The Wounded Land (36 page)

Covenant stared with, surprise and growing trepidation as he moved through the disorganized cluster of huts. How—? he wondered. How can people this careless survive the Sunbane?

Yet in other ways they did not appear careless. Their eyes smoldered with an odd combination of belligerence and fright as they regarded him. They reminded him strangely of Drool Rockworm, the Cavewight who had been ravaged almost to death by his lust for the Illearth Stone.

Covenant’s captors took him to the largest and best-made of the houses. There, the leader called out, “Graveler!” After a few moments, a woman emerged and came down the ladder to face Covenant and Vain. She was tall, and moved with a blend of authority and desperation. Her robe was a vivid emerald color—the first bright raiment Covenant had seen—and it was whole; but she wore it untidily. Her hair lay in a frenzy of snarls. She had been weeping; her visage was dark and swollen, battered by tears.

He was vaguely confused to meet a Graveler in a Woodhelven. Formerly the people of wood and stone had kept their lores separate. But he had already seen evidence that such distinctions of devotion no longer obtained. After Lord Foul’s defeat, the villages must have had a long period of interaction and sharing. Therefore Crystal Stonedown had raised an eh-Brand who used wood, and Stonemight Woodhelven was led by a Graveler.

She addressed the leader of the captors. “Brannil?”

The man poked Covenant’s shoulder. “Graveler,” he said in a tone of accusation, “this one spoke the name of the stranger, companion to the Stonedownors.” Grimly he continued, “He is the Halfhand. He bears the white ring.”

She looked down at Covenant’s hand. When her eyes returned to his face, they were savage. “By the Stonemight!” she snarled, “we will yet attain recompense.” Her head jerked a command. Turning away, she went toward her house.

Covenant was slow to respond. The woman’s appearance—and the mention of his friends—had stunned him momentarily. But he shook himself alert, shouted after the Graveler, “Wait!”

She paused. Over her shoulder, she barked, “Brannil, has he shown power against you?”

“No, Graveler,” the man replied.

“Then he has none. If he resists you, strike him senseless.” Stiffly she reentered her dwelling and closed the door.

At once, hands grabbed Covenant’s arms, dragged him toward another house, thrust him at the ladder. Unable to regain his balance, he fell against the rungs. Immediately several men forced him up the ladder and through the doorway with such roughness that he had to catch himself on the far wall.

Vain followed him. No one had touched the Demondim-spawn. He climbed into the hut of his own accord, as if he were unwilling to be separated from Covenant.

The door slammed shut. It was tied with a length of vine.

Muttering, “Damnation,” Covenant sank down the wall to sit on the woven-wood floor and tried to think.

The single room was no better than a hovel. He could see through chinks in the walls and the floor. Some of the wood looked rotten with age. Anybody with strength or a knife could have broken out. But freedom was not precisely what he wanted. He wanted Linden, wanted to find Sunder and Hollian. And he had no knife. His resources of strength did not impress him.

For a moment, he considered invoking his one command from Vain, then rejected the idea. He was not that desperate yet. For some time, he studied the village through the gaps in the walls, watched the afternoon shadows lengthen toward evening in the canyon. But he saw nothing that answered any of his questions. The hovel oppressed him. He felt more like a prisoner—more ineffectual and doomed—than he had in Mithil Stonedown. A sense of impending panic constricted his heart. He found himself clenching his fists, glaring at Vain as if the Demondim-spawn’s passivity were an offense to him.

His anger determined him. He checked through the front wall to be sure the two guards were still there. Then he carefully selected a place in the center of the door where the wood looked weak, measured his distance from it, and kicked.

The house trembled. The wood let out a dull splitting noise.

The guards sprang around, faced the door.

Covenant kicked the spot again. Three old branches snapped, leaving a hole the size of his hand.

“Ware, prisoner!” shouted a guard. “You will be clubbed!”

Covenant answered with another kick. Splinters showed along one of the inner supports.

The guards hesitated, clearly reluctant to attempt opening the door while it was under assault.

Throwing his weight into the blow, Covenant hit again.

One guard poised himself at the foot of the ladder. The other sprinted toward the Graveler’s dwelling.

Covenant grinned fiercely. He went on kicking at the door, but did not tire himself by expending much effort. When the Graveler arrived, he gave the wood one last blow and stopped.

At a command from the Graveler, a guard ascended the ladder. Watching Covenant warily through the hole, he untied the lashings, then sprang away to evade the door if Covenant kicked it again.

Covenant did not. He pushed the door aside with his hand and stood framed in the entryway to confront the Graveler. Before she could address him, he snapped, “I want to talk to you.”

She drew herself up haughtily. “Prisoner, I do not wish to speak with you.”

He overrode her. “I don’t give a good goddamn what you wish. If you think I don’t have power, you’re sadly mistaken. Why else does the Clave want me dead?” Bluffing grimly, he rasped, “Ask your men what happened when they attacked my companion.”

The narrowing of her eyes revealed that she had already been apprised of Vain’s apparent invulnerability.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” he went on, denying her time to think. “I’m not afraid of you. But I don’t want to hurt you. I can wait until you decide to release me yourself. If you’ll answer some questions, I’ll stop breaking this house down.”

Her eyes wandered momentarily, returned to his face. “You have no power.”

“Then what are you afraid of?”

She hesitated. He could see that she wanted to turn away; but his anger undermined her confidence. Apparently her confidence had already taken heavy punishment from some other source. After a moment, she murmured thickly, “Ask.”

At once, he said, “You took three prisoners—a woman named Linden Avery and two Stonedownors. Where are they?”

The Graveler did not meet his gaze. Somehow his question touched the cause of her distress. “They are gone.”

“Gone?” A lurch of dread staggered his heart. “What do you mean?” She did not reply. “
Did you kill them?
”

“No!” Her look was one of outraged hunger, the look of a predator robbed of its prey. “It was our
right
! The Stonedownors were enemies! Their blood was forfeit by right of capture. They possessed Sunstone and
lianar
, also forfeit. And the blood of their companion was forfeit as well. The friend of enemies is also an enemy. It was our right.

“But we were reft of our right,” A corrupt whine wounded her voice. “The three fell to us in the first day of the fertile sun. And that same night came Santonin na-Mhoram-in on his Courser.” Her malignant grief was louder than shouting. “In the name of the Clave, we were riven of that which was ours. Your companions are nothing, Halfhand. I acceded them to the Rider without compunction. They are gone to Revelstone, and I pray that their blood may rot within them.”

Revelstone? Covenant groaned. Hellfire! The strength drained from his knees; he had to hold himself up on the doorframe.

But the Graveler was entranced by her own suffering, and did not notice him. “Yes, and rot the Clave as well,” she screamed. “The Clave and all who serve the na-Mhoram. For by Santonin we were riven also of the power to live. The Stonemight—!” Her teeth gnashed. “When I discover who betrayed our possession of the Stonemight to Santonin na-Mhoram-in, I will rend the beating heart from that body and crush it in my hands!”

Abruptly she thrust her gaze, as violent as a lance, at Covenant. “I pray your white ring is such a periapt as the Riders say. That will be our recompense. With your ring, I will bargain for the return of the Stonemight. Yes, and more as well. Therefore make ready to die, Halfhand. In the dawn I will spill your life. It will give me joy.”

Fear and loss whirled through Covenant, deafening him to the Graveler’s threat, choking his protests in his throat. He could grasp nothing clearly except the peril of his friends. Because he had insisted on going into Andelain—

The Graveler turned on her heel, strode away: he had to struggle to gasp after her, “When did they go?”

She did not reply. But one of the guards said warily, “At the rising of the second fertile sun.”

Damnation! Almost two days—! On a Courser! As the guards shoved him back into the hovel and retied the door, Covenant was thinking stupidly, I’ll never catch up with them.

A sea of helplessness broke over him. He was imprisoned here while every degree of the sun, every heartbeat of time, carried his companions closer to death. Sunder had said that the Earth was a prison for a-Jeroth of the Seven Hells, but that was not true: it was a jail for him alone, Thomas Covenant the Incapable. If Stonemight Woodhelven had released him at this moment, he would not have been able to save his friends.

And the Woodhelven would not release him; that thought penetrated his dismay slowly. They intended to kill him. At dawn. To make use of his blood. He unclenched his fists, raised his head.

Looking through the walls, he saw that the canyon had already fallen into shadow. Sunset was near; evening approached like a leper’s fate. Mad anguish urged him to hurl himself against the weakened door; but the futility of that action restrained him. In his fever for escape, for the power to redeem what he had done to his companions, he turned to his wedding band.

Huddling there against the wall in the gathering dusk, he considered everything he knew about wild magic, remembered everything that had ever given rise to white fire. But he found no hope. He had told Linden the truth: in all his past experience, every exertion of wild magic had been triggered by the proximity of some other power. His final confrontation with Lord Foul would have ended in failure and Desecration if the Despiser’s own weapon, the Illearth Stone, had not been so mighty, had not raised such a potent response from the white gold.

Yet Linden had told him that in his delirium at Crystal Stonedown his ring had emitted light even before the Rider had put forth power. He clung to that idea. High Lord Mhoram had once said to him,
You are the white gold
. Perhaps the need for a trigger arose in him, in his own unresolved reluctance, rather than in the wild magic itself. If that were true—

Covenant settled into a more comfortable position and composed his turmoil with an effort of will. Deliberately he began to search his memory, his passions, his need, for the key which had unlocked wild magic in his battle with Lord Foul.

He remembered the completeness of his abjection, the extremity of his peril. He remembered vividly the cruelty with which the Despiser had wracked him, striving to compel the surrender of his ring. He remembered the glee with which Lord Foul had envisioned the Land as a cesspit of leprosy.

And he remembered the awakening of his rage for lepers, for victims and destitution. That passion—clear and pure beyond any fury he had ever felt—had carried him into the eye of the paradox, the place of power between conflicting impossibilities: impossible to believe the Land real; impossible to refuse the Land’s need. Anchored by the contradiction itself, made strong by rage, he had faced Lord Foul, and had prevailed.

He remembered it all, re-experienced it with an intensity that wrung his heart. And from his intensity he fashioned a command for the wild magic—a command of fire.

The ring remained inert on the second finger of his half-hand. It was barely visible in the dimness.

Despair twisted his guts; but he repressed it, clenched his purpose in both hands like a strangles Trigger, he panted. Proximity. Bearing memory like an intaglio of flame in his mind, he rose to his feet and confronted the only external source of power available to him.
Swinging his half-fist through a tight arc, he struck Vain in the stomach.

Pain shot through his hand; red bursts like exploding carbuncles staggered across his mind. But nothing happened. Vain did not even look at him. If the Demondim-spawn contained power, he held it at a depth Covenant could not reach.

“God damn it!” Covenant spat, clutching his damaged hand and shaking with useless ire. “Don’t you understand? They’re going to kill me!”

Vain did not move. His black features had already disappeared in the darkness.

“Damnation.” With an effort that made him want to weep, Covenant fought down his pointless urge to smash his hands against Vain. “Those ur-viles probably lied to Foamfollower. You’re probably just going to stand there and watch them cut my throat.”

But sarcasm could not save him. His companions were in such peril because he had left them defenseless. And Foamfollower had been killed in the cataclysm of Covenant’s struggle with the Illearth Stone. Foamfollower, who had done more to heal the Despiser’s ill than any wild magic—killed because Covenant was too frail and extreme to find any other answer. He sank to the floor like a ruin overgrown with old guilt, and sat there dumbly repeating his last hope until exhaustion dragged him into slumber.

Twice he awakened, pulse hammering, heart aflame, from dreams of Linden wailing for him. After the second, he gave up sleep; he did not believe he could bear that nightmare a third time. Pacing around Vain, he kept vigil among his inadequacies until dawn.

Gradually the eastern sky began to etiolate. The canyon walls detached themselves from the night, and were left behind like deposits of darkness. Covenant heard people moving outside the hut, and braced himself.

Feet came up the ladder; hands fumbled at the lashings.

When the vine dropped free, he slammed his shoulder against the door, knocking the guard off the ladder. At once, he sprang to the ground, tried to flee.