The Runes of the Earth

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  An instant later, gunfire and Lord Foul’s blasts burned all light away, and she fell into the bottomless night.

  Part One

  “chosen for this desecration”

  1.

  “I am content”

  Gunfire seemed to track her down into blackness like a cannonade: each harsh blast drove her deeper. Concussions shocked breath and pulse and pain out of her until only silent cries remained. She had abandoned her son to bloodshed. She tried and tried to shout his name, strove to twist her body so that she might shield him from the rush of death; but she only plunged farther into the dark.

  She had sworn that she would protect Joan with her life. And she had promised that she would allow no harm to touch Jeremiah. This was how she kept her vows.

  She was dying; was already close to death. Lytton’s deputies had granted Roger the outcome he most desired.

  Nevertheless she felt no pain. She knew only the force which had struck her to the stone, and which struck her still, ceaselessly, impelling her always deeper into the abyss of the Despiser’s despair.

  And Jeremiah—

  Blinded by blood, she had not seen him fall. He may not have been hit: the fusillade might conceivably have spared him, when he could not have warded himself. But Lord Foul did not require his death in order to snare him. Linden herself had once been taken alive in Thomas Covenant’s wake. If Roger had not relaxed his grasp on Jeremiah’s wrist—

  God, let it be true that Lord Foul did not require his death!

  Yet the outcome would be the same, whatever the Despiser demanded. She had failed to protect her son, failed utterly. She had not so much as witnessed his fate.

  Barton Lytton had probably survived. And Sandy Eastwall might live still. Prostrate, they had sprawled below the wild gunfire. They had no part in this.

  Nevertheless everything which Linden had ached to cherish and preserve had been lost. She had failed her son, the frail boy with one red racing car clutched in his good hand. No one else needs you the way he does. Dead or alive, he must believe that she had forsaken him.

  Falling, she could only pray that they would not be separated; that by some miracle he would be swept after her as she had once followed Thomas Covenant, rather than being borne away by Roger’s madness. If the Despiser took Jeremiah, claimed him; possessed him—

  The thought went through her like flame through the abandoned tinder of Covenant’s home; and her own fire answered it, as extravagant as lightning. Without transition she became a blaze of passion and argence. She had fallen so far from herself that Covenant’s ring responded. Its heat seemed to demand life from her when her heart had already burst; labored its last. Hot silver knitted desperation into her tissues, her bones, and made them whole. It burned the stigma of Roger’s blood from her face.

  Jeremiah.

  If there had been any justice—any justice in all the world—her anguish would have undone the darkness. Such power should have been stronger than loss and time; should have allowed her to fling herself back to the desolate hollow in the woods, and to the gunfire, so that she might shield her son with her own flesh.

  Did not the Land believe that white gold was the keystone of the Arch of Time? How else had Thomas Covenant defeated the Despiser, if not by sealing Time against him?

  But Covenant was dead. Alone, she contained nothing which would enable her to withstand the loss of her son.

  Still the sound and impact of shots receded, smothered by her measureless fall. Their violence blurred and deepened until it became a low tectonic rumble, the ancient grinding of the world’s bones. She could feel realities shift as she plunged through them, translating her away from the people and commitments to which she had dedicated herself.

  And as she fell, she felt a blow strike her right temple.

  Its force snatched a phosphene flare across the blackness in her eyes. The abyss into which she fell became vivid with consumed comets, bursting suns, scattered stars. She shook her head, trying to dispel them, but they did not fade. Rather they took on coherence, definition: like a cleaned lens, they resolved suddenly into vision.

  She saw him sitting on the edge of the bed in which she lay: Thomas Covenant as she had known him on Haven Farm, gaunt with pain and empathy, his stricken gaze fixed on her. She saw fingers that must have been hers rise to rake their nails along the back of his right hand. Appalled, she watched herself smear her fingers in his blood and lift them to her mouth.

  Her fall had carried her into the abysm of Joan’s memories. With her white gold ring, Joan now wielded her power to rip open the barrier between worlds; summoning—

  Another blow reached Linden. Again she rocked with the impact, and found herself stretched out in a bed in Berenford Memorial, her arms tied to the rails. At the same time, she sat beside herself, wearing a doctor’s white coat and a plain skirt. In scorn, her external self snorted, Of course you can bear it. That’s what you do.

  Compulsory as hallucinations, times and places and identities reeled through her.

  She had a son, a ten-year-old boy. He gazed at her earnestly, absorbing every word, while she held his face between her hands. He goes somewhere, she told him. I know he does. She loved and loathed Roger’s features as though they were his father’s. It’s a powerful place. He matters there. He makes a difference. Everyone makes a difference. Now the face she held was Thomas Covenant’s, the man she had known and loved and betrayed. I have to go there. I have to find that place.

  He met her tormented stare as if he understood her; as if he acquiesced.

  If I fail, she adjured him, you’ll have to take my place.

  His acceptance was another blow.

  Time blurred and ran; and Linden folded to her knees. Even in death, Joan’s pain consumed her. Kneeling, she heard fanatics preach over her like Roger or Thomas Covenant hurling imprecations. You failed him. You broke your vows. You abandoned him when he needed you most.

  The preachers might have been Jeremiah.

  Her knees hurt as if she had dropped to the hard floor from a great height. The figure before her had become Roger again, impossibly tall and cruel. Behind him rose a gleaming brass cross. Within each of its arms hung a bitter eye like a fang suspended in fire. Gothic letters on a banner beyond the cross announced like a shout:

  The COMMUNITY of RETRIBUTION

  You are worthless. Broken. Empty of faith. Without value to God or man or Satan. Unworthy even of damnation.

  Joan! she cried into the grinding silence. Dear God. Is that what they told you?

  You must expiate, her son retorted. Sacrifice. But you are worthless. You have nothing to sacrifice that God or man or Satan would want. The sacrifice must have some value. Otherwise it counts for nothing.

  Is that what they told you?

  Only the man you betrayed can expiate for you.

  Righteous and enraged, Thomas Covenant turned his back on her.

  She was Joan, trapped in Joan’s torment. As Roger and Lord Foul must have intended, she reached out with power and pain to draw others after her. But she was also herself, Linden Avery, and she had felt the touch of Covenant’s ring. Reborn resources strove for definition within her: the health-sense, the spiritual discernment, which she had known in the Land. Tentative and fragile, her former ability to see opened itself to the abyss and denunciation, to the excoriation of soul which tortured Joan—

  —and felt a Raver.

  She knew it instantly, recognized its evil. Its craving for destruction was familiar to her. It called itself turiya: it was known as Herem.

  The bare memory of its hunger hurt.

  It had no face, no hands, no flesh, it was a black soul, the ancient foe and ravager of the great forest that had once thrived in the Land. Its presence was suppuration and horror, the old screaming of trees.

  In Revelstone, one of turiya’s brothers, samadhi Sheol, had touched her. You have been especially chosen for this desecration, it had told her, glad of her terror. You are being f
orged as iron is forged to achieve the ruin of the Earth. Through eyes and ears and touch, you are made to be what the Despiser requires.

  Then samadhi Raver had withdrawn. But that had been enough. Appalled, she had fallen so far into the knowledge of evil that she knew only despair; desired only death. To herself she had appeared as ruined as the wasteland which the Ravers coveted; lost in her own crimes.

  Now a Raver had taken hold of Joan. Perhaps it had lived in her for years. Certainly it filled her now, feeding on her madness, consuming her with its voracious malevolence.

  And it possessed Joan’s ring. Turiya Herem could wield wild magic in the service of the Despiser. Coerced by the Raver, Joan had summoned others after her. Roger. Linden herself.

  And Jeremiah—?

  The woman she had once been would have quailed and fled.

  But that Linden Avery was gone, unmade by Covenant’s love and the Land’s need. So many of the people who had opened their hearts to her had surpassed her: Sunder and Hollian, Pitchwife and the First, Honninscrave and Seadreamer. Covenant himself had gone to glory in the Land’s name; had defeated Lord Foul and passed beyond her. Nevertheless they had all helped her to become who she was now: not the frangible woman who had fled within herself from her own darkness, but rather the healer who had raised wild magic and the Staff of Law against the Sunbane.

  In the abyss between worlds, Thomas Covenant or his son had just told her, Only the man you betrayed can expiate for you. Now he turned from her in contempt.

  She stared after him with conflagration in her eyes.

  She would not accept his denunciation. Joan had betrayed only her own heart. Fear had undermined her until she became too frail to stand: fear for herself, and for her infant son. A stronger woman might have made a different choice. But no one could condemn her for what she had done. No one had the right.

  Joan herself did not have the right.

  Inspired by passion and flame, Linden refused to endure it.

  With fire she dismissed Joan’s self-loathing. With white power she swept her own pain aside. The ring burned between her breasts as she shocked the dark with argence. As if wild magic were words, she shouted a blaze of defiance into the void of Lord Foul’s malice.

  Thomas Covenant—the real Covenant, not the tormentor in Joan’s mind—had taught Linden that no contempt or cruelty or hurt could defeat her if she did not choose to be defeated. The Despiser might assail and savage her as a predator attacked prey, but he could not deprive her of herself. Only her own weaknesses could wreak so much harm.

  That she believed utterly.

  Jolted by her sudden strength, reality veered again: a nauseating reel like the plunge of heavy seas. She seemed to tumble as if she had been snared by breakers until she came down hard on a flash of vision like a shingled beach.

  For the second time in her life, she stood with Covenant and the rest of their companions in the depths of the isle where the One Tree spread its limbs. There Seadreamer suffered and perished; and Vain met salvific harm; and her other companions came near to death. But this time—

  Oh, this time it was not Covenant who raved with white fire, disturbing the Worm of the World’s End in its slumbers, threatening to rouse the destruction of the Earth. Now it was Linden herself. In her hands she held more power than she could comprehend or control; and with it she lashed out in a frenzy of desperation, seeking to reclaim her son, and achieving only cataclysm.

  Unchecked, her needs goaded the Worm to wakefulness. It lifted its vast head, seeking havoc. For a moment as terrible as eternity, it looked into her eyes with recognition.

  No! she cried in protest. No! This was more of Joan’s madness; more of Lord Foul’s malice. But it was not: it was prophecy. She had regained her health-sense and knew the truth.

  If she did not quail and flee, this augury could come to pass. With Covenant’s ring, she might indeed be capable of rousing the Worm.

  Nevertheless she did not falter. Her fury held. She had lost her son, and would dare any devastation to win him back. In her scales, he outweighed the life of worlds. If Lord Foul believed that she could be daunted—

  Abruptly reality veered again, flinging her from vision to vision. For a moment, she tumbled through a chaos of outcomes: moments of outrage and stark evil; instances of slaughter and betrayal, the cruel scything of death. Then she staggered to a halt.

  Now she stood on a bluff overlooking a plain of rich life and ineffable loveliness. The ground below her undulated among hills and woodlands; luxuriant greenswards; streams delicate as crystal, cleansing as sunlight. Here and there, majestic Gilden trees lifted their boughs to the flawless sky, and vast oaks shed beneficent shade. Birds like reified song soared overhead while small animals and deer gamboled alertly among the woods. With her enhanced discernment, Linden beheld the vibrant health of the plain, its apt fecundity and kindliness. She might have been gazing down at Andelain, the essential treasure of the Land, born of its most necessary beauty; the incarnation of everything which she had striven to attain when she had fashioned the new Staff of Law.

  This, too, felt like a form of prophecy.

  As she drank in the gentle grandeur below her, however, a spot of wrongness like a chancre appeared amid the grasses. It was not large—not at first—but its intensity multiplied moment by moment as she studied it in dismay. Soon it seemed as bright as a glimpse into a furnace, incandescent, malefic, and brutally hot. And from it writhed forth a fiery beast like a serpent of magma; an avatar of lava with the insidious, squirming length of a snake and the massive jaws of a kraken. While she watched, appalled, the monster began to devour its surroundings as if earth and grass and trees were the flesh on which it fed.

  And around it other chancres appeared. They, too, gathered intensity until they gave birth to more monsters which also feasted on the plain, consuming its loveliness in horrifying chunks. A handful of the creatures would destroy the entire vista in a matter of hours. But more of them clawed ravening from the earth, and still more, as calamitous as the Sunbane. Soon every blade and leaf of life would be gone. If the beasts were not stopped, they might eat through the world.

  Then her vision fell to darkness like the closing of an eye. And she fell with it, blind and dismayed; full of woe. If this were death, then she could only believe that she was being translated, not to the Land, but to Hell.

  But instead of the shrieks of the damned she heard a voice she knew.

  It was fathomless and resonant, as vast as the abyss: her fall itself might have been speaking. And it brought with it a sweet and cloying reek, a stench like attar, as vile as putrefaction.

  “It is enough,” Lord Foul said softly. “I am content.” His tone wrapped around her caressingly, like the oil of cerements and death. “She will work my will, and I will be freed at last.”

  He may have been speaking to Joan. Or to turiya Herem.

  Then the shock of her power rebounded against her, and she was flung away as if in rejection; as if the abyss itself sought to vomit her out.

  For a moment longer, she could hear the Despiser. As his voice receded, he said, “Tell her that I have her son.”

  She would have wailed then: the pain would have sundered her. Now, however, she tumbled headlong through the tectonic groan of shifting realities; and she could draw no breath with which to cry out. Percipience came to her in scraps and tatters, granting her glimpses of emptiness: the unspeakable beauty of the spaces between the stars. The passion of Covenant’s ring faded from her, quenched by the sheer scale of what might suffer and die.

  Only the loss of her son remained.

  Jeremiah—

  It might be better for him if he had been slain.

  Later she no longer tumbled, although she was unaware that anything had changed. She did not notice the smooth cool stone under her face and chest, or the high, thin touch of open air. Tell her that I have her son. At their fringes, her senses tasted the immense expanse of the sky; but the Despiser had taken
Jeremiah, and nothing else conveyed any meaning.

  No one else needs you the way he does.

  Yet the old stone insisted against her face. Her hands at her sides felt its ancient, flawed strength. The danger of another fatal plunge tugged at her nerves. Along her back the breeze whispered of distant horizons and striding crests of upraised, illimitable rock.

  Where was Thomas Covenant, now that her need for him had grown so vast? She was no match for the Despiser. Without Covenant, she would never win back her son.

  She remembered Sheol’s touch. At its behest, she had fled from consciousness and responsibility. But she was no longer that woman: she could not flee now. Jeremiah needed her. He required her absolutely.

  Covenant was gone. She lacked the strength to stand in his place.

  Nevertheless.

  Finally she noticed that Roger’s blood was gone from her face. It had clogged her nostrils, blinded her eyes: she could still taste its coppery sickness in her mouth. Yet it no longer stained her skin.

  Despite the bullet wound in her chest—the death she could not feel—she lifted her head and drew up her hands to confirm that she had been burned clean.

  When she opened her eyes, she found herself on stone in deep sunlight. Finished granite formed a circle around her, enclosed by a low parapet.

  She was alone.

  Tell her that I have her son.

  Once more she cried Jeremiah’s name. For a moment, the sound echoed back to her, vacant and forlorn under the wide sky. Then it vanished into the sunlight and left no trace.

  2.

  Caesure

  At first Linden could not move. Her cry had taken the last of her strength.

  Haunted by echoes, she folded her arms on the stone and lowered her head to rest.

  She knew where she was. Oh, she knew. Her brief look around had confirmed it. She had been here once before, ten years and a lifetime ago. This stone circle with its parapet was Kevin’s Watch, a platform carved into the pinnacle of a leaning stone spire high above the line of hills which divided the South Plains from the Plains of Ra.