The Runes of the Earth

calm him, and he did not protest as the Cords boosted him onto Hrama’s back.

By the time Hyn had turned toward the north, Stave and Mahrtiir were mounted as well. The Manethrall looked exultant, elevated beyond himself, and crowded with anticipation. Stolidly Stave brought Hynyn to Hyn’s side as Bhapa helped Liand vault onto a palomino stallion named Rhohm. Mahrtiir joined Linden opposite the Haruchai. Then Pahni and Bhapa sprang onto their own Ranyhyn, following behind Liand and Anele to ensure that no one fell back or was lost.

At the same time, the ur-viles changed their formation. Running on all fours, they scattered around the riders to form a black ring with their loremaster in the lead. As they did so, they chanted together like a chorus of dogs.

Once in position, the loremaster exchanged its ruddy blade for a pointed iron rod like a sceptre or javelin; and from the metal, dark force flowed around the riders, enclosing them with vitriol.

Esmer had disappeared. Linden scanned the rain quickly, but felt no hint of him. Apparently he had simply folded his power around himself and winked away.

She remained where she was, staring into the gloom. After the brief respite of Esmer’s absence, her stomach felt a renewed nausea as the swirling wrongness of the caesure approached. Peering through the raindrops, she began to discern the visible outlines of the Fall.

The caesure she had seen from Kevin’s Watch had resembled the aura of a migraine: a sickening phosphene dance which seemed to cast every individual mote of reality into chaos. Without her health-sense, she might have believed that the swirl took place among the neurons of her brain rather than within the fabric of existence. But this Fall looked worse; stronger. Multiplied, perhaps, by the pressure of Esmer’s summons, it formed a howl of distortion and madness against the grey backdrop of the rain.

The sight reminded her of damnation. Abandon hope-

Although she was soaked, the caesure’s ill covered her skin with formication, as if fire ants crawled through her clothes.

“Chosen?” Stave asked, questioning her hesitation-or her resolve.

“Oh, hell.” Frightened now on a scale that surpassed prolonged frustration and metaphysical chills, Linden reached into the front of her shirt; drew out Covenant’s ring. Closing the cold circle in her fist, she muttered, “Let’s do it.”

If Joan were indeed the cause of the caesures, then entering one might resemble being plunged into her madness. But Linden had already survived Joan’s torment once-

Joan was stronger now. In the Land, white gold inherited its true power; and her despair fed on itself, swelling ceaselessly. But Linden had grown as well. She was strengthened by the support of her friends as by the healing of the ur-viles. She also held a white ring. And when gunfire had first stripped her of her former life, she had not known that the Despiser would claim her son.

The loremaster heard her and understood. It began to pace forward through the water-heavy grass, holding high its sceptre. Grimly Linden touched Hyn’s flanks with her heels. The Ranyhyn quivered under her, but did not falter.

Then all of the riders were in motion, trotting ahead within the ur-viles’ protective theurgy.

The chanting of the creatures rose. Gradually the Ranyhyn quickened their pace to match the rhythm of the invocation.

Rain splashed past Linden’s hood into her eyes. Now the caesure resembled a vast swarm of hornets. Its power shocked her senses: it seemed to swallow the north in its frenzy. She no longer wondered why Kevin’s Watch had fallen. The wonder was that any aspect of the living world could endure the caesure’s evil.

Anele had done so. His inborn Earthpower had preserved him then. It would again. But the rest of the company would have to rely on the Demondim-spawn- and on Linden’s uncertain ability to use wild magic.

With Stave and Mahrtiir beside her, she gripped Covenant’s ring and followed the ur-viles at a canter into the turmoil of the Fall. At the last instant, she may have shouted Jeremiah’s name. If so, she did not hear herself. The firestorm assault of the caesure had already stricken her deaf and dumb and blind.

Chapter five: Against Time

In an instant, formication became the world. It filled Linden’s senses as though biting ants had burrowed into her flesh, chewing their way deeper and deeper toward the essential fibres-the thews of will and purpose, experience and memory-which bound her identity into a coherent whole. She felt that she was being torn from herself strand by strand; ripped to agony.

She would not have believed that she could endure such pain and remain conscious of it. Surely the human mind could call upon blankness or insanity to defend it? How else had Jeremiah kept himself alive; able to be loved? How else had Anele borne the cost of his bereavements?

Nevertheless she had no means to protect herself. No aspect of her being remained intact to ward her against the meticulous excruciation of the caesure. She had entered a demesne of flux, inchoate and chaotic; altogether devoid of Time’s necessary sequences. Life could not exist outside the stricture of chronology. She remained alive only because she occupied no consecutive moments during which she could have ceased to be.

Instead of dying, she was caught in an eternity of incineration as though she had been struck by a bolt of lightning which would never end.

And yet-

Formication, devouring, was only one of the caesure’s avatars. It had others. Her entire being had become a timeless shriek. Simultaneously, however, she stood alone in a realm of utter white and cold.

It had no features and no dimensions in any direction. It was simply gelid white multiplied to infinity, faceless as snow, demeaning as ice: vast and desolate, entirely uninhabitable: a heatless interstice between the possible moments of existence. The cold was an infinite fire. It would have peeled the skin from her bones if this moment could have modulated forward in time. But here there was no time, no movement, no possible modulation.

Only her solitary presence in that place defined it.

There her loneliness was complete. It seemed less bearable than pain. She could have wailed forever and gone unheard.

Nevertheless some form of movement was permitted to her. She could turn her head. Take steps as though she stood on solid ground. Gasp as freezing bit into her lungs. She could feel the cold stab like a krill through the bullet-hole in her shirt. Surely that implied a state of being in which one thing led to another? A condition in which her pain might be heeded?

But she saw only bitter white, and her steps took her nowhere, and her gasping puffed no vapour into the isolation.

And yet-

Formication tore her apart and white emptiness bereft her simultaneously. And simultaneously again, in still another avatar of the caesure’s evil, she found herself gazing out at a wasteland of shattered stone and rubble. She heard the lorn hiss of the wind punctuated by the rhythmic fall and retreat of surf; and although she did not look, she knew that behind her the seas crashed perpetually against a broken cliff.

The raw damaged rocks before her appeared to be chunks of time, discrete instances of the substance which should have made existence possible; woven the world whole. They were badly battered, torn from their natural union with each other by violence or lunacy. Yet they were intact in themselves; and each of them still implied its place in the former cliff.

Once they had formed a buttress against the sea, an assertion of structure and endurance in the teeth of the surging waves. Although they had been shattered, they retained their essential identity, their obdurate granite