Nevertheless Covenant’s underlying falseness surpassed her. She could not suffer it.
He feared the Staff of Law. He insisted that any contact with her would unmake the distortion of Time which allowed him-and Jeremiah-to exist in her presence. Yet Berek’s touch, Berek’s awakening strength, had not harmed him. And he showed no fear when he proposed to approach the Land’s purest and most potent source of Earthpower.
He wanted her to believe that she was more fatal to him than Berek Halfhand or the Blood of the Earth.
When he had said to her in dreams, Trust yourself, and, You need the Staff of Law, and, Linden, find me, he had sounded more true to himself, more like the man who had twice redeemed the Land, than he ever did when he spoke in person.
More than once long ago, she had believed that he was wrong; that his actions would lead to loss and doom. More than once, she had tried to prevent him. And he had shown her that he had made the right choice. By the simple force of his courage and love and will, he had forged salvation from the raw materials of disaster.
But he had done so without imposing his desires on her. Nor had he ever-not once-suggested that she was responsible for his dilemmas.
Do you not fear that I will reveal you?
Therefore she did not hesitate. Carefully neutral, and deliberately dishonest, she replied. “We’re clear. Jeremiah will take us to the EarthBlood.” She was astonished that her voice did not tremble. Yet it remained steady, as if she were stronger than the stone of Rivenrock. “You’ll drink it and use the Power of Command. After that, you’ll disappear,” undone by the scale of the powers which he had released. “and I’ll take my turn so that I can save Jeremiah.”
She had made her choice. Nevertheless she prayed that she was wrong; that she would be given a reason to change her mind; that Covenant would do or say something to account for his lies-or perhaps merely to show that he cared about her fate. The man whom she remembered would not have been content to abandon her in the depths of Melenkurion Skyweir.
But this Covenant seemed to have no room in his heart for her. Lifting his head, he let her see the flicker of embers in his eyes as he said. “Good.”
With that one word, he sealed her decision.
Beware the halfhand.
When they returned to the centre of the plateau, Linden found her son constructing what appeared to be a crude cage. Around a clear space large enough for at least three people to stand without touching each other, he stacked crooked branches to form walls. Some of the limbs looked so heavy that he must have had difficulty lifting them: others seemed too slight and brittle to support the weight above them. And they gave the impression that they were precariously balanced, almost haphazardly poised on top of each other. Yet he worked steadily, without faltering or hesitation. Guided by an instinct beyond her comprehension, he used his stolen boughs and twigs as if they were Tinker toys or pieces of an Erector set, and all of his movements were certain. Even his maimed hand never fumbled.
With unconvincing nonchalance, Covenant asked, “How’s it going, Jeremiah?” but the boy did not answer. His concentration was as complete as it had ever been in Linden’s living room. His eyes had resumed the muddy hue with which she was familiar-the colour that she had learned to love-and he seemed lost in his task; reclaimed by dissociation.
Already he had raised the walls of his construct to the height of Linden’s chest. When she walked around it in a vain attempt to understand it, she saw that he had left a gap in the side toward Melenkurion Skyweir’s cliffs. Once we climb inside- For a moment, she wondered whether the opening would be too small for her. But he knew what he was doing. If she turned sideways, and handled the Staff carefully-
Without apparent effort, Jeremiah picked up a log which he should have needed help to lift and put it in position, propping its ends atop branches that were obviously too unstable to hold its weight. Yet the structure did not topple: it hardly wobbled. Then it seemed to become visibly sturdier.
As he began to devise a roof for his edifice, Linden felt faint emanations of power from the construct. And they grew stronger with every added branch. Somehow the shapes and positions and intersections of his materials evoked a form of theurgy from the dead wood.
His magic did not smell or taste familiar. Certainly it did not resemble any manifestation of the Earth’s essential vitality that she had encountered before. Nor did it remind her of the darkness of the Viles, or the malign vitriol of the Demondim. It did not imitate the illimitable liquid possibilities of the Elohim, or Esmer’s storm-charged potency, or the dangerous eagerness of wild magic. Yet she discerned no wrongness in the energies of the construct; no violation of Law.
Linden’s son had brought into the Land a form of puissance entirely his own.
When he had finished bracing and balancing dead limbs to fashion a roof, the entire construct seemed to thrum with constrained readiness. At the same time, it looked as solid and irrefusable as the rock of its floor. And on a level too visceral for language, it called to Linden. Although the wood was dead, it possessed-or Jeremiah had given it-a palpable intention, a will to be used. In spite of her rapt surprise and her many fears, she wanted to enter the portal immediately.
But this was Jeremiah’s magic, not hers. She needed his instructions or permission: she owed him that. Out of respect for his talent, his accomplishment, she waited until he stepped back from his task and looked around, first at Covenant, then at her.
“Good,” Covenant pronounced with obvious approval. “That should do it. Looks like we’re ready.”
Linden’s reaction was stronger. When Jeremiah met her gaze, blinking as though he had been asleep, she allowed herself a moment of simple humanity. “Oh, Jeremiah, honey,” she breathed. “My God. You said that you could do this, but I had no idea-I didn’t really understand. This is the most wonderful-”
Her throat closed. Under other circumstances, her eyes would have filled with tears. But there was no room for weeping or grief in what she meant to do.
His tic intensified, signalling until he could hardly open his left eye. “I’m glad you like it,” he said bashfully. “I could do a lot more, if I had the right things to work with.”
Then he faced Covenant again. “We should go. You’ve been under too much strain for a long time.”
Covenant grinned fiercely. “I’m ready. If I get any readier, I’m going to rupture something.”
He must have believed that he had persuaded Linden-
“Then, Mom-” Jeremiah kept his face turned away from her. You go first. Be careful with the Staff. It won’t fit. You’ll have to poke it through a gap. Once you’re inside, get down on your hands and knees at the back. Brace yourself. Well be in there with you. When the ground shifts, you might touch one of us. Or the Staff might. We won’t have room to dodge.”
“All right,” she murmured. “I understand.”
She approached the opening slowly, searching for the best way to enter. She did not fear treachery here. It would serve no purpose. But she had to be sure that she did not dislodge any detail of Jeremiah’s design.
At last, reluctantly, she placed her Staff near the opening. Without it, she turned sideways, trusting percipience to guide her as she hunched down and stepped warily into the structure.
Inside the cage, she grasped the Staff by one end and pulled it after her. Near a corner of the back wall, Jeremiah had left a space between the branches and Rivenrock’s granite. As she drew the Staff inward, she slid one of its heels through that space. With elaborate care, she positioned the Staff so that it lay on stone near the wall without touching any of the deadwood. Then she knelt over it, planting her hands and knees so that she could simply crumple and lie flat if she lost her balance-and so that she could grab the Staff quickly if she needed it.
At once, the cold of the rock began to soak into her like water. Aching spread from her palms and fingers toward her wrists: shivers accumulated in her chest like the mountain’s impending earthquak
e.
The precise emanations of the construct did not waver or change. Although they had called to her, they did not react to her presence. The thoughtless intention humming in the wood was not yet satisfied. Or it had not been completed-
As soon as she was in position, Covenant followed, moving brusquely as if he were confident that he would not disturb Jeremiah’s theurgy. Unlike Linden, however, he did not kneel or sit down. Instead he stood crouching with his hands braced on his thighs for support.
He had placed himself as far from Linden as he could without obstructing Jeremiah. His eyes watched the boy: she could not see them.
I yell because I hurt. Perhaps he understood Kastenessen. Everything he does is just another way of screaming.
And when that doesn’t work-
Yet Covenant did not give the impression that he was in pain. He was closed to her health-sense; but her ordinary perceptions had been whetted by years of training. She saw nothing to confirm his claims of distress and exertion.
For a moment after Covenant had entered the crooked box, Jeremiah remained outside to gather up the last twigs and small branches. Then he, too, slipped through the opening without hesitation, sure of his relationship with his construct.
“Get ready, Linden.” Covenant’s voice was husky with anticipation. He sounded like a man on the verge of a defining triumph. “It won’t be long now.”
And when that doesn’t work, he maims-
Carefully Jeremiah fitted his larger pieces of deadwood across the gap, set them in position to complete his portal. As he did so, the power constrained within the construct increased again. Its vibrations grew more urgent. The cage still seemed stable, inert; petrified in place. It made no audible sound. Nonetheless its thrumming affected Linden’s nerves as if it might shake itself apart at any moment.
When he had adjusted the final branches, he began to balance his twigs among them apparently at random. The mute call of the construct became a cavernous growl. She felt it in the base of her throat, the centre of her chest.
“Fuck the Theomach,” Covenant muttered through his teeth. “Fuck the Elohim. Fuck them all.”
Then Jeremiah was finished. Instantly Melenkurion Skyweir and Rivenrock, the sunlight and the wide sky, disappeared as though they had been wiped from the face of the world. Linden and all of her choices were plunged into absolute darkness.
She felt the stone under her slip and tilt. She started to drop down, lie flat: then she caught herself. The tilt was slight; so slight that the Staff did not move. Braced, she was able to keep her balance while her senses reeled, scrambling to accommodate realities which had been profoundly altered.
The rock under her fingers was wet. Dampness filled the air: already a spray as fine as mist moistened her cheeks, her hands. She felt inestimable masses crowding around her, basalt and obsidian, schist and granite on all sides; league after league of the Land’s most ancient stone.
Jeremiah had transported her into the depths of the mountain.
The surface on which she knelt had been worn smooth by eons of water. Yet it was warm rather than cold; palpably heated by the energies within the Skyweir. The droplets on her face felt like sweat.
The imminent tremors which had disturbed her on the plateau were stronger here. Underground, she was closer to the pressures which would one day split Melenkurion Skyweir to its foundations: But that upheaval would not happen now. More force would be required to bring about the inevitable crisis.
Those sensations were small things, however; effectively trivial. The unexplained moisture in the air and the nearly audible groaning among the mountain’s roots were dwarfed as soon as she recognised them, swept away like the plateau and the open heavens by raw power.
She was surrounded by Earthpower, immersed in it. Its primeval might seemed as immense as the Skyweir itself, and as unanswerable. By comparison, the healing potency of Glimmermere and the mind-blending waters of the horserite tarn were minor instances of the Earth’s true life, and everything that Linden had done since she had returned to the Land paled into insignificance. Here was the uncompromised fount of the Land’s vitality and loveliness. If it had not been natural and clean, as necessary as sunlight to every aspect of the living world, its simple proximity would have undone her.
And yet-
As soon as she recognised the concentrated presence of Earthpower, she realised that she had not yet reached its source. The vast strength flowing around her had been attenuated by other waters. The spray that beaded on her forehead, trickled into her eyes, ran down her cheeks, arose from less eldritch springs. They were rich with minerals, squeezed from the mountain gutrock to nourish the world. If she had submerged herself in them, they might have washed the weariness from her abused flesh. But they were not the Blood of the Earth.
Now she shivered, not because she was cold, but because she was afraid. The crux of her intentions was near, and she might fail.
“Jeremiah?” she croaked. “Honey? Covenant?” But no sound answered her. Silence entombed the space around her. Earthpower stilled the spray and the stone and the damp air.
Panic clutched at her chest. She jerked up her head, closed her fingers around the Staff. Then she stopped.
The wood of the construct had begun to shine. Or perhaps it had been shining all along, and her senses had failed to register the truth. Every bit of deadwood from the smallest twig to the heaviest bough emitted a murky phosphorescence. Each detail of the cage was limned in nacre, defined by moonlight. Yet the glow shed no illumination. She could not see the stone on which she knelt, or the Staff clutched in her hand. The portal’s luminescence referred only to itself.
Nevertheless the white outlines enabled her to discern the black silhouettes of her companions. Covenant still crouched in one corner of the box. Jeremiah remained near the place where he had sealed his construct.
Linden’s pulse drummed in her ears. Around her, the lightless phosphorescence of the wood intensified. Covenant and Jeremiah sank deeper into darkness as the nacre mounted. Briefly the cage resembled a contorted meshwork woven of sterile wild magic, affectless, its purpose exhausted.
A heartbeat later, the entire construct flared soundlessly and vanished as every scrap and splinter of deadwood was consumed by the aftereffects of Jeremiah’s theurgy.
She expected unilluminable midnight. Instead, however, a warm reddish glow opened around her as if the last deflagration of Jeremiah’s door had set fire to her surroundings.
The light was not bright enough to hurt her eyes. She blinked rapidly, not because she had been dazzled, but because the sudden disappearance of the box exposed her to the full impact of Earthpower. Ineffable puissance stung her eyes and nose: tears joined the spray on her cheeks as if she were weeping. Through the blur, she saw Covenant stand upright, arch his back as if he had been crouching for hours. She saw her son look at Covenant and grin like the blade of a scimitar.
Then her nerves began to adjust. Slowly her vision cleared.
She and her companions were on a stone shelf at the edge of a stream nearly broad enough to be called a river. Jeremiah’s construct had brought them to a cavern as high and wide as the forehall of Revelstone. The arching rock was crude, unfashioned: clearly the cavern was a natural formation. But all of its facets had been worn smooth by millennia of spray and Earthpower.
And they radiated a ruddy illumination that filled the cave. The particular hue of the glow-soft crimson with a fulvous undertone-made the rushing current look black and dangerous, more like ichor than water. The stone seemed to contemplate lava, imagine magma. It remained gently warm, stubbornly solid. Nevertheless it implied the possibility that it might one day flow and burn.
Linden had seen illumination like this before, in the Wightwarrens under Mount Thunder. Covenant had called it “rocklight,” and it was inherent to certain combinations of stone and Earthpower. It had not been caused by Jeremiah’s theurgy. Instead his portal had temporarily blinded her to the lambent stone,
the tumbling stream. Spray and warmth and Earthpower had entered through the gaps among the branches: light had not.
In spite of the water’s speed and turbulence, it was utterly silent. It raced along its course without the slightest gurgle or slap. She might have believed that she had been stricken deaf; that the concentration of Earthpower was too acute for her ears. But then she heard Covenant speak.
“Good,” he announced for the third time. “We’re almost there.”
Only the water had been silenced by the weight of Earthpower.
Involuntarily Linden’s gaze followed them current as it spilled into a crevice at the end of the cavern. But when she turned her head in the other direction, she felt a rush of astonishment. The source of the stream-and the fine spray-was a high waterfall that spewed from the cave’s ceiling and pounded in turmoil down onto a pile of slick stones and boulders at the head of the watercourse. Every plume and spatter of the torrent caught the fiery light in a profuse scattering of reflections: the waterfall resembled a downpour of rubies and carbuncles, incarnadine gemstones; profligate instances of Earthpower. Yet the towering spectacle was entirely soundless. The bedizened tumult of spume and collision had no voice.
“How-?” Linden breathed the question aloud simply to confirm that she could still hear. “How is it possible’?”
She did not expect an answer. But Covenant muttered, “Beats the hell out of me. I’ve never understood it. There’s probably just too much Earthpower here for our senses to handle.”
Like the waterfall, the spray on his face sparkled redly. His features were webbed with droplets of light and eagerness.
“That’s just water,” he said, dismissing the lit implications of the falls. “When it finds its way out of the mountain, it’ll be the Black River. But the Blood of the Earth comes in here. It leaks out through those rocks.” He indicated the foot of the waterfall. “That’s what causes all this rocklight. Earthpower has soaked into the stone. But it’s too thin for what we need. We have to get to the source.”
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