Stephen Donaldson - Fatal Revenant

“A simple charm will master time,

A cantrip clean and cold as snow.

It melts upon the brow of thought,

As plain as death, and so as fraught,

Leaving its implications’ rime,

For understanding makes it so.

“The secret of its spell is trust.

It does not change or undergo

The transformations which it wreaks-

The end in silence which it seeks

But stands forever as it must,

For cause and sequence make it so.

“Such knowing is the sap of life

And death, the rich, ripe joy and woe

Ascending in vitality

To feed the wealth of life’s wide tree

Regardless of its own long strife,

For plain acceptance makes it so.

This simple truth must order time:

It simply is, and all minds know

The way of it, the how, the why:

They must forever live and die

In rhythm, for the metered rhyme

Of growth and passing makes it so.

“The silent mind does not protest

The ending of its days, or go

To loss in grief and futile pain,

But rather knows the healing gain

Of time’s eternity at rest.

The cause of sequence makes it so.”

Linden did not understand-and neither knew nor cared that she did not. While she worked, she set all other considerations aside. With her abused fingers and her blurring vision, she concentrated solely and entirely on completing her gratitude; her homage.

But when she came to the end of her thread, and the scrap of her shirt was loosely stitched to the Mahdoubt’s robe-when the older woman removed her hand, ceasing her chant-Linden thought that she heard a familiar voice shout with relief and gladness. “Ringthane! The Ringthane has returned!”

At the same time, she seemed to feel sunrise on her back and smell spring in the air. She appeared to kneel on dewy grass at the Mahdoubt’s feet with the sound of rushing water in her ears and the Staff of Law as black as a raven’s wing beside her.

And she heard other voices as well. They, too, were known to her, and dear. They may have been nickering.

As she toppled to the grass, she fell out of her ensorcelled trance. She had a chance to think, Revelstone. The plateau.

The Mahdoubt had restored her to her proper time and place.

Then exhaustion claimed her, and she was gone.

Linden awoke slowly, climbing with effort and reluctance through the exhaustion of millennia. The years that she had bypassed or slipped between seemed to multiply her natural age; and her attempts to open her eyes, confirm the substance of her surroundings, felt hampered by caducity. She did not know where she was. She had told herself that she had reached the plateau above Revelstone in her proper time. She had believed that, trusted it; and slept. But the surface on which she lay was not fresh grass in springtime. Linen rather than soiled garments covered her nakedness, and her feet were bare. The light beyond her eyelids was too dim to be morning.

And she was diminished, truncated, in some fashion that she could not identify.

Yet she was warm, comfortably nestled. The unremitting clench of winter had released her. Her bed supported her softly. Like her eyes, her mouth and throat were too dry for ease, but those small discomforts were the normal consequences of unconsciousness. They did not hamper her.

For a moment like an instant of panic in a dream, quickly forgotten, she imagined that she had been taken to a hospital; that paramedics had rushed her, sirens wailing, to a place of urgent care. Had the bullet missed her heart? But the deeper levels of her mind knew the truth.

Gradually she recognised how she had been reduced.

Her skin felt nothing except the tactile solace of linen and softness and warm weight. She smelled nothing except the faint tang of wood smoke and the precious scent of cleanliness; heard nothing except the subtle effort of her own breathing. None of her senses extended beyond the confines of her body.

She did not know where she was, or how, or why-she hardly knew who-because her health-sense was gone. She had grown accustomed to its insights. Its absence diminished her.

Nonetheless she was paradoxically comforted by the realisation that Kevin’s Dirt had regained its hold. Now she could be certain that the Mahdoubt had brought her near to her rightful time.

In any case, her benevolent rescuer would not have stranded her earlier than she belonged. Then she would still have posed a threat to the integrity of the Arch. Nor had the Mahdoubt greatly overshot the day of Linden’s disappearance in rain from the upland plateau. She seemed to recall that she had heard Bhapa’s voice announcing her presence. If that were true, then she had also heard Manethrall Mahrtiir and Cord Pahni answer Bhapa’s call.

Surely they would not have awaited her return indefinitely? Not while their choices were constrained by the Masters-and the Demondim. At some point, they would have left Revelstone to rejoin their people, or to seek out a defence against the Land’s foes.

Linden had not been absent long enough to exhaust her friends’ hopes. And she had felt spring in the air—

When she was sure that the Mahdoubt had delivered her to the proper season in the proper year, a few of her numberless fears faded. At last, she allowed herself to remember why she was here.

Jeremiah. The croyel . Roger Covenant. Purpose and urgency.

Heavy with sleep, she raised her hands to confirm that Covenant’s ring still hung from its chain around her neck. Then she lifted them higher to rub her face. But she was not yet ready to sit up. She needed a moment to acknowledge that she had done Thomas Covenant the shameful injustice of permitting herself to be misled by his son.

She should have known better. Her dead love had earned more than her loyalty: he had earned her faith. Recalling the long tally of her mistakes, she was grieved that she let Roger tarnish her memories of the man who had twice defeated Lord Foul for the Land’s sake.

Grieved and angered.

Jeremiah’s presence had accomplished Roger’s intentions perfectly: it had distorted her judgment, leaving her vulnerable.

No more, she vowed. Not again. She had fallen in with the Despiser’s machinations once. She would not repeat that mistake.

Instead she meant to exact a price for Jeremiah’s torment.

But she was getting ahead of herself. Her night with the Mahdoubt in Garroting Deep had taught her-or retaught her-an important lesson. One step at a time. Just one. First she needed to absorb the details of her present situation. And she had to retrieve her Staff so that she could cast off the pall of Kevin’s Dirt. She would determine other actions later, after her true strength was restored.

Blinking against the smear of nightmares and regret, she looked around.

Strange, she thought. She was in a small room which she knew well enough, although it seemed vaguely unreal, dislocated by the passage of too much time; too much cold and desperation, battle and loss. She lay under blankets in a narrow bed. A pillow cradled her head. A shuttered window in the smooth stone wall above her admitted a dull grey light that could have been dawn or dusk. A doorway in the opposite wall past the foot of the bed held a soft illumination, yellow and flickering, which suggested lamps or a fire. Near her head, a second doorway led to a bathroom.

The chamber appeared to be the same one in which she had spent two nights before Roger and the croyel had translated her out of her time. She remembered it as though she had visited it in dreams rather than in life.

Yet she was here. As if to demonstrate the continuity of her existence, the Staff of Law leaned like a shaft of midnight against the wall at the head of the bed. And in a chair at its foot sat the Mahdoubt, watching Linden with a smile on her lips and gloaming in her mismatched eyes.