The Runes of the Earth

pack was gone.

Even Stave’s transcendent skill and force could not meet so many slavering predators. Liand had a Stonedownor’s bulk of muscle: he would give a good account of himself before he went down. Somo’s hooves might stop a few wolves. Nevertheless the end would be swift and savage. And soon.

Stave’s warning no longer mattered. If Linden could not summon wild magic against the kresh, she would never help anyone again, or anything: not Anele; not Jeremiah; not the Land.

Still she knelt beside the old man. His moonstone eyes stared at her sightlessly-He needed to talk. She knew of no other way to lance the psychic suppuration of his Pain.

Tears smeared grime into his beard, down the sides of his neck. “It seemed a small thing,” he said brokenly. “Such a small thing. Yet I have wrought such evil-”

“Anele!” she breathed like a cry, “make sense! You’re sane now. I can feel it. For God’s sake, tell me something I can understand!”

He must have heard her. Abruptly his attention turned to her. Although he could not see her, he gulped in surprise, “I know you. You are Linden Avery the Chosen. The Haruchai has said so. You accompanied Sunder my father as he bore the corpse of Hollian my mother into Andelain and life.”

Linden gaped at him as though he had shocked the air from her lungs. He might have spoken in an alien tongue: she recognised each word individually, but together they conveyed no meaning.

“That’s impossible,” she protested.

Impossible.

God in Heaven-

How much time had passed since she had travelled with Sunder and Covenant into Andelain, and seen Hollian reborn? Stave could tell her, if she asked him. Millennia, certainly.

This was Anele’s sanity?

Now Stave stood beside her. He gazed down at the old man like a denunciation. “It cannot be,” he announced flatly. “He remains mad, though he appears sane. Do not heed him.”

“What-?” She surged erect to confront the Haruchai. “You want me to ignore this?”

Stave faced her steadily. He hardly seemed to blink.

“Linden Avery, you must not harken to him. He is mad. And the kresh will soon be upon us. You must flee. If you do not, the hope of white gold will be lost to the Land. The Stonedownor and I will strive to provide for your escape.”

When she did not move, he said in a tone like a shove, “You must flee now.”

Compelled by his appeal, she turned to look down the slope.

As the kresh boiled over the rubble, they moved from deep shade toward the borrowed light of the sky; and for the first time Linden saw them clearly.

The sight staggered her.

They were yellow, as Liand had told her, the hue of pestilence. And they were huge. God, they were huge: taller than ponies at the shoulders. A fulvous fire shone from their hot eyes, and their gaping fangs seemed to slather acid across the rocks. To her Senses, their fury for death was a scream pouring ahead of them up the rift.

They horrified her. Lord Foul drove them somehow: their ferocity was the febrile hunger of scourged animals. When they had ripped away her flesh, they might turn on each other to quench their coerced savagery.

Yet through her dismay she heard Anele murmur, “Linden Avery the Chosen. You alone” Tears spilled ceaselessly from his eyes, although he did not sob. “You have known those who trusted me. You alone may comprehend what I have done.”

So saying, he altered everything.

Instantly Linden shrugged off her shock and horror. Before all else, she was a physician’ and Anele had suffered too much. She could not abandon him now: this window into his shame and pain might never open again. Somehow she had to help hint unlock the bars which had closed his mind.

When the kresh attacked, she would trust herself to repulse them with white fire. Surely the same instincts which had preserved her during the collapse of Kevin’s Watch would come to her rescue again?

In a rush, she stooped to the old man and helped him to his feet. Then she positioned herself so that she could watch his face as well as the rising tide of kresh.

“Tell me,” she urged him softly. “I’m listening. I won’t leave you. Tell me what happened.”

A frown intensified Stave’s scar. For a moment, he appeared to consider the merits of simply snatching her into his arms again and running upward with her; leaving Liand and Anele to die. But then he shrugged slightly.

Without haste or fear, he called Liand to him; readied the Stonedownor and Somo to fight for their lives.

Liand cast Linden a look fraught with apprehension. But he showed no hesitation as he plucked a pair of stone knives from Somo’s packs and braced himself against the multiplied howling of the kresh. Events had not granted him time enough to learn regret.

Anele clung to her with supplication on his face. Tears still ran like blood from his eyes, although he spoke more steadily.

“This stone remembers,” he told her. “Therefore I remember. I am Anele son of Sunder and Hollian.” The child Hollian had carried in her resurrected womb. “In Mithil Stonedown I was born to them. I came to life in their care and their love.”

It was impossible: all of it. For him, sanity was only a more profound form of madness. Nevertheless he invoked names which Linden could not ignore. In spite of the danger, she listened to him as if they stood leagues rather than moments away from the charging pack, and had no cause for fear.

“Though they made their home in Mithil Stonedown, their concern was for all the Land.” Again Anele’s voice took on the cadences, the implied threnody, of the stone. The advance of the kresh might have ceased to exist for him. “The Staff of Law had been entrusted to them, and they knew what was required of them. Indeed, they felt no wish to shun it, for their task was one of healing, and its necessity lifted their h longer

Facing him, Linden tried to estimate the speed of the wolves. How much gin for could she delay before she reached for fire? She had already sacrificed any margin for failure. If Covenant’s ring did not answer immediately to her hand, she and her companions would be lost.

Still Anele spoke as if he were oblivious to everything beyond his incomprehensible sanity.

“I was born after the passing of the Sunbane, yet I recall its ravages for the harm was vast, and my parents journeyed throughout the Land for many years, bearing with them. From earliest childhood, I watched them wield the Staff for the Land’s healing. From them, I learned of love and hope and courage, and of commitment to beauty.

“And I learned also to be astonished at them, though they did not desire to astonish me.”

“Linden Avery,” Stave instructed distinctly, “you must not heed him. The old man is entirely mad”

The kresh had come so near that their fangs seemed to reflect the sick fire in their eyes. Their massive shoulders heaved as they bounded closer: in another moment their claws might strike sparks from the rocks.

Yet Anele was saying, “Their past you know. Ere I was born, Sunder and Hollian had already accomplished the most wonderful deeds. Knowing nothing of wild magic and true Law, they had nonetheless given themselves utterly to the Land’s redemption. So great was their love and devotion that even death did not stand against them. I would not otherwise have found life.”

Now, Linden thought, now, and as she came to readiness her last doubts slipped away. Anele might be a demented old man, but he had known Sunder and Hollian, whom she had loved. If this were madness, she preferred it to sanity.

In some sense, the last remnant of the One Forest had restored to Sunder his wife and unborn son.