Fatal Revenant

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  He looked to Covenant as if he were loath to answer her without Covenant’s support or approval; and as Jeremiah turned his head, the Theomach came lightly up the hillside. His wrapped feet made no mark on the surface of the crust. Once again, he conveyed the eerie impression that he occupied more than one time and place; that with every step he blurred the definitions of reality.

  He ascended as if he meant to accost Covenant. But when he was still nearly a dozen paces away, he halted. Behind his bindings, his eyes seemed to study Covenant for some promise of violence.

  “That was just a warning,” Covenant pronounced harshly. “Next time, I’ll actually hurt you.”

  The Theomach shrugged. His tone implied its own threat as he said. “Do not doubt that I remain able to frustrate your designs. I have counseled wisdom as well as caution, yet you give me cause to doubt that you will heed me.”

  “Just so we understand each other,” Covenant retorted. “I’m on your damn path. I’ll stay on your damn path. But I’m tired of being taunted.”

  The stranger nodded once, slowly. Then he seemed to slip sideways and was gone. Linden could not detect any evidence that he had ever been present.

  Apparently unsurprised, Jeremiah moved closer to Covenant. When Covenant glanced at him, the boy said, “Mom wants to know why we don’t just transport ourselves to Melenkurion Skyweir. But I think there’s something more important.” He seemed unsure of his ability to form an independent opinion. “It’s too cold for her. She’s going to—”

  “Oh, bloody hell,” muttered Covenant. “I keep forgetting.”

  His halfhand drew a brusque arc in the air. Linden only registered the gesture as a trail of phosphenes like the sweep of a comet: she hardly saw the red flicker of heat in the depths of his eyes. Then a second tide of warmth flooded through her, washing the ice from her skin in an instant, dispelling shivers from the core of her body. Between one heartbeat and the next, she felt a flush of fire as if Covenant had ignited her blood.

  Momentarily helpless with relief, she breathed, “God in Heaven. How do you do that?”

  Covenant frowned critically at his hand; flexed his fingers as though they did not entirely belong to him. “It doesn’t matter. Being part of the Arch isn’t exactly fun. It ought to be good for at least a few tricks.”

  A moment later, he looked at Linden, and his expression changed to a humorless grin. “But as it happens, there’s a perfectly good reason why we can’t ‘just transport ourselves.’ I mean, aside from the fact that the Theomach won’t let us. He may be right. It could be too dangerous.”

  Covenant sighed. “This is a pivotal time for the Land. New possibilities are coming to life. Old powers are changing. In the grand scheme of things, it won’t be all that long before the Forestals start to fade.” Some of his earlier scorn returned. “They’ll make the mistake of thinking the Lords can take care of the forests for them. And of course people just naturally like cutting down trees.”

  Then he appeared to shake off an impulse to digress. “But that’s not the problem. The problem is those ‘puissant beings’ the Theomach mentioned. If Jeremiah and I risk using power now, we’ll be noticed. And not in a good way. We could run into opposition. The kind of opposition that might damage the Arch.”

  Linden wanted to ask, What beings? But she had more immediate concerns. The heat in her veins had given her a sense of urgency. And it had restored a measure of her earlier determination. Covenant and Jeremiah had answered some of her most compelling questions; but she had more.

  “All right,” she said, nodding more to herself than to Covenant. “We can’t do this the easy way. So what are we going to do? You said it yourself. We have two hundred leagues to go. On foot in the dead of winter, with no food or shelter. You and Jeremiah don’t look like you feel the cold, but it can kill me. And I assume that you need to eat. How do you expect us to survive?”

  Covenant looked away. “Actually,” he said as if he could taste bile. “that’s up to you.” Then he met her gaze again, glaring angrily. “This whole mess is the Theomach’s idea. He expects you to make the decisions.

  “Right now, you sort of are the Arch of Time. Or you represent it. You’re the only one of us who’s all here. Or just here. You’re the only one who isn’t already a walking violation of Time. So you’re the only one who might be able to do things safely. Your kid and I can keep you alive—as long as we don’t attract any attention. As long as no one sees us do anything that isn’t supposed to happen in this time. But you have to take charge.

  “Should be simple enough,” he growled in disgust. “All we have to do is reach Melenkurion Skyweir. Without going through Garroting Deep.

  “I’m ready when you are.”

  Linden stared at him. “You can’t be serious.”

  In response, Covenant wheeled away from her. Brandishing his fists, he shouted into the air over the valley. “Do you hear that? She thinks you aren’t serious!”

  He must have believed—or known—that the Theomach was still nearby.

  “We don’t really have much choice, Mom,” Jeremiah said tentatively. “We weren’t expecting to end up here. What we wanted to do was pretty easy. This is much more complicated. Right now, we’re as lost as you are.”

  Reflexively Linden wanted to reassure him. “That’s all right, honey. I’ll think of something.” In fact, she did not need to think. Her choices were already plain to her. The shaped snow had whispered them to her; or she had seen them in the winter’s irrefusable beauty. “There’s just one more thing that I want to understand.”

  She had many other questions, a long list of them. But first she needed to leave this hilltop; needed an answer to the cold. And the potential for redemption in Covenant’s intentions urged movement. For the first time since Roger had taken her son, she seemed to see a road which might lead to Jeremiah’s rescue, and the Land’s.

  Covenant spun back toward her as if he meant to yell in her face. But his tone was unexpectedly mild as he said. “Just one? Linden, you astonish me.”

  “Just one for now,” she acknowledged. “But it’s important. In spite of the Theomach, you make it sound like there’s hope. If I choose the right path. If we can get to Melenkurion Skyweir. So why did the ur-viles try to stop you?”

  The implications of their attack undermined Covenant’s explanations. What did they see that she did not?

  “Is that all?” Covenant scowled sourly. “Hell and blood! They’re Demondim-spawn, Linden. Their makers are besieging Revelstone. Don’t tell me you still imagine they want to help you?

  “Think, for God’s sake. They made Vain so you could create that Staff, which has effectively prevented me from stopping Foul. Then they guided you to it so you would have the power to erase me anytime you don’t happen to like what I’m doing. Sure, they gave you what you needed to weaken the Demondim. Hell, why not? If I don’t succeed, Revelstone is going to fall eventually, and in the meantime they want to stay on your good side. Every bit of trust they can squeeze out of you serves the Despiser. They’re trying to turn you against me.”

  Linden did not believe him: she could not. The ur-viles had done too much—And whenever he reproached her for forming and using the Staff of Law, her instinctive resistance to him stiffened. The man whom she had accompanied to his death would not have said such things.

  His scorn and ire made her ache for the Thomas Covenant who had once loved and accepted her.

  But she had nothing to gain by arguing. If the ur-viles had intended their manacles for Covenant, they had failed. She would have to live with the consequences of their failure.

  “All right,” she said as if Covenant’s vehemence had persuaded her. He had enabled her to withstand the cold—temporarily, at least. To that extent, he resembled his former self. “I’m just trying to understand. If I have to decide what we’re going to do, I need to understand as much as I can.”

  She took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “Here’s an idea. Why don’t
we call the Ranyhyn?”

  Hyn would not be born for thousands of years. Even the herd that had reared to Covenant lived millennia in the future of this present. But Linden did not know how to gauge the mysterious relationship between the Ranyhyn and Time. Her constrained linear conceptions had been proven inadequate repeatedly. Hyn’s far distant ancestors might already be aware of her need for them.

  But Jeremiah covered his face as if she had embarrassed him. And Covenant exploded. “Hellfire and bloody damnation! That’s another terrible idea. In fact, it’s even worse than wanting to go to Andelain.”

  Holding his glare, Linden made no effort to interrupt him.

  “Maybe they can hear you,” he told her hotly. “Maybe they can’t. If they can, they’ll probably answer. They’re loyal enough for anything. That’s not the point. You’ll be asking them to violate the Land’s history. To risk the Arch.”

  “How?” she countered.

  Covenant made a visible effort to recover his composure. “Because right now there aren’t any Ranyhyn in the Land. After Foul killed Kelenbhrabanal, he drove them away. If they hadn’t left, he would have exterminated them. They won’t come back for another three or four hundred years. Until they find the Ramen—or the Ramen find them. Without Kelenbhrabanal, they need the Ramen to lead them.

  “If you summon them now—and they answer—the consequences will ripple for millennia. And they’ll only get worse. One thing will lead to another. They’ll cause more and more changes.”

  Linden waited coldly until Covenant was done. Then she said without inflection. “I didn’t know any of that. There are too many things that you haven’t told me. I don’t have any way to tell the difference between good ideas and bad ones.”

  “She’s right,” Jeremiah put in hesitantly. “We’re asking an awful lot of her. It isn’t her fault if she gets some of it wrong.”

  His apparent reluctance to defend her—or to disagree with Covenant in any way—made her bite her lip. She needed that small hurt to conceal her deeper pain. She had spent much of his life caring for him with her whole heart; and during that time, Covenant had become more essential to him than she had ever been.

  She remembered a Covenant who would not have blamed her—

  She did not fault her son for his loyalties. She loved him enough to be grateful that he had grown capable of the kind of attachment which he felt for Covenant. But her helpless rage at what the Despiser had done mounted with every fresh sign that Jeremiah did not love her.

  Covenant avoided her gaze. “I get mad too easily,” he admitted as if he were speaking to the empty air. “I know that. It’s the frustration—What I’m trying to do is hard as hell. And it hurts. But it’s nothing compared to what Jeremiah is going through. I want to help him so bad—” After a moment, he added, “And you. And the Land. You didn’t cause any of these delays and obstacles. But they’re making me crazy.”

  He seemed to be attempting an apology.

  Linden did not care. He could have asked for her sufferance on his knees without swaying her. For Jeremiah’s sake, however, she replied quietly, “Don’t worry about it. Eventually we’ll learn how to talk to each other.

  “We’re all tired of frustration. We should go before it gets any worse.”

  The relief on Jeremiah’s face was so plain that she could not bear to look at it.

  Covenant jerked his eyes to hers. A sudden intensity exaggerated the strictures of his face. “Go where? You still haven’t—”

  Linden cut him off. “Where else? Berek’s camp. You said that he’s in the middle of a battle. But he has food. He has warm clothes.” Even true believers could not fight on faith alone. “And I’m willing to bet that he has horses. If we can reach him”—if she could endure the cold long enough—“he might be persuaded to help us.”

  She was serious: she did not know how else she could hope to reach Covenant’s goal. But she also wanted to hear what he would say about ripples now. If her choices and actions were somehow consonant with the Arch—The Theomach had asserted that her deeds will do no harm. That I will ensure.

  Surely entering Berek’s camp would be less dangerous than redirecting the entire past of the Ranyhyn?

  “I told you,” Jeremiah crowed. “Sometimes she does exactly the right thing. This is going to work. She’ll make it work.”

  For a long moment, Covenant studied her skeptically, as if he suspected a trick of some kind. Then he seemed to throw up his hands. “It’s worth a try. Berek is still in the dark about almost everything. He hardly knows what he can do, or how he can do it. He isn’t likely to recognize the truth about any of us. And he definitely has horses.

  “I should warn you, though,” he added grimly. “You’ll have to make this work because I sure as hell can’t. He doesn’t realize it yet, but he’s full of Earthpower. He can erase us. If he so much as touches us, this whole ordeal will be wasted.”

  Linden nodded to herself. She was not surprised: she was only sure. If she stepped aside from the Theomach’s “path,” he would correct her.

  At first, she led the way, not because she knew the location of Berek’s battle, but because she was in a hurry to leave the hilltop. She did not want to exhaust herself by following the difficult crests: she needed the less arduous passage of the valley bottom, in spite of its death-laden atmosphere. So she headed downward across the slopes at the best pace that she could manage, keeping her back to the west.

  Her haste caused her to slip often as her boots skidded over buried stones or bones. Sometimes she fell. But her cloak gave her a measure of protection from the snow. She did not slow her steps until she reached the floor of the valley.

  There the implications of the fallen were stronger. The mere thought that she trod over abandoned corpses daunted her. But the sun was westering; and with its light behind her, she did not suffer from its flagrant glare. Now she moved more slowly for the same reason that she had hurried to reach the valley: she feared exhaustion. The laborious hesitation-and-plunge of every step drained her strength. And the cold grew sharper as the sun lost its force. If she tried to walk too quickly, she would soon defeat herself.

  Before long, Covenant and Jeremiah caught up with her. For a time, they matched her burdened plod, keeping a safe distance from her. But they both seemed proof against exertion as well as cold; and gradually they began to draw ahead as if they were reluctant for her company.

  “Covenant, wait,” Linden panted. “I have another question.” She did not want to be left behind.

  Covenant and Jeremiah exchanged comments too low for her to hear. Then they slowed their strides.

  Hardly able to control her breathing, she asked. “How far do we have to go?”

  “Three leagues,” Covenant answered brusquely. “Maybe more. At this rate, we won’t get there until after dark.”

  Until even the insufficient warmth of the sun had vanished from the Last Hills.

  If she did not think about something other than her own weakness, she would lose heart altogether. “I have no idea what we’re getting into,” she admitted. “I know that there are things the Theomach doesn’t want you to say. But what can you tell me?”

  Covenant scowled at her. “You want me to describe the battle? What does it matter? People are hacking at each other, but they’re too tired to be much good at it. From one minute to the next, most of them don’t know if they’re winning or losing. There’s yelling and screaming, but mostly it’s just hacking.”

  Linden shook her head. She had already been in too many battles. “I meant Berek. You said that he doesn’t realize what he can do. Or how he can do it. But he summoned the Fire-Lions. He must have some kind of lore.”

  “Oh, well.” Covenant seemed to lose interest. “It wasn’t like that. He didn’t exactly summon the Fire-Lions. He didn’t even know they existed. But he got their attention, and for that he only had to be desperate and bleeding. And he had to have a little power. The real question is, where did he get power?r />
  “According to the legends, when Berek was desperate and bleeding and beaten on Mount Thunder, the rocks spoke to him. They offered him help against the King if he pledged to serve the Land. So he swore he would, and the rocks sent the Fire-Lions to decimate the King’s forces.

  “But that doesn’t actually make sense. Sure, the stone of the Land is aware. That’s especially true in Mount Thunder, where so many forces have been at work for so long. But it doesn’t talk. I mean, it doesn’t talk fast enough for most people to hear it.

  “So how did Berek do it?” Covenant asked rhetorically. “How did he tap into the little bit of Earthpower he needed to call down the Fire-Lions?”

  Concentrating so that she would not think about her weariness, Linden waited for him to go on.

  “This is the Land, remember,” Covenant said after a moment. She could not read him with her health-sense; but his manner betrayed that he was losing patience again. His tone gave off glints of scorn. “Earthpower runs near the surface. And Berek has what you might call a natural affinity. He just didn’t know it. The damn stones were more aware than he was.”

  “Then how—?” Linden began.

  Without transition, Covenant seemed to digress. “It’s easy to criticize Elena,” he drawled. “Silly woman. Didn’t she know despair is a weakness, not a strength?” He was talking about his own daughter. “Didn’t she know Kevin dead was bound to be weaker than he was alive?

  “But she had precedent. She understood that better than anybody. Which is probably why they made her High Lord. No matter what you’ve heard, the Old Lords were all about despair. It gave them some of their greatest victories. And it’s what saved Berek.

  “It opened him up. Tapped into his natural affinity. Being half insane with pain and blood loss and despair made him raw enough to feel what’s really going on here. What the life of the Land is really like. That’s all it took. When he finally felt the Earthpower in Mount Thunder, he felt it in himself as well. And the Fire-Lions felt that. They responded to it because that’s what they do.”