The Runes of the Earth

was more complex. While she emulated Joan’s insanity, she had to remember that what she did was evil. She had to remember its consequences.

Therefore she cast herself deliberately back into the instant when she had first entered the Fall; when formication had become the world, leaving her capable of nothing except featureless gelid whiteness and Joan’s torment. That excruciation she re-created in her mind as she focused her argence closer and closer to the gap between the instants. With every piercing breath, she relived agony.

That pain helped her cling to herself. It reminded her that she was not Joan; that she was prepared to accept the cost of her own actions.

She had caused this crisis by the extravagance of her choices. Uncounted ur-viles had been slain, and most of the Waynhim would follow. Her friends would die. The Staff of Law might be destroyed. She herself might fall in spite of her powers, abandoning Jeremiah and the Land to Lord Foul’s malice. And all because she had risked leaving her proper time.

Set beside the potential cost of failure, the anguish and evil of creating a caesure were prices that she was willing to pay.

Somewhere beyond her attention, emerald flared and raved, adumbrating malice into the betrayed night. The Waynhim were driven back. The waves of their theurgy, shock after shock like combers in a high wind, were barely adequate to defend them: they could not stand their ground. The explosions of vitriol from the ur-viles had become pitifully brief and slight; too small to hamper the Demondim. The bitter gleaming of the attackers swept resistance aside.

Watching the doomed contest, Mahrtiir and his mount could no longer restrain themselves. Howling defiance, the Manethrall launched his Ranyhyn like thunder down the hillside. At once, Pahni and Naharahn pounded after him, chased unsteadily by Bhapa on Whrany. Pahni added her girlish shout to Mahrtiir’s stentorian roar; but Bhapa was silent.

Only Whrany’s fleet skill enabled the injured Cord to keep his seat. Unable to use his garrote, and fatally weak, he could not fight. Nevertheless he raced after his Manethrall and Pahni, trusting the hooves of his mount to strike for him.

Liand might have followed the Ramen into battle, but his responsibility for the Staff held him back. Stave did not move from Linden’s side. And Anele remained where he was, consumed by his useless imprecations.

If the onslaught came near Linden, she would be defended only by an untried Stonedownor, a madman, and one lone Haruchai.

With some part of her mind, she must have been aware of her companions and the Demondim; must have felt the proximity of the Illearth Stone and slaughter. Her sense of urgency increased moment by moment, and white fire from Covenant’s ring spired higher into the dark, shedding a stark luminescence across the bare hillsides and the thronging battleground.

Nevertheless her peril only fed her concentration, sending her deeper into her task.

It was hard. God, it was hard! Intending to violate time, she violated as well every instinct for healing and health which had shaped her life. Caesures were evil: they attacked the fundamental structures which made existence possible. And she had committed herself to wholeness rather than ruin.

Still she did not hold back. She knew the depth of the Despiser’s malice. She felt the lust and hatred of the Demondim, and the destructiveness of the Illearth Stone. She understood what would happen if she allowed such hungers to feed unopposed, and her whole being rose up in repudiation.

And Liand held the Staff of Law in her name: the only instrument of power in all the Land which might be able to halt or contain the vast wrong of a Fall. If he did not fail her, she could hope to impose limits on the harm she meant to cause.

Guilt is power. Only the damned can be saved.

When she was ready, she cast a silent appeal to Hyn and all of the Ranyhyn. Without them, she would be unable to reach her necessary goal.

Then she released a slash of silver flame which sundered the night.

Through the riven dark, chaos tumbled forth. A tremendous migraine swirl of distortion appeared in the night, destructive as a tornado, and maddening as a swarm of wasps. It seethed with force as though every link and interstice of material reality had been torn apart.

Remembered agony squalled in Linden’s nerves as she saw that she had succeeded.

The caesure boiled no more than a stone’s throw to her right. It seemed to drift toward her with a kind of hideous nonchalance, sure of its might, and in no hurry to devour.

Stave barked a warning, and Liand called her name; but she hardly heard them. With a gesture of wild magic, a sweep of fire, she redirected the Fall, sent it sprawling like an avalanche in slow motion down toward the heart of the battle. At the same time, she scourged it with flame so that it swelled over the ground, growing wider until it was vast enough to consume the entire horde of the Demondim. Then she urged Hyn into motion after it.

As the mare stretched into a gallop, Linden shouted in a voice of argence, “Come now!” praying that the Waynhim and the ur-viles would be able to hear her through the tumult.

At the same time, she prayed that Mahrtiir and his Cords still lived, and could respond.

Stave and Liand rode at her sides. Silver fire lit the stern concentration on the Master’s visage: he looked like a man who believed that he could determine the outcome of Linden’s gamble by sheer force of will. Liand clung grimly to the Staff, holding it ready. His fear of the Fall glared in his eyes, but he did not try to restrain his mount.

Behind them ran Hrama, bearing Anele whether or not the old man wished to follow.

Linden glimpsed Waynhim racing toward her on all fours. Among them, a few ur-viles appeared, splashed with blood as black as night. As Hyn pounded among the massed forces of the Demondim, more Ranyhyn joined her, two or three. But in the light of Covenant’s ring, Linden caught only a brief flash of them. She could not be sure that more than one of them still carried a rider.

Then she plunged into the caesure as though it were a lake of nightmares.

In an instant, utter anguish seemed to swallow her whole. And as the roiling torment closed over her head, she began to drown-

At that moment, she had no reason to believe she had not brought death to all that she held dear.

Chapter Nine: Pursuit

The unspeakable pain of the Fall was the same: the disorientation: the sensory insanity. She was trapped as she had been once before in the simultaneous shattering of too many realities. Every moment which would ever come and go in the caesure’s path was torn apart and flung at her like a bleeding gobbet; and every scrap of time’s shredded flesh as it struck her became a burrowing insect, a wasp or chigger driven mad by dissociation and avid to lay its ruinous eggs within her. At the same time, all perceptible meaning and structure were wiped away, leaving behind only white emptiness and illimitable cold.

Drowning in all the world’s distress at once, Linden could easily have perished, suffocated by icy formication and loss. She could just as easily have been driven mad. But even madness and death required causality, sequence, interconnection; and the Fall had severed every link which would have made such consequences possible.

Yet this experience was essentially unlike her first such immersion. She did not need to compel the current of distortion backward, into the past. Nor was she required to trust that the ur-viles would impose her will upon it. Instead she could let the terrible forces of the caesure carry her forward according to their own peculiar logic. The Earthpowerful instincts of the Ranyhyn would provide for her redemption.

In addition, she was spared another encounter with Joan Covenant’s demented grief. Somewhere Joan still stood among her attending skest, reaching out with wild magic and self-loathing to name her endless pains. But she had not created this Fall, and did not occupy it. Her madness played no part in its ravening.

And Linden had one other advantage as well. Covenant’s ring still shone like a beacon through the fabric of