Then a caesure exploded to life directly ahead of Covenant, three or four paces behind Clyme. The Master wheeled away as if he believed himself capable of protecting Covenant from the violence of ruptured time.

Branl released Covenant’s right arm. Instinctively? Deliberately? Covenant did not care. He wrenched his left free.

The Fall was big, a tornado of chaos. Most of it had appeared within the substance of the hill. Dismembered instants as devastating as the Worm conflated every moment of the stone’s recent millennia. The force of their insanity chewed the bluff to grit and pebbles, flung scree like a barrage at the sky.

The caesure’s propinquity stung every inch of Covenant’s skin that could still feel pain. Nausea and wrongness knotted his guts. If he could have unclenched the muscles of his stomach, he might have puked.

But he was ready for this. He had to be. Why else had he forced himself to leave Linden?

The area around him was clear enough. He had room to move.

This is your mistake, Joan. Not mine. I’m coming for you.

Dropping the scraps of Anele’s tunic, he clutched the krill in both hands. Its heat was Joan’s fury; but he knew how to bear it.

Anchored to everything that he loved by nausea and stings and searing pain, he ran straight into the core of the Fall.

Clyme or Branl may have shouted after him, but he did not hear them. As soon as the gyre caught him, it swept him out of existence.

Chapter 12. - Sold Souls

12.

Sold Souls

Without transition, Covenant staggered onto a featureless plain, infinitely unrelieved, and so cold that it froze the blood in his veins. If time had been possible here, one lurching attempt of his heart to beat would have shattered him. His entire body would have burst into ice crystals and drifted like dust, falling from nowhere to nowhere. But of course his heart did not beat, or he did not shatter, because this gelid moment did not move on to another. It did not imply time of any kind. He could stagger and catch his balance—could turn his head or his whole body to scan the suzerain nothing of the horizons—could walk in any direction if he chose—because this one miniscule fragment of causality and sequence had become the universe. It was all that the Arch of Time contained.

If he wished, he could imagine his breath as frigid plumes and searing inhalations, but such things had no significance. They meant nothing. They would never mean anything.

On some other plane of perception, a dimension simultaneous with the plain and the cold, hornets in their myriads or millions burrowed into his flesh. Each of them was pure excruciation, an instance of agony like being flayed. His leper’s numbness did not protect him. Even one of them might have destroyed him; but his absolute pain was eternally suspended within itself, forever caught between cause and effect. Here there was no difference between one insufferable anguish and a thousand. A thousand stings and a hundred thousand were the same. He endured them all for the same reason that he endured one: like his body, his mind was not given a chance to shatter.