The Wounded Land

of the Land, for blood is the key to the Sunbane. If we do not unlock that power, there will be no end to our perishing.

“Hear you, Halfhand?” Memla demanded. “I doubt not that in your sojourn you have met much reviling of the Clave. Despite all our labour, Stonedown and Woodhelven must believe that we exact their blood for pleasure or self.” To Covenant's ears, her acidity was the gall of a woman who instinctively abhorred her conscious convictions. “Be not misled! The cost is sore to us. But we do not flinch from it because it is our sole means to preserve the Land. If you must cast blame, cast it upon a-Jeroth, who incurred the just wrath of the Master-and upon the ancient betrayers, Berek and his ilk, who leagued with a-Jeroth.”

Covenant wanted to protest. As soon as she mentioned Berek as a betrayer, her speech lost its persuasiveness. He had never known Berek Halfhand; the Lord-Fatherer was already a legend when Covenant had entered the Land. But his knowledge of the effects of Berek's life was nearly two score centuries more recent than Memla's. Any set of beliefs which counted Berek a betrayer was founded on a lie; and so any conclusions drawn from that foundation were false. But he kept his protest silent because he could conceive of no way to demonstrate its accuracy. No way short of victory over the Sunbane.

To spare himself a pointless argument, he said, “I'll reserve judgment on that for a while. In the meantime, satisfy my curiosity. I've got at least a dim notion of who a-Jeroth is. But what are the Seven Hells?”

Memla was muttering sourly to herself. He suspected that she resented his distrust precisely because it was echoed by a distrust within herself. But she answered brusquely, “They are rain, desert, pestilence, fertility, war, savagery, and darkness. But I believe that there is also an eighth. Blind hostility.”

After that, she rebuffed his efforts to engage her in any more talk.

When they halted for the night, he discarded his empty pouch and accepted food from her. And the next morning, he did what he could to help her prepare for the day's journey.

Sitting on Din, she faced the sunrise. It crested the horizon like a cynosure in green; and she shook her head. “A fertile sun,” she murmured. “A desert sun wreaks much ruin, and a sun of rain may be a thing of great difficulty. A sun of pestilence carries peril and abhorrence. But for those who must journey, no other sun is as arduous as the sun of fertility. Speak not to me under this sun, I adjure you. If my thoughts wander, our path will also wander.”

By the time they had covered half a league, new grass blanketed the ground. Young vines crawled visibly from place to place: bushes unfolded buds the colour of mint.

Memla raised her rukh. Uncapping the hollow sceptre, she decanted enough blood to smear her hands. Then she started chanting under her breath. A vermilion flame, pale and small in the sunlight, burned within the open triangle.

Under Din's hooves, the grass parted along a straight line stretching like a plumb toward Revelstone. Covenant watched the parting disappear into the distance. The line bared no ground; but everything nearby-grass, shrubs, incipient saplings-bent away from it as if an invisible serpent were sliding northwestward through the burgeoning vegetation.

Along the parting, Din cantered as if it were incapable of surprise.

Memla's chant became a low mumble. She rested the end of her rukh on Din's shoulders; but the triangle and the flame remained erect before her. At every change in the terrain, the verdure thickened, compressing whole seasons into fractions of the day. Yet her line remained open. Trees shunned it; copses parted as if they had been riven by an axe; bushes edging the line had no branches or leaves on that side.

When Covenant looked behind him, he saw no trace of the path; it closed the moment Memla's power passed. As a result, Vain had to fend for himself. But he did so with characteristic disinterest, slashing through grass and brush at a run, crashing thickets, tearing across briar patches which left no mark on his black skin. He could not have seemed less conscious of difficulty. Watching the Demondim-spawn, Covenant did not know which amazed him more: Memla's ability to create this path; or Vain's ability to travel at such speed without any path.

That night, Memla explained her line somewhat. Her rukh, she said, drew on the great Banefire in Revelstone, where the Clave did its work against the Sunbane, and the Readers tended the master-rukh. Only the power for the link to the master-rukh came from her; the rest she siphoned from the Banefire. So the making of her path demanded stern concentration, but did not exhaust her. And the nearer she drew to Revelstone, the easier her access to the Banefire became. Thus she was able to form her line again the next day, defying the resistance of huge trees, heather and bracken as high as Din's shoulders, grass like thickets and thickets like forests.

Yet Vain was able to match the Courser's pace. He met the sharper test of each new league as if no size or density of vegetation could ever estimate his limits. And the third day made no change. It intensified still more the extravagance of the verdure, but did not hamper the nonchalant ease with which he followed Din. Time and again, Covenant found himself craning his neck, watching Vain's progress and wondering at the sheer unconscious force it represented.

But as the afternoon passed, his thoughts turned from Vain, and he began to look ahead. The mammoth jungle concealed any landmarks the terrain might have offered, but he knew that Revelstone was near. All his anxiety, dread, and anticipation returned to him; and he fought to see through the thronging foliage as if only an early glimpse of the ancient Keep would forewarn him of the needs and hazards hidden there.

But he received no forewarning. Late in the afternoon, Memla's path started up a steep hillside. The vegetation suddenly ended on the rock of the foothills. Revelstone appeared before Covenant as if in that instant it had been unfurled from the storehouse of his most vivid memories.

The Courser had arrived athwart the great stone city, Giant-wrought millennia ago from the gutrock of the plateau. Out of the farthest west, mountains came striding eastward, then, two leagues away on Covenant's left, dropped sheer to the upland plateau, still a thousand feet and more above the foothills. The plateau narrowed to form a wedged promontory half a league in length; and into this promontory the ancient Giants had delved the immense and intricate habitation of Revelstone.

The whole cliff-face before Covenant was coigned and fortified, lined with abutments and balconies, punctuated by oriels, architraves, embrasures, from a level fifty or a hundred feet above the foothills to the rim of the plateau. On his left, Revelstone gradually faded into native rock; but on his right, it filled the promontory to the wedge-tip, where the watchtower guarded the massive gates of the Keep.

The tremendous and familiar size of the city made his heart ache with pride for the Giants he had loved-and with sharp grief, for those Giants had died in a body, slain by a Raver during the war against Lord Foul's Illearth Stone. He had once heard that there was a pattern graven into the walls of Revelstone, an organization of meaning too huge for un-Giantish minds to grasp; and now he would never have it explained to him.

But that was not all his grief. The sight of Revelstone recalled other people, friends and antagonists, whom he had hurt and lost: Trell Atiaran-mate; Hile Troy, who had sold his soul to a Forestal so that his army might survive; Saltheart Foamfollower; Elena. High Lord Mhoram. Then Covenant's sorrow turned to anger as he considered that Mhoram's name was being used by a Clave which willingly shed innocent blood.

His wrath tightened as he studied Revelstone itself. Mania's line ran to a point in the middle of the city; and from the plateau above that point sprang a prodigious vermeil beam, aimed toward the heart of the declining sun. It was like the Sunbane shaft of Sunder's orcrest; but its sheer size was staggering. Covenant gaped at it, unable to conceive the number of lives necessary to summon so much power. Revelstone had become a citadel of blood. He felt poignantly that it would never be clean again.

But then his gaze caught something in the west, a glitter of hope. There, halfway between Revelstone and the Westron Mountains, lay Furl Falls, where the overflow of Glimmermere came down the cliff to form the White River. And the Falls held water; tumbling spray caught the approaching sunset, and shone. The land had been eighteen days without a sun of rain, and six of them had been desert; yet the springs of Glimmermere had not failed.

Gripping anger and hope between his teeth, Covenant set himself to face whatever lay ahead.

Memla gave a sigh of accomplishment, and lowered her rukh. Turning Din's head with a muttered command, she sent the beast trotting toward the gates under the southeast face of the tower.

The watchtower was barely half the height of the plateau, and its upper reaches stood independent of the