The Last Dark

  Throughout the bane’s clamoring chaos, she drifted, searching for Covenant’s daughter.

  Scores of faces wailed in front of her and fled. Hundreds. Thousands. She believed that she knew how to save them all. Or perhaps she only hoped. But she had to start with Elena, who had been four times betrayed: by the circumstances of her birth, by her own actions in the cave of the EarthBlood, by Linden, and by being cast into the inferno of the bane’s mad agony.

  Elena was here. Finding her was only a matter of time—and Linden was immune to time while her strength lasted.

  When the aghast ravage of Elena’s face appeared, Linden clutched it with silver before the spectre could be swept away.

  Elena did not struggle, yet Linden could barely hold her. The bane’s wrath lashed the eidolon in every direction. She Who Must Not Be Named pressed down on Linden’s shield with all of Her accumulated mass: the weight of ages. Only Linden’s cocoon preserved her. Only wild magic kept Elena with her, face to face.

  “Oh, Elena.” She spoke in flames. She had no other voice for her remorse and shame. Her words were the lament of her wedding band: the grief of an absolute promise broken absolutely. “I’m so sorry. You didn’t deserve what I did to you. You and Caer-Caveral brought Thomas to me. I should have been grateful. But I couldn’t think about anything except how much I hurt. I treated you like it was your fault. I wanted you to be stronger than I was. I wanted you to forgive me, but I couldn’t say that. I can’t forgive myself.

  “I’m like Kevin. I chose my own Desecration. You just made a mistake. You don’t deserve—”

  Elena’s cries made no sound that Linden could hear. Nevertheless the High Lord’s protests silenced Linden. They appeared like avatars in her mind; like reifications of every injury which had ever flensed Elena’s heart.

  Why have you come? My suffering is enough. I do not desire the sufferings of others. I did not call you to this doom.

  Terrible pressures distorted Elena’s features: stretched them until they tore; compressed them into granite knots. Her eyes were wounds.

  Do you conceive that I was compelled to eternal horror? The Dead are not so cruel. I acceded to the pleas of Sunder and Hollian out of love for my father, and because you are his beloved, and because you must be preserved.

  Linden Avery, you multiply my torment. You have damned yourself. I must go mad, as She is mad. Why have you come?

  At an unconceivable distance, the thunder of Melenkurion Skyweir’s destruction boomed. Surely the Worm had begun its feeding at the wellspring of the Earth’s Blood? Surely the world’s remaining life could be measured in heartbeats?

  Linden did not care. She had been trained as a physician, a surgeon, a healer. She knew in her bones that her first and only responsibility was to find an answer for the need in front of her.

  “To free you,” she answered in conflagration. “I’ll free as many of you as I can. I’ll tell the bane how to free Herself. But I have to start with you. You’re the one I hurt.”

  Thomas Covenant’s daughter, as precious as her own son.

  Elena’s wailing was inaudible. Still Linden heard her. Her voice seemed to burst from her eyes, from the veins throbbing in her temples.

  You cannot. Do you hear? You cannot. We are souls. Her anguish binds us. As we are, we cannot be divided from Her. We must live again to be free of Her. We must have flesh. We must be truly separate, spirit from spirit, thought from thought. Pain from pain. To release us, you must unmake our deaths.

  We cannot be freed!

  That cry rent Linden’s heart. It nearly snapped her resolve. For a moment, she could only gape at Elena. Unmake your death? How? Elena was not Thomas: she was not imprinted on Linden’s nerves, Linden’s needs, Linden’s love. Her body was gone beyond comprehension. And Linden did not have either the krill or the Staff. She had only her ring.

  Don’t tell me that I have to leave you like this!

  But then her preconceptions shifted. She had spent her life making promises that she did not know how to keep. She had never sufficed to keep them. And yet she had accomplished more than she could have imagined. But not because she was more—or not only because she was more. No, she had been able to do so much because she was not alone. From Liand and Anele and Stave to the Ranyhyn and the Swordmainnir and Thomas himself, she had been aided in every deed. She had been given gifts—

  They had taught her truths which should have been obvious, but which had nonetheless eluded her. Berek Halfhand had seen Gallows Howe in her, a mound of ruin made barren by bitterness and slaughter. In Garroting Deep, however, she had discovered a deeper truth beneath the drenched dirt.

  More than bloodshed and revenge, the olden forest had yearned for restitution. The trees would have turned their backs on killing entirely if they could have recovered their ravaged expanse and majesty.

  She understood that now. She recognized, if the bane did not, that healing was both more arduous and more worthy than retribution. And sometimes healing required measures as extreme as the patient’s plight. Surgeons amputated or extirpated. They performed sacrifices. They transplanted. They did not judge the cost. They only did what they could.

  And even here, in the Lost Deep at the onset of the World’s End, Linden was not alone.

  In a blaze of wild magic, she reeled against the current of the bane’s savagery, dragging Elena with her.

  The bane’s resistance was brutal and blind, undirected. She Who Must Not Be Named could shatter entire landscapes, but She did not know how to fight within Herself. She had never needed to do so before. Linden seemed to struggle endlessly—and to find what she sought in an instant.

  Through the flame and hunger and abhorrence of the bane’s boundaries, she saw the Demondim-spawn.

  Under a deluge of collapsing theurgies, the ur-viles and the Waynhim stood together as if they had finally become kin, united by a common interpretation of their Weird. As one, they studied the bane with senses other than sight; or they studied Linden.

  Time and again, they had helped her when she had not known that she needed their gifts. Like Thomas. Like the Land itself.

  Peering at the creatures, she understood at last that they had not unbound the ancient magicks of the Viles merely so that she would be able to remember and act. They had cast down their purest heritage for reasons greater than her needs and desires. Their Weird demanded more. They had undone the wonders of the Lost Deep for the same reason that they had aided her and the Land repeatedly: so that they would be vulnerable now. So that they would be accessible—

  If you can ever figure out a way to let me know what you need or want from me—

  What had the ur-viles and the Waynhim ever wanted, except to escape their loathing for their own forms?

  Linden waited until the loremaster met her gaze; until the tall creature nodded its assent. Then she did what she could for Elena.

  Risking the shroud of wild magic which protected her, Linden flung Elena out of the bane; tossed her like a wisp of hope or a kept promise into the waiting embrace of the loremaster.

  The creature appeared to swallow. The spectre of Elena seemed to vanish. Linden could not be sure. She Who Must Not Be Named was roaring: a howl that stunned Linden’s chest, rattled her mind in its chamber of bone, stopped her ears and eyes and mouth and lungs. She hardly knew who or what she was.

  Time was fraying at the edges around her, starting to unravel. Soon its deterioration would unweave the world. Reality would lose its shape. Existence would cease.

  Still wild magic shielded her. Her own needs shielded her; her own loves. She was not done.

  She grasped the first spectre shrieking past her: a woman who could have been anyone, Diassomer Mininderain, Sara Clint, Joan herself, anyone at all. As she had with Elena, she gave the savaged soul to the loremaster, or to all of the Demondim-spawn. Then she reached for another victim.

  Before Linden could do more, the bane found a defense. Her ferocity seemed to have no beginning and no end a
s She began to compress Herself, condensing Her might and bulk around Linden, making Herself more solid. Linden no longer drifted on currents of fire and fury. Pressures great enough to rive mountains clamped down on her. Forces which dwarfed her threatened to rupture her eardrums, burst vessels in her lungs, squeeze blood from her eyes. Lost women were held motionless in their unutterable screams.

  But Linden did not need ears or eyes or air to hear She Who Must Not Be Named.

  “You diminish me! You dare to diminish me! You will not! You speak of save, but your purpose is betrayal. I will not permit you!”

  Linden had no voice. It had been crushed out of her. She could speak only with wild magic: the blazing paradox, save or damn, which formed the keystone of life.

  “This isn’t betrayal. It’s kindness. I can save all of these poor women. I can tell you how to save yourself.”

  “How?” The bane’s roar was a sneer, contemptuous as vitriol. “You are nothing! What do you offer that I have not attempted endlessly?”

  Linden could not move. She was effectively dead. The bane’s power was too much for her. Nevertheless she answered.

  “The Arch of Time is breaking. If you don’t believe me, look for yourself. You can see it. The Worm of the World’s End is drinking the EarthBlood. Everything is going to be destroyed. Your prison is starting to fall apart.

  “While it falls, you can slip out. You’ll be free. But you have to go now. Otherwise I don’t know what might happen. You belong to eternity. If you don’t leave—if you stay inside Time—you might be extinguished along with everything else.”

  Perhaps She Who Must Not Be Named craved extinction, an eternal end to Her suffering. If so, Linden had failed. But at least her own anguish would end as well.

  “All I want,” she insisted in fire, “is to release your women. You don’t need them anymore. Not now. They’re part of this world.” They were dross, imperfections. “If you take them with you, they’ll only hinder you. They may even prevent you. You won’t be truly free.”

  The bane contracted around her. Terrible strength made pulp of her flesh and organs, her bones, her mind. Nothing existed for her except the raw rage of She Who Must Not Be Named.

  “Fool! Madwoman! Treacher! Do you conceive that I desire freedom? You do not know me. Freedom is agony. It is abhorrence. It is not redemption. I am anguish because I have forgotten who I am.

  “The destruction of this world is nothing to me. I cannot die. I must have my true name!”

  Convulsions shook Mount Thunder to its roots. Shocks distorted the definitions of existence. Slabs fell from the ceiling and were pulverized. Granite sifted like ash onto the heads and shoulders of the ur-viles and Waynhim. Stone lurched under their feet. Yet they stood as if they were rooted by pride: legs straight, backs regal, arms open to welcome released souls. The loremaster’s eerie visage shone with an inward exaltation.

  Linden felt ripples like imminent caesures trembling toward her, confusing the structure of instants. There were no risks left except this one.

  “Then give me Emereau Vrai.” Kastenessen’s lover: the only woman who had ever been loved by an Elohim. He had given her some of his magicks. How else had she been able to create the merewives? Perhaps he had also revealed secrets which no one mortal—which none of the bane’s other victims—could have known. Why else had his people considered his crime so heinous that he deserved his Durance? Linden had heard long ago that he had been punished for harming an ordinary woman with his love; but she did not trust that explanation. When had the Elohim ever been so protective of individual lives? Emereau Vrai might know—And if she did, the Demondim-spawn might be lorewise enough to understand her. “Let me show you that I’m telling the truth.”

  I’m a woman, damn it! I don’t want to seduce you.

  The bane contracted in fury. Her vehemence increased. It was unbearable, unanswerable. Though Linden clung to wild magic—to her wedding band—to the promise of Thomas Covenant—she was little more than a spark, a fading ember within the virulence of She Who Must Not Be Named. Hundreds or thousands of women shrieked their pain and despair, but they made no sound.

  Then the pressure eased. Yowling to Herself, the bane receded slightly. Linden remembered to breathe. She blinked at the blood in her eyes.

  An excoriated face appeared in front of her. A voice that registered only in Linden’s mind said, I am Emereau Vrai. Does Kastenessen love me still? I am betrayed to this doom, but not by him. It was his kindred who made of me a plaything for damnation. All that I have done, I did because he was taken from me.

  You have spoken my name. Know that I forgive nothing. Alone among this host, I approve my fate. She Who Must Not Be Named is my god. My anguish is worship.

  Linden might have said, Of course he still loves you. In his heart, he never let you go. He made himself insane for you. But she did not have the strength. Her life and her will were almost gone. She needed the last of herself to clasp Emereau Vrai and send Kastenessen’s lover into the arms of the Demondim-spawn.

  They accepted her gladly, barking their homage amid the devastation of the Lost Deep.

  Then Linden was done. Wild magic drained out of her, and she was swept unshielded into the excoriation of the bane. As far as she knew, she only remained alive because she had slipped into a fracture between instants. When the currents of the bane’s fury carried her back into the sequences of time, she would die.

  Yet that fracture—or some other pause—held her. She did not die, or move, or think. Entire realms of pain slid past her as if she had become untouchable.

  As if she had finally become worthy of her husband.

  With senses other than vision or hearing or touch, she recognized the Demondim-spawn. They stood like kings in the wreckage of their eldritch legacy. Every visage among them now shone like the loremaster’s. The proportions of their bodies were changing, as if they were becoming human; sharing the loremaster’s transfigured spirit. They seemed taller.

  In unison, they chanted at the bane: a paean or invocation as alien as their guttural speech, and as incomprehensible. With every rise and fall, every beat, their hymn appeared to accrue peril, as if they were hazarding more than their own destruction; as if the accumulation of their words threatened the pediments of reality. And yet their eagerness was plain on their eyeless faces. Somehow they had arrived at a crisis of extermination or apotheosis toward which they had striven for millennia.

  They may have been extolling the bane—or forbidding Her.

  Her response was a cry that sent spasms through the gutrock for leagues in all directions:

  “I AM MYSELF!”

  When Linden’s heart beat again, she was no longer inside the bane. Instead she had the sensation that she was being carried; cradled with the tenderness of a lover. Powers that surpassed understanding protected her from the ruination of the Lost Deep.

  She was given a moment to watch the bane release souls into the waiting arms and mouths and bodies of the ur-viles and the Waynhim: a torrent of long anguish so suddenly relieved that she could not name what became of it. Then the bane began to rise like music, intangible as mist, and potent as divinity, through Mount Thunder’s stubborn foundations; and Linden was lifted with Her, passing among the mountain’s complex rocks and cavities as if she were as transient as a wraith.

  11.

  Of My Deeper Purpose

  For a moment that felt like a protracted sob, Jeremiah watched Covenant and Branl recede along the passage toward Kiril Threndor; watched the silver of the krill fade like the last light in the world. Then he folded back down to the floor. Sitting with the Staff of Law gripped across his thighs and images of the Worm chewing at the edges of his mind, he stared into absolute blackness and tried to believe that he was not out of time. That the subtle trembling of the stone did not announce the collapse of the Arch. That Covenant would come back to him, since Linden had said that she would not. That he would be spared.

  His mother had not even bo
thered to explain where she was going; or why.

  He was angry; too angry to speak or grieve. Linden and Covenant had left him with an impossible burden, as if he were somehow responsible for saving the Earth. As if he were not still the same boy who had been too small to rescue his sisters from Lord Foul’s bonfire.

  On some level, he knew that he was also angry at himself. Angry because he hated his own childishness. Because he felt useless and stupid. Because he had not tried to get an explanation from Linden, or to change her mind, or to say goodbye. Angry because Covenant expected too much from him. But that anger belonged to some other Jeremiah—to a piece of who he had become when Kastenessen had broken him—not to the boy who had been left by his mother and his first friend.

  Sure, he understood Covenant’s reasons for walking away. I don’t want you that close to Lord Foul until I can distract him. The words sounded like they made sense. But I do want you to come. I need your help to keep him busy. That was simple enough.

  But it was not simple at all. Covenant had also said, You aren’t strong enough?Neither am I.

  And Then let him be too strong. You don’t need to beathim. And Just do something he doesn’t expect.

  So what was that supposed to mean?

  And what would it accomplish? Nothing that Jeremiah or Linden or Covenant himself ever did would stop the Worm. It was already drinking EarthBlood: Jeremiah could feel or see or hear it. The whole world did not contain enough power to prevent its own death.

  What good would it do to make Lord Foul miss his chance?

  As guerdon for his puerile valor—

  Jeremiah was angry, all right. Of course he was angry.

  In some ways, sitting there in Mount Thunder’s stark midnight hurt more than being possessed by the croyel. That bitter creature had made him truly helpless, as unable as a corpse to affect how he was used or what he became. But he was not helpless now: not literally. He had the Staff of Law and his own Earthpower. He could kill Cavewights. Eventually he could maybe teach himself how to help Coldspray and Grueburn recover. If nothing else, he should have been able to fill this cave with light and warmth. But the Staff’s possibilities only taunted him. They emphasized all of the things that he could not do.