Against All Things Ending (44 page)

Manethrall Mahrtiir cleared his throat. “Pay no heed to the
croyel
, Covenant Timewarden.” In spite of his blindness—or perhaps because of it—he appeared to have shrugged off the massive intimidation of Mount Thunder’s gutrock. “We comprehend your rejection of combat. I cannot speak for the Masters. Doubtless the Swordmainnir will speak for themselves. But we who have been the Ringthane’s first companions and friends in this time are content to abide the outcome of your efforts.”

“As ever,” growled the Ironhand, “the Manethrall is well-spoken. It is a cause for wonder that one so combative of heart is possessed of such courtesy.”

“I appreciate that,” Covenant replied through his teeth. “But right now, I don’t need you. I need Anele.”

Pahni stared in alarm, clearly frightened for the old man. As if to himself, Liand asked, “Anele?”

“He’s part Earthpower,” Covenant explained. “It’s inherent in him,” the legacy of his transubstantiated parents. “He can do things even Berek and the other High Lords couldn’t.”

Fearing that at any moment the bane’s hunger might overcome Her desire to hear Her true name, Covenant faced the old man.

The Humbled watched him as if they were trying to gauge the likelihood of Desecration. If Her name is restored to Her—Esmer regarded Covenant with bafflement and nausea.—the result will be a cataclysm—

“Anele,” Covenant said more harshly than he intended. “You’re on rock. You’re so full of its memories, you hardly know what’s going on. But I think there are still some things you understand.

“I want you to ask for Liand’s
orcrest
. I need to talk to you sane.”

Anele’s moonstone eyes glistened. They flicked toward Covenant and away as if Covenant were as fearsome as She Who Must Not Be Named. His head jerked roughly from side to side. His wrinkled hands seemed to pluck pleading from the air.

“I hear.” His voice quavered. “I do not comprehend. This stone knows too much of evil. It remembers horror. Its supplication fills my ears.”

Abruptly he slapped himself hard, first with his right hand, then with his left, as though he sought to silence the confusion of his thoughts. Then he extended one scrawny arm, rigid as a demand, toward Liand.

Liand did not hesitate: he gave Anele the Sunstone.

As Anele’s fingers closed on it, he jerked back his head and screamed as if a dagger had been driven through his chest. Behind Covenant, the bane’s raw countenances paused in their wailing as though they had been startled by the sheer desolation of Anele’s cry. As though they recognized it—

An instant later, a rush of theurgy from the
orcrest
swept away the old man’s illucidity. Between one heartbeat and the next, his manner cleared as if he had become suddenly deaf to the myriad hoary murmurings of granite and limestone and madness.

When he lowered his head, his blind gaze held Covenant’s. Slowly he straightened his back and shoulders. As he did so, he appeared to acquire the dignity of a Lord.

Through a tumult of fire and ferocity and plunging waters, he said, “Timewarden.” Alarm and severity blurred together in his tone. Spray dripped from his straggling beard. “I implore you. Do not.”

“I’m sorry, Anele.” Mutely Covenant cursed himself. “You’ve been through too much already. And you aren’t done. But I’m running out of choices here. We need your help.”

Clutching the
orcrest
like a talisman, Anele protested, “It is not for this that I am made mad.”

“I know.” Intuitively Covenant understood, although he could not have said how or why. Those memories were gone. He remembered only that Anele held some portion of the Earth’s fate in his gnarled grasp—and that his time had not yet come. “But if we don’t survive now, you’ll never get the chance to finish what you started.

“I think you can talk to the Dead. I think Sunder and Hollian can hear you.” Covenant paused to swallow pity. “And I think it’s possible they know how to help us.”

For the moment, that was all he wanted: a way to distract the bane from slaughter. Somehow.

Dismay twisted Anele’s visage. “My father and my mother speak only in my dreams.” He sounded forlorn, rent by prolonged sorrow and abasement; by a lifetime of disappointment in himself. “There I am mute. Yet in Andelain I did not dream, and still they counseled me. Here I am not mute. I will ask. If I am not answered, I can do nothing.”

Covenant wanted to say, Neither can I. But he kept his dread to himself. Aloud he told Anele, “They’ll answer. They love you. They love the Land. Hell, they even love me. And they haven’t forgotten what Linden means to them.”

To all of us.

Anele nodded vaguely: he was no longer listening. His eyelids fluttered. Then they closed. He began to mutter prayers or invocations too frail to be heard over the cacophony of floods and devoured anguish.

“Timewarden?” Liand’s query was an accusation. “To our sight, the recovery of his mind by
orcrest
causes acute suffering. If the Dead do not bring us to destruction by naming the bane, what can they offer to justify his hurt?”

“Peace, Stonedownor.” Wrapped in his ribbands, the Ardent was barely audible. “It is a worthy attempt. I deem that the Dead possess no fatal knowledge of this evil.”

Covenant held up his truncated halfhand. Wait. He did not glance away from Anele. Just wait.

Above him, She Who Must Not Be Named held Herself in abeyance, anticipating revelation.

Then Bhapa gave a wordless shout. Covenant spun away from Anele as the spectres of Sunder and Hollian took shape on either side of the Despiser’s first victim.

Dim against the burning of the waters, the fiery vehemence of the bane, and the writhen stalactites, the Dead were limned in silvery evanescence: the Graveler and the eh-Brand. Amid the forces rampant in the cavern, they looked incomplete, as if they lacked the strength to manifest themselves fully. Nonetheless they were like their son, rife with Earthpower. Though they were little more than silhouettes, they withstood the flames, endured the thunder of torrents.

Briefly they gazed at Anele with aching regret. Before he or Covenant could speak, they turned to each other and nodded as if they had reached an agreement.

We have no value here. Covenant heard them in his mind. Perhaps everyone heard them. We serve only to confirm Her woe and wrath. Yet your need is plain. We will insist upon other aid.

As suddenly as they had come, they vanished—

Wait! Covenant shouted voicelessly, not to Sunder and Hollian, but to his companions.

Frantically Anele thrust the
orcrest
at Liand. As soon as Liand accepted it, the old man crumpled to the lurching stone.

An instant later, Stormpast Galesend swept him into her arms.

—and High Lord Elena appeared directly in front of She Who Must Not Be Named.

When Elena saw the bane, she began to shriek like every damned woman who had ever been consumed.

As if in surprise or recognition, the bane replied with Her own cries. Elena was brighter than Sunder and Hollian: a cynosure of pain wracked by the harm that she had done, and by the use which Lord Foul had made of her. Together the bane’s howling and hers scaled higher, louder. They were a firestorm of screams. The tortures of the doomed scourged the air; lashed Covenant’s hearing. Liand and the Ramen covered their ears. Several of the Giants flinched. Blood spread from the corners of Esmer’s eyes.

Covenant understood. Oh, he
understood
—Sunder and Hollian had made the right choice. Elena had loved, and been betrayed, and suffered. And she was Covenant’s daughter, excruciated by self-abhorrence for millennia: the bane’s perfect food. The perfect bait. The bane could not ignore such ripe anguish.

But when She Who Must Not Be Named opened Her maws, Elena fled toward the end of the cavern. Covenant’s daughter was a Law-Breaker; but she had once been a High Lord. Long ago, she had been consumed by evil—and had been freed by her father. Her horror of being devoured was greater than the punishments which she had exacted from herself. Frantically, as if she remembered being her father’s daughter, she tried to escape.

Ravening, the bane thrashed in pursuit; flung out long arms of theurgy to snatch Elena from the air. Somehow she eluded them.

And while She Who Must Not Be Named gave chase, Covenant forced himself to turn away. With his partial fists clenched, and his heart pounding out rage and rue, he faced Cail’s son.

Through the chaos of screams, he snarled, “I guess you finally picked a side.”

His last gambit.

Blood stained Esmer’s cheeks. “I have not.” His tone echoed Elena’s dismay. “I serve the Wildwielder as I serve Kastenessen.”

“Then you’ve got it wrong. This is all treachery. Sure, you’ve told us a few things that might have been useful, if we weren’t as good as dead. But under the circumstances, they hardly count.”

Desperation and shrieks accumulated in the cavern. Wails broke stalactites from the ceiling, sent turbulence across the rising flood. The Swordmainnir retreated to form a tight cluster around their companions. Some of them watched Elena’s flight. Others searched Covenant as though he had appalled them.

“I do as I must.” Like Anele, Esmer seemed to plead for mercy. “You cannot save me. Earlier I averred my wish for death. That course is no longer open to you.”

“I know,” Covenant retorted. “But there’s a way out.” Elena’s cries rent his heart. “A way to serve both sides of who you are. Aid and betrayal at the same time.”

Esmer shook his head, scattering red droplets. “I cannot comprehend why you have not been redeemed. It is madness! I have granted those who wish to serve you ample opportunity.
That
is my aid to the Wildwielder. Yet I am spurned.”

Covenant had no idea what Esmer meant. But he could not afford to pursue the question. Tendrils of power had already grasped the Dead High Lord. The bane’s mouths gaped to rend Elena’s spectre.

Linden had refused her the gift which Berek, Damelon, and Loric had given Kevin. Now she was being sacrificed—

Covenant had no
time
.

“Don’t change the subject,” he snapped. “
Look
at us, Esmer. We’re finished. If this is how you
aid
Linden, it’s just pathetic. You can’t hurt her now. You can only make sure we all die.

“That’s probably good enough for Kastenessen. But you haven’t thought it through. You haven’t thought about what happens when She Who Must Not Be Named gets my ring.

“That isn’t just betrayal.” Swallowing dread like bile, Covenant insisted, “It’s
the
betrayal. Treachery pure and absolute. With that kind of power—”

“She is complete in herself,” Esmer countered. Blood rimmed his eyes. It formed streaks like shame down the sides of his face. “She cares naught for such theurgies.

“You are indeed betrayed, but not by me.”

Abruptly the bane gave a vast roar of triumph. An avid pounce and gnash slashed Elena’s voice from the air.

Elena!

Involuntarily Covenant turned. But Giants blocked his view. He did not see his lost daughter eaten by the many maws of She Who Must Not Be Named. He saw only the bane’s towering savagery as She consumed Elena—

—who had never been forgiven.

This was his fault,
his
. Not by me. Then by whom? He could not think of anyone to blame except himself. Who else had failed Linden and her companions and Elena badly enough for the failure to be called treachery?

Fiercely he faced Esmer again. With his own rage and grief, he rasped, “Sure. She’s complete. I understand that. She wants my ring because it’s a
wedding
ring. She doesn’t care about white gold. Wild magic can’t make Her any more eternal.

“But it’ll make Her victims into monsters.” It was the symbol and instrument of everything that they had ever desired; everything that had been taken from them. “They’ll be capable of endless butchery. They won’t have to wait for the Worm. Hell, they won’t even
need
the Worm. And they’ll probably start with Kastenessen just because he’s
using
Her. But they won’t stop there.

“It’s going to be the end of everything, and
it’s your doing!

“You can’t want that. Not if you’re still Cail’s son.”

Almost as an afterthought, he added, “If you let us go now, you can always get us later. If Kastenessen doesn’t like it, you can tell him you saved his life.”

Mouths and teeth and fire advanced on the ledge again. Esmer’s chagrin was as vivid as the bane’s hunger.

“I remember my father.”

“Then do something about it.
Don’t let her get my ring
.”

For an instant, Esmer appeared to hesitate. Storms scattered the blood in his eyes. Winds and screaming whipped at his hair, tugged his torn cymar, stung his damaged flesh. Out of nowhere, hail pelted the company like a fall of stones.

Then he wrapped himself in nothingness and disappeared.

The bane’s glee seemed to deafen the world. Excoriation and rage reared over the ledge. Covenant did not have time to see the Demondim-spawn race away, fleeing for their lives; barking incantations of concealment.

But Esmer was gone.

As though he had spent his entire life waiting for this moment, the Ardent flung his ribbands around the company and snatched them all into darkness.

Part Two

“Only the damned”