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 wϋrd of the Elohim is strict and costly.” If he had raised his eyes to Linden's, she might have thought he was asking for understanding or acceptance. "How should it be otherwise? Are we not the heart of the Earth in all things? Yet those who remain in the bliss and blessing of Elemesnedene have been misled by their comfort Because the clachan is our home, we have considered that all questions may be answered there. Yet it is not in Elemesnedene that the truth lies, but rather in we who people the place. And we have mistaken our wϋrd. Because we are the heart, we have conceived that whatever we will must perforce transcend all else.
“Therefore we do not question our withdrawal from the wide Earth. We contemplate all else, yet give no name to what we fear.”
Then he did look up; and his voice took on the anger of self justification. “But I have witnessed that fear. Chant and others have fallen to it. Infelice herself knows its touch. And I have participated in the binding to doom of the Appointed. I have felt the curse of Kastenessen upon my head.” He was ashamed of what he had done to Vain-and determined not to regret it “You have taught me to esteem you. You bear the outcome of the Earth well. But my peril is thereby increased.
“I will not suffer that cost.”
Folding his arms across his chest, he closed himself off from interrogation.
In bafflement Covenant turned to Linden. But she had no explanation to offer. Her percipience had never been a match for the Elohim. She had caught no glimpse of Findail until; he emerged from the roadway, still knew nothing about him except that he was Earthpower incarnate, capable of taking any form of life he wished. Altogether flexible. And dangerously unbound by scruple. His people had not hesitated to efface Covenant's mind for their own inhuman reasons. More than once, he had abandoned her and her companions to death when he could have aided them.
His refusals seemed innumerable; and the memory of them made her bitter. The pain of the tree he had slaughtered in his last attempt on Vain's life came back to her. To Covenant, she replied, “He's never told the truth before. Why should she start now?”
Covenant frowned darkly. Although he had no cause to trust Findail's people, he appeared strangely reluctant to judge them, as if instinctively he wanted to do them more justice than they had ever done him.
But there was nothing any of the company could do about Vain. The River-cleft was deep now-and growing sharply deeper as it advanced into the mountain. The sound of the water diminished steadily.