Against All Things Ending (104 page)

He did not try to enter Covenant. He was unwilling to relinquish Joan. And he had reason to believe that Covenant knew how to defy him. Covenant had twice defeated the Despiser—

Unlike Joan, however,
turiya
recognized that Covenant had other vulnerabilities. Instead of striving to rule Covenant, the Raver turned Covenant’s reincarnation against him.

Reaching out,
turiya
tripped Covenant’s mind. A dark hand of thought sent Covenant sprawling into one of the fissures that flawed his ability to stand in his own present.

Instantly Joan and wild magic and
turiya
Herem and the Humbled and the
krill
and the emptied seabed lost their immediacy; their importance. In one form or another, they all still occupied the living moments before Joan summoned the will to complete Covenant’s death. Stubbornly Branl and Clyme strained to alter what had happened to them. But Covenant did not. He could not. A wall like leprosy stood between him and his mortality. It was transparent. He could see what lay beyond it. But it was also incurable. It enclosed him until nothing mattered except memory.

For a time, he remembered the stasis which the
Elohim
had once imposed on him. They had rendered him utterly helpless—and perfectly aware of it. By that means, they had sought to prevent him from endangering the Arch while they manipulated Linden; while they tried to make of her their chosen instrument. He remembered
Bhrathairealm
, and Kasreyn of the Gyre, and the Sandgorgon Nom.

Fortunately that recollection was brief. He fell again, or slipped aside, and was set free.

From stasis, he walked with the ease of youth and vigor back into the comfortable shade of a remnant of the One Forest.

He knew this region. After centuries of killing and bitter loss, the Forest here had dwindled until it became Morinmoss between the borders of Andelain and the Plains of Ra. Still this portion of the woodland, like others elsewhere, retained its intended grandeur. These were trees that knew abundant sunshine and rain, enjoyed deep loam. Most of them were hoary monarchs bestrewn with creepers and draped in moss, trees like oak and sycamore and cypress that spread their roots and their boughs wide, crowding out lesser vegetation. There were saplings, certainly. There were deadfalls, and trunks blasted by lightning, and vast kings perishing of old age. But such things were natural to forests. And few of them obstructed the ground. Covenant could walk where he willed without hindrance. Blessed by fecundity and shade, he could have run if he had felt any desire or need to do so.

He was in no hurry. He remembered where he was going, and the way was not far.

Guided by the gentle contours of hills, he came to a rich glade like a coronal display of wildflowers and long grass. Reveling in sunlight, he walked out from among the trees to watch with wonder as Forestals came together in conclave.

All of them. Together. Here. For the first time—and for the last. Some who would soon pass away. Others who endured for centuries or millennia, faithful to their tasks among the trees, and to their growing wrath, and to their woe. All of them.

They were singing a song that Covenant knew by heart.

Branches spread and tree trunks grow
Through rain and heat and snow and cold;
Though wide world’s winds untimely blow,
And earthquakes rock and cliff unseal,

My leaves grow green and seedlings bloom.
Since days before the Earth was old
And Time began its walk to doom,
The Forests world’s bare rock anneal,

Forbidding dusty waste and death.
I am the Land’s Creator’s hold:
I inhale all expiring breath,
And breathe out life to bind and heal.

Unseen within the Arch, unknown to the Forestals, Covenant had often stood witness to this scene. He loved it with his whole heart.

Caerroil Wildwood was here, and Cav-Morin Fernhold. Dhorehold of the Dark. One who was called the Magister of Andelain; and another who named himself Syr Embattled, doing what he could to defend Giant Woods. Others. All of them. In their times, they had been the exigent guardians of everything precious in the Land: precious and doomed. Here they were wreathed in music and magic, the poignant, potent sorrow of their striving to slow the ineluctable murder of trees.

Yet something about the scene troubled Covenant: something that was not woe or regret or ire. He was surely entranced; but he was also disturbed. In some fashion that he did not know how to identify, the conclave of the Forestals was not as he remembered it. It had become
flat
: too superficial to be true. It resembled a masque performed by smaller beings, accurate in every detail, yet somehow less than it should have been.

If the trees and the glade and the Forestals had been anything other than a memory, Covenant might have concluded that he had lost his health-sense. He could not
see in
, and so he could not truly see at all.

Joan was too strong for him.
Turiya
Herem was too strong. If they did not kill him, he would never survive the tsunami.

Linden might hang on for a few more days. Then she, too, would perish.

He had abandoned her as though he had never loved her.

Without warning, the Forestals began to transgress his recollection of them.

Together they sang, “Only rock and wood know the truth of the Earth. The truth of life.”

“But wood is too brief,” Dhorehold of the Dark intoned. “All vastness is forgotten.”

“Unsustained,” answered Andelain’s Magister, “wood cannot remember the lore of the Colossus, the necessary forbidding of evils—”

“There is too much,” the Forestals agreed as one. “Power and peril. Malevolence. Ruin.”

“And too little time,” added Syr Embattled. “The last days of the Land are counted. Without forbidding, there is too little time.”

Like an antiphonal response, the Forestals chanted, “Become as trees, the roots of trees. Seek deep rock.”

No! Covenant protested. He felt abruptly wounded; pierced to the soul.
No
. This isn’t what happened. This isn’t what I heard.

While the last notes of their litany faded among the trees, Cav-Morin Fernhold walked away from his comrades to look directly at Covenant.

Directly
at
Covenant.

Who was not there.

“Timewarden,” Cav-Morin mused in a melody that wrenched at Covenant’s bones, “this is false.” He had always been Covenant’s favorite among his kind: a gentler spirit who knew when to condone human intrusion even though he did not know why he should do so. In his own way, he had loved the Ranyhyn as much as the Ramen did. “Your presence is false. Can you not discern this?

“Your time lies beyond our ken. You are needed then, not here. You are loved then, not here.

“There must be forbidding. The end must be opposed by the truths of stone and wood, of
orcrest
and refusal.”

With those words, he turned his back. Wearing sunshine like song and glory, he went to rejoin the other Forestals.

His counsel lit recognition like tinder in Covenant’s veins.

Suddenly Covenant was full of fire. His nerves burned. His muscles blazed. His heart hammered in his damaged chest. All of his senses opened, and he could smell—

Oh, God.

Smell? Damnation! He could practically
taste
Herem Kinslaughterer’s evil. It was everywhere around him, everywhere: hidden behind every tree, lurking under every leaf, twisting like mockery and malice around every bough. Concealed by sunlight, it boiled and chuckled, delighted with its own cunning.

This was
turiya
’s doing, this corruption of the remembered past. He had sent Covenant here to distract him until Joan recovered her failing strength; until she was ready to scatter the instants of his life like dust over the seafloor. But the Raver’s power showed through the veil of Covenant’s recall.

Still the ploy had succeeded.
Turiya
Herem had chosen a memory that Covenant adored. Covenant could have remembered this scene happily until he died. He loved it and the Forestals too much to trust his own discomfort.

Or the ploy would have succeeded. Perhaps it should have. But the Raver had made a mistake. He had underestimated the sheer might and melody of the Forestals. He had not considered that they might be able to detect his influence; that they might sing against it, opening Covenant’s perceptions.

Now Covenant burned with his own fire and abhorrence; his own storm of refusal. And somewhere long ages in the future, millennia after the last Forestal had surrendered his life, Covenant’s maimed hands still held the
krill
.

The
krill
was life. It was the instrument of his resurrection, as it was of Hollian’s before him. And Joan had increased its magicks. Covenant could use it. With wild magic, he could reclaim his heritage.

For centuries, his spirit had extended throughout the Arch of Time. Now he had been severed from it. He would never wield its forces again. But he could understand them. He could grasp the nature and implications of Joan’s theurgy. He could call upon them indirectly.

Loric’s dagger made that possible.
You are the white gold
. It enabled him to burn as if he wore a wedding band that matched his ex-wife’s.

And if he could burn, he could return to the
krill
. To the moment when he still gripped the
krill
. No memory had the power to hold him back.

Bleeding from more wounds than he could count, Covenant found the path that led toward his present self. At once, he began to work his way along it. And while he arose from the Earth’s past, he fused fissures behind him. He closed cracks. Rife with silver fire, he healed breaks until all of them were mended.

Deliberately he annealed fragments of his former being, rendering them inaccessible so that he could be whole.

Like an astral spirit done with wandering, Thomas Covenant reentered his body in front of Joan.

He stood unsteadily among rocks and pools under a night sky as gravid and heavy as the stone of a tomb. The only light came from Loric’s blade: it may have been the only light left in the world. In the gem’s argent, the seafloor looked garish, ghostly: a nightscape illuminated by lightning or phosphorescence. Clyme and Branl remained on either side of him; but now they resembled shadows of themselves, tenuous as spectres or dreams, as though they inhabited a dimension of existence which he could scarcely perceive. When he completed his reality, they would be gone, lost among the effects of Joan’s madness.

In the sequences of her life, he had not been absent for more than a few moments: that was obvious. She had not moved. Apart from the uncertain clutch of her fist on her ring, and the tremulous shudder of her breathing, and the pitiless drip of blood down her face, she might have been a corpse so meagerly loved that it had been denied sepulture. Her dulled gaze hardly seemed capable of noticing him.

But then the Raver gave fuel to a spark of awareness within her. Her eyes caught reflections from the
krill
: they rediscovered rage.

Shaking at the force of
turiya
Herem’s hate, and of her own repudiation, she readied her arm.

Covenant was still ten paces from her. And he, too, was weak; badly hurt. Blood soaked his torn clothes: they felt like bandages applied in haste. He was barely able to remain on his feet and hold the dagger. He could not reach her quickly enough to interrupt her blow.

In another moment, another instant, she would hit herself again. Then he would die.

Gasping against the pain in his chest, he shouted, “Joan!” His own gambit of distraction. “Don’t do this!

“One of us has to die. One of us has to live. You know that! You know why. And I think you’ve already suffered too much.

“Joan,
please!
Let me live!”

She heard him. She must have: she paused. Reflections accumulated in her eyes, a wild glare of madness. Her body stiffened as though she feared that he would rape her.

Her reply was a scream that clawed its way out of her taut throat.

“
Leper!
”

Straining, she lifted her arm; clenched her fist.

Ah, hell, Covenant groaned in silence.

He could not use his hands. He needed them to grip the
krill
. It was his only conceivable defense. But it was not enough. His life and will and even his love seemed to leak out of him from too many injuries. Tottering on the cluttered seabed, he was too drained to do anything except bare his teeth. And the Humbled could not help him. They had already given him the pure gift of their support. They were not substantial here.

Yet he was not dead.
And betimes some wonder is wrought to redeem us
.

With all of the air that he could force from his rent chest, he made a thin whistling sound through his teeth.

Then he waited for death or life.

Any delay would have been fatal; but he was answered instantly. Somewhere behind him, two Ranyhyn trumpeted defiance into the night.

When he heard Mhornym and Naybahn, he secured his grasp on the
krill
and mustered his resolve.

Joan heard them as well. She heard
horses
. Holding her arm poised, she looked away from Covenant.

A moment later, her face crumpled. Her fury vanished. Even her insanity seemed to vanish. Tears welled in her eyes: they spilled into the blood on her cheek and mouth. Her fist dropped.

While
turiya
Kinslaughterer spat and gibbered within her, she opened her arms to welcome Mhornym and Naybahn.

Careless and quick among the stones and reefs, the shivering pools, the Ranyhyn cantered toward her. As they ran, they neighed again: a kinder call now fretted with compassion and sorrow. Together they came near as if they were eager for her embrace.