Satisfied and urgent, Linden faced Liand at last.
“Linden,” he began like a man in shock, “I—”
She stopped him gently. “Liand, thank you. For everything.” She felt almost frantic to be on her way. Nevertheless she took the time to add, “I’m lucky I met you. If you decide you want to go with the Ramen, I’ll still consider myself lucky.”
Her words seemed to pluck away his apprehensions. “Are you mad?” he replied with a sudden grin. “Can you believe that I will let pass an occasion to cross time upon the back of a Ranyhyn? I have been too long a mere Stonedownor. Here I will become more than I was.” He laughed. “I mean to teach Stave and the Masters the error of their mastery.”
Linden nodded. What else could she do? She had already tried to dissuade him too often.
Hurrying now, she strode toward Hyn, calling over her shoulder, “Mahrtiir, it’s time! We need to go.”
Her senses had caught their first taste of the caesure. If it did not slacken its advance or drift aside, it would soon be visible to ordinary sight.
Mahrtiir came promptly to help her mount while Bhapa and Pahni guided Anele to the smallest of the Ranyhyn, a muscular pinto with flaring eyes and shaggy hocks whom they called Hrama. Linden worried that Anele might be afraid to ride; but some visceral interaction between Hrama’s vitality and his own Earthpower seemed to calm him, and he did not protest as the Cords boosted him onto Hrama’s back.
By the time Hyn had turned toward the north, Stave and Mahrtiir were mounted as well. The Manethrall looked exultant, elevated beyond himself, and crowded with anticipation. Stolidly Stave brought Hynyn to Hyn’s side as Bhapa helped Liand vault onto a palomino stallion named Rhohm. Mahrtiir joined Linden opposite the Haruchai. Then Pahni and Bhapa sprang onto their own Ranyhyn, following behind Liand and Anele to ensure that no one fell back or was lost.
At the same time, the ur-viles changed their formation. Running on all fours, they scattered around the riders to form a black ring with their loremaster in the lead. As they did so, they chanted together like a chorus of dogs.
Once in position, the loremaster exchanged its ruddy blade for a pointed iron rod like a scepter or javelin; and from the metal, dark force flowed around the riders, enclosing them with vitriol.
Esmer had disappeared. Linden scanned the rain quickly, but felt no hint of him. Apparently he had simply folded his power around himself and winked away.
She remained where she was, staring into the gloom. After the brief respite of Esmer’s absence, her stomach felt a renewed nausea as the swirling wrongness of the caesure approached. Peering through the raindrops, she began to discern the visible outlines of the Fall.
The caesure she had seen from Kevin’s Watch had resembled the aura of a migraine: a sickening phosphene dance which seemed to cast every individual mote of reality into chaos. Without her health-sense, she might have believed that the swirl took place among the neurons of her brain rather than within the fabric of existence. But this Fall looked worse; stronger. Multiplied, perhaps, by the pressure of Esmer’s summons, it formed a howl of distortion and madness against the grey backdrop of the rain.
The sight reminded her of damnation. Abandon hope—
Although she was soaked, the caesure’s ill covered her skin with formication, as if fire ants crawled through her clothes.
“Chosen?” Stave asked, questioning her hesitation—or her resolve.
“Oh, hell.” Frightened now on a scale that surpassed prolonged frustration and metaphysical chills, Linden reached into the front of her shirt; drew out Covenant’s ring. Closing the cold circle in her fist, she muttered, “Let’s do it.”
If Joan were indeed the cause of the caesures, then entering one might resemble being plunged into her madness. But Linden had already survived Joan’s torment once—
Joan was stronger now. In the Land, white gold inherited its true power; and her despair fed on itself, swelling ceaselessly. But Linden had grown as well. She was strengthened by the support of her friends as by the healing of the ur-viles. She also held a white ring. And when gunfire had first stripped her of her former life, she had not known that the Despiser would claim her son.
The loremaster heard her and understood. It began to pace forward through the water-heavy grass, holding high its scepter. Grimly Linden touched Hyn’s flanks with her heels. The Ranyhyn quivered under her, but did not falter.
Then all of the riders were in motion, trotting ahead within the ur-viles’ protective theurgy.
The chanting of the creatures rose. Gradually the Ranyhyn quickened their pace to match the rhythm of the invocation.
Rain splashed past Linden’s hood into her eyes. Now the caesure resembled a vast swarm of hornets. Its power shocked her senses: it seemed to swallow the north in its frenzy. She no longer wondered why Kevin’s Watch had fallen. The wonder was that any aspect of the living world could endure the caesure’s evil.
Anele had done so. His inborn Earthpower had preserved him then. It would again. But the rest of the company would have to rely on the Demondim-spawn—and on Linden’s uncertain ability to use wild magic.
With Stave and Mahrtiir beside her, she gripped Covenant’s ring and followed the ur-viles at a canter into the turmoil of the Fall. At the last instant, she may have shouted Jeremiah’s name. If so, she did not hear herself. The firestorm assault of the caesure had already stricken her deaf and dumb and blind.
5.
Against Time
In an instant, formication became the world. It filled Linden’s senses as though biting ants had burrowed into her flesh, chewing their way deeper and deeper toward the essential fibers—the thews of will and purpose, experience and memory—which bound her identity into a coherent whole. She felt that she was being torn from herself strand by strand; ripped to agony.
She would not have believed that she could endure such pain and remain conscious of it. Surely the human mind could call upon blankness or insanity to defend it? How else had Jeremiah kept himself alive; able to be loved? How else had Anele borne the cost of his bereavements?
Nevertheless she had no means to protect herself. No aspect of her being remained intact to ward her against the meticulous excruciation of the caesure. She had entered a demesne of flux, inchoate and chaotic; altogether devoid of Time’s necessary sequences. Life could not exist outside the stricture of chronology. She remained alive only because she occupied no consecutive moments during which she could have ceased to be.
Instead of dying, she was caught in an eternity of incineration as though she had been struck by a bolt of lightning which would never end.
And yet—
Formication, devouring, was only one of the caesure’s avatars. It had others. Her entire being had become a timeless shriek. Simultaneously, however, she stood alone in a realm of utter white and cold.
It had no features and no dimensions in any direction. It was simply gelid white multiplied to infinity, faceless as snow, demeaning as ice: vast and desolate, entirely uninhabitable: a heatless interstice between the possible moments of existence. The cold was an infinite fire. It would have peeled the skin from her bones if this moment could have modulated forward in time. But here there was no time, no movement, no possible modulation.
Only her solitary presence in that place defined it.
There her loneliness was complete. It seemed less bearable than pain. She could have wailed forever and gone unheard.
Nevertheless some form of movement was permitted to her. She could turn her head. Take steps as though she stood on solid ground. Gasp as freezing bit into her lungs. She could feel the cold stab like a krill through the bullet hole in her shirt. Surely that implied a state of being in which one thing led to another? A condition in which her pain might be heeded?
But she saw only bitter white, and her steps took her nowhere, and her gasping puffed no vapor into the isolation.
And yet—
Formication tore her apart and white emp
tiness bereft her simultaneously. And simultaneously again, in still another avatar of the caesure’s evil, she found herself gazing out at a wasteland of shattered stone and rubble. She heard the lorn hiss of the wind punctuated by the rhythmic fall and retreat of surf; and although she did not look, she knew that behind her the seas crashed perpetually against a broken cliff.
The raw damaged rocks before her appeared to be chunks of time, discrete instances of the substance which should have made existence possible; woven the world whole. They were badly battered, torn from their natural union with each other by violence or lunacy. Yet they were intact in themselves; and each of them still implied its place in the former cliff.
Once they had formed a buttress against the sea, an assertion of structure and endurance in the teeth of the surging waves. Although they had been shattered, they retained their essential identity, their obdurate granite selves.
And among them moved sad gleaming creatures like misshapen children.
As the creatures squirmed over and among the stones, they emitted a sick emerald radiance; light the hue of acid and gangrene. They might have been the fouled progeny of the Illearth Stone, if that condensed bane had not been destroyed by wild magic millennia before her own time in the Land.
Nonetheless she recognized them. They were skest, and their touch was death: they were formed of a rank corrosive which devoured flesh. At one time, they had served the lurker of the Sarangrave, herding prey to the lurker’s hungry tentacles. Without aid, she and Covenant and their Quest for the One Tree would not have survived their passage through Lifeswallower, the Great Swamp.
Now the acid-children appeared to serve her, occasionally placing tasteless food and brackish water in her mouth, offering their bitter warmth to her wind-chilled skin, and mewling for pity which she did not deign to provide. At other times, they dissolved from sight, perhaps melting between the rocks in order to replenish her viands, or to restore their own lambent green lives. When they reappeared, they resumed their diligence.
Sharp formication: lost white and cold: a wasted vista of torn stone and skest. All simultaneous, overlapping around her and within her as though they occupied the same space at the same time. If the caesure took other forms as well, they lay beyond the reach of her senses.
Tearing ants and fiery cold slowed her perceptions. Gradually, however, she became aware that in the wasteland among the skest she was someone else: that she inhabited a flesh not her own; gazed about her through eyes which did not answer to her will; made choices over which she had no control. Although she wailed and grieved, she altered nothing, affected nothing. None of her pain or her yearning escaped the mind where she was imprisoned.
She should have died, consumed by fire ants and cold. She should have been driven mad by the loss of her friends and her purpose; of her son. She had brought them all to ruin and deserved no less. Yet she could not escape.
Instead she felt a hand which was not hers clench and rise abruptly toward her head. Through the eyes of her prison, she saw the body’s right fist strike against its temple. Nerves that did not belong to her felt blood weep from an aggravated sore, dripping like tears down an abused cheek. Dissociated whimpers leaked from a mouth that had lost most of its teeth. When the throat swallowed, she tasted the seepage of bleeding gums.
At the same time, a flash of argent fire burst from the ring hanging against a sternum on its chain. Silver anguish blazed and coruscated among the stones, the rent instances, until one of them had been torn to confusion and dust.
Then, simultaneous with her other agonies, Linden understood that she was trapped in Joan’s mind; that the woman who tortured this wasteland of rubble with the sea at her back, the woman whom the skest served, was Covenant’s ex-wife. Charred by the Despiser’s lightning, Joan had indeed found her way to the Land, as Linden had feared.
And here Joan herself had been found by turiya Herem.
Linden knew the Raver’s touch intimately: she could not fail to recognize it. During her own translation to the Land, she had met turiya in Joan’s mind. She had been afflicted with visions of pain and destruction which she still did not know how to bear. But there were no visions now. Even they required sequences and causality which did not exist within the caesure. Instead she felt only the Raver’s insatiable abhorrence of life.
Goaded by turiya Herem’s malice, Joan continued to strike herself, measuring out her despair against her temple. And with each blow, her power lashed out to create Falls, shattering coherent fragments of time until every moment within that fragment was torn apart.
Wild magic could have unmade the entire landscape in one towering gout of power; broken the Arch of Time instantly. Trapped in Joan’s mind, however, Linden understood that she was incapable of such an act. Coercion and insanity fettered her pain: she could utter no cry louder or more sustained than this piecemeal devastation.
Gauged by the scale of Joan’s blasts, the wasteland around her was immense. The Earth might endure and suffer for centuries before the damage became irrecoverable.
To Linden, that seemed still worse than formication and emptiness. Had she remained alive in any coherent sense, able to make choices and act, she might have striven to counteract Joan’s suffering; to hold back the harm of Joan’s self-loathing. But that possibility also Linden had lost.
Her plight surpassed endurance, yet she could not escape it. When the skest had fed her, Joan savaged another of the littered moments—and freezing white loneliness filled Linden’s senses, featureless and forever unrelieved—and myriads upon myriads of gnawing pincers bit her flesh to shreds—and she could not escape it.
Then she might have attempted deliberately to abandon consciousness and knowledge, hoping to find relief. More than once in the past, however, she had felt the same desire; the same impulse to abdicate herself. Watching her father’s suicide. Tortured in every nerve by the ravages of the Sunbane. Imprisoned in Revelstone. Possessed by a Raver while Covenant surrendered to Lord Foul. In some sense, she had sacrificed volition when she had entered Covenant’s mind in order to free him from the imposed stasis of the Elohim.
Now she could not forget what her desire for absence had cost her in the past. Or what it would cost Jeremiah here.
Nor could she forget that her companions suffered as well; that Anele and Liand, Stave, the Ramen and the Ranyhyn, even the ur-viles, had entered this demesne of horror at her behest.
And she remembered that no time had passed.
She was trapped in all moments and none simultaneously. She might spend eternity searching for an escape, and still nothing would have been lost. Nothing would be lost until the bounds of her identity frayed and failed; until she truly and entirely abandoned hope.
Until then, she could still think.
Both Anele and the ur-viles had once survived this same experience. She intended to do the same.
But they had merely entered a caesure, or been taken by it. And when the chaos had flung them forth again, by accident of Earthpower or design of lore, they had emerged thousands of years later. She needed more: not merely to survive and emerge, but to defy the inherent attributes of the Fall. Within itself, it was all moments and none, impossible confusion. Externally, however, it was a specific rock on the littoral of Joan’s madness; a discrete force which moved from place to place through time. Despite its internal insanity, it was like a river: it ran in only one direction.
Linden needed to do more than simply endure until the caesure cast her onto its banks. She needed to swim against the current, drawing her companions with her.
She needed wild magic.
Thinking was a form of movement. And the avatar of freezing whiteness was the only one which allowed her the illusion of movement. Therefore she selected a direction at random—all directions were the same in that place—and began to walk. Then she began to run—
—seeking the door within herself which opened on white fire.
The cold attacked her lungs with relentless
ferocity: she should have collapsed in bloody coughing. Yet she did not. No time had passed. She did not need air. Therefore the rending in her chest never changed. She could continue to run, no matter how vast her pain.
In that way, she clung to herself through formication and loss and blazing madness.
But she had lost the door. It lay hidden somewhere within her. Twice before, she had found her way there consciously, and it had opened to her hand. Now, however, the path which might have led toward it had been transformed to chaos. She was in too much pain to rediscover the route inward.
In this excruciating tumult, only Joan had power.
Nevertheless Linden kept running. She believed now that if she stopped she would never become herself again.
Nothing changed. Nothing could change in a realm devoid of cause and sequence. Fire ants and utter loneliness ruled here. Yet Joan continued to feed occasionally, drink occasionally, and strike out; and Linden still ran, fleeing her own despair.
Then the lash of argent from Joan’s ring caused a jagged chunk of granite to detonate in incandescence, momentarily dimming the emerald glow of the skest—and Linden stumbled to an unsteady halt in front of Anele.
He gazed straight at her as if he were aware of her presence, although he could not see her. They did not exist for each other here, and he was blind. Yet his eyes were a milky gleam of Earthpower and intention.
She had not seen him appear: he was simply there, as he both had and had not been all along. Without his inherited strength, he would have remained beyond the reach of her perceptions. Yet here he was more real than she was. Unlike hers, his breath plumed in the frigid air.
In a gust of steam, he said as if he were invoking her, “Please.”
Then he was gone.
He had never been there. He was a figment of her desperation, a reification of her loss.
Nevertheless he had saved her.
Please? Please what?
She knew the answer.
The richness of the Land was written in grass stains on the fabric of her pants: a map like a metaphor for her own heart, both revealing and disguising the location of vitality and treasure. If she could not find the way to wild magic, she could make other use of such guidance.
The Runes of the Earth: The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant - Book One Page 53
