Against All Things Ending

by Donaldson, Stephen R.

  Anger and Earthpower glittered around the Elohim as if she wore garments of disillusioned gems. Even in her wrath, she should have been lovely to behold. But everything that Thomas Covenant still possessed was concentrated on Linden: her sob-wracked body in his arms; her hair against the side of his face. Immersed in her distress, he ignored Infelice.

  Loric Vilesilencer did not. “Be still, Elohim,” he growled. “The fault of this—if it is fault—is yours as much as his or hers. You fear only for yourselves. You care nothing for the Earth. Yet there is much here that surpasses your self-regard.”

  “No!” protested Kevin urgently. “The Elohim speaks sooth. Have I suffered damnation and learned naught? She has performed a Desecration which exceeds comprehension. The Humbled know it, if the Timewarden does not. The Chosen herself knows it.”

  “Enough, Loric-son,” Berek said in a voice of commandment. “The fate of life belongs to those who know love and death. It is not our place to judge, or to condemn. And Time remains to us, as it does to the living. The making of worlds is not accomplished in an instant. It cannot be instantly undone. Much must transpire before the deeds of the Chosen bear their last fruit.”

  Holding Linden’s knotted grief and horror, Covenant tried to grapple with all that he had lost. He needed to retain as much as he could; but a numbness like lethargy hampered him. When Kevin spoke of damnation and Desecration, the bedrock plates of Covenant’s mind shifted against each other. His concentration broke: he seemed to slip out of the present. He still held Linden; still saw that the Haruchai were barely able to contain their desire to deliver death; still felt the troubled emotions of the Dead High Lords. The Ramen and the Ranyhyn, the Stonedownor and one Haruchai, remained poised to defend Linden. At the same time, however, he found himself remembering—

  The Stonedownor had come to stand behind Linden; place his hands softly on her shoulders. “Ah, Linden.” His voice ached. “Do not weep so. I grasp little of what has occurred. But an august spirit has avowed that time remains to us. Can you not hear him? Surely the powers gathered here may accomplish much. And we have not yet attempted to redeem your son. In his name—”

  The young man said more, but Covenant did not recognize it. He was remembering Kevin’s confrontation with Lord Foul in Kiril Threndor, Heart of Thunder. Pieces of his mind witnessed the first moments of the Ritual of Desecration as if they were superimposed on Linden and Andelain.

  There Kevin’s despair was as vivid as the chiaroscuro glinting from Kiril Threndor’s myriad-faceted stone: his self-loathing; his desire to punish himself. His ravaged love and failure exalted the carious illumination of Lord Foul’s malice. If Covenant had been truly present in the chamber, he would have tried to stop Kevin. He would have had no choice: his own spirit would have been torn by the fangs of Lord Foul’s eyes, clawed by the ragged nails of Kevin’s desperation.

  But he could not stay to watch the Ritual enacted. He had seen it before, and was unable to control the images which slid along the fault-lines within him. One thing led to another in the wrong direction. Instead of witnessing the culmination of Kevin’s self-betrayal, he followed Lord Foul backward in time.

  While Linden struggled to master herself in his embrace, and the Stonedownor attempted to soothe or rally her, Covenant visited the Despiser’s brief decades masquerading among the Lords of the Council, accepted as a-Jeroth because none of the Lords could name their reasons for being reluctant to trust him. From there, Covenant’s recollections involuntarily retreated to the many centuries when Lord Foul had inhabited the Lower Land, unknown to the Council, or to any of the peoples who preceded the Lords; unrecognized by anyone except the Forestals who preserved the truncated awareness of the One Forest. During that long age, the Despiser was hampered by the Colossus of the Fall, and by the fierce strength of the Forestals. Therefore he had hidden himself even from the Ravers, until the first waning of the Interdict freed them to do his bidding. Instead he bred other servants among the twisted denizens of Sarangrave Flat and the Great Swamp, and built Foul’s Creche, and spawned his armies, and readied his powers—and quested unceasingly for the most useful of the banes buried deep under Mount Thunder.

  But before that—

  Covenant could not stop himself, even though Linden’s wretchedness wrung his heart, and her companions waited as if they expected him to offer some salvific revelation.

  Before that, the Despiser considered the Insequent, rejecting them because their theurgies were too dissociated to serve him. In regions of the Earth so distant that even the Giants had never visited them, he submerged himself among the Demimages of Vidik Amar, who wielded a contingent magic; but he found that when he had corrupted them to his purpose, they turned against each other, diminishing themselves in the name of Despite. Earlier, he nurtured his resentment within the eager energies of the Soulbiter, although they could not accomplish his purpose. Earlier still, he spent an age of failure with the cunning folk who would one day give birth to Kasreyn of the Gyre. And before that, he essayed an approach to the Worm of the World’s End. But the Worm was not of his making. He could not rouse it directly: he could only disturb its slumber by damaging the One Tree. And the Guardian of the One Tree was proof against him.

  Covenant remembered the sources of the Despiser’s frustration, the roots of his accumulating, minatory fury. He recognized the Despiser’s own secret despair, concealed even from himself, and enacted on the beings around him instead.

  Roughly Linden pushed herself back from Covenant. He could not stop her, or try to understand her: he only saw and felt her through the veils of Lord Foul’s past. Her face was a smear of tears, and her chest shook with the effort of stifling her sobs. Her torment was as acute as Kevin’s, and as punitive. But her straits were more cruel than his. She had committed her Desecration—and she had survived it.

  Clenching herself against spasms of renewed weeping, she fought to speak.

  “All you had to do. All you had to do. Was tell me. How to find Jeremiah.” For a moment, she knotted her fists, beat them against her face. “Then I wouldn’t—”

  Her features twisted as if she were about to howl.

  The Haruchai with one eye had moved to stand beside her. “He could not, Chosen,” he said flatly. “His silence was required. I endeavored to forewarn you. But you were unable to heed me. You do not forgive, and cannot harken to other counsel.”

  Like Covenant, Linden did not appear to hear him.

  But Covenant remembered.

  Spectres which may not be denied—

  —will come to affirm the necessity of freedom.

  Nevertheless the Haruchai’s words were too recent: they could not break the grip of Lord Foul’s striving across hundreds or thousands of centuries.

  Still Linden needed Covenant: some part of him felt that. She needed something from him that he could not give while he remained trapped among the fragments of the past. In spite of his own pain and bewilderment, he could not willingly ignore her.

  Nor could he contain the pressure of remembrance which severed him from himself.

  “Hit me,” he panted thinly. His voice was so frayed and raw that he hardly heard it. “Hit me again.”

  A fire that might have been shock or shame or rage burned away Linden’s tears; but she did not hesitate. Flinging her whole hurt into the blow, she struck his cheek as hard as she could.

  Physical pain. The shock and sting of abused skin. The harsh jerk of his neck as his head snapped back. Air which should have healed him in his lungs.

  He saw her clearly again, as if she had slapped away his confusion.

  “I’m sorry,” he said: the best answer he had. “I’m too full of time. I can’t hold on to it. But pieces—”

  Her open anguish stopped him. He was not saying what she needed to hear. The Stonedownor—Liand, his name was Liand—tried to comfort her, but his words and his gentle hands did not touch her distress. The Haruchai was called Stave. His single eye considered Covenant wit
h ungiving severity.

  Linden had been brought to this place—to the Dead, and to Loric’s krill, and to the devastation of the world—by forces as great in their own way as the pressures which fractured Covenant.

  “I couldn’t tell you then,” he said; groaned. “I couldn’t say anything. None of us could.” He meant the Dead around him. “The necessity of freedom—It’s absolute. You have to make your own choices. Everything hinges on that. If I told you where to find your son—or warned you what might happen if you used the krill the way you did—I would have changed your decisions. I would have changed the nature of what you had to choose.”

  The nature of the risks that she had to take.

  “That’s what Lord Foul does. He changes your choices. He wasn’t trying to stop you when you were attacked on your way here. His allies fought you because he wanted to make you more determined. So you would think you were doing the right thing.”

  “His servants have their own desires,” Infelice told Linden. Her tone was acid, gemmed in gall. “Some among them do not believe that they serve him. In folly, they imagine that their aspirations exceed his, or that they act in their own names. But they cannot conceive the height and breadth of his intent. Like yours, all of their deeds conduce to his ends.

  “Did we not caution you to beware the halfhand? Did we not speak to the peoples of the Land, seeking to ensure that you were forewarned?”

  “Enough, Elohim,” Berek’s shade demanded. “Your plight is not forgotten. Permit the Timewarden to speak while he remains able to do so.”

  Covenant ignored Infelice; ignored Berek. “I couldn’t treat you that way,” he went on, imploring Linden to understand him. “No matter what happened. I couldn’t tamper with anything you decided to do. I’ve already taken too many chances. If you need to blame someone, blame me.

  “But if the Earth has any hope—any hope at all—it depends on you. It has ever since Joan brought you here. And it still does. Freedom isn’t just a condition for using wild magic. It’s a condition for life. Without it, everything eventually turns into Despite.”

  Abruptly Linden pushed herself to her feet; distanced herself from him. He saw a fresh storm of tears gather in her, but she closed herself against it. “No.” Her protest was a rough scrape of sound, bloody and betrayed. “That isn’t right. It doesn’t work that way. You’re the one who saves the world. I just want to save my son.”

  He ached for her through the clamor of his own dismay: the heavy labor of his pulse, needless for millennia; the gasp of air in his lungs; the burning of his face where she had struck him; the excruciation of Time as it bled away. She had every reason to feel betrayed. She had believed that he loved her—

  He did love her. He had loved her during every instant that the Arch had ever contained. If he had not loved her, he would never have found the strength to sacrifice himself against the Despiser. But for that very reason, he shied away from the sight of her outrage and grief. Slipping again, he fell like debris into fissured memories where his mind and his volition could be ground to powder.

  For reasons that eluded him, he found himself regarding the ornately clad figure of the Harrow.

  The Insequent still sat his destrier as though he had no part to play in what transpired around him. But the deep voids of his eyes were fixed hungrily on the ring and the Staff that Linden had dropped as if in abandonment.

  The Harrow had known the Vizard. Of course he had. And the Vizard had possessed knowledge which the Harrow lacked. Inspired by some leap of imagination, or by his own assiduous study, the Vizard had grasped the almost mystical significance, the potential use, of Jeremiah’s talent for constructs. And he had craved that resource for himself. He had seen in it the possibility that he might one day hold sway over the entire race of the Elohim. By that means, he would show himself greater than any of his people.

  But he had made a damning mistake: he had tried to eliminate the implied threat of the Harrow. By their very nature, the Harrow’s intentions would obliquely thwart the Vizard’s. If the Harrow attained his goal, Jeremiah would be freed from Lord Foul’s possession—and then Jeremiah would surely pass beyond the Vizard’s reach. Therefore the Vizard had violated the most vital of the restrictions which the Insequent imposed upon themselves. Goaded by the scale of his own ambitions, he had opposed the Harrow’s private designs. Thus the Vizard was lost to mind and name and life. The combined will of every Insequent had imposed his destruction. From Covenant’s former place among the uncounted instants of the Arch, he had watched the Vizard fail and die.

  It was the same fate that the Mahdoubt had suffered—

  On some other level of his attention, Covenant understood that the Harrow would not attempt to snatch up the ring and the Staff: not while Infelice stood ready to resist him, and the Wraiths would come to preclude their conflict. But such concerns would not hinder the Harrow much longer.

  Abruptly Stave stepped forward and slapped Covenant in Linden’s stead. The Haruchai measured his blow precisely: it was not as hard as Linden’s, although he could have snapped Covenant’s neck with ease. But it was enough.

  Renewed pain restored Covenant to the present.

  At once, two of the other Haruchai sprang at Stave. They dragged him away roughly, ignoring the fact that he did not resist them. When the Ramen rushed to his aid—even the Manethrall whose lost eyes were bandaged—Stave stopped them with a word.

  Facing the aggravated injury of Linden’s gaze, Covenant tried again to answer her.

  “I know. You’ve already changed the fate of the Earth, but you still don’t believe you can do things like that. You just want to find your son.

  “I can’t tell you. I have no idea where he is. I used to know. But it’s gone. It’s just gone.” He had already been reduced to a husk of his former self. With every breath, every heartbeat, the sum of his memories shrank. He imagined that he had once labored to protect Jeremiah’s spirit from Lord Foul’s taint. Yet he could no longer recall his efforts. “Everything I remember is broken. And I’m losing more all the time. There isn’t enough of me to hold it.”

  He retained only the fragments that lay hidden among the cracks in his awareness. When he slipped into them, his mind lost its connection to his new flesh.

  “Linden?” Liand asked softly, pleading with her. “What can be done? What remains to us? We cannot continue to strike him. If he is indeed unable to recollect—”

  “No.” Linden shook her head urgently; frantically. “No.” She took a step backward. The avid brilliance of the krill limned her form, left her features in darkness. “This is wrong. It can’t be this way.

  “What did you want me to do? When you urged me to find you? What did you think I could accomplish?”

  —hold it, Covenant thought. Hold them all. For a moment, the sight of Giantships tugged at him, pulling him down. He saw the wooden vessels of the Unhomed sunk by turiya Kinslaughterer while the Giants waited for death in their homes. The suction as the ships foundered tried to drag Covenant with them. None of them were left at sea: they had returned to The Grieve to be fitted with Gildenlode keels and rudders so that they might be able to find their way Home; end their long bereavement—

  But Covenant struggled to remain present for Linden’s sake.

  Fumbling, unsure of his movements, he forced himself to stand and face her. “It isn’t up to me.” He was hardly able to feel his hands and feet. “I just didn’t want—” His fingers twitched involuntarily, as if he were reaching for something. But he was unaware of them. They were as useless as the knowledge which had bled out of him. “That old man. The beggar. The Creator. He abandoned you before you ever came here. I didn’t want you to think I’d abandoned you too.”

  “The Timewarden is diminished,” Infelice told Linden. Her voice sounded raw, almost flayed. “Before he became less than he was, he conceived that you might discover some less fatal means to span the gulf between the living and the Dead. He dreamed that you might earn or coe
rce his vast awareness from him without dooming this Creation.”

  You would not be driven by mistaken love to bring about the end of all things!

  Infelice may have been right. Or not. Covenant had lost those memories as well.

  A short distance beyond the krill, two of the Haruchai—the Humbled—had released Stave. Covenant almost knew their names. Striding ahead of Stave, they joined their hand-maimed comrade among the Ramen and the Ranyhyn. But it was Stave who announced, “Then the burden falls to you, Elohim. Your knowledge is also vast. Where is the Chosen’s son? How may Corruption and his servants be opposed? How may the Worm be returned to slumber?”

  Adrift in his dismembered mind, Covenant finally identified Mahrtiir: the Manethrall. The man had been terribly wounded in the battle of First Woodhelven. And the girl and the man with him were—They were—Covenant clung to Linden’s face with his grieving gaze. The Ramen with the Manethrall were his Cords. Pahni and Bhapa.

  “Have I not spoken of this?” retorted Infelice. “Like the Wildwielder herself, her son—and the Timewarden’s also, as well as his mate—are a shadow upon our hearts. Her son has been hidden from us. And the Worm cannot be returned to slumber. By the measure of mountains, it is a small thing, no more than a range of hills. An earthquake might swallow it. Yet its power surpasses comprehension. No upheaval or convulsion will hinder it. Against any obstruction, it will feed and grow mighty until it consumes the essence of the Earth. Then all life and Time will cease. Naught remains for us except extinction.”

  “All the more reason for vengeance,” growled Kevin’s shade. “Her crimes must be answered, as mine have been. The Humbled serve the Land falsely if they continue to permit her life.”

  Elena moaned as though she shared the Landwaster’s ire—and loathed herself for doing so. Caer-Caveral regarded her with a bitter scowl, but said nothing.

  “Have done, son of Loric,” High Lord Berek ordered. “I will not caution you again. Your crimes have not yet been truly answered. Your fathers will speak of you ere this night is done. Until you have heard what is in our hearts, you will withhold your denunciations of the Chosen.”