Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant 02 - Fatal Revenant

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  “All right,” she said warily. “Just tell me what to do.”

  “It’s simple, really.” Jeremiah recovered his equanimity quickly. “All you have to do is stand still. And make sure you don’t touch either of us. We’ll do the rest.

  “We’ll be using as little magic as possible, so we don’t need much preparation. And we won’t have to worry about wearing ourselves out. I know four leagues doesn’t sound like much. But if nothing goes wrong, you’ll be amazed how much progress we can make.”

  Covenant kicked at the dirt with the toe of his boot, lifted his palms to the morning breeze, turned his head from side to side as if he were studying the conditions for travel. Then he said brusquely. “Let’s do it. I’m not getting any younger.”

  Obeying gestures from her son, Linden retrieved her bundle, braced the severe comfort of the Staff against her chest. Reflexively she used her free hand to confirm that she still bore the unyielding circle of Covenant’s ring. Then she pulled her robe more tightly around her cloak and moved to stand near Covenant.

  Jeremiah positioned himself at her back: Covenant faced her. Now she seemed to see sparks or glowing coals in the deep background of the Covenant’s gaze. But he did not appear angry. Instead his mien suggested anticipation or fear. His strict features were distorted by a grin like a snarl.

  Slowly he raised his arms until they pointed into the air above Linden’s head. As he did so, he began to radiate heat as if he had eased open the door of a furnace: the conflagration of his true nature. Glancing behind her, she saw that Jeremiah had lifted his arms also. From him, she felt a mounting pressure, warm and solid; a force which would drive her to her knees if it became too strong.

  In some fashion, Covenant and Jeremiah were creating a portal—

  To her right, the Last Hills rose bluff and uncaring, too enwrapped in their slow contemplations to heed beings as brief as Linden and her companions. But on her left, Garroting Deep seemed to glower avidly, hungry for the taste of flesh. The cold sky and the comfortless sun covered her with their disregard.

  Softly she breathed. “I’m trusting you, Jeremiah, honey.”

  She meant, Don’t betray me. Don’t let Covenant betray me. Please.

  Then the divergent forces arching over her head combined and gathered to form a concussion as lurid as lightning, as bleak and disruptive as thunder. In that instant, everything around her ceased to exist—

  —and was instantly re-created as though nothing had occurred. Covenant’s arms, and Jeremiah’s, held no power. The sky and the hills and the trees seemed unaltered; untouchable. The sun had not moved.

  Nevertheless Linden stumbled, disoriented by the unexpected angle of the ground under her feet. Covenant and Jeremiah jumped away to avoid her as she floundered for balance. A second ago, less than a heartbeat, she had been standing on a hillside that sloped downward toward Garroting Deep. Now she found herself on a surface which tilted in the opposite direction.

  She and her companions must have gained the ridge that Jeremiah had suggested: she appeared to be standing on the treeward side of a notch or gouge in one of the granite ribs of the hills. Somehow Covenant and Jeremiah had avoided arriving amid a cluster of shattered rocks nearby. Those jagged shards would surely have caused her to fall.

  A sharp veering sensation unsettled her: the visceral effect of movement without transition. For a moment, she had difficulty remaining on her feet. But the hills here were distinctly themselves; beyond question not the slopes and crags which had risen above her when she had emerged from Bargas Slit. As she concentrated on their uncompromised shapes, she slowly regained her stability.

  Breathing deeply, almost gasping for calm, she panted. “Just like that.”

  She felt vaguely appalled, even though she had known what would happen. As far as she could determine, no harm had been done, either to her surroundings or to any aspect of Law. The mundane physical exertion of movement had simply been replaced by an effort of theurgy. Surely she had no cause for chagrin? Yet she felt unaccountably distressed, as if she had been aided by an act of violence.

  “Just like that,” agreed Covenant. Behind his apparent satisfaction, Linden heard an undercurrent of acid. “It isn’t much. But every little bit helps. And once we reach the mountains”—he gestured toward the northwest—“we won’t have to be so careful. That damn Forestal won’t be able to get at us.”

  His distaste for Garroting Deep was unmistakable. Yet he had chosen to come near the forest—

  —between a rock and a hard place.

  Linden remembered, aching, that Thomas Covenant had viewed the woodland beauty of Andelain with a boundless love. He had treated Caer-Caveral with respect and honor. And she herself was only frightened by the Deep’s clenched anger: she understood it too well, and saw too much loveliness hidden in the heart of the forest, to be repulsed by it.

  She did not comprehend the man who claimed that he was leading her to the Land’s salvation.

  I want to repay some of this pain.

  Yet his sore ribs—like Jeremiah’s battered face—had healed with remarkable celerity. And he must have known that his hurt would be brief. Under the circumstances, he might have considered it trivial. In his previous incarnation, he would certainly have done so. He had allowed Joan to hurt him repeatedly; had sacrificed himself for her—

  The Thomas Covenant who had twice defeated Lord Foul would not have sought to punish Inbull.

  Linden missed her former lover as sorely as she grieved for her son. Nevertheless she was forced to acknowledge that he was gone. There was no portal to that past.

  Four “short hops” later, Linden and her companions had covered fifteen more leagues—according to Jeremiah’s estimates—and she found that her imbalance, her almost metaphysical sense of dislocation, was growing worse. Each succeeding rupture weakened her. More and more, the energy which Covenant and Jeremiah invoked appeared to resemble Lord Foul’s iterated lightning when the Despiser had taken Joan’s life. Linden had seen eyes like fangs among the savage blasts of the storm. Now she saw—or seemed to see—the Despiser’s carious malice in each detonation of theurgy which bore her along the marge of Garroting Deep.

  She may have been hallucinating; imagining nightmares to account for her disorientation and weakness, her loss of perceptual coherence. Nonetheless a sense of crepitation gathered in her nerves like an accumulation of static, primed for a discharge which would shred her flesh.

  She had also seen Lord Foul’s eyes in the bonfire which had maimed Jeremiah—

  Struggling to manage her mounting paresthesia, she begged. “Can we take a break? Something’s wrong. I need—”

  “No!” snapped Covenant. “They’re aware of us now. We have to keep going.”

  The strain in his voice—the strident admixture of exultation and dread—snatched at her attention.

  He was sweating profusely, as if the cost of carrying his many burdens had finally begun to break down his unnatural endurance. The whites of his eyes glistened with incipient panic. His hands shook.

  Wheeling to face her son, Linden saw that he, too, was sweating as though he had run for leagues. Alarm or concentration darkened the muddy hue of his gaze. And his mouth hung open, as slack as she remembered it: he looked like he might start to drool at any moment, lost in his personal dissociation.

  The subliminal mutter of Garroting Deep’s many voices had grown louder. A kind of aural brume filled the forest, ominous and inchoate, confusing Linden’s percipience.

  “What’s happening?” she asked her son urgently. “They’re aware of us? What does that mean?”

  “They’re fighting us.” His chest heaved. “Putting up barriers. We have to push our way through. If we can’t outrun them—”

  “Come on,” Covenant demanded. “They’re going to catch us.”

  Immediately Jeremiah flung up his arms, casting his magic to complete the arch of Covenant’s heat over Linden’s head. Their blast of power blinded her; snuffed
out the stubborn bulk of the hills and the crouching menace of the trees; cast her adrift.

  This time, however, the wrench of movement was not instantaneous. Instead of staggering without transition, flailing to find her balance on a hillside for which her muscles were not prepared, she seemed to hang suspended in a darkness as absolute as extinction. While her heart beat frantically, she heard nothing, saw nothing; felt nothing except her own fear. The tangible world had passed away, leaving her alone in a void like the abyss between the stars.

  Then, distinctly, she heard Covenant rasp, “Hellfire!” Heat struck her like a hand, slapping her back into existence.

  She fell. For one small instant, a tiny sliver of time, she appeared to fall interminably. Then her feet hit the slope of a steep hill, and she tumbled headlong downward.

  She lost her grip on the Staff: her bundle of food vanished in residual midnight. Instinctively she ducked her head, tucked herself into a ball. When she collided with the hard earth, the impact drove the air from her lungs, but she rolled instead of breaking.

  Dirt and rock and sky whirled around her indistinguishably, too swift to be defined. There was no sunlight: she had plunged into shadow. Gloom and stones crowded around her as she rolled. Her companions and the Staff were gone. Covenant and Jeremiah were closed to her, Covenant wanted to repay some of this pain, but she should have been able to discern the presence of the Staff, her Staff, the instrument of Law which she had called into being with love and grief and wild magic.

  An instant later, she felt her opportunity. Kicking out her legs, she caught herself in mid-plummet and stumbled to her feet.

  Her surroundings continued to whirl, dusk and sky and bitter yearning in a vertiginous gyre. She may have splintered bones, torn open flesh: if so, her hurts brought no pain. Shock muffled everything that she might have known about herself.

  Covenant and Jeremiah had disappeared, but she did not stand in shadow. As the spinning of the world slowed, she saw clear sky overhead; saw the sun. Its cold illumination should have reached her. Yet the gloom persisted. She stood near the bottom of a hollow between two outstretched ribs of the Last Hills. To her left, veiled by impossible twilight, lay the threatening wall of the forest. Through the dusk, she saw jutting plinths of stone below her, sharp spurs that strained out of the dirt like doomed fingers clutching for air and open sky; release. Among them, she thought that she recognized the shape of her bundled supplies.

  A few steps farther down the slope, near the jagged stones, she saw the unmistakable length of her Staff. Its clean wood glowed softly in the eldritch twilight.

  But Covenant—Her son—

  “Linden!” Covenant shouted. Jeremiah called. “Mom!”

  She barely heard them. Their voices were wrapped in dusk, muted and unattainable: they seemed to come from some other dimension of reality, a plane beyond her grasp. She would have tried to answer them, but she had no air in her lungs; had forgotten how to breathe.

  Stiff-kneed and lurching, she made her way down into the hollow to reclaim the Staff.

  “Linden!” Covenant may have howled, raging. “Hell and blood!” But she could not be certain that she heard him.

  As soon as her fingers closed on the immaculate surface of the wood, a taste of Law flowed into her, and she regained an aspect of herself. Gasping, she began to suck air fervently into her lungs. Between one heartbeat and the next, she discovered that she had suffered a dozen scrapes and bruises, but had broken nothing. A moment of the Staff’s flame—only a moment—would be enough to ease her battered condition. If she dared to raise power in this preternatural shadow, and could be sure that Jeremiah and Covenant would not suffer for it—

  She restrained herself, however. The comfort of the Staff in her hands was enough to sustain her until she could determine why her son’s voice and Covenant’s reached her as though they occupied some other time and place, a world beyond her grasp.

  The sun shone on the Last Hills and Garroting Deep, but its light did not touch her. It could not illumine the hollow, or the straining stones, or the consequences of her fall.

  “Mom!” Jeremiah called from the far side of the heavens. “Can you hear me?”

  She should have tried to respond. But her throat was full of twilight and trepidation: she seemed to have no words and no voice. Moment by moment, the Staff reawakened her health-sense. She felt intentions in the caliginous air. An impression of purpose and desire swirled about her as though the gloom were mist. She was in the presence of sentience, encompassed by a being or beings as impalpable as thought, and as analystic.

  Puissant beings—They’re going to catch us.

  But her perceptions remained vague, as disquieting as a badly smeared lens: they spurned accuracy. Instead her paresthesia intensified in spite of her grasp on the Staff. She saw the sound of her own hoarse breathing as if it emerged from her mouth in twisted blotches of distress. In the gloom, she heard shapes and precision which her senses were too blunt to identify. The cold was the distant clatter and collision of thunder. Her hurts smelled like bile, tasted like sulfur.

  Confusion filled her sight, muffling her companions’ shouts. Evening crept along her skin like the play of ruinous fingers: it probed her flesh to determine who and what she was. Loud forms twisted and squirmed around her, evanescent as tendrils, dangerous as tentacles; but an eerie delinition prevented her from hearing them clearly.

  Somewhere beyond her, Jeremiah was saying, howling, murmuring, “Covenant, they’ve got her! The Viles! They don’t want us. They want her.”

  The shadow had a voice which she could not hear. They had voices which surpassed her senses, etiolating Jeremiah’s fright, forcing her to mistake the color of her own heartbeat. At the same time, however, she felt crepuscular ropey streamers coalesce into deeper darkness: she saw them speak. They had only one voice, but they were many. They said many things. She saw one of them—or saw several of them one at a time.

  Limned in condensation and grue, the voice announced, Her, as if it had heard Jeremiah. Of course. How should it be otherwise?

  Distinctly she heard tentacles curl and shift; saw them pronounce, The others are perilous. They have power. They exert themselves. And they responded to themselves, Yet hers is as great, and she does not. Within her she holds the devastation of the Earth, yet she permits the others to have their will.

  It is unseemly, the same voice said or answered. It is a mystery. And again, or differently: Our lore does not account for this.

  With the nerves of her skin, Linden felt Covenant raging. “Hellfire, Linden! Give me my ring! Just throw it. I’ll catch it. I can’t protect you without my ring!”

  Viles, she thought dimly. Sensory distortion made a writhen vapor of her mind. She could not think consecutively. Covenant wanted his ring. The beings around her were Viles, the makers of the Demondim: absent in her proper time, but present here. He had always wanted his ring, ever since he had first ridden into Revelstone with Masters and Jeremiah.

  Spectres and ghouls. Tormented spirits.

  Esmer had tried to warn her. Instead of answering her most necessary questions, he had described the history of the Viles and Demondim.

  Her former lover hungered for wild magic: he craved it to repay some of this pain, although he had not said so.

  Fragments of the One Forest’s lost soul. Creatures of miasma, evanescent and dire.

  Do you not know, Esmer had asked her, that the Viles were once a lofty and admirable race?

  It must be extinguished. The voices spoke to themselves, wisps and tendrils of elusive, impermeable darkness, using words which Linden could see but not hear, feel but not smell or taste.

  It does not concern us. In the swirl of shadow, she recognized hebetude, condescension, disdain. It does not interest us.

  New possibilities are coming to life. Old powers are changing.

  It interests us intimately, an image or sensation argued. She is a lover of trees.

  She is. Still she do
es not concern us.

  Deliracy possessed her, a whirl of memory and confusion as lurid as fever, gravid as nightmare. Eidolons spoke so vividly that she winced. I can’t do it without you. At the same time, Esmer continued his remembered impatient peroration. For an age of the Earth, they spurned the heinous evils buried among the roots of Gravin Threndor—

  “Damnation, Linden!” Covenant’s fury crawled down her spine. I can’t help you unless you find me. “Give me my ring!”

  —and even in the time of Berek Lord-Fatherer no ill was known of them.

  Ravers did this, she thought disjointedly. Esmer had told her so. Sounds danced around the desperate fingers of stone. Just be wary of me. Remember that I’m dead. She could not escape the rampant blurring discontinuity in her nerves, the disorder of her mind. The Ravers began cunningly to twist the hearts of the sovereign and isolate Viles.

  Still words effloresced in the hollow. She does. She must be extinguished. Her power must be extinguished.

  With whispers and subtle blandishments, and by slow increments, the Ravers obliquely taught the Viles to loathe their own forms.

  Other shapes and images agreed. We will not survive her presence.

  Their transformation had begun with mistrust and contempt toward the surviving mind of the One Forest, and toward the Forestals.

  Somewhere beyond or beneath perception, Jeremiah replied, “She can’t hear you. They’ve overwhelmed her. She’s lost.”

  Linden, find me.

  Lost, she echoed. Oh, yes. Nothing in her life had equipped her to disentangle such chaos. If she could have lifted her fingers to the ring hanging from its chain around her neck, she might have drawn it over her head and tossed it aside, abdicating its indelible responsibility. But even that effort surpassed her. Her grasp on the Staff of Law was all that preserved her from tentacles of twilight, and she clung to it with both hands.