Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant 02 - Fatal Revenant

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Stave and the Manethrall steered her in a northerly curve toward the jut of the plateau, seeking, perhaps, to avoid an unseen hill or some other obstacle. Slowly water seeped through her cloak into her clothes: it dripped from her legs into her boots. By degrees, the chill of night and spring and damp leached the warmth from her skin. More and more, she yearned to draw on the invigorating fire of the Staff. She wanted to banish cold and fear and her own mortality so that she might feel equal to what lay ahead of her.

  But if she did so, she would forewarn the Demondim. Knowing that she meant to release Law and Earthpower, Covenant might muster enough of his inexplicable puissance to protect himself and Jeremiah. But the Vile-spawn would recognize their danger. And they would not need prescience to guess her purpose. They would ramify their defenses, creating cul-de-sacs and chimeras of lore to baffle her health-sense so that she could not identify their caesure. Or perhaps they would preempt her by unleashing the full evil of the Illearth Stone—

  She knew that bane too well to believe that she could stand against it: not without wild magic. And she trembled to think what might happen to Covenant and her son—or indeed to the hidden Fall of the Demondim—if she were compelled to unveil the force of Covenant’s ring. It’s hard now. And it’s going to get harder. Covenant and Jeremiah might not simply vanish: they might cease to exist in any meaningful form. And the caesure of the Demondim might grow vast enough to devour the whole of Lord’s Keep.

  Her own fears as much as the cold and rain filled her with shivering, imminent fever, as she restrained her wish for the Staff’s warmth and consolation. Instead she let her companions lead her to her destination as if she were more blind than Anele, and had far less fortitude.

  Immersed in private dreads, she did not sense the presence of the Masters until she neared the rim of Revelstone high above the courtyard and watchtower that guarded the Keep’s gates.

  Two of them awaited her. By now, she knew them well enough to recognize Handir and Galt, although she could scarcely discern their shapes in the darkness; certainly could not make out their features. No doubt the other Humbled, Branl and Clyme, had remained with Covenant and Jeremiah.

  Galt and the Voice of the Masters stood between her and the cliff-edge of her intent.

  She was not surprised to find them in her way. Doubtless they had read her intentions in Stave’s mind. And she was confident that they had informed the ur-Lord—If she had not sunk so far into herself, she might have expected to encounter the Masters earlier.

  Perhaps she should have been grateful that only two of Stave’s kinsmen had come to witness her actions; or to oppose them.

  “Chosen,” Handir said when Linden and her friends were near enough to hear him easily through the rain, “the Unbeliever requests that you refrain from your intent. He requests it. He does not command it. In this, he was precise. He acknowledges the merit of your purpose. But he conceives that the peril is too great.

  “Having been forewarned, he asserts that he will be able to refuse banishment. That is not his concern. Rather he fears what will transpire should you fail. Provoked, the Demondim will draw upon the full might of the Illearth Stone. From such an assault, only ruin can ensue. The ur-Lord’s design for the salvation of the Land is fragile, easily impeded. If he is assailed by the Demondim, he will be unable to perform what he must.

  “For that reason and no other, he asks that you turn aside from your intent and await the revelation of his purposes at Furl Falls.”

  “And if the Chosen does not fail?” countered Stave before Mahrtiir could retort. “Are the Masters not thereby greatly aided in their service to both Lord’s Keep and the Land?”

  The Voice of the Masters did not reply. Instead Galt stated, “Her failure is certain. Our discernment exceeds hers, yet we cannot determine how the Fall of the Demondim is concealed. And if she draws upon Earthpower to enhance her sight, she will be revealed, and the horde will strike against her. Therefore she cannot achieve her aim.

  “It is the ur-Lord, the Unbeliever, the rightful wielder of white gold who requests her compliance. How may any refusal be justified?”

  Linden stepped closer. She was beyond persuasion: fear and determination and even bafflement had made her as unwilling to compromise as the Masters themselves. Covenant’s indirect appeal and Galt’s reasoning were like the rain: they could fall on her, soak into her clothes, fill her mortal heart with shivering; but they could not deflect her.

  Handir had not bowed to her. She gave him no greeting of her own. Ignoring Galt, she asked abruptly. “Did he tell you what this design of his is?”

  “No,” Handir answered as though her question had no relevance. “We cannot aid him, and so he did not speak of it. He asked only that we keep the ancient promise of the Haruchai to preserve Revelstone.”

  “Then,” she said softly, as if she wished only Handir and the rain to hear her, “it seems to me that you still don’t understand what Brinn did against the Guardian of the One Tree.” If the Master did not consider the specific nature of Covenant’s purpose germane, he could not say the same of the example upon which his people had founded their Mastery. “I tried to explain it yesterday, but I probably wasn’t clear.

  “Brinn didn’t beat ak-Haru Kenaustin Ardenol by defeating him. He beat him by surrendering. He couldn’t stop the Guardian from throwing him off a cliff, so he took Kenaustin Ardenol with him when he fell.”

  “This you have—” Handir began; but Linden did not let him interrupt her.

  “Doesn’t that strike you as a rather un-Haruchai thing to do? In your whole history, have your people ever considered trying to solve a problem by surrendering to it?”

  That may have been why Covenant had asked the Haruchai not to accompany him while he and Linden went to confront Lord Foul. The ancestors of the Masters might have sacrificed their lives to prevent him from giving his ring to the Despiser. Indeed, Covenant may have decided on his own course because he had witnessed Brinn’s victorious defeat.

  “So where do you suppose Brinn got the idea? How did he even think of it?” She suspected that Handir knew the answer—that his ancestors had heard it from Cail, and that it was the underlying reason for their repudiation of Brinn’s companion—but she did not pause for his reply. “I’ll tell you. He got it because he already thought of himself as a failure. He and Cail were seduced by the merewives. They surrendered. They proved that they were unworthy before Brinn fought the Guardian of the One Tree.”

  He had said, Our folly must end now—But no Haruchai except Cail had harkened to him.

  Still softly, almost whispering, Linden finished. “Brinn became your ak-Haru, your greatest hero, because he was a failure. He believed the worst about himself, and he understood surrender.”

  If the Masters had heeded Brinn’s example, they would have chosen their Humbled, not by victory, but by defeat.

  “It may be so,” Handir admitted after a moment’s silence. “We have not yet determined our stance toward you. But we have become the Masters of the Land, and the import of the Unbeliever’s presence among us is plain. Lords whom the Bloodguard honored believed that Thomas Covenant was Berek Earthfriend come again. They sacrificed much in his name, trusting that he would save rather than damn the Land. And he has twice justified their faith.

  “We know nothing of the rebirth of ancient legends. But we are Haruchai and will not turn aside from ourselves. Therefore we also will place our faith in the Halfhand. Where he is concerned, we discount the warning of the Elohim, for they are arrogant and heartless, and their purposes are often cruel.”

  “All right.” Linden looked away from the sound of Handir’s voice. “You didn’t hear Cail, you didn’t hear Stave, and you won’t hear me.” You’ll have to make them listen to you, but that was not her task. “You’ve made that obvious enough.” When she directed her attention past him and the grass-cloaked rim of Revelstone, she could feel the distant moiling of the Demondim. Through the rain, she tasted thei
r opalescence and vitriol, their ravenous hunger for harm, as well as their wary defenses and apparent confusion. “But we’re still your guests, and Covenant didn’t command you to stop me. So unless you have something else to say, I want to get started before those monsters notice me.”

  Even if the Demondim could not feel her presence, they might detect the proximity of the Staff of Law.

  Handir appeared to hesitate. Then Linden felt rather than saw him move until he no longer stood between her and the horde.

  Do something they don’t expect.

  At once, she dropped to her hands and knees as if she were sinking back into herself; into her concentration and dismay. She no longer regarded Handir and Galt, or her friends, or the clammy grasp of the rain on her back. If anyone spoke to her, she did not hear. By touch, she crawled through the drenched grass toward the extreme edge of Revelstone’s promontory. She did not know what the limits of the Vile-spawn’s perceptions might be; but she hoped to expose as little of herself as possible.

  Then she found it: the outermost rim of the cliff, where the grass and soil of the plateau fell away from their foundation of stone. With little more than her head extended beyond the edge, she cast her health-sense downward.

  At first, the rain seemed to plunge past her into a featureless abyss, black and primitive as terror. But as she focused her percipience, she saw with every sense except vision the shaped, deliberate surface of Revelstone’s prow directly below her; the walled and open courtyard; the massed bulk of the watchtower. For a moment, she distracted herself by noticing the presence of Masters within the tower. Then she looked farther.

  The crown of the watchtower partially blocked her view of the Demondim. However, only a small portion of the horde was obscured: in spite of the rain and the darkness, she could discern most of the forces gathered beyond the Keep’s outer gates. When she had attuned herself to the roil and surge of the horde’s hatred, its dimensions became clear.

  Veiled by rainfall, fiery opalescence seethed in chaotic waves and spatters from edge to edge of the Demondim formation. And through the stirred turmoil of the monsters’ might, amid the randomness of their black vitriol, she caught brief hints and glimpses, as elusive as phosphenes, of the dire emerald which emanated from the Illearth Stone. That evil was muffled, muted; banked like embers in ash. But she knew it intimately and could not be mistaken.

  Yet of the caesure which the Vile-spawn used to reach the Illearth Stone, she saw no sign.

  To her taut nerves, the confusion and uncertainty of the monsters seemed as loud as the blaring of battle-horns. But as she studied what she felt and heard and tasted—seeking, seeking—she began to think that their display of bewilderment was too loud. Surely if such lorewise creatures were truly baffled, chary of destruction, their attention would resemble hers? They would search actively for comprehension and discernment. Yet they did not. Rather their behavior was like the wailing of confounded children: thoughtless; apparently incapable of thought.

  Galvanized by a small jolt of excitement, Linden pushed her perceptions further, deeper. As she did so, she became certain that the Demondim were putting on a show of confusion, that their obvious disturbance was a ruse. It was one of the means by which they concealed their doorway to the Illearth Stone.

  According to Covenant, he had put a crimp in their reality. I made us look like bait. But Linden was no longer convinced that the Vile-spawn feared an ambush. They had some other reason for withholding their attack.

  For a time, uncertainty eroded her concentration, and her sense of the horde became blurred, indefinite; as vague and visceral as the wellsprings of nightmares. Instead of continuing to search for some glimpse of the caesure, she felt Kevin’s Dirt overhead, high among the clouds. Independent of wind and weather, it spread a smear of doubt across her health-sense; numbed her tactile connection to the Land’s true life.

  If Covenant had lied—

  Mahrtiir had assured her that Kevin’s Dirt could not blind her while the effects of her immersion in Glimmermere lingered. Stave had implied that he held the same belief. Nevertheless she seemed to grow weaker by the moment, losing focus; drifting out of tune with the recursive emanations of the horde. She would never be able to identify the Fall unless she awakened the fire of Law to sharpen her perceptions.

  Two days ago, the Masters had been able to descry the caesure’s presence because the Demondim had not yet adopted their tactics of concealment. If she had been aware then of any Fall other than her own—and if she had been stronger—

  She had missed that opportunity. It would not come again.

  Surely it was Covenant who had told her that she needed the Staff of Law?

  Yet any premature use of Earthpower would trigger the defenses and virulence of her foes.

  Trust yourself. You’re the only one who can do this.

  Her time with Thomas Covenant long ago had taught her to ignore the dictates of panic.

  All right, she told herself. All right. So she could not guess how the Demondim had decided on their present stratagems. So what? She had come to the rim of Revelstone to attempt a kind of surgery; and surgery demanded attention to what was immediately in front of her. The underlying motivations of the monsters were irrelevant. At this moment, under these circumstances, Kastenessen’s and even Covenant’s designs were irrelevant. Her task was simply and solely to extirpate the cancer of the horde’s access to the Illearth Stone. For the surgeon in her, nothing else mattered.

  With assiduous care, Linden Avery the Chosen reclaimed her focus on the manipulative masque of the Demondim.

  She had spotted quick instances of the Stone’s green and lambent evil earlier: she saw more of them now. But they were widely scattered throughout the horde; brief as single raindrops; immediately absorbed. And they were in constant motion, glinting like fragments of lightning reflected on storm-wracked seas. When she had studied them for a time, she saw that they moved like the whirling migraine miasma of a caesure.

  Then she understood why she could not discern the Fall itself. Certainly the Demondim concealed it with every resource at their command. Behind their feigned confusion, they seethed with conflicting energies and currents, seeking to disguise the source of their might. But still they exerted that might, using it to obscure itself. Each glimpse and flicker of the Illearth Stone was so immediate, immanent, and compelling that it masked the disruption of time which made it possible.

  Linden understood—but the understanding did not help her. Now that she had recognized what was happening, she could focus her health-sense past the threat inherent in each individual glint of emerald; and when she did so, she saw hints of time’s enabling distortion, the swirl of instants which severed the millennia between the horde and the Stone. But those hints were too brief and unpredictable. Their chaotic evanescence obscured them. They were like hemorrhaging blood vessels in surgery: they prevented her from seeing the precise place where her scalpel and sutures were needed.

  There she knew the truth. The task that she had chosen for herself was impossible. She was fundamentally inadequate to it. The tactics of the Demondim were too alien for her human mind to encompass: she could not find her way through the complex chicanery and vehemence of the monsters. She would not be able to unmake the caesure unless she found a way to grasp what all of the Demondim were thinking and doing at every moment.

  Therefore—

  Groaning inwardly, she retreated a little way so that she could rest her forehead on the wet grass. She wanted to console herself with the sensation of its fecund health, its fragile and tenacious grip on the aged soil of the plateau; its delicate demonstration of Earthpower. Even the chill of the rain contradicted in some fashion the hurtful machinations of the Demondim, the savage emerald of the Stone, the quintessential wrong of the caesure; the impossibility of her task. Rain was appropriate; condign. It fell because the earth required its natural sustenance. Such things belonged to the organic health of the world. They deserved to be pre
served.

  She could not cut the caesure away as she had intended. Therefore she would have to approach the problem in a less surgical—and far more hazardous—manner. She would have to risk a direct assault on the monsters, hoping that they would strike back with the force of the Illearth Stone. Then, during the imponderable interval between the instant of their counterattack and the moment when she was incinerated, she would have to locate the horde’s now-unveiled Fall; locate and extinguish it. If she survived long enough—

  She had no reason to believe that she could succeed. The challenge would be both swift and overwhelming. And if she effaced the caesure, she would be no closer to rescuing Jeremiah or relieving the Land’s other perils. If she failed, she might not live long enough to see Revelstone destroyed because of her.

  In her son’s name, she had twice risked absolute ruin. But now the question of his survival had become far more complex. In spite of the fact that he remained Lord Foul’s prisoner, he was here. He had regained his mind. And Covenant, whose every word disturbed her, had averred that his own plans would free Jeremiah at last—

  Covenant was concerned that an assault by the horde might prevent him from carrying out his designs. If she confronted the Demondim directly, she might do more than cause a catastrophe for the Land: she might cost her son his only real chance to live.

  And yet—and yet—

  The Demondim were here. The power of the Illearth Stone was here. Kastenessen and the skurj were already at work, seeking the destruction of the Land. And somewhere the Worm of the World’s End awaited wakening. How could she turn her back on any immediate threat when she did not understand Covenant, and the Masters had no effective defense?

  Trapped in her dilemma, she was conscious of nothing except the ravening powers of the horde and the extremity of her hesitation. She did not feel the rain falling on her back or the dampness of the grass. And she did not sense Stave’s approach. Until he said. “Attend, Chosen,” she had forgotten that she was not alone.