The Wounded Land (11 page)

The wild magic is no longer potent
. So much for power. He had already abandoned himself to Lord Foul’s machinations. A groan escaped him before he could lock his teeth on it.

“Covenant?” Concern sharpened Linden’s voice. “Are you all right?”

He could not reply. The simple fact that she was worried about him, was capable of worrying about him when she was under so much stress, multiplied the dismay in his bones. His eyes clung to the stone, searching for strength.

“Covenant!” Her demand was like a slap in the face. “I don’t know how to help you. Tell me what to do.”

What to do. None of this was her fault. She deserved an answer. He pulled himself down into the center of his fatigue and dizziness. Had he really doomed himself by taking Joan’s place? Surely he did not have to fail? Surely the power for which he had paid such a price was not so easily discounted? Without raising his head, he gritted, “At the bottom of the stairs, to my left, there’s a ledge in the cliff. Be careful.”

Coercing himself into motion, he backed through the gap.

As his head passed below the level of the Watch, he heard her whisper fiercely, “Damn you, why do you have to act so impervious? All I want to do is help.” She sounded as if her sanity depended on her ability to be of help.

But he could not afford to think about her; the peril of the stairs consumed his attention. He worked his way down them as if they were a ladder, clutching them with his hands, kicking each foot into them to be sure it was secure before he trusted it. His gaze never left his hands. They strained on the steps until the sinews stood out like desperation.

The void around him seemed fathomless. He could hear the emptiness of the wind. And the swift seething of the clouds below him had a hypnotic power, sucking at his concentration. Long plunges yawned all around him. But he knew this fear. Holding his breath, he lowered himself into the clouds—into the still center of his vertigo.

Abruptly the sun faded and went out. Gray gloom thickened toward midnight at every step of the descent.

A pale flash ran through the dank sea, followed almost at once by thunder. The wind mounted, rushed wetly at him as if it sought to lift
him off the spire. The stone became slick. His numb fingers could not tell the difference, but the nerves in his wrists and elbows registered every slippage of his grasp.

Again a bolt of lightning thrashed past him, illuminating the mad boil and speed of the clouds. The sky shattered. Instinctively he flattened himself against the stone. Something in him howled, but he could not tell whether it howled aloud.

Crawling painfully through the brutal impact of the storm, he went on downward.

He marked his progress in the intensifying weight of the rain. The fine cold sting of spray against his sore face became a pelting of heavy drops like a shower of pebbles. Soon he was drenched and battered. Lightning and thunder shouted across him, articulating savagery. But the promise of the ledge drew him on.

At last, his feet found it. Thrusting away from the spire, he pressed his back to the wall of the cliff, gaping upward.

A flail of blue-white fire rendered Linden out of the darkness. She was just above the level of his head.

When she reached the ledge, he caught her so that she would not stumble over the precipice. She gripped him urgently. “Covenant!” The wind ripped her shout away; he could barely hear her. “Are you all right?”

He put his mouth to her ear. “Stay against the cliff! We’ve got to find shelter!”

She nodded sharply.

Clenching her right hand in his left, he turned his back on the fall and began to shuttle west along the ledge.

Lightning burned overhead, to give him a glimpse of his situation. The ledge was two or three feet wide and ran roughly level across the cliff face. From its edge, the mountain disappeared into the abyss of the clouds.

Thunder hammered at him like the voice of his vertigo, commanding him to lose his balance. Wind and rain as shrill as chaos lashed his back. But Linden’s hand anchored him. He squeezed himself like yearning against the cliff and crept slowly forward.

At every lightning blast, he peered ahead through the rain, trying to see the end of the ledge.

There: a vertical line like a scar in the cliff face.

He reached it, pulled Linden past the corner, up a slope of mud and scree which gushed water as if it were a stream bed. At once, the wind became a constricted yowl. The next blue glare revealed that they had entered a narrow ravine sluicing upward through the mountainside. Water frothed like rapids past the boulders which cramped the floor of the ravine.

He struggled ahead until he and Linden were above a boulder that appeared large enough to be secure. There he halted and sat down in the current with his back braced on the wall. She joined him. Water flooded over their legs; rain blinded their faces. He did not care. He had to rest.

After a few moments, she shifted, put her face to his ear. “Now what?”

Now what? He did not know. Exhaustion numbed his mind. But she was right; they could not remain where they were. He mustered a wan shout. “There’s a path somewhere!”

“You don’t know the way? You said you’ve been here before!”

“Ten years ago!” And he had been unconscious the second time; Saltheart Foamfollower had carried him.

Lightning lit her face for an instant. Her visage was smeared with rain. “What are we going to do?”

The thought of Foamfollower, the Giant who had been his friend, gave him what he needed. “Try!” Bracing himself on her shoulder, he lurched to his feet. She seemed to support his weight easily. “Maybe I’ll remember!”

She stood up beside him, leaned close to yell, “I don’t like this storm! It doesn’t feel right!”

Doesn’t feel—? He blinked at her. For a moment, he did not understand. To him, it was just a storm, natural violence like any other. But then he caught her meaning. To her, the storm felt
un
natural. It offended some instinctive sensitivity in her.

Already she was ahead of him; her senses were growing attuned to the Land, while his remained flat and dull, blind to the spirit of what he perceived. Ten years ago, he had been able to do what she had just done: identify the rightness or wrongness, the health or corruption, of physical things and processes, of wind, rain, stone, wood, flesh. But now he could feel nothing except the storm’s vehemence, as if such force had no meaning, no implications. No soul.

He muttered tired curses at himself. Were his senses merely slow in making the adjustment? Or had he lost the ability to be in harmony with the Land? Had leprosy and time bereft him entirely of that sensitivity? Hell and blood! he rasped weakly, bitterly. If Linden could see where he was blind—

Aching at the old grief of his insufficiency, he tried to master himself. He expected Linden to ask him what was wrong. And that thought, too, was bitter; he did not want his frailties and fears, his innate wrongness, to be visible to her. But she did not question him. She was rigid with surprise or apprehension.

Her face was turned up the ravine.

He jerked around and tried to penetrate the downpour.

At once, he saw it—a faint yellow light in the distance.

It flickered toward them slowly, picked its way with care down the spine of the ravine. As it neared, a long blast of lightning revealed that it was a torch in the hand of a man. Then blackness and thunder crashed over them, and Covenant could see nothing but the strange flame. It burned bravely, impossibly, in spite of the deluge and battery of the storm.

It approached until it was close enough to light the man who held it. He was a short, stooped figure wearing a sodden robe. Rain gushed through his sparse hair and tangled beard, streamed in runnels down the creases of his old face, giving him a look of lunacy. He squinted at Covenant and Linden as if they had been incarnated out of nightmares to appall him.

Covenant held himself still, returned the old man’s stare mutely.

Linden touched his arm as if she wanted to warn bun of something.

Suddenly, the old man jerked up his right hand, raised it with the palm forward, and spread his fingers.

Covenant copied the gesture. He did not know whether or not Lord Foul had prepared this encounter for him. But he needed shelter, food, information. And he was prepared to acknowledge anyone who could keep a brand alight in this rain. As he lifted his half-hand into the light, his ring gleamed dully on the second finger.

The sight shocked the old man. He winced, mumbled to himself, retreated a step as if in fear. Then he pointed tremulously at Covenant’s ring. “White gold?” he cried. His voice shook.

“Yes!” Covenant replied.

“Halfhand?”

“Yes!”

“How are you named?” the man quavered.

Covenant struggled to drive each word through the storm. “Ur-Lord Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever and white gold wielder!”

“Illender?” gasped the man as if the rain were suffocating him. “Prover of Life?”

“Yes!”

The old man retreated another step. The torchlight gave his visage a dismayed look. Abruptly he turned, started scrambling frailly upward through the water and muck.

Over his shoulder, he wailed, “Come!”

“Who is that?” Linden asked almost inaudibly.

Covenant dismissed the question. “I don’t know.”

She scrutinized him. “Do you trust him?”

“Who has a choice?” Before she could respond, he pushed away from the stone, used all his energy to force himself into motion after the old man.

His mouth was full of rain and the sour taste of weakness. The strain of the past weeks affected him like caducity. But the torch helped him find handholds on the walls and boulders. With Linden’s support, he was able to heave forward against the heavy stream. Slowly, they made progress.

Some distance up the ravine, the old man entered a cut branching off to the right. A rough stair in the side of the cut led to its bottom. Freed of the torrents, Covenant found the strength to ask himself,
Do you trust him?
But the torch reassured him. He knew of nobody who could keep a brand burning in rain except the masters of wood-lore. Or the Lords. He was ready to trust anybody who served wood or stone with such potent diligence.

Carefully he followed the old man along the bottom of the cut until it narrowed, became a high sheer cleft in the mountain rock. Then, abruptly, the cleft changed directions and opened into a small dell.

Towering peaks sheltered the vale from the wind. But there was no escape from the rain. It thrashed Covenant’s head and shoulders like a club. He could barely see the torch as the old man crossed the valley.

With Linden, Covenant waded a swollen stream; and moments later they arrived at a squat stone dwelling which sat against the mountainside. The entry had no door; firelight scattered out at them as they approached. Hurrying now, they burst bedraggled and dripping into the single room of the house.

The old man stood in the center of the room, still clutching his torch though a bright fire blazed in the hearth beyond him. He peered at Covenant with trepidation, ready to cringe, like a child expecting punishment.

Covenant stopped. His bruises ached to be near the fire; but he remained still to look around the room.

At once, a pang of anxiety smote him. Already he could see that something had changed in the Land. Something fundamental.

The dwelling was furnished with an unexpected mixture of wood and stone. Stoneware bowls and urns sat on wooden shelves affixed to the sidewalls; wooden stools stood around a wooden table in one stone corner. And iron—there were iron utensils on the shelves, iron nails in the stools. Formerly the people of stone and wood, Stonedownor and Woodhelvennin, had each kept to his own lore—not because they wished to
be exclusive, but rather because their special skills and knowledge required all their devotion.

For a moment, he faced the man, bore the old, half-wild gaze. Linden, too, studied the old man, measuring him uncertainly. But Covenant knew she was asking herself questions unlike the ones which mobbed into his mind. Had the Stonedownors and Woodhelvennin grown together, blended their lore? Or had—?

The world is not what it was
.

A raw sickness twisted his heart. Without warning, he became conscious of smoke in the room.

Smoke!

He thrust past the old man, hastened to the hearth.

The wood lay on a pile of ash, burning warmly. Coals cracked and fell off the logs, red worms gnawing the flesh of trees. At intervals, wisps of smoke curled up into the room. The rain in the chimney made a low hissing noise.

Hellfire!

The people he had known here would never have voluntarily consumed wood for any purpose. They had always striven to use the life of wood, the Earthpower in it, without destroying the thing they used. Wood, soil, stone, water—the people of the Land had cherished every manifestation of life.

“Ur-Lord,” the old man groaned.

Covenant whirled. Grief burned like rage in him. He wanted to howl at the Despiser, What have you
done?
But both Linden and the old man were staring at him. Linden’s eyes showed concern, as if she feared he had slipped over the edge into confusion. And the old man was in the grip of a private anguish. Fiercely Covenant contained the yelling of his passion. But the strain of suppression bristled in his tone. “What keeps that torch burning?”

“I am ashamed!” The man’s voice broke as if he were on the verge of weeping. He did not hear Covenant’s question; his personal distress devoured him. “This temple,” he panted, “built by the most ancient fathers of my father’s father—in preparation. We have done nothing! Other rooms fallen to ruin, sanctuaries—” He waved his brand fervidly. “We did nothing. In a score of generations, nothing. It is a hovel—unworthy of you. We did not believe the promise given into our trust—generation after generation of Unfettered too craven to put faith in the proudest prophecies. It would be right for you to strike me.”

“Strike you?” Covenant was taken aback. “No.” There were too many things here he did not understand. “What’s the matter? Why are you afraid of me?”