Stephen Donaldson - Fatal Revenant

“I’m going to build a door.” Eagerness seemed to crackle and spatter in his voice. “Like the one in my bedroom that let me visit the Land. Like that one, it won’t look like a door. It’ll be more like a big box. Once we climb inside, and I put the last pieces in place, we’ll disappear here - his gaze touched Linden’s briefly, then dropped away- “and reappear there . Where were going.”

The muddy hue of his eyes had turned the colour of dark loam.

“And the best part is, the Elohim won’t know what we’re doing. We’ll be invisible. They’ll think we’re just gone .”

Linden stared at her son as though she had never seen him before.

“I know what you’re going to say,” Covenant put in. Now his smile looked false; feigned and strangely vulnerable. “If he can do all that, why didn’t he do it days ago? Why didn’t we come straight here from Revelstone? We could have avoided the Theomach completely. And why can’t the Elohim see us? Don’t they know everything? They sure as hell think they do.”

Linden shook her head, effectively dumbfounded. In one sense, she understood what she heard. The words were simple; within her grasp. But in another, she was completely baffled. Jeremiah might as well have spoken in an alien tongue. He was going to build a door ? When he had talked earlier about using his raceway construct as an entrance to the Land, his explanation had had the same effect: it conveyed nothing that she knew how to comprehend.

Jeremiah? she wanted to ask. Jeremiah-? But she had no language for her question. Her son had remained cruelly unreactive during all of their time together; and yet for years he had been capable-?

One of the Insequent, the Vizard, had tried to persuade him to build a prison for the Elohim .

She was so cold-

“Come on, Linden.” Covenant’s voice seemed to reach her from a great distance; across a gulf of millennia and ambiguous intentions. “It’s going to take him a while to do this. It has to be done exactly right. Let’s leave him to it. We can go for a walk.” He missed a beat, then said. “We need to talk.”

She hardly heard him. “I would rather stay here,” she murmured. “I want to watch. I could watch him all day.”

She had spent innumerable hours absorbed in her son’s inexplicable abilities.

“Actually, I could too,” Covenant said without conviction. “But this is important. We’re only an hour or two away from saving the world. We need to be clear.”

His tone rather than his statement caught Linden’s attention. His eyes were dull, almost lifeless. The embers which smouldered sporadically in his gaze had been banked with ash; hidden away. His grin had become a coerced grimace.

Apparently he had chosen to suppress his anger and frustration; his disappointment in her.

“All right.” She, too, needed to be clear. The time had come for decisions which surpassed her. Tightening her grip on the Staff, she checked to be sure that his ring still hung from its chain around her neck. “Let’s walk.”

Movement might hold her shivering at bay.

Covenant gestured toward the rim of the plateau. Keeping a safe distance between them, he accompanied her as she started in that direction.

But he did not speak. When he had been silent for a few moments, her thoughts reverted to her son, drawn there by the mystery that Jeremiah had become.

“How does he do it?” she asked; almost pleaded. “Is this more “leakage”? Power he gets from being in two places at once? Because time is bleeding?”

“No, no.” Covenant flapped one hand dismissively. “Making a door like this one-or the one in his bedroom-That’s natural talent. The right shapes can change worlds. They’re like words. He does it all himself. Leakage is when he puts up a barrier. Or when we move from one place or time to another. Then he’s using what spills out while I fold time.”

Linden nodded as though she understood. Jeremiah’s ability to prevent her from touching him was an acquired magic. He had not been born with it. She wanted to believe that it was not inevitable or necessary; that she would be able to hug him before the end.

“This talent-” She remembered faery castles, unexplained monuments, wooden toys. Revelstone and Gravin Threndor. “How big is it? How far does it reach? What can he do?”

Ever since she had first discovered his gift for building, she had prayed that he might construct his own escape from his mental prison.

Again Covenant grimaced. “I’ll get to that. None of this is as simple as you want it to be.”

Instead of continuing, however, he fell silent again.

Gradually they neared the edge of the plateau. Covenant seemed to be waiting for that. He wanted to show her something that could only be seen from the precipice above Garroting Deep. Or he wanted to be sure that he was entirely out of Jeremiah’s earshot. Or he-

He did not slow as he approached the rim; but Linden held back. Kevin’s Watch had been shattered under her, and she still did not know how she had saved herself and Anele. She feared another fall.

Nonetheless Caerroil Wildwood’s demesne opened before her with every step: an unfurling tapestry of trees, dark with winter and old hate. Hills lay under the forest like the waves of a sea, seething too slowly for her limited senses to descry. Soon she could see the crooked line of the Black River through the woods. True to its name, its waters did not reflect the cold sky or the comfortless sunlight. Rather the river seemed thick with Earthpower and slaughter.

Covenant had called the Forestal an out-and-out butcher.

At last, he stopped with his boots on the jagged verge of the plateau. Now it was Linden who kept her distance, from him as well as from the cliff. For a while, he waited for her to join him. Then he turned to face her, sighing quietly.

When the water comes out down there”- he indicated the base of the sheer drop behind him- “it’s sort of red. In the right light, it looks like blood. The ichor of the Earth. But Wildwood uses it to wash the death out of Gallows Howe. That’s what turns the river black.”

Without pausing, he said, “Your kid makes doors. All kinds of doors. Doors from one place to another. Doors through time. Doors between realities. And doors that don’t go anywhere. Prisons. When you walk into them, you never come out. Ever again.”

Linden gripped the Staff of Law until her knuckles ached; bit down sharply on her numb lip until she felt the pain; said nothing. Her son had such power-

“I can’t explain how he does it. Talent is always a mystery. But I can tell you a couple of things.

“First, he has to have the right materials for the door he wants to make. Exactly the right wood or stone or metal or bone or cloth-or racetracks. And they have to be in exactly the right shapes. In theory, he could have made a box or portal to take us straight here from Revelstone just after Damelon arrived.

“Incidentally,” Covenant remarked, “that’s how we were going to make sure Damelon didn’t know we were there. Jeremiah would have built a door to hide us.” Then he continued.

“But in practice, he didn’t have the right materials. There wasn’t enough”- Covenant spread his hands- “whatever he needed in Revelstone. And putting one of his doors together takes too long. The ur-viles were always going to try to stop us. Plus no one ever knows what Esmer might do.

“No,” he asserted. “we had to travel the way we did. And we had to use you and the Viles to distract Wildwood so we could get the wood your kid needs for this door. Without it, the Elohim are definitely going to interfere.