Against All Things Ending

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Aching, she turned toward Jeremiah, Galt, and the croyel.

  Briefly she paused to rally her resolve. Then she said to Galt, “Come on. We should let the others sleep as long as they can. Let’s climb out of this canyon.”

  From an open ridge or hilltop, she might find some form of guidance among the stars.

  The hairless skull of the croyel cast Galt’s face into shadow: she felt rather than saw him nod. At once, he drew Jeremiah away from the sleepers toward one of the easier slopes on the northern side of the canyon. As he walked, the krill’s gem cast shifting gleams like omens across the bare dirt and shale of the hillsides.

  Linden followed, bracing herself on the Staff. Stave fell into step at her side. Together Coldspray and Grueburn rose to accompany her, leaving Stonemage to watch over the others. With the nerves of her skin, Linden tasted Mahrtiir’s indecision; knew the moment when he made up his mind. Leaving the stream, he went to Covenant and stood there until Covenant muttered a familiar curse and heaved himself to his feet. The two men trailed after Coldspray and Grueburn.

  As Galt started upward, picking a careful path in the darkness, Stave said quietly, “Chosen, there remains one matter of which you have not been apprised.” Then he paused.

  Concentrating on the uncertainties of the slope, Linden asked, “Yes?” to prompt him.

  “While you were absent within yourself,” he replied, “the Unbeliever sought aid for you from the Ardent. He desired your return, as did all who accompany you. But the Ardent professed himself unable to succor you.”

  Again Stave paused. When he resumed, Linden heard hints of anger and apprehension in his tone.

  “Here I must be exact, for I cannot interpret his words. To the Unbeliever, the Ardent answered, ‘The lady has gone beyond my ken. I perceive only that her need for death is great.’”

  Instinctively Linden flinched.

  “ ‘Or perchance,’” Stave continued, “ ‘the need is her son’s. But do I speak of her death, or of her son’s? Does her plight, or his, require the deaths of others? Such matters have become fluid. Every current alters them.’”

  Without inflection, the former Master admitted, “I have scrupled to speak of this. If it is indeed sooth that your fate is now ‘writ in water,’ of what worth are further pronouncements? The import of the Ardent’s words may be vast or trivial. Unable to distinguish augury from emptiness, I thought to spare you added alarm.”

  “But now?” Linden asked more sharply than she intended. Why tell me now?

  “Now,” Stave answered, “I fear for you. Should you fail, the outcome will be heinous to you. And should you succeed”—he appeared to consider the night’s implications—“we cannot know what will emerge from the clutches of the croyel. In this matter, I now perceive that I resemble the Unbeliever. I seek both to assure you of my place at your side and to caution you against every form of peril.”

  “All right,” Linden muttered. “Fine.” The ascent that Galt had selected was not difficult: she was breathing harder than necessary. “So the Ardent thinks that one of us needs death. Or deaths. Or we did. Or we will. So what? How is that a surprise? The Worm of the World’s End is coming. Everything is about death.”

  Her father had killed himself in front of her. She had ended her mother’s life. For her, becoming a doctor had begun as an attempt to reject the legacy of her parents. If she turned her back on Jeremiah’s plight, she would have nothing left except warnings and doom.

  Stave’s only response was a firm nod, as if his acceptance of her had become complete.

  Now I fear for you. That scared Linden. Its mere simplicity made it more ominous. But in her former life, she had faced innumerable emergencies: she knew the dangers of panic. Since that time, she had fallen so far from herself that Linden Avery the physician no longer seemed to exist. Climbing the hillside with a clog of dread in her throat, however, she felt old reflexes return to life. Her sense of peril triggered responses so deeply trained that they were almost autonomic. Gradually calm settled into her nerves. Step by step, she shed her fears, and began to breathe more easily.

  She could do this, she told herself. As long as she refused to panic. And here she was not alone. Several of her friends accompanied her, of course—but she was not thinking of them. No, where Jeremiah’s possession was concerned, she was not alone because the Land itself stood with her. Its gifts were her aides, her surgical team: health-sense, the Staff of Law, Loric’s krill, even wild magic. In spite of a landscape left arid and stricken by ancient warfare and bloodshed, she and Jeremiah ascended a hillside in a place where health and self-determination and even sanity were his birthright.

  In addition, she had other help, aid for which she had not asked. Roused by Pahni’s skilled instincts, or by his own empathy, Liand trailed behind Covenant and Mahrtiir. In one hand, the Stonedownor held his piece of orcrest shining in the dark like a sustained moment of sunlight; a small display of wonder, human and ineffable. Already his light blurred the crisp precision of the stars.

  Linden wanted to send him away. She intended to spare him. For Jeremiah’s sake, she did not.

  More friends. More support. More Earthpower.

  Here, if nowhere else in the Land, she could do this.

  As long as she was careful.

  Her pulse was strong in her veins, hard but unappalled, as she and Stave topped the rise a few paces behind Galt and Jeremiah, and reached the crest of a ridge like a contorted spine twisting east and south away from the distant loom of Landsdrop.

  Here the whole ridgecrest was an exposed seam of gypsum, sickly white against the darker terrain: a pale road into the east. Around Linden, the wan glitter of starlight lay like immanence on the friable crust. On one side, the hills piled higher against the south. On the other, they canted slowly lower, apparently slumping toward the fens and marshes of Sarangrave Flat. From her vantage, she seemed able to see for leagues in spite of the darkness; yet she descried no sign of the Sarangrave itself. Its ominous sprawl was still occluded by hills, or it was simply too far away for her senses. The breeze blowing over the baked slopes was cool, almost chill, and slightly moist; but it suggested none of the Sarangrave’s verdure and rot, or of the lurker’s bitter appetites.

  Black against the softer hues of minerals and sandstone, Clyme stood atop a hill a long stone’s throw to the north. From the far side of the canyon, Branl watched the south.

  Galt had stopped Jeremiah at the highest point of the ridge. Now he turned the boy to face Linden. As Linden and Stave halted as well, the Ironhand and Frostheart Grueburn arrived behind them. Outlined by the glow of Liand’s Sunstone, Covenant plodded upward in stark contrast to blind Mahrtiir’s lighter, more confident strides. Soon Liand and Pahni would reach the foot of the ascent.

  All right, Linden said to herself. The time had come.

  Placing herself so that the shadow of Jeremiah’s head protected her eyes from the krill’s piercing silver, she leaned on the Staff and considered her options.

  Long ago—and without the enhancement of her Staff—she had reached deep into Covenant, in spite of his organic resistance to percipience. On one occasion, she had triggered a release of power from his ring. On another, she had entered him to free him from the machinations of the Elohim. And more than once, she had gone to the extreme of attempting to possess him. Terrified by his willingness to hazard himself, she had striven to stop him—

  She could try something similar for Jeremiah. In the Lost Deep, she had seen that the croyel had made its mind and life inextricable from her son’s. She could not simply separate them. But there were other possibilities. Without question, the croyel would fight her. With the Land’s best instrument of Earthpower and Law in her hands, however, she might be able to penetrate the creature’s defenses. One thin neural strand at a time, she might be able to sever or extirpate the malign tangle of the croyel’s grasp. And if she could do that—if she could do it without harming or tainting or even touching Jeremiah’s own s
entience—

  The Ranyhyn had warned her against possessing her son.

  Galt would cut the creature’s throat for her without hesitation. The krill would slice through the croyel’s theurgies as readily as ordinary flesh.

  If.

  She might fail. The task would be as challenging as her efforts to protect Revelstone from the Illearth Stone in the hands of the Demondim. At the same time, it would require far more delicacy. She would need an almost supernal degree of precision and care. One mistake, any mistake, might harm the core of Jeremiah’s consciousness for as long as he remained alive.

  And the croyel might prove too strong for her. She doubted that: here nothing hindered her access to health-sense and Earthpower. Yet the sheer sickness of the monster’s nature might be more than she could suffer. It would hurt her as intimately as the Sunbane, but it would do so with intent. While she reached into Jeremiah, the croyel might reach into her—

  If it were capable of possessing two distinct minds at once, the monster might endeavor to rule her as well as Jeremiah.

  Galt would not permit that. Liand and Covenant would not.

  And if her first efforts did not relieve Jeremiah, she still had Covenant’s ring.

  In the Lost Deep, Esmer had said that only white gold could oppose She Who Must Not Be Named. Surely wild magic might sweep aside the croyel’s magicks? With raw force, Linden might be able to accomplish what subtlety and precision could not.

  All right. Behind her, Liand and Pahni gained the spine of gypsum. Orcrest spread its forgiving light across Jeremiah’s slack form and scruffy cheeks. It humanized the silt that defined his gaze. Again Linden confirmed that Jeremiah’s racecar rested in her pocket, as ambiguous as runes. Then, gripping her Staff until her knuckles ached, she readied herself to examine the nature of the croyel’s hold over her son.

  “Pay attention,” she murmured to no one in particular. “I don’t know what I’m getting into here. I’m going to try to make that thing let go. If I succeed, things might happen fast.” The croyel would seek another host, or defend itself in some other fashion. “And if I don’t, I might need help breaking away.”

  Unexpectedly Jeremiah raised his head. Despite the emptiness of his eyes, he spoke with mordant sarcasm. “Do your worst.” Sarcasm or fright. “Or your best, if you think that’ll help. You can’t even read those runes. When it comes to power, you’re like a kid playing with bonfires. You’re too ignorant to do anything except kill your son. If that’s what you want.”

  “Oh, stop,” Linden replied impatiently. “Have you forgotten the last time you tried to fight me? Have you already forgotten that you were terrified? You did your worst, and I’m still here.”

  Unfurling cornflower fire like an oriflamme from her Staff, Linden Avery the Chosen cast herself into the core of Jeremiah’s enslaved mind.

  Entering him was easier than she had imagined. The croyel could not ward against this specific manifestation of Earthpower and health-sense—or it did not wish to oppose her. And Jeremiah’s natural barriers were too weak to resist her. Between heartbeats, she found herself in a place like a graveyard at dusk, in twilight so dim and grainy that it might never have known full sunshine; a place littered with the poorly tended memorials of a fallen army.

  Veiled in greyness as if a fine powder of midnight filled the air, the writhen mounds of graves sprawled in all directions as far as her senses could reach. At first, she did not understand them, or know where she was. The gloaming was pervasive and depthless, as if the failed light had no source. No stars shone overhead. The black sky was impermeable, as blank as the lid of a tomb. Nothing stirred the air, neither cold nor heat nor recognition. Nothing grew, or gave off scent, or implied life. Despite the wan illumination, there was nothing here except an innumerable clutter of graves: the buried remains of a multitude utterly decimated.

  Bewildered and suddenly afraid, Linden extended the reach of her senses. She pushed hard against the flat vault of the heavens, thrust discernment down into the ground; strove to relieve the illimitable bereavement of the gloom.

  By slow degrees, she began to see.

  At first, she perceived only that there was more to the lid or sky than she had initially realized. Some weight or power worked there, holding it down; sealing it shut. At the boundaries of her health-sense, she felt the presence of a dark resolve.

  Driven by fear, she pushed harder.

  Yes: resolve. Concentrating her percipience, she smelled or heard its bitter force and malevolence; its hatred; its atrocious strength. It was a web, at once tangled and thetic, sequacious; deliberate in its snarled confusion. It lay tightly bound across the sky as if to preclude any possibility that the lid would lift. But it did not cover only the heavens. When she had tuned her nerves to the hue and thrum of its fierce theurgies, she saw that it enclosed the wide landscape of graves completely. It squirmed far beneath her feet as well as far overhead, a sepulcher of magicks from which neither life nor death would escape.

  And it was warm: as warm as the force of repulsion which Jeremiah had wielded when Roger and the croyel had lured her into the Land’s past. Warm and malign.

  Hesitantly she risked drawing the fire of her Staff into the twilight. But her flames were invisible. They seemed as ineffective as dying breaths.

  Yet she felt their presence, discerned them with her health-sense. Apparently her power could not cast back the gloaming. Nonetheless it was here. She could use it.

  Remembering horserite visions and supreme care, she extended her strength to pluck gently at one clenched strand of the web.

  It responded instantly. From that precise spot, a shaft of lightning blazed down.

  Lurid and obscene, it lit the thronged burials from horizon to horizon. Instinctively Linden recoiled; and dusk closed back over the landscape like a clap of inaudible thunder, too loud to register on any mortal hearing.

  But the blast did not touch Linden. Instead it struck a grave perhaps a dozen paces distant. At once, the mound of barren ground began to seethe. Briefly it appeared to moil and bubble as though the force of the lightning had liquefied the dirt. Then the mound scattered in clumps as something under it struggled to claw free.

  Oh, God! Something alive—

  A hand thrust clear of the dirt. The right hand, a halfhand. Missing the index and middle fingers.

  More dirt was shoved aside. Clods slid off the mound. Dust drifted in the vacant air; thickened the gloom. Straining, a head forced its way into view.

  Jeremiah’s head.

  Appalled and paralyzed, Linden watched as her son labored out of the dirt: first his head and one arm; then the other arm and his chest. When he could brace his hands on either side of him, he rose in a frenzy of effort, shedding clots of earth.

  He was naked. And he was whole; untouched by the ruin of bullets. Standing at last, swaying unsteadily with his calves and feet still buried, he flung his gaze toward her like a wail.

  His eyes retained the color of old mud. But they were clear. And conscious. He seemed to see her as vividly as she saw him.

  For a moment, his jaw worked as though he had forgotten speech. Then he said, “Mom,” in a voice like the drift and settle of dust. “Help me.”

  Linden knew then that he had never belonged to the Despiser. No servant of Lord Foul would beseech—

  But before she could summon an answer, he began to fray and fade. Impalpable breezes tugged through him as if he had as little substance as mist; as little meaning. While she fought herself, floundering to call out or rush forward, Jeremiah slowly dissipated like a banished ghost.

  Soon he had dissolved completely; become as crepuscular and eternally lightless as the air that absorbed him.

  As the last residue of his plea evaporated, the earth of his grave re-formed to cover him again. Soon there was no sign that he had ever emerged from life or death.

  As though the harsh flare of lightning had been a revelation, Linden understood. She understood.

&nbs
p; She was inside an incarnation of her son’s mind, a reification of his imprisonment made corporeal by health-sense and Earthpower. The tangling web of magicks knotted around the graveyard was the power of the croyel; the power that ruled him. With cruel bolts of energy, the monster unleashed what it needed from the boy: the ordinary language and movement and memory which enabled the croyel to carry out its charade of being Jeremiah. And the graves, the endless graves, careless mounds scattered beyond the farthest extent of Linden’s senses—

  Sweet Christ! The graves were Jeremiah’s thoughts. They were the workings of his trapped mind moment by moment, each as solid as a corpse, and as transient as mist—and all buried alive within him.

  Buried.

  Alive.

  Within him.

  In that flash of comprehension, she forgot everything that might have been fear or paralysis. Horror she remembered—horror and unendurable rage—but every emotion that might have limited or constrained her vanished as though it had been exorcised. Jeremiah! If mere lightning could raise discrete fragments of her son’s self, she could resurrect them all with Earthpower and fury. She could set every grave ablaze, arouse in fire every instance of the identity which he had never been able to manifest as his own. In their thousands, their myriad thousands, she could gather them into herself before they evaporated and were reimmured. And then she could—

  Possessing Jeremiah, she would remain in his crypt. And the croyel would fight her. Oh, it would fight! With every scrap of its native puissance, with every particle of its gleaned lore and cunning, it would do battle to make her its prisoner as well.

  Within the smaller world of Jeremiah, the creature’s magicks were as vast as firmaments.

  But she: ah, she existed outside her son’s mind. She had a separate identity and a physical self which the croyel could not grasp. And she was not the monster’s only foe. Galt would not hesitate to cut its throat. Fear would hamper its efforts to contain her.

  She could do this!

  She, Linden Avery, who had already roused the Worm of the World’s End.