At her back champed five of the Clave's huge Coursers.
Brinn nodded to her. “Memla na-Mhoram-in,” he said flatly. “The ur-Lord has awaited you.”
She gave Brinn a gesture of recognition without taking her eyes from Covenant. Her gruff voice both revealed and controlled her wrath. “I cannot live with lies. I will accompany you.”
Covenant had no words for her. Mutely, he touched his right hand to his heart, then raised the palm toward her.
“I have brought Coursers,” she said. “They were not well defended-but well enough to hamper me. Only five could I wrest from so many of the na-Mhoram-cro.” The beasts were laden with supplies. “They are Din, Clang, Clangor, Annoy, and Clash.”
Covenant nodded. His head went on bobbing feebly, as if the muscles of his neck had fallen into caducity.
She gripped his gaze. “But one matter must be open between us. With my rukh, I can wield the Banefire to aid our journey. This the Clave cannot prevent. But I in turn cannot prevent them from knowing where I am and what I do, through my rukh. Halfhand.” Her tone took on an inflection of appeal. “I do not wish to set aside the sole power I possess.”
Her honesty and courage demanded an answer. With an effort that defocused his eyes and made his head spin, he said, “Keep it. I'll take the chance.”
His reply softened her features momentarily. “When first we met,” she said, “your misdoubt was just, though I knew it not. Yet trust is preferable.” Then, abruptly, she stiffened again. “But we must depart. Gibbon has gathered the Clave at the Banefire. While we delay, they raise the Grim against us.”
The Grim! Covenant could not block the surge of his dismay. It carried him over the edge, and he plunged like dead stone into darkness.
As he fell, he heard a cold wail from Revelstone-a cry like the keening of the great Keep, promising loss and blood. Or perhaps the wail was within himself.
Twenty One: Sending
SOMETIME during the night, he wandered close to consciousness. He was being rocked on the back of a Courser. Arms reached around him from behind and knotted together over his heart. They supported him like bands of stone. Haruchai arms.
Someone said tensely, “Are you not a healer? You must succour him.”
“No.” Linden's reply sounded small and wan, and complete. It made him moan deep in his throat.
Glints of rukh-fire hurt his eyes. When he shut out the sight, he faded away once more.
The next time he looked up, he saw the grey of dawn in fragments through the monstrous jungle. The lightening of the sky lay directly ahead of him. He was mounted on Din, with Memla before him and Brinn behind. Another Courser, carrying Ceer and Hergrom, led the way along the line Memla created with her rukh. The rest of the company followed Din.
As Covenant fumbled toward wakefulness, Memla's path ran into an area of relatively clear ground under the shade of a towering stand of rhododendron. There she halted. Over her shoulder, she called to the company, “Remain mounted. The Coursers will spare us from the Sunbane.”
Behind him, Covenant heard Sunder mutter, “Then it is true-”
But Hergrom dropped to the ground, began to accept supplies handed down by Ceer; and Brinn said, “The Haruchai do not share this need to be warded.”
Immune? Covenant wondered dimly. Yes. How else had so many of them been able to reach Revelstone unwarped?
Then the sun began to rise, sending spangles of crimson and misery through the vegetation. Once again, the eh-Brand had foretold the Sunbane accurately.
When the first touch of the sun was past, Memla ordered the Coursers to their knees, controlling them all with her command. The company began to dismount.
Covenant shrugged off Brinn's help and tried to stand alone. He found that he could. He felt as pale and weak as an invalid; but his muscles were at least able to hold his weight.
Unsteadily, he turned to look back westward through the retreating night for some sign of the na-Mhoram's Grim.
The horizon seemed clear.
Near him, Sunder and Stell had descended from one Courser, Hollian and Harn from another. Cail helped Linden down from the fifth beast. Covenant faced her with his frailty and concern; but she kept her gaze to herself, locked herself in her loneliness as if the very nerves of her eyes, the essential marrow of her bones, had been humiliated past bearing.
He left her alone. He did not know what to do, and felt too tenuous to do it.
While the Haruchai prepared food for the company-dried meat, bread, fruit, and metheglin- Memla produced from one of her sacks a large leather pouch of distilled voure, the pungent sap Covenant's friends had once used to ward off insects under the sun of pestilence. Carefully, she dabbed the concentrate on each, of her companions, excluding only Vain. Covenant nodded at her omission. Perhaps rukh-fire could harm the Demondim-spawn. The Sunbane could not.
Covenant ate slowly and thoroughly, feeding his body's poverty. But all the time, a weight of apprehension impended toward him from the west. He had seen During Stonedown, had seen what the Grim could do. With an effort, he found his voice to ask Memla how long the raising of a Grim took.
She was clearly nervous. “That is uncertain,” she muttered. “The size of the Grim, and its range, must be considered.” Her gaze flicked to his face, leaving an almost palpable mark of anxiety across his cheek. “I read them. Here.” Her hands tightened on her rukh. “It will be very great.”
Very great, Covenant murmured. And he was so weak. He pressed his hands to the krill, and tried to remain calm.
A short time later, the company remounted. Memla drew on the Banefire to open a way for the huge Coursers. Again, Hergrom and Ceer-on Annoy, Memla said: the names of the beasts seemed important to her, as if she loved them in her blunt fashion-went first, followed by Covenant, Brinn, and the Rider on Din, then by Cail and Linden on Clash, Sunder and Stell on Clang, Harn and Hollian on Clangor. Vain brought up the rear as if he were being sucked along without volition in the wake of the Coursers.
Covenant dozed repeatedly throughout the day. He had been too severely drained; he could not keep himself awake. Whenever the company paused for food, water, and rest, he consumed all the aliment he was given, striving to recover some semblance of strength. But between stops the rocking of Din's stride unmoored his awareness, so that he rode tides of dream and dread and insects, and could not anchor himself.
In periods of wakefulness, he knew from the rigidity of Mania's back that she wanted to flee and flee, and never stop. She, too, knew vividly what the Grim could do. But, toward evening, her endurance gave out. Under the shelter of a prodigious Gilden, she halted the quest for the night.
At first, while she started a fire, the air thronged with flying bugs of every description; and the boughs and leaves of the tree seethed with things which crawled and bored. But voure protected the company. And gradually, as dusk seeped into the jungle, macerating the effect of the Sunbane, the insects began to disappear.
Their viscid stridulation faded as they retreated into gestation or sleep. Memla seated her weary bones beside the fire, dismissed the Coursers, and let the Haruchai care for her companions.
Sunder and Hollian seemed tired, as if they had not slept for days; but they were sturdy, with funds of stamina still untapped. Though they knew of the Grim, at least by rumour, their relief at escaping Revelstone outweighed their apprehension. They stood and moved together as if their imprisonment had made them intimate. Sunder seemed to draw ease from the eh-Brand, an anodyne for his old self-conflicts; her youth and her untormented sense of herself were a balm to the Graveller, who had shed his own wife and son and had chosen to betray his people for Covenant's sake. And she, in turn, found support and encouragement in his knotted resourcefulness, his determined struggle for conviction. They both had lost so much; Covenant was relieved to think that they could comfort each other. He could not have given them comfort.
But their companionship only emphasized Linden's isolation in his eyes. The R
aver had done something to her. And Covenant, who had experience with such things, dreaded knowing what it was-and dreaded the consequences of not knowing.
As he finished his meal, he arrived at the end of his ability to support his ignorance. He was sitting near the fire. Memla rested, half-asleep, on one side of him. On the other sat Sunder and Hollian. Four of the Haruchai stood guard beyond the tree. Brinn and Cail moved silently around the fringes of the Gilden, alert for peril. Vain stood at the edge of the light like the essence of all black secrets. And among them, across the fire from Covenant, Linden huddled within herself, with her arms clasped around her knees and her eyes fixed on the blaze, as if she were a complete stranger.
He could not bear it. He had invested so much hope in her and knew so little about her; he had to know why she was so afraid. But he had no idea how to confront her. Her hidden wound made her untouchable. So for his own sake, as well as for the sake of his companions, he cleared his throat and began to tell his tale.
He left nothing out. From Andelain and the Dead to Stonemight Woodhelven, from Vain's violence to Bamako's rhysh, from his run across the Centre Plains to Memla's revelation of the Clave's mendacity, he told it all. And then he described the soothtell as fully as he could. His hands would not remain still as he spoke; so much of the memory made him writhe. He tugged at his beard, knitted his fingers together, clutched his left fist over his wedding band, and told his friends what he had witnessed.
He understood now why the Raver had been willing to let him see the truth of the Land's history. Lord Foul wanted him to perceive the fetters of action and consequence which bound him to his guilt, wanted him to blame himself for the destruction of the Staff, and for the Sunbane, and for every life the Clave sacrificed. So that he would founder in culpability, surrender his ring in despair and self-abhorrence. Lord Foul, who laughed at lepers. At the last there will be but one choice for you. In that context, the venom in him made sense. It gave him power he could not control. Power to kill people. Guilt. It was a prophecy of his doom-a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That, too, he explained, hoping Linden would raise her eyes, look at him, try to understand. But she did not. Her mouth stretched into severity; but she held to her isolation. Even when he detailed how the seeds planted by his Dead had led him to conceive a quest for the One Tree, intending to make a new Staff of Law so that thereby he could oppose Lord Foul and contest the Sunbane without self-abandonment, even then she did not respond. Finally, he fell silent, bereft of words.
For a time, the company remained still with him. No one asked any questions; they seemed unwilling to probe the pain he had undergone. But then Sunder spoke. To answer Covenant, he told what had happened to Linden, Hollian, and him after Covenant had entered Andelain.
He described Santonin and the Stonemight, described the Rider's coercion, described the way in which he and Hollian had striven to convince Gibbon that Covenant was lost or dead. But after that, he had not much to tell. He had been cast into a cell with little food and water, and less hope. Hollian's plight had been the same. Both had heard the clamour of Covenant's first entrance into the hold, and nothing more.
Then Covenant thought that surely Linden would speak. Surely she would complete her part of the tale. But she did not. She hid her face against her knees and sat huddled there as if she were bracing herself against a memory full of whips.
“Linden.” How could he leave her alone? He needed the truth from her. “Now you know how Kevin must have felt.”
Kevin Landwaster, last of Berek's line. Linden had said, I don't believe in evil. Kevin also had tried not to believe in evil. He had unwittingly betrayed the Land by failing to perceive Lord Foul's true nature in time, and had thereby set the Despiser on the path to victory. Thus he had fallen into despair. Because of what he had done, he had challenged the Despiser to the Ritual of Desecration, hoping to destroy Lord Foul by reaving the Land. But in that, too, he had failed. He had succeeded at laying waste the Land he loved, and at losing the Staff of Law; but Lord Foul had endured.
All this Covenant told her. “Don't you see?” he said, imploring her to hear him. “Despair is no answer. It's what Foul lives on. Whatever happened to you, it doesn't have to be like this.” Linden, listen to me!
But she did not listen, gave no sign that she was able to hear him. If he had not seen the shadows of distress shifting behind her eyes, he might have believed that she had fallen back into the coma which Gibbon had levied upon her.
Sunder sat glowering as if he could not choose between his empathy for Linden and his understanding of Covenant. Hollian's dark eyes were blurred with tears. Brinn and Cail watched as if they were the models for Vain's impassivity. None of them offered Covenant any help.
He tried a different tack. “Look at Vain.” Linden! “Tell me what you see.”
She did not respond.
“I don't know whether or not I can trust him. I don't have your eyes. I need you to tell me what he is.”
She did not move. But her shoulders tautened as if she were screaming within herself.
“That old man.” His voice was choked by need and fear. “On Haven Farm. You saved his life. He told you to Be true.”
She flinched. Jerking up her head, she gaped at him with eyes as injured as if they had been gouged into the clenched misery of her soul. Then she was on her feet, fuming like a magma of bitterness. “You!” she cried. “You keep talking about desecration. This is your doing. Why did you have to sell yourself for Joan? Why did you have to get us into this? Don't you call that desecration?”
“Linden.” Her passion swept him upright; but he could not reach out to her. The fire lay between them as if she had lit it there in her fury.
“Of course you don't. You can't see. You don't know” Her hands clawed the air over her breasts as if she wanted to tear her flesh. “You think it will help if you go charging off on some crazy quest. Make a new Staff of Law.” She was savage with gall. “You don't count, and you don't even know it!”
He repeated her name. Sunder and Hollian had risen to their feet. Memla held her rukh ready, and Cail stood poised nearby, as if both Rider and Haruchai felt violence in the air.
“What did he do to you?” What did that bastard do to you?
“He said you don't count!” Abruptly, she was spouting words, hurling them at him as if he were the cause of her distress. “All they care about is your ring. The rest is me. He said, 'You have been especially chosen for this desecration. You are being forged as iron is forged to achieve the ruin of the Earth.'” Her voice thickened like blood around the memory, “Because I can see. That's how they're going to make me do what they want. By torturing me with what I see, and feel, and hear. You're making me do exactly what they want!”
The next instant, her outburst sprang to a halt. Her hands leaped to her face, trying to block out visions. Her body went rigid, as if she were on the verge of convulsions; a moan tore its way between her teeth. Then she sagged.
In desolation, she whispered, “He touched me.”
Touched-?
“Covenant.” She dropped her hands, let him see the full anguish in her visage. “You've got to get me out of here. Back to where I belong. Where my life means something. Before they make me kill you.”
“I know,” he said, because she had to have an answer. “That's another reason why I want to find the One Tree.” But within himself he felt suddenly crippled. You don't count. He had placed so much hope in her, in the possibility that she was free of Lord Foul's manipulations; and now that hope lay in wreckage. “The Lords used the Staff to call me here.” In one stroke, he had been reft of everything. “A Staff is the only thing I know of that can send us back.” Everything except the krill, and his old intransigence.
Especially chosen — Hell and blood! He wanted to cover his face; he could have wept like a child. But Linden's eyes clung to him desperately, trying to believe in him. Sunder and Hollian held each other against a fear they could not name. And
Memla's countenance was blunt-moulded into a shape of sympathy, as if she knew what it meant to be discounted. Only the Haruchai appeared unmoved-the Haruchai, and Vain.
When Linden asked, “Your ring?” he met her squarely.
“I can't control it.”
Abruptly, Memla's expression became a flinch of surprise, as if he had uttered something appalling.
He ignored her. While his heart raged for grief, as if tears were a debt which he owed to his mortality and could not pay, he stretched out his arms. There in front of all his companions he gave himself a VSE.
Ah, you are stubborn yet.
Yes. By God. Stubborn.
Acting with characteristic detached consideration, Brinn handed Covenant a pouch of metheglin. Covenant lifted it between himself and his friends, so that they could not see his face, and drank it dry. Then he walked away into the darkness around the Gilden, used the night to hide him. After a time, he lay down among the things he had lost, and closed his eyes.
Brinn roused him with the dawn, got him to his feet in time to meet the second rising of the sun of pestilence, protected by his boots. The rest of the quest was already awake. Sunder and Hollian had joined Memla on pieces of stone; the Haruchai were busy preparing food; Linden stood gazing at the approaching incarnadine. Her face was sealed against its own vulnerability; but when she noticed Covenant, her eyes acknowledged him sombrely. After the conflicts of the previous evening, her recognition touched him like a smile.
He found that he felt stronger. But with recovery came a renewal of fear. The na-Mhoram's Grim-
Memla bore herself as if throughout the night she had not forgotten that peril. Her aging features were lined with apprehension, and her hands trembled on her rukh. To answer Covenant's look, she murmured, “Still he raises it, and is not content. It will be a Grim to rend our souls.” For a moment, her eyes winced to his face as if she needed reassurance. But then she jerked away, began snapping at her companions to make them hurry.
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