The Runes of the Earth: The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant - Book One

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  She knew where she was. Oh, she knew. Her brief look around had confirmed it. She had been here once before, ten years and a lifetime ago. This stone circle with its parapet was Kevin’s Watch, a platform carved into the pinnacle of a leaning stone spire high above the line of hills which divided the South Plains from the Plains of Ra.

  How much time had passed since her first appearance here? She knew from experience that months in the Land were mere hours in her natural world: centuries were months. And Thomas Covenant had told her that between his imposed translations the Land had undergone three and a half millennia of transformation.

  If a comparable interval had passed again, the healing which she had begun should have worked its way into every stretch of rock and blade of grass, every vein of leaf and truck of tree, from the Westron Mountains to Landsdrop and beyond.

  But thirty centuries and more were also time enough for Lord Foul to restore himself, and to devise a new corruption of this precious, vulnerable place.

  She would have to search for her son in a country that had almost certainly changed beyond recognition.

  According to Covenant, the Land had once been a region of health and beauty, rich in vitality. In those days, the natural puissance of the world had flowed close to the surface here; and the Land’s inward loveliness had been tangible to everyone who gazed upon it. But the Sunbane had tainted that elemental grace; had twisted it to desert and rain, pestilence and fertility. As a result, Linden had only grasped the true worth of the Land when she had at last visited Andelain.

  There, in the final bastion of Law against the Sunbane, she had seen and felt and tasted the real wealth of Earthpower, the anodyne and solace of the Land’s essential largesse. Her preternatural discernment had made its health and abundance palpable to her senses.

  Inspired by Andelain and Covenant, she had striven with all her love and compassion to remake the Land as it had been before Lord Foul had launched his attack on its nature.

  Three and a half millennia? Time enough, and more than enough, for everything which she and Covenant had accomplished to change, or be forgotten.

  And the prophetic figure who should have warned her of her peril had given her nothing. He had denied her any chance to protect her son.

  Dear God, how bad was it this time? What had Lord Foul done?

  What was he doing to Jeremiah right now?

  That thought stung her; galvanized her.

  In her own world, she was dead, or dying. Her life there was gone, stamped out by a leaden slug. She had failed all of her promises.

  Here, however, she remained somehow among the living, just as Covenant had remained after his murder in the woods behind Haven Farm. And while she retained any vestige of herself, only Jeremiah mattered to her.

  Tell her that I have her son.

  He, too, had survived: here at least, if not in his former existence.

  As long as she could still breathe and think and strive, she would not, would not, allow the Despiser to keep him.

  Yet she did not leap to her feet. Already she knew that any attempt to rescue Jeremiah might well require months. She could not simply descend from Kevin’s Watch and step to his side. The place where Lord Foul had secreted her son could be hundreds of leagues distant. Hell, she might need days simply to gain an understanding of her own circumstances—and the Land’s.

  She had seen herself rouse the Worm of the World’s End. She had witnessed monstrous creatures devouring the ground as though they fed on life and Earthpower.

  And this time she was alone. Entirely alone. She did not even know whether the village of Mithil Stonedown, where she and Covenant had found Sunder to aid them, still existed. She had no supplies or maps; no means of travel except her untrained legs.

  All she had was power: Covenant’s white gold ring, wild magic that destroys peace. Enough power to crumble Time and set the Despiser free, if she could learn how to use it.

  Lord Foul had prepared her well to understand despair.

  Nevertheless her alarm for Jeremiah had restored her to herself; and she recognized that she had one other resource as well. During her fall from her own life, she had tasted her former health-sense. Now she felt it fully: it sang in her nerves, as discerning and keen as augury. It told her of the cleanliness of the sunshine; of its untrammeled, life-giving warmth. It described to her senses the high purity of the air and the breeze, the sky, the heavens. It made her aware of the bold reach of the mountains behind her, ancient and enduring, although she had not glanced toward them.

  And it warned her—

  Involuntarily she flinched; jerked herself onto the support of her hands and knees. Had she misunderstood the sensation? No, it was there, in the stone: a suggestion of weakness, of frailty; a visceral tremor among the old bones of the spire. The platform did not literally move or quiver. Still the message was unmistakable.

  Something threatened Kevin’s Watch. It had been strained to the breaking point. Any new stress might cause it to collapse—

  —dropping her a thousand feet and more to the hard hills.

  Panic flared briefly through her, and she nearly sprang erect. But then her percipience gained clarity, and she saw that the danger was not imminent. She could not imagine what manner of force had done the Watch so much harm, when it had withstood every assault of weather, earthquake, and magic since at least the time of High Lord Kevin Landwaster, a thousand years before Covenant’s first appearance here. However, no such power impinged upon it now.

  Kevin’s Watch would stand awhile longer.

  Breathing deeply, Linden Avery closed her eyes and at last turned her discernment on herself.

  She had been shot. She had felt the shock in her chest, the irreversible rupture that had severed her link to the life that she had chosen for herself.

  Yet she was not in pain now. Probing gingerly inward, her reborn senses descried no damage. Her heart beat too rapidly, spurred by Jeremiah’s plight and her own fear; but it remained whole. Her lungs sucked in the clean air without difficulty, and her ribs flexed with each breath, as if they had not been touched by frantic lead.

  Anxiously she opened her eyes and looked down at her shirt.

  A neat round hole had been punched through the red flannel directly below her sternum. Yet the fabric at the rim of the hole showed no blood. Even that sign that she had been slain had been burned away.

  When she unbuttoned her shirt, however, to study the skin between her breasts, she found a round white scar in the V where her ribs came together. Covenant’s ring hung on its thin chain only an inch or two above the newly healed flesh.

  Undoubtedly there was another scar in the center of her back, a larger and more ragged wound, impossibly repaired. And her palm had been made whole as well.

  Moments or hours ago, in the darkness of Joan’s mind, she had felt power flare through her; the argence of white gold. Had she healed herself? Covenant had once done something similar. He had borne the scar of a knife throughout his remaining time in the Land.

  Such healing violated every precept of her medical training. Nevertheless it was natural here. Wild magic and Earthpower worked such wonders. She had experienced them at Covenant’s side too often to doubt them.

  Still her former life was gone; irretrievable. She would never see Berenford Memorial again, or her patients, or her friends. She would never know whether Sandy and Sheriff Lytton had survived—

  But she could not afford such griefs. Lord Foul had taken Jeremiah. She had lost something more precious to her than her own life.

  Her healed scars gave her courage. When she had rebuttoned her shirt, she climbed slowly upright.

  She knew what she would see; and at first the scene which greeted her was just as she remembered it. The circle of stone and its parapet had been smoothed from the native granite of the mountains; and its spire leaned northward, toward Andelain. The sun, nearly overhead and slightly to her left in the southern expanse of the sky, suggested that she had arr
ived in late morning, despite the violent darkness which she had left behind. Confirming her other senses, the light showed her immediately that there was no flaw upon the sun; that no vestige or reminder of the Sunbane remained.

  In this one way, if in no other, she resembled Thomas Covenant. She had not failed the Land.

  Turning slowly with the sun’s health on her face, she saw the familiar mountains rearing up over the spire to the south. Here, she recalled, the Southron Range jutted some distance northward, forming a wedge of peaks that ended at Kevin’s Watch and the north-lying hills. From among those peaks to the west arose the Mithil River, which then flowed along a widening valley out into the South Plains. But on the other side, the mountains were more strongly fortified. They stretched east and then northeast like a curtain-wall from Kevin’s Watch to Landsdrop, separating the Plains of Ra from the distant south.

  Linden had never seen or heard what lay beyond the Southron Range. East of Landsdrop, however, past Lord Foul’s former demesne in Ridjeck Thome, was the Sunbirth Sea. And as the littoral ran northward, the Spoiled Plains lapsed into Lifeswallower, the Great Swamp, which in turn eventually rose from its fens to form the verdant land of Seareach, where the Unhomed Giants had once lived.

  Her head swirling with memories, she sat down in the center of the Watch so that she would not fall again. She had already plunged too far: farther than she could measure; perhaps farther than she could endure. While her eyes scanned the crests and valleys of the mountains, and her memories gyred across the Land, she steadied herself on the stone’s stubborn endurance.

  She faced there because she did not want to remember Revelstone, Lord’s Keep, three hundred leagues to the west and north: the huge granite habitation which Jeremiah had re-created in Legos in her living room; in the life she had lost.

  But beyond the Keep, high in the cold-clad fastness of the Westron Mountains—so she had been told—lived the Haruchai. She thought of them more willingly, recalling their distrust of her and their fidelity to Thomas Covenant; their extravagant strength; their costly rejection of compromise.

  Had they survived the uncounted centuries of her absence? Were they still a presence in the Land?

  If so, she could hope for help.

  And if the tale of what she and Covenant had accomplished for the Land had withstood so much time, she might find other allies as well. Covenant’s first victory against Lord Foul had survived the telling and retelling of it over a comparable stretch of centuries. In Mithil Stonedown, Sunder had cast in his lot with Covenant and Linden because his father had taught him to preserve the memory of the Unbeliever.

  She needed aid of some kind. She had to trust that she would find it somehow. Otherwise she might not have the courage to creep down the long, precarious stair which descended from Kevin’s Watch. She would certainly not be brave enough to search the entire Land for her son.

  Joan was out there somewhere, the summoner with her madness and her white ring. And Roger was there as well, serving his bitter master. He had to be. How else could Lord Foul have claimed Jeremiah?

  At that moment, she felt Thomas Covenant’s loss so acutely that it wrung her heart. She could have borne anything, faced any peril, endured any hardship, if only he were alive to stand beside her.

  Yet when she had rested awhile, she climbed to her feet again. Yearning for her dead lover was a weakness she could not afford. The Despiser had captured her son. While she lived, she would do everything in her power to win him back.

  Wrapping her fingers around Covenant’s ring for comfort, she shifted toward the western side of the Watch. She wanted to look down at the valley of the Mithil River.

  She had hardly taken a step, however, when she froze in surprise and dismay. Her first glance past the parapet showed her that the entire vista from horizon to horizon was shrouded in a thick layer of yellow cloud.

  No, not cloud, she corrected herself almost immediately: smog. It looked like smog. The air thickened to obscurity no more than a hundred feet below her; as dense as thunderheads. But it had the hue of pollution, the stifling and damaged shade of industrial exhaust. From the mountains behind her, it stretched as far as she could see in every direction, hiding even the base of the spire. Beneath it, where her senses could not penetrate, the Land might have become a wasteland.

  And it was wrong. Her eyes and nose, the nerves of her face, even her tongue, were certain of that: the shrilling of her health-sense permitted no doubt. It was as vile as the Sunbane, and as pervasive, lying like cerements over slain flesh as though the vital beauty, the very Law, which she had once given her utmost to preserve had been arrayed for burial.

  I am content. God in Heaven! What had the Despiser done?

  Her percipience told her only that this acrid yellow shroud was an act of violence against the fundamental Law of the Land’s nature. It could not reveal the smog’s cause, effects, or purpose.

  Instinctively she retreated into the center of the Watch; hugged her arms around her stomach to contain her distress. Now she feared the descent from Kevin’s Watch in a new way. The stair was exposed, dangerous. And it would take her into that yellow shroud. Remembering the Sunbane, she believed that the eerie smog would savage her open nerves. It might hurt her so severely that she would lose her balance—

  While she squirmed in alarm, however, she heard a new sound through the gentle breeze. Its susurration was punctuated by the noise of scrambling, the frantic movement of skin on stone.

  Where—? She looked around quickly; saw only the clean sky and the bluff mountains and the acrid shroud.

  The sound appeared to come from the stair—from someone climbing toward her.

  Because she was frightened, she dropped to the stone. Then she eased forward on her belly to peer furtively through the gap in the parapet at the top of the stair.

  There she heard scrambling more clearly. Hands and feet against rock: hoarse, ragged breathing.

  A few heartbeats later, a head emerged from the yellow cloud.

  A tangle of rank grey hair straggled to the shoulders of a torn and filthy tunic which may once have been brown. A man: she knew that at once. An old man. His hands clutching at the treads looked gnarled and bent, almost crippled. She sensed their arthritic straining as if they ached aloud. His labored breathing threatened to choke him.

  He was mortally afraid. His ascent was an attempt at escape.

  Linden’s percipience was too sharp: she felt his difficulties too acutely. She had forgotten how to manage the sensations which inundated her. Carefully she retreated to the far edge of the Watch and sat with her back against the parapet, bracing herself for the moment when he would emerge from the gap.

  What could he flee by coming here? There was no escape for either of them now.

  Lifting Covenant’s ring out of her shirt, she folded it in both hands as if she were praying.

  With a gasp of desperation, he heaved himself over the rim of the last stair and collapsed, panting. His legs still dangled off the Watch.

  The nature of his prostration told her at once that he had lost his mental balance a long time ago; had toppled into a kind of madness. And he had not eaten for days. Hunger and sorrow had taken his mind.

  He reminded her of Nassic—

  When she and Covenant had arrived together in the Land, they had been greeted by Sunder’s father, Nassic, who had inherited a vague knowledge of the Unbeliever from a long line of half-mad hermits called Unfettered Ones. In spite of his confused grasp on events, he had done everything in his power to aid them.

  A Raver had killed him for his trouble.

  This old man might be in similar danger.

  At once she set her own fears aside. Kneeling forward, she gripped him by his arms and pulled him fully onto the Watch. Then she crept to the gap and looked downward again, searching the shroud for anything that resembled turiya Herem’s malice.

  Still the cloud baffled her percipience; concealed its secrets.

  Come on!
she urged the long fall. Try me. I am in no mood for this!

  Until now, she had been helpless to save any of Roger’s victims. But Covenant’s ring had power here. She was done with helplessness.

  Nothing appeared out of the shroud.

  Slowly she withdrew from the gap; returned her attention to the collapsed old man.

  For a moment, she studied him with her health-sense, trying to determine how close he had come to death. Now that she could observe him more precisely, however, she saw that he had not exhausted his life. In fact, he possessed an astonishing resilience, in spite of his inanition. He was sustained by—

  New surprise rocked her back onto her heels.

  —by Earthpower.

  Automatically she rubbed at her eyes, trying to sharpen her senses.

  The old man was a being of some puissance. Human, undoubtedly: old, arthritic, and frail. Nevertheless an active pulse of Earthpower throbbed in his worn veins. It made her think of Hollian, who had been brought back from death by Caer-Caveral’s sacrifice and the krill of Loric. Linden remembered her vividly as she had stood at Sunder’s side, lambent with Earthpower made tangible and lovely—and mortal. Sunder himself had shared her numinous glow. Even the child in her womb had shared it.

  But neither Sunder nor Hollian had been mad.

  And there was something else in the old man, another ill in addition to his arthritis and his instability. When Linden first became aware of it, she could not define it. But then he groaned, stirred, and raised his head; and she saw that he was blind.

  He had a face like a broken rock, all ragged edges and rough planes, softened by an old tangle of neglected beard and a patina of ingrained grime. His mouth resembled a crack in dried mud.

  And above it, his eyes were the milky color of moonstone, devoid of iris or pupil. She thought at first that he suffered from cataracts; but when she looked more closely, she realized that his sightlessness ran deeper. His mind itself appeared to have rejected vision. In some way—perhaps by Earthpower—he had blinded himself.

  With the Staff of Law she might have been able to heal him. She could certainly have eased his arthritis. But with Covenant’s ring? She had used its power on herself successfully. Yet she hardly knew how she had done so. And she had been guided by her instinctive awareness of her condition. For this tattered old man—