Stephen Donaldson: Fatal Revenant

The waters healed bruises: they washed away the strain and sorrow of battle. She needed that. They could not undo the emotional cost of the things which she had suffered, but they lifted from her the long physical weariness and privation of recent days, the visceral residue of her passage through caesures, the tangible galls of her fraught yearning for her son. The eldritch implications of Glimmermere renewed her bodily health and strength as though she had feasted on aliantha .

As cold as the water, Covenant’s ring burned between her breasts.

But the lake did more. The renewed accuracy with which she was able to perceive her own condition told her that the stain of Kevin’s Dirt had been scrubbed from her senses. And when she reached beyond herself, she felt the ramified richness of the grass beneath her, the imponderable life-pulse of the undergirding soil and stone. She could not detect Mahrtiir’s presence beyond the hills: his emanations were too mortal to penetrate Glimmermere’s glory. Yet spring’s fecundity whispered to her along the gentle breeze, and the faint calling of the birds was as eloquent as melody. The wealth of the lake was now a paean, a sun-burnished outpouring of the Earth’s essential gladness, as lambent as Earthpower, and as celebratory as an aubade.

In other ways, nothing had changed. Her torn heart could not be healed by any expression of this world’s fundamental bounty. Covenant and Jeremiah had been restored to her-and they would not let her touch them. That hurt remained. Glimmermere held no anodyne for the dismay and bereavement which had brought her here.

Nevertheless the lake had given her its gifts. It had made her stronger, allowing her to feel capable again, more certain of herself. And it had erased the effects of Kevin’s Dirt, when she had been forbidden to do so with the Staff of Law.

She was as ready as she would ever be.

Steady now, and moving without haste, she donned her clothes and boots; retrieved her Staff. Then she climbed a short way up the hillside, back toward Revelstone, until she found a spot where the slope offered a stretch of more level ground. There she planted her feet as though her memories of Thomas Covenant and love stood at her back to support her. Facing southward across the hillside, she braced the Staff in the grass at her feet and gripped it with one hand while she lifted the white gold ring from under her damp shirt with the other and closed it in her fist.

She took a deep breath; held it for a moment, preparing herself. Then she lifted her face to the sky.

She had ascended far enough to gain a clear view of the mountainheads in the west. Clouds had begun to thicken behind the peaks, suggesting the possibility of rain. It would not come soon, however. The raw crests still clawed the clouds to high wisps and feathers that streamed eastward like fluttering pennons. As Glimmermere’s waters flowed between the hills into the south, they caught the sunshine and glistened like a spill of gems.

Now, she thought. Now or never.

With her head held high, she announced softly, “It’s time, Esmer. You’ve done enough harm. It’s time to do some good.

“I need answers, and I don’t know anyone else who can give them to me.” Her voice seemed to fall, unheard, to the grass. Nothing replied to her except birdsong and the quiet incantations of the breeze.

More loudly, she continued, “Come on, Esmer. I know you can hear me. You said that the Despiser is hidden from you, and you can’t tell me where to find my son, but those seem to be the only things that you don’t know. There’s too much going on, and all of it matters too much. It’s time to pick a side. I need answers. ” Still she had no reason to believe that he would heed her. She had no idea what his true powers were, or how far they extended. She could not even be sure that he had returned to her present. He may have sought to avoid the pain of his conflicting purposes by remaining in the Land’s past; in a time when he could no longer serve either Cail’s devotion or Kastenessen’s loathing.

Hell, as far as she knew, he had arrived to aid and betray her outside the cave of the Waynhim before his own birth. And he had certainly brought the Demondim forward from an age far older than himself. But his strange ability to go wherever and whenever he willed reassured her obliquely. It was another sign that the Law of Time retained its integrity.

No matter which era of the Earth Esmer chose to occupy, his life and experience remained consecutive, as hers did. His betrayal of her, and of the Waynhim, in the Land’s past had been predicated on his encounters with her among the Ramen only a few days ago. If he came to her now, in his own life he would do so after he had brought the Demondim to assail her small company. The Law of Time required that, despite the harm which Joan had wrought with wild magic.

Even if he did hear her, however, he had given her no cause to believe that he could be summoned. He was descended-albeit indirectly-from the Elohim ; and those self-absorbed beings ignored all concerns but their own. Linden was still vaguely surprised that they had troubled to send warning of the Land’s peril.

Nevertheless Esmer’s desire to assist her had seemed as strong as his impulse toward treachery. The commitments that he had inherited from Cail matched the dark desires of the merewives .

He might yet come to her.

She was not willing to risk banishing Covenant and Jeremiah with the Staff. And she was not desperate enough to chance wild magic. But she had found her own strength in Glimmermere. She had felt its cold in the marrow of her bones. When a score of heartbeats had passed, and her call had not been answered, she raised her voice to a shout.

“Esmer, God damn it! I’m keeping score here, and by my count you still owe me!” Even his riven heart could not equate unleashing the Demondim-and the Illearth Stone-with serving as a translator for the Waynhim. “Cail was your father ! You can’t deny that. You’ll tear yourself apart. And the Ranyhyn trust me! You love them, I know you do. For their sake, if not for simple fairness-!” Abruptly she stopped. She had said enough. Lowering her head, she sagged as if she had been holding her breath.

Without transition, nausea began squirming in her guts.

She knew that sensation; had already become intimately familiar with it. If she reached for wild magic now, she would not find it: its hidden place within her had been sealed away.

She felt no surprise at all as Esmer stepped out of the sunlight directly in front of her.

He was unchanged; was perhaps incapable of change. If she had glimpsed him from a distance, only his strange apparel would have prevented her from mistaking him for one of the Haruchai . He had the strong frame of Stave’s kinsmen, the brown skin, the flattened features untouched by time. However, his gilded cymar marked him as a being apart. Its ecru fabric might have been woven from the foam of running seas, or from the clouds that fled before a thunderstorm, and its gilding was like fine streaks of light from a setting sun.

But he stood only a few steps away; and at this distance, his resemblance to his father vanished behind the dangerous green of his eyes and the nausea he evoked as though it were an essential aspect of his nature. His emanations were more subtle than those of the Demondim, yet in his own way he seemed more potent and ominous than any of the Vile-spawn.

By theurgy if not by blood, he was Kastenessen’s grandson.

For a moment, nausea and perceptions of might dominated Linden’s attention. Then, belatedly, she saw that he was not alone.

A band of ur-viles had appeared perhaps a dozen paces behind him: more ur-viles than she had known still existed in the world; far more than had enabled her to retrieve the Staff of Law. Only six or seven of those creatures had lived to reach the ambiguous sanctuary of Revelstone and the plateau. Yet here she saw at least three score of the black Demondim-spawn, perhaps as many as four. None of them bore any sign that they had endured a desperate struggle for their lives, and hers.