Near the fire stretched a rough plane of native rock, perhaps ten feet across. A large triangle had been painted on it in red-colour as crimson as fresh blood.
Joan lay on her back within the triangle. She did not move, appeared to be unconscious; only the slow lifting of her chest against her nightgown showed that she was alive.
People clustered around her, twenty or thirty of them. Men, women, children-all dressed in habiliments of burlap; all masked with grey as if they had been wallowing in ashes. They were as gaunt as icons of hunger. They gazed out of eyes as dead as if the minds behind their orbs had been extirpated-eyes which had been dispossessed of every vestige of will or spirit. Even the children stood like puppets and made no sound.
Their faces were turned toward a place on Linden's left.
Toward Thomas Covenant.
He stood halfway down the hillside, confronting the fire across the barrenness of the hollow. His shoulders hunched; his hands were fists at his sides, and his head was thrust combatively forward. His chest heaved as if he were full of denunciations.
Nobody moved, spoke, blinked. The air was intense with silence like concentrated coercion.
Abruptly, Covenant grated through his teeth, “I'm here.” The clench of his throat made each word sound like a self-inflicted wound. “Let her go.”
A movement snatched Linden's attention back to the bottom of the hollow. A man brawnier than the rest changed positions, took a stance on the rock at the point of the triangle, above Joan's head. He raised his arms, revealing a long, curved dagger gripped in his right fist. In a shrill voice like a man on the verge of ecstasy, he shouted, “It is time! We are the will of the Master of life and death! This is the hour of retribution and cleansing and blood! Let us open the way for the Master's presence!”
The night sucked his voice out of the air, left in its place a stillness as sharp as a cut. For a moment, nothing happened.
Covenant took a step downward, then jerked to a halt.
A woman near the fire shambled forward. Linden nearly gasped aloud as she recognized the woman who had stood on the steps of the courthouse, warning people to repent. With her three children behind her, she approached the blaze.
She bowed to it like a dead woman.
Blankly, she put her right hand into the flames.
A shriek of pain rent the night. She recoiled from the fire, fell in agony to the bare ground.
A red quivering ran through the flames like a spasm of desire. The fire seemed to mount as if it fed on the woman's pain.
Linden's muscles bunched, ached to hurl her to her feet. She wanted to shout her horror, stop this atrocity. But her limbs were locked. Images of desperation or evil froze her where she crouched. All these people were like Joan.
Then the woman regained her feet and stood as dumbly as if the nerves to her burned hand had been severed. Her gaze returned to Covenant like a compulsion, exerting its demand against him.
The oldest of her children took her place at the bonfire.
No! Linden cried, striving uselessly to break the silence.
The young boy bowed, thrust his emaciated arm into the blaze.
His wail broke Linden's will, left her panting in helpless abomination. She could not move, could not look away. Loathings for which she had no name mastered her.
The boy's younger sister did what he had done, as if his agony meant nothing to her. And the third waif followed in turn, surrendering her flesh to harm like lifeless tissue animated solely for immolation.
Then Linden would have moved. The rigid abhorrence of Covenant's stance showed that he would have moved. But the fire stopped them, held them. At every taste of flesh, lust flared through it; flames raged higher.
A figure began to take shape in the heart of the blaze.
More people moved to sacrifice their hands. As they did so, the figure solidified. It was indistinct in the flames; but the glaring red outlined a man in a flowing robe. He stood blood-limned with his arms folded across his powerful chest-created by pain out of fire and self-abandonment.
The worshipper with the knife sank to his knees, cried out in exaltation, “Master!”
The figure's eyes were like fangs, carious and yellow; and they raged venomously out of the flames. Their malignance cowed Linden like a personal assault on her sanity, her conception of life. They were rabid and deliberate, like voluntary disease, fetid corruption. Nothing in all her life had readied her to witness such palpable hate.
Across the stillness, she heard Covenant gasp in fury, “Foul! Even children?” But his wrath could not penetrate the dread which paralyzed her. For her, the fiery silence was punctuated only by the screaming of the burned.
Then the moon began to rise opposite her. A rim as white as bone crested the hill, looked down into the hollow like a leer.
The man with the knife came to his feet. Again he raised his arms, brandished his dagger. His personal transport was approaching its climax. In a shout like a moan, he cried, “Now is the hour of apocalypse! The Master has come! Doom is at hand for those who seek to thwart His will. Now we will witness vengeance against sin and life, we who have watched and waited and suffered in His name. Here we fulfil the vision that was given to us. We have touched the fire, and we have been redeemed!” His voice rose until he was shrieking like the burned. “Now we will bring all wickedness to blood and eternal torment!”
He's mad. Linden clung to that thought, fought to think of these people as fanatics, driven wild by destitution and fear. They're all crazy. This is impossible. But she could not move.
And Covenant did not move. She yearned for him to do something, break the trance somehow, rescue Joan, save Linden herself from her extremity. But he remained motionless, watching the fire as if he were trapped between savagery and helplessness.
The figure in the blaze stirred. His eyes focused the flames like twin scars of malice, searing everything with his contempt. His right arm made a gesture as final as a sentence of execution.
At once, the brawny man dropped to his knees. Bending over Joan, he bared her throat. She lay limp under him, frail and lost. The skin of her neck seemed to gleam in the firelight like a plea for help.
Trembling as if he were rapturous or terrified, the man set his blade against Joan's white throat.
Now the people in the hollow stared emptily at his hands. They appeared to have lost all interest in Covenant. Their silence was appalling. The man's hands shook.
“Stop!”
Covenant's shout scourged the air.
“You've done enough! Let her go!”
The baleful eyes in the fire swung at him, nailed him with denigration. The worshipper at Joan's throat stared whitely upward. “Release her?” he croaked. “Why?”
“Because you don't have to do this!” Anger and supplication thickened Covenant's tone. “I don't know how you were driven to this. I don't know what went wrong with your life. But you don't have to do it.”
The man did not blink; the eyes in the fire clenched him. Deliberately, he knotted his free hand in Joan's hair.
“All right!” Covenant barked immediately. “All right. I accept. I'll trade you. Me for her.”
“No.” Linden strove to shout aloud, but her cry was barely a whisper. “No”
The worshippers were as silent as gravestones.
Slowly, the man with the knife rose to his feet. He alone seemed to have the capacity to feel triumph; he was grinning ferally as he said, “It is as the Master promised.”
He stepped back. At the same time, a quiver ran through Joan. She raised her head, gaped around her. Her face was free of possession. Moving awkwardly, she climbed to her feet. Bewildered and afraid, she searched for an escape, for anything she could understand.