The Wounded Land (37 page)

But he had misjudged the height of the stilts. He landed awkwardly, plunged headlong into a knot of men beyond the foot of the ladder. Something struck the back of his head, triggering vertigo. He lost control of his limbs.

The men yanked him to his feet by the arms and hair. “You are fortunate the Graveler desires you wakeful,” one of them said. “Else I would teach your skull the hardness of my club.” Dizziness numbed Covenant’s legs; the canyon seemed to suffer from nystagmus. The Woodhelvennin hauled him away like a collection of disarticulated bones.

They took him toward the north end of the canyon. Perhaps fifty or sixty paces beyond the last house, they stopped.

A vertical crack split the stone under his feet. Wedged into it was a heavy wooden post, nearly twice his height.

He groaned sickly and tried to resist. But he was helpless.

The men turned him so that he faced the village, then bound his arms behind the post. He made a feeble effort to kick at them; they promptly lashed his ankles as well.

When they were done, they left without a word.

As the vertigo faded, and his muscles began to recover, he gagged on nausea; but his guts were too empty to release anything.

The houses were virtually invisible, lost in the gloaming of the canyon. But after a moment he realized that the post had been placed with great care. A deep gap marked the eastern wall above him; and through it came a slash of dawn. He would be the first thing in Stonemight Woodhelven to receive the sun.

Moments passed. Sunlight descended like the blade of an axe toward his head.

Though he was protected by his boots, dread ached in his bones. His pulse seemed to beat behind his eyeballs.

The light touched his hair, his forehead, his face. While the Woodhelven lay in twilight, he experienced the sunrise like an annunciation. The sun wore a corona of light brown haze. A breath of arid heat blew across him.

Damnation, he muttered. Bloody damnation.

As the glare covered his mien, blinding him to the Woodhelven, a rain of sharp pebbles began to fall on him. Scores of people threw small stones at him.

He squeezed his eyes shut, bore the pain as best he could.

When the pebbles stopped, he looked up again and saw the Graveler approaching out of the darkness.

She held a long, iron knife, single-edged and hiltless. The black metal appeared baleful in her grasp. Her visage had not lost its misery; but it also wore a corrupt exaltation which he could not distinguish from madness.

Twenty paces or more behind the Graveler stood Vain, The Woodhelvennin had wrapped him in heavy vines, trying to restrain him; but he seemed unaware of his bonds. He held himself beyond reach as if he had come simply to watch Covenant die.

But Covenant had no time to think about Vain. The Graveler demanded his attention. “Now,” she rasped. “Recompense. I will shed your life, and your blood will raise water for the Woodhelven.” She glanced down at the narrow crevice, “And with your white ring we will buy back our Stonemight from the Clave.”

Clutching his dismally-rehearsed hope, Covenant asked, “Where’s your
orcrest
?”

“
Orcrest
?” she returned suspiciously.

“Your Sunstone.”

“Ah,” she breathed, “Sunstone. The Rede speaks of such matters.” Bitterness twisted her face. “Sunstone is permitted—yet we were reft of our Stonemight. It is not just!” She eyed Covenant as if she were anticipating the taste of his blood. “I have no Sunstone, Halfhand.”

No Sunstone? Covenant gasped inwardly. He had hoped with that to ignite his ring. But the Graveler had no Sunstone. No Sunstone. The desert sun shone on him like the bright, hot flood which had borne him into the Land. Invisible vulture-wings beat about his head—heart strokes of insanity. He could barely thrust his voice through the noise. “How can—? I thought every Graveler needed a Sunstone.” He knew this was not true, but he wanted to make her talk, delay her. He had already been stabbed once: any similar blow would surely end him. “How else can you work the Sunbane?”

“It is arduous,” she admitted, though the hunger in her gaze did not blink. “I must make use of the Rede. The Rede!” Abruptly she spat into the crack at her feet. “For generations Stonemight Woodhelven has had no need of such knowledge. From Graveler to Graveler the Stonemight has been handed down, and with it we made
life
! Without it, we must grope for survival as we may.”

The sun sent sweat trickling through Covenant’s beard, down the middle of his back. His bonds cut off the circulation in his arms, tugged pain into his shoulders. He had to swallow several times to clear his throat. “What is it? The Stonemight?”

His question reached her. He saw at once that she could not refuse to talk about the Stonemight. A nausea of love or lust came into her face. She lowered her knife; her eyes lost their focus on him. “Stonemight,” she breathed ardently. “Ah, the Stonemight.” Her breasts tightened under her green robe as if she were remembering rapture. “It is power and glory, wealth and comfort. A stone of dearest emerald, alight with possibility and cold beyond the touch of any stone. That such might is contained in so small and lovely a periapt! For the Stonemight is no larger than my palm. It is flat, and sharp of edge, like a flake stricken from a larger stone. And it is admirable beyond price.”

She went on, unable to rein the rush of her entrancement. But Covenant lost her words in a flash of intuitive horror. Suddenly he was certain that the talisman she described was a fragment of the Illearth Stone.

That conviction blazed through him like appalled lightning. It explained so many things: the ruined condition of this region; the easiness of the Woodhelven’s life; the gratuitous violence of the people; the Graveler’s obsession. For the Illearth Stone was the very essence of corruption, a bane so malignant that he had been willing to sacrifice Foamfollower’s life as well as his own in order to extirpate that evil from the Land. For a moment of dismay, he believed he had failed to destroy the Stone, that the Illearth Stone itself was the source of the Sunbane.

But then another explanation occurred to him. At one time, the Despiser had given each of his Ravers a piece of the Stone. One of these Ravers had marched to do battle against the Lords, and had been met here, at the southwest corner of Andelain—met and held for several days. Perhaps in that conflict a flake of the Raver’s Stone had fallen undetected among the hills, and had remained there, exerting its spontaneous desecration, until some unhappy Woodhelvennin had stumbled across it.

But that did not matter now. A Rider had taken the Stonemight. To Revelstone. Suddenly Covenant knew that he had to live, had to reach Revelstone. To complete the destruction of the Illearth Stone. So that his past pain and Foamfollower’s death would not have been for nothing.

The Graveler was sobbing avidly, “May they rot!” She clenched the haft of her knife like a spike. “Be damned to interminable torment for bereaving me! I curse them from the depths of my heart and the abyss of my anguish!” She jerked the knife above her head. The blade glinted keen and evil in the desert sun. She had lost all awareness of Covenant; her gaze was bent inward on a savage vision of the Clave. “I will slay you all!”

Covenant’s shout tore his throat. In horror and desperation, he yelled, “
Nekhrimah
, Vain! Save me.”

The Graveler paid no heed. With the whole force of her body, she drove her knife at his chest.

But Vain moved. While the blade arced through its swing, he shrugged his arms free of the bindings.

He was too far away, too late—

From a distance of twenty paces, he closed his fist.

Her arms froze in mid-plunge. The knife tip strained at the center of Covenant’s shirt; but she could not complete the blow.

He watched wildly as Vain approached the Graveler. With the back of his hand, Vain struck her. She crumpled. Blood burst from her mouth. As it ran, she twitched once, then lay still.

Vain ignored her. He gestured at the post, and the wood sprang into splinters. Covenant fell; but Vain caught him, set him on his feet.

Covenant allowed himself no time to think. Shedding splinters and vines, he picked up the knife, thrust it into his belt. His arms felt ferocious with the return of circulation. His heart labored acutely. But he forced himself forward. He knew that if he did not keep moving he would collapse in an outrage of reaction. He strode among the paralyzed Woodhelvennin back into the village, and entered the first large house he reached.

His eyes took a moment to pierce the dimness. Then he made out the interior of the room. The things he sought hung on the walls: a woven-vine sack of bread, a leather pouch containing some kind of liquid. He had taken them before he noticed a woman sitting in one of the corners. She held herself small and still in an effort to protect the baby sucking at her breast. He unstopped the pouch and swallowed deeply. The liquid had a cloying taste, but it washed some of the gall from his throat. Roughly he addressed the woman. “What is it?”

In a tiny voice, she answered, “
Metheglin
.”

“Good.” He went to the door, then halted to rasp at her, “Listen to me. This world’s going to change. Not just here—not just because you lost your bloody Stonemight. The whole Land is going to be different. You’ve got to learn to live like human beings. Without all this sick killing.”

As he left the house, the baby started crying.

He moved brusquely among the stupefied Woodhelvennin. The baby’s crying was like a spur in the air; the men and women began to shift, blink their eyes, glance around. In moments, they would recover enough to act. As he reached Vain, he muttered, “Come on. Let’s get out of here,” and strode away toward the north end of the canyon.

Vain followed.

The sunrise lit Covenant’s path. The canyon lay crookedly beyond him, and its rims began to draw together, narrowing until it was little more than a deep sheer ravine. He marched there without a backward look, clinched by the old intransigent stricture of his illness. His friends were already two days ahead of him, and traveling swiftly.

Shouts started to echo along the walls: anger, fear, loss. But he did not falter. Borne on the back of a Courser, Linden and the two Stonedownors might easily reach Revelstone ten days before him. He could conceive of no way to catch up with them in time to do them any good. But leprosy was also a form of despair for which there was no earthly cure; and he had learned to endure it, to make a life for himself in spite of it, by stationing himself in the eye of the paradox, affirming the acceptable humanity of all the contradictions—and by locking his soul in the most rigid possible discipline. The same resources enabled him to face the futile pursuit of his friends.

And he had one scant reason for hope. The Clave had decreed
his
death, not Linden’s, Sunder’s, Hollian’s. Perhaps his companions would be spared, held hostage, so that they could be used against him. Like Joan. He clung to that thought, and strode down the narrowing canyon to the tight beat of his will.

The shouts rose to a crescendo, then stopped abruptly. In the frenzy of their loss, some of the Woodhelvennin set out after him. But he did not look back, did not alter his pace. The canyon was constricted enough now to prevent his pursuers from reaching him without first passing Vain. He trusted that the Demondim-spawn would prove too intimidating for the Woodhelvennin.

Moments later, he heard bare feet slapping stone, echoing. Apprehension knotted his shoulders. To ease himself, he attempted a bluff. “Vain!” he shouted without turning his head. “Kill the first one who tries to get past you!” His words danced between the walls like a threat of murder.

But the runners did not hesitate. They were like their Graveler, addicts of the Illearth Stone; violence was their only answer to loss. Their savage cries told Covenant that they were berserk.

The next instant, one of them screamed hideously. The others scrambled to a halt.

Covenant whirled.

Vain stood facing the Woodhelvennin—five of them, the nearest still ten paces away. That man knelt with his back arched and straining, black agony in his face. Vain clenched his fist toward the man. With a wrench, he burst the man’s heart.

“Vain!” Covenant yelled. “Don’t—! I didn’t mean it!”

The next Woodhelvennin was fifteen paces away. Vain made a clawing gesture. The man’s face, the whole front of his skull, tore open, spilling brains and gore across the stone.

“
Vain
!”

But Vain had not yet satisfied Covenant’s command. Knees slightly bent, he confronted the three remaining men. Covenant howled at them to flee; but the berserkergang was on them, and they could not flee. Together they hurled themselves at Vain.

He swept them into his embrace, and began to crush them with his arms.

Covenant leaped at Vain’s back. “Stop!” He strove to pry Vain’s head back, force him to ease his grip. “You don’t have to do this!” But Vain was granite and unreachable. He squeezed until the men lost the power to scream, to breathe. Their ribs broke like wet twigs. Covenant pounded his fury at the Demondim-spawn; but Vain did not release the men until they were dead.

Then in panic Covenant saw a crowd of Woodhelvennin surging toward him. “No!” he cried, “get back!” and the echoes ran like terror down the canyon. But the people did not stop.

He could not think of anything else to do. He left Vain and fled. The only way he could prevent Vain from butchering more people was by saving himself, completing the command. Desperately he dashed away, running like the virulence of his curses.

Soon the rims of the canyon closed above him, forming a tunnel. But the light behind him and the glow at the far end of the passage enabled him to keep up his pace. The loud reiteration of his boots deafened him to the sounds of pursuit.

When he cast a glance backward, he saw Vain there, matching his speed without effort.

After some distance, he reached sunlight in the dry riverbed of the Mithil. Panting raggedly, he halted, rested against the bank. As soon as he could muffle his respiration, he listened at the tunnel; but he heard nothing. Perhaps five corpses were enough to check the extremity of the Woodhelvennin. With rage fulminating in his heart, he swung on Vain.