rising into the Earthpower of the Hills. It made her guts tremble as if she were walking across an open wound.
By degrees Covenant's pace became laboured. Andelain no longer sustained him. More and more of its waning strength went to ward off the corruption of the Sunbane. As a result, the fertile sun had little superficial effect A few trees groaned taller, grew twisted with hurt; some of the shrubs raised their branches like limbs of desecration. All the birds and animals seemed to have fled. But most of the woods and grass were preserved by the power of the soil in which they grew.
However, the sickness in the underlying rock and dirt mounted without cessation. That night, Covenant slept the sleep of exhaustion and
Well before dawn, she and her companions arose and went on. She felt now that they were racing the dissolution of the Hills.
That morning, they caught their first glimpse of Mount Thunder.
It was still at least a day away. But it stood stark and fearsome above Andelain, with the sun leering past its shoulder and a furze of unnatural vegetation darkening its slopes. From this distance, it looked like a titan that had been beaten to its knees.
Somewhere inside that mountain Covenant intended to find Lord Foul.
He turned to Linden and the Giants, his eyes red-rimmed and flagrant Words yearned m him, but he seemed unable to utter them. She had thought him incognisant of the Giants’ disconsolation, offended by her own intransigent refusal; but she saw now that he was not. He understood her only too well. A fierce and recalcitrant part of him felt as she did, fought like loathing against his annealed purpose. He did not want to die, did not want to lose her or the Land. And he had withheld any explanation of himself from the Giants so that they would not side with him against her. So that she would not be altogether alone.
He wished to say all those things. They were plain to her aggrieved senses. But his throat closed on them like a fist, would not let them out.
She might have reached out to him then. Without altering any of her promises, she could have put her love around him. But horror swelled in the ground on which they stood, and it snatched her attention away from him.
Abhorrence. Execration. Sunbane and Earthpower locked in mortal combat beneath her feet. And the Earthpower could not win. No Law defended it Corruption was going to tear the heart out of the Hills. The ground had become so unstable that the Giants and Covenant felt its tremors.
“Dear Christ!” Linden gasped. She grabbed at Covenant's arm. “Come on!” With all her strength, she pulled him away from the focus of Andelain's horror.
The Giants were aghast with incomprehension; but they followed her. Together, the companions began to run.
A moment later, the grass where they had been standing erupted.
Buried boulders shattered. A large section of the greensward was shredded; stone-shards and dirt slashed into the sky. The violence which broke the Earthpower in that place sent a shock throughout the region, gouged a pit in the body of the ground. Remnants of ruined beauty rained everywhere.
And from the naked walls of the pit came squirming and clawing the sick, wild verdure of the fertile sun. Monstrous as murder, a throng of ivy teemed upward to spread its pall over the ravaged turf.
In the distance, another eruption boomed. Linden felt it like a wail through the ground. Piece by piece, the life of Andelain was being torn up by the roots.
“Bastard!” Covenant raged. “Oh, you bastard! You've crippled everything else. Aren't you content?”
Turning, he plunged eastward as if he meant to launch himself at the Despiser's throat.
Linden kept up with him. Pain belaboured her senses. She could not speak because she was weeping.
Seventeen: Into the Wightwarrens
EARLY the next morning, the company climbed into the foothills of Mount Thunder near the constricted rush of the Soulsease River Covenant was gaunt with fatigue, his gaze as grey as ash. Linden's eyes burned like fever in their sockets; strain throbbed through the bones of her skull. Even the Giants were tired. They had only stopped to rest in snatches during the night The First's lips were the colour of her fingers clinching the hilt of her sword. Pitchwife's visage looked like it was being torn apart. Yet the four of them were united by their urgency. They attacked the lower slopes as if they were racing the sun which rose behind me fatal bulk of the mountain.
A desert sun.
Parts of Andelain had already become as blasted and ruinous as a battlefield.
The Hills still clung to the life which had made them lovely. While it lasted, Caer-CaveraI's nurture had been complete and fundamental. The Sunbane could not simply flush all health from the ground in so few days. But the dusty sunlight reaching past the shoulders of Mount Thunder revealed that around the fringes of Andelain-and in places across its heart-the damage was already severe.
The vegetation of those regions had been ripped up, riven, effaced by hideous eruptions. Their ground was cratered and pitted like the ravages of an immedicable disease. The previous day, the remnants of those woods had been overgrown and strangled by the Sunbane's feral fecundity. But now, as the sun advanced on that verdure, every green and living thing slumped into viscid sludge which the desert drank away.
Linden gazed toward the Hills as if she, too, were dying. Nothing would ever remove the sting of that devastation from her heart. The sickness of the world soaked into her from the landscape outstretched and tormented before her. Andelain still fought for its life and survived. Much of it had not yet been hurt. Leagues of soft slopes and natural growth separated the craters, stood against the sun's arid rapine. But where the Sunbane had done its work the harm was as keen as anguish. If she had been granted the chance to save Andelain's health with her own life, she would have taken it as promptly as Covenant. Perhaps she, too, would have smiled.
She sat on a rock in a field of boulders that cluttered the slope too thickly to admit vegetation. Panting as if his lungs were raw with ineffective outrage Covenant had stopped there to catch his breath. The Giants stood nearby. The First studied the west as if that scene of destruction would give her strength when the time came to wield her blade. But Pitchwife could not bear it He perched himself on a boulder with his back to the Andelainian Hills, His hands toyed with his flute, but he made no attempt to play it.
After a while Covenant rasped, “Broken- ” There was a slain sound in his voice, as if within him also something vital were perishing. “All that beauty- ” Perhaps during the night he had lost his mind, “Your very presence here empowers me to master you. The ill that you deem most terrible is upon you.” He was quoting Lord Foul; but he spoke as if the words were his. “There is despair laid up for you here-”
At once, the First turned to him. “Do not speak thus. It is false.”
He gave no sign that he had heard her, “It's not my fault,” he went on harshly. “I didn't do any of this. None of it But I'm the cause. Even when I don't do anything. It's all being done because of me. So I won't have any choice. Just by being alive, I break everything I love.” He scraped his fingers through the stubble of his beard; but his eyes continued staring at the waste of Andelain, haunted by it “You'd think I wanted this to happen.”
“No!” the First protested. “We hold no such conception. You must not doubt. It is doubt which weakens- doubt which corrupts. Therefore is this Despiser powerful.
Covenant looked at her for a moment. Then he rose stiffly to his feet His muscles and his heart were knotted so tightly that Linden could not read him.
“That's wrong.” He spoke softly, in threat or appeal. “You need to doubt. Certainty is terrible. Let Foul have it. Doubt makes you human.” His gaze shifted toward Linden. It reached out to her like flame or beggary, the
