The Runes of the Earth: The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant - Book One (37 page)

One Master and an untried Stonedownor would never hold back that tide.

Liand flung a look over his shoulder, cursed under his breath, and began to haul on Somo's reins, trying to hasten the pinto with his own strength.

But Stave did not quicken his pace, or glance behind him. “They will outrun us,” he said stolidly. “That cannot be altered. Over these rocks the mount travels poorly.” He had told Liand to abandon the supplies—and Somo. “Haste will only exhaust your companions to no purpose.”

Then how—? she wanted to ask; demand. How do you expect us to survive? An instant later, however, she realized that Stave had no such expectation. Her flight into the rift had created this plight. He had merely pursued her so that he could fight on her behalf.

While she could, she rested in his arms and tried to focus her remaining percipience inward, searching for the link or passage which might connect her to the limitless power of Covenant's ring.

The howling of the pack echoed up the rift; and the sound seemed to sharpen the chill on Linden's skin. In it she heard more than ordinary animal ferocity. As they
raced upward, the
kresh
gave tongue to a more personal and fervid hunger; a desire, not merely for food and blood, but for destruction. Redoubled by the cliffs, their howls suggested Lord Foul's eager malice.

The Despiser had guided her to hurtloam. He had taunted her with Jeremiah's suffering, the Land's pain. And now he sent wolves to feast on her flesh?

No. She did not believe it. Lord Foul did not desire her death. Not yet.

He had sent the wolves to
prevent
her.

Prevent her from what? She could not imagine. Nevertheless she was abruptly certain that the true threat of the
kresh
surpassed mere fangs and rending.

When Lord Foul had aided her earlier, he may have expected her to flee in the opposite direction, toward the Land she knew. And he had not touched Anele again, however briefly, until after she and her companions had passed the Mithil's Plunge.

If she gained the mountains, she might thereby foil some aspect of the Despiser's machinations.

Even here, her foe had something to fear from her.

Ahead of her, Anele had stopped climbing. He had mounted no more than halfway up the cleft. A harsh ascent remained between him and the possibilities of the mountains. Yet he knelt among the rocks as if he had come to the end of his stamina—or his heart.

Peering through the shadows in alarm, Linden saw that he had halted at the lower edge of a rising plane of unbroken stone. There the fall of rubble had exposed a stretch of native granite which reached from cliff to cliff and perhaps a dozen strides upward.

The rough surface offered a few moments of easier flight. Yet the old man had faltered below it—

“Anele!” she called up to him. “Keep going! We have to keep going!”

With a twist of his shoulders, he looked back at her in Stave's embrace; at Liand and Somo, and the rising wave of wolves. A faint cry reached her among the howls and echoes as he floundered to his feet and staggered onto the exposed gutrock.

He managed three steps, or four. Then he fell on his face and lay still.

“Hurry!” Linden panted to Stave. “God,
Anele.
”

This time the
Haruchai
heeded her. Springing into a run, he sped forward.

Behind them, Liand labored over the rocks as swiftly as his mount could climb.

Scant heartbeats later, Stave reached the plane of stone; strode to Anele's prone form. There he set her on her feet.

At once, she dropped to her knees and found the old man gasping as if in terror.

“Anele? What's wrong?”

Her health-sense had declined too far: she could not discern the source of his distress. She only knew that he had not exhausted his strange strength. But when she touched his arm, she realized that he was indeed terrified; that he was wracked, nearly undone, by remorse and sanity.

Behind the Plunge, he had radiated similar emanations. Yet the character of his aura here had substantial differences. There he had writhed in self-recrimination, scourged by the consequences of his supposed crimes. I
lost the Staff!
He had blamed himself for impossible faults; mistakes which he could not have made. Here his dismay was more intimate. His fears seemed to come from the foundation of his being, the bedrock upon which his commitments and beliefs had once stood.

Although he did not move, he seemed to rise to meet her as if her touch had evoked him in some way; called him up from an abyss to speak to her.

“How was it possible?” he panted as if he were answering her. “I was not blind. Not deaf.” Echoes of hunger chased his words away. “I felt the
wrongness
of it. A thing which severed Law from Law. Yet I—

“Why am I not slain? I do not merit life. How is it that I am permitted to continue, when I have imperiled all the Land?”

Abruptly Somo's hooves clattered on the plain stone. Tugged forward by Liand, the pinto came to Stave's side and halted, blowing froth and trepidation from its nostrils. Its eyes rolled wildly. If Liand had not gripped the mustang's reins, held them hard, Somo might have wheeled and fled into the jaws of the wolves.

“Anele.” Urgently Linden grasped the old man's shoulders, rolled him over so that he lay on his back. If he had truly become sane at last—“Go on. Keep talking. I can't help you if you don't talk to me.”

Distant howls beat about her head, resounding from the cliffs to harry her. The wolves had already swarmed halfway to her position. Any hope, however irrational, that she and her companions might outrace the pack was gone.

Even Stave's transcendent skill and force could not meet so many slavering predators. Liand had a Stonedownor's bulk of muscle: he would give a good account of himself before he went down. Somo's hooves might stop a few wolves. Nevertheless the end would be swift and savage. And soon.

Stave's warning no longer mattered. If Linden could not summon wild magic against the
kresh,
she would never help anyone again, or anything: not Anele; not Jeremiah; not the Land.

Still she knelt beside the old man. His moonstone eyes stared at her sightlessly. He needed to talk. She knew of no other way to lance the psychic suppuration of his pain.

Tears smeared grime into his beard, down the sides of his neck. “It seemed a small thing,” he said brokenly. “Such a small thing. Yet I have wrought such evil—”

“Anele!” she breathed like a cry, “make sense! You're sane now. I can feel it. For God's sake, tell me something I can understand!”

He must have heard her. Abruptly his attention turned to her. Although he could not see her, he gulped in surprise, “I know you. You are Linden Avery the Chosen. The
Haruchai
has said so. You accompanied Sunder my father as he bore the corpse of Hollian my mother into Andelain and life.”

Linden gaped at him as though he had shocked the air from her lungs. He might have spoken in an alien tongue: she recognized each word individually, but together they conveyed no meaning.

“That's impossible,” she protested.

Impossible.

God in Heaven—

How much time had passed since she had traveled with Sunder and Covenant into Andelain, and seen Hollian reborn? Stave could tell her, if she asked him. Millennia, certainly.

This
was Anele's sanity?

Now Stave stood beside her. He gazed down at the old man like a denunciation. “It cannot be,” he announced flatly. “He remains mad, though he appears sane. Do not heed him.”

“What—?” She surged erect to confront the
Haruchai.
“You want me to
ignore
this?”

Stave faced her steadily. He hardly seemed to blink.

“Linden Avery, you must not harken to him. He is mad. And the
kresh
will soon be upon us. You must flee. If you do not, the hope of white gold will be lost to the Land. The Stonedownor and I will strive to provide for your escape.”

When she did not move, he said in a tone like a shove, “You must flee now.”

Compelled by his appeal, she turned to look down the slope.

As the
kresh
boiled over the rubble, they moved from deep shade toward the borrowed light of the sky; and for the first time Linden saw them clearly.

The sight staggered her.

They were yellow, as Liand had told her, the hue of pestilence. And they were huge. God, they were
huge:
taller than ponies at the shoulders. A fulvous fire shone from their hot eyes, and their gaping fangs seemed to slather acid across the rocks. To her senses, their fury for death was a scream pouring ahead of them up the rift.

They horrified her. Lord Foul drove them somehow: their ferocity was the febrile hunger of scourged animals. When they had ripped away her flesh, they might turn on each other to quench their coerced savagery.

Yet through her dismay she heard Anele murmur, “Linden Avery the Chosen. You alone—” Tears spilled ceaselessly from his eyes, although he did not sob. “You have known those who trusted me. You alone may comprehend what I have done.”

So saying, he altered everything.

Instantly Linden shrugged off her shock and horror. Before all else, she was a physician; and Anele had suffered too much. She could not abandon him now: this window
into his shame and pain might never open again. Somehow she had to help him unlock the bars which had closed his mind.

When the
kresh
attacked, she would trust herself to repulse them with white fire. Surely the same instincts which had preserved her during the collapse of Kevin's Watch would come to her rescue again?

In a rush, she stooped to the old man and helped him to his feet. Then she positioned herself so that she could watch his face as well as the rising tide of
kresh.

“Tell me,” she urged him softly. “I'm listening. I won't leave you. Tell me what happened.”

A frown intensified Stave's scar. For a moment, he appeared to consider the merits of simply snatching her into his arms again and running upward with her; leaving Liand and Anele to die. But then he shrugged slightly.

Without haste or fear, he called Liand to him; readied the Stonedownor and Somo to fight for their lives.

Liand cast Linden a look fraught with apprehension. But he showed no hesitation as he plucked a pair of stone knives from Somo's packs and braced himself against the multiplied howling of the
kresh.
Events had not granted him time enough to learn regret.

Anele clung to her with supplication on his face. Tears still ran like blood from his eyes, although he spoke more steadily.

“This stone remembers,” he told her. “Therefore I remember. I am Anele son of Sunder and Hollian.” The child Hollian had carried in her resurrected womb. “In Mithil Stonedown I was born to them. I came to life in their care and their love.”

It was impossible: all of it. For him, sanity was only a more profound form of madness. Nevertheless he invoked names which Linden could not ignore. In spite of the danger, she listened to him as if they stood leagues rather than moments away from the charging pack, and had no cause for fear.

“Though they made their home in Mithil Stonedown, their concern was for all the Land.” Again Anele's voice took on the cadences, the implied threnody, of the stone. The advance of the
kresh
might have ceased to exist for him. “The Staff of Law had been entrusted to them, and they knew what was required of them. Indeed, they felt no wish to shun it, for their task was one of healing, and its necessity lifted their hearts.”

Facing him, Linden tried to estimate the speed of the wolves. How much longer could she delay before she reached for fire? She had already sacrificed any margin for failure. If Covenant's ring did not answer immediately to her hand, she and her companions would be lost.

Still Anele spoke as if he were oblivious to everything beyond his incomprehensible sanity.

“I was born after the passing of the Sunbane, yet I recall its ravages, for the harm was vast, and my parents journeyed throughout the Land for many years, bearing me
with them. From earliest childhood, I watched them wield the Staff for the Land's healing. From them, I learned of love and hope and courage, and of commitment to beauty.

“And I learned also to be astonished at them, though they did not desire to astonish me.”

“Linden Avery,” Stave instructed distinctly, “you must not heed him. The old man is entirely mad.”

The
kresh
had come so near that their fangs seemed to reflect the sick fire in their eyes. Their massive shoulders heaved as they bounded closer: in another moment their claws might strike sparks from the rocks.

Yet Anele was saying, “Their past you know. Ere I was born, Sunder and Hollian had already accomplished the most wonderful deeds. Knowing nothing of wild magic and true Law, they had nonetheless given themselves utterly to the Land's redemption. So great was their love and devotion that even death did not stand against them. I would not otherwise have found life.”