That the Harrow had bound himself with oaths did not comfort her. No one can get in if that portal isn’t opened first. The shock of being in this immured cavern, without full percipience or clean air, was not as great as her fear that he did not know how to unseal the way into the Lost Deep.

The Worm of the World’s End was coming to the Land.

Like an echo of the paresthesia that had afflicted her among the Viles millennia ago, she seemed to smell the hard respiration of the Giants, taste the vapor they exhaled. Their confusion as they scrambled to absorb Anele’s revelations stung her nerves.

Here it will discover its final nourishment. The very blood of life from the most potent and private recesses of the Earth’s heart.

The old man was unconscious now, exhausted by his encounter with the world’s oldest secrets.

Without forbidding, there is too little time.

Linden could not imagine where anyone would find or wield enough power to forbid the Worm of the World’s End. Covenant and wild magic might conceivably have done so. But his mind was broken, and Linden had given his ring to the Harrow.

She did not believe that the Harrow would be able to keep Covenant’s ring. She hardly considered it likely that he would retain her Staff. He was counting too heavily on the inability of beings like the Elohim and Esmer to locate Jeremiah. And there were other enemies—

She had surrendered to the Harrow in part because she suspected that forces greater than her human desperation would oppose his intentions for her son.

But first the portal had to be opened. With one mistake, any mistake, the Harrow would break the fragile span of stone; doom Jeremiah. The Staff of Law and Covenant’s ring would be lost.

And A terrible power lives here: another warning that Linden could not afford to heed.

Outwardly she seemed steady enough. Her hands did not shake. The steam of her breathing did not blind her. Nevertheless her heart shivered as if she were too cold to move—

—as cold as she had felt in the winter of the Land’s past, where Roger Covenant and the croyel had betrayed her.

After a moment, however, Rime Coldspray spoke. “Doubtless we have been granted a precious insight.” She sounded like a clenched fist. “In this, the Ardent has spoken sooth. Here we have gained knowledge of the world’s plight which we could not have obtained by other means. Yet it is of no present import. It will serve no purpose if we do not both retrieve Linden Giantfriend’s son and evade the perils of this demesne.”