A sudden weakness yearned in his muscles, making his shoulders quiver. The particular numbness of his dead nerves had not altered, for better or worse. But the diseased hue of his flesh looked fatal and prophetic; it struck him like a leap of intuition. One of his questions answered itself. Why was Linden here? Why had the old man spoken to her rather than to him? Because she was necessary. To save the Land when he failed.
The wild magic is no longer potent. So much for power. He had already abandoned himself to Lord Foul's machinations. A groan escaped him before he could lock his teeth on it.
“Covenant?” Concern sharpened Linden's voice. “Are you all right?”
He could not reply. The simple fact that she was worried about him, was capable of worrying about him when she was under so much stress, multiplied the dismay in his bones. His eyes clung to the stone, searching for strength.
“Covenant!” Her demand was like a slap in the face. “I don't know how to help you. Tell me what to do.”
What to do. None of this was her fault. She deserved an answer. He pulled himself down into the centre of his fatigue and dizziness. Had he really doomed himself by taking Joan's place? Surely he did not have to fail? Surely the power for which he had paid such a price was not so easily discounted? Without raising his head, he gritted, “At the bottom of the stairs, to my left, there's a ledge in the cliff. Be careful.”
Coercing himself into motion, he backed through the gap.
As his head passed below the level of the Watch, he heard her whisper fiercely, “Damn you, why do you have to act so impervious? All I want to do is help.” She sounded as if her sanity depended on her ability to be of help.
But he could not afford to think about her; the peril of the stairs consumed his attention. He worked his way down them as if they were a ladder, clutching them with his hands, kicking each foot into them to be sure it was secure before he trusted it. His gaze never left his hands. They strained on the steps until the sinews stood out like desperation.
The void around him seemed fathomless. He could hear the emptiness of the wind. And the swift seething of the clouds below him had a hypnotic power, sucking at his concentration. Long plunges yawned all around him. But he knew this fear. Holding his breath, he lowered himself into the clouds-into the still centre of his vertigo.
Abruptly, the sun faded and went out. Grey gloom thickened toward midnight at every step of the descent.
A pale flash ran through the dank sea, followed almost at once by thunder. The wind mounted, rushed wetly at him as if it sought to lift him off the spire. The stone became slick. His numb fingers could not tell the difference, but the nerves in his wrists and elbows registered every slippage of his grasp.
Again, a bolt of lightning thrashed past him, illuminating the mad boil and speed of the clouds. The sky shattered. Instinctively, he flattened himself against the stone. Something in him howled, but he could not tell whether it howled aloud.
Crawling painfully through the brutal impact of the storm, he went on downward.
He marked his progress in the intensifying weight of the rain. The fine cold sting of spray against his sore face became a pelting of heavy drops like a shower of pebbles. Soon he was drenched and battered. Lightning and thunder shouted across him, articulating savagery. But the promise of the ledge drew him on.
At last, his feet found it. Thrusting away from the spire, he pressed his back to the wall of the cliff, gaping upward.
A flail of blue-white fire rendered Linden out of the darkness. She was just above the level of his head.
When she reached the ledge, he caught her so that she would not stumble over the precipice. She gripped him urgently. “Covenant!” The wind ripped her shout away; he could barely hear her. “Are you all right?”
He put his mouth to her ear. “Stay against the cliff! We've got to find shelter!”
She nodded sharply.
Clenching her right hand in his left, he turned his back on the fall and began to shuttle west along the ledge.
Lightning burned overhead, to give him a glimpse of his situation. The ledge was two or three feet wide and ran roughly level across the cliff face. From its edge, the mountain disappeared into the abyss of the clouds.
Thunder hammered at him like the voice of his vertigo, commanding him to lose his balance. Wind and rain as shrill as chaos lashed his back. But Linden's hand anchored him. He squeezed himself like yearning against the cliff and crept slowly forward.
At every lightning blast, he peered ahead through the rain, trying to see the end of the ledge.
There: a vertical line like a scar in the cliff face.
He reached it, pulled Linden past the corner, up a slope of mud and scree which gushed water as if it were a stream bed. At once, the wind became a constricted yowl. The next blue glare revealed that they had entered a narrow ravine sluicing upward through the mountainside. Water frothed like rapids past the boulders which cramped the floor of the ravine.
He struggled ahead until he and Linden were above a boulder that appeared large enough to be secure. There he halted and sat down in the current with his back braced on the wall. She joined him. Water flooded over their legs; rain blinded their faces. He did not care. He had to rest.
After a few moments, she shifted, put her face to his ear. “Now what?”
Now what? He did not know. Exhaustion numbed his mind. But she was right; they could not remain where they were. He mustered a wan shout. “There's a path somewhere!”
“You don't know the way? You said you've been here before!”
“Ten years ago!” And he had been unconscious the second time; Saltheart Foamfollower had carried him.
Lightning lit her face for an instant. Her visage was smeared with rain. “What are we going to do?”
The thought of Foamfollower, the Giant who had been his friend, gave him what he needed. “Try!” Bracing himself on her shoulder, he lurched to his feet. She seemed to support his weight easily. “Maybe I'll remember!”
She stood up beside him, leaned close to yell, “I don't like this storm! It doesn't feel right!”
Doesn't feel-? He blinked at her. For a moment, he did not understand. To him, it was just a storm, natural violence like any other. But then he caught her meaning. To her, the storm felt un-natural. It offended some instinctive sensitivity in her.
Already, she was ahead of him; her senses were growing attuned to the Land, while his remained flat and dull, blind to the spirit of what he perceived. Ten years ago, he had been able to do what she had just done: identify the Tightness or wrongness, the health or corruption, of physical things and processes, of wind, rain, stone, wood, flesh. But now he could feel nothing except the storm's vehemence, as if such force had no meaning, no implications. No soul.
He muttered tired curses at himself. Were his senses merely slow in making the adjustment? Or had he lost the ability to be in harmony with the Land? Had leprosy and time bereft him entirely of that sensitivity? Hell and blood! he rasped weakly, bitterly. If Linden could see where he was blind-Aching at the old grief of his insufficiency, he tried to master himself. He expected Linden to ask him what was wrong. And that thought, too, was bitter; he did not want his frailties and fears, his innate wrongness, to be visible to her. But she did not question him. She was rigid with surprise or apprehension.
Her face was turned up the ravine.
He jerked around and tried to penetrate the downpour.
At once, he saw it-a faint yellow light in the distance.
It flickered toward them slowly, picked its way with care down the spine of the ravine. As it neared, a long blast of lightning revealed that it was a torch in the hand of a man. Then blackness and thunder crashed over them, and Covenant could see nothing but the strange flame. It burned bravely, impossibly, in spite of the deluge and battery of the storm.