Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant 02 - Fatal Revenant

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  “Hell, no,” Covenant snorted as if he had come to the end of his forbearance. “It confirms what was going to happen anyway. Now the Viles despise Wildwood. They despise Garroting Deep. They’re ready to listen to the Ravers. And nobody else knows they ever fought. We didn’t change anything.”

  He made the statement sound like an accusation.

  A moment later, he and Jeremiah prepared their next arch so that they could move on. As she stepped between them, Linden felt like weeping. But she refused her tears; her intensifying bereavement. They had become useless to her.

  11. Melenkurion Skyweir

  Sickened by disorientation and doubt, Linden Avery arrived with her companions on the broad plateau of Melenkurion Skyweir high above Garroting Deep early in the afternoon of that same day.

  Safe from the Viles, Covenant and Jeremiah moved in longer and longer jumps, carrying their jumble of wood with them. But they continued to respect the threat of Caerroil Wildwood’s power. Instead of crossing over the forest, they followed the line of the Last Hills until they gained the packed snow and ice of the Westron Mountains at the northwestern limit of the Deep. Then they turned toward the south among the crags, devouring distance in instantaneous bursts of twenty or thirty leagues.

  The intervening crests and tors blocked Linden’s first sight of Melenkurion Skyweir until Covenant and Jeremiah paused to rest before opening their final portal. While they recovered from their exertions, however, she was given a brief opportunity to study the mighty peak; see it for what it was.

  The effects of dislocation and the hard cold of the mountains, the air as sharp and pointed as augury, had already left her gasping. Otherwise Melenkurion Skyweir might have taken her breath away.

  Made brilliant by sunshine, it dominated the south. Indeed, it seemed to command the entire range. Although the neighboring peaks and spires—mottled by endless ice and snow, defined by raw granite against the pale cold depth of the sky—were gigantic in themselves, they resembled children beside the towering head of the Skyweir, with its crown and chin raised to the heavens as if in defiance. As it presented its nearly sheer front to the east, it created the impression that it had been frozen in the act of striding massively toward Landsdrop and the Sunbirth Sea, drawing with it like acolytes or escorts all of the other mountains.

  But while its eastern face fell precipitously for fifteen or twenty thousand feet, its other slopes were more gradual. On the north and west, they blended with the lower peaks in scalloped cols and coombs, or in ragged moraines. Those sides held centuries or millennia of impacted ice like glacial fragments; scraps and swaths of ice so old and deep that in sunlight they were more blue than the winter sky.

  Backed by rugged grandeur, the single titan of Melenkurion Skyweir confronted the east and Garroting Deep as though here, at least, if nowhere else in the Land, the Earth’s fundamental rock had risen up to watch over the dark trees.

  Somehow the mountain appeared impervious to doubt or reproach; immune to time.

  The thin, sharp air held no taint, and the angle of the sun had not yet cast the Skyweir’s eastern face into shadow. As a result, Linden could discern the precise contours of the plateau which girdled the tremendous stone. It began among Melenkurion Skyweir’s northern slopes, spread out below the stark eastward cliffs, and disappeared behind the mountain’s bulk toward the south. From her vantage, the plateau resembled a wide altar, a gathering place for humility and worship. The whole mountain and its surrounding rock might have been a fane erected for and sanctified to the august beauty of the world.

  And somewhere deep within that temple lay hidden the spring of EarthBlood, the source of the Power of Command: the Power with which Covenant had promised to end Lord Foul’s malice, and Kastenessen’s: the Power that would enable Linden to redeem her son.

  She would be left behind; alone and lost in this time. Jeremiah would be free at last. But there would be no one to prevent Roger from seeking out his mother’s ring.

  Shivering in the cold—at this elevation, the chill resembled shards of glass—she gazed through her steaming breath toward Melenkurion Skyweir and tried to imagine how she might navigate the complex ramifications of her suspicion and grief.

  The coming crisis would end her life. If other outcomes were possible, she could not see them.

  Her companions were too eager to pause for long. “We should go,” Jeremiah murmured to Covenant. “She lost her supplies back there.” Among the Viles. “She’s hungry and thirsty, and it’s going to get worse. We should try to do this quickly.”

  Covenant nodded at once. “Linden,” he said, peremptory with anticipation, “come on. You can pull yourself together later. We’ll have time to talk soon enough.”

  Neither he nor Jeremiah felt the cold. They were oblivious to the weaknesses which defined her. Yet she seemed to hear real concern in her son’s voice, and so she did not hesitate. After all, he was right. Covenant’s strange powers could warm her, but they did not spare her from hunger and thirst and weariness. She was already shivering. Soon she would lose more of her frayed strength. And searching for the Blood of the Earth might require hours or days.

  Obediently she moved to stand between her companions while Jeremiah and Covenant summoned their eldritch doorway.

  Afterward, as she staggered to regain her balance, she found that her son and her former lover had brought her to the center of Melenkurion Skyweir’s plateau. They were halfway between the towering plunge of the cliffs and the jagged rim of the plateau; at the midpoint of the wide altar. Jeremiah’s collection of torn branches and twigs had landed with a clatter nearby. As always, he and Covenant had stepped away so that she would not touch them inadvertently, either with her hand or with the Staff.

  Starving for stability, Linden lowered herself to her knees, then placed the Staff beside her and braced her hands on the bare stone. The granite here was free of ice and snow: the entire plateau appeared to have been swept clean. She thought that if she extended her health-sense toward the mountain’s depths, she might draw some of its knowledge and permanence into herself. Perhaps she would find a form of courage among Melenkurion Skyweir’s fundamental truths.

  For a moment, she felt only cold through her palms and fingers, through the knees of her stained jeans; cold as irrefragable as the stone, and as unyielding. But then her percipience grew sharper, and she realized that the chill, the reified frost, was not as severe as she had expected it to be. Somewhere far beneath her, beyond the range of her senses, ran a source of warmth.

  The Blood of the Earth: Earthpower in its purest and most absolute incarnation. Its implied presence seemed to throb like a pulse in the veins among the mountain’s roots.

  As she attuned her perceptions to the rock, however, she realized that she was wrong, not about the stone’s comparative warmth, but about its pulse. The beating deep under her hands and knees was not the rhythm of Melenkurion Skyweir’s heart. It was a tremor of strain, the slow tectonic grinding of imponderable pressures so distant that they were barely palpable. Somewhere far beneath the plateau and the immense peak, irresistible forces were rising. Her nerves caught the first dim elusive hints of a mounting cataclysm, a convulsion which would alter everything.

  The sensation reminded her of the damage which she had felt in Kevin’s Watch when she had first arrived in the Land. But the subcutaneous tremors here were not the result of imposed harm or unnatural powers. Rather they were an expression of the Earth’s internal necessities, as natural as the world’s slow respiration, and as potentially destructive as a hurricane, an avalanche, the calving of icebergs.

  Clutching at the Staff, Linden struggled to her feet. When Covenant and Jeremiah turned to look at her, she announced unsteadily. “There’s going to be an earthquake.”

  Covenant nodded. “I know.” His unconcern was plain. “And it’ll be massive. It’ll split the Skyweir from top to bottom. Right where we’re standing, there’ll be a crevice all the way down to the Black River. So
mething like four thousand feet. When he gets here, Damelon is going to call this place Rivenrock. And the mountain will have two crests. The quake will crack it along a seam in the stone. It’ll look like two mountains shoved together.

  “No one in the Land will even know it happened. Except Wildwood, of course—and he won’t care. Once Earthroot fills up, the flow of water will return to normal. He won’t be affected.” Covenant shrugged. “Oh, sure, people are going to feel the quake. Even as far away as Doriendor Corishev. But this place is so remote—No one will know the quake hit here, or what it did to the mountain. When Damelon shows up, he’ll think Melenkurion Skyweir was always split like that.

  “But it won’t happen for years and years. A decade at least. We don’t need to worry about it.”

  “All right.” Linden tested her perceptions and found that she believed him. The almost subliminal vibration in the stone disturbed her health-sense as if the surface under her had become subtly unreliable; but the peak’s heavy intransigence held. It might hold for a long time—

  “That’s a relief,” she admitted. “It makes me nervous.”

  According to the Theomach, Melenkurion Skyweir could be approached safely in this time—or more safely than while High Lord Damelon searched for the mountain’s secrets.

  “But Jeremiah is right,” she went on. “Without supplies,” or the use of the Staff. “I’ll be in real trouble.” She would need Covenant’s aid—or a bonfire—to survive a night exposed to the mountain winds. She was weary; deeply aggrieved. And she had no idea how long a fumbling trek into the bowels of the Skyweir might take. “Can I assume that you know the way to the EarthBlood?”

  Covenant bared his teeth. “I do.” He sounded pleased with himself. “There are two of them. But we won’t use them.”

  Before she could react, he explained, “One is way the hell on the other side of the mountain. The other involves getting down into Garroting Deep and then following the Black River upstream. Which naturally Wildwood won’t let us do. But in any case, both routes are bloody difficult. We could be clambering in the dark for days. And you still wouldn’t have any food”—he shrugged again—“although I’m sure we’ll find water easily enough.”

  Linden held his gaze warily. “So you’re going to transport us?”

  If Jeremiah did not need his wood for campfires and torches, what purpose did it serve?

  Covenant’s grin widened. “Unfortunately, no. That won’t work. The Blood of the Earth is just too damn powerful. It puts out too much interference. Once we get close to it, I’m going to need every ounce of power I can muster just to keep the two of us”—he nodded toward Jeremiah—“from evaporating like steam.

  “And we still have the Elohim to worry about. They don’t approve of what we’re trying to do. You haven’t stopped us yet, and they don’t know why. If they can tell we’re going in, they might lose patience with you. I don’t want to take the chance.”

  Linden studied him. With an effort, she kept her voice low. “Then what are we going to do?”

  Still grinning, Covenant looked at her son. “Tell her, Jeremiah. Why should I have all the fun?”

  Jeremiah ducked his head as if he were embarrassed; but he, too, was grinning. The fever of his tic contradicted his obvious excitement.

  “That’s what all this wood is for. It’s one of the main reasons we had to make the Viles and Wildwood fight each other. So I could get enough branches.

  “I’m going to build a door.” Eagerness seemed to crackle and spatter in his voice. “Like the one in my bedroom that let me visit the Land. Like that one, it won’t look like a door. It’ll be more like a big box. Once we climb inside, and I put the last pieces in place, we’ll disappear here”—his gaze touched Linden’s briefly, then dropped away—“and reappear there. Where we’re going.”

  The muddy hue of his eyes had turned the color of dark loam.

  “And the best part is, the Elohim won’t know what we’re doing. We’ll be invisible. They’ll think we’re just gone.”

  Linden stared at her son as though she had never seen him before.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” Covenant put in. Now his smile looked false; feigned and strangely vulnerable. “If he can do all that, why didn’t he do it days ago? Why didn’t we come straight here from Revelstone? We could have avoided the Theomach completely. And why can’t the Elohim see us? Don’t they know everything? They sure as hell think they do.”

  Linden shook her head, effectively dumbfounded. In one sense, she understood what she heard. The words were simple; within her grasp. But in another, she was completely baffled. Jeremiah might as well have spoken in an alien tongue. He was going to build a door? When he had talked earlier about using his raceway construct as an entrance to the Land, his explanation had had the same effect: it conveyed nothing that she knew how to comprehend.

  Jeremiah? she wanted to ask. Jeremiah—? But she had no language for her question. Her son had remained cruelly unreactive during all of their time together; and yet for years he had been capable—?

  One of the Insequent, the Vizard, had tried to persuade him to build a prison for the Elohim.

  She was so cold—

  “Come on, Linden.” Covenant’s voice seemed to reach her from a great distance; across a gulf of millennia and ambiguous intentions. “It’s going to take him a while to do this. It has to be done exactly right. Let’s leave him to it. We can go for a walk.” He missed a beat, then said. “We need to talk.”

  She hardly heard him. “I would rather stay here,” she murmured. “I want to watch. I could watch him all day.”

  She had spent innumerable hours absorbed in her son’s inexplicable abilities.

  “Actually, I could too,” Covenant said without conviction. “But this is important. We’re only an hour or two away from saving the world. We need to be clear.”

  His tone rather than his statement caught Linden’s attention. His eyes were dull, almost lifeless. The embers which smoldered sporadically in his gaze had been banked with ash; hidden away. His grin had become a coerced grimace.

  Apparently he had chosen to suppress his anger and frustration; his disappointment in her.

  “All right.” She, too, needed to be clear. The time had come for decisions which surpassed her. Tightening her grip on the Staff, she checked to be sure that his ring still hung from its chain around her neck. “Let’s walk.”

  Movement might hold her shivering at bay.

  Covenant gestured toward the rim of the plateau. Keeping a safe distance between them, he accompanied her as she started in that direction.

  But he did not speak. When he had been silent for a few moments, her thoughts reverted to her son, drawn there by the mystery that Jeremiah had become.

  “How does he do it?” she asked; almost pleaded. “Is this more ‘leakage’? Power he gets from being in two places at once? Because time is bleeding?”

  “No, no.” Covenant flapped one hand dismissively. “Making a door like this one—or the one in his bedroom—That’s natural talent. The right shapes can change worlds. They’re like words. He does it all himself. Leakage is when he puts up a barrier. Or when we move from one place or time to another. Then he’s using what spills out while I fold time.”

  Linden nodded as though she understood. Jeremiah’s ability to prevent her from touching him was an acquired magic. He had not been born with it. She wanted to believe that it was not inevitable or necessary; that she would be able to hug him before the end.

  “This talent—” She remembered faery castles, unexplained monuments, wooden toys. Revelstone and Gravin Threndor. “How big is it? How far does it reach? What can he do?”

  Ever since she had first discovered his gift for building, she had prayed that he might construct his own escape from his mental prison.

  Again Covenant grimaced. “I’ll get to that. None of this is as simple as you want it to be.”

  Instead of continuing, however, he fell s
ilent again.

  Gradually they neared the edge of the plateau. Covenant seemed to be waiting for that. He wanted to show her something that could only be seen from the precipice above Garroting Deep. Or he wanted to be sure that he was entirely out of Jeremiah’s earshot. Or he—

  He did not slow as he approached the rim; but Linden held back. Kevin’s Watch had been shattered under her, and she still did not know how she had saved herself and Anele. She feared another fall.

  Still Caerroil Wildwood’s demesne opened before her with every step: an unfurling tapestry of trees, dark with winter and old hate. Hills lay under the forest like the waves of a sea, seething too slowly for her limited senses to descry. Soon she could see the crooked line of the Black River through the woods. True to its name, its waters did not reflect the cold sky or the comfortless sunlight. Rather the river seemed thick with Earthpower and slaughter.

  Covenant had called the Forestal an out-and-out butcher.

  At last, he stopped with his boots on the jagged verge of the plateau. Now it was Linden who kept her distance, from him as well as from the cliff. For a while, he waited for her to join him. Then he turned to face her, sighing quietly.

  “When the water comes out down there”—he indicated the base of the sheer drop behind him—“it’s sort of red. In the right light, it looks like blood. The ichor of the Earth. But Wildwood uses it to wash the death out of Gallows Howe. That’s what turns the river black.”

  Without pausing, he said, “Your kid makes doors. All kinds of doors. Doors from one place to another. Doors through time. Doors between realities. And doors that don’t go anywhere. Prisons. When you walk into them, you never come out. Ever again.”

  Linden gripped the Staff of Law until her knuckles ached; bit down sharply on her numb lip until she felt the pain; said nothing. Her son had such power—

  “I can’t explain how he does it. Talent is always a mystery. But I can tell you a couple of things.

  “First, he has to have the right materials for the door he wants to make. Exactly the right wood or stone or metal or bone or cloth—or racetracks. And they have to be in exactly the right shapes. In theory, he could have made a box or portal to take us straight here from Revelstone just after Damelon arrived.