The Runes of the Earth

For a time which she could not have measured or understood, she passed among the sorrows of the stars, and wept with them, and felt no other hurt.

Eventually, however, the stars drew nearer until they became the pressure of the sun against her eyelids. Warmth soothed her battered face while constellations danced into dazzles across her vision. A vast silence seemed to cover her-a silence given depth and definition by the delicate soughing of the breeze, and by the distant call of birds. Under her, cool edges of rock punctuated the encompassing warmth.

A deep lassitude held her, as if she had expended all her strength and could have slept where she lay.

Every breath hurt her chest. She felt beaten from head to foot: a woman caught in a profound wreck, and surrounded by devastation. Yet she could breathe. As far as she knew, she had been merely bruised, not broken. The air tasted of dust and torn earth, and soon it would make her cough; but for now she responded only to its sweetness.

The stone beneath her seemed recently damaged. Faintly she tasted its granite pain, the raw hurt of new wounds. If she could have slowed her perceptions to the pace of its ineffable pulse, she might have been able to hear it groaning.

Somehow she had landed atop the fragments of the Watch rather than under them. And she had survived the impact. Falling so far, she had come down gently enough to live.

Wild magic again.

But where was Anele? She had lost him while she fell. His arms were no longer around her neck.

At the thought, she inhaled sharply, and immediately began coughing. Tears welled in her eyes to wash away grit and dirt. When the pressure in her chest eased, she found that she could blink her sight clear and look around for the old man.

Damn it, she had to be able to save somebody.

She lay amid a chaos of shattered stone. Apparently the collapse of Kevin’s Watch had struck a hillside and spread itself down into a low valley, burying grass, shrubs, and trees under mounds and monoliths of granite. Hillcrests softened by verdure constricted her horizons on all sides. In the direction of her feet, the vale wandered away toward more hills.

Above her, a new scar marked the cliff-face where Kevin’s Watch had clung for all its millennia. The sun hung almost directly over the mountains, suggesting that she had not been unconscious long. Yet the dire swirling which had caused the fall of the spire was gone. It had dissipated or moved on.

Still, enough time had passed for the heavy debris of the Watch to settle, and for most of the dust to drift away. And the birds had apparently forgotten the event. Already they had resumed their piping soars and flits among the hills.

After a moment, she realised that the tumbling stone must have been seen or heard by everyone who lived in the vicinity. Simple curiosity might bring them out to look at the wreckage. The help she needed might be on its way to her.

Or Anele’s enemies might come-

In spite of the intervening shock, she remembered his fears. He had been right to fear that aura of wrongness. He might be right to fear them as well.

Were there truly people in the Land now who meant harm to crazy old men?

She needed to find him.

If she could move-

Groaning and wincing, she shifted her arms in an attempt to prop herself up. But her limbs were as weak as an infant’s: she could hardly move them. And when after a while she succeeded, the effort left her gasping. Although her bones were apparently intact, she felt as broken as the stone.

Sitting, she rested. Unaware at first of what she did, she gazed dully at her hands as though she wondered what had become of them. They seemed strange to her; pallid with powdered stone. Dumbly she stared at them, trying to determine how they had changed.

How had they grown so frail?

They were caked in dust, but the blood which had marred her right palm was gone. Like her other wounds, the cut she had inflicted on herself had been healed. Even the blood had been scoured away. Still the sight of her hands disturbed her. Something was wrong with them.

She was too tired to think.

She had lost Anele.

Surely he was around here somewhere? She had saved herself. Surely she had done the same for him?

Vaguely she lifted her eyes to the cerulean expanse of the sky. Northward only the crests of the hills defined the horizon, their slopes blurred by trees and brush. Behind her, however, mountains lambent with sunlight piled into the heavens. The more distant peaks held snow.

When she glanced back down at her cut palm, she realised that she could not discern whether it had healed cleanly. She could not tell whether the nerves were whole, or the tendons. If blood flowed in the veins, it lay beneath the reach of her perceptions.

From the Watch, she had not been able to see the ground. The whole region had been covered by a smog of wrongness. Now nothing obscured her view in any direction. Yet the sun shining down on her had lost its impression of beatitude. It might have been any sun in any world.

Suddenly frightened, she dropped her hands to the stone edges under her, probed their rough planes with her fingers-and felt only cool stone, superficial and crude; mute; lifeless.

The Land’s yellow cerements had vanished-

– taking her health-sense with them. She had lost her sensitivity to the Land’s rich vitality and substance. A remnant of her percipience had endured after she had regained consciousness: now it was gone.

Goaded by new fears, she forced herself to her feet, standing awkwardly on the broken stones so that she could search for Anele.

The rubble covered the hillside where it had fallen. Above her, massive fragments of granite balanced precariously on other stones of all sizes. She had not felt Anele slip away. For all she knew, wild magic had burned out his life. Or he might have been crushed under the jagged menhirs around her.

He was all she had.

But then, ten or fifteen paces above her on the slope, she spotted a hand clutching at the stone as if it groped for help.

Without her health-sense, she could only see its surface; could discern nothing about the body to which it belonged. Yet it moved. The fingers searched feebly at the rocks.

In a rush, Linden scrambled toward it.

She was weak, and haste made her careless. She slipped repeatedly on the treacherous rubble, fell; caught herself and climbed again, panting with urgency. Without her boots and jeans, she would have scraped her legs raw; but she took no notice.

When she reached the stone where the hand clutched, she found Anele among the wreckage behind it.

He lay on his back, blind eyes staring whitely upward. With both hands he clawed vaguely at the granite as if he sought to dig his way out of a grave. His breath laboured painfully through his filthy beard.

“Anele,” she gasped thinly. Bending over him, she tried to force her senses into him; tried to see beyond the surface of his seamed, unwashed skin. But of the madness and Earthpower which had defined him earlier she caught no glimpse. He was closed to her now.

Oh, God. She did not understand.

A moment of sharp grief overtook her, and her vision blurred as she mourned the loss of her health-sense. For her, the beauty had gone out of the world. And she had tasted it so briefly-

During her previous time in the Land, percipience had exposed her to evils against which she had no armour and no weapons. The Sunbane and samadhi Raver had nearly shattered her spirit. Nevertheless she had learned to treasure such discernment. It had shed light into beauty as well as evil. It had enabled her to understand why Covenant loved the Land. It had taught her to view healing in a new way, less as a repudiation of death and more as an affirmation of life. And it had given her purpose, a reason to continue striving when her burdens, and Covenant’s, and the Land’s, seemed more than she could bear.