“Is this possession?” Stormpast Galesend asked, anxious for the man she had been charged to carry. “Is it some new manifestation of his madness? Stone and Sea! The diminishment of my sight vexes me.”

Wincing, Linden wheeled away from the Ardent.

Anele lay facedown on the uneven obsidian with his arms and legs outstretched as if in deliberate prostration. Beneath his scrawny frame, veins of green radiated outward as though they depicted rays of light. Somehow the malachite conveyed the impression that it throbbed to the beat of his pulse.

Those veins resembled the stains which Covenant had once worn after passing through Morinmoss.

To Covenant, Anele looked only frail and beaten, as if he had been felled. But Liand murmured in wonder, “See him, Linden.” And one of the Swordmainnir added, “Aye, behold.”

Covenant wanted to ask, See what? Almost at once, however, Linden breathed, “That’s not possession. It’s Earthpower. He’s on fire with it. His birthright—I’ve never seen it so strong. Or so close to the surface.”

With an air of respect, even of reverence, the Ardent backed away from Anele; cleared a space around the old man.

In a voice like stone and apprehension and sorrow crushed together until they were in danger of crumbling, the old man said distinctly, “It is here.”

The words themselves, or the tone in which Anele spoke them, ignited memories in Covenant—

Seek deep rock.

—memories so recent and explicit that they should have been impossible to forget.

The Harrow had brought Linden’s company to stone so deep that no human capable of interpreting it had ever touched it before.

In Salva Gildenbourne, Anele had tried to explain something to Linden. Who else had heard him? Who else, apart from Covenant before his reincarnation? Stave? Liand?

“Here, Anele?” Linden asked in steam and cold. “What’s here? What is the stone telling you?”

What had awakened the old man’s inherited strength?

“The wood of the world has forgotten.” Anele sounded as harsh as the rock beneath him. “It cannot reclaim itself. It requires aid. Yet this stone remembers.”

Covenant remembered other things instead. A different time. A distant place.

Wood is too brief. All vastness is forgotten.

He expected to see Anele’s limbs straining, fingers clawing at the obsidian. But there was no effort in Anele’s splayed fingers. His whole body looked limp, as if he were slowly melting into the gutrock. Only his voice was tight; wakeful.

“There must be forbidding.”

Without forbidding, there is too little time.

The Giants gathered around Linden and Stave, Liand and the old man. Instinctively they formed a protective cordon, although there was nothing that they could do to ease or aid him. Linden knelt at Anele’s side. Liand held his orcrest high. Its light cast grotesque shadows of the Swordmainnir on the crude walls of the passage. The vapor of their breathing spread out and vanished, inhaled by the surrounding dark.