Against All Things Ending

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  But it also smelled like terror. It felt like supplication.

  While the Feroce huddled together, Branl moved around them to stand over the krill between them and Covenant, readying himself to snatch up the dagger. But they did not move to menace him or Covenant. Their flames remained contained within their circle.

  In the absence of any explicit threat, Branl did not touch the knife.

  At last, the Feroce spoke again. “Our High God knows desperation. He is acquainted with agony.” None of them looked at Covenant or Branl or the krill. “Your offer is accepted. While our High God lives, he and all who serve him will honor the alliance.”

  Then they fled the chamber. In a moment, every hint of green and flame was gone, swallowed by darkness. For a while, the reek of malice lingered, an augur of calamity and woe. But soon the moiling winds from the sea and the precipice swept the scent away.

  Finally Covenant let his shoulders slump. He felt vaguely nauseated, sick at heart, as if he committed a crime against the peculiar innocence of the lurker’s servants. But he did not know what else he could have done.

  Help against the skest. Protection for Linden from further attacks. Such things were necessary. But he had procured them by pretending to be something that he was not.

  Long ago, in a different life, he had once written that guilt and power were synonymous. Effective people were guilty because the use of power was guilt. Therefore only guilty people could be effective. Effective for good or evil, boon or bane. Only the damned could be saved.

  By that reasoning, life itself was a form of guilt.

  At the time, he had believed what he was writing. Now he had to hope that he was right.

  11.

  Kurash Qwellinir

  Dawn was little more than a faint smudge of grey in the cleft of the chamber when Clyme entered, bearing treasure-berries for Thomas Covenant.

  As Covenant ate, again saving the seeds to scatter later, the Master reported that all of the Feroce had fled the vicinity as soon as their emissaries had emerged from the cave. Now, he announced, Mhornym, Naybahn, and Covenant’s mount were ready to be ridden. Then he stood with Branl while Covenant consumed fruit as salubrious as a feast.

  Chewing, Covenant tried not to believe that this was his last meal; that this day would see the end of his renewed life. The end of Linden’s greatest gift—

  Ah, hell. He had been alive again for such a short time, and there was so much that he wanted to do; had to do. He owed Linden more than an apology: he owed her his whole world. And he loved this world so fiercely that he hardly knew how to contain the pressure. Twice he had been given the credit for saving the Land; but the truth was that the Land and its people had redeemed him on more occasions and in more ways than he could name. His only real virtue was that he had striven to prove worthy of aliantha and hurtloam. Of Glimmermere and Revelstone and Andelain. High Lord Mhoram and Bannor of the Bloodguard, Triock and Saltheart Foamfollower. Brinn and Cail and the Giants of the Search. Atiaran. Memla. Sunder and Hollian. Broken Lena and her doomed daughter, Elena, whom he and the Dead had sacrificed.

  Linden Avery.

  He knew that Linden blamed herself for many things. But she was wrong. He wanted to earn the chance to tell her so.

  When he was done eating, he rose stiffly to his feet. After two days on horseback and a night on cold stone, his legs and back were aching knots. But he was grateful for that kind of pain. It was ordinary and physical, contradicting his numbness. His leprosy was not the whole truth. As long as he could feel, and care, and resist, he would be more than the sum of his hurts.

  After a moment’s hesitation, he stooped to retrieve the strips of Anele’s tunic that he had used to wrap Loric’s krill. Draping cloth over the haft, he gripped it with his halfhand.

  In Andelain, he would have failed to draw the knife without help—and there it had been held by wood rather than stone. He might need the aid of Humbled here. But first he wanted to find out what he could do and what he could not.

  This, too, was fitting; condign.

  However, he did not try to drag the blade straight from the floor. Wiser now, he attempted instead to work the dagger back and forth until it came free.

  The krill cut stone with eldritch ease. After only a moment, he was able to pull the weapon loose.

  “Well, hell,” he muttered. “I didn’t expect that.”

  Briefly he studied the radiant gem as though he sought to see Joan through it; to discern her particular torment. But he could discern only the rare jewel’s light and heat, its participation in wild magic. Shrugging, he flipped fabric around the krill until the whole dagger was covered, shielded, its illumination hidden. Then he tucked the bundle into the waist of his jeans.

  In darkness softened only by the distant approach of the sun, he let Branl and Clyme lead him out of his covert.

  Certain as stone, the Humbled guided him up the crevice, guarded him from vertigo along the ledge, and watched over him as he clambered up the split to the grassland above the cliff.

  There the horses waited. Mhornym and Naybahn greeted their riders with nickering eagerness and trepidation. The destrier rolled its eyes and champed its bit as if only the authority of the Ranyhyn prevented it from charging at Covenant, pounding him into the turf.

  Even with his blunt senses, Covenant could see that the Feroce had told the truth. His mount was still weak, worn down by overexertion: the lurker’s creatures had not given it strength. Nevertheless it had recovered its cantankerous spirit.

  —caused it to remember what it is. While it lives—

  Covenant prayed that the beast would live long enough.

  Angrily the horse allowed Covenant to mount. Groaning to himself, he settled his sore muscles into the saddle, took the reins in his maimed fingers. With one hand, he wedged the krill into a more comfortable position. Then he nodded to the Humbled.

  “Let’s go. I don’t know how we’re going to do this. But the sooner we get it done, the better.”

  The Worm was coming. On some intuitive level, he felt it drawing nearer. Or perhaps what he felt was plain dread. The making of worlds is not accomplished in an instant. It cannot be instantly undone. Sure, he thought sourly. Fine. But what did that mean? How many more days would the Worm spend feeding on the Elohim, devouring them to nourish its search for the EarthBlood?

  He wished urgently that he could remember—

  As Branl and Clyme turned their Ranyhyn and headed south along the soft slope below the cliffedge, Covenant resisted an impulse to prod his mount into a gallop. By one measure or another, he had lived for something like seven millennia; and now he had no time.

  But Mhornym and Naybahn set a rolling pace that the destrier could match without exhausting itself quickly. In spite of his impatience, Covenant tried to tell himself that twenty leagues was trivial for the Ranyhyn—and possible for his mount. Yet his doubts weighed on him; and the gait of the horses felt as sluggish as lead.

  Gradually dawn spread out of the east, muted and ruddy, like a forecast of storms. As the sky grew brighter, it took on an ashen hue, the ominous grey of smoke from distant wildfires. For a while as the sun crested the horizon, pale streaks of a more welcome blue showed through the pall. But they were soon occluded, and the whole firmament of the heavens became a sealed lid the color of hammered iron, uneven and depthless.

  “This bodes ill, ur-Lord,” Clyme remarked unnecessarily. “The natural currents of sky and wind and weather are disrupted. They foretell the onset of some great violation.”

  Instead of responding, Covenant dug in his pockets for treasure-berry seeds. As he and his companions rode, he scattered seeds two or three at a time, sowing the grassland with aliantha like a gesture of defiance. And with every toss, he murmured to the Despiser, Come on. Try me. Whatever happens, you aren’t going to like it.

  In this region between the Shattered Hills and the Sunbirth Sea, turf filled the south for several leagues, interrupted only by occasional fissur
es in the cliff, chewed scallops of erosion, barren stretches where sheets of stone denied incursion. Provender for the horses was plentiful. Water was not.

  But as the sun crossed midmorning, the jagged jumble of the Hills crowded closer. Grasses grew more sparsely as the expanse of fertile soil dwindled. The shape of the terrain pushed the riders more and more toward the rim of the precipice.

  By some fortuitous quirk of orogeny, however, freshwater springs became easier to find. The same harsh forces which had raised the twists and ridges of the Shattered Hills had also webbed the underlying gutrock with flaws. There ramified splits and gaps had formed the ancient habitations of the jheherrin. The same breaks had supplied the Despiser’s armies with lines of march beneath the Hills. And they had tapped sources of water as old as the world. In hollows like denuded swales, or cracks so thin that they were barely visible, or crude basins as unexpected as fonts, springs bubbled forth. The Ranyhyn and the destrier and their riders could at least quench their thirst. Then the horses cantered on, heading more southeastward now than south, and probing for a path across the increasingly obstructed landscape.

  Covenant suspected that they were beginning to curve toward the long promontory which had once held Foul’s Creche; and he still had no idea what he would do if or when he located Joan.

  By noon, the horses were forced to move more slowly. There was no more clear ground. The Hills piled ever nearer to the cliff; and the narrowing space between them was cluttered with rubble, or blocked by boulders, or fretted with fissures like veins of erosion pulsing ever deeper into the heart of the Lower Land’s last buttress against the Sea. The Ranyhyn may have been sure-footed enough to run there: Covenant’s mount was not.

  And the charger was failing. It had exhausted the energy that it had regained during the night. Now only its belligerence kept it going. When it died, it would perish because it had ruptured its own heart.

  That was the gift of the Feroce: a mixed blessing, beneficial for Covenant, but fatal for the poor horse. The innocent, he thought bitterly, were always the first to die. They were the first casualties of every struggle against Despite.

  Nevertheless he rode as if he had no pity. Joan had nothing left except the sheer extremity of her pain. If he hoped to face her and live, he would have to do things equally extreme.

  Then thrusts of granite pushed the riders within a stone’s throw of the last cliff, and Covenant smelled saltwater; saw the Sunbirth Sea.

  The ocean was as grey as the sky, a tainted seethe heaving urgently against the base of the precipice as if it were desperate to break down the Lower Land’s fortifications. No wind lashed the waves: the air seemed preternaturally still, as if the sky were holding its breath. Nevertheless the roll of seas was confused, tossed this way and that by its surge over grim boulders and fraught reefs. Slamming against each other, the wavecrests broke into agitated froth and spray like salt expostulations.

  And wherever Covenant looked, the sea was stippled with bursts and splashes as if it were being struck by hail. But there was no hail. Instead he felt an almost subliminal vibration, a mute massive thud like the slow beat of the seafloor’s immersed heart; or like the heavy tread of doom.

  Premonitions of vertigo tugged at Covenant’s thoughts; at his stomach. But the knotted bulk of the cliff still stood between him and falling, and he kept his balance.

  Time dragged like difficult breathing. For a while, the horses maintained a jolting trot. Then the rimose terrain compelled them to walk. Boulders complicated their path. And with every stride, they were wedged closer to the precipice.

  Covenant doubted that his mount would last much longer. He doubted that he would. His trek to Foul’s Creche long ago had taught him that the Hills were a hazardous barrier. And they probably stretched right to the cliffedge. Beyond them, of course, the way was easier. At the base of Ridjeck Thome’s promontory, the Shattered Hills were cut off by cooled lava where Hotash Slay had once moiled and poured. There he would be able to walk. He had done it before. But here—

  A glance at the sky told him that midafternoon had passed. Under the loom of the Hills, night would fall early.

  He tried to assure himself that he and his companions had made good progress. Certainly the charger had endured more than he could have expected. When he asked the Humbled, however, they informed him that the igneous boundary of Hotash Slay was still two leagues away.

  Meanwhile his mount was stumbling, unable to drag its hooves clear of the uneven ground. And the gap between the sudden upward lurch of the Hills and the sheer plummet of the cliff had become little more than a taunt. On foot, Covenant could have crossed it in four strides. For safety’s sake, Branl had to ride ahead of him on one side, Clyme behind him on the other.

  He remembered nothing about this part of the coast. Living, he had never been here before. The jheherrin had guided him with Foamfollower beneath the Shattered Hills from a different direction. He and his last friend in that time, the last of the Unhomed, had bypassed most of the bitter maze; had emerged from the passages of the soft ones only a short distance from Hotash Slay. But other things he could not forget—

  Foamfollower in vast agony carrying him across the boil of lava. Foamfollower sinking horribly beneath the molten stone. Foamfollower reappearing from his caamora in time to clear Covenant’s way into Foul’s Creche.

  Foamfollower laughing with unfettered joy at Lord Foul’s malice.

  Ah, God. The Giants. They were all of them miracles, every one whom Covenant had known: Pitchwife and the First of the Search, Grimmand Honninscrave and Cable Seadreamer, the Ironhand and her comrades: they were all instances of the transcending valor that made the Land and the Earth precious. Too precious to be surrendered. Joy is in the ears that hear—Any world which nurtured such beings deserved to live. Any world which gave birth to people like Berek Heartthew and High Lord Mhoram, Sunder and Hollian. Any world so rich in wonders that it could transform the dark Weird of the ur-viles.

  This world deserved to live.

  Engrossed in remembrance and useless remonstration, Covenant was surprised when the horses stopped.

  They had come to an impasse. Directly ahead of them, a jut of stone like a plane of slate taller than one Giant standing on another’s shoulders blocked the way. It reached from the louring bulk of the nearest hill to the precipice barely two paces away on Covenant’s left. Shaded from the westering sun, he and the Humbled were shrouded in shadows and gloom. But beyond the barrier, cliffs and crags like clenched knuckles curved crookedly from the southeast out into the wan sunlight of late afternoon. They towered higher than his recollection of them. At their far end, he glimpsed the jagged edge where the collapse of Foul’s Creche had rent the tip of the promontory, sending uncounted thousands of tons of granite and obsidian and malachite into the insatiable hunger of the Sunbirth. And far below him—

  A shock like a jolt of lightning ran through him. Bloody damnation!

  Far below him, a simple spin and topple over the precipice, seas no longer thundered against the base of the cliff. When he first looked down, clinging fervidly to his saddle, he saw no breakers at all. The whole of the ocean seemed to have vanished, leaving slick rocks, splintered menhirs, and knife-sharp boulders like the detritus of landslides exposed to the air. Among them, reefs like the spines of cripples reticulated the expanse. Grey water lay in pools that trembled at the slow thud of imponderable heartbeats as though even salt and the smallest creatures of the sea understood fear. Patches of cloacal mud seemed to shiver in anticipation, reeking of ancient death and rot. Draped over and around the chaos of stones and reefs, strands of kelp sprawled as if they were already dying.

  But when Covenant raised his eyes, cast his gaze farther, he saw the Sunbirth in retreat. Perhaps half a league from the cliff, waves still toppled onto the ocean floor. But they were ebbing. Ebbing dramatically. With every fall and return, they withdrew as if they were being sucked away. As if they were being swallowed by the depths of the world
.

  Faint with distance, they sounded vulnerable, as forlorn as a plaint.

  Instinctively Covenant understood. His mind reeled, and vertigo was an acute teacher.

  Somewhere scores or hundreds of leagues out to sea, a shock like a split in the Earth’s crust had begun to gather a tsunami.

  The riders had stopped on level stone like a small clearing between the impassable hill and the fatal cliff. There the destrier stood with its legs splayed, gasping out its life. Ahead of and behind the beast, Mhornym and Naybahn fretted, tossing their heads and stamping their hooves.

  Had they misjudged the path to their destination? Was that even possible?

  Gritting his teeth in a wasted attempt to keep his voice steady, Covenant demanded, “Are we lost? We can’t be. The Ranyhyn don’t get lost.”

  “Ur-Lord, we are not,” Branl replied inflexibly. “Our passage lies there.” He pointed at the rockface behind Covenant.

  Covenant twisted in his seat, looked where Branl pointed.

  The Master was right. A dozen or so paces behind Clyme and Mhornym, a crack opened the wall of stone: a way into the maze of the Shattered Hills. The Ranyhyn knew it was there. And they could thread the maze: Covenant was sure of that. They could navigate time within caesures. Yet they had walked past it.

  They must have done so deliberately.

  Fearing the answer, he asked, “I don’t understand. Why aren’t we moving?”

  His horse was done. But he could still walk.

  “Ur-Lord,” Clyme answered without expression, “Mhornym and Naybahn choose to halt here. We are not Ramen. We do not discern the thoughts of Ranyhyn. But we speculate.

  “It may be that we near our goal. It may be that we do not. We perceive neither your former mate, who is unknown to us, nor vile turiya Herem, with whom we are well familiar. They lie beyond the reach of our senses. However, we have no measure for the Raver’s awareness. Perhaps Corruption’s servant descries our approach. Perhaps your former mate does likewise.