Thomas Covenant 8 - The Fatal Revenant (115 page)

Her fire became so extreme that she saw everything with her eyes closed: the Humbled and their opponents frozen in shock or chagrin or astonishment; the terror on Infelice’s face, the frightened calculation in the Harrow’s gaze; the scrutiny of the High Lords, solemn and alarmed. She saw Covenant consider her as if he were

praying.

She had gone beyond fear-beyond the very concept of fear-as she reached out for the blessed yellow flame of her Staff.

At once, Earthpower and Law responded as though they had come to efface every darkness from the Hills of Andelain. Strength as blissful as sunshine, as natural as Gilden, and as capable as a furnace erupted from the

Staff, pouring like the incarnation of her will into the heart of Loric’s krill.

Briefly she seemed to feel herself battling in the depths of Melenkurion Skyweir, wielding the Power of Command and the Seven Words while Roger Covenant and the croyel strove to extinguish her. But wild lightning exceeded the frenzy of her earlier struggles. It lit the vale as if it could illuminate the Earth. Together argence and cornflower flame and the dagger’s

incandescence swallowed any

possibility of opposition or malice, drowning mere inadequacy in a vast sea of power.

Now instinctively she understood the runes with which Caerroil Wildwood had elaborated her Staff. They were for this. The Forestal of Garroting Deep had engraved the ebony wood with his knowledge of Life and Death. Indirectly he had given her a supernal relationship with Law. For a moment,

at least, his gift enabled her to commingle wild magic and Earthpower without losing control of one or falsifying the other.

She could have raised or leveled mountains, divided oceans, carved glaciers. She had become greater than her most flagrant expectations: as efficacious as a god, and as complete.

It should have been too much. Either alone will transcend your strength

Human flesh had not been formed to survive such forces. Yet Linden felt no danger. She was hardly conscious of strain. Perhaps her mind had already shattered. If so, she did not recognize the loss, or choose to regret it. Loric’s gem drew immeasurable might away from her mortal blood and nerves and bones. Caerroil Wildwood’s runes imposed a kind of structure on potential chaos. Her beloved stood before her, radiant in the admixture of theurgies and his own innominate

transcendence. And she did not doubt herself at all.

She could imagine that the

Swordmainnir knew the location of Covenant’s human bones. The First and Pitchwife had carried his body out of the Wightwarrens for burial. And they had told the tale. Rime Coldspray and her comrades might know where to find the last time-gnawed residue of his life. Linden could have summoned them to her with a thought.

But she did not need any lingering particle of his ordinary flesh. His spirit stood before her, as necessary as love, and as compulsory as a commandment. She had wild magic and Earthpower, Loric’s krill and Caer-Caveral’s runes. She had her health-sense. And the Laws of Death and Life had already been broken once. They were weaker now.

She knew of no power with which she could cause the immediate release of

her son. Jeremiah was hidden from her; beyond her reach. Covenant’s ring and her Staff did not enable her to scry, or to search out secrets, or to foretell the effects of malevolence.

But that which she could do, she did without hesitation.

Now, she said in fire and passion. Now. Covenant, I need you. I need your help. I need to get you back.

She had demonstrated again and again that she could not save Jeremiah alone. Without Covenant, she was inadequate to the task.

Gazing steadily through her eyelids at the Land’s redeemer, she murmured his name in an exultation of fires. Then she brought her hands together, wild magic and Earthpower.

A blast that seemed to quell the stars erupted from Loric’s krill. Deliberately

she invoked a concussion which compelled conflicting energies to become one.

This was not culmination. It was apotheosis. Power shocked the bedrock of the world: it strove to claim the sky. Convulsions like the earthquake under Melenkurion Skyweir cast reality into madness.

Around the vale, the Wraiths scattered suddenly; fled and winked out. They

may have been screaming. Someone wailed or roared: Elena or Kevin, Infelice or the Harrow. Emotions trumpeted from the High Lords. But Linden heeded nothing except Covenant and her own purpose.

Through the gem, her powers took hold of him as if she had chosen to incinerate his soul.

An instant later, the sheer scale of the forces which she had unleashed

overwhelmed her; and the world was swept away.

Covenant’s agony must have been terrible to behold. His cry of protest may have deafened the night. But Linden was no longer able to see or hear him. Absolute vastness stunned every nerve in her body, every impulse in her mind. For a moment, her detonation left her entirely insensate, unable to feel or think or move. She did not know that she had dropped

Covenant’s ring as if it had scalded her. Her fingers were too numb to realize that the Staff had slipped from her grasp. Her eyes might as well have been charred away: she did not see the knits coruscating puissance rupture and vanish, blown apart by fundamental contradictions.

She did not recognize what she had done until darkness reasserted her mortality, and the frantic labor of her pulse began to force new awareness

into her muscles and nerves.

When she opened her eyes, she saw Covenant’s resurrected form standing, twisted with pain, on the far side of the blank gem, the dead stump. Theurgies flared and spat from his arms, his shoulders, his chest. Linden had burned him as badly as Lord Foul had burned him in Kiril Threndor. But she had burned him to life instead of death. The fading energies of his transformation wracked him as though

he had emerged from a bonfire.

Like Joan, he bore the consequences of too much time.

Yet he was alive. In some sense, he was whole; unmarked except by his old wounds. Even his clothes were intact. Linden could see the rent in his T-shirt where he had been stabbed for Joan’s sake. His hair was tousled silver like reified white gold.

Fires flickered up and down his body. They were the only light in the vale; or in Andelain; or in the Land. Slowly they exhausted themselves and went out.

While the last wisps of power streamed from his eyes, Covenant forced himself to straighten his back and look at Linden.

He took one step toward her, then another, before his legs failed and he plunged to his knees. Still upright, he

gazed at her with such dismay that her throat closed. She could not breathe.

“Oh, Linden.” His first words to her were a hoarse gasp. “What have you done?”

“Done, Timewarden?” Infelice snapped viciously. “Done? She has roused the Worm of the World’s End. Such magicks must be answered. Because of her madness and folly, every Elohim will be devoured.”

Abruptly the krilts gem began to shine again. Its light throbbed like a heart in ecstasy, as if it echoed Joan’s distant excitement-or Lord Foul’s.

Hyn’s dolorous whickering reminded Linden that the Ranyhyn had tried to warn her.

Here ends

Fatal Revenant

Book Two of

“The Last Chronicles of Thomas

Covenant.”

The story continues in Book Three

Against All Things Ending