The Last Dark

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Oh, Jeremiah breathed. Order out of shapelessness. The idea pleased him. Constructs. Building. His one joy. To his granted peace was added an unforeseen happiness, a sense of possibilities.

  We do what we must so that we may find worth in ourselves.

  He was beginning to understand that there was more than one path to godhood.

  Beyond the Staff in his mind, the Staff in his hands, the Giants and Canrik still struggled. Though their strength was waning—though every step and effort drained the life from their muscles—they circled and evaded, apparently trying to maneuver the monsters away from Jeremiah. But the stone-things were no threat to him. They protected him. They had been sent to keep his companions away from the Staff of Law.

  Yes, Jeremiah said. Yes.

  Moksha’s approval seemed to make reality bend and ripple. His voice seemed to be the Worm’s.

  Then observe closely. That noisome wight, the hated Forestal of abhorred Garroting Deep, has written his will and power upon your instrument. He is among the most despised of our foes, yet even he must serve our lord and master. Such is the Despiser’s majesty and cunning. Harken well while I read the runes.

  Their import will distress you. This saddens me. The Raver did not sound saddened. I desire only your exaltation. Alas, all knowledge is hurtful. Yet it is also needful. And your discomfort will be brief. You will swiftly return to joy.

  Jeremiah nodded his consent. Masked within himself, within the private quietude of graves, he began to ask questions which the Raver did not hear. His time as the croyel’s host and victim had taught him that possession was torture. He had only been able to endure it because he had no choice. Why, then, had moksha entered him bearing only relief and ease? Why did the Raver trouble to lull him with peace or pleasure?

  He suspected that he knew the answer. He had heard too many people talk about the necessity of freedom.

  And Kastenessen had broken him; but that violation had not destroyed him. Now he realized that the experience had taught him something useful. He knew how to be more than one Jeremiah at a time, each distinct from the others. He could think his own thoughts as well as the Raver’s.

  What Lord Foul wanted from him, he told himself secretly, was not something that could be compelled. Like wild magic, his talent could not be coerced beyond the small uses which the croyel had made of it. No matter how much he was whetted, he would not be able to exceed anything unless he agreed to it. At some point, the Despiser would need Jeremiah to serve him by choice. To submit. The tranquility which moksha gave or imposed was a lure.

  The idea did not disturb Jeremiah. The Raver’s mastery did not allow resistance, or the emotions of resistance. It banished distress. Nevertheless there was more than one Jeremiah—and some of them could be concealed or dissociated in ways which did not attract moksha Jehannum’s attention.

  Bubbling with glee, moksha read the Staff. His magicks lit the abstruse symbols, not with fire or shining, but with a deeper black that scorned human notions of darkness. His disembodied finger traced the script as he interpreted it. Yet he did not explain it in words. Instead he gave Jeremiah images.

  While the runes came to life, Jeremiah found himself standing on the ruined dirt of Gallows Howe surrounded by the ire of trees.

  His presence there was only a vision. He had not passed through time to an age when Caerroil Wildwood’s outrage ruled Garroting Deep. His body still sat on the floor of a cave in Mount Thunder, holding the Staff of Law across his thighs, feeling tremors rise through the gutrock; apparently watching his companions fight with their last strength. But his mind—

  His mind had followed the Forestal’s symbols into the recesses of moksha Jehannum’s memories.

  Everything that Jeremiah beheld, moksha viewed with hate, with savagery and revulsion. The dirt under his feet had drunk the deaths of Ravers. Their assumed bodies had dangled from the gibbet of the Howe while their spirits had shrieked in agony. Anywhere else in the Land, anywhere at all, moksha or samadhi or turiya could have simply slipped away when their flesh was taken, sparing themselves the horror of being slain. But in Caerroil Wildwood’s demesne, they had been denied that luxury. The Forestal had forbidden them. They could not escape.

  The recollection made moksha Jehannum froth with fury and frustration. Nonetheless what the Raver sought was here, in the innate lore of forbidding; in Caerroil Wildwood’s ability to draw power or sentience or resolve or rage from every leaf and branch, every twig and trunk and root, throughout his loathed realm—and then to express that force in ways which moksha and his brothers could not withstand.

  For the Raver, Gallows Howe summed up everything that he abhorred about forests. But his hatred was more than that. It was wide as well as deep. It included every tree of every variety everywhere: young and old, graceful and gnarled, upright and outstretched. Alone they were each as vulnerable as kindling. Together they were as mighty as mountains. Therefore moksha hated them with a vehemence that trembled in every particle of his being. They were everything that he was not: stately, grand, generous, welcoming, austere, fecund. Their existence justified every stretch of ground where they flourished—and the Raver hungered for their extinction.

  Jeremiah saw all of this as moksha Jehannum saw it. He felt the Raver’s fulminating outrage so keenly that he appeared to share it. And he knew that moksha wished him to share it. But he also saw the Howe and the Deep with his hidden eyes. He knew the wrath and grief of the innumerable trees. He understood how those passions formed the essence of the Forestal’s power. More, he recognized that the forest’s vast appetite for bloodshed was not inherent. It was a response to a terrible crime.

  The force which lay behind it was not rage, but rather a bereft adoration for the green and living world in all of its fragile guises. The substance and sorrow of everything that Caerroil Wildwood had been and done was his love.

  And Garroting Deep was an emblem of the Land. Moksha’s hatred of trees was only one manifestation of a more encompassing evil: the fury and despair that despised or feared every aspect of the Land’s rich beauty.

  This, too, did not trouble Jeremiah. He felt no indignation, no desire to protest. Instead he considered it among his private selves. He resisted nothing, and so nothing was taken from him. Passive as a victim, he kept his thoughts to himself, as he had done for most of his life.

  Frostheart Grueburn still circled on unsteady legs, flailing with her blunted longsword. Rime Coldspray hacked and hacked at her foe until her glaive was shattered to the hilt. Canrik twisted between the stone-thing’s legs, trying to trip or topple the monster. But that tactic failed him. The creature was too strong, too heavy.

  Still the Haruchai struggled. And he had resources of stamina which exceeded even the Swordmainnir: he could still think. When he realized that he was too weak to bring down the monster, he slipped away. Snatching up a long sliver of the Ironhand’s sword, he sprang again onto the creature’s back. His ragged dirk he pounded into one of its eyes.

  The force of his blow sliced open his hand. Blood spurted between his fingers. But the sliver penetrated. Actinic blue blazed for an instant. Then the eye went dark.

  The stone-thing had no voice. It could not scream. Nevertheless the reflexive slap of its hands at its face was as wounded as a shriek. One hand swept the shard from its eye. The other caught Canrik’s wrist. A fierce swing flung him away.

  Entirely by chance, the monster threw him into the tunnel toward Kiril Threndor. He vanished from the cave.

  Jeremiah did not see what became of him. He did not know how the Giants stayed on their feet. Yet this sight also did not distress him. He watched his friends impassively, as if he had already succumbed.

  He understood forbidding now: the how of it, the why, the necessary power. He had absorbed it without the hindrances of language because moksha and the Despiser needed him to understand it. It was essential to Lord Foul’s deeper purpose. But Jeremiah’s epiphanies went further. On Gallows Howe, with Garrotin
g Deep unfurled like a banner around him, he realized that forbidding was essential to other purposes as well, to desires which were not the Despiser’s.

  Forbidding was Earthpower, of course; but it was Earthpower transformed by trees and their Forestal into an entirely different form of magic.

  To moksha, Jeremiah said, I need more.

  If forbidding alone had been enough, the Forestals could have defeated Lord Foul themselves.

  Indeed. Moksha Jehannum’s approval was incandescent. Abhorrence is but one refinement. Other whetstones are needed to perfect the blade.

  While Jeremiah watched, helpless and unmoved, the Raver took him on a coruscating plunge through other memories, other expressions of recalled lore.

  His passage was a whirlwind, a giddy chiaroscuro, a torrent of glimpses and insights. He did not try to grasp them: he hardly looked at them. Instead he simply accepted them; allowed them to be imprinted on his nerves, written into his brain. Some were millennia old: a jeweled casket sunk deep into the mire of the Great Swamp, a tapestry sealed in a cavern lost among the snows of the Northron Climbs, a periapt as crowded with knowledge as a tome. Others were immeasurably ancient: the creation of Forestals from the substance of an Elohim, the complex theurgies which had fashioned the Colossus of the Fall, the invocation of Fire-Lions. He did not need to make sense of them because they were already his, ready for his submission and use.

  But among the swift confusion of those recollections, Jeremiah found one memory that filled moksha Jehannum with a particular delight. It was the Raver’s recall of that horrific, wonderful moment when moksha had taken possession of Linden.

  Perhaps her straits should have appalled Jeremiah; yet they did not. He was intimately familiar with the excruciation which the Raver had inflicted on her, the relish for her torment. He had survived such things himself. And he knew that she had somehow expelled moksha Jehannum for Covenant’s sake, or for the Land’s. She was Linden Avery. Moksha’s cruelty could not define her.

  However, some of her own memories lived among the Raver’s; and those wrung Jeremiah’s heart. They erased his calmness, dismissed his given relief as if it were nothing more than a mirage. For the first time, he learned what his mother had suffered when she, too, had been just a kid.

  Remembered by moksha, Jeremiah stood in the attic with her, watching her father bleed out of his cut wrists, and helpless to force the blood back into his veins. Already gashed and dying, that aggrieved man had locked her in with him so that she would not be able to go for help. In effect, he had compelled her to witness his surrender to self-pity: her father.

  She had been only eight.

  Mom. Jeremiah wanted to wail. Mom. But the Raver was not done.

  Crowing, moksha remembered Linden’s mother. At about Jeremiah’s present age, she had been at her mother’s bedside while her mother had prayed for death. According to moksha, the woman’s illness may not have been terminal. But Linden had heeded her mother’s pleading. Her mother had blamed her, Linden, for causing her husband’s death; for making her life unsupportable. And Linden had been left alone to provide care. Wipe away sweat. Mop up dribbling mucus. Tend bedpans. So when Linden had exhausted her own misery, she had—

  Jeremiah did not know how to bear it.

  —taken wads of tissues and forced them down her mother’s throat; forced more and more of them down until her mother would never blame anyone else again.

  The Raver reveled in those events. Moksha wanted Jeremiah to understand that his mother had always been a victim and a killer. The woman who had claimed to love him was as pitiful and weak as his natural mother. Linden’s parents had made her who she was. She would never be anything more. Because of her—moksha Jehannum insisted on this as if the truth were beyond question—Jeremiah had always belonged to Lord Foul. From the first, he had been raised to serve Despite by women who had earned their own victimization.

  The gift that Lord Foul offered now was more than mere peace, more than simple relief: it was transcendence. Jeremiah’s submission would be rewarded with a place in eternity, a form of godhood in which his wounds and struggles would have no meaning. He would be free at last of his inherited unworth.

  Moksha urged this vision of Jeremiah’s future as if it were perfected delight. And Jeremiah heard the Raver. He recognized what the Raver wanted from him. But he was no longer listening. Within his secret silence, he cried out for the woman who had chosen to be his mother when no power in life could have required her to claim him.

  Yes, he told Lord Foul’s servant. Yes.

  Entirely dissociated from his real circumstances—entirely concealed from his possessor—he meant, Watch your back, you piece of shit. I’m coming for you.

  Just do something he doesn’t expect.

  Spasms shook the cave. Forerunners of temporal rupture broke chunks of rock from the ceiling, scattered debris across the floor. Grueburn staggered from side to side gasping for breath, barely able to stand. Canrik lurched back into the cave. He kept his fist clenched to stanch the bleeding of his hand. Desperation twisted his features as he searched for a way to aid the Giants.

  Ineffective as a cripple, Coldspray stood directly in front of Jeremiah. The one-eyed monster advanced on her, ready to strike. She waited for it as if she had come to the end of herself and could no longer raise her arms.

  But when it reached out to wrap her in a crushing embrace, she lifted the remains of her glaive and hammered the pommel into the creature’s good eye.

  As the light of that eye died, the blinded stone-thing lashed out. In mute pain, it tossed the Ironhand aside as if she had become trivial.

  Now, however, the monster could not see. Confused by its hurts, it seemed unable to locate Coldspray. Instead of pursuing her, it continued its advance. Swinging its massive arms, it came toward Jeremiah.

  One inadvertent impact would be enough. He would not survive even a glancing blow. Lord Foul’s plans for him—

  Inside Jeremiah, moksha Jehannum snarled an obscenity. Distracted, he snatched Jeremiah’s halfhand off the Staff of Law, drew a swift symbol in the air.

  The creature began another step. Halfway through the motion, it suddenly collapsed into dust: a pile of remains stirred only by the tremors rising through the floor.

  During that brief instant, Jeremiah took his chance.

  He had absorbed astonishing kinds and quantities of lore from the Raver, more knowledge than he could have named. Forbidding was a part of it. An expression of Earthpower called a Word of Warning was a part. The wood-magicks of the lillianrill were a part, as were the elaborate healings which the Lords had once wrought in Trothgard, and the music with which Caerwood ur-Mahrtiir had invoked a bower among the wastes of the Lower Land. He knew how the great tree-city of Revelwood in the Valley of Two Rivers had been fashioned.

  But that was not all: he had learned more. If he had been released, he could have devised a prison which would have snared moksha Jehannum until Time was extinguished. Given a few uninterrupted days, he could have repaired the damage that ancient violence had done to Mount Thunder’s heart. With a few years and a Forestal’s aid, he could have made a garden of the Lower Land.

  But the Raver had not released him, and he had only an instant. When his opportunity came, he did not hesitate.

  One small sip of Earthpower from the Staff restored his inherited theurgy. Then he rose up from helplessness to trade places with his possessor.

  In the space of a single heartbeat, he trapped moksha Jehannum inside himself.

  The Raver struggled, screaming. Of course he struggled. He knew everything that Jeremiah did. He had long ages of experience to guide him. He had frenzy and ripe terror. And Jeremiah was only mortal. He lacked the intransigent metal of a Haruchai. He did not have the great spirit of a Giant. He had no inborn capacity to defy possession.

  But he had resources which Lord Foul’s servant could not match. Linden had blessed him with long years of care and tenderness. Anele had given him power.
He had learned how to walk away from the helplessness with which he had protected himself. And he was not afraid to grasp the Staff of Law.

  Moksha howled horror at the ceiling. He thrashed and writhed, raked frantic claws across the barriers which Jeremiah raised against him, sank sharp teeth into the flesh of Jeremiah’s resolve. Wild and despairing, the Raver fought.

  Yet Jeremiah refused the fight. He did not need to measure his strength against his foe. Instead he relied on knowledge which moksha did not share. Retracing his own past, he dissociated the Raver; committed Lord Foul’s servant to the graveyard where he himself had once lain, hidden and lost. Almost effortlessly, he dropped the Raver into the waiting earth.

  With Earthpower and newly acquired lore, he clamped down on moksha Jehannum until he could no longer hear the Raver’s screams. He piled dirt over the malign spirit, stamped the grave flat. Then he turned away.

  At one side of the cave, Rime Coldspray tried to regain her feet, but she could not. Trying to evade the second monster, Frostheart Grueburn had crumpled to her knees. Canrik had found another splinter of Coldspray’s glaive. Now he looked for an opening, a chance to sacrifice his other hand.

  Gritting his teeth, Jeremiah rose up in power. A detonation like a thunderclap from one heel of the Staff tore the stone-thing apart. Rendered to powder, it fell.

  The floor heaved. The ceiling shed more rocks. Cracks yawned open, grated shut. Here and there, wounds split the walls. Patches of gutrock oozed and ran as if their essences were being squeezed out of them.

  “I’m sorry,” Jeremiah panted: a faint echo of his friends’ gasping. “I mean, I’m sorry that took so long. First I didn’t know how to do it. Then I had to wait for a chance.”

  A chance which the Swordmainnir and Canrik had given him.

  “Do not heed us,” the Ironhand managed to say between broken breaths. “The Timewarden—The Worm—”

  Jeremiah did not have time to think. Covenant needed him. Canrik was already waiting for him at the tunnel toward Kiril Threndor.

  He took the time. “You’re joking.” His tone hinted at moksha’s glee. He had enjoyed immuring the Raver. “I can’t leave you like this. You don’t look strong enough to stand.