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small detail compared to the threat of the Worm. The world’s end would not pause for any instance of mere human exaltation and relief.
    “Say something, Mom,” Jeremiah prodded. His tone suggested a teenager’s impatience. “Say anything. Tell me you heard Stave. He’s right, we need to go.” His next thought made him grin again. “And I want to see the Giants’ faces when they see me. They are not going to believe it.”
    Linden tried to refuse. She wanted nothing except to concentrate on her son. Her thirst for the sound of his voice was acute. There was so much that she yearned to know about him. About what he had endured—and how he had endured it. It did not matter where she began, as long as she could search for the truth.
    I never wanted you to get shot.
    But there was something else—Something in Stave’s tone nagged at the edges of her health-sense.
    She absolutely had to stop crying.
    When she rubbed at her eyes, the emptiness of her hands reminded her that she no longer held the Staff of Law.
    She felt strangely reluctant to retrieve it. It represented responsibilities which were too great for her. Nevertheless she was capable now of many things that would have surpassed her less than an hour ago. She was still the same Linden Avery who had raged and failed and despaired; yet somehow she had also been made new. And watching over Jeremiah was a task to which she could commit herself without hesitation.
    To meet that challenge, she might well need every conceivable resource.
    Unsteadily she stooped to reclaim her Staff.
    As her fingers closed on the engraved blackness of the wood, another faint pang touched her nerves: an evanescent breath of approaching
wrongness
. Frowning, she raised her head to scent the air, extend her health-sense.
    The atmosphere had a brittle taste, as if it were compounded of a substance that might shatter. She knew that the season was spring; but that fact seemed to have no meaning on the Lower Land. Hideous theurgies and slaughter had made a wasteland of the entire region. Muirwin Delenoth was as desiccated as its bones: it had been shaped by death.
    “Mom?” Jeremiah asked; but still she did not speak.
    Drawing warmth and sensitivity from her Staff, Linden considered the slopes of the hollow, the ragged plates around the rim. Then she lifted her attention to the declining sun and the tainted hue of the sky. The pall of ash and dust overhead was wrong in its own fashion: it was unnatural, imposed by some force beyond the reach of her senses. But it was not malice; not evil or deliberate. The almost imperceptible frisson of
wrongness
rose from some other source.
    “Stave—?” She had to swallow hard to clear her throat. “Do you feel it?”
    The former Master’s silence was answer enough.
    Slowly she turned in a circle, pushing her percipience to its limits. She expected the disturbance to come from the vicinity of Foul’s Creche; from Covenant’s search for Joan. But she felt nothing there. When she faced northwest, however, she found what she sought.
    It was faint, almost too subtle to be discerned. Yet it was thin with distance, not weakness. The fact that she could detect it at all across so many leagues bespoke tremendous power. As soon as she tuned her nerves to the pitch of this specific malevolence—and to the direction from which it spread—she knew what it was.
    It was Kevin’s Dirt, and it came from Mount Thunder.
    For the first time, Kastenessen was extending his bale over the Lower Land.
    Repeatedly he had tried to prevent Jeremiah’s rescue from the
croyel
. Now he was sending the fug of Kevin’s Dirt to hamper Linden and the Staff of Law. When it spread far enough, his theurgy would numb her senses, and Mahrtiir’s, and perhaps Jeremiah’s. And it would aggravate Covenant’s leprosy. If Joan did not kill him first. With forces drawn from She Who Must Not Be Named, the mad
Elohim
strove to ensure that Linden and her companions would not survive.
    A