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. He does not doubt While you are certain, there is hope.” Her iron voice betrayed a note of fear. “This price will be exacted from him if you do not doubt!”
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 culmination and defeat of all his power in the Banefire. “You need every doubt you can find. I want you to doubt I'm hardly human anymore.”
Each flare and wince of his eyes contradicted itself. Stop me. Don't touch me. Doubt me. Doubt Kevin. Yes. No. Please.
Please.
His inchoate supplication drew her to him. He did not appear strong or dangerous now, but only needy, appalled by himself. Yet he was as irrefusable as ever. She touched her hand to his scruffy cheek; her arms hurt with the tenderness of her wish to hold him.
But she would not retreat from the commitments she had made, whatever their cost. Perhaps her years of medical training and self abnegation had been nothing more than a way of running away from death; but the simple logic of that flight had taken her in the direction of life, for others if not for herself. And in the marrow of her bones she had experienced both the Sunbane and Andelain. The choice between them was as clear as Covenant's pain.
She had no answer for his appeal. Instead, she gave him one of her own. “Don't force me to do that” Her love was naked in her eyes. “Don't give up.”
A spasm of grief or anger flinched across his face. His voice sank to a desert scraping in the back of his throat. “I wish I could make you understand.” He spoke flatly, all inflection burned away. “He's gone too far. He can't get away with this. Maybe he isn't really sane anymore. He isn't going to get what he wants.”
But his manner and his words held no comfort for her. He might as well have announced to the Giants and Vain and the ravaged world that he still intended to surrender his ring.
Yet he remained strong enough for his purpose, in spite of little food, less rest, and the suffering of Andelain. Dourly, be faced the First and Pitchwife again as if he expected questions or protests. But die Swordmain held herself stem. Her husband did not look up from his flute.
To their silence Covenant replied, “We need to go north for a while. Until we get to the river. That's our way into Mount Thunder.”
Sighing, Pitchwife gained his feet. He held his flute in both hands. His gaze was focused on nothing as he snapped the small instrument in half. With all his strength, he hurled the pieces toward the Hills.
Linden winced. An expostulation died on the Firsts lips.
Covenant's shoulders hunched.
As grim as a cripple, Pitchwife raised his eyes to the Unbeliever. “Heed me well,” he murmured clearly. “I doubt”
“Good!” Covenant rasped intensely. Then he started moving again, picking a path for himself among the boulders.
Linden followed with old cries beating against her heart Haven't you even got the guts to go on living? You never loved me anyway. But she knew as surely as vision that he did love her. She had no means by which to measure what had happened to him in the Banefire. And Gibbon’s voice answered her, taunting her with the truth. Are you not evil?
The foothills of Mount Thunder, ancient Gravin Threndor, were too rugged to bear much vegetation. And the light of the desert sun advanced rapidly past the peak now, wreaking dissolution on the ground's residual fertility. The company was hampered by strewn boulders and knuckled slopes, but not by the effects of the previous sun. Still the short journey toward the Soulsease was arduous. The sun's loathsome corruption seemed to parch away the last of Linden's strength. Heatwaves like precursors of hallucination tugged at the edges of her mind. A confrontation with the Despiser would at least put an end to this horror and rapine. One way or the other. As she panted at the hillsides, she found herself repeating the promise she had once made in Revelstone-the promise she had made and broken. Never. Never again. Whatever happened, she would not return to the Sunbane.
Because of her weakness Covenant's exhaustion, and the difficulty of the terrain, the company did not reach the vicinity of the River until mid-morning.