Lord Foul's Bane

dimension. He looked at the grass, smelled its freshness-and saw its verdancy, its springing life, its fitness. Jerking his eyes to a nearby aliantha, he received an impression of potency, health, that dumbfounded him.

His thoughts reeled, groped, then suddenly clarified around the image of health. He was seeing health, smelling natural fitness and vitality, hearing the true exuberance of spring. Health was as vivid around him as if the spirit of the Land's life had become palpable, incarnate. It was as if he had stepped without warning into an altogether different universe. Even Atiaran-she was gazing at his entrancement with puzzled surprise-was manifestly healthy, though her life was complicated by uneasiness, fatigue, pain, resolution.

By hell, he mumbled. Is my leprosy this obvious to her? Then why doesn't she understand-? He turned away from her stare, hunted for some way to test both his eyes and hers. After a moment, he spotted near the top of a hill a Gilden tree that seemed to have something wrong with it. In every respect that he could identify, specify, the tree appeared normal, healthy, yet it conveyed a sense of inner rot, an unexpected pang of sorrow, to his gaze. Pointing at it, he asked Atiaran what she saw.

Soberly, she replied, “I am not one of the lillianrill, but I can see that the Gilden dies. Some blight has stricken its heart. Did you not see such things before?”

He shook his head.

“Then how does the world from which you come live?” She sounded dismayed by the prospect of a place in which health itself was invisible.

He shrugged off her question. He wanted to challenge her, find out what she saw in him. But then he remembered her saying, You are closed to me. Now he understood her comment, and the comprehension gave him a feeling of relief. The privacy of his own illness was intact, safe. He motioned her northward again, and when after a moment she started on her way, he followed her with pleasure. For a long time he forgot himself in the sight of so much healthiness.

Gradually, as the day-moved through afternoon into gloaming and the onset of night, he adjusted to seeing health behind the colours and forms which met his eyes. Twice more his nostrils had caught the elusive odour of wrongness, but he could not find it anywhere near the creek by which Atiaran chose to make camp. In its absence he thought that he would sleep peacefully.

But somehow a rosy dream of soul health and beauty became a nightmare in which spirits threw off their bodies and revealed themselves to be ugly, rotten, contemptuous. He was glad to wake up, glad even to take the risk of shaving without the aid of a mirror.

On the sixth day, the smell of wrong became persistent, and it grew stronger as Atiaran and Covenant worked their way north along the hills. A brief spring shower dampened their clothes in the middle of the morning, but it did not wash the odour from the air. That smell made Covenant uneasy, whetted his anxiety until he seemed to have a cold blade of dread poised over his heart.

Still he could not locate, specify, the odour. It keened in him behind the bouquet of the grass and the tangy bracken and the aliantha, behind the loveliness of the vital hills, like the reek of a rotting corpse just beyond the range of his nostrils.

Finally he could not endure it any longer in silence. He drew abreast of Atiaran, and asked, “Do you smell it?”

Without a glance at him, she returned heavily, “Yes, Unbeliever. I smell it. It becomes clear to me.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means that we are walking into peril. Did you not expect it?”

Thinking, Hellfire! Covenant rephrased his question. “But what does it come from? What's causing it?”

“How can I say?” she countered. “I am no oracle.”

Covenant caught himself on the edge of an angry retort. With an effort, he kept his temper. “Then what is it?”

“It is murder,” Atiaran replied flatly, and quickened her pace to pull away from him. Do not ask me to forget, her back seemed to say, and he stumped fuming after it. Cold anxiety inched closer to his heart.

By midafternoon, he felt that his perception of wrongness was sharpening at almost every step. His eyes winced up and down the hills, as though he expected at any moment to see the source of the smell. His sinuses ached from constantly tasting the odour. But there was nothing for him to perceive-nothing but Atiaran's roaming path through the dips and hollows and valleys and outcroppings of the hills-nothing but healthy trees and thickets and flowers and verdant grass, the blazonry of the Earth's spring and nothing but the intensifying threat of something ill in the air. It was a poignant threat, and he felt obscurely that the cause would be worth bewailing.

The sensation of it increased without resolution for some time. But then a sudden change in the tension of Atiaran's back warned Covenant to brace himself scant instants before she hissed at him to stop. She had just rounded the side of a hill far enough to see into the hollow beyond it. For a moment she froze, crouching slightly and peering into the hollow. Then she began running down the hill.

At once, Covenant followed. In three strides, he reached the spot where she had halted. Beyond him, in the bottom of the hollow, stood a single copse like an eyot in a broad glade. He could see nothing amiss. But his sense of smell jabbered at him urgently, and Atiaran was dashing straight toward the copse. He sprinted after her.

She stopped short just on the east side of the trees. Quivering feverishly, she glared about her with an expression of terror and hatred, as if she wanted to enter the copse and did not have the courage. Then she cried out, aghast, “Waynhim? Melenkurion! Ah, by the Seven, what evil!”

When Covenant reached her side, she was staring a silent scream at the trees. She held her hands clasped together at her mouth, and her shoulders shook.

As soon as he looked at the copse, he saw a thin path leading into it. Impulsively, he moved forward, plunged between the trees. In five steps, he was in an open space much like the other Waymeets he had seen. This chamber was round, but it had the same tree walls, branch-woven roof, beds, and shelves.

But the walls were spattered with blood, and a figure lay in the centre of the floor.

Covenant gasped as he saw that the figure was not human.

Its outlines were generally manlike, though the torso was inordinately long, and the limbs were short, matched in length, indicating that the creature could both stand erect and run on its hands and feet. But the face was entirely alien to Covenant. A long, flexible neck joined the hairless head to the body; two pointed ears perched near the top of the skull on either side'; the mouth was as thin as a mere slit in the flesh. And there were no eyes. Two gaping nostrils surrounded by a thick, fleshy membrane filled the centre of the face. The head had no other features.

Driven through the centre of the creature's chest-pinning it to the ground-was a long iron spike.

The chamber stank of violence so badly that in a few breaths Covenant felt about to suffocate. He wanted to flee. He was a leper; even dead things were dangerous to him. But he forced himself to remain still while he sorted out one impression. On seeing the creature, his first thought had been that the Land was rid of something loathsome. But as he gritted himself, his eyes and nose corrected him. The wrongness which assailed his senses came from the killing from the spike-not from the creature. Its flesh had a hue of ravaged health; it had been natural, right-a proper part of the life of the Land Gagging on the stench of the crime, Covenant turned and fled.

As he broke out into the sunlight, he saw Atiaran already moving away to the north, almost out of the hollow. He needed no urging to hurry after her; his bones ached to put as much distance as possible between himself and the desecrated Waymeet. He hastened in her direction as if there were fangs snapping at his heels.

For the rest of the day, he found relief in putting leagues behind him. The edge of the unnatural smell was slowly blunted as they hurried onward. But it did not fade below a certain level. When he and Atiaran were forced by fatigue and darkness to stop for the night, he felt sure that there was uneasiness still ahead-that the killer of the Waynhim was moving invidiously to the north of them. Atiaran seemed to share his conviction; she asked him if he knew how to use the knife he carried.

After sleep had eluded him for some time, he made himself ask her, “Shouldn't we have-buried it?”

She answered softly from her shadowed bed across the low light of the graveling, “They would not thank our interference. They will take care of their own. But the fear is on me that they may break their bond with the Lords because of this.”