Fatal Revenant

still others. As Linden reached level ground and sped toward the tents of the wounded, holding aloft her pennon of power, a thickening barricade of riders surged into formation across her path.

She could not fight them. Nor could she bear to be stopped. In her ears, the need of Berek’s wounded and dying was as loud as a wail, and as compulsory as blood. Even the men and women who rode out to refuse her were rife with injuries.

Mustering fire, she called in a voice of flame, “By Yellinin’s command! I’m a healer! Let me pass!”

Again Berek’s warriors hesitated. Some began to rein in their mounts: others veered aside. But an older veteran, hardened and glaring, yelled back, “Yellinin’s command does not suffice! Halt and answer!”

Linden swore to herself. If she could elude the riders, she suspected that her mount would be able to outdistance them. Its energy was the Staffs. But they were mere heartbeats away. And the prospect of delays and argument was intolerable.

Shouting, “In Lord Berek’s name!” she mentally stamped one heel of her Staff against the frozen ground. With Earthpower and Law, she sent a concussion like the tremor of an earthquake rolling under the hooves of the advancing horses.

Covenant and Jeremiah had withstood worse when she had closed the caesure of the Demondim. The Theomach might not protect them; but they had risked too much: they would not allow themselves to be banished now.

Instinctive animal terror cleared her passage. Some of the beasts stumbled, pitching their riders. Others shied; reared; wheeled away. Their panic forced the riders behind them to struggle for control.

Through the momentary turmoil, Linden’s mount raced like Hyn, pounding the ice and dirt toward the tents of the wounded. Followed by shouts of rage and alarm, she ran for her destination.

She was now little more than a hundred paces from the edge of the encampment. When she dismounted, she would be within twenty or thirty steps of the nearest pavilion. But during her dash at the camp, Berek’s commanders had readied a wall of swords and spears to resist her. Warriors stood clenched against their fear. Damn it: this was the cost of her haste. She had left behind anyone who might have spoken for her. Now she seemed to have no choice except to fight or fail.

But she had seen too much death and could not do otherwise than she had done.

She began to pull on her mount’s reins, slowing the beast so that the warriors ahead of her would see that she did not mean to hurl herself onto their weapons. While riders swept toward her, she eased the horse to a canter; to a walk. Then she slipped down from the beast’s back and left it.

A heartbeat later, horses clattered to a halt behind her. But she did not turn toward them. Striding directly at the wall of warriors, she let the Staffs fire die away. She wanted Berek’s people to recognise that she had no wish to harm them. Then she said as calmly as she could, knowing that she was close enough to be heard, “By Yellinin’s command, and in Lord Berek’s name, let me pass. Please. I would beg you, but I don’t have time. Your friends are dying in those tents.”

Still the points of the spears and the edges of the swords confronted her. Berek’s forces had grown accustomed to fear and death: they may not have been capable of heeding her.

“I’m a healer.” She walked straight at the barricade of warriors. “I intend to help. Either cut me down”- she did not raise her voice- “or let me pass.”

No one answered her. She heard no order given; felt no conscious decision reached. Yet something in her tone or her manner, her strangeness or her steady stride, must have inspired conviction. When she drew near enough to spit herself on the first of the spears, it lifted out of her path. Abruptly several men and women lowered their swords. More spears followed the example of the first. The warriors stared at her with fierce concentration: their eyes held every shade of apprehension and doubt. Nevertheless they parted so that she could walk between them.

For a moment, tears blurred her sight. “Thank you,” she murmured unsteadily, “thank you,” as she moved unhurt into the encampment.

Men and women formed an aisle for her, a gauntlet, all with their weapons held ready-and all motionless in spite of their uneasy tension. Here and there, firelight reflected in their eyes, or on the battered metal of their breastplates. Many of them wore hardened leather caps in lieu of helmets; leather vambraces and other protection. All were variously clad in blood and bandages. As individuals, they ached with weariness and old wounds, entrenched loss and desperation. Together they hurt Linden’s senses like a festering abscess. Yet she caught only hints of hopelessness or despair. Berek’s people were sustained by their deep belief in him. It kept them on their feet.

She loathed war and killing. At times, she did not know how to accept humankind’s readiness for evil. But she was already starting to admire Berek, and she had not yet met him. His spirit preserved his people when every other resource failed. And he was the reason-she was sure of this-that they had refrained from slaying her. She had invoked his name. They strove to prove themselves worthy of him.

Roughly she rubbed away her tears. Without hesitation, she followed the aisle and her raw nerves toward the nearest pavilion.

As she approached the heavy canvas, torn and filthy from too much use, her perceptions of distress accumulated. The naked human suffering ahead of her was worse than any she had faced before.

She had spent years preparing for such crises. Nothing in that tent was more severe than the mangled cost of car wrecks or bad falls; the outcome of drunken brawls and domestic abuse; the vicious ruin of gunshots. Berek’s people were not more severely damaged than Sahah had been, or others of the Ramen, or the Masters who had opposed the Demondim.

But there were so many of them-And they were being given such primitive care-During the last strides of her approach to the pavilion, she felt three of them die. More than a score of them lingered on the absolute edge of death, kept alive only by simple unbending steadfastness; by the strength of their desire not to fail their Lord. Before long, they would slip away, some stupefied by their wounds, others in pure agony. And this was only one tent: there were two more.

Never before had Linden faced bleeding need on this scale: not by several orders of magnitude. The grim frantic hours that she and Julius Berenford had spent in surgery after Covenant’s murder were paltry by comparison.

And her nerves were raw; too raw. She felt every severed limb and broken skull, every pierced abdomen and slashed joint, as if they had been incused on her own flesh. Nevertheless she did not falter. She would not. Confronted with such pain, she would allow nothing to prevent her from doing what she could.

Trust yourself.

As if she had forgotten her own mortality, she thrust the stiff fabric of the opening aside and strode into the tent.

She hardly noticed that no one entered behind her.

The tent was supported by four heavy poles, each more than twice her height. And the interior was illuminated by oil lamps, at least a score of them. Nevertheless she could scarcely descry the far wall. The whole place was full of smoke, a heavy brume so thick and pungent that her eyes watered instantly and she began to cough before she had taken two steps across the dirt floor.

God damn it, she might have shouted, are you trying to suffocate them? Almost at once, however, her senses came into focus, and she saw and smelled and felt that the rank fug arose from burning herbs. It was a febrifuge of some kind, intended to combat fever. In addition, it had a degree of virtue against infection. Beyond question, it hurt the lungs of the wounded. But most of them had grown accustomed to it, or were too weak to cough. And it kept some of them alive.

They lay on the iron ground in long rows, protected from the cold only by thin straw pallets padded with blankets. But the blankets had been fouled by months or seasons of blood and pus and sputum, urine and faeces: they were caked and crusted with disease. Still coughing, Linden discerned pneumonia and dysentery rampant around her, exacerbating the bitter throng of wounds and a host of other illnesses.

Then she understood that the true horror of this war was not that so many people were dying, but rather that so many still clung to life. Death would have been kinder-The men and women who served as Berek’s physicians had wrought miracles against impossible odds.