The Runes of the Earth

Or from her.

“Go ahead,” she breathed, although she hardly heard herself. Her head reeled. The defenders of the Staff-? She wanted to challenge him; demand an explanation. The Staff was here? But surprise and confusion seemed to compel her acquiescence.

Some part of him wanted to help her.

He had already betrayed-?

When she spoke, Stave, Liand, and Mahrtiir stepped out of Esmer’s way. He swept past them scornfully, ignoring Linden as if she had fulfilled her role and no longer had any significance.

Together, she and her companions turned to watch him approach the dry streambed.

He did not pause as he neared the shimmering. Instead he plunged into the crease between the hills like the onset of a gale.

And like a gale, he tore reality asunder.

A tremendous concussion shook the ground. For an instant, dirt and grass and rocks sprang into the air like waterspouts, force-driven geysers. Unable to keep her feet, Linden pitched headlong down the slope; landed with dust in her eyes and mouth. Liand fell beside her: even Mahrtiir staggered to his knees. Only Stave contrived to remain upright.

The blast passed quickly, leaving in its wake a rain of broken stones, rent grass, clods of soil. Blinking desperately to clear her sight, Linden saw Esmer standing undisturbed in the bottom of the watercourse, facing up the ravine. The fall of debris cane nowhere near him.

She coughed convulsively at the dust in her lungs; but she made no sound. Liand appeared to call her name, yet his voice did not reach her. The concussion had taken her hearing.

And-

Oh, God.

The sand on which Esmer stood was no longer the bottom of a small ravine. The crease between the hills was gone; ripped out of existence. In its place stood a wider streambed, higher and more rugged walls. As the slopes rose on either side, the walls piled upward, forming a deep cut in the bedrock of the hills-an incision filled with shadows and implied peril.

At the end of the cut, fifty or a hundred paces up the ravine, gaped the broad mouth of a cave. It seemed as full of darkness as a sepulchre.

Esmer, Linden tried to say. God in Heaven. Esmer! But she heard nothing.

Then Stave came to her side. His hands clasped her shoulders, lifted her to her feet as if she were weightless. His lips moved, conveying nothing.

Liand scrambled upright a moment later. He shook his head, raised his hands to his ears. Fear flashed in his eyes as he realised that he had been deafened. In a rush, he flung his arms around Linden and held her close as if to assure himself that she was whole.

Their deafness would pass: she knew that already. The concussion had only shocked her auditory nerves. If her eardrums had ruptured, she would have felt more pain. In a moment, Liand would discern the same for himself.

Struggling against his embrace, she turned to see what Esmer was doing.

At the same time, the ur-viles launched themselves down the slope, galvanised by alarm or vitrim. Their jaws worked: they appeared to bark frenetically. In spite of their weariness, they held their blades glowing in their fists. As they hastened toward the new ravine, they managed to form a ragged wedge.

At the point of the wedge, the loremaster staggered weakly, hardly able to keep its balance. Nevertheless its sceptre seemed to ache with power, and dark vitriol glistened on the surface of the iron.

Esmer gave them a jeering glance, then returned his attention to the cave at the end of the ravine.

Made visible only by its own intensity, by the discrepancy between its force and the calm of summer, a shock wave lashed through the air from the mouth of the cave. Channelled and focused by the rough stone of the walls, it struck at Esmer like a scourge; fell on him with such vehemence that Linden almost saw the flesh stripped from his bones. She expected him to fall backward in a clutter of disarticulated limbs.

At the last instant, however, he erupted like a burst of sunfire, blinding and incandescent.

Then Linden was blind as well as deaf, lost in a glare that blotted out vision. Heat licked through her clothes as though the air had become flame.

Yet somehow she broke free of Liand’s grasp and began to run, sightless and desperate, in the direction of the ravine. This had to stop. The Staff was in that cave. Its defenders were not her enemies.

When she could see again, she squinted through a chaos of splotches and power-echoes, and found Esmer standing unharmed a few strides ahead of her, wrapped in disdain as if it were armour; as if the force unleashed against him were no more than a petty affront.

Covenant’s ring bounced against her chest as she landed heavily in the sand of the watercourse. No! she cried silently at Esmer. Stop this! Get out of here! They aren’t our enemies!

But she did not pause to see whether he heard her; heeded her. Thrusting him aside, she staggered frantically up the ravine.

No! she cried again, appealing now to the beings hidden in the cave. Please! We don’t want to fight you. We won’t fight you!

Confused by phosphenes, little suns and nebulae, she could not see her footing clearly. Sand shifted under her boots, and rocks tripped her, making her stumble. Still she ran.

In the darkness ahead of her, another shock wave gathered, powerful enough to be palpable through the residual burning of her skin. If it struck her, she would suffer the rent flesh and scattered bones which she had imagined for Esmer. Yet she did not stop.

Before she reached the mouth of the cave, however, and the shock wave ripped through her, she heard a howl in spite of her deafness, a cry of warning in Esmer’s voice. So suddenly that she could not avoid colliding with him, he appeared between her and the poised assault.

He faced into the cave, obviously shouting something which once again she did not hear. With one hand, he pointed urgently at the ring swinging on its chain outside her shirt. With the other, he directed a wall of force back down the ravine, a barrier which prevented Linden’s companions and the ur-viles from following her.

Beyond his forbidding, Liand and Bhapa appeared to call for her; and Pahni clung to them both as if she had lost her voice. But Stave and Mahrtiir had already flung themselves up the hillsides beside the ravine, seeking to bypass Esmer’s barrier. In the streambed, the ur-viles concentrated their wedge, preparing ‘an acid counterstroke.

Linden turned her back on them to continue struggling toward the cave.

Esmer caught her arm to restrain her-and at once released her as a small form emerged from the darkness within the cave.

Of her own volition, she halted.

The figure before her was a Waynhim.

She recognised it instantly, although ten years had passed since its kind had saved her life and Covenant’s in the Northron Climbs. But she had never expected to see one of them again. She had believed that all of the Waynhim, every community or rhysh, had gathered long ago to oppose the depredations of the arghuleh. There most of them had perished, overpowered by the unexpected might of the ice-beasts.

Had enough of the creatures survived to form one last rhysh?

If so, they were absolutely not her enemies. Throughout their long existence, they had served the Land with all the cunning of their strange lore.

But they had always been the deadly foes of the ur-viles-

Like the rest of its kind, the Waynhim was smaller than any of the ur-viles: standing erect, its head reached no higher than the centre of her chest. And its skin was an ambiguous grey, a colour which would have looked pale in direct sunlight, but which appeared darker, tinged with illness or sorrow, in the shadows that filled the ravine. Yet the creature could only be a making of the Demondim. Its pointed ears perched high on its bald skull; its entire body was hairless; and instead of eyes, two wide damp nostrils gaped above its lipless mouth.

It stood just outside the cave. Its mouth moved as though it were speaking; but if Linden had been able to