Fifteen: "Lord Mhoram's Victory"


   The exertion of hauling the dead forms from the ground and throwing them at Revelstone had exhausted samadhi Satansfist, drained him until he could no longer sustain that expenditure of force. He had seen High Lord's Furl torn from its flagpole atop the tower by his Cavewights. He knew he had met at least part of his master's objective in this assault. While his forces held the tower-while tons of sand blocked the inner gates of the Keep-while winter barrened the upland plateau above Revelstone-the Lords and all their people were doomed. They could not feed themselves within those stone walls indefinitely. If last came to last, the Giant-Raver knew that he could through patience alone make the great Keep into one reeking tomb or crypt. He let his dead collapse into sand.
   Yet his failure to burst those inner gates enraged him, made him pant for recompense even though he lacked the strength to assail the walls himself. He was a Raver, insatiable for blood despite the mortal limits of the Giantish body he occupied. And other things compelled him also. There was an implacable coercion in the wind, a demand which brooked no failure, however partial or eventually meaningless.
   As the dead fell apart, Satansfist ordered his long-leashed army to the attack.
   With a howl that shivered the air, echoed savagely off the carven walls, beat against the battlements like an ululation of fangs and claws and hungry blades, the Despiser's hordes charged. They swept up through the foothills like a shrill gray flood and hurled themselves at Revelstone.
   Lord Foul's Stone-spawned creatures led the attack-not because they were effective against granite walls and abutments, but because they were expendable. The Raver's army included twice a hundred thousand of them, and more arrived every day, marching to battle from Foul's Creche through the Center Plains. So samadhi used them to absorb the defense of the Keep, thus protecting his Cavewights and ur-viles. Thousands of perverted creatures fell with arrows, spears, javelins jutting from them, but many many thousands more forged ahead. And behind them came the forces which knew how to damage Revelstone.
   In moments, the charge hit. Rabid, rockwise Cavewights found crafty holds in the stone, vaulted themselves up onto the lowest battlements and balconies. Mighty ur-vile wedges used their black vitriol to wipe clear the parapets above them, then pounced upward on sturdy wooden ladders brought to the walls by other creatures. Within a short time, Revelstone was under assault all along its south and north faces.
   But the ancient Giants who made Lord's Keep had built well to defend against such an attack. Even the lowest parapets were high off the ground; they could be sealed off, so that the attackers were denied access to the city; they were defended by positions higher still in the walls. And Warmark Quaan had drilled the Warward year after year, preparing it for just this kind of battle. The prearranged defenses of the Keep sprang into action instantly as alarms sounded throughout the city. Warriors left secondary tasks and ran to the battlements; relays formed to supply the upper defenses with arrows and other weapons; concerted Eoman charged the Cavewights and ur-viles which breached the lower abutments. Then came Lore wardens, Hirebrands, Gravelingases. Lorewardens repulsed the attacks with songs of power, while Hirebrands set fire to the ladders, and Gravelingases braced the walls themselves against the strength of the Cavewights.
   As he commanded the struggle from a coign in the upper walls, Quaan soon saw that his warriors could have repulsed this assault if they had not been outnumbered thirty or more to one-if every life in his army had not been so vital, and every life in the Raver's so insignificant. But the Warward was outnumbered; it needed help. In response to the fragmentary reports which reached him from the Close-reports of fire and power and immense relief-he sent an urgent messenger to summon the Lords to Revelstone's aid.
   The messenger found High Lord Mhoram in the Close, but Mhoram did not respond to Quaan's call. It only reached the outskirts of his mind, and he held it gently distant, away from himself. When he heard one of the guards explain to the messenger what had transpired in the fire-ruined Close, he let his own awareness of the battle slip away-let all thought of the present danger drop from him, and gave himself to the melding of the Lords.
   They sat on the slumped floor around the graveling pit with their staffs on the stone before them-Trevor and Loerya on Mhoram's left, Amatin on his right. In his trembling hands, the krill blazed in hot affirmation of white gold. Yet he barely saw the light; his eyes were heat-scorched, and he was blinded by tears of release that would not stop. Through the silent contact of the meld, he spread strength about him, and shared knowledge which had burdened him more than he had ever realized. He told his fellow Lords how he had been able to remove the krill from its stone rest, and why now it did not burn his vulnerable flesh.
   He could feel Amatin shrink from what he said, feel Trevor shake with a pain that only in part came from his injury, feel Loerya appraise his communication as she might have appraised any new weapon. To each of them, he gave himself; he showed them his conviction, his understanding, his strength. And he held the proof in his hands, so that they could not doubt him. With such evidence shining amid the ravage of the Close, they followed the process which had led him to his secret knowledge and shared the dismay which had taught him to keep it secret.
   Finally, Lord Amatin framed her question aloud. It was too large for silence; it required utterance, so that Revelstone itself could hear it. She swallowed awkwardly, then floated words in the untarnished acoustics of the chamber. "So it is we-we ourselves who have-for so many generations the Lords themselves have inured themselves to the power of Kevin's Lore."
   "Yes, Lord," Mhoram whispered, knowing that everyone in the Close could hear him.
   "The Oath of Peace has prevented-"
   "Yes, Lord."
   Her breathing shuddered for a moment. "Then we are lost."
   Mhoram felt the lorn dilemma in her words and stood up within himself, pulling the authority of his High Lordship about his shoulders. "No."
   "Without power, we are lost," she countered. "Without the Oath of Peace, we are not who we are, and we are lost."
   "Thomas Covenant has returned," responded Loerya.
   Brusquely, Amatin put this hope aside. "Nevertheless. Either he has no power, or his power violates the Peace with which we have striven to serve the Land. Thus also we are lost."
   "No," the High Lord repeated. "Not lost. We-and ur-Lord Covenant-must find the wisdom to attain both Peace and power. We must retain our knowledge of who we are, or we will despair as Kevin Land-waster despaired, in Desecration. Yet we must also retain this knowledge of power, or we will have failed to do our utmost for the Land. Perhaps the future Lords will find that they must turn from Kevin's Lore-that they must find lore of their own, lore which is not so apt for destruction. We have no time for such a quest. Knowing the peril of this power, we must cling to ourselves all the more, so that we do not betray the Land."
   His words seemed to ring in the Close, and time passed before Amatin said painfully, "You offer us things which contradict each other, and tell us that we must preserve both, achieve both together. Such counsel is easily spoken."
   In silence, the High Lord strove to share with her his sense of how the contradiction might be mastered, made whole; he let his love for the Land, for Revelstone, for her, flow openly into her mind. And he smiled as he heard Lord Trevor say slowly, "It may be done. I have felt something akin to it. What little strength I have returned to me when the Keep's need became larger for me than my fear of the Keep's foe."
   "Fear," Loerya echoed in assent.
   And Mhoram added, "Fear-or hatred."
   A moment later, Amatin began to weep quietly in comprehension. With Loerya and Trevor, Mhoram wrapped courage around her and held her until her dread of her own danger, her own capacity to Desecrate the Land, relaxed. Then the High Lord put down the krill and opened his eyes to the Close.
   Dimly, blurrily, his sight made out Hearthrall Tohrm and Trell. Trell still huddled within himself, shirking the horror of what he had done. And Tohrm cradled his head, commiserating in rhadhamaerl grief with the torment of soul which could turn a Gravelingas against beloved stone. They were silent, and Mhoram gazed at them as if he were to blame for Trell's plight.
   But before he could speak, another messenger from Warmark Quaan arrived in the Close, demanded notice. When the High Lord looked up at him, the messenger repeated Quaan's urgent call for help.
   "Soon," Mhoram sighed, "soon. Tell my friend that we will come when we are able. The Lord Trevor is wounded. I am"-with a brief gesture, he indicated the scalded skin of his head-"the Lord Amatin and I must have food and rest. And the Lord Loerya-"
   " I will go," Loerya said firmly. " I have not yet fought as I should for Revelstone.'' To the messenger, she responded, ''Take me to the place of greatest need, then carry the High Lord's reply to Warmark Quaan." Moving confidently, as if the new discovery of power answered her darkest doubts, she climbed the stairs and followed the warrior away toward the south wall of the Keep.
   As she departed, she sent the guards to call the Healers and bring food. The other Lords were left alone for a short time, and Tohrm took that opportunity to ask Mhoram what was to be done with Trell.
   Mhoram gazed around the ruined galleries as if he were trying to estimate the degree to which he had failed Trell. He knew that generations of rhadhamaerl work would be required to restore some measure of the chamber's useful Tightness, and tears blurred his vision again as he said to Tohrm, "The Healers must work with him. Perhaps they will be able to restore his mind."
   "What will be the good? How will he endure the knowledge of what he has done?"
   "We must help him to endure. I must help him. We must attempt all healing, no matter how difficult. And I who have failed him cannot deny the burden of his need now."
   "Failed him?" Trevor asked. The pain of his injury had drawn the blood from his face, but he had not lost the mood which had inspired him to bear such a great share of the Keep's defense. "In what way? You did not cause his despair. Had you treated him with distrust, you would have achieved nothing but the confirmation of his distress. Distrust-vindicates itself."
   Mhoram nodded. "And I distrusted-I distrusted all. I kept knowledge secret even while I knew the keeping wrong. It is fortunate that the harm was no greater."
   "Yet you could not prevent-"
   "Perhaps. And perhaps-if I had shared my knowledge with him, so that he had known his peril-known- Perhaps he might have found the strength to remember himself-remember that he was a Gravelingas of the rhadhamaerl, a lover of stone."
   Tohrm agreed stiffly, and his sympathy for Trell made him say, "You have erred, High Lord."
   "Yes, Hearthrall," Mhoram replied with deep gentleness in his voice. "I am who I am-both human and mortal. I have-much to learn."
   Tohrm blinked fiercely, ducked his head. The tautness of his shoulders looked like anger, but Mhoram had shared an ordeal with the Hearthrall, and understood him better.
   A moment later, several Healers hurried into the Close. They brought with them two stretchers, and carefully bore Trell away in one. Lord Trevor they carried in the other, peremptorily ignoring his protests. Tohrm went with Trell. Soon Mhoram and Amatin were left with the warrior who brought their food, and a Healer who softly applied a soothing ointment to the High Lord's burns.
   Once Mhoram's hurts had been treated, he dismissed the warrior and the Healer. He knew that Amatin would want to speak with him, and he cleared the way for her before he began to eat. Then he turned to the food. Through his weariness, he ate deliberately, husbanding his strength so that when he was done he would be able to return to his work.
   Lord Amatin matched his silence; she seemed to match the very rhythm of his jaws, as if his example were her only support in the face of a previously unguessed peril. Mhoram sensed that her years of devotion to Kevin's Wards had left her peculiarly unprepared for what he had told her; her trust in the Lore of the Old Lords had been exceedingly great. So he kept silent while he ate; and when he was done, he remained still, resting himself while he waited for her to speak what was in her heart.
   But her question, when it came, took a form he had not anticipated. "High Lord," she said with a covert nod toward the krill, "if Thomas Covenant has returned to the Land-who summoned him? How was that call performed? And where is he?"
   "Amatin-" Mhoram began.
   "Who but the Despiser could do such a thing?"
   "There are-"
   "And if this is not Lord Foul's doing, then where has Covenant appeared? How can he aid us if he is not here?"
   "He will not aid us." Mhoram spoke firmly to stop the tumble of her questions. "If there is help to be found in him, it will be aid for the Land, not aid for us against this siege. There are other places from which he may serve the Land-yes, and other summoners also. We and Lord Foul are not the only powers. The Creator himself may act to meet this need."
   Her waifish eyes probed him, trying to locate the source of his serenity. "I lack your faith in this Creator. Even if such a being lives, the Law which preserves the Earth precludes- Do not the legends say that if the Creator were to break the arch of Time to place his hand upon the Earth, then the arch and all things in it would come to an end, and the Despiser would be set free?"
   "That is said," Mhoram affirmed. "I do not doubt it. Yet the doom of any creation is upon the head of its Creator. Our work is enough for us. We need not weary ourselves with the burdens of gods."
   Amatin sighed. "You speak with conviction, High Lord. If I were to say such things, they would sound glib."
   "Then do not say them. I speak only of what gives me courage. You are a different person and will have a different courage. Only remember that you are a Lord, a servant of the Land-remember the love that brought you to this work, and do not falter."
   "Yes, High Lord," she replied, looking intensely into him. "Yet I do not trust this power which makes Desecration possible. I will not hazard it."
   Her gaze turned him back to the krill. Its white gem flamed at him like the light of a paradox, a promise of life and death. Slowly, he reached out and touched its hilt. But his exaltation had faded, and the krill's heat made him withdraw his hand.
   He smiled crookedly. "Yes," he breathed as if he were speaking to the blade, "it is a hazard. I am very afraid.'' Carefully, he took a cloth from within his robe; carefully, he wrapped the krill and set it aside until it could be taken to a place where the Lorewardens could study it. Then he glanced up and saw that Amatin was trying to smile also.
   "Come, sister Amatin," he said to her bravery, "we have delayed our work too long."
   Together, they made their way to the battle, and with Lord Loerya they called fire from their staffs to throw back the hordes of the Despiser.
   The three were joined late in the afternoon by a bandaged and hobbling Trevor. But by that time, Revelstone had survived the worst frenzy of Satansfist's assault. The Lords had given the Warward the support it needed. Under Quaan's stubborn command, the warriors held back the onslaught. Wherever the Lords worked, the casualties among the defenders dropped almost to nothing, and the losses of the attackers increased vastly. In this kind of battle, the ur-viles could not focus their power effectively. As a result, the Lords were able to wreak a prodigious ruin among the Cavewights and other creatures. Before the shrouded day had limped into night, samadhi Raver called back his forces.
   But this time he did not allow the Keep to rest. His attacks began again shortly after dark. Under the cover of cold winter blackness, ur-viles rushed forward to throw liquid vehemence at the battlements, and behind them tight companies of creatures charged, carrying shields and ladders. Gone now was the haphazard fury of the assault, the unconcerted wild attempt to breach the whole Keep at once. In its place were precision and purpose. Growling with hunger, the hordes shaped themselves to the task of wearing down Revelstone as swiftly and efficiently as possible.
   In the days that followed, there was no let to the fighting. Satansfist controlled his assaults so that his losses did not significantly outrun the constant arrival of his reinforcements; but he exerted pressure remorselessly, allowing the warriors no respite in which to recover. Despite Quaan's best efforts to rotate his Eoman and Howard, so that each could rest in turn, the Warward grew more and more weary-and weary warriors were more easily slain. And those who fell could not be replaced.
   But the Warward did not have to carry the burden of this battle alone. Gravelingases and Hirebrands and Lore wardens fought as well. People who had no other urgent work-homeless farmers and Cattleherds, artists, even older children-took over supporting tasks; they supplied arrows and other weapons, stood sentry duty, ran messages. Thus many Eoman were freed for either combat or rest. And the Lords rushed into action whenever Quaan requested their aid. They were potent and compelling; in their separate ways, they fought with the hard strength of people who knew themselves capable of Desecration and did not intend to be driven to that extreme.
   Thus Lord's Keep endured. Eoman after Eoman fell in battle every day; food stores shrank; the Healers' supplies of herbs and poultices dwindled. Strain carved the faces of the people, cut away comfortable flesh until their skulls seemed to be covered by nothing but pressure and apprehension. But Revelstone protected its inhabitants, and they endured.
   At first, the Lords concentrated their attention on the needs of the battle. Instinctively, they shied away from their dangerous knowledge. They spent their energy in work and fighting, rather than in studying last resorts. But when the continuous adumbrations of assault had echoed through the Keep for six days, High Lord Mhoram found that he had begun to dread the moment when Satansfist would change his tactics-when the Raver and his master were ready to use the Stone and the Staff again. And during the seventh night, Mhoram's sleep was troubled by dim dreams like shadows of his former visionary nightmares. Time and again, he felt that he could almost hear somewhere in the depths of his soul the sound of an Unfettered One screaming. He awoke in an inchoate sweat, and hastened upland to see if anything had happened to the Unfettered One of Glimmermere.
   The One was safe and well, as were Loerya's daughters. But this did not relieve Mhoram. It left a chill in the marrow of his bones like an echo of winter. He felt sure that someone, somewhere, had been slain in torment. Straightening himself against the shiver of dread, he called the other Lords to a Council, where for the first time he raised the question of how their new knowledge could be used against the Despiser.
   His question sparked unspoken trepidations in them all. Amatin stared widely at the High Lord, Trevor winced, Loerya studied her hands-and Mhoram felt the acuteness of their reaction as if they were saying, Do you think then that we should repeat the work of Kevin Landwaster? But he knew they did not intend that accusation. He waited for them, and at last Loerya found her voice. "When you defended the Close-you worked against another's wrong. How will you control this power if you initiate it?"
   Mhoram had no answer.
   Shortly, Trevor forced himself to add, "We have nothing through which we could channel such might. It is in my heart that our staffs would not suffice-they would not be strong to control power of that extent. We lack the Staff of Law, and I know of no other tool equal to this demand."
   "And," Amatin said sharply, "this knowledge in which you dare to put your faith did not suffice for High Lord Kevin son of Loric. It only increased the cost of his despair. I have-I have given my life to his Lore, and I speak truly. Such power is a snare and a delusion. It cannot be controlled. It strikes the hand that wields it. Better to die in the name of Peace than to buy one day of survival at the cost of such peril!"
   Again, Mhoram had no answer. He could not name the reasons behind his question. Only the cold foreboding in his bones impelled him, told him that unknown horrors stalked the Land in places far distant from Revelstone. When Amatin concluded grimly, "Do you fear that ur-Lord Covenant may yet Desecrate us?" he could not deny that he was afraid.
   So the Council ended without issue, and the Lords went back to the defense of the Keep.
   Still the fighting went on without surcease. For four more days, the Lords wielded their staff fire with all the might and cunning they could conceive-and the Warward drove itself beyond its weariness as if it could not be daunted-and the other people of Revelstone did their utmost to hurl Cavewights, ur-viles, Stone-spawn, from the walls. But Satansfist did not relent. He pressed his assault as if his losses were meaningless, spent whole companies of his creatures to do any kind of damage to the city, however small. And the accumulating price that Lord's Keep paid for its endurance grew more terrible day by day.
   During the fifth day, Mhoram withdrew from the battle to inspect the condition of the city. Warmark Quaan joined him, and when they had seen the fatal diminishment of the stores, had taken the toll of lost lives, Quaan met Mhoram's gaze squarely and said with a tremor in his brusque voice, "We will fall. If this Raver does not raise another finger against us, still we will fall."
   Mhoram held his old friend's eyes. "How long can we hold?"
   "Thirty days-at most. No more. Forty-if we deny food to the ill, and the injured, and the infirm."
   "We will not deny food to any who yet live."
   "Thirty, then. Less, if my warriors lose strength and permit any breach of the walls." He faltered and his eyes fell. "High Lord, does it come to this? Is this the end-for us-for the Land?"
   Mhoram put a firm hand on Quaan's shoulder. "No, my friend. We have not come to the last of ourselves. And the Unbeliever- Do not forget Thomas Covenant."
   That name brought back Quaan's war-hardness. "I would forget him if I could. He will-"
   "Softly, Warmark,'' Mhoram interrupted evenly. ''Do not be abrupt to prophesy doom. There are mysteries in the Earth of which we know nothing."
   After a moment, Quaan murmured, "Do you yet trust him?"
   The High Lord did not hesitate. "I trust that Despite is not the sum of life."
   Quaan gazed back into this answer as if he were trying to find its wellspring. Some protest or plea moved in his face; but before he could speak, a messenger came to recall him to the fighting. At once, he turned and strode away.
   Mhoram watched his stern back for a moment, then bestirred himself to visit the Healers. He wanted to know if any progress had been made with Trell Atiaran-mate.
   In the low groaning hall which the Healers had made into a hospital for the hundreds of injured men and women, Mhoram found the big Gravelingas sprawled like a wreck on a pallet in the center of the floor. A fierce brain-fever had wasted him. To Mhoram's cold dread, he looked like the incarnated fate of all Covenant's victims-a fleshless future crouched in ambush for the Land. The High Lord's hands trembled. He did not believe he could bear to watch that ineluctable ravage happen.
   "At first, we placed him near the wall," one of the attendants said softly, "so that he would be near stone. But he recoiled from it in terror. Therefore we have laid him here. He does not recover-but he no longer shrieks. Our efforts to succor him are confounded."
   "Covenant will make restitution," Mhoram breathed in answer, as if the attendant had said something else. "He must."
   Trembling, he turned away, and tried to find relief for his dismay in the struggle of Revelstone.
   The next night, samadhi changed his tactics. Under cover of darkness, a band of Cavewights rushed forward and clambered up onto one of the main battlements, and when warriors ran out to meet the attack, two ur-vile wedges hidden in the night near the walls swiftly formed Forbid-dings across the ends of the battlement, thus trapping the warriors, preventing any escape or rescue. Two Eoman were caught and slaughtered by the ur-viles before Lord Amatin was able to break down one of the Forbiddings.
   The same pattern was repeated simultaneously at several points around the Keep.
   Warmark Quaan had lost more than eightscore warriors before he grasped the purpose of these tactics. They were not intended to break into Revelstone, but rather to kill defenders.
   So the Lords were compelled to bear the brunt of defending against these new assaults; a Forbidding was an exercise of power which only they were equipped to counter. As long as darkness covered the approach of the ur-viles, the attacks continued, allowing the Lords no chance to rest. And when dawn came, Sheol Satansfist resumed the previous strategy of his assault.
   After four nights of this, Mhoram and his comrades were near exhaustion. Each Forbidding cost two of them an arduous exertion; one Lord could not counteract the work of three- or fivescore ur-viles swiftly enough. As a result, Amatin was now as pale and hollow-eyed as an invalid; Loerya's once-sturdy muscles seemed to hang like ropes of mortality on her bones; and Trevor's eyes flinched at everything he saw, as if even in the deepest safety of the Keep he was surrounded by ghouls. Mhoram himself felt that he had a great weight leaning like misery against his heart. They could all taste the accuracy of Quaan's dire predictions, and they were sickening on the flavor.
   During a brief moment of dazed half-sleep late that fourth night, the High Lord found himself murmuring, "Covenant, Covenant," as if he were trying to remind the Unbeliever of a promise.
   But the next morning the attacks stopped. A silence like the quietude of open graves blew into Revelstone on the wind. All the creatures had returned to their encampment, and in their absence Revelstone panted and quivered like a scourged prisoner between lashes. Mhoram took the opportunity to eat, but he put food into his mouth without seeing it and chewed without tasting it. In the back of his mind, he was trying to measure the remnant of his endurance. Yet he responded immediately when a messenger hastened up to him, informed him that samadhi Raver was approaching the Keep alone.
   Protected by flanks of archers from any attack by the enemy occupying the tower, Mhoram and the other Lords went to one of the high balconies near the eastward point of the Keep and faced Satansfist.
   The Giant-Raver approached sardonically, with a swagger of confidence and a spring of contempt in his stride. His huge fist gripped his fragment of the Stone, and it steamed frigidly in the freezing air. He stopped just beyond effective bow range, leered up at the Lords, and shouted stertorously, "Hail, Lords! I give you greeting! Are you well?"
   "Well!" Quaan grated under his breath. "Let him come five paces nearer, and I will show him 'well.' "
   "My master is concerned for you!" samadhi continued. "He fears that you have begun to suffer in this unnecessary conflict!"
   The High Lord's eyes glinted at this gibe. "Your master lives for the suffering of others! Do you wish us to believe that he has eschewed Despite?"
   "He is amazed and saddened that you resist him. Do you still not see that he is the one word of truth in this misformed world? His is the only strength-the one right. The Creator of the Earth is a being of disdain and cruelty! All who are not folly-blind know this. All who are not cowards in the face of the truth know that Lord Foul is the only truth. Has your suffering taught you nothing? Has Thomas Covenant taught you nothing? Surrender, I say! Give up this perverse and self-made misery-surrender! I swear to you that you will stand as my equals in the service of Lord Foul!''
   In spite of his mordant sarcasm, the Raver's voice carried a strange power of persuasion. The might of the Stone was in his words, compelling his hearers to submit. As samadhi spoke, Mhoram felt that the flesh of his resistance was being carved away, leaving his bare bones exposed to the winter. His throat ached at the taste of abdication, and he had to swallow heavily before he could reply.
   "Samadhi Sheol," he croaked, then swallowed again and focused all his skeletal resolve in his voice. "Samadhi Sheol! You mock us, but we are not mocked. We are not blind-we see the atrocity which underlies your persuasion. Begone! Foul-chattel! Take this army of torment and despication-return to your master. He has made your suffering-let him take joy in it while he can. Even as we stand here, the days of his might are numbered. When his end comes upon him, be certain he will do nothing to preserve your miserable being. Begone, Raver! I have no interest in your cheap taunts."
   He hoped that the Raver would react with anger, do something which would bring him within reach of the archers. But Satansfist only laughed. Barking with savage glee, he turned away and gave a shout that sent his forces forward to renew their assault.
   Mhoram turned also, pulled himself painfully around to face his fellow Lords. But they were not looking at him. They were intent on a messenger who stood trembling before them. Fear-sweat slicked his face despite the cold, and the muscles of his throat locked, clenched him silent. Mutely, he reached into his tunic, brought out a cloth bundle. His hands shook as he unwrapped it.
   After a febrile moment, he exposed the krill.
   Its gem was as dull as death.
   Mhoram thought he heard gasps, groans, cries, but he could not be sure. Dread roared in his ears, made other sounds indistinguishable. He snatched up the krill. Staring aghast at it, he fell to his knees, plunged as if his legs had broken. With all the force of his need, he thrust his gaze into the gem, tried to find some gleam of life in it. But the metal was cold to his touch, and the edges of the blade were dull. Blind, lusterless winter filled the furthest depths of the jewel.
   The hope of the wild magic was lost. Covenant was gone.
   Now Mhoram understood why the Raver had laughed.
   "Mhoram?"
   "High Lord."
   "Mhoram!"
   Supplications reached toward him, asking him for strength, begging him, requiring. He ignored them. He shrugged off the hands of melding which plucked at his mind. The prophecy of his dread had come to pass. He had nothing left with which to answer supplications.
   "Ah, High Lord!"
   There were tears and despair in the appeals, but he had nothing left with which to answer.
   He was only dimly aware that he rose to his feet, returned the krill to the messenger. He wanted it removed from his sight as if it were a treacher, yet that feeling occupied only a distant portion of him. With the rest, he tightened his frail blue robe as if he were still fool enough to believe it could protect him from the cold, and walked numbly away from the battlement. The short, stiff shock of his hair, newly grown after the fire in the Close, gave him a demented aspect. People came after him, beseeching, requiring, but he kept up his wooden pace, kept ahead of them so that he would not have to see their needy faces.
   He gave no thought to where he was going until he reached a fork in the passage. There, the weight of decision almost crushed him to his knees again-left and down into the Keep, or right and out toward the upland plateau. He turned to the right because he could not bear the unintended recrimination of Revelstone-and because he was a man who already knew that he had no choice.
   When he started up the long ascending road, the people behind him slowed, let him go. He heard them whispering:
   "He goes to the Unfettered One-to the interpreter of dreams."
   But that was not where he was going; he had no questions to ask an oracle. Oracles were for people to whom ambiguous visions could make a difference, but now the only things which could make a difference to High Lord Mhoram son of Variol were things which would give him courage.
   In a stupor of dread, he climbed out into the wind which scythed across the open plateau. Above its chill ululations, he could hear battle crashing against the walls of the Keep, waves of assailants hurling themselves like breakers against a defiant and ultimately frangible cliff. But he put the sound behind him; it was only a symbol, a concentration, of the whole Land's abominable doom. Without Thomas Covenant-! Mhoram could not complete the thought. He walked up through the barren hills away from Revelstone, up toward the river and northward along it, with an abyss in his heart where the survival of the Land should have been.

This, he told himself, was what Kevin Landwaster must have felt when Lord Foul overwhelmed Kurash Plenethor, making all responses short of Desecration futile. He did not know how the pain of it could be endured.
   After a time, he found himself standing cold in the wind on a hill above Glimmermere. Below him, the rare, potent waters of the lake lay unruffled despite the buffeting of the wind. Though the skies above it were as gray as the ashes of the world's end, it seemed to shine with remembered sunlight. It reflected cleanly the hills and the distant mountains, and through its purity he could see its fathomless, rocky bottom.
   He knew what he would have to do; he lacked courage, not comprehension. The last exactions of faith lay unrolled before him in his dread like the map of a country which no longer existed. When he stumbled frozenly down toward the lake, he did so because he had nowhere else to turn. There was Earthpower in Glimmermere. He placed his staff on the bank, stripped off his robe, and dropped into the lake, praying that its icy waters would do for him what he could not do for himself.
   Though he was already numb with cold, the water seemed to burn instantly over all his flesh, snatch him out of his numbness like a conflagration in his nerves. He had had no thought of swimming when he had slipped into the depths, but the force of Glimmermere triggered reactions in him, sent him clawing up toward the surface. With a whooping gasp, he broke water, sculled for a moment to catch his breath against the fiery chill, then struck out for the bank where he had left his robe.
   Climbing out onto the hillside, he felt aflame with cold, but he compelled himself to remain naked while the wind made ice of the water on his limbs and dried him. Then he pulled his robe urgently over his shoulders, hugged his staff to his chest so that its heat warmed him where he most needed warming. His feverish chill took some time to pass, and while he waited, he braced himself, strove to shore up his heart against the obstacles and the dismay which awaited him.
   He had to do something which was obviously impossible. He had to slay samadhi Satansfist.
   He would need help.
   Putting grimly aside all his former scruples, he turned to the only possible source of help-the only aid whose faithfulness matched his need. He raised one cold hand to his lips and whistled shrilly three times.
   The turbulent wind seemed to snatch the sound to pieces, tatter it instantly. In a place where echoes were common, his call disappeared without resonance or answer; the wind tore it away as if to undo his purpose, make him unheard. Nevertheless he summoned his trust, pried himself up the hillside to stand waiting on the vantage of the crest. A suspense like the ether of despair filled him, but he faced the western mountains as if his heart knew neither doubt nor fear.
   Long moments which sharpened his suspense to the screaming point passed before he saw a dull brown movement making its way toward him out of the mountains. Then his soul leaped up in spite of its burdens, and he stood erect with the wind snapping in his ears so that his stance would be becoming to the Ranyhyn that was answering his call.
   The wait nearly froze the blood in his veins, but at last the Ranyhyn reached the hills around Glimmermere, and nickered in salutation.
   Mhoram groaned at the sight. In order to answer his call, the Ranyhyn must have left the Plains of Ra scores of days ago-must have fled Satansfist's army to run straight across the Center Plains into the Westron Mountains, then found its pathless way among the high winter of the peaks northward to the spur of the range which jutted east and ended in the plateau of Revelstone. The long ordeal of the mountain trek had exacted a severe price from the great stallion. His flesh hung slack over gaunt ribs, he stumbled painfully on swollen joints, and his coat had a look of ragged misery. Still Mhoram recognized the Ranyhyn, and greeted him with all the respect his voice could carry:
   "Hail, Drinny, proud Ranyhyn! Oh, bravely done! Worthy son of a worthy mother. Tail of the Sky, Mane of the World, I am"-a clench of emotion caught his throat, and he could only whisper-"I am honored.''
   Drinny made a valiant effort to trot up to Mhoram, but when he reached the High Lord he rested his head trembling on Mhoram's shoulder as if he needed the support in order to keep his feet. Mhoram hugged his neck, whispered words of praise and encouragement in his ear, stroked his ice-clogged coat. They stood together as if in their differing weaknesses they were making promises to each other. Then Mhoram answered the nudging of Drinny's unquenchable pride by springing onto the Ranyhyn's back. Warming the great horse with his staff, he rode slowly, resolutely, back toward Revelstone.
   The ride took time-time made arduous and agonizing by the frailty of Drinny's muscles, his painful, exhausted stumbling. While they passed down through the hills, Mhoram's own weariness returned, and he remembered his inadequacy, his stupefying dread. But he had placed his feet on the strait path of his faith; now he held the Ranyhyn between his knees and bound himself in his determination not to turn aside. Drinny had answered his call. While his thoughts retained some vestige of Glimmermere's clarity, he made his plans.
   Then at last his mount limped down into the wide tunnel which led into Lord's Keep. The clop of hooves echoed faintly against the smooth stone walls and ceiling-echoed and scurried ahead of the High Lord like a murmurous announcement of his return. Soon he could feel the voices of the Keep spreading word of him, proclaiming that he had come back on a Ranyhyn. People left their work and hastened to the main passage of the tunnel to see him. They lined his way, muttered in wonder or pain at the sight of the Ranyhyn, whispered intently to each other about the look of focused danger which shone in his eyes. Down into the Keep he rode as if he were borne on a low current of astonishment and hope.
   After he had ridden a few hundred yards along the main ways of Revelstone, he saw ahead of him the other leaders of the city-the Lords Trevor, Amatin, and Loerya, Warmark Quaan, the two Hearthralls, Tohrm and Borillar. They awaited him as if they had come out together to do him honor. When the Ranyhyn stopped before them, they saluted the High Lord and his mount mutely, lacking words for what they felt.
   He gazed back at them for a moment, studied them. In their separate ways, they were all haggard, needy, stained with battle. Quaan in particular appeared extravagantly worn. His bluff old face was knotted into a habitual scowl now, as if only the clench of constant belligerence held the pieces of his being together. And Amatin, too, looked nearly desperate; her physical slightness seemed to drain her moral stamina. Borillar's face was full of tears that Mhoram knew came from the loss of Thomas Covenant. Trevor and Loerya supported each other, unable to remain upright alone. Of them all, only Tohrm was calm, and his calm was the steadiness of a man who had already passed through his personal crisis. Nothing could be worse for him than the stone Desecration he had experienced in the Close-experienced and mastered. The others met Mhoram with concentrated hope and dismay and suspense and effectlessness in their faces- expressions which begged to know what this returning on a Ranyhyn meant.
   He nodded to their silent salute, then dropped heavily from Drinny's back and moved a step or two closer to them. On the only level for which he had sufficient strength-the level of his authority-he answered them. He spoke softly, but his voice was raw with peril. "Hear me. I am Mhoram son of Variol, High Lord by the choice of the Council. I have taken my decision. Hear me and obey. Warmark Quaan, Drinny of the Ranyhyn must be given care. He must be fed and healed-he must be returned swiftly to his strength. I will ride him soon.
   "Lords, Hearthralls, Warmark-the watchtower of Revelstone must be regained. The gates of the Keep must be cleared. Do it swiftly. Warmark, ready the horses of the Warward. Prepare all mounted warriors and as many unmounted as you deem fit-prepare them to march against samadhi Satansfist. We strike as soon as our way has been made clear."
   He could see that his commands stunned them, that they were appalled at the mad prospect of attacking the Raver's army. But he did not offer them any aid, any reassurance. When the time came for the certain death of his purpose, he hoped to leave behind him men and women who had proved to themselves that they could meet extreme needs-leaders who had learned that they could do without him.
   Yet he could not refuse to explain the reason for his commands. "My friends," he went on with the rawness livid in his tone, "the light of the krill has failed. You know the meaning of this. Thomas Covenant has left the Land-or has fallen to his death-or has been bereft of his ring. Therein lies our sole hope. If the Unbeliever lives-and while the wild magic has not been brought into use against us-we can hope that he will regain his ring.
   "We must act on this hope. It is small-but all hopes are small in this extremity. It is our work to redeem victory from the blood and havoc of despair. We must act. Surely the Despiser knows that ur-Lord Covenant has lost the white gold-if it has been lost and not withdrawn from the Land or captured. Therefore his thoughts may be turned from us for a time. In that time we may have some hope of success against samadhi Raver. And if Lord Foul seeks to prevent the Unbeliever's recovery of his ring, we may give a distant aid to ur-Lord Covenant by requiring the Despiser to look toward us again."
   He could not bear to watch the aghast supplications which wrung the faces of his friends. He put his arm over Drinny's neck and concluded as if he were speaking to the Ranyhyn, "This choice is mine. I will ride against Satansfist alone if I must. But this act must be made."
   At last, Amatin found herself to gasp, "Melenkurion! Melenkurion abatha! Mhoram, have you learned nothing from Trell Atiaran-mate- from the Bloodguard-from Kevin Landwaster himself? You beg yourself to become a Desecrator. In this way, we learn to destroy that which we love!"
   High Lord Mhoram's reply had the sting of authority. "Warmark, I will take no warrior with me who has not accepted this hazard freely. You must explain to the Warward that the light of Loric's krill has failed."
   He ached to rush to his friends, ached to throw his arms around them, hug them, show them in some way his love and his terrible need for them. But he knew himself; he knew he would be utterly unable to leave them if they did not first show their independence to themselves and him by meeting alone his extreme demands. His own courage hung too much on the verge of faltering; he needed some demonstration from them to help him follow the strait line of faith. So he contained himself by hugging Drinny tightly for a moment, then turned on his heel and walked stiffly away to his private chambers.
   He spent the next days alone, trying to rest-searching himself for some resource which would enable him to bear the impossibility and the uselessness of his decision. But a fever was on his soul. The foundation of serenity which had sustained him for so long seemed to have eroded. Whether he lay on his bed, or ate, or paced his chambers, or studied, he could feel a great emptiness in the heart of the Keep where the krill's fire should have been. He had not realized how much that white blaze had taught him to rely on the Unbeliever. Its quenching left him face to face with futile death-death for himself, for Drinny, for any who dared follow him-death that could only be trusted to foreshorten Revelstone's survival. So he spent large stretches of the time on his hands and knees on the floor, probing through the stone in an effort to sense how his commands were being met.
   Without difficulty he read the preparations of the Warward. The few hundred horses which had been stabled in the Keep were being made ready. The duty rotations of the warriors were changed so that those who chose to follow the High Lord could rest and prepare. And as a result, the burden of resisting samadhi's attacks fell on fewer shoulders. Soon the defense took on a febrile pitch which matched Mhoram' s own fever. His commands had hastened the Warward's ineluctable decline into frenzy and desperation. He ground his teeth on that pain and hunted elsewhere in the city for the Lords.
   He found that Lord Amatin had retreated to the isolation of the Loresraat's libraries, but Trevor, Loerya, and Hearthrall Tohrm were active. Together, Lord Trevor and Tohrm went down into one of the unfrequented caverns directly under the tower. There they combined their lore in a rite dangerously similar to Trell's destruction of the Close, and sent a surge of heat up through the stone into the passages of the tower. They stoked the heat for a day, raised it against the enemy until the Cavewights and creatures began to abandon the tower.
   And when the lowest levels were empty, Lord Loerya led several Eoman in an assault. Under cover of darkness, they leaped from the main Keep into the sand, crossed the courtyard, and entered the tower to fight their way upward. By the dawn of the third day, they were victorious. Makeshift crosswalks were thrown up over the courtyard, and hundreds of archers rushed across to help secure the tower.
   Their success gave Mhoram a pride in them that eased his distress for a time. He doubted that the tower could be held for more than a day or two, but a day or two would be enough, if the rest of his commands were equally met.
   Then, during the third day, Amatin returned to work. She had spent the time in an intense study of certain arcane portions of the Second Ward which High Lord Mhoram himself had never grasped, and there she had found the rites and invocations she sought. Armed with that knowledge, she went to the abutments directly above the courtyard, made eldritch signs and symbols on the stone, wove rare gestures, chanted songs in the lost language of the Old Lords-and below her the sandy remains of the dead slowly parted. They pulled back far enough to permit the opening of the gates, far enough to permit an army to ride out of Revelstone.
   Her achievement drew Mhoram from his chambers to watch. When she was done, she collapsed in his arms, but he was so proud of her that his concern was dominated by relief. When the Healers assured him she would soon recover if she were allowed to rest, he left her and went to the stables to see Drinny.
   He found a Ranyhyn that hardly resembled the ragged, worn horse he had ridden into Revelstone. Good food and treatment had rekindled the light in Drinny's eyes, renewed his flesh, restored elasticity to his muscles. He pranced and nickered for Mhoram as if to show the High Lord he was ready.
   Such things rejuvenated Mhoram. Without further hesitation, he told Warmark Quaan that he would ride out against the Raver the next morning.
   But late that night, while Trevor, Loerya, and Quaan all struggled against a particularly fierce flurry of onslaughts, Lord Amatin came to Mhoram's rooms. She did not speak, but her wan, bruised aspect caught at his heart. Her labors had done something to her; in straining herself so severely, she had lost her defenses, left herself exposed to perils and perceptions for which she was neither willing nor apt. This vulnerability gave her a look of abjection, as if she had come to cast herself at Mhoram's feet.
   Without a word, she raised her hands to the High Lord. In them she held the krill of Loric.
   He accepted it without dropping his gaze from her face. "Ah, sister Amatin," he breathed gently, "you should rest. You have earned-"
   But a spasm of misery around her eyes cut him off. He looked down, made himself look at the krill.
   Deep in its gem, he saw faint glimmerings of emerald.
   Without a word, Amatin turned and left him alone with the knowledge that Covenant's ring had fallen into the power of the Despiser.
   When he left his rooms the next morning, he looked like a man who had spent the night wrestling in vain against his own damnation. His step had lost its conviction; he moved as if his very bones were loose and bending. And the dangerous promise of his gaze had faded, leaving his eyes dull, stricken. He bore the krill within his robe and could feel Lord Foul's sick emerald hold upon it growing. Soon, he knew, the cold of the green would begin to burn his flesh. But he was past taking any account of such risks. He dragged himself forward as if he were on his way to commit a perfidy which appalled him.
   In the great entrance hall a short distance within Revelstone's still-closed gates, he joined the warriors. They were ranked by Eoman, and he saw at a glance that they numbered two thousand: one Howard on horseback and four on foot-a third of the surviving Warward. He faltered at the sight; he had not expected to be responsible for so many deaths. But the warriors hailed him bravely, and he forced himself to respond as if he trusted himself to lead them. Then he moved in anguish to the forefront, where Drinny awaited him.
   The Lords and Warmark Quaan were there with the Ranyhyn, but he passed by them because he could not meet their eyes, and tried to mount. His muscles failed him; he was half paralyzed by dread and could not leap high enough to gain Drinny's back. Shaking on the verge of an outcry, he clung to the horse for support, and beseeched himself for the serenity which had been his greatest resource.
   Yet he could not make the leap; Drinny's back was too high for him. He ached to ask for help. But before he could force words through his locked throat, he felt Quaan behind him, felt Quaan's hand on his shoulder. The old Warmark's voice was gruff with urgency as he said, "High Lord, this risk will weaken Revelstone. A third of the Warward-two thousand lives wasted. High Lord-why? Have you become like Kevin Land-waster? Do you wish to destroy that which you love?"
   "No!'' Mhoram whispered because the tightness of his throat blocked any other sound. With his hands, he begged Drinny for strength. "I do not-I do not forget- I am the High Lord. The path of faith is clear. I must follow it-because it is not despair."
   "You will teach us despair-if you fail."
   Mhoram heard the pain in Quaan's voice, and he compelled himself to answer. He could not refuse Quaan's need; he was too weak, but he could not refuse. "No. Lord Foul teaches despair. It is an easier lesson than courage." Slowly, he turned around, met first Quaan's gaze, then the eyes of the Lords. "An easier lesson," he repeated. "Therefore the counsels of despair and hate can never triumph over Despite."
   But his reply only increased Quaan's pain. While knuckles of distress clenched Quaan's open face, he moaned brokenly, "Ah, my Lord. Then why do you delay? Why do you fear?"
   "Because I am mortal, weak. The way is only clear-not sure. In my time, I have been a seer and oracle. Now I-I desire a sign. I require to see."
   He spoke simply, but almost at once his mortality, his weakness, became too much for him. Tears blurred his vision. The burden was not one that he could bear alone. He opened his arms and was swept into the embrace of the Lords.
   The melding of their minds reached him, poured into him on the surge of their united concern. Folded within their arms and their thoughts, he felt their love soothe him, fill him like water after a long thirst, feed his hunger. Throughout the siege, he had given them his strength, and now they returned strength to him. With quiet diffidence, Lord Trevor restored his crippled sense of endurance in service-a fortitude which came, not from the server, but from the preciousness of the thing served. Lord Loerya shared with him her intense instinct for protection, her capacity for battle on behalf of children-loved ones who could not defend themselves. And Lord Amatin, though she was still frail herself, gave him the clear, uncluttered concentration of her study, her lore-wisdom-a rare gift which for his sake she proffered separate from her distrust of emotion.
   In such melding, he began to recover himself. Blood seemed to return to his veins; his muscles uncramped; his bones remembered their rigor. He accepted the Lords deep into himself, and in response he shared with them all the perceptions which made his decision necessary. Then he rested on their love and let it assuage him.
   His appetite for the meld seemed to have no bottom, but after a time the contact was interrupted by a strident voice so full of strange thrills that none of the Lords could refuse to hear it. A sentry raced into the hall clamoring for their attention, and when they looked at her she shouted, "The Raver is attacked! His army-the encampment-! It is under attack. By Waynhim! They are few-few-but the Raver had no defenses on that side, and they have already done great damage. He has called his army back from Revelstone to fight them!"
   High Lord Mhoram whirled away, ordering the Warward to readiness as he moved. He heard Warmark Quaan echo his commands. A look full of dire consequences for the Raver passed between them; then Quaan leaped onto his own horse, a tough, mountain-bred mustang. To one side among the warriors, Mhoram saw Hearthrall Borillar mounting. He started to order Borillar down; Hirebrands were not fighters. But then he remembered how much hope Borillar had placed in Thomas Covenant, and left the Hearthrall alone.
   Loerya was already on her way to aid the defenses of the tower, keep it secure so that the Warward would be able to reenter Revelstone. Trevor had gone to the gates. Only Amatin remained to see the danger shining in Mhoram's eyes. She held him briefly, then released him, muttering, "It would appear that the-Waynhim have made the same decision."
   Mhoram spun and leaped lightly onto Drinny's back. The Ranyhyn whinnied; peals of pride and defiance resounded through the hall. As the huge gates opened outward on the courtyard, Mhoram sent Drinny forward at a canter.
   The Warward started into motion behind him, and at its head High Lord Mhoram rode out to war.
   In a moment, he flashed through the gates, across the courtyard between steep banks of sand and earth, into the straight tunnel under the tower. Drinny stretched jubilantly under him, exalted by health and running and the scent of battle. As Mhoram passed through the splintered remains of the outer gates, he had already begun to outdistance the Warward.
   Beyond the gates, he wheeled Drinny once, gave himself an instant in which to look back up at the lofty Keep. He saw no warriors in the tower, but he sensed them bristling behind the fortifications and windows. The bluff stone of the tower, with Revelstone rising behind it like the prow of a great ship, answered his gaze in granite permanence as if it were a prophecy by the old Giants-a cryptic perception that victory and defeat were human terms which had no meaning in the language of mountains.
   Then the riders came cantering through the throat of the tower, and Mhoram turned to look at the enemy. For the first time, he saw samadhi's army from ground level. It stood blackly in the bleak winterscape around him like a garrote into which he had prematurely thrust his neck. Briefly, he remembered other battles-Kiril Threndor, Doom's Retreat, Doriendor Corishev-as if they had been child's play, mere shadows cast by the struggle he now faced. But he pushed them out of his mind, bent his attention toward the movements in the foothills below him.
   As the sentry had said, Revelstone's attackers were pelting furiously back toward their encampment. It was only a few hundred yards distant, and Mhoram could see clearly why samadhi's forces had been recalled. The Giant-Raver was under assault by a tight wedge of ten- or f if teenscore Waynhim.
   Satansfist himself was not their target, though he fought against them personally with feral blasts of green. The Waynhim struck against the undefended rear of the encampment in order to destroy its food supplies. They had already incinerated great long troughs of the carrion and gore on which Lord Foul's creatures fed; and while they warded off the scourge of Satansfist's Stone as best they could, they assailed other stores, flash-fired huge aggregations of hacked dead flesh into cinders.
   Even if they had faced the Raver alone, they would have had no chance to survive. With his Giantish strength and his fragment of the Illearth Stone-with the support of the Staff of Law-he could have beaten back ten or fifteen thousand Waynhim. And he had an army to help him. Hundreds of ur-viles were nearly within striking distance; thousands of other creatures converged toward the fighting from all directions. The Waynhim had scant moments of life left.
   Yet they fought on, resisted samadhi's emerald ill with surprising success. Like the ur-viles, they were Demondim-spawn-masters of a dark and potent lore which no Lord had ever touched. And they had not wasted the seven and forty years since they had gone into hiding. They had prepared themselves to resist Despite. Yelping rare words of power, gesturing urgently, they shrugged off the Raver's blasts, and continued to destroy every trough and accumulation of food they could reach.
   All this High Lord Mhoram took in almost instantly. The raw wind hurt his face, made his eyes burn, but he thrust his vision through the blur to see. And he saw that, because of the Waynhim, he and the Warward had not yet been noticed by Satansfist's army.
   "Warmark," he snapped, "we must aid the Waynhim! Give the commands."
   Rapidly, Quaan barked his instructions to the mounted warriors and the Hafts of the four unmounted Howard as they came through the tunnel. At once, a hundred riders positioned themselves on either side of the High Lord. The remaining two hundred fell into ranks behind him. Without breaking stride, the unmounted warriors began to run.
   Mhoram touched Drinny and started at a slow gallop straight down through the foothills toward the Raver.
   Some distant parts of the encampment saw the riders before they had covered a third of the distance. Hoarse cries of warning sprang up on all sides; ur-viles, Cavewights, Stone-made creatures which had not already been ordered to the Giant-Raver's aid, swept like a ragged tide at the Warward. But the confusion around the Waynhim prevented Satansfist's immediate forces from hearing the alarm. The Raver did not turn his head. Revelstone's counterattack was nearly upon him before he saw his danger.
   In the last distance, Warmark Quaan shouted an order, and the riders broke into full gallop. Mhoram had time for one final look at his situation. The forces around samadhi were still locked in their concentration on the Waynhim. The Raver's reinforcements were long moments away. If Quaan's warriors could hit hard enough, break through toward the Waynhim fast enough, the unmounted Howard might be able to protect their rear long enough for them to strike once at the Raver and withdraw.
   That way, some of the warriors might survive to return to the Keep.
   Mhoram sent Drinny forward at a pace which put him among the first riders crashing into Satansfist's unready hordes.
   They impacted with a shock that shook the High Lord in his seat. Horses plunged, hacked with their hooves. Swords were brandished like metal lightning. Shrieks of surprised pain and rage shivered the air as disorganized ranks of creatures went down under the assault. Heaving their mounts forward, the warriors cut their way in toward the Raver.
   But thousands of creatures milled between them and Satansfist. Though the hordes were in confusion, the' sheer weight of their numbers slowed the Warward's charge.
   Seeing this, Quaan gave new orders. On his command, the warriors flanking Mhoram turned outward on either side, cleared a space between them for the riders behind the High Lord. These Eoman sprinted forward. When they reached Mhoram, he called up the power of his staff. Blue fire raged ahead of him like the point of a lance, piercing the wall of enemies as he led the second rush of riders deeper into the turmoil of the Raver's army.
   For a moment, he thought they might succeed. The warriors with him hacked their way swiftly through the enemy. And ahead of them, Satansfist turned from the Waynhim to meet this new threat. The Raver howled orders to organize his army, turned his forces against the Warward, surged a few furious strides in that direction. Mhoram saw the distance shorten. He wielded his Lords-fire fiercely, striving to reach his foe before the impossible numbers of the enemy broke his momentum.
   But then the riders plowed into an obstacle. A band of Cavewights had had time to obey the Raver's commands; they had lined themselves across the path of the Warward, linked their strong earth-delvers' arms, braced themselves. When the riders plunged forward, they crashed into the creatures.
   The strength of the Cavewights was so great that their line held. Horses were thrown down. Riders tumbled to the ground, both before and beyond the wall. The charge of the Warward was turned against itself as the horses which followed stumbled and trampled among the leaders.
   Only Mhoram was not unhorsed. At the last instant, Drinny gathered himself, leaped; he hurdled the line easily, kicking at the heads of the Cavewights as he passed.
   With the riders who had been thrown beyond the wall, Mhoram found himself faced by a massing wedge of ur-viles.
   The Cavewights cut him off from the Warward. And the falling of the horses gave samadhi's creatures a chance to strike back. Before Quaan could organize any kind of assault on the Cavewights, his warriors were fighting for their lives where they stood.
   Wheeling Drinny, Mhoram saw that he would get no help from the riders. But if he went back to them, fought the wall himself, the ur-viles would have time to complete their wedge; they would have the riders at their mercy.
   At once, he sent the warriors with him to attack the Cavewights. Then he flung himself like a bolt of Lords-fire at the ur-viles.
   He was only one man against several hundred of the black, roynish creatures. But he had unlocked the secret of High Lord Kevin's Lore; he had learned the link between power and passion; he was mightier than he had ever been before. Using all the force his staff could bear, he shattered the formation like a battering ram, broke and scattered ur-viles like rubble. With Drinny pounding, kicking, slashing under him, he held his staff in both hands, whirled it about him, sent vivid blasts blaring like the blue fury of the cloud-damned heavens, shouting in a rapture of rage like an earthquake. And the ur-viles staggered as if the sky had fallen on them, collapsed as if the ground had bucked under their feet. He fired his way through them like a titan, and did not stop until he had reached the bottom of a low hollow in the hills.
   There he spun, and discovered that he had completely lost the War-ward. The riders had been thrown back; in the face of insuperable odds, Quaan had probably taken them to join the unmounted warriors so that they could combine their strength in an effort to save the High Lord.
   On the opposite rim of the hollow, Satansfist stood glaring down at Mhoram. He held his Stone cocked to strike, and the mad lust of the Raver was in his Giantish face. But he turned away without attacking, disappeared beyond the rim as if he had decided that the Waynhim were a more serious threat than High Lord Mhoram.
   "Satansfist!" Mhoram yelled. "Samadhi Sheol! Return and fight me! Are you craven, that you dare not risk a challenge?"
   As he shouted, he hit Drinny with his heels, launched the Ranyhyn in pursuit of Satansfist. But in the instant that his attention was turned upward, the surviving ur-viles rallied. Instead of retreating to form a wedge, they flung themselves at him. He could not swing his staff; ravenous black hands clutched at him, clawed his arms, caught hold of his robe.
   Drinny fought back, but he succeeded only in pulling himself out from under the High Lord. Mhoram lost his seat and went down under a pile of rabid black bodies.
   Blood-red Demondim blades flared at him. But before any of the eldritch knives could bite his flesh, he mustered an eruption of force which blasted the ur-viles away. Instantly, he was on his feet again, wielding his staff, crushing every creature that came near him-searching fervidly for his mount.
   The Ranyhyn was already gone, driven out of the hollow.
   Suddenly, Mhoram was alone. The last ur-viles fled, leaving him with the dead and dying. In their place came a fatal silence that chilled his blood. Either the fighting had ended, or the livid wind carried all sounds away; he could hear nothing but the low cruel voice of Lord Foul's winter, and his own hoarse respiration.
   The abrupt absence of clamor and turmoil kept him still also. He wanted to shout for Quaan but could not raise his voice through the horror in his throat-wanted to whistle for Drinny, but could not bring himself to break the awful quietude. He was too astonished with dread.
   The next instant, he realized that the Raver had trapped him. He sprang into a run, moving away from the Warward, toward the Waynhim, hoping that this choice would take the trap by surprise.
   It was too complete to be surprised. Before he had gone a dozen yards, creatures burst into view around the entire rim of the hollow. Hundreds of them let him see them; they stood leering down at him, pawing the ground hungrily, slavering at the anticipated taste of his blood and bones. The wind bore their throaty lust down to him as if they gave tongue to the animating spirit of the winter.
   He was alone against them.
   He retreated to the center of the hollow, hunted swiftly around the rim for some gap or weakness in the surrounding horde. He found none. And though he sent his perceptions ranging as far as he could through the air, he discovered no sign of the Warward; if the warriors were still alive, still fighting, they were blocked from his senses by the solid force of the trap.
   As he grasped the utterness of his plight, he turned inward, retreated into himself as if he were fleeing. There he looked the end of all his hopes and all his Landservice in the face, and found that its scarred, terrible visage no longer appalled him. He was a fighter, a man born to fight for the Land. As long as something for which he could fight remained, he was impervious to terror. And something did remain; while he lived, at least one flame of love for the Land still burned. He could fight for that.
   His crooked lips stretched into an extreme and perilous grin; hot, serene triumph shone in his eyes. "Come, then!" he shouted. "If your master is too much a coward to risk himself against me, then come for me yourselves! I do not wish to harm you, but if you dare me, I will give you death!"
   Something in his voice halted them momentarily. They hesitated,  moiling uneasily. But almost at once the grip of their malice locked like jaws. At the harsh shout of a command, they started down toward him from all sides like an avalanche.
   He did not wait for them. He swung in the direction Satansfist had taken, intending to pursue the Raver as far as his strength would carry him. But some instinct or intuition tugged him at the last instant, deflected him to one side. He turned and met that part of the avalanche head-on.
   Now the only thing which limited his might was his staff itself. That wood had been shaped by people who had not understood Kevin's Lore; it was not formed to bear the force he now sent blazing through it. But he had no margin for caution. He made the staff surpass itself, sent it bucking and crackling with power to rage against his assailants. His flame grew incandescent, furnace-hot; in brilliance and coruscation it sliced through his foes like a scythe of sun-fire.
   In moments, their sheer numbers filled all his horizons, blocked everything but their dark assault out of his awareness. He saw nothing else, felt nothing but huge waves of misshapen fiends that sought to deluge him, knew nothing but their ravening lust for blood and his blue, fiery passion. Though they threw themselves at him in scores and hundreds, he met them, cut them down, blasted them back. Wading through their corpses as if they were the very sea of death, he fought them with fury in his veins, indomitability in his bones, extravagant triumph in his eyes.
   Yet they outweighed him. They were too many. Any moment now, one of them would drive a sword into his back, and he would be finished. Through the savage clash of combat, he heard a high, strange cry of victory, but he hardly knew that he had made it himself.
   Then, unexpectedly, he glimpsed the light of a fire through a brief gap in his attackers. It disappeared instantly, vanished as if it had never happened. But he had recognized it. He shouted again and began to fight toward it. Ignoring the danger at his back, he reaped a break in the avalanche ahead. There he saw the fire again.
   It was the blaze of a Hirebrand.
   On the rim of the hollow, Hearthrall Borillar and the last of the Waynhim fought together against Mhoram's foes. Borillar used his flaming staff like a mace, and the Waynhim supported him with their own powers. Together they struggled impossibly to rescue the High Lord.
   At the sight of them, Mhoram faltered; he could see immense monsters rising up to smite them, and their peril interrupted his concentration. But he recovered, surged toward them, driving his staff until it screamed in his hands.
   Too many creatures were pressed between him and his rescuers; he could not reach them in time. While he fought slipping and plowing through the blood, he saw Borillar slain, saw the formation of the Waynhim broken, scattered. He almost fell himself under his inability to help them.
   But with their deaths they had purchased a thinning in the flood of attackers at that point. Through that thinning came Drinny of the Ranyhyn, bucking and charging to regain his rider.
   His violent speed carried him down into the hollow. He crashed through creatures, leaped over them, hacked them out of his way. Before they could brace themselves to meet him, Drinny had reached the High Lord.
   Mhoram sprang onto the Ranyhyn's back. From that vantage, he brought his power down on the heads of his assailants, while Drinny kicked and plunged back up the hillside. In moments, they crested the rim and broke into clearer ground beyond it.
   As he guided Drinny ahead, Mhoram caught a glimpse of the War-ward. It had rallied around Quaan and was struggling in the High Lord's direction. The riders charged to break up the ranks of the enemy, then the other warriors rushed to take advantage of the breach. But they were completely engulfed-a small, valiant island in the sea of Satansfist's army. Their progress was tortuous, their losses atrocious. High Lord Mhoram knew of only one effective way to help them, and he took Drinny toward it without an instant of hesitation.
   Together, they pursued samadhi Raver.
   Satansfist was only fifty yards away. He stood on a knoll from which he could direct the battle. And he was alone; all his forces were engaged elsewhere. He towered atop the hill like a monolith of hatred and destruction, wielding his army with the force of green ill.
   Holding his staff ready, Mhoram sent the Ranyhyn lunging straight into the teeth of the winter-straight at samadhi. When he was scant strides away from his foe, he cried his challenge:
   "Melenkurion abatha! Duroc minas mill khabaal!"
   With all his strength, he leveled a blast of Lords-fire at the Raver's leering skull.
   Satansfist knocked the attack down as if it were negligible; disdainfully, he slapped Mhoram's blue out of the air with his Stone and returned a bolt so full of cold emerald force that it scorched the atmosphere as it moved.
   Mhoram sensed its power, knew that it would slay him if it struck. But Drinny dodged with a fleet, fluid motion which belied the wrenching change of his momentum. The bolt missed, crashed instead into the creatures pursuing the High Lord, killed them all.
   That gave Mhoram the instant he needed. He corrected Drinny's aim, cocked his staff over his shoulder. Before samadhi could unleash another blast, the High Lord was upon him.
   Using all Drinny's speed, all the strength of his body, all the violated passion of his love for the Land, Mhoram swung. His staff caught Satansfist squarely across the forehead.
   The concussion ripped Mhoram from his seat like a dry leaf in the wind. His staff shattered at the blow, exploded into splinters, and he hit the ground amid a brief light rain of wood slivers. He was stunned. He rolled helplessly a few feet over the frozen earth, could not stop himself, could not regain his breath. His mind went blank for an instant, then began to ache as his body ached. His hands and arms were numb, paralyzed by the force which had burned through them.
   Yet even in his daze, he had room for a faint amazement at what he had done.
   His blow had staggered Satansfist, knocked him backward. The Giant-Raver had fallen down the far side of the knoll.
   With a gasp, Mhoram began to breathe again. Spikes of sensation dug into his arms; dazzling pain filled his vision. He tried to move, and after a moment succeeded in rolling onto his side. His hands hung curled on the ends of his wrists as if they were crippled, but he shifted his shoulder and elbow, turned himself onto his stomach, then levered himself with his forearms until he gained his knees. There he rested while the pain of returning life stabbed its way down into his fingers.
   The sound of heavy steps, heavy breathing, made him look up.
   Samadhi Sheol stood over him.
   Blood poured from Satansfist's forehead into his eyes, but instead of blinding him, it seemed only to enrich his raving ferocity. His lips were contorted with a paroxysm of savage glee; ecstatic rage shone on his wet teeth. In the interlocked clasp of his fists, the Illearth Stone burned and fumed as if it were on the brink of apotheosis.
   Slowly, he raised the Stone over Mhoram's head like an ax.
   Transfixed, stunned-as helpless as a sacrifice-Mhoram watched his death rise and poise above him.
   In the distance, he could hear Quaan shouting wildly, uselessly, "Mhoram! Mhoram!" On the ground nearby, Drinny groaned and strove to regain his feet. Everywhere else there was silence. The whole battle seemed to have paused in midblow to watch Mhoram's execution. And he could do nothing but kneel and regret that so many lives had been spent for such an end.
   Yet when the change of the air came an instant later, it was so intense, so vibrant and thrilling, that it snatched him to his feet. It made Satansfist arrest his blow, gape uncomprehendingly into the sky, then drop his fists and whirl to shout strident curses at the eastern horizon.
   For that moment, Mhoram also only gaped and gasped. He could not believe his senses, could not believe the touch of the air on his cold-punished face. He seemed to be tasting something which had been lost from human experience.
   Then Drinny lurched up, braced himself on splayed legs, and raised his head to neigh in recognition of the change. His whinny was weak and strained, but it lifted Mhoram's heart like the trumpets of triumph.
   While he and Satansfist and all the armies stared at it, the wind faltered. It limped, spurting and fluttering in the air like a wounded bird, then fell lifeless to the ground.
   For the first time since Lord Foul's preternatural winter had begun, there was no wind. Some support or compulsion had been withdrawn from samadhi Satansfist.
   With a howl of rage, the Raver spun back toward Mhoram. "Fool!" he screamed as if the High Lord had let out a shout of jubilation.' "That was but one weapon of many! I will yet drink your heart' s blood to the bottom!'' Reeling under the weight of his fury, he lifted his fists again to deliver the executing blow.
   But now Mhoram felt the fire which burned against his flesh under his robe. In a rush of exaltation, he understood it, grasped its meaning intuitively. As the Stone reached its height over his head, he tore open his robe and grasped Loric's krill.
   Its gem blazed like a hot white brazier in his hands. It was charged to overflowing with echoes of wild magic; he could feel its keenness as he gripped its hilt.
   It was a weapon strong enough to bear any might.
   His eyes met Satansfist's. He saw dismay and hesitation clashing against the Raver's rage, against samadhi Sheol's ancient malice and the supreme confidence of the Stone.
   Before Satansfist could defend himself, High Lord Mhoram sprang up and drove the krill deep into his bosom.
   The Raver shrieked in agony. With Mhoram hanging from the blade in his chest, he flailed his arms as if he could not find anything to strike, anywhere to exert his colossal outrage. Then he dropped to his knees.
   Mhoram planted his feet on the ground and braced himself to retain his grip on the krill. Through the focus of that blade, he drove all his might deeper and deeper toward the Giant-Raver's heart.
   Yet samadhi did not die. Faced with death, he found a way to resist. Both his fists clenched the Stone only a foot above the back of Mhoram's neck. With all the rocky, Giantish strength of his frame, he began to squeeze.
   Savage power steamed and pulsed like the beating of a heart of ice-a heart laboring convulsively, pounding and quivering to carry itself through a crisis. Mhoram felt the beats crash against the back of his spine. They kept Satansfist alive while they strove to quench the power which drove the krill
   But Mhoram endured the pain, did not let go; he leaned his weight on the blazing blade, ground it deeper and still deeper toward the essential cords of samadhi's life. Slowly, his flesh seemed to disappear, fade as if he were being translated by passion into a being of pure force, of unfettered spirit and indomitable will. The Stone hammered at his back like a mounting cataclysm, and Satansfist's chest heaved against his hands in great, ragged, bloody gasps.
   Then the cords were cut.
   Pounding beyond the limits of control, the Illearth Stone exploded, annihilated itself with an eruption that hurled Mhoram and Satansfist tumbling inextricably together from the knoll. The blast shook the ground, tore a hole in the silence over the battle. One slow instant of stunned amazement gripped the air, then vanished in the dismayed shrieks of the Despiser's army.
   Moments later, Warmark Quaan and the surviving remnant of his mounted Howard dashed to the foot of the knoll. Quaan threw himself from his horse and leaped to the High Lord's side.
   Mhoram's robe draped his bloodied and begrimed form in tatters; it had been shredded by the explosion. His hands as they gripped the krill were burned so badly that only black rags of flesh still clung to his bones. From head to foot, his body had the look of pain and brokenness. But he was still alive, still breathing faintly, fragilely.
   Fear, weariness, hesitation dropped off Quaan as if they were meaningless . He took the krill, wrapped it, and placed it under his belt, then with celerity and care lifted the High Lord in his arms. For an instant, he looked around. He saw Drinny nearby, shaking his head and mane to throw off the effects of the blast. He saw the Despiser's army seething in confusion and carnage. He hoped that it would fall apart without the Raver's leadership and coercion. But then he saw also that the ur-viles were rallying, taking charge of the creatures around them, reorganizing the hordes.
   In spite of the High Lord's weight, Quaan ran and vaulted onto Drinny's back. Shouting to the Warward, "Retreat! Return to the Keep! The Gray Slayer has not lost his hold!" he clapped Drinny with his heels and took the Ranyhyn at a full gallop toward the open gates of Revel-stone.

Sixteen: Colossus


   There were gaps in the darkness during which Covenant knew dimly that rank liquids were being forced into him. They nourished him despite their rancid taste; his captors were keeping him alive. But between these gaps nothing interrupted his bereavement, his loss of everything he could grasp or recognize. He was dismembered from himself. The shrill vermilion nail of pain which the ur-viles had driven through his forehead impaled his identity, his memory and knowledge and awareness. He was at the nadir-captured, conquered, bereft-and only that iron stab in his forehead stood between him and the last numbness of the end.
   So when he began to regain consciousness, he jerked toward it like a half-buried corpse, striving to shift the weight which enfolded him like the ready arms of his grave. Cold ebbed into him from the abyss of the winter. His heart labored; shuddering ran through him like a crisis. His hands clutched uselessly at the frozen dirt.
   Then rough hands flopped him onto his back. A grim visage advanced, receded. Something struck his chest. He gasped at the force of the blow. Yet it helped him; it seemed to break him free of imminent hysteria. He began to breathe more easily. In a moment, he became aware that he was beating the back of his head against the ground. With an effort, he stopped himself. Then he concentrated on trying to see.

He wanted to see, wanted to find some answer to the completeness of his loss. And his eyes were open-must have been open, or he would not have been able to perceive the shadowy countenance snarling over him. Yet he could not make it out. His eyeballs were dry and blind; he saw nothing but cold, universal gray smeared around the more compact gray of the visage.
   "Up, Covenant," a harsh voice rasped. "You are of no use as you are."
   Another blow knocked his head to the side. He lurched soddenly. Through the pain in his cheek, he felt himself gaping into the raw wind. He blinked painfully at the dryness of his eyes, and tears began to resolve his blindness into shapes and spaces.
   "Up, I say!"
   He seemed to recognize the voice without knowing whose it was. But he lacked the strength to turn his head for another look. Resting on the icy ground, he blinked until his sight came into focus on a high, monolithic fist of stone.
   It was perhaps twenty yards from him and forty feet tall-an obsidian column upraised on a plinth of native rock, and gnarled at its top into a clench of speechless defiance. Beyond it he could see nothing; it stood against a background of clouds as if it were erect on the rim of the world. At first, it appeared to him a thing of might, an icon of Earthpower upthrust or set down there to mark a boundary against evil. But as his vision cleared, the stone seemed to grow shallow and slumberous, blank; while he blinked at it, it became as inert as any old rock. If it still lived, he no longer had the eyes to see its life.
   Slowly, fragments of other senses returned to him. He discovered that he could hear the wind hissing ravenously past him like a river thrashing across rapids; and behind it was a deep, muffled booming like the thunder of a waterfall.
   "Up!" the harsh voice repeated. "Must I beat you senseless to awaken you?"
   Mordant laughter echoed after the demand as if it were a jest.
   Abruptly, the rough hands caught hold of his robe and yanked him off the ground. He was still too weak to carry his own weight, too weak even to hold up his head. He leaned against the man's chest and panted at his pain, trying with futile fingers to grasp the man's shoulders.
   "Where-?" he croaked at last. "Where-?"
   The laughter ridiculed him again. Two unrecognizable voices were laughing at him.
   "Where?" the man snapped. "Thomas Covenant, you are at my mercy. That is the only where which signifies."
   Straining, Covenant heaved up his head and found himself staring miserably into Triock's dark scowl.
   Triock? He tried to say the name, but his voice failed him.
   "You have slain everything that was precious to me. Think on that, Unbeliever"-he invested the title with abysms of contempt-"if you require to know where you are."
   Triock?
   "There is murder and degradation in your every breath. Ah! you stink of it." A spasm of revulsion knotted Triock's face, and he dropped Covenant to the ground again.
   Covenant landed heavily amid sarcastic mirth. He was still too dazed to collect his thoughts. Triock's disgust affected him like a command; he lay prostrate with his eyes closed, trying to smell himself.
   It was true. He stank of leprosy. The disease in his hands and feet reeked, gave off a rotten effluvium out of all proportion to the physical size of his infection. And its message was unmistakable. The ordure in him, the putrefaction of his flesh, was spreading-expanding as if he were contagious, as if at last even his body had become a violation of the fundamental health of the Land. In some ways, this was an even more important violation than the Despiser's winter-or rather his stench was the crown of the wind, the apex of Lord Foul's intent. That intent would be complete when his illness became part of the wind, when ice and leprosy together extinguished the Land's last vitality.
   Then, in one intuitive leap, he understood his sense of bereavement. He identified his loss. Without looking to verify the perception, he knew that his ring had been taken from him; he could feel its absence like destitution in his heart.
   The Despiser's manipulations were complete. The coercion and subterfuge which had shaped Covenant's experiences in the Land had borne fruit. Like a Stone-warped tree, they had fructified to produce this unanswerable end. The wild magic was now in Lord Foul's possession.
   A wave of grief rushed through Covenant. The enormity of the disaster he had precipitated upon the Land appalled him. His chest locked in a clench of sorrow, and he huddled on the verge of weeping.
   But before he could release his pain, Triock was at him again. The Stonedownor gripped the shoulders of his robe, shook him until his bones rattled. "Awaken!" Triock rasped viciously. "Your time is short. My time is short. I do not mean to waste it."
   For a moment, Covenant could not resist; inanition and unconsciousness and grief crippled him. But then Triock's gratuitous violence struck sparks into the forgotten tinder of Covenant's rage. Anger galvanized him, brought back control to his muscles. He twisted in Triock's grip, got an arm and a leg braced on the ground. Triock released him, and he climbed unevenly to his feet, panting, "Hell and blood! Don't touch me, you-Raver!"
   Triock stepped forward as Covenant came erect and stretched him on the dirt again with one sharp blow. Standing over Covenant, he shouted in a voice full of outrage, "I am no Raver! I am Triock son of Thuler!-the man who loved Lena Atiaran-child-the man who took the part of a father for Elena daughter of Lena because you abandoned her! You cannot deny any blow I choose to strike against you!"
   At that, Covenant heard laughter again, but he still could not identify its source. Triock's blow made the pain in his forehead roar; the noise of the hurt confused his hearing. But when the worst of the sound passed, his eyes seemed to clear at last. He forced himself to look up steadily into Triock's face.
   The man had changed again. The strange combination of loathing and hunger, of anger and fear, was gone; the impression he had created that he was using his own anguish cunningly was gone. In the place of such distortions was an extravagant bitterness, a rage not controlled by any of his old restraints. He was himself and not himself. The former supplication of his eyes-the balance and ballast of his long acquaintance with gall- had foundered in passion. Now his brows clenched themselves into a knot of violence above the bridge of his nose; the pleading lines at the corners of his eyes had become as deep as scars; and his cheeks were taut with grimaces. Yet something in his eyes themselves belied the focus of his anger. His orbs were glazed and milky, as if they were blurred by cataracts, and they throbbed with a vain intensity. He looked as if he were going blind.
   The sight of him made Covenant's own rage feel in condign, faulty. He was beholding another of his victims. He had no justification for anger. "Triock!" he groaned, unable to think of any other response. "Triock!"
   The Stonedownor paused, allowing him a chance to regain his feet, then advanced threateningly.
   Covenant retreated a step or two. He needed something to say, something that could penetrate or deflect Triock's bitterness. But his thoughts were stunned; they groped ineffectually, as if they had been rendered fingerless by the loss of his ring. Triock swung at him. He parried the blow with his forearms, kept himself from being knocked down again. Words-he needed words.
   "Hellfire!" he shouted because he could not find any other reply. "What happened to your Oath of Peace?"
   "It is dead," Triock growled hoarsely. "It is dead with a spike of wood in its belly!" He swung again, staggered Covenant. "The Law of Death is broken, and all Peace has been laid waste."
   Covenant regained his balance and retreated farther. "Triock!" he gasped. "I didn't kill her. She died trying to save my life. She knew it was my fault, and she still tried to save me. She would fight you now if she saw you like this! What did that Raver do to you?"
   The Stonedownor advanced with slow ferocity.
   "You're not like this!'' Covenant cried. "You gave your whole life to prove you're not like this!"
   Springing suddenly, Triock caught Covenant by the throat. His thumbs ground into Covenant's windpipe as he snarled, "You have not seen what I have seen!"
   Covenant struggled, but he had no strength to match Triock's. His fingers clawed and clutched, and had no effect. The need for air began to hum in his ears.
   Triock released one hand, cocked his fist deliberately, and hit Covenant in the center of his wounded forehead. He pitched backward, almost fell. But hands caught him from behind, yanked him upright, put him on his feet-hands that burned him like the touch of acid.
   He jerked away from them, then whirled to see who had burned him. Fresh blood ran from his yammering forehead into his eyes, clogged his vision, but he gouged it away with numb fingers, made himself see the two figures that had caught him.
   They were laughing at him together. Beat for beat, their ridicule came as one, matched each other in weird consonance; they sounded like one voice jeering through two throats.
   They were Ramen.
   He saw them in an instant, took them in as if they had been suddenly revealed out of midnight by a flash of dismay. He recognized them as two of Manethrall Kam's Cords, Lal and Whane. But they had changed. Even his truncated vision could see the alteration which had been wrought in them, the complete reversal of being which occupied them. Contempt and lust submerged the former spirit of their health. Only the discomfortable spasms which flicked their faces, and the unnecessary violence of their emanations, gave any indication that they had ever been unlike what they were now.
   "Our friend Triock spoke the truth," they said together, and the unharmonized unison of their voices mocked both Covenant and Triock. "Our brother is not with us. He is at work in the destruction of Revelstone. But Triock will take his place-for a time. A short time. We are turiya and moksha, Herem and Jehannum. We have come to take delight in the ruin of things we hate. You are nothing to us now, groveler-Unbeliever.'' Again they laughed, one spirit or impulse uttering contempt through two throats. "Yet you-and our friend Triock-amuse us while we wait."
   But Covenant hardly heard them. An instant after he comprehended what had happened to them, he saw something else, something that almost blinded him to the Ravers. Two other figures stood a short distance behind Whane and Lal.
   The two people he had most ached to see since he had regained himself in Morinmoss: Saltheart Foamfollower and Bannor.
   The sight of them filled him with horror.
   Foamfollower wore a host of recent battle-marks among his older scars, and Banner's silvering hair and lined face had aged perceptibly. But all that was insignificant beside the grisly fact that they were not moving.
   They did not so much as turn their heads toward Covenant. They were paralyzed, clenched rigid and helpless, by a green force which played about them like a corona, enveloped them in coercion. They were as motionless as if even pulse and respiration had been crushed out of them by shimmering emerald.
   And if they had been able to look at Covenant, they would not have seen him. Their eyes were like Triock's, but much more severely glazed. Only the faintest outlines of pupil and iris were visible behind the white blindness which covered their orbs.
   Bannor! Covenant cried. Foamfollower! Ah!
   While his body swayed on locked joints, he cowered inwardly. His arms covered his head as if to protect it from an ax. The plight of Bannor and Foamfollower dealt him an unendurable shock. He could not bear it. He quailed where he stood as if the ground were heaving under him.
   Then Triock caught hold of him again. The Stonedownor bent him to the dirt, hunched furiously over him to pant, "You have not seen what I have seen. You do not know what you have done."
   Weak, ringless, and miserable though he was, Covenant still heard Triock, heard the whelming passion with which Triock told him that even now he did not know the worst, had not faced the worst. And that communication made a difference to him. It pushed him deep into his fear, down to a place in him which had not been touched by either capture or horror. It drove him back to the calm which had been given to him in Morinmoss. He seemed to remember a part of himself that had been hidden from him. Something had been changed for him in the Forest, something which could not be taken away. He caught hold of it, immersed himself in the gift.
   A moment later, he raised his head as if he had come through a dark gulf of panic. He was too weak to fight Triock; he had lost his ring; blood streamed from his damaged forehead into his eyes. But he was no longer at the mercy of fear.
   Blinking rapidly to clear his vision, he gasped up at Triock, "What's happened to them?"
   "You have not seen!'' Triock roared. Once more, he raised his fist to hammer the Unbeliever's face. But before he could strike, a low voice commanded simply, "Stop."
   Triock jerked, struggling to complete his blow.
   "I have given you time. Now I desire him to know what I do."
   The command held Triock; he could not strike. Trembling, he wrenched away from Covenant, then spun back to point lividly toward the stone column and shout, "There!"
   Covenant lurched to his feet, wiped his eyes.
   Midway between him and the upreared fist of stone stood Elena!
   She was robed in radiant green velure, and she bore herself proudly, like a queen. She seemed swathed in an aura of emeralds; her presence sparkled like gems when she smiled. At once, without effort of assertion, she showed that she was the master of the situation. The Ravers and Triock waited before her like subjects before their liege.
   In her right hand she held a long staff. It was metal-shod at both ends, and between its heels it was intricately carved with the runes and symbols of theurgy.
   The Staff of Law.
   But the wonder of its appearance there meant nothing to Covenant compared with the miracle of Elena's return. He had loved her, lost her. Her death at the hands of dead Kevin Landwaster had brought his second sojourn in the Land to an end. Yet she stood now scarcely thirty feet from him. She was smiling.
   A thrill of joy shot through him. The love which had tormented his heart since her fall rushed up in him until he felt he was about to burst with it. Blood streamed from his eyes like tears. Joy choked him so that he could not speak. Half blinded, half weeping, he shrugged off his travail and started toward her as if he meant to throw himself down before her, kiss her feet.
   Before he had crossed half the distance, she made a short gesture with the Staff, and at once a jolt of force hit him. It drove the air from his lungs, pitched him to his hands and knees on the hard ground.
   "No," she said softly, almost tenderly. "All your questions will be answered before I slay you, Thomas Covenant, ur-Lord and Unbeliever-beloved." On her cold lips, the word beloved impugned him. "But you will not touch me. You will come no closer."
   A great weight leaned against his shoulders, held him to the ground. He retched for air, but when he gasped it into his lungs, it hurt him as if he were inhaling disease. The atmosphere around him reeked with her presence. She pervaded the air like rot. On a scale that dwarfed him, she smelled as he did-smelled like-leprosy.
   He forced up his head, gaped gasping at her from under the streaming spike of his wound.
   With a smile like a smirk or leer, she extended her left hand toward him and opened it, so that he could see lying in her palm his white gold wedding band.
   Elena! he retched voicelessly. Elena! He felt that he was being crushed under a burden of impenetrable circumstance. In supplication and futility, he reached toward her, but she only laughed at him quietly, as if he were a masque of impotence enacted for her pleasure.
   A moment passed before his anguish permitted him to see her clearly, and while he groveled without comprehension, she shone defiantly before him like a soul of purest emerald. But slowly he recovered his vision. Like a reborn phoenix, she flourished in green loveliness. Yet in some way she reminded him of the specter of Kevin Landwaster-a spirit dredged out of its uneasy grave by commands of irrefusable cruelty. Her expression was as placid as power could make it; she radiated triumph and decay. But her eyes were completely lightless, dark. It was as if the strange bifurcation, the dualness, of her sight had gone completely to its other pole, away from the tangible things around her. She seemed not to see where or who she was, what she did; her gaze was focused elsewhere, on the secret which compelled her.
   She had become a servant of the Despiser. Even while she stood there with the Staff and the ring in her hands, Lord Foul's eyes held her like the eyes of a serpent.
   In her violated beauty, Covenant beheld the doom of the Land. It would be kept fair, so that Lord Foul could more keenly relish its ravishment-and it would be diseased to the marrow.
   "Elena,'' he panted, then paused, gagging at the reek of her. "Elena. Look at me."
   With a disdainful toss of her head, she turned away from him, moved a step or two closer to the stone pillar. ' Triock,'' she commanded lightly, "answer the Unbeliever's questions. I do not wish him to be in ignorance. His despair will make a pretty present for the master."
   At once, Triock strode stiffly forward, and stood so that Covenant could see him without fighting the pressure which held him to the ground. The Stonedownor's scowl had not changed, not abated one muscle or line of its vehemence, but his voice carried an odd undertow of grief. He began roughly, as if he were reading an indictment: "You have asked where you are. You are at Landsdrop. Behind you lies the Fall of the River Landrider and the northmost reach of the Southron Range. Before you stands the Colossus of the Fall."
   Covenant panted at this information as if it interfered with his ragged efforts to breathe.
   "Perhaps the Lords"-Triock hissed the word Lords in rage or desperation-"have spoken to you of the Colossus. In ages long past, it uttered the power of the One Forest to interdict its enemies the three Ravers from the Upper Land. The Colossus has been silent for millennia-silent since men broke the spirit of the Forest. Yet you may observe that turiya and moksha do not approach the stone. While one Forestal still lives in the remnants of the Forest, the Colossus may not be altogether undone. Thus it remains a thorn in the Despiser's mastery.
   "It is now Elena's purpose to destroy this stone."
   Behind Covenant, both Ravers growled with pleasure at the thought.
   "This has not been possible until now. Since this war began, Elena has stood here with the Staff of Law in support of the master's armies. With the Staff's power, she has held this winter upon the Land, thus freeing the master for other war work. This place was chosen for her so that she would be ready if the Colossus awoke-and so that she could destroy it if it did not awaken. But it has resisted her.'' The hardness in his voice sounded almost like rage at Elena. "There is Earthpower in it yet.
   "But with the Staff and the wild magic, she will be capable. She will throw the rubble of the Colossus from its cliff. And when you have seen that no ancient bastion, however Earthpowerful and incorruptible, can stand against a servant of the master-then Elena Foul-wife will slay you where you kneel in your despair. She will slay us all." With a jerk of his head, he included Bannor and Foamfollower.
   In horrific unison, the Ravers laughed.
   Covenant writhed under the pressure which held him. "How?"
   His question could have meant many things, but Triock understood him. "Because the Law of Death has been broken!" he rasped. Fury flamed in his voice; he could no longer contain it. He watched Elena as she moved gracefully toward the Colossus, preparing herself to challenge it, and his voice blared after her as if he were striving in spite of her coercion to find some way to restrain her. Clearly, he knew how he was being compelled, what was being done to him, and the knowledge filled him with torment. "Broken!" he repeated, almost shouting. "When she employed the Power of Command to bring Kevin Landwaster back from his grave, she broke the Law which separates life from death. She made it possible for the master to call her back in her turn-and with her the Staff of Law. Therefore she is his servant. And in her hands, the Staff serves him- though he would not use it himself, lest he share the fate of Drool Rockworm. Thus all Law is warped to his will!
   "Behold her, Thomas Covenant! She is unchanged. Within her still lives the spirit of the daughter of Lena. Even as she readies herself for this destruction, she remembers what she was and hates what she is." His chest heaved as if he were strangling on bitterness. "That is the master's way. She is resurrected so that she may participate in the ruin of the Land-the Land she loves!"
   He no longer made any pretense of speaking to Covenant; he hurled his voice at Elena as if his tone were the only part of him still able to resist her. "Elena Foul-wife"-he uttered the name with horror-"now holds the white gold. She is more the master's servant than any Raver. In the hands of turiya or moksha, that power would breed rebellion. With wild magic, any Raver would throw down the master if he could, and take a new seat in the thronehall of Ridjeck Thome. But Elena will not rebel. She will not use the wild magic to free herself. She has been commanded from the dead, and her service is pure!"
   He raged the word pure at her as if it were the worst affront he could utter. But she was impervious to him, secure in power and triumph. She only smiled faintly, amused by his ranting, and continued to make her preparations.
   With her back to Covenant and Triock, she faced the monolith. It towered over her as if it were about to fall and crush her, but her stance admitted to no possibility of danger. With the Staff and the ring, she was superior to every power in the Land. In radiance and might, she raised her hands, holding up the Staff of Law and the white gold. Her sleeves fell from her arms. Exulting and exalted, she began to sing her attack on the Colossus of the Fall.
   Her song hurt Covenant's ears, exacerbating his raw helplessness. He could not bear her intent, and could not oppose it; her interdict kept him on his knees like fetters of humiliation. Though he was only a dozen yards from her, he could not reach her, could not interfere with her purpose.
   His thoughts raced madly, scrambled for alternatives. He could not abide the destruction of the Colossus. He had to find another answer.
   "Foamfollower!" he croaked in desperation. "I don't know what's happening to you-I don't know what's being done to you. But you've got to fight it! You're a Giant! You've got to stop her! Try to stop her! Foamfollower! Bannor!"
   The Ravers met his plea with sardonic jeers, and Triock rasped without taking his eyes off Elena, "You are a fool, Thomas Covenant. They cannot help you. They are too strong to be mastered-as I have been mastered-and too weak to be masters. Therefore she has imprisoned them by the power of the Staff. The Staff crushes all resistance. Thus it is proven that Law does not oppose Despite. We are all mastered beyond redemption."
   "Not you!" Covenant responded urgently. He fought the pressure until he feared his lungs would break, but he could not free himself. Without his ring, he felt as crippled as if his arms had been amputated. Without it, he weighed less than nothing in the scales of the Land's fate. "Not you!" he gasped again. "I can hear you, Triock! You! She isn't afraid of you-she isn't holding you. Triock! Stop her!"
   Again the Ravers laughed. But this time Covenant heard the strain in their voices. Heaving against his captivity, he managed to wrench his head around far enough to look at Whane and Lal.
   They still stood a safe distance from the Colossus. Neither made any move to help Covenant or oppose Elena. Both went on chuckling as if they could not help themselves. Yet their exertion was unmistakable. They were white-lipped and rigid; beads of effort ran down their faces. With all the long pride of their people, the Ramen were struggling to break free.
   And behind them, Foamfollower and Bannor strove for freedom also. Somehow, both of them had found the strength to move slightly. Foamfollower's head was bowed, and he clenched his face with one hand as if he were trying to alter the shape of his skull. Banner's fingers clawed at his sides; his face grew taut, baring his teeth. Urgently, desperately, they fought Elena's power.
   Their ordeal felt terrible to Covenant-terrible and hopeless. Like the Ramen, they were beyond the limits of what they could do. Pressure mounted in them, radiated from them. It was so acute that Covenant feared their hearts would rupture. And they had no chance of success. The power of the Staff increased to crush every extravagance of their self-expenditure.
   Their futility hurt Covenant more than his own. He was accustomed to impotence, inured to it, but Bannor and Foamfollower were not. The stark vision of their defeat almost made him cry out in anguish. He wanted to shout to them, beg them to stop before they drove themselves soul-mad.
   But the next instant a surge of new hope shot through him as he suddenly understood what they were doing. They knew they could not escape, were not trying to escape. They fought toward another goal. Elena was paying no attention to them; she concentrated on preparing for the destruction of the Colossus. So she was not actively exerting herself to imprison them. She had simply left her compulsion in the air and turned her back.
   Foamfollower and Bannor were drawing on this compulsion, using it-using it up. As the Giant and the Bloodguard strained for freedom, strove with all their personal might, Triock jerked his head from side to side, quivered in a fever of passion, snapped his jaws as if he were trying to tear hunks of domination out of the air-and began to move toward Elena.
   The Ravers made no attempt to stop him. They could not; the struggles of the Ramen gave them no leeway in which to act.
   Triock strained as he moved as if his bones were being torn asunder, and he quavered imploringly again and again, "Elena? Elena?" But he moved; he advanced step by step toward her.
   Covenant watched him in an agony of suspense.
   Before he came within arm's reach of her, she said severely, "Stop.''
   Swaying in a gale of conflicting demands, Triock halted.
   "If you resist me one more step," she grated, "I will tear your heart from your pathetic old body and feed it to Herem and Jehannum while you observe them and beg me to let you die."
   Triock was weeping now, shaking with importunate sobs. "Elena? Elena?"
   Without even glancing at him, she resumed her song.
   But the next instant, something snatched at her attention, spun her away from the Colossus. Her face pointed lividly toward the west. Surprise and anger contorted her features. For a moment, she stared in speechless indignation at the intrusion.
   Then she brandished the Staff of Law. "The Lords strike back!" she howled furiously. "Samadhi is threatened! They dare!"
   Covenant gaped at the information, at her knowledge of the siege of Revelstone. But he had no time to assimilate it.
   "Foul's blood!" she raged. "Blast them, Raver!" Immense forces gathered in the Staff, mounting to be hurled across the distance to samadhi Sheol's aid.
   For that instant, she neglected her compulsion of the people around her.
   The blindness lost its hold on Bannor and Foamfollower. They tottered, lurched, started into motion. The Ravers tried to react, but could not move quickly enough against the resistance of the Ramen.
   Covenant felt the pressure on his back ease. At once, he rolled out from under it. Springing to his feet, he launched himself toward Elena.
   But Triock was the only one close enough to her to take advantage of her lapse. With a wild cry, he chopped both fists down at her left hand.
   His hands passed through her spectral flesh and struck the ring. The unexpectedness of the blow tore the solid band from her surprised fingers. It dropped free.
   He dove after it, got one hand on it, flicked it away toward Covenant as his body slapped the hard ground.
   Elena' s reaction came instantly. Before Triock could roll, try to evade her, she stabbed the Staff down at him, hit him in the center of his back. Power flared through him, shattering his spine.
   Almost in the same motion, she swung the Staff up again, caught it in a combat grip as she whirled to face Covenant.
   His start toward her almost made him miss the ring. It went past him on one side, but he skidded and pounced on it, scooped it up before she could stop him. With his wedding band clenched in his fist, he braced himself to meet her attack.
   She regarded him momentarily, then chose not to exert herself against him. With one wave of the Staff, she reimprisoned Foamfollower and Bannor, quenched the rebellion of the Ramen. Then she dropped her guard as if she no longer needed it. Her voice shook with anger, but she was steady as she said, "It will not avail him. He knows not how to awaken its might. Herem, Jehannum-I leave him to you."
   In horrid unison, the two Ravers snarled their satisfaction, their hunger for him. Together, they moved slowly toward him.
   He was caught between them and Elena.
   So that he would not lose his ring again, he pushed it onto his wedding finger. He had lost weight; his fingers were gaunt, and the ring hung on him insecurely, as if it might fall off at any moment. Yet his need for it had never been greater. He clenched his fist around it and retreated before the advance of the Ravers.
   In the back of his mind, he was sure that Triock was not dead. Triock was his summoner; he would disappear from the Land as soon as the Stonedownor died. But Triock surely had only moments of life left. Without knowing how to do it, Covenant wanted to make those moments count.
   He backed away from the Ravers, toward Elena. She stood at rest near the Colossus, observing him. Glee and anger were balanced in her face. The Ravers came at him step by slow step, with their arms extended hungrily, sarcastically, inviting him to abandon resistance and rush into the oblivion of their grasp.
   They advanced; he retreated; she stood where she was, defying him to touch her. His ring hung lifeless on his finger as if it were a thing of metal and futility, nothing more-a talisman devoid of meaning in his hands. A rising tide of protest filled him with ineffectual curses.
   Hellfire. Hellfire. Hell and blood!
   Impulsively, without knowing why he did it, he shrieked into the gray wind, "Forestall Help me!"
   At once, the clenched crown of the Colossus burst into flame. For an instant while Herem and Jehannum yowled, the monolith blazed with verdant fire-a conflagration the color of leaves and grass flourishing, green that had nothing in common with Lord Foul's emerald Illearth Stone. Raw, fertile aromas crackled in the air like violent spring.
   Abruptly, two bolts of force raged out of the blaze, sprang like lightning at the Ravers. In a coruscating welter of sparks and might, the bolts struck the chests of Lal and Whane.
   The monolith's power flamed at their hearts until the mortal flesh of the Ramen was incinerated, flash-burned into nothingness. Then the bolts dropped, the conflagration vanished.
   Herem and Jehannum were gone.
   The sudden blast and vanishing of the fire staggered Covenant. Forgetting his peril, he stared dumbly about him. The Ramen were dead. More blood, more lives sacrificed to his impotence. He wanted to cry out, No!
   Some instinct warned him. He ducked, and the Staff of Law hissed past his head.
   He jumped away, turned, caught his balance. Elena was advancing toward him. She held the Staff poised in both hands. Her face was full of murder.
   She could have felled him with an exertion of the Staff's might, ravaged him where he stood by unleashing her power against him. But she was too mad with rage for such fighting. She wanted to crush him physically, beat him to death with the strength of her own arms. As he faced her, she gestured toward Foamfollower and Banner without even glancing in their direction. They crumpled like puppets with cut strings, fell on their faces and lay still. Then she raised the Staff over his head like an ax and hacked at Covenant.
   With a desperate fling of his arm, he deflected the Staff so that it slammed against his right shoulder rather than his head. The force of the blow seemed to paralyze his whole right side, but he grappled for the Staff with his left hand, caught hold of it, prevented her from snatching it back for another strike.
   Quickly, she shifted her hands on the Staff and threw her weight onto the wood to take advantage of his defense. Bearing down on his shoulder, she drove him to his knees.
   He braced his numb arm on the ground and strained to resist her, tried to get his feet under him. But he was too weak. She changed the direction of her pressure so that it jammed squarely against his throat. He had to fight the Staff with both hands to keep his larynx from being crushed. Slowly, almost effortlessly, she bent him back.
   Then she had him flat on the ground. He pushed against the Staff with all his waning strength, but he could not stop her. His breathing was cut off. His bloodied eyes throbbed in their sockets as he stared at her ferocity.
   Her gaze was focused on him as if he were food for the rankest hunger of her ill soul. Through it, he seemed to see the Despiser slavering in triumph and scorn. And yet her eyes showed something else as well. Triock had told the truth about her. Behind the savagery of her glare, he felt the last unconquerable core of her sobbing with revulsion.
   He lacked the strength to save himself. If he could have hated her, met her fury with fury, he might have been capable of one convulsive heave, one thrust to buy himself another moment or two of life. But he could not. She was his daughter; he loved her. He had put her where she was as surely as if he had been a conscious servant of the Despiser all along. She was about to kill him, and he loved her. The only thing left for him was to die without breaking faith with himself.
   He used his last air and his last resistance to croak, "You don't even exist."
   His words inflamed her like an ultimate denial. In mad fury, she eased the pressure for an instant while she gathered all her force, all her strength, and all the power of the Staff, for one crush which would eradicate the offense of his life. She took a deep breath as if she were inhaling illimitable might, then threw her weight and muscle and power, her very Foul-given existence, through the Staff at his throat.
   But his hands were clenched on the Staff. His ring pressed the wood. When her force touched his white gold, the wild magic erupted like an uncapped volcano.
   His senses went blank at the immensity of the blast. Yet not one flame or thrust of it touched him; all the detonation went back through the Staff at Elena.
   It did not hurl her off him; it was not that kind of power. But it tore through the rune-carved wood of the Staff like white sun-fire, rent the Staff fiber from fiber as if its Law were nothing but a shod bundle of splinters. A sharp riving shook the atmosphere, so that even the Colossus seemed to recoil from this unleashing of power.
   The Staff of Law turned to ash in dead Elena's hands.
   At once, the wind lurched as if the eruption of wild magic were an arrow in its bosom. With flutters and gusts and silent cries, it tumbled to the ground, came to an end as if the raw demon of winter had been stricken out of the air with one shaft.
   A whirl of force sprang up around Elena, mounted like a wind devil with her in its center. Her death had come back for her; the Law she had broken was sucking her out of life again. As Covenant watched-stunned and uncomprehending, almost blinded by his reprieve-she began to dissipate. Particle by particle, her being vanished into the gyre, fled into dissolution. But while she faded and failed, lost her ill existence, she found the solidity for one final cry.
   "Covenant," she called like a lorn voice of desolation. "Beloved! Strike a blow for me!"
   Then she was gone, reabsorbed into death. The gyre grew pale, paler, until it had disappeared in unruffled air.
   Covenant was left alone with his victims.
   Involuntarily, through means over which he had no control, he had saved himself-and had allowed his friends to be struck down. He felt chastened, frail, as devoid of victory as if he had actively slain the woman he loved.
   So many people had sacrificed themselves.
   He knew that Triock was still alive, so he climbed painfully to his feet and stumbled over to the fallen Stonedownor. Triock's breathing rattled like blood in his throat; he would be dead soon. Covenant seated himself on the ground and lifted Triock so that the man's head rested on his lap.
   Triock's face was disfigured by the force which had smashed him. His charred skin peeled off his skull in places, and his eyes had been seared. From the slack dark hole of his mouth came faint plumes of smoke like the fleeing wisps of his soul.
   Covenant hugged Triock's head with both arms and began to weep.
   After a time, the Stonedownor sensed in some way who held him. Through the death thickening in his gullet, he struggled to speak. "Covenant."
   His voice was barely audible, but Covenant fought back his tears to respond, "I hear you."
   "You are not to blame. She was-flawed from birth."
   That was as far as his mercy could go. After one final wisp, the smoke faded away. Covenant held him, and knew he had no pulse or breath of life left.
   He understood that Triock had forgiven him. The Stonedownor was not to blame if his gift gave no consolation. In addition to everything else, Covenant was responsible for the flaw of Elena's birth. She was the daughter of a crime which could never be undone. So he could do nothing but sit with Triock's unanswerable head in his lap, and weep while he waited for the reversal of his summons, the end which would reave him of the Land.
   But no end came. In the past, he had always begun to fail as soon as his summoner died; but now he remained. Moments passed, and still he was undiminished. Gradually, he realized that this time he would not disappear, that for reasons he did not understand, he had not yet lost his chance.
   He did not have to accept Elena's fate. It was not the last word-not
   yet.
   When Bannor and Foamfollower stirred, groaned, began to regain consciousness, he made himself move. Carefully, deliberately, he took his ring from his wedding finger and placed it on the index finger of his halfhand, so that it would be less likely to slip off.
   Then, amid all his grief and regret, he stood up on bones that could bear anything, and hobbled over to help his friends.

Seventeen: The Spoiled Plains


   Bannor recovered more quickly than Foamfollower. In spite of his advancing age, the toughness of the Haruchai was still in him; after Covenant had chafed his wrists and neck for a moment, he shrugged off his unconsciousness and became almost instantly alert. He met Covenant's teary gaze with characteristic dispassion, and together they went to do what they could for the Giant.
   Foamfollower lay moaning on the ground in a fever of revulsion. Spasms bared his teeth, and his massive hands thrashed erratically against his chest as if he were trying to smite some fatal spot of wrong in himself. He seemed in danger of harming himself. So Bannor sat on the ground at the Giant's head, braced his feet on Foamfollower's shoulders, and caught his flailing arms by the wrists. Banner held the Giant's arms still while Covenant sat on Foamfollower's chest and slapped his snarling face.
   After a moment of resistance, Foamfollower let out a roar. Wrenching savagely, he heaved Bannor over Covenant's head, knocked the Unbeliever off his chest, and lurched panting to his feet.
   Covenant retreated from the threat of Foamfollower's fists. But as the Giant blinked and panted, he recovered himself, recognized his friends. "Covenant?" he gritted, "Bannor?" as if he feared they were Ravers.
   "Foamfollower," Covenant responded thickly. Tears of relief streamed down his gaunt cheeks. "You're all right."
   Slowly, Foamfollower relaxed as he saw that his friends were unmastered and whole. "Stone and Sea!" he gasped weakly, shuddering as he breathed. "Ah! My friends-have I harmed you?"
   Covenant could not answer; he was choked with fresh weeping. He stood where he was and let Foamfollower watch his tears; he had no other way to tell the Giant how he felt. After a moment, Bannor replied for him, "We are well-as well as may be. You have done us no injury."
   "And the-the specter of High Lord Elena? The Staff of Law? How is it that we yet live?"
   "Gone." Covenant fought to control himself. "Destroyed."
   Foamfollower's face was full of sympathy. "Ah, no, my friend," he sighed. "She is not destroyed. The dead cannot be destroyed."
   "I know. I know that." Covenant gritted his teeth, hugged his chest, until he passed the crest of his emotion. Then it began to subside, and he regained some measure of steadiness. "She's just dead-dead again. But the Staff-it was destroyed. By wild magic." Half fearing the reaction of his friends to this information, he added, "I didn't do it. It wasn't my doing. She-" He faltered. He had heard Mhoram say, You are the white gold. How could he be sure now what was or was not his doing?
   But his revelation only drew a strange glint from Banner's flat eyes. The Haruchai had always considered weapons unnecessary, even corruptive. Bannor found satisfaction rather than regret in the passing of the Staff. And Foamfollower shrugged the explanation aside, as if it were unimportant compared to his friend's distress. "Ah, Covenant, Covenant," he groaned. "How can you endure? Who can withstand such things?"
   " F m a leper,'' Covenant responded. He was surprised to hear himself say the word without bitterness. "I can stand anything. Because I can't feel it." He gestured with his diseased hands because his tears so obviously contradicted him. "This is a dream. It can't touch me. I'm"-he grimaced, remembering the belief which had first led Elena to break the Law of Death-"numb."
   Answering tears blurred Foamfollower's cavernous eyes. "And you are very brave," he said in a thick voice. "You are beyond me."
   The Giant's grief almost reopened Covenant's weeping. But he steadied himself by thinking of the questions he would have to ask, the things he would have to say. He wanted to smile for Foamfollower, but his cheeks were too stiff. Then he felt he had been caught in the act of a perennial failure, a habitual inadequacy of response. He was relieved to turn away when Banner called their attention to the weather.
   Bannor made him aware of the absence of wind. In his struggle with Elena, he had hardly noticed the change. But now he could feel the stillness of the atmosphere like a palpable healing. For a time, at least, Lord Foul's gelid frenzy was gone. And without the wind to drive it, the gray cloud-cover hung sullen and empty overhead, like a casket without a corpse.
   As a result, the air felt warmer. Covenant half expected to see dampness on the ground as the hard earth thawed, half expected spring to begin on the spot. In the gentle stillness, the sound of the waterfall reached him clearly.
   Banner's perceptions went further; he sensed something Covenant had missed. After a moment, he took Covenant and Foamfollower to the Colossus to show them what he had found.
   From the obsidian monolith came a soft emanation of heat.
   This warmth held the true promise of spring; it smelled of buds and green grass, of aliantha and moss and forest-loam. Under its influence, Covenant found that he could relax. He put aside misery, fear, unresolved need, and sank down gratefully to sit with his back against the soothing stone.
   Foamfollower hunted around the area until he located the sack of provisions he had carried with him from the Ramen covert. He took out food and his pot of graveling. Together, he, Bannor, and Covenant ate a silent meal under the fist of the Colossus as if they were sharing a communion-as if they accepted the stone's warmth and shelter to do it honor. They had no other way to express their thanks.
   Covenant was hungry; he had had nothing but Demondim-drink to sustain him for days. Yet he ate the food, absorbed the warmth, with a strange humility, as if he had not earned them, did not deserve them. He knew in his heart that the destruction of the Staff purchased nothing more than a brief respite for the Land, a short delay in the Despiser's eventual triumph. And that respite was not his doing. The reflex which had triggered the white gold was surely as unconscious, as involuntary, as if it had happened in his sleep. And yet another life had been spent on his account. That knowledge humbled him. He fed and warmed himself because all his work had yet to be done, and no other being in the Land could do it for him.
   When the frugal meal was finished, he began his task by asking his companions how they had come to the Colossus.
   Foamfollower winced at the memory. He left the telling of it to Banner's terseness. While Banner spoke, the Giant cleaned and tended Covenant's forehead.
   In short sentences, Banner indicated that the Ramen had been able to defeat the attack on their covert, thanks to the Giant's prodigious aid. But the battle had been a long and costly one, and the night was gone before Bannor and Foamfollower could begin to search for Covenant and Lena. ("Ur-viles!'' Foamfollower muttered at Covenant's injury. ' "This will not heal. To make you captive, they put their mark upon you.") The Mane-thralls permitted only two Cords, Whane and Lal, to aid in the search. For during the night, a change had come over the Ranyhyn. To the surprise and joy of the Ramen, the great horses had unexpectedly started south toward the sanctuary of the mountains. The Ramen followed at once. Only their mixed awe and concern for the Ringthane induced them to give Bannor and Foamfollower any aid at all.
   So the four of them began the hunt. But they had lost too much time; wind and snow had obscured the trail. They lost it south of the Roamsedge and could find no trace of Covenant. At last they concluded that he must have gained other aid to take him eastward. Together the four made what haste they could toward the Fall of the River Landrider.
   The journey was made slow and arduous by kresh packs and marauders, and the four feared that Covenant would have left the Upper Land days ago. But when they neared the Colossus, they came upon a band of ur-viles accompanied by the Raver, Herem-Triock. Then the four were dismayed to see that the band bore with it the Unbeliever, prostrate as if he were dead.
   The four attacked, slew the ur-viles. But they could not prevent the call which Herem sent. And before they could defeat Herem, rescue Covenant, and retrieve the ring, that call was answered by the dead Elena, wielding the Staff of Law. She mastered the four effortlessly. Then she gave Whane to Herem, so that Triock's anguish would be more poignant. When Jehannum came to her, that Raver entered Lal. Covenant knew the rest.
   Bannor and Foamfollower had seen no sign of Lena. They did not know what had delayed Covenant's arrival at Landsdrop.
   As Bannor finished, Foamfollower growled in angry disgust, "Stone and Sea! She has made me unclean. I must bathe-I will need a sea to wash away this coercion."
   Bannor nodded. "I, also."
   But neither of them moved, though the River Landrider was nearby beyond a low line of hills. Covenant knew they were holding themselves at his disposal; they seemed to sense that he needed them. And they had questions of their own. But he felt unready for the things he would have to say. After a silence, he asked painfully,' Triock summoned me-and he's dead. Why am I still here?"
   Foamfollower mused briefly, then said, "Perhaps because the Law of Death has been broken-perhaps it was that Law which formerly sent you from the Land when your summoner died. Or perhaps it is because I also had a hand in this call."
   Yes, Covenant sighed to himself. His debt to Triock was hardly less than what he owed Foamfollower.
   He could not shirk the responsibility any longer; he forced himself to describe what had happened to Lena.
   His voice was dull as he spoke of her-an old woman brought to a bloody and graveless end because in her confusion she clung to the man who had harmed her. And her death was only the most recent tragedy in her family. First and last, her people had borne the brunt of him: Trell Gravelingas, Atiaran Trell-mate, High Lord Elena, Lena herself-he had ruined them all. Such things altered him, made a different man of him. That made it possible for him to ask another question after he had told all he knew of his own tale.
   "Foamfollower"-he framed his inquiry as carefully as he could- "it's none of my business. But Pietten said some terrible things about you. Or he meant them to be terrible. He said-" But he could not say the words. No matter how he uttered them, they would sound like an accusation.
   The Giant sighed, and his whole frame sagged. He studied his intertwined hands as if somewhere in their clasped gentleness and butchery were a secret he could not unclose, but he no longer evaded the question. "He said that I betrayed my kinfolk-that the Giants of Seareach died to the last child at the hands of turiya Raver because I abandoned them. It is true."
   Foamfollower! Covenant moaned. My friend! Sorrow welled up in him, almost made him weep again.
   Abstractedly, Bannor said, "Many things were lost in The Grieve that day."
   " Yes." Foamfollower blinked as if he were trying to hold back tears, but his eyes were dry, as parched as a wilderland. "Yes-many things. Among them I was the least.
   "Ah, Covenant, how can I tell you of it? This tongue has no words long enough for the tale. No word can encompass the love for a lost homeland, or the anguish of diminishing seed, or the pride-the pride in fidelity- That fidelity was our only reply to our extinction. We could not have borne our decline if we had not taken pride.
   "So my people-the Giants-I also, in my own way-the Giants were filled with horror-with abhorrence so deep that it numbed the very marrow of their bones-when they saw their pride riven-torn from them like rotten sails in the wind. They foundered at the sight. They saw the portent of their hope of Home-the three brothers-changed from fidelity to the most potent ill by one small stroke of the Despiser's evil. Who in the Land could hope to stand against a Giant-Raver? Thus the Unhomed became the means to destroy that to which they had held themselves true. And in horror at the naught of their fidelity, their folly practiced through long centuries of pride, they were transfixed. Their revulsion left no room in them for thought or resistance or choice. Rather than behold the cost of their failure-rather than risk the chance that more of them would be made Soulcrusher's servants-they-they elected to be slain.
   "I also-in my way, I was horrified as well. But I had already seen what they had not, until that moment. I had seen myself become what I hated. Alone of all my kindred, I was not surprised. It was not the vision of a Giant-Raver which horrified me. It was my-my own people.
   "Ah! Stone and Sea! They appalled me. I stormed at them-I ran through The Grieve like a dark sea of madness, howling at their abandonment, raging to strike one spark of resistance in the drenched tinder of their hearts. But they-they put away their tools, and banked their fires, and made ready their homes as if in preparation for departure-'' Abruptly, his suppressed passion broke into a cry. "My people! I could not bear it! I fled them with abjection crowding at my heart-fled them lest I, too, should fall into their dismay. Therefore they were slain. I who might have fought the Raver deserted them in the deepest blackness of their need." Unable to contain himself any longer, he heaved to his feet. His raw, scourged voice rasped thickly in his throat. "I am unclean. I must-wash."
   Holding himself stiffly upright, he turned and lumbered away toward the river.
   The helplessness of Covenant's pain came out as anger. His own voice shook as he muttered to Banner, "If you say one word to blame him, I swear-"
   Then he stopped himself. He had accused Bannor unjustly too often in the past; the Bloodguard had long ago earned better treatment than this from him. But Bannor only shrugged. "I am a Haruchai, " he said. "We also are not immune. Corruption wears many faces. Blame is a more enticing face than others, but it is none the less a mask for the Despiser.''
   His speech made Covenant look at him closely. Something came up between them that had never been laid to rest, neither on Gallows Howe nor in the Ramen covert. It wore the aspect of habitual Bloodguard distrust, but as he met Banner's eyes, Covenant sensed that the issue was a larger one.
   Without inflection, Bannor went on: "Hate and vengeance are also masks."
   Covenant was struck by how much the Bloodguard had aged. His mortality had accelerated. His hair was the same silver as his eyebrows; his skin had a sere appearance, as if it had started to wither; and his wrinkles looked oddly fatal, like gullies of death in his countenance. Yet his steady dispassion seemed as complete as ever. He did not look like a man who had deserted his sworn loyalty to the Lords.
   "Ur-Lord," he said evenly, "what will you do?"
   "Do?" Covenant did his best to match the Bloodguard, though he could not look at Banner's aging without remorse. "I still have work to do. I've got to go to Foul's Creche."
   "For what purpose?"
   "I've got to stop him."
   "High Lord Elena also strove to stop him. You have seen the outcome."
   "Yes." Covenant did full justice to Banner's statement. But he did not falter. "I've got to find a better answer than she did."
   "Do you make this choice out of hate?"
   He met the question squarely. "I don't know."
   "Then why do you go?"
   "Because I must." That must carried the weight of an irrefusable necessity. The escape he had envisioned when he had left Morinmoss did not suffice. The Land's need held him like a harness. "I've done so many things wrong. I've got to try to make them right."
   Bannor considered this for a moment, then asked bluntly, "Do you know then how to make use of the wild magic?"
   "No," Covenant answered. "Yes." He hesitated, not because he doubted his reply, but because he was reluctant to say it aloud. But his sense of what was unresolved between him and Bannor had become clearer; something more than distrust was at stake. "I don't know how to call it up, do anything with it. But I know how to trigger it." He remembered vividly how Bannor had compelled him to help High Lord Prothall summon the Fire-Lions of Mount Thunder. "If I can get to the Illearth Stone-I can do something."
   The Bloodguard's voice was hard. "The Stone corrupts."
   "I know." He understood Banner's point vividly. "I know. That's why I have to get to it. That's what this is all about-everything. That's why Foul has been manipulating me. That's why Elena-why Elena did what she did. That's why Mhoram trusted me."
   Bannor did not relent. "Will it be another Desecration?"
   Covenant had to steady himself before he could reply. "I hope not. I don't want it to be."
   In answer, the Bloodguard got to his feet. Looking soberly down at the Unbeliever, he said, "Ur-Lord Covenant, I will not accompany you for this purpose."
   "Not?" Covenant protested. In the back of his mind, he had been counting on Banner's companionship.
   "No. I no longer serve Lords."
   More harshly than he intended, Covenant rasped, "So you've decided to turn your back?"
   "No.'' Bannor denied the charge flatly. "What help I can, I will give. All the Bloodguard knowledge of the Spoiled Plains, of Kurash Qwellinir and Hotash Slay, I will share with you. But Ridjeck Thome, Corruption's seat-there I will not go. The deepest wish of the Bloodguard was to fight the Despiser in his home, pure service against Corruption. This desire misled. I have put aside such things. My proper place now is with the Ranyhyn and their Ramen, in the exile of the mountains."
   Covenant seemed to hear an anguish behind the inflectionless tone of the speech-an anguish that hurt him in the same way that this man always hurt him. "Ah, Bannor," he sighed. "Are you so ashamed of what you were?"
   Bannor cocked a white eyebrow at the question, as if it came close to the truth. "I am not shamed," he said distinctly. "But I am saddened that so many centuries were required to teach us the limits of our worth. We went too far, in pride and folly. Mortal men should not give up wives and sleep and death for any service-lest the face of failure become too abhorrent to be endured." He paused almost as if he were hesitating, then concluded, "Have you forgotten that High Lord Elena carved our faces as one in her last marrowmeld work?"
   "No." Bannor had moved him. His response was both an assertion and a promise. "I will never forget."
   Bannor nodded slowly. Then he said, "I, too, must wash," and strode away toward the river without a backward glance.
   Covenant watched him go for a moment, then leaned his head back against the warmth of the Colossus and closed his sore eyes. He knew that he should not delay his departure any longer, that he increased his risks every moment he remained where he was. Lord Foul was certain to know what had happened; he would feel the sudden destruction of the Staff, and would search until he found the explanation, perhaps by compelling Elena once more out of her death to answer his questions. Then preparations would be made against the Unbeliever; Foul's Creche would be defended; hunting parties would be sent out. Any delay might mean defeat.
   But Covenant was not ready. He still had one more confession to make-the last and hardest thing he would have to tell his friends. So he sat absorbing the heat of the Colossus like sustenance while he waited for Bannor and Foamfollower to return. He did not want to carry the weight of any more dishonesty with him when he left the place where Triock had
   died.
   Bannor was not gone long. He and Foamfollower returned dripping to dry themselves in the heat of the stone. Foamfollower had regained his composure. His teeth flashed through his stiff wet beard as if he were eager to be on his way-as if he were ready to fight his way through a sea of foes for one chance to strike a blow at the Despiser. And Bannor stood dourly at the Giant's side. They were equals, despite the difference in size. They both met Covenant's gaze when he looked up at them. For an odd moment he felt torn between them, as if they represented the opposing poles of his dilemma.
   But odder than this torn feeling was the confidence which came with it. In that fleeting moment, he seemed to recognize where he stood for the first time. While the impression lasted, his fear or reluctance or uncertainty dropped from him.' "There's one more thing,'' he said to both his friends at once, "one more thing I've got to tell you."
   Then, because he did not want to see their reactions until he had given them the whole tale, he sat gazing into the lifeless circle of his ring while he described how High Lord Mhoram had summoned him to Revelstone, and how he had refused.
   He spoke as concisely as he could without minimizing the plight of Revelstone as he had seen it then, or the danger of the little girl for whom he had denied Mhoram's appeal, or the hysteria which had been on him when he had made his choice. He found as he spoke that he did not regret the decision. It seemed to have nothing to do with either his regret or his volition; he simply could not have chosen otherwise. But the Land had many reasons for regret-a myriad reasons, one for every life which had been lost, one for every day which had been added to the winter, because he had not given himself and his ring into Mhoram's hands. He explained what he had done so that Bannor and Foamfollower at least would not be able to reproach him for dishonesty.
   When he was done, he looked up again. Neither Bannor nor Foamfollower met his eyes at first; in their separate ways, they appeared upset by what they had heard. But finally Bannor returned Covenant's gaze and said levelly, "A costly choice, Unbeliever. Costly. Much harm might have been averted-"
   Foamfollower interrupted him. "Costly! Might!" A fierce grin stretched his lips, echoed out of his deep eyes. "A child was saved! Covenant-my friend-even reduced as I am, I can hear joy in such a choice. Your bravery-Stone and Sea! It astounds me."
   Bannor was not swayed. "Call it bravery, then. It is costly nonetheless. The Land will bleed under the expense for many years, whatever the outcome of your purpose in Foul's Creche."
   Once again, Covenant was forced to say, ''I know.'' He knew with a vividness that felt terrible to him. "I couldn't do anything else. And-and I wasn't ready then. I'm ready now-readier." I'll never be ready, he thought. It's impossible to be ready for this. "Maybe I can do something now that I couldn't do then."
   Bannor held his eyes for another moment, then nodded brusquely. "Will you go now?" he asked without expression. "Corruption will be a hunt for you."
   Covenant sighed, and pushed himself to his feet. "Yes." He did not want to leave the comfort of the Colossus. "Ready or not. Let's get on with it."
   He walked between Bannor and Foamfollower, and they took him up the last of the hills to a place where he could look down the cliff of Landsdrop to the Spoiled Plains.
   The precipice seemed to leap out from behind the hill as if it had been hiding in ambush for Covenant-abruptly, he found himself looking over the edge and down two thousand feet-but he gripped the arms of his friends on either side and breathed deeply to hold back his vertigo. After a moment, the suddenness of the view faded, and he began to notice details.
   At the base of the hill on his right, the River Landrider swooped downward in a final rush to pour heavily over the lip of Landsdrop. The tumult of its roar was complex. In this region, the cliff broke into four or five ragged stairs, so that the waterfall went down by steps, all pounding simultaneously, unharmonically. From the bottom of the Fall, it angled away southeastward into the perpetual wasteland of the Spoiled Plains.
   "There," said Bannor, "there begins its ordeal. There the Landrider becomes the Ruinwash, and flows polluted toward the Sea. It is a murky and repelling water, unfit for use by any but its own unfit denizens. But it is your way for a time. It will provide a path for you through much of these hazardous Plains. And it will place you south of Kurash Qwellinir.
   "You know"-he nodded to Foamfollower-"that the Spoiled Plains form a wide deadland around the promontory of Ridjeck Thome, where Foul's Creche juts into the Sea. Within that deadland lies Kurash Qwellinir, the Shattered Hills. Some say that these Hills were formed by the breaking of a mountain-others, that they were shaped from the slag and refuse of Corruption's war caverns, furnaces, breeding dens. However they were made, they are a maze to bewilder the approach of any foe. And within them lies Gorak Krembal-Hotash Slay. From Sea-cliff to Sea-cliff about the promontory, it defends Corruption's seat with lava, so that none may pass that way to gain the one gateless maw of the

Creche.
   "Corruption's creatures make their way to and from Ridjeck Thome through tunnels which open in secret places among Kurash Qwellinir. But it is in my heart that such an approach will not avail you. I do not doubt that a Giant may find a tunnel within the maze. But on that road all Corruption's defending armies stand before you. You cannot pass.
   "I will tell you of a passage through the Shattered Hills on their southward side. The narrowest point of Hotash Slay is there, where the lava pours through a gash in the cliff into the Sea. A Giant may find crossing in that place." He spoke as if he were discussing a convenient path among mountains, not an approach to the Corrupter of the Bloodguard. "In that way, it may be that you will take Ridjeck Thome by surprise."
   Foamfollower absorbed this information, and nodded. Then he listened closely while Bannor detailed his route through the maze of Kurash Qwellinir. Covenant tried to listen also, but his attention wandered. He seemed to hear Landsdrop calling to him. Imminent vertigo foiled his concentration. Elena, he breathed to himself. He called her up in his mind, hoping that her image would steady him. But the emerald radiance of her fate made him wince and groan.
   No! he averred into the approach of dizziness. It doesn't have to be that way. It's my dream. I can do something about it.
   Foamfollower and Bannor were looking at him strangely. His fingers gripped them feebly, urgently. He could not take his eyes off the waterfall's rush. It called him downward like the allure of death.
   He took a deep breath. Finger by finger, he forced himself to release his friends. "Let's get going," he murmured. "I can't stand any more waiting."
   The Giant hefted his sack. "I am ready," he said. "Our supplies are scant-but we have no recourse. We must hope for aliantha on the Lower Land."
   Without looking away from the Fall, Covenant addressed Bannor. He could not ask the Bloodguard to change his decision, so he said, "You'll bury Triock? He's earned a decent grave."
   Banner nodded, then said, "I will do another thing also.'' He reached one hand into his short robe and drew out the charred metal heels of the Staff of Law. "I will bear these to Revelstone. When the time of my end comes upon me, I will return to the mountain home of the Haruchai. On the way, I will visit Revelstone-if the Lords and Lord's Keep still stand. I know not what value may remain in this metal, but perhaps the survivors of this war will find some use for it."
   Thank you, Covenant whispered silently.
   Banner put the bands away and bowed once briefly to Covenant and Foamfollower. "Look for help wherever you go," he said. "Even in the Spoiled Plains, Corruption is not entirely master." Before they could reply, he turned and trotted away toward the Colossus. As he passed over the hilltop, his back told them as clearly as speech that they would never see him again.
   Bannor! Covenant groaned. Was it that bad? He felt bereft, deserted, as if half his support had been taken away.
   "Gently, my friend," Foamfollower breathed. "He has turned his back on vengeance. Two thousand years and more of pure service were violated for him-yet he chooses not to avenge them. Such choices are not easily made. They are not easily borne. Retribution-ah, my friend, retribution is the sweetest of all dark sweet dreams."
   Covenant found himself still staring at the waterfall. The complex plunge of the river had a sweetness all its own. He shook himself. "Hell-fire." The emptiness of his curses seemed appropriate to his condition. "Are we going to do it or aren't we?"
   "We will go." Covenant felt the Giant's gaze on him without meeting it. "Covenant-ur-Lord-there is no need for you to endure this descent. Close your eyes, and I will bear you as I did from Kevin's Watch."
   Covenant hardly heard himself answer, ''That was a long time ago.'' Vertigo was beginning to reel in his head. "I've got to do this for myself. For a moment, he let slip his resistance and almost fell to his knees. As the suction tugged at his mind, he comprehended that he would have to go into it rather than away from it, that the only way to master vertigo was to find its center. Somewhere in the center of the spinning would be an eye, a core of stability. "Just go ahead-so you can catch me.'' Only in the eye of the whirl could he find solid ground.
   Foamfollower regarded him dubiously, then started down to the edge of the cliff near the Fall. With Covenant limping in his wake, he went to the rim, glanced down to pick the best place for a descent, then lowered himself out of sight over the edge.
   Covenant stood for a moment teetering on the lip of Landsdrop. The Fall yawed abysmally from side to side; it beckoned to him like relief from delirium. It was such an easy answer. As his vertigo mounted, he did not see how he could refuse it.
   But its upsurge made his pulse hammer in his wounded forehead. He spun around that pain as if it were a pivot, and found that the seductive panic of the plunge was fading. The simple hope that vertigo had a firm center seemed to make his hope come true. The whirl did not stop, but its hold on him receded, withdrew into the background. Slowly, the pounding in his forehead eased.
   He did not fall.
   He felt as weak as a starving penitent-hardly able to carry his own weight. But he knelt on the edge, lowered his legs over the rim. Clinging to the top of the cliff with his arms and stomach, he began to hunt blindly for footholds. Soon he was crawling backward down Landsdrop as if it were the precipice of his personal future.
   The descent took a long time, but it was not particularly difficult. Foamfollower protected him all the way down each stage of the broken cliff. And the steeper drops were moderated by enough ledges and cracks and hardy scrub brush to make that whole stretch of the cliff passable. The Giant had no trouble finding a route Covenant could manage, and Covenant eventually gained a measure of confidence, so that he was able to move with less help down the last stages to the foothills.
   When at last he reached the lower ground, he took his drained nerves straight to the pool at the foot of the Fall and dropped into the chill waters to wash away the accumulated sweat of his fear.
   While Covenant bathed, Foamfollower filled his water jug and drank deeply at the pool. This might be the last safe water they would find. Then the Giant set out the graveling for Covenant. As the Unbeliever dried himself, he asked Foamfollower how long their food supplies would last.
   The Giant grimaced. "Two days. Three or four, if we find aliantha a day or two into the Spoiled Plains. But we are far from Foul' s Creche. Even if we were to run straight into Soulcrusher's arms, we would have three or tour foodless days within us before he made sustenance unnecessary." Then he grinned. "But it is said that hunger teaches many things. My friend, a wealth of wisdom awaits us on this journey."
   Covenant shivered. He had had some experience with hunger. And now the possibility of starvation lay ahead of him; his forehead had been reinjured; he would have to walk a long distance on bare feet. One by one the conditions of his return to his own life were being met. As he tightened the sash of his robe, he muttered sourly, "I heard Mhoram say once that wisdom is only skin-deep. Or something like that. Which means that lepers must be the wisest people in the world."
   "Are they?" the Giant asked. "Are you wise, Unbeliever?"
   "Who knows? If I am-wisdom is overrated."
   At this, Foamfollower's grin broadened. "Perhaps it is-perhaps it is. My friend, we are the two wisest hearts in the Land-we who march thus weaponless and unredeemed into the very bosom of the Despiser. Verily, wisdom is like hunger. Perhaps it is a very fine thing-but who would willingly partake of it?"
   Despite the absence of the wind, the air was still wintry. Knuckles of ice clenched the rocky borders of the pool where the spray of the Fall had frozen, and Foamfollower's breath plumed wetly in the humid air. Covenant needed to move to warm himself, keep up his courage. "It's not fine," he grated, half to himself. "But it's useful. Come on."
   Foamfollower repacked his graveling, then swung the sack onto his broad shoulder, and led Covenant away from Landsdrop along the river.
   Night stopped them when they had covered only three or four leagues. But by that time they had left behind the foothills and the last vestiges of the un-Spoiled flatland which had at one time, ages ago in the history of the Earth, stretched from the Southron Wastes north to the Sarangrave and Lifeswallower, the Great Swamp. They were down in the bosk of the Ruinwash.
   Gray, brittle, dead brush and trees-cottonwoods, junipers, once-beautiful tamarisks-stood up out of the dried mud on both sides of the stream, occupying ground which had once been part of the riverbed. But the Ruinwash had shrunk decades or centuries ago, leaving partially fertile mud on either side-mud in which a scattering of tough trees and brush had eked out a bare existence until Lord Foul's preternatural winter had blasted them. As darkness soaked into the air as if it were oozing out of the ground, the trees became spectral shapes of forbidding which made the bosk almost impassable. Covenant resigned himself to camping there for the night, though the dried mud had an old, occluded reek, and the river made a slithering noise like an ambush in its course. He knew that he and Foamfollower would be safer if they traveled at night, but he was weary and did not believe the Giant could find his way in the cloud-locked dark.
   Later, however, he found that the river gave off a light like lambent verdigris; the whole surface of the water glowed dimly. This light came, not from the water, but from the hot eels which flicked back and forth across the current. They had a hungry aspect, and their jaws were rife with teeth. Yet they made it possible for him and Foamfollower to resume their journey.
   Even in the cynosural eel light, they did not go much farther. The destruction of the Staff had changed the balance of Lord Foul's winter; without the wind to hold them, the massed energies of the clouds recoiled. In the deeper chill of darkness, they triggered rain out of the blind sky. Soon torrents fell through the damaged grasp of the clouds, crashed straight down onto the Lower Land as if the vaulting which held up the heavens had broken. Under those conditions, Foamfollower could not find his way. He and Covenant had no choice but to huddle together for warmth in the mud and try to sleep while they waited.
   With the coming of dawn, the rain stopped, and Covenant and Foamfollower went on along the Ruinwash in the blurred light of morning. During that day, they saw the last of the aliantha; as they penetrated into the Spoiled Plains, the mud became too dead for treasure-berries. The travelers kept themselves going on scant shares of their dwindling supplies. At night, the rains came again, soaking them until they seemed to have its dankness in the marrow of their bones.
   The next day, an eagle spotted them through a gap in the gray trees. It cycled twice close over their heads, then soared away, screaming in mockery like a voice from the dead, "Foamfollower! Kinabandoner!"
   "They're after us," said Covenant.
   The Giant spat violently. '' Yes. They will hunt us down." He found a smooth stone the size of Covenant's two fists and carried it with him to throw at the eagle if it returned.
   It did not come back that day, but the next-after another torrential downpour avalanched the Plains as if the cloud lid over the Land were a shattered sea-Lord Foul's bird circled them twice, morning and afternoon. The first time, it taunted them until Foamfollower had hurled all the stones he could find nearby, then it slashed close to bark scornfully, "Kinabandoner! Groveler!"
   The second time, Foamfollower kept one stone hidden. He waited until the eagle had swooped lower to jeer, then threw at it with deadly force. It survived by breaking the blow with its wings, but it flew limping away, barely able to stay aloft.
   "Make haste," Foamfollower growled. "That ill bird has been guiding the pursuit toward us. It is not far off."
   At the best pace Covenant could manage on his numb, battered feet, he pushed ahead through the bosk.
   They stayed under tree cover as much as possible to ward against spying birds. This caution slowed them somewhat, but the largest drag on their progress was Covenant's weariness. His injury and the ordeal of the Colossus appeared to have drained some essential resilience out of him. He got little sleep in the cold wet nights, and he felt that he was slowly starving on his share of the food. In dogged silence he shambled along league after league as if his fear of the hunt were the only thing that kept him moving. And that evening, in the gloaming verdigris of the eel fire, he consumed the last of Foamfollower's supplies.
   "Now what?" he muttered vaguely when he was done.
   "We must resign ourselves. There is no more."
   Ah, hell! Covenant groaned to himself. He remembered vividly what had happened to him in the woods behind Haven Farm, when his self-imposed inanition had made him hysterical. The memory filled him with cold dread.
   In turn, that dread called up other memories-recollections of his ex-wife, Joan, and his son, Roger. He felt an urge to tell Foamfollower about them, as if they were spirits he could exorcise by simply saying the right thing about them to the right person. But before he could find the words, his thoughts were scattered by the first attack of the hunt.
   Without warning, a band of apelike creatures came crashing through the bosk from the south side of the Ruinwash. Voiceless, like the rush of a nightmare, they broke through the brittle wood and the eel light. They threw themselves from the low bank and heaved across the current toward their prey.
   Either they did not know their danger, or they had forgotten it. Without one shout or cry, they all vanished under a sudden, hot, seething of blue-green iridescence. None of them reappeared.
   At once, Covenant and Foamfollower started on their way again. While the crepuscular light lasted, they put as much distance as possible between themselves and the place of the attack.
   A short time later the rain began. It fell on them like the collapse of a mountain, made the whole night impenetrable. They were forced to stop. They hunched together like waifs under the scant, leafless shelter of a tree, trying to sleep and hoping that the hunt could not follow them in this weather.
   After a while, Covenant dozed. He was hovering near the true depths of sleep when Foamfollower shook him awake.
   "Listen!"
   Covenant could hear nothing but the uninterrupted smash of the rain.
   The Giant's ears were keener. "The Ruinwash rises! There will be a flood."
   Straggling like blind men, thrashing their way against unseen trees and brush, slipping through water that already reached above their ankles, they tried to climb out of the bosk toward higher ground. After a long struggle, they worked clear of the old riverbed. But the water continued to mount, and the terrain did not. Now beyond the rain, Covenant could hear the deeper roar of the flood; it seemed to tower above them in the night. He was stumbling knee-deep in muddy water, and could see no way to save himself.
   But Foamfollower dragged him onward. Some time later, they waded into an erosion gully. Its walls were slick, and the water poured down through it like flowing silt, but the Giant did not hesitate. He attached Covenant to him with a short clingor line and began to forge up the gully.
   Covenant clung to Foamfollower for a distance that seemed as long as leagues. But at last he could feel that they were climbing. The walls of the gully narrowed. Foamfollower used his hands to help him ascend.
   When they reached an open hillside where the flow of water hardly covered their feet, they stopped. Covenant sank exhausted into the mud. The rain faltered to an end, and he went numbly to sleep until another cold gray dawn smeared its way across the clouds from the east.
   At last he rubbed the caked fatigue out of his eyes and sat up. Foamfollower was gazing at him with amusement. "Ah, Covenant," the Giant said, "we are a pair. You are so bedraggled and sober- And I fear my own appearance is not improved." He struck a begrimed pose. "What is your opinion?"
   For a moment, Foamfollower looked as gay and carefree as a playing child. The sight gave Covenant a pang. How long had it been since he had heard the Giant laugh? "Wash your face,'' he croaked with as much humor as he could manage. "You look ridiculous."
   "You honor me," Foamfollower returned. But he did not laugh. As his amusement faded, he turned away and splashed a little water on his face to clean it.
   Covenant followed his example, though he was too tired to feel dirty. He drank three swallows from the jug for breakfast, then pried himself unsteadily to his feet.
   In the distance, he could see a few treetops sticking out of the broad brown swath of the flood. No other signs remained visible to mark the bosk of the Ruinwash.
   Opposite the flood, in the direction he and Foamfollower would now have to take, lay a long ridge of hills. They piled in layers above him until they seemed almost as high as mountains, and their scarred sides looked as desolate as if their very roots had been dead for aeons.
   He groaned at the prospect. His worn flesh balked. But he had no choice; the lowlands of the Ruinwash were no longer passable.
   With nothing to sustain them but frugal rations of water, he and the Giant began to climb.
   The ascent was shallower than it had appeared. If Covenant had been well fed and healthy, he would not have suffered. But in his drained condition, he could hardly drag himself up the slopes. The festering wound on his forehead ached like a heavy burden attached to his skull, pulling him backward. The thick humid air seemed to clog his lungs. From time to time, he found himself lying among the stones and could not remember how he had lost his feet.
   Yet with Foamfollower's help he kept going. Late that day, they crested the ridge of hills, started their descent.
   Since leaving the Ruinwash, they had seen no sign of pursuit.
   The next morning, after a night's rain as ponderous and rancid as if the clouds themselves were stagnant, they moved down out of the hills. As Covenant's gaunt flesh adjusted to hunger, he grew steadier-not stronger, but less febrile. He made the descent without mishap, and from the ridge he and Foamfollower traveled generally eastward out into the barren landscape.
   After a foodless and dreary noon, they came to an eerie wilderness of thorns. It occupied the bottom of a wide lowland; for nearly a league, dead thorn-trees with limbs like arms and gray barbs as hard as iron stood in their way. The whole bottom looked like a ruined orchard where sharp spikes and hooks had been grown for weapons; the thorns stood in crooked rows as if they had been planted there so that they could be tended and harvested. Here and there, gaps appeared in the rows, but from a distance Covenant could not see what caused them.
   Foamfollower did not want to cross the valley. Higher ground bordered the thorn wastes on both sides, and the barren trees offered no concealment; while they were down in the bottom, they could be easily seen. But again they had no choice. The wastes extended far to the north and south. They would need time to circumvent the thorns-time in which hunger could overcome them, pursuit overtake them.
   Muttering to himself, Foamfollower scanned all the terrain as far as he could see, searching for any sign of the hunt. Then he led Covenant down the last slope into the thorns.
   They found that the lowest branches of the trees were six or seven feet above the ground. Covenant could move erect along the crooked rows of trunks, but Foamfollower had to crouch or bend almost double to keep the barbs from ripping open his torso and head. He risked injury if he moved too quickly. As a result, their progress through the wastes was dangerously
   slow.
   Thick dust covered the ground under their feet. All the rain of the past nights seemed to have left this valley untouched. The lifeless dirt faced the clouds as if years of torrents could never assuage the thirst of its ancient ruin. Choking billows rose up from the strides of the travelers, filled their lungs and stung their eyes-and plumed into the sky to mark their presence as clearly as smoke.
   Soon they came to one of the gaps in the thorns. To their surprise, they found that it was a mud pit. Damp clay bubbled in a small pool. In contrast to the dead dust all around it, it seemed to be seething with some kind of muddy life, but it was as cold as the winter air. Covenant shied away from it as if it were dangerous, and hurried on through the thorns as fast as Foamfollower could go.
   They were halfway to the eastern edge of the valley when they heard a hoarse shout of discovery in the distance behind them. Whirling, they saw two large bands of marauders spring out of different parts of the hills. The bands came together as they charged in among the thorn-trees, howling for the blood of their prey.
   Covenant and Foamfollower turned and fled.
   Covenant sprinted with the energy of fear. In the first surge of flight, he had room in his mind for nothing but the effort of running, the pumping of his legs and lungs. But shortly he realized that he was pulling away from Foamfollower. The Giant's crouched stance cramped his speed; he could not use his long legs effectively without tearing his head off among the thorns. "Flee!" he shouted at Covenant. "I will hold them back!"
   "Forget it!" Covenant slowed to match the Giant's pace. "We're in this together."
   "Flee!" Foamfollower repeated, flailing one arm urgently as if to hurl the Unbeliever ahead.
   Instead of answering, Covenant rejoined his friend. He heard the savage outcry of the pursuit as if it were clawing at his back, but he stayed with Foamfollower. He had already lost too many people who were important to him.
   Abruptly, Foamfollower lurched to a halt. "Go, I say! Stone and Sea!" He sounded furious. "Do you believe I can bear to see your purpose fail for my sake?"
   Covenant wheeled and stopped. "Forget it," he panted again. "I'm good for nothing without you."
   Foamfollower spun to look at the charging hunters. "Then you must find the way of your white gold now. They are too many."
   "Not if you keep moving! By hell! We can still beat them."
   The Giant swung back to face Covenant. For an instant, his muscles bunched to carry him forward again. But then he went rigid; his head jerked up. He stared hotly through the branches into the distance past Covenant's head.
   A new dread seized Covenant. He turned, followed the Giant's gaze.
   There were ur-viles on the eastern slope of the valley. They rushed in large numbers toward the wastes as if they were swarming, and as they moved, they coalesced into three wedges. Covenant could see them clearly through the thorns. When they reached the bottom, they halted, wielded their staves. All along the eastern edge of the forest, they set fire to the dead trees.
   The thorns flared instantly. Flames leaped up with a roar, spread rapidly through the branches from tree to tree. Each trunk became a torch to light its neighbors. In moments, Covenant and Foamfollower were cut off from the east by a wall of conflagration.
   Foamfollower snatched his gaze back and forth between the fire and the charging hunters, and his eyes shot gleams of fury like battle-lust from under his massive brows. "Trapped!" he shouted as if the impossibility of the situation outraged him. But his anger had a different meaning. "They have erred! I am not so vulnerable to fire. I can break through and attack!"
   "I'm vulnerable,'' Covenant replied numbly. He watched the Giant's rising rage with a nausea of apprehension in his guts. He knew what his response should have been. Foamfollower was far better equipped than he to fight the Despiser. He should have said, Take my ring and go. You can find a way to use it. You can get past those ur-viles. But his throat would not form the words. And the fear that Foamfollower would ask for his wedding band churned in him, inspired him to find an alternative. He croaked, "Can you swim in quicksand?"
   The Giant stared at him as if he had said something incomprehensible.
   "The mud pits! We can hide in one of them-until the fire passes. If you can keep us from drowning."
   Still Foamfollower stared. Covenant feared that the Giant was too far gone in rage to understand what he said. But a moment later Foamfollower took hold of himself. With a sharp convulsion of will, he mastered his desire to fight. "Yes!" he snapped. "Come!" At once, he scuttled away toward the fire.
   They raced to find a pool of the bubbling clay near the fire before the hunters caught up with them. Covenant feared that they would be too late; even through the wild roar of the fire, he could hear his pursuers howling.
   But the blaze moved with frightful rapidity. While the creatures were still several hundred yards distant, he slapped into the heat of the flames and veered aside, searching for one of the pits.
   He could not find one. The rush of heat stung his eyes, half blinded him. He was too close to the fire. It chewed its way through the tree tops toward him like a world-devouring beast. He called to Foamfollower, but his voice made no sound amid the tumult of the blaze.
   The Giant caught his arm, snatched him up. Running crouched like a cripple, he headed toward a pool directly under the wall of flame. The twigs and thorns nearest the pit were already bursting into hot orange flower as if they had been brought back to life by fire.
   Foamfollower leaped into the mud.
   His impetus carried them in over their heads, but with the prodigious strength of his legs he thrust them to the surface again. The mounting heat seemed to scorch their faces instantly. But Covenant was more afraid of the mud. He thrashed frantically for a moment, then remembered that the swiftest way to die in quicksand was to struggle. Straining against his instinctive panic, he forced himself limp. At his back, he felt Foamfollower do the same. Only their heads protruded from the mud.
   They did not sink. The fire swept over them while they floated, and long moments of pain seared Covenant's face as he hung in the wet clay, hardly daring to breathe. His intense helplessness seemed to increase as the fire passed.
   When the flames were gone, he and Foamfollower would be left floating in mire to defend themselves as best they could against three wedges of ur-viles without so much as moving their arms.
   He tried to draw a large enough breath to shout to Foamfollower. But while he was still inhaling, hands deep in the mud pit caught his ankles and pulled him down.

Eighteen: The Corrupt


   He struggled desperately, trying to regain the surface. But the mud clogged his movements, sucked at his every effort, and the hands on his ankles tugged him downward swiftly. He grappled toward Foamfollower, but found nothing. Already, he felt he was far beneath the surface of the pit.
   He held his breath grimly. His obdurate instinct for survival made him keep on fighting though he knew that he could never float to the surface from this cold depth. Straining against the mud, he bent, worked his hands down his legs in an effort to reach the fingers which held him. But he could not find them. They pulled him downward-he felt their wet clench on his ankles-but his own hands passed through where those hands should have been, must have been.
   In his extremity, he seemed to feel the white gold pulsing for an instant. But the pulse gave him no sensation of power, and it disappeared as soon as he reached toward it with his mind.
   The air in his lungs began to fail. Red veins of light intaglioed the insides of his eyelids. He began to cry wildly, Not like this! Not like this!
   The next moment, he felt that he had changed directions. While his lungs wailed, the hands pulled him horizontally, then began to take him upward. With a damp sucking noise, they heaved him out of the mud into dank, black air.
   He snatched at the air in shuddering gasps. It was stale and noisome, like the air in a wet crypt, but it was life, and he gulped it greedily. For a long moment, the red blazonry in his brain blinded him to the darkness. But as his respiration subsided into dull panting, he squeezed his eyes free of mud and blinked them open, tried to see where he was.
   The blackness around him was complete.
   He was lying on moist clay. When he moved, his left shoulder touched a muddy wall. He got to his knees and reached up over his head; an arm's length above him, he found the ceiling. He seemed to be against one wall of a buried chamber in the clay.
   A damp voice near his ear said, "He cannot see." It sounded small and frightened, but the surprise of it startled him, made him jerk away and slip panting against the wall.
   "That is well," another timorous voice responded. "He might harm
   us."
   "It is not well. Provide light for him." This voice seemed more resolute, but it still quavered anxiously.
   "No! No, no." Covenant could distinguish eight or ten speakers protesting.
   The sterner voice insisted. "If we did not intend to aid him, we should not have saved him."
   "He may harm us!"
   "It is not too late. Drown him."
   "No." The sterner voice stiffened. "We chose this risk."
   "Oh! If the Maker learns-!"
   "We chose, I say! To save and then slay-that would surely be Maker-work. Better that he should harm us. I will"-the voice hesitated fearfully-"I will provide light myself if I must."
   "Stand ready!" speakers chorused, spreading an alarm against Covenant.
   A moment later, he heard an odd slippery noise like the sound of a stick being thrust through mud. A dim red glow the color of rocklight opened in the darkness a few feet from his face.
   The light came from a grotesque figure of mud standing on the floor of the chamber. It was about two feet tall, and it faced him like a clay statue formed by the unadept hands of a child. He could discern awkward limbs, vague misshapen features, but no eyes, ears, mouth, nose. Reddish pockets of mud in its brown form shone dully, giving off a scanty illumination.
   He found that he was in the end of a tunnel. Near him was a wide pit of bubbling mud, and beyond it the walls, floor, and ceiling came together, sealing the space. But in the opposite direction the tunnel stretched away darkly.
   There, at the limit of the light, stood a dozen or more short clay forms like the one in front of him.
   They did not move, made no sound. They looked inanimate, as if they had been left behind by whatever creature had formed the tunnel. But the tunnel contained no one or nothing else that might have spoken. Covenant gaped at the gnarled shapes, and tried to think of something to say.
   Abruptly, the mud pit began to seethe. Directly in front of Covenant, several more clay forms hopped suddenly out of the mire, dragging two huge feet with them. The glowing shape quickly retreated down the tunnel to make room for them. In an instant, they had heaved Foamfollower out onto the floor of the tunnel and had backed away from him to join the forms which stood watching Covenant.
   Foamfollower's Giantish lungs had sustained him; he needed no time at all to recover. He flung himself around in the constricted space and lurched snarling toward the clay forms with rage in his eyes and one heavy fist upraised.
   At once, the sole light went out. Amid shrill cries of fear, the mud creatures scudded away down the tunnel.
   "Foamfollower!" Covenant shouted urgently. "They saved us!"
   He heard the Giant come to a stop, heard him panting hoarsely. "Foamfollower," he repeated. "Giant!"
   Foamfollower breathed deeply for a moment, then said, "My friend?" In the darkness, his voice sounded cramped, too full of suppressed emotions. "Are you well?"
   "Well?" Covenant felt momentarily unbalanced on the brink of hysteria. But he steadied himself. "They didn't hurt me. Foamfollower-I think they saved us."
   The Giant panted a while longer, regaining his self-command. "Yes," he groaned. "Yes. Now I have taught them to fear us." Then, projecting his voice down the tunnel, he said, "Please pardon me. You have indeed saved us. I have little restraint-yes, I am quick to anger, too quick. Yet without purposing to do so you wrung my heart. You took my friend and left me. I feared him dead-despair came upon me. Bannor of the Bloodguard told us to look for help wherever we went. Fool that I was, I did not look for it so near to Soulcrusher's demesne. When you took me also, I had no thought left but fury. I crave your pardon."
   Empty silence answered him out of the darkness.
   "Ah, hear me!" he called intently. "You have saved us from the hands of the Despiser. Do not abandon us now."
   The silence stretched, then broke. "Despair is Maker-work," a voice said. "It was not our intent."
   "Do not trust them!" other voices cried. "They are hard."
   But the shuffling noise of feet came back toward Covenant and Foamfollower, and several of the clay forms lit themselves as they moved, so that the tunnel was filled with light. The creatures advanced cautiously, stopped well beyond the Giant's reach. "We also ask your pardon," said the leader as firmly as it could.
   " Ah, you need not ask," Foamfollower replied. " It may be that I am slow to recognize my friends-but when I have recognized them, they have no cause to fear me. I am Saltheart Foamfollower, the"-he swallowed as if the words threatened to choke him-"the last of the Seareach Giants. My friend is Thomas Covenant, ur-Lord and bearer of the white gold."
   "We know," the leader said. "We have heard. We are the jheher-rin-the aussat jheherrin Befylam. The Maker-place has no secret that the jheherrin have not heard. You were spoken of. Plans were made against you. The jheherrin debated and chose to aid you."
   "If the Maker learns," a voice behind the leader quavered, "we are doomed."
   "That is true. If he guesses at our aid, he will no longer suffer us. We fear for our lives. But you are his enemies. And the legends say-"
   Abruptly, the leader stopped, turned to confer with the other jheherrin. Covenant watched in fascination as they whispered together. From a distance, they all looked alike, but closer inspection revealed that they were as different as the clay work of different children. They varied in size, shape, hue, timidity, tone of voice. Yet they shared an odd appearance of unsolidity. They bulged and squished when they moved as if they were only held together by a fragile skin of surface tension-as if any jar or blow might reduce them to amorphous wet mud.
   After a short conference, the leader returned. Its voice quivered as if it were afraid of its own audacity as it said, "Why have you come? You dare- What is your purpose?"
   Foamfollower answered grimly, so that the jheherrin would believe him, "It is our purpose to destroy Lord Foul the Despiser."
   Covenant winced at the bald statement. But he could not deny it. How else could he describe what he meant to do?
   The jheherrin conferred again, then announced rapidly, anxiously, "It cannot be done. Come with us."
   The suddenness of this made it sound like a command, though the leader's voice was too tremulous to carry much authority. Covenant felt impelled to protest, not because he had any objection to following the jheherrin, but because he wanted to know why they considered his task impossible. But they forestalled him by the celerity of their withdrawal; before he could frame a question, half the lights were gone and the rest were going.
   Foamfollower shrugged and motioned Covenant ahead of him down the tunnel. Covenant nodded. With a groan of weariness, he began to crouch along behind the jheherrin.
   They moved with unexpected speed. Bulging and oozing at every step, they half trotted and half poured their way down the tunnel. Covenant could not keep up with them. In his cramped crouch, his lungs ached on the stale air, and his feet slipped erratically in the slimy mud. Foamfollower's pace was even slower; the low ceiling forced him to crawl. But some of the jheherrln stayed behind with them, guiding them past the bends and intersections of the passage. And before long the tunnel began to grow larger. As the number and complexity of the junctions increased, the ceiling rose. Soon Covenant was able to stand erect, and Foamfollower could move at a crouch. Then they traveled more swiftly.
   Their journey went on for a long time. Through intricate clusters of intersections where tunnels honeycombed the earth, and the travelers caught glimpses of other creatures, all hastening the same way, through mud so wet and thick that Covenant could barely wade it and shiny coal-lodes reflecting the rocklight of the jheherrin garishly, they tramped for leagues with all the speed Covenant could muster. But that speed was not great, and it became steadily less as the leagues passed. He had been two days without food and closer to ten without adequate rest. The caked mud throbbed like fever on his forehead. And the numbness in his hands and feet-a lack of sensation which had nothing to do with the cold-was spreading.
   Yet he trudged on. He was not afraid that he would cripple himself; in his weariness, that perpetual leper's dread had lost its power over him. Feet, head, hunger-the conditions for his return to his own world were being met. It was not the fear of leprosy which drove him. He had other motivations.
   The conditions of the trek gradually improved. Rock replaced the mud of the tunnel; the air grew slowly lighter, cleaner; the temperature moderated. Such things helped Covenant keep going. And whenever he faltered, Foamfollower's concern and encouragement steadied him. League after league, he went on as if he were trying to erase the troublesome numbness of his feet on the bare rock.
   At last he lapsed into somnolence. He took no more notice of his surroundings or his guides or his exhaustion. He did not feel the hand Foamfollower placed on his shoulder from time to time to direct him. When he found himself unexpectedly stationary in a large, rocklit cavern full of milling creatures, he stared at it dumbly as if he could not imagine how he had arrived there.
   Most of the creatures stayed a safe distance from him and Foamfollower, but a few dragged themselves forward, carrying clay bowls of water and food. As they approached, they oozed with instinctive fear. Nevertheless, they came close enough to offer the bowls.
   Covenant reached out to accept, but the Giant stopped him.
   "Ah, jheherrin," Foamfollower said in a formal tone, "your hospitality honors us. If we could, we would return honor to you by accepting. But we are not like you-our lives are unalike. Your food would do us harm rather than help."
   This speech roused Covenant somewhat. He made himself look into the bowls and found that Foamfollower was right. The food had the appearance of liquefied marl, and it reeked of old rot, as if dead flesh had moldered in it for centuries.
   But the water was fresh and pure. Foamfollower accepted it with a bow of thanks, drank deeply, then handed it to Covenant.
   For the first time, Covenant realized that Foamfollower's sack had been lost in the thorn wastes.
   The rush of cold water into his emptiness helped him shake off more of his somnolence. He drank the bowl dry, savoring the purity of the water as if he believed he would never taste anything clean again. When he returned it to the waiting, trembling jheherrin, he did his best to match Foamfollower's bow.
   Then he began to take stock of his situation. The cavern already held several hundred creatures, and more were arriving constantly. Like the jheherrin who had rescued him, they all appeared to be made of animated mud. They were grotesquely formed, like monsters ridiculed for their monstrosity; they lacked any sense organs that Covenant could recognize. Yet he was vaguely surprised to see that they came in several different types. In addition to the short erect forms he had first seen, there were two or three distinct beast-shapes, which looked like miserably failed attempts to mold horses, wolves, Cavewights in mud, and one oddly serpentine group of belly crawlers.
   "Foamfollower?" he murmured. A painful intuition twisted in him. "What are they?"
   "They name themselves in the tongue of the Old Lords," Foamfollower replied carefully, as if he were skirting something dangerous, "according to their shapes. Those who rescued us are the aussat Befylam of the jheherrin. Other Befylam you see-the fael Befylam"-he pointed to the crawlers-"and the roge"-he indicated the Cave wight-like creatures. "I have heard portions of their talk as we marched," he explained. But he did not continue.
   Covenant felt nauseated by the thrust of his guess. He insisted, "What are they?"
   Under the mud which darkened his face, Foamfollower's jaw muscles knotted. His voice quivered slightly as he said, "Ask them. Let them speak of it if they will." He stared around the cavern, did not meet Covenant's gaze.
   "We will speak," a cold, dusky voice said. One of the fael jheherrin Befylam crawled a short distance toward them. It slopped wetly over the rock as it moved, and when it halted, it lay panting and gasping like a landed fish. Resolution and fear opposed each other in every heave of its length. But Covenant was not repelled. He felt wrung with pity for all the jheherrin. "We will speak," the crawler repeated. "You are hard-you threaten us all."
   "They will destroy us," a host of voices whimpered.
   "But we have chosen to aid."
   "The choice was not unopposed!" voices cried.
   "We have chosen. You are-the legend says-" It faltered in confusion. "We accept this risk.'' Then a wave of misery filled its voice. "We beg you-do not turn against us."
   Evenly, firmly, Foamfollower said, "We will never willingly harm the jheherrin."'
   A silence like disbelief answered him from every part of the cavern. But then a few voices said in a tone of weary self-abandonment, "Speak, then. We have chosen."
   The crawler steadied itself. "We will speak. We have chosen. White gold human, you ask what we are. We are the jheherrin-the soft ones- Maker-work." As it spoke, the rocklight pulsed in the air like sorrow.
   ' "The Maker labors deep in the fastness of his home, breeding armies. He takes living flesh as you know living flesh, and works his power upon it, shaping power and malice to serve his own. But his work does not always grow to his desires. At times the result is weakness rather than strength. At times his making is blind-or crippled-or stillborn. Such spawn he casts into a vast quagmire of fiery mud to be consumed."
   A vibration of remembered terror filled the cavern.
   "But there is another potency in that abysm. We are not slain. In agony we become the jheherrin-the soft ones. We are transformed. From the depths of the pit we crawl."
   "We crawl," voices echoed.
   "In lightless combs lost even to the memory of the Maker-"
   "Lost."
   "-we supplicate our lives."
   "Lives."
   "From the mud of the thorn wastes to the very walls of the Maker-place, we wander in soil and fear, searching-"
   "Searching."
   "-listening-"
   "Listening."
   "-waiting."
   "Waiting."
   "The surface of the Earth is denied to us. We would perish in dust if the light of the sun were to touch us. And we cannot delve-we cannot make new tunnels to lead us from this place. We are soft."
   "Lost."
   "And we dare not offend the Maker. We live in sufferance-he smiles upon our abjection."
   "Lost."
   "Yet we retain the shapes of what we were. We are"-the voice shuddered as if it feared it would be stricken for its audacity-"not servants of the Maker."
   Hundreds of the jheherrin gasped in trepidation.
   "Many of our combs border the passages of the Maker. We search the walls and listen. We hear-the Maker has no secret. We heard his enmity against you, his intent against you. In the name of the legend, we debated and chose. Any aid that could be concealed from the Maker, we choose to give."
   As the crawler finished, all the jheherrin fell silent, and watched Covenant while he groped for a response. Part of him wanted to weep, to throw his arms around the monstrous creatures and weep. But his purpose was rigid within him. He felt that he could not bend to gentleness without breaking. To destroy Lord Foul, he grated silently. Yes! "But you," he responded harshly, "they said it's impossible. Cannot be done."
   "Cannot," the crawler trembled. "The passages of the Maker under Kurash Qwellinir are guarded. Kurash Qwellinir itself is a maze. The fires of Gorak Krembal ward the Maker-place. His halls swarm with malice and servants. We have heard. The Maker has no secret."
   "Yet you aided us." The Giant's tone was thoughtful. "You have dared the Maker's rage. You did not do this for any small reason."
   "That is true." The speaker seemed afraid of what Foamfollower might say next.
   "Surely there are other aids which you can give."
   "Yes-yes. Of Gorak Krembal we do not speak-there is nothing. But we know the ways of Kurash Qwellinir. And-and in the Maker-place also-there is something. But-" The speaker faltered, fell silent.
   "But," Foamfollower said steadily, "such aid is not the reason for the aid you have already given. I am not deaf or blind, jheherrin. Some other cause has led you to this peril."
   "The legend-" gulped the speaker, then slithered away to confer with the creatures behind it. An intensely whispered argument followed, during which Covenant tried to calm his sense of impending crisis. For some obscure reason, he hoped that the creatures would refuse to speak of their legend. But when the crawler returned to them, Foamfollower said deliberately, "Tell us."
   A silence of dread echoed in the cavern, and when the speaker replied fearfully, "We will," a chorus of shrieks pierced the air. Several score of the jheherrin fled, unable to bear the risk. "We must. There is no other way."
   The crawler approached a few feet, then slumped wetly on the floor, gasping as if it could not breathe. But after a moment, it lifted up its quavering voice and began to sing. The song was in an alien tongue that Covenant did not comprehend, and its pitches were made so uncertain by fear that he could not discern the melody. Yet-more in the way the jheherrin listened than in the song itself-he sensed something of its potency, its attractiveness for the creatures. Without understanding anything about it, he was moved.
   It was a short song, as if long ages of grim or abject use had reduced it to its barest bones. When it was done, the speaker said weakly, "The legend. The one hope of the jheherrin-the sole part of our lives that is not Maker-work, the sole purpose. It tells that the distant forebearers of the jheherrin, the un-Maker-made, were themselves Makers. But they were not seedless as he is-as we are. They were not driven to breed upon the flesh of others. From their bodies came forth young who grew and in turn made young. Thus the world was constantly renewed, in firmness and replenishment. Such things cannot be imagined.
   "But the Makers were flawed. Some were weak, some blind, others incautious. Among them the Maker was born, seedless and bitter, and they did not see or fear what they had done. Thus they fell into his power. He captured them and took them to the deep fastnesses of his home, and used them to begin the work of forming armies.
   "We are the last vestige of these flawed un-Maker-made. Their last life is preserved in us. In punishment for their flaws, we are doomed to crawl the combs in misery and watchfulness and eternal fear. Mud is our sun and blood and being, our flesh and home. Fear is our heritage, for the Maker could bring us to an end with one word, living as we do in the very shadow of his home. But we are watchful in the name of our one hope. For it is said that some un-Maker-made are still free of the Maker-that they still bring forth young from their bodies. It is said that when the time is ready, a young will be birthed without flaw-a pure offspring impervious to the Maker and his making-unafraid. It is said that this pure one will come bearing tokens of power to the Maker's home. It is said that he will redeem the jheherrin if they prove-if he finds them worthy-that he will win from the Maker their release from fear and mud-if-if-'' The crawler could not go on. Its voice stumbled into silence, left the cavern aching for a reply to fill the void of its misery.
   But Covenant could not bend without breaking. He felt all the attention of the jheherrin focused on him. He could feel them voicelessly asking him, imploring, Are you the pure one? If we help you, will you free us? But he could not give them the answer they wanted. Their living death deserved the truth from him, not a false hope.
   Deliberately, he sacrificed their help. His voice was harsh; he sounded angry as he said, "Look at me. You know the answer. Under all this mud, I'm sick-diseased. And I've done things- I'm not pure. I'm corrupt."
   One last pulse of silence met his denial-one still moment while the intent, tremulous hope around him shattered. Then a shrill wail of despair tore through the multitude of the jheherrin. All the light vanished at once. Shrieking in darkness like desolated ghouls, the creatures ran.
   Foamfollower caught hold of Covenant to protect him against an attack. But the jheherrin did not attack; they fled. The sound of their movement rushed through the cavern like a loud wind of loss, and died away. Soon the silence returned, fell limp at the feet of Covenant and Foamfollower like empty cerements, the remains of a violated grave.
   Covenant's chest shook with dry spasms like sobs, but he clenched himself into union with the silence. He could not bend; he would break if the rictus of his determination were forced to bend. Foul! he jerked. Foul! You're too cruel.
   He felt the attempted consolation of the Giant's hand on his shoulder. He wanted to respond, wanted to utter in some way the violence of his resolve. But before he could speak, the silence seemed to flow and concentrate itself into the sound of soft weeping.
   The sound grew on him as he listened. Forlorn and miserable, it rose up into the darkness like irremediable grief, made the hollow air throb. He yearned to go to the weeper, yearned to comfort it in some way. But when he moved, it found words to halt him, desolate accusation. "Despair is Maker-work."
   "Forgive me," Covenant groaned. "How could I lie to you?" He searched for the right reply, then said on intuition, "But the legend hasn't changed. I haven't touched the legend. I don't deny your worth. You are worthy. I'm just-not the pure one. He hasn't come yet. I don't have anything to do with your hope."
   The weeper did not answer. Its sobs ached on in the air; having started, its old unanodyned misery could not stop. But after a moment it brought up a glimmer of rocklight. Covenant saw that it was the crawler who had spoken for the jheherrin.
   "Come," it wept. "Come." Shaking with sorrow, it turned and crept out of the cavern.
   Covenant and the Giant followed without hesitation. In the presence of the creature's grief, they silently accepted whatever it intended for them.
   It led them back into the combs-away from their earlier route, upward through a complex chain of tunnels. Soon the rock walls had become cold again, and the air began to smell faintly of brimstone. A short time later-little more than half a league from the cavern-their guide halted.
   They kept themselves a respectful distance from the creature and waited while it tried to control its sobs. Its dim, rocklit struggle was painful to watch, but they contained their own emotions, waited. Covenant was prepared to allow the creature any amount of time. Patience seemed to be the only thing he could offer the jheherrin.
   It did not keep them waiting long. Forcing down its grief, it said thickly, "This tunnel-it ends in Kurash Qwellinir. At every turn choose-the way toward the fire. You must pass a passage of the Maker. It will be guarded. Beyond it take each turn away from the fire. You will find Gorak Krembal. You cannot cross-you must cross it. Beyond it is the rock of the Maker-place.
   "Its mouth is guarded, but has no gate. Within it swarms- But there are secret ways-the Maker has secret ways, which his servants do not use. Within the mouth is a door. You cannot see it. You must find it. Press once upon the center of the lintel. You will find many ways and hiding places.''
   The crawler turned and began to shuffle back down the tunnel. Its light flickered and went out, leaving Covenant and Foamfollower in darkness. Out of the distance of the hollow comb, the creature moaned, "Try to believe that you are pure.'' Then the sound of its grief faded, and it was gone.
   After a long moment of silence, Foamfollower touched Covenant's shoulder. "My friend-did you hear it well? It has given us precious aid. Do you remember all it said?"
   Covenant heard something final in the Giant's tone. But he was too preoccupied with the bitter rictus of his own intent to ask what that tone signified. "You remember it," he breathed stiffly. "I'm counting on you. You just get me there."
   "My friend-Unbeliever," the Giant began dimly, then stopped, let drop whatever he had been about to say. "Come, then." He steered Covenant by the shoulder. "We will do what we can."
   They climbed on up the tunnel. It made two sharp turns and began to ascend steeply, narrowing as it rose. Soon Covenant was forced to his hands and knees by the angle of the cold stone slope. With Foamfollower breathing close behind him, helping him with an occasional shove, he pulled and scraped upward, kept on scrambling while the rock grew more and more constricted.
   Then the tunnel ended in a blank wall. Covenant searched around with his numb hands. He found no openings-but he could not touch the ceiling. When he looked upward, he saw a faint window of red light out of reach above his head.
   By pressing against each other, he and Foamfollower were able to stand in the end of the tunnel. The dim opening was within the stretch of Foamfollower's arms. Carefully, he lifted Covenant, boosted him through the window.
   Covenant climbed into a vertical slit in the rock. Crawling along its floor, he went forward and looked out around its edges into what appeared to be a short, roofless corridor. Its walls were sheer stone, scores of feet high. It looked as if it had been rough-adzed out of raw, black, igneous rock-a passage leading senselessly from one blank wall to another. But as his eyes adjusted to the light, he discerned intersections at both ends of the corridor.
   The light came from the night sky. Along one rim of the walls was a dull red glow-the shine of a fire in the distance. The air was acrid and sulfurous; if it had not been cold, Covenant would have guessed that he was already near Hotash Slay.
   When he was sure that the corridor was empty, he called softly to Foamfollower. With a leap, the Giant thrust his head and shoulders through the opening into the slit, then squirmed up the rest of the way. In a moment, he was at Covenant's side.
   "This is Kurash Qwellinir," he whispered as he looked around, "the Shattered Hills. If I have not lost all my reckoning, we are far from the passage which Bannor taught us. Without the aid of the jheherrin, we would be hard pressed to find our way.'' Then he motioned for Covenant to follow him. "Stay at my back. If we are discovered, I must know where you are."
   Gliding forward as smoothly as if he were rested and eager for stealth, he started toward the fiery glow, and Covenant limped along behind him on bare numb feet. Near the end of the corridor, they pressed themselves cautiously against one wall. Covenant held his breath while Foamfollower peered around the corner. An instant later, the Giant signaled. They both hurried into the next passage, taking the turn toward the red sky-shine.
   This second corridor was longer than the first. The ones beyond it were crooked, curved; they reversed directions, twisted back on themselves, writhed their way through the black, rough rock like tormented snakes. Covenant soon lost all sense of progress. Without the instructions of the jheherrin, he would have attempted to recover lost ground, correct apparent errors. Once again, he realized how much his survival had from the beginning depended on other people. Atiaran, Elena, Lena, Banner, Triock, Mhoram, the jheherrin-he would have arrived nowhere, done nothing, without them. In return for his brutality, his raging and incondign improvidence, they had kept him alive, given him purpose. And now he was wholly dependent upon Saltheart Foamfollower.
   It was not a good omen for a leper.
   He trudged on under the aegis of dolorous portents. His wound felt like a weight under which he could no longer lift up his head; the brimstone air seemed to sap the strength from his lungs. In time he began to feel numb and affectless, as if he were wandering in confusion.
   Yet he noticed the increase of light near a sharp turn in one corridor. The brightening was brief-it opened and shut like a door-but it plunged him into alertness. He dogged the Giant's feet like a shadow as they approached the corner.
   They heard guttural voices from beyond the turn. Covenant flinched at the thought of pursuit, then steadied himself. The voices lacked the urgency or stealth of hunting.
   Foamfollower put his head to the corner, and Covenant crouched under him to look as well.
   Beyond it, the corridor opened into a wide area faintly lit by two small stones of rocklight, one near each entrance to the open space. Against the far wall midway between the two stones stood a dark band of half-human creatures. Covenant counted ten of them. They held spears and stood in relaxed or weary postures, talking to each other in low rough voices. Then five of them turned to the wall behind them. A section of the stone opened, letting out a stream of red light. Covenant glimpsed a deep tunnel behind the opening. The five creatures passed through the entrance and closed the stone behind them. The door closed so snugly that no crack or gleam of light revealed the tunnel's existence.
   "Changing the watch," Foamfollower breathed. "We are fortunate that the light warned us."
   With the door closed, the guards placed themselves against the darkness of the wall where they were nearly invisible, and fell silent.
   Covenant and Foamfollower backed a short distance away from the corner. Covenant felt torn; he could not think of any way past the guards, yet in his fatigue he dreaded the prospect of hunting through the maze for another passage. But Foamfollower showed no hesitation. He put his mouth to Covenant's ear and whispered grimly, "Stay hidden. When I call, cross this open space and turn away from Hotash Slay. Wait for me beyond one turn."
   Trepidation beat in Covenant's head.  "What are you going to
   do?"
   The Giant grinned. But his mud-dark face held no humor, and his eyes glinted hungrily. "I think I will strike a blow or two against these Maker-work creatures." Before Covenant could respond, he returned to the corner.
   With both hands, Foamfollower searched the wall until he found a protruding lump of stone. His great muscles strained momentarily, and the lump came loose in his hands.
   He sighted for an instant past the turn, then lofted the stone. It landed with a loud clatter in the far corridor.
   One guard snapped a command to the others. Gripping their spears, they started toward the noise.
   Foamfollower gave them a moment in which to move. Then he launched himself at them.
   Covenant jumped to the corner, saw Foamfollower charge the guards. They were looking the other way. Foamfollower's long legs crossed the distance in half a dozen silent strides. They only caught a glimpse of him before he fell on them like the side of a mountain.
   They were large, powerful fighters. But he was a Giant. He dwarfed them. And he took them by surprise. One blow, two, three-in instant succession, he crushed three of them, skull or chest, and sprang at the fourth.
   The creature dodged backward, tried to use its spear. Foamfollower tore the spear from its hands and broke the guard's head with one slap of the shaft.
   But that took an instant too long; it allowed the fifth guard to reach the entrance of the tunnel. The door sprang open. Light flared. The guard disappeared down the bright stone throat.
   Foamfollower wheeled to the opening. In his right hand, he balanced the spear. It looked hardly larger than an arrow in his fist, but he cocked it over his shoulder like a javelin, and flung it at the fleeing guard.
   A strangled shout of pain echoed from the tunnel.
   The Giant whirled toward Covenant. "Now!" he barked. "Run!"
   Covenant started forward, impelled by the Giant's urgency; but he could not run, could not force his limbs to move that fast. His friend transfixed him. Foamfollower stood in the vivid rocklight with blood on his hands, and he was grinning. Savage delight corrupted his bluff features; glee flashed redly from the caves of his eyes.
   "Foamfollower?" Covenant whispered as if the name hurt his throat. "Giant?"
   "Go!" the Giant shouted, then turned back to the tunnel. With one sweep of his arm, he slammed the stone door shut.
   Covenant stood blinking in the relative darkness and watched as Foamfollower snatched up the three remaining spears, took them to the doorway, then broke them in pieces and jammed the pieces into the cracks of the door to wedge it shut.
   When he was done, he started away from the wall. Only then did he realize that Covenant had not obeyed him. At once, he pounced on the Unbeliever, caught him by the arm. "Fool!" he snapped, swinging Covenant toward the far passage. "Do you mock me?" But his hand was slick with blood. He lost his hold, accidentally sent Covenant reeling to jolt heavily against the stone.
   Covenant slumped down the wall, gasping to regain his breath. "Foamfollower-what's happened to you?"
   Foamfollower reached him, gripped his shoulders, shook him. "Do not mock me. I do such things for you!"
   "Don't do them for me," Covenant protested. "You're not doing them for me."
   With a snarl, the Giant picked up Covenant. "You are a fool if you believe we can survive in any other way." Carrying the Unbeliever under his arm like an obdurate child, he loped into the maze toward Hotash Slay.
   Now he turned away from the fiery sky-glow at every intersection. Covenant flopped in his grasp, demanding to be put down; but Foamfollower did not accede until he had put three turns and as many switchbacks behind him. Then he stopped and set Covenant on his feet.
   Covenant staggered, regained his balance. He wanted to shout at the Giant, rage at him, demand explanations. But no words came. In spite of himself, he understood Saltheart Foamfollower. The last of the Unhomed had struck blows which could not be called back or stopped; Covenant could not pretend that he did not understand. Yet his heart cried out. He needed some other answer to his own extremity.
   A moment passed before he heard the sound that consumed Foamfollower' s attention. But then he caught it-a distant, reiterated boom like the impact of a battering ram on stone. He guessed what it was; the Despiser's creatures were trying to break out of their tunnel into the maze. An instant later, he heard a sharp, splintering noise and shouts.
   The Giant put a hand on his shoulder. "Come."
   Covenant broke into a run to keep pace with Foamfollower's trot. Together, they hurried through the corridors.
   They discarded all caution now, made no attempt to protect themselves from what might lie ahead. At every junction of the maze, they swung away from the mounting red glow, and in every curve and switchback of the corridors, they moved closer to the fire, deeper into the thick, acrid atmosphere of Gorak Krembal. Covenant felt heat in the air now, a dry, stifling heat like the windless scorching of a desert. As it grew, it sent rivulets of sweat running down his back. He panted hoarsely on the air, stumbled across the rough rock, kept running. At odd intervals, he could hear shouts of pursuit echoing over the walls of Kurash Qwellinir.
   Whenever he tripped, the Giant picked him up and carried him a short way. This happened more and more often. His fatigue and inanition affected him like vertigo. In his falls, he battered himself until he felt benumbed with bruises from head to foot.
   When he reached it, the change was so sudden that it almost flattened him. One moment he was lurching through a blind series of corridors, the next he was out on the shores of Hotash Slay.
   He slapped into the heat and light of the lava and stopped. The Hills ended sharply; he found himself on a beach of dead ash ten yards from a moiling red river of molten stone.
   Under the blank dome of night, Hotash Slay curved away from him out of sight on both sides. It bubbled and seethed, sent up flaring spouts of lava and brimstone into the air, swirled as if it were boiling where it stood rather than flowing. Yet it made no sound; it hit Covenant's ears silently, as if he had been stricken deaf. He felt that the flesh was being scorched from his bones, felt that he was suffocating on hot sulfur, but the lava seethed weirdly across his gaze as if it were inaudible-a nightmare manifestation, impossibly vivid and unreal.
   At first, it dominated his sight, stretched from this ashen shore to the farthest limit of any horizon. But when he blinked back the damp heat-blur from his eyes, he saw that the lava was less than fifty yards wide. Beyond 11, he could make out nothing but a narrow marge of ash. The hot red light cast everything else into darkness, made the night on the far side look as black and abysmal as the open throat of hell.
   He groaned at that prospect, at the thought of Foul's Creche standing murderous and hidden beyond this impassable fire. Here all his purpose and pain came to nothing. Hotash Slay could not be crossed. Then a burst of echoed yelps jerked him around. He expected to see creatures pouring out of the maze.
   The sound died again as the pursuit charged into less resonant corridors. But it could not be far behind them. "Foamfollower!" Covenant cried, and his voice cracked with fear despite his efforts to control it. "What do we do?"
   "Listen to me!" Foamfollower said. A fever of urgency was on him. "We must cross now-before we are seen. If you are seen-if Soulcrusher knows that you have crossed-he will hunt for you on the far side. He will capture you."
   "Cross?" Covenant gaped. "Me?"
   "If we are not seen, he will not guess what we have done. He will judge that you are elsewhere in the maze-he will hunt you there, not on the promontory of Ridjeck Thome."
   "Cross that? Are you crazy? What do you think I am?" He could not believe what he was hearing. In the past, he had assumed that he and Foamfollower would somehow get beyond Hotash Slay, but he had made that assumption because he had not visualized this moat of lava around Foul's dwelling place, had not conceived the true immensity of the obstacle. Now he saw his folly. He felt that if he went two steps closer to the lava, his skin would begin to char.
   "No," replied Foamfollower. His voice was full of fatality. "I have striven to prepare myself. It may be that in doing this I will anneal the long harm of my life before I die. My friend, I will bear you across."
   At once, he lifted Covenant into the air, placed him sitting upon his broad shoulders.
   "Put me down!" Covenant protested. "What the hell are you doing?"
   The Giant swung around to face the fiery liquefaction of the stone. "Do not breathe!" he barked fiercely. "My strength will help you to endure the heat, but it will sear your lungs if you breathe!"
   "Damnation, Giant! Put me down! You're going to kill us!"
   "I am the last of the Giants," Foamfollower grated. "I will give my life as I choose."
   Before Covenant could say another word, Foamfollower sprinted down the ashen beach toward the lava of Hotash Slay.
   From the last edge of the shore, he leaped mightily out over the molten stone. As his feet touched the lava, he began to run with all his great Giantish strength toward the far shore.
   The swift blast of heat almost snuffed out Covenant's consciousness. He heard a distant wailing, but moments passed before he realized that it came from his throat. The fire blinded him, wiped everything but red violence out of his sight. It tore at him as if it were flailing the flesh from his bones.
   But it did not kill him. Endurance flowed into him from the Giant. And his ring ached on his half hand as if it were absorbing his torment, easing the strain on his flesh.
   He could feel Foamfollower sinking under him. The lava was thicker than mud or quicksand, but with each stride the Giant fell deeper into it. By the time his long surging strides had covered half the distance, he was in over his thighs. Yet he did not falter. Agony shot up through his shoulders at Covenant. Still he thrust himself forward, stretching every sinew past all limits in his effort to reach the far bank.
   Covenant stopped wailing to hold his breath, though Foamfollower's pain seemed to burn him worse than the heat of the lava. He tried to grasp the white gold with his mind, pull strength from it to aid the Giant. But he could not tell whether or not he succeeded. The red fire blinded his perceptions. In another two strides, Foamfollower had sunk to his waist. He gripped Covenant's ankles, boosted him up so that the Unbeliever was standing on his shoulders. Covenant wavered on that heaving perch, but Foamfollower's hold on his ankles was as strong as iron, kept him erect.
   Two more strides-the lava reached Foamfollower's chest. He mastered his pain for one instant to gasp out over the silent fire, "Remember the jheherrin!" Then he began to howl, driven beyond his endurance by red molten agony.
   Covenant could see nothing, did not know how far they had come. Reeling over the lava, he held his breath, kept himself from joining Foamfollower's terrible scream. The Giant went on, propelled himself with his tortured legs as if he were treading water.
   But finally he floundered to a stop. The weight and pain of the lava halted him. He could not wade any farther.
   With one last, horrific exertion, he thrust himself upward, reared back, concentrated all his strength in his shoulders. Heaving so hard that he seemed to tear his arms from their sockets, he hurled Covenant toward the bank.
   Covenant arched through the blazing light for an instant, clenched himself against the sudden pain of incineration.
   He landed on dead cinders five feet from the edge of Hotash Slay. The ashes crunched under him, gave slightly, absorbed some of the impact. Gasping for breath, he rolled, staggered to his knees. He could not see; he was blind with tears. He gouged water out of his eyes with numb fingers, blinked furiously, forced his vision into focus.
   Ten or more yards out in the lava, he saw one of Foamfollower's hands still above the surface. It clenched uselessly for a moment, trying to find a grip on the brimstone air. Then it followed the Giant into the molten depths.
   Foamfollower! Covenant cried soundlessly. He could not find enough air to scream aloud. Foamfollower!
   The heat beat back at him furiously. And through the pounding blaze came dim shouts-the approaching clamor of pursuit.
   Before we are seen, Covenant remembered dumbly. Foamfollower had done this for him so that he would not be seen-so that Foul would not know that he had crossed Hotash Slay. He wanted to kneel where he was until he dissolved in heat and grief, but he stumbled to his feet.
   Foamfollower! My friend!
   Lumbering stiffly, he turned his back on the lava as if it were the grave of all his victims, and moved away into darkness.
   After a short distance, he crossed a low, barren ridge, fell into the shallow gully beyond it. At once, a landfall of weariness buried him, and he abandoned himself to sleep. For a long time, he lay in his own night, dreaming of impossible sunlight.

Nineteen: Ridjeck Thome


   He awoke with the acrid taste of brimstone in his mouth, and ashes in his heart. At first, he could not remember where he was; he could not identify the ruined ground on which he lay, or the rasp of sulfur in his throat, or the sunless sky; he could not recollect the cause of his loneliness. How could anyone be so alone and still go on breathing? But after a time he began to notice a smell of sweat and disease under the brimstone. Sweat, he murmured. Leprosy. He remembered.
   Frailly, he levered himself into a sitting position in the gully, then leaned his back against one crumbling wall and tried to grasp his situation.
   His thoughts hung in tatters from the spars of his mind, shredded by a sale of inanition and loss. He knew that he was starving. That's right, he said to himself. That's the way it was. His feet were battered, scored with cuts, and his forehead hurt as if a spike had been driven through his skull. He nodded in recognition. That's right. That's the way it was. But his dirty skin was not burned, and his mud-stained robe showed no signs of heat damage. For a while, he sat without moving, arid tried to understand why he was still alive.
   Foamfollower must have saved him from the heat by exerting power through him, in the same way that the Giants propelled boats by exerting power through Gildenlode rudders. He shook his head at Foamfollower's valor. He did not know how he could go on without the help of a friend.
   Yet he shed no tears over the Giant. He felt barren of tears. He was a leper and had no business with joy or grief. None, he claimed flatly. The crisis at the Colossus had taken him beyond himself, drawn responses from him which he did not properly possess. Now he felt that he had returned to his essential numbness, regained the defining touchstone of his existence. He was done pretending to be anything more than what he was.
   But his work was not done. He needed to go on, to confront the Despiser-to complete, if he could, the purpose which had brought him here. All the conditions of his release from the Land had not yet been fulfilled. For good or ill, he would have to bring Lord Foul's quest for white gold to an end.
   And he would have to do it as Bannor and Foamfollower would have done it-dispassionately and passionately, fighting and refusing to fight, both at once-because he had learned one more reason why he would have to seek out the Despiser. Surrounded in his mind by all his victims, he found that there was only one good answer still open to him.
   That answer was a victory over Despite.
   Only by defeating Lord Foul could he give meaning to all the lives which had been spent in his name, and at the same time preserve himself, the irremediable fact of who he was.
   Thomas Covenant: Unbeliever. Leper.
   Deliberately, he looked at his ring. It hung loosely on his emaciated finger-dull, argent, and intractable. He groaned, and started to wrestle himself to his feet.
   He did not know why he was still in the Land after Foamfollower's death-and did not care. Probably the explanation lay somewhere in the breaking of the Law of Death. The Despiser could do anything. Covenant was prepared to believe that in Lord Foul's demesne all the former Law of the Earth had been abrogated.
   He began to make his way up the far side of the gully. He had no preparations to make, no supplies or plans or resources to get ready-no reason why he should not simply begin his task. And the longer he delayed, the weaker he would become.
   As he neared the crest of the hill, he raised his head to look around.
   There he got his first sight of Foul's Creche.
   It stood perhaps half a league away across a cracked, bare lowland of dead soil and rock, a place which had lain wrecked and riven for so long that it had forgotten even the possibility of life. From the vantage of the hill-the last elevation between him and Foul's Creche-he could see that he was at the base of Ridjeck Thome's promontory. Several hundred yards away from him on either side, the ground fell off in sheer cliffs which drew closer to each other as they jutted outward until they met at the tip of the promontory. In the distance, he heard waves thundering against the cliffs, and far beyond the lips of the wedge he could see the dark, gray-green waters of the Sea.
   But he gave little attention to the landscape. His eyes were drawn by the magnet of the Creche itself. He had guessed from what he had heard that most of Lord Foul's home lay underground, and now he saw that this must be true. The promontory rose to a high pile of rock at its tip, and there the Creche stood. Two matched towers, as tall and slender as minarets, rose several hundred feet into the air, and between them at ground level was the dark open hole of the single entrance. Nothing else of the Despiser's abode was visible. From windows atop the towers, Lord Foul or his guards could look outward beyond the promontory, beyond Hotash Slay, beyond even the Shattered Hills, but the rest of his demesne-his breeding dens, storehouses, power works, barracks, thronehall-had to be underground, delved into the rock, accessible only through that one mouth and the tunnels hidden among Kurash Qwellinir.
   Covenant stared across the promontory; and the dark windows of the towers gaped blindly back at him like soulless eyes, hollow and abhorred. At first, he was simply transfixed by the sight, stunned to find himself so close to such a destination. But when that emotion faded, he began to wonder how he could reach the Creche without being spotted by sentries. He did not believe that the towers would be as empty as they appeared. Surely the Despiser would not leave any approach unwatched. And if he waited for dark to conceal him, he might fall off a cliff or into one of the cracks.
   He considered the problem for some time without finding any answer. But at last he decided that he would have to take his chances. They were no more impossible than they had ever been. And the ground he had to cross was blasted and rough, scarred with slag pits, ash heaps, crevices; he would be able to find cover for much of the distance.
   He began by returning to the gully and following it south until it began to veer down toward the cliff. He could hear and see the ocean clearly now, though the lava's brimstone still overwhelmed any smell of salt in the air; but he took notice of it only to avoid the danger of the cliff. From there he climbed the hill again, and peered over it to study the nearby terrain.
   To his relief, he saw more gullies. From the base of the hill, they ran like a web of erosion scars over that part of the lowland. If he could get into them without being seen, he would be safe for some distance.
   He congratulated himself grimly on the filthiness of his robe, which blended well into the ruined colors of the ground. For a moment, he gathered his courage, steadied himself. Then he sprinted, tumbled down the last slope, rolled into the nearest gully.
   It was too shallow to allow him to move erect, but by alternately crawling and crouching, he was able to work his way into the web. After that, he made better progress.
   But beyond the heat of Hotash Slay, the air turned cold and wet like an exhalation from a dank crypt; it soaked into him despite his robe, made his sweat hurt like ice on his skin, drained his scant energies. The ground was hard, and when he crawled, his knees felt muffled ill beating up through the rock. Hunger ached precipitously within him. But he drove himself onward.
   Beyond the gullies, he moved more swiftly for a time by limping between slag pits and ash heaps. But after that he came to a flat, shelterless stretch riddled with cracks and crevices. Through some he could hear the crashing of the Sea; from others came rank blasts of air, ventilation for the Creche. He had to scuttle unprotected across the flat, now running between wide gaps in the ground, now throwing himself in dizzy fear over cracks across his path. When at last he reached the foot of the rugged, upraised rock which led to the towers, he dropped into the shelter of a boulder and lay there, gasping, shivering in the damp cold, dreading the sound of guards.
   But he heard no alarms, no shout or rush of pursuit-nothing but his own hoarse respiration, the febrile pulse of his blood, the pounding of the waves. Either he had not been seen or the guards were preparing to ambush him. He mustered the vestiges of his strength and began to clamber up through the rocks.
   As he climbed, he grew faint. Weakness like vertigo filled his head made his numb hands powerless to grasp, his legs powerless to thrust. Yet he went on. Time and again, he stopped with his heart lurching because he had heard-or thought he had heard-some clink of rock or rustle of apparel which said that he was being stalked. Still he forced himself to continue. Dizzy, weak, alone, trembling, vulnerable-he was engaged in a struggle that he could understand. He had come too far for any kind of surrender.
   Now he was so high that he could seldom hide completely from the towers. But the angle was an awkward one for any guards that might have been at the windows. So as he gasped and scraped up the last ascents, he worried less about concealment. He needed all his attention, energy, just to move his hands and feet, lift his body upward, upward.
   At last he neared the top. Peering through a gap between two boulders, he caught his first close look at the mouth of Foul's Creche.
   It was smooth and symmetrical, unadorned, perfectly made. The round opening stood in a massive abutment of wrought stone-a honed and polished fortification which cupped the entrance as if it led to a sacred crypt. Its sheen echoed the clouded sky exactly, reflected the immaculate gray image of the parapets.
   One figure as tall as a Giant stood before the cave. It had three heads, three sets of eyes so that it could watch in all directions, three brawny legs forming a tripod to give it stability. Its three arms were poised in constant readiness. Each held a gleaming broadsword, each was protected with heavy leather bands. A long leather buckler girded its torso. At first, Covenant saw no movement to indicate that the figure was alive. But then it blinked, drew his attention to its fetid yellow eyes. They roamed the hilltop constantly, searching for foes. When they flicked across the gap through which he peered, he recoiled as if he had been discovered.
   But if the figure saw him, it gave no sign. After a moment, he calmed his apprehension. The warder was not placed to watch any part of the promontory except the last approaches to the cave; virtually all his trek from Hotash Slay had been out of the figure's line of sight. So he was safe where he crouched. But if he wanted to enter Foul's Creche, he would have to pass that warder.
   He had no idea how to do so. He could not fight the creature. He could not think of any way to trick it. And the longer he waited for some kind of inspiration, the larger his fear and weakness became.
   Rather than remain where he was until he paralyzed himself, he squirmed on his belly up through the boulders to the fortification on one side of the entrance. Hiding behind the parapet almost directly below and between the twin towers, he clenched himself to quiet his breathing, and tried to muster his courage for the only approach he could conceive-drop over the parapet into the entry way and try to outrun the warder. He was so close to the figure now that he felt sure it could smell his sweat, hear the reel of his dizziness and the labor of his heart.
   Yet he could not move. He felt utterly exposed to the towers, though he was out of sight of the windows; yet he could not make himself move. He was afraid. Once he showed himself-once the warder saw him- Foul's Creche would be warned. All Foamfollower's effort and sacrifice, all the aid of the jheherrin, would be undone in an instant. He would be alone against the full defenses of Ridjeck Thome.
   Damnation! he panted to himself. Come on, Covenant! You're a leper-you ought to be used to this by now.
   Foul's Creche was a big place. If he could get past the warder, he might be able to avoid capture for a while, might even be able to find the secret door of which the jheherrin had spoken. This was no greater than any other. He was trapped between mortal inadequacy and irrefusable need; he had long ago lost the capacity to count costs, measure chances.
   He braced his hands on the stone, breathed deeply for a moment.
   Before he could move, something crashed into him, slammed him down. He struggled, but a grip as hard as iron locked his arms behind his back. Weight pinned his legs. In fury and fear, he tried to yell. A hand clamped over his face.
   He was helpless. His attacker could have broken his back with one swift wrench. But the hands only held him still-asserting their mastery over him, waiting for him to relax, submit.
   With an effort, he forced his muscles to unclench.
   The hand did not uncover his mouth, but he was suddenly flipped onto his back.
   He found himself looking up into the warm, clean face of Saltheart Foamfollower.
   The Giant made a silencing gesture, then released him.
   At once, Covenant flung his arms around Foamfollower's neck, hugged him, clung to his strong neck like a child. A joy like sunrise washed the darkness out of him, lifted him up into hope as if it were the pure, clear dawn of a new day.
   Foamfollower returned the embrace for a moment, then disentangled !t and moved stealthily away. Covenant followed, though his eyes were so full of tears that he could hardly see where he was going. The Giant led him from the abutment to the far side of one of the towers. There they were hidden from the warder, and the rumble of the waves covered their voices Grinning happily, Foamfollower whispered, "Please pardon me. I hope I have not harmed you. I have been watching for you, but did not see you. When you gained the parapet, I could not call without alerting that Foul-spawn. And I feared that in your surprise, you might betray your presence."
   Covenant blinked back his tears. His voice shook with joy and relief as he said, "Pardon you? You scared me witless."
   Foamfollower chuckled softly, hardly able to contain his own pleasure. "Ah, my friend, I am greatly glad to see you once again. I feared I had lost you in Hotash Slay-feared you had been taken prisoner- feared-ah! I had a host of fears."
   "I thought you were dead.'' Covenant sobbed once, then caught hold of himself, steadied himself. Brusquely, he wiped his eyes so that he could look at the Giant.
   Foamfollower appeared beautifully healthy. He was naked-he had lost his raiment in the fires of the Slay-and from head to foot his flesh was clean and well. The former extremity of his gaze had been replaced by something haler, something serene; his eyes gleamed with laughter out of their cavernous sockets. The alabaster strength of his limbs looked as solid as marble; and except for a few recent scrapes received while scrambling from Hotash Slay to the Creche, even his old battle-scars were gone, effaced by a fire which seemed to have refined him down to the marrow of his bones. Nothing about him showed that he had been through agony.
   Yet Covenant received an impression of agony, of a transcending pain which had fundamentally altered the Giant. Somehow in Hotash Slay, Foamfollower had carried his most terrible passions through to their apocalypse.
   Covenant steadied himself with sea air, and repeated, "I thought you were dead."
   The Giant's happiness did not falter. "As did I. This outcome is an amazement to me, just as it is to you. Stone and Sea! I would have sworn that I would die. Covenant, the Despiser can never triumph entirely over a world in which such things occur."
   That's true, Covenant said to himself. In that kind of world. Aloud, he asked, "But how-how did you do it? What happened?"
   "I am not altogether certain. My friend, I think you have not forgotten the Giantish caamora, the ritual fire of grief. Giantish flesh is not harmed by ordinary fire. The pain purges, but does not burn. In that way the Unhomed from time to time found relief from the extravagance of their
   hearts.
   "In addition-it will surprise you to hear that I believe your wild magic succored me in some degree. Before I threw you from my shoulders, j felt--some power sharing strength with me, just as I shared strength with
   you."
   "Hellfire." Covenant gaped at the blind argent band on his finger.
   Hellfire and bloody damnation. Again he remembered Mhoram's assertion, You are the white gold. But still he could not grasp what the High Lord had meant.
   "And-in addition," the Giant continued, "there are mysteries alive in the Earth of which Lord Foul, Satansheart and Soulcrusher, does not dream. The Earthpower which spoke to befriend Berek Halfhand is not silent now. It speaks another tongue, perhaps-perhaps its ways have been forgotten by the people who live upon the Earth-but it is not quenched. The Earth could not exist if it did not contain good to match such banes as the lllearth Stone."
   "Maybe,'' Covenant mused. He hardly heard himself. The thought of his ring had triggered an entirely different series of ideas in him. He did not want to recognize them, hated to speak of them, but after a moment he forced himself to say, "Are you-are you sure you haven't been- resurrected-like Elena?"
   A look of laughter brightened the Giant's face. "Stone and Sea! That has the sound of the Unbeliever in it."
   "Are you sure?"
   "No, my friend," Foamfollower chuckled, "I am not sure. I neither know nor care. I am only glad that I have been given one more chance to aid you."
   Covenant consumed Foamfollower's answer, then found his response. He did his best to measure up to the Giant as he said, "Then let's do something about it while we still can."
   '' Yes.'' Gravity slowly entered Foamfollower's expression, but it did not lessen his aura of ebullience and pain. "We must. At our every delay, more lives are lost in the Land."
   "I hope you have a plan." Covenant strove to repress his anxiety. "I don't suppose that warder is just going to wave us through if we ask it nicely."
   "I have given some thought to the matter.'' Carefully, Foamfollower outlined the results of his thinking.
   Covenant considered for a moment, then said, "That's all very well. But what if they know we're coming? What if they're waiting for us-inside there?"
   The Giant shook his head, and explained that he had spent some time listening through the rock of the towers. He had heard nothing which would indicate an ambush, nothing to show that the towers were occupied at all. "Perhaps Soulcrusher truly does not believe that he can be approached in this way. Perhaps this warder is the only guard. We will soon know."
   "Yes, indeed," Covenant muttered. "Only I hate surprises. You never know when one of them is going to ruin your life."
   Grimly, Foamfollower replied, "Perhaps now we will be able to return a measure of ruin to the miner."
   Covenant nodded. "I certainly hope so."
   Together, they crept back toward the entrance, then separated. Following the Giant's instructions, Covenant worked his way down among the boulders and rubble, trying to get as close as he could to the front of the cave without being seen. He moved with extreme caution, took a circuitous route. When he was done, he was still at least forty yards from the abutment. The distance distressed him, but he could find no alternative. He was not trying to sneak past the warder; he only wanted to make it hesitate.
   Come on, Covenant, he snarled. Get on with it. This is no place for cowards.
   He took a deep breath, cursed himself once more as if this were his last chance, and stepped out of his hiding place.
   At once, he felt the warder's gaze spring at him, but he tried to ignore it, strove to pick his way up toward the cave with at least a semblance of nonchalance. Gripping his hands behind him, whistling tunelessly through his teeth, he walked forward as if he expected free admittance to Foul's Creche.
   He avoided the warder's stare. That gaze felt hot enough to lay bare his purpose, expose him for what he was. It made his skin crawl with revulsion. But as he passed from the rubble onto the polished stone apron of the entry way, he forced himself to look into the figure's face.
   Involuntarily, he faltered, stopped whistling. The yellow ill of the warder's gaze smote him with chagrin. Those eyes seemed to know him from skin to soul, seemed to know everything about him and hold everything they knew in the utterest contempt. For a fraction of an instant, he feared that this being was the Despiser himself. But he knew better. Like so many of the marauders, this creature was made of warped flesh-a victim of Lord Foul's Stonework. And there was uncertainty in the way it held itself.
   Feigning cockiness, he strode up the apron until he was almost within sword reach of the warder. There he stopped, deliberately scrutinized the figure for a moment. When he had surveyed it from head to foot, he met its powerful gaze again, and said with all the insolence he could muster, "Don't tell Foul I'm here. I want to surprise him."
   As he said surprise him, he suddenly snatched his hands from behind his back. With his ring exposed on the index finger of his right hand, he lunged forward as if to attack the warder with a blast of wild
   magic.
   The warder jumped into a defensive stance. For an instant, all three of its heads turned toward Covenant.
   In that instant, Foamfollower came leaping over the abutment above the entrance to the Creche.
   The warder was beyond his reach; but as he landed, he dove forward, rolled at it, swept its feet from under it. It went down in a whirl of limbs and blades.
   At once, he straddled it. It was as large as he, perhaps stronger. It was armed. But he hammered it so mightily with his fists, pinned it so effectively with his body, that it could not defend itself. After he dealt it a huge two-fisted blow at the base of its necks, it went limp.
   Quickly, he took one of its swords to behead it.
   "Foamfollower!" Covenant protested.
   Foamfollower thrust himself up from the unconscious figure, faced Covenant with the sword clenched in one fist.
   "Don't kill it."
   Panting slightly at his exertion, the Giant said, "It will alert the Creche against us when it recovers." His expression was grim, but not savage.
   "There's been enough killing," Covenant replied thickly. "I hate it."
   For a moment, Foamfollower held Covenant's gaze. Then he threw back his head and began to laugh.
   Covenant felt suddenly weak with gratitude. His knees almost buckled under him. " That' s better," he mumbled in relief. Leaning against one wall of the entry, he rested while he treasured the Giant's mirth.
   Shortly, Foamfollower subsided. "Very well, my friend," he said quietly. "The death of this creature would gain time for us-time in which we might work our work and then seek to escape. But escape has never been our purpose.'' He dropped the sword across the prostrate warder. "If its unconsciousness allows us to reach our goal, we will have been well enough served. Let escape fend for itself.'' He smiled wryly, then went on: "However, it is in my heart that I can make a better use of this buckler."
   Bending over the warder, he stripped off its garment, and used the leather to cover his own nakedness.
   "You're right," Covenant sighed. He did not intend to escape. "But there's no reason for you to get yourself killed. Just help me find that secret door-then get out of here."
   "Abandon you?" Foamfollower adjusted the ill-fitting buckler with an expression of distaste. "How could I leave this place? I will not attempt Hotash Slay again."
   "Jump into the Sea-swim away-I don't know.'' A sense of urgency mounted in him; they could not afford to spend time debating at the very portal of Foul's Creche. "Just don't make me responsible for you too."
   "On the contrary," the Giant replied evenly, "it is I who am responsible for you. I am your summoner."
   Covenant winced. "I'm not worried about that."
   "Nor am I," Foamfollower returned with a grin. "But I mislike this talk of abandonment. My friend-I am acquainted with such things."
   They regarded each other gravely; and in the Giant's gaze Covenant saw as clearly as words that he could not take responsibility for his friend, could not make his friend's decisions. He could only accept Foamfollower's help and be grateful. He groaned in pain at the outcome he foresaw. "Then let's go," he said dismally. "I'm not going to last much longer."
   In answer, the Giant took his arm, supported him. Side by side, they turned toward the dark mouth of the cave.
   Side by side, they penetrated the gloom of Foul's Creche.
   To their surprise, the darkness vanished as if they had passed through a veil of obscurity. Beyond it, they found themselves in the narrow end of an egg-shaped hall. It was coldly lit from end to end as if green sea-ice were aflame in its walls; the whole place seemed on the verge of bursting into frigid fire.
   Involuntarily, they paused, stared about them. The hall's symmetry and stonework were perfect. At its widest point, it opened into matched passages which led up to the towers, and the floor of its opposite end sank flawlessly down to form a wide, spiral stairway into the rock. Everywhere the stone stretched and met without seams, cracks, junctures; the hall was as smoothly carved, polished, and even, as unblemished by ornament, feature, error, as if the ideal conception of its creator had been rendered into immaculate stone without the interference of hands that slipped, minds that misunderstood. It was obviously not Giant-work; it lacked anything which might intrude on the absolute exaction of its shape, lacked the Giantish enthusiasm for detail. Instead, it seemed to surpass any kind of mortal craft. It was preternaturally perfect.
   Covenant gaped at it. While Foamfollower tore himself away to begin searching the side walls for the door of which the jheherrin had spoken, Covenant moved out into the hall, wandered as if aimlessly toward the great stairway. There was old magic here, might treasured by hate and hunger; he could feel it in the ceremental light, in the sharp cold air, in the immaculate walls. This fiery, frigid place was Lord Foul's home, seat and root of his power. The whole soulless demesne spoke of his suzerainty, his entire and inviolate rule. This empty hall alone made mere gnats and midges out of his enemies. Covenant remembered having heard it said that Foul would never be defeated while Ridjeck Thome still stood. He believed it.
   When he reached the broad spiral of the stairway, he found that its open center was like a great well, curving gradually back into the promontory as it descended. The stair itself was large enough to carry fifteen or twenty people abreast. Its circling drew his gaze down into the bright hole until he was leaning out from the edge to peer as far as he could; and its symmetry lent impetus to the surge of his vertigo, his irrational love and fear of falling.
   But he had learned the secret of that dizziness and did not fall. His eyes searched the stairwell. And a moment later, he saw something which shook away his dangerous fascination.
   Running soundlessly up out of the depths was a large band of ur-viles.
   He pulled himself backward. "You better find it fast," he called to Foamfollower. "They're coming."
   Foamfollower did not interrupt his scrutiny of the walls. As he searched the stone with his hands and eyes, probed it for any sign of a concealed entrance, he muttered, "It is well hidden. I do not know how it is possible for stone to be so wrought. My people were not children in this craft, but they could not have dreamed such walls."
   "They had too many nightmares of their own," gritted Covenant. "Find it! Those ur-viles are coming fast." Remembering the creature that had caused his fall in the catacombs under Mount Thunder, he added, "They can smell white gold."
   "I am a Giant," answered Foamfollower. "Stonework is in the very blood of my people. This doorway cannot be concealed from me."
   Then his hands found a section of the wall which felt hollow. Swiftly, he explored the section, measured its dimensions, though no sign of any door was visible in that immaculate wall.
   When he had located the entrance as exactly as possible, he pressed once on the center of its lintel.
   Glimmering with green tracery, the lintel appeared in the blank wall. Doorposts spread down from it to the floor as if they had at that instant been created out of the rock, and between them the door swung noiselessly inward.
   Foamfollower rubbed his hands in satisfaction. Chuckling, "As you commanded, ur-Lord," he motioned for Covenant to precede him through the doorway.
   Covenant glanced toward the stairs, then hastened into the small chamber beyond the door. Foamfollower came behind him, ducking for the lintel and the low ceiling of the chamber. At once, he closed the door, watched it dissolve back into featureless stone. Then he went ahead of Covenant to the corridor beyond the chamber.
   This passage was as bright and cold as the outer hall. Foamfollower and Covenant could see that it sloped steeply downward, straight into the depths of the promontory. Looking along it, Covenant hoped that it would take him where he needed to go; he was too weak to sneak all through the Creche hunting for his doom.
   Neither of them spoke; they did not want to risk being heard by the ur-viles. Foamfollower glanced at Covenant, shrugged once, and started down into the tunnel.
   The low ceiling forced Foamfollower to move in a crouch, but he traveled down the corridor as swiftly as he could. And Covenant kept pace with him by leaning against the Giant's back and simply allowing gravity to pull his strengthless legs from stride to stride. Like twins, brothers connected to each other despite all their differences by a common umbilical need, they crouched and shambled together through the rock of Ridjeck Thome.
   As they descended, Covenant fell several times. His sense of urgency, his fear, grew in the constriction of the corridor; but it drained rather than energized him, left him as slack as if he had already been defeated. Livid cold drenched him, soaked into his bones like the fire of an absolute chill, surrounded him until he began to feel strangely comfortable in it- comfortable and drowsy, as if, like an exhausted sojourner, he were at last arriving home, sinking down before his rightful hearth. Then at odd moments he caught glimpses of the spirit of this place, the uncompromising flawlessness which somehow gave rise to, affirmed, the most rabid and insatiable malice. In this air, contempt and comfort became the same thing. Foul's Creche was the domain of a being who understood perfection--a being who loathed life, not because it was any threat to him, but because its mortal infestations offended the defining passion of his existence. In those glimpses, Covenant's numb, lacerated feet seemed to miss the stone, and he fell headlong at Foamfollower's back.
   But they kept moving, and at last they reached the end of the tunnel. It opened into a series of unadorned, unfurnished apartments-starkly exact and symmetrical-which showed no sign that they had ever been, or ever would be, occupied by anyone. Yet the cold, green light shone everywhere, and the air was as sharp as ice crystals. Foamfollower's sweat formed a cluster of emeralds in his beard, and he was shivering, despite his normal immunity to temperature.
   Beyond the apartments, they found a chain of stairs which took them downward through blank halls, empty caverns large enough to house the most fearsome banes, uninhabited galleries where an orator could have stormed at an audience of thousands. Here again they found no sign of any occupation. All this part of the Creche was for Lord Foul's private use; no ur-viles or other creatures intruded, had ever intruded. Foamfollower hastened Covenant through the eerie perfection. Down they went, always down, seeking the depths in which Lord Foul would cherish the Illearth Stone. And around them, the ancient ill of Ridjeck Thome grew heavier and more dolorous at each deeper level. In time, Foamfollower became too cold to shiver; and Covenant shambled along at his side as if only an insistent yearning to find the Creche's chillest place, the point of absolute ice, kept him from falling asleep where he was.
   The instinct which took them downward at every opportunity did not mislead them. Gradually, Foamfollower began to sense the location of the Stone; the radiance of that bane became palpable to his sore nerves.
   Eventually, they reached a landing in the wall of an empty pit. There he found another hidden door. Foamfollower opened it as he had the first one, and ducked through it into a high round hall. After Covenant had stumbled across the sill, Foamfollower closed the door and moved warily out into the center of the hall.
   Like the other halls the Giant had seen, this one was featureless except for its entrances. He counted eight large doorways, each perfectly spaced around the wall, perfectly identical to the others, each sealed shut with heavy stone doors. He could sense no life anywhere near him, no activity beyond any of the doors. But all his nerves shrilled in the direction of the Stone.
   "There," Foamfollower breathed softly, pointing at one of the entrances. "There is the thronehall of Ridjeck Thome. There Soulcrusher holds the Illearth Stone."
   Without looking at his friend, he went over to the door, placed his hands on it to verify his perception. "Yes," he whispered. "It is here." Dread and exultation wrestled together in him. Moments passed before he realized that Covenant had not answered him.
   He pressed against the door to measure its strength. "Covenant," he said over his shoulder, "my friend, the end is near. Cling to your courage for one moment longer. I will break open this door. When I do, you must run at once into the thronehall. Go to the Stone-before any power intervenes." Still Covenant did not reply. "Unbeliever! We are at the end. Do not falter now."
   In a ghastly voice, Covenant said, "You don't need to break it down."
   Foamfollower whirled, springing away from the door.
   The Unbeliever stood in the center of the hall. He was not alone.
   An ur-vile loremaster stood before him, slavering from its gaping nostrils. In its hands, it held chains, shackles.
   As Foamfollower watched in horror, it locked the shackles onto Covenant's wrists. Leading him by the chain, it took him to the door of the thronehall.
   The Giant started toward his friend. But Covenant's terrible gaze stopped him. In the dark, starved bruises of Covenant's eyes, he read something that he could not answer. The Unbeliever was trying to tell him something, something for which he did not have words. Foamfollower had studied the injury which other ur-viles had done to Covenant, but he could not fathom the depth of a misery which could make a man surrender to Demondim-spawn.
   "Covenant!" he cried in protest.
   Deliberately, Covenant's gaze flicked away from the Giant-bored intensely into him and then jumped away, pulling Foamfollower's eyes with it.
   The Giant turned in spite of himself, and saw another Giant standing across the hall from him. The newcomer's fists were clenched on his hips, and he was grinning savagely. Foamfollower recognized him at once; he was one of the three brothers who had fallen victim to the Ravers. Like Elena, this tormented soul had been resurrected to serve Soulcrusher.
   Before Foamfollower could react, the door to the thronehall opened, then closed behind Covenant.
   At the same time, all the other doors leaped open, pouring Stone-made monsters into the hall.

Twenty: The Unbeliever


   Foamfollower wheeled around, saw that he had been surrounded. Scores of creatures had entered the hall; they were more than enough to deluge him, bury him under their weight if they did not choose to slay him with their weapons. But they did not attack. They spread out along the wall, bunched in tight formations before the doors, so that he could not escape. There they stopped. With the doors closed behind them, they stood leaning eagerly forward as if they yearned to hack him to pieces. But they left him to the dead Giant.
   Foamfollower swung back to face the specter.
   It advanced slowly, jeering at him with its malevolent grin. "Greetings, Foamfollower," it spat. "Kinabandoner. Comrade! I have come to congratulate you. You serve the master well. Not content merely to desert our people in their time of doom, so that our entire race was extirpated from the Land, you have now delivered this groveler and his effectless white gold into the hands of the Despiser, Satansheart and Soulcrusher. Oh, well done! I give you greeting and praise, comrade!" It ejaculated the word comrade as if it were a supreme affront. "I am Kinslaughterer. It was I who slew-adult and child-every Giant in The Grieve. Behold the fruit of your life, Kinabandoner. Behold and despair!"
   Foamfollower retreated a few steps, but his eyes did not for an instant quail from the dead Giant.
   "Retribution!" Kinslaughterer sneered. "I see it in your face. You do not think of despair-you are too blind to perceive what you have done. By the master! You do not even think of your despicable friend. You have retribution in your heart, comrade! You behold me, and believe that if all else in your life fails, you have now at least been made able to exact vengeance for your loss. For your crime! Kinabandoner, I see it in you. It is the dearest desire of your heart to rend me limb from limb with your own hands. Fool! Do I have the appearance of one who fears you?"
   While he held the specter's gaze, Foamfollower gauged his position measured distances around him. Kinslaughterer's words affected him. In them, he saw the sweetness of retribution. He knew the fury of killing, the miserable, involuntary delight of crushing flesh with his hands. He quivered as if he were eager, poised the gnarled might of his muscles for a leap.
   "Attempt me, then," the dead Giant went on. "Unleash the lust which fills you. Do you believe you can vindicate yourself against me? Are you so blind? Comrade! There is nothing that justifies you. If you shed blood enough to wash the Land from east to west, you cannot wash out the ill of yourself. Imbecile! Anile fool! If the master did not control you, you would do his work for him so swiftly that he would be unable to take pleasure in it. Come then, comrade! Attempt me. I am slain already. How will you bring me to death again?"
   ''I will attempt it,'' Foamfollower grated softly, "in my own way.'' The specter's unnecessary goading told him what he needed to know. The creatures could have slain him at any time-yet they waited while Kin-slaughterer strove to provoke him. Therefore Soulcrusher still had something to gain from him; therefore Covenant was still alive, still unbeaten. Perhaps Lord Foul hoped to use Foamfollower himself against the Unbeliever.
   But Foamfollower had survived the caamora of Hotash Slay. He poised himself, his whole body tensed. Yet when he sprang suddenly into motion, he did not attack Kinslaughterer. Straining mightily, thrusting with all the power of his legs, he launched himself at the guards before the door of the thronehall.
   They ducked under the suddenness of his assault. He dove headlong over them, forearms braced, so that his entire force struck the doors.
   They had not been made to withstand such an impact. With a sharp cry of splintering stone, they burst inward.
   Foamfollower fell in a flurry of door shards, somersaulted, snapped to his feet in the thronehall of Ridjeck Thome.
   The room was a wide round hall like the one he had just left, but it had fewer doors, and its ceiling was far higher, as if to accommodate the immense powers which occupied it. Opposite Foamfollower was the great throne itself. On a low mound against the far wall, old grisly rock had been upreared to form the Despiser's seat in the shape of jaws, raw hooked teeth bared to grip and tear. It and its base were the only things he had seen in Foul's Creche which were not perfectly carved, utterly polished. It appeared to have been irremediably crippled, grotesqued, by the age-long weight of Lord Foul's malice. It looked like a prophecy or foretaste of ultimate doom for all Ridjeck Thome's immaculate rock.
   Set into the floor directly before it was the Illearth Stone.
   The Stone was not as large as Foamfollower had expected it to be; it did not appear so big or heavy that he could not have lifted it in his arms. Yet its radiance staggered him like the blow of a prodigious fist. It was not extremely bright-its illumination in the thronehall was only a little stronger than the light elsewhere-but it blazed in its setting like an incarnation of absolute cold. It pulsed like a mad heart, sent out unfetter-able gouts and flares of force, radiated violently its power for corruption. Foamfollower slammed into the glare and Stopped as if he could already feel the gelid emerald turning his skin to ice.
   He stared at the Stone for a moment, horrified by its strength. But then his staggered senses became aware of another might in the thronehall. This power seemed oddly subdued in comparison to the Stone. But it was only subtler, more insidious-not weaker. As Foamfollower turned toward it, he knew that it was the Stone's master.
   Lord Foul.
   He located the Despiser more by tactile impression than by sight. Lord Foul was essentially invisible, though he cast an impenetrable blankness in the air like the erect shadow of a man-a shadow of absence rather than presence which showed where he would have been if he had been physically corporeal-and around the shadow shone a penumbra of glistering green. From within it, he reeked of attar.
   He stood to one side of the Stone, with his back to the door and the Giant. And before him, facing Foamfollower, was Thomas Covenant.
   They were alone; after delivering Covenant, the ur-vile had left the thronehall.
   Covenant seemed unaware of the chains shackling his wrists. He did not appear to be struggling at all. He was already in the last stages of starvation and cold. Pain dripped like dank sweat down his emaciated cheeks; and his gaunt, desolate eyes met Lord Foul as if the Despiser's power were clenched in the ugly wound on his forehead.
   Neither of them took any notice of Foamfollower's loud entrance; they were concentrated on each other to the exclusion of everything else. Some interchange had taken place between them-something Foamfollower had missed. But he saw the result. Just as he focused his attention on Lord Foul and Covenant, the Despiser raised one penumbral arm and struck Covenant across the mouth.
   With a roar, Foamfollower charged to his friend's aid.
   Before he had taken two strides, an avalanche of creatures rushed through the shattered doorway and fell on him. They pounded him to the floor, pinned him under their weight, secured his limbs. He fought wildly extravagantly, but his opponents were many and strong. They mastered him in a moment. They dragged him to the side wall and fettered him there with chains so massive that he could not break them. When the creatures left him, hurried out of the thronehall, he was helpless.
   The dead Giant was not with them. Already it had served or failed its purpose; it had been banished again.
   He had been placed in a position where he could watch Lord Foul and Covenant-where their conflict would be enacted with him as its audience.
   As soon as the creatures had departed, the Despiser turned toward him for the first time. When the gleaming green penumbra had shifted itself to face him, he saw the Despiser's eyes. They were the only part of Lord Foul that was visible within his aura.
   He had eyes like fangs, carious and yellow-fangs so vehement in malice that they froze Foamfollower's voice, gagging him on the encouragement he had tried to shout for Covenant's sake.
   "Be silent," Lord Foul said venomously, "or I will roast you before your time."
   Foamfollower obeyed without volition. He gaped as if he were choking on ice and watched with helpless passion in his throat.
   The Despiser's eyes blinked in satisfaction. He turned his attention back to Covenant.
   Covenant had been knocked from his feet by Lord Foul's blow, and he knelt now with his shackled hands covering his face in a gesture of the most complete abjection. His fingers seemed entirely numb; they pressed blindly against his face, as incapable as dead sticks of exploring his injury, of even identifying the dampness of his blood. But he could feel the disease gnawing at his nerves as if Lord Foul's presence amplified it, made the senseless erosion tangible; and he knew that his leprosy was in full career now, that the fragile arrest on which his life depended had been broken. Illness reached down into his soul like tendrils of affectlessness, searching like tree roots in a rock for cracks, flaws, at which the rock could be split asunder. He was as weak and weary as any nightmare could make him without causing the labor of his heart to stop.
   But when he lowered his bloodied hands-when the swift poison of Foul's touch made his lip blacken and swell so acutely that he could no longer bear to touch it-when he looked up again toward the Despiser, he was not abject. He was unbeaten.
   Damn you, he muttered dimly. Damn you. It's not that easy.  Deliberately, he closed his fingers of his halfhand around his ring.
   The Despiser's eyes raged at him, but Lord Foul controlled himself to say in a sneering, fatherly tone, "Come, Unbeliever. Do not prolong this unpleasantness. You know that you cannot stand against me. In my own name I am wholly your superior. And I possess the Illearth Stone. I can blast the moon in its course, compel the oldest dead from their deep graves, spread ruin at my whim. Without effort I can tear every fiber of your being from its moor and scatter the wreck of your soul across the heavens."
   Then do it, Covenant muttered.
   "Yet I choose to forbear. I do not purpose harm against you. Only place your ring in my hand, and all your torment will be at an end. It is a small price to pay, Unbeliever."
   It's not that easy.
   "And I am not powerless to reward you. If you wish to share my rule over the Land, I will permit you. You will find I am not an uncongenial master. If you wish to preserve the life of your friend Foamfollower, I will not demur-though he has offended me." Foamfollower thrashed in his chains, struggled to protest, but he could not speak. "If you wish health, that also I can and will provide. Behold!"
   He waved one penumbral arm, and a ripple of distortion passed over Covenant's senses. At once, feeling flooded back into his hands and feet; his nerves returned to life in an instant. While they flourished, all his distress-all pain and hunger and weakness-sloughed off him. His body seemed to crow with triumphant life.
   He was unmoved. He found his voice, breathed wearily through his teeth. "Health isn't my problem. You're the one who teaches lepers to hate themselves."
   "Groveler!" Lord Foul snapped. Without transition, Covenant became leprous and starved again. "You are on your knees to me! I will make you plead for the veriest fragments of life! Do lepers hate themselves? Then they are wise. I will teach you the true stature of hatred!"
   For a moment, the Despiser's own immitigable hate gouged down at Covenant from his carious eyes, and Covenant braced himself for an onslaught. But then Lord Foul began to laugh. His scorn shone from him, shook the air of the thronehall like the sound of great boulders crushing each other, made even the hard stone of the floor seem as insidious as a quagmire. And when he subsided, he said, "You are a dead man before me, groveler-as crippled of life as any corpse. Yet you refuse me. You refuse health, mastery, even friendship. I am interested-I am forbearant. I will allow you time to think better of your madness. Tell me why you are so rife with folly."
   Covenant did not hesitate. "Because I loathe you."
   "That is no reason. Many men believe that they loathe me because they are too craven to despise stupidity, foolhardiness, pretension, subservience. I am not misled. Tell me why, groveler."
   "Because I love the Land."
   "Oh, forsooth!" Lord Foul jeered. "I cannot believe that you are so anile. The Land is not your world-it has no claim upon your small fidelity. From the first, it has tormented you with demands you could not meet, honor you could not earn. You portray yourself as a man who is faithful unto death in the name of a fashion of apparel or an accident of diet-loyal to filthy robes and sand. No, groveler. I an unconvinced. Again, I say, tell me why." He pronounced his why as if with that one syllable he could make Covenant's entire edifice founder.
   The Land is beautiful, Covenant breathed to himself. You're ugly. For a time, he felt too weary to respond. But at last he brought out his answer.
   "Because I don't believe."
   "No?" the Despiser shouted with glee. "Still?" His laughter expressed perfect contempt. "Groveler, you are pathetic beyond price. Almost I am persuaded to keep you at my side. You would be a jester to lighten my burdens." Still he catechized Covenant. "How is it possible that you can loathe or love where you do not believe?"
   "Nevertheless."
   "How is it possible to disbelieve where you loathe or love?"
   "Still."
   Lord Foul laughed again. "Do my ears betray me? Do you-after my Enemy has done all within his power to sway you-do you yet believe that this is a dream?"
   "It isn't real. But that doesn't matter. That's not important."
   "Then what is, groveler?"
   "The Land. You."
   Once more, the Despiser laughed. But his mirth was short and vicious now; he sounded disturbed, as if there were something in Covenant which he could not understand. "The Land and Unbelief," he jeered. "You poor, deranged soul! You cannot have both. They preclude each other."
   But Covenant knew better; after all that he had been through, he knew better. Only by affirming them both, accepting both poles of the contradiction, keeping them both whole, balanced, only by steering himself not between them but with them, could he preserve them both, preserve both the Land and himself, find the place where the parallel lines of his impossible dilemma met. The eye of the paradox. In that place lay the reason why the Land had happened to him. So he said nothing as he stared up at the blank shadow and the emerald aura and the incalculable might of the Despiser. But in himself, he gritted, No they don't, Foul. You're wrong. It's not that easy. If it were easy, I would have found it long ago.
   "But I grow weary of your stupid assertions," Lord Foul went on after a moment. "My patience is not infinite. And there are other questions I wish to ask. I will set aside the matter of your entry into my demesne. It is a small matter, easily explained. In some manner unknown to me, you suborned a number of my chattel, so that twice I received false reports of your death. But set it aside. I will flay the very souls from their bones, and learn the truth. Answer this question, groveler." He moved closer to Covenant, and the intensity of his voice told Covenant that the Despiser had reached the heart of his probing. "This wild magic is not a part of your world. It violates your Unbelief. How can you use this power in which you do not believe?"
   There Covenant found the explanation of Lord Foul's forbearance. The Despiser had spent his time interrogating Covenant rather than simply ripping the fingers off his hand to take the ring because he, Lord Foul, feared that Covenant had secretly mastered the wild magic-that he had concealed his power, risked death in the Spoiled Plains and Hotash Slay and Kurash Qwellinir, permitted himself to be taken captive, so that he could surprise the Despiser, catch Lord Foul from a weak or blind side.
   Foul had reason for this fear. The Staff of Law had been destroyed.
   For an instant, Covenant thought he might use this apprehension to help himself in some way. But then he saw that he could not. For his own sake, so that his defense would not be flawed by his old duplicity, he told the truth.
   "I don't know how to use it." His voice stumbled thickly past his swollen lip. "I don't know how to call it up. But I know it is real in the Land. I know how to trigger it. I know how to bring this bloody icebox down around your ears."
   The Despiser did not hesitate, doubt. He seemed to expand in Covenant's sight as he roared savagely, "You will trigger nothing! I have endured enough of your insolence. Do you say that you are a leper? I will show you leprosy!"
   Power swarmed around Covenant like a thousand thousand mad wasps. Before him, the Despiser's blank shadow grew horribly, swept upward larger and larger until it dwarfed Covenant, dwarfed Foamfollower, dwarfed the thronehall itself; it filled the air, the hall, the entire Creche. He felt himself plunging into the abyss of it. He cried out for help, but no help came. Like a stricken bird, he plummeted downward. The speed of his fall roared in his ears as if it were trying to suck him out of himself. He could sense the rock on which he would be shattered, unutterably far below him.
   In the void, an attar-laden voice breathed, "Worship me and I will save you."
   Giddy terror-lust rushed up in him. A black whirlwind hurled him at the rock as if all the puissance of the heavens had come to smash him against the unbreakable granite of his fate. Despite screamed in his mind, demanding admittance, demanding like the suicidal paradox of vertigo to overwhelm him. But he clung to himself, refused. He was a leper; the Land was not real; this was not the way he was going to die.
   He clenched his fist on the ring with all the frail strength of his arm.
   At the crash of impact, pain detonated in his skull. Incandescent agony yowled and yammered through his head, shredded him like claws ferociously tearing the tissue of his brain. Foul rode the pain as if it were a tidal wave, striving to break down or climb over the seawall of his will. But he was too numb to break. His hands and feet were blind, frozen; his forehead was already inured to harm; and the black swelling in his lip was familiar to him. The green, ghastly cold could not bend the rigor of his bones. Like a dead man, he was stiff with resistance.
   Lord Foul tried to enter him, tried to merge with him. The offer was seductively sweet-a surcease from pain, a release from the long unrest which he had miscalled his life. But he was harnessed to himself in a way that allowed no turning aside, no surrender. He was Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever and leper. He refused.
   Abruptly, his pain fell into darkness. Harm, injury, crushing, assault-all turned to ashes and blew away on windless air. In their place came his own numbness, his irreparable lack of sensation. In the great, unlimited abyss, he found that he could see himself.
   He was standing nowhere, surrounded by nothing; he was staring as if in dumb incomprehension at his hands.
   At first they seemed normal. They were as gaunt as sticks, and the two missing digits of his right hand gave him a sense of loss, unwholeness, that made him groan. But his ring was intact; it hung inertly on his index finger, an argent circle as perfect and inescapable as if it had some meaning.
   But as he watched, dim purple spots began to appear on his hands-on his fingers, the backs of his knuckles, the heels of his palms. Slowly, they spread and started to suppurate; they bulged slightly like blisters, then opened to show abscesses under his skin. Fluid oozed from the sores as they grew and spread. Soon both his hands were covered with infection.
   They became gangrenous, putrescent; the cloying stench of live, rotten flesh poured from them like the effluvium of some gnawing fungus, noisome and cruel. And under the infection, the bones of his fingers began to gnarl. Unmarrowed, flawed by rot, stressed by tendons whose nerves had died, leaving them perpetually taut, perpetually clenched against each other, the bones twisted, broke, and froze at crooked angles. In the rot and the disease, his hands maimed themselves. And the black, sick swelling of gangrene began to eat its way up his wrists.
   The same pressures, the same fetid and uncontrollable tension of muscles and thews-bereft of volition by the rot in his nerves-bowed his forearms so that they hung grotesquely from his elbows. Then pus began to blossom like sweat from the abscessed pores of his upper arms. When he twitched his robe aside, he found that his legs were already contorted to the knees.
   The assault horrified him, buried him in misery and self-loathing. He was wearing his own future, the outcome of his illness-the destination of the road down which every leper fared who did not either kill himself or fight hard enough to stay alive. He was seeing the very thing which had first determined him to survive, all those long months ago in the leprosarium, but now it was upon him, virulent and immedicable. His leprosy was in full rank flower, and he had nothing left for which to fight.
   Nevertheless he was on his home ground. He knew leprosy with the intimacy of a lover; he knew that it could not happen so swiftly, so completely. It was not real. And it was not all of him. This heinous and putrescent gnawing was not the sum total of his being. Despite what the doctors said-despite what he saw in himself-he was more than that, more than just a leper.
   No, Foul! he panted bitterly. It's not that easy.
   "Tom. Tom!" a stricken voice cried. It was familiar to him-a voice as known and beloved as health. "Give it up. Don't you see what you're doing to us?"
   He looked up, and saw Joan standing before him. She held their infant son, Roger, in her hands, so that the child was half extended like an offering toward him. Both of them appeared just as they had been when he had last seen them, so long ago; Joan had the same look of torn grief in her face, the expression that begged him to understand why she had already decided to divorce him. But she was inexplicably naked. His heart wept in him when he saw the lost love of her loins, the unwillingness of her breasts, the denied treasure of her face.
   As he gazed at her, purple stains began to show through the warmth of her skin. Abscesses suppurated on her breasts; sickness oozed from her nipples like milk.
   Roger was puling pathetically in her hands. When he turned his helpless infant head toward his father, Covenant saw that his eyes were already glazed and cataractal, half blinded by leprosy. Two dim magenta spots tainted his cheeks.
   Foul! Covenant shrieked. Damn you!
   Then he saw other figures pressing forward behind Joan. Mhoram was there; Lena and Atiaran were there; Bannor and Hile Troy were there. Mhoram's whole face had fallen into yellow rot and running chancrous sores; his eyes cried out through the infection as if they were drowning in a quagmire of atrocious wrong. All Lena's hair had fallen out, and her bald scalp bristled with tubercular nodules. Atiaran's eyes were drowning in milky blindness. The grotesque gnarling of Banner's limbs entirely crippled him. Troy's eyeless face was one puckered mass of gangrene, as if the very brain within his skull were festering.
   And behind these figures stood more of the people Covenant had known in the Land. All were mortally ill, rife and hideous with leprosy. And behind them crowded multitudes more, numberless victims-all the people of the Land stricken and destitute, abominable to themselves, as ruined as if Covenant had brought a plague of absolute virulence among them.
   At the sight of them, he erupted. Fury at their travail spouted up in him like lava. Volcanic anger, so long buried under the weight of his complex ordeal, sent livid, fiery passion geysering into the void.
   Foul! he screamed. Foul! You can't do this!
   "I will do it," came the mocking reply. "I am doing it."
   Stop it!
   "Give me the ring."
   Never!
   "Then enjoy what you have brought to pass. Behold! I have given you companions. The solitary leper has remade the world in his own image, so that he will not be alone."
   I won't let you!
   The Despiser laughed sardonically. "You will aid me before you die."

"Never! Damn you! Never!"
   Fury exalted Covenant-fury as hot as magma. A rage for lepers carried him beyond all his limits. He took one last look at the victims thronging innumerably before him. Then he began to struggle for freedom like a newborn man fighting his way out of an old skin.
   He seemed to be standing in the nowhere nothingness of the abyss, but he knew that his physical body still knelt on the floor of the thronehall-With a savage effort of will, he disregarded all sensory impressions, all appearances that prevented him from perceiving where he was. Trembling, jerking awkwardly, he levered his gaunt frame to its feet. The eyes of his body were blind, still caught in Lord Foul's control, but he grated fiercely, "I see you, Foul." He did not need eyes. He could sense with the nerves of his stiff cheeks the emanations of power around him.
   He took three lumbering, tottering steps, and felt Foul suddenly surge toward him, rush to stop him. Before the Despiser could reach him, he raised his hands and fell fists-first at the Illearth Stone.
   The instant his wedding band struck the Stone, a hurricane of might exploded in his hand. Gales of green and white fire blasted through the air, shattered it like a bayamo. The veil of Lord Foul's assault was shredded in a moment and blown away. Covenant found himself lying on the floor with a tornado of power gyring upward from his halfhand.
   He heaved to his feet. With one flex of his arms, he freed his wrists as if the shackles were a skein of lies.
   Foul's penumbral shadow crouched in battle-readiness across the Stone from him. The Despiser brandished his carious eyes as if he were frantic to drive them into Covenant's heart. "Fool!" he howled shrilly. "Groveler! It is I who rule here! Alone I am your rightful master-and I command the Stone! I will destroy you. You will not so much as touch me!"
   As he yelled, he threw out a flare of force which struck Covenant's hand, embedded itself deep in the core of his ring. Amid its raging gale, the white gold was altered. Cold ill soaked into the metal, forced itself into the ring until all the argent had been violated by green. Again, Covenant felt himself falling out of the thronehall.
   Without transition, he found himself on Kevin's Watch. He stood on the stone platform like a titan, and with his malefic band he alone levied a new Ritual of Desecration upon the Land. All health withered before him. Great Gilden trees splintered and broke. Flowers died. Aliantha grew barren and became dust. Soil turned to sand. Rivers ran dry. Stonedowns and Woodhelvens were overthrown. Starvation and homelessness slew every shape of life that walked upon the earth. He was the Lord of a ruin more absolute than any other, a desolation utterly irreparable.
   Never!
   With one violent thrust of his will, he struck the green from his ring and returned to the thronehall. His wedding band was immaculate silver, and the slashing wind of its power was wild beyond all emerald mastery.
   He almost laughed. The Stone could not corrupt him; he was already as fundamentally diseased as any corruption could make him.
   To the Despiser, he rasped, "You've had your chance. You've used your filthy power. Now it' s my turn. You can' t stop me. You've broken too many Laws. And I'm outside the Law. It doesn't control wild magic, it doesn't control me. But it was the only thing that might have stopped me. You could have used it against me. Now it's just me-it's my will that makes the difference." He was panting heavily; he could not find enough air to support the extremity of his passion. "I'm a leper, Foul. I can stand anything."
   At once, the Despiser attacked him. Foul put his hands on the Illearth Stone, placed his power on the pulsing heart of its violence. He sent green might raving at Covenant.
   It fell on him like the collapse of a mountain, piled onto him like tons of wrecked stone. At first he could not focus the ring on it, and it drove him staggering backward. But then he found his error. He had tried to use the wild magic like a tool or weapon, something which could be wielded. But High Lord Mhoram had told him, You are the white gold. It was not a thing to be commanded, employed well or ill as skill or awkwardness allowed. Now that it was awake, it was a part of him, an expression of himself. He did not need to focus it, aim it; bone and blood, it arose from his passion.
   With a shout, he threw back the attack, shattered it into a million droplets of rank fever.
   Again Lord Foul struck. Power that fried the air between them sprang at Covenant, strove to interrupt the white, windless gale of the ring. Their conflict coruscated through the thronehall like a mad gibberish of lightning, green and white blasting, battering, devouring each other like all the storms of the world gone insane.
   Its sheer immensity daunted Covenant, tried like a landslide to sweep the feet of his resolve from under him. He was unacquainted with power, unadept at combat. But his rage for lepers, for the Land, for the victims of Despite, kept him upright. And his Unbelief enabled him. He knew more completely than any native of the Land could have known that Lord Foul was not unbeatable. In this manifestation, Despite had no absolute reality of existence. The people of the Land would have failed in the face of Despite because they were convinced of it. Covenant was not. He was not overwhelmed; he did not believe that he had to fail. Lord Foul was only an externalized part of himself-not an immortal, not a god. Triumph was possible.
   So he threw himself heart and soul and blood and bone into the battle. He did not think of defeat; the personal cost was irrelevant. Lord Foul beat him back until he was pressed to the wall at Foamfollower's side. The savagery of the Stone made a holocaust around him, tore every last flicker of warmth from the air, shot great lurid icicles of hatred at him. But he did not falter. The wild magic was passionate and unfathomable, as high as Time and as deep as Earth-raw power limited only by the limits of his will. And his will was growing, raising its head, blossoming on the rich sap of rage. Moment by moment, he was becoming equal to the Despiser's attack.
   Soon he was able to move. He forged away from the wall, waded like a strong man through the tempest toward his enemy. White and green blasts scalded the atmosphere; detonations of savage lightning shattered against each other. Lord Foul's fiery cold and Covenant's gale tore at each other's throats, rent each other, renewed themselves and tore again. In the virulence of the battle, Covenant thought that Ridjeck Thome would surely come crashing down. But the Creche stood; the thronehall stood. Only Covenant and Lord Foul shook in the thunderous silence of the power storm.
   Abruptly, he succeeded in driving Lord Foul back from the Stone. At once, his own fire blazed still higher. Without direct contact, the Despiser's control over his emerald bane was less perfect. His exertions became more frenzied, erratic. Unmastered force rocked the throne, tore ragged hunks of stone from the ceiling, cracked the floor. He was screaming now in a language Covenant could not understand.
   The Unbeliever grabbed his opportunity. He moved forward, rained furious gouts and bolts of wild magic at the Despiser, then suddenly began to form a wall of might between Lord Foul and the Stone. Lord Foul shrieked, tried frantically to regain the Stone. But he was too late. In an instant, Covenant's force had surrounded Lord Foul.
   With all the rage of his will, he pressed his advantage. He pounced like a hawk, clenched power around the Despiser. Whitely, brutally, he began to penetrate the penumbra.
   Lord Foul's aura resisted with shrieks and showers of sparks. It was tough, obdurate; it shed Covenant's feral bolts as if they were mere show, incandescent child's play. But he refused to be denied. The dazzling of his wild magic flung shafts and quarrels of might at the emerald glister of the aura until one prodigious blast pierced it.
   It ruptured with a shock which jarred the thronehall like an earth tremor. Waves of concussion pealed at Covenant's head, hammered at his sore and feverish skull. But he clung to his power, did not let his will wince.
   The whole penumbra burst into flame like a skin of green tinder, and as it burned it tore, peeled away, fell in hot shreds and tatters to the floor.
   Within Covenant's clench, Lord Foul the Despiser began to appear.
   By faint degrees, he became material, drifted from corporeal absence to presence. Perfectly molded limbs, as pure as alabaster, grew slowly visible-an old, grand, leonine head, magisterially crowned and bearded with flowing white hair-an enrobed, dignified trunk, broad and solid with strength. Only his eyes showed no change, no stern, impressive surge of incarnation; they lashed constantly at Covenant like fangs wet with venom.
   When he was fully present, Lord Foul folded his arms on his chest and said harshly, "Now you do in truth see me, groveler." His tone gave no hint of fear or surrender. "Do you yet believe that you are my master? Fool! I grew beyond your petty wisdom or belief long before your world's babyhood. I tell you plainly, groveler-Despite such as mine is the only true fruit of experience and insight. In time you will not do otherwise than I have done. You will learn contempt for your fellow beings-for the small malices which they misname their loves and beliefs and hopes and loyalties. You will learn that it is easier to control them than to forbear-easier and better. You will not do otherwise. You will become a shadow of what I am-you will be a despiser without the courage to despise. Continue, groveler. Destroy my work if you must-slay me if you can-but make an end! I am weary of your shallow misperception."
   In spite of himself, Covenant was moved. Lord Foul's lordly mien, his dignity and resignation, spoke more vividly than any cursing or defiance. Covenant saw that he still had answers to find, regardless of all he had endured.
   But before he could respond, try to articulate the emotions and intuitions which Lord Foul's words called up in him, a sudden clap of vehemence splintered the silence of the thronehall. A great invisible door opened in the air at his back; without warning, strong presences, furious and abhorring, stood behind him. The violence of their emanations almost broke his concentrated hold on Lord Foul.
   He clenched his will, steadied himself to face a shock, and turned.
   He found himself looking up at tall figures like the one he had seen in the cave of the EarthBlood under Melenkurion Skyweir. They towered above him, grisly and puissant; he seemed to see them through the stone rather than within the chamber.
   They were the specters of the dead Lords. He recognized Kevin Landwaster son of Loric. Beside Kevin stood two other livid men whom he knew instinctively to be Loric Vilesilencer and Damelon Giantfriend. There were Prothall, Osondrea, a score of men and women Covenant had never met, never heard named. With them was Elena daughter of Lena. And behind and above them all rose another figure, a dominating man with hot prophetic eyes and one halfhand: Berek Earthfriend, the Lord-Fatherer.
   In one voice like a thunder of abomination-one voice of outrage that shook Covenant to the marrow of his bones-they cried, "Slay him! It is within your power. Do not heed his treacherous lies. In the name of all Earth and health, slay him!"
   The intensity of their passion poured at him, flooded him with their extreme desire. They were the sworn defenders of the Land. Its glory was their deepest love. Yet in one way or another, Lord Foul had outdone them all, seen them all taken to their graves while he endured and ravaged. They hated him with a blazing hate that seemed to overwhelm Covenant's individual rage.
   But instead of moving him to obey, their vehemence washed away his fury, his power for battle. Violence drained out of him, giving place to sorrow for them-a sorrow so great that he could hardly contain it, hardly hold back his tears. They had earned obedience from him; they had a right to his rage. But their demand made his intuitions clear to him. He remembered Foamfollower's former lust for killing. He still had something to do, something which could not be done with rage. Anger was only good for fighting, for resistance. Now it could suborn the very thing he had striven to achieve.
   In a voice thick with grief, he answered the Lords, "I can't kill him. He always survives when you try to kill him. He comes back stronger than ever the next time. Despite is like that. I can't kill him."
   His reply stunned them. For a moment, they trembled with astonishment and dismay. Then Kevin asked in horror, "Will you let him live?"
   Covenant could not respond directly, could not give a direct answer. But he clung to the strait path of his intuition. For the first time since his battle with the Despiser had begun, he turned to Saltheart Foamfollower.
   The Giant stood chained to the wall, watching avidly everything that happened. The bloody flesh of his wrists and ankles showed how hard he had tried to break free, and his face looked as if it had been wrung dry by all the things he had been forced to behold. But he was essentially unharmed, essentially whole. Deep in his cavernous eyes, he seemed to understand Covenant' s dilemma. '' You have done well, my dear friend," he breathed when Covenant met his gaze. " I trust whatever choice your heart makes.''
   "There's no choice about it," Covenant panted, fighting to hold back his tears. "I'm not going to kill him. He'11 just come back. I don't want that on my head. No, Foamfollower-my friend. It's up to you now. You-and them.'' He nodded toward the livid, spectral Lords. "Joy is in the ears that hear-remember? You told me that. I've got joy for you to hear. Listen to me. I've beaten the Despiser-this time. The Land is safe-for now. I swear it. Now I want-Foamfollower!" Involuntary tears blurred his sight. "I want you to laugh. Take joy in it. Bring some joy into this bloody hole. Laugh!" He swung back to shout at the Lords, "Do you hear me? Let Foul alone! Heal yourselves!"
   For a long moment that almost broke his will, there was no sound in the thronehall. Lord Foul blazed contempt at his captor; the Lords stood aghast, uncomprehending; Foamfollower hung in his chains as if the burden were too great for him to bear.
   "Help me!" Covenant cried.
   Then slowly his plea made itself felt. Some prophecy in his words touched the hearts that heard him. With a terrible effort, Saltheart Foamfollower, the last of the Giants, began to laugh.
   It was a gruesome sound at first; writhing in his fetters, Foamfollower spat out the laugh as if it were a curse. On that level, the Lords were able to share it. In low voices, they aimed bursts of contemptuous scorn, jeering hate, at the beaten Despiser. But as Foamfollower fought to laugh, his muscles loosened. The constriction of his throat and chest relaxed, allowing a pure wind of humor to blow the ashes of rage and pain from his lungs. Soon something like joy, something like real mirth, appeared in his voice.
   The Lords responded. As it grew haler, Foamfollower's laugh became infectious; it drew the grim specters with it. They began to unclench their hate. Clean humor ran through them, gathering momentum as it passed. Foamfollower gained joy from them, and they began to taste his joy. In moments, all their contempt or scorn had fallen away. They were no longer laughing to express their outrage at Lord Foul; they were not laughing at him at all. To their own surprise, they were laughing for the pure joy of laughter, for the sheer satisfaction and emotional ebullience of mirth.
   Lord Foul cringed at the sound. He strove to sustain his defiance, but could not. With a cry of mingled pain and fury, he covered his face and began to change. The years melted off his frame. His hair darkened, beard grew stiffer; with astonishing speed, he was becoming younger. And at the same time he lost solidity, stature. His body shrank and faded with every undone age. Soon he was a youth again, barely visible.
   Still the change did not stop. From a youth he became a child, growing steadily younger as he vanished. For an instant, he was a loud infant, squalling in his ancient frustration. Then he disappeared altogether.
   As they laughed, the Lords also faded. With the Despiser vanquished,  they went back to their natural graves-ghosts who had at last gained something other than torment from the breaking of the Law of Death. Covenant and Foamfollower were left alone.
   Covenant was weeping out of control now. The exhaustion of his ordeal had caught up with him. He felt too frail to lift his head, too weary to live any longer. Yet he had one more thing to do. He had promised that the Land would be safe. Now he had to ensure its safety.
   "Foamfollower?" he wept. "My friend?" With his voice, he begged the Giant to understand him; he lacked the strength to articulate what he had to do.
   "Do not fear for me," Foamfollower replied. He sounded strangely proud, as if Covenant had honored him in some rare way. "Thomas Covenant, ur-Lord and Unbeliever, brave white gold wielder-I desire no other end. Do whatever you must, my friend. I am at Peace. I have beheld a marvelous story."
   Covenant nodded in the blindness of his tears. Foamfollower could make his own decisions. With the flick of an idea, he broke the Giant's chains, so that Foamfollower could at least attempt to escape if he chose. Then all Covenant's awareness of his friend became ashes.
   As he shambled numbly across the floor, he tried to tell himself that he had found his answer. The answer to death was to make use of it rather than fall victim to it-master it by making it serve his goals, beliefs. This was not a good answer. But it was the only answer he had.
   Following the nerves of his face, he reached toward the Illearth Stone as if it were the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of life and death.
   As soon as he touched it, his ring's waning might reawoke. Immense red-green fire pillared upward, towered out of the Stone and his ring like a pinnacle tall enough to pierce the heavens. As he felt its power tearing through the battered hull or conduit of his being, he knew that he had found his fire, the fire for which he was apt like autumn leaves or a bad manuscript. In the heart of the whirling gale, the pillar of force, he knelt beside the Stone and put his arms around it like a man embracing immolation. New blood from his poisoned lip ran down his chin, dripped into the green and was vaporized.
   With each moment, the conjunction of the two powers produced more and more might. Like a lifeless and indomitable heart of fury, the Illearth Stone pulsed in Covenant's arms, laboring in mindless, automatic reflex to destroy him rather than be destroyed. And he hugged it to his breast like a chosen fate. He could not slay the Corruption, but he could at least try to break this corruptive tool; without it, any surviving remnant of the Despiser would have to work ages longer to regain his lost power. Covenant embraced the Stone, gave himself to its fire, and strove with the last tatters of his will to tear it asunder.
   The green-white, white-green holocaust grew until it filled the thronehall, grew until it hurricaned up through the stone out of the bowels of Ridjeck Thome. Like fighters locked mortally at each other's throats, emerald and argent galled and blasted, gyring upward at velocities which no undefended granite could withstand. In long pain, the roots of the promontory trembled. Walls bent; great chunks of ceiling fell; weaker stones melted and ran like water.
   Then a convulsion shook the Creche. Gaping cracks shot through the floors, sped up the walls, as if they were headlong in mad flight. The promontory itself began to quiver and groan. Muffled detonations sent great clouds of debris up through the cracks and crevices. Hotash Slay danced in rapid spouts. The towers leaned like willows in a bereaving wind.
   With a blast that jolted the Sea, the whole center of the promontory exploded into the air. In a rain of boulders, Creche fragments as large as homes, villages, the wedge split open from tip to base. Accompanied by cataclysmic thunder, the rent halves toppled in ponderous, monumental agony away from each other into the Sea.
   At once, ocean crashed into the gap from the east, and lava poured into it from the west. Their impact obscured in steam and fiery sibilation the seething caldron of Ridjeck Thome's collapse, the sky-shaking fury of sea and stone and fire-obscured everything except the power which blazed from the core of the destruction.
   It was green-white-savage, wild-mounting hugely toward its apocalypse.
   But the white dominated and prevailed.

Twenty-One: Leper's End


   In that way, Thomas Covenant kept his promise.
   For a long time afterward, he lay in a comfortable grave of oblivion; buried in utter exhaustion, he floated through darkness-the disengaged no-man's-land between life and death. He felt that he was effectively dead, insensate as death. But his heart went on beating as if it lacked the wit or wisdom to stop when it had no more reason to go on. Raggedly, frailly, it kept up his life.
   And deep within him-in a place hidden somewhere, defended, inside the hard bone casque of his skull-he retained an awareness of himself. That essential thing had not yet failed him, though it seemed to be soaking slowly away into the warm soft earth of his grave.
   He wanted rest; he had earned rest. But the release which had brought him to his present dim peace had been too expensive. He could not approve.
   Foamfollower is dead, he murmured silently.
   There was no escape from guilt. No answer covered everything. For as long as he managed to live, he would never be clean.
   He did not think that he could manage to live very long.
   Yet something obdurate argued with him. That wasn't your fault, it said. You couldn't make his decisions for him. Beyond a certain point, this responsibility of yours is only a more complex form of suicide.
   He acknowledged the argument. He knew from experience that lepers were doomed as soon as they began to feel that they were to blame for contracting leprosy, were responsible for being ill. Perhaps guilt and mortality, physical limitation, were the same thing in the end-facts of life, irremediable, useless to protest. Nevertheless Foamfollower was gone, and could never be restored. Covenant would never hear him laugh again.
   "Then take peace in your other innocence," said a voice out of the darkness. "You did not choose this task. You did not undertake it of your own free will. It was thrust upon you. Blame belongs to the chooser, and this choice was made by one who elected you without your knowledge or consent."
   Covenant did not need to ask who was speaking; he recognized the voice. It belonged to the old beggar who had confronted him before his first experience in the Land-the old man who had urged him to keep his wedding band, and had made him read a paper on the fundamental question of ethics.
   Dimly, he replied, "You must have been sure of yourself."
   "Sure? Ah, no. There was great hazard-risk for the world which I made-risk even for me. Had my enemy gained the white wild magic gold, he would have unloosed himself from the Earth-destroyed it so that he might hurl himself against me. No, Thomas Covenant. I risked my trust in you. My own hands were bound. I could not touch the Earth to defend it without thereby undoing what I meant to preserve. Only a free man could hope to stand against my enemy, hope to preserve the Earth."
   Covenant heard sympathy, respect, even gratitude in the voice. But he was unconvinced. "I wasn't free. It wasn't my choice."
   "Ah, but you were-free of my suasion, my power, my wish to make you my tool. Have I not said that the risk was great? Choiceless, you were given the power of choice. I elected you for the Land but did not compel you to serve my purpose in the Land. You were free to damn Land and Earth and Time and all, if you chose. Only through such a risk could I hope to preserve the rectitude of my creation."
   In his darkness, Covenant shrugged. "I still wasn't free. That singer -who called me Berek. That revival. The kid who got herself snakebit. Maybe you left me free in the Land, but you didn't leave me alone in my own life."
   "No," the voice responded softly. "I had no hand in those chances. Had I done anything at all to shape you, you would have been my tool-effectless. Without freedom, you could not have mastered my enemy-without independence-without the sovereignty of your own allegiance. No, I risked too much when I spoke to you once. I interfered in no other way."
   Covenant did not like to think that he had been so completely free to ruin the Land. He had come so close! For a while, he mused numbly to himself, measuring the Creator's risk. Then he asked, "What made you think I wouldn't just collapse-wouldn't give up in despair?"
   The voice replied promptly. "Despair is an emotion like any other. It is the habit of despair which damns, not the despair itself. You were a man already acquainted with habit and despair-with the Law which both saves and damns. Your knowledge of your illness made you wise."
   Wise, Covenant murmured to himself. Wisdom. He could not understand why his witless heart went on beating.
   "Further, you were in your own way a creator. You had already tasted the way in which a creator may be impotent to heal his creation. It is ofttimes this impotence which teaches a creation to despair,"
   "What about the creator? Why doesn't he despair?"
   "Why should he despair? If he cannot bear the world he has made, he can make another. No, Thomas Covenant." The voice laughed softly, sadly. "Gods and creators are too powerful and powerless for despair."
   Yes, Covenant said with his own sadness. But then he added almost out of habit, It's not that easy. He wanted the voice to go away, leave him alone with his oblivion. But though it was silent, he knew it had not left him. He drifted along beside it for a time, then gathered himself to ask, "What do you want?"
   "Thomas Covenant"-the voice was gentle-"my unwilling son, I wish to give you a gift-a guerdon to speak my wordless gratitude. Your world runs by Law, as does mine. And by any Law I am in your debt. You have retrieved my Earth from the brink of dissolution. I could give you precious gifts a dozen times over, and still not call the matter paid."
   A gift? Covenant sighed to himself. No. He could not demean himself or the Creator by asking for a cure to leprosy. He was about to refuse the offer when a sudden excitement flashed across him. "Save the Giant," he said. "Save Foamfollower."
   In a tone of ineffable rue, the voice answered, "No, Thomas Covenant-I cannot. Have I not told you that I would break the arch of Time if I were to put my hand through it to touch the Earth? No matter how great my gratitude, I can do nothing for you in the Land or upon that Earth. If I could, I would never have permitted my enemy to do so much harm.''
   Covenant nodded; he recognized the validity of the answer. After a moment of emptiness, he said, "Then there's nothing you can do for me. I told Foul I don't believe in him. I don't believe in you either. I've had the chance to make an important choice. That's enough. I don't need any gifts. Gifts are too easy-I can't afford them."
   "Ah! but you have earned-"
   "I didn't earn anything.'' Faint anger stirred in him. "You didn't give me a chance to earn anything. You put me in the Land without my approval or consent-even without my knowledge. All I did was see the difference between health and-disease. Well, it's enough for me. But there's no particular virtue in it."
   Slowly, the voice breathed. "Do not be too quick to judge the makers of worlds. Will you ever write a story for which no character will have cause to reproach you?"
   "I'll try," said Covenant. "I'll try."
   "Yes," the voice whispered. "Perhaps for you it is enough. Yet for my own sake I wish to give you a gift. Please permit me."
   "No." Covenant's refusal was weary rather than belligerent. He could not think of anything he would be able to accept.
   "I can return you to the Land. You could live out the rest of your life in health and honor, as befits a great hero."
   "No." Have mercy on me. I couldn't bear it. "That's not my world. I don' t belong there."
   "I can teach you to believe that your experiences in the Land have been real."
   "No." It's not that easy. "You'll drive me insane."
   Again the voice was silent for a while before it said in a tone made sharp by grief, "Very well. Then hear me, Thomas Covenant, before you refuse me once more. This I must tell you.
   "When the parents of the child whom you saved comprehended what you had done, they sought to aid you. You were injured and weak from hunger. Your exertions to save the child had hastened the poison in your lip. Your condition was grave. They bore you to the hospital for treatment. This treatment employs a thing which the Healers of your world name 'antivenin.' Thomas Covenant, this antivenin is made from the blood of horses. Your body loathes-you are allergic to the horse serum. It is a violent reaction. In your weak state, you cannot survive it. At this moment, you stand on the threshold of your own death.
   "Thomas Covenant-hear me." The voice breathed compassion at him. "I can give you life. In this time of need, I can provide to your stricken flesh the strength it requires to endure."
   Covenant did not answer for some time. Somewhere in his half-forgotten past, he had heard that some people were allergic to rattlesnake antivenin. Perhaps the doctors at the hospital should have tested for the allergy before administering the full dosage; probably he had been so far gone in shock that they had not had time for medical niceties. For a moment, he considered the thought of dying under their care as a form of retribution.
   But he rejected the idea, rejected the self-pity behind it. "I'd rather survive," he murmured dimly. "I don't want to die like that."
   The voice smiled. "It is done. You will live."
   By force of habit, Covenant said, "I'll believe it when I see it."
   "You will see it. But there is first one other thing that you will see. You have not asked for this gift, but I give it to you whether or not you wish it. I did not ask your approval when I elected you for the Land, and do not ask now."
   Before Covenant could protest, he sensed that the voice had left him. Once again, he was alone in the darkness. Oblivion swaddled him so comfortably that he almost regretted his decision to live. But then something around him or in him began to change, modulate. Without sight or hearing or touch, he became aware of sunlight, low voices, a soft warm breeze. He found himself looking down as if from a high hill at Glimmermere.
   The pure waters of the lake reflected the heavens in deep burnished azure, and the breeze smelled gently of spring. The hills around Glimmer-mere showed the scars of Lord Foul's preternatural winter. But already grass had begun to sprout through the cold-seared ground, and a few tough spring flowers waved bravely in the air. The stretches of bare earth had lost their gray, frozen deadness. The healing of the Land had begun.
   Hundreds of people were gathered around the lake. Almost immediately, Covenant made out High Lord Mhoram. He stood facing east across Glimmermere. He bore no staff. His hands were heavily bandaged. On his left were the Lords Trevor and Loerya, holding their daughters, and on his right was Lord Amatin. All of them seemed solemnly glad, but Mhoram's serene gaze outshone them, testified more eloquently than they could to the Land's victory.
   Behind the Lords stood Warmark Quaan and Hearthrall Tohrm- Quaan with the Hafts of his Warward, and Tohrm with all the Hirebrands and Gravelingases of Lord's Keep. Covenant saw that Trell Atiaran-mate was not among them. He understood intuitively; Trell had carried his personal dilemma to its conclusion, and was either dead or gone. Again, the Unbeliever found that he could not argue away his guilt.
   All around the lake beyond the Lords were Lorewardens and warriors. And behind them were the survivors of Revelstone-farmers, Cattleherds, horse-tenders, cooks, artisans, Craftmasters-children and parents, young and old-all the people who had endured. They did not seem many, but Covenant knew that they were enough; they would be able to commence the work of restoration.
   As he watched, they drew close to Glimmermere and fell silent. High Lord Mhoram waited until they were all attentive, ready. Then he lifted up his voice.
   "People of the Land," he said firmly, "we are gathered here in celebration of life. I have no long song to sing. I am weak yet, and none of us is strong. But we live. The Land has been preserved. The mad riot and rout of Lord Foul's army shows us that he has fallen. The fierce echo of battle within the krill of Loric shows us that the white gold has done combat with the Illearth Stone, and has emerged triumphant. That is cause enough for celebration. Enough? My friends, it will suffice for us and for our children, while the present age of the Land endures.
   ''In token of this, I have brought the krill to Glimmermere.'' Reaching painfully into his robe, he drew out the dagger. Its gem showed no light or life. "In it, we see that ur-Lord Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever and white gold wielder, has returned to his world, where a great hero was fashioned for our deliverance.
   "Well, that is as it must be, though my heart regrets his passing. Yet let none fear that he is lost to us. Did not the old legends say that Berek Halfhand would come again? And was not that promise kept in the person of the Unbeliever? Such promises are not made in vain.
   "My friends-people of the Land-Thomas Covenant once inquired of me why we so devote ourselves to the Lore of High Lord Kevin Landwaster. And now, in this war, we have learned the hazard of that Lore. Like the krill, it is a power of two edges, as apt for carnage as for preservation. Its use endangers our Oath of Peace.
   "I am Mhoram son of Variol, High Lord by the choice of the Council. I declare that from this day forth we will not devote ourselves to any Lore which precludes Peace. We will gain lore of our own-we will strive and quest and learn until we have found a lore in which the Oath of Peace and the preservation of the Land live together. Hear me, you people! We will serve Earthfriendship in a new way."
   As he finished, he lifted the krill and tossed it high into the air. It arced glinting through the sunlight, struck water in the center of Glimmermere. When it splashed the potent water, it flared once, sent a burn of white glory into the depths of the lake. Then it was gone forever.
   High Lord Mhoram watched while the ripples faded. Then he made an exultant summoning gesture, and all the people around Glimmermere began to sing in celebration:
   Hail, Unbeliever! Keeper and Covenant, Unoathed truth and wicked's bane, Ur-Lord Illender, Prover of Life: Hail! Covenant!
   Dour-handed wild magic wielder, Ur-Earth white gold's servant and Lord- Yours is the power that preserves.
   Sing out, people of the Land-
   Raise obeisance!
   Hold honor and glory high to the end of days:
   Keep clean the truth that was won!
   Hail, Unbeliever!
   Covenant!
   Hail!
   They raised their staffs and swords and hands to him, and his vision blurred with tears. Tears smeared Glimmermere out of focus until it became only a smudge of light before his face. He did not want to lose it. He tried to clear his sight, hoping that the lake was not gone. But then he became conscious of his tears. Instead of wetting his cheeks, they ran from the corners of his eyes down to his ears and neck. He was lying on his back in comfort. When he refocused his sight, pulled it into adjustment like the resolution of a lens, he found that the smear of light before him was the face of a man.
   The man peered at him for a long moment, then withdrew into a superficial haze of fluorescence. Slowly, Covenant realized that there were gleaming horizontal bars on either side of the bed. His left wrist was tied to one of them, so that he could not disturb the needle in his vein. The needle was connected by a clear tube to an IV bottle above his head. The air had a faint patina of germicide.
   "I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it," the man said. "That poor devil is going to live."
   "That's why I called you, doctor," the woman said. "Isn't there anything we can do?"
   "Do?" the doctor snapped.
   "I didn't mean it like that," the woman replied defensively. "But he's a leper! He's been making people in this town miserable for months. Nobody knows what to do about him. Some of the other nurses want-they want overtime pay for taking care of him. And look at him. He' s so messed up. I just think it would be a lot better for everyone-if he-"
   "That's enough." The man was angry. "Nurse, if I hear another word like that out of you, you're going to be looking for a new job. This man is ill. If you don't want to help people who are ill, go find yourself some other line* of work."
   "I didn't mean any harm," the nurse huffed as she left the room.
   After she was gone, Covenant lost sight of the doctor for a while; he seemed to fade into the insensitive haze of the lighting. Covenant tried to take stock of his situation. His right wrist was also tied, so that he lay in the bed as if he had been crucified. But the restraints did not prevent him from testing the essential facts about himself. His feet were numb and cold. His fingers were in the same condition-numb, chill. His forehead hurt feverishly. His lip was taut and hot with swelling.
   He had to agree with the nurse; he was in rotten shape.
   Then he found the doctor near him again. The man seemed young and angry. Another man entered the room, an older doctor whom Covenant recognized as the one who had treated him during his previous stay in the hospital. Unlike the younger man, this doctor wore a suit rather than a white staff jacket. As he entered, he said, "I hope you've got good reason for calling me. I don't give up church for just anyone-especially on Easter."
   "This is a hospital," the younger man growled, "not a bloody revival. Of course I've got good reason."
   "What's eating you? Is he dead?"
   "No. Just the opposite-he's going to live. One minute he's in allergic shock, and dying from it because his body's too weak and infected and poisoned to fight back-and the next- Pulse firm, respiration regular, pupillary reactions normal, skin tone improving. I'll tell you what it is. It's a goddamn miracle, that's what it is."
   "Come, now," the older man murmured. "I don't believe in miracles-neither do you." He glanced at the chart, then listened to Covenant's heart and lungs for himself. "Maybe he's just stubborn." He leaned close to Covenant's face. "Mr. Covenant," he said, "I don't know whether you can hear me. If you can, I have some news which may be important to you. I saw Megan Roman yesterday-your lawyer. She said that the township council has decided not to rezone Haven Farm. The way you saved that little girl-well, some people are just a bit ashamed of themselves. It's hard to take a hero's home away from him.
   "Of course, to be honest I should tell you that Megan performed a little legerdemain for you. She's a sharp lawyer, Mr. Covenant. She thought the council might think twice about evicting you if it knew that a national news magazine was going to do a human interest story on the famous author who saves children from rattlesnakes. None of our politicians were very eager for headlines like 'Town Ostracizes Hero.' But the point is that you'll be able to keep Haven Farm."
   The older man receded. After a moment, Covenant heard him say to the other doctor, "You still haven't told me why you're in such high dudgeon."
   "It's nothing,'' the younger man replied as they left the room. "One of our Florence Nightingales suggested that we should kill him off."
   "Who was it? I'll get the nursing superintendent to transfer her. We'll get decent care for him from somewhere."
   Their voices drifted away, left Covenant alone in his bed.
   He was thinking dimly, A miracle. That's what it was.
   He was a sick man, a victim of Hansen's disease. But he was not a leper-not just a leper. He had the law of his illness carved in large, undeniable letters on the nerves of his body; but he was more than that. In the end, he had not failed the Land. And he had a heart which could still pump blood, bones which could still bear his weight; he had himself.
   Thomas Covenant: Unbeliever.
   A miracle.
   Despite the stiff pain in his lip, he smiled at the empty room. He felt the smile on his face, and was sure of it.
   He smiled because he was alive.