By noon, the horses were forced to move more slowly. There was no more clear ground. The Hills piled ever nearer to the cliff; and the narrowing space between them was cluttered with rubble, or blocked by boulders, or fretted with fissures like veins of erosion pulsing ever deeper into the heart of the Lower Land’s last buttress against the Sea. The Ranyhyn may have been sure-footed enough to run there: Covenant’s mount was not.

And the charger was failing. It had exhausted the energy that it had regained during the night. Now only its belligerence kept it going. When it died, it would perish because it had ruptured its own heart.

That was the gift of the Feroce: a mixed blessing, beneficial for Covenant, but fatal for the poor horse. The innocent, he thought bitterly, were always the first to die. They were the first casualties of every struggle against Despite.

Nevertheless he rode as if he had no pity. Joan had nothing left except the sheer extremity of her pain. If he hoped to face her and live, he would have to do things equally extreme.

Then thrusts of granite pushed the riders within a stone’s throw of the last cliff, and Covenant smelled saltwater; saw the Sunbirth Sea.

The ocean was as grey as the sky, a tainted seethe heaving urgently against the base of the precipice as if it were desperate to break down the Lower Land’s fortifications. No wind lashed the waves: the air seemed preternaturally still, as if the sky were holding its breath. Nevertheless the roll of seas was confused, tossed this way and that by its surge over grim boulders and fraught reefs. Slamming against each other, the wavecrests broke into agitated froth and spray like salt expostulations.

And wherever Covenant looked, the sea was stippled with bursts and splashes as if it were being struck by hail. But there was no hail. Instead he felt an almost subliminal vibration, a mute massive thud like the slow beat of the seafloor’s immersed heart; or like the heavy tread of doom.

Premonitions of vertigo tugged at Covenant’s thoughts; at his stomach. But the knotted bulk of the cliff still stood between him and falling, and he kept his balance.

Time dragged like difficult breathing. For a while, the horses maintained a jolting trot. Then the rimose terrain compelled them to walk. Boulders complicated their path. And with every stride, they were wedged closer to the precipice.