Glowering, the First absorbed Covenant’s answer. After a moment, she asked carefully, “May it be that this is but a variation—that the essential period remains unaltered?”
That was possible. He remembered one sun of two days. But when he turned to Linden for her opinion, she was not looking at him. Her band had not come down from her mouth. Her teeth were closed on the knuckle of her index finger, and a drop of blood marked her chin.
“Linden.” He grabbed at her wrist, yanked her hand away.
Her dismay slapped at him. “The sun of pestilence.” Her voice came twisted and harsh from her knotted throat. “Have you forgotten what it’s like? We don’t have any voure.”
At that, a new fear stung Covenant. Voure was the pungent sap of a certain plant—a sap that warded off the insects which thrived under a red sun. And more: it was also an antidote for the Sunbane-sickness. That pestilential disease could attack through any kind of exposed cut or injury. “Hellfire,” he breathed. Then snapped, “Get a bandage on that finger!” His arm was healed enough to be safe; but this sun might prove the small marks on her knuckle fatal.
Around him, steam rolled like a miasma. Wherever the light touched the vines and trunks, their bark opened and began to ooze. The steam stank of decomposition.
Nameless insects started to whine like augers through the mounting stench. Suddenly Covenant caught up with Linden’s apprehension. In addition to everything else, she had realized before he did that even a Giant might sicken and fail from breathing too much of that vapor—or from being bitten by too many of those insects.
She had not moved. Her eyes appeared glazed and inward, as if she could not move. Small red beads formed around her knuckle and dropped to the dirt.
Fierce with exasperation and alarm, Covenant snarled at her, “By hell! I said, get a bandage on that finger. And think of something. We’re in big trouble.”
She flinched. “No,” she whispered. The delicacy of her features seemed to crumble. “No. You don’t understand. You don’t feel it. It was never this—I can’t remember—” She swallowed heavily to keep herself from crying out. Then her tone became flat and dead. “You don’t feel it. It’s hideous. You can’t fight it.”
Wisps of steam passed in front of her face as if she, too, had begun to rot.
Urgently Covenant grabbed her shoulders, ground his numb fingers into her. “Maybe I can’t. But you can. You’re the Sun-Sage. What do you think you’re here for?”
The Sun-Sage. Elohim had given her that title. For an instant, her gaze became wild; and he feared he had torn the thin fabric of her sanity. But then her eyes focused on him with an emotional impact that made him wince. Abruptly she was alabaster and adamantine in his grasp. “Let go of me,” she articulated distinctly. “You don’t give enough to have the right.”
He pleaded with her mutely, but she did not relent. When he dropped his arms and stepped back, she turned away as if she were dismissing him from her life.
To the First, she said, “Get some green wood. Branches or whatever you can find.” She sounded oddly hard and brittle, not to be touched. “Soak the ends in vitrim and light them. The smoke should give us some protection.”
The First cocked an eyebrow at the tension between Covenant and Linden. But the Giants did not hesitate: they were acquainted with Linden’s health-sense. In moments, they had wrenched several boughs the size of brands from nearby trees. Pitchwife muttered mournfully at the idea of using his precious vitrim for such a purpose, but he handed one of his pouches to the First readily enough. Shortly the four Giants and Cail held flaming branches that guttered and spat with enough smoke to palliate the reek of rot. Outsized flying insects hummed angrily around the area, then shot off in search of other prey.
When the supplies had been repacked, the First turned to Linden for instructions, tacitly recognizing the change which had taken place in the Chosen. Covenant was Giantfriend and ring-wielder; but it was Linden’s percipience upon which the company depended now for survival.
Without a glance at Covenant, Linden nodded. Then she took Pitchwife’s place behind the First and Honninscrave; and the company started moving.
Beclouded with smoke and rot, they struggled on through the wild region. Under the particular corruption of the sun’s scarlet aura, vines which had been too hard for the First’s sword were now marked with swellings that burst and sores that ran. Fetor and borers took hold of some of the trees, ate out their hearts. Others lost wide strips of bark, exposing bald wood fatally veined with termites. The narcoleptic sweetness of the orchids penetrated the acrid smoke from time to time. Covenant felt that he was laboring through the fruition of what Lord Foul had striven to achieve ten years and three and a half millennia ago—the desecration of all of the Land’s health to leprosy. Here the Despiser emerged in the throes of victory. The beauty of Land and Law had been broken. With smoke in his eyes and revulsion in his guts, images of gangrene and pain on all sides, Covenant found himself praying for a sun of only two days.
Yet the red sun produced one benefit: the rotting of the wood allowed the First to begin cutting a path once more. The company was able to improve its pace. And finally the juniper wildland opened into an area of tall, thick grass as corrupt and cloying as a tarpit. The First called a halt for a brief meal and a few swallows of diamondraught.
Covenant needed the liquor, but he could hardly eat. His gaze refused to leave the swelling of Linden’s bitten finger.
Sunbane-sickness, he thought miserably. She had suffered from it once before. Sunder and Hollian, who were familiar with such sickness, had believed that she would die. He would never forget the look of her as she had lain helpless in the grip of convulsions as flagrant as his nightmares. Only her health-sense and voure had saved her.
That memory compelled him to risk her ire. More harshly than he intended, he began, “I thought I told you—”
“And I told you,” she retorted, “to leave me alone. I don’t need you to mother me.”
But he faced her squarely, forced her to recognize his concern. After a moment, her belligerence failed. Frowning, she turned her head away. “You don’t have to worry about it,” she sighed. “I know what I’m doing. It helps me concentrate.” “Helps—?” He did not know how to understand her.
“Sunder was right,” she responded. “This is the worst—the sun of pestilence. It sucks at me—or soaks into me. I don’t know how to describe it I become it. It becomes me.” The simple act of putting her plight into words made her shudder. Deliberately she raised her hand, studied her hurt finger.
“The pain. The way it scares me. It helps make the distinction. It keeps me separate.”
Covenant nodded. What else could he do? Her vulnerability had become terrible to him. Huskily he said, “Don’t let it get too bad.” Then he made another attempt to force food down into his knotted stomach.
The rest of the day was atrocious. And the next day was worse. But early in the evening, amid the screaming of numberless cicadas and the piercing frustration of huge, smoke-daunted mosquitoes, the company reached a region of hills where wide boulders still protruded from the surrounding morass of moss and ground ivy. That proved to be a fortuitous camping place; for when the sun rose again, it was wreathed in dusty brown.
After only two days.
The elevation of the rocks protected the travelers from the effect of the desert sun on the putrifying vegetation.
Everything that the fertile sun had produced and the sun of pestilence had blighted might as well have been made of wax. The brown-clad sun melted it all, reduced every form of plant fiber, every kind of sap or juice, every monstrous insect to a necrotic gray sludge. The few bushes in the area slumped like overheated candles; moss and ivy sprawled into spilth that formed turbid pools in the low places of the terrain; the bugs of dawn fell like clotted drops of rain. Then the sludge denatured as if the desert sun drank it away.
Long before midmorning, every slope and hollow and span of ground h
ad been burned to naked ruin and dust.
For the Giants, that process was more horrible than anything else they had seen. Until now, only the scale of the Sunbane’s power had been staggering. Verdure grew naturally, and insects and rot could be included in the normal range of experience. But nothing had prepared Covenant’s companions for the quick and entire destruction of so much prodigious vegetation and pestilence.
Staring about her, the First breathed, “Ah, Cable Seadreamer! There is no cause for wonder that you lacked voice to utter such visions. The wonder is that you endured to bear them at all—and that you bore them in loneliness.”
Pitchwife clung to her as if he were reeling inwardly. Open nausea showed in Mistweave’s face. He had learned to doubt himself, and now the things he could no longer trust covered all the world. But Honninscrave’s deep eyes flamed hotly—the eyes of a man who knew now beyond question that he was on the right path.
Grimly Linden demanded a knife from Pitchwife. For a moment, he could not answer her. “But at last the First stirred, turned from the harsh vista of the waste; and her husband turned with her.
Dazedly Pitchwife gave Linden his blade. She used its tip to lance her infected finger. With vitrim, she cleansed the wound thoroughly, then bound it in a light bandage. When she was done, she lifted her head; and her gaze was as intense as Honninscrave’s. Like him, she now appeared eager to go forward.
Or like High Lord Elena, who had been driven by inextricable abhorrence and love, and by lust for power, to the mad act of breaking the Law of Death. After only three days under the Sunbane, Linden appeared capable of such things.
Soon the company started southwestward again across a wasteland which had become little more than an anvil for the fierce brutality of the sun.
It brought back more of the past to Covenant. Heat-haze as thick as hallucination and dust bleached to the color of dismay made his memories vivid. He and Linden had been summoned to Kevin’s Watch during a day of rain; but that night Sander’s father, Nassic, had been murdered, and the next day had arisen a desert sun—and Covenant and Linden had encountered a Raver amid the hostility of Mithil Stonedown.
Many of the consequences had fallen squarely upon Sunder’s shoulders. As the Stonedown’s Graveler, he had already been required to shed the lives of his own wife and son so that their blood would serve the village. And then the Raver’s actions had cost him his father, had compelled him to sacrifice his friend, Marid, to the Sunbane, and had faced him with the necessity of bleeding his mother to death. Such things had driven him to flee his duty for the sake of the Unbeliever and the Chosen—and for his own sake, so that he would be spared the responsibility of more killing.
Yet during that same desert sun Covenant’s life had also been changed radically. The corruption of that sun had made Marid monstrous enough to inflict the Despiser’s malice. Out in the wasteland of the South Plains, Marid had nailed venom between the bones of Covenant’s forearm, crucifying him to the fate Lord Foul had prepared for him.
The fate of fire. In a nightmare of wild magic, his own terrible love and grief tore down the world.
The sun would sot let him think of anything else. The company had adequate supplies of water, diamondraught, and food; and when the haze took on the attributes of vertigo, leeched the strength out of Covenant’s legs, Honninscrave carried him. Foamfollower had done the same for him more than once, bearing him along the way of hope and doom. But now there was only haze and vertigo and despair—and the remorseless hammer-blow of the sun.
That phase of the Sunbane also lasted for only two days. But it was succeeded by another manifestation of pestilence.
The red-tinged heat was less severe. The stricken Plains contained nothing which could rot. And here the insect life was confined to creatures that made their homes in the ground. Yet this sun was arduous and bitter after its own fashion. It brought neither moisture nor shade up out of the waste. And before it ended, the travelers began to encounter stag beetles and scorpions as big as wolves among the low hills. But the First’s sword kept such threats at bay. And whenever Honninscrave and Mistweave took on the added weight of Covenant and Linden, the company made good speed.
In spite of their native hardiness, the Giants were growing weary, worn down by dust and heat and distance. But after the second day of pestilence came a sun of rain. Standing on stone to meet the dawn, the companions felt a new coolness against their faces as the sun rose ringed in blue like a concentration of the sky’s deep azure. Then, almost immediately, black clouds began to pile westward.
Covenant’s heart lifted at the thought of rain. But as the wind stiffened, plucking insistently at his unclean hair and beard, he remembered how difficult it was to travel under such a sun. He turned to the First. “We’re going to need rope.” The wind hummed in his ears. “So we don’t lose each other.”
Linden was staring toward the southwest as if the idea of Revelstone consumed all her thoughts. Distantly she said, “The rain isn’t dangerous. But there’s going to be so much of it”
The First glared at the clouds, nodded. Mistweave unslung his bundles and dug out a length of line.
The rope was too heavy to be tied around Covenant and Linden without hampering them. As the first raindrops hit, heavy as pebbles, the Swordmain knotted the line to her own waist, then strung it back through the formation of the company to Mistweave, who anchored it.
For a moment, she scanned the terrain to fix her bearings in her mind. Then she started into the darkening storm.
As loud as a rabble, the rain rushed out of the east. The clouds spanned the horizons, blocking the last light. Gloom fell like water into Covenant’s eyes. Already he could barely discern the First at the head of the company. Pitchwife’s misshapen outlines were blurred. The wind leaned against Covenant’s left shoulder. His boots began to slip under him. Without transition, soil as desiccated as centuries of desert changed to mud and clay. Instant pools spread across the ground. The downpour became as heavy as cudgels. Blindly he clung to the rope.
It led into a blank abyss of rain. The world was reduced to this mad drenching lash and roar, this battering cold. He should have retrieved his robe before the rain started: his T-shirt was meaningless against the torrents. How could there be so much water, when for days the North Plains and all the Land had been desperately athirst? Only Pitchwife’s shape remained before him, badly smudged but still solid—the only solid thing left except the rope. When he tried to look around toward Cail, Mistweave, Vain, and Findail, the storm hit him full in the face. It was a doomland he wandered because he had failed to find any answer to his dreams.
Eventually even Pitchwife was gone. The staggering downpour dragged every vestige of light and vision out of the air. His hands numb with leprosy and cold, Covenant could only be sure of the rope by clamping it under his elbow, leaning his weight on it. Long after he had begun to believe that the ordeal should be given up, that the company should find some shelter and simply huddle there while the storm lasted, the line went on drawing him forward.
But then, as suddenly as the summons which had changed his life, a pressure jerked back on the rope, hauled it to a stop; and he nearly fell. While he stumbled for balance, the line went slack.
Before he recovered, something heavy blundered against him, knocked him into the mire.
The storm had a strange timbre, as if people were shouting around him.
Almost at once, huge hands took hold of him, heaved him to his feet. A Giant: Pitchwife. He was pushed a few steps toward the rear of the formation, then gripped to a halt.
The rain was at his back. He saw three people in front of him. They all looked like Cail.
One of them caught his arm, put a mouth to his ear. Cail’s voice reached him dimly through the roar.
“Here are Durris and Fole of the Haruchai! They have come with others of our people to oppose the Clave!”
Rain pounded at Covenant; wind reeled through him. “Where’s Sunder?” he cried.
“Where’s Hollian?”
Blurred in the fury of the torrents, two more figures became discernible. One of them seemed to hold out an object toward Covenant.
From it, a white light sprang through the storm, piercing the darkness. Incandescence shone from a clear gem which had been forged into a long dagger, at the cross where blade and hilt came together. Its heat sizzled the rain; but the light itself burned as if no rain could touch it
The krill of Loric.
It illuminated all the faces around Covenant: Cail and his kinfolk, Durris and Fole; Mistweave flanked by Vain and Findail; Pitchwife; the First and Honninscrave crowding forward with Linden between them. And the two people who had brought the krill.
Sunder, son of Nassic, Graveler from Mithil Stonedown.
Hollian Amith-daughter, eh-Brand.
EIGHT: The Defenders of the Land
The torrents came down like thunder. The rain was full of voices Covenant could not hear. Sunder’s lips moved, made no sound. Hollian blinked at the water streaming her face as if she did not know whether to laugh or weep. Covenant wanted to go to them, throw his arms around them in sheer relief that they were alive; but the light of the krill held him back. He did not know what it meant. The venom in his forearm ached to take hold of it and burn.
Cail spoke directly into Covenant’s ear again. “The Graveler asks if your quest has succeeded!”
At that, Covenant covered his face, pressed the ring’s imminent heat against the bones of his skull. The rain was too much for him; suppressed weeping knotted his chest. He had been so eager to find Sunder and Hollian safe that he had never considered what the ruin of the quest would mean to them.
The First’s hearing was keener than his. Sunder’s query had reached her. She focused her voice to answer him through the roar. “The quest has failed!” The words were raw with strain. “Cable Seadreamer is slain! We have come seeking another hope!”