Against All Things Ending

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  For a portion of the morning, the Ranyhyn headed somewhat east of south across the beaten plain. Before noon, however, Stave pointed out the promontory of the Colossus in the distant west. Over the drumming of hooves, he informed Linden that beyond the promontory Landsdrop curved southward. There the River Landrider fell in a heavy cascade to become the Ruinwash.

  Thinking,—written in water, Linden wondered whether the Ranyhyn intended to intercept the Ruinwash. But according to Stave, the Ruinwash skirted the Spoiled Plains as well as the Shattered Hills to reach the sea many leagues beyond Foul’s Creche. Although the horses turned south when they had passed the promontory, their goal apparently lay somewhere between the Ruinwash and the Shattered Hills.

  As heat mounted from the flat, the sky began to resemble a lid closing over the Lower Land: as grey as a sheet of molded lead, and impossible to lift. How much longer could the Ranyhyn gallop like this? They were mortal. Surely they had limits? To Linden’s nerves, Hyn’s endurance seemed as certain as the sun. Yet there was froth on the mare’s nostrils. Sweat darkened her dappled sides, soaking slowly into Linden’s jeans; chafing Linden’s legs. At intervals, she thought that she heard an irregular catch and falter in Hyn’s respiration.

  If the Ranyhyn still had far to go, they would need help. Their destination might be a dozen leagues distant, or a score. Blinking rapidly, Linden tightened her grip on the Staff; readied herself to summon black fire.

  But then, on a horizon fraught with haze, she saw the end of the flat. In the east, the terrain tilted toward lower ground. Toward the west, brief hills like afterthoughts interrupted the plain. They wore a scurf of scrannel grass like a beggar’s mantle, threadbare and tattered.

  If they had grass, they had water—

  Responding to Hynyn’s authority, Hyn and Khelen followed the roan stallion toward the hills.

  Soon they were passing between rises that were little more than hillocks; low mounds of dirt partially clad in patches of grass. As the horses ran deeper into the region, the grass grew more thickly.

  Then Hynyn slowed to a canter; to a walk. Ahead of him, Linden saw an erosion gully. She smelled water.

  At once, she dropped down from Hyn’s back so that she would not impede Hyn’s approach to the stream. And she was in a hurry to drink herself; to clear dust and death from her throat. A moment later, Stave also dismounted. Jeremiah he pulled gently but unceremoniously to the ground. Bringing the boy with him, he followed Linden and the Ranyhyn toward the watercourse.

  It was, he told her, the same stream in which the company had bathed earlier, pursuing its union with the Ruinwash. But when Linden asked him if he had any idea where the horses were going, he only shrugged. Foul’s Creche lay to the east. The Ranyhyn were headed south. More than that he did not know.

  The horses drank deeply. They cropped a little grass along the verges of the gully while Linden and Stave quenched their thirst. For a few moments, Linden scooped water into Jeremiah’s mouth. With her hands and her health-sense, she assured herself that he was physically well. Then Stave lifted her onto Hyn; seated Jeremiah on Khelen; mounted Hynyn.

  Within a few strides, the Ranyhyn were running again.

  Soon they left the mounded hillocks behind, still racing south. For a time, they crossed damaged plains. After that, however, they came upon a wide field of broken obsidian, basalt, and flint, the muricated remains of a slagland. Shards as cutting as blades gouged out of the soil at every angle: another consequence of ancient violence.

  Linden thought that the Ranyhyn would have to find a way around. Otherwise splintered edges would tear the frogs of their hooves to shreds. But she had underestimated the great horses. As nimble as mountain-goats, they plunged among the rocks; swept and wheeled forward as though they were engaged in an elaborate and courtly gavotte. Somehow they found safe footing that Linden could not see, and passed unharmed.

  Beyond the shards, they encountered a rugose region like a delta or malpaís where igneous creeks and rills had branched, burning, through once-arable earth. Some fierce theurgy during a distant era had caused the stone of the area to melt and stream like spilth. There the Ranyhyn ran again, apparently heedless of occasional surfaces as slick as ice, twisted clumps of dirt that masked rubble, friable ground concealing sinkholes like deadfalls.

  The heat across the landscape felt more like summer than spring. The sun seemed to lean its leaden aspect close to the Lower Land. It barely cast shadows, but its pressure made the mounts drip sweat as they ran, splashing the complex ground. Linden’s shirt clung to her back: her legs rubbed like sores against Hyn’s damp flanks. Trickles ran down Jeremiah’s cheeks into the soilure of his pajamas, his stained rearing horses.

  Early in the afternoon, the riders left the delta behind; galloped onto a slowly rolling plain like a trammeled moor. Guided by instincts more precise than Linden’s percipience, the Ranyhyn came to a thicket of aliantha clustered around a small spring oozing like blood from the wounded ground. There they paused while Stave dismounted to gather treasure-berries. Linden made a bowl of her shirttail to hold the fruit. With both hands full, Stave leapt onto Khelen’s back behind Jeremiah. As the horses cantered away, Stave placed berries one at a time into the boy’s mouth. Jeremiah did not chew them, or spit out the seeds; but he swallowed everything.

  When Stave was done, he sprang from Khelen’s back to Hynyn’s; and the Ranyhyn resumed their urgent gallop, racing south.

  Linden ate more slowly, savoring the refreshment of aliantha; casting aside the seeds. The haste of the Ranyhyn infected her. With every increment of the day’s passage, she became more certain that she and her companions would need all of their strength. She had no idea what lay ahead of them. They had to be ready.

  Finally she leaned as close as she could to Hyn’s ears and murmured, “I want to help, but I don’t know how to ask your permission. If I’m wrong, I hope that you’ll forgive me.”

  Hesitant at first, then with more confidence, Linden began to draw Earthpower from the Staff. Concentrated flames uncoiled like dire tendrils, like the Ardent’s ribbands, and reached out to wrap sustenance around Hyn, Hynyn, and Khelen.

  Hynyn blared a neigh; tossed his head. Khelen pranced for two or three strides, as if he were showing off. Hyn’s whickering sounded like affection. In a moment, they increased their pace, thrusting the ground behind them until they almost seemed to fly.

  Apparently the horses of Ra approved.

  By mid-afternoon, the terrain tilted gently downward to both the south and the east. For a time, the running was easier. But then the dirt became sandstone and shale again, a punitive surface made hazardous by outcroppings and loose sheets of rock. Fighting the blur of speed in her eyes, Linden forced her gaze ahead. In the distance, she saw the land begin to rise. By stages and shelves, layers of erosion, the ground climbed to a ragged horizon like a wall of broken teeth. The ascent was neither high nor steep, but it sufficed to block everything beyond it.

  Peering upward, she had the impression that she was approaching the rim of the world.

  The Ranyhyn raced down the last decline, crossed a flat span like an alluvial plain left behind by some long-forgotten flood, then thundered urgently upward. As they neared the crest, Linden realized that the teeth of the horizon were not boulders. They were flawed sheets of sandstone like mammoth scapulae that jutted, cracked and fraying, from the underlying skeleton of the rise.

  At last, Hynyn, Hyn, and Khelen eased their pace. In spite of their weariness, they conveyed the impression that they slowed, not because they were tired, but rather because they were close to their goal. Cantering, then trotting, finally walking, they ascended as if the lip of the climb were the edge of a precipice; as if the sandstone plates were the final barrier between them and an absolute fall. Yet they did not seem apprehensive. Instead their steps were almost stately, and the spirit shining through their sweat and fatigue suggested pride or awe, as if they were nearing a source of wonder, a place potent to transfo
rm realities.

  “Stave—?” Linden asked hoarsely. “What—?”

  Surely he knew where they were? Surely his people had seen what lay beyond the broken teeth?

  The Haruchai did not answer. Nothing in his manner implied recognition—or comprehension.

  The upthrust sheets were taller than Stave on Hynyn’s back; taller than any Giant. They reached for the sealed sky as if they had once stood high enough to hold back the heavens; as if eons ago they had formed an impenetrable barrier. Now the Ranyhyn stepped between them, unhindered, and paused.

  The riders had reached the ridge of a round hollow like a crater or caldera, although Linden could not imagine what manner of volcanism might have created such a formation. All around the rim rose eroded sheets like weary sentinels, a ragged troop of guards too tired to stand at attention. The caldera itself was so wide that one of the Swordmainnir might not have been able to throw a stone across it. Yet the enclosed hollow or crater was not deep. Indeed, it resembled a basin rather than a pit, with shallow sides and a flat bottom.

  This, apparently, was the reason that the Ranyhyn had spent the day running hard enough to burst the hearts of ordinary horses. So baffled that she had no words, Linden stared downward like a woman who had come to the end of her wits.

  The bottom of the caldera was filled with piled bones.

  They were old—God, they were old! Thousands of them, tens of thousands, lay there as though they had been simply tossed aside; as though the crater were a midden in which every other form of refuse had fallen to dust. Or perhaps Lord Foul’s armies had never bothered to burn or bury their dead. Seasons of sun and weather beyond counting had scalded the bones to an utter whiteness. Under a brighter sky, they would have been dazzling.

  Trying to understand, Linden studied them. Her first thought was that they were human; but they were not. She had never seen their like before. Some had curves or condyles that seemed unnatural. Some were far too long or broad to belong to Giants. Some looked like the ribs of animals much larger than Ranyhyn. Among them, there were too many crooks and bends, too many bones that resembled flames, too many wide sheets that might have been the shoulder-blades of hills or the sides of cromlechs.

  They could not be what the Ranyhyn had sought in such haste. They could not. They were not merely unimaginably old: they were meaningless. Perhaps this was the graveyard of some species that had gathered together for comfort while it fell into extinction. Or perhaps Lord Foul, for some incomprehensible reason, had discarded his failed or slain creations here. In either case, these bones had no conceivable purpose now. Whatever they had once been, they had become nothing more than the residue of vast time. They might well be as ancient as the gutrock of the Lost Deep, but they were just bones; dismembered skeletons. They remembered only death.

  The sheer waste of what she and her friends had done since Covenant’s departure urged Linden to fill the sky with her frustration.

  Yet the Ranyhyn felt otherwise: that was obvious. After a long pause while she scanned the caldera, and her chagrin swelled until it seemed too great to be contained, all three of the horses whinnied loudly: a sound like the clash of swords on shields as a mighty army marched to battle. Then they began to move again. As if they were approaching a seat of majesty, they paced gravely down into the hollow.

  “Stave,” Linden croaked. Her heart labored toward a crisis of denied needs. “God damn it. What is this?”

  “I cannot answer,” he said flatly. “The Masters have seen this place, but have no knowledge of it. And during the centuries of the Bloodguard, no Lord hazarded this region of the Lower Land. Upon occasion, the Council of Lords spoke of a time before the coming of the Bloodguard, when High Lord Loric risked forays toward Sarangrave Flat and the Spoiled Plains. But within the hearing of the Bloodguard, those Lords described neither the purpose nor the outcome of Loric Vilesilencer’s efforts. And no mention was made of these littered bones.”

  The Haruchai turned a searching gaze on Linden. “I will remind you, however, that even here Manethrall Mahrtiir would counsel trust. The ways of the Ranyhyn are a mystery in the Land, and their discernment surpasses ours. I surmise that in this place we will witness some event, or encounter some friend or foe, which they deem needful. Come good or ill, boon or bane, we must hold fast to our faith in the great horses.”

  An encounter? Linden drew a shuddering breath, tried to calm the rapid stutter of her pulse. An event? What could possibly happen here? She had ridden for leagues across open terrain, but her life was still constrained by stone walls that allowed no turning, no choices: no conceivable escape. No help for her son. Stave was wrong: Desecration did not lie ahead of her. It was here, in this pile of ruined bones. Or the Ranyhyn had followed Kelenbhrabanal’s example by electing a form of self-sacrifice which she was helpless to alter.

  Yet the former Master was also right.—hold fast to our faith—What else could she do? She was here now, with no food or water, no hope for Jeremiah; no chance to make one last effort in the Land’s name. What remained, except to pray that she and her friends had not made a terrible mistake by surrendering their fate to the Ranyhyn?

  When the horses gained the bottom of the caldera, Linden found that the mound of bones did not rise much higher than her head. And around them lay a clear space perhaps a dozen paces wide, suggesting that the bones had been placed here rather than simply discarded. At some point in the lost past, someone had arranged the scatter of skeletons into a heap like a cairn. But why anyone had bothered to do so, she could not conceive.

  In the cleared flat, the horses halted, facing the bones. Their muscles trembled with fatigue. Sweat still ran from their flanks. But they did not shift their hooves or walk around the pile. Instead they stood motionless, waiting, as if they expected something ineffable to manifest itself within the clutter.

  It is ever thus. The alternative is despair.

  Linden closed her hand around Covenant’s ring through her shirt. She was finding it harder and harder to believe that despair was not a better choice. Here her deeds had come to doom, as they must—She could not escape their ramifications.

  She had violated the Laws of Life and Death to restore Thomas Covenant; but she had failed to bring him back whole. From that moment, it was probably inevitable that he would abandon her. Only his fatal loyalty to other people’s mistakes had prevented him from turning his back sooner.

  She should have listened—

  Without warning, Jeremiah slipped down from Khelen’s back; and a caesure appeared, seething luridly among the teeth of the caldera’s rim.

  Christ!

  Scrambling in panic, Linden released the ring and snatched up her Staff in both hands, wheeled it around her head. Melenkurion abatha! Nausea clawed at her guts. Hornets swarmed toward her. Duroc minas mill! She had not faced a caesure like this: not since her personal descent into darkness had taken hold. The stain on her soul might weaken her. Some part of her had learned to crave violations of Law.

  But she had to try.

  Harad khabaal!

  If the Seven Words had no outward power unless they were spoken aloud, they still served to focus her desperation. Responding to her frantic desires, fuligin fire erupted from the wood. Blackness scaled upward, baleful and abused, like a scream that she had inherited from She Who Must Not Be Named.

  Savage as a tornado, the Fall surged into the crater as if Joan or turiya Raver had aimed it straight at the bones. Some effect of fury or madness—or perhaps of lessened distance—had improved Joan’s control over her blasts.

  Dissociated and vacant, Jeremiah ignored the caesure. He may have been unaware of it. Certain of himself, he walked toward the jumbled skeletons.

  Into the path of ravaged time.

  The Ranyhyn did not react. Stave did not move. Linden wanted him to spring down from Hynyn, catch up her son, run—But he sat his mount as if there were no peril.

  As if he did not fear the virulent storm.

  As if he
trusted Linden Avery the Chosen.

  Swinging her Staff, she lashed blazing midnight into the caesure’s wild core.

  You cannot have my son!

  Just for an instant, a staccato heartbeat, she saw herself fail. Her gush of power seemed to exacerbate the Fall—The caesure was feeding on her soiled strength.

  But her sins had not altered the nature of the Staff, or the import of Caerroil Wildwood’s script. Almost immediately, the fundamental strictures of Earthpower and Law asserted themselves. They existed to affirm the organic integrity of life: Linden’s darkness did not corrupt them. As the caesure squirmed downward, it caught fire from the inside out. Halfway down the slope, it became an ebon conflagration, writhing in hunger. A moment later, it began to collapse into itself.

  The force of its inrush nearly tugged Linden from Hyn’s back. But she did not stop scourging the Fall with flame, or shouting the Seven Words in her mind, until every severed instant of its violence was quenched.

  Then she staggered inwardly; let her power fade. God, that was close—Too close.

  “Stave,” she panted. “Damnit, Stave. What are you doing? Why didn’t you—?”

  He did not glance at her. Without any expression that she could interpret, he said, “Attend to your son, Chosen. You have spoken of such things.”

  Still staggering, she wrenched her attention toward Jeremiah.

  He stood at the edge of the pile, regarding it as though nothing had happened. His back was to his mother: she could not see his face. But she caught whiffs of Earthpower from his shoulders and arms; Earthpower and absence, the same emptiness that she had known ever since he had withdrawn his halfhand from Lord Foul’s bonfire ten years ago.

  One by one, he began pulling bones out of the pile; examining them; setting them on the ground beside him.