Against All Things Ending (40 page)

Linden clung to her concern for the Ardent until she felt hints of his presence, brittle as desiccated twigs, trailing after the Giants and the ur-viles. He was indeed spent, too tired for terror. Nonetheless he still supported himself on his ribbands, bracing them against knuckles and knags in the old rock. Some vestige of fear or determination impelled him onward.

When she was sure of him, Linden closed her attention tightly around herself and tried not to moan aloud. She needed all of her resources to fend off abhorrence and crawling. Behind her, the bane burst through the rockfall: a rupture that stained the air; made the walls tremble. Ahead the slope seemed to strive toward inconceivable heights. But she did not want to know such things. Wrapped in flame, and crooning to herself so that she would not groan or mewl, she struggled against the sensations of biting and pinching; the seductions of despair.

She could not defeat them. At the bottom of her heart writhed the conviction that she deserved this. The bane was right. She had killed her mother and failed her son. There was nothing left for her to do except wait to be eaten.

B
y slow degrees, however, the rich benison of Earthpower permeated her. Implied denunciations receded from her nerves. The core of her distress remained unrelieved; incurable. But using her Staff granted her a degree of superficial remission.

Tentatively she began to look outward again.

Now she heard Grueburn’s exhausted breathing rattle in her chest; felt Grueburn’s muscles quiver. Ahead of them, the Ironhand ascended, steady as granite, holding Jeremiah and the
croyel
and the
krill
; but her steps had slowed to a grim plod. Between Rime Coldspray and Onyx Stonemage—between the
krill
’s gem and Liand’s
orcrest
—Cirrus Kindwind floundered like a woman who had never fully recovered from her maiming. She seemed to batter her way along, lurching from wall to wall to thrust herself and Covenant higher.

The surface underfoot might not have supported the Giants at all if the shale and scree and dirt had not been damp, clotted by moisture oozing incessantly down the crevice.

Yet Esmer strode easily at Kindwind’s back. The slope seemed to require nothing from him. Stave kept pace with Grueburn as if he were impervious to fatigue. Around Kindwind and Covenant, the Humbled moved like men who could not be daunted.

Behind Linden, the other Swordmainnir followed in succession: Stormpast Galesend cradling Anele, Cabledarm holding Pahni, Halewhole Bluntfist with Bhapa, Latebirth with Mahrtiir. Then came the ur-viles in a dark surge, ravaged and scrambling. Above them, the Ardent rose between the walls. Too weary to walk, he wedged his way upward with his ribbands.

In the distance, She Who Must Not Be Named raved and glowered. The mad roil of faces followed without haste, as slow as a rising tide, and as inexorable. The evil that had consumed Diassomer Mininderain and Emereau Vrai and countless others was certain of its prey.

The bane’s unhurried stalking seemed to imply that the company was trapped; that the Waynhim were leading Linden and her companions into a cul-de-sac. Linden wanted to believe that the grey creatures knew what they were doing.
They are not without cunning
. But she did not know how to reassure herself.

She had been passive too long; had allowed herself to feel too badly beaten. Now she needed to become something more than just another victim.
Attempts must be made, even when there can be no hope
. Transformations were possible. It was time.

Risking maggots and worms, Linden reached out with Earthpower; spread her fire up and down the crevice until it touched all of the Giants. As fully as possible under the bane’s bale, and without endangering the ur-viles, she shared the Land’s essential bounty with women who struggled to surpass themselves so that she and Covenant and Jeremiah and the Earth might not perish.

The
croyel
’s abhorrence and Jeremiah’s vacancy impeded her, but she did not let them stop her. When vile things resumed their avid feast inside her clothes, she strove to ignore them, at least for a few moments. They were not
real
. They were only a disturbance in her mind, or in her soul: a spiritual disease. Gritting her teeth, she refused to heed them.

Briefly—too briefly—she bathed each of the Swordmainnir in light and flame, washing some of the fatigue from their muscles, cleaning some of the gall from their sore hearts. While she was still able to resist the noxious biting of centipedes and spiders, she extended a small touch of renewal toward the Ardent: a gift which he accepted with fearful eagerness.

Then she heard herself whimpering again, and her self-command crumbled. Frantically she turned her fire against beetles and worms and pinchers which did not exist.

Bit by bit, she was being driven closer to Joan’s madness. Her Staff was losing its effectiveness—or she was losing her ability to wield it. Transformations were impossible. Soon she would be crept upon and stung beyond endurance, pushed past the point of sanity. Eventually she might begin to crave the bane’s cruel embrace.

But not yet. God, please. Not yet.

Then she heard Liand’s voice echo down the fault. “Here the ascent ends! The walls open! Beyond them our passage appears less effortful!”

A rustle of tightened resolve scattered along the crevice. “And not before time,” gasped Cabledarm or Latebirth. “Stone and Sea! Am I not a Giant? Aye, and also a fool. I had credited myself with greater hardiness.”

“Fool indeed,” someone else responded hoarsely. “Have you numbered the days during which we have run for Longwrath’s life, or for our own? Truly, it appears that we have persisted in this exertion for an age of the Earth.”

Hang on, Linden told herself as if she were trying to encourage a cowed child. Hang on.

Somewhere above her, the light of Liand’s Sunstone vanished.

“It is a cavern”—the Ardent’s voice was a frayed groan—“immense, damp, and cluttered. I discern naught else.”

“Aye,” Kindwind answered, struggling for breath. “Immense. Damp. Cluttered. A pool, long stagnant.” She may have said more; but her voice was cut off as she left the crevice.

Linden writhed against the intrusion of spiders, the intimacy of centipedes. She Who Must Not Be Named rose like floodwaters.

“Linden Giantfriend is beset!” Frostheart Grueburn announced between fervid gulps of air. “I descry no ill, yet she suffers.”

“Mayhap,” suggested Stave stolidly, “it is an effect of the bane. I also perceive no bodily hurt, though her distress is plain. It is my thought that the strengths which have enabled her to exceed us time and again are also a weakness. Her discernment exposes her to the bane’s evil.”

Linden tightened her grip on herself. Involuntarily she tried to twist away from heinous things that scurried and nipped. Stave was mistaken. She had never exceeded her companions. She was weak because she was
wrong
. She belonged among the bane’s excruciated fodder. Each spider and insect and worm was an accusation.
Good cannot be accomplished by evil means
. She felt like carrion because she had committed Desecrations.

Ahead of her, Coldspray lurched out of the crevice, taking the
krill
’s argence with her. A moment later, Grueburn reached the opening of the walls; stumbled through it.

A sudden impression of imponderable space spread out around Linden. Stagnation seemed to clog her way as though Grueburn had carried her into a quagmire. And at every distance, water dripped and splashed and ran, an immeasurable multitude of droplets and trickling so extensive that it sounded like rain within the mountain. In Grueburn’s arms, Linden entered a drizzle devoid of boundaries. Simple reflex caused her to fling her fire upward.

The cavern was indeed immense. To Linden’s abused sight, it looked large enough to contain all of Revelstone, although surely it was not. The company’s lights reached the ceiling dimly, but failed to find the far wall: she had no way to gauge the scale of the cavity. However, her immediate vicinity resembled a shallow basin tipped slightly to one side, so that the lowest point of the curve lay somewhat to her left. There eons of dripping water had gathered into a pool so old and unrelieved that it no longer held any possibility of life. Across the millennia, the water had gone beyond mere brackish-ness to a toxic mineral concentration.

The pool seemed small because the cavern was so broad. In some other setting, it might have been considered a lake.

From its center outward, it trembled to the pulse of the bane’s approaching hunger. Ripples fled in circles, sloshing timorously onto the travertine sides of the basin.

The water fell from the tips of stalactites the size of Revelstone’s watchtower. And below each pending taper of stone rose a stalagmite. Cluttered—In some places, the stalagmites had met and melded with their sources, forming misshapen columns with constricted waists. In others, the calcified residue of ages appeared to strain for union, yearning upward drop by incessant drop, and infinitely patient. And everywhere around the monolithic deposits, water fell like light rain from lesser flaws in the porous ceiling. Within the reach of the company’s illuminations, every wet surface had been cut or sculpted into scallops and whorls delicate as filigree, and keen as knives.

Grueburn stuck out her tongue to catch a few falling drops, then spat in disgust. To the Giants around her, she shook her head sourly.

Rain splashed onto Linden’s forehead; ran into her eyes and stung. Blinking rapidly, she searched the cavern for some sign of egress or hope.

To her left, the basin narrowed. Beyond the pool there, at least a Giant’s stone’s throw distant, a concave wall of granite too obdurate to be eroded by mere moisture formed the lower end of the tremendous cavity. But she could not descry the cavern’s limit opposite her. As far as she knew, it reached forever into darkness. To her right, however, the side of the basin rose slowly, and continued to rise in gradual increments, until it was swallowed by midnight.

In the crevice behind the company, the bane still poured upward without haste, confident of Her craved prey. Heartbeats agitated the surface of the pool more and more. Nevertheless the Giants paused to gasp for breath, straining to imagine endurance which they no longer possessed. At the same time, the noxious crawling on Linden’s skin intensified. She needed every scrap and fragment of her remaining will to refuse the torment of small creatures that did not exist. Hundreds of them, or thousands, crept everywhere to savor her illimitable faults.

Under Esmer’s scornful gaze, the Waynhim had halted off to Linden’s right, apparently waiting for the Ardent and the ur-viles. But now all of the Swordmainnir stood on the slope of the basin, fighting to breathe and looking urgently around them. Soon three or four score ur-viles arrived in a black torrent. Limping badly, the Ardent tottered toward Coldspray and Grueburn. Strips of his raiment dragged after him like beaten things, and his head hung down as if he had lost the will to meet anyone’s gaze.

At once, the grey Demondim-spawn ran at the slope, beckoning and barking for Linden’s company to follow. Without delay, the ur-viles joined the Waynhim. Led by their loremaster, the black creatures snarled demands like curses. Esmer trailed after them as though as he assumed that everyone else would do the same.

But the Giants did not move. Perhaps they could not.

Among them, the Humbled and Stave stood, patient and implacable. Perhaps Linden’s crumbling defenses troubled them. Or perhaps not. If they debated decisions that they might need to make for themselves, they did so in silence.

“
Now
what must we do?” asked the Ironhand thinly. “The bane’s evil is itself a mountain. We have beheld no more than hints of its true extent. It was for
this
”—she gestured around her—“that it has pursued us at such leisure. Here it will expand to consume us.

“We will run again, if run we must. But we cannot run far, or swiftly. And this cavern appears to have no end. Surely She Who Must Not Be Named will pounce upon us at Her pleasure.”

Her voice fell flat in the cavern, echoless and defeated.

From Latebirth’s arms, Manethrall Mahrtiir rasped, “It is said that the Ramen have an instinct for open sky. That is sooth. But our gifts will not serve us here. This stone is too great. It thwarts our hearts. If we would flee farther, we must trust to the Waynhim.

“Their fidelity is certain. And Esmer
mere
-son has averred that they are cunning. I will believe that they have guided us hither—aye, and that they now urge us onward—to some worthy purpose. I cannot think otherwise.”

Moisture trickled like insects down the sides of Linden’s neck. She had as much reason as anyone—more—to put her faith in the Waynhim. But she was too distracted to speak.

“Attend!” commanded Branl abruptly. “The bane is not our only peril.”

He and the other
Haruchai
had turned. They were gazing with something akin to alarm at the lower end of the cavern, beyond the pool.