Against All Things Ending (102 page)

Here the way was cluttered with impediments: piles of rock fallen from the sheered rims of the Hills; occasional boulders; heaps of innominate debris. Covenant had to go more slowly, probing for obstacles. Damp blood like fire marked the place on his rib cage where he had been cut. His forehead seemed to burn. Fortunately Clyme soon found another intersection where a wider split like a corridor extended in both directions. The Master appeared to consider turning to the right again. Then he shook his head slightly and went left.

Darkness and the height of the walls confused Covenant’s tenuous sense of direction. He could not remember patterns among the stars; and cold stone growing colder filled his scant health-sense. He had no idea whether he was moving toward or away from the promontory where he had remembered or imagined Joan.

Impatience beat in the background of his awareness, an accumulating thunder. He did not question Clyme’s choices or instincts; but he felt sure that he was running out of time. How much longer would the Raver withhold his next attack? During the afternoon, the Humbled had sensed
caesures
. Had Joan exhausted herself? Was she tired enough to wait for Covenant?

If she struck now, or the
skest
did, he might miss his only chance to surprise her and
turiya
—

Come
on
, he thought at Clyme. Find what I need. While we’re still alive. But he insisted in silence. Without the guidance of the Humbled, he would never discover the space he needed, except by accident or providence.

Another intersection. This time, Clyme turned right into a break so narrow that he was forced to squeeze along it sideways. Groaning, Covenant wedged himself between the walls.

He bruised his cheek; abraded his arms. On an unexpected knob of rock, he reopened the clotting wound on his forehead. He could not feel his outstretched fingers. If Clyme or Branl spoke, they did so to each other, not to him.

Panting in silent frustration, he emerged from the crack into a wider seam. There Clyme chose the left. He strode ahead more swiftly, as if he now felt the need for haste. Awkward on his numbed feet, Covenant scrambled to keep up with the Master.

Finally the seam debouched into a junction where several passages and breaks crossed each other. Together they formed an open space six or seven paces across, perhaps ten wide. Its surface was littered with detritus: old rubble, brittle shards of weapons, splintered scraps that may once have been bones. At every step, Covenant tripped on a rock, kicked something metallic, or crushed a desiccated shape to powder.

Against one high bluff of the Hills crouched a pit as black as an abyss: obviously a cave. Two of the intersecting passages looked or felt as broad as roads. They were too clear to be natural formations. They may have served as corridors for Lord Foul’s armies long ago. Or they might be lures—

Clyme stopped; indicated the pit. “
Skest
crowd there. At present, they stand in abeyance. Doubtless they will soon pour forth.” Then he nodded at one of the broad passages. “That path ends in blind stone. There we will render ourselves helpless. The other clear way holds more
skest
.

“Ur-Lord, will this juncture meet your need? Other choices are open to us, but along them we may be readily overtaken.”

Fears thronged in Covenant’s throat. He swallowed hard. “I wanted more room.” There was too much at stake. “But I guess we’ll have to make do with this.”

“Then I ask again,” Clyme said like the voice of the darkness. “What is your intent?”

“Stay with me.” Covenant’s hands shook as he pulled the bundle from his waist. “Don’t stay with me.” Hell and blood! I don’t have the courage for this—“It’s up to you.” Every choice led to doom of one kind or another. He had already been killed once: he did not want to die again. “I can’t stop now. If I had a better idea, we wouldn’t be here.

“Sometimes we just have to take the chance—”

How many times had he told Linden to trust herself?

Vehement with self-coercion, he gripped the bundle in his left fist and began to unwrap the
krill
. But he was careful not to touch the dagger. Cursing his many trepidations, he bared the haft of the blade; uncovered the gem.

Avid brilliance burst into the night. It glared on every rock, every shard, every sign of ruin. It limned the crowding hills until they seemed to impend over him, stark against the blinded black of the sky.

“At least this way,” he panted through his teeth, “the damn
skest
won’t attack us until they see what happens next.”

Before Clyme or Branl could protest, he stroked Loric’s lore-cut jewel with the numb fingers of his halfhand.

In spite of the danger, he rubbed the gem until he smelled scorching flesh.

Come on, damn it. You know it’s me. If you can recognize me all the way down in the Lost Deep, you can sure as hell feel me when I’m this close. And don’t tell me you’re too tired. You want this. It’s the only way to end what you’re going through.

Branl grabbed his upper arms, clamped them to his sides. Clyme moved to snatch away the
krill
.

“No!” Covenant shouted; raged. “
Hell
, no! If you stop me now, she
wins
! Lord Foul
wins
!”

Just for a moment, Clyme hesitated.

Then a
caesure
exploded to life directly ahead of Covenant, three or four paces behind Clyme. The Master wheeled away as if he believed himself capable of protecting Covenant from the violence of ruptured time.

Branl released Covenant’s right arm. Instinctively? Deliberately? Covenant did not care. He wrenched his left free.

The Fall was big, a tornado of chaos. Most of it had appeared within the substance of the hill. Dismembered instants as devastating as the Worm conflated every moment of the stone’s recent millennia. The force of their insanity chewed the bluff to grit and pebbles, flung scree like a barrage at the sky.

The
caesure
’s propinquity stung every inch of Covenant’s skin that could still feel pain. Nausea and
wrongness
knotted his guts. If he could have unclenched the muscles of his stomach, he might have puked.

But he was ready for this. He had to be. Why else had he forced himself to leave Linden?

The area around him was clear enough. He had room to move.

This is your mistake, Joan. Not mine. I’m coming for you.

Dropping the scraps of Anele’s tunic, he clutched the
krill
in both hands. Its heat was Joan’s fury; but he knew how to bear it.

Anchored to everything that he loved by nausea and stings and searing pain, he ran straight into the core of the Fall.

Clyme or Branl may have shouted after him, but he did not hear them. As soon as the gyre caught him, it swept him out of existence.

12.

Sold Souls

Without transition, Covenant staggered onto a featureless plain, infinitely unrelieved, and so cold that it froze the blood in his veins. If time had been possible here, one lurching attempt of his heart to beat would have shattered him. His entire body would have burst into ice crystals and drifted like dust, falling from nowhere to nowhere. But of course his heart did not beat, or he did not shatter, because this gelid moment did not move on to another. It did not imply time of any kind. He could stagger and catch his balance—could turn his head or his whole body to scan the suzerain nothing of the horizons—could walk in any direction if he chose—because this one miniscule fragment of causality and sequence had become the universe. It was all that the Arch of Time contained.

If he wished, he could imagine his breath as frigid plumes and searing inhalations, but such things had no significance. They meant nothing. They would never mean anything.

On some other plane of perception, a dimension simultaneous with the plain and the cold, hornets in their myriads or millions burrowed into his flesh. Each of them was pure excruciation, an instance of agony like being flayed. His leper’s numbness did not protect him. Even one of them might have destroyed him; but his absolute pain was eternally suspended within itself, forever caught between cause and effect. Here there was no difference between one insufferable anguish and a thousand. A thousand stings and a hundred thousand were the same. He endured them all for the same reason that he endured one: like his body, his mind was not given a chance to shatter.

It would never have that chance. In this place, there were no chances.

On yet another plane of perception, however, another overlapping dimension, he found Joan. He
was
Joan. He stood where she stood, among wet rocks and reefs which had formed the floor of the Sunbirth Sea only a short while ago. He screamed her horror and rage against the pitiless night. He pounded her abused flesh with his useless fists. He tore out her hair in clumps that did not hurt enough to redeem her.

And he remembered.

He remembered her life. His memories were hers. They were broken and whetted, as sharp as flensing knives, and they sliced through him until every vestige of his sanity was cut away.

They had driven her mad. They did the same to him.

And on still another dimension of perception, he recognized
turiya
Raver, Herem, Kinslaughterer. The Raver wore Joan and him as if they were garments donned at will. In his hands,
turiya
juggled memories and realities like toys. When he found one or another that displeased him, he crushed it; discarded it. The rest he kept aloft so that each possibility and recollection scraped across the whetstone of the air and became sharper.

But the Raver had no effect on Covenant. That sempiternal sickness could not hurt him. He had felt it too often; understood it too well. In Lord Foul’s servants, evil was just another form of disease. It could be endured. It could be ignored. And
turiya
was only the juggler. He was only malice laughing in wild triumph. His greed for harm changed nothing. He was not freezing emptiness forever. He was not the swarming hornets of maimed time. He was not madness or remembrance.

He was not Joan.

And he would never be Linden Avery.

An instant or an eternity ago, Covenant had known what he was doing. He had chosen this plight. He knew
caesures
intimately. He had spent an age defending the Arch of Time; helping it heal after each violation. He had realized what would happen to him.

He would be lost, of course: that was obvious. He had no defense against the temporal inferno of the Fall: no lorewise ur-viles, no ineffable Ranyhyn, no rightful wedding band. No Earthpowerful companions. And his mind was already webbed with flaws, a cracked wilderland of unscalable fissures as trackless as the Shattered Hills, and as fraught with vertigo as the precipice above the sea. Of course he would be lost.

But he would also find Joan. He
had
found her. A moment or an eon ago, he had believed that she would be his path. His salvation. His way back to life. Mad or sane, she stood at the center of the Fall’s turmoil. The whirl of instants revolved around her; around white gold and wild magic. They reached from the Land’s past into an unbearable future, but she held the crux of their devastation. The eye of the paradox. And she was still alive. Still human. Moment by moment, her heart continued its fraying labor. Therefore she was also the
present
, her own and Covenant’s and the Land’s. She could stand on the drained seabed because the tsunami had not yet come. The Worm had not.

Covenant had rushed into the
caesure
because Joan was there.

She was the only road that might lead him back to life and Linden, and to the last, necessary battles for the Land.

He had known the danger; the acute extremes of his vulnerability. Oh, he had known! He had never learned how to ward off the seductions of lost time, the dizzying call of chasms. For that reason, he had trusted—

But he could no longer remember who or what he had trusted. Alone in an irredeemable wilderness of cold while burrowing agony exposed every nerve, he was Joan. Her torment was his. He remembered nothing that was not her.

Somewhere among the multiplied dimensions of his extinction, his human hands still gripped the
krill
: High Lord Loric Vilesilencer’s supreme achievement. But it was wasted here because Covenant himself was helpless. He could not unravel his own mind from the skein of Joan’s deranged memories. The dagger’s implicit fire had no effect on his torment.

You have sold your freedom to purchase the misery of love,
turiya
Herem told him, laughing. While you remained within the Arch, you were capable of opposition. You enforced boundaries upon the World’s End. Now you are naught but fodder for my delight. Here your life is mine.

Covenant heard the Raver, but he did not listen. He was Joan. When the tsunami came, it would destroy her—and him with her. Only
turiya
would survive.

If or when Lord Foul decided that he wanted white gold, his servant would know exactly where to find it.

There every tale that Covenant had ever loved would end.

He no longer wondered why the old beggar had not given Linden warning of her peril. The Creator had recognized his own defeat. He had abandoned his creation.

Yet Joan did not think such thoughts; and so Covenant did not. She experienced only pain and betrayal. She felt only rage, wild and ultimately futile. She wanted only to
make it stop
.

At one time in her life, many years earlier, she had craved the opposite. More than anything, she had desired her life then to go on and on just as it was, sunlit and always content. With Covenant on Haven Farm. Pregnant with Roger. Surrounded by her beloved horses. Training them, not by breaking them to her will, but rather by comforting them until they trusted her. By luring them one gentle step at a time to want what she wanted. Happy. Passive.

She had found pleasure in Covenant’s first ecstasy of writing. She had enjoyed his passion for her body. The hurt of childbirth was nothing to her because her husband had written a bestseller, and because she had a son, and because her heart sang in the presence of horses.

Turiya
Raver relished those memories. They supplied the excoriation for everything that followed. Without them, she would not have felt so profoundly betrayed by Covenant’s leprosy.

From the first instant, she had loathed the maiming of his right hand. It disfigured him; tainted him in her eyes. But perhaps she could have lived with it. It was only his hand. Yet she could not quell her revulsion at what his amputation implied.

Leprosy. Her husband was a leper. His humanity had been cut away. His illness was a form of treachery because it destroyed her contentment. It would make her a leper as well. It would turn her precious, perfect son into a diseased thing; an object of abhorrence. Everyone would shun them, all of them. Even horses might flinch away.

And they would be right to do so. Leprosy was more than an affliction of the flesh. It was a judgment. A condemnation. Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting. Her husband,
her husband
, would sicken everyone who came near him.

In memories distorted by
turiya
’s malice and her own fears, Covenant’s novel was a lie. His exaltation in writing was a lie. His love was malevolence, a hunger to inflict his illness on her. If she had killed him then, she might still have been too late to save herself and her son.

But she could not kill him: not then. She had lacked that kind of courage. Instead the shock of his condition taught her that she lacked
any
kind of courage. Her sense of violation seemed to have no bottom. It had no end. It dug into her, and dug, until it exposed the fragility buried at the core of her ruined life. She was doing her utmost when she abandoned him. When she divorced him. When she went to live with her parents, putting as much distance as she could manage between herself and her cowardice.

Yet distance did not save her. The fumbling inadequacy of her parents did not save her. Just once, she had tried to reach out to Covenant. He had refused to speak to her. In his silence, she had heard the truth. Her husband had betrayed her—and she did not know how to live without him. Forsaking him, she had forsaken herself; had turned her back on sunshine and contentment and horses. He had falsified those things; or her fears had driven her to falsify them.

Excruciated, and unaware of what she did, she had already begun the process of selling her soul.

And whenever she contrived to convince herself that she was seeking help, she went further. Sharing her mind, Covenant relived her misdirected struggles as if they were his. His mind was broken: he could not defend himself. Like her, if in different ways, he had fallen far enough to plumb any depths.

Blank cold so extreme that it seared his spirit.

Hornets denouncing every particle of his mortal flesh.

And Joan.

He had become them all.

Therapist after therapist suggested reassurance, offered guidance back to strength. Some proposed medications. Others did not. But they were all wasted on her. She had never had any strength to which she might return. Weakness was her only resource. Passivity defined her. In the end, therapy gave her nothing. It asked her to confront the beating heart of her revulsion; and so it pushed her deeper.

And churches were no better. Religion after religion, they proposed redemption; promised grace to efface horror. They did not require confrontations. Instead they insisted on contrition. Another form of abandonment: the surrender of her will and abhorrence to their forgiving God.

That might have saved her. Living her life, Covenant prayed that it would. But she could not distinguish between contrition and self-abasement; between acknowledgment and blame. And she could not surrender her horror. It alone justified her. Within her, Covenant remembered the precise moment when she had first realized that she could see eyes like fangs in the back of her mind. Piercing her defenses, biting deep, the eyes had assured her that there was no difference between therapy and religion. Forgiveness was just another way of accepting the disease, the spiritual leprosy, inflicted by Covenant’s betrayal. Like therapy, religion expected her to excuse his crime against her. To take the blame herself.

She embraced revulsion because she understood it. The fangs in her mind approved. Offers of forgiveness only pushed her farther into the Lost Deep of her defining despair, her essential and necessary loathing.

Betrayed, she let everything else go—even her parents—even her son—until she discovered the Community of Retribution.

There she felt that she had found recognition at last.

Among those believers, those fanatics, she reveled in promises of punishment. They made sense to her. She became chattel to the Community’s fierce priests. They made sense to her. She spoke every word that came to her from the eyes in her mind. They all made sense to her. And in return, she was given a kind of peace. Not the peace of forgiveness: the Community of Retribution did not forgive. Rather she received the peace of universal condemnation. Within the Community, she was blameworthy only because the whole world deserved denunciation, and she was part of the world. In every other way—so the believers and their priests taught her—she was innocent because nothing was her fault. She simply existed: she had not done anything, caused anything, inflicted anything. And the world needed retribution.

It needed to exact the cost of her suffering from Covenant.

To that extent, she thought as he did. In her own fashion, she believed that guilt was power. But for her, as for him, the guilt was his. Not hers. The power was his. And if he were punished enough, if he suffered enough, if he met destruction for his crimes, his agony would redeem her.