Against All Things Ending (42 page)

His Sunstone had become meaningless. Mere swords and muscle had no value. The Ironhand might conceivably strike one effective blow with Loric’s
krill
. Then she would be lost—and the
croyel
would escape with Jeremiah.

Now or never. Esmer had deprived the Giants of their ability to grasp what the ur-viles wanted.

Already Linden felt
vitrim
turning to ash in her veins.

“God damn it, Esmer.” She could not spare the strength to raise her voice. “You’ve done more than enough harm. The least you can do is translate.”

Cail’s son studied her with shame like crimson spume in his eyes. Disdain and anguish buffeted each other across his visage. His wounds wept unassuaged blood.

Renewed nausea twisted through Linden’s guts; but she did not look away. With her ruined gaze, she commanded Esmer to consider the cost of his betrayals.

A spasm of revulsion knotted his features. In disgust, he announced harshly, “The ur-viles desire you to recognize that the waters falling here must have a source. Doubtless you”—his tone said, Even you—“are aware that the Soulsease pours the greater portion of the Upper Land’s streams and rivers into the depths of Gravin Threndor. Later those same torrents emerge, besmirched, as the Defiles Course. But have you never contemplated the path of that vast weight of water during its millennia within the bowels of the mountain? The ur-viles assure you that the Soulsease plunges deep among the Wightwarrens, and still deeper, until it has passed beyond the knowledge of all but the Viles and their makings. There it gathers in lakes and chasms, filling utter darkness until it rises at last to its egress on the Lower Land.”

Esmer glanced upward. “The ur-viles proclaim that they have discerned a point of weakness in the high stone of this tomb.”

Then he clamped his mouth shut, biting down hard on his own misery.

The ur-viles gibbered and gesticulated like incarnations of mania. Below them, She Who Must Not Be Named reared higher, extending Her maleficence as if She dreamed of feeding until She filled the cavern. Some of the
skurj
approached directly. Others arced around the company’s position, perhaps to close off any possible retreat, perhaps to ascend the ledge themselves.

“Linden!” cried Liand. “Water!
Water!
”

She hardly heard him. Her gaze followed the line of the loremaster’s iron jerrid toward the ceiling. In the radiance of fangs and ferocity, she seemed to see the exact place that the jerrid indicated; see it as if the loremaster had marked it for her by sheer force of will.

The last of the Demondim-spawn had sacrificed themselves for her repeatedly; extravagantly. Nevertheless they wanted to live.

As she did. As long as Jeremiah needed help, and Covenant remained to redeem the Land.

One blast: that was all she had left. Just one. Then she would be finished, for good or ill.

Make it count.

Her parents would not have approved. They had chosen death. But for a moment longer, she refused their legacy. Spiders and worms could not cause more torment than they had already inflicted.

Saving her energies for flame, she whispered the Seven Words as she flung Earthpower toward the ceiling.

“
Melenkurion abatha
.”

Tenuously balanced on the brink of herself, she aimed fire at the damp patch of stone which the ur-viles indicated.

“
Duroc minas mill
.”

Every remaining shred of her love and need and fear, she committed to the written wood of the Staff until they formed a blaze of theurgy as brutal as a battering-ram.

“
Harad khabaal
.”

Centipedes and horror hampered her. The bane’s nearness drained her. The example of her parents promised futility; abject surrender. Defying them, she struck—

—and the ceiling held.

But she was not alone. A heartbeat behind her blast, a great gout of vitriol rose from the wedge and its loremaster. Strange magicks as corrosive as acid, and sour as self-loathing, smashed against the rock where her power burned.

Smashed and detonated.

Together the concussion of dire liquid and hot flame tore a cascade of stone from the ceiling.

From the breach, water trickled as though Linden and the ur-viles had partially unclogged a rainspout.

A rumble as throaty and unfathomable as the bane’s livid beat resounded among the spires. Tremors ran through the rock, shook the ledge. Clots of damp debris fell, loosened by a subtle convulsion among the mountain’s roots. The entire cavern groaned like a wounded titan.

Still some distance away, tortured faces wailed at Linden. Her father had killed himself in front of her. Her mother had begged to be slain. The excruciation of beetles and maggots intensified.

“Ware and watch!” shouted the Ironhand. “This perch may fail!”

She Who Must Not Be Named screamed from a dozen throats. The
skurj
paused as though they were capable of surprise.

An instant later, the damaged ceiling ruptured.

A tremendous fist of water flung great chunks of gutrock downward. From the breach, an immured sea began to fall in a staggering crash like all of the Land’s waterfalls joined into one. Thunder filled the air like the ravage of worlds. An avalanche of forgotten waters slammed down onto the
skurj
; pounded against the hideous bulk of the bane.

The tumult drew weight from other caverns above it. Scalding steam erupted from the impact of waters on Kastenessen’s monsters; but instantly those bursts were swept away by the torrential plunge. The bane tried to lurch aside, and failed. The plummet of water bore Her down, dragged Her under.

Groaning in granite agony, Gravin Threndor emptied its deep guts as though a firmament of water had been torn open.

Coldspray roared warnings which no one could hear. Other Giants yelled soundlessly, as if they had been stricken dumb. Jeremiah appeared to howl, uttering the
croyel
’s inaudible dismay.

Spray acrid with minerals drenched the company. It bit into Linden’s sight. She could not blink fast enough to clear her eyes. Dropping the Staff, she scrubbed at her face with both hands; slapped her neck and chest and legs.

Before the mountain’s tremors shrugged the Staff out of reach, Liand stooped to catch it.

Abruptly the ledge shook. It began to sheer away.

Esmer stopped it. The force which he had used on other occasions to raise spouts like geysers from the ground, he exerted now to stabilize the stone. A shudder ran along the steep shelf; but the ledge held.

Water hammered into the cavern, poured like a tsunami down the slow slope. Already it had immersed the bane and the
skurj
. Lurid fires and violence lit its mounting depths as the monsters fought to survive; as the bane strove for purchase among the inundated stalagmites. Shivering feverishly, Linden feared that the
skurj
would survive. Buried in floods, their fangs flamed as if they chewed minerals from the water to feed their furnace-hearts. Fighting for life, they tumbled down the cavern.

Whatever happened to them, Linden could not imagine that a power as enduring and virulent as She Who Must Not Be Named would simply drown. Nevertheless she wiped her eyes, and slapped herself, and prayed—

Betimes some wonder is wrought to redeem us
.

Even if the bane failed to gather Herself and return, Linden and all of her companions would soon perish. The vast rush of water smashed against the lower end of the cavern. Then it boiled and frothed back onto itself. And as it accumulated, it rose. Scores or hundreds of centuries of the Land’s springs and rainfall would fill the space until every gasp of air had been forced out.

In the distance, fires still burned under the flood. Crimson streaks stained the water: the
skurj
or the bane, Linden could not tell which.

As the new lake mounted, however, the thunder changed. Water pounding onto itself rather than on stone softened the edges of the roar. Dimly Linden heard the Ironhand’s voice.

“The
skurj
perish! They
perish
, although the bane does not! But these waters have found the descent to the Lost Deep! They rise more slowly now!”

Coldspray added something about time and Esmer that Linden did not understand. The Ardent appeared to argue with other Insequent who were beyond hearing. Both Liand and Stave shouted pleas or warnings at Linden. But inflicted imaginary beetles had crept into her ears again. She could not distinguish individual words from the adumbration of ancient torrents.

If the rate of the flood’s accumulation had indeed slowed, that small reprieve was insignificant. It made no difference.

Through the bite of bitter spray, Linden thought that she saw a few submerged fires fail and die. But she was sure of nothing. Crawling things fed on her; took her life in small nips and stings. Thunder and failure became lassitude. Her parents spoke more loudly than any of her friends. In the bane’s voices, they assured her of despair.

Like them, she deserved her end. She had earned it with woe and wrongs and weakness.

No one had the right to make Jeremiah suffer. No one except Thomas Covenant could hope to save the Land. But there was nothing left that she could do for them.

She was not even surprised when the whole surface of the surging flood burst into flame.

Mere water could not harm She Who Must Not Be Named. The ancient poisons which fouled the torrents appeared to nourish Her. Now She had found Her own answer to the inrush of ages.

Below the precarious ledge, boiling currents and chaos were lashed with conflagration as though they had been transmogrified into oil. Waters crashing against stalagmites and walls flung spouts of fire at the wracked ceiling.

Voices cried for Linden, but they conveyed nothing. Weary and tormented beyond bearing, she surrendered at last to the paralysis from which she had fled throughout her life: the helplessness which had permitted Covenant’s murder ten years ago, and had left her at the mercy of
turiya
Raver: the ineluctable doom of her parents.

Carrion.

As the bane arose from the waters halfway between the company and the end of the cavern, Linden fell to her knees. Deep inside her, something fundamental succumbed.

12.

She Who Must Not

Like a ghost, Thomas Covenant occupied discrete realities simultaneously, and had no effect on any of them.

In one, he saw everything that happened around him. He recognized every event from the moment when Esmer touched his forehead until he stood near Linden’s collapse above a rabid lake of fire, gazing at She Who Must Not Be Named. He felt everything, feared everything. But he had no volition, no power to act. He could do nothing to help his companions. He could only care and grieve and groan and dread. In that dimension, the part of him that made choices was out of reach.

It wandered elsewhere, among his memories, where nothing was required of him because everything had already happened. Perhaps he needed to recall those people and places and deeds: perhaps he did not. But they did not need him. He was merely a spectator, as oneiric as a figment, amid the fragments and rubble of things past; shattered stretches of time. And because his memories were broken, he did not know how to find his way through them. They were out of sequence; could not lead him back to himself.

Esmer had cast him into a realm of contradictory knowledge and bewilderment where every impulse of his heart was thwarted. Instead of responding to the company’s plight, or to the killing deluge which Linden had unleashed in the cavern, or to her final failure in the face of the bane’s emergence, Covenant remembered.

Earlier, while the company fled from the Lost Deep, he had observed ur-viles reconsidering their Weird millennia ago. The Demondim had not been fools: they had not made the ur-viles to be fools. Even the Waynhim—the accidents or miscalculations of breeding—had been discerning and lorewise, capable of recondite insights. Their black cousins had been far too intelligent for the contemptuous use which Lord Foul had made of them.

Their Weird as they had first understood it expressed their self-loathing: better to die promoting the end of all things than to live flawed and hateful in a world meant for beauty. Perishing by the thousands in the Despiser’s wars, however, the ur-viles had recognized that the logic of their servitude could reach only one conclusion. And in battle at the gates of Lord’s Keep, the Waynhim had demonstrated by valor and commitment that other choices were possible. Thus the Waynhim had prodded the ur-viles to question themselves.

When the Despiser had been defeated, therefore, the black Demondim-spawn had withdrawn to the Lost Deep to search their lore and their oldest legacies for a reply to the challenge posed by the Waynhim. Among the ineffable achievements of the Viles, the ur-viles had probed the history of their makers, and of their makers’ makers, until they reached an era before the Viles had ventured across the Hazard and been swayed by the Ravers.

In the Lost Deep, miracles of old lore had reminded the ur-viles that they had sprung from creatures not ruled by disgust for their own natures. There the ur-viles found that their first progenitors had conceived truths which spanned Time: truths which in turn enabled the ur-viles to estimate distant outcomes. They saw clearly where their service to the Despiser would lead them in the end—and what would be required to counter the syllogisms of Lord Foul’s scorn.

They hesitated. For centuries, they contemplated what they had come from, and what they were, and what they might wish to be. And eventually they reached new conclusions. As a result, they began the assiduous studies and exhaustive labors by which they created Vain.

Vain and manacles.

But while the Swordmainnir carrying Linden and her human companions followed the Waynhim, Covenant fell deeper. Other memories took the place of the ur-viles.

In a different fissure, he regarded an image which did not exist: an image which had never existed, except as a symbol or metaphor for a more profound and inarticulate truth. The image of a young woman. A woman fresh with loveliness and self-discovery. A woman brimming with new passion, ready to give and receive the kind of adoration which would define Her days. In his eyes, She was the reason that men and women had discovered love; the cause of every whole and holy desire.

Studying Her, he saw Her betrayed.

Hers was the tale which had given rise to that of Diassomer Mininderain, seduced and misled; abandoned to darkness. During the creation of the Earth, She had been cast down. By the sealing of the Arch of Time, She had been imprisoned. She was Mininderain and Emereau Vrai and the Auriference and scores or hundreds of other women. Indirectly She was Lena and Joan. At its core, Hers was the tale of every love which had ever been used or abused and then discarded.

The tale of She Who Must Not Be Named.

Heart-wrung by Her plight, Covenant watched Her arise amid water and flames, a lake of conflagration; and he understood that behind Her appalling malice and hunger lay a quintessential wail of lamentation, forlorn and deathless: the devouring grief of a heart that knew no other response to absolute treachery.

Perhaps deliberately—perhaps cruelly—Esmer had sent Covenant to this place among his riven memories. They might have been precious to him, had he been able to act on them. But they were the past: he could not change them.

Remembering love and loss, he, too, was lost.

Nevertheless he knew everything that happened around him. He saw and heard and felt: he cared so much that the straits of his companions rent him. Above all, uselessly, he understood Linden’s protracted ordeal. He regarded the effect of finding her son, and of being unable to free the boy from the
croyel
. He saw the hopelessness of her decision to flee the Lost Deep. When she had found the strength to treat his hands, his pride in her had been as poignant as yearning. During her fall from the Hazard, the futility of his desire to leap after her had filled him with anguish. With the ineffable discernment of a spectre, he had witnessed the consequences of her plunge toward agony. The despair that had crawled and fed on her failing sanity, he had experienced as though it should have been his.

Still she had continued to struggle and strive. When the thews of her resolve, of her essential self, had parted at last, his most acute reaction had been relief for her. Later, if she lived, she would think the worst of herself. For the moment, however, she had found a small escape from pain.

Yet she was not likely to survive. She and Covenant and everyone with them were about to die.

He saw no great harm in his own demise. Linden esteemed him too highly. But the others—For reasons that he could no longer recall, Linden and Jeremiah were essential to the Land. Dire futures hinged on Liand and Anele. Manethrall Mahrtiir and his Cords were needed desperately. There was no hope without Stave and the Masters and the Giants. And Covenant did not discount the Ardent, who alone knew how to rescue the company. Nor did he dismiss the Demondim-spawn, who still yearned to relieve their instinctive self-disgust.

Everyone who had come so far in Linden’s name, or in the Land’s, had a part to play. Even Esmer might find within himself the will to become his father’s son rather than Kastenessen’s minion. Even Covenant—

He would have given much to believe the same of Roger. But Roger was his mother’s son, not his father’s; and Joan had chosen the path of her doom long ago. Like Elena, she could no longer escape what she had made of herself, except through extinction.

Covenant had been removed from the Arch of Time. His responsibility for it had been taken from him. But Joan and Roger remained. They were his burdens to bear.

Therefore he, too, needed to live.

She Who Must Not Be Named had no intention of letting any of Her victims survive. Doubtless Esmer would avoid Her hungers. The
croyel
would certainly try to do so, taking Jeremiah with it. And the ur-viles and Waynhim might be able to evade destruction. But everyone else—

Through Esmer’s treachery, they also had become Covenant’s burdens. And Covenant loved Linden. In different ways, he loved all of her friends and companions: even the Masters, who had misled themselves to the brink of the Land’s annihilation. There was no one else who could save them.

Yet he remained lost.

As he examined his circumstances, however, he began to imagine that he was not altogether impotent. Almost by definition, betrayals had flaws. Esmer’s were no different.

The Humbled had caused Covenant to swallow
vitrim
; and that musty liquid was an unnatural approximation of hurtloam. It provided a partial mimicry of hurtloam’s sovereign healing.

When he had been offered hurtloam in Andelain, he had refused it. He had insisted on numbness and leprosy.
It doesn’t just make me who I am
.
It makes me who I
can
be
.

Now the dour taste and energy of
vitrim
galvanized his desire to be himself: a leper and pariah who knew better than to heed Despite. Because it was an artificial elixir, it could not bring new life to his nerves. But it made him stronger—

And there was another flaw as well.

Esmer’s effect on him bore no resemblance to the stasis which the
Elohim
had once used against him. The
Elohim
had severed him from thought and concern; from any kind of reaction. Esmer had merely knocked him off balance, tripping him into the maze of broken time. He could still think and care and strive. In that sense, he was only lost, not helpless. And anything that could be lost could also be found.

If he climbed high enough, or used his memories in the right way, he might conceivably rediscover his physical present by his own efforts.

If Esmer did not cast him down again.

If.

He had to try. The bane was coming closer.

After uncounted ages within the Arch, Covenant did not have enough time.

She Who Must Not Be Named lifted Herself like a pyre from the burning waters. Even at a distance, She appeared to tower over the company. Her fury shook the ledge in spite of Esmer’s efforts to steady it. For no clear reason except that they were Giants and courageous, all of the Swordmainnir except Rime Coldspray stood at the edge of falling and flames with their weapons ready. They must have known that no mortal blade would cut their foe; yet they confronted Her simply because they refused to accept defeat.

In that respect, they could have been Saltheart Foamfollower’s daughters.

Behind them, the Ironhand still supported Jeremiah with one arm, holding the
krill
against the
croyel
’s throat. Despite the bane’s ferocity, Jeremiah’s muddy eyes gazed at nothing. Spittle slid from one corner of his mouth. But the
croyel
had lost its feral grin. Squirming its talons deeper into the boy’s flesh, the creature seemed to brace itself for one last ploy, some act of power or cunning that might save its life.

Without hesitation, Stave scooped Linden into his arms and carried her to the wall, leaving the Giants room to swing their swords. Glimpsed past lank, untended strands of hair, the slackness of her mouth and the unfocused glaze of her eyes told Covenant that she had become as unreactive as her son. She had endured too much—He could only pray in silence that something within her still lived and loved, and could be reached.

Clyme and Branl had already dragged him back from the edge of the shelf. Galt stood in front of him like Bannor or Brinn: a display of resolve as brave as that of the Giants, and as wasted. At the same time, the Cords had taken Liand and the Staff, their Manethrall, and Anele as far from the rim of the ledge as they could. There Anele squatted against the wall as if he sought to curl his emaciated frame into the stone. Whispering aimlessly, he slapped at his old cheeks.

Nearby the Ardent wrapped every shred of his marred raiment around himself as though he hoped irrationally to ward his plump flesh with cloth. Panic glistened among the reflected fires in his eyes.

Higher up on the ledge, the ur-viles and Waynhim barked feverishly, strident with imprecations or despair. Their baying and yells appeared to be directed at Esmer.

Clad in wounds and tatters, Esmer ignored the Demondim-spawn. Apparently his efforts to scorn the people whom he had betrayed had failed. Dismay twisted his visage as he regarded the bane.

Relishing its immanent feast, She Who Must Not Be Named glowered higher and howled like a call for vengeance. Soon She would loom over the company.

Abruptly the
croyel
croaked in Jeremiah’s voice, “Esmer. Get us out of here.
Esmer
.”

Coldspray tightened her grip threateningly; but the monster was too frightened to heed the pain of the
krill
.

“It wasn’t supposed to come to this,” the
croyel
gasped. “She wasn’t supposed to be able to stop the
skurj
. You have to save us.”

Only Jeremiah’s loose features and silted gaze confirmed that the boy was not pleading for himself.

“You won’t regret it. Kastenessen will forgive you. He’ll heal you. If he doesn’t, we’ll
make
him. But you have to
get us out of here
.”