Against All Things Ending (39 page)

Then Liand’s light was cut off as though he and Stonemage had fallen out of reach. A rush of failure filled Linden’s lungs. Sickening swarms of creatures had burrowed too deeply into her: she feared that she would never breathe again.

Somehow she clung to Frostheart Grueburn.

“Here!” Kindwind shouted. “A clear passage! If the Ardent and the ur-viles endure, they will gain a more defensible path.”

Through bites and squirming that had no tangible form, Linden seemed to catch a memory from Covenant, as if pieces of their past had leaked out of his chaotic recollections. When they had first come to the Land together—when they had been gaoled in Mithil Stonedown—Sunder had touched Covenant’s forehead with the Graveler’s Sunstone at Covenant’s urging. By that action, Sunder had awakened Covenant’s ring, triggering wild magic with
orcrest
.

Linden might be able to do something similar—if she could get close to Liand. Any hint of health-sense might rebuff her dismay; her accumulating collapse. Then she might be able to choose Earthpower and Law instead of carrion. She could use the flame of her Staff to scour her flesh clean.

If only she could breathe—

“As soon as you can,” she gasped with her last air. “Take me to Liand. I need his
orcrest
.”

Grueburn nodded. She was panting too hard to speak.

Kindwind and Covenant were gone. With her arms rigid around Jeremiah and the
croyel
, Rime Coldspray skidded farther. The monster gazed straight at Linden. Its grin showed its fangs.

Then Coldspray stopped. When she heaved herself and her burdens upright, she did not collide with the upper wall of the split. Instead she and they vanished into a break in the stone.

Half a dozen heartbeats later, Grueburn carried Linden there; and Linden snatched scraps of better air from the Sunstone. As Grueburn turned her back to the lower wall, Linden shifted to face upward. Past the Giants ahead of her, she caught a brief dazzle of purity.

Here a wider fault intersected the split. The new crevice was level at first: then it ascended steeply into the immured dark. Shards of
orcrest
-light showed the Waynhim scrambling at the slope. Their hands and feet dislodged clots of ancient dirt like scurrying beetles. Stonemage and Liand had already neared the foot of the climb. But behind them, behind Kindwind and Covenant, Coldspray had paused to rest. There she held her burdens with the
croyel
’s visage turned away from Linden. The Ironhand’s grip on the
krill
did not waver.

She must have heard Linden’s appeal. Linden would have to pass her in order to catch up with Liand.

He was too far away.

In that position, the dagger’s argence shone straight into Linden’s face. It shed stark streaks along the stone; found sudden gleams like inspirations on facets of mica and quartz; exposed the sullen sheen of moisture oozing downward.

The sensations of scurrying in Linden’s clothes intensified. Scores of biting things sought tender flesh hidden from the light. She could not endure it; could not wait for Grueburn to reach the Stonedownor.

Halfway between Kindwind and Coldspray, Esmer stood watching as if he had no real interest in anything that transpired among Mount Thunder’s roots.

“Hurry,” Linden pleaded: a raw cough of suffocation.

Groaning for air, Grueburn thrust herself upright, strode toward the Ironhand.

Millennia ago, wild magic had destroyed the original Staff of Law; but Linden was too desperate to care. As soon as she could, she extended her own Staff. Frantically she jabbed one iron-shod heel into the heart of the gem’s radiance.

For a terrible instant, she felt nothing. After all, why should she? The
krill
was not
orcrest
: the Staff was not white gold. And she had no health-sense. She could not focus her needs. She could only try to pray while imminent wails bubbled in the back of her throat.

Then a gentle surge of energy touched her hands, a palpable warmth—

Quickly she jerked back the Staff, hugged it to her chest; concentrated every supplication of her life on the runed black wood.

Hindered by proximity to the bane’s magicks, flickers of new life leaked into her aggrieved nerves.

She clung to that vitality, stoked it. Demanded. Cajoled.

By small increments, it grew stronger. A flame as evanescent as a will-o’-the-wisp slid along the shaft. Too frail to be sustained, it evaporated. But another took its place, and another—and the third spread. Briefly it traced the runes as if the wood had been etched with oil. Then it lit other fires. A tumble of flames leapt out as if they sprang from Linden’s chest.

Light as kindly and sapid as sunshine cascaded into the crevice. Soon she stood in the core of a pillar of fire; of Earthpower and life.

On all sides, Kevin’s Dirt restricted her strength. Her power was a pale mockery of the forces which she had summoned on other occasions. Nevertheless it fed her spirit; implied possible transformations. It would suffice.

It had to.

Febrile with haste, she pulled flame tightly around her; clad herself in conflagration. Then she began scrubbing every distressed inch of her body with cleanliness.

The gnawing and pinching, the crawling, the quick slither of hysteria: they fell away one by one, incinerated or quashed. When she had burned them all to ash, however, she found that nothing had changed. The conviction that she had become carrion, that she bred only death—her true despair—lay too deep for any anodyne that she knew how to provide for herself. A sickness of the soul afflicted her; and the devouring faces of She Who Must Not Be Named drew closer by the moment.

Nevertheless she could breathe easily again. She could see. The revulsion of centipedes and spiders had been banished. Her companions sucked fresh air into their lungs. Coldspray offered her a grin of gratitude.

Stave’s flat mien betrayed no sign of doubt. But Esmer regarded Linden as if her ailment were his.

Climbing higher, the Waynhim had ascended past a bulge in the fissure’s wall. Below them on the slope, Stonemage waited with Liand, beckoning urgently. In the illumination of his Sunstone and her Staff, Linden saw that Kindwind and the Humbled had also stopped. They must have felt Coldspray and Grueburn halt.

Linden studied Covenant long enough to confirm that he remained lost in the world’s past. Then she turned to gauge her other companions.

Anele’s fright cried out to her nerves. Galesend’s alarm mounted as her comrades gathered at her back. Nevertheless Linden ignored them; forced herself to cast her senses farther.

Beyond the Giants, she tasted the rank vitriol of the ur-viles in rabid bursts. Among them, the feverish gibber of the Ardent’s incantations added his support against the baleful gnash of teeth and pain—

She Who Must Not Be Named was too close.

Fresh panic stung Linden. “Oh, God.” She had taken too much time for herself. “We have to
go
.”

“Aye,” growled the Ironhand. She needed no urging. Bearing Jeremiah and his doom and the eldritch threat of the
krill
, she headed for the slope. In spite of her long weariness and her exigent burdens, she managed a brief sprint.

Grueburn followed immediately, hurrying over the damp grit and scree of the crevice floor. At her back came Galesend and the rest of the Swordmainnir.

As Grueburn heaved her bulk up the loose surface of the ascent, Linden felt the Ardent squeeze out of the canted split. She perceived him clearly now. His wheeze of effort scraped along her nerves as he lifted himself into the air on strips of fabric that clung to the crude walls. Rising, he made way for the ur-viles below him.

Then Linden smelled burning—

—from the Insequent. His raiment had lost many of its colors. Scores of his ribbands had been charred black, or scorched to brittle threads. She tasted his sweating frenzy like iron on her tongue; his sharp fear and fraying resolve; his desperation. Yet he did not flee ahead of the ur-viles. Instead he braced himself high above them, guarding their retreat.

As they straggled out of the split, the creatures seemed ragged and unsteady; routed. The narrowing of the passage had forced them to disperse their wedge: they had been unable to combine their theurgies. As a result, some of them had been horribly damaged. Linden sensed creatures with cleft hands or feet, missing limbs. She felt a few ur-viles collapse on the damp dirt and fail to rise. Through the bane’s ferocity, she smelled the acrid pulse of unnatural blood.

They were the last of their kind. One by one, they were being decimated.

Floundering, they formed a new wedge in the crevice. She could not guess how many of them had been lost. Ten? More? Nevertheless they prepared to continue fighting. After a long moment, their loremaster appeared out of the split, wielding its ruddy jerrid. As the largest and strongest of the creatures reclaimed its position at the point of the wedge, the power of the whole formation snapped into focus.

A turmoil of screaming faces thrust into the crevice. It filled the fault from wall to wall.

The ur-viles responded with a spray of fluid force, bitter and corrosive. Their magicks were too puny to injure the bane; but they made the faces pause—

While She Who Must Not Be Named summoned Her many selves in pursuit, the creatures backed away.

The bane must have been certain of Her victims. She did not deign to hasten. The Demondim-spawn were able to put a little distance between themselves and their chosen foe.

Distracted by alarm, Linden’s concentration slipped. Her fire faltered.

At once, she felt renewed squirming inside her boots, along the waist of her jeans, across her breasts. Nightmare spiders and centipedes as avid as rapine resumed their interrupted feast.

She heard herself whimpering: a thin frail sound like the cry of a dying child. She tried to stop, tried to close her throat against a surge of hysteria as sour as bile, and could not. She was an unburied corpse ripe with rot, helpless to refuse any dire appetite.

Abruptly a different scream shocked the air: a howl of such extremity that it seemed to draw blood from the Ardent’s throat. In a display of strength that staggered Linden, his ribbands wrenched huge chunks of rock out of the walls.

No, he did more than that. He did not merely tear boulders loose. Somehow he pulled the walls themselves toward each other, heaved on them until they shattered.

In an instant, an avalanche destroyed the entire opening of the crevice. The sheer mass of the rockfall shook the standing walls. Moist grit and debris slid under the feet of the Giants, poured them downward. The very gutrock groaned like an echo of the Ardent’s scream.

Tons of granite and malachite, schist and travertine, crashed onto the bane. Rubble buried every raving face.

In panic, Linden forgot the Ardent and the ur-viles; forgot the bane and insects and gnawing; forgot her failing grasp on Earthpower. Without transition, she became an eruption of flame. If the slope slipped too far, it might bury the Giants. Certainly it would make the ascent impossible. Unless she caught it with fire and Law, forced it to hold—

The earth slide should have been too heavy for her; but she ignored its fatal weight, its impending rush. Hardly aware of what she did, she anchored the slope until the convulsion of the avalanche passed.

Mahrtiir tried to shout Linden’s name, but air thick with new dust clogged his throat. Gasping, Latebirth called upward, “We are unharmed! As are the ur-viles!” A tattered breath. “I cannot discern the Ardent!”

More strongly, Stonemage responded, “We also are unharmed!”

The bane was not gone. She had not perished or suffered. She had only been thwarted. Already Her puissance reached through the rockfall; yowled against Linden’s abraded nerves. In moments, She would force open a passage—

Crawling things in the privacy of Linden’s flesh brought her back to herself. Oh, God, they were everywhere! They did not exist. Nevertheless they relished her dead flesh as if she had perished long ago. Dozens of devoured faces raged to consume her, uncounted women in limitless torment.

Somehow she held on until the slope settled. Then she withdrew her power. Weakly she called out for the Ardent.

The company could not escape these depths without him. The ur-viles and Waynhim obviously knew the way. But the Lost Deep was too far below the lowest reaches of the Wightwarrens. None of Linden’s companions could climb so far, or follow the paths of the Demondim-spawn. They needed the Ardent’s ability to translate them elsewhere.

In the distance, an exhausted voice replied, “I am spent. Naught remains.”

“Are you capable of movement?” shouted the Ironhand. “If we must, we will contrive to retrieve you!”

“Nay.” The Ardent’s response was a sigh of utter weariness. “Your strength is required for flight. I will follow as I can.”

“We will not forsake you!” Coldspray countered.

“Nor do I wish to be forsaken.” He sounded too frail to go on living. “You must flee. Therefore I must follow. I cannot confront She Who Must Not Be Named again.” A moment later, he added, “If the lady will but cleanse the air—”

Choking down revulsion for her own body—her own existence—Linden swept dust aside; burned away stagnation. Then she wrapped theurgy around herself until she was sheathed in cerements of flame. Whimpering again, she tried to root roaches and centipedes out of her revolted flesh.

That was as much as she could do.

Ahead of and behind her, Giants flung themselves at the climb, fighting for purchase on the weakened slope. Raggedly Grueburn staggered upward. Above the Swordmainnir, the Waynhim chittered encouragements or reprimands. At the rear of the company, the ur-viles hurried to ascend.

Lights tried to fill the space: Liand’s Sunstone in the lead, Loric’s
krill
, Linden’s personal fire, the dour glow of the loremaster’s jerrid. But they were too small to cast back the dark. Midnight and vast stone crowded around them; threatened to smother them. Within the crevice, the slope appeared to climb indefinitely, as if here dirt and damp and stale air clawed for an unattainable sky.