“What’s it going to be, boy? You want a soft bed in a hospital? Or are you so
Sandy moved one arm, braced her hand on the stone, and tried to push herself upright.
In that instant, Joan slumped backward as if she were about to fall. For one heartbeat, she seemed to sag down into herself, breaking inward like a woman with crumbling bones. Then she raised her face to the dark heavens and cried out with her last strength, “
As if in response, a long harsh shaft of lighting rife with eyes caught her where she stood, impaling her to the stone. It burned her life away; must have seared the marrow of her bones. While it endured, she hung in the bolt as though her death upheld her. When the blast ended, however, she dropped like shed spilth.
Linden tottered. The rock on which she stood had become a plunge into darkness. Jeremiah gazed vacantly past her. On the hillside, Lytton staggered backward; barely caught himself.
Placidly Roger made his reply as loud as the wind, as large as the hollow. “You’re wasting your time, Sheriff,” he said as if loan’s death could not touch him. “What makes you think I would believe a word you say?”
Without warning, he swept his gun from Linden to Lytton and fired.
The gun made a hard, flat, coughing sound, immediately torn away by the wind. The heavy slug caught Lytton high on his right shoulder, kicked him off his feet with the force of a thunderclap. He landed on his back without a sound. His arms and legs recoiled, bouncing. Then he lay still.
No time had passed. Linden’s heart had not yet beat again. But already Roger had shifted his aim. His right arm dropped as he pointed his gun at Sandy’s struggling form.
His left hand gripped Jeremiah’s wrist as though he meant to hold her son forever.
In that sudden absence of time, Linden made her choice. Releasing her pent arm, she flung her flashlight at Roger’s head.
Her cut hand betrayed her. Drying blood stuck the flashlight to her skin just long enough to reduce its momentum. It appeared to tumble across the short gap toward Roger in slow motion. When it struck the side of his neck, it had no impact.
He ignored her failure.
She did the same. With all the strength of her legs, heaving upward from the soles of her feet, she swung her physician’s bag into motion and let it fly.
It collided with Roger’s ribs just as he fired at Sandy.
This time the shot seemed to make no noise. Instead Linden heard only the slug as it spanged off the stone beside Sandy’s head and whined away into the ravenous lightning.
At last Linden’s heart beat again. She drew breath; gathered herself to spring for Jeremiah-
– and the rim of the hollow on all sides exploded in a barrage of gunfire.
The sheriff’s men.
Helpless to stop them, she watched muzzle flashes and streaking death, fire as destructive as any conflagration of wood and flesh. She would have cried out for the men to stop, spare her son, but she had no air and no voice. She could only strain with all her heart toward Jeremiah.
As she moved, Roger’s chest erupted in a spray of blood.
Still he did not release his grip on her son.
Then his life splashed into her eyes, and she could no longer see. Instead she felt the heavy punch of lead slap her down as if she, too, had been struck by lightning.
In that brief falling interval, she tried to find her voice and cry out Jeremiah’s name; but she made no sound that he could hear.
An instant later, gunfire and Lord Foul’s blasts burned all light away, and she fell into the bottomless night.
PART I. “chosen for this desecration”
Chapter One: “I am content”
Gunfire seemed to track her down into blackness like a cannonade: each harsh blast drove her deeper. Concussions shocked breath and pulse and pain out of her until only silent cries remained. She had abandoned her son to bloodshed. She tried and tried to shout his name, strove to twist her body so that she might shield him from the rush of death; but she only plunged farther into the dark.
She had sworn that she would protect Joan with her life. And she had promised that she would allow no harm to touch Jeremiah. This was how she kept her vows.
She was dying; was already close to death. Lytton’s deputies had granted Roger the outcome he most desired.
Nevertheless she felt no pain. She knew only the force which had struck her to the stone, and which struck her still, ceaselessly, impelling her always deeper into the abyss of the Despiser’s despair.
And Jeremiah-
Blinded by blood, she had not seen him fall. He may not have been hit: the fusillade might conceivably have spared him, when he could not have warded himself. But Lord Foul did not require his death in order to snare him. Linden herself had once been taken alive in Thomas Covenant’s wake. If Roger had not relaxed his grasp on Jeremiah’s wrist-
God, let it be true that Lord Foul did not require his death!
Yet the outcome would be the same, whatever the Despiser demanded. She had failed to protect her son, failed utterly. She had not so much as witnessed his fate.
Barton Lytton had probably survived. And Sandy Eastwall might live still. Prostrate, they had sprawled below the wild gunfire. They had no part in this.
Nevertheless everything which Linden had ached to cherish and preserve had been lost. She had failed her son, the frail boy with one red racing car clutched in his good hand.
Falling, she could only pray that they would not be separated; that by some miracle he would be swept after her as she had once followed Thomas Covenant, rather than being borne away by Roger’s madness. If the Despiser took Jeremiah, claimed him;
The thought went through her like flame through the abandoned tinder of Covenant’s home; and her own fire answered it, as extravagant as lightning. Without transition she became a blaze of passion and argence. She had fallen so far from herself that Covenant’s ring responded. Its heat seemed to demand life from her when her heart had already burst; laboured its last. Hot silver knitted desperation into her tissues, her bones, and made them whole. It burned the stigma of Roger’s blood from her face.
If there had been any justice-any justice in all the world-her anguish would have undone the darkness. Such power should have been stronger than loss and time; should have allowed her to fling herself back to the desolate hollow in the woods, and to the gunfire, so that she might shield her son with her own flesh.
Did not the Land believe that white gold was the keystone of the Arch of Time? How else had Thomas Covenant defeated the Despiser, if not by sealing Time against him?
But Covenant was dead. Alone, she contained nothing which would enable her to withstand the loss of her son.
Still the sound and impact of shots receded, smothered by her measureless fall. Their violence blurred and deepened until it became a low tectonic rumble, the ancient grinding of the world’s bones. She could feel realities shift as she plunged through them, translating her away from the people and commitments to which she had
