not fall. The rhadhamaerl must preserve Revelstone’s inner gates!”

He felt the change in the attack. Satansfist’s Stone now threw bolts against the gates. Amatin tried to resist, but the Raver brushed her efforts aside as if they were nothing. Yet Mhoram stayed with Tohrm, focused his strength on the Hearthrall until Tohrm met the demand of his eyes and hands.

“Who will mourn the stone if I do not?” Tohrm moaned.

Mhoram controlled his desire to yell. “No harm will receive its due grief if we do not survive.”

The next instant, he forgot Tohrm, forgot everything except the silent screams that detonated through him from the base of the tower. Over Trell’s shrill rage and the vehemence of Trevor’s fire, the gates shrieked in agony.

A shattering concussion convulsed the stone. The people atop the tower fell, tumbled across the floor. Huge thunder like a howl of victory crashed somewhere between earth and sky, as if the very firmament of existence had been rent asunder.

The gates split inward.

Torrents of dead stone flooded into the tunnel under the tower.

Mhoram was shouting at Quaan and Amatin, “Defend the tower!” The shaking subsided, and he staggered erect. Pulling Tohrm with him, he yelled, “Come! Rally the Gravelingases! The inner gates must not fall.” Though the tower was still trembling, he started toward the stairs.

But before he could descend, he heard a rush of cries, human cries. An anguish like rage lashed through the roiling throng of his emotions. “Quaan!” he roared, though the old Warmark had almost caught up with him. “The warriors attack!” Quaan nodded bitterly as he reached Mhoram’s side. “Stop them! They cannot fight these dead. Swords will not avail.”

With Tohrm and Quaan, the High Lord raced down the stairs, leaving Amatin to wield her fire from the edge of the parapet.

Quaan went straight down through the tower, but Mhoram took Tohrm out over the courtyard between the tower and the Keep on the highest crosswalk. From there, he saw that Trell and Lord Trevor had already been driven back out of the tunnel. They were fighting for their lives against the slow, blind march of the dead. Trevor exerted an extreme force like nothing Mhoram had ever seen in him before, battering the foremost attackers, breaking them rapidly, continuously, into sand. And Trell wielded in both hands a massive fragment of one gate. He used the fragment like a club with such ferocious strength that even shapes vaguely resembling horses and Giants went down under his blows.

But the two men had no chance. Swords and spears and arrows had no effect on the marching shapes; scores of warriors who leaped into the tunnel and the courtyard were simply crushed underfoot; and the cries of the crushed were fearful to hear. While Mhoram watched, the dead pushed Trell and Trevor back past the old Gilden tree toward the closed inner gates.

Mhoram shouted to the warriors on the battlements below him, commanding them to stay out of the courtyard. Then he ran across to the Keep and dashed down the stairways toward the lower levels. With Tohrm behind him, he reached the first abutment over the inner gates in time to see Cavewights spill through the tunnel, squirming their way among the dead to attack the side doors which provided the only access to the tower.

Some of them fell at once with arrows in their throats and bellies, and others were cut down by the few warriors in the court who had avoided being crushed. But their thick, heavy jerkins protected them from most of the shafts and swords. With their great strength and their knowledge of stone, they threw themselves at the doors. And soon the gangrel creatures were swarming through the tunnel in large numbers. The High Lord saw that the warriors alone could not keep samadhi’s creatures out of the tower.

For a harsh moment, he pushed Trevor and Trell, Cavewights, warriors, animated dead earth from his mind, and faced the decision he had to make. If Revelstone were to retain any viable defence, either the tower or the inner gates must be preserved. Without the gates, the tower might still restrict Satansfist’s approach enough to keep Revelstone alive; without the tower, the gates could still seal out Satansfist. Without one or the other, Revelstone was defeated. But Mhoram could not fight for both, could not be in both places at once. He had to choose where to concentrate the Keep’s defence.

He chose the gates.

At once, he sent Tohrm to gather the Gravelingases. Then he turned to the battle of the courtyard. He ignored the Cavewights, focused instead on the shambling dead as they trampled the Gilden tree and pushed Trell and Trevor back against the walls. Shouting to the warriors around him for clingor, he hurled his Lords-fire down at the faceless shapes, battered them into sand. Together, he and Trevor cleared a space in which the trapped men could make their escape.

Almost immediately, the sentries brought two tough clingor lines, anchored them, tossed them down to Trevor and Trell. But in the brief delay, a new wave of Cavewights rode into the courtyard on the shoulders of the dead and joined the assault on the doors. With a nauseating sound like the breaking of bones, they tore the doors off the hinges, tossed the stone slabs aside, and charged roaring into the tower. They were met instantly by staunch, dour-handed warriors, but the momentum and strength of the Cavewights carried them inward.

When he saw the doors broken, Trell gave a cry of outrage, and tried to attack the Cavewights. Slapping aside the clingor line, he rushed the dead as if he believed he could fight his way through them to join the defence of the tower. For a moment, his granite club and his rhadhamaerl lore broke passage for him, and he advanced a few steps across the court. But then even his club snapped. He went down under the prodigious weight of the dead.

Trevor sprang after him. Aided by Mhoram’s fire, the Lord reached Trell. One of the dead stamped a glancing blow along his ankle, but he ignored the pain, took hold of Trell’s shoulders, dragged him back.

As soon as he was able to regain his feet, Trell pushed Trevor away and attacked the insensate forms with his fists.

Trevor snatched up one of the clingor lines and whipped it several times around his chest. Then he pounced at Trell’s back. With his arms under Trell’s, he gripped his staff like a bar across Trell’s chest, and shouted for the warriors to pull him up. Instantly, ten warriors caught the line and hauled. While Mhoram protected the two men, they were drawn up the wall and over the parapet of the abutment.

With a sickening jolt, the dead thudded against the inner gates.

Amid the cries of battle from the tower, and the mute pressure building sharply against the gates, High Lord Mhoram turned his attention to Trell and Lord Trevor.

The Gravelingas struggled free of Trevor’s hold and the hands of the warriors, thrust himself erect, and faced Mhoram as if he meant to leap at the High Lord’s throat. His face flamed with exertion and fury.

“Intact!” he rasped horribly. “The tower lost—intact for Sheol’s use! Is that your purpose for Revelstone? Better that we destroy it ourselves!”

Swinging his powerful arms to keep anyone from touching him, he spun wildly and lurched away into the Keep.

Mhoram’s gaze burned dangerously, but he bit his lips, kept himself from rushing after the Gravelingas. Trell had spent himself extravagantly, and failed. He could not be blamed for hating his inadequacy; he should be left in peace. But his voice had sounded like the voice of a man who had lost all peace forever. Torn within himself, Mhoram sent two warriors to watch over Trell, then turned toward Trevor.

The Lord stood panting against the back wall. Blood streamed from his injured ankle; his face was stained with the grime of battle, and he shuddered as the effort of breathing wracked his chest. Yet he seemed unconscious of his pain, unconscious of himself. His eyes gleamed with eldritch perceptions. When Mhoram faced him, he gasped, “I have felt it. I know what it is.”

Mhoram shouted for a Healer, but Trevor shrugged away any suggestion that he needed help. He met the High Lord like a man exalted, and repeated, “I have felt it, Mhoram.”

Mhoram controlled his concern. “Felt it?”

“Lord Foul’s power. The power which makes all this possible.”

“The Stone—” Mhoram began.

“The Stone does not suffice. This weather—the speed with which he became so mighty after his defeat in Garroting Deep—the force of this army, though it is so far from his command—these dead shapes, compelled from the very ground by power so vast—!

“The Stone does not suffice. I have felt it. Even Lord Foul the Despiser could not become so much more unconquerable in seven short years.”

“Then how?” the High Lord breathed.

“This weather—this winter. It sustains and drives the army—it frees Satansfist—it frees the Despiser himself for other work—the work of the Stone. The work of these dead. Mhoram, do you remember Drool Rockworm’s power over the weather—and the moon?”

Mhoram nodded in growing amazement and dread.

“I have felt it. Lord Foul holds the Staff of Law.”

A cry tore itself past Mhoram’s lips, despite his instantaneous conviction that Trevor was right. “How is it possible? The Staff fell with High Lord Elena under Melenkurion Sky weir.”

“I do not know. Perhaps the same being who slew Elena bore the Staff to Foul’s Creche—perhaps it is dead Kevin himself who wields the Staff on Foul’s behalf, so that the Despiser need not personally use a power not apt for his control. But I have felt the Staff, Mhoram—the Staff of Law beyond all question.”

Mhoram nodded, fought to contain the amazed fear that seemed to echo inimitably within him. The Staff! Battle raged around him; he could afford neither time nor strength for anything but the immediate task. Lord Foul held the Staff! If he allowed himself to think about such a thing, he might lose himself in panic. Eyes flashing, he gave Trevor’s shoulder a hard clasp of praise and comradeship, then turned back toward the courtyard.

For a moment, he pushed his perceptions through the din and clangour, bent his senses to assess Revelstone’s situation. He could feel Lord Amatin atop the tower, still waging her fire against the dead. She was weakening—her continuous exertions had long since passed the normal limits of her stamina—yet she kept her ragged blaze striking downward, fighting as if she meant to spend her last pulse or breath in the tower’s defence. And her labour had its effect. Though she could not stop even a tenth of the shambling shapes, she had now broken so many of them that the unbound sand clogged the approaches to the tunnel. Fewer of the dead could plough forward at one time; her work, and the constriction of the tunnel, slowed their march, slowed the multiplication of their pressure on the inner gates.

But while she strove, battle began to mount up through the tower toward her. Few Cavewights now tried to enter through the doors. Their own dead blocked the corridors; and while they fought for access, they were exposed to the archers of the Keep. But enemies were breaching the tower somehow; Mhoram could hear loud combat surging upward through the tower’s complex passages. With an effort, he ignored everything else around him, concentrated on the tower. Then through the hoarse commands, the clash of weapons, the raw cries of hunger and pain, the tumult of urgent feet, he sensed Satansfist’s attack on the outer wall of the tower. The Raver threw fierce bolts of Illearth power at the exposed coigns and windows, occasionally at Lord Amatin herself; and under the cover of these blasts, his creatures threw up ladders against the wall, swarmed through the openings.

In the stone under his feet, High Lord Mhoram could feel the inner gates groaning.

Quickly, he turned to one of the warriors, a tense Stonedownor woman. “Go to the tower. Find Warmark Quaan. Say that I command him to withdraw from the tower. Say that he must bring Lord Amatin with him. Go.”

She saluted and ran. A few moments later, he saw her dash over the courtyard along one of the crosswalks.

By that time, he had already returned to the battle. With Lord Trevor working doggedly at his side, he renewed his attack on the earthen pressure building against Revelstone’s inner gates. While the supportive power of the Gravelingases vibrated in the stone under him, he gathered all his accumulated ferocity and drove it at the crush of dead. Now he knew clearly what he hoped to achieve; he wanted to cover the flagstones of the courtyard with so much sand that the blind, shambling shapes would have no solid footing from which to press forward. Trevor’s aid seemed to uplift his effectiveness, and he shattered dead by tens and scores until his staff hummed in his hands and the air around him became so charged with blue force that he appeared to emanate Lords-fire.

Yet while he laboured, wielded his power like a scythe through Satansfist’s ill crop, he kept part of his attention cocked toward the crosswalks. He was watching for Quaan and Amatin.

A short time later, the first crosswalk fell. The battered remnant of an Eoman dashed along it out of the tower, rabidly pursued by Cavewights. Archers sent the Cavewights plunging to the courtyard, and as soon as the warriors were safe, the walk’s cables were cut. The wooden span swung clattering down and crashed against the wall of the tower.

The tumult of battle echoed out of the tower. Abruptly, Warmark Quaan appeared on one of the upper spans. Yelling stridently to make himself heard, he ordered all except the two highest crosswalks cut.

Mhoram shouted up to the Warmark, “Amatin!”

Quaan nodded, ran back into the tower.

The next two spans fell promptly, but the sentries at the third waited. After a moment, several injured warriors stumbled out onto the walk. Supporting each other, carrying the crippled, they struggled toward the Keep. But then a score of Stone-born creatures charged madly out of the tower. Defying arrows and swords, they threw the injured off the span and rushed on across the walk.

Grimly, deliberately, the sentries cut the cables.

Every enemy that appeared in the doorways where the spans had been was killed or beaten back by a hail of fiery arrows. The higher crosswalks fell in swift succession. Only two remained for the survivors in the tower.

Now Lord Trevor was panting dizzily at the High Lord’s side, and Mhoram himself felt weak with strain. But he could not afford to rest. Tohrm’s Gravelingases would not be able to hold the gates alone.

Yet his flame lost its vehemence as the urgent moments passed. Fear for Quaan and Amatin disrupted his concentration. He wanted intensely to go after them. Warriors were escaping constantly across the last two spans, and he watched their flight with dread in his throat, aching to see their leaders.

One more span went down.

He stopped fighting altogether when Quaan appeared alone in the doorway of the last crosswalk.

Quaan shouted across to the Keep, but Mhoram could not make out the words. He watched with clenched breath as four warriors raced toward the Warmark.

Then a blue-robed figure moved behind Quaan —Amatin. But the two made no move to escape. When the warriors reached them, they both disappeared back into the tower.

Stifling in helplessness, Mhoram stared at the empty doorway as if the strength of his desire might bring the two back. He could hear the Raver’s hordes surging constantly upward.

A moment later, the four warriors reappeared. Between them, they carried Hearthrall Borillar.

He dangled in their hands as if he were dead.

Quaan and Amatin followed the four. When they all had gained the Keep, the last crosswalk fell. It seemed to make no sound amid the clamour from the tower.

A mist passed across Mhoram’s sight. He found that he was leaning heavily on Trevor; while he gasped for breath, he could not stand alone. But the Lord upheld him. When his faintness receded, he met Trevor’s gaze and smiled wanly.

Without a word, they turned back to the defence of the gates.

The tower had been lost, but the battle was not done. Unhindered now by Amatin’s fire, the dead were slowly able to push a path through the sand. The weight of their assault began to mount again. And the sensation of wrong that they sent shuddering through the stone increased. The High Lord felt Revelstone’s pain growing around him until it seemed to come from all sides. If he had not been so starkly confronted with these dead, he might have believed that the Keep was under attack at other points as well. But the present need consumed his attention. Revelstone’s only hope lay in burying the gates with sand before they broke.

He sensed Tohrm’s arrival behind him, but did not turn until Quaan and Lord Amatin had joined the Hearthrall. Then he dropped his power and faced the three of them.

Amatin was on the edge of prostration. Her eyes ached in the waifish pallor of her face; her hair stuck to her face in sweaty strands. When she spoke, her voice quivered. “He took a bolt meant for me. Borillar—he—I did not see samadhi’s aim in time.”

A moment passed before Mhoram found the self-mastery to ask quietly, “Is he dead?”

“No. The Healers—he will live. He is a Hirebrand—not defenceless.” She dropped to the stone and slumped against the wall as if the thews which held her up had snapped.

“I had forgotten he was with you,” Mhoram murmured. “I am ashamed.”

” You are ashamed!” The rough croak of Quaan’s voice caught at Mhoram’s attention. The Warmark’s face and arms were smeared with Wood, but he appeared uninjured. He could not meet Mhoram’s gaze. “The tower—lost!” He bit the words bitterly. “It is I who am ashamed. No Warmark would permit—Warmark Hile Troy would have found a means to preserve it.”

“Then find a means to aid us,” Tohrm groaned. “These gates cannot hold.”

The livid desperation in his tone pulled all the eyes on the abutment toward him. Tears streamed down his face as if he would never stop weeping, and his hands flinched distractedly in front of him, seeking something impossible in the air, something that would not break. And the gates moaned at him as if they were witnessing to the truth of his distress.

“We cannot,” he went on. “Cannot. Such force! May the stones forgive me! I am—we are unequal to this stress.”

Quaan turned sharply on his heel and strode away, shouting for timbers and Hirebrands to shore up the gates.

But Tohrm did not seem to hear the Warmark. His wet gaze held Mhoram as he whispered, “We are prevented. Something ill maims our strength. We do not comprehend—High Lord, is there other wrong here? Other wrong than weight and dead violence? I hear—all Revelstone’s great rock cries out to me of evil.”

High Lord Mhoram’s senses veered, and he swung into resonance with the gut-rock of the Keep as if he were melding himself with the stone. He felt all the weight of samadhi’s dead concentrated as if it were impending squarely against him; he felt his own soul gates groaning, detonating, cracking. For an instant, like an ignition of prophecy, he became the Keep, took its life and pain into himself, experienced the horrific might which threatened to rend it—and something else, too, something distinct, private, terrible. When he heard frantic feet clattering toward him along the main hall, he knew that Tohrm had glimpsed the truth.

One of the two men Mhoram had sent to watch over Trell dashed forward, jerked to a halt. His face was as white as terror, and he could hardly thrust words stuttering through his teeth.

“High Lord, come! He!—the Close! Oh, help him!”

Amatin covered her head with her arms as if she could not bear any more. But the High Lord said, “I hear you. Remember who you are. Speak clearly.”

The man gulped sickly several times. “Trell—you sent—he immolates himself. He will destroy the Close.”

A hoarse cry broke from Tohrm, and Amatin gasped, “Melenkurion!” Mhoram stared at the warrior as if he could not believe what he had heard. But he believed it; he felt the truth of it. He was appalled by the dreadful understanding that this knowledge also had come too late. Once again, he had failed of foresight, failed to meet the needs of the Keep. Spun by irrefusable exigencies, he wheeled on Lord Trevor and demanded, “Where is Loerya?”

For the first time since his rescue, Trevor’s exaltation wavered. He stood in his own blood as if his injury had no power to hurt him, but the mention of his wife pained him like a flaw in his new courage. “She,” he began, then stopped to swallow thickly. “She has left the Keep. Last night—she took the children upland—to find a place of hiding. So that they would be safe.”

“By the Seven!” Mhoram barked, raging at all his failures rather than at Trevor. “She is needed!” Revelstone’s situation was desperate, and neither Trevor nor Amatin were in any condition to go on fighting. For an instant, Mhoram felt that the dilemma could not be resolved, that he could not make these decisions for the Keep. But he was Mhoram son of Variol, High Lord by the choice of the Council. He had said to the warrior: Remember who you are. He had said it to Tohrm. He was High Lord Mhoram, incapable of surrender. He struck the stone with his staff so that its iron heel rang, and sprang to his work.

“Lord Trevor, can you hold the gates?”

Trevor met Mhoram’s gaze. “Do not fear, High Lord. If they can be held, I will hold them.”

“Good.” The High Lord turned his back on the courtyard. “Lord Amatin—Hearthrall Tohrm—will you aid me?”

For answer, Tohrm met the outreach of Amatin’s arm and helped her to her feet.

Taking the fear-blanched warrior by the arm, Mhoram hastened away into the Keep.

As he strode through the halls toward the Close, he asked the warrior to tell him what had happened. “He—it—” the man stammered. But then he seemed to draw a measure of steadiness from Mhoram’s grip. “It surpassed me, High Lord.”

“What has happened?” repeated Mhoram firmly.

“At your command, we followed him. When he learned that we did not mean to leave him, he reviled us. But his cursing showed us a part of the reason for your command. We were resolved to obey you. At last he turned from us like a broken man and led us to the Close.

“There he went to the great graveling pit and knelt beside it. While we watched over him from the doors, he wept and prayed, begging. High Lord, it is in my heart that he begged for peace. But he found no peace. When he raised his head, we saw—we saw abomination in his face. He—the graveling-flame came from the fire-stones. Fire sprang from the floor. We ran down to him. But the flames forbade us. They consumed my comrade. I ran to you.”

The words chilled Mhoram’s heart, but he replied to meet the pain and faltering in the warrior’s face. “His Oath of Peace was broken. He lost self-trust, and fell into despair. This is the shadow of the Grey Slayer upon him.”

After a moment, the warrior said hesitantly, “I have heard—it is said—is this not the Unbeliever’s doing?”

“Perhaps. In some measure, the Unbeliever is Lord Foul’s doing. But Trell’s despair is also in part my doing. It is Trell’s own doing. The Slayer’s great strength is that our mortal weakness may be so turned against us.”

He spoke as calmly as he could, but before he was within a hundred yards of the Close, he began to feel the heat of the flames. He had no doubt that this was the source of the other ill Tohrm had sensed. Hot waves of desecration radiated in all directions from the council chamber. As he neared the high wooden doors, he saw that they were smouldering, nearly aflame, and the walls shimmered as if the stone were about to melt. He was panting for breath, wincing against the heat, even before he reached the open doorway and looked down into the Close.

An inferno raged within it. Floor, tables, seats—all burned madly, spouted roaring flames like a convulsion of thunder. Heat scorched Mhoram’s face, crisped his hair. He had to blink tears away before he could peer down through the conflagration to its centre.

There Trell stood in the graveling pit like the core of a holocaust, bursting with flames and hurling great gouts of fire at the ceiling with both fists. His whole form blazed like incarnated damnation, white-hot torment striking out at the stone it loved and could not save.

The sheer power of it staggered Mhoram. He was looking at the onset of a Ritual of Desecration. Trell had found in his own despair the secret which Mhoram had guarded so fearfully, and he was using that secret against Revelstone. If he were not stopped, the gates would only be the first part of the Keep to break, the first and least link in a chain of destruction which might tear the whole plateau to rubble.

He had to be stopped. That was imperative. But Mhoram was not a Gravelingas, had no stone-lore to counter the might which made this fire possible. He turned to Tohrm.

“You are of the rhadhamaerl!” he shouted over the raving of the fire. “You must silence this flame!”

“Silence it?” Tohrm was staring, aghast, into the blaze; he had the stricken look of a man witnessing the ravage of his dearest love. “Silence it?” He did not shout; Mhoram could only comprehend him by reading his lips. “I have no strength to equal this. I am a Gravelingas of the rhadhamaerl—not Earthpower incarnate. He will destroy us all.”

“Tohrm!” the High Lord cried. “You are the Hearthrall of Lord’s Keep! You or no one can meet this need!”

Tohrm mouthed soundlessly, “How?”

“I will accompany you! I will give you my strength—I will place all my power in you!”

The Hearthrall’s eyes rolled fearfully away from the Close and hauled themselves by sheer force of will into focus on the High Lord’s face.

“We will burn.”

“We will endure!”

Tohrm met Mhoram’s demand for a long moment. Then he groaned. He could not refuse to give himself for the sake of the Keep’ s stone. ” If you are with me,” he said silently through the roar.

Mhoram whirled to Amatin. “Tohrm and I will go into the Close. You must preserve us from the fire. Put your power around us—protect us.”

She nodded distractedly, pushed a damp strand of hair out of her face. “Go,” she said weakly. “Already the table melts.”

The High Lord saw that she was right. Before their eyes, the table slumped into magma, poured down to the lowest level of the Close and into the pit around Trell’s feet.

Mhoram called his power into readiness and rested the shaft of his staff on Tohrm’s shoulder. Together, they faced the Close, waited while Amatin built a defence around them. The sensation of it swarmed over their skin like hiving insects, but it kept back the heat.

When she signalled to them, they started down into the Close as if they were struggling into a furnace.

Despite Amatin’s protection, the heat slammed into them like the fist of a cataclysm. Tohrm’s tunic began to scorch. Mhoram felt his own robe blackening. All the hair on their heads and arms shrivelled. But the High Lord put heat out of his mind; he concentrated on his staff and Tohrm. He could feel the Hearthrall singing now, though he heard nothing but the deep, ravenous howl of the blaze. Tuning his power to the pitch of Tohrm’s song, he sent all his resources running through it.

The savage flames backed slightly away from them as they moved, and patches of unburned rock appeared like stepping-stones under Tohrm’s feet. They walked downward like a gap in the hell of Trell’s rage.

But the conflagration sealed behind them instantly. As they drew farther from the doors, Amatin’s defence weakened; distance and flame interfered. Mhoram’s flesh stung where his robe smouldered against it, and his eyes hurt so badly that he could no longer see. Tohrm’s song became more and more like a scream as they descended. By the time they reached the level of the pit, where Loric’s krill still stood embedded in its stone, Mhoram knew that if he did not take his strength away from Tohrm and use it for protection they would both roast at Trell’s feet.

“Trell!” Tohrm screamed soundlessly. “You are a Gravelingas of the rhadhamaerl! Do not do this!”

For an instant, the fury of the inferno paused. Trell looked at them, seemed to see them, recognize them.

“Trell!”

But he had fallen too far under the power of his own holocaust. He pointed a rigid, accusing finger, then stooped to the graveling and heaved a double armful of fire at them.

At the same moment, a thrill of strength ran through Mhoram. Amatin’s protection steadied, stiffened. Though the force of Trell’s attack knocked Tohrm back into Mhoram’s arms, the fire did not touch them. And Amatin’s sudden discovery of power called up an answer in the High Lord. With a look like joy gleaming in his eyes, he swept aside all his self-restraints and turned to his secret understanding of desecration. That secret contained might—might which the Lords had failed to discover because of their Oath of Peace—might which could be used to preserve as well as destroy. Despair was not the only unlocking emotion. Mhoram freed his own passion and stood against the devastation of the Close.

Power coursed vividly in his chest and arms and staff. Power made even his flesh and blood seem like invulnerable bone. Power shone out from him to oppose Trell’s ill. And the surge of his strength restored Tohrm. The Hearthrall regained his feet, summoned his lore; with all of his and Mhoram’s energy, he resisted Trell.

Confronting each other, standing almost face to face, the two Gravelingases wove their lore-secret gestures, sang their potent rhadhamaerl invocations. While the fire raged as if Revelstone were about to crash down upon them, they commanded the blaze, wrestled will against will for mastery of it.

Tohrm was exalted by Mhoram’s support. With the High Lord’s power resonating in every word and note and gesture, renewing him, fulfilling his love for the stone, he bent back the desecration. After a last convulsive exertion, Trell fell to his knees, and his fire began to fail.

It ran out of the Close like the recession of a tide—slowly at first, then faster, as the force which had raised it broke. The heat declined; cool fresh air poured around Mhoram from the airways of the Keep. Sight returned to his scorched eyes. For a moment, he feared that he would lose consciousness in relief.

Weeping with joy and grief, he went to help Tohrm lift Trell Atiaran-mate from the graveling pit. Trell gave no sign that he felt them, knew in any way that they were present. He looked around with hollow eyes, muttering brokenly, “Intact. There is nothing intact. Nothing.” Then he covered his head with his arms and huddled into himself on the floor at Mhoram’s feet, shaking as if he needed to sob and could not.

Tohrm met Mhoram’s gaze. For a long moment, they looked into each other’s faces, measuring what they had done together. Tohrm’s features had the burned aspect of a wilderland, a place that would never grin again. But his emotion was clear and clean as he murmured at last, “We will grieve for him. The rhadhamaerl will grieve. The time has come for mourning.”

From the top of the stairs, an excited voice cried, “High Lord! The dead! They have all fallen into sand! Satansfist has exhausted this attack. The gates hold!”

Through his tears, Mhoram looked around the Close. It was badly damaged. The Lords’ table and chairs had melted, the steps were uneven, and most of the lower tiers had been misshaped by the fire. But the place had survived. The Keep had survived. Mhoram nodded to Tohrm. “It is time.”

His sight was so blurred with tears that he seemed to see two blue-robed figures moving down the stairs toward him. He blinked his tears away, and saw that Lord Loerya was with Amatin.

Her presence explained the protection which had saved him and Tohrm; she had joined her strength to Amatin’s.

When she reached him, she looked gravely into his face. He searched her for shame or distress but saw only regret. “I left them with the Unfettered One at Glimmermere,” she explained quietly. “Perhaps they will be safe. I returned—when I found courage.”

Then something at Mhoram’s side caught her attention. Wonder lit her face, and she turned him so that he was looking at the table which held Loric’s krill.

The table was intact.

In its centre, the gem of the krill blazed with a pure white fire, as radiant as hope.

Mhoram heard someone say, “Ur-Lord Covenant has returned to the Land.” But he could no longer tell what was happening around him. His tears seemed to blind all his senses.

Following the light of the gem, he reached out his hand and clasped the krill’s haft. In its intense heat, he felt the truth of what he had heard. The Unbeliever had returned.

With his new might, he gripped the krill and pulled it easily from the stone. Its edges were so sharp that when he held the knife in his hand he could see their keenness. His power protected him from the heat.

He turned to his companions with a smile that felt like a ray of sunshine on his face.

“Summon Lord Trevor,” he said gladly. “I have —a knowledge of power that I wish to share with you.”