The Last Dark

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  The man’s tone became more urgent, although he existed only as vagueness. “She rises, Linden. And I fear—” His fading hands shook her. “Linden, hear me. I am Haruchai. I fear nothing, yet I tremble. I fear that the bane will ascend to Kiril Threndor. I fear that She will discern the scent of Corruption and the puissance of the Timewarden. I fear that She will fall upon them in fury and lay the Timewarden waste.

  “For that reason I have guided you here. It is my hope that you will call out to Her with wild magic. It is my prayer, Linden, that you will draw Her to us before She nears Kiril Threndor.”

  He must have wanted something from her. Why else did he mar the palace with his voice, his hands, his insistence? But each word evaporated as soon as his mouth shaped it. He might as well have made no sound. He persisted in her sight as nothing more than a dwindling imperfection among the meretricious entrancements of the ballroom.

  “Linden.” Although he sounded as calm as snow-clad peaks in clear sunshine, he conveyed a subtle desperation. “You must hear me. All of life tilts on the edge of a blade, and I am afraid. My hand remains able to strike you, and to strike again, until I am heeded. Alas, my heart will not suffer it. You must hear me.”

  She did not. She had forgotten him. She had almost forgotten that language had meaning. His words slipped past her. Then they were gone. Only ensorcelments remained.

  But Stave was not alone. At his back, an array of creatures crouched in the act of rising to their hind legs. Black things, no more than a dozen. And grey ones, smaller, half that number. Above the cruel slits of their mouths, they had no eyes. Wet nostrils dominated their faces. Pointed ears twitched on their skulls. Their heads and bodies were hairless.

  Stave turned and bowed to them as if they had earned homage.

  They made chittering sounds like his, language without meaning. One of them taller than the others held a jerrid of black iron, a scepter like a short javelin. A fuming liquid as dire as poison dripped from the iron. The tall creature snuffled at Linden, then turned away. With low growls and snarls, it used the point of its jerrid to sketch incomprehensible symbols in the air. Acid drops scattered here and there; but they evaporated before they touched the floor.

  For a moment without measure or duration, nothing changed. Linden remembered nothing. Only the ballroom endured. Like Stave, the creatures faded, the black ones and the grey. Like him, they were almost gone.

  Then a subtle tremor ran through the fountain, a vibration so brief and untenable that it defied sight. She could not believe that she had seen it. She hardly recognized her own fright.

  Slow and horrid as a plunge from a nightmare precipice, a single jewel of water high in the fountain began to fall.

  Light shone all around the small bead. It looked like an epiphany; like the essence of the Earth’s gems; like the last gleam of the ravaged heavens. It fell and fell forever, infinite and fatal; and while Linden watched it, her heart did not beat, her lungs did not draw breath. When at last it reached the floor, the largesse of the rugs, it made a tiny splash: the first faint quiver of a world about to shatter.

  Somewhere in the distance, hundreds of leagues away, the Worm—

  Linden blinked. A small frown knotted her forehead. Her heart offered up a weak beat.

  The creatures continued their guttural invocation—and another bead of water began its interminable demise—and Stave stood in front of her again, clutching her shoulders.

  When he repeated her name, she wanted to weep.

  A second little splash. A few ripples. In rugs? In marble?

  A third rare jewel of water, and a fourth, dropping from perfection into time and ruin. When they struck, they made a pattering sound, delicate and awful.

  Oh, God, she thought. Stave. The Worm. The bane.

  Ur-viles and Waynhim. Once again, they had come to her rescue when she did not know how to save herself.

  In this place, rescue was an atrocity. It destroyed a supernal achievement, the triumph of lore which had preserved the palace through the ages. And the effect on Linden was no less cruel. Raindrops brought back memories like devastations. Thoughts were carnage and cataclysm.

  Jeremiah. Thomas!

  Somehow she reached out to the Haruchai. Her voice was softer than the accumulating drip of the fountain. Her eyes should have been full of tears.

  “What did you say? About the bane?”

  His back straightened. His chin rose proudly. His eye shone.

  “She rises, Linden. If you do not call out to Her, She will assail the Timewarden. She will consume your son.”

  Damn it! Linden wished that Stave had hit her. She wanted to pummel herself. She had chosen to face her worst fears. Then she had forgotten all about them. And while she had lost herself among marvels, the Earth’s peril had increased beyond bearing.

  She Who Must Not Be Named might take Thomas and Jeremiah.

  In a different life, a bullet had struck Linden. A scar over her heart matched the perfect circle in her shirt. There was no going back. Choices made could not be recanted.

  Thomas had unforeseeable strengths. He might survive. But mere Law and Earthpower would not suffice to ward Jeremiah.

  For Linden’s sake, or for the Earth’s, the ur-viles and Waynhim had disrupted the prolonged theurgies of the Viles; sacrificed their own heritage of splendor. Around the ballroom, a light drizzle fell. The fountain cast a fine mist that gathered into droplets. Drips leaked from the music of the ceiling. Ripples ran down the stairways. Gradually the chandeliers released their lights. Spots of water stippled the woven rugs, the immemorial floor.

  No going back. Now or never.

  God help me.

  Linden delayed only long enough to say to the ur-viles and Waynhim, to the eyeless features of the loremaster, “You keep helping me, no matter how much it costs, and I still don’t know how to repay you.” Then she wheeled away.

  Clenching her fists, she raised her face to the leagues of blind stone above the Lost Deep. Rain spattered her cheeks and forehead. Its sheer age stung her eyes. In her mouth, the drops tasted like dust.

  As if she had always known what she could do, she invoked her wedding band. She had no more use for despair and recrimination; inadequacy. Only power would serve. Like a woman screaming, she flung a roar of wild magic into Mount Thunder’s gutrock.

  “I’m here! You lost me once! Come get me now!”

  Her theurgy could have torn vast stone to powder; could have brought the weight of the mountain crashing into the caverns of the Lost Deep. But her health-sense was precise. She did not hurl silver against the rock: she tuned it to pass through Mount Thunder’s substance, sharpened it to a pitch that only the bane would be able to hear.

  “Come and get me! I can save you!”

  Melenkurion Skyweir was already falling. She felt its massive collapse like atmospheric pressure on her skin, heard it like the grumble of impossible thunder. At any moment, the Worm would begin to drink EarthBlood from the world’s heart.

  Slowly the drizzle became rain. Details among the mosaics blurred and ran as their melodies dwindled to liquid. The staircases slumped, shrugging thin streams from their sides. The shafts of the chandeliers bowed as if they had lost faith in themselves. Rills curled around Linden’s boots, flowing nowhere. Argent made raindrops as bright as exploding stars.

  “I can tell you how to save yourself!”

  She felt Stave’s hand on her shoulder. His touch seemed almost diffident as he asked for her attention. But she did not acknowledge him until her power and her shouting failed; until she could no longer sustain her summons.

  Silver stains danced like little suns across her vision as she turned back to her friend.

  Through a veil of rainfall, Stave told her, “It is enough. If your call is not heard, no other will suffice.”

  The ur-viles and Waynhim barked to each other like dogs, excited or fearful. The loremaster gestured resignation or encouragement with its jerrid. Water glistened on the skin of t
he creatures as if the fluid were dying, giving up its last magic.

  “Therefore I must speak,” continued the former Master. “I will not be vouchsafed another occasion to do so.”

  Linden glared and squinted, trying to clear the spots from her eyes. Wet hair straggled across her cheeks.

  “I must state plainly, Linden, that you have become wondrous in my sight. Here my life is forfeit. It may be that the bane will heed you. Me She will not suffer. In Her sight, all men are betrayers. I will be devoured.”

  Water streamed on Linden’s face, scattered from the lines of her jaw. Drops snapped against her skin. Here my life is forfeit. How had she failed to consider this? For hours, she had imagined her intentions as though they threatened only her. But of course Stave was right. He could not withstand the bane. She Who Must Not Be Named would not tolerate him.

  “As farewell,” her final companion told her, “I must say aloud that I regret nothing. My fears are gone. You risk much, as you have ever done. Whatever now ensues, know that I am made proud by my place at your side.”

  She Who Must Not Be Named only slew men; only killed and ate them. She had no other use for them. Women She consumed in an entirely different fashion. She craved the torment of their living spirits when their bodies were destroyed. Her hunger was for the anguish of their souls, undying and endlessly tormented. It resembled or confirmed or justified Her own agony.

  In some sense, literally or metaphorically, the bane was here because Lord Foul had betrayed Her; seduced and ruined Her with lies; gaoled Her within Time. Now She could only suffer—and feed on the sufferings of any woman who came within Her grasp. Diassomer with fear and dread—Unforgiven Elena, Covenant’s daughter by rape. Emereau Vrai, Kastenessen’s mortal lover. An Insequent whom the Ardent had called the Auriference. Hundreds or thousands of women across the ages of the Earth. As far as She was concerned, all women and every love had been betrayed.

  If She had not forgotten Her true name—Her real scope and power—She would have brought everything to an end long ago.

  Linden peered through splashes and rivulets at Stave. The rain was becoming torrential as millennia of lore failed, unloosed by these few ur-viles and Waynhim according to the arcane dictates of their Weird. Lashing drops and spray fraught with residues stung like acid. She tried to find her voice; swallowed bitterness so that she might shout refusals at her friend. If he would not ask the Demondim-spawn for protection, she meant to plead on his behalf.

  But she did not. She was already overwhelmed.

  I am made proud by my place at your side.

  In the small space between instants, the rainwater running over her body became vermin. It became centipedes as long as her hand, feasting maggots, spiders with hundreds of pincers, lice that scuttled and squirmed, worms burrowing. Noisome things crawled and clawed and pecked everywhere, intimate as lovers, avid as eaters of death. Desperate to quash the feeding, she thrashed like a madwoman, hit herself frantically, dug at her scalp until she drew blood.

  Stave may have shouted her name. If he did, the rain slapped his voice from the air.

  Cascades filled her mouth with biting insects. They laid their eggs in her eyes, breeding. When she tried to breathe, she gasped abhorrence into her lungs and retched. Beetles and centipedes scuttled down her throat.

  —written in water. The Despiser had named her fate. Water was horror. It was eager excruciation. It transformed her to carrion and shrieking.

  Now Lord Foul laughed at her from an insurmountable distance. You have become the daughter of my heart. Laughed as he must have laughed at She Who Must Not Be Named. Soon Time would begin to crumble, and he would be free. Linden had brought this on herself. She had given it to the world as if it were the sum and consummation of her life. It would never stop. Across every inch of her flesh, it drove her mad. She could not bear it. If she had been given a knife, she would not have hesitated to flay the skin from her bones.

  Such desecration should have finished her. But it was endless. It could always get worse.

  And while Linden flailed in torrents, the bane shouldered Her way into the cavern.

  Her power was immense. No doubt She could have shaped Herself to slip through the passages of the Lost Deep. Yet She did not. Damage suited Her: She liked wreckage in Her wake. As She entered, the rolling bulk of Her fury made a ruin of the stone. With every shrug, Her advance flung rubble at the walls. Her many faces were etched in fire. Mute screams stretched their mouths. Torment gouged their eyes.

  Without knowing what she did, Linden stopped thrashing. The scale of the bane’s extremity and rage demanded her absolute attention. Suddenly worms and maggots were no longer sensations. They became insights.

  When She Who Must Not Be Named spoke, the impact of Her voice seemed to stop Linden’s heart. The ferocity of the sound changed the rain to steam and scalding.

  “Do you speak to me?” The roar crushed Linden’s hearing. “Do you speak to me of save? Do you dare? My pain cannot be redeemed. It can only feed and grow.

  “You are mine. I will relish you. I require only a moment to chew the marrow from the bones of the man who has betrayed you to me. Endure your suffering. It will be brief. Then I will consume you, and you will know the ecstasy of eternal woe and regret”—She gathered Herself to cry like a beast—“and agony!”

  Linden could not protest. The bane’s intent was just. Linden deserved centipedes and spiders. Horror was her true heritage: the legacy of her pitiful, self-pitying parents. By audacity and blind carelessness and insufficiency, she had awakened both the Worm of the World’s End and her own worst nightmares. She had brought this doom upon herself.

  Nevertheless it was intolerable. The bane would kill Stave, her friend when she had no other. The knowledge that he was about to die for her sins was more than she could bear.

  Days ago, the foundations of her life had begun to shift. Now they settled into new alignments. Like a woman rising from her own grave, she changed. In a rush, her whole reality was transformed. Faster than the febrile stutter of her heart, maggots and squirming and misery became a wail of wild magic.

  She had no power to equal the bane’s. She Who Must Not Be Named transcended everything mortal. Nevertheless Linden was Thomas Covenant’s wife. He had wed her in love and joy. In passion and courage, he had made of her a rightful white gold wielder. She was not helpless.

  Swift as her pulse in her veins, she spun silver puissance around her treasured friend, caught him in a fist of bright flame: a fist or a circle. She had no krill to enable a translation, but she had other resources. She had the unthinking reflexes which had allowed her to step outside the sequences of time during the collapse of Kevin’s Watch. She had the whetted senses with which she had created caesures without stumbling into Joan’s madness. And she was not hampered by her husband’s necessary reluctance.

  While the bane surged forward, Linden grasped Stave and threw him. Away from this moment. Away from this place, this stone, this fate. Trusting his instincts—his clarity of intent—to choose his destination, she spared him the cost of her choices.

  Perhaps he would forgive her.

  When he was gone, she wrapped herself in wild argent a heartbeat before the bane pounced on her, shrieking.

  The ur-viles and Waynhim did not try to help her now. Shrouded in rain, they stood apart like witnesses: creatures condemned to watch the extinction of their obscure hopes.

  The bane’s rage took Linden, snatched her into incandescence and infernal torment. But the bane did not have her. Vermin and pestilence did not have her. She was cloaked in her own fire, cocooned heart and soul. Within the bane’s appalling body, she was not devoured. Instead she left the sensations of horror and eaten death behind as if they had become irrelevant.

  According to Kasreyn of the Gyre, white gold was an imperfect tool able to fashion perfection in a flawed world. But she did not seek perfection. She wanted only to preserve herself until she could at least try to keep her promise.r />
  She thought of herself as an embolism, a tiny clot or bubble in the flagrant bloodstream of She Who Must Not Be Named. Untouched because she was trivial. Wild magic warded her against time, against mortality. She controlled nothing. She could not harm the bane. But she could remain herself. She could think and strive. The vast being roared in frustration and bafflement, thwarted hunger; but Linden ignored Her.

  Linden Avery had chosen this fate. She knew why she had done so. She knew that she was lost. She would die as soon as her resolve and her fire failed. Nevertheless she did not falter. While she could, she pursued salvation.

  Through the tremendous roil of wracked souls, the seething turmoil of the bane’s victims, Linden searched for Elena.

  Elena Lena-daughter, child of rape, prey of Despite. Seeking to oppose Lord Foul, she had broken the Law of Death to raise Kevin Landwaster’s spectre—and by that crime, she had become the Despiser’s servant. When Linden had seen her among the Dead in Andelain, Elena had still borne the galls and wounds of her self-Desecration. Yet Linden had given her no pity, no kindness. Of Elena’s later sacrifice to the bane, Linden knew only what she had been told. But she remembered too well what she herself had done to the first Law-Breaker. Now she considered it the least forgivable of her sins.

  As if she had the right to judge—she, who had set the world’s last crisis in motion—she had denied to Elena the understanding and consolation which Berek and Damelon and Loric had given Kevin. Instead of mercy, she had offered Elena only demands: the selfish expostulations of her own guilt.

  Stop feeling sorry for yourself. It doesn’t accomplish anything.

  That memory still made Linden cringe. It had brought her here. Because of it—and because the implications of carrion required this—she had forsaken her husband and her son and the imminent destruction of the Earth.