Covenant groped for anger to master his fear. “You hurt that Waynhim. You were going to kill it. What’s the matter with you? There isn’t enough murder in the world—you have to add more?”
The man was not listening. He gazed at his hands with an expression of mad delight. “It is a wondrous gift.” He shuffled forward as if he did not know that he was moving. “No man but you can know the wonder of it.”
Covenant willed himself to retreat; but his feet remained rooted to the ground. The man exerted a horrific fascination. Covenant found himself staring involuntarily at those hands as if they truly held something wonderful.
“Behold,” the man whispered with gentle hysteria. Slowly, carefully, like a man unveiling treasure, he opened his hands.
A small furry spider sat on his palm.
Before Covenant could flinch, recoil, do anything to defend himself, the spider jumped.
It landed on his neck. As he slapped it away, he felt the tiny prick of its sting.
For an instant, a marvelous calm came over him. He watched unperturbed as the man moved forward as if he were swimming through the sudden thickness of the firelight. The sound of the blaze became woolly. Covenant hardly noticed when the man took away his knife. Vain gazed at him for no reason at all. With imponderable delicacy, the floor of the bowl began to tilt.
Then his heart gave a beat like the blow of a sledgehammer, and everything shattered. Flying shards of pain shredded his thoughts. His brain had time to form only two words: venom relapse. After that, his heart beat again; and he was conscious of nothing except one long raw howl.
For some time, he wandered lorn in a maze of anguish, gibbering for release. Pain was everywhere. He had no mind, only pain—no respiration that was not pain—no pulse which did not multiply pain. Agony swelled inside his right forearm. It hurt as if his limb were nothing but a bloody stump; but that harm was all of him, everything, his chest and bowels and head and on and on in an unbearable litany of pain. If he screamed, he did not hear it; he could not hear anything except pain and death.
Death was a dervish, vertigo, avalanche, sweeping him over the precipice of his futility. It was everything he had ever striven to redeem, every pointless anguish to which he had ever struggled to give meaning. It was inconsolable grief and ineradicable guilt and savage wrath; and it made a small clear space of lucidity in his head.
Clinging shipwrecked there, he opened his eyes.
Delirium befogged his sight; gray shapes gamboled incomprehensibly across his fever, threatening the last lucid piece of himself. But he repulsed the threat. Blinking as if the movement of his eyelids were an act of violence, he cleared his vision.
He was in the bowl, bound at the stake. Heaps of firewood lay around him. Flames danced at the edges of the pyre.
The bowl was full of figures dancing like flames. They capered around the space like ghouls. Cries of blood-lust sprang off the walls of the escarpment; voices shrill with cannibalism battered his ears. Men with chatoyant eyes and prehensile noses leered at him. Women with adder-breasts, fingers lined by fangs, flared past him like fragments of insanity, cackling for his life. Children with hideous facial deformities and tiger maws in their bellies puked frogs and obscenities.
Horror made him spin, tearing clarity from his grasp. His right arm blasted pain into his chest. Every nerve of that limb was etched in agony. For an instant, he almost drowned.
But then he caught sight of Vain.
The Demondim-spawn stood with his back to the Plains, regarding the fervid dancers as if they had been created for no other purpose than to amuse him. Slowly his eyes shifted across the frenzy until they met Covenant’s.
“Vain!” Covenant gasped as if he were choking on blood. “Help me!”
In response, Vain bared his teeth in a black grin.
At the sight, Covenant snapped. A white shriek of fury exploded from his chest. And with his shriek came a deflagration that destroyed the night.
FIFTEEN: “Because You Can See”
No. Never again.
After Covenant had passed beyond the hillcrest in Andelain, Linden Avery sat down among the dead stones, and tried to recover her sense of who she was. A black mood was on her. She felt futile and bereft of life, as she had so often felt in recent years; all her efforts to rise above her parents had accomplished nothing. If Sunder or Hollian had spoken to her, she might have screamed, if she were able to summon the energy.
Now that she had made her decision, had struck a blow in defense of her difficult autonomy against Covenant’s strange power to persuade her from herself, she was left with the consequences. She could not ignore them; the old and forever unassuaged barrenness around her did not permit them to be ignored. These dead hills climbed south and west of her, contradicting Andelain as if she had chosen death when she had been offered life.
And she was isolated by her blackness. Sunder and Hollian had found companionship in their mutual rejection of the Hills. Their lives had been so fundamentally shaped by the Sunbane that they could not question the discomfiture Andelain gave them. Perhaps they could not perceive that those lush trees and greenswards were healthy. Or that health was beautiful.
But Linden accepted the attitude of the Stonedownors. It was explicable in the context of the Sunbane. Her separateness from them did not dismay her.
The loss of Covenant dismayed her. She had made her decision, and he had walked out of her life as if he were taking all her strength and conviction with him. The light of the fertile sun had danced on the Mithil as he passed, burning about him like a recognition of his efficacy against the Land’s doom. She had shared the utmost privacy of his life, and yet he had left her for Andelain. And the venom was still in him.
She would not have been more alone if he had riven her of all her reasons for living.
But she had made her decision. She had experienced Covenant’s illness as if it were her own, and knew she could not have chosen otherwise. She preferred this lifeless waste of stone over the loveliness of Andelain because she understood it better, could more effectively seal herself against it. After her efforts to save Covenant, she had vowed that she would never again expose herself so intimately to anything, never again permit the Land-born sensitivity of her senses to threaten her independent identity. That vow was easier to keep when the perceptions against which she closed her heart were perceptions of ruin, of dead rock like the detritus of a cataclysm, rather than of clean wood, aromatic grasses, bountiful aliantha. In her private way, she shared Hollian’s distrust. Andelain was far more seductive than the stone around her. She knew absolutely that she could not afford to be seduced.
Lost in her old darkness, with her eyes and ears closed as if she had nailed up shutters, barred doors, she did not understand Sunder’s warning shout until too late. Suddenly men with clubs and knives boiled out of hiding. They grappled with Sunder as he fought to raise his poniard, his Sunstone. Linden heard a flat thud as they stunned him, Hollian’s arms were pinioned before her dirk could make itself felt. Linden leaped into motion; but she had no chance. A heavy blow staggered her. While she retched for breath, her arms were lashed behind her.
A moment later, brutal hands dragged her and her companions away from the River.
For a time while she gasped and stumbled, she could not hold up her defenses. Her senses tasted the violence of the men, experiencing their roughness as if it were a form of ingrained lust. She felt the contorted desecration of the terrain. Involuntarily she knew that she was being taken toward the source of the deadness, that these people were creatures of the same force which had killed this region. She had to shut her eyes, tie her mind in dire knots, to stifle her unwilling awareness of her straits.
Then the companions were manhandled down a narrow crevice into the canyon of Stonemight Woodhelven.
Linden had never seen a Woodhelven before, and the sight of it revolted her. The carelessly made homes, the slovenly people, the blood-eagerness of the Graveler—these things deba
sed the arduous rectitude she had learned to see in people like Sunder and Hollian. But everything else paled when she caught her first glimpse of the Graveler’s steaming, baleful green stone. It flooded her eyes with ill, stung her nostrils like virulent acid; it dwarfed every other power she had encountered, outshone everything except the Sunbane itself. That emerald chip was the source of the surrounding ruin, the cause of the imminent and uncaring wildness of the Woodhelvennin. Tears blinded her. Spasms clenched her mind like a desire to vomit. Yet she could not deafen herself to the Graveler’s glee when that woman announced her intention to slay her captives the next morning.
Then Linden and the Stonedownors were impelled into a rude hut on stilts, and left to face death as best they could. She could not resist. She had reached a crisis of self-protection. This close to the Stonemight, she was always aware of it. Its emanations leeched at her heart, sucked her toward dissolution. Rocking against the wall to remind herself that she still existed, still possessed a separate physical identity, she repeated, No, never again. She iterated the words as if they were a litany against evil, and fought for preservation.
She needed an answer to Joan, to venom and Ravers, to the innominate power of the Stonemight. But the only answer she found was to huddle within herself and close her mind as if she were one of her parents, helpless to meet life, avid for death.
Yet when dawn came, the door of the hut was flung open, not by the Graveler or any of the Woodhelvennin, but by a Rider of the Clave. The fertile sun vivified his stark red robe, etched the outlines of his black rukh, made the stiff thrust of his beard look like a grave digger’s spade. He was tall with authority and unshakably confident. “Come,” he said as if disobedience were impossible. “I am Santonin na-Mhoram-in. You are mine.” To Sunder’s glower and Hollian’s groan, he replied with a smile like the blade of a scimitar.
Outside the Woodhelvennin stood moaning and pleading. The Graveler protested abjectly. But Santonin compelled her. Weeping she surrendered her Stonemight. Another man delivered to him the Stonedownors’ Sunstone, lianar, knives.
Watching the transaction, Linden was unable to think anything except that Covenant would return from Andelain soon, and his companions would be gone. For one mad instant, Santonin’s smile almost drew her to confess Covenant’s existence; she wanted to keep him from falling into the hands of Stonemight Woodhelven. But Sunder and Hollian were silent; and their silence reminded her that the Clave desired Covenant’s death. With the remnants of her will, she swallowed everything which might betray him.
After that, her will was taken from her altogether. Under the green doom of the sun, Santonin na-Mhoram-in ignited his rukh. Coercion sprang from the blaze, seized possession of her soul. All choice left her. At his word, she mounted Santonin’s Courser. The shred of her which remained watched Sunder and Hollian as they also obeyed. Then Santonin took them away from Stonemight Woodhelven. Away toward Revelstone.
His control could not be broken. She contained nothing with which she might have resisted it. For days, she knew that she should attempt to escape, to fight. But she lacked the simple volition to lift her hands to her face or push her hair out of her eyes without Santonin’s explicit instructions. Whenever he looked into her dumb gaze, he smiled as if her imposed docility pleased him. At times, he murmured names that meant nothing to her, as if he were mocking her: Windscour, Victuallin Tayne, Andelainscion. And yet he did not appear to be corrupt. Or she was not capable of perceiving his corruption.
Only once did his mastery fail. Shortly after sunrise on the first day of a desert sun, eight days after their departure from Stonemight Woodhelven, a silent shout unexpectedly thrilled the air, thrilled Linden’s heart. Santonin’s hold snapped like an over-tight harp string.
As if they had been straining at the leash for this moment, Sunder and Hollian grappled for the rukh. Linden clamped an arm-lock on Santonin, flung him to the ground, then broke away southeastward in the direction of the shout.
But a moment later, she found herself wandering almost aimlessly back to Santonin’s camp. Sunder and Hollian were packing the Rider’s supplies. Santonin wore a fierce grin. The triangle of his rukh shone like blood and emerald. Soon he took his captives on toward Revelstone, as if nothing had happened.
Nothing had happened. Linden knew nothing, understood nothing, chose nothing. The Rider could have abused her in any way he desired. She might have felt nothing if he had elected to exercise a desire. But he did not. He seemed to have a clear sense of his own purpose. Only the anticipation in his eyes showed that his purpose was not kind.
After days of emptiness, Linden would have been glad for any purpose which could restore her to herself. Any purpose at all. Thomas Covenant had ceased to exist in her thoughts. Perhaps he had ceased to exist entirely. Perhaps he had never existed. Nothing was certain except that she needed Santonin’s instructions in order to put food in her mouth.
Even the sight of Revelstone itself, the Keep of the na-Mhoram rising from the high jungle of a second fertile sun like a great stone ship, could not rouse her spirit. She was only distantly aware of what she was seeing. The gates opened to admit the Rider, closed behind his Courser, and meant nothing.
Santonin na-Mhoram-in was met by three or four other figures like himself; but they greeted him with respect, as if he had stature among them. They spoke to him, words which Linden could not understand. Then he commanded his prisoners to dismount.
Linden, Sunder, and Hollian obeyed in an immense, ill-lit hall. With Santonin striding before them, they walked the ways of the great Keep. Passages and chambers, stairs and junctions, passed unmarked, unremembered. Linden moved like a hollow vessel, unable to hold any impression of the ancient gut-rock. Santonin’s path had no duration and no significance.
Yet his purpose remained. He brought his captives to a huge chamber like a pit in the floor of Revelstone. Its sloping sides were blurred and blunt, as if a former gallery or arena had been washed with lava. At its bottom stood a man in a deep ebony robe and a chasuble of crimson. He gripped a tall iron crozier topped with an open triangle. His hood was thrown back, exposing features which were also blurred and blunt in the torchlight.
His presence pierced Linden’s remaining scrap of identity like a hot blade. Behind her passivity, she began to wail.
He was a Raver.
“Three fools,” he said in a voice like cold scoria. “I had hoped for four.”
Santonin and the Raver spoke together in alien, empty words. Santonin produced the Stonemight and handed it to the Raver. Emerald reflected in the Raver’s eyes; an eloquent smile shaped the flesh of his lips. He closed his fist on the green chip, so that it plumed lush ferns of force. Linden’s wail died of starvation in the poverty of her being.
Then the Rider stepped to one side, and the Raver faced the captives. His visage was a smear of ill across Linden’s sight. He gazed at her directly, searched out the vestiges of her self, measured them, scorned them. “You I must not harm,” he said dully, almost regretfully. “Unharmed, you will commit all harm I could desire.” His eyes left her as if she were too paltry to merit further notice. “But these treachers are another matter.” He confronted Sunder and Hollian. “It signifies nothing if they are broken before they are shed.”
He held the Stonemight against his chest. Its steam curled up his face. Nostrils dilating, he breathed the steam as if it were a rare narcotic. “Where is Thomas Covenant?”
The Stonedownors did not react, could not react. Linden stood where she had been left, like a disregarded puppet. But her heart contracted in sudden terror.
The Raver made a slight gesture. Santonin muttered softly over his rukh. Abruptly the control holding Sunder and Hollian ended. They stumbled as if they had forgotten how to manage their limbs and jerked trembling erect. Fear glazed Sunder’s eyes, as if he were beholding the dreadful font and master of his existence. Hollian covered her face like a frightened child.
“Where is Thomas Covenant?”
The Raver let Hollian go. But with the Stonemight he put out a hand of force which caught Sunder by the neck. Hot emerald gripped him like a garrote, snatched him to his knees.
Reft of her companion, Hollian stopped and swung around to face the Raver. Her raven hair spread about her head like wings.
The Raver knotted green ill at Sunder’s throat. “Where is Thomas Covenant?”
Sunder’s eyes were blind with fear and compulsion. They bulged in their sockets. But he did not answer. Locking his jaws, he held himself still.
The Raver’s fingers tightened. “Speak.”
The muscles of Sunder’s jaw pulled together, clenched as if he were trying to break his teeth, grind his voice into silence forever. As the force at his throat grew stronger, those muscles became distinct, rigid, etched against the darkness of his fear and strangulation. It seemed impossible that he could so grit his teeth without tearing the ligatures of his jaw. But he did not answer. Sweat seemed to burst from his pores like bone marrow squeezed through his skin. Yet his rictus held.
A frown of displeasure incused the Raver’s forehead. “You will speak to me,” he soughed. “I will tear words from your soul, if need be.” His hand clinched the Stonemight as if he were covetous to use all its power. “Where is Thomas Covenant?”
“Dead.” Whimpers contorted Hollian’s voice. Linden felt the lie in the core of her helplessness. “Lost.”
The Raver did not glance away from Sunder, did not release his garrote. “How so?”
“In Andelain,” the eh-Brand panted. “He entered. We awaited him. He did not return.” To complete her he, she moaned, “Forgive me, Sunder.”
“And the white ring?”
“I know not. Lost. He did not return.”
Still the Raver gave no look or answer to Hollian. But he eased slightly his grasp on the Graveler. “Your refusal,” he breathed, “says to me that Thomas Covenant lives. If he is lost, why do you wish me to believe that he lives?”
The Wounded Land Page 31
