Against All Things Ending (71 page)

But its escape came too late; or it had misjudged its opportunity. It still clung to Jeremiah. Rather than flinging itself aside, it pounced at his neck with its fangs, seeking the nameless magicks hidden within him.

Too late. Too slow.

Anele had already pressed his hands and the Sunstone to the sides of Jeremiah’s head. Now he poured his birthright into the boy, using
orcrest
to channel his long-preserved inheritance into Jeremiah’s vacancy.

As he did so, the
orcrest
fell to powder in his grasp. It could not endure the forces streaming from it and through it.

Nevertheless it served its purpose.

Immediate Earthpower became a kind of fire in Jeremiah’s veins. It entered him utterly, blossomed in his chest, raced along his limbs, shone out of his skin.

And from the graveyard of his mind and the enduring throb of his heart, the rich essence of health and Law was sucked into the
croyel
’s mouth.

Belated realization filled the creature’s eyes with horror as its own malign ichor caught flame and
burned
—

In unison, the
croyel
and Roger squalled as if they were answering each other; suffering together. Then a conflagration for which the monster was entirely unprepared tore through it like a wildfire through brittle deadwood. On Jeremiah’s back, the succubus burst apart, consumed from within by energies that it could neither contain nor suppress. Gore and viscera sprayed out over the slope, and steamed in the hot sunshine, and did no hurt.

Jeremiah still stood slack-mouthed and dull, as unreactive as a husk. Nevertheless he rather than the
croyel
was free. The creature which had used and excruciated him had been destroyed.

By Anele, who lay at his feet gasping for breath. In the old man there remained no flicker or pulse of Earthpower to stitch together the rent remnants of his spirit. Yet he was sane at last, and smiling.

Linden wanted to sob like Esmer; wrap Jeremiah in her arms; wail over Anele’s dying body. But she had no time.

6.

Parting Company

Fighting raged around Linden and Jeremiah. Within the frantic protection provided by Stave, Clyme, Branl, and the Giants, Galt lay dead, and Anele was dying. Esmer’s sobs had faded, made impotent by manacles. The ur-viles and Waynhim had thrust their wedge between two of the Swordmainnir. Joined by the surviving remnants of their kind, the creatures flung liquid blackness to shield Linden’s company from Roger. Within that dark theurgy, Cavewights fell and died in agony.

Yet the cordon was failing. The Cavewights were too many; and Roger’s blasts struck the ridge like convulsions.

At the feet of her comrades lay Onyx Stonemage, clubbed senseless. Cabledarm fought on one knee, unable to support herself with her damaged leg. Frostheart Grueburn did the same, hamstrung by the thrust of a spear. But their longswords were being beaten down by the rabid savagery of their foes. Halewhole Bluntfist had lost the use of her right arm: she was forced to wield her blade with her left. Battered by too many blows, Latebirth’s broken cataphract hung from her shoulders in fragments. The Ironhand, Cirrus Kindwind, and Stormpast Galesend had all been hacked until they were weak with blood loss; but they continued to struggle, desperate as the doomed.

Like the Swordmainnir, the remaining
Haruchai
had been badly wounded. Still they punished their assailants as if they were as mighty as Giants, and as unyielding as granite. They shattered brute armor with punches and kicks, broke necks, snapped limbs, cracked skulls—and could not prevail.

Without the intervention of the ur-viles and Waynhim, every
Haruchai
and Giant would already be dead, scorched lifeless by Roger’s withering magma. But acid magicks intercepted a portion of his fury; deflected a portion. And he hurled his power like a madman, too crazed for thought or care. He seemed deranged by the loss of the
croyel
, and therefore of Jeremiah. Cavewights who chanced to stand in his path perished. His screams echoed everywhere as if the sky were a vault, featureless and sealed.

Mahrtiir had crawled to the edge of the battle. He could no longer defend himself, and there was no one left to guard him except Bhapa. The older Cord had abandoned Covenant to Pahni. Now Bhapa stood over the Manethrall with bleak determination in his eyes and his garrote in his hands.

But at the focus of the carnage, Jeremiah stood exactly as he had stood while he was possessed, slack and vacant, with nothing that resembled awareness in his muddy gaze; as unreactive as a corpse. His whole body thronged with Earthpower, Anele’s last gift. Yet his new strength changed nothing. It did not restore his mind.

When Roger had killed everyone else, he would go after Covenant: Linden did not doubt that. Lord Foul would consider her death, and Covenant’s, a victory, if Roger did not.

Covenant’s son needed the
croyel
and Jeremiah.
The
croyel
can use your kid’s talent
.
He’ll make us a door
.
A portal to eternity
.—
to help us become
gods.

For Roger, that hope was gone. Now he would have to trust the Despiser.

It was too much. Too much. Linden could not suffer it. All of her friends. Jeremiah and Covenant. She had felt overwhelmed and frantic earlier. Now her despair had no limits.

Unable to make any other choice, she became Gallows Howe: a killing field made flesh.

In the gypsum and dirt where it had fallen, High Lord Loric’s
krill
still shone. Its brilliance throbbed to the beat of Joan’s madness. And she was a rightful white gold wielder. Only her abjection and
turiya
Raver’s mastery restricted her access to wild magic.

Linden was done with hesitation, with paralysis, with weakness. Done with humanity. Deliberately she dropped the Staff of Law at Jeremiah’s feet. Then she lifted Covenant’s ring on its chain over her head. Closing the chain in her fist, she slipped the ring onto the index finger of her right hand.

With no more preparation than that, she stooped to touch the avid gem of the
krill
with Covenant’s wedding band.

Long ago, she had seen him do something similar when he had needed a trigger or catalyst; a source of power to overcome his instinctive reluctance.
She
was not reluctant: not now. And Esmer’s influence no longer blocked her. It would never hinder her again. But she had no right to white gold. She needed help.

In the instant that the ring made contact with the gem, she became a holocaust of silver flame.

When she had spent one heartbeat, or two, measuring her borrowed power with her health-sense so that she could be sure of her control, she left the collapsing defense of her friends and began to wreak havoc as if she had been born for butchery and death.

S
o quickly that she appalled herself, the battle was over. While her friends and the Demondim-spawn watched, too stunned or horrified or injured to react, she ravaged every Cavewight on the ridge; rent asunder the hilltop where Roger stood; brought down cascades of fire from the blank sky. When surviving creatures turned to flee, she let them go. But she would have harried Roger until she had scorched every drop of his blood with wild magic, if he had not first hidden behind blunt hills and then warded himself with lava while he raced away on the shoulders of a Cavewight.

At his escape, she raised a scream of her own into the air; a shriek of unconstrained wild magic that seemed to challenge the Despiser himself. She yelled for Liand, and howled for Anele, and cried out for the pain of her companions, until her strength failed. Then at last her world went dark. All of her burdens fell away, and there was no more power anywhere that could hurt her.

W
hen she recovered consciousness, she was sitting propped against a boulder at the base of Liand’s cairn. Someone must have put her there. Must have hung Covenant’s ring around her neck again, rested the Staff of Law across her lap. Stave, probably. He stood over her now, watching her while blood dripped from the ends of his fingers and the hem of his rent tunic.

Her entire being flinched at what she had done. But she could not undo it.

“Your absence has been brief, Linden,” the former Master answered before she found the will to question him. “We have only begun to tally our wounds.” His voice was strangely congested, thick with an emotion which she did not recognize. “Had you not bestirred yourself, however, I would have roused you. Our need for your aid is grievous. Among us, only the Unbeliever, the Cords, and your son lack any dire hurt.”

Then he turned and walked away as though he could no longer bear the sight of her. Oozing blood, he went to join the figures kneeling or supine near Jeremiah, Galt, Anele, and Esmer.

Thinking, Anele? she tried to pull herself to her feet. Is he still alive? Tried, and could not. If she managed to stand, she would see bodies. Hundreds of them. Thousands. She would be forced to confront the outcome of her despair.

Peering through a blur of weakness, she saw the black shapes of ur-viles and the grey forms of Waynhim moving among her companions. Dimly through the reek of spilled guts and gore, she caught the dank scent of
vitrim
. The Demondim-spawn were still trying to help. Their musty drink appeared to be all that kept some of the Giants and Mahrtiir alive. As far as she could tell, however,
vitrim
did nothing for Anele, although he did not refuse it. And Esmer laughed at it softly, without scorn, as if he had passed beyond the reach of any sustenance.

That the ur-viles and Waynhim offered kindness to Esmer confounded Linden. In a distant age, they had forged their manacles, foreseeing this day. Ever since she had first encountered them, the Demondim-spawn had come to her aid whenever Esmer had posed a threat. Yet now they showed him compassion?

For centuries or millennia, they had been among the most feared of the Despiser’s servants—

Closing her fingers on the warm wood of her Staff, she tried again to rise.

The bright silver of Caerroil Wildwood’s runes had vanished. They were inert again, as inarticulate as sigils. But the shaft retained the stark blackness of her fire. She could not imagine that any blaze would ever burn it clean. Still it was the Staff of Law, an instrument of Earthpower and health. When she asked it for a little strength, it replied with its familiar gifts.

Trembling, she braced herself on ambiguous commandments until she gained her feet.

Everywhere she looked, the ground had been desecrated by blood and offal, mangled limbs and bodies. Weapons and shattered armor littered the ridge. In the vicinity of the battle, the friable gypsum had been fouled until only a few random patches of whiteness remained to punctuate the carnage.

Above her, the voiceless sky seemed to retain echoes like memories of screaming and slaughter.

For a moment or two, she thought that she ought to cleanse the ridge. That should have been her next responsibility. A pyre for the dead: some form of sanctification for the betrayed hills. But then she sensed Thomas Covenant striding fiercely from the south as if he meant to deliver a burden of wrath and repudiation. At the same time, she felt Anele slip closer to his life’s last precipice. When he fell, others would follow him soon—and they, too, were her friends. Like Liand, they had given her more than she had ever given them.

Squaring her shoulders against the recrimination of the dead, Linden Avery left the cairn to resume the pretense that she was a healer.

Because she needed to do so, she went first to Jeremiah. With one hand, she stroked his flaccid cheek, confirming that he remained lost inside himself. That fact hurt her. Nevertheless it was true that he had been released from the
croyel
. Freed—To that extent, at least, the promise of his mended racecar had been kept. Received Earthpower enriched him with vitality. He gave no sign that he could use his new strength. Yet the grisly sores of the monster’s feeding had already begun to heal themselves.

Briefly Linden hugged him. She had been too long denied the simple comfort of touching him. Then, while Covenant was still too far away to judge her, she turned to acknowledge the sufferings of her friends.

Among the Giants, only Rime Coldspray and Frostheart Grueburn met the rue in Linden’s eyes. Stormpast Galesend knelt with her hands clamped on Cabledarm’s thigh, trying to slow the bleeding. In spite of her injuries and maiming, Cirrus Kindwind pressed repeatedly on Onyx Stonemage’s chest as if she feared that Stonemage would stop breathing. Stonemage’s breastplate hampered her efforts; but Kindwind clearly did not have the strength to remove it. Laboriously, like a woman with fractured ribs, Latebirth struggled to tie a tourniquet above the spear in Grueburn’s upper leg. After a glance at Linden, Coldspray continued working on Halewhole Bluntfist’s right arm, trying to reset dislocated bones.

The ur-viles and Waynhim gave
vitrim
to all who could or would accept it. Nourished by their weird lore, Manethrall Mahrtiir had recovered enough to stand facing Covenant’s approach. And Bhapa stood with him. They kept their backs to Linden. But she saw in the stiffness of their spines, the clench of their shoulders, that they were readying themselves to confront the Unbeliever’s ire on her behalf.