Free The Runes of the Earth: The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant - Book One by Stephen R. Donaldson Page B

enabled him to challenge Lord Foul in wayswhich might never have been possible otherwise. In the end, Covenant’s rejection of the Land for the sake of a little girl had provided for the Despiser’s defeat.
    Fervently Linden prayed that Covenant’s promise would hold true for her as well.
    With that, she left her car, climbed the steps to the front porch, and let herself into her home.
    The door admitted her to Jeremiah’s domain; and at once she had to duck her head. During her absence, the short hallway which joined the living room on one side, the dining room on the other, and the stairway to the second floor had been transformed into the site of a high, ramified castle of Tinkertoys.
    Turrets of wooden rods and circular connectors rose above her on both sides. If she had not ducked, she would have struck her head on the flying rampart stretched between them. Other ramparts linked the turrets to a central keep: more turrets proliferated beyond it. The whole edifice was at once enormously elaborate, thick with details like balconies and bartizans, and perfectly symmetrical, balanced in all its parts. Its strangeness in her entryway, a pedestrian place intended for the most ordinary use, gave it an eldritch quality, almost an evanescence, as though some faery castle had been half translated from its own magical realm, and could be discerned by its outlines in slim rods and wheels like a glimpse into another dimension of being. Seen by moonlight, blurred and indistinct, it would have seemed the stuff of dreams.
    As perhaps it was. Jeremiah’s dreams—like his mind itself—lay beyond her reach. Only such castles and his other constructs gave her any hint of the visions which filled his head, defined his secret life.
    â€œSandy?” she called. “Jeremiah? I’m home.”
    â€œHi,” Sandy answered. “We’re in the living room.
    â€œJeremiah,” she added, “your mother’s home.”
    One of the things that Linden appreciated most about Sandy was that she consistently treated Jeremiah as if he were paying attention.
    Smiling, Linden worked her way between the turrets to the living room.
    Sandy put down her knitting as Linden entered. “Hi,” she said again. “We were going to put the Legos away, but I wanted you to see what he made.” She gestured around the room, pleased by what her charge had accomplished.
    Linden was accustomed to Jeremiah’s projects. Nevertheless this time she stopped and stared, stricken with shock. At first she could not grasp the import of what she saw.
    Sandy sat in an armchair in one corner of the room. Opposite her, Jeremiah knelt on the floor as he usually did when he was not busy, feet splayed out on either side of him, arms across his stomach with both hands folded under them, gently rocking.
    And between them—
    From the floor up onto an ottoman in the middle of the rug, he had built a mountain of interlocking Legos. Despite the stubbornly rectangular shape of the Legos, and theiruncompromising primary colors, his construct was unmistakably a mountain, ragged ravines cut into its sides and foothills, bluffs bulging. Yet it also resembled a titan kneeling at the edge of the ottoman with its elbows braced on the ottoman’s surface and its crown raised defiantly to the sky. A canyon widened between its legs as its calves receded into the floor. The whole structure stood almost to the level of Linden’s shoulders.
    The mountain or titan faced the sofa; and there Jeremiah had been at work as well. He had adjusted one of the seat cushions so that its corner jutted outward; and out onto the floor from that corner as from a promontory he had devised another castle. However, this one was entirely unlike his towering, airy construct in the entryway. Instead it resembled a wedge like an extension of the cushion’s corner—a wedge which had been hollowed out rather than built up for habitation. Its high