The Runes of the Earth

She had heard Covenant say while she dreamed, Trust yourself

And within her a door which she could not find shifted on its hinges.

“I want your help again,” she continued, “if you’ll give it. Not against the Despiser this time,” although she sought that as well. “One of the Ramen is dying. She needs vitrim. You can save her.

“In Vain’s name I ask it, and my own. Hear me, please. Otherwise a young woman,” hardly more than a girl, “who fought with you against the kresh is going to die”

Reaching out as if blindly with the fingers of her volition, the hand of choice, she grasped for the handle and unfurled white flame into the new day.

It could have been a high sheet of fire or a small tendril: she neither knew nor cared. Only a moment of wild magic; scarcely more than a heartbeat. Then she opened her hands and let Covenant’s ring fall; left it dangling against her chest. Still with her eyes closed, she bowed her forehead to the grass.

If the ur-viles helped her now, they might do so again.

They might help her save Jeremiah.

She heard nothing except the mild curiosity of the breeze; felt nothing except the gravid silence of the mountains. Yet when she raised her head and opened her eyes, she saw an ur-vile standing before her on the grass with an iron cup in its hands.

In the burgeoning dawn, the aroma of vitrim- dusky, thick as silt-could not be mistaken.

Chapter Eleven: Hints

The Ramen broke camp when Linden and Liand had eaten a brief meal Then they set off along the escarpment, travelling generally eastward toward narrow gorge between two of the surrounding mountains.

Somo had arrived during the night, guided by Ramen. The mustang appeared hale and ready, undamaged by the difficulties of the rift. That visibly erased Liand’s doubts about the Ramen. Now he shared their company, and Linden’s, with a young man’s eagerness.

Sahah they left behind with a few of her companions to care for her. Under the sustaining influence of vitrim, the injured Cord had rallied. She could not be moved: her life still hung precariously from the strings of her native toughness. Nevertheless the infection in her belly and the fever in her eyes had receded. She sipped water as well as vitrim willingly. At intervals, her mind cleared enough to let her speak. Linden believed-and Manethrall Hami agreed-that Sahah would live until the Cords who had been sent for hurtloam returned.

As the company moved, one of the Cords retrieved Anele from the mountainside above the scarp. Linden had noticed the old man’s absence only after her concern for Sahah had eased. She had felt little alarm, however, although she needed Anele in ways which she could hardly name: the Manethrall had promised that the Ramen would not lose him. When Linden asked after him, Hami answered that he had roused early and wandered away, she could not say why: to avoid the Master’s presence, perhaps, or to commune with his demons alone. In any case, he rejoined Linden and the Ramen without any obvious reluctance. As he accompanied them toward the gorge, he mumbled to himself incomprehensibly, as if he were engaged in a debate that no one else could hear or understand.

He had been reclaimed by madness, and his blindness had the distracted cast of a man who wandered among ghosts and saw only death.

With her renewed senses, Linden might have tried to pierce his confusion. But she feared the prices they both might pay for such an intrusion. Any possession was a form of psychic violence which might damage the last shards of his sanity. And she herself would be in danger from his madness. When she had entered Covenant years ago to free him from the imposed stasis of the Elohim, his blankness had overcome her, and for a time she had been as lost as Jeremiah. Ceer had died protecting her because she had been so completely absent from herself.

For the present, at least, she was unwilling to take the risk. Her own emotional state was too frangible.

Her success with Covenant’s ring had given her a grim, febrile exhilaration. She had found the door to power within herself, and would be able to do so again. In addition, the restoration of her senses seemed to fill her with possibilities. To that extent, at least, she had regained her ability to make effective choices. To influence her own fate-and Jeremiah’s. She was no longer entirely dependent on the willingness of others to guide and aid her.

Unfortunately her more profound dilemmas remained unchanged. Beneath her sent joy lurked frustration and despair like a buried lake of magma, a potential volcano. Every step that she took in the company of the Ramen, like every tale that she heard-like wild magic itself-was necessary to her. Yet none of them brought her nearer to Jeremiah.

If her muscles had not stiffened to an acute soreness during the night, so that merely walking demanded most of her concentration, she might have been defenceless against the larger difficulties of her situation.

Off to one side of the vale where the Ramen had camped, snowmelt gathered to form a stream which ran along the floor of the gorge. There the company paused briefly to refill their waterskins. Then they entered the gorge itself.

The narrow defile squirmed between its crude walls, following an ancient seam in the substance of the peaks. At intervals, fallen boulders littered the way, constricting the stream to pools and small rapids. Stave, Anele, and the Ramen seemed oblivious to such obstacles, too sure-footed to be hindered. But Linden, Liand, and Somo had to pick their footing carefully.

By the time they reached the far end of the gorge, the sun had risen past the shoulders of the lowest mountains. In the new light, she saw crests piling southward until they grew dark with distance. In shadow their cloaks of ice looked grimy and tattered, eroded by time. Direct sunlight, however, gave the ice a purity that seemed almost blue. As if exalted by the sun, the peaks lifted their grandeur proudly into the sky.

There the route of the Ramen traversed an open mountain slope southeastwards. This easier surface allowed Linden’s muscles to grow accustomed to movement. In addition, the sun warmed some of the tension from her joints. Gradually the aching in her thighs and calves faded, and her knees began to feel less brittle.

Liand walked at her side, leading Somo after him; and his buoyant company also helped her along. He was new to percipience, delighted by it, and every unfamiliar vista among the peaks, every type of grass or shrub or tree which he had never seen before, every soaring bird, enhanced his excitement. For him, the world was being made fresh as he moved through it.

Linden still believed that he should have remained in Mithil Stonedown; should return home as soon as he could. Nevertheless she found that she relied upon him more with every passing hour. He helped her believe that a world which g to such people could never be entirely ruined by Despite.

Then the Ramen began to descend to the south, avoiding a gnarled bluff that jutted from the mountainside, and Linden was forced to concentrate on her steps again. Walking downward strained her knees and thighs until they threatened to fold under her. She had to grit her teeth as well as her determination in order to stay on her feet.

Whenever she glanced at Anele, she saw that his madness was modulating between its various phases, responding to necessities or catalysts which she could not begin to grasp.

Ahead of her, the slope dropped toward a place of torn and jagged boulders, great blocks and monoliths, where two of the lower mountains appeared to have collided with each other. Studying the granite chaos, she feared that the Ramen would ask her to clamber there. However, they reassured her by turning so that their path angled more toward the east. As they rounded the mountainside beyond the tumbled monoliths, she saw that they were headed toward an arete between massive cliffs, a ridge like a saddle. It had been formed by tremendous rockfalls which had echoed each other off the higher cliffs and crashed together in the intervening valley, filling all of the space between the mountainsides with rubble.

Linden groaned to herself. More rubble-She could not conceal her chagrin as she