The Runes of the Earth: The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant - Book One (69 page)

Thomas Covenant's love shone from him, as it had once before. Standing ankle-deep in the sodden grass, he said to her in Covenant's familiar voice—but softly, softly, so that only she would hear him—“Go now, beloved. While you can. Just be wary of me. Remember that I'm dead.”

Beware the halfhand.

She stared at the old man, too surprised—and too entirely transformed—to react. Some part of her tried to cry out, but her heart had no words—

Then the light of possession disappeared from Anele's mien, snatched away by the sudden interruption of the loremaster. Before Linden could protest, the ur-vile reached out with its molten blade and flicked a small gouge in the thin flesh of Anele's forearm. Snuffling damply, the creature put its mouth to the wound and sucked.

With their lore, they will pierce the madman's confusion—

Anele suffered the loremaster's actions without protest or struggle: he seemed unaware of them. Covenant's brief presence must have reassured him. Mere days ago he had yelled in distress,
Creatures make Anele
remember
!

Had the ur-viles themselves searched for the Staff of Law? For what purpose?

Until the loremaster finished with the old man and stepped back, Linden did not notice that the Ranyhyn had grown restive.

They had arrived together as she had imagined them entering the dell for Elena's horserite; but now they separated, stamping their hooves and tossing their manes among the Ramen. Hyn came purposefully toward Linden: Hynyn approached Stave. The others ranged themselves before Anele and Liand, Mahrtiir and his Cords.

The three Ramen stared, stricken dumb, as star-browed horses urged them to mount.

As one, the throng drew back. Voices rose through the rain: whispers of astonishment; low cries of expostulation. Hami's eyes went wide and white as if her ready pride had become chagrin.

Responding to their people as well as to the Ranyhyn, Mahrtiir, Pahni, and Bhapa immediately prostrated themselves like supplicants in the sodden grass. They may have feared that what happened now would undermine the foundations of everything the Ramen had ever done; that the meaning of their lives might crack and fall.

No Raman had ever ridden a Ranyhyn—but nor had any Raman refused the will of the great horses.

Through the confusion of voices, the Ranyhyn made blowing noises that sounded like affectionate jeers as they lowered their heads to nudge at the three prone Ramen.

Linden watched Mahrtiir, Bhapa, and Pahni in suspense, afraid that none of them would move; that the
caesure
would overtake her before the Ramen could redefine themselves. But then the Manethrall shook himself as if he were gathering his courage and climbed unsteadily to his feet. His voice shook like Linden's as he announced, “The will of Ranyhyn is plain. We cannot serve the Ringthane—or the Land—if we do not ride.”

The horses replied with a resounding whinny of approval.

“No Raman has ever done so,” objected Hami thinly.

“No Ranyhyn,” Mahrtiir answered, gaining strength, “has ever offered to bear a Raman.”

Still Bhapa and Pahni remained prostrate. Like their people, they were caught in a contradiction that they could not resolve. Softly in the background, Esmer exchanged a harsh commentary with the ur-viles.

“Then let it be so,” said a new voice; and Linden saw that Manethrall Dohn had moved to the forefront of crowd. His years and his scars gave him an air of authority. He did not speak loudly, but his words seemed to carry through the rain into the future. “Too long have the Ranyhyn and their Ramen been exiled from the Plains of Ra. Once in this place we determined that we would never again allow Fangthane to ravage the Ranyhyn. We have held to that promise. Yet now my heart misgives me. I fear that we have entered the last days of the Land. If we do not accept this opportunity to strike against the Render, we will be forever homeless.”

For a moment longer, no one moved. Then Mahrtiir reached down abruptly, grabbed Pahni and Bhapa by the backs of their jerkins, and tugged them erect. “Up, Cords,” he growled with hectic eagerness. “Are we craven, that we fear to give our lives a new meaning?”

Under her breath, Linden muttered, “Thank God.” Go now, beloved. While you can. She did not know how much longer she could contain the pressure building within her.

As if Mahrtiir had broken a trance, all of the Ramen seemed to slough off their wonder and dismay. They looked around them; studied the sky; peered anxiously into the north. Singly and in groups, they turned back toward the encampment. Soon only Hami remained with Linden and her companions.

“Ringthane, we must depart,” said the Manethrall. Now that a decision had been reached, she seemed resigned to its implications. “We cannot withstand this Fall.”

Linden turned toward the woman. “Then go, Hami. Take care of yourselves. Protect the Ranyhyn. I'm grateful for everything you've done.

“I'll come back if I can,” she told the concern in Hami's eyes. “If I can't, look for me in the Land. You'll always be needed.”

Hami's gaze clouded; and her throat worked as if she wished to say more. Instead, however, she bowed deeply, mutely, in the fashion of her people. After that, she wheeled and trotted away after the other Ramen.

Before he left, Char spoke privately to Mahrtiir. Linden winced, thinking that Mahrtiir might rebuff the young Cord in some hurtful way. But then she saw Char offer his garrote to the Manethrall—and noticed as well that Mahrtiir's hands had been scorched in his attempt to throttle the loremaster.

Mahrtiir accepted Char's cord with taut grace. Although his fingers hurt, he rumpled Char's hair: a quick gesture of affection. Then the Cord ran after the rest of the Ramen, and Mahrtiir turned to Bhapa and Pahni, and to the champing Ranyhyn.

Satisfied and urgent, Linden faced Liand at last.

“Linden,” he began like a man in shock, “I—”

She stopped him gently. “Liand, thank you. For everything.” She felt almost frantic to be on her way. Nevertheless she took the time to add, “I'm lucky I met you. If you decide you want to go with the Ramen, I'll still consider myself lucky.”

Her words seemed to pluck away his apprehensions. “Are you mad?” he replied with a sudden grin. “Can you believe that I will let pass an occasion to cross time upon the back of a Ranyhyn? I have been too long a mere Stonedownor. Here I will become more than I was.” He laughed. “I mean to teach Stave and the Masters the error of their mastery.”

Linden nodded. What else could she do? She had already tried to dissuade him too often.

Hurrying now, she strode toward Hyn, calling over her shoulder, “Mahrtiir, it's time! We need to
go.
”

Her senses had caught their first taste of the
caesure.
If it did not slacken its advance or drift aside, it would soon be visible to ordinary sight.

Mahrtiir came promptly to help her mount while Bhapa and Pahni guided Anele to the smallest of the Ranyhyn, a muscular pinto with flaring eyes and shaggy hocks whom they called Hrama. Linden worried that Anele might be afraid to ride; but some
visceral interaction between Hrama's vitality and his own Earthpower seemed to calm him, and he did not protest as the Cords boosted him onto Hrama's back.

By the time Hyn had turned toward the north, Stave and Mahrtiir were mounted as well. The Manethrall looked exultant, elevated beyond himself, and crowded with anticipation. Stolidly Stave brought Hynyn to Hyn's side as Bhapa helped Liand vault onto a palomino stallion named Rhohm. Mahrtiir joined Linden opposite the
Haruchai.
Then Pahni and Bhapa sprang onto their own Ranyhyn, following behind Liand and Anele to ensure that no one fell back or was lost.

At the same time, the ur-viles changed their formation. Running on all fours, they scattered around the riders to form a black ring with their loremaster in the lead. As they did so, they chanted together like a chorus of dogs.

Once in position, the loremaster exchanged its ruddy blade for a pointed iron rod like a scepter or javelin; and from the metal, dark force flowed around the riders, enclosing them with vitriol.

Esmer had disappeared. Linden scanned the rain quickly, but felt no hint of him. Apparently he had simply folded his power around himself and winked away.

She remained where she was, staring into the gloom. After the brief respite of Esmer's absence, her stomach felt a renewed nausea as the swirling
wrongness
of the
caesure
approached. Peering through the raindrops, she began to discern the visible outlines of the Fall.

The
caesure
she had seen from Kevin's Watch had resembled the aura of a migraine: a sickening phosphene dance which seemed to cast every individual mote of reality into chaos. Without her health-sense, she might have believed that the swirl took place among the neurons of her brain rather than within the fabric of existence. But this Fall looked worse; stronger. Multiplied, perhaps, by the pressure of Esmer's summons, it formed a howl of distortion and madness against the grey backdrop of the rain.

The sight reminded her of damnation.
Abandon hope
—

Although she was soaked, the
caesure
's ill covered her skin with formication, as if fire ants crawled through her clothes.

“Chosen?” Stave asked, questioning her hesitation—or her resolve.

“Oh, hell.” Frightened now on a scale that surpassed prolonged frustration and metaphysical chills, Linden reached into the front of her shirt; drew out Covenant's ring. Closing the cold circle in her fist, she muttered, “Let's do it.”

If Joan were indeed the cause of the
caesures,
then entering one might resemble being plunged into her madness. But Linden had already survived Joan's torment once—

Joan was stronger now. In the Land, white gold inherited its true power; and her despair fed on itself, swelling ceaselessly. But Linden had grown as well. She was strengthened by the support of her friends as by the healing of the ur-viles. She also held a
white ring. And when gunfire had first stripped her of her former life, she had not known that the Despiser would claim her son.

The loremaster heard her and understood. It began to pace forward through the water-heavy grass, holding high its scepter. Grimly Linden touched Hyn's flanks with her heels. The Ranyhyn quivered under her, but did not falter.

Then all of the riders were in motion, trotting ahead within the ur-viles' protective theurgy.

The chanting of the creatures rose. Gradually the Ranyhyn quickened their pace to match the rhythm of the invocation.

Rain splashed past Linden's hood into her eyes. Now the
caesure
resembled a vast swarm of hornets. Its power shocked her senses: it seemed to swallow the north in its frenzy. She no longer wondered why Kevin's Watch had fallen. The wonder was that any aspect of the living world could endure the
caesure
's evil.

Anele had done so. His inborn Earthpower had preserved him then. It would again. But the rest of the company would have to rely on the Demondim-spawn—and on Linden's uncertain ability to use wild magic.

With Stave and Mahrtiir beside her, she gripped Covenant's ring and followed the ur-viles at a canter into the turmoil of the Fall. At the last instant, she may have shouted Jeremiah's name. If so, she did not hear herself. The firestorm assault of the
caesure
had already stricken her deaf and dumb and blind.

 In an instant, formication became the world. It filled Linden's senses as though biting ants had burrowed into her flesh, chewing their way deeper and deeper toward the essential fibers—the thews of will and purpose, experience and memory—which bound her identity into a coherent whole. She felt that she was being torn from herself strand by strand; ripped to agony.

She would not have believed that she could endure such pain and remain conscious of it. Surely the human mind could call upon blankness or insanity to defend it? How else had Jeremiah kept himself alive; able to be loved? How else had Anele borne the cost of his bereavements?

Nevertheless she had no means to protect herself. No aspect of her being remained intact to ward her against the meticulous excruciation of the
caesure.
She had entered a demesne of flux, inchoate and chaotic; altogether devoid of Time's necessary sequences. Life could not exist outside the stricture of chronology. She remained alive only because she occupied no consecutive moments during which she could have ceased to be.

Instead of dying, she was caught in an eternity of incineration as though she had been struck by a bolt of lightning which would never end.

And yet—

Formication, devouring, was only one of the
caesure
's avatars. It had others. Her entire being had become a timeless shriek. Simultaneously, however, she stood alone in a realm of utter white and cold.

It had no features and no dimensions in any direction. It was simply gelid white multiplied to infinity, faceless as snow, demeaning as ice: vast and desolate, entirely uninhabitable: a heatless interstice between the possible moments of existence. The cold was an infinite fire. It would have peeled the skin from her bones if this moment could have modulated forward in time. But here there was no time, no movement, no possible modulation.

Only her solitary presence in that place defined it.

There her loneliness was complete. It seemed less bearable than pain. She could have wailed forever and gone unheard.

Nevertheless some form of movement was permitted to her. She could turn her head. Take steps as though she stood on solid ground. Gasp as freezing bit into her lungs. She could feel the cold stab like a
krill
through the bullet hole in her shirt. Surely that implied a state of being in which one thing led to another? A condition in which her pain might be heeded?

But she saw only bitter white, and her steps took her nowhere, and her gasping puffed no vapor into the isolation.

And yet—

Formication tore her apart and white emptiness bereft her simultaneously. And simultaneously again, in still another avatar of the
caesure
's evil, she found herself gazing out at a wasteland of shattered stone and rubble. She heard the lorn hiss of the wind punctuated by the rhythmic fall and retreat of surf; and although she did not look, she knew that behind her the seas crashed perpetually against a broken cliff.

The raw damaged rocks before her appeared to be chunks of time, discrete instances of the substance which should have made existence possible; woven the world whole. They were badly battered, torn from their natural union with each other by violence or lunacy. Yet they were intact in themselves; and each of them still implied its place in the former cliff.

Once they had formed a buttress against the sea, an assertion of structure and endurance in the teeth of the surging waves. Although they had been shattered, they retained their essential identity, their obdurate granite selves.

And among them moved sad gleaming creatures like misshapen children.

As the creatures squirmed over and among the stones, they emitted a sick emerald radiance; light the hue of acid and gangrene. They might have been the fouled progeny of the Illearth Stone, if that condensed bane had not been destroyed by wild magic millennia before her own time in the Land.

Nonetheless she recognized them. They were
skest,
and their touch was death: they were formed of a rank corrosive which devoured flesh. At one time, they had served the lurker of the Sarangrave, herding prey to the lurker's hungry tentacles. Without aid, she and Covenant and their Quest for the One Tree would not have survived their passage through Lifeswallower, the Great Swamp.

Now the acid-children appeared to serve her, occasionally placing tasteless food and brackish water in her mouth, offering their bitter warmth to her wind-chilled skin, and mewling for pity which she did not deign to provide. At other times, they dissolved from sight, perhaps melting between the rocks in order to replenish her viands, or to restore their own lambent green lives. When they reappeared, they resumed their diligence.

Sharp formication: lost white and cold: a wasted vista of torn stone and
skest.
All simultaneous, overlapping around her and within her as though they occupied the same space at the same time. If the
caesure
took other forms as well, they lay beyond the reach of her senses.

Tearing ants and fiery cold slowed her perceptions. Gradually, however, she became aware that in the wasteland among the
skest
she was someone else: that she inhabited a flesh not her own; gazed about her through eyes which did not answer to her will; made choices over which she had no control. Although she wailed and grieved, she altered nothing, affected nothing. None of her pain or her yearning escaped the mind where she was imprisoned.

She should have died, consumed by fire ants and cold. She should have been driven mad by the loss of her friends and her purpose; of her son. She had brought them all to ruin and deserved no less. Yet she could not escape.

Instead she felt a hand which was not hers clench and rise abruptly toward her head. Through the eyes of her prison, she saw the body's right fist strike against its
temple. Nerves that did not belong to her felt blood weep from an aggravated sore, dripping like tears down an abused cheek. Dissociated whimpers leaked from a mouth that had lost most of its teeth. When the throat swallowed, she tasted the seepage of bleeding gums.

At the same time, a flash of argent fire burst from the ring hanging against a sternum on its chain. Silver anguish blazed and coruscated among the stones, the rent instances, until one of them had been torn to confusion and dust.

Then, simultaneous with her other agonies, Linden understood that she was trapped in Joan's mind; that the woman who tortured this wasteland of rubble with the sea at her back, the woman whom the
skest
served, was Covenant's ex-wife. Charred by the Despiser's lightning, Joan had indeed found her way to the Land, as Linden had feared.

And here Joan herself had been found by
turiya
Herem.

Linden knew the Raver's touch intimately: she could not fail to recognize it. During her own translation to the Land, she had met
turiya
in Joan's mind. She had been afflicted with visions of pain and destruction which she still did not know how to bear. But there were no visions now. Even they required sequences and causality which did not exist within the
caesure.
Instead she felt only the Raver's insatiable abhorrence of life.

Goaded by
turiya
Herem's malice, Joan continued to strike herself, measuring out her despair against her temple. And with each blow, her power lashed out to create Falls, shattering coherent fragments of time until every moment within that fragment was torn apart.

Wild magic could have unmade the entire landscape in one towering gout of power; broken the Arch of Time instantly. Trapped in Joan's mind, however, Linden understood that she was incapable of such an act. Coercion and insanity fettered her pain: she could utter no cry louder or more sustained than this piecemeal devastation.

Gauged by the scale of Joan's blasts, the wasteland around her was immense. The Earth might endure and suffer for centuries before the damage became irrecoverable.

To Linden, that seemed still worse than formication and emptiness. Had she remained alive in any coherent sense, able to make choices and act, she might have striven to counteract Joan's suffering; to hold back the harm of Joan's self-loathing. But that possibility also Linden had lost.

Her plight surpassed endurance, yet she could not escape it. When the
skest
had fed her, Joan savaged another of the littered moments—and freezing white loneliness filled Linden's senses, featureless and forever unrelieved—and myriads upon myriads of gnawing pincers bit her flesh to shreds—and she could not escape it.

Then she might have attempted deliberately to abandon consciousness and knowledge, hoping to find relief. More than once in the past, however, she had felt the same
desire; the same impulse to abdicate herself. Watching her father's suicide. Tortured in every nerve by the ravages of the Sunbane. Imprisoned in Revelstone. Possessed by a Raver while Covenant surrendered to Lord Foul. In some sense, she had sacrificed volition when she had entered Covenant's mind in order to free him from the imposed stasis of the
Elohim.

Now she could not forget what her desire for absence had cost her in the past. Or what it would cost Jeremiah here.

Nor could she forget that her companions suffered as well; that Anele and Liand, Stave, the Ramen and the Ranyhyn, even the ur-viles, had entered this demesne of horror at her behest.

And she remembered that no time had passed.

She was trapped in all moments and none simultaneously. She might spend eternity searching for an escape, and still nothing would have been lost. Nothing would be lost until the bounds of her identity frayed and failed; until she truly and entirely abandoned hope.

Until then, she could still think.

Both Anele and the ur-viles had once survived this same experience. She intended to do the same.

But they had merely entered a
caesure,
or been taken by it. And when the chaos had flung them forth again, by accident of Earthpower or design of lore, they had emerged thousands of years later. She needed more: not merely to survive and emerge, but to defy the inherent attributes of the Fall. Within itself, it was all moments and none, impossible confusion. Externally, however, it was a specific rock on the littoral of Joan's madness; a discrete force which moved from place to place through time. Despite its internal insanity, it was like a river: it ran in only one direction.

Linden needed to do more than simply endure until the
caesure
cast her onto its banks. She needed to swim against the current, drawing her companions with her.

She needed wild magic.

Thinking was a form of movement. And the avatar of freezing whiteness was the only one which allowed her the illusion of movement. Therefore she selected a direction at random—all directions were the same in that place—and began to walk. Then she began to run—

—seeking the door within herself which opened on white fire.

The cold attacked her lungs with relentless ferocity: she should have collapsed in bloody coughing. Yet she did not. No time had passed. She did not need air. Therefore the rending in her chest never changed. She could continue to run, no matter how vast her pain.

In that way, she clung to herself through formication and loss and blazing madness.

But she had lost the door. It lay hidden somewhere within her. Twice before, she had found her way there consciously, and it had opened to her hand. Now, however, the path which might have led toward it had been transformed to chaos. She was in too much pain to rediscover the route inward.

In this excruciating tumult, only Joan had power.

Nevertheless Linden kept running. She believed now that if she stopped she would never become herself again.

Nothing changed. Nothing could change in a realm devoid of cause and sequence. Fire ants and utter loneliness ruled here. Yet Joan continued to feed occasionally, drink occasionally, and strike out; and Linden still ran, fleeing her own despair.

Then the lash of argent from Joan's ring caused a jagged chunk of granite to detonate in incandescence, momentarily dimming the emerald glow of the
skest
—and Linden stumbled to an unsteady halt in front of Anele.

He gazed straight at her as if he were aware of her presence, although he could not see her. They did not exist for each other here, and he was blind. Yet his eyes were a milky gleam of Earthpower and intention.