The Runes of the Earth: The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant - Book One (82 page)

The Cord nodded. For a moment, he appeared to crouch, huddling over his injury; and his hurt burned at Linden as if she, too, had been splashed with acid. Then he flung himself onto Whrany's back.

“Describe them, Cord.” Stave spoke quietly, but his tone cut through the restiveness of the horses. “What is their appearance? What did you discern of them?”

Green malignance slashed the night, momentarily limning the exposed shape of the foothills. It looked more savage now, and reached farther: its wielders were advancing up the slope, or the ur-viles opposing it had been decimated. Frantic barking rose against the breeze. Scattered blooms and geysers of obsidian tattered the flash of emerald, but could not tear it apart.

Linden clung to the warm wood of the Staff and the broad strength of Hyn's back, and tried to believe that she was capable of combating a piece of the Illearth Stone.

Without wild magic—

“They are bitter,” Bhapa answered in a congested voice, “and ancient beyond estimation. So I have felt. They appear to rise from the ground as if they have been freed from graves. Some have the size and semblance of trees, though they walk like men.
Others resemble Cavewights and similar creatures. Still others wear monstrous shapes—I have never beheld the like, or heard them named.”

Through his teeth, he groaned, “They are too many. Far too many. The ur-viles cannot hold them.”

Linden's heart quailed to hear him. Freed from graves—Oh, God. She seemed to hear Stave's response before he spoke.
Animate dead
—

“It should not be so,” said the Master. “Yet it is. In this the recall of the
Haruchai
is sure.”

Earlier, days ago, he had spoken of
the lore and bitterness of the Viles made manifest in slain flesh, corpses with the puissance of Lords.

Again emerald beat in the air like the throbbing of a diseased heart. It had come a long way up the hillside. A spatter of blackness answered it, and fell still.

The Ranyhyn stamped and whickered anxiously.

“We have shared it mind to mind across the millennia,” Stave continued, “undiminished and unconfused.”

The vitriol which the ur-viles wield for destruction pulsed in their hearts.

“At first I was reluctant to name what I perceive. It offends Time and all Law. Yet now I am certain.”

Abruptly he stopped.

Clad in cerements and rot, their touch was fire.

Sitting Rhohm at Linden's side, Liand was a dark ache in the moonlight, an outpouring of innominate alarm. Behind them, Pahni leaned from her mount to succor Bhapa as best she could, while Anele muttered execrations into his beard.

“Speak the name, Bloodguard,” Mahrtiir put in harshly. “Your knowledge is needed.”

Bursts of green evil echoed through the night, accumulating like summer lightning. Linden thought she heard the sound of running; desperate haste. Small swirls of blackness coalesced along the slope below her, still some distance from the Waynhim.

The ur-viles had been routed.

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.

“They are Demondim,” Stave answered. If he felt either fear or uncertainty, he did not show it. “Esmer has brought them to this time.”

Apparently Cail's son had betrayed Linden and her companions with a vengeance.

If the legends of the Demondim were accurate, and their lore as vast and insidious as Stave had reported, the creatures might be able to destroy the Staff of Law. Given a little time, they could easily exterminate the last of the ur-viles and Waynhim. Even wild magic might not surpass their powers.

“Ringthane,” Mahrtiir asked avidly, “will we not give battle? The ur-viles cannot hold. In moments they will be swept aside, and the Waynhim with them. We must ride to their defense.”

“No!” Linden protested. “We can't. Not here. Don't you remember what Stave said? There haven't been any battles,” any extravagant exertions of power, “in this part of the Land.” Not since she had unmade the Sunbane. “If we fight now,” or if she did, “we'll violate history. We'll damage the Arch of Time.”

The mere presence of the Demondim and a flake of the Illearth Stone might suffice to undermine the foundations of reality.

Yet the plight of the ur-viles cried out to her. Their desperate barking had become ragged, frenetic: they were being overwhelmed. And the Waynhim would be next. Already the grey creatures stood at the verge of the Stone's reach. With each mounting flash of emerald, each multiplied burst of virulence, their doom advanced on them. She could hear them chanting, and knew that they were too weak, too few—

Shapes that she could not define crowded up the slope, dark forms like a storm-lashed wave breaking impossibly upward. They seemed to devour the moonlight so that they were illumined only by green evil. But now other forces were visible as well, quick eruptions of a killing opalescence which appeared to flash from indistinct hands.

“Then what must we do?” snarled Mahrtiir. “It is intolerable that all who aid us must be slain while we stand aside.”

“Protect me,” she answered, acrid with self-restraint. The Waynhim had preserved the Staff for her. The ur-viles had exhausted themselves to help her find it. She wanted to rush to their defense, regardless of the consequences. But she had recognized her true peril. “I need time—”

It is an effect of my nearness.

You will not be blocked from wild magic.

She needed time to rediscover the truth about herself.

At last, the Waynhim released the results of their steady invocation. From their wedge, a shock wave poured down the hillside; a blast which dwarfed the one that had warded their cave. Perceptible only because it was so potent, it crashed against the rising tsunami of the attackers.

A staggering emerald jolt answered the collision. Murderous nacre blazed soundlessly from the hands of the Demondim. Instantly an electric discharge as cruel as fangs and as lurid as the Despiser's lightning lit the night; and for that brief moment Linden saw the Demondim clearly.

Eyeless like the creatures they had spawned, they resembled their creations in no other way except darkness. Bhapa was right. They looked like huge trees ripped somehow intact from centuries of mold and rot; like Cavewights corroded by time to skeletons and ferocity; like
kresh
and other rapt beasts resurrected to repay their deaths. Among them marched human corpses, men and women who knew only the animating lust of their possessors. And there were other figures as well, monsters in the shape of nightmares. The Demondim appeared to number in the hundreds, all surging
upward against the assault of the Waynhim—and all so long abandoned to the hungry embrace of worms that they had forgotten whatever they had once known of their mortality.

Linden could not tell which among them held their fragment of the Illearth Stone. Perhaps several did in concert. She saw only that while the Stone blazed its evil seemed to rave from many of the Demondim at once, casting back the darkness; tainting the moonlight with the hues of atrocity.

She no longer believed that her foes held a mere flake of the ancient bane. To her horrified senses, its power seemed as absolute as that of the original Illearth Stone.

When the Waynhim fell, the onslaught would reach Linden and her companions. She had only a little time left. A scattering of moments: a few dozen heartbeats.

Too few to save the world—

The Ranyhyn were growing frantic. Whrany skittered and flinched, apparently feeling Bhapa's pain, yearning to protect his rider. Pahni walked her mount in tight circles to calm the mare; and Mahrtiir leaned along his stallion's neck, murmuring fierce promises to the horse's ears. But Stave sat motionless, with Hynyn as stolid as a statue under him. And Hrama bore Anele steadily in spite of the old man's angry muttering.

Linden gripped the Staff until her hands were slick with sweat, thinking that she would have no choice except to call forth its power—and praying fervently that an exertion of Law by its very nature would sustain rather than weaken the Arch; that the insult to the integrity of Time would not prove irreparable.

Another tremendous concussion shook the night, emerald shot through with opalescence and ruin, dropping the Waynhim to their knees. Faint bursts of vitriol still attacked the dire force of the bane, but they were few and widely separated. Only a handful of the ur-viles remained alive—

Esmer had foretold death for the Waynhim. He had not mentioned the ur-viles. They had discerned treachery in him from the first, and had set themselves to guard against him. He may have been glad to think that they would all perish.

Yet he could do nothing without contradicting his own intentions. For every betrayal, his conflicted nature required him to offer help. That was why he had left.

So that Linden could use Covenant's ring.

Stave had assured her that she would be able to do so.

Abruptly she shook off her hesitation. “Here,” she said to Liand. Prompted by an instinct which she could not have explained, she tossed the Staff to him, trusting him to catch it. “Keep it safe for me. I'll need it later.”

It would only distract her now—and might hinder her in other ways as well. Its essential nature contradicted wild magic.

Liand fumbled for it in surprise, secured his grasp on it; hugged it to his chest. But she did not see his nod of acceptance, or the promise in his eyes. She had already
dropped away from him in her mind, bowing her head and covering her face with her hands as if to isolate herself from him and all her companions.

Esmer was gone. And she held Covenant's ring by right and need. She had inherited it from him in Kiril Threndor; had confirmed her claim upon it by wielding its illimitable fire to shape the new Staff of Law. It had healed a bullet's passage through her vulnerable flesh. It had preserved her from the collapse of Kevin's Watch. If she needed it now, it would not be denied to her.

It could not.

Scrambling along the twisted pathways of herself, the lost route to the hidden door, she found the truth. Stave was right. The door had not vanished. It had merely been masked by Esmer's aura. In his absence, she seemed to rediscover it with ease. She was already desperate: she had forgotten agony and formication and utter bereavement. And at times the ring's argence had answered her urgent impulses more naturally, more readily, than her deliberate choices.

Between one heartbeat and the next, white fire bloomed from the hard circle under her shirt as though it had arisen straight out of her heart.

If she had opened her eyes, she would have seen the faces of her companions turning toward her, defined by wonder and white fire. If she had reached out with her percipience, she would have felt a shock of recognition and eagerness galvanize the Ranyhyn. Her nerves might have tasted the more distant awe of the Waynhim and the grim determination of the remaining ur-viles. She could have found comfort in the sudden apprehension which momentarily halted the Demondim.

But she had no attention to spare for the external details of her situation. As soon as she found the door, and felt the silver fire of Covenant's ring spring forth like exaltation, she squeezed her eyes more tightly shut, bowed more deeply into herself, and pulled her concentration down to a point as fine as the tip of a dirk.

With that delicate instrument, she probed the necessary structure of time.

At once, she felt the
wrongness
of what she did. She was attempting a violation as cruel as possession or rape. On a level too deep for words or understanding, she seemed to feel the woven fabric of existence shudder in dismay. If she made even the smallest mistake, all of reality would be torn apart; and the rending shriek of ruin would be the last sound the world ever heard.

Nevertheless she did not falter now. She was Linden Avery the Chosen, and she meant to prove herself against the Land's doom.

Lord Foul had taught her to know her own evil. She could still fear what might happen; but she no longer feared herself.

She needed to focus her power and her senses so keenly that she would be able to detect the ligatures which connected one instant to the next; the bonds of sequence which caused one heartbeat, one thought, one event to follow another. If she could
identify the ceaseless, evanescent, and ineluctable fact of transition which defined time, she would be able to insert her fire there and sever—

—detaching one moment from the next. Opening a
caesure,
as Joan did whenever her madness impelled her to strike herself.

Yet she knew that it would not be enough to simply replicate Joan's actions; to slow and refine her perceptions to the pitch that empowered Joan. If she did, she would have no control over what ensued. Her task was more complex. While she emulated Joan's insanity, she had to remember that what she did was evil. She had to remember its consequences.

Therefore she cast herself deliberately back into the instant when she had first entered the Fall; when formication had become the world, leaving her capable of nothing except featureless gelid whiteness and Joan's torment. That excruciation she re-created in her mind as she focused her argence closer and closer to the gap between the instants. With every piercing breath, she relived agony.