The Wounded Land (39 page)

A figure snagged the corner of Covenant’s vision. He turned, and saw Vain standing beside him. The Demondim-spawn made no attempt to conceal himself below the ridge.

“Idiot!” whispered Covenant fiercely. “Get down!”

Vain paid no attention. He regarded the fire with the same blind, ambiguous smile that he had worn while traveling through Andelain. Or while killing the people of Stonemight Woodhelven. Covenant grabbed at his arm; but Vain was immovable.

Through his teeth, Covenant muttered, “Damn you, anyway. Someday you’re going to be the death of me.”

When he looked back toward the fire, it had moved noticeably toward the escarpment, and the bowl was brighter. With a sudden rush of dismay, he saw that the mound of wood ended in a pile around an upright stake as tall and heavy as a man.

Someone or something was tied to the stake. Tied alive. The indistinct figure was struggling.

Hell and blood! Covenant instinctively recognized a trap. For a moment, he was paralyzed. He could not depart, leave that bound figure
to burn. And he could not approach closer. An abominable purpose was at work here, malice designed to snare him—or someone else equally vulnerable. Someone else? That question had no answer. But as he gritted himself, trying to squeeze a decision out of his paralysis, he remembered Mhoram’s words:
It boots nothing to avoid his snares
—

Abruptly he rose to his feet. “Stay here,” he breathed at Vain. “No sense both of us getting into trouble.” Then he went down the slope and strode grimly toward the fire.

Vain followed as usual. Covenant could hardly keep from raging at the Demondim-spawn. But he did not stop.

As he neared the escarpment, the fire began to lick at the woodpile around the stake. He broke into a run. In moments, he was within the bowl and staring at the bait of the trap.

The creature bound to the stake was one of the Waynhim.

Like the ur-viles, the Waynhim were Demondim-spawn. Except for their gray skin and smaller stature, they resembled the ur-viles closely. Their hairless bodies had long trunks and short limbs, with the arms and legs matched in length so that the creatures could run on all fours as well as walk erect. Their pointed ears sat high on their bald skulls; their mouths were like slits. And they had no eyes; they used scent instead of vision. Wide nostrils gaped in the centers of their faces.

As products of the Demondim, the Waynhim were lore-wise and cunning. But, unlike their black kindred, they had broken with Lord Foul after the Ritual of Desecration. Covenant had heard that the Waynhim as a race served the Land according to their private standards; but he had seen nothing more of them since his last stay at Revelstone, when a Waynhim had escaped from Foul’s Creche to bring the Council word of Lord Foul’s power.

The creature before Covenant now was in tremendous pain. Its skin was raw. Dark blood oozed from scores of lash-marks. One of its arms bent at an angle of agony, and its left ear had been ripped away. But it was conscious. Its head followed his approach, nostrils quivering. When he stopped to consider its situation, it strained toward him, begging for rescue.

“Hang on,” he rasped, though he did not know if the creature could understand him. “I’ll get you out.” Fuming in outrage, he began to scatter the wood, kicking dead boughs and brush out of his way as he reached toward the stake.

But then the creature seemed to become aware of a new scent. Perhaps it caught the smell of his wedding ring. He knew that Demondim-spawn were capable of such perceptions. It burst into a fit of agitation, began barking in its harsh, guttural tongue. Urgency filled its voice. Covenant grasped none of its language; but he heard one word which sent a chill of apprehension down his spine. Again and again, the Waynhim barked, “
Nekhrimah
!”

Bloody hell! The creature was trying to give Vain some kind of command.

Covenant did not stop. The creature’s desperation became his. Heaving wood aside, he cleared a path to the stake. At once, he snatched the Graveler’s knife from his belt and began to slash the vines binding the Waynhim.

In a moment, the creature was free. Covenant helped it limp out of the woodpile. Immediately, the creature turned on Vain, emitted a stream of language like a curse. Then it grabbed Covenant’s arm and tugged him away from the fire.

Southward.

“No.” He detached his arm with difficulty. Though the Waynhim probably could not comprehend him, he tried to explain. “I’m going north. I’ve got to get to Revelstone.”

The creature let out a muffled cry as if it knew the significance of that word
Revelstone
. With a swiftness which belied its injuries, it scuttled out of the bowl along the line of the escarpment. A moment later, it had vanished in the darkness.

Covenant’s dread mounted. What had the Waynhim tried to tell him? It had infected him with a vivid sense of peril. But he did not intend to take even one step that increased the distance between him and Linden. His only alternative was to flee as quickly as possible. He turned back toward Vain.

The suddenness of the surprise froze him.

A man stood on the other side of the fire.

He had a ragged beard and frenzied eyes. In contrast, his lips wore a shy smile. “Let it be,” he said, nodding after the Waynhim. “We have no more need of it.” He moved slowly around the fire, drawing closer to Covenant and Vain. For all its surface nonchalance, his voice was edged with hysteria.

He reached Covenant’s side of the blaze. A sharp intake of air hissed through Covenant’s teeth.

The man was naked to the waist, and his torso was behung with salamanders. They grew out of him like excrescences. Their bodies twitched as he moved. Then: eyes glinted redly in the firelight, and their jaws snapped.

A victim of the Sunbane!

Remembering Marid, Covenant brandished his knife. “That’s close enough,” he warned; but his voice shook, exposing his fear. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“No,” the man replied, “you do not wish to hurt me.” He grinned like a friendly gargoyle. “And I have no wish to hurt you.” His hands were clasped together in front of him as if they contained something precious. “I wish to give you a gift.”

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.

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.