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the Despiser considered the Insequent, rejecting them because their theurgies were too dissociated to serve him. In regions of the Earth so distant that even the Giants had never visited them, he submerged himself among the Demimages of Vidik Amar, who wielded a contingent magic; but he found that when he had corrupted them to his purpose, they turned against each other, diminishing themselves in the name of Despite. Earlier, he nurtured his resentment within the eager energies of the Soulbiter, although they could not accomplish his purpose. Earlier still, he spent an age of failure with the cunning folk who would one day give birth to Kasreyn of the Gyre. And before that, he essayed an approach to the Worm of the World’s End. But the Worm was not of his making. He could not rouse it directly: he could only disturb its slumber by damaging the One Tree. And the Guardian of the One Tree was proof against him.
    Covenant remembered the sources of the Despiser’s frustration, the roots of his accumulating, minatory fury. He recognized the Despiser’s own secret despair, concealed even from himself, and enacted on the beings around him instead.
    Roughly Linden pushed herself back from Covenant. He could not stop her, or try to understand her: he only saw and felt her through the veils of Lord Foul’s past. Her face was a smear of tears, and her chest shook with the effort of stifling her sobs. Her torment was as acute as Kevin’s, and as punitive. But her straits were more cruel than his. She had committed her Desecration—and she had survived it.
    Clenching herself against spasms of renewed weeping, she fought to speak.
    “All you had to do. All you had to do. Was tell me. How to find Jeremiah.” For a moment, she knotted her fists, beat them against her face. “Then I wouldn’t—”
    Her features twisted as if she were about to howl.
    The Haruchai with one eye had moved to stand beside her. “He could not, Chosen,” he said flatly. “His silence was required. I endeavored to forewarn you. But you were unable to heed me. You do not forgive, and cannot harken to other counsel.”
    Like Covenant, Linden did not appear to hear him.
    But Covenant remembered.
    Spectres which may not be denied —
    — will come to affirm the necessity of freedom .
    Nevertheless the Haruchai ’s words were too recent: they could not break the grip of Lord Foul’s striving across hundreds or thousands of centuries.
    Still Linden needed Covenant: some part of him felt that. She needed something from him that he could not give while he remained trapped among the fragments of the past. In spite of his own pain and bewilderment, he could not willingly ignore her.
    Nor could he contain the pressure of remembrance which severed him from himself.
    “Hit me,” he panted thinly. His voice was so frayed and raw that he hardly heard it. “Hit me again.”
    A fire that might have been shock or shame or rage burned away Linden’s tears; but she did not hesitate. Flinging her whole hurt into the blow, she struck his cheek as hard as she could.
    Physical pain. The shock and sting of abused skin. The harsh jerk of his neck as his head snapped back. Air which should have healed him in his lungs.
    He saw her clearly again, as if she had slapped away his confusion.
    “I’m sorry,” he said: the best answer he had. “I’m too full of time. I can’t hold on to it. But pieces—”
    Her open anguish stopped him. He was not saying what she needed to hear. The Stonedownor—Liand, his name was Liand—tried to comfort her, but his words and his gentle hands did not touch her distress. The Haruchai was called Stave. His single eye considered Covenant with ungiving severity.
    Linden had been brought to this place—to the Dead, and to Loric’s krill , and to the devastation of the world—by forces as great in their own way as the pressures which fractured Covenant.
    “I couldn’t tell you then,” he said; groaned. “I couldn’t say anything. None