Against All Things Ending (83 page)

Dirt crunched under her boot heels as she walked among the Giants. The ground was freezing—

After High Lord Elena’s disastrous use of the Power of Command, when her spirit had been forced to serve Lord Foul, she had used Berek’s Staff of Law to inflict an unnatural winter upon the Land. Standing at the Colossus, she had scourged the Despiser’s foes with snow and ice.

In Andelain, Linden had unleashed something worse. This day’s deranged weather was only the leading edge of a far more savage storm.

Berek’s spectre had said of Lord Foul,
He may be freed only by one who is compelled by rage, and contemptuous of consequence.

Had she done that? Truly? Had she already accomplished the Despiser’s release?

If so, she had earned the right to despair.

The cold made her leg ache as though the cuts had sunk into her bones.

The blast struck tears from her eyes: she could not see. Coldspray shouted demands or warnings that vanished along the wind. Cirrus Kindwind, Latebirth, and Onyx Stonemage joined Grueburn, Bluntfist, and Cabledarm to form a partial cordon. The Ironhand and Galesend stayed with Linden, Stave, and Mahrtiir.

Jeremiah still had not closed his eyes. He did not appear to blink. Perhaps he never blinked. If so, he would eventually go blind. As blind as Anele. It was inevitable.

Stave gripped Linden’s arm. “Attend, Chosen.”

She was already shivering.

She squeezed her eyes shut, scrubbed tears away, opened them again.

At first, she saw only small green flames bobbing like Wraiths in the distance. Their essential
wrongness
was palpable; but they were so little—Too minor to wield much force.

Then she realized that the fires were not affected by the wind. They danced and moved blithely, oblivious to the blast.

That should have been impossible.

Blinking fervidly, she made out the forms of the creatures. As Stave had said, they looked vaguely human. Naked, lacking either pelts or garments. No taller than her shoulders. Cupped in each of their hands, they carried quick flaws of emerald like recollections of the Illearth Stone. Green glints reflected auguries or promises in their large round eyes. Small as they were, they resembled eidolons reeking with malice.

They advanced steadily, but not in a group. Instead they spread out across the lower ground and partway up the hillsides: at least a score of them; perhaps thirty. Straining her senses, Linden saw no bonds of theurgy between them, no reinforced power. Yet she felt certain that they had come with a shared intent.

While the nearest creatures were still a dozen Giantish strides away, Rime Coldspray swept out her stone glaive. “Hold!” she shouted at the caper of fires, the green reflections. “Friend or foe, we require a parley! Name your purpose. Explain your wishes. We mean to defend ourselves if we must!”

The wind carried her voice away as if it would never be heard.

Yet the—eight? ten?—creatures most directly in front of her halted. For a few paces, the others did not. Then, beginning on the lowland and spreading incrementally up the slopes on both sides, those creatures also stopped.

Now the company stood half-enclosed in a shallow arc of handheld fires that defied the wind.

A creature spoke, Linden could not tell which one. Perhaps they all did, using a single voice. Without apparent effort, or any hint of emotion, it said, “We are the Feroce.”

Its sound was strangely squishy, damp and ill-defined, like mud squeezed between toes.

“We are Swordmainnir of the Giants,” answered Coldspray. Her blade did not waver. “Why have you come?”

The pain in Linden’s leg had begun to burn. Without the support of her Staff, she might not have been able to stand.

“There is among you,” replied the creature or creatures, “a stick of power.” They may all have been discrete instances of the same being. “The cruel metal we will not touch. It is abhorrent. But we claim the stick. Our High God hungers for it.”

Linden gasped; felt the breath snatched from her lungs. Christ, her
leg
—!

All of the Giants drew their swords. Stave shifted closer to Linden. With his garrote in his hands, the Manethrall positioned himself near Stormpast Galesend and Jeremiah.

The blast was becoming a gale, as gelid and heartless as the wasteland within a
caesure
.

Who were the Feroce?
What
were they?

Loudly the Ironhand replied, “You cannot have the Staff of Law!” Her tone was firm, but unthreatening. “Yet if you will speak with us concerning your High God’s hunger, perhaps we will discover some fashion in which we may be of service. We neither fear nor desire contention. Rather our preference is for amity in all things. Speak, therefore. Let us together consider the nature of your need.”

Linden heard a splash of water, an ooze of loam, as the creature responded, “We are the Feroce. We do not need.”

Did she see a multitude of verdant fires leap and flare, mounting like disease into the heavens? No: it was only imagination. Hallucination. Not magic.

There was nothing except darkness.

A subtle shift in the air. Realities swept aside; replaced.

A momentary sensation of falling, of vertigo, as if she had lost her balance.

But she caught herself. Her leg held. It did not hurt.

It had never hurt. That pain did not exist. She had already forgotten it. Only her palm stung where she had gouged it with her car keys.

She was in the farmhouse, Covenant’s house. It shook around her, battered by angry winds. Outside, lightning glared, an erratic succession of furies from a clear sky. Thunder groaned in the timbers of the building. Joists squalled at the force of the dry storm.

The detritus of Covenant’s former life littered the kitchen floor. Blood cooled in coagulating puddles. But she did not stop here. She did not turn and flee. Instead she entered the short passage leading to three doors. Covenant’s bedroom. The bathroom. The last room, where he had cared for Joan.

Following splashes of blood and the splayed illumination of her flashlight, Linden went down the hall to the last room. Where else could she go? Roger had Jeremiah.

The weight of her medical bag in her left hand steadied her. It was her anchor against the storm’s madness, and Roger’s. Her only weapon. Her grip on the flashlight abraded the small wound in her palm, but that beam was too frail to protect her. She had left her coat at home. Deliberately she had put on a clean red flannel shirt, clean jeans, sturdy boots. She had driven here, to Haven Farm, where she knew what she would find.

The door was open: the last room. She smelled ozone and blood. The house trembled. Roger had committed butchery here. But he had not killed some poor animal. Certainly not: not Covenant’s heartless son. He had shed the life of one of his hostages.

Linden felt as buffeted as Covenant’s abandoned home. A strange disorientation thwarted her. For some reason, she expected there to be crusted dirt on her shirt. Stains, grime, tatters: consequences. She expected a neat hole over her heart. But the flannel was still clean. It was practically new. Her jeans were innocent of Roger’s carnage.

Lightning struck nearby, lightning and thunder, a crash like a tall tree shattering. Roger had taken Jeremiah. Jeremiah had driven a splinter like a spike through the center of her hand. The last room was a ruin, wrecked and toxic. There the wan thrust of the flashlight revealed Sara Clint lying on the forlorn bed in the dark residue of her life. She had been cut dozens of times,
dozens of times
. Roger had lashed her wrists and ankles to the bed frame with duct tape. Then, over and over again, he had sliced through the white fabric of her uniform, drawing venous blood. Preparation for a ritual.

Static made a galvanic nimbus of Linden’s hair, a halo of desperation. Jeremiah! Roger had cut Sara with
that
knife, the large cleaver protruding from the pillow beside her desecrated head. When he was satisfied, he had stabbed the blade into her heart before leaving the knife in the pillow: a presentation for Linden’s benefit, demonstrating his seriousness.

He was gone now. He had taken Jeremiah and Joan and Sandy Eastwall. To the place where he meant to sacrifice Jeremiah. And probably Sandy as well. He might need her blood to open the way. He might need even his own mother’s life.

Linden should have spent a while grieving over Sara’s body. Absolutely she should have. No one could say that Sara Clint had not earned at least that much recognition. She was a good woman, and she had been murdered.

But Linden had no time. She knew where Roger was going; where he was taking his prisoners. She knew why. She had to catch up with him before—

Jeremiah!

There was something that she needed to remember.

—before he reached the sheet of rock in the woods where Thomas Covenant had been killed. The place where Lord Foul’s bonfire had claimed half and more of Jeremiah’s hand.

No, there was nothing to remember.

Yes. There was.

A face.

Whose face was it? Jeremiah’s? No. She had not forgotten his lost visage. It was as essential to her as the pathways of her brain. That was why she was here.

Liand’s, then? Anele’s? Stave’s?

Who in hell were Liand and Anele and Stave?

And why did she want to think about Giants? She had not seen them for ten years, and could not afford to be distracted by old love. Not now.

In spite of her haste, she tried to honor Sara briefly. A few heartbeats of sorrow. But she could no longer smell blood. Or ozone. Those scents were heavy enough to cling. Nevertheless the barrage of winds had torn them from the house, through the broken windows and gapped walls.

Instead she smelled smoke: smoke so thick and dire that it could have been the leaping fume of the Despiser’s blaze. She saw wisps in the beam of her flashlight. Pressure grew in her chest. Threats of suffocation filled her lungs.

She had to go. She had wasted too much time.

Wait! Her shirt—Her jeans—

Nothing. They might as well have been new. She did not know Liand, or Anele, or Stave, of course not, she had never heard those names before.

Roger had taken Jeremiah and Joan and Sandy into the woods. Linden knew where he was going.

Where had Liand’s name come from—or Anele’s and Stave’s—or Mahrtiir’s—if she had never met them?

Lightning had struck the house: it must have. All of this dry wood was going to burn like a pyre.

God, she was hallucinating! Her son needed her, and she was losing her mind. Stave spurned by the Masters. Covenant’s hands burning, ravaged by Joan and wild magic. Covenant was dead. Killed ten years ago. Nothing after this moment had happened. She had imagined it, all of it. Every struggle, every nightmare, every loss. Liand and Anele: Stave and Mahrtiir: Pahni and Bhapa: Giants. They were figments, chimeras sent to distract her. To paralyze her. Until the flames took her. So that she would not follow Roger.

So that she would not save her son.

Screams of rage or terror that she could not hear ripped at her throat as she wheeled away from Sara and murder, rushed from the bedroom back into the hall.

Covenant’s ring hung on its chain under her clean shirt; but white gold had no power to save her here.

Roger wanted it. He had said so.
It belongs to me
. Otherwise he could have created his portal here, in this house; doomed her where she stood. But he lacked his father’s ring.

Lurid flames chewed the edges of the boards, the walls of the passage. The whole house was kindling. A jolt like the impact of a hurricane staggered the entire structure. Swinging her bag, Linden beat at the fires; recovered her balance.

She needed to dash past them before they could catch her. Reach the kitchen, the living room, the front door. Escape into the night. Free Jeremiah.

But she was already too late. Ahead of her, the door to Covenant’s room burst outward, blasted from its hinges by a furnace-roar of flame. Conflagration howled into the hall. Smoke as black as midnight struck at her, demented fists of heat. They drove her backward. Soon the fire itself would be as black as—as black as—

She could not flee through the house.

She had nothing with which to fend off the heat except her medical bag. Holding it up like a shield, she returned in a stagger to the room where Sara lay. Sara’s cruel pyre.

Linden slapped the door shut behind her, but she knew that it would not protect her. Her bag was her only defense. In a rush, harried by Cavewights and killing, she reached the window.

The glass was broken and jagged: it would cut her to shreds. It would kill Galt.

Who was
Galt
?

Dear God! She had to stop this. Stop
imagining
. Roger had Jeremiah. He had Joan and Sandy. If Linden died here—if she let her delusions trap her—nothing would save her son.

With her bag, she swept daggers of glass from their frame. Her flashlight she tossed outside. She meant to throw her bag as well; but first she braced her right hand on the window-frame.

A shard of glass dug into her palm. Blood pulsed from the cut. She could not let go of her bag. She
needed
it—

—needed it to fight the flames.

Screaming like the storm and the blaze and the bane, she took the bag in her right hand, sealed her grip with blood. Awkward as a cripple, she began to crawl backward through the window.

Stave would have helped her, but he did not exist. None of her friends had ever existed.—
dreaming
, Covenant had once told her.
We’re sharing a dream
. If she could not stop imagining people and events and nightmares, Roger would butcher her son.

But going backward through the window required her to brace her shins on the window-frame. She felt half a dozen cuts in one leg, a dozen, more cuts than there were scraps of glass.

And when she dropped to the ground outside the house, she was still in the hallway. Smoke and flame boiled toward her, a tumult avid for the end of all things. But now the last room, Sara’s death-chamber, had become an inferno. It roared with ruin like the rest of the farmhouse.