Free Thomas Covenant 8 - The Fatal Revenant by Stephen R. Donaldson Page B

speak of Kastenessen.” He may have feared being overheard. “I have named him my grandsire, though the Dancers of the Sea were no get of his. Yet they were formed by the lore and theurgy which he gifted to the mortal woman whom he loved. Therefore I am the descendant of his power. Among the Elohim, no other form of procreation has meaning.”
    The ur-viles and Waynhim responded with a low mutter which may have
    expressed approval or disbelief. Like them, if in an entirely different fashion, the merewives were artificial beings, born of magic and knowledge rather than of natural flesh.
    Kastenessen, Linden thought. New fears shook her. She believed Esmer instinctively. Kastenessen had burned her with his fury in the open center of the Verge of Wandering. And yesterday he had influenced the Demondim, persuading them to alter their
    intentions.
    “That’s why you serve him,” she murmured unsteadily. serve him utterly. You inherited your power from him.”p>
    His power—and his hunger for destruction.
    “As I also serve you,” he told her for the second time.
    Kastenessen. The name was a knell; a funereal gong adumbrating echoes in all directions. Her nausea was growing worse. The Elohim had forcibly Appointed Kastenessen to prevent or imprison a peril in the farthest north of the world. But now he had broken free of his Durance. When Lord Foul had said, I have merely whispered a word of counsel here and there, and awaited events, he may have been speaking of Kastenessen.
    She knew how powerful the Elohim could be, any of them
    Kastenessen had provided for her escape from the horde. Had he also enabled Covenant and Jeremiah to reach her? Did he want all three of them alive?
    Still scrambling to catch up with the implications of Esmer’s revelation, she mused aloud, “So when Anele talks about skurj—”
    He names the beasts”—Esmer shook his head—”nay, the monstrous creatures of fire which Kastenessen was Appointed to contain. They come to assail the Land because he has severed or eluded the Durance which compelled him to his doom.”
    Behind the Mithil’s Plunge, Anele had referred to Kastenessen. I could have preserved the Durance! he had cried. Stopped the skurj. With the Staff! If I had been worthy.
    Did you sojourn under the Sunbane with Sunder and Hollian, and learn nothing of ruin?
    According to Anele—or to the native stone that he had touched behind the Plunge—the Elohim had done nothing to secure Kastenessen’s imprisonment.
    Aching for Anele’s pain, and for her own peril, Linden asked Esmer softly, “What about this morning? The Demondim let Covenant and my son
    reach Revelstone.” Covenant had given her an explanation. She wanted to know if he had told the truth. “Was that Kastenessen’s doing too?’
    “You do not comprehend,” Esmer protested dolefully; as regret-ridden as the wind that drove seafarers into the Soulbiter. “Your ignorance precludes it. Do you not know that the Viles, those beings of terrible and matchless lore, were once a lofty and admirable race? Though they roamed the Land widely,
    they inhabited the Lost Deep in caverns as ornate and majestic as castles. There they devoted their vast power and knowledge to the making of beauty and wonder, and all of their works were filled with loveliness. For an age of the Earth, they spurned the heinous evils buried among the roots of Gravin Threndor, and even in the time of Berek Lord-Fatherer no ill was known of them.”
    Esmer’s ambiguous conflicts had
    grown so loud that Linden could not shut them out. They hurt her nerves like the carnage before Revelstone’s gates, when the Demondim had slaughtered so many Masters and their mounts.
    She had asked about KastenessenŹabout Covenant—and Esmer talked of Viles.
    “Yet a shadow had already fallen upon them,” Cail’s son continued, “like and
    unlike the shadow upon the hearts of the Elohim. The corruption of the Viles, and of their makings, the Demondim, transpired