The Runes of the Earth

dedicated herself.

And as she fell, she felt a blow strike her right temple.

Its force snatched a phosphene flare across the blackness in her eyes. The abyss into which she fell became vivid with consumed comets, bursting suns, scattered stars. She shook her head, trying to dispel them, but they did not fade. Rather they took on coherence, definition: like a cleaned lens, they resolved suddenly into vision.

She saw him sitting on the edge of the bed in which she lay: Thomas Covenant as she had known him on Haven Farm, gaunt with pain and empathy, his stricken gaze fixed on her. She saw fingers that must have been hers rise to rake their nails along the back of his right hand. Appalled, she watched herself smear her fingers in his blood and lift them to her mouth.

Her fall had carried her into the abysm of Joan’s memories. With her white gold ring, Joan now wielded her power to rip open the barrier between worlds; summoning-

Another blow reached Linden. Again she rocked with the impact, and found herself stretched out in a bed in Berenford Memorial, her arms tied to the rails. At the same time, she sat beside herself, wearing a doctor’s white coat and a plain skirt. In scorn, her external self snorted, Of course you can bear it. That’s what you do.

Compulsory as hallucinations, times and places and identities reeled through her.

She had a son, a ten-year-old boy. He gazed at her earnestly, absorbing every word, while she held his face between her hands. He goes somewhere, she told him. I know he does. She loved and loathed Roger’s features as though they were his father’s. It’s a powerful place. He matters there. He makes a difference. Everyone makes a difference. Now the face she held was Thomas Covenant’s, the man she had known and loved and betrayed. I have to go there. I have to find that place.

He met her tormented stare as if he understood her; as if he acquiesced.

If I fail, she adjured him, you’ll have to take my place.

His acceptance was another blow.

Time blurred and ran; and Linden folded to her knees. Even in death, Joan’s pain consumed her. Kneeling, she heard fanatics preach over her like Roger or Thomas Covenant hurling imprecations. You failed him. You broke your vows. You abandoned him when he needed you most.

The preachers might have been Jeremiah.

Her knees hurt as if she had dropped to the hard floor from a great height. The figure before her had become Roger again, impossibly tall and cruel. Behind him rose a gleaming brass cross. Within each of its arms hung a bitter eye like a fang suspended in fire. Gothic letters on a banner beyond the cross announced like a shout:

The COMMUNITY of RETRIBUTION

You are worthless. Broken. Empty of faith. Without value to God or man or Satan. Unworthy even of damnation.

Joan! she cried into the grinding silence. Dear God. Is that what they told you?

You must expiate, her son retorted. Sacrifice. But you are worthless. You have nothing to sacrifice that God or man or Satan would want. The sacrifice must have some value. Otherwise it counts for nothing.

Is that what they told you?

Only the man you betrayed can expiate for you.

Righteous and enraged, Thomas Covenant turned his back on her.

She was Joan, trapped in Joan’s torment. As Roger and Lord Foul must have intended, she reached out with power and pain to draw others after her. But she was also herself, Linden Avery, and she had felt the touch of Covenant’s ring. Reborn resources strove for definition within her: the health-sense, the spiritual discernment, which she had known in the Land. Tentative and fragile, her former ability to see opened itself to the abyss and denunciation, to the excoriation of soul which tortured Joan-

– and felt a Raver.

She knew it instantly, recognised its evil. Its craving for destruction was familiar to her. It called itself turiya: it was known as Herem.

The bare memory of its hunger hurt.

It had no face, no hands, no flesh, it was a black soul, the ancient foe and ravager of the great forest that had once thrived in the Land. Its presence was suppuration and horror, the old screaming of trees.

In Revelstone, one of turiya’s brothers, samadhi Sheol, had touched her. You have been especially chosen for this desecration, it had told her, glad of her terror. You are being forged as iron is forged to achieve the ruin of the Earth. Through eyes and ears and touch, you are made to be what the Despiser requires.

Then samadhi Raver had withdrawn. But that had been enough. Appalled, she had fallen so far into the knowledge of evil that she knew only despair; desired only death. To herself she had appeared as ruined as the wasteland which the Ravers coveted; lost in her own crimes.

Now a Raver had taken hold of Joan. Perhaps it had lived in her for years. Certainly it filled her now, feeding on her madness, consuming her with its voracious malevolence.

And it possessed Joan’s ring. Turiya Herem could wield wild magic in the service of the Despiser. Coerced by the Raver, Joan had summoned others after her. Roger. Linden herself.

And Jeremiah-?

The woman she had once been would have quailed and fled.

But that Linden Avery was gone, unmade by Covenant’s love and the Land’s need. So many of the people who had opened their hearts to her had surpassed her: Sunder and Hollian, Pitchwife and the First, Honninscrave and Seadreamer. Covenant himself had gone to glory in the Land’s name; had defeated Lord Foul and passed beyond her. Nevertheless they had all helped her to become who she was now: not the frangible woman who had fled within herself from her own darkness, but rather the healer who had raised wild magic and the Staff of Law against the Sunbane.

In the abyss between worlds, Thomas Covenant or his son had just told her, Only the man you betrayed can expiate for you. Now he turned from her in contempt.

She stared after him with conflagration in her eyes.

She would not accept his denunciation. Joan had betrayed only her own heart. Fear had undermined her until she became too frail to stand: fear for herself, and for her infant son. A stronger woman might have made a different choice. But no one couId condemn her for what she had done. No one had the right.

Joan herself did not have the right.

Inspired by passion and flame, Linden refused to endure it.

With fire she dismissed Joan’s self-loathing. With white power she swept her own pain aside. The ring burned between her breasts as she shocked the dark with argence. As if wild magic were words, she shouted a blaze of defiance into the void of Lord Foul’s malice.

Thomas Covenant-the real Covenant, not the tormentor in Joan’s mind-had taught Linden that no contempt or cruelty or hurt could defeat her if she did not choose to be defeated. The Despiser might assail and savage her as a predator attacked prey, but he could not deprive her of herself. Only her own weaknesses could wreak so much harm.

That she believed utterly.

Jolted by her sudden strength, reality veered again: a nauseating reel like the plunge of heavy seas. She seemed to tumble as if she had been snared by breakers until she came down hard on a flash of vision like a shingled beach.

For the second time in her life, she stood with Covenant and the rest of their companions in the depths of the isle where the One Tree spread its limbs. There Seadreamer suffered and perished; and Vain met salvific harm; and her other companions came near to death. But this time-

Oh, this time it was not Covenant who raved with white fire, disturbing the Worm of the World’s End in its