Thomas Covenant 8 - The Fatal Revenant (51 page)

At last, reluctantly, she placed her Staff near the opening. Without it, she turned sideways, trusting percipience to guide her as she hunched down and stepped warily into the structure.

Inside the cage, she grasped the Staff by one end and pulled it after her. Near a corner of the back wall, Jeremiah had left a space between the branches and Rivenrock’s granite. As she drew the Staff inward, she slid one of its heels through that space. With elaborate

care, she positioned the Staff so that it lay on stone near the wall without touching any of the deadwood. Then she knelt over it, planting her hands and knees so that she could simply crumple and lie flat if she lost her balance-and so that she could grab the Staff quickly if she needed it.

At once, the cold of the rock began to soak into her like water. Aching spread from her palms and fingers toward her wrists: shivers accumulated in her

chest like the mountain’s impending earthquake.

The precise emanations of the construct did not waver or change. Although they had called to her, they did not react to her presence. The thoughtless intention humming in the wood was not yet satisfied. Or it had not been completed—

As soon as she was in position, Covenant followed, moving brusquely

as if he were confident that he would not disturb Jeremiah’s theurgy. Unlike Linden, however, he did not kneel or sit down. Instead he stood crouching with his hands braced on his thighs for support.

He had placed himself as far from Linden as he could without obstructing Jeremiah. His eyes watched the boy: she could not see them.

I yell because
hurt. Perhaps hep>

understood Kastenessen. Everything he does is just another way of screaming.

And when that doesn’t work—

Yet Covenant did not give the impression that he was in pain. He was closed to her health-sense; but her ordinary perceptions had been whetted by years of training. She saw nothing to confirm his claims of distress and exertion.

For a moment after Covenant had entered the crooked box, Jeremiah remained outside to gather up the last twigs and small branches. Then he, too, slipped through the opening without hesitation, sure of his relationship with his construct.

“Get ready, Linden.” Covenant’s voice was husky with anticipation. He sounded like a man on the verge of a defining triumph. “It won’t be long now.”

And when that doesn’t work, he maims—

Carefully Jeremiah fitted his larger pieces of deadwood across the gap, set them in position to complete his portal. As he did so, the power constrained within the construct increased again. Its vibrations grew more urgent. The cage still seemed stable, inert; petrified in place. It made no audible sound. Nonetheless its thrumming affected Linden’s nerves as if it might shake

itself apart at any moment.

When he had adjusted the final branches, he began to balance his twigs among them apparently at random. The mute call of the construct became a cavernous growl. She felt it in the base of her throat, the center of her chest.

“Fuck the Theomach,” Covenant muttered through his teeth. “Fuck the Elohim. Fuck them all.”

Then Jeremiah was finished. Instantly Melenkurion Skyweir and Rivenrock, the sunlight and the wide sky, disappeared as though they had been wiped from the face of the world. Linden and all of her choices were plunged into absolute darkness.

She felt the stone under her slip and tilt. She started to drop down, lie flat:

then she caught herself. The tilt was slight; so slight that the Staff did not move. Braced, she was able to keep her balance while her senses reeled, scrambling to accommodate realities which had been profoundly altered.

The rock under her fingers was wet. Dampness filled the air: already a spray as fine as mist moistened her cheeks, her hands. She felt inestimable masses crowding around her, basalt and obsidian, schist and granite on all

sides; league after league of the Land’s most ancient stone.

Jeremiah had transported her into the depths of the mountain.

The surface on which she knelt had been worn smooth by eons of water. Yet it was warm rather than cold; palpably heated by the energies within the Skyweir. The droplets on her face felt like sweat.

The imminent tremors which had disturbed her on the plateau were stronger here. Underground, she was closer to the pressures which would one day split Melenkurion Skyweir to its foundations: But that upheaval would not happen now. More force would be required to bring about the inevitable crisis.

Those sensations were small things, however; effectively trivial. The unexplained moisture in the air and the

nearly audible groaning among the mountain’s roots were dwarfed as soon as she recognized them, swept away like the plateau and the open heavens by raw power.

She was surrounded by Earthpower, immersed in it. Its primeval might seemed as immense as the Skyweir itself, and as unanswerable. By comparison, the healing potency of Glimmermere and the mind-blending waters of the horserite tarn were minor

.. -

instances of the Earth’s true life, and everything that Linden had done since she had returned to the Land paled into insignificance. Here was the uncompromised fount of the Land’s vitality and loveliness. If it had not been natural and clean, as necessary as sunlight to every aspect of the living world, its simple proximity would have undone her.

And yet

As soon as she recognized the concentrated presence of Earthpower, she realized that she had not yet reached its source. The vast strength flowing around her had been attenuated by other waters. The spray that beaded on her forehead, trickled into her eyes, ran down her cheeks, arose from less eldritch springs. They were rich with minerals, squeezed from the mountain gutrock to nourish the world. If she had submerged herself in them, they might have washed the

weariness from her abused flesh. But they were not the Blood of the Earth.

Now she shivered, not because she was cold, but because she was afraid. The crux of her intentions was near, and she might fail.

“Jeremiah?” she croaked. “Honey? Covenant’?” But no sound answered her. Silence entombed the space around her. Earthpower stilled the spray and the stone and the damp air.

Panic clutched at her chest. She jerked up her head, closed her fingers around the Staff. Then she stopped.

The wood of the construct had begun to shine. Or perhaps it had been shining all along, and her senses had failed to register the truth. Every bit of deadwood from the smallest twig to the heaviest bough emitted a murky phosphorescence. Each detail of the cage was limned in nacre, defined by moonlight. Yet the glow shed no

illumination. She could not see the stone on which she knelt, or the Staff clutched in her hand. The portal’s luminescence referred only to itself.

Nevertheless the white outlines

enabled her to discern the black silhouettes of her companions. Covenant still crouched in one corner of the box. Jeremiah remained near the place where he had sealed his construct.

Linden’s pulse drummed in her ears. Around her, the lightless

phosphorescence of the wood intensified. Covenant and Jeremiah sank deeper into darkness as the nacre mounted. Briefly the cage resembled a contorted meshwork woven of sterile wild magic, affectless, its purpose exhausted.

A heartbeat later, the entire construct flared soundlessly and vanished as every scrap and splinter of deadwood

was consumed by the aftereffects of Jeremiah’s theurgy.

She expected unilluminable midnight. Instead, however, a warm reddish glow opened around her as if the last deflagration of Jeremiah’s door had set fire to her surroundings.

The light was not bright enough to hurt her eyes. She blinked rapidly, not because she had been dazzled, but because the sudden disappearance of

the box exposed her to the full impact of Earthpower. Ineffable puissance stung her eyes and nose: tears joined the spray on her cheeks as if she were weeping. Through the blur, she saw Covenant stand upright, arch his back as if he had been crouching for hours. She saw her son look at Covenant and grin like the blade of a scimitar.

Then her nerves began to adjust. Slowly her vision cleared.

She and her companions were on a stone shelf at the edge of a stream nearly broad enough to be called a river. Jeremiah’s construct had brought them to a cavern as high and wide as the forehall of Revelstone. The arching rock was crude, unfashioned: clearly the cavern was a natural formation. But all of its facets had been worn smooth by millennia of spray and Earthpower.

And they radiated a ruddy illumination that filled the cave. The particular hue

of the glow-soft crimson with a fulvous undertone-made the rushing current look black and dangerous, more like ichor than water. The stone seemed to contemplate lava, imagine magma. It remained gently warm, stubbornly solid. Nevertheless it implied the possibility that it might one day flow and burn.

Linden had seen illumination like this before, in the Wightwarrens under Mount Thunder. Covenant had called it

“rocklight,” and it was inherent to certain combinations of stone and Earthpower. It had not been caused by Jeremiah’s theurgy. Instead his portal had temporarily blinded her to the lambent stone, the tumbling stream. Spray and warmth and Earthpower had entered through the gaps among the branches: light had not.

In spite of the water’s speed and turbulence, it was utterly silent. It raced along its course without the slightest

gurgle or slap. She might have believed that she had been stricken deaf; that the concentration of Earthpower was too acute for her ears. But then she heard Covenant speak.

“Good,” he announced for the third time. “We’re almost there.”

Only the water had been silenced by the weight of Earthpower.

Involuntarily Linden’s gaze followed the

current as it spilled into a crevice at the end of the cavern. But when she turned her head in the other direction, she felt a rush of astonishment. The source of the stream-and the fine spray-was a high waterfall that spewed from the cave’s ceiling and pounded in turmoil down onto a pile of slick stones and boulders at the head of the watercourse. Every plume and spatter of the torrent caught the fiery light in a profuse scattering of reflections: the waterfall resembled a

downpour of rubies and carbuncles, incarnadine gemstones; profligate instances of Earthpower. Yet the towering spectacle was entirely soundless. The bedizened tumult of spume and collision had no voice.

“How-‘?” Linden breathed the question aloud simply to confirm that she could still hear. “How is it possible’?”

She did not expect an answer. But Covenant muttered, “Beats the hell out

of me. I’ve never understood it. There’s probably just too much Earthpower here for our senses to handle.”

Like the waterfall, the spray on his face sparkled redly. His features were webbed with droplets of light and eagerness.

“That’s just water,” he said, dismissing the lit implications of the falls. “When it finds its way out of the mountain, it’ll be the Black River. But the Blood of the

Earth comes in here. It leaks out through those rocks.” He indicated the foot of the waterfall. “That’s what causes all this rocklight. Earthpower has soaked into the stone. But it’s too thin for what we need. We have to get to the source.”

Linden could see no obvious way in or out of the cavern. But Covenant pointed at the waterfall. “Through there.”

“There’s a tunnel on the other side,” added Jeremiah. His muddy gaze had assumed the color of hunger; avarice. The corner of his eye beat frenetically. In his right hand, his halfhand, he clutched his racecar as though it were a talisman. It leads to the place where the EarthBlood oozes out of the rock. That’s where we have to go. Covenant has to drink right from the source. Otherwise there’s no Power of Command.”

“But how?” Linden asked weakly. “That much water-We’ll be washed away.”

For a moment, Covenant looked at her directly; let her see rocklight like coals in his eyes. In the presence of more Earthpower than she had exerted since the time when she first formed her Staff of Law and unmade the Sunbane, he showed no sign of strain; gave no hint that he could be effaced.

Grinning avidly, he replied, “No, we

won’t.
wasn’t when Elena brought me here. You’ll probably have to crawl. But you can do it. All this Earthpower-It’s making you stronger. You just don’t feel the difference because there’s so much more of it.”p>

Then he turned back to the falls as though he had no more attention to spare for her. Motioning for Jeremiah to join him, he moved toward the gemmed cascade.

Jeremiah complied at once. Side by side, he and Covenant headed through the spray to essay the wet jumble of rocks.

As she watched them stride away, panic tugged at Linden again. She had to blink constantly at the sting of puissance; could hardly breathe against the might and dampness of the mist. Reflections of rocklight confused her, threatening her balance. Covenant was wrong. She could not withstand

that torrential mass of water.

But she had already made her decision. She had to try—

For a moment longer, she watched Covenant and Jeremiah take their first steps into the waterfall. As they ascended the clutter of stone, she saw forces which should have crushed them crash onto their heads and shoulders, and splash away swathed in jewels. At erratic intervals, the

mountain’s epitonic bones trembled.

Then, fiercely, she set down the Staff so that she could fling off both her robe and her cloak: protections which she had been given by people who wanted to help her. She did not need them in the warm cavern. And she feared that their weight when they became soaked would drag her to her death.

Clad only in her red flannel shirt, her jeans, and her boots, as she had been

when she had first left her home to pursue Roger Covenant and his victims, Linden Avery took up the Staff and set herself to bear the brunt of the waterfall.

Spray drenched her before she reached the falls itself. Her face streamed: her shirt and jeans clung to her skin. She felt a fright akin to the alarm which had afflicted her at the Mithil’s Plunge. Ahead of her lay a fatal passage in which everything that she