After only two days.
The elevation of the rocks protected the travellers from the effect of the desert sun on the putrefying vegetation.
Everything that the fertile sun had produced and the sun of pestilence had blighted might as well have been made of wax. The brown clad sun melted it all, reduced every form of plant fiber, every kind of sap or juice, every monstrous insect to a necrotic grey sludge. The few bushes in the area slumped like over-heated candles; moss and ivy sprawled into Physician's Plight spilth that formed turbid pools in the low places of the terrain; the bugs of dawn fell like clotted drops of rain. Then the sludge denatured as if the desert sun drank it away.
Long before mid-morning, every slope and hollow and span of ground had been burned to naked ruin and dust.
For the Giants, that process was more horrible than anything else they had seen. Until now, only the scale of the Sunbane's power had been staggering. Verdure grew naturally, and insects and rot could be included in the normal range of experience. But nothing had prepared Covenant's companions for the quick and entire destruction of so much prodigious vegetation and pestilence.
Staring about her, the First breathed, “Ah, Cable Seadreamer! There is no cause for wonder that you lacked voice to utter such visions. The wonder is that you endured to bear them at all-and that you bore them in loneliness.”
Pitchwife clung to her as if he were reeling inwardly. Open nausea showed in Mistweave's face. He had learned to doubt himself, and now the things he could no longer trust covered all the world. But Honninscrave's deep eyes flamed hotly-the eyes of a man who knew now beyond question that he was on the right path.
Grimly, Linden demanded a knife from Pitchwife. For a moment, he could not answer her. “But at last the First stirred, turned from the harsh vista of the waste; and her husband turned with her.
Dazedly, Pitchwife gave Linden his blade. She used its tip to lance her infected finger. With vitrim, she cleansed the wound thoroughly, then bound it in a light bandage. When she was done, she lifted her head; and her gaze was as intense as Honninscrave's. Like him, she now appeared eager to go forward.
Or like High Lord Elena, who had been driven by inextricable abhorrence and love, and by lust for power, to the mad act of breaking the Law of Death. After only three days under the Sunbane, Linden appeared capable of such things.
Soon the company started south-westward again across a wasteland which had become little more than an anvil for the fierce brutality of the sun.
It brought back more of the past to Covenant. Heat haze as thick as hallucination and dust bleached to the colour of dismay made his memories vivid. He and Linden had been summoned to Kevin's Watch during a day of rain; but that night Sander's father, Nassic, had been murdered, and the next day had arisen a desert sun-and Covenant and Linden had encountered a Raver amid the hostility of Mithil Stone' down.
Many of the consequences had fallen squarely upon Sunder's shoulders. As the Stonedown's Graveler, he had already been required to shed the lives of his own wife and son so that their blood would serve the village. And then the Raver's actions had cost him his father, had compelled him to sacrifice his friend, Marid, to the Sunbane, and had faced him with the necessity of bleeding his mother to death. Such things had driven him to flee his duty for the sake of the Unbeliever and the Chosen-and for his own sake, so that he would be spared the responsibility of more killing.
Yet during that same desert sun Covenant's life had also been changed radically. The corruption of that sun had made Marid monstrous enough to inflict the Despiser's malice. Out in the wasteland of the South Plains, Marid had nailed venom between the bones of Covenant's forearm, crucifying him to the fate Lord Foul had prepared for him.
The fate of fire. In a nightmare of wild magic, his own terrible love and grief tore down the world.
The sun would not let him think of anything else. The company had adequate supplies of water, diamondraught, and food; and when the haze took on the attributes of vertigo, leeched the strength out of Covenant's legs, Honninscrave carried him. Foamfollower had done the same for him more than once, bearing him along the way of hope and doom. But now there was only haze and vertigo and despair-and the remorseless Hammer blow of the sun.
That phase of the Sunbane also lasted for only two days. But it was succeeded by another manifestation of pestilence.
The red-tinged heat was less severe. The stricken Plains contained nothing which could rot. And here the insect-life was confined to creatures that made their homes in the ground. Yet this sun was arduous and bitter after its own fashion. It brought neither moisture nor shade up out of the waste. And before it ended, the travellers began to encounter stag-beetles and scorpions as big as wolves among the low bills. But the First's sword kept such threats at bay. And Physician's Plight whenever Honninscrave and Mistweave took on the added weight of Covenant and Linden, the company made good speed.
hi spite of their native hardiness, the Giants were growing weary, worn down by dust and heat and distance. But after the second day of pestilence came a sun of rain. Standing on stone to meet the dawn, the companions felt a new coolness against their faces as the sun rose ringed in blue like a concentration of the sky's deep azure. Then, almost immediately, black clouds began to pile westward.
Covenant's heart lifted at the thought of rain. But as the wind stiffened, plucking insistently at his unclean hair and beard, he remembered how difficult it was to travel under such a sun. He turned to the First “We're going to need rope.” The wind hummed in his ears. “So we don't lose each other.”
Linden was staring toward the southwest as if the idea of Revelstone consumed all her thoughts. Distantly, she said, The rain isn't dangerous. But there's going to be so much of it”
The First glared at the clouds, nodded. Mistweave unslung his bundles and dug out a length of line.
The rope was too heavy to be tied around Covenant and Linden without hampering them. As the first raindrops hit, heavy as pebbles, the Swordmain knotted the line to her own waist, then strung it back through the formation of the company to Mistweave. who anchored, it.
For a moment, she scanned the terrain to fix her bearings in her mind. Then she started into the darkening storm.
As loud as a rabble, the rain rushed out of the east. The clouds spanned the horizons, blocking the last light. Gloom fell like water into Covenant's eyes. Already, he could barely discern the First at the head of the company. Pitchwife's misshapen outlines were blurred. The wind leaned against Covenant's left shoulder. His boots began to slip under him, Without transition, soil as desiccated as centuries of desert changed to mud and clay. Instant pools spread across the ground. The downpour became as heavy as cudgels. Blindly, he clung to the rope.
It led into a blank abyss of rain. The world was reduced to this mad drenching lash and roar, this battering cold. He should have retrieved his robe before the rain started: his scant T-shirt was meaningless against the torrents. How could there be so much water, when for days the North Plains and all the Land had been desperately athirst? Only Pitchwife's shape remained before him, badly smudged but still solid-the only solid thing left except the rope. When he tried to look around toward Cail, Mistweave, Vain, and Findail, the storm hit him full in the face. It was a doomland he wandered because he had failed to find any answer to his dreams.