Against All Things Ending (89 page)

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.