The Runes of the Earth

“You said sometimes the Masters go away. For days?”

“Upon occasion,” the Stonedownor affirmed. “Other absences are less prolonged.

Revelstone was three hundred leagues away. Even on horseback, the journey would take more than a few days.

“Do you know where they go?” she asked. “I mean, when they aren’t going to Revelstone. Why do they need to go anywhere?”

Liand shrugged. “They are the Masters. They reveal little, and explain less.

“However,” he added more slowly, “at times they accept my company, when my duties permit it. Thus I have learned that in certain absences they searched for your companion.”

Linden caught her breath. In this also, Anele had told the truth.

“I know not,” Liand went on, “why they have attended so to the capture of one frail old man. Nor am I able to describe how he has eluded them. I could not have done so in his place. Yet it is certain that their desire against him is no recent wish.”

She nodded in the gloom. The sun’s light had faded further, and as it did so the air grew noticeably cooler. Soon she might start to shiver. Liand’s account was consistent with what both Stave and Anele had told her.

How had the old man been able to evade capture? She could not imagine. Like Liand, she would have been helpless to foil the Haruchai.

If she wanted to escape, she needed to learn Anele’s secret.

He had mentioned dark, fearsome creatures. Lost things, long dead. Creatures that forced him to remember

That question would have to wait. Something that Liand had been about to reveal nagged at her. Instead of pursuing his sporadic travels with the Masters, she said, “A minute ago, you started to say something else. You mentioned kresh and-?”

He frowned, momentarily confused. “Kresh and-?” But then his expression lifted. “Ah, yes. I meant to add that the Masters aid us also against the Falls.”

As if to himself, Anele muttered, “Caesures.”

“Go on,” Linden urged the young man.

Liand sighed. “By some means which we do not comprehend, and which the Masters do not explain, they discern the Falls at great distance. We are scarcely able to behold the Falls when they are nigh, yet the Masters perceive their presence and their movements from afar. Destructive as they are, and unpredictable to us, they might well have torn us from life if the Masters did not forewarn and guide us.”

The Stonedownors could not detect the caesures because they had been blinded; yet the Haruchai had not so much as mentioned Kevin’s Dirt to Liand’s people.

Cursing to herself, Linden asked, “Could you see the Fall that broke Kevin’s Watch?”

Liand shook his head. “We could not. The distance was too great for our eyes. We only guessed at its presence when the spire fell.”

She understood none of this. What did Lord Foul gain by it? Nevertheless the yellow smog baffled her less than did the caesures. If she could not imagine its ultimate purpose, she could grasp the nature of its evil. But the migraine aura which had shattered Kevin’s Watch was another matter. She had seen that it was potent and harmful; but what was it for?

Groping, she probed further.

“You said you’ve had trouble with kresh for three or four generations. How long have you had to worry about Falls?”

“Four score years, perhaps, or five. Falls are more”- he grimaced- “remarkable than kresh, fearsome though the wolves may be. They disturb our lives more profoundly.” Liand thought for a moment, then offered, “If I question my people, I may be able to determine the time of their first appearance among us.”

Eighty or a hundred years. Three or four generations. Caesures and kresh had begun to afflict the South Plains at about the same time.

“What do the Falls do?” Linden asked intently.

The young man’s mouth twisted again. “They are destructive, as I have said.” He did not enjoy the taste of his memories. “Trees and shrubs are often blasted, and crops are ruined as though ploughs by the score had torn through them. At times we have been brought near to starvation by the loss of our fields, and winter has been cruel to us because we could find little wood to feed our fires.” He sighed. “Beyond question the aid of the Masters has enabled us to endure.”

His voice held a note of fatality as he concluded, “Stone may withstand a Fall, though it does not do so repeatedly. But any beast or bird or human that nears a Fall is swallowed away and does not return.”

Linden stared at him. Swallowed away? Actually devoured? God! No wonder Anele was terrified-

Fearing Liand’s answer, she asked, “How often do you see Falls?”

He shrugged uncomfortably. “We cannot foretell them. They are not constant. However, the interval between them is commonly measured in years. Some pass, harmless, across the Plains. Others disappear among the mountains, or emerge from them. It is rare that a Fall enters this valley.”

As he spoke, Linden winced at an abrupt flash of intuition. Caesures had begun to afflict the Land, say, ninety years ago. Covenant had told her that roughly a year passed in the Land for every day in her ordinary world. And three months had passed since she had restored a white gold ring-

Was it possible? Behind Liand’s shrouded form, and the blank stone walls, and the gloom, Linden seemed to see Roger’s mother in her hospital bed raising her fist against herself. Had Lord Foul taken hold of Joan’s mind so completely that she had been able to reach across the barrier between realities with wild magic? Had Joan caused the Falls by beating out her pain on the bones of her temple?

If so, the danger was about to get a lot worse. She was here now; able to strike directly at the Land.

And Linden was inadvertently responsible. Nothing in her experience had prepare her for the possibility that Joan’s madness might have power across such distances.

Even the Staff of Law-if Linden could somehow contrive to find it-might Prove useless against such wrong.

Her voice shook as she asked, “Do the kresh ever attack while you’re threatened by a Fall?”

How far did Joan’s insanity-and Lord Foul’s machinations-extend? Kevin’s Dirt effectively masked the caesures. Did the Falls similarly disguise the peril of the wolves?

“I have beheld one such attack,” Liand admitted, “no more. Yet when they neared the Fall, the kresh attempted flight. Those that failed were consumed.”

His answer gave her a small relief. It suggested that Joan-or the Despiser-was somehow constrained; limited. Or that separate intentions were at work; hungers driven by differing impulses.

Nevertheless she did not understand it. It did not sound like Lord Foul. Surely his appetite for ruin would be better fed by a coordinated assault? The Masters alone could not repeatedly withstand such an attack.

Stave’s people had spent centuries ensuring that the Land had no other defenders.

Linden needed more information. She lacked some crucial fact or insight which would have allowed her to grasp the Despiser’s purpose.

“So kresh and Falls are new,” she mused. “Comparatively. Have there been any other changes? Maybe not in your lifetime, but in the past few generations? Do your people talk about anything unusual? Has anything strange happened?”

“Do you mean apart from the fall of the Watch, and your own presence?” Liand’s tone suggested a grin, but the accumulating gloom concealed his features. “Do you inquire of stillbirths, or twins, or unwonted blights?” Then he shook his shadowed head. “Surely you do not.

“One event,” he said more seriously, “which we would deem “strange” without hesitation has transpired. Indeed, I was present at its occurrence. Though I was little more than a child, I recall it well-as do we all.”

“Tell me,” Linden urged.

He rubbed his arms roughly for a moment, as if the thought of what he would say left him vulnerable to the growing cold. Outside the day had turned crepuscular somehow ominous: she could hardly make out the wall of the home beyond her gaol. An erratic breeze began to scrub up dust from the packed dirt between the