Against All Things Ending by Stephen R. Donaldson Page B

of his collapse, as if he were still pleading with her even though she had set in motion the world’s ruin.
    He was only unconscious: the violence of what she had done to him had not burst his heart. She could be sure of that. Wielding catastrophic quantities of power, she had whetted her senses to an unbearable edge. Her nerves wailed with too much percipience. She saw clearly that Covenant had been felled by shock and strain, not by injury. Physically her extravagance had not harmed him.
    But his mind—Oh, God, his mind . Webbed with cracks, it resembled a clay goblet in the instant before the vessel shattered. The imminent fragments of who he was remained individually intact. In some sense, they clung to each other. If time stopped here—if this instant did not move on to the next—the goblet might yet hold water. A cunning potter might have been able to make the clay whole again.
    But Linden did not know how to stop time. She only knew how to destroy it.
    Berek’s spectre had said, The making of worlds is not accomplished in an instant. It cannot be instantly undone. Nevertheless Linden Avery, Chosen, Ringthane, and Wildwielder, had made the end of all things inevitable.
    In addition, Covenant was rife with renewed leprosy. His illness had deadened most of the nerves in his fingers and toes. There were insensate patches on the backs and palms of his hands, the soles of his feet. But that, at least, was not her doing. Rather it was an oblique effect of Kevin’s Dirt. The bitter truncation which hampered health-sense and Law, blunted every expression of Earthpower, had diminished Covenant more profoundly. He had become an outcast of Time; a pariah to his own nature, and to his long service against Despite: an icon of the Land’s immedicable peril.
    In the life that she had lost, she could have treated his bodily illness, if not his riven mind. Her former world had discovered drugs to end the ravages of this disease. Here she felt helpless. She feared what might happen if she used Earthpower and Law to attempt healing either his illness or his consciousness without his consent.
    She, too, had become an icon: an embodiment of loss and shame and unheeded warnings. She had made of her life a wasteland in which she did not know how to live.
    And I trust you. I’ll do everything I can to help.
    In her dismay, Covenant’s reassurances sounded like mockery.
    At that moment, there was no part of her still capable of attending to the distress of her friends. Liand and Stave; Mahrtiir, Pahni, and Bhapa; the Ranyhyn: she had nothing left for them. If the Humbled or the Law-Breakers, Infelice or the Harrow, had spoken to her, she would not have been able to hear them.
    Nevertheless there were powers abroad in the night that could reach her. When the great voice of Berek Halfhand announced, “The time has come to speak of the Ritual of Desecration,” she staggered as though she had been struck.
    She believed that he meant to excoriate her.
    While she flinched, however, Loric Vilesilencer turned to the first High Lord. Grim and gaunt, the spectre of the krill ’s maker countered, “Is it not my place to do so?”
    “It is,” Berek acknowledged. Lambent with his own ghostly silver, he appeared to gain definition from the unresolved illumination of the krill . The gem’s light still held a throb of eagerness and wild magic; but it did not pale his earned majesty. Instead it seemed to enhance his strength. “Yet you well know that there are words which cannot be heard by a son who deems that he has failed his father. The love which lies between them precludes heed.”
    Liand stared with open wonder. Stave watched warily. The Ramen held themselves ready, taut with innominate expectations. Gradually Linden understood that the attention of the Dead was not directed toward her. Though they spoke to each other, their emanations were concentrated, not on her, but on Kevin Landwaster, who stood appalled and ghastly in the east as if