Against All Things Ending Part 54

"There is among you," replied the creature or creatures, "a stick of power." They may all have been discrete instances of the same being. "The cruel metal we will not touch. It is abhorrent. But we claim the stick. Our High G.o.d hungers for it."

Linden gasped; felt the breath s.n.a.t.c.hed from her lungs. Christ, her leg leg-!

All of the Giants drew their swords. Stave shifted closer to Linden. With his garrote in his hands, the Manethrall positioned himself near Stormpast Galesend and Jeremiah.

The blast was becoming a gale, as gelid and heartless as the wasteland within a caesure caesure.

Who were the Feroce? What What were they? were they?

Loudly the Ironhand replied, "You cannot have the Staff of Law!" Her tone was firm, but unthreatening. "Yet if you will speak with us concerning your High G.o.d's hunger, perhaps we will discover some fashion in which we may be of service. We neither fear nor desire contention. Rather our preference is for amity in all things. Speak, therefore. Let us together consider the nature of your need."

Linden heard a splash of water, an ooze of loam, as the creature responded, "We are the Feroce. We do not need."

Did she see a mult.i.tude of verdant fires leap and flare, mounting like disease into the heavens? No: it was only imagination. Hallucination. Not magic.

There was nothing except darkness.

A subtle shift in the air. Realities swept aside; replaced.

A momentary sensation of falling, of vertigo, as if she had lost her balance.

But she caught herself. Her leg held. It did not hurt.

It had never hurt. That pain did not exist. She had already forgotten it. Only her palm stung where she had gouged it with her car keys.

She was in the farmhouse, Covenant's house. It shook around her, battered by angry winds. Outside, lightning glared, an erratic succession of furies from a clear sky. Thunder groaned in the timbers of the building. Joists squalled at the force of the dry storm.

The detritus of Covenant's former life littered the kitchen floor. Blood cooled in coagulating puddles. But she did not stop here. She did not turn and flee. Instead she entered the short pa.s.sage leading to three doors. Covenant's bedroom. The bathroom. The last room, where he had cared for Joan.

Following splashes of blood and the splayed illumination of her flashlight, Linden went down the hall to the last room. Where else could she go? Roger had Jeremiah.

The weight of her medical bag in her left hand steadied her. It was her anchor against the storm's madness, and Roger's. Her only weapon. Her grip on the flashlight abraded the small wound in her palm, but that beam was too frail to protect her. She had left her coat at home. Deliberately she had put on a clean red flannel shirt, clean jeans, st.u.r.dy boots. She had driven here, to Haven Farm, where she knew what she would find.

The door was open: the last room. She smelled ozone and blood. The house trembled. Roger had committed butchery here. But he had not killed some poor animal. Certainly not: not Covenant's heartless son. He had shed the life of one of his hostages.

Linden felt as buffeted as Covenant's abandoned home. A strange disorientation thwarted her. For some reason, she expected there to be crusted dirt on her shirt. Stains, grime, tatters: consequences. She expected a neat hole over her heart. But the flannel was still clean. It was practically new. Her jeans were innocent of Roger's carnage.

Lightning struck nearby, lightning and thunder, a crash like a tall tree shattering. Roger had taken Jeremiah. Jeremiah had driven a splinter like a spike through the center of her hand. The last room was a ruin, wrecked and toxic. There the wan thrust of the flashlight revealed Sara Clint lying on the forlorn bed in the dark residue of her life. She had been cut dozens of times, dozens of times dozens of times. Roger had lashed her wrists and ankles to the bed frame with duct tape. Then, over and over again, he had sliced through the white fabric of her uniform, drawing venous blood. Preparation for a ritual.

Static made a galvanic nimbus of Linden's hair, a halo of desperation. Jeremiah! Roger had cut Sara with that that knife, the large cleaver protruding from the pillow beside her desecrated head. When he was satisfied, he had stabbed the blade into her heart before leaving the knife in the pillow: a presentation for Linden's benefit, demonstrating his seriousness. knife, the large cleaver protruding from the pillow beside her desecrated head. When he was satisfied, he had stabbed the blade into her heart before leaving the knife in the pillow: a presentation for Linden's benefit, demonstrating his seriousness.

He was gone now. He had taken Jeremiah and Joan and Sandy Eastwall. To the place where he meant to sacrifice Jeremiah. And probably Sandy as well. He might need her blood to open the way. He might need even his own mother's life.

Linden should have spent a while grieving over Sara's body. Absolutely she should have. No one could say that Sara Clint had not earned at least that much recognition. She was a good woman, and she had been murdered.

But Linden had no time. She knew where Roger was going; where he was taking his prisoners. She knew why. She had to catch up with him before- Jeremiah!

There was something that she needed to remember.

-before he reached the sheet of rock in the woods where Thomas Covenant had been killed. The place where Lord Foul's bonfire had claimed half and more of Jeremiah's hand.

No, there was nothing to remember.

Yes. There was.

A face.

Whose face was it? Jeremiah's? No. She had not forgotten his lost visage. It was as essential to her as the pathways of her brain. That was why she was here.

Liand's, then? Anele's? Stave's?

Who in h.e.l.l were Liand and Anele and Stave?

And why did she want to think about Giants? She had not seen them for ten years, and could not afford to be distracted by old love. Not now.

In spite of her haste, she tried to honor Sara briefly. A few heartbeats of sorrow. But she could no longer smell blood. Or ozone. Those scents were heavy enough to cling. Nevertheless the barrage of winds had torn them from the house, through the broken windows and gapped walls.

Instead she smelled smoke: smoke so thick and dire that it could have been the leaping fume of the Despiser's blaze. She saw wisps in the beam of her flashlight. Pressure grew in her chest. Threats of suffocation filled her lungs.

She had to go. She had wasted too much time.

Wait! Her shirt-Her jeans- Nothing. They might as well have been new. She did not know Liand, or Anele, or Stave, of course not, she had never heard those names before.

Roger had taken Jeremiah and Joan and Sandy into the woods. Linden knew where he was going.

Where had Liand's name come from-or Anele's and Stave's-or Mahrtiir's-if she had never met them?

Lightning had struck the house: it must have. All of this dry wood was going to burn like a pyre.

G.o.d, she was hallucinating! Her son needed her, and she was losing her mind. Stave spurned by the Masters. Covenant's hands burning, ravaged by Joan and wild magic. Covenant was dead. Killed ten years ago. Nothing after this moment had happened. She had imagined it, all of it. Every struggle, every nightmare, every loss. Liand and Anele: Stave and Mahrtiir: Pahni and Bhapa: Giants. They were figments, chimeras sent to distract her. To paralyze her. Until the flames took her. So that she would not follow Roger.

So that she would not save her son.

Screams of rage or terror that she could not hear ripped at her throat as she wheeled away from Sara and murder, rushed from the bedroom back into the hall.

Covenant's ring hung on its chain under her clean shirt; but white gold had no power to save her here.

Roger wanted it. He had said so. It belongs to me It belongs to me. Otherwise he could have created his portal here, in this house; doomed her where she stood. But he lacked his father's ring.

Lurid flames chewed the edges of the boards, the walls of the pa.s.sage. The whole house was kindling. A jolt like the impact of a hurricane staggered the entire structure. Swinging her bag, Linden beat at the fires; recovered her balance.

She needed to dash past them before they could catch her. Reach the kitchen, the living room, the front door. Escape into the night. Free Jeremiah.

But she was already too late. Ahead of her, the door to Covenant's room burst outward, blasted from its hinges by a furnace-roar of flame. Conflagration howled into the hall. Smoke as black as midnight struck at her, demented fists of heat. They drove her backward. Soon the fire itself would be as black as-as black as- She could not flee through the house.

She had nothing with which to fend off the heat except her medical bag. Holding it up like a shield, she returned in a stagger to the room where Sara lay. Sara's cruel pyre.

Linden slapped the door shut behind her, but she knew that it would not protect her. Her bag was her only defense. In a rush, harried by Cavewights and killing, she reached the window.

The gla.s.s was broken and jagged: it would cut her to shreds. It would kill Galt.

Who was Galt Galt?

Dear G.o.d! She had to stop this. Stop imagining imagining. Roger had Jeremiah. He had Joan and Sandy. If Linden died here-if she let her delusions trap her-nothing would save her son.

With her bag, she swept daggers of gla.s.s from their frame. Her flashlight she tossed outside. She meant to throw her bag as well; but first she braced her right hand on the window-frame.

A shard of gla.s.s dug into her palm. Blood pulsed from the cut. She could not let go of her bag. She needed needed it- it- -needed it to fight the flames.

Screaming like the storm and the blaze and the bane, she took the bag in her right hand, sealed her grip with blood. Awkward as a cripple, she began to crawl backward through the window.

Stave would have helped her, but he did not exist. None of her friends had ever existed.-dreaming, Covenant had once told her. We're sharing a dream We're sharing a dream. If she could not stop imagining people and events and nightmares, Roger would butcher her son.

But going backward through the window required her to brace her shins on the window-frame. She felt half a dozen cuts in one leg, a dozen, more cuts than there were sc.r.a.ps of gla.s.s.

And when she dropped to the ground outside the house, she was still in the hallway. Smoke and flame boiled toward her, a tumult avid for the end of all things. But now the last room, Sara's death-chamber, had become an inferno. It roared with ruin like the rest of the farmhouse.

She should have thrown her medical bag out the window with her flashlight. She had lost her chance to escape that way.

Long arms of fire reached out for her. Ebony smoke streaked with bitter orange and unbearable heat tumbled toward her.

Shrieking, she turned and fled; ran frantically as if the hall were the throat of She Who Must Not Be Named. She had to find the end before the bane's mouth closed; before she became horror and torment forever.

Before Roger hurt Jeremiah.

Because she was still trying to save her son, she slapped fire and smoke away with her bag. Floundering and flailing, she ran with all her strength- -and could not reach the end, the final wall- Pain throbbed in her leg as if her shin and calf were gushing blood.

-because there was no end. She had been betrayed by her dreams. The hall stretched interminably ahead of her, and flames devoured the walls, growing faster than she could stamp them out, and the furnace squalling at her back had become the heart of a volcano: the savage core of the bane's need, or the brimstone ferocity of Roger's given hand.

Where had Roger obtained a hand that spouted lava and anguish? With such strength, he would not have needed a gun, or Sara Clint, or Sandy Eastwall. He could have claimed Joan and Jeremiah, done whatever he wished to obtain Covenant's ring. No force on this earth could have stopped him.

He did not have that kind of power.

The bane did. She Who Must Not Be Named had seen into Linden's heart and judged her. She was the bane's rightful prey, trapped in a gullet that had not yet swallowed her because uncounted devoured women were screaming.

The bane did not exist. The women did not. Linden knew nothing about Elena except tales.

Only her bag of instruments and vials kept the flames from consuming her. Only the bleeding of her palm gave the bag meaning; kept her alive.

Her lower leg throbbed like an open sore. She had pierced it on the window-frame. She could not run or struggle much longer; but there was no end to the hall and the flames, the smoke, the terrible heat.

This was death. It was h.e.l.l. It was the agony of all things ending, irredeemable calamity. And she had brought it on herself. She had earned it with anger and folly.

Wind flailed the flames. Smoke thick with sparks gyred upward amid lightnings that came from nowhere and never stopped.

A spasm of pain s.n.a.t.c.hed her leg away. She sprawled along the burning floorboards.

In a frenzy, she flipped over onto her back. Frantically she swung her bag at the rush of the blaze.

d.a.m.n it. This was impossible. The hall had an end. It ended at the wall of the room where Sara had died. Linden had not left enough gla.s.s in the window-frame to hurt her this badly. it. This was impossible. The hall had an end. It ended at the wall of the room where Sara had died. Linden had not left enough gla.s.s in the window-frame to hurt her this badly.

But she had lost her chance to save Jeremiah. Her reason to live.

Trust yourself.

Covenant was crazy. Dead and insane. There was nothing in her that she could trust. The only thing that mattered was power; and her defense was failing. By now, every necessary resource in her bag had been smashed.

Trust yourself.

Trust what what, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d?

She might not have resurrected him and roused the Worm if he had only spoken to her. In Andelain. When any word from him would have been as precious as her son.

She can do this. No, she could not. No one could.

No one except Covenant, who had refused her.

Her hair sizzled and stank. Her eyelashes burned, scorching her eyes. Flame and smoke scoured her mouth, her throat, her lungs. Charred blots like deserved torments marked her shirt.

Now she needed to die. Anything was better than spending eternity trapped in the nightmare of She Who Must Not Be Named.

The world will not see her like again.

But there were also marks on her leg, on her jeans: a tracery of blood-stains below her knee. They formed a pattern.

She did not know what the pattern meant. Still she recognized it.

It could not have been caused by her struggle to crawl over the fanged frame of the window. Beneath the darker script of blood, she saw hints of green. Her eyes were scalded; nearly blind. Nevertheless the green looked as essential as gra.s.s.

The pattern-if it existed-was a map.

And there there, on her shirt, surrounded by smoldering and blackness: a small round hole as precise as the pa.s.sage of a bullet.

-her like again.

From somewhere beyond the flames, voices shouted her name. They had been shouting for a long time. Too long. Friends whom she had never met because they did not exist, imagined friends, pleaded for her in voices as loud as the conflagration and collapse of the farmhouse.

If she could not trust herself, she might be able to trust them.

Or the map.

It showed the way out.

Out of what? Into what? She had no idea. She could not read the map. She could only follow it.

She knew how. Do something they don't expect Do something they don't expect. Everything else will take care of itself Everything else will take care of itself.

Because she had only one real weapon, one defense, and had failed to save herself, she hurled her medical bag straight into the teeth of the fire.