The sight of his reaction stung Linden. He was such a potent individual, seemed to have so many strengths which she lacked. How had he been brought to this?
But an instant later he crushed his fear as if he were stamping on the neck of a viper. Defying his own weakness, he strode toward the door.
It opened before he reached it. A lone man stepped uninvited out of the dark. Linden could see him clearly. He wore burlap wound around him like cerements. Ash had been rubbed unevenly into his hair, smeared thickly over his cheeks. It emphasized the deadness of his eyes, so that he looked like a ghoul in masque.
“Covenant?” Like his mien, his voice was ashen, dead.
Covenant faced the man. He seemed suddenly taller, as if he were elevated by his own hard grasp on life. “Yes.”
“Thomas Covenant?”
The writer nodded impatiently. “What do you want?”
“The hour of judgment is at hand.” The man stared into the room as if he were blind. “The Master calls for your soul. Will you come?”
Covenant's mouth twisted into a snarl. “Your master knows what I can do to him.”
The man did not react. He went on as if his speech had already been arrayed for burial. “The woman will be sacrificed at the rising of the full moon. Expiation must be made for sin. She will pay if you do not. This is the commandment of the Master of life and death. Will you come?”
Sacrificed? Linden gaped. Expiation? A flush of indignation burned her skin. What the hell-?
Covenant's shoulders knotted. His eyes flamed with extreme promises, threats. “I'll come.”
No flicker of consciousness animated the man's grey features. He turned like a marionette and retreated into the night.
For a moment, Covenant stood still. His arms hugged his chest as if to stifle an outcry; his head stretched back in anguish. The bruises marked his face like a bereavement.
But then he moved. With a violence that startled Linden, appalled her, he struck himself across the cheek with his half-hand. Abruptly, he threw himself into the darkness after his summoner.
Linden almost lost her chance to follow. She felt stunned by dismay. The Master-? Sacrificed? Dreads and doubts crawled her skin like vermin. The man in burlap had looked so insentient-soulless more than any animal. Drugs? Or-?
Was Covenant right? About the old man, about possession? About the purpose-?
Sacrificed?
Oh, dear God! The man in burlap appeared insane enough, lost enough, to be dangerous. And Covenant-? Covenant was capable of anything.
Her guess at what he was doing galvanized her. Fear for him broke through her personal apprehension, sent her hurrying around the corner of the house in pursuit.
His summoner had led him away from the highway, away from the house into the woods. Linden could hear them in the brush; without light, they were unable to move quietly. As her eyes adjusted, she glimpsed them ahead of her, flickering like shadows in and out of the variegated dark. She followed them.
They travelled blindly through the woods, over hills and along valleys. They used no path; Linden had the impression that they were cutting as straight as a plumb line toward their destination. And as they moved, the night seemed to mount around her, growing steadily more hostile as her trepidation increased. The trees and brush became malevolent, as if she were passing into another wood altogether, a place of hazard and cruel intent.
Then a hill lay across their way. Covenant and his summoner ascended, disappeared over the crest in a strange flare of orange light. It picked them out of the dark, then quenched them like an instant of translation. Warned by that brief gleam, Linden climbed slowly. The keening of her nerves seemed loud in the blackness. The last few yards she crossed on her hands and knees, keeping herself within the cover of the underbrush.
As her head crested the hill, she was struck by a blaze of light. Fire invisible a foot away burst in her face as if she had just penetrated the boundary of dreams. For an instant, she was blinded by the light, paralyzed by the silence. The night swallowed all sound, leaving the air empty of life.
Blinking furiously, she peered past the hillcrest.
Beyond her lay a deep barren hollow. Its slopes were devoid of grass, brush, trees, as if the soil had been scoured by acid.
A bonfire burned at the bottom of the hollow. Its flames sprang upward like lust, writhed like madness; but it made no noise. Seeing it, Linden felt that she had been stricken deaf. Impossible that such a fire could blaze in silence.
Near the fire stretched a rough plane of native rock, perhaps ten feet across. A large triangle had been painted on it in red-colour as crimson as fresh blood.
Joan lay on her back within the triangle. She did not move, appeared to be unconscious; only the slow lifting of her chest against her nightgown showed that she was alive.
People clustered around her, twenty or thirty of them. Men, women, children-all dressed in habiliments of burlap; all masked with grey as if they had been wallowing in ashes. They were as gaunt as icons of hunger. They gazed out of eyes as dead as if the minds behind their orbs had been extirpated-eyes which had been dispossessed of every vestige of will or spirit. Even the children stood like puppets and made no sound.
Their faces were turned toward a place on Linden's left.
Toward Thomas Covenant.
He stood halfway down the hillside, confronting the fire across the barrenness of the hollow. His shoulders hunched; his hands were fists at his sides, and his head was thrust combatively forward. His chest heaved as if he were full of denunciations.
Nobody moved, spoke, blinked. The air was intense with silence like concentrated coercion.
Abruptly, Covenant grated through his teeth, “I'm here.” The clench of his throat made each word sound like a self-inflicted wound. “Let her go.”
A movement snatched Linden's attention back to the bottom of the hollow. A man brawnier than the rest changed positions, took a stance on the rock at the point of the triangle, above Joan's head. He raised his arms, revealing a long, curved dagger gripped in his right fist. In a shrill voice like a man on the verge of ecstasy, he shouted, “It is time! We are the will of the Master of life and death! This is the hour of retribution and cleansing and blood! Let us open the way for the Master's presence!”
The night sucked his voice out of the air, left in its place a stillness as sharp as a cut. For a moment, nothing happened.
Covenant took a step downward, then jerked to a halt.
A woman near the fire shambled forward. Linden nearly gasped aloud as she recognized the woman who had stood on the steps of the courthouse, warning people to repent. With her three children behind her, she approached the blaze.
She bowed to it like a dead woman.
Blankly, she put her right hand into the flames.
A shriek of pain rent the night. She recoiled from the fire, fell in agony to the bare ground.
A red quivering ran through the flames like a spasm of desire. The fire seemed to mount as if it fed on the woman's pain.
Linden's muscles bunched, ached to hurl her to her feet. She wanted to shout her horror, stop this atrocity. But her limbs were locked. Images of desperation or evil froze her where she crouched. All these people were like Joan.
Then the woman regained her feet and stood as dumbly as if the nerves to her burned hand had been severed. Her gaze returned to Covenant like a compulsion, exerting its demand against him.
The oldest of her children took her place at the bonfire.
No! Linden cried, striving uselessly to break the silence.
The young boy bowed, thrust his emaciated arm into the blaze.
His wail broke Linden's will, left her panting in helpless abomination. She could not move, could not look away. Loathings for which she had no name mastered her.
