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.

Ultimately that was why she had returned to Haven Farm, and to him. So that he would try to help her. It was why she had tasted his blood and given him moments of lucidity. With her weakness, she had lured him to his doom in exactly the same way that she would have seduced a horse too vicious for any fate except slaughter.

In torment and frailty, she was still fighting for salvation. Everything else—rage and the Raver, wild magic, self-abuse, carnage—was just confusion.

Because of course eventually she had realized that she had been betrayed again. Eyes like fangs had not spared her that knowledge. Turiya Herem had not spared her. Covenant was the source of her horror. Her agony and degradation could not end while he lived. But her efforts on Haven Farm had led only to the death of his body. His spirit flourished in the Arch of Time. While she grew weaker, he acquired new strength. He was loved. He was even revered. Retribution was her only conceivable release, and he blocked it. Worse, he negated it. Simply by standing against her, he made her less than nothing. His treachery transformed every single moment and slash of her unceasing anguish into a cruel joke.

Turiya did not let her forget that. Contemptuously he ruled her thoughts. He guided her use of her ring. And he reminded her that her son hated her. Her own son. Who could have spared her; could have made it stop.

Roger had refused to do so because he scorned her pain. He had come for her only to inflict more brutality. Like his father, he had betrayed her utterly.

If she could have found anything within herself except pain and turiya Herem, she would have torn down entire worlds to punish him.

Behold! the Raver chortled to Covenant. His glee was the purest sting, the most perfect ice. Witness the outcome of your long strife! She is yours. You have made her to be what she is. Are you not therefore culpable for her deeds?

If Joan’s caesures had not damaged the Law of Time, Linden could not have resurrected Covenant. She could not have roused the Worm of the World’s End. She was not a rightful wielder of wild magic. She did not have enough power. No, the original wounds to the structure of Life and Death had been delivered by Elena, Sunder, and Caer-Caveral. But Falls kept those hurts fresh. Without them, Linden would have failed.

By the inexorable logic of guilt, the fault was Covenant’s.

Involuntarily he nodded. He did not have it in him to contradict turiya. Like Joan, he had been shattered. The fact that she had fallen too far to be retrieved altered nothing. Indeed, he had not merely made her what she was. By permitting himself to be withdrawn from the Arch, when he could have refused the summons to Andelain, he had removed a vital barrier against her madness and wild magic. To that extent, he had enabled the barren future within which he was trapped.

At one time, perhaps, she had been responsible for herself. Now the burden was his.

Cold and scalding as congealed fire, the flat wilderland ached toward its illimitable horizons. An infinitude of disarticulated instants burrowed like screaming into Covenant’s helpless flesh. Within Joan’s mind, he returned to Haven Farm and horses in sunlight. He lived through what had become of her over and over again, as she did. Endlessly they repeated the cycle of her terrible dismay.

Such things held him. They had always held him, and always would. This moment would never lead to another, and so he could neither escape nor die. Nothing would ever change.

Nevertheless Branl and Clyme stood on either side of him. They remained exactly where they had been ever since this specific instant had been ripped out of its natural continuum.

They did not look at him. They had never looked at him. They were unaware of his presence—or they, too, no longer existed.

“Ur-Lord,” Branl said: a gust of vapor as gelid and unbearable as stark ice. “You must return to yourself.”

“You must,” Clyme said. Plumes of frost issued from his mouth. “We cannot ward you.”

“We are Haruchai,” Branl said. “We cannot share our minds with you.”

“We are Haruchai,” Clyme echoed. “We do only what we can. Nothing more. As we have ever done.”

They stood beside Covenant. Companions. He was not alone.

Nothing changed. Here there was no possibility of change.

Nonetheless Branl put his hand on Covenant’s left elbow. Clyme grasped the right.

Together they lifted Covenant’s arms until he could see Loric’s krill clenched in both of his numbed hands.

Oh, they were Haruchai! They lived in each other’s thoughts. They could carry the burden of too much time without faltering. And they stayed away from Joan. They had that power; that salvific intransigence. Stave had done the same. Even when he could have witnessed the private writhing of Linden’s spirit, he had held himself apart.

The dagger’s shining did not pierce Covenant’s sight. His eyes were frozen. They had been chewed out of their orbits. Mere radiance could not blind him to what he saw; what he had seen; what he would always see. It was only wild magic. It was not redemption.

But it was wild magic, an inherent and inextricable aspect of the Arch of Time. It added a new dimension to the overlapping realities of his helplessness.

While Clyme and Branl supported him—while they upheld the krill’s transcendence—he saw more than the flat plain; more than swarming hornets; more than Joan’s reiterated suffering.

He also saw her as if from the outside. As if he were present in her present.

She stood ankle-deep in muck and water surrounded by jagged rocks and cruel reefs. Somehow she had crept or clambered several hundred paces across the seabed. Now she faced the blasted cliff where Foul’s Creche had fallen. Under the sealed doom of the night sky, she faced Covenant and the Humbled.

In her trembling fist, she clutched her wedding band with its chain wrapped around it.

Her knuckles were raw. Blood pulsed from the sore on her temple where she had punched and punched herself. In its own way, her self-abuse matched Covenant’s bleeding forehead. Blood made streaks of anguish down her sunken cheek. It stained the filth and tatters of her hospital gown. Rage blazed like the krill in her eyes. A rictus bared her few remaining teeth. The gaps in her gums oozed more blood. It marked her mouth as though she fed on living flesh.

From his prison inside her mind, Covenant saw that she also saw him. She saw the Humbled and Loric’s bright weapon as if they had all stepped out of her madness to confront her.

Watching himself and his companions while he also watched her, Covenant saw that he and Branl and Clyme were making their way toward her. Awash in silver, they traversed the unfathomable dark. Together they passed around boulders sharp enough to shred their flesh, avoided fingers of coral that reached for them like blades, splashed through puddles and pools left behind by the indrawn ocean.

On all sides as far as the light of the krill extended, waters and gasping fish and sea-plants quivered in the shocks of distant convulsions. But such things did not trouble Joan. She wanted the tsunami. It could not come soon enough.

Staring through her appalled eyes, Covenant saw himself and the krill and the Humbled advance toward her like the approach of horror: the ultimate apotheosis of her despair.

None of this was real: he understood that. It was a mirage of movement and sequence made possible by Loric’s lore and Joan’s wild magic, nothing more; a mere figment. Nothing had changed. Nothing could change. He remained lost in his last Fall. His own abyss would never release him.

But that did not matter. It was irrelevant. Meaningless. Because Joan believed what she saw. Participating in her thoughts, Covenant knew that she believed he had come for her.

She believed that he meant to finish what he had started when he had married and betrayed her; when he had afflicted her with a cruel son. The man whom she most loathed and feared: the man who haunted her worst terrors. The man who had made her what she was.

And she had no skest to defend her. The Raver had sent them all to oppose Covenant among the Shattered Hills.

With a shriek that seemed to split the world, she raised her fist. Striking at her forehead, she unleashed a blast savage enough to incinerate an entire legion of Thomas Covenants and Haruchai.

The krill accepted her attack. Its jewel became a sun in Covenant’s grasp. Some of her force the dagger simply dissipated. Some it absorbed until its edges became sharp enough to cut through the boundaries between realities.

Nevertheless a portion of her fury hit him.

It did not kill him outright because he was not real. He had no physical existence, and so he could not be extirpated from her nightmares. But he was still vulnerable. She created caesures with wild magic. She could affect what happened within them.

She could hurt him.

In the multiplied simultaneous instants of impact, Covenant finally understood why Lord Foul had not forbidden turiya Raver to endanger Jeremiah with Falls. Yes, the Despiser burned to possess Jeremiah’s gifts; to control them. And Linden’s son would be forever unattainable if he were lost within a caesure. Eventually the destruction of the Arch of Time would destroy him also. But if wild magic enabled Joan to take action inside her temporal maelstroms, turiya could do the same through her. In effect, therefore, turiya Herem had the power to snatch Jeremiah back from chaos. Lord Foul could recapture the boy and use him.

But no foe of the Land would choose to recapture Covenant. Joan’s force hurled him away. It pounded him against rocks and shoals.

The Humbled did not move to catch him. They did not react at all. Instead they stood rigid as death, frozen in timeless ice and hornets.

Their passivity was turiya’s doing. The Raver lived within Joan. He ruled her. As much as her madness permitted, he guided her rage. Riding her fire, he had reached into the Fall and mastered Clyme and Branl.

They were done. They did not exist. They had never existed.

But—

Hellfire!

But—

Hell and blood!

—Joan’s blow had other effects as well: effects which Herem had not intended, and could not prevent. It increased the implicit puissance of the krill, yes. That was important. It was necessary. But her violence also cast Covenant out of her mind. It externalized him. She could not end his life while he was absent in chaos, and so her hunger for retribution began to make him real. Physically present.

Inadvertently her despair resurrected him in front of her.

And the complex lore galvanized in Loric’s blade reinforced Covenant’s manifestation. It enhanced his substance. His grip on it quickened his translation out of the caesure.

Already the gelid wilderness was fraying; evaporating. The firestorm of severed instants lost some of its ferocity. He was no longer trapped inside Joan.

If she struck him again, she would make him fully present.

But the same blow would also incinerate him. With one more bolt of silver lightning, she would finally rid herself of the ghoul which had haunted her suffering.

Until then, however—until she punched herself once more, transformed her intimate agony into coruscation—

Try it, Covenant panted. Try it. Try to survive it yourself. You’ve been making too many caesures. You exhausted yourself getting here. You’re so weak you can hardly stand. So go on. Try to kill me without burning out your own heart.

While she groped for her last strength, he had things to do.

Shaking in pain, he struggled to his feet.

She had hit him hard. He had landed hard. His chest felt like a jumble of fractured ribs. Rocks and coral had torn strips from his jeans and T-shirt. They had shredded his arms and torso, parts of his legs. Blood ran from his forehead and a score of other wounds. Every beat of his pulse spilled more of his humanity. He was scarcely able to swallow or draw breath or hold himself upright.

Nevertheless he stumbled toward Joan with the krill clenched in his fists and his own storm glaring in his eyes.

I’m sorry you’ve been through so much. I really am. But this is the wrong answer. It’s possible to be in pain without hating yourself and the whole world. You don’t have the right to make everybody else feel the same way you do.

She blinked at his staggering approach. Her wild eyes were empty of comprehension. She was not alarmed to see him coming closer with his incandescent dagger. Here the power was hers, not his. She would hit herself again. Hurl another bolt of wild magic. Flay the skin from his bones; burn out his soul. As soon as he came close enough. As soon as she was able to lift her arm.

In her own way, she was no longer afraid.

And the Humbled could not help him. They were still caught in the caesure. They did not exist in any defined time.

But turiya saw more than Joan did; understood more. He knew what was happening to Covenant. He knew what the krill could do.

In spite of his eager rapture, the Raver lived within Joan’s weakness. With torment and coercion, he could direct her outbursts; but he also shared her physical frailty, her prolonged emotional inanition. That was the price he paid for possessing her. He could not exceed her limitations through her.

Nonetheless turiya Herem retained his own powers. He could exert them. He delivered his separate assault while Covenant was still ten ravaged paces away.

He did not try to enter Covenant. He was unwilling to relinquish Joan. And he had reason to believe that Covenant knew how to defy him. Covenant had twice defeated the Despiser—

Unlike Joan, however, turiya recognized that Covenant had other vulnerabilities. Instead of striving to rule Covenant, the Raver turned Covenant’s reincarnation against him.

Reaching out, turiya tripped Covenant’s mind. A dark hand of thought sent Covenant sprawling into one of the fissures that flawed his ability to stand in his own present.

Instantly Joan and wild magic and turiya Herem and the Humbled and the krill and the emptied seabed lost their immediacy; their importance. In one form or another, they all still occupied the living moments before Joan summoned the will to complete Covenant’s death. Stubbornly Branl and Clyme strained to alter what had happened to them. But Covenant did not. He could not. A wall like leprosy stood between him and his mortality. It was transparent. He could see what lay beyond it. But it was also incurable. It enclosed him until nothing mattered except memory.

For a time, he remembered the stasis which the Elohim had once imposed on him. They had rendered him utterly helpless—and perfectly aware of it. By that means, they had sought to prevent him from endangering the Arch while they manipulated Linden; while they tried to make of her their chosen instrument. He remembered Bhrathairealm, and Kasreyn of the Gyre, and the Sandgorgon Nom.

Fortunately that recollection was brief. He fell again, or slipped aside, and was set free.

From stasis, he walked with the ease of youth and vigor back into the comfortable shade of a remnant of the One Forest.

He knew this region. After centuries of killing and bitter loss, the Forest here had dwindled until it became Morinmoss between the borders of Andelain and the Plains of Ra. Still this portion of the woodland, like others elsewhere, retained its intended grandeur. These were trees that knew abundant sunshine and rain, enjoyed deep loam. Most of them were hoary monarchs bestrewn with creepers and draped in moss, trees like oak and sycamore and cypress that spread their roots and their boughs wide, crowding out lesser vegetation. There were saplings, certainly. There were deadfalls, and trunks blasted by lightning, and vast kings perishing of old age. But such things were natural to forests. And few of them obstructed the ground. Covenant could walk where he willed without hindrance. Blessed by fecundity and shade, he could have run if he had felt any desire or need to do so.

He was in no hurry. He remembered where he was going, and the way was not far.

Guided by the gentle contours of hills, he came to a rich glade like a coronal display of wildflowers and long grass. Reveling in sunlight, he walked out from among the trees to watch with wonder as Forestals came together in conclave.

All of them. Together. Here. For the first time—and for the last. Some who would soon pass away. Others who endured for centuries or millennia, faithful to their tasks among the trees, and to their growing wrath, and to their woe. All of them.

They were singing a song that Covenant knew by heart.

Branches spread and tree trunks grow
Through rain and heat and snow and cold;
Though wide world’s winds untimely blow,
And earthquakes rock and cliff unseal,

My leaves grow green and seedlings bloom.
Since days before the Earth was old
And Time began its walk to doom,
The Forests world’s bare rock anneal,

Forbidding dusty waste and death.
I am the Land’s Creator’s hold:
I inhale all expiring breath,
And breathe out life to bind and heal.

Unseen within the Arch, unknown to the Forestals, Covenant had often stood witness to this scene. He loved it with his whole heart.

Caerroil Wildwood was here, and Cav-Morin Fernhold. Dhorehold of the Dark. One who was called the Magister of Andelain; and another who named himself Syr Embattled, doing what he could to defend Giant Woods. Others. All of them. In their times, they had been the exigent guardians of everything precious in the Land: precious and doomed. Here they were wreathed in music and magic, the poignant, potent sorrow of their striving to slow the ineluctable murder of trees.

Yet something about the scene troubled Covenant: something that was not woe or regret or ire. He was surely entranced; but he was also disturbed. In some fashion that he did not know how to identify, the conclave of the Forestals was not as he remembered it. It had become flat: too superficial to be true. It resembled a masque performed by smaller beings, accurate in every detail, yet somehow less than it should have been.

If the trees and the glade and the Forestals had been anything other than a memory, Covenant might have concluded that he had lost his health-sense. He could not see in, and so he could not truly see at all.

Joan was too strong for him. Turiya Herem was too strong. If they did not kill him, he would never survive the tsunami.

Linden might hang on for a few more days. Then she, too, would perish.

He had abandoned her as though he had never loved her.

Without warning, the Forestals began to transgress his recollection of them.

Together they sang, “Only rock and wood know the truth of the Earth. The truth of life.”

“But wood is too brief,” Dhorehold of the Dark intoned. “All vastness is forgotten.”

“Unsustained,” answered Andelain’s Magister, “wood cannot remember the lore of the Colossus, the necessary forbidding of evils—”

“There is too much,” the Forestals agreed as one. “Power and peril. Malevolence. Ruin.”

“And too little time,” added Syr Embattled. “The last days of the Land are counted. Without forbidding, there is too little time.”

Like an antiphonal response, the Forestals chanted, “Become as trees, the roots of trees. Seek deep rock.”

No! Covenant protested. He felt abruptly wounded; pierced to the soul. No. This isn’t what happened. This isn’t what I heard.

While the last notes of their litany faded among the trees, Cav-Morin Fernhold walked away from his comrades to look directly at Covenant.

Directly at Covenant.

Who was not there.

“Timewarden,” Cav-Morin mused in a melody that wrenched at Covenant’s bones, “this is false.” He had always been Covenant’s favorite among his kind: a gentler spirit who knew when to condone human intrusion even though he did not know why he should do so. In his own way, he had loved the Ranyhyn as much as the Ramen did. “Your presence is false. Can you not discern this?

“Your time lies beyond our ken. You are needed then, not here. You are loved then, not here.

“There must be forbidding. The end must be opposed by the truths of stone and wood, of orcrest and refusal.”

With those words, he turned his back. Wearing sunshine like song and glory, he went to rejoin the other Forestals.

His counsel lit recognition like tinder in Covenant’s veins.

Suddenly Covenant was full of fire. His nerves burned. His muscles blazed. His heart hammered in his damaged chest. All of his senses opened, and he could smell—

Oh, God.

Smell? Damnation! He could practically taste Herem Kinslaughterer’s evil. It was everywhere around him, everywhere: hidden behind every tree, lurking under every leaf, twisting like mockery and malice around every bough. Concealed by sunlight, it boiled and chuckled, delighted with its own cunning.

This was turiya’s doing, this corruption of the remembered past. He had sent Covenant here to distract him until Joan recovered her failing strength; until she was ready to scatter the instants of his life like dust over the seafloor. But the Raver’s power showed through the veil of Covenant’s recall.

Still the ploy had succeeded. Turiya Herem had chosen a memory that Covenant adored. Covenant could have remembered this scene happily until he died. He loved it and the Forestals too much to trust his own discomfort.

Or the ploy would have succeeded. Perhaps it should have. But the Raver had made a mistake. He had underestimated the sheer might and melody of the Forestals. He had not considered that they might be able to detect his influence; that they might sing against it, opening Covenant’s perceptions.

Now Covenant burned with his own fire and abhorrence; his own storm of refusal. And somewhere long ages in the future, millennia after the last Forestal had surrendered his life, Covenant’s maimed hands still held the krill.

The krill was life. It was the instrument of his resurrection, as it was of Hollian’s before him. And Joan had increased its magicks. Covenant could use it. With wild magic, he could reclaim his heritage.

For centuries, his spirit had extended throughout the Arch of Time. Now he had been severed from it. He would never wield its forces again. But he could understand them. He could grasp the nature and implications of Joan’s theurgy. He could call upon them indirectly.

Loric’s dagger made that possible. You are the white gold. It enabled him to burn as if he wore a wedding band that matched his ex-wife’s.

And if he could burn, he could return to the krill. To the moment when he still gripped the krill. No memory had the power to hold him back.

Bleeding from more wounds than he could count, Covenant found the path that led toward his present self. At once, he began to work his way along it. And while he arose from the Earth’s past, he fused fissures behind him. He closed cracks. Rife with silver fire, he healed breaks until all of them were mended.

Deliberately he annealed fragments of his former being, rendering them inaccessible so that he could be whole.

Like an astral spirit done with wandering, Thomas Covenant reentered his body in front of Joan.

He stood unsteadily among rocks and pools under a night sky as gravid and heavy as the stone of a tomb. The only light came from Loric’s blade: it may have been the only light left in the world. In the gem’s argent, the seafloor looked garish, ghostly: a nightscape illuminated by lightning or phosphorescence. Clyme and Branl remained on either side of him; but now they resembled shadows of themselves, tenuous as spectres or dreams, as though they inhabited a dimension of existence which he could scarcely perceive. When he completed his reality, they would be gone, lost among the effects of Joan’s madness.

In the sequences of her life, he had not been absent for more than a few moments: that was obvious. She had not moved. Apart from the uncertain clutch of her fist on her ring, and the tremulous shudder of her breathing, and the pitiless drip of blood down her face, she might have been a corpse so meagerly loved that it had been denied sepulture. Her dulled gaze hardly seemed capable of noticing him.

But then the Raver gave fuel to a spark of awareness within her. Her eyes caught reflections from the krill: they rediscovered rage.

Shaking at the force of turiya Herem’s hate, and of her own repudiation, she readied her arm.

Covenant was still ten paces from her. And he, too, was weak; badly hurt. Blood soaked his torn clothes: they felt like bandages applied in haste. He was barely able to remain on his feet and hold the dagger. He could not reach her quickly enough to interrupt her blow.

In another moment, another instant, she would hit herself again. Then he would die.

Gasping against the pain in his chest, he shouted, “Joan!” His own gambit of distraction. “Don’t do this!

“One of us has to die. One of us has to live. You know that! You know why. And I think you’ve already suffered too much.

“Joan, please! Let me live!”

She heard him. She must have: she paused. Reflections accumulated in her eyes, a wild glare of madness. Her body stiffened as though she feared that he would rape her.

Her reply was a scream that clawed its way out of her taut throat.

“Leper!”

Straining, she lifted her arm; clenched her fist.

Ah, hell, Covenant groaned in silence.

He could not use his hands. He needed them to grip the krill. It was his only conceivable defense. But it was not enough. His life and will and even his love seemed to leak out of him from too many injuries. Tottering on the cluttered seabed, he was too drained to do anything except bare his teeth. And the Humbled could not help him. They had already given him the pure gift of their support. They were not substantial here.

Yet he was not dead. And betimes some wonder is wrought to redeem us.

With all of the air that he could force from his rent chest, he made a thin whistling sound through his teeth.

Then he waited for death or life.

Any delay would have been fatal; but he was answered instantly. Somewhere behind him, two Ranyhyn trumpeted defiance into the night.

When he heard Mhornym and Naybahn, he secured his grasp on the krill and mustered his resolve.

Joan heard them as well. She heard horses. Holding her arm poised, she looked away from Covenant.

A moment later, her face crumpled. Her fury vanished. Even her insanity seemed to vanish. Tears welled in her eyes: they spilled into the blood on her cheek and mouth. Her fist dropped.

While turiya Kinslaughterer spat and gibbered within her, she opened her arms to welcome Mhornym and Naybahn.

Careless and quick among the stones and reefs, the shivering pools, the Ranyhyn cantered toward her. As they ran, they neighed again: a kinder call now fretted with compassion and sorrow. Together they came near as if they were eager for her embrace.

On their foreheads, their stars shone like echoes of Loric’s eldritch gem; instances of salvation.

Covenant did not hesitate. He would not be able to stay on his feet much longer. He had to act—

In spite of his peril, he sacrificed a moment for the Humbled. Swinging the krill, he slapped at Clyme’s chest with the flat of the blade. He did the same to Branl. Needy as a supplicant, he touched both of them with the inferred possibilities of wild magic.

A heartbeat later, he lurched into motion, stumbling toward Joan.

The Raver tried to warn her. He howled for her attention; roared to break the enchantment of horses. But in her that magic was older than his mastery: much older. It endured like bedrock beneath the rubble of her madness. Rapt in the face of her one remaining love, she waited with her arms wide while Covenant struggled to reach her.

Five wracked steps. Six.

God help me. Be merciful to me, for I have sinned.

Moments before the Ranyhyn came near enough to take his burden from him, Thomas Covenant gave Joan the only gift that he had left. Nearly falling, he slid his blade into the center of her chest.

With High Lord Loric’s krill, he accepted her guilt and set her free. Then he plunged to his knees.

As she died, he heard Mhornym and Naybahn cry lamentation into the night.

Later Covenant realized that Branl and Clyme were still with him. Wild magic and Joan’s death had removed them from the caesure before the Arch healed itself, locking them out of their proper time forever.

And the Ranyhyn were still with him. Killing Joan, he had spared them the necessity of striking down a woman who loved them. Because he was capable of such things, they feared him—and would remain faithful to the end.

Turiya Herem was gone. Covenant did not imagine that he had slain the Raver. Doubtless the krill could have killed Lord Foul’s servant, if turiya had continued to possess Joan. However, the Raver had not done so. He had discarded her like a useless husk, seeking some new being or creature to inhabit.

But Covenant did not think about turiya, or about the Ranyhyn, or about the improbable survival of the Humbled. He hardly thought at all. Stunned in the aftermath of delivering death, he was not aware that he had dropped the krill; or that Branl had retrieved it; or that the dagger’s gem was dark, deprived of wild magic and light. Covenant was only grateful that he was not alone.

He had never been able to bear his crimes in isolation. Without friends and companions and love steadfast beyond his worth, he would have failed long ago.

When Clyme or Branl spoke, he did not hear. He had no room for words. Instead he crawled forward, seeping blood, until he reached Joan. Her arms were still outstretched; still waiting for horses. Her right fist still held her wedding band.

With as much gentleness as he could summon, he peeled back her fingers until he was able to claim her ring.

For a long moment, he peered at it as if it were a mere trinket; something to be tossed aside when it had served its purpose. But finally he accepted it as well. Looping the chain over his head, he hung her ring against his sternum: one of the few bones in his chest that did not feel cracked or broken.

Only then did he begin to listen.

“Ur-Lord,” Clyme or Branl was saying, “we must flee. The tsunami comes.” One of them added, “We cannot bear you to safety. We are not swift enough. You must consent to ride.”

After a while, Covenant found that he had room for one word.

“Never.”

If he accomplished nothing else that would serve as restitution, he was going to by God keep his promise to the Ranyhyn.

The Humbled did not object or argue. They did not waste time. Quickly they mounted their Ranyhyn. Then they leaned down to Covenant, one on each side of him, grasped him by his arms near his shoulders, and lifted him into the air between them.

Mhornym and Naybahn needed no urging to run. In perfect step an exact distance apart, they wheeled away and sprang into a gallop, racing toward their only conceivable salvation: the riven cliffs where Foul’s Creche had once stood high above the sea.

Hanging helpless while his arms wept with pain, and fragments of bone ground against each other in his chest, Covenant heard it now, the unfathomable rumble of the tidal-wave. He felt tremors like incipient spasms in the seafloor, even though the horses were sure of their footing, and the hands of the Humbled were as reliable as iron. If he could have looked behind him, he might have seen havoc looming against the bleak stars, the fragile heavens—

He did not try to look. He paid no attention to the littleness of the Ranyhyn against the imponderable force of a tsunami. He trusted them absolutely, and had no strength left for fear.

The rumble became thunder, an upheaval as vast as the Worm’s movement through the sea. It blotted out the world at his back, making every mortal effort vain. To strive against all things ending was simple vanity, valiant and futile. Like the Worm, the tsunami exceeded living comprehension. It could be neither accepted nor opposed. It required a different answer.

Nevertheless the Ranyhyn ran like figures in dreams, swift as yearning, slow as hopelessness. Their febrile rush tore at Covenant’s arms, but they would never reach the cliffs.

Then they had already done so. At the verge of a great fan of rubble that piled massively toward the heights of the promontory, Naybahn and Mhornym pounded to a halt.

Somehow Clyme and Branl dismounted without dropping Covenant; without dislocating his shoulders. At once, Clyme swept Covenant into his arms. As he sprang at the rising wreckage, he told Covenant, “Here we are quicker than Ranyhyn. There is no path. They must ascend with care. If fortune smiles upon them, they may yet survive the onslaught of waters. But we require greater haste.”

Covenant did not hear him. The roar of the tidal-wave smothered sound. It smothered thought. The tsunami was a mountain-range of water mounting against the Land. It would hit like the earthquake which had riven Melenkurion Skyweir. Its violence might resemble the convulsion which had severed the whole of the Lower Land from the Upper. The Ranyhyn would be smashed to pulp in an instant. Covenant and the Humbled would die in the first impact of the wave.

During the past few days, many regions of the Earth must have suffered similar catastrophes: shocks brutal enough to crush islands, maim continents. Now the Worm was feeding its way toward the Land at last.

Useless in Clyme’s arms, Covenant tried to say, “Thank you.” Just in case. But his voice made no sound that could be heard through the onset of mountains.

Supernally fleet, the Humbled bounded upward. Covenant tried to sense the progress of the struggling Ranyhyn, but the tsunami filled every nerve, every perception. It felt higher than the cliffs; higher than the unattainable obstruction of the Shattered Hills. It might flood the Lower Land as far as Landsdrop. Unable to discern the horses, he simply prayed that Linden and her companions would receive enough warning—

Then the Humbled were not leaping up rocks, not hurling themselves at unassailable boulders. Instead they ran from crest to crest across the foundation-stones of Foul’s Creche. The rubble still climbed toward the comparative flat of the promontory, but more gradually here, allowing them to increase their speed.

Covenant should have been able to remember this place. He should have known how far he and the Humbled were from cooled Hotash Slay and the Shattered Hills. He had not cut himself off from the memories which belonged to his former mortal life. But he was too weak now. He had lost too much blood; had too many broken bones. He had killed Joan. Even his most human recollections were effaced by the impending mass of the tidal-wave.

When the Humbled stopped—when they turned to watch the wavefront—he did not understand why. A moment passed before he realized that they stood on old lava at the western boundary of the promontory. He gaped at the dark bulk of the Shattered Hills only a few dozen paces away, and could not comprehend what he saw.

How had Clyme carried him so far?

Why were they still alive?

Why were they no longer fleeing?

At last, he forced himself to look toward the east; and as he did so, the tsunami struck the cliff. In that instant, his entire reality became thunder and tumult as savage as the destruction of Ridjeck Thome.

Time seemed to pause as though the Arch itself recoiled in dismay. He felt stubborn rock shaken to shards and scattered. He heard cliffs scream as they clung to their moorings. He saw an immeasurable mass of water rise and rise, its surge crowned with froth and luminescence as if it were full of stars. Concussions shook the world. But he could not separate one detail from another. They were all one, all too much for his mind to contain; and they appeared to take no time. No time forever.

Water broke over the promontory; inundated it; plunged from its sides; swept forward. It spouted like a tremendous geyser from the rent where Foul’s Creche had once stood. Spray stung Covenant’s eyes until he could not see. It soaked his clothes, drenched his many wounds. Yet Clyme and Branl stood where they were, rigid as defiance. Apparently they believed that they had estimated the tsunami’s reach exactly; that it would not take them.

Too weak to protest, Covenant lay in Clyme’s arms and awaited the fate that the Humbled had chosen.

In front of him, the wave’s force was split by the wedge of the promontory, deflected by the shape and bulk of the stone. Higher turmoil crashed against the cliffs on either side. Sweeping over granite toward Hotash Slay, the tsunami parted; recoiled against itself; poured away. At the end of its rush, it climbed to the knees of the Masters. It slapped against the first bluffs of the Hills. Then it began to spill backward. Its sweep would have dragged anyone weaker than the Haruchai with it.

When time resumed its inexorable beat, Covenant understood that he was going to live.

After a while, he was able to think again. Eventually he was able to look away from the receding waters. But when he regarded his companions, their flat stoicism made him flinch. It reminded him that they had left the Ranyhyn behind.

Sighing to himself, he wondered whether he would ever again draw a breath that did not taste of salt and death. If the Humbled whistled, other Ranyhyn would come. And they would know how to find their way through the maze. But their fidelity would not make the loss of Mhornym and Naybahn less grievous. It would not relieve the necessity of Joan’s end.

By degrees, Covenant regained the sensation of passing moments. Through the star-pricked darkness, he watched the seas subside, thrashing against the cliffs. On either side, sections of stone had calved like glaciers. Slabs the size of Revelstone’s prow, or of Kevin’s Watch, continued to topple, unregarded by the lashing ocean. And as the waves shrank to the scale of a more ordinary storm, he saw that the end of the promontory was gone, broken by the brunt of the tidal-wave. Every hint or relic of the Despiser’s former habitation had collapsed, leaving no sign that it had ever existed.

Still Clyme and Branl stood where they were, as unmoved as icons. For a time, Covenant wondered why they remained, expressionless and dour. Then he realized that they were waiting for the Ranyhyn.

Waiting for Mhornym and Naybahn, and refusing to mourn, until hope became impossible.

Even then, they might not permit themselves sorrow. They were Haruchai: they had done what they could. To their way of thinking, grief was a form of disrespect. Any admission of loss would dishonor the sacrifice of the Ranyhyn.

Vexed by the self-inflicted wound that was the Haruchai version of rectitude, Covenant twisted against Clyme’s arms; asked to be put down. When the Master set him on his feet, he feared that he would prove too weak to stand. But he splayed his legs, braced himself on Clyme’s shoulder, and refused to crumble. Then he withdrew his hand, kept himself upright.

He needed at least that much distance from the intransigence of the Humbled. His own mute lament demanded it.

Gradually he became aware that dawn was near. The pallor in the east was faint: he could not be sure of it. Nonetheless his wan health-sense interpreted the darkness. His surviving nerves assured him that this night was nearly done.

Perhaps when the sun rose, the Humbled would consent to leave Hotash Slay so that he could at least try to return to Linden and Jeremiah and Stave; to Mahrtiir and the Swordmainnir.

Linden would recognize his sadness and his sins. Her companions would understand them.

But the sun did not rise.

By tentative increments, the east paled. Slowly a preternatural gloaming spread across the Sunbirth Sea until it diluted the dark over Hotash Slay and the Shattered Hills. In contrast, the stars overhead grew strangely distinct, eerie and fragile. They seemed closer, drawing near to bewail their plight. The Humbled became vaguely visible, as if they stood in dusk or shadow. At their backs, the Hills crouched like megalithic beasts. But there was no sun.

No sun at all.

When he peered upward, Covenant saw that the stars were winking out. One at a time, they vanished from the infinite heavens. A few died in rapid succession, others at longer intervals; but they were all doomed. Within a handful of days, every star would perish, extinguished by the unforbidden hunger of the Worm.

Here ends
Against All Things Ending
Book Three of
“The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.”
The story concludes in Book Four
The Last Dark.