Against All Things Ending

by Donaldson, Stephen R.

  His begrimed face and soiled eyes looked entirely vacant, as empty of consciousness as an abandoned farmhouse, as he reached for the lintel of his doorway.

  Infelice blared at him in fraught turmoil as chaotic as a caesure, but her powers failed to stop him.

  He resembled an incarnation of Anele’s blind essence, ragged and enduring, as he wedged his racecar between two bones supporting the femur lintel. With Earthpower, he sealed the toy in place.

  Before Linden could guess what he was doing, Infelice began to shriek like a banshee—and the entire marrowmeld sculpture became a white shout of radiance so pure that Linden could not look at it. She clapped a hand over her eyes, squeezed them shut; but the light pierced her hand and her eyelids, seemed to stab straight into her brain. She saw every bone of her palm and fingers limned in incandescence. Every phalange and metacarpal, the capitate, the scaphoid, the hamate: they all gleamed as if they were lit by the cynosure of the sun.

  For a moment, she believed that she would never see anything else again; that she would be left as sightless as Anele and Mahrtiir. The defined framework of her hand would be all that remained of her world.

  Then she felt Infelice disappear again, still shrieking.

  The Elohim did not return.

  Seconds or hours later, the portal’s blaze went out. There was no light except the dust and smoke of sunshine. Every sensation of power had left the caldera. Nothing endured to commemorate Linden’s lost sight or Infelice’s defeat except a wide pile of bones which should have been as white as Jeremiah’s innominate triumph.

  But Stave was still here. Linden heard him calling her name. He did not sound hurt. And the Ranyhyn had survived. The hard thud of their hooves as they trotted, nickering proudly, around and around the pile seemed to promise that they had accomplished their intent.

  Fearfully Linden lowered her hand, blinked open her eyes, and found that she had not been harmed. Dazzles like little suns swirled in her vision, confusing everything; but she could see. Experience and health-sense assured her that soon she would be able to see normally.

  Squinting, she searched for her son.

  Jeremiah stood in the center of a crude square of ash. His entire edifice had been rendered to powder around his feet. Even his racecar—If any scrap of the red metal remained, it lay buried in the residue of ancient bone.

  His legacy of Earthpower had receded into the background. But he was looking at Linden.

  At Linden.

  His eyes were clear as untainted skies. When she met his gaze, his face broke into a broad grin of excitement and affection.

  “I did it, Mom.” He sounded like he wanted to crow. “I did it. I made a door for my mind, and it opened.

  “I couldn’t have done it without Anele.” Gradually his grin fell away, unmade by remembered sorrows. “Or without Galt. And Liand. And the Ranyhyn. Stave was amazing.” Nonetheless his eyes shone on Linden, luminous with gratitude. “And I could never have done anything without you.

  “But I did it.”

  Then he hurried forward to fling his love around her.

  In that moment, Linden Avery began to believe that her rent heart might heal.

  Lord Foul always told the truth. In time you will behold the fruit of my endeavors. If your son serves me, he will do so in your presence. If I slaughter him, I will do so before you. If you discover him, you will only hasten his doom. But the Despiser’s craving for his foes’ self-desecration was so great that he never told the whole truth.

  Perhaps he did not know it.

  Do you see him? He’s my son.

  Hugging Jeremiah hard, Linden thought that maybe this time Lord Foul’s machinations had gone wrong. Like Infelice, perhaps, the Despiser had misled himself.

  10.

  The Pure One and the High God

  From the ravine where he had left Linden and her companions, Thomas Covenant rode the Harrow’s destrier south and east into a region of denuded hills interspersed with shallow vales of gravel and dirt.

  Clyme and Branl guarded him, Mhornym on his left, Naybahn on his right. And the Ranyhyn set a hard pace, apparently disregarding the limitations of Covenant’s mount. The destrier was a heavy warhorse, but it had been bred for endurance as well as power and fury. Covenant sensed that it would strive to emulate its Earthpowerful companions until its heart burst. And by some means, Mhornym and Naybahn seemed to impose their will on the beast, stifling its instinctive loathing for an unfamiliar rider; transforming its trained battle-frenzy into speed. While it could, the horse matched the fluid gallop of the Ranyhyn.

  Protected by Ranyhyn and the Humbled, Covenant rode toward his future as if he were absent from himself; as if he were conscious only of other people, other places, other times. But he had not slipped into one of the flaws that riddled his memories. Nor was he distracted by the imponderable prospect of confronting Joan and turiya Raver and the skest. Instead he traveled among the hills like an abandoned icon of himself because he was too full of grief and dread to regard the landscape or his companions or his own purpose.

  Some distant part of him felt grateful for the Harrow’s saddle and stirrups, the Harrow’s reins. They steadied him: he was a poor rider. In addition, he was vaguely glad that Kevin’s Dirt did not cover the Lower Land. He was already too numb, too inattentive; and Kastenessen’s dire brume would aggravate his leprosy. But such details did not deflect his sorrow.

  He was galled by the way that he had left Linden; by the manner in which he had refused her.

  He knew how Clyme and Branl felt about her. He understood why they distrusted her. But he also understood why she distrusted them. And he was not convinced that she had misjudged the Masters, or that her risks and concealments were mistakes, or that her determination to resurrect him had been misguided. Both in death and in life, he had watched her refusal to forgive harden toward despair—and still he believed in her. In spite of everything, he loved her exactly as she was. Every pain, every extravagance, every compromised line of her beauty: he loved them all. Without them, she would have been less than herself. Less than the mother Jeremiah needed. Less than the woman Covenant himself wanted. Less than the savior the Land required.

  Nevertheless he had told her the exact truth when he had pushed her away. He had lost too much of himself. He feared what he was becoming—or what he might have to become.

  That was why he had distanced himself from her, why he had kept himself apart from her clear yearning, why he had ridden away without so much as a kind farewell. He could not profess his love—or accept hers—without making it sound like a promise; and he had no reason to believe that he would be able to keep that troth. If Joan did not succeed at killing him, he might return from facing her in a condition which he had not anticipated, and which Linden would no longer recognize. He might find that he had become abhorrent to her; or to himself.

  There was indeed a storm brewing in him, and it was dread. Resurrected, his dilemma represented that of the Land, and of the whole Earth; the plight of Linden and everyone he cared about. He was afraid because he had too much to lose.

  Long ago, he had told Linden, There’s only one way to hurt a man who’s lost everything . Give him back something broken. In Andelain, he had done that to her. But now he knew a deeper truth. Even broken things were precious. Like Jeremiah, they could become more precious than life. And they could still be taken away.

  He was more afraid of making a promise to Linden that he could not keep than he was of Joan.

  And he had another reason for treating Linden severely. Any promise—even an implied one—might encourage her to insist on accompanying him. To choose him instead of her son.

  Perhaps everything would have been different if he could have explained why her desire to help him face Joan would effectively doom Jeremiah. But he had no explanation. He had told her, You have other things to do, but he had no real idea what they were. He only knew that they were crucial. They may have been more important than his own need
to confront Joan.

  It was conceivable that he could not remember them because he had never known. Even from his perspective within the Arch, the future may have been undefined; less certain than it was to the Elohim, whose fluid relationship with time confused linear distinctions. His mortality made it easy for him to believe that he had never possessed any prescient insight into the Land’s need.

  Then why was he certain that Linden’s support against Joan would prove fatal to Jeremiah—and therefore to the Land as well? He had no answer. Yet he was sure of it. And his only justification, although it sounded contradictory, was that he trusted her. He trusted her more than he trusted himself.

  He trusted the implications of her devotion to her son.

  Still the ache of leaving her forlorn seemed to consume his heart. During his participation in the Arch of Time, he had witnessed so much loss and wrong that eventually he had imagined himself inured to ordinary woe. But now—Ah, now he acknowledged that his share of immortality had blunted his perceptions of individual human anguish. Across the ages, his sense of scale had changed to accommodate vaster possibilities.

  Watching Linden’s struggles, first to retrieve the Staff of Law, then to survive Roger and the croyel, then to reach Andelain, he had understood her pain. But he had also seen beyond it. He had known far more than she did about what was at stake, and about how her actions might affect the Earth. Now he was human again: he could no longer see past his own limitations. Like every creature that died when its time was done, he could only live in his circumscribed present.

  This was the truth of being mortal, this imprisonment in the strictures of sequence. It felt like a kind of tomb.

  In his earlier state, he had recognized that this prison was also the only utile form of freedom. Another contradiction: strictures enabled as much as they denied. The Elohim were ineffectual precisely because they had so few constraints. Linden was capable of so much because her inadequacies walled her on all sides.

  Now, however, he had to take that perception on faith.

  But there were other truths as well, or other aspects of the same truth. His imprisonment had its own demands: it insisted upon them. And one of them was his body. The flesh which reified his spirit was both needy and exigent. He could only spend a certain amount of time in grief before the jarring of his inexpert horsemanship demanded precedence. The gait of the Ranyhyn was as smooth as water: the destrier’s was not. Already his joints were beginning to hurt. And when he finally realized that he was sitting too stiffly to endure a long ride, he also became aware that he was thirsty. The first premonitions of dehydration throbbed in his temples, and his tongue felt so dry and thick that he could hardly swallow.

  Blinking to compensate for what may have been hours of neglect, Covenant peered around; tried to identify where he was.

  He should have known this region. Hell, it probably even had a name. But that was only one of a myriad—no, damnation, a myriad myriad myriad—things which he had forgotten.

  The hills were gone: he had lost them somewhere. Between Mhornym and Naybahn, his mount was pounding heavily across bare dirt thick with splinters and blades of flint. The beast’s hooves were iron-shod: that provided a measure of protection. But how the Ranyhyn avoided hurting themselves—Yet they flowed ahead, sweeping the ground behind them, apparently impervious to the hazards of the terrain.

  As far as he could tell with his numbed health-sense, all of his mount’s fierceness was focused on endurance. But it was laboring hard. Eventually, inevitably, the beast would begin to founder. Then—

  Then what? He had no notion. He had brought no water with him; no food; nothing for the horses. He had made no plans. In fact, he had given no thought to anything except getting away from Linden and heading toward Joan before his courage failed.

  They’re Ranyhyn, for God’s sake. He had said that. They’ll think of something.

  He had left himself no choice except to assume that Naybahn and Mhornym would compensate for his improvidence.

  He rubbed at his forehead. For some reason, it had begun to itch: a reminder of falling.

  “Hellfire,” he mused to himself. “This damn mortality—It’s enough to humble a pile of rocks.”

  But he did not realize that he had muttered the words aloud until Branl asked over the rumble of hoofbeats, “Ur-Lord?”

  Shaking his head, Covenant blinked at the Master. “Huh?”

  Branl rode as if he were one with Naybahn; as if their disparate strengths had merged. His flat gaze was fixed on Covenant. “You spoke of mortality, and of being humbled.”

  “Oh, that.” Covenant dismissed the subject. Jarred mercilessly in his seat, he found speech difficult. “I was just thinking.”

  He wanted to tell Branl that he needed water. But before he could frame a request, the Haruchai observed, “Yet with every word and deed, ur-Lord, you demonstrate that you comprehend neither the Masters nor the Humbled.”

  Oh, good, Covenant sighed. Just what we need. Clearly there was something nagging at Branl and Clyme; something at which they had taken umbrage.

  Past the thickness of his tongue, he mumbled, “Don’t tell me. Let me guess. You don’t like the way I forced you to let Linden heal you. You don’t approve.”

  Branl nodded. “Nor do we approve of your forbearance toward Linden Avery, when all of her actions conduce to ruin. You do not ask humility of us. You inflict humiliation.

  “We are Haruchai. The distinction has been made plain to us. In earlier incarnations, you did not seek to diminish us. Since your return to life, you have done so repeatedly.”

  Don’t you think, Covenant wanted to retort, there could be more than one reason why I act this way? Have you considered that maybe you’ve changed as much as I have? But he was too thirsty to welcome an argument. Soon he would be too hungry.

  Stifling sarcasm, he said, “Then explain it to me. If you think I don’t understand, give me some help.”

  Perhaps the justifications of the Humbled would distract him until the Ranyhyn found water.

  Branl nodded. “I will speak only of imposed healing,” he began. “It is bootless to belabor slights long past recall.

  “Ur-Lord, we are the Humbled. By skill and long combat, we have won the honor of embodying the refusal of our people to countenance humiliation. That we live and die does not humble us. It demands neither humility nor humiliation because we make no compromise with failure. We do what we can, and we accept the outcome. If our strength and skill do not suffice, we are content to bear the cost in pain and death. Indeed, the cost of our efforts provides the substance of our lives, and by our contentment we confirm our worth.

  “When you demand that we endure Linden Avery’s healing, you deny our acceptance. You proclaim us unworthy of our lives.”

  “Hell and blood,” Covenant growled under his breath. Haven’t you realized yet that everything isn’t about you? But he gritted his teeth, trying to keep his irritation to himself.

  Impassively Branl continued, “If you assert that humility necessitates an acknowledgment that we are not equal to all things, as the Elohim describe themselves, I reply that we are indeed humble in our acceptance. With Clyme and lost Galt, I am our humility made flesh. But if you avow that humility requires relief from the consequence of being less than equal to all things, I reply that you speak of humiliation, not of humility. Any abrogation of the outcome of our deeds diminishes us.

  “If you wish it, ur-Lord, I will describe the self-denigration implicit in Cail’s return to the Land. That was the failure for which our ancestors judged him. They did not denounce his seduction by the merewives, but rather his acceptance of rescue from the cost of his surrender, and his insistence that in his place his kinsmen would have acted as he did.

  “Or if you wish it, I will speak of Stave—”

  “No,” Covenant interrupted gruffly. He had been goaded too far. “Please don’t.” He hated the way that Cail had been repudiated. He did not want to hear any accu
sation against Stave. “Sometimes you people make me crazy.” Like Stave, Covenant had a son. “You’ve accepted gifts, haven’t you? From High Lord Kevin, if not from anybody else. What’s so wrong about accepting a gift from Linden?”

  “First,” Branl answered without hesitation, “our ancestors accepted no gift from the Landwaster until they had determined how they would repay his largesse, with the Vow by which Haruchai became Bloodguard. Thus they preserved the import of their lives. Second, his gifts were not imposed. The freedom of refusal was not denied to our ancestors as it was to us.”

  “Then don’t blame Linden,” Covenant retorted. “Your grievance is with me, not her. And I didn’t deny you anything. I just told you what I was going to do if you refused. You could have accepted that cost.

  “If Joan doesn’t kill us,” he promised, “you’ll get your chance to repay Linden. Or me, if you judge me the way you judge her.”

  When he squinted ahead, he saw the terrain changing. Beyond the flint, sandstone and shale gathered into mounds like barrows or glacial moraines. He had the impression that huge creatures had been buried there: buried, or plowed under by warfare. But he did not try to remember the forces which had shaped that landscape. He did not want to fall into the past again.

  As the horses pounded toward the mounds, the Humbled regarded him steadily. “Still you do not comprehend us, ur-Lord,” Branl observed. “It is not without cause that you have been named the Unbeliever.”

  Apparently unwilling to let the matter drop, he took a different approach. “The Ardent has assured us that the Cords Bhapa and Pahni have been conveyed toward Revelstone, where they will strive to sway the Masters. But the Masters will not heed them. Cord Pahni’s desire for the Stonedownor’s resurrection is abhorrent to us. She has beseeched Linden Avery to demean his death by unmaking the outcome of his life. Thus her every word will be tainted by her craving for the Stonedownor’s humiliation, which she misnames love. No Master would hold him in such low esteem. He was courage in life. Why, then, should he be denied the courage of his death? Is that not false honor?”