White Gold Wielder

wild; and he feared he had torn the thin fabric of her sanity. But then her eyes focused on him with an emotional impact that made him wince. Abruptly, she was alabaster and adamantine in his grasp. “Let go of me,” she articulated distinctly. 'You don't give enough to have the right.”

He pleaded with her mutely, but she did not relent. When he dropped his arms and stepped back, she turned away as if she were dismissing him from her life.

To the First, she said, “Get some green wood. Branches or whatever you can find.” She sounded oddly hard and brittle, not to be touched. “Soak the ends in vitrim and light them. The smoke should give us some protection.”

The First cocked an eyebrow at the tension between Covenant and Linden. But the Giants did not hesitate: they were acquainted with Linden's health-sense. In moments, they had wrenched several boughs the size of brands from nearby trees. Pitchwife muttered mournfully at the idea of using his precious vitrim for such a purpose, but he handed one of his pouches to the First readily enough. Shortly, the four Giants and Cail held flaming branches that guttered and spat with enough smoke to palliate the reek of rot. Outsized flying insects hummed angrily around the area, then shot off in search of other prey.

When the supplies had been repacked, the First turned to Linden for instructions, tacitly recognizing the change which had taken place in the Chosen Covenant was Giantfriend and ring-wielder; but it was Linden's percipience upon which the company depended now for survival.

Without a glance at Covenant, Linden nodded. Then she took Pitchwife's place behind the First and Honninscrave; and the company started moving.

Beclouded with smoke and rot, they struggled on through the wild region. Under the particular corruption of the sun's scarlet aura, vines which had been too hard for the First's sword were now marked with swellings that burst and sores that ran. Fetor and borers took hold of some of the trees, ate out their hearts. Others lost wide strips of bark, exposing bald wood fatally veined with termites. The narcoleptic sweetness of the orchids penetrated the acrid smoke from time to time Covenant felt that tie was labouring through the fruition of what Lord Foul had striven to achieve ten years and three and a half millennia ago-the desecration of all of the Land's health to leprosy. Here the Despiser emerged in the throes of victory. The beauty of Land and Law had been broken. With smoke in his eyes and revulsion in his guts, images of gangrene and pain on all sides Covenant found himself praying for a sun of only two days.

Yet the red sun produced one benefit: the rotting of the wood allowed the First to begin cutting a path once more. The company was able to improve its pace. And finally the juniper wilderness opened into an area of tall, thick grass as corrupt and cloying as a tarpit. The First called a halt for a brief meal and a few swallows of diamondraught.

Covenant needed the liquor, but he could hardly eat. His gaze refused to leave the swelling of Linden's bitten finger.

Sunbane-sickness, he thought miserably. She had suffered from it once before. Sunder and Hollian, who were familiar with such sickness, had believed that she would die. He would never forget the look of her as she had lain helpless in the grip of convulsions as flagrant as his nightmares. Only her health-sense and voure had saved her.

That memory compelled him to risk her ire. More harshly than he intended, he began, “I thought I told you- ”

“And I told you,” she retorted, “to leave me alone. I don't need you to mother me.”

But he faced her squarely, forced her to recognize his concern. After a moment, her belligerence failed. Frowning, she turned her head away. “You don't have to worry about it,” she sighed. “I know what I'm doing. It helps me concentrate.”

“Helps-?” He did not know how to understand her.

“Sunder was right,” she responded. “This is the worst-the sun of pestilence. It sucks at me-or soaks into me-I don't know how to describe it. I become it. It becomes me.” The simple act of putting her plight into words made her shudder. Deliberately, she raised her hand, studied her hurt finger. 'The pain. The way it scares me. It helps make the distinction. It keeps me separate.”

Covenant nodded. What else could he do? Her vulnerability had become terrible to him. Huskily, he said, “Don't let it get too bad.” Then he made another attempt to force food down into his knotted stomach.

The rest of the day was atrocious. And the next day was worse. But early in the evening, amid the screaming of numberless cicadas and the piercing frustration of huge, smoke-daunted mosquitoes, the company reached a region of hills where wide boulders still protruded from the surrounding morass of moss and ground-ivy. That proved to be a fortuitous camping-place; for when the sun rose again, it was wreathed in dusty brown.

After only two days.

The elevation of the rocks protected the travellers from the effect of the desert sun on the putrefying vegetation.

Everything that the fertile sun had produced and the sun of pestilence had blighted might as well have been made of wax. The brown clad sun melted it all, reduced every form of plant fiber, every kind of sap or juice, every monstrous insect to a necrotic grey sludge. The few bushes in the area slumped like over-heated candles; moss and ivy sprawled into Physician's Plight spilth that formed turbid pools in the low places of the terrain; the bugs of dawn fell like clotted drops of rain. Then the sludge denatured as if the desert sun drank it away.

Long before mid-morning, every slope and hollow and span of ground had been burned to naked ruin and dust.

For the Giants, that process was more horrible than anything else they had seen. Until now, only the scale of the Sunbane's power had been staggering. Verdure grew naturally, and insects and rot could be included in the normal range of experience. But nothing had prepared Covenant's companions for the quick and entire destruction of so much prodigious vegetation and pestilence.

Staring about her, the First breathed, “Ah, Cable Seadreamer! There is no cause for wonder that you lacked voice to utter such visions. The wonder is that you endured to bear them at all-and that you bore them in loneliness.”

Pitchwife clung to her as if he were reeling inwardly. Open nausea showed in Mistweave's face. He had learned to doubt himself, and now the things he could no longer trust covered all the world. But Honninscrave's deep eyes flamed hotly-the eyes of a man who knew now beyond question that he was on the right path.

Grimly, Linden demanded a knife from Pitchwife. For a moment, he could not answer her. “But at last the First stirred, turned from the harsh vista of the waste; and her husband turned with her.

Dazedly, Pitchwife gave Linden his blade. She used its tip to lance her infected finger. With vitrim, she cleansed the wound thoroughly, then bound it in a light bandage. When she was done, she lifted her head; and her gaze was as intense as Honninscrave's. Like him, she now appeared eager to go forward.

Or like High Lord Elena, who had been driven by inextricable abhorrence and love, and by lust for power, to the mad act of breaking the Law of Death. After only three days under the Sunbane, Linden appeared capable of such things.

Soon the company started south-westward again across a wasteland which had become little more than an anvil for the fierce brutality of the sun.

It brought back more of the past to Covenant. Heat haze as thick as hallucination and dust bleached to the colour of dismay made his memories vivid. He and Linden had been summoned to Kevin's Watch during a day of rain; but that night Sander's father, Nassic, had been murdered, and the next day had arisen a desert sun-and Covenant and Linden had encountered a Raver amid the hostility of Mithil Stone' down.

Many of the consequences had fallen squarely upon Sunder's shoulders. As the Stonedown's Graveler, he had already been required to shed the lives of his own wife and son so that their blood would serve the village. And then the Raver's actions had cost him his father, had compelled him to sacrifice his friend, Marid, to the Sunbane, and had faced him with the necessity of bleeding his mother to death. Such things had driven him to flee his duty for the sake of the Unbeliever and the Chosen-and for his own sake, so that he would be spared the responsibility of more killing.

Yet during that same desert sun Covenant's life had also been changed radically. The corruption of that sun