Cail’s affliction was more advanced. The fits which wracked him went on until moonset. Brinn’s people had to fight incessantly to prevent him from battering himself to death on the rocks.
“Dawn is near,” Sunder murmured softly, as if he feared to disturb the stillness, feared that the sound of his voice might trigger Linden or Cail into frenzy again.
“We are too late.” Hollian could not suppress her bitterness. “We must remain here. We cannot gain safety in time.”
Covenant ignored both of them. He sat with Linden in his embrace and sought to believe that she would live.
No one moved. They sat in the krill-light while the east paled toward sunrise. A dusty glow began to silhouette the earth. All the stars were washed away. The sky modulated as brown gathered around the imminence of the dawn. The atmosphere grew palpably drier, foretelling heat.
When the sun rose, it wore a cloak of desiccation. Its touch reminded Covenant that he had not had food or fluid since the previous morning. A giddy dispassion began to revolve in him, distancing him from his fate. Linden’s flagrant slumber felt like an accomplished fact in his arms.
As the Sunbane colored the savannah, the pampas grass began to melt. Its fiber turned to a dead gray sludge, and slumped to the ground like spilth. This, Covenant mused in a mood of canted detachment, was what had happened to Morinmoss. To Grimmerdhore and Garroting Deep. A desert sun had risen over them, and tens of thousands of years of sentient forest had simply dissolved into muck. And the glory of the world becomes less than it was. For a moment, he recovered enough passion to ache out, Damn you, Foul! It would be better if you just killed me.
In a voice like Covenant’s inanition, but infinitely steadier, Brinn addressed Hollian. “Eh-Brand, you spoke of fire.”
“The lianar spoke of fire.” Both affronted dignity and nagging self-doubt marked her words. “Never have I seen such a flame in my foretelling. Do not question me. I cannot answer.”
Covenant thought dimly that there was no reason for fire. The quest was without water under a desert sun. Nothing else was necessary.
The truth of Hollian’s augury became clear when the sun rose high enough, and the grass sank low enough, for light to contact the bare ground around the knoll. And with the light came a faint shimmer which seemed to transmogrify the texture of the soil. The dirt began to glow.
Covenant believed that he was hallucinating.
Without warning, Vain ascended the boulders. Everyone stared at him; but his black eyes remained unfocused, private, as if he were unaware of his own intentions.
Brinn and Hergrom placed themselves to guard Covenant and Linden. But Vain stopped without acknowledging the Haruchai and stood gazing like a void into the blank air.
Slowly the soil took on a reddish tinge enriched with yellow. The color deepened, hardened.
Heat radiated from the ground.
Around the edges of the clearing, the sludge started to smolder. Viscid smoke went up in wisps, then in billows which thickened steadily, clogging the atmosphere.
In moments, the muck was afire.
As it burned, smoke began to mount in other places across the savannah. Soon there were blazes everywhere.
And the bare dirt continued to darken.
The company watched tensely; even the Haruchai seemed to be holding their breath. Only Linden and Cail were oblivious. Vain was not. He studied Linden between the shoulders of Brinn and Hergrom, and his visage sharpened, as if vague purposes were being whetted toward clarity within him.
Numbly Covenant studied the ground. That rich, half-orange light and heat brought up recollections. Gradually the face of Lena’s father, Trell, became vivid to him; he did not know why. He could see Trell standing like granite in Lena’s home. The big Stonedownor’s face was ruddy with light. Reflections gleamed in his beard—the precise color of these emanations.
Then Covenant remembered.
Graveling. Fire-stones.
Under the touch of the desert sun, this entire savannah was being transformed into a sea of graveling.
Fire consumed the sludge; and under it lay clear graveling which sent one long, silent shout of heat into the heavens.
Covenant and his companions might as well have been perched above a flow of lava.
He sat and stared as if his eyeballs had been scorched blind. He could feel death lying like a familiar in his arms.
Memla had sacrificed herself. Linden and Cail were going to die. Everyone was going to die.
Vain gave no hint of his intent. The suddenness of his movement took even the wary Haruchai by surprise. With a frightening swiftness, he thrust Brinn and Hergrom aside and stepped between them toward Covenant and Linden.
Hergrom caught himself on an outcropping of rock. Brinn was saved from a fall into the graveling only by the celerity with which Ceer grabbed for him.
Effortlessly Vain took Linden from Covenant’s arms.
Stell surged forward, pounded Vain between the eyes. The Demondim-spawn did not react; he went about his purpose as if he had not been touched. Stell was knocked back against Harn.
Cradling Linden gently, Vain stepped to the eastern edge of the mound and leaped down into the fire-stones.
“Vain!”
Covenant was on his feet. His hearing roared as if the heat had become a gale. Venom pulsed in his veins. He wanted wild magic, wanted to strike—!
But if he hit Vain, hurt him, the Demondim-spawn might drop Linden into the graveling.
Linden!
Vain paid no heed to the danger behind him. Firmly, surely, he strode away.
At that instant, Hergrom sprang pantherish from the boulders. At the farthest stretch of his leap, he impacted against Vain’s shoulders.
The Demondim-spawn did not even stumble. He walked on across the graveling with Linden held before him and Hergrom clinging to his back as if he were unconscious of them both.
Covenant’s shouting died in his chest. He was hardly aware that Brinn and Sunder were holding his arms as if to prevent him from pursuing Vain.
“He does not feel the fire,” Brinn remarked distantly. “Perhaps he will save her. Perhaps he intends to save her.”
To save—? Covenant sagged. Was it possible? The muscles of his face hurt, but he could not unclench his grimace. To save her so that she could serve Lord Foul? “Then why”—his voice knotted—“didn’t he help her before? During the Grim?”
Brinn shrugged. “Perhaps he saw then that his aid was not needed. He acts now to save her because we are helpless.”
Vain? Covenant panted. No. He could not suppress the tremors in him. “We’re not helpless.” It was unbearable. Not even a leper could bear it. We are not helpless.
He cast one abrupt glance toward Vain. The Demondim-spawn was running, fading into the shimmer of the graveling.
Covenant wrenched free of Brinn and Sunder. He confronted his companions. The effort to control his trembling made him savage. “Ceer. Give me the rukh.”
Sunder scowled. Hollian’s eyes widened as if she felt an intuitive hope or fear. But the Haruchai showed no surprise. Ceer took Memla’s rukh from his tunic and handed it to Covenant.
With a jerk, Covenant thrust the iron toward Sunder. “All right. You’re the Graveler. Use it.”
Sunder’s lips formed words without sound: Use it?
“Call the Coursers back. They’re bred to the Sunbane. They can carry us out of here.”
The Graveler breathed a strangled protest. “Covenant!”
Covenant jabbed the rukh against Sunder’s chest. “Do it. I can’t. I don’t know the Sunbane the way you do. I can’t touch it. I’m a leper.”
“And I am not a Rider!”
“I don’t care.” Covenant clinched ire around his dread. “We’re all going to die. Maybe I don’t count. But you do. Hollian does. You know the truth about the Clave.” Again he punched Sunder with the rukh. “Use it.”
The heat spread sweat across Sunder’s face, made his features loo
k like they were about to melt like the grass. Desperately he turned an imploring gaze toward Hollian.
She touched his scarred forearm. The stature of her calling was upon her. “Sunder,” she said quietly. “Graveler. Perhaps it may be done. Surely the Sunstone empowers you to the attempt. And I will aid you as I can. Through the lianar, I am able to perceive the state of the Sunbane. It may be that I can guide you to mastery.”
For a moment, they held each other’s eyes, measuring what they saw. Then Sunder swung back to Covenant. The Graveler’s expression was rent by fear of failure, by instinctive loathing for anything which belonged to the Clave. But he accepted the rukh.
Grimly he climbed to sit atop the highest boulder, near the white radiance of the krill.
Hollian stood on a lower rock so that her head was level with his. She watched gravely as he set his orcrest in his lap, then fumbled to uncap the hollow handle of the rukh.
Covenant’s legs quavered as if they could no longer bear the weight of who he was. But he braced himself on the rocks, remained erect like a witness and a demand.
Sunder poured the last fluid from the rukh into his hand. Hollian placed her palm in his, let it rest there for a moment, sharing the blood like a gesture of comradeship. Then she wrapped her stained fingers around the lianar, and began to chant softly to herself. Sunder rubbed his hands together, dabbed red onto his forehead and cheeks, then picked up the Sunstone.
The rigid accents of his invocation formed a counterpoint to her lilting murmur. Together they wove the silence into a skein of Sunbane-power: bloodshed and fire.
Soon his familiar vermeil shaft shot like a quarrel toward the sun. A crepitation like the discharge of slow lightning made the air squirm.
He lifted the rukh and held it so that the Sunstone’s beam ran along the iron. His knuckles whitened, cording the backs of his hands.
Delicate flames opened like buds along the lianar. Hollian closed her eyes. Her fire turned slowly to the color of the sun’s brown aura, began to put out tendrils. One of them reached Sunder’s hands. It wound around his grasp, then started to climb the rukh and the Sunstone shaft.
He blinked fiercely at the sweat in his eyes, glared as if the rukh were an adder he could neither hold nor release.
The poignance in Covenant’s chest told him that he had forgotten to breathe. When he forced himself to inhale, he seemed to suck in vertigo from the air. Only his braced arms kept him from losing his balance.
None of the Haruchai were watching Sunder and Hollian. Cail had gone into convulsions. The others fought to keep him still.
Memories of Linden wrung Covenant’s guts. He shut his eyes against the nausea.
He looked up again when the chanting ended. Sunder’s shaft and Hollian’s flame vanished. The Stonedownors clung to each other. The Graveler’s shoulders shook.
Covenant knelt without knowing how he had lost his feet.
When Sunder spoke, his voice was muffled against Hollian’s neck. “After all, it is not greatly difficult to be a Rider. I am attuned to the rukh. The Coursers are distant. But they have heard. They will come.”
Eventually Cail’s seizure receded. For a while, he regained consciousness; but he spoke in the alien tongue of the Haruchai, and Covenant did not understand what he said.
The first of the great beasts returned shortly before noon. By then, thirst and hunger had reduced Covenant to stupefaction; he could not focus his eyes to see which of the Coursers it was, or whether the animal still bore any supplies. But Brinn reported, “It is Clangor, the Courser which assailed Linden Avery. It limps. Its chest is burned. But it suffers no harm from the graveling.” A moment later, he added, “Its burdens are intact.”
Intact, Covenant thought dizzily. He peered through the haze as Ceer and Stell leaped down to the Courser, then returned carrying sacks of water and food. Oh dear God.
By the time he and the Stonedownors had satisfied the first desperation of their thirst and had begun to eat a meal, Annoy came galloping from the south. Like Clangor, it was unscathed by the graveling; but it skittered uncomfortably around the knoll, champing to escape the fire-stones.
Clash and Clang also returned. Sunder frowned at them as if he did not like the pride he felt in what he had achieved; but Hollian’s smile shone.
At once, the Haruchai began to prepare for departure.
Using the piece of cloth he had discarded, Covenant rewrapped the krill and tucked it under his belt. Then he descended the boulders to the level of the Coursers’ backs.
At close range, the heat of the graveling felt severe enough to char his flesh. It triggered involuntary memories of Hotash Slay and Saltheart Foamfollower. The Giant had spent himself in lava and agony to help Covenant.
Distrusting the Coursers and himself, Covenant could not leap the small distance to a mount. No more, he yearned. Don’t let any more friends die for me. He had to cling where he was, squinting against the radiance, until the Haruchai could help him.
In a moment, Ceer and Brinn joined him, carrying Cail. Sunder raised the rukh, uncertain of his mastery; but the Coursers obeyed, crowding close to the knoll. Leaving Cail, Ceer stepped to Annoy’s back. Harn tossed the sacks to him. He placed them across Annoy’s huge withers, then accepted Cail from Brinn.
Cail’s arm was livid and suppurating badly. It made Covenant groan. Cail needed Linden. She was a doctor.
She was as sick as the Haruchai.
Practicing his control, Sunder sent Annoy out of the way of the other Coursers. Then Harn and Hollian mounted Clangor. The Graveler joined Stell on Clang. Before Covenant could suppress his dread, Brinn lifted him onto Clash.
He dropped to the broad back, knotted his fists in Clash’s hair. Heat blasted at him like slow roasting and suffocation. But he fought to raise his voice. “Find Vain. Fast.”
With a gesture, Sunder launched the beasts eastward. They galloped away through air burnished orange by graveling.
Clang bore Sunder and the rukh at a staggering pace; but the other mounts matched it. Even Clangor, oozing pain from its wound, did not fall behind; it ran like a storm-wind with frenzy in its red eyes. It had been formed by the power of the Banefire to obey any rukh. It could not refuse Sunder’s authority.
Covenant could not gauge their speed; he could hardly keep his eyes open against the sharp heat, hardly breathe. He only knew that he was traveling swiftly. But he did not know how fast Vain could run. The Demondim-spawn’s lead was as long as the morning.
Wind scorched his face. His clothes felt hot on his skin, as if the fabric had begun to smolder. He wore warm sweat down the length of his body. His eyes bled tears against the shine and heat of the graveling. But the Coursers ran as if they were being borne by the passion of the fire-stones. Hollian clung to Harn’s back. Sunder hunched over Clang’s neck. The Haruchai rode with magisterial detachment. And the Coursers ran.
The graveling unfurled as if it would never end. Fire deepened the sky, colored the heavens with molten grandeur. Through the haze, the sun’s coronal looked like an outer ring of incandescence. The entire savannah was a bed of coals; the Coursers were traversing an accentuated hell. But Sunder had mastered the rukh. While he lived, the beasts could not falter.
They did not. They ran as if they had been born in flames. Smoothly, indefatigably, they swept the leagues behind them like dead leaves into a furnace.
Covenant’s breathing sobbed, not because he lacked air, but rather because his lungs were being seared. He began to have visions of Glimmermere, the cool tarn tinged with Earthpower. His bones throbbed to inhale water. And the Coursers ran.
When they broke out of the graveling onto hard dirt, the suddenness of the change made the desert air feel like bliss. It snatched his head up. Relief slammed into his chest like a polar wind. In an instant, the Coursers were clattering across dead, sunbaked soil, raising pennons of dust. The haze retreated; abruptly the terrain had features, texture, meaning.
As his sight cleared, he saw Vai
n ahead of him.
The Demondim-spawn stood, black and fatal, on the bank of a gully which twisted emptily across the company’s way. The dull iron bands of the Staff of Law emphasized his midnight form. He watched the Coursers thunder toward him as if he had been waiting for them.
He was alone.
Alone?
Covenant tumbled from Clash’s back as the beast pounded to a halt. He landed hard, sprawled across the dirt. Rolling his feet under him, he hurled himself at Vain.
“What have you done with her?”
Vain did not move: Covenant crashed into the Demondim-spawn, recoiled as if he had hit a wall of obsidian.
The next moment, Hergrom appeared out of the gully. He seemed uninjured, though his raiment had been singed by the graveling. Without expression, as if he did not deign to judge Covenant’s precipitation, he said, “She is here. In the shade.”
Covenant surged past him, jumped down into the gully.
The dry watercourse was not deep. He landed in sand and whirled, searching for Linden.
She lay on her back under the shadow of the gully wall. Her skin seemed faintly red in the dimmer light; she had been so close to the graveling. He could see her as clearly as if she were engraved on his mind: her raw color, the streaks of sweat in her wheaten hair, the frown scar between her brows like an expostulation against the life she had lived.
She was in convulsions. Her heels drummed the sand; her fingers attacked the ground on either side; spasms racked her body, arched her back. A skull-grin clinched her face. Small gasps whimpered through her teeth like shreds of pain.
Covenant dove to her side, gripped her shoulders to restrain her arms. He could not make a sound, could not thrust words past his panic.
Sunder and Hollian joined him, followed by Harn and Hergrom. Brinn, Ceer, and Stell came a moment later, bearing Cail. He, too, was in the throes of another seizure.
Sunder rested a hand on Covenant’s shoulder. “It is the Sunbane sickness,” he said softly. “I am sorry. She cannot endure.”