The Last Dark: The climax of the entire Thomas Covenant Chronicles (Last Chronicles of Thomas Cove)

wilderland of the Spoiled Plains to rejoin the other horses.
    Stave nodded. Briefly he stroked the side of Hynyn’s neck.
    With a whicker of command to Khelen and Hyn, the roan stallion gathered speed so fluidly that Linden could not discern the precise moment when he began to quicken his gait. He galloped slightly ahead of them, but they did not lose ground in spite of their smaller stature. Indeed, Hyn matched his pace with apparent ease. As she had done before, the mare cast the hard ground behind her as if she could equal Hynyn’s thundering haste for hours or days.
    Stave rode effortlessly, like a man who had become one with his mount. In Khelen’s care, Jeremiah waved his arms and shouted encouragement. But Linden gripped her Staff and prayed that she had not driven her son to bury his wounds more deeply.
    The quality of the light in the stained air told her that the sun was setting beyond the barrier of Landsdrop. In the distance ahead, still scores of leagues away, she felt the advance of Kevin’s Dirt more strongly. After their fashion, the Ranyhyn were trying to outrace a doom for which she had no answer.
    Linden’s relief and joy at her son’s restoration would have been greater if she had not been so afraid for him.
    In your pre
s
ent state, Chosen, Desecration lies ahead of you
.
It does not crowd at your back.
    It was entirely impossible that he had not been maimed in some way by Lord Foul’s malice and the
croyel
’s cruelty.

2.
    Nightfall

    The sun set, casting darkness across the Spoiled Plains; shrouding everything except the sensory glower of Kevin’s Dirt. But Kastenessen’s oblique assault on Earthpower and Law was increasingly vivid to Linden’s percipience. Soon it would begin to hamper her. Even Jeremiah’s inherited theurgy might be tainted. And the resources of the Staff would be diminished.
    In addition, Covenant’s leprosy would worsen. He might go blind, or lose the use of his hands altogether. He might find it difficult to keep his balance because his feet were numb.
    I need to be numb
, he had insisted in Andelain.
It doesn’t just make me who I am. It makes me who I
can
be.
    Linden did not understand that. The way in which he defined himself as a leper was like his relationship with wild magic, inherent, inexplicable—and too ambiguous to be measured.
    Crossing terrain that made her feel numbed herself, Linden clung to the flowing reassurance of Hyn’s back and prayed that some good would come of this long gallop through the threatened night.
    Fortunately no
caesures
appeared. Joan’s attention was focused elsewhere; or
turiya
Raver’s was. Nevertheless Linden felt a growing disquiet across the region, an almost subliminal sense of disturbance that seemed separate from Kevin’s Dirt. At first, she thought that she was tasting a nameless discomfiture in Hyn, a new anxiety that affected only the Ranyhyn. Yet when she pushed her percipience farther, she found a sensation of restiveness in the ground under Hyn’s hooves. The foundations of the Lower Land appeared to be bracing themselves for an impact which they might not be able to withstand.
    Across the leagues, Jeremiah’s mood had changed. His eagerness had become impatience, frustration. He rode low over Khelen’s neck, apparently urging the Ranyhyn to greater speed as if he fled from ghouls—or as if he were filled to bursting with an unspoken sense of purpose.
    Stars sprinkled the firmament overhead: the only light on the Lower Land. Surely the moon would rise soon? Even a slim crescent would do more than the lorn stars to soften the dark. But there was no moon. In its absence, the stars seemed strangely closer, at once more distinct and more vulnerable, as if they were drawing near to witness the outcome of their long yearning.
    The shadows of the Creator’s children
, for good or ill: come boon or bane. They glistened like weeping in the absolute black of the heavens.
    With growing urgency, Linden tried to recognize some specific feature of the terrain. But she had not attended to her surroundings during the ride to Muirwin Delenoth. She did not know where she was, and could only guess where she was going.
    Hyn’s unfaltering strides spoke eloquently of trust. Linden heard them well enough. She knew what they meant. Nevertheless her anxieties harried her through the night. Galled by them, she traversed an unreadable landscape in darkness like the onset of a nightmare from which there could be no