The Wounded Land (61 page)

Looking vaguely around the gully, he noticed the Stonedownors. The sight of them stopped him.

They sat a short distance away. Sunder held the
rukh
. Faint red flames licked the triangle. Hollian supported him as she had when he had first attuned himself to the
rukh
.

Covenant could not guess what they were doing. He had not paid any attention to them for too long, had no idea what they were thinking.

Shortly they dropped their fires. For a moment, they sat gazing at each other, holding hands as if they needed courage.

“It cannot be regretted.” Her whisper wafted up the gully like a voice of starlight. “We must bear what comes as we can.”

“Yes,” Sunder muttered. “As we can.” Then his tone softened. “I can bear much—with you.” As they rose to their feet, he drew her to him, kissed her forehead.

Covenant looked away, feeling like an intruder. But the Stonedownors came straight to him; and Sunder addressed him with an air of grim purpose. “Ur-Lord, this must be told. From the moment of your request”—he stressed the word ironically—“that I take up this
rukh
, there has been a fear in me. While Memla held her
rukh
, the Clave knew her. Therefore the
Grim
came upon us. I feared that in gaining mastery of her
rukh
I, too, would become known to the Clave.

“Covenant—” He faltered for only an instant. “My fear is true. We have ascertained it. I lack the skill to read the purpose of the Clave—but I have felt their touch, and know that I am exposed to them.”

“Ur-Lord,” asked Hollian quietly, “what must we do?”

“Just what we’ve been doing.” Covenant hardly heard her, hardly heard his answer. “Run. Fight, if we have to.” He was remembering Linden’s face in convulsions, her rigid mouth, the sweat streaks in her hair. And wild magic. “Live.”

Fearing that he was about to lose control, he turned away.

Who was he, to talk to others about living and striving, when he could not even handle the frightening growth of his own power? The venom! It was part of him now. As the wild magic became more possible to him, everything else seemed more and more impossible. He was so capable of destruction. And incapable of anything else.

He picked up a jug of
metheglin
and drank deeply to keep himself from groaning aloud.

He was thinking, Power corrupts. Because it is unsure. It is not enough. Or it is too much. It teaches doubt. Doubt makes violence.

The pressure for power was growing in him. Parts of him were hungry for the rage of wild fire.

For a time, he was so afraid of himself, of the consequences of his own passions, that he could not eat. He drank the thick mead and stared into the flames, trying to believe that he would be able to contain himself.

He had killed twenty-one people. They were vivid to him now in the approaching dawn. Twenty-one! Men and women whose only crime had been that their lives had been deformed by a Raver.

When he raised his head, he found Linden standing near him.

She was insecure on her feet, still extremely weak; but she was able to hold herself upright. She gazed at him soberly. As he dropped his eyes, she said with an echo of her old severity, “You should eat something.”

He could not refuse her. He picked up a piece of dried meat. She nodded, then moved woodenly away to examine Cail. Covenant chewed abstractly while he watched her.

Cail appeared to be both well and ill. He seemed to have recovered from the Sunbane sickness, regained his native solidity and composure. But his injury was still hotly infected;
voure
had no efficacy against the poison of the Courser’s spur.

Linden glared at the wound as if it wrung her nerves, then demanded fire and boiling water. Hergrom and Ceer obeyed without comment. While the water heated, she borrowed Hollian’s dirk, burned it clean in the flames, then used it to lance Cail’s infection. He bore
the pain stoically; only a slight tension between his brows betrayed what he felt. Blood and yellow fluid splashed a stain onto the sand. Her hands were precise in spite of her weakness. She knew exactly where and how deeply to cut.

When the water was ready, she obtained a blanket from Brinn. Slashing the material into strips, she used some of them to wash out the wound; with others, she made a crude bandage. Fine beads of sweat mirrored the firelight from Cail’s forehead; but he did not wince. He did not appear to be breathing.

“You’ll be all right as soon as we stop the infection.” Her voice sounded impersonal, as if she were reading from some medical tome. “You’re healthy enough for any five people.” Then her severity frayed. “This is going to hurt. If I could think of any way to kill the pain, I’d do it. But I can’t. I left everything in my bag.”

“Have no concern, Linden Avery,” Cail replied evenly. “I am well. I will serve you.”

“Serve yourself!” she grated at once. “Take care of that arm.” As she spoke, she made sure that his bandage was secure. Then she poured boiling water over the fabric.

Cail made no sound. She stumbled to her feet, moved away from him and sat down against the gully wall, as if she could not bear the sight of his courage.

A moment later, Vain caught Covenant’s attention. The first light of the sun touched Vain’s head, etched it out of the gloaming—a cynosure of blackness and secrets. Sunder and Hollian went quickly to find rock. Covenant helped Linden erect. The
Haruchai
stood. All the company faced the dawn.

The sun broached the rim of the gully, wearing brown like the cerements of the world. Thirst and hallucination, bleached bones, fever-blisters. But Linden gasped involuntarily, “It’s weaker!”

Then, before Covenant could grasp what she meant, she groaned in disappointment. “No. I must be losing my mind. It hasn’t changed.”

Changed? Her bitterness left him in a whirl of anxiety as the quest broke camp, mounted the Coursers, and set off eastward. Was she so badly stressed by fear that she could no longer trust her eyes? In her convulsions, sweat had darkened her hair like streaks of damp anguish. But she seemed to be recovering. Her wound had been relatively minor. The company rode the sun-trammeled wasteland of the North Plains as if they were traversing an anvil. Why did he know so little about her?

But the next morning she was steadier, surer. She carried her head as if it had ceased to pain her. When she faced the dawn and saw the third desert sun rise, her whole body tensed. “I was right,” she gritted. “It
is
weaker.” A moment later, she cried, “There!” Her arm accused the horizon. “Did you see it? Right there, it changed! It was weaker and then it became as strong as ever. As if it crossed a boundary.”

No one spoke. Sunder and Hollian watched Linden as if they feared that the Sunbane sickness had affected her mind. The
Haruchai
gazed at her without expression.

“I saw it.” Her voice stiffened. “I’m not crazy.”

Covenant winced. “We don’t have your eyes.”

She glared at him for an instant, then turned on her heel and strode away toward the waiting Coursers.

Now she rode as if she were angry. In spite of the dry brutality of the sun and the strain of clinging to Clash’s back, her strength was
returning. And with it came ire. Her ability to see had already cost her so much; and now her companions appeared to doubt what she saw. Covenant himself half disbelieved her. Any weakening of the Sunbane was a sign of hope. Surely therefore it was false? After what she had been through?

When the company stopped for the night, she ate a meal, tended Cail’s arm, and set herself to sleep. But long before dawn, she was pacing the dead shale as if she were telling the moments until a revelation. Her tension articulated clearly how much she needed to be right, how sorely her exacerbated soul needed relief.

That morning, the sun rose in red pestilence. It tinged the stark outlines of the wilderland crimson, making the desert roseate, lovely, and strange, like a gilded burial ground; but though he strained his sight until his brain danced with images of fire, Covenant could not descry any lessening of the Sunbane. Yet Linden gave a fierce nod as if she had been vindicated. And after a moment, Brinn said impassively, “The Chosen is farsighted.” He used her title like a recognition of power. “The corruption about the sun has lessened.”

“I am surpassed,” Sunder muttered in frustration. “I do not see this lessening.”

“You will,” Linden replied. “We’re getting closer.”

Covenant was suddenly dizzy with hope. “Closer to what?” Was the Sunbane failing?

“Inquire of the Chosen.” Brinn’s shrug disavowed all responsibility for what he saw. “We know nothing of this.”

Covenant turned to her.

“I’ll tell you.” She did not meet his gaze. “When I’m sure.”

He swallowed a curse, gritted himself still.
It’s too much
, she had said.
I’ll try
. He understood. She was trying. She wanted to trust what she saw and feared to be misled, to be hurt again. With difficulty, he left her alone.

She continued to stare eastward while the
Haruchai
distributed food, water, and
voure
. She ate heedlessly, ignoring Brinn’s people as they readied the Coursers. But then, just as Sunder brought the beasts forward, her arm stabbed out, and she barked, “There!”

Brinn glanced at the sun. “Yes. The corruption regains its strength.”

Covenant groaned to himself. No wonder she did not wish to explain what she saw. How could she bear it?

Morosely he mounted Clash behind Linden and Brinn. The quest moved out across the ragged wasteland.

Under this sun, the desert became a place of silence and scorpions. Only the rattle of the Coursers’ hooves punctuated the windless air; and soon that noise became part of the silence as well. Insects scuttled over the rocks, or waded the sand, and made no sound. The sky was as empty of life as a tomb. Slowly Covenant’s mood became red and fatal. The Plains seemed eerie with all the blood he had shed. Involuntarily he toyed with his ring, turning it around his finger as if his bones itched for fire. Yet he loathed killing, loathed himself. And he was afraid.

We have to accept who we are
. Where had he learned the arrogance or at least the insensitivity to say such things?

That night, his memories and dreams made his skin burn as if he were eager for immolation, for a chance to anneal his old guilt in flame. Lena filled his sight as if she had been chiseled on the backs of his eyes. A child, in spite of her body’s new maturity. He had
struck her, knotted his hands in her shift and rent—The memory of her scream was distilled nightmare to him.
A moral leper
.

You are mine
.

He was a creature of wild magic and doubt; and the long night, like the whole Land stretched helpless under the Sunbane, was also a desert.

But the next morning, when the sun rose in its crimson infestation, he, too, could see that its aurora was weaker. It seemed pale, almost uncertain. Sunder and Hollian could see it as well.

And this time the weakness did not vanish until midmorning. Ascending from the first quarter of the sky, the aura crossed a threshold; and the Sunbane closed over the Plains like a lid. Intuitions tried to clarify themselves in Covenant’s head; he felt that he should have been able to name them. But he could not. Lacking Linden’s eyes, he seemed also to lack the ability to interpret what he saw. A strange blindness—

That evening, the company reached Landsdrop.

Now Covenant knew where he was. Landsdrop was the precipice which separated the Upper Land in the west from the Lower Land in the east. It stretched roughly north-northwest from deep in the Southron Range far toward the unexplored Northron Climbs. Many leagues south of him, Mount Thunder, ancient Gravin Threndor, crouched against the cliff, kneeling with its knees on the Lower Land and its elbows on the Upper. Deep in its dark roots lay the place where the Illearth Stone had been found. And deep in its dark heart was the secret chamber of Kiril Threndor, where Lord Foul the Despiser now made his home.

The sun was setting as the quest halted. The shadow of Landsdrop, three or four thousand feet high in this region, obscured all the east. But Covenant knew what lay ahead. The deadly marsh of Sarangrave Flat.

In past ages, the Sarangrave had become what it was—a world of intricate waterways, exotic life, and cunning peril—through the effects of the river called the Denies Course. This water emerged between the knees of Mount Thunder from the catacombs in the bowels of the mountain, where it had run through Wightwarrens and Demondim breeding dens, through charnals and offal pits, laboratories and forges, until it was polluted by the most irrefragable filth. As sewage spread throughout the Flat from the river, it corrupted a once-fair region, changed a marsh home for egrets and orchids into a wild haven for the misborn. During the last wars, Lord Foul had found much of the raw material for his armies in Sarangrave Flat.

Covenant knew about the Flat because at one time he had seen it for himself, from Landsdrop to the south of Mount Thunder. He had seen with Land-sharpened eyes, vision he no longer possessed. But he had other knowledge of the region as well. He had heard some things during his visits to Revelstone. And he had learned more from Runnik of the Bloodguard. At one time, Runnik had accompanied Korik and two Lords, Hyrim and Shetra, on a mission to Seareach, to ask the aid of the Giants against Lord Foul. Lord Shetra had been slain in the Sarangrave, and Runnik had barely survived to bring back the tale.

Covenant’s guts squirmed at the thought of the Sarangrave under a sun of pestilence. Beyond doubt, he was going to have to tell Runnik’s tale to his companions.

The
Haruchai
set camp a stone’s throw from the great cliff because Covenant refused to go any closer in the dark; he already felt too susceptible to the lure of precipices. After he had eaten, fortified himself with
metheglin
, he huddled near the jumping allusions of the
campfire, wrapped his memories around him, and asked the quest to listen.

Linden sat down opposite him. He wanted to feel that she was nearby; but the intervening fire distanced her. Sunder and Hollian were vague at the edges of his sight. His attention narrowed to the crackling wood and the recollection of Runnik’s tale.