The Runes of the Earth

momentarily dimming the emerald glow of the skest- and Linden stumbled to an unsteady halt in front of Anele.

He gazed straight at her as if he were aware of her presence, although he could not see her. They did not exist for each other here, and he was blind. Yet his eyes were a milky gleam of Earthpower and intention.

She had not seen him appear: he was simply there, as he both had and had not been all along. Without his inherited strength, he would have remained beyond the reach of her perceptions. Yet here he was more real than she was. Unlike hers, his breath plumed in the frigid air.

In a gust of steam, he said as if he were invoking her, “Please.”

Then he was gone.

He had never been there. He was a figment of her desperation, a reification of her loss.

Nevertheless he had saved her.

Please? Please what?

She knew the answer.

The richness of the Land was written in grass stains on the fabric of her pants: a map like a metaphor for her own heart, both revealing and disguising the location of vitality and treasure. If she could not find the way to wild magic, she could make other use of such guidance.

She was a physician, a giver of care. Her response to pleading and need reached as deep as any pain. And Joan’s violence, against herself as against time, was a form of supplication. In the only language which remained to her, Joan cried out her long madness, her self-loathing, and her hunger for release.

Linden’s years in Berenford Memorial had taught her that the form in which damaged people repulsed aid expressed with terrible eloquence the nature of their wounds. In her own crippled way, Joan needed Linden’s intervention as badly as Jeremiah did.

Linden could not contain her voiceless wailing; had no control over her agony. The cold white emptiness burned as fiercely as scoria, and she had no hands with which she might have reached out to Joan. But she was not helpless.

Despair and isolation and gnawing searched her to the root of her soul. She could do the same. If she had no power herself, she would use Joan’s.

Riding the force of her own anguish and empathy, Linden tuned her heart to the pitch of Joan’s madness.

It was possible: she knew that now. As if accidentally-as if accidents were possible for a soul in such pain- Joan had raised Anele like an echo inside Linden, a knell of death and life. With his appearance and his pleading to guide her, Linden could choose to participate in each new exertion of Joan’s ring.

And she knew how to do so. Once before, briefly, she had been trapped in Joan’s mind. She had met Joan’s ghouls and spectres; Joan’s tormentor. She could find her way because Lord Foul-perhaps unaware that he was aiding her-had allowed her to hear the true name of Joan’s pain.

Knowing that name, Linden added Joan’s agony to her own, and became stronger.

She had no means to impose her will on Joan; could do nothing to stop the remorseless blows which Joan struck against herself. Joan still lived in the Land, still inhabited time: Linden did not. But Linden had no desire for that form of power. Instead of trying to stay Joan’s hand, she used her presence in Joan’s mind, her comprehension of Joan’s despair, to tap into the force of Joan’s blasts.

With Joan’s wedding ring, Linden summoned her companions.

She could find them. If they had not been severed from themselves by anguish, shredded by the cruelty of the caesure’s avatars, she could hope to touch them. They were mounted upon Ranyhyn, as she was. And they were warded in some fashion by ur-viles, whose lore encompassed enormous transgressions of Law.

If she still endured, surely they did also?

Through Esmer, the ur-viles had promised to aid her. The loremaster had mingled its strength with hers. It had sucked memories from Anele’s wounded forearm. And Esmer had suggested that the creatures could communicate with the Ranyhyn.

Thus she may hope to be guided-

With wild magic which she siphoned from Joan’s violence, Linden turned against the current of the caesure and called the ur-viles to join her.

They had made Anele remember-

At first, her borrowed and oblique argence accomplished nothing. In spite of its purity, it did not repulse the fire ants, or soften the cold, or ease Joan’s desolation. Linden remained in her prison, tormented by ruin.

But then Joan made a whimpering sound which brought the skest scurrying to her side; and Linden rode the bitter whiteness on Hyn’s back. The mare trotted through the cold confidently, as though she had always been there and knew exactly where she was going; as though she had waited only for Linden to rouse herself from some unexplained stupor.

The Ranyhyn’s breath sent thick gusts of steam curling past her shoulders to Linden’s face, filling Linden’s nose with the scent of cropped grass; reinforcing the bond between them. Thus tangibly Hyn seemed to recreate the lovable world which should have existed instead of the Fall’s chaos.

Oh, yes.

Lord Foul preached despair. But Linden Avery the Chosen was not helpless.

Again she called out to the Demondim-spawn.

Joan’s whimpers became moaning, nascent sobs. The skest fretted around her, sensing distress which their compelled attentions could not relieve. But now her silver blasts were shot through with blackness and vitriol like streaks of poison in mortifying flesh.

Beside Linden, Anele sat Hrama’s back with an air of disdain, as though the caesure’s afflictions were trivial.

Opposite him, Liand huddled over Rhohm’s neck like a man whose back had been broken. Linden feared to meet his eyes. She could not bear to see how badly he had been hurt.

Still dark acid insinuated itself throughout Joan’s violence. The frigid wasteland appeared to break apart like floes of ice, calving smaller chunks of loneliness; and through the cracks and breaches shone streams of midnight.

The gnawing insects of the caesure’s swirl became hornets again; vibrating augers loud for the taste of Linden’s frailty. Stave held himself stolidly erect, impassive as stone. Under him, Hynyn stamped his massive hooves and tossed his head, imperiously demanding release, while the hornets attacked the encroaching obsidian and burst into flames.

Mahrtiir’s gasping sounded like a splash of blood. Pain crippled his Cords.

Now Joan sobbed aloud, beating at her forehead repeatedly to invoke blasts and breakage. Turiya Herem multiplied her torment. Her skest blundered over the rocks, aimlessly dissolving and reforming themselves. For one brief moment in the tangible Land, her power had become darkness, and she could not expend her pain.

Ur-viles surrounded all of the riders. Their barking chant was palpable in Linden’s ears, a solid thing rife with power, at once frantic and resolute, tattered and untorn. Fed by their lore, vitriol swelled in the caesure, defying the white void and the hornets; enforcing the distinction between chaos and identity.

Then Anele clenched his fist, shedding a thin drop of blood from the gouged flesh of his forearm. As one, the ur-viles seemed to redouble their vehemence.

Together the Ranyhyn lifted their heads. To the beat of the harsh chant, they began surging into the teeth of formication and cold; plunging against the current of severed time.

For a while which might have been an instant or an eon, Linden feared that the Demondim-spawn would falter. That the Ranyhyn would lose their way. That Joan’s unanswerable madness would regain its efficacy. That the hornets howling into and through her flesh would devour the last of her sanity.

Then the migraine aura of the Fall parted on either side of her, and she and her companions ran onto solid earth under a bright sky as though they had been spit out from the belly of Hell’s own leviathan.