The Runes of the Earth

verdant land of Seareach, where the Unhomed Giants had once lived.

Her head swirling with memories, she sat down in the centre of the Watch so that she would not fall again. She had already plunged too far: farther than she could measure; perhaps farther than she could endure. While her eyes scanned the crests and valleys of the mountains, and her memories gyred across the Land, she steadied herself on the stone’s stubborn endurance.

She faced there because she did not want to remember Revelstone, Lord’s Keep, three hundred leagues to the west and north: the huge granite habitation which Jeremiah had re-created in Lego in her living room; in the life she had lost.

But beyond the Keep, high in the cold-clad fastness of the Westron Mountains-so she had been told-lived the Haruchai. She thought of them more willingly, recalling their distrust of her and their fidelity to Thomas Covenant; their extravagant strength; their costly rejection of compromise.

Had they survived the uncounted centuries of her absence? Were they still a presence in the Land?

If so, she could hope for help.

And if the tale of what she and Covenant had accomplished for the Land had withstood so much time, she might find other allies as well. Covenant’s first victory against Lord Foul had survived the telling and retelling of it over a comparable stretch of centuries. In Mithil Stonedown, Sunder had cast in his lot with Covenant and Linden because his father had taught him to preserve the memory of the Unbeliever.

She needed aid of some kind. She had to trust that she would find it somehow. Otherwise she might not have the courage to creep down the long, precarious stair which descended from Kevin’s Watch. She would certainly not be brave enough to search the entire Land for her son.

Joan was out there somewhere, the summoner with her madness and her white ring. And Roger was there as well, serving his bitter master. He had to be. How else could Lord Foul have claimed Jeremiah?

At that moment, she felt Thomas Covenant’s loss so acutely that it wrung her heart. She could have borne anything, faced any peril, endured any hardship, if only he were alive to stand beside her.

Yet when she had rested awhile, she climbed to her feet again. Yearning for her dead lover was a weakness she could not afford. The Despiser had captured her son. While she lived, she would do everything in her power to win him back.

Wrapping her fingers around Covenant’s ring for comfort, she shifted toward the western side of the Watch. She wanted to look down at the valley of the Mithil River.

She had hardly taken a step, however, when she froze in surprise and dismay. Her first glance past the parapet showed her that the entire vista from horizon to horizon was shrouded in a thick layer of yellow cloud.

No, not cloud, she corrected herself almost immediately: smog. It looked like smog. The air thickened to obscurity no more than a hundred feet below her; as dense as thunderheads. But it had the hue of pollution, the stifling and damaged shade of industrial exhaust. From the mountains behind her, it stretched as far as she could see in every direction, hiding even the base of the spire. Beneath it, where her senses could not penetrate, the Land might have become a wasteland.

And it was wrong. Her eyes and nose, the nerves of her face, even her tongue, were certain of that: the shrilling of her health-sense permitted no doubt. It was as vile as the Sunbane, and as pervasive, lying like cerements over slain flesh as though the vital beauty, the very Law, which she had once given her utmost to preserve had been arrayed for burial.

I am content. God in Heaven! What had the Despiser done?

Her percipience told her only that this acrid yellow shroud was an act of violence against the fundamental Law of the Land’s nature. It could not reveal the smog’s cause, effects, or purpose.

Instinctively she retreated into the centre of the Watch; hugged her arms around her stomach to contain her distress. Now she feared the descent from Kevin’s Watch in a new way. The stair was exposed, dangerous. And it would take her into that yellow shroud. Remembering the Sunbane, she believed that the eerie smog would savage her open nerves. It might hurt her so severely that she would lose her balance-

While she squirmed in alarm, however, she heard a new sound through the gentle breeze. Its susurration was punctuated by the noise of scrambling, the frantic movement of skin on stone.

Where-? She looked around quickly; saw only the clean sky and the bluff mountains and the acrid shroud.

The sound appeared to come from the stair-from someone climbing toward her.

Because she was frightened, she dropped to the stone. Then she eased forward on her belly to peer furtively through the gap in the parapet at the top of the stair.

There she heard scrambling more clearly. Hands and feet against rock: hoarse, ragged breathing.

A few heartbeats later, a head emerged from the yellow cloud.

A tangle of rank grey hair straggled to the shoulders of a torn and filthy tunic which may once have been brown. A man: she knew that at once. An old man. His hands clutching at the treads looked gnarled and bent, almost crippled. She sensed their arthritic straining as if they ached aloud. His laboured breathing threatened to choke him.

He was mortally afraid. His ascent was an attempt at escape.

Linden’s percipience was too sharp: she felt his difficulties too acutely. She had forgotten how to manage the sensations which inundated her. Carefully she retreated to the far edge of the Watch and sat with her back against the parapet, bracing herself for the moment when he would emerge from the gap.

What could he flee by coming here? There was no escape for either of them now.

Lifting Covenant’s ring out of her shirt, she folded it in both hands as if she were Praying.

With a gasp of desperation, he heaved himself over the rim of the last stair and collapsed, panting. His legs still dangled off the Watch.

The nature of his prostration told her at once that he had lost his mental balance a long time ago; had toppled into a kind of madness. And he had not eaten for days. Hunger and sorrow had taken his mind.

He reminded her of Nassic-

When she and Covenant had arrived together in the Land, they had been greeted by Sunder’s father, Nassic, who had inherited a vague knowledge of the Unbeliever from a long line of half-mad hermits called Unfettered Ones. In spite of his confused grasp on events, he had done everything in his power to aid them.

A Raver had killed him for his trouble.

This old man might be in similar danger.

At once she set her own fears aside. Kneeling forward, she gripped him by his arms and pulled him fully onto the Watch. Then she crept to the gap and looked downward again, searching the shroud for anything that resembled turiya Herem’s malice.

Still the cloud baffled her percipience; concealed its secrets.

Come on! she urged the long fall. Try me. I am in no mood for this!

Until now, she had been helpless to save any of Roger’s victims. But Covenant’s ring had power here. She was done with helplessness.

Nothing appeared out of the shroud.

Slowly she withdrew from the gap; returned her attention to the collapsed old man.

For a moment, she studied him with her health-sense, trying to determine how close he had come to death. Now that she could observe him more precisely, however, she saw that he had not exhausted his life. In fact, he possessed an astonishing resilience, in spite of his inanition. He was sustained by-

New surprise rocked her back onto her heels.

– by Earthpower.

Automatically she rubbed at her eyes, trying to sharpen her senses.

The old man was a being of some puissance. Human, undoubtedly: old, arthritic, and frail. Nevertheless an active pulse of Earthpower throbbed in his worn veins. It made her think of Hollian, who had been brought back from death by Caer-Caveral’s sacrifice and the krill of Loric. Linden remembered her vividly as she had stood at Sunder’s side, lambent with Earthpower made tangible and lovely-and mortal. Sunder himself had shared her numinous glow. Even the child in her womb had shared it.

But neither Sunder nor Hollian had been mad.