The Last Dark (23 page)

Covenant nodded. “Sure. Why not?” He needed strength. When the Worm came, he would have to flee, whatever happened. If he and Branl died here, their lives would be truly wasted.

Uncovering only the dagger’s blade, the Humbled deftly took a melon, sliced it into sections, cut out the seeds. The pieces he handed to Covenant one at a time.

Covenant ate until only rinds remained; but he did not notice the taste, or attend to what he was doing. He was listening to the unsteady ululation of the wind, trying to decipher its oblique message. Its salt tang and its keening were auguries that he did not know how to interpret.

Branl offered to prepare another melon. Vaguely Covenant declined. He was not conscious of hunger; or he was not hungry for that kind of sustenance. He wanted the richer nourishment of an
answer
.

After cleaning the blade, Branl put the
krill
away and resumed his study of the east.

Wind and salt. The ravage of the delta. The Worm of the World’s End. Kastenessen. She Who Must Not Be Named.

And Linden, who was so far away that only Rallyn would know how to find her. The thought that he might not see her again before the end made Covenant’s chest ache like a wound to the heart.

Branl stepped back to gaze around the stones. After a moment, he said, “Attend, ur-Lord. The Feroce approach.”

Jerking up his head, Covenant spotted glints of emerald on the rocks. Fires guttered; flared more brightly; receded. Soon two of the creatures brought their flames and their timidity to the border of the grass. Two or three more Feroce followed behind them. Their eyes cast echoes of their theurgy into his shelter.

In their damp, squeezed voice, they asked, “Pure One?”

Covenant faced them until he was sure that they did not mean to say more; that the two words of their question sufficed for them. Then he looked at Branl. “What time is it?”

The Humbled was a thicker shadow in the gathering murk. “Evening becomes night,” he answered. Responding to Covenant’s underlying query, he added, “I do not yet descry the Worm. Though its coming is plain, it remains beyond my discernment.”

And mine, Covenant sighed. Tightening his grip on himself, he turned back to the Feroce. “Is the havoc close? The Worm? Do you know? Can your High God feel it?”

The creatures replied with a thin wail, quickly cut off. Almost gibbering, they forced themselves to say, “It is near. How do you not know that it is near? Our High God asks what he must do. He asks with desperation. His alarm is terrible.”

Near? Covenant muttered to himself. Hellfire!

“I’m sorry,” he told the Feroce gruffly. “You’ll just have to wait. I won’t know what to say until I see it.” Almost at once, he went on, “And I won’t see anything until you get rid of those fires.” They blinded him to everything else; cast a pall of memories over his mind. He remembered the Illearth Stone too well. “If you can’t survive without them outside the Sarangrave, hide them somewhere. I won’t abandon you. I’ll tell you as soon as I have something.”

The creatures quailed. They moaned like the wind. But they did not protest. One by one, they retreated among the stones. For a while, their emerald lingered on rims of granite and basalt. Then Covenant lost sight of them.

“Branl?” he asked anxiously. “Anything?”

“Perhaps,” replied the Humbled. “I am uncertain.”

Cursing, Covenant surged to his feet. The wind seemed to blow darkness into his covert. Branl was little more than an outline against the rocks.

If the Master’s acute senses were uncertain, Covenant would be effectively eyeless; but he had to look. Pressing himself against his companion, he stared through the eastward oriel until the strain of trying to see made his forehead throb as if he had bruised it. Still he found nothing.

Or something.

A hint of light at the boundary between sea and sky.

“There.” He pointed. “Did you see it?”

At first, he thought that it was heat-lightning: a storm brewing. Almost immediately, however, he realized that he was wrong. The light did not flicker and glare. Instead it appeared to float on the distant turmoil of the seas.

Wind lashed at his eyes. It had become a gale.

“It resembles fog.” The last of the Humbled sounded utterly dispassionate. “A luminous fog, lit from within. Storms which arise nowhere else clash within it.” After a moment, he remarked, “The fog and its storms shroud an immense power. It brings havoc in all sooth, such havoc as no
Haruchai
has ever witnessed. Yet the power does not harm the seas. It merely disturbs them.”

Waves hammered harder at the base of the cliffs. In spite of his numbness, Covenant felt the ground under his boots trembling.

Hell and blood. “That’s the Worm?”

Coming from the east? Straight for the Great Swamp?

“I deem that it is. And it is swift. Yet the fog—and indeed the storms—run some distance ahead of their source.” Branl turned to Covenant. “Ur-Lord, I must speak of this. Time remains to us. If you wish it, we may flee in safety. Wild magic will enable us to traverse many leagues ere this peril achieves landfall.”

Covenant clenched his teeth until his jaws ached. “Who do you think you’re kidding? We can’t leave now. Not until we see what that thing does.”

The eerie glow expanded on the horizon. Already it was distinct even to his marred vision. He felt its force in the wind on his face. Its teeth seemed to gnash at his cheeks. The luminescence did indeed resemble fog, vapor filled with lightning. But the lightning did not waver or strike: it
endured
, a convulsion of bolts without beginning and without end.

And the fog did not flow toward the southwest. Rather it sent tendrils like arms ahead of the storms, questing over an area as wide as the delta. Soon, however, even the most distant streamers began curving inward, reaching for Lifeswallower.

Reaching as if they had found the spoor of the Worm’s prey.

Oh, bloody hell!

Bands of fog drifted over the seas. They drew closer with every harsh thud of Covenant’s heart. Wild winds hurt his eyes, but he could not look away. Now he saw that the actinic glare within the brume was not truly constant. Instead of jumping and crackling, it swelled and receded incrementally, a slow seethe which belied the speed of its advance; a gradual rhythm like the undulating heave of a tremendous body. And every surge flung the vehemence of the waves harder against the cliffs. Collisions and crashes sounded like thunder; like the blare of steerhorns announcing ruin.

“Ur-Lord,” Branl stated, “we must not delay. These forces threaten the headland. We cannot withstand them.”

Damn
it! The wind was trying to tell Covenant something. It urged him to
think
—

The inundation of Lifeswallower’s delta. The bitter lash of salt.

If he judged only by smell, he would believe that the whole of the Great Swamp had already been ripped out of existence. Uncounted millennia of poisons no longer reeked; no longer spread their nauseating odors into the air. The fury of wind and water effaced every other perception.

Surely that
meant
something?

Streamers full of fatal light swept closer, riding the blasts. One of them poured up the precipice in front of Covenant and Branl. Squirming like a serpent of moisture, it writhed among the stones. A ribbon as luminous as the enchanted stone of the Lost Deep brushed Covenant’s cheek before he could jump back. For an instant like a heartbeat, it appeared to curl around Branl. Its touch was damp and gelid, bitterly cold, as fierce as the caress of a
caesure
. But the fog did not react to Covenant and his companion; to Joan’s ring or Loric’s
krill
. Oblivious to anything that was not food for the Worm, it ran on along the wind, gusting westward.

Now Covenant saw a shape within the hermetic mass of the storms, a dark form limned by the heavy rise and fall of the lightning. Infelice had described the Worm as
no more than a range of hills
in size.
An earthquake might swallow it
. But to him, it looked more like a chain of mountains breasting inexorably through the seas. Its power was staggering: he was barely able to keep his feet. Perhaps his appalled senses exaggerated the Worm’s physical bulk; but nothing could measure its sheer
force
. He was too human to look at it for more than a moment at a time.

By comparison, the lurker was trivial in spite of its polluted mass. It could do nothing to thwart the Worm’s passage. It could only die.

And the World’s End was definitely heading west. Toward Mount Thunder.

Hellfire! Hell and damnation! Covenant was thinking about the problem backward. The wind carried away the rancid effluviums of Lifeswallower and the Sarangrave. Of course it did. But considered from a different perspective, the gale
blocked
the fetor.

And how did the Worm find its prey? How did it locate the
Elohim
in their myriad hiding places? By scent. It smelled them out. Not in any ordinary sense, no. They did not emit a mundane aroma. But their magicks, the mystical essence of who they were:
that
the Worm could detect.

If those emanations could be detected, perhaps they could also be blocked. By a different kind of power. A force that was inherently
wrong
for the Worm, antithetical to its appetites.

More urgently, Branl insisted, “Ur-Lord.”

The Worm’s puissance had become explicit, even to Covenant’s blunted nerves. Its might shone through the rigid rocks of the headland as if they were transparent.

He guessed that it was still two or three leagues out to sea. But at that speed—He had no time to doubt himself. Practically reeling, he wheeled away from the oriel; away from the heedless band of fog.

And as he moved, he yelled, “Feroce! I need you!”

Glints of green showed in the jumble. They were too far away.

“I need your High God! I need him
now
!”

The wind snatched words from his mouth. They disappeared among the stones, meaningless. Nevertheless the fires came closer. Gleams flashed from place to place, apparently running.

As the first creature emerged from the maze, the voice of the Feroce moaned urgently, “Pure One? What must our High God do? He must not perish!”

Streamers searched the turmoil of the delta. Lightning pulsed with every heave of the Worm’s bulk. Seas hurled chaos at the cliffs. The silent shout of storms constrained by the Worm’s aura made the ground under Covenant lurch as if the foundations of the promontory were in spasm.

An earthquake might swallow it
. Under the right circumstances, Linden could trigger an earthquake. She and the Staff of Law had that kind of strength. Covenant did not: not with Joan’s ring.

Haste and frenzy gripped him. “Listen fast.” He was hardly coherent. “Try to understand. I don’t want your High God dead. He can’t fight the Worm. But he has to
act
like he’s going to fight. He has to rear up. Make himself as big as he can. Right
there
.” Covenant pointed at the drowned stretch of Lifeswallower to the north. “I need him to block the way,” confuse the Worm’s instincts, fill the Worm’s senses with corrupt emanations; mask the powers hidden in Mount Thunder.

“
Ur-Lord
,” protested Branl.

“Pure One?” The voice of the Feroce was a cry, a groan, a prayer. Their fires shuddered like the cliffs’ bedrock. “We are little. Our minds are small. We do not—”

Covenant cut them off. “Just
tell
him!” He wanted to tear his hair. “I can’t explain. I don’t have time. I need him to
do it
. Rear up. Make himself
huge
. Pretend he’s a barrier.”

If the lurker did not panic—if the monster kept its word—

Frantically Covenant strove to impose comprehension on Horrim Carabal’s acolytes. “The Worm doesn’t want him. If he doesn’t fight, it won’t hurt him. But he has to look
big
enough to fight.

“
Tell
him! He can get out of the way if the Worm doesn’t stop. But first he has to try to make it
pause
! He has to make it look somewhere else for food!”

Would that work? Of course not. Or not for long. But it might distract the Worm for a while. Slow it down. Buy a little time. Until the World’s End found a different scent.

The Feroce could do what he asked of them. They could communicate swiftly enough. And the deeper waters of Lifeswallower were the lurker’s true home. The core of the monster’s mass and muscle lived there. If Horrim Carabal chose to do so, it could respond immediately.

Already the Worm had seethed a league closer.

Wind scattered the wailing of the Feroce among the stones. Their fires rose like screams. The gale did not touch their emerald theurgy, but the mounting convulsions beneath them did. The Worm’s hunger made the flames flinch and bend.

Instead of answering, they turned and fled.

“Ur-Lord!” Branl demanded. He stood in the path of a glowing tendril, but it flowed around him as if he were nothing more than granite or basalt. “We must depart!”

Shaking his head, Covenant turned to peer down at the delta. “I just need a minute! I have to see if this is going to work!”

Please, God damn it! he begged the lurker. I almost killed myself against
turiya
. Clyme died for you. I know you’re terrified. But you made a promise.

Why would Horrim Carabal comply? Covenant was asking the monster to dare its own extinction.

The lash of seas over Lifeswallower had become an undifferentiated flood. Incoming waters tried to withdraw and could not: the imponderable forces of the Worm’s approach drove them farther into the Great Swamp. Night had overtaken the Lower Land, but it changed nothing. The fog shed its own light. Its radiance made the hard stone of the headland seem as insubstantial as dreams. Through obstructions of rock, Covenant felt every rise and dip of the Worm’s heaving. The rhythm of its undulations was slow. It seemed almost casual. Or perhaps it was sluggish yet. Nevertheless its speed—or its power—filled him with dismay. His chest felt ready to burst.