The Runes of the Earth: The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant - Book One (41 page)

Fire to boil water, cauterize wounds, burn away as much infection as possible. There was no wood for fuel in the rift.

Linden felt a pang of despair, and she faltered.

“Or we could go down,” she offered hesitantly. “Get out of the wind. Find
aliantha.
” Do what Stave wanted. “Mithil Stonedown will help us.”

Severity sharpened the Manethrall's face. “Ringthane, we love the Land. It is the long dream of the Ramen that we will one day return there—to the Plains of Ra and Manhome, where we belong.” Her voice implied a suppressed outrage. “But we will not enter any place where these Masters hold sway.”

Turning away, she added, “My Cords will endure, if they are able. They are Ramen.”

Stave regarded her impassively, as though he did not deign to take umbrage.

Linden could not imagine what grudge the Ramen held against the
Haruchai.
However, she herself feared to return to Mithil Stonedown. Stave had surprised her by promising the Manethrall two days. In her experience, his people neither compromised nor negotiated.

When she had absorbed the hard fact that she could do nothing for the Cords—that all her years of training were useless here—she sat down to save her strength. The shadows in the rift approached true twilight, and the tops of the walls seemed too far away to reach. She did not believe that she would be able to climb so high.

Dumbly she watched one of the Cords treat Liand's arm. She had become certain that the Ramen meant him no harm.

The Cord applied a touch of
amanibhavam
and saliva to the gash, then bound it with a bandage of clean cloth. As he felt the effects of the poultice, Liand frowned at first, then gradually relaxed into a smile. “I know not what other benefits this grass may have,” he told Linden when he had thanked the Cord, “but it assuredly softens pain. For that I am grateful.”

Linden nodded vacantly. Her uselessness galled her. For the time being, at least, she had come to the end of herself.

Scant moments later, however, Manethrall Hami called her Cords into motion. Around Linden, the comparatively whole young men and women prepared themselves to carry their dead and fallen comrades, some in slings across their backs, others cradled in their arms. Liand readied Somo for an ascent they could scarcely see. And Linden realized that she was staring at a darkness deeper than shadows: the ur-viles.

Without thinking about it, she had expected them to depart. Surely they had already done what they came to do? Yet they remained, obviously waiting for something. Did they mean to accompany the Ramen? Did they anticipate another attack? Or were they wary of the moment when their interests might diverge from those of the Ramen?

Then Stave came to her side. “Chosen,” he announced, “I must bear you again.” Gloom obscured his features. If he had bared his teeth at her, she would not have known it. “If I do not, your weariness will hold you here, and you will be exposed to cold beyond your endurance.”

Too worn out to do otherwise, she surrendered herself and the immediate future to his ambiguous care.

As the Cords settled their burdens, the ur-viles also prepared to move. Apparently the disturbing creatures intended to accompany them.

Then the Ramen began to climb. Linden had assumed that they would move slowly and rest often, laden as they were. But she soon saw that she had underestimated their toughness. They managed the jagged slope more swiftly than she could have imagined.

And the ur-viles ascended with ease. The proportions of their limbs aided them here: although they looked awkward upright, they could use their hands for climbing as readily as their feet. Somehow they had put their weapons away, so that their hands were empty; unencumbered.

Soon it became obvious that only Liand and Somo could not match the pace of the Ramen. Alone, Liand might have kept up well enough; but in the deepening twilight the mustang had to pick its footing carefully. Otherwise it might snap a foreleg among the stones.

At a word from Manethrall Hami, the lone unburdened Cord dropped back to Liand. “Join your companions,” the young woman told him brusquely. “I will guide your mount.”

“No.” Liand may have shaken his head. “I brought Somo to this. The responsibility is mine.”

The Cord might have argued; but Stave put in, “You have wrought sufficient folly for one day, Stonedownor. Do not be foolish in this. The horselore of the Ramen surpasses you. Your mount will fare better in her care than in yours.”

“Linden?” Liand asked out of the darkness. He may have meant, What should I do?

He may have meant, Tell this damn Master to leave me alone.

Sighing to herself, Linden answered, “I think the Ramen know what they're doing. Somo should be safe with her.”

“Very well,” Liand muttered to the Cord. “I have tended the mounts of Mithil Stonedown since I grew tall enough to curry them. If you do not return Somo to me, you will answer for it.”

The young woman snorted under her breath, but made no other retort.

Liand scrambled up the rocks to Stave's side. “I know nothing of these Ramen, Master,” he said softly. “You have concealed them from us. If I am foolish, how could it be otherwise? You have kept secret all that might have made us wise.”

Stave ignored the justice of Liand's accusation.

Overhead the sky had turned purple with evening. Slowly it dimmed toward black. For some time now, the breeze had gathered force as cold poured like a stream into the narrows of the rift. Linden felt chills seep into her skin in spite of Stave's intransigent warmth. Soon she would start to shiver under the mounting weight of the wind.

A day and a half in the Land, hardly more than that, and she had already become as helpless as an infant. Jeremiah needed her. More than that: he needed her to be a figure of power, the stuff of legends; rapt with wild magic and efficacy. Yet here she lay, cradled weakly in the arms of a man who had turned his back on such things.

Ahead of her, the Ramen and ur-viles moved in their distinct groups, as obscure as clouds against the vague background of the rocks. Yearning to find some use for herself, she asked abruptly, “Stave, will you talk to me?”

He replied without turning his head. “What do you wish me to say?”

“Tell me what you know about ur-viles.” She desired a concession from him; something more personal than the forbearance he had shown the Ramen. “You called them a great evil, but they don't act like it.”

Out of the gloaming, Stave said, “They are as strange to us as to you. We cannot account for them. We have never understood them.”

Linden persisted. “You still know more about them than I do. Their history. Where they come from. All I've ever heard is that they were made, not born. Created by the Demondim—whoever
they
were. I need more.

“Isn't there anything else you can tell me?”

For a long moment, Stave appeared to consider the deeper ramifications of her
question. Deliberately over the centuries, the
Haruchai
had suppressed the history of the Land. Now she asked him to speak of it—and in Liand's presence.

Finally he countered, “Chosen, do you comprehend what you request? This foolish young man has elected to dare his fate with you. If I give you answer, and he seeks later to relate what he has heard, we must prevent him.

“You appear to value kindness. Will you treat him so roughly?”

Before Linden could object, Liand put in stiffly, “Your words sow confusion, Master. You threaten me rather than the Chosen. Therefore the choice is mine to make. To pretend otherwise is not honest. It ill becomes you.”

A subliminal tension seemed to run through Stave's chest. “Have a care, Stonedownor,” he replied. “You are not equal to such determinations.”

“Because,” Linden protested, “you don't allow him to be.” Stave's inflexibility exasperated her. “He's right. If you think he's too ignorant to understand the risks, that's
your
doing. No one else's.”

The
Haruchai
had made themselves responsible for all the Land. Under the circumstances, the unexpected aid of the ur-viles must have undermined Stave's convictions. And he may have felt disturbed by the way in which the presence of the Demondim-spawn lent credibility to Anele's impossible tale. Perhaps his need to understand the creatures was as acute as Linden's.

“Very well,” he said at last. His voice held no hint of concession. “I will answer. This Stonedownor must be wary of us as he sees fit.”

The indistinct group of the Ramen appeared nearer than it had earlier. Stave was gaining on them—or they had slowed their pace to listen.

“You have been told, Linden Avery, that the
Haruchai
first came to the Land in the time of High Lord Kevin Landwaster.” Having accepted this task, Stave spoke steadily, in spite of his taciturn nature. Nevertheless his tone conveyed an impression of awkwardness, as though he were translating a richer and more numinous tongue into blunt human language. “I say this again to explain that they did not know the High Lord's father, Loric son of Damelon, who earned the name of Vilesilencer. They heard only tales of those years, and of the black Viles which had haunted the Land. We cannot now declare which of those tales were true.”

Linden settled herself in the Master's arms. His decision to speak gave her an obscure comfort. It suggested that he could still compromise, in spite of his native severity.

“It was said by some,” he told her as well as Liand and the listening Ramen, “that the Viles were creatures of miasma, evanescent and dire, arising from ancient banes buried within Mount Thunder as mist arises from tainted waters. Others claimed that they were specters and ghouls, the tormented spirits of those who had fallen victim to Corruption's evil. And yet others proclaimed that they were fragments of the One Forest's lost soul, remnants of spirit rent by the slaughter of the trees, and ravenous for harm.

“On three things, however, the tales agreed. First, the Viles appeared where they willed, elusive as swamp lights, wreaking mortification and horror. Next, their lore, which they had gained from the buried banes of the Earth, was black and ruinous, delving into matters which the old Lords could not penetrate. And last, the evil of the Viles was inspired by their loathing of themselves.

“Doubt-ridden, perhaps, by the cleaner spirits from which they had arisen, or by the havoc which Corruption required of them, they desired above all things to become other than they were. And toward that desire they bent all their terrible lore.

“Therefore they created the Demondim, laboring long in the Lost Deep. And for a time it appeared that they had succeeded in their self-loathing, for the Demondim were unlike their makers. Among the Lords, they were described as ‘powerful and austere.' It was said of them that they were ‘once friendly' to the trees.

“Still the Viles were a bane upon the Land. For that reason, High Lord Loric took up the challenge of silencing their evil. And in this he prevailed, though at great cost. Because their lore was a mystery to him, beyond his conception, he enlisted the aid of the Demondim against their makers. There he learned dismay, and could never again be truly whole, for he did not know that Corruption had been at work among the Demondim, sending his Ravers to teach them self-Despite, the same abhorrence of themselves which had long tormented the Viles.

“Because they had been swayed, the Demondim became the foes of the forests. For the same reason, they returned to the breeding dens of the Viles in order to begin the making of the ur-viles. And for that same reason, the aid which the Demondim granted to Loric Vilesilencer was Despite in another form, for it arose from their self-loathing. They turned against their makers because Corruption is cunning, and because they saw no value in their own creation.

“Thus was High Lord Loric's victory over evil made possible by Corruption. So were planted the seeds of doubt and chagrin which later blossomed in Kevin Landwaster and the Ritual of Desecration.”

Shades of evening still held the sky, but night now filled the rift, welling up from the memories of the rubble; flowing downward from the dark past of the ur-viles. And with it came the ice-sharp wind which Manethrall Hami had promised. Cold soughed and hissed in the background of Stave's words.

Yet he was not chilled. His people made their home among the ice and snows of the Westron Mountains. The passion in his veins gave him all the warmth he required.

Bearing Linden upward appeared to cost him no effort at all.

“The Bloodguard,” he stated flatly, “heard only tales of the Viles, but of the Demondim their experience was certain. Among other causes, High Lord Kevin was driven to Desecration by his failure to answer the darkness of the Vile-spawn.

“The Viles were in some form wraiths, as enduring and insidious as mist. The ur-viles were”—he hesitated momentarily, corrected himself—“are as you see them, tangible flesh which may be slain, despite their deep lore. But the Demondim possessed a middle nature, at once both and neither, partaking of miasma and flesh together. As did the Viles, they persisted outside or beyond life and death. As do the ur-viles, they had forms which could be touched and harmed.”