9.
Great Need
057
From the rumpled terrain south of the pool, the Ranyhyn pounded onto a baked flatland as hard as the surface of an anvil. In spite of the previous day’s rain, their hooves raised bleached dust as fine as ash. When Linden glanced behind her, she saw a pale plume trailing after her like a pennon.
The speed of the horses was wind in her face, growing warmer as the morning advanced. The air parched her throat, dried her eyes. She thought that she tasted death on her tongue; but if she did, the scent was ancient beyond reckoning. Uncounted centuries ago, living things by the scores or hundreds of thousands had perished in bloodshed: human and inhuman, sentient and bestial, monsters whose forms were no longer remembered even by the Haruchai. Like every shape and kind of vegetation that had once flourished here, they were the forgotten detritus of Lord Foul’s wars. Ghosts so long dead that they had lost all substance lingered, mourning mutely. Nothing remained to bespeak their desires and wounds, their fears and furies, except a vague tang pounded up from the iron dirt by the strides of the Ranyhyn.
Without her health-sense, Linden might have thought that the Ranyhyn were giving their utmost. But the smooth flow of Hyn’s muscles under her legs assured her that the mare had strength and stamina in reserve. At need, the horses could do more.
Stave looked fluid and relaxed, more like an expression of Hynyn’s swiftness than a burden. In contrast, Jeremiah rode characteristically slack, slumped, as unmoved as a sack of grain by Khelen’s fleet pace. Linden had not seen him blink since his rescue. Yet his eyes were unharmed, preserved by some implication of the Earthpower that he had received from Anele.
For a portion of the morning, the Ranyhyn headed somewhat east of south across the beaten plain. Before noon, however, Stave pointed out the promontory of the Colossus in the distant west. Over the drumming of hooves, he informed Linden that beyond the promontory Landsdrop curved southward. There the River Landrider fell in a heavy cascade to become the Ruinwash.
Thinking,—written in water, Linden wondered whether the Ranyhyn intended to intercept the Ruinwash. But according to Stave, the Ruinwash skirted the Spoiled Plains as well as the Shattered Hills to reach the sea many leagues beyond Foul’s Creche. Although the horses turned south when they had passed the promontory, their goal apparently lay somewhere between the Ruinwash and the Shattered Hills.
As heat mounted from the flat, the sky began to resemble a lid closing over the Lower Land: as grey as a sheet of molded lead, and impossible to lift. How much longer could the Ranyhyn gallop like this? They were mortal. Surely they had limits? To Linden’s nerves, Hyn’s endurance seemed as certain as the sun. Yet there was froth on the mare’s nostrils. Sweat darkened her dappled sides, soaking slowly into Linden’s jeans; chafing Linden’s legs. At intervals, she thought that she heard an irregular catch and falter in Hyn’s respiration.
If the Ranyhyn still had far to go, they would need help. Their destination might be a dozen leagues distant, or a score. Blinking rapidly, Linden tightened her grip on the Staff; readied herself to summon black fire.
But then, on a horizon fraught with haze, she saw the end of the flat. In the east, the terrain tilted toward lower ground. Toward the west, brief hills like afterthoughts interrupted the plain. They wore a scurf of scrannel grass like a beggar’s mantle, threadbare and tattered.
If they had grass, they had water—
Responding to Hynyn’s authority, Hyn and Khelen followed the roan stallion toward the hills.
Soon they were passing between rises that were little more than hillocks; low mounds of dirt partially clad in patches of grass. As the horses ran deeper into the region, the grass grew more thickly.
Then Hynyn slowed to a canter; to a walk. Ahead of him, Linden saw an erosion gully. She smelled water.
At once, she dropped down from Hyn’s back so that she would not impede Hyn’s approach to the stream. And she was in a hurry to drink herself; to clear dust and death from her throat. A moment later, Stave also dismounted. Jeremiah he pulled gently but unceremoniously to the ground. Bringing the boy with him, he followed Linden and the Ranyhyn toward the watercourse.
It was, he told her, the same stream in which the company had bathed earlier, pursuing its union with the Ruinwash. But when Linden asked him if he had any idea where the horses were going, he only shrugged. Foul’s Creche lay to the east. The Ranyhyn were headed south. More than that he did not know.
The horses drank deeply. They cropped a little grass along the verges of the gully while Linden and Stave quenched their thirst. For a few moments, Linden scooped water into Jeremiah’s mouth. With her hands and her health-sense, she assured herself that he was physically well. Then Stave lifted her onto Hyn; seated Jeremiah on Khelen; mounted Hynyn.
Within a few strides, the Ranyhyn were running again.
Soon they left the mounded hillocks behind, still racing south. For a time, they crossed damaged plains. After that, however, they came upon a wide field of broken obsidian, basalt, and flint, the muricated remains of a slagland. Shards as cutting as blades gouged out of the soil at every angle: another consequence of ancient violence.
Linden thought that the Ranyhyn would have to find a way around. Otherwise splintered edges would tear the frogs of their hooves to shreds. But she had underestimated the great horses. As nimble as mountain-goats, they plunged among the rocks; swept and wheeled forward as though they were engaged in an elaborate and courtly gavotte. Somehow they found safe footing that Linden could not see, and passed unharmed.
Beyond the shards, they encountered a rugose region like a delta or malpaís where igneous creeks and rills had branched, burning, through once-arable earth. Some fierce theurgy during a distant era had caused the stone of the area to melt and stream like spilth. There the Ranyhyn ran again, apparently heedless of occasional surfaces as slick as ice, twisted clumps of dirt that masked rubble, friable ground concealing sinkholes like deadfalls.
The heat across the landscape felt more like summer than spring. The sun seemed to lean its leaden aspect close to the Lower Land. It barely cast shadows, but its pressure made the mounts drip sweat as they ran, splashing the complex ground. Linden’s shirt clung to her back: her legs rubbed like sores against Hyn’s damp flanks. Trickles ran down Jeremiah’s cheeks into the soilure of his pajamas, his stained rearing horses.
Early in the afternoon, the riders left the delta behind; galloped onto a slowly rolling plain like a trammeled moor. Guided by instincts more precise than Linden’s percipience, the Ranyhyn came to a thicket of aliantha clustered around a small spring oozing like blood from the wounded ground. There they paused while Stave dismounted to gather treasure-berries. Linden made a bowl of her shirttail to hold the fruit. With both hands full, Stave leapt onto Khelen’s back behind Jeremiah. As the horses cantered away, Stave placed berries one at a time into the boy’s mouth. Jeremiah did not chew them, or spit out the seeds; but he swallowed everything.
When Stave was done, he sprang from Khelen’s back to Hynyn’s; and the Ranyhyn resumed their urgent gallop, racing south.
Linden ate more slowly, savoring the refreshment of aliantha; casting aside the seeds. The haste of the Ranyhyn infected her. With every increment of the day’s passage, she became more certain that she and her companions would need all of their strength. She had no idea what lay ahead of them. They had to be ready.
Finally she leaned as close as she could to Hyn’s ears and murmured, “I want to help, but I don’t know how to ask your permission. If I’m wrong, I hope that you’ll forgive me.”
Hesitant at first, then with more confidence, Linden began to draw Earthpower from the Staff. Concentrated flames uncoiled like dire tendrils, like the Ardent’s ribbands, and reached out to wrap sustenance around Hyn, Hynyn, and Khelen.
Hynyn blared a neigh; tossed his head. Khelen pranced for two or three strides, as if he were showing off. Hyn’s whickering sounded like affection. In a moment, they increased their pace, thrusting the ground behind them until they almost seemed to fly.
Apparently the horses of Ra approved.
058
By mid-afternoon, the terrain tilted gently downward to both the south and the east. For a time, the running was easier. But then the dirt became sandstone and shale again, a punitive surface made hazardous by outcroppings and loose sheets of rock. Fighting the blur of speed in her eyes, Linden forced her gaze ahead. In the distance, she saw the land begin to rise. By stages and shelves, layers of erosion, the ground climbed to a ragged horizon like a wall of broken teeth. The ascent was neither high nor steep, but it sufficed to block everything beyond it.
Peering upward, she had the impression that she was approaching the rim of the world.
The Ranyhyn raced down the last decline, crossed a flat span like an alluvial plain left behind by some long-forgotten flood, then thundered urgently upward. As they neared the crest, Linden realized that the teeth of the horizon were not boulders. They were flawed sheets of sandstone like mammoth scapulae that jutted, cracked and fraying, from the underlying skeleton of the rise.
At last, Hynyn, Hyn, and Khelen eased their pace. In spite of their weariness, they conveyed the impression that they slowed, not because they were tired, but rather because they were close to their goal. Cantering, then trotting, finally walking, they ascended as if the lip of the climb were the edge of a precipice; as if the sandstone plates were the final barrier between them and an absolute fall. Yet they did not seem apprehensive. Instead their steps were almost stately, and the spirit shining through their sweat and fatigue suggested pride or awe, as if they were nearing a source of wonder, a place potent to transform realities.
“Stave—?” Linden asked hoarsely. “What—?”
Surely he knew where they were? Surely his people had seen what lay beyond the broken teeth?
The Haruchai did not answer. Nothing in his manner implied recognition—or comprehension.
The upthrust sheets were taller than Stave on Hynyn’s back; taller than any Giant. They reached for the sealed sky as if they had once stood high enough to hold back the heavens; as if eons ago they had formed an impenetrable barrier. Now the Ranyhyn stepped between them, unhindered, and paused.
The riders had reached the ridge of a round hollow like a crater or caldera, although Linden could not imagine what manner of volcanism might have created such a formation. All around the rim rose eroded sheets like weary sentinels, a ragged troop of guards too tired to stand at attention. The caldera itself was so wide that one of the Swordmainnir might not have been able to throw a stone across it. Yet the enclosed hollow or crater was not deep. Indeed, it resembled a basin rather than a pit, with shallow sides and a flat bottom.
This, apparently, was the reason that the Ranyhyn had spent the day running hard enough to burst the hearts of ordinary horses. So baffled that she had no words, Linden stared downward like a woman who had come to the end of her wits.
The bottom of the caldera was filled with piled bones.
They were old—God, they were old! Thousands of them, tens of thousands, lay there as though they had been simply tossed aside; as though the crater were a midden in which every other form of refuse had fallen to dust. Or perhaps Lord Foul’s armies had never bothered to burn or bury their dead. Seasons of sun and weather beyond counting had scalded the bones to an utter whiteness. Under a brighter sky, they would have been dazzling.
Trying to understand, Linden studied them. Her first thought was that they were human; but they were not. She had never seen their like before. Some had curves or condyles that seemed unnatural. Some were far too long or broad to belong to Giants. Some looked like the ribs of animals much larger than Ranyhyn. Among them, there were too many crooks and bends, too many bones that resembled flames, too many wide sheets that might have been the shoulder-blades of hills or the sides of cromlechs.
They could not be what the Ranyhyn had sought in such haste. They could not. They were not merely unimaginably old: they were meaningless. Perhaps this was the graveyard of some species that had gathered together for comfort while it fell into extinction. Or perhaps Lord Foul, for some incomprehensible reason, had discarded his failed or slain creations here. In either case, these bones had no conceivable purpose now. Whatever they had once been, they had become nothing more than the residue of vast time. They might well be as ancient as the gutrock of the Lost Deep, but they were just bones; dismembered skeletons. They remembered only death.
The sheer waste of what she and her friends had done since Covenant’s departure urged Linden to fill the sky with her frustration.
Yet the Ranyhyn felt otherwise: that was obvious. After a long pause while she scanned the caldera, and her chagrin swelled until it seemed too great to be contained, all three of the horses whinnied loudly: a sound like the clash of swords on shields as a mighty army marched to battle. Then they began to move again. As if they were approaching a seat of majesty, they paced gravely down into the hollow.
“Stave,” Linden croaked. Her heart labored toward a crisis of denied needs. “God damn it. What is this?”
“I cannot answer,” he said flatly. “The Masters have seen this place, but have no knowledge of it. And during the centuries of the Bloodguard, no Lord hazarded this region of the Lower Land. Upon occasion, the Council of Lords spoke of a time before the coming of the Bloodguard, when High Lord Loric risked forays toward Sarangrave Flat and the Spoiled Plains. But within the hearing of the Bloodguard, those Lords described neither the purpose nor the outcome of Loric Vilesilencer’s efforts. And no mention was made of these littered bones.”
The Haruchai turned a searching gaze on Linden. “I will remind you, however, that even here Manethrall Mahrtiir would counsel trust. The ways of the Ranyhyn are a mystery in the Land, and their discernment surpasses ours. I surmise that in this place we will witness some event, or encounter some friend or foe, which they deem needful. Come good or ill, boon or bane, we must hold fast to our faith in the great horses.”
An encounter? Linden drew a shuddering breath, tried to calm the rapid stutter of her pulse. An event? What could possibly happen here? She had ridden for leagues across open terrain, but her life was still constrained by stone walls that allowed no turning, no choices: no conceivable escape. No help for her son. Stave was wrong: Desecration did not lie ahead of her. It was here, in this pile of ruined bones. Or the Ranyhyn had followed Kelenbhrabanal’s example by electing a form of self-sacrifice which she was helpless to alter.
Yet the former Master was also right.—hold fast to our faith—What else could she do? She was here now, with no food or water, no hope for Jeremiah; no chance to make one last effort in the Land’s name. What remained, except to pray that she and her friends had not made a terrible mistake by surrendering their fate to the Ranyhyn?
When the horses gained the bottom of the caldera, Linden found that the mound of bones did not rise much higher than her head. And around them lay a clear space perhaps a dozen paces wide, suggesting that the bones had been placed here rather than simply discarded. At some point in the lost past, someone had arranged the scatter of skeletons into a heap like a cairn. But why anyone had bothered to do so, she could not conceive.
In the cleared flat, the horses halted, facing the bones. Their muscles trembled with fatigue. Sweat still ran from their flanks. But they did not shift their hooves or walk around the pile. Instead they stood motionless, waiting, as if they expected something ineffable to manifest itself within the clutter.
It is ever thus. The alternative is despair.
Linden closed her hand around Covenant’s ring through her shirt. She was finding it harder and harder to believe that despair was not a better choice. Here her deeds had come to doom, as they must—She could not escape their ramifications.
She had violated the Laws of Life and Death to restore Thomas Covenant; but she had failed to bring him back whole. From that moment, it was probably inevitable that he would abandon her. Only his fatal loyalty to other people’s mistakes had prevented him from turning his back sooner.
She should have listened—
Without warning, Jeremiah slipped down from Khelen’s back; and a caesure appeared, seething luridly among the teeth of the caldera’s rim.
Christ!
Scrambling in panic, Linden released the ring and snatched up her Staff in both hands, wheeled it around her head. Melenkurion abatha! Nausea clawed at her guts. Hornets swarmed toward her. Duroc minas mill! She had not faced a caesure like this: not since her personal descent into darkness had taken hold. The stain on her soul might weaken her. Some part of her had learned to crave violations of Law.
But she had to try.
Harad khabaal!
If the Seven Words had no outward power unless they were spoken aloud, they still served to focus her desperation. Responding to her frantic desires, fuligin fire erupted from the wood. Blackness scaled upward, baleful and abused, like a scream that she had inherited from She Who Must Not Be Named.
Savage as a tornado, the Fall surged into the crater as if Joan or turiya Raver had aimed it straight at the bones. Some effect of fury or madness—or perhaps of lessened distance—had improved Joan’s control over her blasts.
Dissociated and vacant, Jeremiah ignored the caesure. He may have been unaware of it. Certain of himself, he walked toward the jumbled skeletons.
Into the path of ravaged time.
The Ranyhyn did not react. Stave did not move. Linden wanted him to spring down from Hynyn, catch up her son, run—But he sat his mount as if there were no peril.
As if he did not fear the virulent storm.
As if he trusted Linden Avery the Chosen.
Swinging her Staff, she lashed blazing midnight into the caesure’s wild core.
You cannot have my son!
Just for an instant, a staccato heartbeat, she saw herself fail. Her gush of power seemed to exacerbate the Fall—The caesure was feeding on her soiled strength.
But her sins had not altered the nature of the Staff, or the import of Caerroil Wildwood’s script. Almost immediately, the fundamental strictures of Earthpower and Law asserted themselves. They existed to affirm the organic integrity of life: Linden’s darkness did not corrupt them. As the caesure squirmed downward, it caught fire from the inside out. Halfway down the slope, it became an ebon conflagration, writhing in hunger. A moment later, it began to collapse into itself.
The force of its inrush nearly tugged Linden from Hyn’s back. But she did not stop scourging the Fall with flame, or shouting the Seven Words in her mind, until every severed instant of its violence was quenched.
Then she staggered inwardly; let her power fade. God, that was close—Too close.
“Stave,” she panted. “Damnit, Stave. What are you doing? Why didn’t you—?”
He did not glance at her. Without any expression that she could interpret, he said, “Attend to your son, Chosen. You have spoken of such things.”
Still staggering, she wrenched her attention toward Jeremiah.
He stood at the edge of the pile, regarding it as though nothing had happened. His back was to his mother: she could not see his face. But she caught whiffs of Earthpower from his shoulders and arms; Earthpower and absence, the same emptiness that she had known ever since he had withdrawn his halfhand from Lord Foul’s bonfire ten years ago.
One by one, he began pulling bones out of the pile; examining them; setting them on the ground beside him.
At the sight, Linden’s mind went blank.
She could not think or feel; could not react. Paralysis stopped her private world. Words seemed to whirl through her like stars and wink out as if every form of language had become incomprehensible. She had no name for what she was seeing.
He had already selected five bones, no, six. Two were twisted into unworldly shapes, but they appeared intact. One resembled the metatarsus of a creature large enough to dwarf a Giant. The others looked like phalanges of various sizes. Now he put his hands on a bone that might have been a mammoth femur.
It was splintered at one end, or perhaps in the middle, obviously broken. Still it should have been too heavy for him to lift. But ages of the sun’s heat had cooked out most of its substance, or it was as hollow as a bird’s—or he had become supernally strong. Without any visible strain, he took the bone from the heap, tested it in his grasp, then placed it carefully on the ground as if its position required precision.
Jeremiah—
That was as far as Linden could go.
He moved a step to the side, studied the pile. After a moment, he found two more bones like long candles that had been heated in their centers, warped into useless twists. He collected several more phalanges, another metatarsus, a massive lump like a talus. From the abundant clutter, he extracted a second femur, a match to the first. This he set exactly parallel to the first with the space of a long stride between them.
Jeremiah was—
Displaying the same steady lack of impatience or doubt that had characterized his work with Legos or Tinkertoys in his former life, he gathered more bones. Some he found nearby. Others he discovered hidden within the heap. Phalanges by the dozens. Five more femurs that he should not have been strong enough to move, one of them whole. A number of metatarsals. And as he added to his selections, his choices became more diverse: cuboid shapes and tarsal lumps; a variety of scapulae that had apparently belonged to some titan; joint-bones with condyle sockets wide enough to cover Linden’s head, or Stave’s. All of these he arrayed in an open space like a craftsman readying his materials.
When he was satisfied, he stooped to his parallel splintered femurs and began to balance other bones on top of them as though he intended them to serve as foundations. As though he were constructing walls.
Jeremiah was building.
That’s natural talent. Roger’s tone had falsified everything he said; but he had told the truth about Jeremiah. The right shapes can change worlds. They’re like words.
Linden struggled against blankness until her heart felt ready to burst. She had to fight to breathe. She had forgotten any words that were not prayers. Oh my God. Oh my God. OhmyGod.
It was for this. The Ranyhyn had brought them here for this. So that Jeremiah could build.
Your kid makes doors. All kinds of doors. Doors from one place to another. Doors through time. Doors between realities.
It was all impossible: the unerring instincts of the horses; Jeremiah’s blank certainty; his strange strength. It was impossible that he could do what he did without focusing his eyes, or giving any sign that he was conscious of his hands. And it absolutely should have been impossible that those bones stayed where he put them, inconceivably poised on each other, defying gravity and their own lines. Their positions were so precarious, so oblivious to the dictates of mass and fit, that they all should have collapsed as soon as his fingers released them. Yet they remained where he put him: scapulae standing on their ends atop rows of phalanges, or resting off-center along awkward knobs of bone; tarsal blocks supporting rachitic lengths that may never have belonged to any natural creature; metatarsals wedged like afterthoughts between long thin fingers that looked like they would topple at any moment.
First, he has to have the right materials for the door he wants to make. Exactly the right wood or stone or metal or bone or cloth—or racetracks. And they have to be in exactly the right shapes.
Watching her son, Linden could not move. Amazement held her in a grip of stone. Her son was building. He was building! But she had never watched him make a construct like this one. Legos and Tinkertoys and raceway tracks interlocked. The branches and twigs with which he had fashioned his portal into Melenkurion Skyweir had been visibly braced on each other. Their own weight had held them in place. But this—
Lost in shock, she took too long to notice that his hands were full of Earthpower when he placed the bones on each other; or that he seemed to caress each fragment before he moved on. Or that each new piece was then fused to those it touched: that each bone became one with the others as if he had welded them together.
He was using Anele’s gift to keep his structure intact.
And he was definitely making walls.
Something about his use of power was familiar. Somewhere she had seen fused bone in the shape of a Ranyhyn rearing like the horses that ramped across the begrimed blue of Jeremiah’s pajamas.
“Chosen,” Stave said—and more sharply, “Linden!”
All of her senses were concentrated on her son; on the transcendental possibilities of his talent; on the magic in his hands. Moments seemed to pass while a distant part of her tried to recognize Stave’s voice.
Fresh nausea prompted her to hear him. Like an act of abnegation, she forced herself to look away from Jeremiah—
—and saw another caesure roaring like an inferno on the rim of the caldera.
It had already torn apart several of the sandstone teeth, swept them into insanity. Now it rushed downward, a stinging holocaust that made havoc of everything in its path. It came from the side of the crater opposite Jeremiah. In another instant, it would begin to devour bones, spinning them toward a future of infinite devastation.
Now Linden had no time for panic: no time and no patience. She wanted to watch her son. She wanted to watch her son. Exalted by outrage and frustration, she called a second flail of Earthpower from her Staff.
Instead of the Seven Words, she shouted as if she were yelling at herself, Damn you, Joan! Leave us the hell alone!
Where was Covenant? He should have stopped his ex-wife by now. Stopped her or died.
Her indignation for Jeremiah multiplied her strength. Her Staff was a howl of theurgy. It thrummed in her hands as she flung stark blackness against the Fall. Hardly aware of what she did, she drove the caesure back. Then she incinerated it.
It was gone before she recognized that she had succeeded. Enraged or enraptured, she went on lashing the air with Earthpower until Stave caught her arm, jerked her down from Hyn’s back.
He startled her enough to make her stop.
She had not seen him dismount. She had seen nothing except Jeremiah and then the caesure. Perhaps he had jumped down as he grabbed her arm. Now he turned her away from Jeremiah; forced her to look at him.
“Chosen!” he said like a slap. “You must attend to our peril as well as to your son. I acknowledge that his efforts are an entrancement. Yet we must not be ensnared.” When she finally met his glare, he added, “And we must free the Ranyhyn to provide for their own safety. Mounted, we hinder them.”
“That’s your job,” she retorted as though he had interrupted some vital task. “Your senses are better than mine anyway. I need to see this.”
Roughly she pulled away from him. Freed of their riders, the Ranyhyn remained behind her, far enough away that she would not accidentally strike them with her Staff or her fire.
Two steps took her closer to Jeremiah’s construct. Blind and deaf to everything except his own efforts, he had continued to work. Dissociated silt filled his gaze until he looked as sightless as Anele; but he had already balanced a broken femur upright on the base of a plate like a shoulder-blade, sealed it in place. Supported by phalanges, and by bones that mimicked snakes in agony, it rose taller than his head; taller than Linden’s. Now he selected another bone like it, splintered at one end, and positioned it standing an arm span beside the first. Together the two femurs looked like doorposts or the scantlings of a wall.
Between heartbeats, Linden’s ire became excitement. At one time, she had loved watching him. He had been a wizard with Tinkertoys and Legos, wooden blocks, racetracks; endlessly fascinating. But now he was more, much more. And long days ago, she had experienced the power of his talent. Whatever he was making here, he would accomplish something wondrous.
“Stave?” she breathed as if she had erased anger from her heart. “Do you know what this is? Do you know what he’s doing?”
Standing at her side, the former Master answered with his accustomed stoicism, “No Haruchai has beheld its like, apart from that which resides in the Hall of Gifts. Yet I deem that this is anundivian yaj?a, marrowmeld, the Ramen craft of bone-sculpting. Their memory of it has ever been tarnished by sorrow, for the necessary lore was lost. How your son acquired such skill surpasses my conception.”
Yes, Linden thought. In the Hall of Gifts. She wanted to believe that she could already feel power accumulating in the early stages of the construct; that its sheer glory would be apparent to Stave. But the bones remained stubbornly inert after each flaring of Earthpower. Their places in his design were still too fragmentary to imply their eventual shape and purpose.
When Stave said her name again, however, she reacted at once. Readying her Staff, she strode away from Jeremiah. She hoped to put at least a few paces between him and anything that she might have to do.
At first, she did not understand why Stave had called her. Under the leaden lid of the sky, she found only the untenable whiteness of bones, the circle of cleared ground, the shallow sides of the basin, the frangible jut of sandstone around the crater’s rim. But the Ranyhyn had skittered away in alarm. Hynyn, Hyn, and Khelen rounded to the far side of the pile and halted there, fretting.
What is it? Linden might have asked the Haruchai. What do you sense?
Then she knew. She heard chiming—
In an urgent clamor of bells, Infelice of the Elohim arrived like a whirlwind arising from the lifeless dirt.
Imperial and proud, she confronted Linden. Adorned in gems and rich music, and clad in sendaline woven and glittering like the stuff of dreams, the woman advanced like the world’s suzerain wreathed in wrath and judgment. The luster of her hair was bright with compulsions in spite of the waning sunshine, and she wore her supple loveliness as though it were an accusation. The gales implied by her eyes reminded Linden of Esmer’s sea-storm gaze.
“Now you are thrice a Desecrator, Wildwielder!” Her voice might have been a bitter snarl, but it was tuned to the pitch of beauty and jewels, and every word soared, accompanied by chimes in perfect harmony. “Rousing the Worm, you have doomed all that is precious within the bounds of Time. Acceding to the Harrow, you have bestirred slumbering havoc, avid for horrors beyond comprehension. Yet here you surpass yourself.”
Linden glared in response. No doubt she should have been daunted; but she was not. Jeremiah was building—She was eager to see what he would achieve: too eager to flinch or falter.
“By all that your paltry heart deems holy, Wildwielder!” Infelice was a carillon of vehemence. She seemed to assail Linden with song and majesty. And she had placed herself between Linden and Jeremiah. “Releasing the boy from the toils of the croyel—That indeed was well done—and no deed of yours. Likewise the Harrow’s death was well done, and no deed of yours. But now you enable ruin incarnate. You should not have heeded the Ranyhyn. They have brought you to this place of death, intending dire atrocity.”
Linden’s eyes widened, but not in dismay. The flagrant indignation of the Elohim meant nothing to her. Death! she thought, sudden as an epiphany. Bones. For which her need—no, Jeremiah’s need—was great.
Somehow the Insequent had foreseen this. In their own way, the Ranyhyn had foreseen it. And that flash of insight released Linden’s heart.
It contradicted the harsh logic of despair.
With music and consternation, Infelice proclaimed, “If you preserve this vile boy, you will cause eternal woe.”
Vile boy? Inspired by revelation, Linden aimed her Staff at Infelice to show the Elohim that she was ready for battle. The need for death was Jeremiah’s, not hers—and he already lived in graves. If nothing of hers could restore him, perhaps he would be able to resurrect himself with bones.
“Listen to me.” Linden pronounced each word as if she were articulating the significance of her love. “I’m only going to warn you once. If you lift so much as a finger against my son, I’ll do whatever it takes to stop you.”
With her whole heart, she willed Infelice to believe her.
“I’ll call up so much Earthpower that it makes another Landsdrop.” In some sense, the Elohim were embodied Earthpower. Surely Infelice could be harmed by her own form of life? “And if that doesn’t work, I’ll use Covenant’s ring.
“I’m not its rightful wielder. I’m told that I can’t actually destroy the Arch. But I can still hurt you. There’s a reason that you’re so afraid of wild magic. I think it’s because you don’t have any defense. Try me, and I’ll burn you until there’s nothing left.”
Infelice clenched her fists. Bells clamored wrath in the caldera until the bones trembled, all of them—except the ones which Jeremiah had merged.
“And do you conceive that I regard your threat? Wildwielder, you do not desire comprehension. You have inquired concerning the shadow upon the hearts of the Elohim , but you do not attend when you are answered. It is this.” She slapped a gesture at Jeremiah. “His purpose for us is an abomination, more so than our doom in the maw of the Worm. But it is not the worst evil.”
“All right.” Linden did not waver. The Staff held steady in her hands. “Let’s take this one step at a time.” Jeremiah was still working, as undisturbed by Infelice as he was by caesures. Apparently he had completed one wall of his construct. Now he began to meld a similar structure atop the second of his foundation-bones. He only needed to be left alone. “If there’s something that you want me to understand, help me with it.”
Before Infelice could interrupt her, she said, “Whatever Jeremiah is making, he needs bone. But why these bones? What are they? Where did they come from? How did they get here?”
The Elohim’s raiment displayed jewels and exasperation. “Wildwielder, I will not suffer this. You ask for the history of the Earth entire. I will say only that they are the remains of quellvisks.” Her bells sang distaste under the dulled sky. “It does not concern you that they once made war upon the Elohim. In a distant age, they were destroyed. Their bones we deposited here, in Muirwin Delenoth, which signifies the resting place of abhorrence, as an emblem of our disdain for such affronts.”
—destroyed. By Infelice and her people.
Linden frowned as though she wanted to understand. “That doesn’t help.” She had no interest in extinct monsters. “It doesn’t matter how long ago you killed them. They’re still just bones. I’ll try a different question.
“Why were the Ranyhyn suddenly in such a hurry? For God’s sake, they spent two days just walking. Then they decided to run.
“Maybe if you explain what changed, I’ll understand.”
Infelice brandished her fists. For an instant, her chiming collapsed into cacophony. Then she mastered herself.
Melodious again, she answered, “An implausible threat approaches the Timewarden’s wracked mate. Long and long within her frail confines, she has readied herself to confront him, she and turiya Herem with her. But now the minions of noisome Horrim Carabal advance against her. They cannot harm her. However, they endanger the skest that ward and sustain her. By so doing, they hope to weaken her.
“This neither turiya Herem nor the Ranyhyn foresaw. They could not. It is the unlikely outcome of your encounter with Horrim Carabal. Therefore the Timewarden’s mate fears it. She is roused to frenzy, and her caesures imperil all who travel here. For that reason, the Ranyhyn have hastened to accomplish their loathsome purpose.”
This time, Linden shook her head. Infelice’s explanation raised as many questions as it answered. The Feroce had almost succeeded in delivering the Staff of Law to the lurker—and now they moved against the skest? But Linden did not allow herself to be distracted. Covenant was still alive: in effect, Infelice had said so. Other issues were more important.
Jeremiah was more important. He was balancing the first layers of his second wall, fusing them with Earthpower—and far from done. He might need hours yet.
He had enough bone here to fashion an entire castle.
“All right,” she repeated, speaking slowly; stalling for time. “That’s a start. Let’s move on. You said that coming here enables atrocity. Jeremiah’s purpose is an abomination. What do you imagine his purpose is? What do you think he’s making?”
She could guess. Roger had said about the Elohim, They’re vulnerable to certain kinds of structures. Like Vain. Specific constructs attract them. Exactly the right materials in exactly the right shape. Other structures repel them. Or blind them. By that means, the croyel had concealed itself in the Lost Deep.
Jeremiah’s edifice of bone might well be a trap of some kind. But Linden wanted to hear the truth from Infelice.
“Did the halfhand not speak of this?” The Elohim’s tone was bitter; but a note of sorrow softened the angry harmonics of her music. “The boy will ensnare us. He will deprive us of life and meaning and hope.”
Your kid makes doors. Doors through time. Doors between realities. And doors that don’t go anywhere. Prisons. When you walk into them, you never come out.
Linden ached to move so that she stood between Infelice and Jeremiah; but she forced herself to remain where she was. As long as she contrived to keep Infelice’s attention fixed on her, away from Jeremiah—
Stave watched the Elohim with his arms folded as though he had the strength to defy her.
“I’m going to pretend that that makes sense,” Linden drawled, “although why Jeremiah would care what happens to you is beyond me. Tell me why—”
“Chosen,” Stave said abruptly: a warning.
An instant later, the three Ranyhyn wheeled aside, lunged away from each other; and a caesure erupted where Khelen had been standing on the far side of the bones.
It was as ravenous as one of the skurj; as irresistible as a Sandgorgon. And it was close—! Its proximity filled her throat with vomit. In three more heartbeats, it would surge near enough to swallow Jeremiah.
Noise filled the air like the clatter of dropped bells or swords as Infelice vanished.
No. “Melenkurion abatha!” Black fire burst from Linden’s Staff, fierce as a volcanic detonation. “Duroc minas mill!” Her whole being was flame: she lashed at the Fall with every passion of her life. “Harad God damn khabaal!”
You will not have my son!
She was becoming an adept, elevated by extremity. For a moment, she seemed to hear Joan screaming in the heart of the storm. I’ve been good! Against Linden’s onslaught, the caesure staggered; flickered. Make it stop! Then it lurched backward. I can’t bear it!
Struck to the core, the time-storm curled into itself and imploded. Scant instants after it appeared, it was gone.
It won’t be much longer. Roger had promised his mother that. We’ll make it stop together.
Covenant! Oh, Covenant, watch out. She’s getting stronger.
Jeremiah was still at work as though nothing had happened. Empty of every form of consciousness except concentration on his construct, he sealed phalanges in place, propped crooked bones among them, rested a scapula off-center and left it, imponderably secure. To Linden’s urgent glance, this side of his structure appeared to be an exact mirror of the other. If she had looked more closely, she might have noticed that he had set dozens of details deliberately askew. But she did not have time.
Announced by chiming, Infelice incarnated herself between Linden and Jeremiah as though she had never been absent. Her sendaline murmured of disdain and supplication as it moved, stirred by a breeze that Linden could not feel.
“Oh, good,” Linden panted, shaken by her own exertions and the caesure’s inrush. “You haven’t given up. I still have questions.”
In scorn, the Elohim retorted, “And I continue to reply, imploring you to set aside your opposition. If you will not permit me to deflect the boy from the path of this atrocity, I pray that you yourself will thwart him, for the sake of the Land and the Earth, since you care naught for the Elohim. Remove him from his task. Unmake what he has done. Set him upon his beast and ride hence. If you do so, while they live the Elohim will ensure that he does not fall under the Despiser’s dominion a second time. Thus the worst of all evils may be forestalled.”
“Wait a minute,” Linden demanded. She no longer held the Staff aimed at Infelice, but she was ready. “You’re going too fast for me.
“Never mind that Jeremiah probably doesn’t care about you any more than I do. I was about to ask you why getting caught in one of his doors is worse than being eaten by the Worm. They sound about the same to me. Either way, you’re finished. Why is a prison worse than dying?”
The music around Infelice sounded like teeth grinding in frustration. Lordly and contemptuous, she answered, “Wildwielder, the Worm is mere extinction. The prison which the boy will devise is eternal helplessness, fully cognizant and forever futile. It will out-live the ending of suns and stars. Which doom would you prefer? Which would you elect for your son?”
Still Stave stood motionless, like a man who had no part to play in the world’s ruin. Behind Infelice, Jeremiah had used two more heavy bones like huge femurs snapped in half to complete the frame of his second wall: the side of an entryway, or the start of a corridor. Now he was busy filling the space between the uprights with fingers and limbs and lumps and gnarled boughs of bone. And as he worked, without haste or hesitation, Earthpower flowed from his hands like water, binding together the many pieces of his construct.
By degrees, theurgy swelled in the bones. It was still nascent, still tenuous and vague, but Linden sensed that soon it would start to burgeon. His creation was beginning to resemble the numinous box which he had used to reach the depths of Melenkurion Skyweir: it was coming to life.
“All right,” Linden said for the third time; perhaps the last time. “I’ll give you that one. It makes sense.
“So tell me. I’m ready to hear it now. What’s ‘the worst evil’? If imprisoning you is worse than the Worm of the World’s End, what could possibly be ‘the worst of all evils’?”
Infelice had become unalloyed wrath, a tintinnabulation too clangorous to be ignored. “The Despiser,” she rang out, “who is called a-Jeroth and Lord Foul and many other names, has placed his mark upon the boy. You claim the boy as your son, but you do not know him. You have not grasped that there is no limit to what he can achieve when he is given suitable aid.
“Assuredly the Despiser desires his escape from the Arch of Time—and to accomplish that end, he does not require the boy. In his secret heart, however, he nurtures a darker intent. He seeks to devise a prison for the Creator, making use of the boy’s gifts when the Arch has fallen. This he means to accomplish in the moment of collapse, when all things have become mutable. As the Despiser has suffered, so he wishes all possible Creation to suffer, in unending emptiness and lamentation.
“This you do not comprehend. Your mortal mind cannot encompass such absolute loss. Yet I beseech you to hear me. You have asked after the shadow on the hearts of the Elohim. The eternal end of Creation is shadow enough to darken the heart of any being.”
Linden stared, shocked in spite of her allegiance to her son. Was it possible? Possible? Could Lord Foul do that? With Jeremiah’s help? The eternal end—
—but of my deeper purpose I will not speak.
More power throbbed behind Infelice. Jeremiah appeared to be finishing his second wall, the other side of a doorway or passage. In another moment or two, he would commence the next phase of his construct, whatever that might be.
He needed more time. But Linden was too stunned to think. The eternal end—? Infelice was right about one thing: Linden could not grasp the concept. Lord Foul intended that? And she had run out of questions or arguments. Soon she would have no means to delay her antagonist except Earthpower or wild magic.
“Nonetheless, Elohim,” Stave said unexpectedly, “your own comprehension is flawed.” He remained standing with his arms closed across his chest, as impassive as Jeremiah, and as unmoved. “I acknowledge that your undying thoughts surpass mine, or the Chosen’s, or indeed those of the Ranyhyn. Yet when you speak of the shadow upon your heart, you speak in contradictions.
“In Andelain, you averred that your spirits are darkened by ‘the threat of beings from beyond Time.’ You cited the Chosen and also the Unbeliever, and I doubt not that you include this boy in your tale of darkness. You described them as ‘beings both small and mortal who are nonetheless capable of utter devastation.’”
Linden remembered. By his own deeds, Infelice had said, the Despiser cannot destroy the Arch of Time. He requires your aid, Wildwielder, and that of the man who was once the Unbeliever.
“To content you,” Stave continued, “I will also acknowledge that the presence in the Land of ‘beings from beyond Time’ has been chiefly caused by Corruption, if not by his own hand then by the efforts of his servants.”
Infelice lifted an elegant eyebrow. The ire of her chiming receded into a more cautious mode. Apparently the Haruchai had caught her attention.
At her back, Jeremiah turned away from the walls or sides of his construct. With strength that astonished Linden, far more strength than he should have possessed, he retrieved the largest of his gathered bones, the single intact femur, and raised it over his head. His muddy gaze regarded nothing as he carried the massive bone to his structure and set its length across the tops of the walls like a lintel.
When he had sealed the femur in its position, the vibration of his created magic rose to a higher pitch. Linden felt its hum in her own bones. Waves of power made her skin itch as if every inch were a wound newly healed.
But Stave did not pause; gave no sign that he was aware of Jeremiah or theurgy.
“Yet by your own admission,” he said, “the Chosen did not effect the boy’s release from the croyel. Nor was he freed by ur-Lord Covenant’s intervention. And it was neither the Chosen nor the Unbeliever who discovered the boy’s covert in the Lost Deep. Furthermore we were not brought to this place at this time by either the Chosen or the Unbeliever—or by her son, or by his son or mate. We are here only by the will of the Ranyhyn.
“Herein lies your error, Elohim. Every essential step along the path of the boy’s purpose has been taken by the natural inhabitants of the Earth. The Chosen and the Unbeliever and perhaps even the Unbeliever’s son have enabled those steps, but have not determined them. Therefore our presence here, and the boy’s present display of lore, do not conform to your description of the shadow upon the hearts of the Elohim. If we are now threatened by ‘the worst of all evils,’ it is through no fault or purpose or power of the Chosen’s son.
“Thus,” the Haruchai stated as though his logic were unassailable, “it is made plain even to mortal minds that your protestations are spurious. You appear to believe that this boy is no more than a tool wielded by other beings. But the tool cannot be held accountable for the use which is made of it. And here the hands which wield him are those of the Ranyhyn and the Harrow, the first new Stonedownor and the lost son of Sunder and Hollian. They are the hands of beings who live and may perish within the proper confines of Time.
“Thus it follows that you have no cause to oppose the boy. His present efforts cannot achieve Corruption’s designs.”
Yes, Linden thought. Yes. It was Stave who had first shown her how to believe that Jeremiah did not belong to Lord Foul. Now the former Master dispelled every doubt that had marred her faith.
Apart from the claiming of your vacant son—
He’s belonged to Foul for years.
Roger had lied to her. The Despiser had tried to mislead her. From the first, one or both of them had striven to teach her despair. And they had succeeded.
Yet Stave answered them for her. The Ranyhyn and Anele had answered them. Jeremiah himself was answering them now.
Trust.
With as much subtlety as she could manage, Linden began mustering Earthpower in her mind.
As her son added phalanges and tarsal blocks like supports for his lintel, the force implicit in his structure scaled still higher. Soon it felt like the gnashing of dislocated realities, a door between worlds. In contrast, the music of the Elohim seemed dim and lusterless; as dulled as the ashen sky.
Over her shoulder, Infelice cast a glance like a blaze of gems at the boy. Then she faced Stave for the first time.
“You are Haruchai,” she said in a tone of regal disdain. “Have you forgotten that your strength is as weak as water to the Elohim, and as devoid of import? Yet I have heard you, hoping that the Wildwielder will reconsider her folly while you bandy words. Now you have said enough. I will hear no more.
“If the tool cannot be held accountable for its use, it likewise cannot be used if it does not exist. Hold yourselves blameless, if that is your desire. I have spoken of perils which transcend blame. They must be prevented at any cost.”
With a gesture of dismissal, as if she were banishing Stave from her sight, Infelice turned away.
Toward Jeremiah.
Linden was already summoning fire from her Staff when Stave barked harshly, “Chosen!”
Another caesure. As soon as Stave called to her, she felt it stinging her flesh, hiving in her guts.
The puissance of Jeremiah’s construct ramified into the grey heavens. He stepped back from it as if his work were done. Gazing blankly at his structure, his marrowmeld sculpture, like an artist who had expended every iota of himself, he extended his halfhand in Linden’s direction like a request for confirmation. But he did not turn his head, or shift his feet, or give any other indication that he wanted something from his mother.
Infelice was about to destroy him. One way or another, the Elohim would put an end to every possibility, every hope.
Nevertheless the Fall was more immediate. And Infelice feared it. She feared it at least as much as Linden did. She might hesitate while she was in danger.
Frantically Linden wheeled away to hurl black fury into the migraine storm of hornets and instants.
But she was wrong. As soon as she spotted the caesure, she saw that she was wrong. Joan had missed her aim. Her concentration, or turiya’s, was fraying. Vicious as a tornado, the Fall seethed on the far rim of the caldera. From where she stood, Linden could not have thrown a piece of bone to hit it. And it was moving away. Awkward as a cripple, it stumbled onto the outer slope of the crater and began to descend, a blind thing forsaken by its guide. If it did not suddenly change directions, it would drift out of sight and do no harm.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Linden had given Infelice a chance—
And Stave was powerless against the Elohim. Long ago, Linden had witnessed the negligent ease with which Infelice’s people had refused Brinn and Cail, Hergrom and Ceer, from their demesne.
Swinging the Staff’s howl of Earthpower, she spun back toward Jeremiah—
—and was instantly frozen; stopped where she stood, as if every imaginable motion had been stripped from her. Her arms and legs were paralyzed: her heart seemed to stop beating. Blood congealed in her veins. Her fire vanished as if she knew nothing of Earthpower and had never understood Law.
The air of the caldera was full of stars. They winked and spangled in front of her, around her, between her and her son, as evanescent and irrefusable as sun-dazzles. They were the gems of Infelice’s raiment, the eldritch jewels of her chiming, and they sang a song of immobility that ruled the basin, dominated the bones. Jeremiah still stood facing his construct with his right arm extended toward Linden: for him, nothing had changed. But Stave had been snared in mid-stride. Impossibly balanced on one foot with the other reaching for its step, he remained like a statue carved from stone.
Linden tried to move, and could not. She had forgotten how to breathe.
Only Infelice moved. Graceful as a breeze, she floated toward Jeremiah with a kind of gentle inevitability, as though his doom had been written eons ago in the materials of his construct.
The Ranyhyn trumpeted warnings that no one heeded.
As Infelice neared Jeremiah, she opened her arms to embrace him with ruin.
In horror, Linden watched as if helplessness were the ultimate truth of her life. She had no answer to it. Perhaps she had never had an answer. It may have been the true source of her despair.
But Stave—
Ah, God.
Somehow he found the will to speak.
“You delude yourself, Elohim.” His voice was a whisper hoarse with strain. Stars like commandments resisted it. Yet he made himself heard. “Do you deem me helpless? I am Haruchai. I do what I must. When you strive to enact your desires against Linden Avery’s son, I will strike a blow which will alter your conception of power.”
Bright gemstones swirled around him, bursts of suzerain coercion. He could not move: of course he could not. Nothing except wild magic could counter the force of the Elohim.
And yet—
—he did move. Slowly, arduously, inexorably, he closed the fingers of his right hand into a fist.
Visibly startled, Infelice turned to stare at him. Her music shaped words which she did not utter. No. You will not.
You. Will. Not.
Ignoring her denial, Stave clenched his fist. His arm shook as he raised it.
At the same time, the pressure binding Linden within herself eased slightly.
She could breathe again. Her heart beat.
Stave had given her a gift greater than power or glory.
It would be brief. In another moment, Infelice would gather enough of her vast magicks to crush the Haruchai.
Linden had to act now.
She was no match for Stave. She did not try to equal him. In spite of Jeremiah’s peril, she ignored her Staff, made no attempt to reach for Covenant’s ring. Infelice would react to any effort of theurgy, any overt challenge. Instead, while the ire of Infelice’s stars forced Stave to lower his arm, Linden slipped her hand into the pocket of her jeans.
The pocket where she carried Jeremiah’s red racecar.
Aid and betrayal. Esmer had healed the crumpled toy for a reason. Linden needed to believe that he had not intended yet another form of treachery.
Her refusal to be helpless was a pale mimicry of Stave’s; but it sufficed.
While Infelice concentrated on stifling the last of Stave’s intransigence, his fundamental birthright, Linden withdrew the racecar from her pocket and tossed it toward Jeremiah.
Stars flared in repudiation. Bells clamored denial across the caldera. But they had no effect on the toy’s passage.
The racecar resembled Stave’s fierce stubbornness. It was Jeremiah’s birthright; his inheritance.
He still faced his construct, motionless and lost. He had not once turned his head to glance at his mother. He could not have caught even a glimpse of his toy.
Nevertheless he claimed it. Deft as legerdemain, his halfhand plucked the racecar from the air.
In that instant, he appeared to receive the full potential of Anele’s gift. His whole body became an exultant hymn of Earthpower, as rich as the Elohim’s chiming, and as profound. Grasping the racecar, he looked as mighty as a Forestal.
The deep thrum of his construct repulsed stars and bells and coercion.
Do you see? Linden asked Infelice, too weak to form words aloud. Do you see him? He’s my son.
Jeremiah’s transformation and the loud demand of his portal snatched Infelice away from Stave. “No!” she sang, shouted, yelled. “You will not!”
Swift as a whirlwind, the spangling of stars and jewels swept around Jeremiah. Infelice left only enough power in the air to hold Stave and Linden where they were; only enough to prevent Linden from using her Staff or Covenant’s ring. All the rest of her music and her ineffable majesty spun around Jeremiah; bound him like a cocoon.
In spite of his new puissance, he did nothing. Infelice was too strong for him.
Her sendaline whipped about her as she strode toward Jeremiah to complete her purpose.
But her second step took her directly into the path of the charging Ranyhyn.
She had forgotten about them—or had underestimated them. She may have believed that mere animals could not resist her compulsions. She may even have believed that they would not; that they would recognize her supremacy and be daunted.
She should have known better.
Doubtless Infelice’s magicks would protect her. Hynyn, Hyn, and Khelen were Ranyhyn; but they were only Ranyhyn. She was Elohim. Their inborn Earthpower could not overcome the forces at her command.
Nevertheless she had noticed them too late.
Khelen was in the lead. He crashed into her, drove her to the dirt, and pounded away, leaving her to be trampled by Hynyn and Hyn.
Their hooves did not touch her. She vanished in an instant—and almost instantly reappeared behind them.
During her brief flicker of absence, however, all of her stars vanished with her.
That small release was enough for Jeremiah. Three quick strides took him around the edge of his construct. Two more carried him into the center of his portal.
Infelice returned like a hurricane. Savage winds slapped Linden to the ground; flung Stave halfway up the slope of the basin; drove the Ranyhyn to their knees. Gales of rage and terror hammered at the portal; at Jeremiah. The sheer desperation of the Elohim staggered him.
Yet the magicks of his construct shielded him. Within its supernal walls, he recovered his balance, straightened his back. Storms ripped at his tattered pajamas, but did not sway him.
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.