The Runes of the Earth

“And don’t tell me they failed. I already know that.”

“As you wish.” Stave’s voice was a shudder of pain.

Although she had spent ten years without this discernment, its uses returned to her readily. Because she could see, the pain and damage which she perceived poured into her as though they afflicted her own flesh, her own spirit. But she had learned how to accept such hurts in order to determine their sources and take action against them. The Master’s agony did not daunt her.

He was silent for so long that she thought he had forgotten her question-or had lost heart. But at last he lifted his voice faintly to her.

“The Ramen resent that we ride the Ranyhyn, but that is not their grievance. The Ranyhyn choose to be ridden.”

His words and even his difficulty speaking freed Linden to focus on her task.

As her senses filtered past his superficial bruises and internal abrasions to his deepest hurts, however, she realised that she could still honour his wishes. Instead of attempting to heal him, she could simply spare him pain while he died. With her health-sense, she could intervene between his consciousness and his wounds-possess him, after a fashion-so that he felt no discomfort as he slipped away.

If she lacked the courage to do more-and if she were willing to violate his right to bear his own distress-

For her own sake as much as for his, she rejected the idea. More than ever, she needed to be able to exceed herself.

Through his pain, Stave breathed words like secrets for her ears alone. “Rather the Ramen do not forgive that the Bloodguard were accepted by the Ranyhyn, and were proved faithless. This you know. When Korik, Sill, and Doar were defeated by the Illearth Stone and Ravers, they vindicated the ire of the Ramen.”

Linden heard him. On one level, she heard him acutely: his words were as sharp as etch-work. On others, however she heeded nothing that he said. Her attention flowed in other directions, other dimensions.

There. When she had reached beyond the symptoms of his dying to their cause, she saw plainly the punctures and lacerations in his lung, the throbbing ooze of his blood. They might have been mapped in her own body. Two badly splintered ribs. Five separate perforations. Three seeping tears.

In an operating theatre, she would have needed half a dozen assistants to help her cope with so much bleeding.

“Through the defeat of the Bloodguard, however,” Stave sighed, “the fidelity of the Ramen itself is tarnished. They have never ridden the great horses, and yet their pure service has been given to beasts that in turn served willingly men who could not uphold their sworn Vow.”

With her own nerves, Linden measured the seriousness of his injuries. But it was not enough to see. Percipience alone would only break her heart. She required power; the ability to make a difference.

While she watched Stave haemorrhage, she groped as if blindly for wild magic, like a woman fumbling behind her to grasp the handle of a door which lay hidden or lost.

Sweat glinted in fire-lit beads on his forehead; dripped from his cheeks like the unsteady labour of his pulse. His scar underlined the pain in his eyes.

“That their service has been diminished the Ramen do not forgive, who have never broken faith.”

Somewhere among the ramified chambers of herself lay a room full of potential fire, crowded with the implications of Covenant’s ring. Yet it eluded her. When she had time to think, when she went looking for that room consciously, she could not be sure of its location. Her doubting mind had too many qualms. Covenant’s ring did not belong to her: she did not deserve its white flame. If she tried to become the Wildwielder, as the Elohim had said that she must, she might lose every aspect of herself.

Stave’s voice had fallen until it was barely audible. “Are you answered?”

“No,” she replied as softly. “The Ramen must know why Korik and the others did what they did.” Certainly Hami’s people respected their own limitations. Otherwise they would not have been content to merely serve the Ranyhyn. “How can they not forgive?”

Everyone else would forgive her if she failed to save Stave; but she was not sure that she would be able to forgive herself.

“Because,” he whispered, “they were not present.”

In the end, her choice was a simple one. She was a physician. Any one of the Haruchai would have given his life for her. And Lord Foul had Jeremiah.

How else could she earn her own redemption?

When she had become sure, her hand closed on the handle of the door she sought.

“How can it be said?” the broken man continued in wisps; faint puffs of life fading between his lips. “You ask too much. Such speech does not suffice. Even in the unspoken tongue of the Haruchai, it transcends-”

There the difficulties of her task began in earnest.

“The Ramen cannot comprehend what transpired because only Bloodguard accompanied Lord Hyrim to the slaughter of the Giants.”

During the collapse of Kevin’s Watch, she had somehow distorted the ineluctable sequences of gravity and time. But if she did such things now, she would burn Stave’s life to ash.

Still he strove to answer her. “Only Bloodguard witnessed the final murder of the Unhomed while it was yet fresh in cruelty. Only Bloodguard saw the outcome of their terrible despair.”

Even the small handful of wild magic which she had raised for Sahah’s sake would be too forceful here. The Master needed delicacy from her, precision; an accuracy at once as keen as whetted steel and as gentle as trained fingers. The smallest leak of flame from its secret chamber would be enough. The merest fraction more would be too much.

If her self-command wavered for a heartbeat-

Stave was nearing the end of himself. “Only Bloodguard,” he panted weakly, “stood beside Lord Hyrim while Kinslaughterer endeavoured to efface every vestige of the Giants from The Grieve.”

Seeking to tune percipience and wild magic to the same feather-soft pitch, she clung to the arduous sound of Stave’s voice as to a saving anchor; a point of clarity against the tug of her self-doubt.

Pierced by the touch of flame, he gasped. But he did not stop.

“The Ramen cannot know how the Bloodguard loved the Giants. They cannot grasp how the hearts of the Bloodguard were rent by what had transpired. Therefore they presume to scorn our fall from faith.”

The stolid demeanour of his people masked how profoundly they had been horrified. It hid the depth of their rage.

The Bloodguard had striven absolutely to succeed, and they had failed. What other conclusion could such men draw from their defeat, except that they were not worthy?

No wonder the Haruchai had made themselves the Masters of the Land. They sought to ensure that they would never again be found unworthy by an atrocity like the destruction of the Unhomed.

They had turned their backs on grief-

In comprehension and empathy, Linden nudged the punctures in Stave’s lungs shut one by one. Then she reached into him with argence in order to bind their edges together.

“Chosen,” he murmured; his last words to her, “hear me.

“The judgment of the Haruchai is not so lightly set aside. There will come a reckoning between us.”

Another man might have meant between the Masters and the Ramen; but she knew that he did not.

Wild magic was too rough for the task. Inadvertently she hurt him until he nearly screamed behind his locked teeth. Nevertheless she sealed the tissues of his lungs around each wound. Then she closed the pleural rents.

Extravagantly careful, and still unable to spare him agony, she stitched white fire along the worst of his internal lacerations until they were made whole.

Finally she bowed her head over her work. Stave had lost consciousness: he lay as still as death. But he breathed more easily now, and no new blood came to his lips.

When she believed that he would live, she let percipience and power and all the world go.