Stephen Donaldson - Fatal Revenant

Even if the Demondim could not feel her presence, they might detect the proximity of the Staff of Law.

Handir appeared to hesitate. Then Linden felt rather than saw him move until he no longer stood between her and the horde.

Do something they don’t expect.

At once, she dropped to her hands and knees as if she were sinking back into herself; into her concentration and dismay. She no longer regarded Handir and Galt, or her friends, or the clammy grasp of the rain on her back. If anyone spoke to her, she did not hear. By touch, she crawled through the drenched grass toward the extreme edge of Revelstone’s promontory. She did not know what the limits of the Vile-spawn’s perceptions might be; but she hoped to expose as little of herself as possible.

Then she found it: the outermost rim of the cliff, where the grass and soil of the plateau fell away from their foundation of stone. With little more than her head extended beyond the edge, she cast her health-sense downward.

At first, the rain seemed to plunge past her into a featureless abyss, black and primitive as terror. But as she focused her percipience, she saw with every sense except vision the shaped, deliberate surface of Revelstone’s prow directly below her; the walled and open courtyard; the massed bulk of the watchtower. For a moment, she distracted herself by noticing the presence of Masters within the tower. Then she looked farther.

The crown of the watchtower partially blocked her view of the Demondim. However, only a small portion of the horde was obscured: in spite of the rain and the darkness, she could discern most of the forces gathered beyond the Keep’s outer gates. When she had attuned herself to the roil and surge of the horde’s hatred, its dimensions became clear.

Veiled by rainfall, fiery opalescence seethed in chaotic waves and spatters from edge to edge of the Demondim formation. And through the stirred turmoil of the monsters’ might, amid the randomness of their black vitriol, she caught brief hints and glimpses, as elusive as phosphenes, of the dire emerald which emanated from the IIIearth Stone. That evil was muffled, muted; banked like embers in ash. But she knew it intimately and could not be mistaken.

Yet of the caesure which the Vile-spawn used to reach the IIIearth Stone, she saw no sign.

To her taut nerves, the confusion and uncertainty of the monsters seemed as loud as the blaring of battle-horns. But as she studied what she felt and heard and tasted-seeking, seeking-she began to think that their display of bewilderment was too loud. Surely if such lorewise creatures were truly baffled, chary of destruction, their attention would resemble hers? They would search actively for comprehension and discernment. Yet they did not. Rather their behaviour was like the wailing of confounded children: thoughtless; apparently incapable of thought.

Galvanised by a small jolt of excitement, Linden pushed her perceptions further, deeper. As she did so, she became certain that the Demondim were putting on a show of confusion, that their obvious disturbance was a ruse. It was one of the means by which they concealed their doorway to the IIIearth Stone.

According to Covenant, he had put a crimp in their reality. I made us look like bait. But Linden was no longer convinced that the Vile-spawn feared an ambush. They had some other reason for withholding their attack.

For a time, uncertainty eroded her concentration, and her sense of the horde became blurred, indefinite; as vague and visceral as the wellsprings of nightmares. Instead of continuing to search for some glimpse of the caesure , she felt Kevin’s Dirt overhead, high among the clouds. Independent of wind and weather, it spread a smear of doubt across her health-sense; numbed her tactile connection to the Land’s true life.

If Covenant had lied-

Mahrtiir had assured her that Kevin’s Dirt could not blind her while the effects of her immersion in Glimmermere lingered. Stave had implied that he held the same belief. Nevertheless she seemed to grow weaker by the moment, losing focus; drifting out of tune with the recursive emanations of the horde. She would never be able to identify the Fall unless she awakened the fire of Law to sharpen her perceptions.

Two days ago, the Masters had been able to descry the caesure ’s presence because the Demondim had not yet adopted their tactics of concealment. If she had been aware then of any Fall other than her own-and if she had been stronger-

She had missed that opportunity. It would not come again.

Surely it was Covenant who had told her that she needed the Staff of Law?

Yet any premature use of Earthpower would trigger the defences and virulence of her foes.

Trust yourself. You’re the only one who can do this.

Her time with Thomas Covenant long ago had taught her to ignore the dictates of panic.

All right, she told herself. All right. So she could not guess how the Demondim had decided on their present stratagems. So what? She had come to the rim of Revelstone to attempt a kind of surgery; and surgery demanded attention to what was immediately in front of her. The underlying motivations of the monsters were irrelevant. At this moment, under these circumstances, Kastenessen’s and even Covenant’s designs were irrelevant. Her task was simply and solely to extirpate the cancer of the horde’s access to the IIIearth Stone. For the surgeon in her, nothing else mattered.

With assiduous care, Linden Avery the Chosen reclaimed her focus on the manipulative masque of the Demondim.

She had spotted quick instances of the Stone’s green and lambent evil earlier: she saw more of them now. But they were widely scattered throughout the horde; brief as single raindrops; immediately absorbed. And they were in constant motion, glinting like fragments of lightning reflected on storm-wracked seas. When she had studied them for a time, she saw that they moved like the whirling migraine miasma of a caesure -

Then she understood why she could not discern the Fall itself. Certainly the Demondim concealed it with every resource at their command. Behind their feigned confusion, they seethed with conflicting energies and currents, seeking to disguise the source of their might. But still they exerted that might, using it to obscure itself. Each glimpse and flicker of the IIIearth Stone was so immediate, immanent, and compelling that it masked the disruption of time which made it possible.

Linden understood-but the understanding did not help her. Now that she had recognised what was happening, she could focus her health-sense past the threat inherent in each individual glint of emerald; and when she did so, she saw hints of time’s enabling distortion, the swirl of instants which severed the millennia between the horde and the Stone. But those hints were too brief and unpredictable. Their chaotic evanescence obscured them. They were like haemorrhaging blood vessels in surgery: they prevented her from seeing the precise place where her scalpel and sutures were needed.

There she knew the truth. The task that she had chosen for herself was impossible. She was fundamentally inadequate to it. The tactics of the Demondim were too alien for her human mind to encompass: she could not find her way through the complex chicanery and vehemence of the monsters. She would not be able to unmake the caesure unless she found a way to grasp what all of the Demondim were thinking and doing at every moment.

Therefore-

Groaning inwardly, she retreated a little way so that she could rest her forehead on the wet grass. She wanted to console herself with the sensation of its fecund health, its fragile and tenacious grip on the aged soil of the plateau; its delicate demonstration of Earthpower. Even the chill of the rain contradicted in some fashion the hurtful machinations of the Demondim, the savage emerald of the Stone, the quintessential wrong of the caesure ; the impossibility of her task. Rain was appropriate; condign. It fell because the earth required its natural sustenance. Such things belonged to the organic health of the world. They deserved to be preserved.