Free The Wounded Land by Stephen R. Donaldson

as a plumb line toward their destination. And as they moved, the night seemed to mount around her, growing steadily more hostile as her trepidation increased. The trees and brush became malevolent, as if she were passing into another wood altogether, a place of hazard and cruel intent.
    Then a hill lay across their way. Covenant and his summoner ascended, disappeared over the crest in a strange flare of orange light. It picked them out of the dark, then quenched them like an instant of translation. Warned by that brief gleam, Linden climbed slowly. The keening of her nerves seemed loud in the blackness. The last few yards she crossed on her hands and knees, keeping herself within the cover of the underbrush.
    As her head crested the hill, she was struck by a blaze of light. Fire invisible a foot away burst in her face as if she had just penetrated the boundary of dreams. For an instant, she was blinded by the light, paralyzed by the silence. The night swallowed all sound, leaving the air empty of life.
    Blinking furiously, she peered past the hillcrest.
    Beyond her lay a deep barren hollow. Its slopes were devoid of grass, brush, trees, as if the soil had been scoured by acid.
    A bonfire burned at the bottom of the hollow. Its flames sprang upward like lust, writhed like madness; but it made no noise. Seeing it, Linden felt that she had been stricken deaf. Impossible that such a fire could blaze in silence.
    Near the fire stretched a rough plane of native rock, perhaps ten feet across. A large triangle had been painted on it in red—color 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 gray as if they had been wallowing in ashes. They were as gaunt as icons ofhunger. 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