Against All Things Ending Read online

  The Humbled appeared to heed Kevin rather than Berek. They bowed to the last of the Lord-Fatherer’s line as if to acknowledge his despair; to honor his counsel. But they did not strike at Linden again. Instead they arrayed themselves between Covenant and the bedizened form of Infelice.

  One of them said, “We require certainty, Elohim.” Galt, that was his name. Beneath its inflectionless surface, his voice thrummed with intensity. “Do you avow that it is indeed Thomas Covenant, ur-Lord and Unbeliever, white gold wielder, who now stands before us, returned from death to flesh and life?”

  Covenant’s eyes felt as untrustworthy as his hands. Cold or numbness blurred his sight in spite of Andelain’s clarity. Nevertheless he saw that the emotions and pressures of the beings around Linden did not console her. They could not. She hardly seemed to hear Kevin’s acid recrimination, or Infelice’s. Berek’s oblique defense did not touch her.

  “Self-doubt?” asked the Harrow, mocking the Haruchai. “You also have become less than you were. The truth must surely be plain to all who have witnessed the lady’s theurgy. Naught but the Timewarden’s absolute resurrection could so pierce the self-absorption of the Elohim.”

  The Humbled ignored the Insequent. As one, Galt and Branl and—Covenant clutched at the name—and Clyme turned to face the result of Linden’s terrifying gamble.

  Galt seemed to speak for every Haruchai except Stave as he said, “Then command us, Unbeliever, Timewarden. Reveal what must be done. We know the treachery of your false son, and the madness of the Chosen. We will serve you with our last strength.”

  Covenant tried to focus on Galt. But the krill plucked at his attention, luring him with images which had once been as familiar as Time. In shards and slivers, flaws, he caught glimpses of Loric’s prolonged, arduous search for a stone which could be shaped into the gem that formed the nexus of the dagger: a search which had taken him deep under Melenkurion Skyweir, following the Black River inward from Garroting Deep until he found a fragment of crystal made perfect by eons of contact with the Blood of the Earth. Like peering through cracked glass, Covenant saw Loric forge the metal of the krill, striving to emulate white gold. He lacked the raw materials to fashion white gold itself. But from his inherited and acquired lore, he had gleaned a comprehension of alloys: he worked with ores that could be transmuted and commingled until they became strong enough to sustain the pristine possibilities of the gem. If Covenant allowed himself to drift, he would be able to watch as though he stood at Loric’s side while the dour High Lord sweated over his incantations and fires—

  But Linden needed something from Covenant, something that his lost memories could not supply. And he had already failed her too often. If he slipped away now, he might break the promise implied by speaking to her when he should have remained silent. Trust yourself. Do something they don’t expect. Broken as he was, he could still see that she hung on the brink, the outermost edge, of Kevin’s despair. Her sense of abandonment, of betrayal, might topple her. Any nudge—Infelice’s flagrant terror and scorn, the Harrow’s machinations, Kevin’s condemnation, the repudiation of the Humbled—might send her plunging into an abyss from which she could not be retrieved.

  Desperately Covenant clung to the present. Wavering on his feet, he struggled to meet the demand of the Humbled. He could not distinguish it from Linden’s need.

  “What will you do?” he countered. “If I don’t command you? If I refuse to respect what you’ve done to yourselves?”

  Fingers had been severed from their right hands in his name; but he did not want that honor.

  Branl’s eyes widened. Clyme almost appeared to wince. But Galt did not hesitate.

  “Then I will ride to Revelstone,” he announced inflexibly, “that I may warn the Masters of the Chosen’s Desecration. Clyme and Branl will remain with her to prevent further evil. Your ring will be returned to you. If you do not claim the Staff of Law, it will be conveyed to Revelstone, where it may be preserved for the Land’s last defense.”

  Liand opened his mouth to protest. Mahrtiir’s glower promised defiance. The Ranyhyn tossed their heads restively. But Linden did not appear to hear the Humbled. She stared at Covenant as though he filled her with horror that had no end.

  “Then listen,” Covenant told Galt with as much force as he could find in his riven spirit. “And pay attention. I can only say this once.

  “The Wraiths allowed her. They preserve Andelain, and they allowed her. Hellfire, doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  Shedding memories like pieces of his soul, he met Linden’s appalled stare.

  “Linden.” Nearly undone by weakness and rue—by the numbness in his fingers and the frailty of his mind—he strained to make himself heard. “I’ve said it before. I know this is hard. I know you think you’ve come to the end of what you can do. But you aren’t done. And I trust you. Do you hear me? I believe in you. I’ll do everything I can to help. If there’s anything left—”

  Linden flinched as though he had promised her the opposite of his intent. On her face, new hurts twisted against older shocks and chagrin. “Can you see it?” she asked Liand or Mahrtiir or Stave. Her voice throbbed like internal bleeding, as if she spoke with her heart’s blood. “He’s right. He can’t hold on. Something inside him is collapsing. I brought him back, but I didn’t do it right. He isn’t whole.

  “And he has leprosy.”

  To that, Covenant had no answer.

  Already falling, he turned back to the Humbled.

  “As for you. I command—” His voice frayed and failed: he could not command anyone. But because he loved Linden, he managed to find a few more words. They felt like the last words in the world. “She’s more important than I am. If you have to choose, choose her. She’s the only one who can do this.”

  He wanted to say more, but his wounds were too much for his mortal flesh. Within him, one age of the Earth bled into another, and he toppled to the grass as if he had been felled.

  2.

  Unfinished Needs

  Linden Avery stood, staring and paralyzed, as if she had finally learned the true meaning of horror. Nothing in her life had prepared her for the outcome of her granite desperation. Long ago, she had been forced to watch her father’s suicide: in fear and pity, she had imposed her mother’s death: she had seen Thomas Covenant stabbed to death in his former world—and later slain again by the Despiser. A Raver had taught her to dread her own capacity for evil. Under Melenkurion Skyweir, she had been forced to do battle against her chosen son. But such things had become trivial. They were too small and human to inure her now.

  Her mind was empty of words. She could not respond to Liand’s stricken empathy, or to the consternation and support of the Ramen, or to Stave’s rigid loyalty. The antagonism of the Humbled meant nothing to her. Neither Infelice nor the Harrow held any import. But she was not stunned or numb. She was not. She had not expended her remorse with weeping, or her rage with blows, or her revulsion—Nor had she been silenced by Covenant’s faltering attempts to explain himself, or by his inadequate affirmation. Instead she was crowded to bursting with dismay.

  Dismay: not despair. Despair was darkness, the nailed lid of a coffin. Her dismay was a moral convulsion, the shock of seeing her whole reality distorted beyond recognition. She had left any ordinary loss of hope or faith behind as soon as she had realized that Covenant was not whole. Now she felt an appalled chagrin like the onset of concussion, simultaneously paralyzing and urgent. The cost of what she had done dwarfed thought. The only sentences remaining to her had been spoken by others; and they were tocsins.

  She has roused the Worm of the World’s End.

  She loved the Land. She loved Thomas Covenant and Jeremiah. The Ramen and the Ranyhyn and the Giants. Liand and Stave and poor Anele. Yet she had doomed them all. Resurrecting Covenant, she had given Lord Foul his heart’s desire.

  Within her she holds the devastation of the Earth—

  Through Anele, Sunder and Hollian had tried t
o warn her. He did not know of your intent. The Ranyhyn had tried: perhaps everyone had tried. There is strength in ire, Chosen. But it may also become a snare. Days ago, she had dreamed that she had become carrion: food for abhorrent things feasting on death. Confident and cruel, the Despiser himself had given her a vision of his intentions.

  Nevertheless she had defied every caution. In fury at what had been done to her son, she had violated one of the essential Laws which made life possible, allowed the Earth to exist: the Laws which she should have served. In one flagrant act, she had broken every promise that she had ever made.

  Good cannot be accomplished by evil means.

  This was the result. Covenant sprawled facedown on the betrayed grass of Andelain. The old scar on his forehead, like the wound in his T-shirt, was hidden; but the strict silver of his hair was accusation enough. Long ago, Lord Foul’s efforts to kill him had burned him clean of venom and dross. The transformation of his hair was only one outcome of that savage caamora. Now the stark light of the krill appeared to concentrate there—and on his halfhand, emphasizing his lost fingers. They seemed to reach toward her in spite of his collapse, as if he were still pleading with her even though she had set in motion the world’s ruin.

  He was only unconscious: the violence of what she had done to him had not burst his heart. She could be sure of that. Wielding catastrophic quantities of power, she had whetted her senses to an unbearable edge. Her nerves wailed with too much percipience. She saw clearly that Covenant had been felled by shock and strain, not by injury. Physically her extravagance had not harmed him.

  But his mind—Oh, God, his mind. Webbed with cracks, it resembled a clay goblet in the instant before the vessel shattered. The imminent fragments of who he was remained individually intact. In some sense, they clung to each other. If time stopped here—if this instant did not move on to the next—the goblet might yet hold water. A cunning potter might have been able to make the clay whole again.

  But Linden did not know how to stop time. She only knew how to destroy it.

  Berek’s spectre had said, The making of worlds is not accomplished in an instant. It cannot be instantly undone. Nevertheless Linden Avery, Chosen, Ringthane, and Wildwielder, had made the end of all things inevitable.

  In addition, Covenant was rife with renewed leprosy. His illness had deadened most of the nerves in his fingers and toes. There were insensate patches on the backs and palms of his hands, the soles of his feet. But that, at least, was not her doing. Rather it was an oblique effect of Kevin’s Dirt. The bitter truncation which hampered health-sense and Law, blunted every expression of Earthpower, had diminished Covenant more profoundly. He had become an outcast of Time; a pariah to his own nature, and to his long service against Despite: an icon of the Land’s immedicable peril.

  In the life that she had lost, she could have treated his bodily illness, if not his riven mind. Her former world had discovered drugs to end the ravages of this disease. Here she felt helpless. She feared what might happen if she used Earthpower and Law to attempt healing either his illness or his consciousness without his consent.

  She, too, had become an icon: an embodiment of loss and shame and unheeded warnings. She had made of her life a wasteland in which she did not know how to live.

  And I trust you. I’ll do everything I can to help.

  In her dismay, Covenant’s reassurances sounded like mockery.

  At that moment, there was no part of her still capable of attending to the distress of her friends. Liand and Stave; Mahrtiir, Pahni, and Bhapa; the Ranyhyn: she had nothing left for them. If the Humbled or the Law-Breakers, Infelice or the Harrow, had spoken to her, she would not have been able to hear them.

  Nevertheless there were powers abroad in the night that could reach her. When the great voice of Berek Halfhand announced, “The time has come to speak of the Ritual of Desecration,” she staggered as though she had been struck.

  She believed that he meant to excoriate her.

  While she flinched, however, Loric Vilesilencer turned to the first High Lord. Grim and gaunt, the spectre of the krill’s maker countered, “Is it not my place to do so?”

  “It is,” Berek acknowledged. Lambent with his own ghostly silver, he appeared to gain definition from the unresolved illumination of the krill. The gem’s light still held a throb of eagerness and wild magic; but it did not pale his earned majesty. Instead it seemed to enhance his strength. “Yet you well know that there are words which cannot be heard by a son who deems that he has failed his father. The love which lies between them precludes heed.”

  Liand stared with open wonder. Stave watched warily. The Ramen held themselves ready, taut with innominate expectations. Gradually Linden understood that the attention of the Dead was not directed toward her. Though they spoke to each other, their emanations were concentrated, not on her, but on Kevin Landwaster, who stood appalled and ghastly in the east as if he had witnessed the fruition of his worst fears—and now expected to be punished for Linden’s crimes as well as his own.

  That recognition plucked at her; intruded on her dismay. Like her, Kevin had accomplished only evil by evil means. His anguish touched her when she had lost her ability to respond to anything else.

  “Indeed, it is so,” Damelon added. Like Berek, he addressed Loric. The tranquility of his earlier smile had become sadness and affection. “Though you are the son of my heart, and entirely beloved, do you not believe that I question your deeds and courage, as you do? Do you not suffer gall, judging that you have not matched the standard which I have set for you? And if I avow that you merit my pride in each and all of your endeavors, will you hear me? Will you not believe that my words are inspired by love rather than by worth?”

  With an air of reluctance, High Lord Loric nodded.

  “Thus it falls to me to speak,” proclaimed Berek.

  His steps did not mark the rich grass as he came slowly forward. “Kevin son of Loric, hear and give heed,” he demanded in a tone that was both stern and gentle. “We share no bond apart from the heritage of lore and High Lordship. The inheritance of blood is too distant to constrain me. Thus I am able to state freely that your sires are grieved by the harm which you have wrought, but they are not shamed.”

  As he moved, he appeared to approach Linden and the krill and Covenant’s fallen form. If he had so much as glanced at her, she would have flinched again. But his gaze was fixed solely on the Landwaster: his strides would take him past her to Loric’s son.

  At the same time, Damelon and Loric also moved, walking carefully toward Kevin as though they wished him to comprehend that he was not threatened.

  Kevin stared wildly. A kind of terror poured from him, contradicting the benison of Andelain. He may have imagined that the words and attitudes of his ancestors were false; intended to exacerbate his torment. Or he may have feared that they would trivialize his sufferings, implying that his despair was devoid of significance to anyone but himself.

  In his place, Linden would have felt those dreads.

  Nevertheless Loric’s son did not withdraw. Perhaps he could not: perhaps the same commandment which had brought him here precluded any word or deed that might have eased his pain.

  In spite of her own plight, or because of it, Linden mourned for him.

  At once stentorian and kindly, Berek continued, “Only the great of heart may despair greatly.” His voice seemed to echo back from the lost stars. “You are loved and treasured, not for the outcome of your extremity, but rather for the open passion by which you were swayed to Desecration. That same quality warranted the Vow of the Haruchai. It was not false.”

  In moments, the first High Lord had passed Linden as he and his descendants gathered before Kevin. “Doubtless such passion may cause immeasurable pain. But it has not released the Despiser. It cannot. Mistaken though it may be, no act of love and horror—or indeed of self-repudiation—is potent to grant the Despiser his desires.” Together, Berek, Damelon, and Loric drew near enough to touch t
he Landwaster. “He may be freed only by one who is compelled by rage, and contemptuous of consequence.”

  Fervid with apprehension, Kevin faced his progenitors. The krill glared argent in his eyes.

  “High Lord Kevin son of Loric,” concluded Berek. “Others may have fallen—or risen—to that extreme. You have not. You did not. None here can assert with certainty that they would not have done as you did in your place.”

  “That is sooth, my son,” Loric murmured roughly, “a word of truth in this fate-ridden time. If I did not speak often or plainly enough of my own encounters with despair, or of the occasions on which I trembled at the very threshold of Desecration, then was I a poor father indeed, and your reproaches must be for me rather than for yourself.”

  When he heard his father, something within Kevin broke. Linden saw the chains which had bound his spirit snap as he opened himself to Loric’s embrace.

  At once, Loric threw his arms fiercely around his son. Kevin’s eyes bled reflected silver like astonishment as Damelon and then Berek enclosed father and son with their acceptance. Hugged and held by his forebears, Kevin wept as relief found its way at last into his wracked soul.

  And as he wept, he appeared to be transformed by the theurgy of the krill; or by Andelain. Briefly he became a glode amid the surrounding night, lucent and exalted. Then he faded until he was only an outline of wisps that evaporated into nothingness.

  At the same time, Loric and Damelon also faded, accompanying the last of their line toward his rest. Soon only Berek remained.

  His own knowledge of despair and striving shone from him as he turned toward Linden.

  However, the moment when she might have winced or hidden her head had passed. Nor did she meet the first Halfhand’s gaze. There was another spectre in the hollow as full of anguish as Kevin had been, and as sorely bereft. Berek should have directed the balm of his compassion elsewhere. Linden had no use for it.