Against All Things Ending (84 page)

She should have thrown her medical bag out the window with her flashlight. She had lost her chance to escape that way.

Long arms of fire reached out for her. Ebony smoke streaked with bitter orange and unbearable heat tumbled toward her.

Shrieking, she turned and fled; ran frantically as if the hall were the throat of She Who Must Not Be Named. She had to find the end before the bane’s mouth closed; before she became horror and torment forever.

Before Roger hurt Jeremiah.

Because she was still trying to save her son, she slapped fire and smoke away with her bag. Floundering and flailing, she ran with all her strength—

—and could not reach the end, the final wall—

Pain throbbed in her leg as if her shin and calf were gushing blood.

—because there was no end. She had been betrayed by her dreams. The hall stretched interminably ahead of her, and flames devoured the walls, growing faster than she could stamp them out, and the furnace squalling at her back had become the heart of a volcano: the savage core of the bane’s need, or the brimstone ferocity of Roger’s given hand.

Where had Roger obtained a hand that spouted lava and anguish? With such strength, he would not have needed a gun, or Sara Clint, or Sandy Eastwall. He could have claimed Joan and Jeremiah, done whatever he wished to obtain Covenant’s ring. No force on this earth could have stopped him.

He did not have that kind of power.

The bane did. She Who Must Not Be Named had seen into Linden’s heart and judged her. She was the bane’s rightful prey, trapped in a gullet that had not yet swallowed her because uncounted devoured women were screaming.

The bane did not exist. The women did not. Linden knew nothing about Elena except tales.

Only her bag of instruments and vials kept the flames from consuming her. Only the bleeding of her palm gave the bag meaning; kept her alive.

Her lower leg throbbed like an open sore. She had pierced it on the window-frame. She could not run or struggle much longer; but there was no end to the hall and the flames, the smoke, the terrible heat.

This was death. It was hell. It was the agony of all things ending, irredeemable calamity. And she had brought it on herself. She had earned it with anger and folly.

Wind flailed the flames. Smoke thick with sparks gyred upward amid lightnings that came from nowhere and never stopped.

A spasm of pain snatched her leg away. She sprawled along the burning floorboards.

In a frenzy, she flipped over onto her back. Frantically she swung her bag at the rush of the blaze.

Damn
it. This was impossible. The hall had an end. It ended at the wall of the room where Sara had died. Linden had not left enough glass in the window-frame to hurt her this badly.

But she had lost her chance to save Jeremiah. Her reason to live.

Trust yourself
.

Covenant was crazy. Dead and insane. There was nothing in her that she could trust. The only thing that mattered was power; and her defense was failing. By now, every necessary resource in her bag had been smashed.

Trust yourself
.

Trust
what
, you bastard?

She might not have resurrected him and roused the Worm if he had only spoken to her. In Andelain. When any word from him would have been as precious as her son.

She can do this
. No, she could not. No one could.

No one except Covenant, who had refused her.

Her hair sizzled and stank. Her eyelashes burned, scorching her eyes. Flame and smoke scoured her mouth, her throat, her lungs. Charred blots like deserved torments marked her shirt.

Now she needed to die. Anything was better than spending eternity trapped in the nightmare of She Who Must Not Be Named.

The world will not see her like again.

But there were also marks on her leg, on her jeans: a tracery of blood-stains below her knee. They formed a pattern.

She did not know what the pattern meant. Still she recognized it.

It could not have been caused by her struggle to crawl over the fanged frame of the window. Beneath the darker script of blood, she saw hints of green. Her eyes were scalded; nearly blind. Nevertheless the green looked as essential as grass.

The pattern—if it existed—was a map.

And
there
, on her shirt, surrounded by smoldering and blackness: a small round hole as precise as the passage of a bullet.

—
her like again.

From somewhere beyond the flames, voices shouted her name. They had been shouting for a long time. Too long. Friends whom she had never met because they did not exist, imagined friends, pleaded for her in voices as loud as the conflagration and collapse of the farmhouse.

If she could not trust herself, she might be able to trust them.

Or the map.

It showed the way out.

Out of what? Into what? She had no idea. She could not read the map. She could only follow it.

She knew how.
Do something they don’t expect
.
Everything else will take care of itself
.

Because she had only one real weapon, one defense, and had failed to save herself, she hurled her medical bag straight into the teeth of the fire.

Everything is simpler than you make it sound
.

Simpler, hell!

In that instant, a bolt of lightning struck through the blazing house into her chest. The concussion knocked her flat, expelled the anguish from her lungs, stunned every muscle. But the shock was brief. Night swallowed the flames, effaced fire from the world. Before her heart knew that it had died, it beat again. She lay on damp grass while realities wheeled around her, spinning too fast to be understood. When she gasped for breath, the air had become cool bliss.

At once, the shouting changed. Crying, “Linden Giantfriend!” Frostheart Grueburn scooped Linden into her arms. The Swordmain’s muscles strained with urgency.

“Is she harmed?” demanded Stormpast Galesend. Her voice was so loud that it covered Mahrtiir’s tense query.

Like a blaring horn, Rime Coldspray roared, “
No!
This I will not permit!

“Stave! The Staff!”

Vaguely Linden realized that she was no longer holding the Staff of Law. Her nerves remembered throwing it—Her medical bag: every drug, every instrument. The darkness held a greenish tinge, wan and frail, so faint that it scarcely dimmed the unregarded stars.

The muffled thud of a Giant’s strides receded. They became splashing, a rush into water: shallow water that grew deeper at every step.

Other feet sprinted in pursuit. Smaller splashes: a smaller body. Stave? Linden’s heart clenched again, and a clamor of water arose. Something greater than a Giant reared and thrashed.

In the distance, aghast children wailed in little voices that sounded like mud.

“
Linden!
” Grueburn insisted. She held Linden hard against her armor. “You must speak! Some horror has befallen you!
Why did you cast away your Staff?
”

Somehow the Manethrall made himself heard through the clamor of Giants, the turmoil of water, the gasp and pound of struggle. “She returns to herself! Ringthane, hear us! Why did you prevent our aid? What madness possessed you?”

Linden did not reply. She could not. She hardly had the strength to lift her head, focus her eyes. But she heard desperation, combat, fear. She should have died. Instead she tried to see.

At first, everything was a blur of darkness. Emerald flames shed no illumination: ordinary vision was useless. With her health-sense, however, her Land-given sight, she discerned sparse grass in damp sandy soil, an agitated boundary of water. Beyond that, details smeared into each other. Shapes bled until they became confusion, a flurry of writhing that flung water in all directions. The water smelled of rot, thick with muck and mold, like a marsh that did not drain.

Why
had
she discarded her Staff? She needed it now.

It was hers.
Hers
. She did not have to hold it in order to call up its strength. As long as she could sense its presence—

She could not. It was gone.

Or it was masked—

Christ!

—by a looming evil as thick as trees, as dense as a grove.

From the verge of the grass, a fen spread farther than her percipience could reach: a wetland clotted with mold and mud and swamp vegetation. Between small eyots of roots and muck, water lay dense and stagnant—and deeper as it stretched into the distance. It had been undisturbed for an age: it was not so now. Its ancient decay was in chaos, scourged and writhing, a welter of froth and spray. And from it came the stench of corpses, bodies by the thousands so long immersed that their putrefaction clogged the air.

The Sarangrave, Linden thought numbly. Sarangrave Flat. What was she doing
here
? Why had her companions brought her? They knew the danger—

Grueburn’s chest shuddered at each rank breath. From somewhere nearby, Mahrtiir made retching sounds. Galesend cupped her hand over Jeremiah’s mouth and nose as if she hoped to filter the reek with her fingers.

Gagging helplessly, Linden forced her perceptions farther.

Latebirth, Cirrus Kindwind, and Onyx Stonemage stood to the ankles in the edge of the marsh, poised to fling themselves into some fray. Yet they appeared to hesitate, uncertain of their enemy—or enemies. Latebirth faced the fen, aimed her sword toward the struggle that lashed the water; searched for an opportunity to attack. But Kindwind and Stonemage kept their backs to the Flat. Across a gap of a dozen or more paces, they confronted two clusters of the small, hairless creatures, the Feroce, one off to the left, the other on the right of Grueburn and Galesend, Linden, Jeremiah, and Mahrtiir.

Green flames gibbered in the hands of the creatures. Their muddy wailing rose through the stench and clash from the wetland, and was swallowed into silence.

Kindwind and Stonemage seemed to be waiting for the Feroce to attempt an assault.

Rank humidity clogged the air. It filled Linden’s lungs like stagnant muck. Her leg throbbed in response to the panicked theurgy of the creatures. But they paid no attention to her.

She had already thrown away her Staff. They had no further interest in her.

Out in the marsh, Coldspray, Cabledarm, Halewhole Bluntfist, and Stave fought the lurker of the Sarangrave.

Oh, God. Linden
knew
that evil, that fierce hunger. She remembered it. She could hardly breathe. Years or millennia ago, it had come close to killing her and everyone with her. In strength and savagery and sheer size, it dwarfed even Giants. Without Covenant and the
krill
and wild magic—

She counted three tentacles standing up from the water, no, four, each as thick as one of the Swordmainnir. Each could have stretched to three times the height of any Giant. To her, they tasted like the Illearth Stone and the shrieking bane; like the effluvium of the darkest deeds of the Viles and Demondim in their loreworks. They were reified corruption: long ages of seeping poisons, acrid and malign, accumulating until they became flesh swollen with craving.

Although the lurker had once commanded the
skest
, it wielded no magicks that Linden could perceive. Its physical bulk and muscle sufficed to feed it. Braced on its own immensity beneath the water, it struck at its opponents with enough force to shatter granite.

Cabledarm and Bluntfist stood against the tentacles, hacking with their swords, fending off blows; floundering through water that reached their thighs when they could not otherwise evade the lurker’s limbs. At first, Linden did not see Stave or the Ironhand. They had been driven underwater, were being held down—

No, they were not. The hard intransigence of Stave’s aura was
there
. Rime Coldspray’s courage shouted against the darkness.

When Linden concentrated on the former Master and the Ironhand, she caught a hint of her Staff.

Her leg hurt as if her cuts had become acid. As if the marks on her jeans were being etched into her bones.

Etched by an acid the hue of malign verdure.

Eruptions of water and violence bewildered her senses; thwarted her efforts to interpret what was happening. But she still had her map. She could still follow it.

Through the tumid obstruction of the air, the untrammeled logic of grass stains and pain led her to Coldspray, Stave, and the Staff of Law.

She had missed them in the rapid flurry of blows, the mad lash and slash of tentacles and swords, because they were not with Cabledarm and Bluntfist. They were not in the water at all.

Supple as snakes, the twisting arms of the lurker had caught them.

One had coiled around the Ironhand’s chest, heaved her into the air. Now it held her there, shaking her viciously and
squeezing
—Through the rancid fetor of corpses, the wet bellow of the swamp, Linden sensed the lurker’s tremendous might. If the monster could not snap Coldspray’s spine or neck, it meant to crush the life from her body.

Coldspray flailed with her glaive; but the tentacle’s thrashing kept her blade from its target.

The lurker was powerful enough to kill her. Its clench should already have collapsed her chest, driven ribs into her heart and lungs, sent blood spurting from her mouth and nose. Yet she was not crushed. She still lived and fought.

For the moment, at least, her armor withstood the hideous pressure of the monster’s arm.

Another tentacle had taken the Staff. Wrapped several times around the shaft, the arm drew back from the contest. The inner surface of the arm was thick with small fingers: it could
grip
. And Cabledarm and Bluntfist were not near enough to assail it. Other tentacles held the Swordmainnir at bay.

But Stave clung to the Staff. In spite of the lurker’s efforts to fling him off, he gripped the wood with both hands. Bracing his feet against the heavy coils, he strove to pull the Staff loose.

He could not out-muscle the tentacle: not directly. To the lurker, his strength was a child’s. And the arm had too many fingers. But the Staff was small in the monster’s clutch, a mere twig compared to the tentacle’s thickness. Stave fought, not to break the lurker’s hold outright, but rather to haul the Staff free from one end.