The Runes of the Earth

  Trembling with her own fury, Linden reached into Stave with her health-sense. Somehow he still lived. If he could be saved, she did not mean to let him die.

  As she studied his wounds, a hush fell over the gathering. The clenched attention of the Ramen turned away from her and the Master. But she did not raise her head. In moments, she was sure that Stave needed saving.

  His body was a mass of bruises and bleeding, but that damage was superficial: his native vitality would heal it. In addition to his shattered clavicle, however, and his dislocated hip, she found a collapsed sinus in one cheek, stress fractures in both femurs, a variety of badly battered internal organs, and at least eight broken ribs.

  One of them had splintered completely, puncturing a lung in several places. She could hear moisture rattle in his troubled breathing. The ground under him seemed to tremble with the difficulty of his respiration.

  She looked up to find only Esmer gazing at her. Liand and the Ramen stared past her toward the far side of the clearing. Wonder and deference filled their faces.

  Linden did not so much as glance at what they saw. The thunder in the dirt left her untouched.

  “You bastard,” she spat at Esmer. “Why didn’t you just kill him? You’ve done everything else.”

  “I have seen what you do not,” he answered ambiguously. The look in his eyes might have been gladness or remorse. “Behold.”

  With one hand, he pointed beyond her to the sound of hooves.

  When she turned her head, she saw two proud horses trot into the clearing as though they had been incarnated from darkness and firelight.

  She had encountered horses aplenty during her life; but she had never seen horses like these.

  They were craggy and extreme, full of the essential substance of the Land, with deep chests and mighty shoulders, and a hot smolder of intelligence in their eyes. Their coats gleamed as if they had been brushed and curried ceaselessly for generations, one a roan stallion, the other a dappled grey mare; and their long manes and tails flew like pennons.

  In the center of their foreheads, white stars blazed like heraldry, emblems of lineage and Earthpower.

  As one, the Ramen bowed low to them: an action as natural and necessary as breathing to the horse-tenders of Ra. Liand gaped openly, transfixed, unable to look away.

  “This is the true challenge of the Ramen,” Esmer explained gruffly. “The Ranyhyn have accepted me.” He sounded both forlorn and proud. “Now they have come to accept you, the Haruchai as well as yourself. And they are precious to me. Their approach stayed my hand. I will not gainsay them.”

  The horses advanced across the clearing until they were mere strides from Linden and Stave. There they halted. She held her breath as they shook their heads and flourished their manes, gazing at her and the Haruchai gravely. The blowing sounds they made may have been greetings.

  Then together they bent their forelegs and bowed their noses to the dirt as if in homage.

  Part Two

  “the only form of innocence”

  1.

  Spent Enmity

  When the Ranyhyn had departed, the Cords bore Stave into one of their open-sided shelters and laid him gently down on a bed of thick grass and bracken near the small cookfire. At Linden’s command, they brought more wood and built up the fire to a sturdy blaze. Shamed that the Ramen had not kept Manethrall Hami’s promises, they would have done more; but Linden sent them away when she was satisfied that Stave had been made as comfortable as possible.

  She needed to be alone with his plight; and with her own.

  Without some extreme intervention, he would die soon. He had begun to hemorrhage around his broken ribs and punctured lung. Even his extraordinary vitality could not ward him from death much longer.

  And the Ramen had no hurtloam. Again they sent out Cords for the healing mud; but to their knowledge the nearest source lay far from the Verge of Wandering.

  Because she was afraid, Linden considered simply borrowing a knife and cutting him open. But she knew better. Even with the sterile resources of a modern operating theater at her disposal, she could not have saved him surgically without transfusions; and she had none to give him. If she used a knife, she would only hasten his death from blood loss.

  And she was in no condition to work on him. She was already exhausted. The burned skin of her face throbbed in spite of the soothing effects of amanibhavam. And she had received too many shocks—

  Yet his life was in her hands. If she did not rise above herself—and do it now—he would die.

  She would have found her fears easier to bear if Stave had not regained consciousness while the Cords settled him in his bed. His eyes were glazed with agony, and he could breathe only in harsh gasps; but he recognized her beside him. Dully he watched her every movement.

  Without his gaze upon her, she might have felt less ashamed of her limitations.

  “Chosen,” he said at last, thinly; a blood-spattered trickle of sound between his lips. “Do not.”

  There was no room for fear in what she had to do. Because she could not be calm, she held her alarm at bay with anger.

  “Shut up,” she told him. “Save your strength. This isn’t up to you.”

  She also feared what he might say to sway her.

  But he persisted. “Chosen, heed me. There are tales of your healing. Do not heal me. I have failed. I am Haruchai. Do not shame me with my own life.”

  If any tears had remained to her, Linden might have wept for him.

  A few Cords lingered outside the shelter, Bhapa, Char, and Pahni among them, no doubt hoping to be of assistance. She caught herself on the verge of yelling at them, ordering them furiously away, so that no one else would hear Stave beg.

  Instead she instructed them to turn their backs. “And don’t let anyone else in here. I need to be alone with this.”

  She did not know how else to bear her own weakness and Stave’s supplication.

  When the Cords had obeyed her, she confronted him as though she meant to strike him where he lay.

  “Don’t talk like that,” she said like an act of violence. “Don’t tell me not to heal you.” Not to at least make the attempt. “You failed long before we came here, but you haven’t used that as an excuse to give up.”

  The Master swallowed blood. “How have I failed?”

  “Well, what would you call it? Anele is just a crazy old man,” whatever else he might be. “Until I came along, the Ramen were the only friends he had, and he didn’t see them very often.” God, she needed to be angry. “But he’s been haunting the mountains above Mithil Stonedown for decades.

  “You’re the Haruchai. As you keep saying. But you couldn’t catch him. Wasn’t that a failure?”

  Stave’s mien gave her no hint of his reaction. He might have felt perplexed or scornful behind his anguish. “He was aided.”

  “By ur-viles, you mean?” she countered. “The ur-viles you didn’t even know existed? That’s another failure. You’ve made yourselves the Masters of the Land. The caretakers—But I’ve only been here for three days, and I’ve already encountered half a dozen things you didn’t know.”

  She had nothing to give her light except the unsteady radiance of the cookfire; nothing to guide her except a numinous discernment which she had lacked for ten long years. And Stave would not last much longer.

  “Listen to me,” she told him grimly. “You didn’t fail to capture Anele because he was aided. You failed because there aren’t enough of you for the job. You’re spread too thin.

  “And you’ve isolated yourselves. Nobody can help you because you won’t even let them know what the dangers are. I understand why you thought that was a good idea. At least I think I do. But you can’t have it both ways. Every choice has consequences. Either you’re the Masters of the Land,” alone and inviolate, beyond compromise, “in which case there simply aren’t enough of you. Or you’re just the Land’s friends, people like the Ramen, in which case you shouldn’t even try to prevent
Earthpower from being misused occasionally.”

  Did he grasp what she meant? She could not tell. His dispassionate suffering seemed to defy comprehension. But that made no difference to her now. She was preaching to herself as much as to him.

  “So you failed,” she assured him more gently. “So what? It isn’t your fault that Esmer beat you. You didn’t lose because there’s something wrong with you. You lost because he’s stronger than you are.” She, too, might fail because she was not strong enough. “It’s the same problem the Bloodguard had with the Illearth Stone.

  “Don’t tell me not to heal you,” she repeated. “You’re wasting your breath. And you still have work to do. Somebody has to tell your people what’s been going on, and I’m sure as hell not going to do it.”

  Riding the thrust of that affirmation, she sent her senses into him like an appeal for understanding.

  Something in her words must have reached him. Instead of clenching his will against her, Stave asked in a growing froth of blood, “What then is your intention? If you will not forewarn the Land—?”

  Her percipience slipped into him with the subtlety of a low breeze, hardly more than a sigh: a soft extension of her essence into his.

  “When I figure that out, I’ll let you know.” At last, the exertion of her health-sense enabled her to regain her physician’s detachment. She was almost calm as she added, “In the meantime, you can help me.” Help her to think; to concentrate unself-consciously. “I don’t understand this grievance the Ramen have against your people. What did the Haruchai do that’s supposed to be so terrible?

  “And don’t tell me they failed. I already know that.”

  “As you wish.” Stave’s voice was a shudder of pain.

  Although she had spent ten years without this discernment, its uses returned to her readily. Because she could see, the pain and damage which she perceived poured into her as though they afflicted her own flesh, her own spirit. But she had learned how to accept such hurts in order to determine their sources and take action against them. The Master’s agony did not daunt her.

  He was silent for so long that she thought he had forgotten her question—or had lost heart. But at last he lifted his voice faintly to her.

  “The Ramen resent that we ride the Ranyhyn, but that is not their grievance. The Ranyhyn choose to be ridden.”

  His words and even his difficulty speaking freed Linden to focus on her task.

  As her senses filtered past his superficial bruises and internal abrasions to his deepest hurts, however, she realized that she could still honor his wishes. Instead of attempting to heal him, she could simply spare him pain while he died. With her health-sense, she could intervene between his consciousness and his wounds—possess him, after a fashion—so that he felt no discomfort as he slipped away.

  If she lacked the courage to do more—and if she were willing to violate his right to bear his own distress—

  For her own sake as much as for his, she rejected the idea. More than ever, she needed to be able to exceed herself.

  Through his pain, Stave breathed words like secrets for her ears alone. “Rather the Ramen do not forgive that the Bloodguard were accepted by the Ranyhyn, and were proved faithless. This you know. When Korik, Sill, and Doar were defeated by the Illearth Stone and Ravers, they vindicated the ire of the Ramen.”

  Linden heard him. On one level, she heard him acutely: his words were as sharp as etch-work. On others, however, she heeded nothing that he said. Her attention flowed in other directions, other dimensions.

  There. When she had reached beyond the symptoms of his dying to their cause, she saw plainly the punctures and lacerations in his lung, the throbbing ooze of his blood. They might have been mapped in her own body. Two badly splintered ribs. Five separate perforations. Three seeping tears.

  In an operating theater, she would have needed half a dozen assistants to help her cope with so much bleeding.

  “Through the defeat of the Bloodguard, however,” Stave sighed, “the fidelity of the Ramen itself is tarnished. They have never ridden the great horses, and yet their pure service has been given to beasts that in turn served willingly men who could not uphold their sworn Vow.”

  With her own nerves, Linden measured the seriousness of his injuries. But it was not enough to see. Percipience alone would only break her heart. She required power; the ability to make a difference.

  While she watched Stave hemorrhage, she groped as if blindly for wild magic, like a woman fumbling behind her to grasp the handle of a door which lay hidden or lost.

  Sweat glinted in firelit beads on his forehead; dripped from his cheeks like the unsteady labor of his pulse. His scar underlined the pain in his eyes.

  “That their service has been diminished the Ramen do not forgive, who have never broken faith.”

  Somewhere among the ramified chambers of herself lay a room full of potential fire, crowded with the implications of Covenant’s ring. Yet it eluded her. When she had time to think, when she went looking for that room consciously, she could not be sure of its location. Her doubting mind had too many qualms. Covenant’s ring did not belong to her: she did not deserve its white flame. If she tried to become the Wildwielder, as the Elohim had said that she must, she might lose every aspect of herself.

  Stave’s voice had fallen until it was barely audible. “Are you answered?”

  “No,” she replied as softly. “The Ramen must know why Korik and the others did what they did.” Certainly Hami’s people respected their own limitations. Otherwise they would not have been content to merely serve the Ranyhyn. “How can they not forgive?”

  Everyone else would forgive her if she failed to save Stave; but she was not sure that she would be able to forgive herself.

  “Because,” he whispered, “they were not present.”

  In the end, her choice was a simple one. She was a physician. Any one of the Haruchai would have given his life for her. And Lord Foul had Jeremiah.

  How else could she earn her own redemption?

  When she had become sure, her hand closed on the handle of the door she sought.

  “How can it be said?” the broken man continued in wisps; faint puffs of life fading between his lips. “You ask too much. Such speech does not suffice. Even in the unspoken tongue of the Haruchai, it transcends—”

  There the difficulties of her task began in earnest.

  “The Ramen cannot comprehend what transpired because only Bloodguard accompanied Lord Hyrim to the slaughter of the Giants.”

  During the collapse of Kevin’s Watch, she had somehow distorted the ineluctable sequences of gravity and time. But if she did such things now, she would burn Stave’s life to ash.

  Still he strove to answer her. “Only Bloodguard witnessed the final murder of the Unhomed while it was yet fresh in cruelty. Only Bloodguard saw the outcome of their terrible despair.”

  Even the small handful of wild magic which she had raised for Sahah’s sake would be too forceful here. The Master needed delicacy from her, precision; an accuracy at once as keen as whetted steel and as gentle as trained fingers. The smallest leak of flame from its secret chamber would be enough. The merest fraction more would be too much.

  If her self-command wavered for a heartbeat—

  Stave was nearing the end of himself. “Only Bloodguard,” he panted weakly, “stood beside Lord Hyrim while Kinslaughterer endeavored to efface every vestige of the Giants from The Grieve.”

  Seeking to tune percipience and wild magic to the same feather-soft pitch, she clung to the arduous sound of Stave’s voice as to a saving anchor; a point of clarity against the tug of her self-doubt.

  Pierced by the touch of flame, he gasped. But he did not stop.

  “The Ramen cannot know how the Bloodguard loved the Giants. They cannot grasp how the hearts of the Bloodguard were rent by what had transpired. Therefore they presume to scorn our fall from faith.”

  The stolid demeanor of his people masked how profoundly
they had been horrified. It hid the depth of their rage.

  The Bloodguard had striven absolutely to succeed, and they had failed. What other conclusion could such men draw from their defeat, except that they were not worthy?

  No wonder the Haruchai had made themselves the Masters of the Land. They sought to ensure that they would never again be found unworthy by an atrocity like the destruction of the Unhomed.

  They had turned their backs on grief—

  In comprehension and empathy, Linden nudged the punctures in Stave’s lungs shut one by one. Then she reached into him with argence in order to bind their edges together.

  “Chosen,” he murmured; his last words to her, “hear me.

  “The judgment of the Haruchai is not so lightly set aside. There will come a reckoning between us.”

  Another man might have meant between the Masters and the Ramen; but she knew that he did not.

  Wild magic was too rough for the task. Inadvertently she hurt him until he nearly screamed behind his locked teeth. Nevertheless she sealed the tissues of his lungs around each wound. Then she closed the pleural rents.

  Extravagantly careful, and still unable to spare him agony, she stitched white fire along the worst of his internal lacerations until they were made whole.

  Finally she bowed her head over her work. Stave had lost consciousness: he lay as still as death. But he breathed more easily now, and no new blood came to his lips.

  When she believed that he would live, she let percipience and power and all the world go.

  What then is your intention?

  If he had asked her that question now, she might have wept.

  Some time later, the sound of voices outside the shelter roused her: soft voices, thick with controlled anger and threats.

  Raising her head, Linden discovered that she must have fallen asleep on her knees beside Stave’s grassy bed. Her arms still rested near him. Dried bits of bracken clung to her cheek, and her folded legs had gone numb under her.