“Most assuredly, groveller,” moksha Jehannum riposted. “I tremble at your will.”
Tearing savagery across the grain of Linden’s clinched consciousness, the Raver turned her, sent her forward along the clear spine of the chasm.
Behind her, the two creatures-both ruled now by moksha’s brother-set themselves at Covenant's back. But she saw with the senses of the Raver that they did not hazard touching him.
He followed her as if he were too weak to do more than place one foot in front of the other-and too strong to be beaten.
The way seemed long: every step, each throb of her heart was interminable and exquisite agony. The Raver relished her violation and multiplied it cunningly. From her helpless brain, moksha drew images and hurled them at her, made them appear more real than Mount Thunder's imponderable gutrock. Marid with his fangs. Joan screaming like a predator for Covenant's blood, wracked by a Sunbane of the soul. Her mother's mouth, mucus drooling at the comers-phlegm as rank as putrefaction from the rot in her lungs. The incisions across her father's wrists, agape with death and glee. There was no end to the ways she could be tortured, if she refused to let go. Her possessor savoured them all.
Yet she held. Stubbornly, uselessly, almost without reason, she clung to who she was, to the Linden Avery who made promises. And in the secret recesses of her heart she plotted moksha Jehannum's downfall Oh, the way seemed long to her! But she knew, had no defence against knowing, that for the Raver the distance was short and eager, little more than a stone's throw along the black gulf. Then the dank light of Covenant's guards picked out a stairway cut into the left wall. It was a rude ascent, roughly hacked from the sheer stone immemorially long ago and worn blunt by use; but it was wide and safe. The Raver went upward with strong strides, almost jaunty in its anticipation. But Linden watched Covenant for signs of vertigo or collapse.
His plight was awful. She felt his bruises aching in the bones of his skull, read the weary limp of his pulse. Sweat like fever or failure beaded on his forehead. An ague of exhaustion made all his movements awkward and imprecise. Yet he kept going, as rigid of intent as he had been on Haven Farm when he had walked into the woods to redeem his ex-wife. His very weakness and imbalance seemed to support him.
He was entirely out of his mind; and Linden bled for him while moksha Jehannum raked her with scorn.
The stairway was long and short. It ascended for several hundred feet and hurt as if it would go on forever without surcease. The Raver gave her not one fragment or splinter of respite while it used her body as if she had never been so healthy and vital. But at last she reached an opening in the wall, a narrow passage-mouth with rocklight reflecting from its end. The stairs continued upward; but she entered the tunnel Covenant followed her, his guards behind him in single file.
Heat mounted against her face until she seemed to be walking into fire; but it meant nothing to moksha. The Raver was at home in dire passages and brimstone. For a while, all the patients she had failed to help, all the medical mistakes she had made beat about her mind, accusing her like furies. In the false name of life, she was responsible for so much death. Perhaps she had employed it for her own ends. Perhaps she had introduced pain and loss to her victims, needing them to suffer so that she would have power and life.
Then the passage ended, and she found herself in the place where Lord Foul had chosen to wield his machinations.
Kiril Threndor. Heart of Thunder.
Here Kevin Landwaster had come to enact the Ritual of Desecration. Here Drool Rockworm had recovered the lost Staff of Law, It was the dark centre of all Mount Thunder's ancient and fatal puissance.
The place where the outcome of the Earth would be decided.
She knew it with moksha Jehannum's knowledge. The Raver's whole spirit seemed to quiver in lust and expectation.
The cave was large, a round, high chamber. Entrances gaped,like mute cries, stretched in eternal pain, around its circumference. The walls glared rocklight in all directions. They were shaped entirely into smooth, irregular facets which cast their illumination like splinters at Linden's eyes. And that sharp assault was whetted and multiplied by a myriad keen reflections from the chamber's ceiling. There the stone gathered a dense cluster of stalactites, as bright and ponderous as melting metal. Among them swarmed a chiaroscuro of orange-red gleamings.
But no light seemed to touch the figure that stood on a low dais in the middle of the time burnished floor. It rose there like a pillar, motionless and immune to revelation. It might have been the back of a statue or a man; perhaps it was as tall as a Giant. Even the senses of the Raver saw nothing certainly. It appeared to have no colour and no clear shape or size. Its outlines were blurred as if they transcended recognition. But it radiated power like a shriek through the echoing rocklight.
The air reeked of sulphur-a stench so acrid that it would have brought tears to her eyes if it had not given such pleasure to her possessor. But under that rank odour lay a different scent, a smell more subtle, insidious, and consuming than any brimstone. A smell on which moksha fed like an addict.
A smell of attar. The sweetness of the grave. Linden was forced to devour it as if she were revelling. The force of the figure screamed into her like a shout poised to bring down the mountain, rip the vulnerable heart of the Land to rubble and chaos.
Covenant stood a short distance away from her now, dissociating his plight from hers so that she would not suffer the consequences of his company. He had no health-sense. And even if his eyes had been like hers, he might not have been able to discern what was left of her-might not have seen the way she cried out to have him beside her. She knew everything to which he was blind, everything that could have made a difference to him. Everything except how in his battered weakness he had become strong enough to stand there as though he were indefeasible.
With moksha’s perceptions, she saw the two creatures and the Raver which controlled them leave the chamber. They were no longer needed. She saw Covenant look at her and form her name, trying mutely to tell her something that he could not say and she could not hear. The light flared at her like a shattered thing, stone trapped in the throes of fragmentation, the onset of the last collapse. The stalactites shed gleams and imminence as if they were about to plunge down on her. Her unbuttoned shirt seemed to let attar crawl across her breasts, teasing them with anguish. Heat closed around her faint thoughts like a fist”
And the figure on the dais turned..
Even moksha Jehannum's senses failed her. They were a blurred lens through which she saw only outlines that dripped and ran, features smeared out of focus. She might have been trying to gauge the figure past the high, hot intervention of a bonfire. But it resembled a man. Parts of him suggested a broad chest and muscular arms, a patriarchal beard, a flowing robe. Tall as a Giant, puissant as a mountain, and more exigent than any conflagration of bloodshed and corruption, he turned; and his gaze swept Kiril Threndor-swept her and Covenant as if with a blink he could have brushed them out of existence.