Against All Things Ending

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Covenant is now ready to exert the Power of Command. But Linden drinks first, remembering Esmer’s counsel. She then uses her Command to expose the secrets of her companions.

  At once, a glamour is dispelled. Covenant shows his true form: he is Roger Covenant, not Thomas, and he despises all that his father loves. His right hand wields immense power: it is Kastenessen’s, grafted onto him to give him magicks which he does not naturally possess. And on Jeremiah’s back rides one of the croyel, a succubus that both feeds from and strengthens its host. The sentience that Jeremiah has demonstrated is the croyel’s, not his own. Gloating, Roger explains that he and the croyel aspire to become gods when the Arch of Time falls. Bringing Linden into the past—and bringing her here—was an attempt to trick her into performing some action which would irretrievably violate the Land’s history, thereby causing the Arch to crumble. So far, she has avoided that danger. But now she is trapped ten thousand years in the Land’s past and cannot escape.

  A terrible battle follows, during which the Staff of Law turns black. Using her Staff and the Seven Words to draw on the EarthBlood, Linden forces Roger and her possessed son to retreat. While an earthquake splits Melenkurion Skyweir, however, Roger and Jeremiah escape Linden and the past, leaving her stranded.

  The experience transforms Linden. Assured of her own inadequacy, she now believes that only Thomas Covenant can accomplish what must be done. At the same time, her determination to save Jeremiah becomes even stronger—and more unscrupulous.

  After an encounter with Caerroil Wildwood, the Forestal of Garroting Deep, who engraves her Staff with runes to make it more powerful, she is rescued from the past by the Mahdoubt. Here the Mahdoubt is revealed as one of the Insequent. When Linden is returned to Revelstone and her friends in her proper time, she learns that Liand has acquired a piece of orcrest, a stone capable of channeling Earthpower in various ways. She also hears that a stranger has single-handedly destroyed the entire horde of the Demondim.

  Meeting this stranger, she finds that he is the Harrow, yet another Insequent. He covets both her Staff and Covenant’s ring, and he has the power to take them by emptying her mind, depriving her of will. However, the Mahdoubt intervenes. Violating the fundamental ethics which govern the Insequent, she opposes the Harrow and defeats him, winning from him the promise that he will not wrest the Staff of Law and Covenant’s ring from Linden by force: a victory which costs the Mahdoubt her own life. After assuring Linden that he will gain his desires by other means later, the Harrow disappears.

  The next day, Linden, her friends, and the three Humbled summon Ranyhyn and ride away from Revelstone. Because she still has no idea where Jeremiah is hidden, or how to rescue him, her stated intention is to reach Andelain and consult with the Dead, as Covenant once did long ago. For reasons which she does not explain, she also hopes to recover High Lord Loric’s krill, an eldritch dagger forged to wield quantities of power too great for any unaided mortal.

  Along the way, she and her companions come upon a Woodhelven, a tree-village, which has been destroyed by a caesure: a caesure controlled by Esmer as a weapon against the Harrow. From them, she learns that the Harrow knows where Jeremiah has been hidden—and that Esmer intends to prevent the Insequent from revealing his secret. At the same time, Roger Covenant attacks with an army of Cavewights. Like Esmer, Roger desires the Harrow’s death. In the ensuing battle, Linden’s company is soon overwhelmed. Frantic, she takes a wild gamble: she tries to summon a Sandgorgon, a savage monster that once aided Covenant against the Clave. Six Sandgorgons charge into the fight, routing Roger and the Cavewights, and allowing the Harrow to escape with his life.

  Later Linden hears that a large number of Sandgorgons have come to the Land, driven by the rent remnants of a Raver’s malign spirit. In Covenant’s name, they answered Linden’s call. But now they have repaid their debt to him. They seek a new outlet for their own savage hungers, and for the Raver’s malice.

  When Linden and her companions have done what they can for the homeless tree-villagers, they ride on to Salva Gildenbourne, a great forest which encircles most of Andelain. There they encounter a party of Giants, Swordmainnir, all women except for one deranged man, Longwrath, who is their prisoner. When the Giants and Linden’s company reach a place of comparative safety, they stop to rest and exchange tales.

  The leader of the Giants, Rime Coldspray, the Ironhand, explains that Longwrath is a Swordmain who has been possessed by a geas: some external force drives him to kill an unnamed woman. With nine of her fellow Swordmainnir, the Ironhand has been following him across the seas, seeking the cause or purpose of his geas. After acquiring an apparently powerful sword, he has led the Giants to the Land. Here it becomes clear that the woman he feels coerced to kill is Linden herself.

  To protect Linden, and for the sake of Linden’s old friendship with the Giants of the Search, the Swordmainnir agree to accompany her to Andelain. But during the next day, they are assailed by the skurj, fiery worm-like monsters that serve Kastenessen. Two of the Giants are killed. Yet Liand saves the company by using his orcrest to summon a thunderstorm. The downpour forces the skurj underground, and the surviving companions are able to flee once more.

  At last, they reach the safety of Andelain. The sacred Hills are warded by the Wraiths, small candle-flame sprites that repulse evil by drawing power from the awakened krill. Thus protected, the companions hasten to find the place where Covenant and Linden left the krill long ago.

  During the dark of the moon, however, the company meets the Harrow again. Indirectly he has offered Linden a bargain: if she surrenders the Staff of Law and Covenant’s ring, he will take her to Jeremiah. But while he taunts Linden, Infelice, the monarch of the Elohim, appears. She argues passionately against the Harrow—and against everything that Linden intends to do. Yet Linden ignores both Infelice and the Harrow as she approaches the krill.

  There the Dead begin to arrive. While the four original High Lords observe, Caer-Caveral and High Lord Elena escort Thomas Covenant’s spectre. Yet the Lords and the last Forestal and Covenant himself refuse to speak. None of them answer Linden.

  Driven to the last extremity, Linden raises all of her power from both her Staff and Covenant’s ring, and commits their contradictory magicks to the krill. With the krill, she cuts through the Laws of Life and Death until she succeeds at resurrecting Covenant; drawing his spirit out of the Arch of Time; restoring his slain body.

  Yet power on such a scale has vast consequences. Resurrecting Covenant, Linden Avery also awakens the Worm of the World’s End.

  Part One

  “to achieve the ruin of the Earth”

  1.

  The Burden of Too Much Time

  Thomas Covenant knelt on the rich grass of Andelain as though he had fallen there from the distance of eons. He was full of the heavens and time. He had spent uncounted millennia among the essential strictures of creation, participating in every manifestation of the Arch: he had been as inhuman as the stars, and as alone. He had seen everything, known everything—and had labored to preserve it. From the first dawn of the Earth to the ripening of Earthpower in the Land—from the deepest roots of mountains to the farthest constellations—he had witnessed and understood and served. Across the ages, he had wielded his singular self in defense of Law and life.

  But now he could not contain such illimitable vistas. Linden had made him mortal again. His mere flesh and bone refused to hold his power and knowledge, his span of comprehension. With every beat of his forgotten heart, intimations of eternity were expelled. They oozed from his new skin like sweat, and were lost.

  Still he held more than he could endure. The burden of too much time was as profound as orogeny: it subjected his ordinary mind to pressures akin to those which caused earthquakes; tectonic shifts. His compelled transubstantiation left him frangible. As the structure of what he had known and understood and thought and desired failed, moment after unaccustomed moment, the sentience that had sustained him across
uncounted ages became riddled with fault-lines and potential slippage.

  In some fashion which was not yet awareness or true sensation, he recognized that he was surrounded by needs; by people and spectres who had gathered to witness Linden’s choices. Dark against the benighted heavens, broad-boughed trees defined the hollow where he knelt among Andelain’s hills. But their shadows paled in the fervid gleaming of Loric’s krill, bright with wild magic—and in the ghostly luminescence of the four High Lords whose presence formed the boundaries of Covenant’s crisis, and of Linden Avery’s.

  Towering and majestic, the Dead Lords stood timeless as sentinels at the points of the compass to observe, and perhaps to judge, the long consequences of their own lives. Berek and Damelon, Loric and Kevin: Covenant knew them—or had known them—as intimately as they knew themselves. He felt Berek’s empathy, Damelon’s concern, Loric’s chagrin, Kevin’s vehement repudiation. He comprehended their presence. They had been summoned by the same urgency which had brought him to this night, drawn and escorted by the Law-Breakers.

  But when he regarded the spirits of the Lords—briefly, briefly, between one wrenching heartbeat and the next—he found that he was no longer one of them; one with them. Their thoughts had become as alien and immemorial as the speech of mountains.

  Each throb of blood in his veins bereft him of himself.

  Caer-Caveral and Elena he comprehended as well. They remained behind him on the slope of the hollow, Caer-Caveral wreathed in the austere self-sacrifice of his centuries as Andelain’s Forestal, Elena heart-rent and grieving at the cost of the misplaced faith which had led her, unwilling, into the Despiser’s service. The Law-Breakers might have had the stature of the High Lords—the grandeur and might of Berek and Damelon, the severe valor of Loric, the anguish of Kevin—but they had been diminished by their chosen deaths; their deliberate participation in the severances which had made possible Covenant’s return to mortality. Now they had completed their purpose. They stood back, leaving Covenant to lose himself among his flaws.

  Had he been able to do so, he might have acknowledged Infelice, not because he esteemed the self-absorbed surquedry of the Elohim, but because he understood the doom which Linden had wrought for them. Of the peoples of the Earth, the Elohim would be the first to suffer extermination. The havoc which would extinguish all of the world’s glories would begin with them.

  The Harrow he perceived in glimpses like the flickering of a far signal-fire. But he had already forgotten the warning that those glimpses should have conveyed. His human vision was blurred as if he were weeping, shedding tears of knowledge and power. Terrible futures hinged upon the Insequent, as they did upon Anele: Covenant saw that. Yet their import had dripped into the fissures of his dwindling mind, or had seeped away like blood.

  The losses which Linden had forced him to bear surpassed his strength. They could not be endured. And still they grew, depriving him by increments of everything that death and purified wild magic and the Arch of Time had enabled. With every lived moment, fractures spread deeper into his soul.

  The Worm of the World’s End was coming. It was holocaust incarnate. He seemed to feel its hot breath on the nape of the Earth’s neck.

  The Haruchai he knew, and the Ranyhyn, and the Ramen, although their names had fled from him. Of the people who had once been the Bloodguard, and once his friends, he remembered only sorrow. In the name of their ancient pride and humiliation, they had made commitments with no possible outcome except bereavement. Now three of them had been maimed so that their right hands resembled his: the fourth had lost his left eye. Recognizing them, Covenant wanted to cry out against their intransigence. They should have obeyed the summons of their Dead ancestors.

  But he did not. Instead he found solace in the company of the Ranyhyn and the Ramen—although he could not have explained in any mortal language why they comforted him. He knew only that they had never striven to reject the boundaries of themselves. And that the Ranyhyn had warned Linden as clearly as they could.

  Like the Ramen, the horses appeared to study the Haruchai warily, as if the halfhand warriors posed a threat which Covenant could not recall.

  The Stonedownor he identified more by the orcrest in his hand and the fate on his forehead than by his features or devotion. The young man had chosen his doom when he had first closed his fingers on the Sunstone. He could not alter his path now without ceasing to be who he was.

  Everyone who had remained near Linden in this place, this transcendent violation, watched Covenant with shock or consternation or bitterness. However, he was not yet fully present among them. He was only conscious of them dimly, like figures standing at the fringes of a dream. His first frail instants of concrete awareness were focused on Linden.

  The anguish on her face, loved and broken, held him. It kept him from losing his way among the cracks of his mind.

  She stood defenseless a few paces in front of him. His ring and her Staff had fallen from her stricken fingers. In the silver glare of the krill, the traced stains on her jeans looked as black as accusations. The red flannel of her shirt was snagged and torn as though she had made her way to him through a wilderness of thorns. She seemed empty of resolve or hope, fundamentally beaten, as if he had betrayed her.

  The sight of her, unconsoled and inconsolable, magnified the stresses which damaged him. But it also anchored him to his mortality. The fault of her plight was his. He had ignored too much of the Law which had bound and preserved him.

  Moments or lifetimes ago, he had said, Oh, Linden. What have you done?—but not in horror. Rather she had filled him with awe. He had loved her across the entire span of the Arch of Time, and she had become capable of deciding the outcome of worlds.

  Done, Timewarden? Infelice had answered. She has roused the Worm of the World’s End. But he cared nothing for Infelice herself: only the fate of her people concerned him.—every Elohim will be devoured. Involuntarily he was remembering his own sins. They seemed more real than the people or beings around him.

  Trust yourself, he had told Linden when he should not have spoken to her at all, not under any circumstance. He had said, You need the Staff of Law, and Do something they don’t expect. He had even addressed her friends through Anele, although their names and exigencies were lost among the cracks of his sentience. And he had pleaded with her to find him—

  Defying every necessity that sustained the Earth and the Land, he had pointed her toward the ineffable catastrophe of his resurrection.

  Still he could not grasp what Linden’s companions were doing. He had not known an illucid instant since his passing; but now people were in motion for reasons which bewildered him.

  Shouting, “Desecrator!” one of the Haruchai rushed to strike her. A single blow of his fist would crush her skull. But another Haruchai, the man who had lost an eye, opposed her attacker; flung him away in a flurry of strikes and counters.

  The two remaining Haruchai also charged at Linden. One stumbled under an onslaught of Ramen. Aided by the Stonedownor, the three Ramen kept that Haruchai from his target. And his kinsman was impeded by Ranyhyn. A roan stallion kicked the man in the chest; sent him sprawling backward.

  “Yes!” Kevin Landwaster shouted. “Slay her! She merits death!”

  But Berek Halfhand’s great voice answered, “Hold! Restrain yourselves, Haruchai! Matters beyond your comprehension lie between the Timewarden and the Chosen. You have no part in them!”

  “This night is sacred,” added Damelon Giantfriend more quietly. “Your strife is unseemly. Beings mightier than you would not contend here.”

  Elena may have been weeping. Caer-Caveral stood apart from her, distancing himself from her distress.

  Perhaps out of respect for the Lords, or perhaps for some reason of their own, the Haruchai ceased their struggles.

  Covenant made no sense of it. He could more easily have explained why the Wraiths had not intervened. The Haruchai were simply too human and necessary to invoke the forces which defended
Andelain. Still he said nothing. There was no room in his crippled apprehension for anything or anyone except Linden.

  She was moving as well, as if she had been released by the quick violence of the Haruchai. Every line of her form was agony and protest as she strode toward him. Flagrant with pain, she seemed to rear over him as she raised her arm. When she struck him, he was too confused to duck his head or defend himself.

  “God damn you!” she cried: a tortured wail. “Why didn’t you say something? You could have told me—!”

  Covenant gaped in wonder at the forgotten sensation of physical hurt as Linden fell to her knees in front of him. She covered her face with her hands; but she could not stop the sobs bursting from the bottom of her heart. Nearly shouting, she wept as if she were being torn out of herself by the roots.

  He recognized her torment. But it was the rich sting of her blow that brought him into focus at last. For the first time since his death in agony, and his transfiguration, he tasted the crisp balm of Andelain’s air, cooled and accentuated by the darkness that enclosed the Hills. It should have eased him, but it did not.

  “Oh, Linden,” he gasped softly. Fearing that she would repudiate his touch, he tried to put his arms around her nonetheless. His movements were awkward with disuse; weak; almost numb. Yet he clasped her to his chest. “I shouldn’t have said anything at all. In your dreams. Through Anele. The risk was too great. But I was afraid you might lose hope. I couldn’t—” He swallowed implications of ruin. “Couldn’t just abandon you.