The Runes of the Earth: The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant - Book One (45 page)

Anxious and uncertain, Linden paced the wiry grass until she felt in the sensitive skin between her shoulder blades that she had reached a safe remove. There she stopped, facing away from the camp. Because she had no lore to guide her, and no experience, she sank to her knees. Perhaps that suppliant stance would convey what words could not.

“I don't know how to do this,” she told the dawn and the mountain breeze. “I don't know if you can hear me. Or if you care. But you've already helped us once.

“And once you saved the world.”

As she spoke, she slowly closed her eyes; turned her concentration inward. Without watching what she did, she pulled Covenant's ring from under her shirt and folded it in her cupped palms as if she were praying. Somewhere hidden within her lay a door which could be opened on silver and conflagration. She knew that: otherwise she would already be dead. But it seemed to occupy a place in her heart and mind which she could only approach as if by misdirection. She had not yet learned how to find that door at will.

“You know who I am.” She spoke softly. If the ur-viles could or would not hear her, no shout would reach them. “With this white gold ring and my own hand, I used Vain to make a new Staff of Law, as you intended.” Vain had been given to Covenant, but he had acknowledged and served her. “With your help, I went as far as I could go against the Despiser.”

Far enough to heal the ravages of the Sunbane. But only Covenant's self-sacrifice had sufficed to contain Lord Foul's malice.

“Now I'm back. This time I intend to do more.”

She thought of Jeremiah, alone and tormented. Of Anele's terrors and bereavements. Of Lord Foul's words in the old man's mouth. Of a yellow shroud tainting the Land.

She had heard Covenant say while she dreamed,
Trust yourself.

And within her a door which she could not find shifted on its hinges.

“I want your help again,” she continued, “if you'll give it. Not against the Despiser this time,” although she sought that as well. “One of the Ramen is dying. She needs
vitrim.
You can save her.

“In Vain's name I ask it, and my own. Hear me, please. Otherwise a young woman,” hardly more than a girl, “who fought with you against the
kresh
is going to die.”

Reaching out as if blindly with the fingers of her volition, the hand of choice, she grasped for the handle and unfurled white flame into the new day.

It could have been a high sheet of fire or a small tendril: she neither knew nor cared. Only a moment of wild magic; scarcely more than a heartbeat. Then she opened her hands and let Covenant's ring fall; left it dangling against her chest. Still with her eyes closed, she bowed her forehead to the grass.

If the ur-viles helped her now, they might do so again.

They might help her save Jeremiah.

She heard nothing except the mild curiosity of the breeze; felt nothing except the gravid silence of the mountains. Yet when she raised her head and opened her eyes, she saw an ur-vile standing before her on the grass with an iron cup in its hands.

In the burgeoning dawn, the aroma of
vitrim
—dusky, thick as silt—could not be mistaken.

 The Ramen broke camp when Linden and Liand had eaten a brief meal. Then they set off along the escarpment, traveling generally eastward toward a narrow gorge between two of the surrounding mountains.

Somo had arrived during the night, guided by Ramen. The mustang appeared hale and ready, undamaged by the difficulties of the rift. That visibly erased Liand's last
doubts about the Ramen. Now he shared their company, and Linden's, with a young man's eagerness.

Sahah they left behind with a few of her companions to care for her. Under the sustaining influence of
vitrim,
the injured Cord had rallied. She could not be moved: her life still hung precariously from the strings of her native toughness. Nevertheless the infection in her belly and the fever in her eyes had receded. She sipped water as well as
vitrim
willingly. At intervals, her mind cleared enough to let her speak. Linden believed—and Manethrall Hami agreed—that Sahah would live until the Cords who had been sent for hurtloam returned.

As the company moved, one of the Cords retrieved Anele from the mountainside above the scarp. Linden had noticed the old man's absence only after her concern for Sahah had eased. She had felt little alarm, however, although she needed Anele in ways which she could hardly name: the Manethrall had promised that the Ramen would not lose him. When Linden asked after him, Hami answered that he had roused early and wandered away, she could not say why: to avoid the Master's presence, perhaps, or to commune with his demons alone. In any case, he rejoined Linden and the Ramen without any obvious reluctance. As he accompanied them toward the gorge, he mumbled to himself incomprehensibly, as if he were engaged in a debate that no one else could hear or understand.

He had been reclaimed by madness, and his blindness had the distracted cast of a man who wandered among ghosts and saw only death.

With her renewed senses, Linden might have tried to pierce his confusion. But she feared the prices they both might pay for such an intrusion. Any possession was a form of psychic violence which might damage the last shards of his sanity. And she herself would be in danger from his madness. When she had entered Covenant years ago to free him from the imposed stasis of the
Elohim,
his blankness had overcome her, and for a time she had been as lost as Jeremiah. Ceer had died protecting her because she had been so completely absent from herself.

For the present, at least, she was unwilling to take the risk. Her own emotional state was too frangible.

Her success with Covenant's ring had given her a grim, febrile exhilaration. She had found the door to power within herself, and would be able to do so again. In addition, the restoration of her senses seemed to fill her with possibilities. To that extent, at least, she had regained her ability to make effective choices. To influence her own fate—and Jeremiah's. She was no longer entirely dependent on the willingness of others to guide and aid her.

Unfortunately her more profound dilemmas remained unchanged. Beneath her transient joy lurked frustration and despair like a buried lake of magma, a potential
volcano. Every step that she took in the company of the Ramen, like every tale that she heard—like wild magic itself—was necessary to her. Yet none of them brought her nearer to Jeremiah.

If her muscles had not stiffened to an acute soreness during the night, so that merely walking demanded most of her concentration, she might have been defenseless against the larger difficulties of her situation.

Off to one side of the vale where the Ramen had camped, snowmelt gathered to form a stream which ran along the floor of the gorge. There the company paused briefly to refill their waterskins. Then they entered the gorge itself.

The narrow defile squirmed between its crude walls, following an ancient seam in the substance of the peaks. At intervals, fallen boulders littered the way, constricting the stream to pools and small rapids. Stave, Anele, and the Ramen seemed oblivious to such obstacles, too sure-footed to be hindered. But Linden, Liand, and Somo had to pick their footing carefully.

By the time they reached the far end of the gorge, the sun had risen past the shoulders of the lowest mountains. In the new light, she saw crests piling southward until they grew dark with distance. In shadow their cloaks of ice looked grimy and tattered, eroded by time. Direct sunlight, however, gave the ice a purity that seemed almost blue. As if exalted by the sun, the peaks lifted their grandeur proudly into the sky.

There the route of the Ramen traversed an open mountainslope southeastward. This easier surface allowed Linden's muscles to grow accustomed to movement. In addition, the sun warmed some of the tension from her joints. Gradually the aching in her thighs and calves faded, and her knees began to feel less brittle.

Liand walked at her side, leading Somo after him; and his buoyant company also helped her along. He was new to percipience, delighted by it, and every unfamiliar vista among the peaks, every type of grass or shrub or tree which he had never seen before, every soaring bird, enhanced his excitement. For him, the world was being made fresh as he moved through it.

Linden still believed that he should have remained in Mithil Stonedown; that he should return home as soon as he could. Nevertheless she found that she relied upon him more with every passing hour. He helped her believe that a world which gave birth to such people could never be entirely ruined by Despite.

Then the Ramen began to descend to the south, avoiding a gnarled bluff that jutted from the mountainside, and Linden was forced to concentrate on her steps again. Walking downward strained her knees and thighs until they threatened to fold under her. She had to grit her teeth as well as her determination in order to stay on her feet.

Whenever she glanced at Anele, she saw that his madness was modulating between its various phases, responding to necessities or catalysts which she could not begin to grasp.

Ahead of her, the slope dropped toward a place of torn and jagged boulders, great
blocks and monoliths, where two of the lower mountains appeared to have collided with each other. Studying the granite chaos, she feared that the Ramen would ask her to clamber there. However, they reassured her by turning so that their path angled more toward the east. As they rounded the mountainside beyond the tumbled monoliths, she saw that they were headed toward an arête between massive cliffs, a ridge like a saddle. It had been formed by tremendous rockfalls which had echoed each other off the higher cliffs and crashed together in the intervening valley, filling all of the space between the mountainsides with rubble.

Linden groaned to herself.
More
rubble—She could not conceal her chagrin as she asked Manethrall Hami, “Is that where we're going?”

The woman nodded. “The Verge of Wandering lies beyond. There we will attempt to answer the Bloodguard's doubts—and our own.”

Temporizing, Linden inquired, “Can Somo make it?” She was not sure that she could. “It looks rough from here.”

Hami concealed a smile. “We have learned a path among the stones. The mustang will not find it difficult.” Then she looked at Linden and said more gravely, “Your weariness is plain, Ringthane. Your mount will be able to bear you, if you wish it.”

Linden stiffened. “No, thanks,” she muttered. Her weakness the previous day had injured her self-confidence. “If Somo can manage it, I probably can too.”

The Ramen leader nodded. “I do not question it.”

“But tell me something,” Linden went on, “before I start breathing too hard to talk.” She had not forgotten the apparent disingenuousness of Hami's earlier claim that her people had no communication with or comprehension of the ur-viles.

“If it will ease your way,” the Manethrall replied, “I will answer as I can.”

Her tone conveyed sincerity, although Linden also heard hints of hesitation. The Ramen had their own secrets, which they did not mean to reveal.

Troubled by her sense of unspoken intentions, Linden asked, “How did you know about the
kresh
?”

Hami gave her a perplexed frown. “Ringthane?”

“It all seems too tidy to me,” Linden explained awkwardly. “I don't see how you could have known that I was in danger. But you came to my rescue anyway, right when I needed you.

“How did you do that?”

“Ah.” Hami nodded. “Now I comprehend. Our presence was indeed timely. It need not surprise you, however.

“It is our custom betimes to scout the borders of the Land, seeking some glimpse of what transpires there. Yesterday with my Cords I had elected to keep watch on the Mithil valley, for only there are these mountains readily entered—there, and from the Plains of Ra. Elsewhere the cliffs forbid passage.

“From the heights above the valley, we saw the
kresh
gather to hunt. We did not know what they hunted. We sought only to assail them when they dared the mountains. That you were their prey we did not discover until we had prepared our ambush.”

Her explanation sounded plausible. Linden would not have questioned it if she had not heard hints of avoidance in the Manethrall's tone.

She stopped walking so that she would be able to stand her ground. When Hami halted as well, Linden said, “Yet somehow you picked yesterday to be right where I needed you. And so did the ur-viles.

“Don't misunderstand me,” she added quickly. “I'm grateful. I trust you already. But I'm”—she shrugged uncomfortably—“suspicious of coincidences.”

Lord Foul had taught her that.

She could believe that the ur-viles had known of her presence in the Land, and of her need. Millennia ago, they had recognized that Covenant would return. But nothing about the Ramen suggested that they had such lore.

Cords gathered around her as she waited, but she ignored them; concentrated on Hami.

“You keep saying,” she went on when the Manethrall did not answer, “you don't speak the ur-viles' language. But that's not the whole story, is it? You communicate with them somehow. You have some way of working together.”

“And the Demondim-spawn,” Stave put in harshly, “have ever served Corruption.” He had placed himself at Linden's shoulder. “They opposed their ancient master in the time of the Sunbane. Yet plainly he did not destroy them, as he appeared to do. Perhaps he preserved them covertly across the centuries, in preparation, it may be, for the return of white gold to the Land.”

Now Linden took notice of the Cords, drawn by the tension emanating from them. When she studied them, she realized that they shared Hami's secrets; that all of the Ramen knew the things which the Manethrall would not say.

Hami bristled at Stave's words. Her fingers twitched to take hold of her garrote. Stave faced her impassively, however, unswayed by her indignation.

“Does it offend you, Manethrall, that the
Haruchai
are not gladdened by your return to the borders of the Land? That we question your actions and your troth? Then reply to the Chosen's query. Permit us to judge the nature of your purposes.”

No doubt he could discern the presence of secrets as clearly as Linden did.

Hami gauged him darkly: she seemed eager for combat. But then, distinctly, she closed the door on her ready pride.

“You speak of that which lies beyond you, sleepless one,” she answered like a sigh. “Two days I asked in which to take counsel and seek comprehension. This you accepted. Therefore there can be no contest between us. You are safe among the Ramen. We will permit no harm to you, or to your companions.

“Nor will we take offense. To provoke us is unseemly. Such impatience ill becomes you.”

Stave regarded Hami for a moment, apparently appraising her. Then he surprised Linden by bowing as he had in the rift.

“I hear you, Manethrall. I will be patient, as I have agreed. I have named the causes of my doubt. But know also that I am grieved to encounter the Ramen after so many generations, and to be denied knowledge of the Ranyhyn.

“You misjudge the Bloodguard. They did not ride Ranyhyn to their deaths, as you avow. Rather they accepted service which the Ranyhyn offered freely. No life or power in all the Land was honored or loved more highly than that of the great horses.”

Again Hami did not return his bow. Instead she retorted, “The Bloodguard might have refused that service. The Ringthane did so. Yet he prevailed.”