Dust and flung detritus obscured the sun. Ponderously at first, and as poignant as augury, it sagged away from the cliff. Stone screams stunned the air as the platform on which Linden and Anele stood tilted outward.

She had time for one last cry; barely heard Anele's lorn wail. Then the weight of so much granite took hold, and the ruined Watch collapsed like a cataract.

With Anele clutching her neck, Linden fell down the sky, accompanied by shattered menhirs-hundreds, thousands of them-heavy enough to crush villages. As she and her burden dropped, they seemed to rebound from one tremendous shard to the next, striking One to be deflected toward another. At any instant, they might have been smashed to pulp between stones; slain long before their flesh was flung against the hard hills.

Anele's grasp threatened to crush her larynx: she could not breathe. Already she might have broken bones. Her last outcry was the rending of Kevin's Watch, an eternity of terror and protest compressed into one small splinter of time.

And again she was struck, as she had been struck before: her temple collided with a boulder the size of a dwelling, and the whole inside of her head-her mind and her scream and her frantic heart-turned white with pain.

White and silver.

In the plunge of her translation here, she had given no thought to wild magic; had made no attempt to call it forth. Instead, beneath or beyond consciousness, she had reached out instinctively for her own strength. But this time she had already begun groping toward Covenant's ring when the stark wrong of the aura had overwhelmed the spire's ancient intransigence.

While the cruel bulk of stones swept her downward, and helpless collisions battered her bones, Linden Avery became a detonation of argent fire.

In the imponderable gap between instants, she felt that she had dropped into the core of a sun. Its glare appeared to catch and seethe in the earth's yellow shroud, lighting the obscurity to its horizons like a lightning strike.

Then rampant flame bore her away, and she vanished into a whiteness like the pure grief of stars.

tars, she had heard, were the bright children of the world's birth, the glad offspring of the Creator, trapped inadvertently in the heavens by the same binding that had imprisoned the Despiser. They could only be set free, restored to their infinite home, by the severing of Time. Hence their crystalline keening: they mourned for the lost grandeur of eternity.

And wild magic was the keystone of Time, the pivot, the crux. Bound by Law, and yet illimitable, it both sustained and threatened the processes which made existence possible, for without causality and sequence there could be no life; no creation; no beauty.

No evil.

Joan held a white gold ring.

Lord Foul had taken Jeremiah.

Although she had failed at everything else, Linden took hold of Covenant's power and with it transcended the necessary strictures of gravity and mass, of falling and mortal frailty. Bearing Anele clasped at her neck, she became the center of a fire which emblazoned the sky. Not knowing what she did, guided only by instinct and passion, she briefly set aside the bonds of life.

For a time which she could not have measured or understood, she passed among the sorrows of the stars, and wept with them, and felt no other hurt.

ventually, however, the stars drew nearer until they became the pressure of the sun against her eyelids.

Warmth soothed her battered face while constellations danced into dazzles across her vision. A vast silence seemed to cover her-a silence given depth and definition by the delicate soughing of the breeze, and by the distant call of birds. Under her, cool edges of rock punctuated the encompassing warmth.

A deep lassitude held her, as if she had expended all her strength and could have slept where she lay.

Every breath hurt her chest. She felt beaten from head to foot: a woman caught in a profound wreck, and surrounded by devastation. Yet she could breathe. As far as she knew, she had been merely bruised, not broken. The air tasted of dust and torn earth, and soon it would make her cough; but for now she responded only to its sweetness.

The stone beneath her seemed recently damaged.

Faintly she tasted its granite pain, the raw hurt of new wounds. If she could have slowed her perceptions to the pace of its ineffable pulse, she might have been able to hear it groaning.

Somehow she had landed atop the fragments of the Watch rather than under them. And she had survived the impact. Falling so far, she had come down gently enough to live.

Wild magic again.

But where was Anele? She had lost him while she fell.

His arms were no longer around her neck.

At the thought, she inhaled sharply, and immediately began coughing. Tears welled in her eyes to wash away grit and dirt. When the pressure in her chest eased, she found that she could blink her sight clear and look around for the old man.

Damn it, she had to be able to save somebody.

She lay amid a chaos of shattered stone. Apparently the collapse of Kevin's Watch had struck a hillside and spread itself down into a low valley, burying grass, shrubs, and trees under mounds and monoliths of granite. Hillcrests softened by verdure constricted her horizons on all sides. In the direction of her feet, the vale wandered away toward more hills.

Above her, a new scar marked the cliff-face where Kevin's Watch had clung for all its millennia. The sun hung almost directly over the mountains, suggesting that she had not been unconscious long. Yet the dire swirling which had caused the fall of the spire was gone. It had dissipated or moved on.

Still, enough time had passed for the heavy debris of the Watch to settle, and for most of the dust to drift away. And the birds had apparently forgotten the event. Already they had resumed their piping soars and flits among the hills.

After a moment, she realized that the tumbling stone must have been seen or heard by everyone who lived in the vicinity. Simple curiosity might bring them out to look at the wreckage. The help she needed might be on its way to her.

Or Anele's enemies might come In spite of the intervening shock, she remembered his fears. He had been right to fear that aura of wrongness. He might be right to fear them as well.

Were there truly people in the Land now who meant harm to crazy old men? She needed to find him.

If she could move Groaning and wincing, she shifted her arms in an attempt to prop herself up. But her limbs were as weak as an infant's: she could hardly move them. And when after a while she succeeded, the effort left her gasping.

Although her bones were apparently intact, she felt as broken as the stone.

Sitting, she rested. Unaware at first of what she did, she gazed dully at her hands as though she wondered what had become of them. They seemed strange to her; pallid with powdered stone. Dumbly she stared at them, trying to determine how they had changed.

How had they grown so frail?

They were caked in dust, but the blood which had marred her right palm was gone. Like her other wounds, the cut she had inflicted on herself had been healed. Even the blood had been scoured away. Still the sight of her hands disturbed her. Something was wrong with them.

She was too tired to think.

She had lost Anele.

Surely he was around here somewhere? She had saved herself. Surely she had done the same for him?

Vaguely she lifted her eyes to the cerulean expanse of the sky. Northward only the crests of the hills defined the horizon, their slopes blurred by trees and brush.

Behind her, however, mountains lambent with sunlight piled into the heavens. The more distant peaks held snow.

When she glanced back down at her cut palm, she realized that she could not dis cern whether it had healed cleanly. She could not tell whether the nerves were whole, or the tendons. If blood flowed in the veins, it lay beneath the reach of her perceptions.

From the Watch, she had not been able to see the ground. The whole region had been covered by a smog of wrongness. Now nothing obscured her view in any direc tion. Yet the sun shining down on her had lost its impression of beatitude. It might have been any sun in any world.

Suddenly frightened, she dropped her hands to the stone edges under her, probed their rough planes with her fingers-and felt only cool stone, superficial and crude; mute; lifeless.

The Land's yellow cerements had vanished -taking her healthsense with them. She had lost her sensitivity to the Land's rich vitality and substance. A remnant of her percipience had endured after she had regained consciousness: now it was gone.

Goaded by new fears, she forced herself to her feet, standing awkwardly on the broken stones so that she could search for Anele.

The rubble covered the hillside where it had fallen.

Above her, massive fragments of granite balanced precariously on other stones of all sizes. She had not felt Anele slip away. For all she knew, wild magic had burned out his life. Or he might have been crushed under the jagged menhirs around her.

He was all she had.

But then, ten or fifteen paces above her on the slope, she spotted a hand clutching at the stone as if it groped for help.

Without her healthsense, she could only see its surface; could discern nothing about the body to which it belonged. Yet it moved. The fingers searched feebly at the rocks.

In a rush, Linden scrambled toward it.

She was weak, and haste made her careless. She slipped repeatedly on the treacherous rubble, fell; caught herself and climbed again, panting with urgency. Without her boots and jeans, she would have scraped her legs raw; but she took no notice.

When she reached the stone where the hand clutched, she found Anele among the wreckage behind it.

He lay on his back, blind eyes staring whitely upward.

With both hands he clawed vaguely at the granite as if he sought to dig his way out of a grave. His breath labored painfully through his filthy beard.

"Anele," she gasped thinly. Bending over him, she tried to force her senses into him; tried to see beyond the surface of his seamed, unwashed skin. But of the madness and Earthpower which had defined him earlier she caught no glimpse. He was closed to her now.

Oh, God. She did not understand.

A moment of sharp grief overtook her, and her vision blurred as she mourned the loss of her healthsense.

For her, the beauty had gone out of the world. And she had tasted it so briefly- During her previous time in the Land, percipience had exposed her to evils against which she had no armor and no weapons. The Sunbane and samadhi Raver had nearly shattered her spirit. Nevertheless she had learned to treasure such discernment. It had shed light into beauty as well as evil. It had enabled her to understand why Covenant loved the Land. It had taught her to view healing in a new way, less as a repudiation of death and more as an affirmation of life. And it had given her purpose, a reason to continue striving when her burdens, and Covenant's, and the Land's, seemed more than she could bear.

A Raver had told her, You are being forged as iron is forged to achieve the ruin of the Earth. You have been chosen, Linden Avery, because you can see. But Lord Foul had misjudged her. Because she could see, she had learned to loathe and oppose him. In the end, her healthsense had made her effective against the Sunbane.

She had lived without it for ten years now, but she treasured it still. For a while, the loss of it rent her heart.

However, she had no time for grief. The hole in her shirt and the scar on her chest changed nothing. She needed answers; understanding. And she hungered for companionship. Therefore she needed Anele.

She repeated his name more strongly. "Can you hear me? Are you all right?"

He jerked as though she had slapped him. "You!" For a moment he rubbed at his eyes as if he wanted to force his blindness aside. Then he rolled over and lurched upright. "You are here." Coughing at the dust in his throat, he leaned against the boulder behind which he had lain, braced his feet on a canted shelf of stone. "I did not delude myself. You have saved me."

Before she could respond, he fumbled toward her.

Instinctively she reached out to help him. One of his hands found her arm, gripped it hard. With the other, he reached up to explore her face as if he thought that he might recognize her by touch.

In spite of herself, Linden flinched. But the old man held her.

"The Law of Death was broken," he murmured, apparently speaking to himself while his fingertips traced her expression, "long ago." He held his head cocked to one side, considering her eyelessly. "The Law of Life was sundered in Andelain. Such things are possible."

She stared at him, baffled at first by the change in his manner. The angle of his head suggested a derangement of some kind. Yet his madness had apparently passed with the smog. He sounded sane now, in possession of himself.

Capable of answers.

"I'm Linden," she told him at once. "Linden Avery. I just got here. I don't know if you've ever heard of me. I don't know what's going on. But I-"

Abruptly he dropped his hand. With one trembling finger, he pointed at Covenant's ring hanging outside her shirt.

"And you have power. That is well. You will have need of it."

His words disturbed her as if they had been pronounced by an oracle. He had become strangely knowledgeable since the collapse of the Watch. She did not know how to approach him.

"I was worried," she responded awkwardly as she slipped the ring back under her shirt. "You disappeared while we were falling. I was afraid you were dead."

He cocked his head farther. "I feared you. You might have been-" He shuddered; and with his free hand he rubbed the top of his head roughly. "The folk of this region are kindly toward me. Kevin's Dirt blinds them, and they cannot see me. Upon occasion they grant me food and shelter. But they are not blinded. If any Master came upon me, I would be taken and doomed.

Therefore I did not seek you out."

Cautious with him, Linden did not ask him to explain who they were. That question could wait. First she needed to know more about his mental state; his apparent recovery. Gently she inquired, "'Kevin's Dirt'? What's that?"

In spite of her care, he winced. Suddenly impatient, he demanded, "You have beheld it, have you not? From the Watch? An evil which concealed all the Land?

That is Kevin's Dirt."

"Yes, of course," she replied, confused. "A dirty yellow cloud, like smog. But it's gone now."

Anele snorted. "It is not. You are merely blind."

Floundering, she said, "I don't understand."

With a jerk, he cocked his head over to the other side.

"Do you behold me now? Do you discern what I am?"

"Of course-" she began, then stopped herself. "Not the way I did," she admitted. There the distortion of his mind, and the Earthpower in his veins, had been plain to her. Now she could not detect them.

"You are blind," he repeated scornfully. "Kevin's Dirt blinds you. On the Watch you stood above it. It could not affect you. Now-" He smacked his lips as if in disdain or regret. "You are unaware of it because it blinds you. You do not see me. Only the Masters-"

Abruptly he tightened his grip on her forearm.

Without transition, his manner became fearful. "Do they come?" he whispered. "I have no sight, and their stealth exceeds my hearing."

Although he could not watch her, Linden made a show of looking around the hillsides, studying the slope of rubble. "I don't see anyone. We're alone, at least for now."

Anele clutched at her with both hands. "They will come." His voice shook. "You must protect me."

That was the opening she needed. Taking him by the shoulders, she held him firmly. "I will. I've already promised that. And I've kept you alive so far. No one will hurt you, or trap you, while I can do anything about it."

Slowly his features relaxed. "From the breaking of the Watch," he responded softly, "yes. With power. Such things are possible." He released a low sigh. "I have failed my power. It was given into my hands, but I have betrayed that trust."

His Earthpower? Linden wondered obliquely. Had "Kevin's Dirt" deprived him of his nature, as it had blinded her healthsense? Or did he refer to something else?

But she did not pursue such questions. Instead she broached her own needs. "That's right," she began. "I saved you. Now you can help me.