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. I 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.”
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 had known and understood might be transmogrified into the stuff of nightmares.
As soon as she felt the first impact of the falls, she knew that she would not be able to climb the rocks standing. The worn granite and obsidian were as slick as glazed ice, and the water had the weight of an avalanche. Helpless to do otherwise, she dropped to her hands and knees. Then she wedged one end of the Staff into a crack between the stones and pulled herself up the shaft as if it were a lifeline.
The wood was smooth and wet: perhaps it should have been as slippery as the rocks and boulders; as unreliable. But she had fashioned it out of love and grief and her passion for healing. Her hands did not lose their grip as she crept slowly deeper into the full force of the waterfall.
It threatened to smash her; carry her away. She could not draw breath. Nevertheless she dragged herself along the Staff until she found a place where she could jam one arm securely among the stones. Anchored there, she used her free hand to haul the Staff after her and brace its iron heel against a boulder. Then she worked her way up its length again while the falls bludgeoned her, filled her eyes and nose and mouth, tore at her clothes.
Once more she anchored herself, raised the Staff higher, gripped it desperately so that she could climb the rocks. And before she reached the end of the shaft, her head emerged from the pitiless cascade into complete darkness.
Gasping, she scrambled out of the waterfall onto flat stone. Her arms and legs quivered as though she had ascended a precipice: she felt too weak to shake the water out of her eyes. No glint or suggestion of rocklight penetrated the falls. She crouched over the Staff in untrammeled midnight. If her companions made any sound—if they waited for her instead of hastening toward their destination—she did not hear it. She only knew that she could hear because her gasping seemed to spread out ahead of her, adumbrated by the constriction of granite.
The rock under her was as slick as the stones of the waterfall. It was not wet; had not been worn to treachery by ages of water. Rather it resisted contact. The scent and taste of Earthpower was far more concentrated here, so thick and poignant that it made her weep: too potent to condone the touch of ordinary flesh. Stone which had become half metaphysical spurned her hands, her knees, her boots.
And the smell—The odor of distilled strength swamped all of her senses. She foundered in it. It transcended her as profoundly as any caesure, although it held no wrongness. In its own way, it was as immense and fraught with mass as Melenkurion Skyweir. Her mere brief mortality could not encompass it.
Instinctively she pressed her forehead to the stone, performing an act of obeisance to the sovereign vitality of Earthpower.
The wood of the Staff had become hot. It radiated heat as if it had been forged of molten iron. It should have burned her unbearably; scalded the skin from her fingers; set fire to her drenched clothing. But it did not. It was hers. Her relationship with it enabled her to hold it, unharmed, in spite of its inherent response to the EarthBlood’s extravagance.
A tunnel, Jeremiah had said. On the other side.
Still she heard nothing. Covenant and Jeremiah must have gone on ahead of her. Covenant had told her that if she did not drink the Blood of the Earth immediately after he and Jeremiah disappeared, she might be too late to save her son from the consequences of Joan’s death. Yet they had left her behind.
She needed light. And she needed to be able to stand on stone which repulsed every touch. If she could not catch up with her companions—
“She made it,” Covenant remarked abruptly. Linden thought that she heard satisfaction in his voice.
I can’t do it without you.
He bore the flagrant hazard of the tunnel easily, as though it had no power to affect him. He had lied about his reasons for seeking to avoid Berek Halfhand’s touch. And hers.
“I told you she would.” Jeremiah sounded like the darkness. “You did, when you were with Elena. And you weren’t half as strong as she is.”
Just be wary of me. Remember that I’m dead.
Tears coursed from Linden’s eyes. She could not stop them.
“Jeremiah, honey,” she panted, still braced on her hands and knees as if in supplication. “where are you? I can’t see.”
The peril of your chosen path I deemed too great. Therefore I have set you upon another.
But if Jeremiah possessed the ability to construct portals which would foil the perceptions of even the Elohim, surely he could evade High Lord Damelon’s discernment? Where was the peril? What had the Theomach meant? Had he simply been ignorant of Jeremiah’s talent? Or had he foreseen some more oblique danger?
I do not desire the destruction of the Earth. If you are wise—if wisdom is possible for one such as you—you also will not desire it.
Fuck them all.
Without warning, a sulfurous illumination blossomed in the darkness. Light with the hue and reek of brimstone shone from the clenched fist of Covenant’s halfhand. Through her reflexive weeping, Linden saw him and Jeremiah. They were no more than two or three strides away.
Both of them seemed taut with impatience or excitement.
Beyond them, a tunnel as straight as a tightened string led away from the waterfall into fathomless night. Its ceiling was little more than an arm’s span above Covenant’s head; but the passage was wide enough for two or three people to walk abreast beside a small rill running toward the falls.
In the red and charlock glow, the fluid of the rivulet had the rich deep color of arterial blood. And it shouted, yelled, positively howled of Earthpower.
It was the living Blood of the Earth. It had seemed pure in the cavern of the waterfall, but it was more so here; far more. Nothing that Linden had ever done with her Staff could match the absolute cleanliness and vitality of the liquid flowing past her.
Somewhere beyond Covenant and Jeremiah lay their destination.
“Come on, Linden,” Covenant said harshly. “You don’t have to grovel here. It’s undignified. And I’m sick to death of waiting.”
He wanted her to stand. She needed to stand. He may have recognized the lie when she had said, We’re clear. That was possible. He may have remembered her well enough—
Why had he and Jeremiah waited for her? Was Covenant honest after all? More honest than she had been? Or did he simply want her to witness what he did, for good or ill?
“All right,” she muttered through her teeth. “Give me a minute.”
Perhaps he feared that she would attack him from behind if he did not wait; that she would dare—If she had made her suspicions too obvious—
Wherever she placed her hands, they tried to skid out from under her. She could not trust her weight to them. And her boots might have been coated with oil. Every shift of her balance threatened her with slippage.
But the Staff had been formed for Earthpower. When she braced one of its heels on the rock, it held; gave her an anchor.
Carefully, by small increments, she rose to her feet. Still she felt her boots trying to slide away. One slip would pitch her onto her face. But the Staff gripped the stone, and she clung to the Staff.
“Are you ready?” demanded Covenant. “Hellfire, Linden, it’s not that hard. I did it, and I didn’t have your damn Staff.”
She ignored the embers glaring in his eyes; did not risk gazing directly at his fiery halfhand. Instead she looked at her son. Facing the hunger which distorted the colo
r of his irises, the fervid clutch of his halfhand around his racecar, the frantic cipher of his tic, she tried to accept them, and found that she could not.
Silently, hardly moving her lips, she said, If I’m wrong, I’m sorry. Try to forgive me.
Then she threw herself headlong toward her companions; stretched out into a dive along the glazed surface of the stone.
In a flare of brimstone surprise and fury, both Covenant and Jeremiah leapt aside. Cursing viciously, Covenant hugged the tunnel wall opposite the rill of EarthBlood. Tense with shock, Jeremiah did the same. Neither of them lost their footing.
Linden landed heavily; skidded past them. As she hit the stone, she slid, and went on sliding, as if she would never stop. She felt only the impact: no friction, no abrasion; nothing that would slow her. She wanted that. She counted on it. Otherwise Covenant and Jeremiah might get ahead of her again.
But her slide took her closer to the rivulet. She did not know what would happen if she plunged into the Blood of the Earth, but she doubted that she would survive an immersion. More by instinct than intention, she dragged one heel of the Staff along the stone.
The iron seemed to meet no resistance. Nevertheless she began to lose momentum. Within half a dozen paces—and mere inches from the rill—she coasted to a halt.
Covenant’s curses followed her down the tunnel. They drew closer as he and Jeremiah rushed to catch up with her.
Shedding incessant tears, Linden called yellow flame like sunshine out of the Staff; a sheet of fire from the entire length of the wood. For an instant, her fire guttered as if it were humbled in the EarthBlood’s presence. Then it shone forth strongly. And while her blaze lit the tunnel, she used that exertion of Earthpower to secure her footing so that she could stand. Then she wheeled to confront her companions as though they had become her foes.
Covenant stamped to a halt a few paces away from her. The fire had fallen out of his hand: he stood glaring at her with no light on his visage except hers. Jeremiah came a step closer, then stopped as well. His precious face was bright with dismay.
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