The Runes of the Earth: The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant - Book One (13 page)

Half of its glass had cracked and fallen long ago. She used her bag to break the rest from the frame. Then she tossed the bag and her flashlight to the ground outside. Bracing her hands on the sill, she climbed out through the window. Scraps of glass tore fresh blood from her right palm.

Sitting on the sill, she dragged her legs out of the room, dropped to the ground. She landed with a jolt that jarred her spine, as if she had fallen much farther; but she kept her balance. Gasping for good air, she retrieved her bag and her flashlight, and stumbled away to put distance between herself and the blazing house.

Helpless to do otherwise, she left Sara for cremation.

When the heat no longer hurt her skin, no longer threatened to set her hair on fire, she turned to watch Thomas Covenant's home die.

Now gouts and streamers of flame poured from all of the windows. Fire licked between the roof's remaining shingles, showed in the gaps which marred the walls. Every lash of wind spread the flames, intensified the conflagration. Sparks gyred into the sky and were torn away. In minutes the structure would collapse in on itself, reduced to ash and embers by the eerie storm.

From Linden's perspective, Roger's sedan seemed too close to the house. Surely it would catch fire as well? Her own car might be safe—

In the flagellated light of the blaze, she saw no sign of Roger Covenant or his other victims.

He had not gagged Sara. Jeremiah must have heard her cries. Sandy and Joan must have heard them. Perhaps Joan was beyond caring: Sandy was not. And for Jeremiah—

Running now, frantically, Linden turned her back on the roaring house and headed into the woods behind Haven Farm.

Wind kicked at her legs, tried to trip her among the first trees: it caught at her clothes. She knew where Roger would go, now that he had destroyed his father's home, his father's example of concern and devotion. She had not returned to these woods since the night of Covenant's murder, but she was sure of them. Where else
could
Roger go, if he wished to undo his father's self-sacrifice?

The woods twisted like a thrown ribbon among the fields of the county, following the crooked course of Righters Creek. Scrub oak, sycamore, and ivy crowded against each other along the gully of the stream. As soon as she had outrun the light of the burning house, she had to slow down. The wind or a fallen branch or a gap in the ground might trip her.

Gusts of wind flung limbs and leaves at her face, confused her senses with the wet odor of rotting wood and loam. Repeatedly her bag banged into her leg. Her flashlight was ineffective against the scourged dark. It had a will-o'-the-wisp frailty; cast only enough light to lead her astray. No trod ground opened in any direction: the woods were cut off from the world she knew. If she had not been sure, she might have wandered there for hours.

But she had forgotten nothing of the night of Thomas Covenant's death: she followed her memories. The wind whipped branches to bar her way, sent tangles of ivy reaching for her neck. But she could not be turned aside.

Roger's pace would be slower than hers. He could not be far ahead of her.

Standing somewhere else in these woods, on a hillside above Righters Creek, Thomas Covenant had once seen a young girl threatened by a timber rattler. On his way down the slope to help her, he had fallen—and found himself summoned to
Revelstone. Yet he had refused the Land's need. Instead he had chosen to do what he could for the child in his own world.

Roger would avoid such a place. The ground itself might retain too much of his father's courage. But Linden clung to it in her mind as she forged among the trees, following her faint light through the rending wind.

She had every intention of refusing the Land, if she had to; if Roger left her no other choice.

Lightning flared and snapped overhead, flooding the woods and then sweeping them into darkness. Repeatedly she pressed the heel of her right hand against the uncompromising circle of Covenant's ring. She needed to assure herself that she still possessed one thing Roger wanted; one talisman with which she could bargain for Jeremiah's life.

Her cut palm stung whenever she shifted her grip on the flashlight. Its plastic case had become sticky with her blood. How far ahead of her was Roger? A hundred yards? A quarter of a mile? No, it could not be so far. She remembered the way. He was already near his destination.

Over my dead body.

Then the ground began to rise, and she recognized the last hill, the final boundary. The cluttered terrain climbed to a crest. Beyond it, the ground dropped down into a hollow, deep as a stirrup cup, its sides steep and treacherous. Within the hollow nothing grew, as if decades or centuries ago the soil had been anointed with a malign chrism which had left it barren.

As Linden reached the crest, she half expected to find fire burning below her. Roger could have readied a conflagration here. Not tonight: he had not had time. But he might have begun to prepare for this night from the moment when he had first known what he meant to do.

However, there was no fire; no light of any kind. In the bottom of the hollow, she knew, lay a rough plane of exposed stone like a rude altar. Covenant had been sacrificed on it: she had fallen there herself. But she could not see it now. Her flashlight's beam did not reach so far. Before her, the ground seemed to sink away into deeper blackness like a plunge into an abyss.

Then lightning split the heavens; and in its shrill silver glare she saw the hollow as if it had been etched onto her retinas. When night closed back over the flash, she saw the scene still, limned in argent and terror.

Flecks of mica in the native stone glittered so that Roger Covenant appeared to stand amid a swath of sparks. He faced up the hillside toward Linden as if he had been expecting her—and had known exactly where she would appear. His smile had the empty pleasantry of an undertaker's.

In his right hand, he held a gun as heavy as a bludgeon, pointing it at Sandy Eastwall's head. She knelt on the stone beside him, her hands clasped over her heart in prayer. Her features were swollen, aggrieved with tears.

She knew her peril. Roger must have forced her to watch while he had shed Sara Clint's blood, preparing the way—

At his back stood Joan, her head bowed in submission. Around the betrayed sticks of her arms and legs, her nightgown fluttered like a pennon.

With his left hand, Roger gripped Jeremiah's wrist. The boy's maimed hand dangled in his captor's grasp. He held his free arm over his stomach, rocking himself as best he could on his feet. His lost eyes stared at nothing.

In the image burned onto Linden's retinas, sparks surrounded them all like a nimbus: the first touch of power which would translate them to ruin.

She could see nothing except dismay. Her flashlight hardly revealed the ground at her feet. Wind rushed wailing among the trees, lashed their limbs to frenzy. Its gusts seemed to cry out her son's name.

“Jeremiah!”
she called like an echo of the storm. “I'm here! I won't let him hurt you!”

At once she plunged down the hillside, heedless of the dark.

Again lightning hit the night. Stone and sparks seemed to reel toward her as she rushed downward. In the flash, she saw fresh blood stream from Joan's right temple. Joan had smeared the blood into her mouth. Without that lunatic strength, she would surely have collapsed.

“My dear Doctor,” Roger answered, “I have a gun. I don't see how you can stop me.”

Linden heard no strain in his voice, no effort to outshout the wind. Nevertheless his words reached her as though he had spoken them directly into her heart.

She jerked to a stop half a dozen paces from him. Her flashlight reached the plane of rock now, found four dim shapes poised in the dark. Its beam seemed to concentrate of its own volition on the black weight of Roger's gun.

“Linden!” Sandy gasped, “Oh, my God, he killed Mrs. Clint, back in the house, he cut her apart—”

With a negligent flick of his wrist, Roger swung the gun against Sandy's head. She sagged to the side; nearly fell.

“You don't talk now,” he informed her, smiling through another wrench of lightning that seemed to endure for a heartbeat too long. “This is between me and the good doctor. You don't have anything more to say.”

Wind shoved at Linden's back, urged her forward. She held her ground. She wanted to spring at Roger and tear the smile from his face; but she understood the danger too well. He needed nothing from Sandy now except her blood. He could pull the trigger at any moment, any provocation, to supply his desires.

With an effort, Linden turned her flashlight away from the gun and Sandy's stricken face toward her son.

More lightning rent the night. The blasts were growing more frequent, fiercer; accumulating toward a convulsion which would crack the boundary between realities. In silver fire, she saw Jeremiah gaze blindly through her, his sight and his mind imprisoned. Horses reared uselessly across the blue flannel of his pajamas. If Roger's grip on his wrist caused him any pain, he did not show it.

He still held his free arm across his stomach, the hand closed into a fist. Lightning and the wan touch of Linden's torch caught a brief flare of red from his fist: the artificial red of bright paint, as raw as a cry.

The next furious flash showed her clearly that he gripped one of his racing cars in his tight fingers. He must have picked it up from his bureau as Roger dragged him away.

Forgotten screaming rose in her. When he had been captured, her mute, blank, helpless son had reached out—

On some level, he must have understood his danger.

At any other time, she would have wept at the sight; but now she had no tears. The moisture which the wind and her whipped hair drew from her eyes was only water, not weeping.

“You bastard!” she yelled at Roger through the gale. “What do you want?”

She knew what he wanted.

He gazed at her. “Don't embarrass yourself, Doctor.” His voice reached her effortlessly. “You already know.”

At his back, Joan made sounds that might have been pleading; but Linden could not identify words through the wind's roar and the sizzling ire of the lightning.

“Linden,” Sandy panted, “get help. He has a gun. He'll kill you, he's going to kill all of us. You can't—”

“Yes!” Linden shouted at Roger to forestall another blow. “I know! I have it.” It hung on its chain against her chest. “But I don't understand.”

“That's right. You don't.”

He struck again, despite Linden's attempt to distract him. This time, Sandy slumped to the stone and lay still. Respiration stirred her chest slightly. Blood oozed through the hair on the side of her head.

Nothing touched Roger's bland smile.

A bolt of lightning struck the ground scarcely twenty feet from the plane of rock. It burned in the air, impossibly prolonged, for two heartbeats; three. Static flashed along Linden's skin as if she were about to burst into flame.

In the hot core of the blast, she saw two curved yellow marks that might have been fangs. Or eyes.

Then darkness slapped the light away. Her flashlight revealed nothing. Until her eyes adjusted, she could not see.

The wind might have been the voice of her own cries.

When the lightning came again, it had receded from the stone as if to make room for Roger's madness. It struck now with horrific frequency, pounded into the hollow at quick, erratic intervals, first on one side, then on the other, behind her, off to her left. Each blast clung to the ground for two or three seconds, sealing off the bottom of the hollow from the rest of the woods; interdicting help. The trapped space between the bolts swarmed with static. Linden's hair seemed to crackle about her head. Roger, Jeremiah, and Joan were wrapped in a penumbra of potential fire.

If a bolt hit the trees, these woods might burn like Covenant's home—

“You said,” Linden shouted at Roger, “you know things I don't.” Each word wore an aura of electricity. “You said I haven't earned the knowledge. But you don't know anything about me.

“How did
you
earn it?”

She did not care how he answered. She wanted only to make him talk. Distract him. Encourage him to drop his guard.

He may have believed that her right hand shook with fear; but it did not. Rather it trembled at the severity of her restraint. Every nerve in her arm burned to swing the flashlight into his face, hit him and
hit
him until she had destroyed his false image of his father. But his gun still threatened Sandy. Linden could not risk attacking him until he gave her an opening.

Had she seen
eyes
in that one long discharge? When he had split open Sandy's scalp, spilled her blood?

“By being her son,” he replied without a glance at Joan. “And Thomas Covenant's. My parents were a leper and a victim. Really, Doctor. You could at least try to imagine who I am.”

Linden did not need to imagine it. She saw him clearly, revealed by the harsh silver stutter of lightning.

“So what?” she shouted back. “My father killed himself in front of me. My mother begged me to put her out of her misery. I know what having damaged parents is like. As far as I can tell, the only thing you've earned is the right to
not do this!
”