The Wounded Land

inflection of appeal. “I do not wish to set aside the sole power I possess.”

Her honesty and courage demanded an answer. With an effort that defocused his eyes and made his head spin, he said, “Keep it. I'll take the chance.”

His reply softened her features momentarily. “When first we met,” she said, “your misdoubt was just, though I knew it not. Yet trust is preferable.” Then, abruptly, she stiffened again. “But we must depart. Gibbon has gathered the Clave at the Banefire. While we delay, they raise the Grim against us.”

The Grim! Covenant could not block the surge of his dismay. It carried him over the edge, and he plunged like dead stone into darkness.

As he fell, he heard a cold wail from Revelstone-a cry like the keening of the great Keep, promising loss and blood. Or perhaps the wail was within himself.

Twenty One: Sending

SOMETIME during the night, he wandered close to consciousness. He was being rocked on the back of a Courser. Arms reached around him from behind and knotted together over his heart. They supported him like bands of stone. Haruchai arms.

Someone said tensely, “Are you not a healer? You must succour him.”

“No.” Linden's reply sounded small and wan, and complete. It made him moan deep in his throat.

Glints of rukh-fire hurt his eyes. When he shut out the sight, he faded away once more.

The next time he looked up, he saw the grey of dawn in fragments through the monstrous jungle. The lightening of the sky lay directly ahead of him. He was mounted on Din, with Memla before him and Brinn behind. Another Courser, carrying Ceer and Hergrom, led the way along the line Memla created with her rukh. The rest of the company followed Din.

As Covenant fumbled toward wakefulness, Memla's path ran into an area of relatively clear ground under the shade of a towering stand of rhododendron. There she halted. Over her shoulder, she called to the company, “Remain mounted. The Coursers will spare us from the Sunbane.”

Behind him, Covenant heard Sunder mutter, “Then it is true-”

But Hergrom dropped to the ground, began to accept supplies handed down by Ceer; and Brinn said, “The Haruchai do not share this need to be warded.”

Immune? Covenant wondered dimly. Yes. How else had so many of them been able to reach Revelstone unwarped?

Then the sun began to rise, sending spangles of crimson and misery through the vegetation. Once again, the eh-Brand had foretold the Sunbane accurately.

When the first touch of the sun was past, Memla ordered the Coursers to their knees, controlling them all with her command. The company began to dismount.

Covenant shrugged off Brinn's help and tried to stand alone. He found that he could. He felt as pale and weak as an invalid; but his muscles were at least able to hold his weight.

Unsteadily, he turned to look back westward through the retreating night for some sign of the na-Mhoram's Grim.

The horizon seemed clear.

Near him, Sunder and Stell had descended from one Courser, Hollian and Harn from another. Cail helped Linden down from the fifth beast. Covenant faced her with his frailty and concern; but she kept her gaze to herself, locked herself in her loneliness as if the very nerves of her eyes, the essential marrow of her bones, had been humiliated past bearing.

He left her alone. He did not know what to do, and felt too tenuous to do it.

While the Haruchai prepared food for the company-dried meat, bread, fruit, and metheglin- Memla produced from one of her sacks a large leather pouch of distilled voure, the pungent sap Covenant's friends had once used to ward off insects under the sun of pestilence. Carefully, she dabbed the concentrate on each, of her companions, excluding only Vain. Covenant nodded at her omission. Perhaps rukh-fire could harm the Demondim-spawn. The Sunbane could not.

Covenant ate slowly and thoroughly, feeding his body's poverty. But all the time, a weight of apprehension impended toward him from the west. He had seen During Stonedown, had seen what the Grim could do. With an effort, he found his voice to ask Memla how long the raising of a Grim took.

She was clearly nervous. “That is uncertain,” she muttered. “The size of the Grim, and its range, must be considered.” Her gaze flicked to his face, leaving an almost palpable mark of anxiety across his cheek. “I read them. Here.” Her hands tightened on her rukh. “It will be very great.”

Very great, Covenant murmured. And he was so weak. He pressed his hands to the krill, and tried to remain calm.

A short time later, the company remounted. Memla drew on the Banefire to open a way for the huge Coursers. Again, Hergrom and Ceer-on Annoy, Memla said: the names of the beasts seemed important to her, as if she loved them in her blunt fashion-went first, followed by Covenant, Brinn, and the Rider on Din, then by Cail and Linden on Clash, Sunder and Stell on Clang, Harn and Hollian on Clangor. Vain brought up the rear as if he were being sucked along without volition in the wake of the Coursers.

Covenant dozed repeatedly throughout the day. He had been too severely drained; he could not keep himself awake. Whenever the company paused for food, water, and rest, he consumed all the aliment he was given, striving to recover some semblance of strength. But between stops the rocking of Din's stride unmoored his awareness, so that he rode tides of dream and dread and insects, and could not anchor himself.

In periods of wakefulness, he knew from the rigidity of Mania's back that she wanted to flee and flee, and never stop. She, too, knew vividly what the Grim could do. But, toward evening, her endurance gave out. Under the shelter of a prodigious Gilden, she halted the quest for the night.

At first, while she started a fire, the air thronged with flying bugs of every description; and the boughs and leaves of the tree seethed with things which crawled and bored. But voure protected the company. And gradually, as dusk seeped into the jungle, macerating the effect of the Sunbane, the insects began to disappear.

Their viscid stridulation faded as they retreated into gestation or sleep. Memla seated her weary bones beside the fire, dismissed the Coursers, and let the Haruchai care for her companions.

Sunder and Hollian seemed tired, as if they had not slept for days; but they were sturdy, with funds of stamina still untapped. Though they knew of the Grim, at least by rumour, their relief at escaping Revelstone outweighed their apprehension. They stood and moved together as if their imprisonment had made them intimate. Sunder seemed to draw ease from the eh-Brand, an anodyne for his old self-conflicts; her youth and her untormented sense of herself were a balm to the Graveller, who had shed his own wife and son and had chosen to betray his people for Covenant's sake. And she, in turn, found support and encouragement in his knotted resourcefulness, his determined struggle for conviction. They both had lost so much; Covenant was relieved to think that they could comfort each other. He could not have given them comfort.

But their companionship only emphasized Linden's isolation in his eyes. The Raver had done something to her. And Covenant, who had experience with such things, dreaded knowing what it was-and dreaded the consequences of not knowing.

As he finished his meal, he arrived at the end of his ability to support his ignorance. He was sitting near the fire. Memla rested, half-asleep, on one side of him. On the other sat Sunder and Hollian. Four of the Haruchai stood guard beyond the tree. Brinn and Cail moved silently around the fringes of the Gilden, alert for peril. Vain stood at the edge of the light like the essence of all black secrets. And among them, across the fire from Covenant, Linden huddled within herself, with her arms clasped around her knees and her eyes