The Last Dark

  “Hear me, treacher!” the mad Elohim howled. “I am more than you deem! Yon puerile fane cannot compel me! Still am I Kastenessen! Still my pain suffices to destroy you!”

  Raving, he stoked his lethal energies, Earthpower and magma, Elohim and skurj, until they looked fierce enough to consume every life that had ever walked the plain. They were far more than he needed them to be. They would level Jeremiah’s crude edifice as if it had no substance and no meaning.

  Infelice had been appalled earlier. Now, strangely, she was calm. She did not answer Kastenessen. Instead she remarked to Rime Coldspray, “You think ill of us, Giant, and you have cause. But we are not as dark as you deem. For this also we laid our geas upon your kinsman. For this also he acquired his blade. Failing one purpose, he has served another.

  “He has not redeemed us, but he has weakened our lost brother. Now comes one who may achieve our salvation, however briefly. We cannot ask more of any who oppose the Worm.

  “You will forgive your kinsman’s passing,” she added sadly. “Alive, he would not lightly bear the recall of his deeds.”

  Then the bedizened Elohim faced Kastenessen across the gulf that separated their thoughts and desires, hers and his.

  “I have heard you, doomed one.” She did not raise her voice, yet it rang out, clarion and clear. “Now you will hear me. Cease your striving. Enter among your people. Permit your hurt to be assuaged. We have dealt cruelly with you, but we are also kind. While life endures to us, we will provide a surcease from all that you have suffered.”

  She may have been telling the truth.

  Now comes one—

  But Kastenessen had spent long ages in his Durance. He had made choices which exacerbated his fury. Infelice’s appeal could not reach him. For him, it may have been the final affront.

  He gathered flames until they burst from his eyes and his mouth, from every limb and line of his towering form. He was becoming a holocaust, devastation personified: a bonfire high and hot enough to ravage the plain. His reply was one word:

  “Never!”

  Yet he was not given time to release his accumulated hate.

  From the northeast, a burst of extravagant argent opened the twilight. It cast back the darkness, dismissed the sunless gloom. It was as bright as Kastenessen, and as complex, but immeasurably cleaner. And it was brief, little more than a blink. Nevertheless it was long enough.

  Out of it came riding Thomas Covenant and Branl Haruchai of the Humbled. Covenant held Loric’s krill.

  The shock of their arrival snatched Kastenessen away from his victims.

  Covenant rode a shovel-headed horse as ungainly and muscular as a mule. Branl was mounted on a Ranyhyn that Jeremiah had never seen before. And they were in a desperate hurry. Froth snorted from the nostrils of Covenant’s horse, the muzzle of Branl’s palomino stallion. Sweat reflected brimstone on their coats. They looked like they had galloped for leagues or days. Covenant lurched in his seat as if he were falling.

  As soon as his mount’s hooves struck the dirt, he pitched from his saddle. But he did not sprawl. Staggering like a holed ship in a storm, he managed to stay on his feet. Awkward and urgent, he confronted Kastenessen as if he had forgotten that the Elohim could reduce his bones to ash.

  In his maimed hands, the gem of the krill shone like a kept promise in an abandoned world.

  “You—!” Kastenessen began: a strangled howl. Rage clenched his throat, choked off his protest.

  “Try me,” Covenant panted as if he were on the verge of prostration. “Do your worst.” He looked too weak to withstand a slap. Streaked by conflicting illuminations, his face had the pallor of a wasting disease. Still he was Thomas Covenant. He did not falter. “See what happens.

  “I killed my ex-wife. I helped destroy a Raver. And I’ve seen the Worm of the World’s End. I am done with restraint!” His teeth gnashed. “I used to care how much you’ve suffered. I don’t anymore. If you think you can beat me, go ahead. I’m wild magic, you crazy bastard. I’ll cut you apart where you stand.”

  Jeremiah stared and stared, and could not name his astonishment, when Kastenessen flinched—

  —and took an alarmed step backward.

  Covenant advanced, holding up the krill. It blazed like havoc, unmitigated and unanswerable. Its argent covered him with majesty. The silver of his hair resembled a crown.

  Branl came behind him, but did not intrude.

  Kastenessen retreated another step, and another. Another. The passion in Covenant’s eyes drove him. He must have realized that he was being forced toward Infelice and the fane; but he did not stop. Perhaps he could not. Perhaps he saw something in Covenant, or in Loric’s numinous dagger, that cowed him.

  With every step, he dwindled. Retreating, he became smaller. Lava seemed to leak out of him and fade, denatured like water by his own thwarted heat.

  Covenant stumbled and wavered, and kept coming. Kastenessen shrank away from him.

  Giants let him pass. They watched as if they were as stricken as Jeremiah; as transfixed.

  Then Infelice spoke Kastenessen’s name like a command, and Kastenessen turned from Covenant to face her.

  Terror and loathing contorted his features. He conveyed the impression that he wanted to scream and could not because he feared that he might sob. Through his teeth, he spat words like fragments of torment.

  “You have earned my abhorrence.”

  Infelice’s calm had become irrefusable. Placid as Glimmermere, she answered, “We have. We will not ask you to set it aside. We ask only that you allow us to soothe your pain.”

  Her response appeared to horrify him. “It is what I am.”

  “It is not,” she countered, undismayed. “When it is gone, you will remember that you and you alone among the Elohim have both loved and been loved.”

  To that assertion, he had no reply.

  She did not repeat her invitation. Instead she reached out one hand to clasp his severed wrist. With chiming and mercy, she stanched his bleeding. If the pollution of the skurj within him caused her any hurt, she accepted it.

  His eyes bled anguish. He made no attempt to pull away.

  Briefly Infelice glanced at the Giants, at the Ironhand. “Be warned,” she told them. “Moksha Jehannum now rules the skurj. He will wield them with cunning and malice. And do not forget that the Chosen-son is precious to a-Jeroth.”

  Then she surrendered at last to the imperative of Jeremiah’s construct. Drawing Kastenessen with her, she entered the fane. In an instant, they were gone as if they had stepped out of the world altogether.

  “Damnation,” Covenant gasped. “I wasn’t sure I could do that.”

  Lowering his arms as if he had been beaten, he tried to approach the Swordmainnir. But his legs failed, and he dropped to his knees.

  Overhead Kevin’s Dirt had already begun to dissipate. If more stars perished, they did so beyond the horizons. Jeremiah did not see them die.

  10.

  But While I Can

  As if they were each entirely alone, Linden Avery and Manethrall Mahrtiir rode through hell to save or damn the Earth.

  They did not exist for each other. They were mounted on Ranyhyn that did not exist. Immersed in a cyclone of rent instants, they were consumed by the kind of hiving that drove men and women mad. Every nerve was stung beyond endurance, assailed by bitter particles of reality. At the same time, every perception had become white ice, gelid as the gulfs between the stars. Linden and her companion inhabited a frozen wilderland eternally unrelieved in all directions. They had entered a realm in which excruciation defined them. It was all they knew because it was all that they had ever known. It was all that they would ever know. One moment did not lead to the next, and so there was nothing to see or do or understand.

  In that perfection of agony, Linden may once have imagined that she and Mahrtiir would be defended by experience. They had endured caesures twice before, and had survived. Surely they would be sustained by the knowledge that what they w
ere trying to do was possible? But she was wrong. Memory was meaningless in a place that contained all time and none simultaneously. One instant, this instant, was the whole truth of who and what they were.

  Yet it was not the whole truth of their plight. The caesure imposed other dimensions of torment as well, other forms of futility. She had asked the Ranyhyn to take her and Mahrtiir backward in time, against the current of the Fall’s wild rush; and that effort had consequences. While hornets burrowed into her flesh, and she occupied a bitter wasteland as if it were the summation of all her needs and desires, she also floated inside herself like a spectator, helpless amid the chaos, watching her own desecration as if she were dissociated from it.

  Days and days ago, she had once hung suspended like this inside Joan’s mind, observing ruin through Joan’s eyes because she had entered a caesure of Joan’s making. But now Linden was the cause of her own suffering. While other tortures failed to tear her apart only because their duration had no meaning, she also bore witness to herself.

  She watched the Linden Avery who had always been inadequate to what her life required of her. The Linden who had allowed herself to be misled by Roger Covenant and the croyel. The Linden who had defied every Law by resurrecting Thomas Covenant, compelled by rage—and had nonetheless failed to resurrect him whole. The Linden who had been consumed by She Who Must Not Be Named, and had not sufficed to raise her precious son from his graves.

  The Linden Avery who had roused the Worm of the World’s End.

  But there was more. Observing, she was able to recall things which the storm of time denied.

  There is no doom so black or deep that courage and clear sight may not find another truth beyond it.

  Covenant had told her that. In the aspect of her anguish that resembled a shadow cast by her own flawed self, she yearned to believe him.

  Trust yourself.

  Oh, she ached for the ability to believe. But he had also said, Don’t touch me, as if he feared that her love would corrupt some essential part of him. She did not know how to trust herself. She was the daughter of her parents, a mother and father who had feared every hurt of living, and had raised her for death. That knowledge endured in her bones. A Raver had confirmed it. Unforgotten and unredeemed, it ruled her even now, in spite of Covenant and Jeremiah and the Land.

  In your present state, Chosen, Desecration lies ahead of you. It does not crowd at your back.

  It was here. Was it not?

  But because she was watching herself as if she were someone else, she was able to recognize that there were other ways to think. Her many friends had been trying to teach her that lesson ever since Liand had first introduced himself in Mithil Stonedown. By their devotion, they had assured her that she did not need to judge herself as if she were defined by her sins. In spite of her concealments and dishonesties, her fury contemptuous of consequence, she was not alone.

  If courage and clear sight exceeded her, they did not surpass her companions. From the first, she had been supported by people whose hearts were bigger than hers; by loyalties more unselfish than hers. Every essential step along the path, Stave had assured Infelice, has been taken by the natural inhabitants of the Earth. Linden’s friends had urged trust until even she had heard them.

  Trapped in the savagery of the caesure, she found that desperation was indistinguishable from faith.

  Attempts must be made—

  Hyn had carried her willingly into the Fall. Mahrtiir on Narunal had accompanied her willingly. She could believe in them.

  —even when there can be no hope.

  And she had done some things right. Witnessing herself with the detachment of a spectator, she could acknowledge those deeds. She had fought her way through the machinations of Roger and the croyel. She had provided for her son’s rescue from the croyel’s covert in the Lost Deep. And when every other action had been denied to her, she had given Jeremiah his racecar: the last piece of the portal which had enabled him to step out of his prison.

  In those moments, no one else could have taken her place. To that extent, Anele had told the truth about her, as he had about so many things. The world will not see her like again.

  And there was more.

  Nothing ameliorated the extravagant burrow and sting of dismembered moments. Nothing eased the cruelty of the frigid wasteland which would arise from Desecrations like hers. Nothing could. Nevertheless she still held Covenant’s wedding band clasped in her hands. Silver fire still shone from the metal even though she was not a rightful wielder of white gold. It was as vivid to her as Covenant himself. It could be an anchor for her foundering spirit.

  Then she was no longer alone. She had always and never been alone. Manethrall Mahrtiir was at her side, holding the Staff of Law for her and looking ahead as if he had nothing to fear; as if he had finally identified the import of his life.

  And she was seated on Hyn’s back, as she had always been. Narunal was at her side. The horses were not moving. Movement required causality: it depended on sequence. Yet they ran. Stride for stride, dappled Hyn matched Narunal’s strength, Narunal’s certainty, as the palomino stallion raced from nowhere to nowhere across the white wilderness.

  In spite of the caesure’s excoriation, Linden clung to Covenant’s ring and endured.

  She did not have to wait long. She had been waiting forever, and did not have to wait at all. This moment did not move on to the next because it could not, or because there was no next. Nevertheless the hard circle between her hands flared suddenly; and Hyn carried her out of chaos into sunshine under a summer sky.

  Sunshine. A slow hillside clad in brittle grey-green grass as thick as bracken. A summer sky as lenitive as hurtloam.

  Without transition, Linden was released.

  The shock of change made her muscles spasm, made the world reel. Her stomach hurt as if she needed to spend hours puking. Blots of black confusion wheeled around her as though she were under assault by crows or vultures. The continuity of her personal world had been severed from itself. Unable to determine her position in time and space, she tumbled from Hyn’s back, landed hard on the grass.

  For a moment, she could not breathe; could not think. While her nerves floundered, she clung to the kind earth and wrestled with her impulse to vomit. She had arrived somewhere. Some when. Hyn had brought her here. She smelled summer in the air, felt an insistence on life in the stiff grass in spite of a prolonged paucity of rain. Straining to inhale, she caught a whiff of distant desiccation, as if she had arrived too close to a desert. The sky held too much dust. She had expected Andelain and lushness. She was unprepared for this baked hillside, this heat, this—

  Something had gone wrong.

  “Ringthane,” Mahrtiir croaked as if he were retching. “Release the white gold. You must. Accept your Staff.”

  She heard him, but the words did not make sense. He sounded like an ur-vile, barking incomprehensibly. Something had gone wrong. The world was wrong: the grass, the sky, the sunshine. Only the writhing ruin of the Fall as it drifted away felt familiar. Narunal trumpeted a warning that she did not know how to interpret. Alarm fretted Hyn’s answering whinny.

  “Chosen!” insisted the Manethrall. “Linden Avery! Your Staff. You must quench the caesure! If it enters among the trees, it will wreak harm which no Forestal will pardon. We will not be heeded if you do not first spare the forest!”

  Linden recognized a few sounds. The sigh of an arid breeze. The consternation of birds somewhere in the distance. A few words.

  When she remembered to let go of Covenant’s ring, she began to breathe again.

  Mahrtiir stumbled to her side. Roughly he rolled her onto her back. “Ringthane!” Crouched against a glare of sunlight, he dropped the Staff of Law onto her chest. Then he fumbled at the dried remains of his garland, pinched off one of the last nubs of an amanibhavam bloom. Scrubbing the nub between his palms to powder it, he slapped one hand to his nose, clamped the other over Linden’s nose and mouth.

  To
o many sensations. Amanibhavam stung her sinuses as if she had inhaled acid. She had no time to notice that it dispelled her nausea. The sunshine wore a faint patina of dust. Shadows blurred Mahrtiir’s visage.

  Then Earthpower flowed into her from the black shaft of the Staff; and she thought, Trees? A Forestal?

  Oh, God.

  You must quench the caesure!

  Caesures destroyed stone. They would tear any forest to shreds. Even a forest defended by a Forestal—

  Where was she?

  Mahrtiir knew Andelain. Surely he would have called that woodland by name?

  Reflexively she clutched the Staff. Then she heaved herself into a sitting position; staggered to her feet.

  The Fall was already thirty paces away, forty. And it was big, as virulent as a tornado; a rip in the fabric of reality. Seething, it lurched toward a scatter of trees: Gilden, ash, sycamores, thirsty willows. They stood alone and in loose copses, punctuating the browning grass like the out-riders of an army in retreat. Like the grass, they looked parched, stricken by a persistent lack of rain, a dwindling watershed. She could not see past them to the forest itself, but she knew instantly that the forest was there. It seemed to glower in the distance, defying an inexorable drought.

  The caesure savaged the ground as it moved. It was going to plow a furrow of devastation into the heart of the woods.

  “Melenkurion abatha,” she gasped as if she were cursing. The burn of amanibhavam sent flames like tendrils along the channels of her brain. “Duroc minas mill.” She felt as blighted as the trees, wan with thirst.

  Where am I?

  What have I done?

  “Harad khabaal.”

  One fire led to another; enabled another. As if she were turning her mind inside out, she drew ebon conflagration from the Staff and flung it like outrage into the core of the Fall.

  Earthpower and Law, the salvific antitheses of the time-storm. Her flames were as stark as fuligin, as black as the immedicable gulf of a night sky after every star had been devoured. But the darkness was hers: it was not inherent to the Staff’s magicks. And here—wherever here might be—she was not hampered by Kevin’s Dirt. Riding the invocative force of the Seven Words, she hit the caesure with a deluge of extinction as if she were pouring a lake onto an inferno.