“Hellfire and bloody damnation, Linden!” raged Covenant. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“Mom, what’s wrong?” panted Jeremiah. “Did you fall? Are you hurt? Are you trying to banish us?”
The wood that you claim must defy them—Linden gripped her Staff grimly and did not falter. You must be the first to drink of the EarthBlood. She stood between her companions and their goal.
Indirectly Esmer had prepared her for her encounter with the Viles. Had he also betrayed her?
“Oh, stop,” she breathed heavily, feigning anger to disguise her sorrow and resolve. “I’m obviously not going to ‘banish’ you. You’ve never been in any danger. There’s more power here than I could ever muster. It doesn’t bother you. And when Berek touched you—”
She left the rest of her protest unsaid. Covenant and Jeremiah had some other reason for rejecting contact with her. But she did not waste her scant strength on recriminations. When Covenant started to swear again, she took a step backward. And another.
“You said that you want to be clear,” she reminded him. Her voice was husky with effort and Earthpower. “So do I. I don’t”—she grimaced—“trust this situation.”
“Linden.” Covenant suddenly became calm. He kept his gaze away from hers; did not let her see his eyes. But he sounded almost gentle. “You don’t have to make a fight out of this. Talk to us. Tell us what you want. We’ll figure it out together.”
She continued moving slowly backward. She could not see either him or Jeremiah clearly. Her vision was an irredeemable smear of tears. But her tears were not weeping, and her nose ran only because it was stung by Earthpower.
“So you say.” Even now she lied without hesitation. “Here’s the problem. I can’t debate with you anymore.” If Covenant carried out his stated intentions—and if she succeeded at saving her son—she would be abandoned here, ten thousand years away from where she belonged. “You’ll come up with too many arguments, and I won’t be able to think.” Her mere presence and power in this time might suffice to alter the Land’s history; unmake the Arch. The Thomas Covenant whom she had known would not have asked or expected that of her. “So I’m just going to drink the EarthBlood first. I’m going to get Jeremiah away from Lord Foul with his mind whole. I’ll make sure that he can stay in the Land after Joan dies. Then I’ll get out of your way and let you do whatever you want.”
“Mom!” Jeremiah protested urgently. “If you do that, I will vanish. I won’t be with you anymore!”
Still retreating along the tunnel, Linden gazed at him through her tears. “I believe you.” A surge of grief slipped past her self-command. Then she forced it down. “I’ll never see you again. But at least I’ll know that you’re safe.”
Another faint shudder undermined the stone, but she did not lose her balance.
If she severed the bond between her son and Covenant, Covenant might become honest. But she did not intend to rely on that slim possibility.
If you err in this, your losses will be greater than you are able to conceive.
“Damnation, Linden.” Covenant still spoke calmly, although he crowded after her with an air of desperation. “It isn’t that simple. What makes you think I can stand by while you use the Power of Command? You’re the only one of us who’s real enough to survive forces on that scale.”
He and Jeremiah pushed toward her. Yet they did not risk coming near enough to be touched by her fire. Upheld by the Staff, she took one step after another.
She could feel the crushing mass of the mountain lean over her. It seemed to hold its breath as though it awaited her decision; her actions. You serve a purpose not your own, and have no purpose. That may have been true earlier. It was not true now.
The intensity in the air increased. It exceeded Linden’s ability to measure its increments—and went on increasing. The untrammeled might of the EarthBlood accumulated at her back.
“I’m not so sure,” she retorted, still pretending ire which she did not feel. “You’re part of the Arch of Time. There’s nothing you can’t do.”
She had seen Thomas Covenant become a being of incarnate wild magic. Even the imponderable capabilities of the Elohim would be too weak to contain him. He could have brushed aside their interference. If he feared them, he had some other reason.
“Hellfire!” he countered more hotly. “That isn’t how it works. Right now, I’m as mortal as you are. You’ve got my ring. You’ve even got your damn Staff. I’ve got nothing. And your kid has less than that.
“When I was here before”—he lowered his voice again—“I had my ring. That’s the only reason I wasn’t wiped off the face of the Earth when Elena summoned Kevin. Without it, I’m vulnerable. Why do you think I had to let the Theomach push me around? Why do you think I’ve been worried about the Elohim? While I’m in two places at once, two different kinds of reality, I’m practically crippled.”
Linden took another step backward, and another, holding the Staff of Law alight. She could not gain what she needed by any form of argument or persuasion. Through Anele, Covenant had told her, I can’t help you unless you find me. Then he had ridden into Revelstone with her son on the strength of his own will? No. Either the being who had spoken to her days ago had deliberately misled her, or the man who stood before her now was false in ways that exceeded her imagination.
“Maybe that’s true,” she muttered through her teeth. “Maybe it isn’t. I really don’t care.” If her son had let her touch him, she might not have been able to go on lying. But he and Covenant gave her nothing which would have compelled her to tell the truth. “I only care about Jeremiah. I’m going to save him. The Land is your problem.”
He should have known that she was lying. He and Jeremiah both should have known.
Then the tunnel expanded into a widening like a cul-de-sac; and at once, every nerve in her body recognized that she had reached the source of the EarthBlood. Covenant and Jeremiah might not attempt to rush her through the flame of the Staff, but she could not be sure. She trusted nothing. Facing the rill, she turned sideways so that she could glance into the end of the passage without losing sight of her companions.
At the back of the cave, a rude plane of stone as black as obsidian or ebony protruded like the exposed face of a lode from the surrounding granite. Peering at it, Linden blinked furiously, strove to clear her sight. The dark wet rock appeared to shimmer: its sharpness and stark purity overwhelmed her eyes. Through the blur, she seemed to see a facet of weakness in the substance of reality, a place of distortion where the tangible rock and the possibilities of Earthpower merged.
From the whole surface of the plane seeped the gravid liquid of the EarthBlood. Trickling down the face of the lode, it gathered in a shallow trough before it flowed thickly away down the length of the tunnel.
There, Linden thought in wonder and terror: there was the source of the Power of Command. In that trough, the concentration of Earthpower was so extreme that it seemed to fray the fabric of her existence, pulling her apart strand by strand.
She would have to drink—
“Mom!” Jeremiah cried, pleading with her. “I don’t want that. I don’t want you to rescue me if the Land is still at Foul’s mercy! My life isn’t worth it.”
“Hell and blood, Linden!” Covenant shouted. “You don’t have to do this! Weren’t you listening to the Viles? The Power of Command can’t touch wild magic, and whoever holds my ring doesn’t need the Power!
“For God’s sake! If you can’t do anything else, at least give me back my ring! Give me a chance to save the Land!”
For a moment, Linden hesitated; questioned herself. Could she carry out her intent without the EarthBlood, using only the Staff? Both Covenant and Jeremiah feared the fire of Law, that was obvious. But she did not believe that she possessed enough sheer power. No flame of hers would be more potent than the air of the tunnel—and her companions breathed it without wavering. She could not gain what she needed with the Staff alone. A
nd she could not wield the Staff and Covenant’s ring together. She had done so once, when she had unmade the Sunbane. But then she had been insubstantial, already half translated away from the Land. She had occupied a transitional dimension, a place of pure spirit; supernal rather than human. And Lord Foul’s frantic exertion of wild magic had opened the way for her; attuned her to a power which was not hers by right. Here the contradictory theurgies of white gold and the Staff would destroy her.
Either alone will transcend your strength, as they would that of any mortal. Together they will wreak only madness, for wild magic defies all Law.
She had made her decision. The time had come act on it.
Trust yourself.
I want to repay some of this pain.
In the end, she placed more faith in her dreams than in Covenant or her son.
Be cautious of love. It misleads. There is a glamour upon it which binds the heart to destruction.
“Jeremiah, honey,” she said through her determination and woe. “I love you. Try to forgive me.”
Before her companions—or her own fears—could intervene, Linden Avery the Chosen stooped to the trough and drank the Blood of the Earth.
Then she jerked erect, stood rigid as stone, while utter Earthpower reified in liquid transformed her mouth and throat and heart—her entire body—to exquisite unendurable fire.
Now it was not only the Staff of Law that shed flame: her whole being had become a conflagration. She burned like an auto-da-fé, as if she had been ignited by the sun’s inferno. Yet her flesh was not consumed, and her only pain was the agony of an intolerable exaltation. The EarthBlood raised her so far above her limitations and alarms that the discrepancy threatened to incinerate her, not because it was wrong or hurtful, but because she was inadequate to bear it.
If she did not express her incandescence at once, utter her Command, the puissance she had swallowed would sear her to the marrow of her bones.
All you have to do is want it—
Enfolded from head to foot in unanswerable fire, she turned to her companions.
She could see them clearly now. Flames had burned away her tears; her weakness. Covenant stared at her with his mouth open as if he were enraptured by eagerness and dread; and the red embers which filled his eyes shone so hotly that they fumed in the viscid air. Jeremiah had thrown his head back as if he were howling. In his halfhand, he clutched his racecar; held it out toward her as though it might ward off an attack.
When Linden spoke, her words were a shout of fire. With the full force of the Power of Command, she demanded of her companions. “Show me the truth!”
Then she watched in horror as her loves flew apart like leaves in a high wind.
12.
Transformations
While her Command compelled obedience to her will, Linden remained clad in fire. Briefly she had become Earthpower, and could not be refused. She saw every detail with lucent precision while her desires were imposed on her companions.
Covenant’s jeans and T-shirt slumped away as the truth was revealed. They became an indeterminate grey shirt and khaki slacks. Three bullet holes formed an arc across the center of his shirt. They had been healed; but their edges were still crusted with blood.
His features blurred as though she had begun to weep again, although she had not; could not. His face became rounder, softer. Lines of severity melted from around his mouth, leaving his cheeks unmarked. The corners of his eyes no longer expressed any intimacy with pain. And he shrank slightly, grew shorter. At the same time, his torso swelled with self-indulgence. Even his posture changed. He stood with a familiar combination of looseness and tension: the looseness of weak muscles; the tension of poor balance.
A glamour upon it—
It was not Thomas Covenant who stood before her, exposed by fire and Command. It was Covenant’s son, Roger, seeking such havoc that the bones of mountains tremble to contemplate it. Linden could not fail to recognize him now.
Do you not fear that I will reveal you? The Theomach must have known—
The embers were gone from Roger’s eyes: his gaze had regained the exact hue of his father’s, the troubled color of suffering and ruin and unalloyed love. Nevertheless he had been altered; terribly transformed. His right hand was whole, but it had lost its humanity. Instead it was composed of magma and theurgy, living lava and anguish. Its fiery brutality reminded her of the devouring serpents she had seen during her translation to the Land, the malefic creatures of lava and hunger that Anele had called the skurj.
Roger Covenant’s right hand had been cut off. It had been replaced by that—
And when that doesn’t work, he maims—
Somewhere in the background of Linden’s mind, a voice gibbered, Oh God. OhGodohGodohGod. But she hardly recognized her own fear.
Kastenessen had merged part of himself with the skurj. Roger himself in his father’s guise had told her that. The deranged and doomed Elohim’s escape from his Durance had been more painful than you can imagine.
Kastenessen is all pain. It’s made him completely insane.
She had been given hints. And she blazed with Earthpower: her perceptions were preternaturally acute. She jumped to conclusions instinctively, instantaneously—and trusted them completely.
Being part skurj isn’t excruciating enough, so he surrounds himself with them, he makes them carry out his rage. And when that doesn’t work—
Sweet Jesus. Kastenessen had severed his own right hand and given it to Roger Covenant. He had granted Roger the magic to conceal himself from her percipience; had turned Roger into an entirely new kind of halfhand—
The truth of the man who had brought her here appalled her; shocked her to the core. Roger’s presence in his father’s place exceeded her sharpest fears. Nevertheless the sight of her son was worse.
Jeremiah also had been concealed. Now his plight was unmasked. He stood gazing vacantly at her or through her; unaware of her. The stain in his eyes seemed to blind him. His mouth hung open, the lower lip slack. Drool ran down his chin. His twitch was gone, erased from his empty features. Linden saw at a glance that he had relapsed to his former unreactive dissociation.
But there was more—
Despite his overt passivity, his arms did not dangle at his sides. Instead his fists were raised in front of him. In his right, his halfhand, he clutched his racecar; gripped it so hard that he had crumpled the metal. In his left, he held a piece of wood as slim and pointed as a stiletto, a splinter of the deadwood which he had gathered from Garroting Deep.
From his shoulders, his blue pajama shirt hung in tatters. Horses reared from scrap to scrap, torn apart by blows and falling. Bruises covered his arms and chest. Yet the unassoiled discoloration of his contusions did not mask the violence of the bullets which had pierced his flesh. His rank wounds, one in his stomach, the other directly over his heart, oozed dark blood that formed a web of crust and fluid on his torso, trickling at last into the waistband of his pajama bottoms.
He had died in his natural world. Like Linden: like Joan. He would never be freed from the Land.
Yet even that was not the worst.
A small hairless creature like a deformed child clung to his back. Its clawed fingers dug into his shoulders: its sharp toes gouged his ribs. Its malign yellow eyes regarded Linden while its teeth chewed ceaselessly at the side of Jeremiah’s neck and its mouth drank his life.
And from the creature came waves of eldritch force so cruel and bitter that they turned the air in Linden’s lungs to ash. In its own way, the creature was as mighty as Roger. Its power matched the potential for savagery and devastation of Kastenessen’s severed hand. But the creature’s strength had more in common with the black lore of the Viles than with the laval hunger of the skurj—or with the covert transformations of the Elohim. It was an altogether different threat; a danger comparable to the Illearth Stone in its violation of Law.
Nonetheless Linden recognized it instantly. Twice before, she had met a simila
r magic, a comparable ferocity.
The creature was one of the croyel: a parasite or demon which throve by giving power and time to more natural men or women or beasts as it mastered them. Long ago, Findail the Appointed had described the croyel as beings of hunger and sustenance which demnify the dark places of the Earth. Those who bargain thus for life or might with the croyel are damned beyond redemption.
But Jeremiah was not damned, she insisted to herself. He was not. He was not like Kasreyn of the Gyre: he had made no bargain. He could not have made one. Lost within himself, he more closely resembled the arghuleh of the Northron Climbs, mindless ice-beasts which had simply been enslaved by the croyel. The bargain here was Lord Foul’s, not Jeremiah’s.
Still her son was effectively possessed. The Ranyhyn had done what they could to forewarn her. But her fears had tended toward Ravers—or toward the Despiser himself. She had not come close to imagining Jeremiah’s true peril.
Empowered by the Blood of the Earth, Linden screamed raw fire down the stone throat of the tunnel.
Her flame was met by a blast of heat like the opening of a furnace. Roger’s given hand flung its own brimstone conflagration against her, vicious as scoria. If she had not been enclosed in Earthpower, and warded by the Staff of Law, she would have died before her heart could beat again. Instead, however, she was only quenched. The flame which the EarthBlood had given her was snuffed out: the illuminating fire of the Staff vanished as though it had been doused.
The sudden vehemence of the attack staggered her. For a brief moment, a small sliver of time, she tottered on the brink of the trough. Then, reflexively, she dropped to her knees, snatching herself back from a second contact with the Blood.
Reclaimed by mortality, her vision blurred again. Only Roger’s crimson virulence remained to light his malice and Jeremiah’s emptiness and the insatiable eyes of the croyel. But she saw them as nothing more than shapes and points of light; instances of bereavement.
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