Fatal Revenant

Then he scrubbed at his seamed forehead, his milky eyes, his weathered cheeks, as if he were struggling to wipe away his derangement.

“Linden,” Liand murmured, “Linden,” but he did not seem to want her attention. Rather he gave the impression that he was trying to remind her of who she was.

“I’m here, Anele.” Linden stifled an impulse to summon fire from the Staff, cast away shadows. The light of Law might enable him to speak more clearly. But she did not want to announce her location. “Go on. I’m listening.”

Morinmoss redeemed the covenant-?

The old man threw out his arms as if he were opening his heart to the forest. “There is too much. Power and peril. Malevolence. Ruin. And too little time. The last days of the Land are counted.” His voice became a growl of distress. “Without forbidding, there is too little time.”

He wedged his feet deeper into the damp sand and rot.

“Anele.” Linden reached out to take hold of his arm. She did not know how else to steady him, anchor him, except by repeating his name. “Are we in danger? Are the skurj coming?”

Anele, make sense.

Flatly Stave announced, “I descry no threat. The Manethrall and the Humbled report nothing. The Cords are distant, but they do not convey alarm.”

As if in response, Anele urged Linden. “Seek deep rock. The oldest stone. You must. Only there the memory remains.”

She stared at him. Memory-? Did he mean the ancient lore which had been lost when the sentience of the One Forest failed, and the last Forestal was gone? Did he believe that the bones of the Earth remembered what the trees had forgotten?

Did the sand into which he had pushed his feet believe it?

“I don’t understand,” she protested. “The Elohim taught that lore to the One Forest.” Anele had told her so himself. “They remember it even if the trees don’t. And they obviously care,” although she could not explain their actions-or their inaction. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have tried to warn the Land. Why can’t we just ask them?”

Anele gnashed his teeth. “Forget understanding,” he snapped. “Forget purpose.” His eyes were hints, nacre and frenetic, in his shadowed face. “Forget the Elohim. They, too, are imperilled. Become as trees, the roots of trees. Seek deep rock.”

“Anele, please.” Linden wanted to swear at him. “I’m not the one who can read stone. You are. Even if I could reach deep enough,” even if she had not lost her only opportunity under Melenkurion Skyweir. “I can’t hear rock.

“I have to go to Andelain. I have to believe in what I’m doing. Covenant told me to find him. I don’t know where else to look.”

Briefly the old man pulled at his bedraggled hair. Then he appeared to make a supreme effort, as if he were clasping at lucidity that leaked through his fingers like water; and his voice changed. For a moment, a handful of words, he sounded like Sunder; like his own father, eerie and sorrowing.

“He did not know of your intent.”

Then he jerked his feet out of the sand and stamped into the stream to wash them clean of perceptions which he could not articulate. In a small voice that reminded Linden of Hollian’s, he murmured. “We are not alone. Others also are lost.”

After that, he lapsed into aimless babbling, as inchoate as the secrets of the rill.

Damn it, Linden breathed to herself. Damn it. She already knew that Sunder and Hollian did not wish her to enter Andelain. Anele had been completely sane when he had spoken for his long-dead parents. He had held the orcrest, and could not have been mistaken. But everything else-

Forget the Elohim. They, too, are imperilled.

The Elohim-? The people who had called themselves the heart of the Earth? The people who had said, We stand at the centre of all that lives and moves and is?

Others also are lost.

Only rock and wood know the truth-

“Linden,” Liand suggested quietly, “perhaps it would be well to offer him the orcrest? Without it, he cannot speak plainly.”

She shook her head. “I wish. But we can’t risk calling attention to ourselves. We don’t know what the skurj can sense.”

Or Kastenessen-

Studying the old man, Liand nodded sadly.

When Stave urged her to continue, Linden took Anele’s arm and drew him with her along the watercourse.

Darker shadows merged into each other. The flickers of light between the leaves grew more evanescent and rare, implying that the sun had fallen far down the western sky. Still her sense of time remained vague, obscured by shade and the stream’s writhen path. She could have believed that she had spent an hour or days in Salve Gildenbourne, and had drawn no nearer to the boundaries of Andelain. Eventually she might find that time had no meaning at all; that Roger and Kastenessen and the Despiser had nothing to fear because she had snared herself in a place from which she could not escape.

For a while, she continued walking only because she knew that she had no choice. Her steps became an apparently endless trudge over slick stones and damp sand. The mounting gloom seemed to swallow her mind as the trees swallowed sound. She was beginning to think that she was too tired to go on much farther when Stave announced suddenly. “Cord Bhapa approaches in haste.”

Anele tugged against her grasp on his arm, but she did not let him go.

“Has he found some sign of the skurj?” asked Liand tensely.

“I do not know.” Stave’s voice seemed to fade behind Linden. He had stopped to scrutinise the jungle. “He is not Haruchai. I discern only his alarm.”

They, too, are imperilled, Linden repeated to herself for no particular reason. Others also are lost. Someday she would be tired enough to forgive herself. She hoped that that day would come soon.

Then Anele broke free of her, and she felt a belated pang of anxiety. She heard him splash through the stream, but she was no longer able to see him: the shadows were too thick. Instead she felt him scramble westward out of the watercourse, fleeing into darkness.

“Liand!” she called softly. “Go after him. Find Pahni.” Intentionally or not, Anele was heading toward the young Cord. “Keep him safe.”

The skurj terrified the old man. After his fashion, he had good reason. And Linden could not think of any other danger-apart from a caesure- that might frighten him into abandoning his protectors.

Liand paused only long enough to drop his burdens beside the rill. Then he sped after Anele.

Wheeling, Linden located Stave more by his impassive aura than by his vague shape. She was about to ask him where Bhapa was when she felt the Cord’s approach through the undergrowth

— his approach and his fear. He was close to panic; closer than he had been three and a half thousand years ago, when he had returned, seriously injured, to describe the advance of the Demondim. He had never seen such monsters before. Among them, they had wielded the emerald bane of the Illearth Stone. Yet they had not scared him this badly.

“Clyme returns,” Stave told her, “responding to the Cord’s alarm. The Manethrall cannot move as swiftly. He has elected to scout eastward alone, seeking to discover more of this peril.” A moment later, the Haruchai added, “Branl also draws nigh. Like the Manethrall, Galt searches to the east.”

Linden hoped that the Humbled would keep their distance until she knew what she was up against. And she did not want Mahrtiir left alone. But she doubted that Clyme, Branl, and Galt would heed her wishes.

Her fingers itched on the written surface of the Staff. Its shaft was visible only because it was darker, blacker, than the masked dusk.