A flinch of revulsion twisted her face; his assertion seemed to hurt her. For an instant, he feared that her mind was going to fail. But then her eyes climbed to his face. The effort of self-mastery darkened them like blood. “I want-” Her voice quavered; she crushed it flat. “I want to meet the sonofabitch who did this. So I can see for myself.”
Covenant nodded, gritted his own black ire. “I think you're going to get the chance.” He, too, wanted to meet Nassic's slayer. “We can't try to second-guess Foul. He knows more than we do. And we can't stay here. But we've lost our guide-our only chance to learn what's happening. We have to go to Mithil Stonedown.” Grimly, he concluded, “Since the killer didn't attack us here, he's probably waiting for us in the village.”
For a long moment, she remained motionless, mustering her resources. Then she said tightly, “Let's go.”
He did not hesitate. Nassic had not even been given the dignity of a clean death. With Linden at his side, he marched out into the night.
But in spite of the violence in him, he did not allow himself to rush. The stars did not shed an abundance of light; and the rain had left the floor of the dell slick with mud. The path to Mithil Stonedown was hazardous. He did not intend to come to harm through recklessness.
He made his way strictly down the valley; and at its end, he followed the stream into a crooked file between sheer walls, then turned away along a crevice that ascended at right angles to the file. The crevice was narrow and crude, difficult going in the star-blocked dark; but it levelled after a while, began to tend downward. Before long, he gained a steep open slope-the eastern face of the Mithil valley.
Dimly in the distance below him, the valley widened like a wedge northward toward an expanse of plains. A deeper blackness along the valley bottom looked like a river.
Beside the river, somewhat to his right, lay a cluster of tiny lights.
“Mithil Stonedown,” he murmured. But then vertigo forced him to turn away leftward along a faint path. He could not repress his memory of the time he had walked this path with Lena. Until he told Linden what he remembered, what he had done, she would not know who he was, would not be able to choose how she wished to respond to him. Or to the Land.
He needed her to understand his relationship to the Land. He needed her support, her skills, her strength. Why else had she been chosen?
A cold, penetrating dampness thickened the air; but the exertion of walking kept him warm. And the path became steadily less difficult as it descended toward the valley bottom. As the moon began to crest the peaks, he gave up all pretence of caution. He was hunting for the courage to say what had to be said.
Shortly, the path curved off the slopes, doubled back to follow the river outward. He glanced at Linden from time to time, wondering where she had learned the toughness, unwisdom, or desperation which enabled or drove her to accompany him. He ached for the capacity to descry the truth of her, determine whether her severity came from conviction or dread.
She did not believe in evil.
He had no choice; he had to tell her.
Compelling himself with excoriations, he touched her arm, stopped her. She looked at him. “Linden.” She was alabaster in the moonlight-pale and not to be touched. His mouth winced. “There's something I've got to say.” His visage felt like old granite. “Before we go any farther.” Pain made him whisper.
'The first time I was here, I met a girl. Lena. She was just a kid, — but she was my friend. She kept me alive on Kevin's Watch, when I was so afraid it could have killed me.' His long loneliness cried out against this self- betrayal.
“I raped her.”
She stared at him. Her lips formed soundless words: Raped-? In her gaze, he could see himself becoming heinous.
He did not see the shadow pass over their heads, had no warning of their danger until the net landed on them, tangling them instantly together. Figures surged out of the darkness around them. One of the attackers hit them in the faces with something which broke open and stank like a rotten melon.
Then he could no longer breathe. He fell with Linden in his arms as if they were lovers.
Six: The Graveller
HE awoke urgently, with a suffocating muck on his face that made him strain to move his arms to clear the stuff away. But his hands were tied behind his back. He gagged helplessly for a moment, until he found that he could breathe.
The dry, chill air was harsh in his lungs. But he relished it. Slowly, it drove back the nausea.
From somewhere near him, he heard Linden say flatly, “You'll be all right. They must have hit us with some kind of anaesthetic. It's like ether-makes you feel sick. But the nausea goes away. I don't think we've been hurt.”
He rested briefly on the cold stone, then rolled off his chest and struggled into a sitting position. The bonds made the movement difficult; a wave of dizziness went through him, “Friends,” he muttered. But the air steadied him. “Nassic was right.”
“Nassic was right,” she echoed as if the words did not interest her.
They were in a single room, as constricted as a cell. A heavy curtain covered the doorway; but opposite the entrance a barred window let the pale grey of dawn into the room-the late dawn of a sunrise delayed by mountains. The bars were iron.
Linden sat across from him. Her arms angled behind her; her wrists, too, were bound. Yet she had managed to clean the pulp from her cheeks. Shreds of it clung to the shoulders of her shirt.
His own face wore the dried muck like a leper's numbness.
He shifted so that he could lean against the wall. The bonds cut into his wrists. He closed his eyes. A trap, he murmured. Nassic's death was a trap. He had been killed so that Covenant and Linden would blunder into Mithil Stonedown's defences and be captured. What's Foul trying to do? he asked the darkness behind his eyelids. Make us fight these people?
“Why did you do it?” Linden said. Her tone was level, as if she had already hammered all the emotion out of it. “Why did you tell me about that girl?”
His eyes jumped open to look at her. But in the dun light he was unable to discern her expression. He wanted to say, Leave it alone, we've got other things to worry about. But she had an absolute right to know the truth about him.
“I wanted to be honest with you.” His guts ached at the memory. “The things I did when I was here before are going to affect what happens to us now. Foul doesn5t forget. And I was afraid”- he faltered at the cost of his desire for rectitude — “you might trust me without knowing what you were trusting. I don't want to betray you — by not being what you think I am.”
She did not reply. Her eyes were shadows which told him nothing. Abruptly, the pressure of his unassuaged bitterness began to force words out of him like barbs.
“After my leprosy was diagnosed, and Joan divorced me, I was impotent for a year. Then I came here. Something I couldn't understand was happening. The Land was healing parts of me that had been dead so long I'd forgotten I had them. And Lena-” The pang of her stung him like an acid. “She was so beautiful I still have nightmares about it. The first night-It was too much for me. Lepers aren't supposed to be potent.”
He did not give Linden a chance to respond; he went on, reliving his old self-judgment. 'Everybody paid for it. I couldn't get away from the consequences. Her mother ended up committing a kind of suicide. Her father's life was warped. The man who wanted to marry her lost everything. Her own mind came apart.
“But I didn't stop there. I caused her death, and the death of her daughter, Elena-
Linden listened without moving. She looked like a figure of stone against the wall, blank and unforgiving, as if
