Abruptly Linden pushed herself to her feet; distanced herself from him. He saw a fresh storm of tears gather in her, but she closed herself against it. “No.” Her protest was a rough scrape of sound, bloody and betrayed. “That isn’t right. It doesn’t work that way. You’re the one who saves the world. I just want to save my son.”

He ached for her through the clamor of his own dismay: the heavy labor of his pulse, needless for millennia; the gasp of air in his lungs; the burning of his face where she had struck him; the excruciation of Time as it bled away. She had every reason to feel betrayed. She had believed that he loved her—

He did love her. He had loved her during every instant that the Arch had ever contained. If he had not loved her, he would never have found the strength to sacrifice himself against the Despiser. But for that very reason, he shied away from the sight of her outrage and grief. Slipping again, he fell like debris into fissured memories where his mind and his volition could be ground to powder.

For reasons that eluded him, he found himself regarding the ornately clad figure of the Harrow.

The Insequent still sat his destrier as though he had no part to play in what transpired around him. But the deep voids of his eyes were fixed hungrily on the ring and the Staff that Linden had dropped as if in abandonment.

The Harrow had known the Vizard. Of course he had. And the Vizard had possessed knowledge which the Harrow lacked. Inspired by some leap of imagination, or by his own assiduous study, the Vizard had grasped the almost mystical significance, the potential use, of Jeremiah’s talent for constructs. And he had craved that resource for himself. He had seen in it the possibility that he might one day hold sway over the entire race of the Elohim. By that means, he would show himself greater than any of his people.

But he had made a damning mistake: he had tried to eliminate the implied threat of the Harrow. By their very nature, the Harrow’s intentions would obliquely thwart the Vizard’s. If the Harrow attained his goal, Jeremiah would be freed from Lord Foul’s possession—and then Jeremiah would surely pass beyond the Vizard’s reach. Therefore the Vizard had violated the most vital of the restrictions which the Insequent imposed upon themselves. Goaded by the scale of his own ambitions, he had opposed the Harrow’s private designs. Thus the Vizard was lost to mind and name and life. The combined will of every Insequent had imposed his destruction. From Covenant’s former place among the uncounted instants of the Arch, he had watched the Vizard fail and die.

It was the same fate that the Mahdoubt had suffered—

On some other level of his attention, Covenant understood that the Harrow would not attempt to snatch up the ring and the Staff: not while Infelice stood ready to resist him, and the Wraiths would come to preclude their conflict. But such concerns would not hinder the Harrow much longer.