Thomas Covenant 8 - The Fatal Revenant (25 page)

His cymar hung loosely along his limbs as if he were impervious to the tangling wind. She could hardly make out his features. In spite of the distance, however, the dangerous and fuming green of his eyes blazed vividly, as incandescent and unclean as small emerald suns tainted by despair.

In a mounting roar, he shouted, You have given birth to havoc, Haruchai, Bloodguard, treachers! Now bear the blame for the Land’s doom!”

Everything happened too quickly: Linden could not react to it. Ignoring Esmer, the ur-viles and the Masters flung themselves toward each other. Vitriol frothed and spattered on the blades of the creatures: the loremaster’s jerrid gathered gouts of darkness. But none of the weapons

struck as the Haruchai spread out swiftly to challenge the wedge along its edges. Linden’s companions sprang forward to ward her, Stave and Mahrtiir first among them. And Esmer

Cail’s son made a savage gesture with one hand; gave a howl like a great blaring of horns. Instantly all of the earth under the feet of the ur-viles and the Masters erupted.

Grass and soil spattered upward like oil

on hot iron. Gouts of sodden loam and rocks and roots and grass-blades burst into the air and were immediately torn to chaos by the wind. Ur-viles and Haruchai alike were scattered like withered leaves: they could not keep their feet, hold their formations; summon their power. Linden half expected to see them tumble away, hurled across the hillside by Esmer’s violence. But they only fell, and were tossed upward, and fell again, pummeled by a hurtling rain of stones

and dirt.

Yet the ground where she stood with Jeremiah and Covenant remained stable. Shock and incomprehension held her friends motionless, but Esmer’s puissance did not threaten them.

He spared them deliberately: Linden could not believe otherwise. Aid and betrayal. He must have wanted Covenant and Jeremiah to succeed

Abruptly Covenant yelled. “Now, Jeremiah!”

The boy shrugged off his chagrin. Instantly obedient, he repulsed Linden’s companions with a flick of his hand. Then he raised his arms as he had before; swung them upward until once again they and Covenant’s suggested an arch over Linden’s head. Jeremiah resumed his voiceless incantation. Covenant may have done the same.

For a brief moment, a piece of time too slight to be measured by the convulsive labor of her heart, Linden felt power gather around her: the onset of an innominate theurgy. From Jeremiah, it seemed to be the same force which had stopped her in the forehall, but multiplied a hundredfold. From Covenant, however, it had the ferocity of running magma. If it continued, it would scorch the cloak from her back, char away her clothes until her flesh bubbled and ran.

Liand and Pahni may have shouted her name: even Stave may have called out to her. But their voices could not penetrate the accumulating catastrophe.

Then Linden heard and saw and felt and tasted a tremendous concussion. Lightning completed the arch over her head, striking like the devastation of worlds from Jeremiah’s fingertips to Covenant’s.

After that, Covenant and Jeremiah, all of her friends, Esmer, the geyser-scattered ur-viles and Haruchai, the gradual slopes on either side of the watercourse, the whole promontory of Revelstone: everything vanished. The fierce arc of lightning lingered momentarily, burned onto her retinas. The Earthpower of Glimmermere’s outflow persisted. But such things faded; and when they did, everything that she knew-perhaps everything that she had ever known-was gone.

6.

Interference

The shock was too great. Linden was too human: no aspect of her body or her mind had been formed to accommodate such a sudden and absolute transition.

The sheer sensory excess of her original translation to the Land had left her numbed and dissociated; hardly able to react. And her passages

through caesures had been bearable only because she had been protected by power, the ur-viles’ and her own.

This was utterly different. In some ways, it was worse. In a small fraction of an instant, everything that she could see and feel and understand and care about vanished-

-or was transformed.

She hardly noticed that she staggered,

instinctively trying to regain her balance on different ground; scarcely realized that the gloom and the battering wind were gone, replaced by dazzling whiteness and sharp cold. The chill in her lungs was only another version of her icy garments. She did not seem to have gone blind because the sunlight was too intense, but rather because her optic nerves simply could not accept the change. If the Staff of Law had not remained, unaltered and kindly, in her embrace, she might have

believed that she had been snuffed out. Every neuron in her body except those that acknowledged the Staff refused to recognize where and who she was.

But then she heard Covenant pant as if he were enraged. “Hellfire! Hell and blood!” and she knew that she was not alone.

An autonomic reflex shut her eyes against the concussive dazzling that seemed to fill the whole inside of her

head like the clamor of great incandescent bells. And a different kind of visceral reflex caused her to reach for the fire of the Staff. She wanted to wall herself off with Earthpower from the incomprehensible change which had come over the world.

At once, however, Covenant yelled, “Don’t even think about it! God damn it, Linden! Don’t you understand that you can still erase me? I’m still folding time, and it’s fragile. If you use that Staff,

you’ll be stuck here alone, you’ll be helpless while Foul destroys everything!”

Cowed by his anger, and belatedly afraid, she snatched herself back from the strength of Law. Gripping the Staff in one hand, she held it away from her so that its dangerous succor would not rest so close to her heart.

She felt Covenant’s fury change directions. Muttering. “Hellfire and

bloody damnation,” he turned his back on her. His steps crunched through a brittle surface as he increased the distance between them.

With her eyes closed and her entire sensorium stunned, she could not find any sign of Jeremiah’s presence.

Or of the Masters. Or of her friends. Somehow she had left them behind. The nausea with which Esmer afflicted her was gone. The ur-viles could

conceal themselves whenever they wished.

But Jeremiah—

Now she wanted to open her eyes, look around frantically for her son. But she could not. Not yet. The brightness was too concentrated to be borne; or she was too vulnerable to it. She might damage her retinas—

Covenant? she asked, demanded,

pleaded. Where are we? What have you done? But her voice refused to respond.

What have you done with Jeremiah?

“Damn it!” Covenant shouted abruptly. “Show yourself!” His anger carried away from her. “I know you’re here! This whole place stinks of you! And”-he lowered his voice threateningly-“you do not want me to force you. That’s going to hurt like hell.”

“And do you not fear that I will reveal you’?” answered a light voice.

Cupping her free hand over her eyes, Linden began blinking furiously, trying to accustom herself to the cold white glare so that she could see. She had never heard that voice before.

“You,” Covenant snorted. “You

wouldn’t dare. You’ll be caught in the cross-fire. You’ll lose everything.”

“Perhaps you speak sooth-” the stranger began.

Covenant insisted. “So what the hell are you doing? Damn it, we’re not supposed to be here.”

“-yet my knowledge suffices,” the other voice continued calmly, “to intervene in your designs. As you have seen.”

Linden fought the stricken numbness

of her senses; and after a moment, she found that she could discern the new arrival. He stood a few paces beyond Covenant. Even through the confusion of cold and dazzling, he appeared to be an ordinary man. If he moved, his steps did not crunch as Covenant’s did. Nevertheless his aura seemed comparatively human.

And yet-And yet—

Something about the man conveyed an

impression of slippage, as if in some insidious, almost undetectable fashion he was simultaneously in front of and behind himself; and on both sides—

Perhaps he had simply stepped out of hiding when Covenant demanded it.

“You didn’t have to show me,” retorted Covenant bitterly. “I already know what you can do. Hellfire, I already know what you’re going to do. What I don’t know is why you put me here. This is

the wrong time. Not to mention the wrong damn place.”

“The Elohim would have done so, if I did not.” The stranger sounded amused.

The Elohim-? Still blinking urgently, Linden made slits of her fingers; tried to force herself to see through the hurtful brilliance. By slow degrees, her health-sense adjusted to the changed world. Spring had inexplicably become

winter—

Covenant swore between his teeth. “No, they wouldn’t. That’s why I brought her. As long as they think she’s the Wildwielder, she protects me.

“Anyway,” he growled. “you hate them. You people might as well be that ‘darkness’ they keep talking about, that shadow on their hearts. So why are you doing their dirty work?”

“It pleases me to usurp them, when I may.” Now the man’s tone suggested satisfaction; smugness. “Also I do not desire the destruction of the Earth. The peril of your chosen path I deemed too great. Therefore I have set you upon another. It is equally apt for your purpose. And its hazards lie within the scope of my knowledge. It will serve me well.”

Covenant, Linden tried to say, listen to me. Where is Jeremiah? What have

you done to my son? But the cold scraped at her throat with every breath, making the muscles clench. She was involuntarily mute; helpless.

“No,” Covenant snapped, “it isn’t equally damn apt. It’s a bloody disaster. You people are such infernal meddlers. I wish you would find something else to do. Go start a war with somebody, leave the rest of us alone.”

The stranger laughed. “When such powers are joined in the hands of one who is constrained by mortality, unable to wield both together?” His tone was ambiguous, a mixture of scorn and regret. “When the Elohim as a race gnash their teeth in frustration and fear? My gratification is too great to be denied. If ever she obtains that which will enable her to bear her strengths, your chagrin will provide my people with vast amusement.”

He did not sound amused.

“Amusement, hell,” growled Covenant. “If that ever happens-which it won’t-your people will be frantically trying to stop her, just like everybody else. Only in their case, it’ll be sheer greed. They’ll want all that power for themselves.

“Oh, that’s right,” he added suddenly, mocking the newcomer. “I forgot. Your people hardly ever agree on anything.

Half of them will be after her power. Half of them will be busy at something completely loony, like trying to make friends with the damn Worm of the World’s End. And half of them will be doing the only thing they’re really good at, which is watching the rest of the world go by and wishing they were Elohim.”

At last, the stabbing glare was blunted enough to let Linden make out blurred details through the slits between her

fingers. Gradually her health-sense approached clarity. The sun shone hard on a wide field of snow; snow so pristine and untrampled that it reflected and concentrated the light cruelly. At one time, she guessed, it would have covered her knees. But it had fallen some time ago. Days of hard sunshine had melted its surface often enough to compact the snow and form an icy crust. As her vision improved, she could see the scars which Covenant’s boots had gouged in the snow, leading

away from her. But he and his companion or antagonist remained indistinct: they were no more than blots on her straining sight.

The surrounding silence was sharper than the chill, and more ominous.

She did not know where she was. She could be sure only that she was still in the Land. Even through the snow and her freezing boots, she felt its characteristic life-pulse, its unique

vitality. But this place was not familiar in any other way.

“Covenant.” Her voice was a hoarse croak, raw with cold. “Where’s Jeremiah?”

Instead of responding to Covenant’s gibes, the stranger said, She requires your consolation.” Now he sounded impatient with Covenant. “Doubtless your merciful heart will urge you to attend to her. I will abide the delay.”

The imprecise stain of Covenant’s shape appeared to gesture in Linden’s direction. “Ignore her. She always thinks what she wants is more important than what anybody else is doing. She’s lost here without me. We’re too far from her time. And she can’t get back without me. She can wait until I’m done with you.”

Too far—

She should have been shocked.

-from her time.

Covenant had removed her from Revelstone, from the upland plateau, from her friends-and from the time in which she belonged.

And she can’t get back—

But the incomprehensible jolt of her dislocation was fading as her senses reasserted themselves. She could not be shocked again, or paralyzed: not

while Jeremiah was missing. At that moment, nothing else mattered.

Don’t you understand that you can still erase me?

Covenant had cause to fear her. She could compel answers—

Squeezing her eyes shut to dismiss tears of pain, Linden opened them again; dropped her hand. “Covenant!” she gasped harshly as she took a

couple of unsteady steps toward him. Her boots broke through the stiff crust and plunged into snow deep enough to reach her shins. “Catch!”

In desperation and dismay, she flung the Staff of Law straight at him.

Panic flared in his eyes. Cursing, he jumped aside.

As he stumbled away, one heel of the Staff jabbed through the ice two or

three paces beyond him. Then the wood fell flat. Almost immediately, its inherent warmth melted the crust. In a small flurry of snow, the shaft sank out of sight.

“Hellfire!” Covenant panted. “Hellfire. Hellfire.”

Linden stamped forward another step, then stopped as she saw the newcomer clearly for the first time.