Fatal Revenant

She is specious. Unjustified. Her own reasoning is flawed.

No, she wanted to protest. No. Everything that you heard from those Ravers was a lie. Even if it sounded like the truth. You can’t listen-

But she had no voice and no will: she hardly seemed to think. The mounting debate left her mute as well as blind; nearly insensate. She had come to the end of words as though it were the end of worlds.

Agreed, the Viles continued, scoring her flesh, rending her courage. Yet our reasoning is also flawed. We acknowledge that we are self-absorbed and affectless. But we mislead ourselves if we conclude that therefore we are deemed paltry. The attitude of the wider world cannot be inferred from the disdain of those whom she names Ravers.

No. We have not erred in that fashion. We have come to this woodland that we might distinguish truth from falsehood.

We have erred in precisely that fashion. We have come to this woodland expecting to discover that we are scorned. We have been taught scorn for ourselves. Is this wisdom? Is it just? Do we merit disdain because we have clung to loveliness, ignoring the concerns of the Earth?

That’s it! Linden fought to say; to confirm. That’s what the Ravers want. -scorn for ourselves. But still she could not speak. Somehow the Viles had silenced her. They would not permit her to intrude on their dissension.

When she felt Covenant’s voice roar through her clothes, “Now, Linden! Run!” she did not hesitate, although she could not tell where she was and had no idea where she was going.

She feared a collision with the upthrust stones; feared falling; feared the outrage of the Viles. She could hardly be certain that she still held the Staff of Law. Every step carried her from nothing to nothing. Under her feet, the packed dirt sounded as unsteady as water: it felt as suffocating as a cave-in. Nevertheless she attempted to flee, seeking the tone or scent of higher ground.

For an instant, she thought that she heard the Viles muster black madness against her. But then a gap opened in her writhing paresthesia. Through it, she felt Covenant hurl a torrent of heat and fire down into the hollow, power as liquid as magma, and as destructive. At the same time, Jeremiah’s unexplained magic gathered until it seemed to tower over the forest. Then it crashed like a shattered wall down onto the trees of the Deep.

Chaos erupted among the Viles: rage and force virulent enough to strip flesh from bones. Simultaneously, however, the disruption faded from Linden’s senses, swept aside by Covenant’s fire, or by the horrendous response of the Demondim-makers. In that swift rush of clarification, time and her frantic breathing and even the urgent throb of her heart: all seemed to stop at once.

In tiny increments, minuscule fragments of infinity, she saw the hillside under her feet; saw herself striving to run diagonally up the slope toward Covenant and Jeremiah; saw the Staff clenched in her urgent fist. Above her, Covenant faced the Viles with heat spouting viciously from his halfhand. While she watched, the creatures parted like mist to evade his attack, then swirled together to concentrate their corrosive theurgy.

A mere shard of an instant later, she saw Jeremiah standing near Covenant with his back to the Viles, flinging repulsion like frenetic blows into Garroting Deep. Exposed. Defenceless-

The sides of the hollow blocked Linden’s view of the Deep. Nevertheless she felt as well as heard an abrupt cavalcade of music among the trees.

It shocked her; held her nearly immobile in mid-stride while slivers of time accumulated to create a single moment. The leaves sang a myriad-throated melody of ineffable loveliness while the twigs and boughs contributed chords of aching harmony and the trunks added a chaconne as poignant as a lament. Each note seemed as pristine and new as the first dew of springtime, dulcet as daisies, thorny as briars. Together the thousands upon thousands of notes fashioned a song of such heartbreaking beauty that Linden would have wept to hear it if she had not been trying feverishly to run-and if her companions had not stood in the path of havoc.

Within the profound glory of the music lay a savage power. Her nerves were stunned by the sheer magnitude of the magic which the singing summoned. It was not merely beauty and grief: it was also a tsunami of rage. Somewhere beyond the hillside, Caerroil Wildwood must have come to the verge of the Deep; and there he sang devastation for every living being that opposed him.

Separately the Viles and the Forestal were potent enough to banish Covenant and her son, her son. Together their energies would rend both of her loves. Jeremiah and Covenant would not simply disappear: they would perish utterly.

Without Covenant’s support, the Arch of Time itself might be undone.

Then we’ll have to do it. Get ready.

She could not reach them; could do nothing to protect them.

She had scarcely finished one stride and begun the next, however, when Covenant and Jeremiah turned away from their peril. Running headlong, they sprinted down the slope toward her. Again Covenant yelled. “Now, Linden!”

Behind them, a tremendous explosion shook the hills as focused serpentine vitriol struck lucent melody. The impact seemed to jolt the sky, jarring the sun, spilling winter brightness back into the hollow: it made the ground under Linden’s boots pitch and heave. At once, time began to race like Covenant and Jeremiah, like Linden herself, as if opposing forces had knocked the interrupted moments loose to bleed and blur. The Viles released an unremitting gush of black unnatural puissance. Caerroil Wildwood sang in response, using the given lore of the Elohim and the sentient Earthpower of trees by the millions. Suddenly Linden and her companions were able to close the gap between them.

“Now!” Covenant panted yet again. “While they’re fighting each other!”

She stopped as if he had commanded her; as if she understood him.

Scrambling to a halt, he and Jeremiah positioned themselves on either side of her, front and back. They flung up their arms. Against a background of incompatible magicks as flagrant as an avalanche, she felt their powers rise. She had time to think, They did this, they tricked-

There are times when it’s useful to be stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Then thunder or lightning arched over her head, and everything vanished as though her existence had been severed with an axe. During the immeasurable interval between instants, she and her companions fled.

Without transition, the acrid midnight of the Viles and the angry music of the Forestal sprang into the distance. Unbalanced by the shifting ground, Linden stumbled; flung out her arms to catch herself. Then, still reeling, she looked wildly around her.

Covenant and Jeremiah had brought her to the ridge of another twisted rib among the Last Hills. On one side, the slopes rose into intransigent bluffs and crags: with each translocation, their resemblance to nascent mountains increased. On the other, Garroting Deep lapped against the hills as though the trees had been caught by winter and cold in the act of encroaching on their boundaries. With her first unsteady glance, Linden saw no significant change in the forest. Slight variations in the textures of the woodland: trees differently arranged. Nothing more. Yet she sensed that the intentions of the Deep had been altered at their roots.

The forest no longer hungered for human flesh. Instead Garroting Deep’s mood had become outrage, and its appetite was focused elsewhere.

In the southeast, at least two or three leagues away, the Viles and Caerroil Wildwood made war on each other. Their might was so intense that Linden could descry each scourging strike of scorn and blackness-and each extravagant note, each instance of pure fury, in the Forestal’s vast song.

Rampant obsidian and glory were plainly visible, hectic and unappeased, against the horizon of the hills. Even here, the ground trembled at the forces which the combatants hurled at each other.

Both Covenant and Jeremiah had dropped to their knees to avoid Linden’s floundering. But Jeremiah still held his arms high. From them, energies poured upward as if he sought to ward away or channel the collapse of the sky. The muscles at the corner of his eye sent out messages which she could not interpret.

A heartbeat later, wood began to rain from the empty air. Deadwood, twisted and knaggy: leafless twigs and branches of every size and shape, all broken by weather or theurgy from what must once have been a majestic oak. Linden and her companions could have been beaten bloody or killed by the sudden downpour. But Jeremiah’s power covered them. Twigs as slender as her fingers and boughs as thick as a Giant’s leg rebounded in mid-plunge