Linden glared back as though all of her darkest passions were directed at him.
“This bane is unknown to the Haruchai,” Stave observed, “and too distant for true discernment. Yet we perceive that it slumbers still. Mayhap there is no imminent need for haste.”
The former Master was wrong. Linden had to get away from the cavern and the Hazard before the proximity of so much malevolence shredded her nerves.
She would never reach Jeremiah if she did not find and cut exactly the right strand of magic. The tendrils of the Viles did not only extend along the span: they also reached inward. Havoc would be wrought in the Lost Deep if she made any mistake. The damage might isolate Jeremiah permanently. It might kill him.
“Then give me my Staff,” she demanded in a voice as low and grim as the Harrow’s. “Let it go. I’ll return it when I’ve found the way in. If I don’t keep my promises, you don’t have to keep yours. I’m not likely to forget that. But I can’t face you and those wards while that monstrosity might wake up.”
The Insequent bared his teeth in a feral grimace, wild and threatened. For a moment, Linden thought that he would refuse; that he might take the fatal risk of trying to open the portal himself. His greed—
But behind his mask of superiority, his fear was as strong as hers, and growing stronger. He needed her as badly as she needed her Staff. After a moment, he made an effort to swallow his pride. Without a word, he relinquished the written wood.
“Chosen,” Stave said like an affirmation. “Linden.”
At once, Linden accepted the Staff of Law, her Staff, and moved closer to the black seethe of magicks which blocked her from Jeremiah.
With the intensity of an absolute need, she ached for Covenant’s presence. Even if he could not help or guide her, he would at least understand that the Harrow was wrong. Thomas Covenant had known the ancient inhabitants of this place from the perspective of the Arch of Time. He had witnessed every manifestation of their dangerous lore; seen into the heart of their most abstruse secrets. He would comprehend that the Harrow had been misled by his avarice.
The Harrow’s knowledge of the Viles was too recent: he had gleaned it millennia after their self-loathing had faded from the Land. But Linden had faced them while they were poised on the cusp of Despite. And Covenant had known them when they had been justly considered lofty and admirable. According to Esmer, they had lived in caverns as ornate and majestic as castles. There they devoted their vast power and knowledge to the making of beauty and wonder, and all of their works were filled with loveliness. For an age of the Earth, they spurned the heinous evils buried among the roots of Gravin Threndor—
Covenant would understand. He had turned his back on scorn and punishment long before Lord Foul had slain him. The defenses of the Viles could not be opened by any power inspired by wrath and the hunger for retribution. Beings that had risked everything by forming the Hazard would not have done so out of rage. They would have been unacquainted with the desire for revenge.
Unless—, Linden thought suddenly. Unless the Viles had shaped their wards after the Ravers had taught them to loathe themselves. In that case, she rather than the Harrow might be wrong; and she was about to make her final mistake.
Far below her, one of the heinous evils stirred. Its sleep was troubled. Soon, inevitably, it would awaken.
Its emanations clawed at Linden until her assurance hung in tatters.
While she hesitated, caught by her old paralysis, Stave came closer. Apparently he could sense her turmoil. With one hand, he rested his strength firmly on her trembling shoulder.
“In your company,” he remarked, “and not without difficulty, I have learned that there is merit in doubt.” He sounded uncharacteristically casual, as if he were making a conscious effort to dispel trepidation. “Yet it is the nature of evil to feast upon fear, breeding distrust and inaction from doubt. And even in sleep, evil seduces. Chosen, you must close your heart to its lure. If the tales of the Lords are sooth, the Viles did not do so. Thus they persuaded themselves to their doom.”
Linden had no choice: she had to trust her first impressions; trust that the convoluted, self-complicating blackness of the wards expressed the caution of majesty rather than the louring bitterness of disdain. If she did not, she would remain frozen in indecision.
With an effort, she straightened her back, squared her shoulders. Deliberately she unclosed one hand from the Staff to comb her hair back from her face. Then she touched Stave’s fingers briefly—a small gesture of thanks—and resumed her grip on the graven ebony of the wood.
—close your heart—
Easily said. Deafening her senses to the somnolent ferocity of the bane was hard. But she had been an emergency room surgeon, trained to regard only the wound directly in front of her. With a kind of concentration that allowed no intrusion, she had once cut into Jeremiah’s burned hand. Thinking of nothing else, she had amputated two of his fingers—and had saved the others as well as the thumb. Because of what she had done, he could use his remaining digits as deftly as a wizard.
Gradually the bane’s aura lost its power to rend and shred. One strand and implication at a time, Linden tuned her percipience to the squirming moil of the entrance to the Lost Deep.
It was there, she was sure of it. The crucial tangle which formed the crux or keystone of the Viles’ wards lay among the entwined permutations of the portal, not elsewhere. Otherwise the creatures could not have left or re-entered their realm. Somewhere within that midnight mass writhing like a nest of snakes—dark as vipers, swift as adders—was the one thread of theurgy which could render all the rest harmless.
As a perceptual challenge, Linden’s task daunted her. It seemed impossible. Apart from the barrier’s seething, it betrayed no features of any kind: no definitions or demarcations; no shapes apart from the tendrils themselves in constant motion. All of its implications led to confusion.
When she had detached herself from her fears, however, she found that she did not lack resources. Her encounter with the Viles informed her health-sense. She had experienced their eldritch paresthesia. She could not see the meaning of the strands; but she could hear that they had meaning. She could smell the austere suzerainty which had suffused their creation. As she opened her senses, she could almost taste the negligent skill with which the Viles had fashioned defenses that they considered a trivial and largely unnecessary precaution.
Now at last she could be certain that the Harrow was wrong. The scent and taste of the barrier expressed no ire, no desire for harm. The Viles had formed it out of wariness, not from fear or hatred.
Slowly, using the Staff only to whet her percipience, Linden reached out with one hand and brushed it lightly over the surface of the blackness. By touch, she listened to the lore which had written the wards.
It spoke no language that she knew. She would never grasp the ineffable knowledge of the Viles. Nevertheless it was as precise and sequacious as Caerroil Wildwood’s runes. Although she could not decipher its meaning, the simple fact that it had meaning guided her. Its logic flowed past her fingers with both direction and purpose.
In one shape or another, every strand and implication, every uninterpretable sound and scent, ran toward or away from the essential conundrum of the Viles’ intentions.
At its core, therefore, her task was one of comprehension: not of the wards, but of the Viles themselves. The tangle of their defenses was a manifestation of their skeined hearts. Millennia in the Land’s past, she had heard and felt and tasted their insistent self-referential debates, their multifarious conflicted questing for the significance of who and what they were. And long days ago, Esmer had done what he could to explain the sovereign and isolate Viles.
For an age of the Earth, they had resembled the Elohim: hermetic and uninvolved, uninterested in anything that did not impinge upon their secret existence. But where the Elohim had cared for little except the contemplation of their own inherent beauties, the Viles had been makers of lovelines
s, glorying in the articulation of their powers; instinctively creative in spite of the sterility of their lives. And by that creativity, that impulse to reach beyond themselves, they had been wooed to consider the possibilities of a world which might surpass them.
Unlike the Elohim, they were able to imagine such things.
That their reaching outward had eventually exposed the Viles to the snare of self-loathing grieved Linden. But their tragedy was not germane to her present efforts. The Viles had devised their defenses at the outset of their search for significance; for a context in which to clarify their definition of themselves. Their magicks articulated the spirit in which they had begun their quest, not the outcome of that quest in wrath and ruin.
Immersed among tendrils, she found no trace of any ill. In the barricade, she descried only yearning.
And the implications of the snarled magicks culminated there: in that exact spot and specific strand within the general turmoil. She could not see it, hear it, feel it. Nevertheless she was familiar with the sensory entanglement of the Viles. Her own disorientation guided her.
After that, she forgot lurking evil; forgot the Harrow. Her companions on the far side of the Hazard did not affect her. She only needed to remember Stave’s steady hand on her shoulder, and she was ready. Secured by his unyielding fidelity, she unwound a fine thread of Earthpower from the Staff. Trusting the taste of sounds, the scent of blackness, the tactile seethe of meaning, she inserted her thread delicately among the tendrils.
Amid such ebony, her power resembled a shout of gold, a vivid ache of flame and violation. But she was careful: oh, she was careful. Her thread was little more than a wisp, a spun wish. She did not impose it on the flowing wards. Instead she insinuated it into the current and let the disguised structure of the barrier carry Earthpower into its heart. And when fine gold reached the vital nexus of the theurgy, she was more careful still. Hardly breathing—hardly daring to think—she wrapped her thread around the essential strand.
As she tightened Earthpower on that strand, she smelled the Harrow’s warnings, tasted the grip of Stave’s hand. Ominous hues thrummed in the stone where she stood. About her head like ravens flew glints of incarnadine and sulphur from the bridge, the stalactites, the cavern walls. But she ignored them. Here, at least, she was done with doubt.
Now or never. Dare or die. Jeremiah needed her.
Shod wood on granite, a quick stamp of the Staff tightened her thread. Her delicate effort of Earthpower became as clenched as crimson: it smelled as rigid as iron.
With it, she snapped the necessary tendril.
For one wild jolt of time, an instant of impact, illusions of blackness whipped around her like released hawsers; harried her like furies. Ruinous serpents fled, squirming, in all directions.
Then the portal stood open, and nacre radiance shone forth from the Lost Deep like a welcome, and Linden would have fallen if Stave had not caught her. She needed his strength to drag her confused senses back from the brink of chaos.
Briefly the light fumed like her strained breathing. She smelled its pastel hues shift and waver as though they were the scents of a distant feast. Then her perceptions relapsed to their ordinary dimensions. When the Harrow spoke, he had become human and explicable.
“That, lady—” He appeared to choke on surprise and wonder. When he continued, he sounded hoarse. “In plain justice, I acknowledge it. That was well done.”
But then he swallowed her effect on him: the effect of her ability to exceed him. More strongly, he stated, “Now I will have my Staff.”
Light rich with iridescence and shifting colors spangled among the stalactites, filling the high space above the Hazard with suggestions of glory.
Linden may have nodded. Or not: she was unsure. As soon as the Staff left her hand, she felt Kevin’s Dirt reassert itself. Almost immediately, it closed down on her like a lid; seeped into her like poison. Her sense of loss was so acute that she whimpered as if she had been beaten.
She had come to the end. There was nothing more that she could do.
Somewhere in the distance, Rime Coldspray announced, “Now, Swordmainnir. Linden Giantfriend has secured our passage. In caution and haste, we must bear our companions singly over the Hazard. The Masters will do what they must with Covenant Timewarden. The Ardent we leave to fend for himself. But the others we will convey safely.”
“Be comforted, Chosen,” Stave urged quietly. “You have succeeded where the Harrow failed. You have gained admittance to your son’s imprisonment. Soon we will seek him out. And when you have reclaimed him, the Harrow will translate us hence. Then the cruelty of Kevin’s Dirt will ease, restoring you to yourself.”
“Assuredly,” the Harrow pronounced, “I do not desire to linger.” He sneered the words, but his scorn was hollow. Linden had humbled him. “Already the caution of your companions heightens our peril. Only my oath precludes me from hastening while your sycophants dally.”
As Linden tried to gather herself, she found that her physical distress was waning. The illumination from the portal counteracted both stagnation and cold. There remained a chill in the air; an ache in her lungs. But she could breathe without shivering—and without the sensation that she was about to suffocate. Somehow the residual theurgy of the Lost Deep restored life to the atmosphere surrounding the Hazard.
And her sensitivity to the evil in the depths of the abyss was gone: an ambiguous boon. Numb to the bane’s state, she feared reflexively that it had already begun to rise. But perceptions of its malice no longer eroded her resolve.
She had surrendered her Staff for a second time, and wanted to weep. But sorrow, like regret, was a luxury that she could not afford: not here. When she had accepted the burden of herself from Stave, she turned to watch her friends cross the span.
Coldspray had nearly reached the foot of the bridge, and Onyx Stonemage had already passed the top of the arc with Liand in her arms. Behind them came the three Humbled holding Covenant securely among them. At the far end of the Hazard, the other Giants waited to carry Manethrall Mahrtiir, Pahni, Bhapa, and Anele into the light.
Liand had quenched his Sunstone, returned the orcrest to its pouch at his waist. His posture leaning against Stonemage’s cataphract implied weariness. Covenant appeared to be explaining something earnestly to Branl, Clyme, and Galt; but now the condition of his mind was hidden. The magicks of the Lost Deep did nothing to diminish Kevin’s Dirt. The demeaning smog was too recent to be affected by the abandoned lore of the Viles.
When Coldspray reached Linden, Stave, and the Harrow, she bestowed a grin like a laugh of pride and pleasure on Linden. Then she studied the progress of the rest of the company.
Now Latebirth and Mahrtiir were on the bridge. Behind the remaining Giants, near the back of the veined fan of obsidian, the Ardent had wrapped his ribbands around him as if he were curling into a ball. Cowering—
As soon as Stonemage set Liand on his feet, he hurried toward Linden; clasped her strongly. Then, frowning his concern, he stepped back to scrutinize her.
“Linden—” he began. “This blindness maddens me. I cannot perceive—Have your efforts or the wards harmed you?”
Frostheart Grueburn followed Latebirth, with Stormpast Galesend carrying Anele a safe distance behind her.
Linden shook her head. She had no other answer.
The Harrow chewed his lips and twitched his fingers, fretting impatiently. But he did not voice his frustration.
Cabledarm with Pahni. Halewhole Bluntfist with Bhapa.
Latebirth reached the shelf of the portal; but when her feet found secure stone, she did not release Mahrtiir—and he did not ask it of her. Without percipience, he was entirely blind; more helpless than Anele, who still slept cradled against Galesend’s armor. Behind his bandage, the Manethrall was more profoundly maimed than Cirrus Kindwind, the last of the Giants to essay the span. She had lost only a hand and forearm—
Still the Ardent remained wrapped around himself. In moments, Cable
darm and then Bluntfist rejoined their comrades; Kindwind passed the crest of the bridge—and the Ardent stood motionless, a parti-colored lump barely visible in the throat of the passage beyond him.
“Coward,” growled the Harrow distinctly. “Impediment. Fop. The will of the Insequent in all sooth. For this I have countenanced interference in my designs.”
Come on, Linden thought faintly. She felt as intangible as the Viles; as empty of effect as the Demondim against the Harrow. We have to rescue Jeremiah. A terrible power lives here.
Earlier the Ardent had appeared able to master his alarms, whatever they might be. Yet now he seemed unequal to them, even though Linden had removed the immediate danger. What did he really fear? His reluctance made her think that he had not told the truth about himself—or the whole truth.
As Kindwind put the Hazard behind her, however, and nodded to acknowledge her comrades, the fat Insequent stirred. Obscured by the shadow of the bridge, he began unwrapping strips of fabric from his apparel. Dim in the distance, he expanded as ribbands and hues were loosened until they formed a wide aura around him.
The flutter of his raiment resembled trembling, as timorous and uncertain as vapor.
Nevertheless he had found the reins that ruled his fears; or some other force compelled him. Abruptly he began to rise from the stone, lifted on swirling bands of cloth. And when he gained the air, colors as potent as incantations carried him forward. Floating within a cloud of ribbands, he moved onto the span.
Higher he rose, gaining momentum with very flourish of his raiment. At once lugubrious and majestic, he sailed upward until his head found the light. Some of the cloths supported him by pressing down on the bridge. Others anchored themselves among the stalactites. As he moved, they shifted to hold him aloft.