Thomas Covenant 8 - The Fatal Revenant (93 page)

Below us?

Anele! Instinctively she whirled toward the west. She was merely human. Perceptions attuned to theurgy would not detect her unless she exerted her

Staff or Covenant’s ring. The Haruchai would be more noticeable than she was; easier to spot. But Anele was full of Earthpower, rife with it: he had been born to it. Although his heritage was deeply submerged, he might be a beacon for any extraordinary percipience. And if he had stepped on bare dirt, even for an instantAs she searched the evening for some hint of the old man, she saw a glimmer of white brilliance through the dark

trunks and brush; and her heart seemed to stop.

Orcrest. Liand was using the orcrest. Oh, God!

Below us. Below Stave and her. Liand’s Sunstone would attract Kastenessen’s creature. Trying to calm Anele-or perhaps simply to light their way-Liand had inadvertently exposed himself to the skurj.

Yelling, “Watch outs’ she snatched power from the runes of the Staff; sent cornflower fire gusting out along the watercourse. “I’m going to try to stop that thing!” For an instant, the stream blazed as if the current had become incandescent. Then she concentrated her flame and drove it into the ground, down through sand and soil and stone, to intercept the skurj before it passed.

Stunned, Bhapa stared at her. But Stave appeared to understand.

Grabbing the Cord’s arm, he drew Bhapa away from her; out to the fringes of her fire.

At first, she could not feel the monstrous creature. Her boots muffled the sensitivity of her feet, and her nerves had not found the pitch of ravening and rage which had appalled Bhapa. Urgently she sent Earthpower and Law deeper and deeper into the earth, deeper than the oldest roots of the most thirsty trees, and still no

hunger responded to her flames.

Then Stave shouted. “Ware, Chosen! The skurj rises!”

In front of her, the watercourse spat filth in a spray of water, rocks, sand. The soil of its banks began to seethe as if the trees and brush were suppurating. Leaves overhead withered and charred. At the same time, she smelled gangrene; a miasma of sickness and rot; necrosis. Disease

boiled upward as though dirt and stone and wood were dying flesh.

When her power touched the surging creature, she staggered. The sheer vehemence of the skurj struck her like a physical blow. God, it was strong—

Putrefaction clogged her throat: she could hardly breathe. She tasted similarities to Roger’s bitter scoria. But the forces which confronted her now were worse; purer. They resembled the

ruddy extravagance of volcanoes: tremendous energies barely contained by the world’s friable shell.

As it came, she read the nature of the skurj. Mindless as cyclones and earthquakes, the monster was a product of organic magic. It had been born in magma: it throve in infernos and molten stone. And it ate the living earth. The earth’s flesh sustained its savagery. Yet it was not an inherent evil comparable to the Illearth Stone.

Nor did it exist outside the bounds of Law, as did the Viles and their descendants. And it did not intend ruin: it had no intention except appetite.

Over the course of millennia, however, all of the skurj had received the legacy of Kastenessen’s rage. During his Appointed Durance, they had been transmogrified; harnessed to his service. From him, they had inherited perversion. Goaded by his hate, they had become havoc and insatiable

sickness.

The creature rising to devour trees and dirt and Linden did not reason, and knew no fear. Therefore it could not be turned aside. It would eat and eat, afflicting everything in its vicinity with rot, until the very Earth was torn open at last.

Gasping at the stench, Linden felt her courage fail. She could not move or think. Around her, a wide span of the

watercourse and the forest boiled and frothed, immedicably diseased. The Staff was useless to her. The skurj consumed her flames; swallowed or ignored her power.

Covenant had told her to find him. Lord Foul and the croyel held Jeremiah. She and all of her companions were here because she had decided to take the Land’s fate into her own hands. Now she was helpless. Before she saw Kastenessen’s beast for the first time,

it had already defeated her.

For an instant, the fabric of reality seemed to rip like a fouled tapestry. The ground pitched and heaved; dropped her to her knees. The pustulent reek of mortification filled her lungs, her nerves, her wailing mind.

Then the skurj erupted from the earth, and she gaped into its avid mouth.

It rose as tall as a Giant above her, and

as thick as a cedar. Its hide was as heavy and hot as slag: the entire length of the creature emitted a terrible heat. Yet the hide shed no light. Even the tremendous kraken maw and gullet gave no illumination. Only the teeth, the fearsome fangs, long as stakes, curved and keen as scimitars, row after row of them filling the jaws: only the teeth shone. They burned with a sick red slashing radiance like lamps along the passage into hell.

Linden did not move. She believed that she could not. Her weakness was her birthright: her parents had spent their lives so that she would receive and accept their last gifts.

Nevertheless she was not the woman she had once been; the emotional cripple who had watched, frozen, while Jeremiah had surrendered his hand to Lord Foul, and Covenant had sacrificed himself for Joan. Her heart had become stone-and the stone held.

She did not move, but she could whisper. Gazing into the fanged throat of slaughter, she murmured. “Melenkurion abatha. Duroc minas mill. Harad khabaal.”

The skurj arched over her, mindless and savage. Its lambent teeth strained toward her. It could have swallowed her in a heartbeat. Yet it did not strike. Hearing her, it hesitated, caught by the potency of the Seven Words.

Then Clyme appeared on the poisoned ground beyond the skurj; and the suddenness of his arrival wrenched Linden from her paralysis. He was a Master, a potential antagonist. But he was also Haruchai: he would not hold back. Already she saw him gather himself to spring at the monster.

One touch of that fierce hide would burn the flesh from his bones. One flash of those wicked fangs would sever his limbs.

She was on her feet before she heard herself howl. “Clyme, no!” Screaming the Seven Words, she flung the full strength of the Staff at the skurj. Every scrap of her desperation and weakness and Earthpower she transmuted to fire and hurled against the creature.

Frantically she unleashed strength enough to set Salva Gildenbourne ablaze. But the focus of her terror and resolve was so single-minded that none of her flames touched the trees.

The skurj reared above her. Its jaws stretched to devour her inadequacy. For a moment or two, however, a handful of heartbeats, her coruscating incendiary repulsion sufficed to stop the beast. Although it ate her power, she lashed it with more force than it could consume.

Hampered by fire and the invocation of Law, the skurj reached toward her with its bright fangs-and failed to strike.

“Clyme!” Stave shouted: a stentorian roar which Linden scarcely heard. “Humbled! Preserve the Stonedownor! His orcrest may serve to distract this abomination!”

The skurj forced Linden backward step after step. Its brute force, prodigious and incapable of dismay, threatened to overwhelm her. Among the roots of Melenkurion Skyweir, she had outfought the combined theurgies of Roger and the croyel. But there she

had drawn directly upon the

EarthBlood: Earthpower unconstrained by mortality and fragile flesh. Here she had only herself.

Then Clyme turned from the creature and ran westward into the trees, followed by Bhapa and then Branl. When she saw that only Stave remained with her, in instant danger, Linden felt a touch of relief. Retreating, she grew stronger.

Grimly she poured torrential fire into the creature’s jaws; down its gullet. She was Linden Avery the Chosen. With no resources except the Staff of Law, the Seven Words, and her own granite, she had survived Melenkurion Skyweir’s convulsion. And Caerroil Wildwood had completed her Staff. Nothing limited the puissance available to her except her own abilities; her circumscribed humanity.

Still she retreated. She had no choice.

The creature was too strong: she could not hold it back entirely. But her moment of defeat had passed. As the jaws of the skurj blazed toward her, she reached deeper and deeper into herself for power.

Half of the beast’s serpentine length remained buried beneath it. Balancing as if it were coiled, the creature thrust itself forward. With every violent movement, the fangs burned closer to Linden, and the ground boiled and

rotted.

Stave stood directly behind her; supported her with his hands on her shoulders. In part, he gave her his intransigence, his unyielding Haruchai valor. But he also steadied her as she stumbled backward over sand and rocks. Unable to fight the creature himself, he preserved her from falling.

In gratitude and extreme fever, Linden howled the Seven Words, and hurled

conflagration as intense as a solar flare at the skurj-and learned the real purpose of Kevin’s Dirt.

Within its definitions-within the

bounds of Earthpower and Law-the Staff had no limits except those of its wielder. And Linden’s doubt and terror had passed. She had been annealed in her battle with Roger and the croyel: she was prepared to unleash any amount of flame against the skurj. It was not alone. Doubtless more of its

kind rushed to assail her. She would have to slay them all. The Land’s life as well as Jeremiah’s depended on her. She did not mean to fail.

She should have been able to ask the Staff for as much Earthpower as she needed.

But she had forgotten the cloying pall of Kevin’s Dirt. The blindness, the truncation of percipience, which it imposed was only one of its effects.

Fighting for her life, she discovered that Kevin’s Dirt hampered other forms of Earthpower as well.

It restricted her fire.

During her battle with Roger and the croyel, Kevin’s Dirt had not constrained her. It had not existed in that time. And it had not prevented her from extinguishing caesures, or from slaying Cavewights and kresh, because those exertions had not required as much

raw force as she sought here. Caesures violated all Law: all Law aided her against them. And Cavewights and kresh were perishable, as prone to immolation as any man or woman or child.

But now-God!

Kevin’s Dirt had been created for this: to inhibit the uttermost use of Earthpower. Linden was not being driven backward because she was

human and weak, but rather because her attempts to summon the full resources of the Staff were clogged by a ubiquitous fug of wrongness.

And this skurj was only one. There would be more.

Stave was right: Linden needed a distraction. She needed to risk Liand and the orcrest and perhaps all of her companions. She could not stop even one of these monsters with

Earthpower. She would die in moments if she did not cast the Staff aside and oppose the skurj with wild magic.

But that would take time. She had not begun to master Covenant’s ring. And white gold defied Law. By its very nature, the Staff would hamper her. It might block her altogether. Even if she surrendered it to Stave, she might not be able to invoke the wild magic that destroys peace swiftly enough to prevent the skurj from crushing her.

Stave! she cried in silence because she could not stop howling the Seven Words. Get Liand!

Stave could not hear her thoughts. She had to rely on his instinctive comprehension of her peril. She would falter and die if Liand did not distract the creature.

Just for a moment. Please.

I am not going to lose my son!

Her task should have been impossible. Without Stave’s support, she would have fallen. Nevertheless she continued to block the monster’s jaws, opposing its fury with fire and utter dismay.

Dimly she heard a voice that was not hers. Somewhere in the distance, Mahrtiir yelled, “Ringthanef’ as if the word were a battle cry.

Another roar answered his, as loud as

the crushing of boulders.

Then the Manethrall crashed into her from the side; drove her staggering through the stream to collide heavily with the bank of the watercourse.

At once, her power collapsed. The breath and stench were driven from her lungs: she nearly lost her grasp on the Staff. In the sudden cessation of flame, night closed like a tomb over the forest. Only the fangs of the skurj still

shone, gaping for prey.

Linden twisted to the side. She clutched for Covenant’s ring.

Between her and the monster’s maw, she saw in silhouette the mighty form of a Giant. Limned by rows of ravenous burning, he advanced on her with his arms raised over his head. In his hands, he gripped a longsword taller than she was, a wave-bladed flamberge.

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We are not alone. Others also are lost.

The Giant’s features were a contorted yammer of rage and insanity as he swung his sword, trying to hack Linden in half.

9.

The Long Journey of the Lost

Stunned by her impact with the bank of the watercourse, Linden could not breathe. She had no capacity for

power. Every Giant whom she had ever known had been her friend: bluff, kindly, humorous, extravagant of heart. Some of them she had loved. She would have felt a rush of joy if she had heard that those sea-and stone-loving people had returned to the Land.

The figure looming over her with butchery in his hands was unmistakably a Giant. He was at least twice her height, twice as broad, and muscled like an oak. His weathered

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features looked like they had been chiseled from brown marble. Even the cropped cut of his beard might have been shaped stone.

Yet he could not have belonged to the race that had called the people of the Land “Rockbrother” and “Rocksister” in friendship and mirth. She had seen Giants in every extreme of desperation and agony, outrage and sorrow, yearning and fear, as well as in affection and laughter and

comradeship; but she had never seen one raving with madness, or frantic for bloodshed.