the Sunbane and Ravers and Andelain's hurt had made her capable of it. “The First is the one who needs you. She can't beat Foul with just a sword-but she's likely to try. Don't let her get herself killed. Don't do that to yourself. Don't sacrifice her for me.”
His visage sharpened like a cry. His hands opened at his sides to show her and the desert sky that they were empty. Moisture blurred his gaze. For a moment, she feared he would say farewell to her; and hard grief clenched her throat But then a fragmentary smile changed the meaning of his face.
“Linden Avery,” he said clearly, “have I not affirmed and averred to all who would hear that you are well Chosen?”
Stooping toward her, he kissed her forehead. Then he hurried after the First and Covenant.
When she had wiped the tears from her cheeks, she followed him.
Vain trailed her with his habitual blankness. Yet she seemed to feel a hint of anticipation from him-an elusive tightening which he had not conveyed since the company had entered
Picking her way down the gully, she gained the rude shelf of the roadway and found her companions waiting for her. Pitchwife stood beside the First, reclaiming his place there; but both she and Covenant watched Linden. The First's regard was a compound of glad relief and uncertainty. She welcomed anything that eased her husband's unhappiness-but was unsure of its implications Covenant's attitude was simpler. Leaning close to Linden, he whispered against the background of the throttled River, “I don't know what you said to him. But thanks.”
She had no answer. Constantly, he foiled her expectations. When he appeared most destructive and unreachable, locked away in his deadly certainty, he showed flashes of poignant kindness, clear concern. Yet behind his empathy and courage lay his intended surrender, as indefeasible as despair. He contradicted himself at every turn. And how could she reply without telling him what she had promised?
But he did not appear to want an answer. Perhaps he understood her, knew that in her place he would have felt as she did. Or perhaps he was too weary and haunted to suffer questions or reconsider his purpose. He was starving for an end to his long pain. Almost immediately, he signalled his readiness to go on.
At once, the First started along the crude road toward the gullet of Mount Thunder.
With Pitchwife and then Vain behind her. Linden followed, stalking the stone, pursuing the Unbeliever to his crisis.
Below her, the Soulsease continued to shrink between its walls, consumed by the power of the Sunbane. The pitch of the rush changed as its roar softened toward sobbing. But she did not take her gaze from the backs of the First and Covenant, the rising sides of the gorge, the dark bulk of the mountain. Off that sun-ravaged crown had once come creatures of fire to rescue Thomas Covenant and the Lords from the armies of Drool Rockworm, the mad Cavewight. But those creatures had been called down by Law; and there was no more Law.
She had to concentrate to avoid the treachery of the road's surface. It was cracked and dangerous. Sections of the ledge were so tenuously held in place that her precipience felt them shift under her weight. Others had fallen into the Gorge long ago, leaving bitter scars where the road should have been. Only narrow rims remained to bear the company past the gaps. Linden feared them more on Covenant's behalf than on her own: his vertigo might make him fall. But he negotiated them without help, as if his fear of height were just one more part of himself that he had already given up. Only the strain burning in his muscles betrayed how close he came to panic.
Mount Thunder loomed into the sky. The desert sun scorched over the rocks, scouring them bare of spray. The noise of the Soulsease sounded increasingly like grief. In spite of her fatigue. Linden wanted to run-wanted to pitch herself into the mountain's darkness for no other reason than to get out from under the Sunbane. Out of daylight into the black catacombs, where so much power lurked and hungered.
Where no one else would be able to see what happened when the outer dark met the blackness within her and took possession.
She fought the logic of that outcome, wrestled to believe that she would find some other answer. But Covenant intended to give Lord Foul his ring. Where else could she find the force to stop him?
She had done the same thing once before, in a different way. Faced with her dying mother, the nightmare blackness had leaped up in her, taking command of her hands while her brain had detached itself to watch and wail. And the darkness had laughed like lust.
She had spent every day of every year of her adulthood fighting to suppress that avarice for death. But she knew of no other source from which she might obtain the sheer strength she would need to prevent Covenant from destruction.
And she had promised—
Treacher's Gorge narrowed and rose on either side. Mount Thunder vaulted above her like a tremendous cairn that marked the site of buried banes, immedicable despair. As the River's lamentation sank to a mere shout, the mountain opened its gullet in front of the company.
The First stopped there, glowering distrust into the tunnel that swallowed the Soulsease and the roadway. But she did not speak. Pitchwife unslung his diminished pack, took out his firepot and the last two fagots he had borne from Revelstone. One he slipped under his belt; the other he stirred into the firepot until the wood caught flame. The First took it from him, held it up as a torch. She drew her sword Covenant's visage wore a look of nausea or dread; but he did not hesitate. When the First nodded, he started forward.
Pitchwife quickly repacked his supplies. Together, he and Linden followed his wife and Covenant out of the Gorge and the desert sun.
Vain came after them like a piece of whetted midnight, acute and imminent.
Linden's immediate reaction was one of relief. The First's torch hardly lit the wall on her right, the curved ceiling above her. It shed no light into the chasm beside the roadway. But to her any dark felt kinder than the sunlight. The peak's clenched granite reduced the number of directions from which peril could come. And as Mount Thunder cut off the sky, she heard the sound of the Soulsease more precisely. The crevice drank the River like a plunge into the bowels of the mountain, carrying the water down to its defilement. Such things steadied her by requiring her to concentrate on them.
In a voice that echoed hoarsely, she warned her companions away from the increasing depth of the chasm. She sounded close to hysteria; but she believed she was not. The Giants had only two torches. The company would need her special senses for guidance. She would be able to be of use again.
But her relief was shortlived. She had gone no more than fifty paces down the tunnel when she felt the ledge behind her heave itself into rubble.
Pitchwife barked a warning. One of his long, arms swept her against the wall. The impact knocked the air from her lungs. For an instant while her head reeled, she saw Vain silhouetted against the daylight of the Gorge. He made no effort to save himself.
Thundering like havoc, the fragments of the roadway bore him down into the crevice.
Long tremors ran through the road, up the wall. Small stones rained from the ceiling, pelted after the Demondim-spawn like a scattering of hail. Linden's chest did not contain enough air to cry out his name.
Torchlight splayed across her and Pitchwife. He tugged her backward, kept her pressed to the wall. The First barred Covenant's way. Sternness locked her face. Sputtering flames reflected from his eyes. “Damnation,” he muttered. “Damnation!” Little breaths like gasps slipped past Linden's teeth.
The torch and the glow of day beyond the tunnel lit Findail as he melted out of the roadway, transforming himself from stone to flesh as easily as thought.
He appeared to have become leaner, worn away by pain. His cheeks were hollow. His yellow eyes had sunk into his skull; their sockets were as livid as bruises. He was rife with mortification or grief.
“You did that,” Linden panted. “You're still trying to kill him.”
He did not meet her gaze. The arrogance of his people was gone from him. “The w?rd of the
“Therefore we do not question our withdrawal from the wide Earth. We contemplate all else, yet give no
