The Last Dark (29 page)

But it was so
much
rock. Of so many different kinds. In so many different shapes and structures. And it supported a mass which would have squeezed ironwood to pulp. Its secrets resisted discovery as if it had set its will against her.

Leaning her Staff against her shoulder, Linden closed her eyes. Hesitantly at first, then more firmly, she placed her hands on the wall and began to insinuate her touch inward.

Stave had followed her as far as the rubble. There he kept watch. Jeremiah stood a bit behind her, but he did nothing to interrupt her concentration. At first, she felt his attention focused on her. Then she closed her mind. Deliberately she thought only about water.

Now that she was not seeking them, she found streaks and facets of malachite everywhere. Crystalline deposits reflected her probing. Heavy granite ground against flows of basalt, reducing them to powder across the eons. Compacted dirt filled every crevice and crack. Schist blocked her search as though its memories and therefore its anger were more recent or more extreme than the rest of the rock.

But Jeremiah needed her. The
Elohim
needed her. The Earth required its panoply of stars. And her friends would be at risk if she failed. They would have to hazard their lives if she could not open the cliff.

Water, that was all she wanted: the most ordinary, necessary stuff of life. And it was everywhere in the created world. It rose from springs among the deepest roots of mountains. Beneath the desiccated purity of the Great Desert, it oozed and ran. The shores of every continent and island felt its surge and lash. From the sky it gave nourishment. And it could be violent. Oh, it could be violent! Linden had felt its force often enough to know what water could do with fury and turbulence.

Yet no Law required it to emerge where she could reach it.

Then Jeremiah’s halfhand clasped her shoulder; and for an instant, her concentration faltered. Almost immediately, however, she felt vitality flow into her from his touch. He was giving her Earthpower as the ur-viles had given her blood, so that she might be able to exceed herself.

Riding the energy of his aid, she sensed a damp patch of dirt between a crumbling granite monolith and a writhen vein of sandstone.

It was small, little more than a suggestion of moisture; perhaps only a few drops. But it was water.

Galvanized by hope and her son’s support, she marked the dampness in her memory and pushed her senses farther.

She forgot hunger and thirst and weariness. Deeper in the ridgefront, higher, she found a second hint of water. By oblique implication, it led her to another pocket of moisture, and another. Another. There bits of damp marl and pumice were strung together like beads along a fissure between incompatible sheets of granite and obsidian. Linden marked them all, and followed them.

The detritus in the fissure became dense gravel. More water seeped in the gaps, fine droplets acrid with minerals. Carefully she extended her perceptions among them. The vein of gravel became a wedge, wetter and looser. Then it was plugged by schist. She stumbled within herself; leaned her forehead against the face of the cliff. That damn schist—She did not understand how it obstructed her. But she could not spare the energy to study it. Insidiously, as if she sought to possess the rock without being noticed, she slipped her senses past the plug.

Beyond it, she found what she sought.

Water. A space like a bubble in the compressed flesh of the ridge. A cavity filled with water.

It was no larger than her head. And the water had not moved for an age of the Earth: it was cut off from its original source. But flaws packed with more gravel guided her to a pocket of water the size of her body. Farther in, she found a space big enough to hold a Giant’s chest; then two more—no, three—each little more than a trapped fist; then, finally, a gap as large as the chamber where she and Anele had been imprisoned in Mithil Stonedown.

After that, there was no more, or she had reached the limit of her reach, or her strength was failing.

Had she located enough? Taken altogether, it was only a drop within the inland sea of the ridge. Nevertheless it would have to suffice. She would have to make it suffice.

She took moments or hours to ascertain that she could remember precisely where and what she had discovered. Then warily, as if she feared the cliff’s animosity, she withdrew.

God, she could barely stand—How had she become so tired?

She had no time for weakness. The marks in her memory would fray and fade. Reeling against Jeremiah, she took up the Staff again. His aid vanished, but she ignored its absence. Her eyes stared at nothing. She saw only the places that she needed to remember.

“Mom?” he asked anxiously.

She staggered past him, nearly falling down the rubble toward Stave. When the
Haruchai
caught her, she panted, “Don’t say anything. I have to concentrate. Just get me away.”

If she succeeded, and they were too close—

Stave seemed to understand. With an arm around her waist, he half carried her toward the hollows or craters in the northwest.

Have mercy, she groaned as she stumbled along. I can’t do this.

She had to do it.

A long stone’s throw from the ridge, Stave stopped; turned Linden to face the cliff. Jeremiah caught up with her there. He must have been able to see her fatigue. Standing behind her, he clasped her shoulders with both hands.

Fresh theurgy set fire to her blood. Flame ran in her veins. Her heartbeats were conflagration. Blackness bloomed from her Staff as if Jeremiah had invoked it without her volition. Fuligin etched everything that she saw and remembered against the tarnished grey daylight.

She told herself to start small. Begin with the tiniest bits of moisture. Try to force a few new cracks. Weaken the cliff.

If she could find them from this distance.

A troubled wind out of the east tumbled over the ridgecrest, skirling in plumes and dust devils out across the wasteland of craters. It chilled the unnoticed sweat on her forehead, tugged loose a few strands of hair that were not matted to her cheeks and scalp. But it did not soothe her whetted senses; her urgency. In this season, the Land’s prevailing winds were from the west.

Straining, Linden Avery reached out to the cliff and tried to prove herself worthy.

A damp patch between granite and sandstone. For a heartbeat or two, she focused her intentions there. Then she sent a dark burst of power to boil that small instance of moisture.

She almost felt the dampness swell; almost felt microfissures mar the surrounding rock. Almost. But she had expected nothing more. She was only trying to create a slight frailty.

With as much care as she could muster, she moved inward, upward.

Pieces of wet marl and pumice strung together like beads: a thin crack separating granite and obsidian: a more difficult challenge. If she failed to heat all of the beads at the same time, her efforts would lose some of their effect. Force would dissipate along the string.

It was too much for her.

It had to be done.

Gathering her resolve, she murmured the Seven Words. Her Staff became a scourge in her hands. Magic struck the string of moisture like a barbed flail. Black fire filled even the most miniscule hints of fluid with passion. For an instant, she thought that she heard the scream of over-heated water, the groan of stressed rock. Then the sound was gone.

Involuntarily she sagged as if she had been overcome. Blots swam and burst across her vision, stars and small suns, stains like abysms.

But Stave upheld her. Jeremiah gripped her shoulders, sharing the strength which Anele had concealed. Earthpower burned in her vessels and nerves, in the channels of her brain and the secret recesses of her heart.

She could not afford to fail.

The wind flicked grit into her eyes. She blinked rapidly, then shut them tight. Ordinary sight was a distraction. Looming huge and unmoved, the rock mocked her inadequacy. Only percipience would enable her to make her last attempt.

She had found six spaces filled with water. She meant to superheat all of them at once. Then larger cracks might join with minor flaws. They might trigger any inherent instability which the immense bulk of the cliff suppressed. They might cause seams and plates to slip—

If one puny human being, exhausted and trembling, could induce something that size to shift.

The Staff shook in her hands as though it had become a burden too great for her to bear. Aching for puissance and accuracy, she invoked the Seven Words again. “
Melenkurion abatha
.” Her voice rose in desperation. “
Duroc minas mill!
” The invocation became a wailing cry. “
Harad KHABAAL!
”

When she unleashed her fire, its blackness seemed to efface the world.

Intense heat constricted by immutable mass created pressures which would have torn mere flesh to shreds. Pockets of water tried to expand. Granite and schist and a mountain’s weight refused to move. The ridge had endured for millennia. Linden poured out power as if she were expending her soul. Given a voice, the stone would have laughed.

Then it found a voice. Through the harsh beat of the Seven Words and her own gasping, she heard the cliff groan.

A short sound, little more than a sigh; but it was enough to break her concentration. Unaware of herself, she dropped her Staff. Fighting a giddy swirl of phosphenes and oxygen deprivation, she opened her eyes; tried to see what was happening.

In two or three places across the ridgefront, dust puffed outward. Almost at once, wind dismissed the small exhalations as if they had never occurred.

After that—

—nothing. The cliff stood glowering in the gloom. It had not been touched, and did not care.

“Oh, Mom,” Jeremiah moaned. “No. That can’t be right. I saw—I felt—”

Linden saw nothing. She felt nothing.

“Indeed,” Stave pronounced. Abruptly he released Linden; left her to Jeremiah. Without explanation, the former Master strode toward the mountain.

Perhaps he had decided to act on his original suggestion. Climb the ridge. Try to break loose pieces with his fingers.

But he stopped before he had crossed half the distance. From the ground, he picked up a rock. For a moment, he hefted it in his hand, tested its weight. Then, fluid as water, he flung it.

It struck the cliff-face above the places where Linden had seen puffs of dust. Three heartbeats passed. Four. Without her son’s support, she would have collapsed.

Then a grinding shriek appalled the air. The earth under her trembled. Tremors kicked up spouts of grit like gusts of pain everywhere between her and the ridge.

With the massive inevitability of a calving iceberg, a wide section of the wall shifted. For a moment, it seemed to hang on the edge of itself, clinging to its long stubbornness. But it could not hold against its own weight.

When it fell in thunder, Linden fell with it. She had nothing left that might have enabled her to remain conscious.

he did not know how much time had passed when a glad halloo awakened her. Only moments, she thought at first. But her head felt too heavy to lift, burdened by sleep. And when she tried to gauge the condition of her surroundings, estimate the effects of plunging rock, she found that her reality had contracted. She recognized only the pressure of the hard ground against her body, the leaden weariness of her limbs, the ragged effort of her breathing, the parched ache of dust in her throat and lungs.

Eventually she realized that Kevin’s Dirt had reclaimed her. Her health-sense was gone.

Not moments, then. She must have slept for hours. Kevin’s Dirt did not erode percipience so suddenly.

Without opening her eyes, she fumbled around her for the Staff of Law.

“It is here, Chosen,” said Stave. The warm wood of the shaft was pressed into her hand. “And now the Giants come. Manethrall Mahrtiir leads them. Soon the true labor of your son’s purpose must begin.”

Linden hardly heard him. She had no attention to spare for anything except her Staff. Without her health-sense, she was less than useless.

Fortunately Liand—lost Liand—had taught her how to find the possibilities beneath the written surface of the wood, even when she had no enhanced discernment to guide her. He had given her more gifts than she could count. Pulling the Staff toward her, she held it close until its natural beneficence began to enlighten her nerves. After that, she was able to absorb Earthpower more quickly.