Against All Things Ending

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Water hammered into the cavern, poured like a tsunami down the slow slope. Already it had immersed the bane and the skurj. Lurid fires and violence lit its mounting depths as the monsters fought to survive; as the bane strove for purchase among the inundated stalagmites. Shivering feverishly, Linden feared that the skurj would survive. Buried in floods, their fangs flamed as if they chewed minerals from the water to feed their furnace-hearts. Fighting for life, they tumbled down the cavern.

  Whatever happened to them, Linden could not imagine that a power as enduring and virulent as She Who Must Not Be Named would simply drown. Nevertheless she wiped her eyes, and slapped herself, and prayed—

  Betimes some wonder is wrought to redeem us.

  Even if the bane failed to gather Herself and return, Linden and all of her companions would soon perish. The vast rush of water smashed against the lower end of the cavern. Then it boiled and frothed back onto itself. And as it accumulated, it rose. Scores or hundreds of centuries of the Land’s springs and rainfall would fill the space until every gasp of air had been forced out.

  In the distance, fires still burned under the flood. Crimson streaks stained the water: the skurj or the bane, Linden could not tell which.

  As the new lake mounted, however, the thunder changed. Water pounding onto itself rather than on stone softened the edges of the roar. Dimly Linden heard the Ironhand’s voice.

  “The skurj perish! They perish, although the bane does not! But these waters have found the descent to the Lost Deep! They rise more slowly now!”

  Coldspray added something about time and Esmer that Linden did not understand. The Ardent appeared to argue with other Insequent who were beyond hearing. Both Liand and Stave shouted pleas or warnings at Linden. But inflicted imaginary beetles had crept into her ears again. She could not distinguish individual words from the adumbration of ancient torrents.

  If the rate of the flood’s accumulation had indeed slowed, that small reprieve was insignificant. It made no difference.

  Through the bite of bitter spray, Linden thought that she saw a few submerged fires fail and die. But she was sure of nothing. Crawling things fed on her; took her life in small nips and stings. Thunder and failure became lassitude. Her parents spoke more loudly than any of her friends. In the bane’s voices, they assured her of despair.

  Like them, she deserved her end. She had earned it with woe and wrongs and weakness.

  No one had the right to make Jeremiah suffer. No one except Thomas Covenant could hope to save the Land. But there was nothing left that she could do for them.

  She was not even surprised when the whole surface of the surging flood burst into flame.

  Mere water could not harm She Who Must Not Be Named. The ancient poisons which fouled the torrents appeared to nourish Her. Now She had found Her own answer to the inrush of ages.

  Below the precarious ledge, boiling currents and chaos were lashed with conflagration as though they had been transmogrified into oil. Waters crashing against stalagmites and walls flung spouts of fire at the wracked ceiling.

  Voices cried for Linden, but they conveyed nothing. Weary and tormented beyond bearing, she surrendered at last to the paralysis from which she had fled throughout her life: the helplessness which had permitted Covenant’s murder ten years ago, and had left her at the mercy of turiya Raver: the ineluctable doom of her parents.

  Carrion.

  As the bane arose from the waters halfway between the company and the end of the cavern, Linden fell to her knees. Deep inside her, something fundamental succumbed.

  12.

  She Who Must Not

  Like a ghost, Thomas Covenant occupied discrete realities simultaneously, and had no effect on any of them.

  In one, he saw everything that happened around him. He recognized every event from the moment when Esmer touched his forehead until he stood near Linden’s collapse above a rabid lake of fire, gazing at She Who Must Not Be Named. He felt everything, feared everything. But he had no volition, no power to act. He could do nothing to help his companions. He could only care and grieve and groan and dread. In that dimension, the part of him that made choices was out of reach.

  It wandered elsewhere, among his memories, where nothing was required of him because everything had already happened. Perhaps he needed to recall those people and places and deeds: perhaps he did not. But they did not need him. He was merely a spectator, as oneiric as a figment, amid the fragments and rubble of things past; shattered stretches of time. And because his memories were broken, he did not know how to find his way through them. They were out of sequence; could not lead him back to himself.

  Esmer had cast him into a realm of contradictory knowledge and bewilderment where every impulse of his heart was thwarted. Instead of responding to the company’s plight, or to the killing deluge which Linden had unleashed in the cavern, or to her final failure in the face of the bane’s emergence, Covenant remembered.

  Earlier, while the company fled from the Lost Deep, he had observed ur-viles reconsidering their Weird millennia ago. The Demondim had not been fools: they had not made the ur-viles to be fools. Even the Waynhim—the accidents or miscalculations of breeding—had been discerning and lorewise, capable of recondite insights. Their black cousins had been far too intelligent for the contemptuous use which Lord Foul had made of them.

  Their Weird as they had first understood it expressed their self-loathing: better to die promoting the end of all things than to live flawed and hateful in a world meant for beauty. Perishing by the thousands in the Despiser’s wars, however, the ur-viles had recognized that the logic of their servitude could reach only one conclusion. And in battle at the gates of Lord’s Keep, the Waynhim had demonstrated by valor and commitment that other choices were possible. Thus the Waynhim had prodded the ur-viles to question themselves.

  When the Despiser had been defeated, therefore, the black Demondim-spawn had withdrawn to the Lost Deep to search their lore and their oldest legacies for a reply to the challenge posed by the Waynhim. Among the ineffable achievements of the Viles, the ur-viles had probed the history of their makers, and of their makers’ makers, until they reached an era before the Viles had ventured across the Hazard and been swayed by the Ravers.

  In the Lost Deep, miracles of old lore had reminded the ur-viles that they had sprung from creatures not ruled by disgust for their own natures. There the ur-viles found that their first progenitors had conceived truths which spanned Time: truths which in turn enabled the ur-viles to estimate distant outcomes. They saw clearly where their service to the Despiser would lead them in the end—and what would be required to counter the syllogisms of Lord Foul’s scorn.

  They hesitated. For centuries, they contemplated what they had come from, and what they were, and what they might wish to be. And eventually they reached new conclusions. As a result, they began the assiduous studies and exhaustive labors by which they created Vain.

  Vain and manacles.

  But while the Swordmainnir carrying Linden and her human companions followed the Waynhim, Covenant fell deeper. Other memories took the place of the ur-viles.

  In a different fissure, he regarded an image which did not exist: an image which had never existed, except as a symbol or metaphor for a more profound and inarticulate truth. The image of a young woman. A woman fresh with loveliness and self-discovery. A woman brimming with new passion, ready to give and receive the kind of adoration which would define Her days. In his eyes, She was the reason that men and women had discovered love; the cause of every whole and holy desire.

  Studying Her, he saw Her betrayed.

  Hers was the tale which had given rise to that of Diassomer Mininderain, seduced and misled; abandoned to darkness. During the creation of the Earth, She had been cast down. By the sealing of the Arch of Time, She had been imprisoned. She was Mininderain and Emereau Vrai and the Auriference and scores or hundreds of other women. Indirectly She was Lena and Joan. At its core, Hers was the tale of every love
which had ever been used or abused and then discarded.

  The tale of She Who Must Not Be Named.

  Heart-wrung by Her plight, Covenant watched Her arise amid water and flames, a lake of conflagration; and he understood that behind Her appalling malice and hunger lay a quintessential wail of lamentation, forlorn and deathless: the devouring grief of a heart that knew no other response to absolute treachery.

  Perhaps deliberately—perhaps cruelly—Esmer had sent Covenant to this place among his riven memories. They might have been precious to him, had he been able to act on them. But they were the past: he could not change them.

  Remembering love and loss, he, too, was lost.

  Nevertheless he knew everything that happened around him. He saw and heard and felt: he cared so much that the straits of his companions rent him. Above all, uselessly, he understood Linden’s protracted ordeal. He regarded the effect of finding her son, and of being unable to free the boy from the croyel. He saw the hopelessness of her decision to flee the Lost Deep. When she had found the strength to treat his hands, his pride in her had been as poignant as yearning. During her fall from the Hazard, the futility of his desire to leap after her had filled him with anguish. With the ineffable discernment of a spectre, he had witnessed the consequences of her plunge toward agony. The despair that had crawled and fed on her failing sanity, he had experienced as though it should have been his.

  Still she had continued to struggle and strive. When the thews of her resolve, of her essential self, had parted at last, his most acute reaction had been relief for her. Later, if she lived, she would think the worst of herself. For the moment, however, she had found a small escape from pain.

  Yet she was not likely to survive. She and Covenant and everyone with them were about to die.

  He saw no great harm in his own demise. Linden esteemed him too highly. But the others—For reasons that he could no longer recall, Linden and Jeremiah were essential to the Land. Dire futures hinged on Liand and Anele. Manethrall Mahrtiir and his Cords were needed desperately. There was no hope without Stave and the Masters and the Giants. And Covenant did not discount the Ardent, who alone knew how to rescue the company. Nor did he dismiss the Demondim-spawn, who still yearned to relieve their instinctive self-disgust.

  Everyone who had come so far in Linden’s name, or in the Land’s, had a part to play. Even Esmer might find within himself the will to become his father’s son rather than Kastenessen’s minion. Even Covenant—

  He would have given much to believe the same of Roger. But Roger was his mother’s son, not his father’s; and Joan had chosen the path of her doom long ago. Like Elena, she could no longer escape what she had made of herself, except through extinction.

  Covenant had been removed from the Arch of Time. His responsibility for it had been taken from him. But Joan and Roger remained. They were his burdens to bear.

  Therefore he, too, needed to live.

  She Who Must Not Be Named had no intention of letting any of Her victims survive. Doubtless Esmer would avoid Her hungers. The croyel would certainly try to do so, taking Jeremiah with it. And the ur-viles and Waynhim might be able to evade destruction. But everyone else—

  Through Esmer’s treachery, they also had become Covenant’s burdens. And Covenant loved Linden. In different ways, he loved all of her friends and companions: even the Masters, who had misled themselves to the brink of the Land’s annihilation. There was no one else who could save them.

  Yet he remained lost.

  As he examined his circumstances, however, he began to imagine that he was not altogether impotent. Almost by definition, betrayals had flaws. Esmer’s were no different.

  The Humbled had caused Covenant to swallow vitrim; and that musty liquid was an unnatural approximation of hurtloam. It provided a partial mimicry of hurtloam’s sovereign healing.

  When he had been offered hurtloam in Andelain, he had refused it. He had insisted on numbness and leprosy. It doesn’t just make me who I am. It makes me who I can be.

  Now the dour taste and energy of vitrim galvanized his desire to be himself: a leper and pariah who knew better than to heed Despite. Because it was an artificial elixir, it could not bring new life to his nerves. But it made him stronger—

  And there was another flaw as well.

  Esmer’s effect on him bore no resemblance to the stasis which the Elohim had once used against him. The Elohim had severed him from thought and concern; from any kind of reaction. Esmer had merely knocked him off balance, tripping him into the maze of broken time. He could still think and care and strive. In that sense, he was only lost, not helpless. And anything that could be lost could also be found.

  If he climbed high enough, or used his memories in the right way, he might conceivably rediscover his physical present by his own efforts.

  If Esmer did not cast him down again.

  If.

  He had to try. The bane was coming closer.

  After uncounted ages within the Arch, Covenant did not have enough time.

  She Who Must Not Be Named lifted Herself like a pyre from the burning waters. Even at a distance, She appeared to tower over the company. Her fury shook the ledge in spite of Esmer’s efforts to steady it. For no clear reason except that they were Giants and courageous, all of the Swordmainnir except Rime Coldspray stood at the edge of falling and flames with their weapons ready. They must have known that no mortal blade would cut their foe; yet they confronted Her simply because they refused to accept defeat.

  In that respect, they could have been Saltheart Foamfollower’s daughters.

  Behind them, the Ironhand still supported Jeremiah with one arm, holding the krill against the croyel’s throat. Despite the bane’s ferocity, Jeremiah’s muddy eyes gazed at nothing. Spittle slid from one corner of his mouth. But the croyel had lost its feral grin. Squirming its talons deeper into the boy’s flesh, the creature seemed to brace itself for one last ploy, some act of power or cunning that might save its life.

  Without hesitation, Stave scooped Linden into his arms and carried her to the wall, leaving the Giants room to swing their swords. Glimpsed past lank, untended strands of hair, the slackness of her mouth and the unfocused glaze of her eyes told Covenant that she had become as unreactive as her son. She had endured too much—He could only pray in silence that something within her still lived and loved, and could be reached.

  Clyme and Branl had already dragged him back from the edge of the shelf. Galt stood in front of him like Bannor or Brinn: a display of resolve as brave as that of the Giants, and as wasted. At the same time, the Cords had taken Liand and the Staff, their Manethrall, and Anele as far from the rim of the ledge as they could. There Anele squatted against the wall as if he sought to curl his emaciated frame into the stone. Whispering aimlessly, he slapped at his old cheeks.

  Nearby the Ardent wrapped every shred of his marred raiment around himself as though he hoped irrationally to ward his plump flesh with cloth. Panic glistened among the reflected fires in his eyes.

  Higher up on the ledge, the ur-viles and Waynhim barked feverishly, strident with imprecations or despair. Their baying and yells appeared to be directed at Esmer.

  Clad in wounds and tatters, Esmer ignored the Demondim-spawn. Apparently his efforts to scorn the people whom he had betrayed had failed. Dismay twisted his visage as he regarded the bane.

  Relishing its immanent feast, She Who Must Not Be Named glowered higher and howled like a call for vengeance. Soon She would loom over the company.

  Abruptly the croyel croaked in Jeremiah’s voice, “Esmer. Get us out of here. Esmer.”

  Coldspray tightened her grip threateningly; but the monster was too frightened to heed the pain of the krill.

  “It wasn’t supposed to come to this,” the croyel gasped. “She wasn’t supposed to be able to stop the skurj. You have to save us.”

  Only Jeremiah’s loose features and silted gaze confirmed that the boy was not pleading for himself.

  “You
won’t regret it. Kastenessen will forgive you. He’ll heal you. If he doesn’t, we’ll make him. But you have to get us out of here.”

  There it was: the path out of himself that Covenant needed. If Linden had been able to hear the croyel, its use of Jeremiah would have clawed her soul. In her present state, she was spared that immediate hurt. But Covenant felt it on her behalf. Her pain was his.

  It reminded him—

  Hit me. Hit me again.

  In Andelain, his first taste of corporeal pain had brought him back to himself, albeit temporarily. It had confirmed the bond between his body and his spirit.

  Now the thought of what Linden would suffer when she regained consciousness was enough. Vitrim had given him strength. And he was a rightful white gold wielder. He stood in the indirect presence of wild magic that Esmer would not or could not block.

  Defying Esmer’s influence, Thomas Covenant stepped out of the Land’s past and became present.

  Instant consternation lashed in Esmer’s eyes. He shrank back as if he dreaded what the Unbeliever had become.

  Ignoring Cail’s son, Covenant turned away. His hands and feet were still numb; dead. But they were not useless. Thanks to Linden, he could flex his fingers. When the time came—if he lived that long—he would be able to grasp the krill.

  But he did not need Loric’s dagger now. It would not daunt She Who Must Not Be Named. He required other suasions.

  How much time had passed? The bane had not reached the ledge yet, but She had the power to strike whenever She wished.

  Had She felt the change in him? Did She mean to destroy him first? Did She see in him an image of Her first betrayer?

  Perhaps. That was possible. He did not doubt that the stains of what he had done to Lena—and, in a different fashion, to Elena—still clung to him. She Who Must Not Be Named may well have discerned his resemblance to the Despiser.