Linden blinked in shock. Was it possible? Had Covenant spoken to her friends through Anele? Had they heard his voice? Felt his love? While she had been alone with him and her son, struggling to make sense of their strangeness, their disturbing evasions, their glimpses of scorn?
Oh, Linden. I’m so glad to see you.
Covenant had claimed or implied that he was exercising his relationship with Time for several different purposes at once, simultaneously making himself and Jeremiah manifest in Revelstone, seeking the means to oppose Kastenessen, and defending the Arch against Joan’s caesures. Could he also have taken possession of Anele; addressed her friends with “gentleness and sorrow”?
Or-
Not to mention some of the other powers that have noticed what’s happening here and want to take advantage of it.
— were there other beings at work? Forces other than Kastenessen and the Demondim and Esmer and the Elohim? Was some foe whom she had never met endeavouring to manipulate her friends?
Linden, find me. I can’t help you unless you find me.
Oh, God, she thought; groaned. Who’s doing this? How many lies have we been told?
Nevertheless this new surprise galvanised her. Her lassitude vanished: even her inward storm was pushed aside. Throughout her encounter with Covenant, he had sounded subtly false; insidiously out of tune. If Jeremiah had become so much more than the boy whom she had known, Covenant had seemed to be less than himself. The voice that had spoken to her through Anele-like the voice in her dreams-had felt far more true than Covenant himself did.
You need the ring.
Dreaming, she had heard Covenant urge her to trust herself.
“Tell me,” she told the Manethrall and Liand intently. “If that was Covenant-or even if it just sounded like him-I need to know what he said.”
The words themselves might reveal who had spoken them.
In a formal tone, Mahrtiir responded, “First he addressed us generally. His words were these.” Then he altered his voice to produce an unexpected imitation of Covenant’s. “I can only say all of this once. And I can’t explain it. As soon as he notices what I’m doing, he’ll stop me. If I even start to say his name, he’ll stop me before I can finish.
“She can do this. Tell her I said that. It’s hard now. And it’s going to get harder. She’ll have to go places and do things that ought to be impossible. But I think she can do it. And there’s no one else who can even make the attempt.”
The Manethrall paused. When Liand and the Cords nodded, confirming his recitation, he resumed.
“Anele’s possessor then spoke to Liand, saying, “I wish I could spare you. Hell, I wish any of us could spare you. But I can’t see any way around it. What you need is in the Aumbrie. Stave will show you where that is, whether the Masters want him to or not. You’ll know what you’re looking for when you touch it.”
The Aumbrie? Linden gripped the Staff; stifled an interruption. The Aumbrie of the Clave? She had never seen that hidden storeroom herself. But she had heard from Covenant that Vain had found his way to the Aumbrie, seeking the iron bands which had formed the heels of Berek’s original Staff of Law.
“To me,” Mahrtiir was saying. “Anele next addressed himself.” Linden felt the veiled knife-edge of the Manethrall’s eagerness as he quoted. “You’ll have to go a long way to find your heart’s desire. Just be sure you come back. The Land needs you.”
Hurrying past his excitement as if he considered it unseemly, Mahrtiir said, “Last Anele named the Cords. He said, ‘In some ways, you two have the hardest job. You’ll have to survive. And you’ll have to make them listen to you. They won’t hear her. She’s already given them too many reasons to feel ashamed of themselves.’
“We thronged with questions at his words,” the Ramen leader admitted; and Liand nodded vigorously. “We would have urged explanations, though he had said that he could not provide them. But then Anele appeared to grow faint, as though a sudden ailment, or perhaps an undetected forbidding, had fallen upon him. Expressing regret, he fell to the grass, and his eyes rolled as though he had been taken by a seizure.
“The moment was brief,” finished the Manethrall. “He roused himself shortly and became as he had been before, distracted and incomprehensible. To us, it appeared that he was unaware of his words. We surmise that his unnamed foe had indeed become cognisant of him, and had roughly imposed incoherence upon him.
“That is our tale, Ringthane. While we pondered what we had heard, the first of the rain began to fall. Desiring shelter more for the old man than for ourselves, we departed from Glimmermere. Stave met us returning toward Revelstone and guided us hither.”
Pahni continued to rest one hand on Liand’s shoulder, keeping her eyes downcast in an effort to mask her alarm. And Bhapa had lapsed into a reverie: he seemed to study the hearth without seeing it, as if he sought the meaning of Anele’s words behind the restless dance and gutter of the flames.
But when the Manethrall was done, Liand asked at once. “Is it conceivable, Linden? Was Thomas Covenant indeed able to address us through Anele while he was also present with you’?”
Linden held Mahrtiir’s discomfited gaze for a moment, thanking him with her eyes. Then she faced Liand’s question.
“I don’t know.” Her alarm had become a kind of courage. Upon occasion, she had experienced a similar reaction during emergency surgeries. At those times, when detachment and training failed her, her own fear had enabled her to proceed. Under the right circumstances, dread and even inadequacy became as compelling as valour. “Covenant says that he and Jeremiah are ‘in two places at once.’ It’s three if you count taking possession of Anele. I don’t know how he can do any of that.
“And he’s dead.” She forced herself to say this. “I watched Lord Foul kill him.” Through Anele, he had urged her, Just be wary of me. “I don’t know how it’s possible for him to have any physical form. He told me himself that too many Laws have been broken for the Dead to hold themselves together.
“But he did say that there are “other powers”, enemies or beings, that we don’t know about. And he gave me such a strong impression of”- she could not say the word falsehood aloud, not speaking to her friends about Thomas Covenant- “of discrepancy. Like all of the pieces didn’t fit. Or I didn’t understand them well enough to put them together.”
Her Jeremiah had been a wizard at such things, making the pieces fit-
“For all I know,” she sighed, “Covenant never said a word to me until today,” and every voice in her dreams, every word in Anele’s mouth, had belonged to someone else. “I can’t even begin to guess whether he actually talked to the four of you. And I certainly can’t tell you what any of it means.”
“Then, Chosen,” Stave put in flatly. “my question stands. If it remains your purpose to exert the Staff, though such forces may dismiss the Unbeliever and your son, what will you attempt to accomplish?”
Steadying herself on a kind of daring and indomitable trepidation, Linden answered him as plainly as she could.
“Covenant wants me to meet him near Furl Falls about an hour after dawn.” She had explained this earlier: she repeated it more for her own sake than to remind her friends. “But I’m not willing to wait that long. I have to do something about the Demondim. I want Revelstone to have a fighting chance if Covenant fails-or even if he just makes a mistake.”