The Last Dark

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Around her, her friends strove like demons against impossible odds. They fought in pairs, supporting each other: Stonemage and Galesend, Grueburn and Bluntfist. Cabledarm also had left Jeremiah. With Stave like a Giant at her side, she committed all of her strength to the fray. Exchanging feints and cuts, they wrought bloodshed among the monsters. Only Rime Coldspray stayed to ward Linden. Only maimed Cirrus Kindwind watched over Jeremiah.

  In small bursts, momentary and localized, the Swordmainnir succeeded. They appeared to kill or cripple every creature they met. And Stave did as much as any titan—until an untimely snap of jaws broke his longsword. After that, he had no choice except to throw the shard of his blade down the monster’s throat, and to withdraw while he searched for some other weapon. His bare flesh could not survive any contact with the monsters.

  Without him, Cabledarm fought alone.

  Nevertheless the companions were doomed. The skurj were simply too many to be overcome by frenetic Earthpower and a few Giants. And those creatures which did not attack fed. They multiplied. Much of the valley bottom had become a mad seethe of monsters as vicious as scoria, as fatal as the white core of a furnace. Many of the trees had gone up in flames, but their destruction made no difference.

  Linden no longer thought. In some sense, she no longer cared. She was too far gone to count her concerns. As far as she knew, her husband and Branl were already dead. She had only moments left. Jeremiah would survive only if Lord Foul or moksha Jehannum turned the monsters aside.

  Abruptly Cabledarm went down. She did not rise again. Stormpast Galesend fell with a fountain of blood where her arm had been. One of the skurj pounced on her before Linden could intervene.

  Instantly Stave dove into the struggle, claimed Cabledarm’s sword. He joined Onyx Stonemage before she was overwhelmed.

  Strands of fog tumbled among the combatants, obscured details until crimson and obsidian fires burned holes in the streamers. Through the confusion, Linden saw too many Giants: half a dozen more than there should have been. Giddy with exhaustion and flame, she tried to count. Three Swordmainnir still fought. Coldspray and Kindwind made five. How could there be more?

  “Welcome!” the Ironhand shouted with a tantara in her voice. “Well come in all sooth!” Then she yelled, “Assume my task, and Kindwind’s, that we may give battle!”

  The others—the others?—were not Swordmainnir. Most of them were men. They wore canvas breeches and shirts rather than armor. And they carried no swords. Two had spears. Another appeared to drive an entire spar between the jaws of a skurj. Linden saw a collection of billhooks with whetted edges, belaying-pins longer than one of her arms, knouts studded with sharp stones, immense cleavers.

  Such weapons should have been useless here; yet they wrought confusion among the nearest monsters. Billhooks tore open the hinges of jaws, left maws unable to close. Belaying-pins smashed teeth. Knouts distracted creatures while spears stabbed. Cleavers shed blood wherever they could. In spite of their bulk, the Giants moved with the agility of sailors trained to weather hurricanes.

  They were a paltry force against the onslaught of skurj. Still they fought as if they were singing; as if they were glad to spend their lives in a hopeless cause.

  The man who had fed his spar to a monster broke free of the battle, came toward Linden and Coldspray. “Ironhand,” he panted, grinning. Reflections of Earthpower and lava in his eyes resembled the exultation of hysteria or madness. “I hear and obey. Stone and Sea! We are lost.”

  Rime Coldspray did not pause to acknowledge him. Roaring a Giantish battle-cry, she took her stone glaive into the heart of the turmoil.

  To Linden, the man remarked, “My name is unwieldy in such straits. For ease of use in peril, I am called Hurl.”

  She hardly heard him.

  A woman with the charred remains of a knout in one hand followed Hurl; hastened past Linden. As soon as the woman neared Jeremiah, Cirrus Kindwind ran to join the Ironhand. Swinging her longsword one-handed, Kindwind dealt furious cuts at every skurj within reach. But she did not pursue her attack on any single creature. Her tactic was speed. Apparently her only objective was to cause pain; to weaken her foes with wounds.

  Stave also relied on swiftness. Still he fought with the precision of a surgeon. He seemed inhumanly adept at slicing open the hearts of monsters. Somehow he avoided every slash of fangs, every scalding splash of blood, every brimstone touch.

  It was all futile. One of the newly arrived Giants died directly below Linden. She could not save him. She had forgotten the Sandgorgons; forgotten Covenant and Branl. She had nothing left except a kind of autonomic ferocity. She had fought her way beyond the precipice of her strength and power. Now she could only flail and fall.

  Yet the surprise of more Giants appeared to affect the skurj. It altered the focus of their rampage; or they received new commands from the evil which had replaced Kastenessen as their master. Their dim minds—or moksha Raver’s—recognized that Linden and the Giants were trivial: puny opponents easily eaten later. A greater enemy awaited their fangs, an antagonist whose power might provide a richer feast. Wild magic might slaughter every one of the monsters; or it might exalt them, if they were able to feed on it.

  In a staggered cadence, as if some skurj were more reluctant than others, they turned toward the lower end of the valley.

  There near the Sarangrave and the Defiles Course, Covenant fought for time. He needed a respite, just a few moments for his only answer. His last gamble. He had to be able to stand back and concentrate—And even then, he might be too late.

  But he could not take the chance while Sandgorgons forced him to struggle for every moment of life.

  He saw Giants now. They seemed to come from nowhere, as if they were an incarnation of the fog. Five, no, six of them, two women, the rest men. Not Swordmainnir. They looked like sailors armed with implements from their ship. Their movements were swift and accurate, but they lacked the fluid poise of warriors.

  Still they were apt foes for Sandgorgons, more agile than Covenant, twice Branl’s size. One against one, their sheer muscle matched the savagery of the monsters. Their skin was not hide bred in the extremes of the Great Desert and the brutal gyre of Sandgorgons Doom. They could not slough off crushing blows and ruinous waters. But their instincts and reflexes were not hampered by single-mindedness. They fought with intelligence as well as strength; with skills which they had earned in storms.

  And they did not fight alone. The lurker’s tentacle continued its battery, pounding at as many creatures as it could reach. At the same time, Branl seemed to float through the contest as if he served his blade; as if he were a weapon wielded by the eldritch flamberge. If a Giant halted a Sandgorgon with a blow or a cut, the Haruchai arrived bearing death.

  Although the newcomers were only six, they fought like furies. Their weapons soon failed them. Knives broke on the hides of Sandgorgons. Knouts had no effect. Spears only pierced when they struck perfectly. Still the Giants were Giants, powerful of fist and arm. Few as they were, they thwarted the onrush of monsters.

  Somehow the Giants and the lurker and Branl cleared a space around Covenant.

  That should have been enough for him. He had been offered his chance. He only needed to gather himself.

  But his damaged chest sucked air in wracked gasps; and vertigo filled his head as if he stood on an appalling height, peering down into the valley from the fatal slopes of Mount Thunder; and he had never unlearned his fear of unrestrained wild magic. He could too easily imagine shattering the high cliff above the river.

  Then he was given more than a momentary reprieve. A kind of convulsion seemed to grip the Sandgorgons as if an invisible hand had taken hold of their minds. They paused; scanned the valley as if they sought more satisfying opponents. An instant later, they wheeled away.

  Some of them delivered a last flurry of blows, but soon all of them were pounding back up the valley. Massed and eager, they formed a bleached river pouring irresistibly uphill. A
t the same time, the skurj began to squirm downward, horrific numbers of the serpent-monsters. As the Sandgorgons ascended, they parted only to let scores of skurj pass among them.

  The attackers had traded targets. The Sandgorgons raced to assail Linden and Jeremiah and the surviving Swordmainnir. A tsunami of skurj plunged toward Covenant and Branl and their unforeseen allies.

  Covenant’s vision was too badly blurred: he could not tell how many Giants still stood with Linden. He recognized her only by the faltering fever of her Staff, her stained fire.

  Damnation. He did not know how she would fare against the Sandgorgons. Even aided by Branl and Giants, he would not be able to withstand the onslaught of skurj. Even if he ripped open the mountain—

  “More!” he cried at the Feroce. “We need more!”

  The lurker’s minions had withdrawn, flinching, toward the Flat. They may not have heard him. They or their High God may have chosen not to hear him.

  Cursing himself for every lost instant, Covenant dismissed his wild magic longsword. Now or never. What good was leprosy if he could not trust its implications? If it did not enable him to bear what he required of himself?

  In one quick motion, he pulled the blade of the krill across his left palm, drew blood sluggish with dehydration. He had no staff, no instrument of Law. Like Berek Halfhand before him, he needed blood and desperation to accomplish what even wild magic could not. Clenching his cut hand, he slapped red drops against the dagger’s gem. Then he flung his gaze upward, past Linden and the onset of Sandgorgons, past the outpouring of the Defiles Course, past the towering cliff to the highest slopes of the mountain. In his mind, he shouted the Seven Words: a prayer that had no voice.

  A prayer that meant, Please.

  Almost immediately, he was answered.

  Power without shape or sound exploded in him, through him, around him. A detonation both silent and invisible shocked the valley from end to end. Theurgy as old as the world seemed to ripple across the fabric of reality. It jolted the Sandgorgons in their strides; bewildered the skurj so badly that some of them turned on each other. Sights that should have been clear blurred and merged. The slopes on both sides of the river trembled.

  After the concussion came stillness: a quiet so profound that it appeared to stop time. Existence held its breath. The Sandgorgons began strides which they did not complete. Skurj paused with their lurid jaws wide. Fangs or brains forgot themselves. Giants tried to flick glances at each other, or at Covenant, and found that they could not move. Only Branl—

  Lowering his blade, the Humbled bowed to Covenant as if he understood. As if he approved.

  A moment later, the entire sky became thunderheads, black as ur-viles, impenetrable as gutrock. The heavens poised themselves for a blast which would rattle Gravin Threndor to its roots.

  As if on command, the lurker struck. From the Defiles Course, a tentacle lashed at the baffled skurj. It wrapped itself around one of the monsters.

  Shrieking in pain, Horrim Carabal lifted the creature.

  The tentacle caught fire: it burned like aged wood. Rabid flames streaked the air. The lurker’s agony must have been extreme: worse than turiya Raver’s violation; worse than self-mutilation. Yet the sovereign of the Sarangrave did not let go. Instead it flung the skurj eastward over the wetland.

  That creature did not return.

  Nor did the lurker. Its arm collapsed into the river, smothered flames in water and corruption. Sounds like the sobbing of marshes roiled through the fog. No other tentacles appeared.

  Through Horrim Carabal’s wailing came a deep concussion as unanswerable as a tectonic shift. Mount Thunder itself seemed to howl as gouts of sizzling rock swept downward. Storms boiled lower until they shrouded Gravin Threndor’s high crown.

  And from the depths of the Flat, waters rose against the current of the Defiles Course as if they had been summoned by the mountain. Dark thrashing swelled between the riverbanks.

  Covenant hardly noticed the river. Dimly in the distance, he thought that he saw yellow fires break through the clouds. He thought that he saw discrete flames surge lower like the onset of an avalanche. They roared as if the very air had become conflagration.

  “You are answered, ur-Lord,” Branl announced distinctly. “A worthy effort in all sooth. How the forces which you have unleashed may combat skurj, who are themselves a form of fire, I cannot conceive. Nonetheless the summons is both valiant and unforeseen. I am proud that I am Humbled in your name.”

  At last, Covenant began to see the fires more clearly. They looked impossibly far away: too far away to reach the valley before the Sandgorgons and the skurj remembered their savagery. But now he was sure that those flames were Fire-Lions. They embodied Earthpower and Mount Thunder’s enduring spirit. They could be as swift as the theurgy which had called them forth.

  The Sandgorgons rallied more quickly than the skurj. But the monsters of the Great Desert did not resume their charge toward Linden and her few companions. Their strange senses marked the rush of a new threat. And some deep part of them—an instinct too atavistic to heed samadhi Sheol—responded with eagerness. They had been bred in scorching heat and flaying winds, and had been trapped for millennia within the scouring energies of Sandgorgons Doom. Their urge to prove themselves against any and every foe outweighed samadhi’s urgings. It outweighed self-preservation.

  Together they turned away from Linden, strode deliberately down into the bottom of the valley. There they stood like a wall, awaiting the landslide fury of the Fire-Lions.

  They had already demonstrated that they had no cause to fear the rising waters.

  Beasts of flame became torrents on the mountainsides. They spread like wildfires toward the sheer drop above the river.

  Muttering mute curses like supplications, Covenant watched the cliff and the Sandgorgons. If samadhi and moksha did not regain control of those creatures—if the uncertainty of the skurj lasted just a little longer—

  Behind Covenant, the Feroce gibbered for his attention. “Pure One, hear us.” Their pleading was a damp clamor, scarcely audible through the tumult of Fire-Lions, the scald and crash of ancient magicks. “Our High God’s flesh cannot endure the worms of fire. He must not hazard them. Yet the alliance has been sealed. Even in his anguish, our High God upholds it.

  “You must seek higher ground. We have done what we have done. The Feroce can do no more.”

  While Covenant stared, stricken witless, Branl called, “Ur-Lord!” He sounded uncharacteristically urgent. “Heed the Feroce! The waters rise!”

  “Well said, Haruchai,” muttered a Giant as he snatched Covenant into his arms. He had a seamed face, and skin toughened by wind and sun, yet he looked as slender as a sapling, or as incomplete, like a man whose body was decades younger than his visage. Nevertheless his muscles were hawsers. “This fog masks a mounting flood. A tide gathers from the east. Even Giants cannot swim such waters.”

  The skurj turned away from the cliff, away from the Sandgorgons. Those monsters which had bitten into other skurj, seeking blood and sustenance, ceased their feeding. Rearing like serpents, they brandished their fangs at Covenant; at Branl and six unknown Giants.

  Together the Giants scrambled out from under a breaking wave of reified lava. Covenant dangled, helpless in his rescuer’s arms, trying to understand events which had become as sudden as vertigo. At the rear of the group, Branl fought alone, swinging Longwrath’s flamberge in a blur of cuts. But he retreated as he slashed, moving quickly without giving the monsters his back. The thunder of the Fire-Lions sounded like ruin, the gutrock rumble of an earthquake powerful enough to tear Landsdrop apart. The tumult of water rising from the Sarangrave resembled the onrush of another tsunami.

  At the full stretch of their long limbs, the Giants raced for the southern rim of the valley. A long stone’s throw away, more Giants bore Linden and Jeremiah upward. Swinging a longsword, Stave accompanied them. Branl cut twice more at the nearest creatures, then turned to follow the Giants
.

  When the Fire-Lions met the wall of Sandgorgons, and Horrim Carabal’s flood found the skurj, the result was cataclysm. It shook the foundations of the Lower Land for leagues in every direction. Struck by acrid eruptions of steam and fury, the thunderheads became a bludgeoning deluge that seemed to erase the valley from existence. Rain fell like the ultimate darkness.

  Then the Giants raised a huzzah, ragged and grateful. The monsters were dying, all of them. Dimly Covenant realized that most of his companions had survived. He had seen Linden’s fire before the end. Lord Foul would not have permitted harm to Jeremiah.

  Carried by a Giant whom he had never met before, Thomas Covenant felt no relief. He had exhausted himself. Now he was too stunned to feel anything.

  4.

  Reluctances

  The downpour lasted until the Fire-Lions were done with the Sandgorgons; until all of the skurj were dead, and the lurker’s flood dwindled to the east; until samadhi Sheol’s sentience had faded entirely from existence. Then the thunderheads drifted apart as if they had forgotten their purpose. The chill of rain and darkness dismissed the fog. Glittering as if they trembled at what they beheld, stars pricked the night sky with loveliness.

  Linden did not see the Fire-Lions depart. For all she knew, they, too, had perished. But she did not think so. Gravin Threndor’s ancient fire and glory were inherent to the world, as natural as the Worm. She doubted that they could be unmade.

  She rested under the shelter of an ironwood high up on the side of the valley, as far as possible from the craters and carnage of the battle, the plague-spots like stigmata in the ground, the clinging reek of gangrene. Leaning against the hard trunk with the Staff of Law in her lap, she waited for some semblance of strength to return.

  She was too tired to be afraid. Too drained even to stay on her feet after Hurl had delivered her here. Too depleted to regard Jeremiah, or Covenant, or the Giants. Instead she floated into the lucidity of exhaustion: that numb mind-set in which unbidden thoughts followed their own logic to conclusions that might not have made sense at any other time.