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

so
much
rock. Of so many different kinds. In so many different shapes and structures. And it supported a mass which would have squeezed ironwood to pulp. Its secrets resisted discovery as if it had set its will against her.
    Leaning her Staff against her shoulder, Linden closed her eyes. Hesitantly at first, then more firmly, she placed her hands on the wall and began to insinuate her touch inward.
    Stave had followed her as far as the rubble. There he kept watch. Jeremiah stood a bit behind her, but he did nothing to interrupt her concentration. At first, she felt his attention focused on her. Then she closed her mind. Deliberately she thought only about water.
    Now that she was not seeking them, she found streaks and facets of malachite everywhere. Crystalline deposits reflected her probing. Heavy granite ground against flows of basalt, reducing them to powder across the eons. Compacted dirt filled every crevice and crack. Schist blocked her search as though its memories and therefore its anger were more recent or more extreme than the rest of the rock.
    But Jeremiah needed her. The
Elohim
needed her. The Earth required its panoply of stars. And her friends would be at risk if she failed. They would have to hazard their lives if she could not open the cliff.
    Water, that was all she wanted: the most ordinary, necessary stuff of life. And it was everywhere in the created world. It rose from springs among the deepest roots of mountains. Beneath the desiccated purity of the Great Desert, it oozed and ran. The shores of every continent and island felt its surge and lash. From the sky it gave nourishment. And it could be violent. Oh, it could be violent! Linden had felt its force often enough to know what water could do with fury and turbulence.
    Yet no Law required it to emerge where she could reach it.
    Then Jeremiah’s halfhand clasped her shoulder; and for an instant, her concentration faltered. Almost immediately, however, she felt vitality flow into her from his touch. He was giving her Earthpower as the ur-viles had given her blood, so that she might be able to exceed herself.
    Riding the energy of his aid, she sensed a damp patch of dirt between a crumbling granite monolith and a writhen vein of sandstone.
    It was small, little more than a suggestion of moisture; perhaps only a few drops. But it was water.
    Galvanized by hope and her son’s support, she marked the dampness in her memory and pushed her senses farther.
    She forgot hunger and thirst and weariness. Deeper in the ridgefront, higher, she found a second hint of water. By oblique implication, it led her to another pocket of moisture, and another. Another. There bits of damp marl and pumice were strung together like beads along a fissure between incompatible sheets of granite and obsidian. Linden marked them all, and followed them.
    The detritus in the fissure became dense gravel. More water seeped in the gaps, fine droplets acrid with minerals. Carefully she extended her perceptions among them. The vein of gravel became a wedge, wetter and looser. Then it was plugged by schist. She stumbled within herself; leaned her forehead against the face of the cliff. That damn schist—She did not understand how it obstructed her. But she could not spare the energy to study it. Insidiously, as if she sought to possess the rock without being noticed, she slipped her senses past the plug.
    Beyond it, she found what she sought.
    Water. A space like a bubble in the compressed flesh of the ridge. A cavity filled with water.
    It was no larger than her head. And the water had not moved for an age of the Earth: it was cut off from its original source. But flaws packed with more gravel guided her to a pocket of water the size of her body. Farther in, she found a space big enough to hold a Giant’s chest; then two more—no, three—each little more than a trapped fist; then, finally, a gap as large as the chamber where she and Anele had been imprisoned in Mithil Stonedown.
    After that, there was no more, or she had reached the limit of her reach, or her strength was failing.
    Had she located enough? Taken altogether, it was only a drop within the inland sea of the ridge. Nevertheless it would have to suffice. She would have to make it suffice.
    She took moments or hours to ascertain that she could remember precisely where and what she had discovered. Then warily, as if she feared the cliff’s animosity, she withdrew.
    God, she could barely stand—How had she become so