Against All Things Ending

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  If the Humbled debated Stave’s counsel, or their own commitments, they did so in silence. None of them voiced any further objection.

  “All right.” Linden gave herself no chance to hesitate. She did not share Covenant’s vertigo; but the depths of the cavern were crowded with terrors nonetheless. If she paused to think about them—“Stay here,” she told her friends. “Don’t try to cross until you can see that I’ve succeeded—or the Harrow has. There’s no sense in risking yourselves yet. And I don’t think that orcrest or the krill is likely to be of much use.”

  “Do not fear for us,” Coldspray replied, still grinning sharply. “We have no wish to meet our deaths in this dire chasm.”

  “Good.” More to encourage herself than to express approval, Linden nodded. “As long as Liand can hold off the worst of Kevin’s Dirt, you’ll probably know what happens as soon as I do.”

  While her companions watched and waited, Linden gripped herself tightly and started toward the span. When Stave moved to join her, she did not refuse his company.

  From her perspective of trepidation, the bridge—the Hazard—looked more delicate and fragile than it had seemed earlier. Making it, they risked everything. Who they were. What they meant to themselves. As she did. And the ceiling of the immense cavern loomed, louring like thunderheads. Hints of chiaroscuro reflected back and forth among the stalactites, implying lightning. Any one of those wet and straining shapes was heavy enough to break the span if it fell.

  Stave walked at her side, so close that his shoulder brushed hers. In spite of her fears for him—for all of her companions—she welcomed the support of his inhuman strength, his argute senses. His dedication might serve as valor if or when her dreads threatened to paralyze her.

  Together, Linden Avery and the former Master left safer rock and began to ascend the shallow arc of the Hazard.

  Really, she insisted to herself, this ought to be easy. It was a short walk, perhaps two hundred paces. If she kept her gaze fixed on the far wall, did not look down—Yet the black abyss seemed to reach up as though it meant to snatch her off the bridge. The darkness itself may have been alive.

  Covenant gave no sign that he had noticed what she was doing.

  She could still feel the taut attention of her friends behind her. But every step took her farther from Liand and light. As the radiance of the Sunstone dimmed, her health-sense faded with it. Soon she would not be able to discern her companions at all. Unless she turned to look—

  Feeling like a coward, she murmured to Stave, “Don’t let me fall. That chasm—” She shuddered. “It pulls at me.”

  Stave touched his solid shoulder to hers. “Even here, Chosen, the sight of the Haruchai is merely diminished. It has not failed. This stone is sure. The weight of the Giants together may endanger it. We do not.”

  He considered for a moment, then added, “Yet we must not tarry. There is evil here. Its malice lacks the distinct malevolence of Corruption, but it is malice nonetheless.”

  Linden believed him. She felt only the seduction of the plunge below her; but she trusted his perceptions.

  The light continued to weaken as the span rose. The dead air became an ache in her lungs. With every step, she moved deeper into memories of winter; of killing cold fraught with manipulation and treachery, and full of Jeremiah’s enslavement.

  As her percipience waned, she lost her ability to locate the Harrow. His dun raiment had become indistinguishable from the dark portal. If he had found his way inward and gone ahead without her, she would not have known the difference. But Stave would have told her—And the Insequent had given his oath. The same strictures which had doomed the Mahdoubt ruled him as well.

  On both sides of the Hazard, water trickled incessantly down the sides of the stalactites and fell like omens; promises of plummeting.

  Then she and Stave passed the crest of the bridge and descended into shadow.

  She was effectively blinded. An irrational certainty that she had begun to drift toward the unguarded rim of the span clutched at her. Fingers of ice reached through her clothes to torment her flesh. A whimper that she was barely able to contain clogged her throat.

  But Stave took hold of her arm to steady her. “Calm your heart, Chosen,” he said as though he feared neither echoes nor banes. “The Harrow awaits you. It appears that he has ceased his own efforts, whatever they may have been. Now he regards you with suspicion and hope. I deem that he dreads the consequences of error, and that his dread has defeated him. He will accept your aid, for his alternative is humiliation and death.”

  Linden trusted his reading of the Harrow. She had no choice. His firm grasp was all that kept her from hastening toward the relative sanctuary of broad granite at the foot of the bridge. She wanted to get off the Hazard. As her steps descended from darkness to darkness, her visceral conviction that the span would crack and collapse increased until it affected her more than bad air or cold or stifled percipience.

  Through the drumming of her pulse, she hardly heard Stave announce, “The Chosen comes to proffer her assistance, Insequent. A courteous man would welcome her with light to ease her way.”

  “And do you now consider yourself an arbiter of courtesies, Haruchai?” the deep loam of the Harrow’s voice replied. “You who only give battle or show disdain, disregarding the stature of those whom you encounter?

  “My knowledge of courtesy exceeds yours, as does my prowess. Thus!”

  Directly ahead of Linden, and no more than a dozen paces away, an umber illumination appeared as all of the beads on the Harrow’s doublet began to glow simultaneously.

  They cast a dull light that revealed little more than the Insequent and his immediate surroundings. But that was enough to let Linden see where she placed her feet.

  The bridge ended in a buttressed shelf of gutrock just outside the high archway of the entrance to the Lost Deep. The Harrow’s brown lumination did not extend beyond the plane of the portal: there it met sheer blackness as blunt and impermeable as burnished ebony. But Linden could see him and the foot of the span clearly enough.

  Through the dusk crouching above her, she saw that the curve of the door was marked with strange symbols which she did not recognize.

  The shelf extended for several long strides on either side of the sealed entrance. It was wide enough to accommodate the Giants. And in the center of the unobstructed stone, the Insequent still knelt as Rime Coldspray had described him: bent on one knee; gripping Covenant’s ring near his forehead; holding Linden’s Staff planted squarely on the stone. The chain on which she had worn the ring dangled from his fingers, swaying slightly. His posture suggested that her approach had interrupted his concentration. His fathomless eyes regarded her like smaller instances of the cavern’s depths: more human than the abyss, but no less fatal.

  “The Haruchai speaks of assistance, lady,” the Harrow remarked, affecting scorn. But his contempt sounded hollow. “Do you conceive that I require any aid of yours?”

  “Of course you do.” An inward rush carried Linden off the bridge. Then she stopped, shivering with relief. In spite of the cold, the enduring granite under her boots affected her like certainty. “You knew that when we first met. You’ve been trying to open that door on your own, but you can’t. And you can’t afford to make a mistake.”

  When Stave released her arm, she grasped his to anchor her. “Those symbols,” she asked the Insequent, glancing upward. “Can you read them? What do they say?”

  The Harrow studied her, loathing the oath which the Mahdoubt had wrested from him. “Their import is no mystery. They proclaim merely that beyond this portal lies the demesne and habitation of the sovereign Viles, monarchs of this realm, great in lore and peril, and unforgiving of intrusion. Further, the symbols counsel all with the wit to read them to turn aside. Here any who enter unwelcomed will discover only doom.”

  Then he shrugged. “Sovereign or no, the Viles are long extinguished. Of their spawn, only those few ur-viles and Waynhim which betime
s endeavor to serve you endure. I do not fear the doom of this place. When I have unbound its restrictions, no harm will remain to daunt me.”

  “In other words,” Linden retorted, “you still don’t have a clue.” Her scorn was as hollow as his: she was too cold and truncated to feel disdain; had to fight too hard for breath. “I think that I can help you. If you let me.”

  “ ‘Let you, lady?” mused the Harrow as though the idea held little interest. “I do not oppose you. In what form do you crave my permit?”

  Gallows Howe, she might have answered. Rage. Slaughter. That’s what you think the Viles were like. You think that’s how they would have answered intrusion. You think that I can unlock blackness with blackness.

  But she did not waste her flagging energy on a useless attempt to correct his misapprehensions. Already she was light-headed with hypoxia. The glow of the Harrow’s beads did nothing to cleanse the air. Soon she would be too weak to stand.

  Panting, she explained, “If you let me use my Staff.” Before he could object, she added, “I’m not asking you to give it back. But somehow your hold on it blocks me.” Once she could have drawn Earthpower from it without grasping it; but he had erected a barrier against her. “Just let me touch it.” Let me be myself again, at least for a little while. “Let me borrow what it can do. Then I may be able to feel my way through the wards. If I see them, maybe I can open the door.”

  While the Harrow considered her, perhaps searching for some indication of trickery, Stave asked flatly, “Is this hesitation, Insequent? If the doom of the Lost Deep does not inspire dread, how does it chance that you fear the Chosen’s aid?”

  The Harrow scowled darkly, but did not respond to Stave’s challenge. Instead he continued to scrutinize Linden until he found something that satisfied him. Then he nodded.

  Swinging the chain of Covenant’s ring as if that small movement were an arcane gesture, he said brusquely, “Make the attempt, lady.”

  In simple weakness, Linden wanted to lie down. Prone, she could take hold of her Staff by its end: all she needed was its touch. But pride or stubbornness kept her on her feet as she moved to stand, trembling, in front of the Insequent. Striving for steadiness, she reached out with both hands and closed her fingers around the Staff of Law.

  Contact with the warm wood was like a rebirth.

  She had no measure for the extent to which Kevin’s Dirt had diminished her until her nerves felt the healing current of Earthpower and Law, the precise elucidation of Caerroil Wildwood’s runes. Then she became able to recognize how wan and superficial her sight had been without percipience. God, how had she borne it? How did the people of the Land who had never known health-sense endure their lives? Her existence in her natural world, the world which she had lost, had been fundamentally transformed by her previous hours or months with Covenant. During that time, she had grown familiar with seeing and hearing and touching and tasting the spiritual essence of all things: the underlying life-pulse of vitality and wonder. She did not know who she would have been if she had never experienced the Land; but she believed that she would have remained emotionally crippled, as damaged and despairing as her parents. The legacy of her father’s suicide and her mother’s death would have continued to define her.

  Now everything around her seemed to unfold, to blossom, as though she had stepped into a new dimension of reality. She felt the obdurate antiquity of the rock under her; the sheer age and indifference of the air; the specific stability and limitations of the Hazard; the ponderous downward yearning of the stalactites; the commingled eagerness and submission of water as it gathered and trickled down the gnarled surfaces of the stalactites to fall like streams of time into the extinction of the abyss. She perceived the Harrow’s anxieties and hungers, and Stave’s stubborn strength, as if they impinged directly on her skin. She became aware of her own body—of its inherent inadequacies, and of its bedrock desire to live—as if her veins and nerves, muscles and sinews, were limned in light. And in the distance far below her, she sensed the restless lurk of something evil—

  But those were the Staff’s passive effects. As soon as she began to draw on its power, the stagnation was banished from her lungs: she could breathe cleanly again. New energy ran like the effects of hurtloam through her veins. She recognized Liand’s brave and tiring efforts to keep his orcrest alight; identified each of the Giants and the Ramen, each of the Humbled. She felt Anele’s slumber and Covenant’s trackless wandering. She could have pointed to the exact spot where Loric’s krill, wrapped in vellum and lambent with possibilities, was tucked into the waist of Covenant’s jeans.

  Nevertheless more immediate sensations demanded her attention. While the Harrow regarded her avidly, and Stave watched as if nothing had changed, she tasted the presence of complex theurgies.

  The blackness that filled the portal of the Lost Deep was not blank: it was a seething mass of magicks, twisted and insidiously recursive. And its implications were not contained within the archway. Instead they extended in long looping tendrils, and in clusters like knot work, to form a web or skein of utter fuligin around the entire length of the Hazard. In some respects, the portal’s dark strands resembled Jeremiah’s racetrack construct: if she tried to follow their flow from one place to another, she would find herself in a maze from which there was no egress. But Jeremiah’s construct had been a door: one through which only he could pass, but a door nonetheless. The tangle that enclosed the bridge was formed for destruction. If even one of its strings were plucked, it would convulse, taking the granite substance of the span with it. In an instant, the bridge would become rubble falling endlessly into the depths.

  In the initial wash of Earthpower, Linden saw that the wards defending the Hazard were like the Demondim. Having no tangible forms, they would be lost to will and deed without some containing ensorcelment to preserve them from dissolution. Imagine that they were bound to themselves by threads of lore and purpose. And the Harrow had told her that he had learned the trick of unbinding them. But apparently his knowledge did not extend to undoing the magicks here—or he was unable to discern the similarity between the way in which the Viles had given shape to the Demondim and the manner in which they had guarded their hidden realm.

  He did not know how to use the Staff—

  To an extent, however, the web threatening the bridge was chaff; distraction. Anyone who did not try to enter the Lost Deep could cross the span repeatedly without harm. The real danger, the crucial tangle, was here, concealed inside the portal’s cryptic moiling. One touch to the wrong strand would release ruin. But plucking the correct thread would open the Lost Deep. Severing that thread would unravel the wards completely, erasing their power from the span.

  Sighing to herself, Linden thought, Well, sure. If only it were that easy. Tugging or cutting the proper strand with Law and Earthpower might not be difficult. However, identifying that tendril within the sensory confusion of the Viles’ lore would be as arduous as finding the caesure through which the Demondim horde had invoked the Illearth Stone. And here she did not have the horde’s evanescent hints of emerald and migraine to guide her. She did not have the ichor of the ur-viles and Waynhim to augment her health-sense.

  But that was not her only problem.

  As she extended her discernment, the sensations of a malignant presence seething in the chasm suddenly increased. For a moment, a swift flurry of frightened heartbeats, she thought that the evil was rising—

  It was not. Now Linden saw the truth. The bane only appeared to surge upward because it, or she, was so enormous; so potent. Worse, she was sentient—Oh, God in Heaven, the malevolence was not merely alive: it was a conscious being. Asleep, yes—Linden could feel that—but restive, and capable of intention. In its—her—virulence, she exceeded the Illearth Stone as a sea exceeded a lake. She did less harm only because she was so much more deeply entombed. Nonetheless to Linden she looked more terrible than a host of skurj and Sandgorgons.

  Only wild magic could oppose
such a being. The Staff of Law would be useless against her. Staring downward, Linden realized with horror that this evil was the source of Kevin’s Dirt. Unconsciously, perhaps, but unmistakably, the bane supplied the raw force which Kastenessen and Esmer and moksha Raver had shaped to form their heinous brume.

  If Linden’s company failed to rescue Jeremiah and escape before that entity came fully awake—

  A cry for Covenant’s help caught in Linden’s throat. Surely it was for this that she had compelled him to resume his life? So that he would spare her the burden of confronting abominations? She lacked his instinct for impossible solutions. Without him, she and Jeremiah and all of her friends were lost.

  But he also was lost.

  While she floundered, the Harrow commanded abruptly, “Speak, lady.” He made a palpable attempt to sound severe, but flashes of alarm marred his tone. “How fare your efforts to demonstrate that I must have your aid?” In a smaller voice, he added, “We dare not linger here.”

  He was lorewise enough to recognize the peril dozing restlessly in the depths.

  Stung by her own fears, Linden jerked her head to face him. Still gripping the Staff with both hands, she snapped, “You don’t know, do you. You talk and talk, you like to tell us how you’re going to save the world, but you have no idea what to do if that thing wakes up.”

  The Insequent flinched. Something in the gulfs of his eyes suggested fear. Yet he did not unclose his fingers from either the Staff of Law or the white gold ring. In his dreams of glory, he had found the trick of unbinding the wards before his presence disturbed the cavern’s bane.

  “Then I will concede, lady,” he whispered softly, fiercely, “that in all sooth I require your assistance. The secret of unmaking the Demondim does not avail here. For that reason, I craved the wordless knowledge within the blackness of your heart. Your encounter with the ancient theurgy of Garroting Deep—the theurgy which scripted these runes—unveiled a mystery to you, though its meaning is beyond your comprehension. I would have known its use, but the Mahdoubt precluded me from acquiring it. Therefore the task is yours. Lady, we will perish here one and all if you do not immerse yourself in your darkest and most insatiable rage. You must become hate and vengeance or die.”