Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant 02 - Fatal Revenant

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Before Linden could ask about Jeremiah, the Theomach put in, “Your son will appear at the Halfhand’s side. No movement in this time will delay him.”

  Swearing to himself again, Covenant began to pound through the ice and snow. The Theomach followed without waiting for Linden to make up her mind. As the stranger stepped lightly over the crust, he said to Covenant, “If you will but consider the path which I have opened to you, you will recognize that you have no cause for anger. True, I have presented new obstacles. But others I have removed. And my path is indeed less perilous.”

  When Covenant did not respond, the Theomach said sharply. “I do not speak of her peril, Halfhand. I speak of yours.”

  —the perils which have been prepared for you.

  Behind them, Linden straggled into motion. She did not intend to be left behind when Jeremiah might rejoin Covenant at any moment. Bracing herself on the Staff, she fought the crust and the cloying snow in an effort to keep pace.

  “Fuck that,” Covenant rasped. “Fuck you and your fake concern. I can handle my perils. But it galls the hell out of me that you think you have the right to interfere.”

  “Now you are dishonest,” replied the Theomach with a mocking laugh. “It is not my interference that ‘galls’ you. It is your powerlessness to prevent me.”

  Again his movements conveyed an eerie sense of slippage. He seemed to accompany himself across the dazzling field as if the theurgy which kept him from breaking through the ice caused him to shift subtly between different places in time and space.

  “Believe that if you can,” Covenant retorted. “What I have in mind for you is going to be worse than ‘the destruction of the Earth.’ I’m going to make you and all your people and even the damn Elohim irrelevant.”

  Lightly the Theomach answered. “You are welcome to the attempt.”

  “What, you think I can’t do it? Hellfire. You aren’t paying attention. I know more about what’s going to happen to you than you do. And I guarantee you won’t like it.”

  For some reason, the Theomach did not respond. Covenant may have surprised or shaken him.

  Linden floundered after them. The soles of her boots gripped the buried snow well enough; but each step was an awkward hesitation-and-plunge as the ice held her weight for an instant and then broke. Soon she had to pant for air, and each breath drew scalding cold deeper into her lungs. Only the warmth of Covenant’s magic and her desire for Jeremiah kept her going.

  If her son appeared, as she had been promised—

  The first slopes of the hills seemed far away. And they would not be easy to climb. The pale uninterrupted blue of the sky felt as wide as her incomprehension, and as empty. The white glitter of the field was empty as well, undefined by any trees or shrubs. Even aliantha did not grow in this place. She saw no birds anywhere. If animals had ever crossed this valley, the crust retained no sign of their passage.

  There should have been aliantha. Those life-giving shrubs had survived the Sunbane. Surely they could endure this winter? But Linden thought that she knew why the valley was so lifeless. Her health-sense grew steadily stronger in the absence of Kevin’s Dirt; and as she trudged across the iced expanse, she began to feel that she trod on graves. The whole valley held a muffled sensation of death, as if the snow cloaked shed blood and slaughter. The ground had absorbed too much violence to nurture treasure-berries.

  Perhaps Covenant or the Theomach would condescend to tell her what had happened here.

  Before she could speak, however, a brief flare of energy like an afterflash of lightning shredded the air near Covenant; and Jeremiah staggered to his knees as though he had been created—or re-created—from the raw stuff of emptiness and cold.

  He was gasping as if he had survived a fight for his life.

  She forgot everything else in her rush to reach him. Instinctively she reached for Earthpower. If Esmer or some other foe still harried her son—

  At once, however, the Theomach stepped or appeared in her way. She collided with him hard; stumbled backward.

  “God damn it!”

  “Do not!” he commanded sharply. His cerement-clad figure confronted her across the trampled snow. “Do not invoke the Staff. And do not attempt to place your hands upon them, neither the Halfhand nor your son. If you err in this, your losses will be greater than you are able to conceive. That I cannot prevent. My purpose lies elsewhere.”

  At the same time, Covenant turned toward Jeremiah. “There you are. I was beginning to wonder.”

  Jeremiah lifted his face to the Unbeliever. The sweat of intense exertion streamed from his cheeks and forehead: his heated skin steamed in the cold. But he was grinning hugely.

  “Jeez, that was hard,” he panted. “I knew Esmer was tough, but I didn’t realize—” In spite of his gasping, his voice seemed to throb with triumph. “It’s a good thing those ur-viles attacked when they did. I didn’t want to have to call for help.”

  Covenant nodded. “I knew you could do it. I told you that, didn’t I? He changes his mind too often. There’s always a flaw somewhere.”

  Biting her lip, Linden swallowed every natural impulse. “All right,” she muttered to the Theomach. “You’ve made your point. I need them as much as they need me. Now get out of my way.”

  The Theomach gave her a shrouded nod and stepped aside.

  With more caution, she approached her son and Covenant.

  Jeremiah was gazing around; and as he did so, his manner changed. “Jeez,” he panted again. “What went wrong? We aren’t supposed to be here.”

  “I know,” replied Covenant sourly. “Look behind you.”

  With a boy’s ungainly alacrity, Jeremiah lurched to his feet. His gaze touched Linden for only an instant. “Oh, hi, Mom,” he said absently, as if he had already put her out of his mind. His attention was focused on the Theomach.

  “You,” he said in surprise. He was still trying to catch his breath. “You’re one of them. I never met you. But I heard them talk about you. You’re the Theomach.”

  The concealed figure sketched a mocking bow. “Assuredly.” Then he added more sternly, “Be guided by the Halfhand, youth. I have set you upon a path which will unmake all of your desires if you step aside from it.”

  Jeremiah glanced at Covenant, then shrugged. “It doesn’t matter to me. As long as we’re together, I don’t care how we do this. Covenant knows I trust him.”

  His tic was barely noticeable.

  Linden took another step closer. “Jeremiah, honey. Are you all right? When I was suddenly here,” wherever here was. “and you weren’t, I thought that I’d lost you again.”

  His muddy gaze avoided hers. “I’m fine.” His respiration had almost returned to normal: he was too young—or too full of magic—to breathe hard for long. “It’s what I said, that’s all. Esmer is tougher than he looks.” He flashed another grin at Covenant. “But I beat him.”

  Plainly reluctant to talk to Linden, the boy made a show of scanning the valley again. “What do we do now?”

  Her son had recovered his mind—and he did not want to talk to her. She bowed her head so that he would not see her face twist or her eyes burn.

  “Your mother is being stubborn,” replied Covenant heavily. “As usual. She wants an explanation. We’ll go up there”—he pointed vaguely at the nearest hills—“and take a look around. Maybe then she’ll feel less contentious. Or at least less disoriented.

  “After that, we’ll need to make some decisions. Or she will. Thanks to the Theomach, we’re in a hell of a mess. And he thinks we should let her figure out how to cope with it.

  “We’ll have to give that a try,” Covenant concluded in disgust. “He hasn’t left us much choice.”

  With his back to Linden, Jeremiah said, “Then let’s go. I think it’ll be OK. Sometimes she does exactly the right thing without even knowing it.”

  Taking her torn heart with him, he led Covenant toward the slopes at the southern edge of the valley.

  Eventuall
y Covenant moved into the lead. Jeremiah followed in his footprints while the Theomach remained off to one side, accompanying himself obscurely over the brittle surface. Linden lagged behind Covenant and Jeremiah; used the path that they had trampled to make her own passage somewhat easier.

  Sometimes she does exactly the right thing—Her son had given her that, although he obviously preferred Covenant’s company in spite of her dedication and love.—without even knowing it. He may have been referring to the raceway construct which she had enabled him to build. To that extent, at least, he acknowledged her importance in his life. Yet even that oblique validation carried a message of pain.

  By buying the tracks and pylons for Jeremiah’s raceway, she had in some sense freed him; or had given him the means to free himself. She had made possible an escape from blankness into the wealth and wonder of the Land. And in so doing, she had lost him to Covenant. But that, she insisted to herself, was not the crucial point. The crux of what she had inadvertently achieved was this: she had supplied her son with an alternative to ordinary consciousness, ordinary responses and emotions; ordinary life. She had made it easier for him to escape than to strive for a more difficult and precious form of recovery.

  It was conceivable that Linden had failed her son as entirely—and as unintentionally—as she had failed Joan.

  Arguing with herself as she plodded ahead, Linden countered, Yes, that was conceivable. But it was also conceivable that Jeremiah would not have been capable of his present sentience, or his disturbing loyalties, if he had not been granted an escape from his mental prison. His mind might have died, utterly alone inside his skull, if he had not found his way to the Land.

  The simple fact was that Linden was too human to know the truth. She could not assign responsibility, blame, or vindication because she was inadequate to gauge the condition of Jeremiah’s soul. He was closed to her. He had always been closed.

  In the years since she had traveled and suffered and loved with Thomas Covenant, she had endeavored to become content with her inadequacy. She would have admitted with unruffled confidence that she healed none of her patients. Instead, at her best, she merely encouraged them to heal themselves. But now, in the Land, she was less able to accept her limitations.

  There was too much at stake—

  She understood almost nothing that had happened since Covenant and Jeremiah had ridden into Lord’s Keep. And she had no reason at all to believe that she was strong enough for what lay ahead of her. But she told herself that such things were trivial. The only inadequacy that truly mattered was her inability to gauge the health or illness of Jeremiah’s restored mind.

  How could she make choices, or defend what she loved, when she did not know whether or not he still needed her?

  The ascent to Covenant’s destination was as difficult as she had feared it would be. Although the snow on the northward slope had seen less sunlight and formed less ice, it was also deeper. The hillside itself was hazardously steep. And the eldritch heat which Covenant had given her faded ineluctably, leaving her with nothing except her clothes and her exertions to ward off the cold.

  Nevertheless she struggled upward. And when she finally gained the hilltop, stood panting in the comfortless sunshine of early afternoon, her doubts and confusion had settled into a grim determination. The Theomach had told Covenant that he must allow her to make her own decisions. She meant to do so. She had never used her inadequacy as an excuse, and did not intend to start now.

  While Jeremiah shuffled his feet, Covenant scowled into the distance, and the Theomach hummed tunelessly to himself, Linden scanned her surroundings. Here the glare from the snow was less severe. In this cold, any wind would have cut at her eyes; but the air was almost entirely still. She was able to look around without the blur of tears or the danger of snow blindness.

  Covenant had chosen an effective vantage point. On all sides, the unimpeded sunshine etched the shapes and edges of the terrain in sharp detail. From this crest, she saw that the hills which bordered both sides of the valley stood in rough rows that gradually lost height from west to east. And they were only two rows among many: a range of rugged slopes and crooked valleys extended farther than she could see into the northwest as well as toward the southeast. The entire landscape was tossed and crumpled, like a discarded blanket. As it tended eastward, it smoothed out in small increments.

  If these were the foothills of mountains in the west, those peaks were too distant to be seen. But as she scanned the vistas, she found that their contours allowed her to see farther into the southwest as well as the southeast. In that direction also, the hilltops sank slowly lower. And beyond their ridges—

  She blinked hard in an effort to clear the ache of brightness from her sight. There was something—For a moment, she closed her eyes; rested them. Then she looked again.

  Now she was sure that she could see trees. At the limits of vision, deciduous trees clung to each other with their stark and naked limbs. And among them a few tall evergreens—cedars, perhaps, or redwoods—stood like sentinels, keeping watch over their winter-stricken kindred. At this distance, she could see only a sliver of woodland past the obstruction of the hills. But percipience or intuition told her that she was squinting at a forest.

  We’re too far from her time. Under the Sunbane, the last vestiges of the ancient woods west of Landsdrop had been utterly destroyed. Yet she remained in the Land: she was sure of that. And there were forests—?

  She wanted to demand, Covenant, damn you, what have you done? But determination had settled into her like the cold, and it brought with it a kind of calm. She was frightened enough for rage; could have slipped easily into fury. Nevertheless she refused to be swayed by her emotions. Until she learned the truth about her son, she intended to hold herself in check. She would do anything and everything that fear or imagination suggested; but she would do it coldly. And she would think about it first.

  Like paralysis, panic served the Despiser.

  “All right, Covenant,” she said when she was ready; when she could bear Jeremiah’s reluctance to look at her. “You promised me an explanation. It’s time.”

  “Well, time,” he replied. His voice was a harsh rasp. “That’s the problem, isn’t it. It’s all about time. Even distance is just a matter of time.”

  Then he sighed. Gesturing around him, he began. “We’re a little less than two hundred leagues from Revelstone. These are the Last Hills, the last barrier. Where we are now, they separate the Center Plains from Garroting Deep.”

  Two hundred leagues? Linden thought; but she was not truly surprised. The suddenness of her transition to this place had prepared her for imponderable dislocations.

  “That piece of forest,” Covenant continued, “is Garroting Deep. Eventually it’ll be considered the most dangerous of the old forests. Of course,” he added, “they’re all places you don’t want to go. In this time, anyway. Morinmoss, Grimmerdhore, hell, even Giant Woods—they’re all protected by Forestals.”

  Now she was taken aback, although she tried not to show it. If Forestals still defended the trees, she was deep in the Land’s past; deeper than she had dared to imagine. During the time of the Sunbane, Caer-Caveral had preserved Andelain; but he had been the last of his kind. According to the tales which Covenant had told her long ago, most of the Forestals had disappeared before his first experiences in the Land. If that were true—

  Oh, God.

  —she was now more than seven thousand years before her proper time.

  However, Covenant had not stopped speaking. She fought down her chagrin in order to concentrate on him.

  “But Garroting Deep is the worst,” he was saying sourly. “Giant Woods is practically benign, probably because Foul and the Ravers spend most of their time south of the Sarangrave. Sometimes you can get through Morinmoss. On a good day, you can survive in Grimmerdhore for a few hours. But Caerroil Wildwood is an out-and-out butcher. He pretty much slaughters anything that doesn’t have fur or feathers.”<
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  While Linden stared at the distant trees in wonder and dismay, the Theomach put in casually, “Perhaps it would profit her to know why the Forestal of Garroting Deep has grown so savage.”

  His manner seemed to imply an oblique warning.

  “There are a lot of reasons.” Covenant’s tone was leaden with sarcasm. “The Colossus of the Fall is losing its power. Too many trees are being butchered. There are too many people, and they’re too greedy. All the Forestals are getting weaker.

  “But Caerroil Wildwood has lost more than the other Forestals. And he knows more about Ravers. You can’t see it from here, of course, but Doriendor Corishev is practically on Wildwood’s doorstep. It’s only sixty leagues from Cravenhaw. And Cravenhaw and Doom’s Retreat are the only gaps into the Land from Doriendor Corishev.

  “A long time ago, when the southern kingdoms spread north toward the Land—even before the kings set up their capital in Doriendor Corishev, and samadhi Sheol got involved—they hacked down a lot of trees. A hell of a lot of trees. Which ruined the watershed. And ruining the watershed dried out the southlands. The old domain of the kings was becoming the Southron Waste. So they kept pushing north. Naturally they liked conquest. But they also needed arable land.”

  Jeremiah had placed himself so that Linden could not see his tic. He seemed to be keeping an eye on her with his peripheral vision, but he did not look at her directly. Instead he resumed playing with his racecar while Covenant described details that did not interest him—or that he already knew.

  “And then samadhi began spreading his poison,” Covenant muttered. “In this time, Foul still hasn’t shown his face. But a century or two ago, samadhi came west behind the Southron Range. Eventually that brought him to Doriendor Corishev.

  “When he got there, he didn’t actually possess any of the kings. Not even Berek’s King. He didn’t want to risk getting too close to Caerroil Wildwood. But he incited—In fact, he did a shitload of inciting. He encouraged generations of kings to think all their problems would be solved if they could overrun the Land. Because of him, whole armies tried to slash and burn their way through Cravenhaw.