Against All Things Ending

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Hearing the Manethrall, Linden understood his anger—and perhaps Hynyn’s as well. Covenant’s farmhouse still burned in the background of her mind: she had her own causes for shame. But Mahrtiir’s guesswork raised the question that she had not asked.

  The Ranyhyn had chosen the company’s path. Why had they elected to drift toward Sarangrave Flat? Surely they could have found another route through the barricades of hills? What purpose had been served by exposing the company—exposing Linden and the Staff of Law—to the Feroce, and to the lurker’s hunger?

  While she searched for a way to pose her query that did not sound like an accusation, however, the Manethrall’s manner changed again. As if he expected a rebuff, and did not mean to accept it, he said, “I have replied as well as I am able. Now, Ringthane, I also require a reply. That the Feroce imposed a geas upon you is plain. Yet they wielded no force to equal that of the Staff. Any and all of your companions would have intervened to spare you, but you did not permit our aid. With fire and seeming fear, you spurned us as you ran to the lurker’s embrace.

  “I crave some account of the coercion which ruled you.”

  Involuntarily Linden winced. She owed her friends an explanation: she knew that. But her vulnerability had not begun with cutting herself. Nor had it arisen from her encounter with She Who Must Not Be Named, or from Roger’s treachery, and the croyel’s, under Melenkurion Skyweir. She had brought it with her from her former life. Ultimately its roots reached past Sara Clint and the savaged ruin of Covenant’s home to the futility of Linden’s love for her son, to her failure to prevent Covenant’s murder, and from there to the plight of being her unforgiven parents’ daughter. She did not want to describe the real sources of her despair.

  Nevertheless she could not refuse to answer Mahrtiir. His need, and the ache in the eyes of the Giants, compelled her.

  Swallowing against a sudden thickness in her throat, Linden said unsteadily, “The Feroce—Whatever they are. They have a kind of power that I’ve never felt before. A kind of glamour.” Even with her health-sense, she had never been able to pierce the theurgy with which Roger could conceal or disguise himself. “But it was all in my mind. It took over”—she swallowed again—“the whole inside of my head.

  “It wasn’t possession. They didn’t force me to think their thoughts. They didn’t control what I was feeling. Instead they used who I already am against me. They used my own memories to make me believe—”

  She wanted to stop there. Surely her companions could imagine the rest? But no: Mahrtiir’s stance demanded more. The expectant attention of the Giants resembled pleading.

  When was she going to start trusting them?

  With a private groan, she told them as much as she could bear about what the glamour had unleashed within her.

  Roger and Jeremiah. Covenant’s farmhouse. Sara Clint. The fire. Fighting the flames. She Who Must Not Be Named. Recursive agony and horror. Desperate flight.

  Rime Coldspray’s eyes widened as Linden spoke. Frostheart Grueburn muttered Giantish oaths under her breath. But Linden did not allow herself to pause.

  These people were her friends—

  She elided as many details as she could. She did not wish to experience them again. But she interpreted the effects of the imposed hallucinations as she had explained them to herself.

  “When I thought that I was beating at the flames, I must have been fighting you. Keeping you away while I tried to escape. But when I threw the Staff, the Feroce dropped their glamour. I wasn’t what they wanted.” Our High God hungers for it. The stick of power. “All at once, I stopped believing that I was trapped. The house and the fire disappeared, and I was here again.”

  Finally Linden bowed her head. What more could she say?

  Manethrall Mahrtiir regarded her in silence for a moment. Then, gravely, he nodded. “Ringthane, I am content.” He may have meant that she had accepted a burden as hurtful as the one he had been asked to bear.

  Marveling, Rime Coldspray mused, “Much you have concealed from us, Linden Giantfriend—aye, and much revealed. You say nothing of the reasons for the Timewarden’s son’s deeds. Yet you make plain that you have long sought your son, at great cost. And though you speak little of your former world, you have allowed us to discern that it is fraught with hazard. With these scant words, too few to contain their own substance, you imply the import of your trials.

  “Therefore I salute you, Chosen Ringthane.” Sitting, she pressed both palms to her chest, then spread her arms wide as if she were opening her heart. “Once again, you have wrestled life from the teeth of death, as by your own account you have done from the first. Had you not cast away your Staff—”

  The Ironhand shook her head in wonder. “I am not shamed to acknowledge that eight Swordmainnir are no match for the lurker of the Sarangrave. We would have spent our last strength, and caused much hurt. But in the end, the monster would have taken your life as well as the Staff of Law, and all hope would now be lost. In Andelain, you surrendered your Staff to redeem your son. Doing so again, you have rescued yourself and us.

  “Therefore,” she continued more quietly, “I ask your consent in one matter. I wish to forestall the necessity of further surrenders. By your leave, Frostheart Grueburn will assume guardianship of your Staff in the event that the Feroce essay another approach. We cannot be assured that her mind will not also fall into glamour, as yours did. However—”

  “It will not,” put in Onyx Stonemage. “You speak of Grueburn, whose natural bewilderment excludes other confusion.”

  Several of the Giants chuckled; and Grueburn retorted, “Fie and folly, Stonemage. Breathes there a Giant upon the wide Earth whose acquaintance with bewilderment is as intimate as your own?”

  But Coldspray’s manner remained serious. “However,” she persisted firmly, “the Staff is not hers. She has neither skill nor aptitude in its use. Should the lurker’s minions bemuse her, we will be able to intercede.

  “By your leave, Linden Giantfriend,” she repeated.

  Stifling an instinctive reluctance, Linden nodded. More than once, she had trusted Liand with her Staff. Surely she could trust Frostheart Grueburn?

  Her own response if the Feroce returned might be to tear them apart before they could intrude on her mind again. But that would mean more killing—and more despair. Eventually she would become like her mother, begging someone who did not deserve the cost to put her out of her misery.

  Too many people had already paid the price for her first failure to rescue Jeremiah.

  She had not slept the previous night. She did so now. Warmed by the partial shelter’s infused Earthpower, she stretched out on her ground-cloth, then wrapped it around her. In spite of the erratic moan and rasp of the wind, and the cut of the unseasonable cold, Linden Avery stumbled into sleep as if she were fleeing.

  During the remainder of the night, she dreamed of bonfires and flame-ripped houses; of a crude throne like a gaping maw in the Lost Deep; of centipedes and intimate pestilence. Deep in sleep, she pushed one hand into a pocket of her jeans and grasped Jeremiah’s toy racecar as if it were a sovereign talisman, potent to ward off nightmares and malice.

  She was still clutching the car when Frostheart Grueburn nudged her awake to meet the dawn of another unanswerable day.

  With the distant rise of the sun, a light as grey as ash had drifted into the gap among the hills. When Linden blinked the blur of dreams from her eyes, and sat up staring as if she were dazed, she saw that Stave had returned.

  He was clean. Indeed, he looked positively scrubbed. Every hint of marsh-filth was gone from his skin, his strife-marred tunic. Hynyn must have taken him to a source of clean water. There he must have beaten his vellum garment against a rock until even the stains of old blood were pounded away.

  Now he stood between Manethrall Mahrtiir and Grueburn, gazing at Linden with his one eye and waiting as if he had never known a moment of impatience in his life.

  His cleanliness made Linden con
sider her own condition. She had not been fouled in the Sarangrave. But she still wore the grime of riding in rain and harsh wind. She, too, needed a bath; needed to wash her hair. As for her clothes—

  Nothing had changed. The over-worn flannel of her shirt looked like it had been plucked by thorns. A small hole marked the place where her heart should have stopped beating. The fraying threads where she had torn a patch from the hem were all that remained of her gratitude to the Mahdoubt.

  On both legs below the knees of her jeans, green lines explicated her plight in a script that she could not read. Where she had cut herself, small blots of blood complicated the grass stains, altering them to obscure or transform their content.

  Aching in every limb as though her dreams had been battles, Linden climbed to her feet. As she accepted a waterskin and a little food from Latebirth, Stave told her, “The Ranyhyn will convey us to a tributary of the Ruinwash. There we will find fresh water and aliantha.”

  “That is well,” muttered Cabledarm sourly. “The muck of the Sarangrave”—she grimaced—“clings. It assails my nostrils yet. I cannot rub it away.”

  The Ironhand and Stonemage nodded, sharing her distaste.

  “But I must counsel against delay,” Stave added. “Chosen, I lack the Manethrall’s communion with the great horses. Yet in Hynyn I sense a new urgency. The Ranyhyn appear to desire haste.”

  “Let the beasts desire what they will,” replied Coldspray. “We must wash. We will be better able to quicken our strides when rot and malevolence no longer clog our lungs.”

  Haste? Linden wanted to ask. Why now? After walking for two days? But she was still too groggy to pose questions that none of her companions would be able to answer. Baffled, she drank and chewed and swallowed, and tried to believe that she was ready.

  As ready as she would ever be.

  Latebirth repacked the company’s dwindling supplies, tied the blankets into a tight roll. Apparently the Giants and Mahrtiir had eaten while Linden slept; or they had elected to forgo a meal. Stormpast Galesend informed Linden that she had fed Jeremiah, although he gave no sign of it. When Linden nodded to Stave, to Mahrtiir, to Rime Coldspray, the company set out, led southward through the hills by Cirrus Kindwind.

  With the rising of the sun, the wind had ceased. Now the air was as still as a held breath: it was growing warmer. Yet it remained grey, tainted by fires and dust-storms which had never occurred. Overhead the sky was leaden with rue, as if a pall of regret had settled over the eastern reaches of the Land. Through the haze, the dispirited sun shone wanly.

  In the dulled light, the company found Hyn, Hynyn, Narunal, and Khelen waiting on open ground. Beyond a narrow lowland rose another crooked barrier, and then another. But Linden did not regard the obstacles ahead. She was simply glad to see Hyn again.

  She should have known that the mare would return. Whatever the Ranyhyn had sought near Sarangrave Flat, they had not wished to rid themselves of their riders.

  An abashed look darkened Hyn’s eyes as she approached Linden; a suggestion of shame. At the last moment, the dappled grey hesitated. She halted just out of Linden’s reach, issued a nickering query. In response to Hynyn’s peremptory snort, however, Hyn came another step closer, then bent one leg and lowered her head, bowing.

  Oh, stop, Linden thought. I don’t blame you. I don’t know why you did it. But I’m sure you had your reasons. If I knew what they were, I might even approve.

  They’re Ranyhyn, for God’s sake. They’ll think of something.

  To reassure the mare, Linden went to her and wrapped her arms around Hyn’s neck.

  Manethrall Mahrtiir prostrated himself briefly in front of Narunal, then sprang onto his mount’s back. When Galesend set Jeremiah astride Khelen, the boy settled there, passive and unmoved, as if there were no perceptible difference between the Swordmain’s care and the young stallion’s. While Linden still held Hyn, Stave mounted Hynyn; and the Giants arrayed themselves around the Ranyhyn.

  For a long moment, Linden gazed into the softness of Hyn’s eyes until she was sure that the mare’s abashment had faded. Then she looked up at Frostheart Grueburn.

  “All right,” she said as firmly as she could. “Let’s go. I want a bath as much as you do.”

  With a fond grin, Grueburn put her huge hands on Linden’s waist, lifted Linden lightly onto Hyn’s back.

  At once, the Ranyhyn began to move, trotting at a pace that the Giants could match without running.

  The horses had chosen to approach the next wall of hills at a westward angle, away from the Sarangrave; closer to Landsdrop. From Linden’s perspective, the barricade looked impassable, for the mounts if not for the Giants. But within half a league, the Ranyhyn came to a more gradual slope that allowed them to reach a notch like a bite taken out of the forbidding ridge. And as they passed between rocky crests gnarled with lichen and age, she saw that the south-facing hillsides provided an easy descent.

  The hills ahead appeared to be the last obstruction plowed to defend the Spoiled Plains.

  In the furrow between the ridges, Stave guided Hynyn to Hyn’s side opposite Frostheart Grueburn. Linden expected him to say something about her actions the previous night. But when he had taken his position, he remained silent. Apparently he desired nothing more than to resume his wonted role as her guardian.

  She scanned the company; confirmed that Khelen bore Jeremiah easily, and that the Swordmainnir looked able to keep pace with the horses. Then she said to Stave sidelong, “You weren’t with us when Mahrtiir talked about Kelenbhrabanal. He did what he could to explain why the Ranyhyn are afraid of the lurker. But he didn’t say anything about why the Ranyhyn took us so close to the Sarangrave in the first place.”

  The company’s present path demonstrated that the horses could have chosen a different route.

  The former Master gazed at her steadily. “Chosen?”

  “You probably don’t know any more about that than I do. But hearing about Kelenbhrabanal made me think about Kevin.” Both had sacrificed themselves, if by different means for dissimilar reasons. “I was wondering if you can tell me anything about him.”

  Again Stave asked, “Chosen?”

  Her query was too vague. But clarifying it would require her to reveal one of her deepest fears. Instinctively she wanted to keep the core of her emotional plight secret. Nevertheless the crisis induced by the Feroce had convinced her that she had to rely more on her friends. If she did not, she might never find a way to thwart Lord Foul’s intentions.

  The next rise still looked insurmountable. Among steep slides of shale, sandstone, and gravel, massive knurls of granite and schist gripped each other like fists, too clenched and contorted for horses. Some of the slopes conveyed an impression of imminent collapse: any slight disturbance might unloose them. In places, slabs of sandstone leaned ominously outward, poised to topple. Yet the Ranyhyn approached the obstruction without slackening their pace, heading into the southwest as though they expected the hills to part for them.

  Linden had fled flames in a hallway—a gullet—that had no end and no escape. She had only survived because she had turned to face the blaze; had read the map on her jeans and thrown away her only defense.

  Trusting someone—

  “There’s something that I want to understand about Kevin,” she told Stave awkwardly, “but I don’t know how to put it into words.” Grueburn’s presence discomfited her. Her friendship with the Swordmain lacked the earned certainty of her bond with Stave. Still she forced herself to proceed as if she and Stave were alone. “Ever since the Ritual of Desecration, he’s been called the Landwaster. I guess that makes me the Earthwaster. Compared to waking up the Worm, his Ritual looks like a petty offense. I want to know what he and I have in common.”

  She needed a reason to believe that she had not already achieved Lord Foul’s victory for him.

  “I can see how what Kelenbhrabanal did is different. He only sacrificed himself. And he did it because he thought that he was savi
ng the Ranyhyn. He wasn’t trying to commit a Desecration. But what I’ve heard about Kevin sounds like how I feel.

  “I mean like how I feel now. I didn’t feel this way in Andelain. Sure, I was too angry to think about the consequences. But I also had hope.” And need. “I wanted Covenant alive because I love him. But I also believed that he’s the only one who can save the Land. If I brought him back, I could afford to concentrate on rescuing Jeremiah. He would take care of everything else.”

  Covenant was supposed to be her defense against despair. She had counted on that. She had never imagined that he would want to leave her behind—

  “So now,” she finished like a sigh, “I want to know what Kevin and I have in common.” She felt the force of Grueburn’s scrutiny at her side; but she tried to ignore it. “He destroyed pretty much everything. I thought that I was saving everything.”

  Fortunately Grueburn did not speak. If she had questions, she was too considerate to express them.

  The Ranyhyn confronted the hills as if they were proof against mundane doubts. To Linden’s distracted gaze, the immediate slopes looked ready to slip. Sandstone columns whispered to her nerves that they were friable, too heavy to support their own mass. And beyond the columns stood glowering buttresses without any breach or gap. Nevertheless Narunal and Khelen began an angled ascent as if they were confident of safety. And Hyn and Hynyn followed without hesitation, surrounded by their coterie of stonewise Giants.

  Somehow the surface held as horses and Swordmainnir pushed upward.

  Stave appeared to dismiss the potential dangers of the climb. For a long moment, he was silent, perhaps probing the ancient memories of the Bloodguard. Then he replied, “If, Chosen.”