Liand did not hesitate: he gave Anele the Sunstone.

As Anele’s fingers closed on it, he jerked back his head and screamed as if a dagger had been driven through his chest. Behind Covenant, the bane’s raw countenances paused in their wailing as though they had been startled by the sheer desolation of Anele’s cry. As though they recognized it—

An instant later, a rush of theurgy from the orcrest swept away the old man’s illucidity. Between one heartbeat and the next, his manner cleared as if he had become suddenly deaf to the myriad hoary murmurings of granite and limestone and madness.

When he lowered his head, his blind gaze held Covenant’s. Slowly he straightened his back and shoulders. As he did so, he appeared to acquire the dignity of a Lord.

Through a tumult of fire and ferocity and plunging waters, he said, “Timewarden.” Alarm and severity blurred together in his tone. Spray dripped from his straggling beard. “I implore you. Do not.”

“I’m sorry, Anele.” Mutely Covenant cursed himself. “You’ve been through too much already. And you aren’t done. But I’m running out of choices here. We need your help.”

Clutching the orcrest like a talisman, Anele protested, “It is not for this that I am made mad.”

“I know.” Intuitively Covenant understood, although he could not have said how or why. Those memories were gone. He remembered only that Anele held some portion of the Earth’s fate in his gnarled grasp—and that his time had not yet come. “But if we don’t survive now, you’ll never get the chance to finish what you started.

“I think you can talk to the Dead. I think Sunder and Hollian can hear you.” Covenant paused to swallow pity. “And I think it’s possible they know how to help us.”

For the moment, that was all he wanted: a way to distract the bane from slaughter. Somehow.

Dismay twisted Anele’s visage. “My father and my mother speak only in my dreams.” He sounded forlorn, rent by prolonged sorrow and abasement; by a lifetime of disappointment in himself. “There I am mute. Yet in Andelain I did not dream, and still they counseled me. Here I am not mute. I will ask. If I am not answered, I can do nothing.”

Covenant wanted to say, Neither can I. But he kept his dread to himself. Aloud he told Anele, “They’ll answer. They love you. They love the Land. Hell, they even love me. And they haven’t forgotten what Linden means to them.”

To all of us.

Anele nodded vaguely: he was no longer listening. His eyelids fluttered. Then they closed. He began to mutter prayers or invocations too frail to be heard over the cacophony of floods and devoured anguish.