Stephen Donaldson - Fatal Revenant

When Linden spoke, her words were a shout of fire. With the full force of the Power of Command, she demanded of her companions. “ Show me the truth! ”

Then she watched in horror as her loves flew apart like leaves in a high wind.

While her Command compelled obedience to her will, Linden remained clad in fire. Briefly she had become Earthpower, and could not be refused. She saw every detail with lucent precision while her desires were imposed on her companions.

Covenant’s jeans and T-shirt slumped away as the truth was revealed. They became an indeterminate grey shirt and khaki slacks. Three bullet holes formed an arc across the centre of his shirt. They had been healed; but their edges were still crusted with blood.

His features blurred as though she had begun to weep again, although she had not; could not. His face became rounder, softer. Lines of severity melted from around his mouth, leaving his cheeks unmarked. The corners of his eyes no longer expressed any intimacy with pain. And he shrank slightly, grew shorter. At the same time, his torso swelled with self-indulgence. Even his posture changed. He stood with a familiar combination of looseness and tension: the looseness of weak muscles; the tension of poor balance.

A glamour upon itIt was not Thomas Covenant who stood before her, exposed by fire and Command. It was Covenant’s son, Roger, seeking such havoc that the bones of mountains tremble to contemplate it. Linden could not fail to recognise him now.

Do you not fear that I will reveal you? The Theomach must have knownThe embers were gone from Roger’s eyes: his gaze had regained the exact hue of his father’s, the troubled colour of suffering and ruin and unalloyed love. Nevertheless he had been altered; terribly transformed. His right hand was whole, but it had lost its humanity. Instead it was composed of magma and theurgy, living lava and anguish. Its fiery brutality reminded her of the devouring serpents she had seen during her translation to the Land, the malefic creatures of lava and hunger that Anele had called the skurj .

Roger Covenant’s right hand had been cut off. It had been replaced by thatAnd when that doesn’t work, he maimsSomewhere in the background of Linden’s mind, a voice gibbered, Oh God. OhGodohGodohGod. But she hardly recognised her own fear.

Kastenessen had merged part of himself with the skurj. Roger himself in his father’s guise had told her that. The deranged and doomed Elohim’s escape from his Durance had been more painful than you can imagine.

Kastenessen is all pain. It’s made him completely insane.

She had been given hints. And she blazed with Earthpower: her perceptions were preternaturally acute. She jumped to conclusions instinctively, instantaneously-and trusted them completely.

Being part skurj isn’t excruciating enough, so he surrounds himself with them, he makes them carry out his rage. And when that doesn’t workSweet Jesus. Kastenessen had severed his own right hand and given it to Roger Covenant. He had granted Roger the magic to conceal himself from her percipience; had turned Roger into an entirely new kind of halfhandThe truth of the man who had brought her here appalled her; shocked her to the core. Roger’s presence in his father’s place exceeded her sharpest fears. Nevertheless the sight of her son was worse.

Jeremiah also had been concealed. Now his plight was unmasked. He stood gazing vacantly at her or through her; unaware of her. The stain in his eyes seemed to blind him. His mouth hung open, the lower lip slack. Drool ran down his chin. His twitch was gone, erased from his empty features.

Linden saw at a glance that he had relapsed to his former unreactive dissociation.

But there was moreDespite his overt passivity, his arms did not dangle at his sides. Instead his fists were raised in front of him. In his right, his halfhand, he clutched his racecar; gripped it so hard that he had crumpled the metal. In his left, he held a piece of wood as slim and pointed as a stiletto, a splinter of the deadwood which he had gathered from Garroting Deep.

From his shoulders, his blue pyjama shirt hung in tatters. Horses reared from scrap to scrap, torn apart by blows and falling. Bruises covered his arms and chest. Yet the unassoiled discoloration of his contusions did not mask the violence of the bullets which had pierced his flesh. His rank wounds, one in his stomach, the other directly over his heart, oozed dark blood that formed a web of crust and fluid on his torso, trickling at last into the waistband of his pyjama bottoms.

He had died in his natural world. Like Linden: like Joan. He would never be freed from the Land.

Yet even that was not the worst.

A small hairless creature like a deformed child clung to his back. Its clawed fingers dug into his shoulders: its sharp toes gouged his ribs. Its malign yellow eyes regarded Linden while its teeth chewed ceaselessly at the side of Jeremiah’s neck and its mouth drank his life.

And from the creature came waves of eldritch force so cruel and bitter that they turned the air in Linden’s lungs to ash. In its own way, the creature was as mighty as Roger. Its power matched the potential for savagery and devastation of Kastenessen’s severed hand. But the creature’s strength had more in common with the black lore of the Viles than with the laval hunger of the skurj- or with the covert transformations of the Elohim. It was an altogether different threat; a danger comparable to the Illearth Stone in its violation of Law.

Nonetheless Linden recognised it instantly. Twice before, she had met a similar magic, a comparable ferocity.

The creature was one of the croyel: a parasite or demon which throve by giving power and time to more natural men or women or beasts as it mastered them. Long ago, Findail the Appointed had described the croyel as beings of hunger and sustenance which demnify the dark places of the Earth. Those who bargain thus for life or might with the croyel are damned beyond redemption.

But Jeremiah was not damned, she insisted to herself. He was not. He was not like Kasreyn of the Gyre: he had made no bargain. He could not have made one. Lost within himself, he more closely resembled the arghuleh of the Northron Climbs, mindless ice-beasts which had simply been enslaved by the croyel. The bargain here was Lord Foul’s, not Jeremiah’s.

Still her son was effectively possessed. The Ranyhyn had done what they could to forewarn her. But her fears had tended toward Ravers-or toward the Despiser himself. She had not come close to imagining Jeremiah’s true peril.

Empowered by the Blood of the Earth, Linden screamed raw fire down the stone throat of the tunnel.

Her flame was met by a blast of heat like the opening of a furnace. Roger’s given hand flung its own brimstone conflagration against her, vicious as scoria. If she had not been enclosed in Earthpower, and warded by the Staff of Law, she would have died before her heart could beat again. Instead, however, she was only quenched. The flame which the EarthBlood had given her was snuffed out: the illuminating fire of the Staff vanished as though it had been doused.

The sudden vehemence of the attack staggered her. For a brief moment, a small sliver of time, she tottered on the brink of the trough. Then, reflexively, she dropped to her knees, snatching herself back from a second contact with the Blood.

Reclaimed by mortality, her vision blurred again. Only Roger’s crimson virulence remained to light his malice and Jeremiah’s emptiness and the insatiable eyes of the croyel. But she saw them as nothing more than shapes and points of light; instances of bereavement.