Twenty-one: Treacher's Gorge


THEY crossed the Plains northward in confidence and good spirits. No danger or report of danger appeared anywhere along their way. And the Ranyhyn rode the grasslands like live blazonry, challenges uttered in flesh. Foamfollower told gay tales as if he wished to show that he had reached the end of a passing travail.. Quaan and his warriors responded with ripostes and jests. And the Ramen entertained them with displays of hunting skill. The company rode late into the first night, in defiance of the dismal moon. And the second night, they camped on the south bank of Roamsedge Ford.
But early the next morning they crossed the Ford and turned northeast up a broad way between the Roamsedge and Morinmoss. By mid-afternoon, they reached the eastmost edge of the Forest. From there, the Roamsedge, the northern border of the Plains, swung more directly eastward, and the company went on northeast, away from both Morinmoss and the Plains of Ra. That night, they slept on the edge of a stark, unfriendly flatland where no people lived and few willingly traveled. The whole region north of them was cut and scarred and darkened like an ancient battleground, a huge field that had been ruined by the shedding of too much blood. Scrub grass, stunted trees, and a few scattered aliantha took only slight hold on the uncompromising waste. The company was due south of Mount Thunder.
As the Quest angled northeastward across this land, Mhoram told Covenant some of its history. It spread east to Landsdrop, and formed the natural front of attack for Lord Foul's armies in the ancient wars. From the Fall of the River Landrider to Mount Thunder was open terrain along the great cliff of Landsdrop. The hordes issuing from Foul's Creche could ascend in scores of places to bring battle to the Upper Land. So it was that the first great battles in all the Land's wars against the Despiser occurred across this ravaged plain. Age after age, the defenders strove to halt Lord Foul at Landsdrop, and failed because they could not block all the ways up from the Spoiled Plains and Sarangrave Flat. Then Lord Foul's armies passed westward along the Mithil, and struck deep into the Center Plains. In the last war, before Kevin Landwaster had been finally driven to invoke the Ritual of Desecration, Lord Foul had crushed through the heart of the Center Plains, and had turned north to force the Lords to their final battle at Kurash Plenethor, now named Trothgard.
In the presence of so much old death, the riders did not travel loudly. But they sang songs during the first few days, and several times they returned to the legend telling of Berek Halfhand and the Fire-Lions of Mount Thunder. On this wilderland Berek had fought, suffering the deaths of his friends and the loss of his fingers in battle. Here he had met despair, and had fled to the slopes of Gravin Threndor, the Peak of the Fire-Lions. And there he had found both Earthfriendship and Earthpower. It was a comforting song, and the riders sang its refrain together as if they sought to make it true for themselves:
Berek! Earthfriend! help and weal,
Battle aid against the foe! Earth gives and answers Power's peal, Ringing, Earthfriend! Help and heal!
Cleanse the Land from bloody death and woel
They needed its comfort. The hard-reft and harrowed warland seemed to say that Berek's victory was an illusion-that all his Earthfriendship and his Staff of Law and his lineage of Lords, his mighty works and the works of his descendants, amounted to so much scrub grass and charred rock and dust-that the true history of the Land was written here, in the bare topsoil and stone which lay like a litter of graves from the Plains of Ra to Mount Thunder, from Andelain to Landsdrop.
The atmosphere of the region agitated Foamfollower. He strode at Covenant's side with an air of concealed urgency, as if he were repressing a desire to break into a run. And he talked incessantly, striving to buoy up his spirits with a constant stream of stories and legends and songs. At first, his efforts pleased the riders, appeased their deepening, hungry gloom like treasure-berries of entertainment. But the Questers were on their way toward the bleak, black prospect of Drool Rockworm, crouched like a bane in the catacombs of Mount Thunder. By the fourth day from Roamsedge Ford, Covenant felt that he was drowning in Giantish talk; and the voices of the warriors when they sang sounded more pleading than confident-like whistling against inexorable night.
With the Ramen to help him, Prothall found rapid ways over the rough terrain. Long after sunset on that fourth day when the growing moon stood high and baleful in the night sky-the Quest made a weary camp on the edge of Landsdrop.
The next dawn, Covenant resisted the temptation to go and look over the great cliff. He wanted to catch a glimpse of the Lower Land, of the Spoiled Plains and Sarangrave Flat-regions which had filled Foamfollower's talk in the past days. But he had no intention of exposing himself to an attack of vertigo. The fragile stability of his bargain did not cover gratuitous risks. So he remained in the camp when most of his companions went to gaze out over Landsdrop. But later, as the company rode north within a stone's throw of the edge, he asked Lord Mhoram to tell him about the great cliff.
"Ah, Landsdrop," Mhoram responded quietly. "There is talk, unfounded even in the oldest legends, that the cleft of Landsdrop was caused by the sacrilege which buried immense banes under Mount Thunder's roots. In a cataclysm that shook its very heart, the Earth heaved with revulsion at the evils it was forced to contain. And the force of that dismay broke the Upper Land from the Lower, lifted it toward the sky. So this cliff reaches from deep in the Southron Range, past the Fall of the River Landrider, through the heart of Mount Thunder, at least half a thousand leagues into the mapless winter of the Northron Climbs. It varies in height from place to place. But it stands across all the Land, and does not allow us to forget."
The Lord's rough voice only sharpened Covenant's anxiety. As the company rode, he held his gaze away to the west, trusting the wilderland to anchor him against his instinctive fear of heights.
Before noon, the weather changed. Without warning, a sharp wind bristling with grim, preternatural associations sprang out of the north. In moments, black clouds seethed across the sky. Lightning ripped the air; thunder pounded like a crushing of boulders. Then, out of the bawling sky, rain struck like a paroxysm of rage -hit with savage force until it stung. The horses lowered their heads as if they were wincing. Torrents battered the riders, drenched, blinded them. Manethrall Lithe sent her Cords scouting ahead to keep the company from plunging over Landsdrop. Prothall raised his staff with bright fire flaring at its tip to help keep his companions from losing each other. They huddled together, and the Bloodguard positioned the Ranyhyn around them to bear the brunt of the attack.
In the white revelations of the lightning, Prothall's flare appeared dim and frail, and thunder detonated hugely over it as if exploding at the touch of folly. Covenant crouched low on Dura's back, flinched away from the lightning as if the sky were stone which the thunder shattered. He could not see the Cords, did not know what was happening around him; he was constantly afraid that Dura's next step would take him over the cliff. He clenched his eyes to Prothall's flame as if it could keep him from being lost.
The skill and simple toughness of the Ramen pre-` served the company, kept it moving toward Mount Thunder. But the journey seemed like wandering in the collapse of the heavens. The riders could only be sure of their direction because they were always forcing their way into the maw of the storm. The wind flailed the rain at their faces until their eyes felt lacerated and their cheeks shredded. And the cold drenching stiffened their limbs, paralyzed them slowly like the rigor of death. But they went on as if they were trying to beat down a wall of stone with their foreheads.
For two full days, they pushed onward-felt themselves crumbling under the onslaught of the rain. But they knew neither day nor night, knew nothing but one continuous, pummeling, dark, savage, implacable storm. They rode until they were exhausted-rested on their feet knee-deep in water and mud, gripping the reins of their horses-ate sopping morsels of food half warmed by lillianrill fires which Birinair struggled to
keep half alive-counted themselves to be sure no one had been lost-and rode again until they were forced by exhaustion to stop again. At times, they felt that Prothall's wan blue flame alone sustained them. Then Lord Mhoram moved among the company. In the lurid lightning, his face appeared awash with water like a foundering wreck; but he went to each Quester, shouted through the howl of wind and rain, the devastating thunder, "Drool-storm-for us! But he mistaken! Main force-passes-west! Take heard Augurs-for us!"
Covenant was too worn and cold to respond. But he heard the generous courage behind Mhoram's words. When the company started forward again, he squinted ahead toward Prothall's flame as if he were peering into a mystery.
The struggle went on, prolonged itself far beyond the point where it felt unendurable. In time, endurance itself became abstract-a mere concept, too impalpable to carry conviction. The lash and riot of the storm reduced the riders to raw, quivering flesh hardly able to cling to their mounts. But Prothall's fire burned on. At each new flash and blast, Covenant reeled in his seat. He wanted nothing in life but a chance to lie down in the mud. But Prothall's fire burned on. It was like a manacle, emprisoning the riders, dragging them forward. In the imminent madness of the torrents, Covenant gritted his gaze as if that manacle were precious to him.
Then they passed the boundary. It was as abrupt as if the wall against which they had thrown themselves like usurped titans had suddenly fallen into mud. Within ten stumbling heartbeats, the end of the storm blew over them, and they stood gasping in a sun-bright noon. They could hear the tumult rushing blindly away. Around them were the remains of the deluge-broken pools and streams and fens, thick mud like wreckage on the battle plain. And before them stood the great ravaged head of Mount Thunder: Gravin Threndor, Peak of the Fire-Lions.
For a long moment, it held them like an aegis of silence-grim, grave and august, like an outcropping of the Earth's heart. The Peak was north and slightly west of them. Taller than Kevin's Watch above the Upper Land, it seemed to kneel on the edge of the Sarangrave, with its elbows braced on the plateau and its head high over the cliff, fronting the sky in a strange attitude of pride and prayer; and it rose twelve thousand feet over the Defiles Course, which flowed eastward from its feet. Its sides from its crumpled foothills to the raw rock of its crown were bare, not cloaked or defended from storms, snows, besieging time by any trees or grasses, but instead wearing sheer, fragmented cliffs like facets, some as black as obsidian and others as gray as the ash of a granite fire-as if the stone of the Mount were too thick, too charged with power, to bear any gentle kind of life.
There, deep in the hulky chest of the mountain, was the destination of the Quest: Kiril Threndor, Heart of Thunder.
They were still ten leagues from the Peak, but the distance was deceptive. Already that scarred visage dominated the northern horizon; it confronted them over the rift of Landsdrop like an irrefusable demand. Mount Thunder! There Berek Halfhand had found his great revelation. There the Quest for the Staff of Law hoped to regain the future of the Land. And there Thomas Covenant sought release from the impossibility of his dreams. The company stared at the upraised rock as if it searched their hearts, asked them questions which they could not answer.
Then Quaan grinned fiercely, and said, "At least now we have been washed clean enough for such work."
That incongruity cracked the trance which held the riders. Several of the warriors burst into laughter as if recoiling from the strain of the past two days, and most of the others chuckled, daring Drool or any enemy to believe that the storm had weakened them. Though nearly prostrated by the exertion of finding a path through the torrents on foot, the Ramen laughed as well, sharing a humor they did not fully understand.
Only Foamfollower did not respond. His eyes were fixed on Mount Thunder, and his brows overhung his gaze as if shielding it from something too bright or hot to be beheld directly.
The Questers found a relatively dry hillock on which to rest and eat, and feed their mounts; and Foamfollower went with them absently. While the company made itself as comfortable as possible for a time, he stood apart and gazed at the mountain as if he were reading secrets in its scored crevices and cliffs. Softly he sang to himself:

Now we are Unhomed,
   bereft of root and kith and kin.
From other mysteries of delight,
   we set our sails to resail our track;
   but the winds of life blew not the way we chose,
   and the land beyond the Sea was lost.

High Lord Prothall let the company rest for as long as he dared in the open plain. Then he moved on again for the remainder of the afternoon, clinging to the edge of Landsdrop as if it were his only hope. Before the storm, Covenant had learned that the sole known entrance to the catacombs of Mount Thunder was through the western chasm of the Soulsease-Treacher's Gorge, the rocky maw which swallowed the river, only to spit it out again eastward on the Lower Land, transmogrified by hidden turbulent depths into the Defiles Course, a stream gray with the sludge and waste of the Wightwarrens. So Prothall's hope lay in his southeastern approach. He believed that by reaching Mount Thunder on the south and moving toward Treacher's Gorge from the east, the company could arrive unseen and unexpected at the Gorge's western exposure. But he took no unnecessary risks. Gravin Threndor stood perilously large against the sky, and seemed already to lean looming toward the company as if the Peak itself were bent to the shape of Drool's malice. He urged the tired Ramen to their best cunning in choosing a way along Landsdrop; and he kept the riders moving until after the sun had set.
But all the time he rode slumped agedly in his saddle, with his head bowed as if he were readying his neck for the stroke of an ax. He seemed to have spent all his strength in pulling his companions through the storm. Whenever he spoke, his long years rattled in his throat.
The next morning, the sun came up like a wound into ashen skies. Gray clouds overhung the earth, and a shuddering wind fell like a groan from the slopes of Mount Thunder. Across the wasteland, the pools of rainwater began to stagnate, as if the ground refused to drink the moisture, leaving it to rot instead. And as they prepared to ride, the Questers heard a low rumble like the march of drums- deep in the rock. They could feel the throb in their feet, in their knee joints.
It was the beat of mustering war.
The High Lord answered as if it were a challenge. "Melenkurion!" he called clearly. "Arise, champions of the Land! I hear the drums of the Earth! This is the great work of our time!" He swung onto his horse with his blue robe fluttering.
Warhaft Quaan responded with a cheer, "Hail, High Lord Prothall! We are proud to follow!"
Prothall's shoulders squared. His horse lifted its ears, raised its head, took a few prancing steps as grandly as a Ranyhyn. The Ranyhyn nickered humorously at the sight, and the company rode after Prothall boldly, as if the spirits of the ancient Lords were in them.
They made their way to the slopes of Mount Thunder through the constant buried rumble of the drums. As they found a path across the thickening rubble which surrounded the mountain, the booming subterreanean call accompanied them like an exhalation of Despite. But when they started up the first battered sides of the Peak, they forgot the drums; they had to concentrate on the climb. The foothills were like a gnarled stone mantle which Mount Thunder had shrugged from its shoulders in ages long past, and the way, westward over the slopes was hard. Time and again, the riders were forced to dismount to lead their mounts down tricky hills or over gray piles of tumbled, ashen rock. The difficulty of the terrain made their progress slow, despite all the Ramen could do to search out the easiest trails. The Peak seemed to lean gravely
over them as if watching their small struggles. And down onto them from the towering cliffs came a chilling wind, as cold as winter.
At noon, Prothall halted in a deep gully which ran down the mountainside like a cut. There the company rested and ate. When they were not moving, they could hear the drums clearly, and the cold wind seemed to pounce on them from the cliffs above. They sat in the straight light of the sun and shivered-some at the cold, others at the drums.
During the halt, Mhoram came over to Covenant and suggested that they climb a way up the gully together. Covenant nodded; he was glad to keep himself busy. He followed the Lord up the cut's contorted spine until they reached a break in its west wall. Mhoram entered the break; and when Covenant stepped in behind the Lord, he got a broad, sudden view of Andelain.
From the altitude of the break between the stone walls he felt that he was looking down over Andelain from a window in the side of Mount Thunder. The Hills lay richly over all the western horizon, and their beauty took his breath away. He stared hungrily with a feeling of stasis, of perfect pause in his chest, like a quick grip of eternity. The lush, clear health of Andelain shone like a country of stars despite the gray skies and the dull battle-roll. He felt obscurely unwilling to breathe, to break the trance, but after a moment his lungs began to hurt for air.
"Here is the Land," Mhoram whispered. "Grim, powerful Mount Thunder above us. The darkest banes and secrets of the Earth in the catacombs beneath our feet. The battleground behind. Sarangrave Flat below. And there-priceless Andelain, the beauty of life. Yes. This is the heart of the Land." He stood reverently, as if he felt himself to be in an august presence.
Covenant looked at him. "So you brought me up here to convince me that this is worth fighting for." His mouth twisted on the bitter taste of shame. "You want something from me-some declaration of allegiance. Before you have to face Drool." The Cavewights he had slain lay hard and cold in his memory.
"Of course," the Lord replied. "But it is the Land itself which asks for your allegiance." Then he said with sudden intensity, "Behold, Thomas Covenant. Use your eyes. Look upon it all. Look and listen hear the drums. And hear me. This is the heart of the Land. It is not the home of the Despiser. He has no place here. Oh, he desires the power of the banes, but his home is in Foul's Creche-not here. He has not depth or sternness or beauty enough for this place, and when he works here it is through ur-viles or Cavewights. Do you see?"
"I see." Covenant met the Lord's gaze flatly. "I've already made my bargain-my `peace,' if you want to call it that. I'm not going to do any more killing."
"Your `peace'?" Mhoram echoed in a complex tone. Slowly, the danger dimmed in his eyes. "Well, you must pardon me. In times of trouble, some Lords behave strangely." He passed Covenant and started back down the gully.
Covenant remained in the window for a moment, watching Mhoram go. He had not missed the Lord's oblique reference to Kevin; but he wondered what kinship Mhoram saw between himself and the Landwaster. Did the Lord believe himself capable of that kind of despair?
Muttering silently, Covenant returned to the company. He saw a measuring look in the eyes of the warriors; they were trying to assess what had occurred between him and Lord Mhoram. But he did not care what portents they read into him. When the company moved on, he led Dura up the side of the gully, blank to the shifting shale which more than once dropped him to his hands and knees, scratching and bruising him dangerously. He was thinking about the Celebration of Spring, about the battle of Soaring Woodhelven, about children and Llaura and Pietten and Atiaran and the nameless Unfettered One and Lena and Triock and the warrior who had died defending him-thinking, and striving to tell himself that his bargain was secure, that he was not angry enough to risk fighting again.
That afternoon, the company struggled on over the arduous ground, drawing slowly higher as they worked westward. They caught no glimpses of their destination. Even when the sun fell low in the sky, and the roar of waters became a distinct accompaniment to the buried beat of the drums, they were still not able to see the Gorge. But then they entered a sheer, sheltered ravine in the mountainside. From this ravine a rift too narrow for the horses angled away into the rock, and through it they could hear a snarling current. In the ravine the riders left their mounts under the care of the Cords. They went ahead on foot down the rift as it curved into the mountain and then broke out of the cliff no more than a hundred feet directly above Treacher's Gorge.
They no longer heard the drums; the tumult of the river smothered every sound but their own half-shouts. The walls of the chasm were high and sheer, blocking the horizon on either side. But through the spray that covered them like a mist, they could see the Gorge itself-the tight rock channel constricting the river until it appeared to scream, and the wild, white, sunset flame-plumed water thrashing as if it fought against its own frantic rush. From nearly a league away to the west,, the river came writhing down the Gorge, and sped below the company into the guts of the mountain as if sucked into an abyss. Above the Gorge, the setting sun hung near the horizon like a ball of blood in the leaden sky; and the light gave a shade of fire to the few hardy trees that clung to the rims of the chasm as if rooted by duty. But within Treacher's Gorge was nothing but spray and sheer stone walls and tortured waters.
The roar inundated Covenant's ears, and the mist wet rock seemed to slip under his feet. For an instant, the cliffs reeled; he could feel the maw of Mount Thunder gaping for him. Then he snatched himself back into the rift, stood with his back pressed against the rock, hugged his chest and fought not to gasp.
There was activity around him. He heard shouts of surprise and fear from the warriors at the end of the rift, heard Foamfollower's strangled howl. But he did not move. He clenched himself against the rock in the mist and roar of the river until his knees steadied, and the scream of slippage eased in his feet. Only then did he go to find out what caused the distress of his companions. He kept one hand braced on the wall and moved the other from shoulder to shoulder among the company as he went forward.
Between Covenant and the cliff, Foamfollower struggled. Two Bloodguard clung to his arms, and he battered them against the sides of the rift, hissing rapaciously, "Release me! Release-! I want them!" As if he wished to leap down into the Gorge.
"No!" Abruptly, Prothall stood before the Giant. The backlight of the sunset dimmed his face as he stood silhouetted against the glow with his arms wide and his staff held high. He was old, and only half the Giant's size. But the orangered fire seemed to expand him, make him taller, more full of authority. "Rockbrother! Master yourself! By the Seven! Do you rave?"
At that, Foamfollower threw off the Bloodguard. He caught the front of Prothall's robe, heaved the High Lord into the air, pinned him against the wall. Into his face, the Giant wheezed as if he were choking with rage, "Rave? Do you accuse me?"
The Bloodguard sprang toward Foamfollower. But a shout from Mhoram stopped them. Prothall hung clamped against the stone like a handful of old rags, but his eyes did not flinch. He repeated, "Do you rave?"
For one horrible moment, Foamfollower held the High Lord as if he meant to murder him with one huge squeeze of his fist. Covenant tried to think of something to say, some way to intervene, but could not. He had no conception of what had happened to Foamfollower.
Then from behind Covenant First Mark Tuvor said clearly, "A Raver? In one of the Seareach Giants? Impossible."
As if impaled by Tuvor's assertion, Foamfollower broke into a convulsion of coughing. The violence of his reaction knotted his gnarled frame. He lowered Prothall, then collapsed backward, falling with a thud against the opposite wall. Slowly, his paroxysm changed into a low chuckle like the glee of hysteria.
Heard through the groaning of the river, that sound made Covenant's skin crawl like a slimy caress. He could not abide it. Driven by a need to learn what had befallen Foamfollower, he moved forward to look into the Gorge.
There, braced now against his vertigo and the inundation of the river roar, he saw what had ignited Foamfollower. Ah, Giant! he groaned. To kill-! Below him and barely twenty feet above the level of the river was a narrow roadway like a ledge in the south wall of the Gorge. And along the roadway to the beat of unheard drums marched an army of Cavewights out of Mount Thunder. Captained by a wedge of urviles, file after file of the gangrel creatures jerked out of the mountain and tramped along the ledge with a glare of lust in their laval eyes. Thousands had already left their Wightwarrens; and behind them the files continued as if Mount Thunder were spewing all the hordes of its inhabiting vermin onto the undefended Earth.
Foamfollower!
For a moment, Covenant's heart beat to the rhythm of the Giant's pain. He could not bear to think that Foamfollower and his people might lose their hope of Home because of creatures like those.
Is killing the only answer?
Numbly, half blindly, he began looking for the way in which Foamfollower had meant to reach the ledge and the Cavewights.
He found it easily enough; it looked simple for anyone not timorous of heights. There was a rude, slick stair cut into the rock of the south wall from the rift down to the roadway. Opposite it were steps which went from the rift up to the top of the Gorge. They were as gray, spray-worn and old as native stone.
Lord Mhoram had come up behind Covenant. His voice reached dimly through the river roar. "This is the ancient Look of Treacher's Gorge. That part of the First Ward which tells of this place is easily understood. It was formed for the watch and concealment of the betrayers. For here at Treacher's Gorge, Lord
Foul the Despiser revealed his true self to High Lord Kevin. Here was struck the first blow of the open war which ended in the Ritual of Desecration.
"Before that time, Kevin Landwaster doubted Lord Foul without knowing why-for the Despiser had enacted no ill which Kevin could discover-and he showed trust for Lord Foul out of shame for his unworthy doubt. Then, through the Despiser's plotting, a message came to the Council of Lords from the Demondim in Mount Thunder. The message asked the Lords to come to the Demondim loreworks, the spawning crypts where the ur-viles were made, to meet with the loremasters, who claimed knowledge of a secret power.
"Clearly, Lord Foul intended for Kevin to go to Mount Thunder. But the High Lord doubted, and did not go. Then he was ashamed of his doubt, and sent in his stead some of his truest friends and strongest allies. So a high company of the Old Lords rafted as was their wont down the Soulsease through Andelain to Mount Thunder. And here, in the roar and spray and ill of Treacher's Gorge, they were ambushed by ur-viles. They were slaughtered, and their bodies sent to the abyss of the mountain. Then marched armies like these out of the catacombs, and the Land was plunged all unready into war.
"That long conflict went on battle after death littered battle without hope. High Lord Kevin fought bravely. But he had sent his friends into ambush. Soon he began his midnight meetings with despair-and there was no hope."
The seductive, dizzy rush of the river drained Covenant's resistance. Spray beaded on his face like sweat.
Foamfollower had wanted to do the same thing leap into the writhing allure of the Gorge-fall on the Cavewights from ambush.
With an effort that made him moan through his clenched teeth, Covenant backed away from the Look. Gripping himself against the wall, he asked without apparent transition, "Is he still laughing?"
Mhoram appeared to understand. "No. Now he sits
and quietly sings the song of the Unhomed, and gives no sign."
Foamfollower! Covenant breathed. "Why did you stop the Bloodguard? He might've hurt Prothall."
The Lord turned his back on Treacher's Gorge to face Covenant. "Saltheart Foamfollower is my friend. How could I interfere?" A moment later, he added, "The High Lord is not defenseless."
Covenant persisted. "Maybe a Raver-"
"No." Mhoram's flat assertion acknowledged no doubt. "Tuvor spoke truly. No Raver has the might to master a Giant."
"But something"-Covenant groped-"something is hurting him. He-he doesn't believe those omens. He thinks-Drool-or something-is going to prevent the Giants from going Home."
Mhoram's reply was so soft that Covenant was forced to read it on his crooked lips. "So do I."
Foamfollower!
Covenant looked down the rift at the Giant. In the darkness Foamfollower sat like a lump of shale against one wall, singing quietly and staring at invisible visions on the stone before him. The sight brought up a surge of sympathetic anger in Covenant, but he clamped it down, clutched his bargain. The walls of the rift leaned in toward him, like suffocating fear, dark wings. He thrust himself past the Giant and out toward the ravine.
Before long, the company gathered there for supper. They ate by the light of one dim lillianrill torch; and when the meal was done, they tried to get some sleep. Covenant felt that rest was impossible; he sensed the army of Cavewights unrolling like a skein of destruction for the weaving of the Land's death. But the ceaseless roar of the river lulled him until he relaxed against the ground. He dozed slightly, with the drums of war throbbing in the rock under him.
Later, he found himself sharply awake. The red moon had passed the crest of Mount Thunder, and now glared straight down on the ravine. He guessed that midnight was past. At first, he thought that the moon had roused him with its nearly full stare. But then he realized that the vibration of the drums was gone from the rock. He glanced around the camp, and saw Tuvor whispering with High Lord Prothall. The next moment, Tuvor began waking the sleepers.
Soon the warriors were alert and ready. Covenant had his knife in the belt of his robe, his staff in his hand. Birinair held aloft a rod with a small flame flickering from its tip, and in that uncertain light Mhoram and Prothall stood together with Manethrall Lithe, Warhaft Quaan, and the First Mark. Dim shadows shifted like fear and resolution across Prothall's face. His voice sounded weak with age as he said, "Now is our last hour of open sky. The outpouring of Drool's army has ended. Those of us who will must go into the catacombs of Mount Thunder. We must take this chance to enter, while Drool's attention is still with his army-before he can perceive that we are not where he thinks us to be.
"Now is the time for those who would to lay down the Quest. There can be no retreat, or escape after failure, in the Wightwarrens. The Quest has already been bravely served. None who now lay it down need feel shame."
Carefully, Quaan said, "Do you turn back, High Lord?"
"Ah, no," sighed Prothall. "The hand of these times is upon me. I dare not falter."
Then Quaan replied, "Can a Eoman of the Warward of Lord's Keep turn back when the High Lord leads? Never!"
And the Eoman echoed, "Never!"
Covenant wondered where Foamfollower was, what the Giant would do. For himself, he felt intuitively sure that he had no choice, that his dream would only release him by means of the Staff of Law. Or by death.
The next moment, Manethrall Lithe spoke to Prothall. Her head was back, and her slim form was primed as if she were prepared to explode. "I gave my word. Your horses will be tended. The Cords will preserve them in hope of your return. But I-" She shook her bound hair as if she were defying herself. "I will go with you. Under the ground." Prothall's protest she stopped with a sharp gesture. "You set an example I must follow. How could I stand before a Ranyhyn again, if I come so far only to turn away when the peril becomes great? And I feel something more. The Ramen know the sky, the open earth. We know air and grass. We do not lose our way in darkness-the Ranyhyn have taught our feet to be sure. I feel that I will always know my way-outward. You may have need of me, though I am far from the Plains of Ra, and from myself."
The shadows formed Prothall's face into a grimace, but he responded quietly, "I thank you, Manethrall. The Ramen are brave friends of the Land." Casting his eyes over the whole company, he said, "Come, then. The outcome of our Quest awaits. Whatever may befall us-as long as there are people to sing, they will sing that in this dark hour the Land was well championed. Now be true to the last." Without waiting for an answer, he went out of the bloody moonlight into the rift.
The warriors let Covenant follow behind the two Lords as if according him a position of respect. Prothall and Mhoram walked side by side; and when they neared the Look, Covenant could see from between them Foamfollower standing at the edge of the cliff. The Giant had his palms braced above his head on either wall. His back was to the Lords; he stared into the bleak, blood-hued writhing of the river. His huge form was dark against the vermilion sky.
When the Lords came near him, he said as if he were speaking back to them from the Gorge, "I remain here. My watch. I will guard you. Drool's army will not trap you in Mount Thunder while I live." A moment later, he added as if he had recognized the bottom of himself, "From here I will not smell the Wightwarrens." But his next words carried an echo of old Giantish humor. "The catacombs were not made to accommodate creatures the size of Giants."
"You choose well," murmured Prothall. "We need your protection. But do not remain here after the full moon. If we do not return by that time, we are lost, and you must go to warn your people."
Foamfollower answered as if in reply to some other voice. "Remember the Oath of Peace. In the maze where you go, it is your lifeline. It preserves you against Soulcrusher's purposes, hidden and savage. Remember the Oath. It may be that hope misleads. But hate-hate corrupts. I have been too quick to hate. I become like what I abhor."
"Have some respect for the truth," Mhoram snapped. The sudden harshness of his tone startled Covenant. "You are Saltheart Foamfollower of the Seareach Giants, Rockbrother to the men of the Land. That name cannot be taken from you."
But Covenant had heard no self-pity in the Giant's words-only recognition and sorrow. Foamfollower did not speak again. He stood as still as the walls against which he braced himself-stood like a statue carved to occupy the Look.
The Lords spent no more time with him. Already the night was waning, and they wanted to enter the mountain before daylight.
The Questers took positions. Prothall, Birinair, and two Bloodguard followed First Mark Tuvor. Then came Mhoram, Lithe, Bannor, Covenant, and Korik. Then came Warhaft Quaan, his fourteen warriors, and the last four Bloodguard.
They were only twenty-nine against all of Drool Rockworm's unknown might.
They strung a line of clingor from Tuvor to the last Bloodguard. In single file, they started down the slick stair into Treacher's Gorge.

Twenty-Two: The Catacombs of Mount Thunder


DROOL'S moon embittered the night like a consummation of gall. Under it, the river thrashed and roared in Treacher's Gorge as if it were being crushed. Spray and slick-wet moss made the stair down from the Look as treacherous as a quagmire.
Covenant bristled with trepidations. At first, when his turn to begin the descent had come, his dread had paralyzed him. But when Bannor had offered to carry him, he had found the pride to make himself move. In addition to the clingor line, Bannor and Korik held his staff like a railing for him. He went tortuously down into the Gorge as if he were striving to lock his feet on the stone of each step.
The stair dropped irregularly from the cliff into the wall of the Gorge. Soon the company was creeping into the loud chasm, led only by the light of Birinair's torch. The crimson froth of the river seemed to leap up at them like a hungry plague as they neared the roadway. Each step was slicker than the one before. Behind him, Covenant heard a gasp as one of the warriors slipped. The low cry carried terror like the quarrel of a crossbow. But the Bloodguard anchoring the line were secure; the warrior quickly regained his footing.
The descent dragged on. Covenant's ankles began to ache with the increasing uncertainty of his feet. He tried to think his soles into the rock, make them part of the stone through sheer concentration. And he gripped his staff until his palms were so slick with sweat that the wood seemed to be pulling away from him. His knees started to quiver.
But Bannor and Korik upheld him. The distance to the roadway shrank. After several long, bad moments, the threat of panic receded.
Then he reached the comparative safety of the ledge. He stood in the midst of the company between the Gorge wall and the channel of the river. Above them, the slash of sky had begun to turn gray, but that lightening only emphasized the darkness of the Gorge. Birinair's lone torch flickered as if it were lost in a wilderland.
The Questers had to yell to make themselves understood over the tumult of the current. Briskly, Quaan gave marching orders to his Eoman. The warriors checked over their weapons. With a few gestures and a slight nod or two, Tuvor made his last arrangements with the Bloodguard. Covenant gripped his staff, and assured himself of his Stonedownor knife-Atiaran's knife. He had a vague impression that he had forgotten something. But before he could try to think what it was, he was distracted by shouts.
Old Birinair was yelling at High Lord Prothall. For once, the Hearthrall seemed careless of his gruff dignity. Against the roar of the river, he thrust his seamed and quivering face at Prothall, and barked, "You cannot! The risk!"
Prothall shook his head negatively.
"You cannot lead! Allow me!"
Again, Prothall silently refused.
"Of course!" shouted Birinair, struggling to make his determination carry over the howl of water. "You must not! I can! I know the ways! Of course. Are you alone old enough to study? I know the old maps. No fool, you know-if I look old, and"-he faltered momentarily-"and useless. You must allow me!"
Prothall strove to shout without sounding angry. "Time is short! We must not delay. Birinair, old friend, I cannot put the first risk of this Quest onto another. It is my place."
"Fool!" spat Birinair, daring any insolence to gain his point. "How will you see?"
"See?"
"Of course!" The Hearthrall quivered with sarcasm.
"You will go before! Risk all! Light the way with Lords-fire! Fool! Drool will see you before you reach Warrenbridge!"
Prothall at last understood. "Ah, that is true." He sagged as if the realization hurt him. "Your light is quieter than mine. Drool will surely sense our coming if I make use of my staff." Abruptly, he turned to one side, angry now. "Tuvor!" he commanded. "Hearthrall Birinair leads! He will light our way in my place. Ward him well, Tuvor! Do not let this old friend suffer my perils."
Birinair drew himself up; rediscovering dignity in his responsibility. He extinguished the rod he carried, and gave it to a warrior to pack away with the rest of his brands. Then he stroked the end of his staff, and a flame sprang up there. With a brusque beckon, he raised his fire and started stiffly down the roadway toward the maw of Mount Thunder.
At once, Terrel and Korik passed the Hirebrand and took scouting positions twenty feet ahead of him. Two other Bloodguard placed themselves just behind him; and after them went Prothall and Mhoram together, then two more Bloodguard followed singly by Manethrall Lithe, Covenant, and Bannor. Next marched Quaan with his Eoman in files of three, leaving the last two Bloodguard to bring up the rear. In that formation, the company moved toward the entrance to the catacombs.
Covenant looked upward briefly to try to catch a last glimpse of Foamfollower in the Look. But he did not see the Giant; the Gorge was too full of darkness. And the roadway demanded his attention. He went into the rock under Foamfollower without any wave or sign of farewell.
Thus the company strode away from daylight-from sun and sky and open air and grass and possibility of retreat-and took their Quest into the gullet of Mount Thunder.
Covenant went into that demesne of night as if into a nightmare. He was .not braced for the entrance to the catacombs. He had approached it without fear; the relief of having survived the descent from the Look
had rendered him temporarily immune to panic. He had not said farewell to Foamfollower; he had forgotten something; but these pangs were diffused by a sense of anticipation, a sense that his bargain would bring him out of the dream with his ability to endure intact.
But the sky above-an openness of which he had hardly been aware-was cut off as if by an ax, and replaced by the huge stone weight of the mountain, so heavy that its aura alone was crushing. In his ears, its mass seemed to rumble like silent thunder. The river's roaring mounted in the gullet of the cave, adumbrated itself as if the constricted pain of the current were again constricted into keener and louder pain. The spray was as thick as rain; ahead of the company, Birinair's flame burned dim and penumbral, nearly quenched by the wet air. And the surface of the roadway was hazardous, littered with holes and rocks and loose shale. Covenant strained his attention as if he were listening for a note of sense in the gibberish of his experience, and under this alertness he wore his hope of escape like a buckler.
In more ways than one, he felt that it was his only protection. The company seemed pathetically weak, defenseless against the dark-dwelling Cavewights and ur-viles. Stumbling through night broken only at the solitary point of Birinair's fire, he predicted that the company would be observed soon. Then a report would go to Drool, and the inner forces of the Wightwarrens would pour forth, and the army would be recalled-what chance had Foamfollower against so many thousands of Cavewights?-and the company would be crushed like a handful of presumptuous ants. And in that moment of resolution or death would come his own rescue or defeat. He could not envision any other outcome.
With these thoughts, he walked as if he were listening for the downward rush of an avalanche.
After some distance, he realized that the sound of the river was changing. The roadway went inward almost horizontally, but the river was falling into the depths of the rock. The current was becoming a cataract, an abysmal plummet like a plunge into death. The sound of it receded slowly as the river crashed farther and farther away from the lip of the chasm.
Now there was less spray in the air to dim Birinair's flame. With less dampness to blur it, the stone wall showed more of its essential granite. Between the wall and the chasm, Covenant clung to the reassurance of the roadway. When he put a foot down hard, he could feel the solidity of the ledge jolt from his heel to the base of his spine.
Around him, the cave had become like a tunnel except for the chasm on the left. He fought his apprehension by concentrating on his feet and the Hirebrand's flame. The river fell helplessly, and its roar faded like fingers scraping for a lost purchase. Soon he began to hear the moving noises of the company. He turned to try to see the opening of the Gorge, but either the road had been curving gradually, or the opening had been lost in the distance; he saw nothing behind him but night as unmitigated as the blackness ahead.
But after a time he felt that the looming dark was losing its edge. Some change in the air attenuated the midnight of the catacombs. He stared ahead, trying to clarify the perception. No one spoke; the company hugged its silence as if in fear that the walls were capable of hearing.
Shortly, however, Birinair halted. Covenant, Lithe, and the Lords quickly joined the old Hirebrand. With him stood Terrel.
"Warrenbridge lies ahead," said the Bloodguard. "Korik watches. There are sentries." He spoke softly, but after the long silence his voice sounded careless of hazards.
"Ah, I feared that," whispered Prothall. "Can we approach?"
"Rocklight makes dark shadows. The sentries stand atop the span. We can approach within bowshot."
Mhoram called quietly for Quaan while Prothall asked, "How many sentries?"
Terrel replied, "Two."
"Only two?"
The Bloodguard shrugged fractionally. "They suffice. Between them lies the only entrance to the Wightwarrens."
But Prothall breathed again, "Only two?" He seemed to be groping to recognize a danger he could not see.
While the High Lord considered, Mhoram spoke rapidly to Quaan. At once, the Warhaft turned to his Eoman, and shortly two warriors stood by Terrel, unslinging their bows. They were tall, slim Woodhelvennin, and in the pale light their limbs hardly looked brawny enough to bend their stiff bows.
For a moment longer, Prothall hesitated, pulling at his beard as if he were trying to tug a vague impression into consciousness. But then he thrust his anxiety down, gave Terrel a sharp nod. Briskly, the Bloodguard led the two warriors away toward the attenuated night ahead.
Prothall whispered intently to the company, "Have a care. Take no risk without my order. My heart tells me there is peril here-some strange danger which Kevin's Lore names-but now I cannot recall it. Ah, memory! That knowledge is so dim and separate from what we have known since the Desecration. Think, all of you. Take great care."
Walking slowly, he went forward beside Birinair, and the company followed.
Now the light became steadily clearer-an orange-red, rocky glow like that which Covenant had seen long ago in his brief meeting with Drool in Kiril Threndor. Soon the Questers could see that in a few hundred yards the cave took a sharp turn to the right, and at the same time the ceiling of the tunnel rose as if there were a great vault beyond the bend.
Before they had covered half the distance, Korik joined them to guide them to a safe vantage. On the way, he pointed out the position of Terrel and the two warriors. They had climbed partway up the right wall, and were kneeling on a ledge in the angle of the bend.
Korik led the company close to the river cleft until they reached a sheer stone wall. The chasm appeared to leave them-vanish straight into the rock which turned the road toward the right-but light shone over this rock as well as through the chasm. The rock was not a wall, but rather a huge boulder sitting like a door ajar before the entrance to an immense chamber. Terrel had taken the two warriors to a position from which they could fire their shafts over this boulder.
Korik guided Prothall, Mhoram, and Covenant across the shadow cast by the boulder until they could peer to the left around its edge. Covenant found himself looking into a high, flat-floored cavern. The chasm of the river swung around behind the boulder, and cut at right angles to its previous direction straight through the center of the vault, then disappeared into the far wall. So the roadway went no farther along the river's course. But there were no other openings in the outer half of the cavern.
At that point, the chasm was at least fifty feet wide. The only way, across it was a massive bridge of native stone which filled the middle of the vault.
Carefully, Mhoram whispered, "Only two. They are enough. Pray for a true aim. There will be no second chance."
At first, Covenant saw no guards. His eyes were held by two pillars of pulsing, fiery rocklight which stood like sentries on either side of the bridge crest. But he forced himself to study the bridge, and shortly he discerned two black figures on the span, one beside each pillar. They were nearly invisible so close to the rocklight.
"Ur-viles," the High Lord muttered. "By the Seven! I must remember! Why are they not Cavewights? Why does Drool waste ur-viles on such duty?"
Covenant hardly listened to Prothall's uneasiness. The rocklight demanded his attention; it seemed to hold affinities for him that he could not guess. By some perverse logic of its pulsations, he felt himself made aware of his wedding band. The Droolish, powerful glow made his hand itch around his ring like a reminder that its promise of cherishing had failed. Grimly, he clenched his fist.
Prothall gripped himself, said heavily to Korik, "Make the attempt. We can only fail."
Without a word, Korik nodded up at Terrel.
Together, two bowstrings thrummed flatly.
The next instant, the ur-viles were gone. Covenant caught a glimpse of them dropping like black pebbles into the chasm.
The High Lord sighed his relief. Mhoram turned away from the vault, threw a salute of congratulation toward the two archers, then hurried back to give explanations and orders to the rest of the company. From the Eoman came low murmured cheers, and the noises of a relaxation of battle tension.
"Do not lower your guard!" Prothall hissed. "The danger is not past. I feel it."
Covenant stood where he was; staring into the rocklight, clenching his fist. Something that he did not understand was happening.
"Ur-Lord," Prothall asked softly, "what do you see?"
"Power." The interruption irritated him. His voice scraped roughly in his throat. "Drool's got enough to make you look silly." He raised his left fist. "It's daylight outside." His ring burned blood-red, throbbed to the pulse of the rocklight.
Prothall frowned at the ring, concentrating fiercely. His lips were taut over his teeth as he muttered, "This is not right. I must remember. Rocklight cannot do this."
Mhoram approached; and said before he saw what was between Covenant and Prothall, "Terrel has rejoined us. We are ready to cross." Prothall nodded inattentively. Then Mhoram noticed the ring. Covenant heard a sound as if Mhoram were grinding his teeth. The Lord reached out, clasped his hand over Covenant's fist.
A moment later, he turned and signaled to the company. Quaan led his Eoman forward with the Bloodguard. Prothall looked distracted, but he went with Birinair into the vault. Automatically, Covenant followed them toward Warrenbridge.
Tuvor and another Bloodguard went ahead of the High Lord. They neared the bridge, inspecting it to be
sure that the span was truly safe before the Lords crossed.
Covenant wandered forward as if in a trance. The spell of the rocklight grew on him. His ring began to feel hot. He had to make an effort of consciousness to wonder why his ring was bloody rather than orangered like the glowing pillars. But he had no answer. He felt a change coming over him that he could not resist or measure or even analyze. It was as if his ring were confusing his senses, turning them on their pivots to peer into unknown dimensions.
Tuvor and his comrade started up the bridge. Prothall held the company back, despite the inherent danger of remaining in the open light. He stared after Tuvor and yanked at his beard with a hand which trembled agedly.
Covenant felt the spell mastering him. The cavern began to change. In places, the rock walls seemed thinner, as if they were about to become transparent. Quaan and Lithe and the warriors grew transparent as well, approached the evanescence of wraiths. Prothall and Mhoram appeared solider, but Prothall flickered where Mhoram was steady. Only the Bloodguard showed no sign of dissipating, of losing their essence in mist-the Bloodguard and the ring. Covenant's own flesh now looked so vague that he feared his ring would fall through it to the stone. At his shoulder, Bannor stood-hard, implacable and dangerous, as if the Bloodguard's mere touch might scatter his beclouded being to the winds.
He was drifting into transience. He tried to clench himself; his fingers came back empty.
Tuvor neared the crest of the span. The bridge seemed about to crumble under him-he appeared so much solider than the stone.
Then Covenant saw it-a loop of shimmering air banded around the center of the bridge, standing fiat across the roadway and around under the span and back. He did not know what it was, understood nothing about it, except that it was powerful.
Tuvor was about to step into it.
With an effort like a convulsion, Covenant started to fight, resist the spell. Some intuition told him that Tuvor would be killed. Even a leper! he adjured himself. This was not his bargain; he had not promised to stand silent and watch men die. Hellfire! Then, with recovered rage, he cried again, Hellfire!
"Stop!" he gasped. "Can't you see?"
At once, Prothall shouted, "Tuvor! Do not move!" Wheeling on Covenant, he demanded, "What is it? What do you see?"
The violence of his rage brought back some of the solidity to his vision. But Prothall still appeared dangerously evanescent. Covenant jerked up his ring, spat, "Get them down. Are you blind? It's not the rocklight. Something else up there."
Mhoram recalled Tuvor and his companion. But for a moment Prothall only stared in blank fear at Covenant. Then, abruptly, he struck his staff on the stone and ejaculated, "Ur-viles! And rocklight just there as anchors! Ah, I am blind, blind! They tend the power!"
Incredulously, Mhoram whispered, "A Word of Warning?"
"Yes!"
"Is it possible? Has Drool entirely mastered the Staff? Can he speak such might?"
Prothall was already on his way toward the bridge. Over his shoulder, he replied, "He has Lord Foul to teach him. We have no such help." A moment later, he strode up the span with Tuvor close behind him.
The spell reached for Covenant again. But he knew it better now, and held it at bay with curses. He could still see the shimmering loop of the Word as Prothall neared it.
The High Lord approached slowly, and at last halted a step before the Word. Gripping his staff in his left hand, he held his right arm up with the palm forward like a gesture of recognition. With a rattling cough, he began to sing. Constantly repeating the same motif, he sang cryptically in a language Covenant did not understand-a language so old that it sounded grizzled and hoary. Prothall sang it softly, intimately, as if he were entering into private communion with the Word of Warning.
Gradually, vaguely, like imminent mist, the Word became visible to the company. In the air opposite Prothall's palm, an indistinct shred of red appeared, coalesced, like a fragment of an unseen tapestry. The pale, hanging red expanded until a large, rough circle was centered opposite his palm. With extreme caution -singing all the while-he raised his hand to measure the height of the Word, moved sideways to judge its configuration. Thus in tatters the company saw the barrier which opposed them. And as Covenant brought more of himself to the pitch of his stiff rage, his own perception of the Word paled until he saw only as much of it as the others did.
At last, Prothall lowered his hand and ceased his song. The shreds vanished. He came tightly down the bridge as if he were only holding himself erect by the simple strength of his resolution. But his gaze was full of comprehension and the measure of risks.
"A Word of Warning," he reported sternly, "set here by the power of the Staff of Law to inform Drool if his defenses were breached-and to break Warrenbridge at the first touch." His tone carried a glimpse of a plunge into the chasm. "It is a work of great power. No Lord since the Desecration has been capable of such a feat. And even if we had the might to undo it, we would gain nothing, for Drool would be warned. Still, there is one sign in our favor. Such a Word cannot be maintained without constant attention. It must be tended, else it decays-though not speedily enough for our purpose. That Drool set urviles here as sentries perhaps shows that his mind is elsewhere."
Wonderful! Covenant growled corrosively. Terrific! His hands itched with an intense urge to throttle someone.
Prothall continued: ."If Drool's eyes are turned away, it may be that we can bend the Word without breaking." He took a deep breath, then asserted, "I believe it can be done. This Word is not as pure and dangerous as might be." He turned to Covenant. "But I fear for you, ur-Lord."
"For me?" Covenant reacted as if the High Lord had accused him of something. "Why?"
"I fear that the mere closeness of your ring to the Word may undo it. So you must come last. And even then we may be caught within the catacombs, with no bridge to bear us out again."
Last? He had a sudden vision of being forsaken or trapped here, blocked by that deep cleft from the escape he needed. He wanted to protest, Let me go first. If I can make it, anybody can. But he saw the folly of that argument. Forbear, he urged himself. Keep the bargain. His fear made him sound bitter as he grated, "Get on with it. They're bound to send some new guards one of these days."
Prothall nodded. With a last measuring look at Covenant, he turned away. He and Mhoram went up onto the bridge to engage the Word.
Tuvor and Terrel followed carrying coils of clingor which they attached to the Lords' waists and anchored at the foot of the bridge. Thus secured against the collapse of the span, Prothall and Mhoram ascended cautiously until they were only an arm's length from the invisible Word. There they knelt together and started their song.
When the bottom of the Word became visible in crimson, they placed their staffs parallel to it on the stone before them. Then, with tortuous care, they rolled their staffs directly under the iridescent power For one bated moment, they remained still in an attitude of prayer as if beseeching their wood not to interrupt the current flowing past their faces. A heartstopping flicker replied in the red shimmer. But the Lords went on singing-and shortly the Word steadied.
Bracing themselves, they started the most difficult part of their task. They began lifting the inner ends of their staffs.
With a quick intake of wonder and admiration, the company saw the lower edge of the Word bend, leaving a low, tented gap below it.
When the peak of the gap was more than a foot high, the Lords froze. Instantly, Bannor and two other Bloodguard dashed up the bridge, unrolling a rope as they ran. One by one, they crawled through the gap and took their end of the lifeline to safe ground beyond the span.
As soon as Bannor had attached his end of the rope, Mhoram took hold of Prothall's staff. The High Lord wormed through the gap, then held the staffs for Mhoram. By the time Mhoram had regained his position beside Prothall, old Birinair was there and ready to pass. Behind him in rapid single file went the Eoman, followed by Quaan and Lithe.
In turn, Tuvor and Terrel slipped under the Word and anchored their ropes to the two Lords beyond the chasm. Then, moving at a run, the last Bloodguard slapped the central lifeline around Covenant and made their way through the gap.
He was left alone.
In a cold sweat of anger and fear, he started up the bridge. He felt the two pillars of rocklight as if they were scrutinizing him. He went up the span fiercely, cursing Foul, and cursing himself for his fear. He did not give a glance to the chasm. Staring at the gap, he ground his rage into focus, and approached the shimmering tapestry of power. As he drew nearer, his ring ached on his hand. The bridge seemed to grow thinner as if it were dissolving under him. The Word became starker, dominating his vision more and more.
But he kept his hold on his rage. Even a leper! He reached the gap, knelt before it, looked momentarily through the shimmer at the Lords. Their faces ran with sweat, and their voices trembled in their song. He clenched his hands around the staff of Baradakas, and crawled into the gap.
As he passed under the Word, he heard an instant high keening like a whine of resistance. For that instant, a cold red flame burst from his ring.
Then he was through, and the bridge and the Word were still intact.
He stumbled down the span, flinging off the clingor lifeline. When he was safe, he turned long enough to see Prothall and Mhoram remove their staffs from under the Word. Then he stalked out of the vault of Warrenbridge into the dark tunnel of the roadway. He felt Bannor's presence at his shoulder almost at once, but he did not stop until the darkness against which he thrust himself was thick enough to seem impenetrable.
In frustration and congested fear, he groaned, "I want to be alone. Why don't you leave me alone?"
With the repressed lilt of his Haruchai inflection, Bannor responded, "You are ur-Lord Covenant. We are the Bloodguard. Your life is in our care."
Covenant glared into the ineluctable dark around him, and thought about the unnatural solidity of the Bloodguard. What binding principle made their flesh seem less mortal than the gutrock of Mount Thunder? A glance at his ring showed him that its incarnadine gleam had almost entirely faded. He found that he was jealous of Bannor's dispassion; his own pervasive irrectitude offended him. On the impulse of a ferocious intuition, he returned, "That isn't enough."
He could envision Bannor's slight, eloquent shrug without seeing it. In darkness he waited defiantly until the company caught up with him.
But when he was again marching in his place in the Quest-when Birinair's wan flame had passed by him, treading as if transfixed by leadership the invisible directions of the roadway-the night of the catacombs crowded toward him like myriad leering spectators, impatient for bloodshed, and he suffered a reaction against the strain. His shoulders began to tremble, as if he had been hanging by his arms too long, and cold petrifaction settled over his thoughts.
The Word of Warning revealed that Lord Foul was expecting them, knew they would not fall victim to Drool's army. Drool could not have formed the Word, much less made it so apposite to white gold. Therefore it served the Despiser's purposes rather than Drool's. Perhaps it was a test of some kind-a measure of the Lords' strength and resourcefulness, an indication of Covenant's vulnerability. But whatever it was, it was Lord Foul's doing. Covenant felt sure that the Despiser knew everything-planned, arranged, made inevitable all that happened to the Quest, every act and decision. Drool was ignorant, mad, manipulated; the Cavewight probably failed to understand half of what he achieved under Lord Foul's hand.
But in his bones Covenant had known such things from the beginning. They did not surprise him; rather, he saw them as symptoms of another, a more essential threat. This central peril-a peril which so froze his mind that only his flesh seemed able to react by trembling-had to do with his white gold ring. He perceived the danger clearly because he was too numb to hide from it. The whole function of the compromise, the bargain, he had made with the Ranyhyn, was to hold the impossibility and the actuality of the Land apart, in equipoise-Back off! Let me be!-to keep them from impacting into each other and blasting his precarious hold on life. But Lord Foul was using his ring to bring crushing together the opposite madnesses which he needed so desperately to escape.
He considered throwing the ring away. But he knew he could not do it. The band was too heavy with remembered lost love and honor and mutual respect to be tossed aside. And an old beggar
If his bargain failed, he would have nothing left with which to defend himself against the darkness-no power or fertility or coherence-nothing but his own capacity for darkness, his violence, his ability to kill. That capacity led-he was too numb to resist the conclusion-as inalterably as leprosy to the destruction of the Land.
There his numbness seemed to become complete. He could not measure his situation more than that. All he could do was trail behind Birinair's flame and tell over his refusals like some despairing acolyte, desperate for faith, trying to invoke his own autonomy.
He concentrated on his footing as if it were tenuous and the rock unsure-as if Birinair might lead him over the edge of an abyss.
Gradually the character of their benighted journey changed. First, the impression of the surrounding tunnel altered. Behind the darkness, the walls seemed to open from time to time into other tunnels, and at one point the night took on an enormous depth, as if the company were passing over the floor of an amphitheater. In this blind openness, Birinair searched for his way. When the sense of vast empty space vanished, he led his companions into a stone corridor so low that his flame nearly touched the ceiling, so narrow that they had to pass in single file.
Then the old Hearthrall took them through a bewildering series of shifts in direction and terrain and depth. From the low tunnel, they turned sharply and went down a long, steep slope with no discernible walls. As they descended, turning left and right at landmarks only Birinair seemed able to see, the black air became colder and somehow loathsome, as if it carried an echo of ur-viles. The cold came in sudden drafts and pockets, blowing through chasms and tunnels that opened unseen on either side into dens and coverts and passages and great Cavewightish halls, all invisible but for the timbre, the abrupt impression of space, which they gave the darkness.
Lower down the sudden drafts began to stink. The buried air seemed to flow over centuries of accumulated filth, vast hordes of unencrypted dead, long abandoned laboratories where banes were made. At moments, the putrescence became so thick that Covenant could see it in the sir. And out of the adjacent openings came cold, distant sounds the rattle of shale dropping into immeasurable faults; occasional low complaints of stress; soft, crystalline, chinking noises like the tap of iron hammers; muffled sepulchral detonations; and long tired sighs, exhalations of fatigue from the ancient foundations of the mountain. The darkness itself seemed to be muttering as the company passed.
But at the end of the descent they reached a wavering stair cut into a rock wall, with lightless, hungry chasms gaping below them. And after that, they went through winding tunnels, along the bottoms of crevices, over sharp rock ridges like aretes within the mountain, around pits with the moan of water and the reek of decay in their depths, under arches like entryways to grotesque festal halls-turned and climbed and navigated in the darkness as if it were a perilous limbo, trackless and fatal, varying only in the kind and extremity of its dangers. Needing proof of his own reality, Covenant moved with the fingers of his left hand knotted in his robe over his heart.
Three times in broad, fiat spaces which might have been halls or ledges or peak tops surrounded by plunges, the company stopped and ate cold food by the light of Birinair's staff. Each meal helped; the sight of other faces around the flame, the consumption of tangible provender, acted like an affirmation or a pooling of the company's capacity for endurance. Once, Quaan forced himself to attempt a jest, but his voice sounded so hollow in the perpetual midnight that no one had the heart to reply. After each rest, the Questers set out again bravely. And each time, their pooled fortitude evaporated more rapidly, as if the darkness inhaled it with increasing voracity.
Later old Birinair led them out of cold and ventilated ways into close, musty, hot tunnels far from the main Wightwarrens. To reduce the risk of discovery, he chose a path through a section of the caves deader than the restsilent and abandoned, with little fresh air left. But the atmosphere only raised the pitch of the company's tension. They moved as if they were screaming voicelessly in anticipation of some blind disaster.
They went on and on, until Covenant knew only that they had not marched for days because his ring had not yet started to glow with the rising of the moon. But after a time his white gold began to gleam like a crimson prophecy. Still they went on into what he now knew was night. They could not afford sleep or long rests. The peak of Drool's present power was only one day away.
They were following a tunnel with walls which seemed to stand just beyond the reach of Birinair's tottering fire. Abruptly, Terrel returned from his scouting position, loomed out of the darkness to appear before the old Hirebrand. Swiftly, Prothall and
Mhoram, with Lithe and Covenant behind them, hastened to Birinair's side. Terrel's voice held a note like urgency as he said, "Ur-viles approach-perhaps fifty. They have seen the light."
Prothall groaned; Mhoram spat a curse. Manethrall Lithe drew a hissing breath, whipped her cord from her hair as if she were about to encounter the stuff of which Ramen nightmares were made.
But before anyone could take action, old Birinair seemed to snap like a dry twig. Shouting, "Follow!" he spun to his right and raced away into the darkness.
At once, two Bloodguard sprinted after him. For an instant, the Lords hesitated. Then Prothall cried, "Melenkurion!" and dashed after Birinair. Mhoram began shouting orders; the company sprang into battle readiness.
Covenant fled after Birinair's bobbing fire. The Hirebrand's shout had not sounded like panic. That cry-Follow!-urged Covenant along. Behind him, he heard the first commands and clatters of combat. He kept his eyes on Birinair's light, followed him into a low, nearly airless tunnel.
Birinair raced down the tunnel, still a stride or two ahead of the Bloodguard.
Suddenly, there came a hot noise like a burst of lightning; without warning a sheet of blue flame enveloped the Hirebrand. Dazzling, coruscating, it walled the tunnel from top to bottom. It roared like a furnace. And Birinair hung in it, spread-limbed and transfixed, his frame contorted with agony. Beside him, his staff flared and became ash.
Without hesitation, the two Bloodguard threw themselves at the fire. It knocked them back like blank stone. They leaped together at Birinair, trying to force him through and past the flame sheet. But they had no effect; Birinair hung where he was, a charred victim in a web of blue fire.
The Bloodguard were poised to spring again when the High Lord caught up with them. He had to shout to make himself heard over the crackling of power. "My place!" he cried, almost screaming. "He will die! Aid Mhoram!"
He seemed to have fallen over an edge into distraction. His eyes had a look of chaos. Spreading his arms, he went forward and tried to embrace Birinair.
The fire kicked him savagely away. He fell, and for a long moment lay facedown on the stone.
Behind them, the battle mounted. The ur-viles had formed a wedge, and even with all the help of the Bloodguard and warriors, Mhoram barely held his ground. The first rush of the attack had driven the company back; Mhoram had retreated several yards into the tunnel where Birinair hung. There he made a stand. Despite Prothall's cries and the roar of the fire behind him, he kept his face toward the ur-viles.
Heavily, Prothall raised himself. His head trembled on his tired old neck. But his eyes were no longer wild.
He took a moment to recollect himself, knowing that he was already too late. Then, mustering his strength, he hurled his staff at the blue coruscation.
The shod wood struck with a blinding flash. For one blank instant, Covenant could see nothing. When his vision cleared, he found the staff hanging in the sheet of flame. Birinair lay in the tunnel beyond the fire.
"Birinair!" the High Lord cried. "My friend! "He seemed to believe that he could help the Hirebrand if he reached him in time. Once again, he flung himself at the flame, and was flung back.
The ur-viles pressed their attack ferociously, in hungry silence. Two of Quaan's Eoman were felled as the company backed into the tunnel, and one more died now with an iron spike in his heart. A woman struck in too close to the wedge, and her hand was hacked off. Mhoram fought the loremaster with growing desperation. Around him, the Bloodguard battled skillfully, but they could find few openings in the wedge.
Covenant peered through the blue sheet at Birinair. The Hirebrand's face was unmarked, but it held a wide stare of agony, as if he had remained alive for one instant after his soul had been seared. The remains of his cloak hung about him in charred wisps.
Follow!
That call had not been panic. Birinair had had some idea. His shout echoed and compelled. His cloak hung about him
Follow!
Covenant had forgotten something-something important. Wildly, he started forward.
Mhoram strove to strike harder. His strength played like lightning along his staff as he dealt blow after blow against the loremaster. Weakened by its losses, the wedge began to give ground.
Covenant stopped, inches away from the sheet of power. Prothall's staff was suspended vertically within it like a landmark. The fire seemed to absorb rather than give off heat. Covenant felt himself growing cold and numb. In the dazzling blue force, he saw a chance for immolation, escape.
Abruptly, the ur-vile loremaster gave a barking shout, and broke formation. It ducked past Mhoram and dashed into the tunnel toward the fire, toward the kneeling High Lord. Mhoram's eyes flashed perilously, but he did not turn from the fight. He snapped an order to Quaan, and struck at the ur-viles with still fiercer force.
Quaan leaped from the fight. He raced to unsling his bow, nock an arrow, and shoot before the loremaster reached Prothall.
Vaguely, Covenant heard the High Lord gasp against the dead air, "Ur-Lord! Beware!" But he did not listen. His wedding band burned as if the defiled moon were like the rocklight on Warrenbridge-a Word of Warning.
He reached out his left hand, hesitated momentarily, then grasped the High Lord's staff.
Power surged. Bloody fire burst from his ring against the coruscating blue. The roar of the flame cycled upward beyond hearing. Then came a mighty blast, a silent explosion. The floor of the tunnel jumped as if its keel had struck a reef.
The blue sheet fell in tatters.
Quaan was too late to save Prothall. But the ur-vile did not attack the High Lord. It sprang over him toward Covenant. With all his strength, Quaan bent his bow and fired at the creature's back.
For an instant, Covenant stood still, listing crazily to one side and staring in horror at the abrupt darkness. Dim orange fire burned on his hand and arm, but the brilliant blue was gone. The fire gave no pain, though at first it clung to him as if he were dry wood. It was cold and empty, and it died out in sputtering flickers, as if after all he did not contain enough warmth to feed it.
Then the loremaster, with Quaan's arrow squarely between its shoulders, crashed into him and scattered him across the stone.
A short time later, he looked up with his head full of mist. The only light in the tunnel came from Mhoram's Lords-fire as he drove back the ur-viles. Then that light was gone, too; the ur-viles were routed. Tuvor and the Bloodguard, started after them to prevent them from carrying reports to Drool, but Mhoram called, "Let them go! We are already exposed. No reports - of ur-viles matter now." Voices gasped and groaned in the darkness; soon two or three of the warriors lit torches. The flames cast odd, dim shadows on the walls. The company drew together around Lord Mhoram and moved down to where Prothall knelt.
The High Lord held Birinair's charred form in his arms. But he brushed aside the sympathy and grief of the company. "Go on," he said weakly. "Discover what he intended. I will be done with my farewells soon." In explanation, he added, "He led in my place."
Mhoram laid a commiserating hand on the High Lord's shoulder. But the dangers of their situation did not allow him to remain still. Almost certainly, Drool now knew where they were; the energies they had released would point them out like an accusing finger. "Why?" Mhoram wondered aloud. "Why was such power placed here? This is not Drool's doing." Carrying one of the torches, he started down the tunnel.
From his collapse on the stone, Covenant replied in a grotesque, stricken voice. But he was answering a different question. "I forgot my clothes-left them behind."
Mhoram bent over him. Lighting his face with the torch, the Lord asked, "Are you injured? I do not understand. Of what importance are your old clothes?"
The question seemed to require a world of explanation, but Covenant responded easily, glib with numbness and fog. "Of course I'm injured. My whole life is an injury." He hardly listened to his own speech. "Don't you see? When I wake up, and find myself dressed in my old clothes, not this moss-stained robe at all-why, that will prove that I really have been dreaming. If it wasn't so reassuring, I would be terrified."
"You have mastered a great power," Mhoram murmured.
"That was an accident. It happened by itself. I was -I was trying to escape. Burn myself."
Then the strain overcame him. He lowered his head to the stone and went to sleep.
He did not rest long; the air of the tunnel was too uncomfortable, and there was too much activity in the company. When he opened his eyes, he saw Lithe and several warriors preparing a meal over a low fire. With a trembling song on his lips, and tears spilling from his eyes, Prothall was using his blue fire to sear the injured woman's wrist-stump.
Covenant watched as she bore the pain; only when her wrist was tightly bandaged did she let herself faint. After that he turned away, sick with shared pain. He lurched to his feet, reeled as if he could not find his footing, had to brace himself against the wall. He stood there hunched over his aching stomach until Mhoram returned, accompanied by Quaan, Korik, and two other Bloodguard.
The Warhaft was carrying a small iron chest.
When Mhoram reached the fire, he spoke in quiet wonder. "The power was a defense placed here by High Lord Kevin. Beyond this tunnel lies a chamber. There we found the Second Ward of Kevin's Lore the Second of the Seven."
High Lord Prothall's face lit up with hope.

Twenty-Three: Kiril Threndor


REVERENTLY, Prothall took the chest. His fingers fumbled at the bindings. When he raised the lid, a pale, pearly glow like clean moonlight shone from within the cask. The radiance gave his face a look of beatitude as he ventured his hand into the chest to lift out an ancient scroll. When he raised it, the company saw that it was the scroll which shone.
Quaan and his Eoman half knelt before the Ward, bowed their heads. Mhoram and Prothall stood erect as if they were meeting the scrutiny of the master of their lives. After a moment of amazement, Lithe joined the warriors. Only Covenant and the Bloodguard showed no reverence. Tuvor's comrades stood casually alert, and Covenant leaned uncomfortably against the wall, trying to bring his unruly stomach under control.
But he was not blind to the importance of that scroll. A private hope wrestled with his nausea. He approached it obliquely. "Did Birinair know-what you were going to find? Is that why?"
"Why he ran here?" Mhoram spoke absently; all of him except his voice was focused on the scroll which Prothall held up like a mighty talisman. "Perhaps it is possible. He knew the old maps. No doubt they were given to us in the First Ward so that in time we might find our way here. It may be that his heart saw what our eyes did not."
Covenant paused, then asked, obliquely again, "Why did you let the ur-viles escape?"
This time, the Lords seemed to hear his seriousness.
With a piercing glance at him, Prothall replaced the scroll in the cask. When the lid was closed, Mhoram answered stiffly, "Unnecessary death, Unbeliever. We did not come here to slay ur-viles. We will harm ourselves more by unnecessary killing than by risking a few live foes. We fight in need, not in lust or rage. The Oath of Peace must not be compromised."
But this also did not answer Covenant's question. With an effort, he brought out his hope directly. "Never mind. This Second Ward-it doubles your power. You could send me back."
Mhoram's face softened at the need for assurance, for consolation against impossible demands, in the question. But his reply denied Covenant. "Ah, my friend, you forget. We have not yet mastered the First Ward-not in generations of study. The best of the Loresraat have failed to unveil the central mysteries. We can do nothing with this new Ward now. Perhaps, if we survive this Quest, we will learn from the Second in later years."
There he stopped. His face held a /look of further speech, but he said no more until Prothall sighed, "Tell him all. We can afford no illusions now."
"Very well." Mhoram said hurriedly, "In truth, our possession of the Second Ward at such a time is perilous. It is clear from the First that High Lord Kevin prepared the Seven in careful order. It was his purpose that the Second Ward remain hidden until all the First was known. Apparently, certain aspects of his Lore carry great hazard to those who have not first mastered certain other aspects. So he hid his Wards, and defended them with powers which could not be breached until the earlier Lore was mastered. Now his intent has been broken. Until we penetrate the First, we will risk much if we attempt the use of the Second."
He pulled himself up and took a deep breath. "We do not regret. For all our peril, this discovery may be the great moment of our age. But it may not altogether bless us."
In a low voice, Prothall added, "We raise no blame or doubt. How could any have known what we would find? But the doom of the Land is now doubly on our heads. If we are to defeat Lord Foul in the end, we must master powers for which we are not ready. So we learn hope and dismay from the same source. Do not mistake us-this risk we accept gladly. The mastery of Kevin's Lore is the goal of our lives. But we must make clear that there is risk. I see hope for the Land, but little for myself."
"Even that sight is dim," said Mhoram tightly. "It may be that Lord Foul has led us here so that we may be betrayed by powers we cannot control."
At this, Prothall looked sharply at Mhoram. Then, slowly, the High Lord nodded his agreement. But his face did not lose the relief, the lightening of its burdens, which his first sight of the Ward had given him. Under its influence, he looked equal to the stewardship of his age. Now the time of High Lord Prothall son of Dwillian would be well remembered-if the company survived its Quest. His resolve had a forward look as he closed the chest of the Second Ward; his movements were crisp and decisive. He gave the cask to Korik, who bound it to his bare back with strips of clingor, and covered it by knotting his tunic shut.
But Covenant looked at the remains of the brief structure of his own hope, collapsed like a child's toy house, and he did not know where to turn for new edifices. He felt vaguely that he had no solid ground on which to build them. He was too weak and tired to think about it. He stood leaning where he was for a long time, with his head bent as if he were trying to decipher the chart of his robe.
Despite the danger, the company rested and ate there in the tunnel. Prothall judged that remaining where they were for a time was as unpredictable as anything else they might do; so while the Bloodguard stood watch, he encouraged his companions to rest. Then he lay down, pillowed his head on his arms, and seemed at once to fall into deep sleep, so intensely calm and quiet that it looked more like preparation than repose. Following his example, most of the company let their eyes close, though they slept only fitfully. But Mhoram and Lithe remained watchful. He stared into the low fire as if he were searching for a vision, and she sat across from him with her shoulders hunched against the oppressive weight of the mountain -as unable to rest underground as if the lack of open sky and grasslands offended her Ramen blood. Reclining against the wall, Covenant regarded the two of them, and slept a little until the stain of his ring began to fade with moonset.
After that Prothall arose, awake and alert, and roused the company. As soon as everyone had eaten again, he put out the campfire. In its place, he lit one of the lillianrill torches. It guttered and jumped dangerously in the thick air, but he used it rather than his staff to light the tunnel. Soon the Quest was marching again. Helpless to do otherwise, they left their dead lying on the stone of the Ward chamber. It was the only tribute they could give Birinair and the slain warriors.  Again they went into darkness, led by the High Lord through interminable, black, labyrinthian passages in the deep rock of Mount Thunder. The air became thicker, hotter, deader. In spite of occasional ascents, their main progress was downward, toward the bottomless roots of the mountain, closer with every unseen, unmeasured league toward immense, buried, slumbering, grim ills, the terrible bones of the Earth. On and on they walked as if they were amazed by darkness, irremediable night. They made their way in hard silence, as if their lips were stiff with resisted sobs. They could not see. It affected them like a bereavement.
As they approached the working heart of the Wightwarrens, certain sounds became louder, more distinct -the battering of anvils, the groaning of furnaces, gasps of anguish. From time to time they crossed blasts of hot fetid air like forced ventilation for charnel pits. And a new noise crept into their awareness-a sound of bottomless boiling. For a long while, they drew nearer to this deep moil without gaining any hint of what it was.
Later they passed its source. Their path lay along the lip of a huge cavern. The walls were lit luridly by a seething orange sea of rocklight. Far below them was a lake of molten stone.
After the long darkness of their trek, the bright light hurt their eyes. The rising acrid heat of the lake snatched at them as if it were trying to pluck them from their perch. The deep, boiling sound thrummed in the air. Great gouts of magma spouted toward the ceiling, then fell back into the lake like crumbling towers.
Vaguely, Covenant heard someone say, "The Demondim in the days of High Lord Loric discarded their failed breeding efforts here. It is said that the loathing of the Demondim-and of the Viles who sired them-for their own forms surpassed all restraint. It led them to the spawning which made both ur-viles and Waynhim. And it drove them to cast all their weak and faulty into such pits as this-so strongly did they abhor their unseen eyelessness."
Groaning, he turned his face to the wall, and crept past the cavern into the passage beyond it. When he dropped his hands from the support of the stone, his fingers twitched at his sides as if he were testing the sides of a casket.
Prothall chose to rest there, just beyond the cavern of rocklight. The company ate a quick, cold meal, then pressed on again into darkness. From this passage, they took two turns, went up a long slope, and at length found themselves walking a ledge in a fault. Its crevice fell away to their left. Covenant made his way absently, shaking his head in an effort to clear his thoughts. Ur-viles reeled across his brain like images of self-hatred, premonitions. Was he doomed to see himself even in such creatures as that? No. He gritted his teeth. No. In the light of remembered bursts of lava, he began to fear that he had already missed his chance-his chance to fall
In time, fatigue came back over him. Prothall called a rest halt on the ledge, and Covenant surprised himself nearly falling asleep that close to a crevice. But the High Lord was pushing toward his goal now, and did not let the company rest long. With his guttering torch, he led the Quest forward again, through darkness into darkness.
As the trek dragged on, their moment-by-moment caution began to slip. The full of the moon was coming, and somewhere ahead Drool was preparing for them. Prothall moved as if he were eager for the last test, and led them along the ledge at a stiff pace. As a result, the lone ur-vile took them all by surprise.
It had hidden itself in a thin fissure in the wall of the crevice. When Covenant passed it, it sprang out at him, threw its weight against his chest. Its roynish, eyeless face was blank with ferocity. As it struck him, it grappled for his left hand.
The force of the attack knocked him backward toward the crevice. For one flicker of time, he was not aware of that danger. The ur-vile consumed his attention. It pulled his hand close to its face, sniffed wetly over his fingers as if searching for something, then tried to jam his ring finger into its ragged mouth.
He staggered back one more step; his foot left the ledge. In that instant, he realized the hungry fall under him. Instinctively, he closed his fist against the ur-vile and ignored it. Clinging to his staff with all the strength of his halfhand, he thrust its end toward Bannor. The Bloodguard was already reaching for him.
Bannor caught hold of the staff.
For one slivered moment, Covenant kept his grip.
But the full weight of the ur-vile hung on his left arm. His hold tore loose from the staff. With the creature struggling to bite off his ring, he plunged into the crevice.
Before he could shriek his terror, a force like a boulder struck him, knocked the air from his lungs, left him gasping sickly as he plummeted. With his chest constricted and retching, unable to cry out, he lost consciousness.
When he roused himself after the impact, he was struggling for air against a faceful of dirt. He lay head down on a steep slope of shale and loam and refuse, and the slide caused by his landing had covered his face. For a long moment, he could not move except to gag and cough. His efforts shook him without freeing him.
Then, with a shuddering exertion, he rolled over, thrust up his head. He coughed up a gout of dirt, and found that he could breathe. But he still could not see. The fact took a moment to penetrate his awareness. He checked his face, found that his eyes were uncovered and open. But they perceived nothing except an utter and desolate darkness. It was as if he were blind with panic-as if his optic nerves were numb with terror.
For a time he did panic. Without sight, he felt the empty air suck at him as if he were drowning in quicksand. The night beat about him on naked wings like vultures dropping toward dead meat.
His heart beat out heavy jolts of fear. He cowered there on his knees, abandoned, bereft of eyes and light and mind by the extremity of his dread, and his breath whimpered in his throat. But as the first rush of his panic passed, he recognized it. Fear-it was an emotion he understood, a part of the condition of his existence. And his heart went on beating. Lurching as if wounded, it still kept up his life.
Suddenly, convulsively, he raised his fists and struck at the shale on either side of his head, pounded to the rhythm of his pulse as if he were trying to beat rationality out of the dirt. No! No! I am going to survive!
The assertion steadied him. Survive! He was a leper, accustomed to fear. He knew how to deal with it. Discipline discipline.
He pressed his hands over his eyeballs; spots of color jerked across the black. He was not blind. He was seeing darkness. He had fallen away from the only light in the catacombs; of course he could not see.
Hell and blood.
Instinctively, he rubbed his hands, winced at the bruises he had given himself.
Discipline.
He was alone-alone- Lightless somewhere on the bottom of a ledge of the crevice long leagues from the nearest open sky. Without help, friends, rescue, for him the outside of the mountain was as unattainable as if it had ceased to exist. Escape itself was unattainable unless
Discipline.
-unless he found some way to die.
Hellfire!
Thirst. Hunger. Injury-loss of blood. He iterated the possibilities as if he were going through a VSE. He might fall prey to some dark-bred bane. Might stumble over a more fatal precipice. Madness, yes. It would be as easy as leprosy.
Midnight wings beat about his ears, reeled vertiginously across the blind blackscape. His hands groped unconsciously around his head, seeking some way to defend himself.
Damnation!
None of this is happening to me.
Discipline!
A fetal fancy came over him. He caught hold of it as if it were a vision. Yes! Quickly, he changed his position so that he was sitting on the shale slope. He fumbled over his belt until he found Atiaran's knife. Poising it carefully in his halffingerless grip, he began to shave.
Without water or a mirror, he was perilously close to slitting his throat, and the dryness of his beard caused him pain as if he were using the knife to dredge his face into a new shape. But this risk, this pain, was part of him; there was nothing impossible about, it. If he cut himself, the dirt on his skin would make infection almost instantaneous. It calmed him like a demonstration of his identity.
In that way, he made the darkness draw back, withhold its talons.
When he was done, he mustered his resolution for an exploration of his situation. He wanted to know what kind of place he was in. Carefully, tentatively, he began searching away from the slopes on his hands and knees.
Before he had moved three feet across flat stone, he found a body. The flesh yielded as if it had not been dead long, but its chest was cold and slick, and his hand came back wet, smelling of rotten blood
He recoiled to the slope, gritted himself into motionlessness while his lungs heaved loudly and his knees trembled. The ur-vile, the ur-vile that had attacked him. Broken by the fall. He wanted to move, but could not. The shock of discovery froze him like a sudden opening of dangerous doors; he felt surrounded by perils which he could not name. How had that creature known to attack him? Could it actually smell white gold?
Then his ring began to gleam. The bloody radiation transformed it into a band of dull fire about his wedding finger, a crimson fetter. But it shed no light-did not even enable him to see the digit on which it hung. It shone balefully in front of him, exposed him to any eyes that were hidden in the dark, but it gave him nothing but dread.
He could not forget what it meant. Drool's bloody moon was rising full over the Land.
It made him quail against the shale slope. He had a gagging sensation in his throat, as if he were being force-fed terror. Even the uncontrollable wheeze of his respiration seemed to mark him for attack by claws and fangs so invisible in the darkness that he could not visualize them. He was alone, helpless, abject.
Unless he found some way to make use of the power of his ring.
He fell back in revulsion from that thought the instant it crossed his mind. No! Never! He was a leper; his capacity for survival depended-on a complete recognition, acceptance, of his essential impotence. That was the law of leprosy. Nothing could be as fatal to him-nothing could destroy him body and mind as painfully-as the illusion of power. Power in a dream. And before he died he would become as fetid and deformed as that man he had met in the leprosarium.
No!
Better to kill himself outright. Anything would be better.
He did not know how long he spun giddily before he heard a low noise in the darkness-distant, slippery and ominous, as if the surrounding midnight had begun breathing softly through its teeth. It stunned
him like a blow to the heart. Flinching in blind fear, he tried to fend it off. Slowly, it grew clearer-a quiet, susurrus sound like a gritted exhalation from many throats. It infested the air like vermin, made his flesh crawl.
They were coming for him. They knew where he was because of his ring, and they were coming for him.
He had a quick vision of a Waynhim with an iron spike through its chest. He clapped his right hand over his ring. But he knew that was futile as soon as he did it. Frenetically, he began searching over the shale for some kind of weapon. Then he remembered his knife. It felt too weightless to help him. But he gripped it, and went on hunting with his right hand, hardly knowing what he sought.
For a long moment, he fumbled around him, regardless of the noise he made. Then his fingers found his staff. Bannor must have dropped it, and it had fallen near him.
The susurration drew nearer. It was the sound of many bare feet sliding over stone. They were coming for him.
The staff! it was a Hirebrand's staff. Baradakas had given it to him. In the hour of darkness, remember the Hirebrand's staff. If he could light it.
But how?
The black air loomed with enemies. Their steps seemed to slide toward him from above.
How? he cried desperately, trying to make the staff catch fire by sheer force of will. Baradakas!
Still the feet came closer. He could hear hoarse breathing behind their sibilant approach.
It had burned for him at the Celebration of Spring. Shaking with haste, he pressed the end of the staff to his bloodembered ring. At once, red flame blossomed on the wood, turned pale orange and yellow, flared up brightly. The sudden light dazzled him, but he leaped to his feet and held the staff over his head.
He was standing at the bottom of a long slope which filled half the floor of the crevice. This loose piled shale had saved his life by giving under the impact of his fall, rolling him down instead of holding him where he hit. Before and behind him, the crevice stretched upward far beyond the reach of his flame. Nearby, the ur-vile lay twisted on its back, its black skin wet with blood.
Shuffling purposefully toward him along the crevice floor was a disjointed company of Cavewights.
They were still thirty yards away, but even at that distance, he was surprised by their appearance. They did not look like other Cavewights he had seen. The difference was not only in costume, though these creatures were ornately and garishly caparisoned like a royal cadre, elite and obscene. They were physically different. They were old-old prematurely, unnaturally. Their red eyes were hooded, and their long limbs bent as if the bones had been warped in a short time. Their heads sagged on necks that still looked thick enough to be strong and erect. Their heavy, spatulate hands trembled as if with palsy. Together, they reeked of ill, of victimization. But they came forward with clenched determination, as if they had been promised the peace of death when this last task was done.
Shaking off his surprise, he brandished his staff threateningly. "Don't touch me!" he hissed through his teeth. "Back off! I made a bargain-!"
The Cavewights gave no sign that they had heard. But they did not attack him. When they were almost within his reach, they spread out on both sides, awkwardly encircled him. Then, by giving way on one side and closing toward him on the other, they herded him in the direction from which they had come.
As soon as he understood that they wished to take him someplace without a fight, he began to cooperate. He knew intuitively where they were going. So through their tortuous herding he moved slowly along the crevice until he reached a stair in the left wall. It was a rude way, roughly hacked out of the rock, but it was wide enough for several Cavewights to climb abreast. He was able to control his vertigo by staying near the wall, away from the crevice.
They ascended for several hundred feet before they reached an opening in the wall. Though the stairs continued upward, the Cavewights steered him through this opening. He found himself in a narrow tunnel with a glow of rocklight at its end. The creatures marched him more briskly now, as if they were hurrying him toward a scaffold.
Then a wash of heat and a stink of brimstone poured over him. He stepped out of the tunnel into Kiril Threndor.
He recognized the burnished stone gleam of the faceted walls, the fetid stench like sulfur consuming rotten flesh, the several entrances, the burning dance of light on the clustered stalactites high overhead. It was all as vivid to him as if it had just been translated from a nightmare. The Cavewights ushered him into the chamber, then stood behind him to block the entrance.
For the second time, he met Drool Rockworm.
Drool crouched on his low dais in the center of the cave. He clenched the Staff of Law in both his huge hands, and it was by the Staff that Covenant first recognized him. Drool had changed. Some blight had fallen on him. As he caught sight of Covenant, he began laughing shrilly. But his voice was weak, and his laughter had a pitch of hysteria. He did not laugh long; he seemed too exhausted to sustain it. Like the Cavewights who had herded Covenant, he was old.
But whatever had damaged them had hurt him more. His limbs were so gnarled that he could hardly stand; saliva ran uncontrolled from his drooping lips; and he was sweating profusely, as if he could no longer endure the heat of his own domain. He gripped the Staff in an attitude of fierce possessiveness and desperation. Only his eyes had not changed. They shone redly, without iris or pupil, and seemed to froth like malicious lava, eager to devour.
Covenant felt a strange mixture of pity and loathing. But he had only a moment to wonder what had happened to Drool. Then he had to brace himself. The Cavewight began hobbling painfully toward him.
Groaning at the ache in his limbs, Drool stopped a few paces from Covenant. He released one hand from the intricately runed Staff to point a trembling finger at Covenant's wedding band. When he spoke, he cast continual, twitching leers back over his shoulder, as if referring to an invisible spectator. His voice was as gnarled and wracked as his arms and legs.
"Mine!" he coughed. "You promised. Mine. Lord Drool, Staff and ring. You promised. Do this, you said. Do that. Do not crush. Wait now." He spat viciously. "Kill later. You promised. The ring if I did what you said. You said." He sounded like a sick child. "Drool. Lord Drool! Power! Mine now."
Slavering thickly, he reached a hand for Covenant's Wig.
Covenant reacted in instant revulsion. With his burning staff, he struck a swift blow, slapped Drool's hand away.
At the impact, his staff broke into slivers as if Drool's flesh were vehement iron.
But Drool gave a coughing roar of rage, and stamped the heel of the Staff of Law on the floor. The stone jumped under Covenant's feet; he pitched backward, landed with a jolt that seemed to stop his heart.
He lay stunned and helpless. Through a throbbing noise in his ears, he heard Drool cry, "Slay him! Give the ring!" He rolled over. Sweat blurred his vision; blearily, he saw the Cavewights converging toward him. His heart felt paralyzed in his chest, and he F could not get his feet under him. Retching for air, he tried to crawl out of reach.
The first Cavewight caught hold of his neck, then abruptly groaned and fell away to the side. Another Cavewight fell; the rest drew back in confusion. One of them cried fearfully, "Bloodguard! Lord Drool, help us!"
"Fool!" retorted Drool, coughing as if his lungs were in shreds. "Coward! I am power! Slay them!"
Covenant climbed to his feet, wiped the sweat from his eyes, and found Bannor standing beside him. The Bloodguard's robe hung tattered from his shoulders, and a large bruise on his brow closed one eye. But his hands were poised, alert. He carried himself on the balls of his feet, ready to leap in any direction. His flat eyes held a dull gleam of battle.
Covenant felt such a surge of relief that he wanted to hug Bannor. After his long, lightless ordeal, he felt suddenly rescued, almost redeemed. But his gruff voice belied his emotion. "What the hell took you so long?"
The Cavewights came forward slowly, timorously, and surrounded Covenant and Bannor. Drool raged at them in hoarse gasps.
Overhead, the chiaroscuro of the stalactites danced gaily.
With startling casualness, Bannor replied that he had landed badly after killing the ur-vile, and had lost consciousness. Then he had been unable to locate Covenant in the darkness. Lashed by Drool's strident commands, a Cavewight charged Covenant from behind. But Bannor spun easily, felled the creature with a kick. "The flame of your staff revealed you," he continued. "I chose to follow." He paused to spring at two of the nearest attackers. They retreated hastily. When he spoke again, his foreign Haruchai tone held a note of final honesty. "I withheld my aid, awaiting proof that you are not a foe of the Lords."
Something in the selfless and casual face that Bannor turned toward death communicated itself to Covenant. He answered without rancor, "You picked a fine time to test me."
"The Bloodguard know doubt. We require to be sure."
Drool mustered his strength to shriek furiously, "Fools! Worms! Afraid of only two!" He spat. "Go! Watch! Lord Drool kills."
The Cavewights gave way, and Drool came wincing forward. He held the Staff of Law before him like an ax.
Bannor leaped, launched a kick at Drool's face.
But for all his crippled condition, Drool Rockworm was full of power. He did not appear to feel Bannor's attack. In ponderous fury, he raised the Staff to deal a blast which would incinerate Bannor and Covenant where they stood. Against the kind of might he wielded, they were helpless.
Still Bannor braced himself in front of Covenant to meet the blow. Flinching, Covenant waited for the pain that would set him free.
But Drool was already too late. He had missed his chance, neglected other dangers. Even as he raised the Staff, the company of the Quest, led by First Mark Tuvor and High Lord Prothall, broke into Kiril Threndor.
They looked battered, as if they had just finished a skirmish with Drool's outer defenses, but they were whole and dour-handed, and they entered the chamber like a decisive wave. Prothall stopped Drool's blast with a shout full of authority. Before the Cavewights could gather themselves together, the Eoman fell on them, drove them from the cave. In a moment, Drool was surrounded by a wide ring of warriors and Bloodguard.
Slowly, with an appearance of confusion, he retreated until he was half-crouching on his dais. He looked around the circle as if unable to realize what had happened. But his spatulate hands held the Staff in a grip as grim as death.
Then, grotesquely, his laval eyes took on an angle of cunning. Twitching nods over his shoulder, he hissed in a raw voice, "Here-this is fair. Fair. Better than promises. All of them-here. All little Lords and puny Bloodguard-humans. Ready for crushing." He started to laugh, broke into a fit of coughing. "Crush!" he spat when he regained control of himself. "Crush with power." He made a noise like a cracking of bones in his throat. "Power! Little Lords. Mighty Drool. Better than promises."
Prothall faced the Cavewight squarely. Giving his staff to Mhoram, he stepped forward to the dais with Tuvor at his side. He stood erect; his countenance was calm and clear. Supported by their years of abnegation, his eyes neither wavered nor burned. In contrast, Drool's red orbs were consumed with the experience of innumerable satiations-an addictive gluttony of power. When the High Lord spoke, even the rattle of his old voice sounded like authority and decision. Softly, he said, "Give it up. Drool Rockworm, hear me. The Staff of Law is not yours. It is not meant for you. Its strength must only be used for the health of the Land. Give it to me."
Covenant moved to stand near the High Lord. He felt that he had to be near the Staff.
But Drool only muttered, "Power? Give it up? Never." His lips went on moving, as if he were communing over secret plans.
Again, Prothall urged, "Surrender it. For your own sake. Are you blind to yourself? Do you not see what has happened to you? This power is not meant for you. It destroys you. You have used the Staff wrongly. You have used the Illearth Stone. Such powers are deadly. Lord Foul has betrayed you. Give the Staff to me. I will strive to help you."
But that idea offended Drool. "Help?" he coughed. "Fool! I am Lord Drool. Master! The moon is mine. Power is mine. You are mine. I can crush! Old man-little Lord. I let you live to make me laugh. Help? No, dance. Dance for Lord Drool." He waved' the Staff threateningly. "Make me laugh. I let you live."
Prothall drew himself up, and said in a tone of command, "Drool Rockworm, release the Staff." He advanced a step.
With a jerk like a convulsion of hysteria, Drool raised the Staff to strike.
Prothall rushed forward, tried to stop him. But Tuvor reached the Cavewight first. He caught the end of the Staff.
Shivering with rage, Drool jabbed the iron heel of the Staff against Tuvor's body. Bloody light flashed. In that instant the First Mark's flesh became transparent; the company could see his bones burning like dry sticks. Then he fell, reeling backward to collapse in Covenant's arms.
His weight was too great for the Unbeliever to hold; Covenant sank to the stone under it. Cradling Tuvor, he watched the High Lord.
Prothall grappled with Drool. He grasped the Staff with both hands to prevent Drool from striking him. They wrestled together for possession of it.
The struggle looked impossible for Prothall. Despite his decrepitude, Drool retained some of his Cave-wightish strength. And he was full of power. And Prothall was old.
With Tuvor in his arms, Covenant could do nothing. "Help him!" he cried to Mhoram. "He'll be killed!"
But Lord Mhoram turned his back on Prothall. He knelt beside Covenant to see if he could aid Tuvor. As he examined the First Mark, he said roughly, "Drool seeks to master the Staff with malice. The High Lord can sing a stronger song than that."
Appalled, Covenant shouted, "He'll be killed! You've got to help him!"
"Help him?" Mhoram's eyes glinted dangerously. Pain and raw restraint sharpened his voice as he said, "He would not welcome my help. He is the High Lord. Despite my Oath"-he choked momentarily on a throat full of passion-"I would crush Drool." He invested Drool's word, crush, with a potential for despair that silenced Covenant.
Panting, Covenant watched the High Lord's fight. He was horrified by the danger, by the price both Lords were willing to pay.
Then battle erupted around him. Cavewights charged into Kiril Threndor from several directions. Apparently, Drool had been able to send out a silent call; his guards were answering. The first forces to reach the chamber were not large, but they sufficed to engage the whole company. Only Mhoram did not join the fight. He knelt beside Covenant and stroked the First Mark's face, as if he were transfixed by Tuvor's dying.
Shouting stertorously over the clash of weapons, Quaan ordered his warriors into a defensive ring around the dais and the Lords. Loss and fatigue had taken their toll on the Eoman, but stalwart Quaan led his command as if the Lords' need rendered him immune to weakness. Among the Bloodguard, his Eoman parried, thrust, fought on the spur of his exhortations.
The mounting perils made Covenant reel. Prothall and Drool struggled horribly above him. The fighting around him grew faster and more frenzied by the moment. Tuvor lay expiring in his lap. And he could do nothing about any of it, help none of them. Soon their escape would be cut off, and all their efforts would be in vain.
He had not foreseen this outcome to his bargain.
Drool bore Prothall slowly backward. "Dance!" he raged.
Tuvor shuddered; his eyes opened. Covenant looked away from Prothall. Tuvor's lips moved, but he made no sound.
Mhoram tried to comfort him. "Have no fear. This evil will be overcome-it is in the High Lord's hands. And your name will be remembered with honor wherever trust is valued."
But Tuvor's eyes held Covenant, and he managed to whisper one word, "True?" His whole body strained with supplication, but Covenant did not know whether he asked for a promise or a judgment.
Yet the Unbeliever answered. He could not refuse a Bloodguard, could not deny the appeal of such expensive fidelity. The word stuck in his throat, but he forced it out. "Yes."
Tuvor shuddered again, and died with a flat groan as if the chord of his Vow had snapped. Covenant gripped his shoulders, shook him; there was no response.
On the dais, Drool had forced Prothall to his knees, and was bending the High Lord back to break him. In futility and rage, Covenant howled, "Mhoram!"
The Lord nodded, surged to his feet. But he did not attack Drool. Holding his staff over his head, he blared in a voice that cut through the clamor of the battle, "Melenkurion abatha! Minas mill khabaal!" From end to end, his staff burst into incandescent fire.
The power of the Words jolted Drool, knocked him back a step. Prothall regained his feet.
More Cavewights rushed into Kiril Threndor. Quaan and his Eoman were driven back toward the dais. At last, Mhoram sprang to their aid. His staff burned furiously as he attacked. Around him, the Bloodguard fought like wind devils, leaping and kicking among the Cavewights so swiftly that the creatures interfered with each other when they tried to strike back.
But Drool's defenders kept coming, pouring into the cave. The company began to founder in the rising onslaught.
Then Prothall cried over the din, "I have it! The moon is free!"
He stood triumphant on the dais, with the Staff of Law upraised in his hands. Drool lay at his feet, sobbing like apiece of broken rock. Between spasms of grief, the creature gasped, "Give it back. I want it."
The sight struck fear into the Cavewights. They recoiled, quailed back against the walls of the chamber.
Released from battle, Quaan and his warriors turned toward Prothall and gave a raw cheer. Their voices were hoarse and worn, but they exulted in the High Lord's victory as if he had won the future of the Land.
Yet overhead the dancing lights of Kiril Threndor went their own bedizened way.
Covenant snapped a look at his ring. Its argent still burned with blood. Perhaps the moon was free; he was not.
Before the echoes of cheering died-before anyone could move-a new sound broke over them. It started softly, then expanded until it filled the chamber like a collapse of the ceiling. It was laughter -Lord Foul's laughter, throbbing with glee and immitigable hate. Its belittling weight dominated them, buried them in their helplessness; it paralyzed them, seemed to cut them off from their own heartbeats and breathing. While it piled onto them, they were lost.
Even Prothall stood still. Despite his victory, he looked old and feeble, and his eyes had an unfocused stare as if he were gazing into his own coffin. And Covenant, who knew that laugh, could not resist it.
But Lord Mhoram moved. Springing onto the dais, he whirled his staff around his head until the air hummed, and blue lightning bolted upward into the clustered stalactites. "Then show yourself, Despiser!" he shouted. "If you are so certain, face us nowl Do you fear to try your doom with us?"
Lord Foul's laughter exploded with fiercer contempt. But Mhoram's defiance had broken its transfixion. Prothall touched Mhoram's shoulder. The warriors gripped their swords, placed themselves in grim readiness behind the Lords.
More Cavewights entered the chamber, though they did not attack. At the sight of them, Drool raised himself on his crippled arms. His bloody eyes boiled still, clinging to fury and malice to the end. Coughing as if he were about to heave up his heart, he gasped, "The Staff. You do not know. Cannot use it. Fools. No escape. None. I have armies. I have the Stone." With a savage effort, he made himself heard through the laughter. "Illearth Stone. Power and power. I will crush. Crush." Flailing one weak arm at his guards, he screamed in stricken command, "Crush!"
Wielding their weapons, the Cavewights surged forward.

Twenty-four: The Calling of Lions


THEY came in a mass of red eyes dull with empty determination. But Lord Foul's bodiless laughter seemed to slow them. They waded through it as if it were a quagmire, and their difficult approach gave the company time to react. At Quaan's command, the warriors ringed Mhoram and Prothall. The Bloodguard took fighting positions with the Eoman.
Mhoram called to Covenant.
Slowly, Covenant raised his head. He looked at his companions, and they seemed pitifully few to him. He tried to get to his feet. But Tuvor was too heavy for him to lift. Even in death, the massive devotion of the First Mark surpassed his strength.
He heard Manethrall Lithe shout, "This way! I know the way!" She was dodging among the Cave-wights toward one of the entrances. He watched her go as if he had already forsaken her. He could not lift Tuvor because he could not get a grip with his right hand; two fingers were not enough.
Then Bannor snatched him away from the fallen First Mark, thrust him toward the protective ring of the Eoman. Covenant resisted. "You can't leave him!" But Bannor forced him among the warriors. "What are you doing?" he protested. "We've got to take him along. If you don't send him back, he won't be replaced." He spun to appeal to the Lords. "You can't leave him!"
Mhoram's lips stretched taut over his teeth. "We must."
From the mouth of the tunnel she had chosen, Lithe called, "Here!" She clenched her cord around a Cavewight's neck, and used the creature's body to protect herself from attack. "This is the way!" Other Cavewights converged on her, forced her backward.
In response, Prothall lit his old staff, swung it, and led a charge toward her. With Mhoram's help, he burned passage for his companions through the massed Cavewights.
Bright Lords-fire intimidated the creatures. But before the company had gained the tunnel Lithe had chosen, a wedge of ur-viles drove snarling into the chamber from a nearby entrance. They were led by a mighty loremaster, as black as the catacombs, wielding an iron stave that looked wet with power or blood.
Prothall cried, "Runt" The Questers dashed for the tunnel.
The ur-viles raced to intercept them.
The company was faster. Prothall and Mhoram gained the passage, and parted to let the others enter between them.
But one of the warriors decided to help his comrades escape. He suddenly veered away from the Eoman. Whirling his sword fervidly, he threw himself at the ur-vile wedge.
Mhoram yelled, started back out into the chamber to help him. But the loremaster brushed the warrior aside with a slap of its stave, and he fell. Dark moisture covered him from head to foot; he screamed as if he had been drenched in acid. Mhoram barely evaded the stave's backstroke, retreated to Prothall's side in the mouth of the passage.
There they tried to stand. They opposed their blazing blue flame to the ur-viles. The loremaster struck at them again and again; they blocked each blow with their staffs; gouts of flaming fluid, igniting blue and then turning quickly black, spattered on all sides at every clash. But the wedge fought with a savagery which drove the Lords backward step by step into the tunnel.
Quaan tried to counter by having his strongest archers loose arrows at the loremaster. But the shafts were useless. They caught fire in the ur-viles' black power and burned to ashes.
Behind the company, Lithe was chaffing to pursue the guide of her instinct for daylight. She called repeatedly for the Lords to follow her. But they could not; they did not dare turn their backs on the wedge.
Each clash drove them backward. For all their courage and resolve, they were nearly exhausted, and every blow of the loremaster's stave weakened them further. Now their flame had a less rampant blaze, and the burning gouts turned black more swiftly. It was clear, that they could not keep up the fight. And no one in the company could take it for them.
Abruptly, Mhoram shouted, "Back! Make room!"
His urgency allowed no refusal; even the Bloodguard obeyed.
"Covenant!" Mhoram cried.
Covenant moved forward until he was only an arm's length from the searing battle.
"Raise your ring!"
Compelled by Mhoram's intensity, the Unbeliever lifted his left hand. A crimson cast still stained the heart of his wedding band.
The loremaster observed the ring as if suddenly smelling its presence. It recognized white gold, hesitated. The wedge halted, though the loremaster did not drop its guard.
"Melenkurion abatha!" Mhoram commanded. "Blast them!"
Half intuitively, Covenant understood. He jabbed at the loremaster with his left fist as if launching a bolt.
Barking in strident fear, the whole wedge recoiled.
In that instant, the Lords acted. Shouting, "Minas mill khaball!" on different pitches in half-screamed harmony, they drew with their fire an X which barricaded the tunnel from top to bottom. The flame of the X hung in the air; and before it could die, Prothall placed his staff erect within it. At once, a sheet of blue flared in the passage.
Howling in rage at Mhoram's ruse, the ur-viles sprang forward. The loremaster struck hugely at the flame with its stave. The fiery wall rippled and fluttered -but did not let the wedge pass.
Prothall and Mhoram took only a moment to see how their power held. Then they turned and dashed down the tunnel.
Gasping for breath, Mhoram told the company, "We have forbidden the tunnel! But it will not endure. We are not strong enough-the High Lord's staff was needed to make any forbidding at all. And the ur-viles are savage. Drool drives them mad with the Illearth Stone." In spite of his haste, his voice carried a shudder. "Now we must run. We must escape-must! All our work will go for nothing if we do not take both Staff and Ward to safety."
"Come!" the Manethrall responded. "I know grass and sky. I can find the way."
Prothall nodded agreement, but his movements were slow, despite the need for alacrity. He was exhausted, driven far past the normal limits of his stamina. With his breath rattling deep in his chest as if he were drowning in the phlegm of his age, he leaned heavily on the Staff of Law. "Go!" he panted. "Run!"
Two Bloodguard took his arms, and between them he stumbled into a slow run down the passage. Rallying around him, the company started away after Lithe.
At first, they went easily. Their tunnel offered few branchings; at each of these, Lithe seemed instantly sure which held the greatest promise of daylight. Lit from behind by Mhoram's staff, she loped forward as if following a warm trail of freedom.
After the struggles of close combat, the company found relief in simple, single-minded running. It allowed them to focus and conserve their strength. Furthermore, they were passing, as if slowly liberated, out of the range of Lord Foul's laughter. Soon they could hear neither mockery nor threat of slaughter at their backs. For once, the silent darkness befriended them.
For nearly a league, they hastened onward. They began to traverse a section of the catacombs which was intricate with small caves and passages and turnings, but which appeared to contain no large halls, crevices, wightworks. Throughout these multiplied corridors, Lithe did not hesitate. Several times she took ways which inclined slowly upward.
But as the complex tunnels opened into broader and blacker ways, where Mhoram's flame illumined no cave walls or ceilings, the catacombs became more hostile. Gradually, the silence changed-lost the hue of relief, and became the hush of ambush. The darkness around Mhoram's light seemed to conceal more and more. At the turnings and intersections, night thickened in their choices, clouding Lithe's instinct. She began to falter.
Behind her, Prothall grew less and less able to keep up the pace. His hoarse, wheezing breath was increasingly labored; even the weariest Questers could hear his gasps over their own hard panting. The Bloodguard were almost carrying him.
Still they pushed on into stark midnight. They bore the Staff of Law and the Second Ward, and could not afford surrender.
Then they reached a high cave which formed a crossroads for several tunnels. The general direction they had maintained since Kiril Threndor was continued by one passage across the cave. But Lithe stopped in the center of the junction as if she had been reined to a halt. She searched about her uncertainly, confused by the number of her choices-and by some intuitive rejection of her only obvious selection. Shaking her head as if resisting a bit, she groaned, "Ah, Lords. I do not know."
Mhoram snapped, "You "must! We have no other chance. The old maps do not show these ways. You have led us far beyond our ken." He gripped her shoulder as if he meant to force her decision. But the next moment he was distracted by Prothall. With a sharp spasm of coughing, the High Lord collapsed to the floor.
One Bloodguard quickly propped him into a sitting position, and Mhoram knelt beside him, peering with intent concern into his old face. "Rest briefly," mumbled Mhoram. "Our forbidding has long since broken. We must not delay."
Between fits of coughing, the High Lord replied, "Leave me. Take the Staff and go. I am done."
His words appalled the company. Covenant and the warriors covered their own breathing to hear Mhoram's answer. The air was suddenly intense with a fear that Mhoram would accept Prothall's sacrifice.
But Mhoram said nothing.
"Leave me," Prothall repeated. "Give your staff to me, and I will defend your retreat as I can. Go, I say. I am old. I have had my time of triumph. I lose nothing. Take the Staff and go." When the Lord still did not speak, he rattled in supplication, "Mhoram, hear me. Do not let my old bones destroy this high Quest."
"I hear you." Mhoram's voice sounded thick and wounded in his throat. He knelt with his head bowed.
But a moment later he rose to his feet, and put back his head, and began to laugh. It was quiet laughter unfeverish and unforced-the laughter of relief and indespair. The company gaped at it until they understood that it was not hysteria. Then, without knowing why, they laughed in response. Humor ran like a clean wind through their hearts.
Covenant almost cursed aloud because he could not share it.
When they had subsided into low chuckling, Mhoram said to the High Lord, "Ah, Prothall son of Dwillian. It is good that you are old. Leave you? How will I be able to take pleasure in telling Osondrea of your great exploits if you are not there to protest my boasting?" Gaily, he laughed again. Then, as if recollecting himself, he returned to where Lithe stood bewildered in the center of the cave.
"Manethrall," he said gently, "you have done well. Your instinct is true-remember it now. Put all doubt away. We do not fear to follow where your heart leads."
Covenant had noticed that she, too, had not joined the laughter of the company. Her eyes were troubled; he guessed that her swift blood had been offended by Mhoram's earlier sharpness. But she nodded gravely to the Lord. "That is well. My thoughts do not trust my heart."
"In what way?"
"My thoughts say that we must continue as we have come. But my heart wishes to go there." She indicated a tunnel opening back almost in the direction from which- they had come. "I do not know," she concluded simply. "This is new to me."
But Mhoram's reply held no hesitation. "You are Manethrall Lithe of the Ramen. You have served the Ranyhyn. You know grass and sky. Trust your heart."
After a moment, Lithe accepted his counsel.
Two Bloodguard helped Prothall to his feet. Supporting him between them, they joined the company and followed Lithe's instinct into the tunnel.
This passage soon began to descend slowly, and they set a good pace down it. They were buoyed along by the hope that their pursuers would not guess what they were doing, and so would neither cut them off nor follow them directly. But in the universal darkness and silence, they had no assurances. Their way met no branchings, but it wavered as if it were tracing a vein in the mountain. Finally it opened into a vast impression of blank space, and began to climb a steep, serrated rock face through a series of switchbacks. Now the company had to toil upward.
The difficulties of the ascent slowed them as much as the climbing. The higher they went, the colder the air became, and the more there seemed to be a wind blowing in the dark gulf beside them. But the cold and the wind only accented their dripping sweat and the exhausted wrack of their respiration. The Bloodguard alone appeared unworn by the long days of their exertion; they strode steadily up the slope as if it were just a variation of their restless devotion. But their companions were more deathprone. The warriors and Covenant began to stagger like cripples in the climb.
Finally Mhoram called a halt. Covenant dropped to sit with his back to the rock, facing the black-blown, measureless cavern. The sweat seemed to freeze on his face. The last of the food and drink was passed around, but in this buried place, both appeared to have lost their capacity to refresh-as if at last even sustenance were daunted by the darkness of the catacombs. Covenant ate and drank numbly. Then he shut his eyes to close out the empty blackness for a time. But he saw it whether his eyes were open or not.
Some time later-Covenant no longer measured duration-Lord Mhoram said in a stinging whisper, "I hear them."
Korik's reply sounded as hollow as a sigh from a tomb. "Yes. They follow. They are a great many."
Lurching as if stricken, the Questers began to climb again, pushing themselves beyond the limits of their strength. They felt weak with failure, as if they were moving only because Mhoram's blue flame pulled them forward, compelled them, beseeched, cajoled, urged, inspired, refused to accept anything from them except endurance and more endurance. Disregarding every exigency except the need for escape, they continued to climb.
Then the wind began to howl around them, and their way changed. The chasm abruptly narrowed; they found themselves on a thin, spiral stair carved into the wall of a vertical shaft. The width of the rude steps made them ascend in single file. And the wind went yelling up the shaft as if it fled the catacombs in stark terror. Covenant groaned when he realized that he would have to risk yet another perilous height, but the rush of the wind was so powerful that it seemed to make falling impossible. Cycling dizzily, he struggled up the stair.
The shaft went straight upward, and the wind yowled in pain; and the company climbed as if they were being dragged by the air. But as the shaft narrowed, the force of the wind increased; the air began to move past them too fast for breathing. As they gasped upward, a light-headed vertigo came over them. The shaft seemed to cant precariously from side to side. Covenant moved on his hands and knees.
Soon the whole company was crawling.
After an airless ache which extended interminably around him, Covenant lay stretched out on the stairs. He was not moving. Dimly, he heard voices trying to shout over the roar of the wind. But he was past listening. He felt that he had reached the verge of suffocation, and the only thing he wanted to do was weep. He could hardly remember what prevented him even now from releasing his misery.
Hands grabbed his shoulders, hauled him up onto flat stone. They dragged him ten or fifteen feet along the bottom of a thin crevice. The howl of the wind receded.
He heard Quaan give a choked, panting cheer. With an effort, he raised his head. He was sprawled in the crevice where it opened on one of the eastern faces of Mount Thunder. Across a flat, gray expanse far below him, the sun rose redly.
To his stunned ears, the cheering itself sounded like sobs. It spread as the warriors one by one climbed out past him into the dawn. Lithe had already leaped down a few feet from the crevice, and was on her knees kissing the earth. Far away, across the Sarangrave and the gleaming line of the Defiles Course and the Great Swamp, the sun stood up regally, wreathed in red splendor.
Covenant pushed himself into a sitting position and looked over at the Lords to see their victory.
They had no aspect of triumph. The High Lord sat crumpled like a sack of old bones, with the Staff of Law on his knees. His head was bowed, and he covered his face with both hands. Beside him, Mhoram stood still and dour, and his eyes were as bleak as a wilderness.
Covenant did not understand.
Then Bannor said, "We can defend here."
Mhoram's reply was 'soft and violent. "How? Drool knows many ways. If we prevent him here, he will attack from below-above. He can bring thousands against us."
"Then close this gap to delay them."
Mhoram's voice became softer still. "The High Lord has no staff. I cannot forbid the gap alone-I have not the power.-Do you believe that I am strong enough to bring down the walls of this crevice? No-not even if I were willing to damage the Earth in that way. We must escape. There-" He pointed down the mountainside with a hand that trembled.
Covenant looked downward. The crevice opened into the bottom of a ravine which ran straight down the side of Mount Thunder like a knife wound. The spine of this cut was jumbled and tossed with huge rocks-fallen boulders, pieces of the higher cliffs like dead fragments of the mountain. And its walls were sheer, unclimbable. The Questers would have to pick their way tortuously along the bottom of the cut for half a league. There the walls gave way, and the ravine dropped over a cliff. When the company reached the cliff, they would have to try to work around the mountainsides until they found another descent.
Still Covenant did not understand. He groaned at the difficulty of the ravine, but it was escape. He could feel sunlight on his face. Heaving himself to his feet, he muttered, "Let's get going."
Mhoram gave him a look thick with suppressed pain. But he did not voice it. Instead, he spoke stiffly to Quaan and Korik. In a few moments, the Questers started down the ravine.
Their progress was deadly slow. In order to make their way, they had to climb from rock to rock, swing themselves over rough boulders, squeeze on hands and knees through narrow gaps between huge fists of stone. And they were weak. The strongest of the warriors needed help time and again from the Bloodguard.
Prothall had to be almost entirely carried. He clutched the Staff, and scrabbled frailly at the climbs. Whenever he jumped from a rock, he fell to his knees; soon the front of his robe was spattered with blood.
Covenant began to sense their danger. Their pace might be fatal. If Drool knew other ways onto the slope, his forces might reach the end of the ravine before the company did.
He was not alone in his perception. After their first relief, the warriors took on a haunted look. Soon they were trudging, clambering, struggling with their heads bowed and backs bent as if the weight of all they had ever known were tied around their necks. The sunlight did not allow them to be ignorant of their peril.
Like a prophecy, their fear was fulfilled before the company was halfway down the ravine. One of the Eoman gave a broken cry, pointed back up the mountain. There they saw a horde of ur-viles rushing out of the cleft from which they had come.
They tried to push faster down the littered spine of the cut. But the ur-viles poured after them like a black flood. The creatures seemed to spring over the rocks without danger of misstep, as if borne along by a rush of savagery. They gained on the company with sickening speed.
And the ur-viles were not alone. Near the end of the ravine, Cavewights suddenly appeared atop one wall. As soon as they spotted the Questers, they began throwing ropes over the edge, scaling down the wall.
The company was caught like a group of mites in the pincers of Drool's power.
They stopped where they were, paralyzed by dismay. For a moment, even Quaan's sense of responsibility for his Eoman failed; he stared blankly about him, and did not move. Covenant sagged against a boulder. He wanted to scream at the mountain that this was not fair. He had already survived so much, endured so much, lost so much. Where was his escape? Was this the cost of his bargain, his forbearance? It was too great. He was a leper, not made for such ordeals. His voice shook uncontrollably full of useless outrage. "No wonder he-let us have the Staff. So it would hurt worse now. He knew we wouldn't get away with it."
But Mhoram shouted orders in a tone that cut through the dismay. He ran a short way down the ravine and climbed onto a wide, flat rock higher than the others near it. "There is space for us! Come!" he commanded. "We will make our end here!"
Slowly, the warriors shambled to the rock as if they were overburdened with defeat. Mhoram and the Bloodguard helped them up. High Lord Prothall came last, propped between two Bloodguard. He was muttering, "No. No." But he did not resist Mhoram's orders.
When everyone was on the rock, Quaan's Eoman and the Bloodguard placed themselves around its edge. Lithe joined them, her cord taut in her hands, leaving Prothall and Mhoram and Covenant in the ring of the company's last defense.
Now the ur-viles had covered half the distance to the rock where the company stood. Behind them came hundreds of Cavewights, gushing out of the crevice and pouring down the ravine. And as many more worked upward from the place where they had entered the cut.
Surveying Drool's forces, Mhoram said softly, "Take heart, my friends. You have done well. Now let us make our end so bravely that even our enemies will remember it. Do not despair. There are many chances between the onset of a war and victory. Let us teach Lord Foul that he will never taste victory until the last friend of the Land is dead."
But Prothall whispered, "No. No." Facing upward toward the crest of Mount Thunder, he planted his feet and closed his eyes. With slow resolution, he raised the Staff of Law level with his heart and gripped it in both. fists. "It must be possible," he breathed. "By the Seven! It must." His knuckles whitened on the intricate runed and secret surface of the Staff. "Melenkurion Skyweir, help me. I do not accept this end." His brows slowly knotted over his shut, sunken eyes, and his head bowed until his beard touched his heart. From between his pale lips came a whispered, wordless song. But his voice rattled so huskily in his chest that his song sounded more like a dirge than an invocation.
Drool's forces poured down and surged up at the company inexorably. Mhoram watched them with a rictus of helplessness on his humane lips.
Suddenly, a desperate chance blazed in his eyes. He spun, gripped Covenant with his gaze, whispered, "There is a way! Prothall strives to call the Fire-Lions. He cannot succeed-the power of the Staff is closed, and we have not the knowledge to unlock it. But white gold can release that power. It can be done!"
Covenant recoiled as if Mhoram had betrayed him. No! he panted. I made a bargain-!
Then, with a sickening, vertiginous twist of insight, he caught a glimpse of Lord Foul's plan for him, glimpsed what the Despiser was doing to him. Here was the killing blow which had lain concealed behind all the machinations, all the subterfuge.
Hell and blood!
Here was the point of impact between his opposing madnesses. If he attempted to use the wild magic if his ring had power-if it had no power- He flinched at the reel and strike of dark visions-the company slain-the Staff destroyed thousands of creatures dead, all that blood on his head, his head.
"No," he gasped thickly. "Don't ask me. I promised I wouldn't do any more killing. You don't know what I've done-to Atiaran-to- I made a bargain so I wouldn't have to do any more killing."
The ur-viles and Cavewights were almost within bowshot now. The Eoman had arrows nocked and ready. Drool's hordes slowed, began to poise for the last spring of attack.
But Mhoram's eyes did not release Covenant. "There will be still more killing if you do not. Do you believe that Lord Foul will be content with our deaths? Never! He will slay and slay again until all life without exception is his to corrupt or destroy. All life, do you hear? Even these creatures that now serve him will not be spared."
"No!" Covenant groaned again. "Don't you see? This is just what he wants. The Staff will be destroyed or Drool will be destroyed-or we'll- No matter what happens, he'll win. He'll be free. You're doing just what he wants."
"Nevertheless!" Mhoram returned fervidly. "The dead are dead-only the living may hope to resist Despite."
Hellfire! Covenant groped for answers like a man incapable of his own distress. But he found none. No bargain or compromise met his need. In his pain, he cried out wildly, protested, appealed, "Mhoram! It's suicide! You're asking me to go crazy!"
The peril in Mhoram's eyes did not waver. "No, Unbeliever. You need not lose your mind. There are other answers other songs. You can find them. Why should the Land be destroyed for your pain? Save or damn! Grasp the Staff!"
"Damnation!" Fumbling furiously for his ring, Covenant shouted, "Do it yourself!" He wrenched the band from his finger and tried to throw it at Mhoram. But he was shaking madly; his fingers slipped. The ring dropped to the stone, rolled away.
He scrambled after it. He did not seem to have enough digits to catch it; it skidded past Prothall's feet. He lurched toward it again-then missed his footing, fell, and smacked his forehead on the stone.
Distantly, he heard the thrum of bowstrings; the battle had begun. But he paid no attention. He felt that he had cracked his skull. When he raised his head, he found that his vision was wrong; he was seeing double.
The moss-stain chart of his robe smeared illegibly in his sight. Now he had lost whatever chance he had to read it, decipher the cryptic message of Morinmoss. He saw two of Mhoram as the Lord held up the ring. He saw two Prothalls above him, clutching the Staff and trying with the last strength of his life-force to compel its power to his will. Two Bannors turned away from the fight toward the Lords.
Then Mhoram stooped to Covenant. The Lord lashed out, caught his right wrist. The grip was so fierce that he felt his bones grinding together. It forced his hand open, and when his two fingers were spread and
vulnerable, Mhoram shoved the ring onto his index digit. It stuck after the first knuckle. "I cannot usurp your place," the double Lord grated. He stood and roughly pulled Covenant erect. Thrusting his double face at the Unbeliever, he hissed, "By the Seven! You fear power more than weakness."
Yes! Covenant moaned at the pain in his wrist and head. Yes! I want to survive!
The snap of bowstrings came now as fast as the warriors could ready their arrows. But their supply of shafts was limited. And the ur-viles and Cavewights hung back, risking themselves only enough to draw the warriors' fire. Drool's forces were in no hurry. The ur-viles particularly looked ready to relish the slow slaughter of the company.
But Covenant had no awareness to spare for such things. He stared in a kind of agony at Mhoram. The Lord seemed to-have two mouths-lips stretched over multiplied teeth-and four eyes, all aflame with compulsions. Because he could think of no other appeal, he reached his free hand to his belt, took out Atiaran's knife, and extended it toward Mhoram. Through his teeth, he pleaded, "It would be better if you killed me."
Slowly, Mhoram's grip eased. His lips softened; the fire of his eyes faded. His gaze seemed to turn inward, and he winced at what he beheld. When he spoke, his voice sounded like dust. "Ah, Covenant-forgive me. I forget myself. Foamfollower-Foamfollower understood this. I should have heard him more clearly. It is wrong to ask for more than you give freely. In this way, we come to resemble what we hate." He released Covenant's wrist and stepped back. "My friend, this is not on your head. The burden is ours, and we bear it to the end. Forgive me."
Covenant could not answer. He stood with his face twisted as if he were about to howl. His eyes ached at the duplicity of his vision. Mhoram's mercy affected him more than any argument or demand. He turned miserably toward Prothall. Could he not find somewhere the strength for that risk? Perhaps the path of escape lay that way-perhaps the horror of wild magic was the price he would have to pay for his freedom.
He did not want to be killed by ur-viles. But when he raised his arm, he could not tell which of those hands was his, which of those two Staffs was the real one.
Then, with a flat thrum, the last arrow was gone. The Cavewights gave a vast shout of malice and glee. At the command of the ur-viles, they began to approach. The warriors drew their swords, braced themselves for their useless end. The Bloodguard balanced on the balls of their feet.
Trembling, Covenant tried to reach toward the staff. But his head was spinning, and a whirl of darkness jumped dizzily at him. He could not overcome his fear; he was appalled at the revenge his leprosy would wreak on him for such audacity. His hand crossed half the distance and stopped, clutched in unfingered impotence at the empty air.
Ah! he cried lornly. Help me!
"We are the Bloodguard." Bannor's voice was almost inaudible through the loud lust of the Cavewights. "We cannot permit this end."
Firmly, he took Covenant's hand and placed it on the Staff of Law, midway between Prothall's straining knuckles.
Power seemed to explode in Covenant's chest. A silent concussion, a shock beyond hearing, struck the ravine like a convulsion of the mountain. The blast knocked the Questers from their feet, sent all the urviles and Cavewights sprawling among the boulders. Only the High Lord kept his feet. His head jerked up, and the Staff bucked in his hands.
For a moment, there was stillness in the ravine a quiet so intense that the blast seemed to have deafened all the combatants. And in that moment, the entire sky over Gravin Threndor turned black with impenetrable thunder.
Then came noise-one deep bolt of sound as if the very rock of the mountain cried out-followed by long waves of hot, hissing sputters. The clouds dropped until they covered the crest of Mount Thunder.
Great yellow fires began to burn on the shrouded peak.
For a time, the company and their attackers lay in the ravine as if they were afraid to move. Everyone stared up at the fires and the thunderheads.
Suddenly, the flames erupted. With a roar as if the sir itself were burning, fires started charging like great, hungry beasts down every face and side of the mountain.
Shrieking in fear, the Cavewights sprang up and ran. A few hurled themselves madly against the walls of the ravine. But most of them swept around the company's rock and fled downward, trying to outrun the Fire-Lions.
The ur-viles went the other way. In furious haste, they scrambled up the ravine toward the entrance to the catacombs.
But before they could reach safety, Drool appeared out of the cleft above them. The Cavewight was crawling, too crippled to stand. But in his fist he clutched a green stone which radiated intense wrong through the blackness of the clouds. His scream carried over the roar of the Lions:
"Crush! Crush!"
The ur-viles stopped, caught between fears.
While the creatures hesitated, the company started down the ravine. Prothall and Covenant were too exhausted to support themselves, so the Bloodguard bore them, throwing them from man to man over the boulders, dragging them along the tumbled floor of the ravine.
Ahead, the Cavewights began to reach the end of the cut. Some of them ran so blindly that they plunged over the cliff; others scattered in either direction along the edge, wailing for escape.
But behind the company, the ur-viles formed a wedge and again started downward. The Questers were barely able to keep their distance from the wedge.
The roar of the flaming air grew sharper, fiercer. Set free by the power of the Peak, boulders tumbled from the cliffs. The Fire-Lions moved like molten stone, sprang down the slopes as if spewed out of the heart of an inferno. Still far above the ravine, the consuming howl of their might seemed to double and treble itself with each downward lunge. A blast of scorched air blew ahead of them like a herald, trumpeting the progress of fire and volcanic hunger. Gravin Threndor shuddered to its roots.
The difficulty of the ravine eased as the company neared the lower end, and Covenant began to move for himself. Impelled by broken vision, overborne hearing, gaining rampage, he shook free of the Bloodguard. Moving stiff-kneed like a puppet, he jerked in a dogged, stumbling line for the cliff.
The other Questers swung to the south along the edge. But he went directly to the precipice. When he reached it, his legs barely had the strength to stop him. Tottering weakly, he looked down the drop. It was sheer for two thousand feet, and the cliff was at least half a league wide.
There was no escape. The Lions would get the company before they reached any possible descent beyond the cliff long before.
People yelled at him, warning him futilely; he could hardly hear them through the roaring air. He gave no heed. That kind of escape was not what he wanted. And he was not afraid of the fall: he could not see it clearly enough to be afraid.
He had something to do.
He paused for a moment, summoning his courage. Then he realized that one of the Bloodguard would probably try to save him. He wanted to accomplish his purpose before that could happen.
He needed an answer to death.
Pulling off his ring, he held it firmly in his halffingerless hand, cocked his arm to throw the band over the cliff.
His eyes followed the ring as he drew back his arm, and he stopped suddenly, struck by a blow of shame. The metal was clean. His vision still saw two rings, but both were flat argent; the stain was gone from within them.
He spun from the cliff, searched up the ravine for Drool.
He heard Mhoram shout, "Bannor! It is his choice!" The Bloodguard was sprinting toward him. At Mhoram's command, Bannor pulled to a halt ten
yards away, despite his Vow. The next instant, he rejected the command, leaped toward Covenant again.
Covenant could not focus his vision. He caught a glimpse of fiery Lions pouncing toward the crevice high up the ravine. But his sight was dominated by the ur-vile wedge. It was only three strides away from him. The loremaster had already raised its stave to strike.
Instinctively, Covenant tried to move. But he was too slow. He was still leaning when Bannor crashed into him, knocked him out of the way.
With a mad, exulting bark as if they had suddenly seen a vision, the ur-viles sprang forward as one and plunged over the cliff. Their cries as they fell sounded ferociously triumphant.
Bannor lifted Covenant to his feet. The Bloodguard urged him toward the rest of the company, but he broke free and stumbled a few steps up the slope, straining his eyes toward the crevice. "Drool! What happened to Drool?" His eyes failed him. He stopped, wavered uncertainly, raged, "I can't see!"
Mhoram hastened to him, and Covenant repeated his question, shouting it into the Lord's face.
Mhoram replied gently, "Drool is there, in the crevice. Power that he could not master destroys him. He no longer knows what he does. In a moment, the Fire-Lions will consume him."
Covenant strove to master his voice by biting down on it. "No!" he hissed. "He's just another victim. Foul planned this all along:" Despite his clamped teeth, his voice sounded broken.
Comfortingly, Mhoram touched his shoulder. "Be at peace, Unbeliever. We have done all we can. You need not condemn yourself."
Abruptly, Covenant found that his rage was gone collapsed into dust. He felt blasted and wrecked, and he sank to the ground as if his bones could no longer hold him. His eyes had a tattered look, like the sails of a ghost ship. Without caring what he did, he pushed his wedding band back onto his ring finger.
The rest of the company was moving toward him. They had given up their attempt at flight; together,
they watched the progress of the Lions. The midnight clouds cast a gloom over the whole mountain, and through the dimness the pouncing fires blazed and coruscated like beasts of sun flame. They sprang down the walls into the ravine, and some of them bounded upward toward the crevice.
Lord Mhoram finally shook himself free of his entrancement. "Call your Ranyhyn," he commanded Bannor. "The Bloodguard can save themselves. Take the Staff and the Second Ward. Call the Ranyhyn and escape."
Bannor met Mhoram's gaze for a long moment, measuring the Lord's order. Then he refused stolidly. "One of us will go. To carry the Staff and Ward to Lord's Keep. The rest remain."
"Why? We cannot escape. You must live-to serve the Lords who must carry on this war."
"Perhaps." Bannor shrugged slightly. "Who can say? High Lord Kevin ordered us away, and we obeyed. We will not do such a thing again."
"But this death is useless!" cried Mhoram.
"Nevertheless." The Bloodguard's tone was as blank as iron. Then he added, "But you can call Hynaril. Do so, Lord."
"No," Mhoram sighed with a tired smile of recognition. "I cannot. How could I leave so many to die?"
Covenant only half listened. He felt like a derelict, and he was picking among the wreckage of his emotions, in search of something worth salvaging. But part of him understood. He put the two fingers of his right hand between his lips and gave one short, piercing whistle.
All the company stared at him. Quaan seemed to think that the Unbeliever had lost his mind; Mhoram's eyes jumped at wild guesses. But Manethrall Lithe tossed her cord high in the air and crowed, "The Ranyhyn! Mane of the World! He calls them!"
"How?" protested Quaan. "He refused them."
"They reared to him!" she returned with a nickering laugh. "They will come."
Covenant had stopped listening altogether. Something was happening to him, and he lurched to his feet
to meet it upright. The dimensions of his situation were changing. To his blurred gaze, the comrades of the company grew slowly harder and solider-took on the texture of native rock. And the mountain itself became increasingly adamantine. It seemed as immutable as the cornerstone of the world. He felt veils drop from his perception; he saw the unclouded fact of Gravin Threndor in all its unanswerable power. He paled beside it; his flesh grew thin, transient. Air as thick as smoke blew through him, chilling his bones. The throat of his soul contracted in silent pain. "What's happening to me?"
Around the cliff edge to the south, Ranyhyn came galloping. Like a blaze of hope, they raced the down rush of the Lions. At once, a hoarse cheer broke from the warriors. "We are saved!" Mhoram cried. "There is time enough!" With the rest of the company, he hurried forward to meet the swift approach of the Ranyhyn.
Covenant felt that he had been left alone. "What's happening to me?" he repeated dimly toward the hard mountain.
But Prothall was still at his side. Covenant heard the High Lord say in a kind old voice that seemed as loud as thunder, "Drool is dead. He was your summoner, and with his death the call ends. That is the way of such power.
"Farewell, Unbeliever! Be true! You have wrought greatly for us. The Ranyhyn will preserve us. And with the Staff of Law and the Second Ward, we will not be unable to defend against the Despiser's ill. Take heart. Despair and bitterness are not the only songs in the world."
But Covenant wailed in mute grief. Everything around him-Prothall and the company and the Ranyhyn and the Fire-Lions and the mountain-became too solid for him. They overwhelmed his perceptions, passed beyond his senses into gray mist. He clutched about him and felt nothing. He could not see; the Land left the range of his eyes. It was too much for him, and he lost it.

Twenty-five: Survived


GRAY mist swirled around him for a long convulsive moment. Then it began to smear, and he lost it as well. His vision blurred, as if some hard god had rubbed a thumb across it. He blinked rapidly, tried to reach up to squeeze his eyes; but something soft prevented his hand. His sight remained blank.
He was waking up, though he felt more as if he were dropping into grogginess.
Gradually, he became able to identify where he was. He lay in a bed with tubular protective bars on the sides. White sheets covered him to his chin. Gray curtains shut him off from the other patients in the room. A fluorescent light stared past him emptily from the ceiling. The air was faintly tinged with ether and germicide. A call button hung at the head of the bed.
All his fingers and toes were numb.
Nerves don't regenerate, of course they don't, they don't-
This was important-he knew it was importantbut for some reason it did not carry any weight with him. His heart was too hot with other emotions to feel that particular ice.
What mattered to him was that Prothall and Mhoram and the Quest had survived. He clung to that as if it were proof of sanity-a demonstration that what had happened to him, that what he had done, was not the product of madness, self-destruction. They had survived; at least his bargain with the Ranyhyn had accomplished that much. They had done exactly what Lord Foul wanted them to do-but they had survived.
At least he was not guilty of their deaths, too. His inability to use his ring, to believe in his ring, had not made Wraiths of them. That was his only consolation for what he had lost.
Then he made out two figures standing at the foot of the bed. One of them was a woman in white-a nurse. As he tried to focus on her, she said, "Doctor -he's regaining consciousness."
The doctor was a middle-aged man in a brown suit. The flesh under his eyes sagged as if he were weary of all human pain, but his lips under his graying mustache were gentle. He approached along the side of the bed, touched Covenant's forehead for a moment, then pulled up Covenant's eyelids and shined a small light at his pupils.
With an effort, Covenant focused on the light.
The doctor nodded, and put his flashlight away. "Mr. Covenant?"
Covenant swallowed at the dryness in his throat.
"Mr. Covenant." The doctor held his face close to Covenant's, and spoke quietly, calmly. "You're in the hospital. You were brought here after your run-in with that police car. You've been unconscious for about four hours."
Covenant lifted his head and nodded to show that he understood.
"Good," said the doctor. "I'm glad you're coming around. Now, let me talk to you for a moment.
"Mr. Covenant, the police officer who was driving that car says that he didn't hit you. He claims that he stopped in time-you just fell down in front of him. From my examination, I would be inclined to agree with him. Your hands are scraped up a bit, and you have a bruise on your forehead-but things like that could have happened when you fell." He hesitated momentarily, then asked, "Did he hit you?"
Dumbly, Covenant shook his head. The question did not feel important.
"Well, I suppose you could have knocked yourself out by hitting your head on the pavement. But why did you fall?"
That, too, did not feel important. He pushed the question away with a twitch of his hands. Then he tried to sit up in bed.
He succeeded before the doctor could help or hinder him; he was not as weak as he had feared he might be. The numbness of his fingers and toes still seemed to lack conviction, as if they would recover as soon as their circulation was restored.
Nerves don't-
After a moment, he regained his voice, and asked for his clothes.
The doctor studied him closely. "Mr. Covenant," he said, "I'll let you go home if you want to. I suppose I should keep you under observation for a day or two. But I really haven't been able to find anything wrong with you. And you know more about taking care of leprosy than I do." Covenant did not miss the look of nausea that flinched across the nurse's face. "And, to be perfectly honest"-the doctor's tone turned suddenly acid-"`I don't want to have to fight the staff here to be sure that you get decent care. Do you feel up to it?"
In answer, Covenant began fumbling with awkward fingers at the dull white hospital gown he wore.
Abruptly, the doctor went to a locker, and came back with Covenant's clothes.
Covenant gave them a kind of VSE. They were scuffed and dusty from his fall in the street; yet they looked exactly as they had looked when he had last worn them, during the first days of the Quest.
Exactly as if none of it had ever happened.
When he was dressed, he signed the releases. His hand was so cold that he could hardly write his name.
But the Quest had survived. At least his bargain had been good for that.
Then the doctor gave him a ride in a wheelchair down to the discharge exit. Outside the building, the doctor suddenly began to talk as if in some oblique way he were trying to apologize for not keeping Covenant in the hospital. "It must be hell to be a leper," he said rapidly. "I'm trying to understand. It's like I studied in Heidelberg, years ago, and while I was there I saw a lot of medieval art. Especially religious
art. Being a leper reminds me of statues of the Crucifixion made during the Middle Ages. There is Christ on the Cross, and his features-his body, even his face-are portrayed so blandly that the figure is unrecognizable. It could be anyone, man or woman. But the wounds-the nails in the hands and feet, the spear in the side, the crown of thorns-are carved and even painted in incredibly vivid detail. You would think the artist crucified his model to get that kind of realism.
"Being a leper must be like that."
Covenant felt the doctor's sympathy, but he could not reply to it. He did not know how.
After a few minutes, an ambulance came and took him back to Haven Farm.
He had survived.
He walked up the long driveway to his house as if that were his only hope.

What Has Cone Before

THOMAS COVENANT is a happy and successful author until an unfelt infection leads to the amputation of two fingers. Then his doctor tells him he has leprosy. The disease is arrested at a leprosarium, but he returns home to find himself an outcast. His wife has divorced him and ignorant fear makes all his neighbors shun him. He becomes a lonely, bitter pariah.
In rebellion, he goes to town. There, just after he meets a strange beggar, he stumbles in front of a police car. Disorientation overcomes him. He revives in a strange world where the evil voice of Lord Foul gives him a mocking message of doom to the Lords of the Land. When Foul leaves, a young girl named Lena takes him to her home. There he is treated as a legendary hero, Berek Halfhand. He finds that his white gold wedding ring is a talisman of great power in the Land.
Lena treats him with a mud called hurtloam, which seems to cure his leprosy. The sensations of healing are more than he can handle, and losing control of himself, he rapes Lena. Despite this, her mother Atiaran agrees to guide him to Revelstone; his message is more important than her hatred of him. She tells him of the ancient war between the Old Lords and Foul, which resulted in millennia of desecration for the Land.
Covenant cannot accept the Land, where there is too much beauty and where stone and wood are subject to the power of magic. He becomes the Unbeliever, because he dares not relax the watchful discipline which a leper needs to survive. To him, the Land is an escape from reality by his injured and perhaps delirious mind.
At the Soulsease River, a friendly Giant takes Covenant by boat to Revelstone, where the Lords meet. There the Lords accept him as one of themselves, calling him the ur-Lord. But his message from Lord Foul dismays them. If Drool Rockworm evil Cavewight-holds the supremely powerful Staff of Law, their position is perilous indeed. They no longer have even the powers of the Old Lords, whom Foul overcame. Of Old Lord Kevin's Seven Wards of lore they have only the first, which they partly understand.
They determine to seek the Staff, held by Drool in caverns under Mount Thunder. Covenant goes with them as they flee through the attacks of Lord Foul's minions. They go south, to the Plains of Ra, where the Ramen serve the Ranyhyn, the great free horses. There the Ranyhyn bow to the power of Covenant's ring. As some recompense to Lena for what he did, he orders that one horse shall go to do her will each year.
Then the Lords ride to Mount Thunder. There, after many encounters with evil creatures and dark magic, they face Drool. High Lord Prothall wrests the Staff from Drool. They escape from the catacombs when Covenant manages to use the power of his ring -but without understanding how.
As the Lords escape, Covenant is beginning to fade away. He finds himself in a hospital bed a few hours after his accident. His leprosy has returned, suggesting it was all delusion. Yet he cannot quite accept any reality now. He is not seriously injured, however, and he is discharged from the hospital. He returns home.

This is a brief summary of Lord Foul's Bane, the first Chronicle of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever

Part I:  Revelstone


One: The Dreams of Men


BY the time Thomas Covenant reached his house the burden of what had happened to him had already become intolerable.
 When he opened the door, he found himself once more in the charted neatness of his living room. Everything was just where he had left it-just as if nothing had happened, as if he had not spent the past four hours in a coma or in another world where his disease had been abrogated despite the fact that such a thing was impossible, impossible. His fingers and toes were all numb and cold; their nerves were dead. That could never be changed. His living room-all his rooms were organized and carpeted and padded so that he could at least try to feel safe from the hazard of bumps, cuts, burns, bruises which could damage him mortally because he was unable to feel them, know that they had happened. There, lying on the coffee table in front of the sofa, was the book he had been reading the previous day. He had been reading it while he was trying to make up his mind to risk a walk into town. It was still open to a page which had had an entirely different meaning to him just four hours ago. It said, ". . . modeling the incoherent and vertiginous matter of which dreams are composed was the most difficult task a man could undertake. . . : " And on another page it said, ". . . the dreams of men ; belong to God ....
He could not bear it. He was as weary as if the Quest for the Staff of Law had actually happened-as if he had just survived an ordeal in the catacombs and on the mountainside, and had played his involuntary part in wresting the Staff from Lord Foul's mad servant. But it was suicide for him to believe that such things had happened, that such things could happen. They were impossible, like the nerve health he had felt while the events had been transpiring around him or within him. His survival depended on his refusal to accept the impossible.
Because he was weary and had no other defense, he went to bed and slept like the dead, dreamless and alone.
Then for two weeks he shambled through his life from day to day in a kind of somnolence. He could not have said how often his phone rang, how often anonymous people called to threaten or berate or vilify him for having dared to walk into town. He wrapped blankness about himself like a bandage, and did nothing, thought nothing, recognized nothing. He forgot his medication, and neglected his VSE (his Visual Surveillance of Extremities-the discipline of constant self-inspection on which the doctors had taught him his life depended). He spent most of his time in bed. When he was not in bed, he was still essentially asleep. As he moved through his rooms, he repeatedly rubbed his fingers against table edges, doorframes, chair backs, fixtures, so that he had the appearance of trying to wipe something off his hands.
It was as if he had gone into hiding-emotional hibernation or panic. But the vulture wings of his personal dilemma beat the air in search of him ceaselessly. The phone calls became angrier and more frustrated; his mute irresponsiveness goaded the callers, denied them any effective release for their hostility. And deep in the core of his slumber something began to change. More and more often, he awoke with the dull conviction that he had dreamed something which he could not remember, did not dare remember.
After those two weeks, his situation suddenly reasserted its hold on him. He saw his dream for the first time. It was a small fire-a few flames without location or context, but somehow pure and absolute. As
he gazed at them, they grew into a blaze, a conflagration. And he was feeding the fire with paper-the pages of his writings, both the published best-seller and the new novel he had been working on when his illness was discovered.
This was true; he had burned both works. After he had learned that he was a leper-after his wife, Joan, had divorced him and taken his young son, Roger, out of the state-after he had spent six months in the leprosarium-his books had seemed to him so blind and complacent, so destructive of himself, that he had burned them and given up writing.
But now, watching that fire in dreams, he felt for the first time the grief and outrage of seeing his handiwork destroyed. He jerked awake wide-eyed and sweating-and found that he could still hear the crackling hunger of the flames.
Joan's stables were on fire. He had not been to the place where she had formerly kept her horses for months, but he knew they contained nothing which could have started this blaze spontaneously. This was vandalism, revenge; this was what lay behind all those threatening phone calls.
The dry wood burned furiously, hurling itself up into the dark abyss of the night. And in it he saw Soaring Woodhelven in flames. He could smell in memory the smoldering dead of the tree village. He could feel himself killing Cavewights, incinerating them with an impossible power which seemed to rage out of the white gold of his wedding band.
Impossible!
He fled the fire, dashed back into his house and turned on the lights as if mere electric bulbs were his only shield against insanity and darkness.
Pacing there miserably around the safety of his living room, he remembered what had happened to him.
He had walked-leper outcast unclean!-into town from Haven Farm where he lived, to pay his phone bill, to pay it in person as an assertion of his common humanity against the hostility and revulsion and black charity of his fellow citizens. In the process, he had fallen down in front of a police car
And had found himself in another world. A place which could not possibly exist, and to which he could not possibly have traveled if it did exist: a place where lepers recovered their health.
That place had called itself "the Land." And it had treated him like a hero because of his resemblance to Berek Halfhand, the legendary Lord-Fatherer-and because of his white gold ring. But he was not a hero. He had lost the last two fingers of his right hand, not in combat, but in surgery; they had been amputated because of the gangrene which had come with the onset of his disease. And the ring had been given to him by a woman who had divorced him because he was a leper. Nothing could have been less true than the Land's belief in him. And because he was in a false position, he had behaved with a subtle infidelity which now made him squirm.
Certainly none of those people had deserved his irrectitude. Not the Lords, the guardians of the health and beauty of the Land; not Saltheart Foamfollower, the Giant who had befriended him; not Atiaran Trellmate, who had guided him safely toward Revelstone, the mountain city where the Lords lived; and not, oh, not her daughter Lena, whom he had raped.
Lena! he cried involuntarily, beating his numb fingers against his sides as he paced. How could I do that to you?
But he knew how it had happened. The health which the Land gave him had taken him by surprise. After months of impotence and repressed fury, he had not been prepared for the sudden rush of his vitality. And that vitality had other consequences, as well. It had seduced him into a conditional cooperation with the Land, though he knew that what was happening to him was impossible, a dream. Because of that health, he had taken to the Lords at Revelstone a message of doom given to him by the Land's great enemy, Lord Foul the Despiser. And he had gone with the Lords on their Quest for the Staff of Law, Berek's rune staff which had been lost by High Lord Kevin, last of the Old Lords, in his battle against the Despiser. This weapon the new Lords considered to be their only hope against their enemy; and he had unwillingly, faithlessly, helped them to regain it.
Then almost without transition he had found himself in a bed in the town's hospital. Only four hours had passed since his accident with the police car. His leprosy was unchanged. Because he appeared essentially uninjured, the doctor sent him back to his house on Haven Farm.
And now he had been roused from somnolence, and was pacing his lighted house as if it were an eyot of sanity in a night of darkness and chaos. Delusion! He had been deluded. The very idea of the Land sickened him. Health was impossible to lepers; that was the law on which his life depended. Nerves do not regenerate, and without a sense of touch there is no defense against injury and infection and dismemberment and death-no defense except the exigent law which he had learned in the leprosarium. The doctors there had taught him that his illness was the definitive fact of his existence, and that if he did not devote himself wholly, heart and mind and soul, to his own protection, he would ineluctably become crippled and putrescent before his ugly end.
That law had a logic which now seemed more infallible than ever. He had been seduced, however conditionally, by a delusion; and the results were deadly.
For two weeks now he had completely lost his grasp on survival, had not taken his medication, had not performed one VSE or any other drill, had not even shaved.
A dizzy nausea twisted in him. As he checked himself over, he was trembling uncontrollably.
But somehow he appeared to have escaped harm. His flesh showed no scrapes, burns, contusions, none of the fatal purple spots of resurgent leprosy.
Panting as if he had just survived an immersion in horror, he set about trying to regain his hold on his life.
Quickly, urgently, he took a large dose of his medication-DDS, diamino-dephenyl-sulfone. Then he went into the white fluorescence of his bathroom, stropped his old straight razor, and set the long sharp blade to his throat.
Shaving this way, with the blade clutched in the two fingers and thumb of his right hand, was a personal ritual which he had taught himself in order to discipline and mortify his unwieldy imagination. It steadied him almost in spite of himself. The danger of that keen metal so insecurely held helped him to concentrate, helped to rid him of false dreams and hopes, the alluring and suicidal progeny of his mind. The consequences of a slip were acid-etched in his brain. He could not ignore the law of his leprosy when he was so close to hurting himself, giving himself an injury which might reawaken the dormant rot of his nerves, cause infection and blindness, gnaw the flesh off his face until he was too loathsome to be beheld.
When he had shaved off two weeks of beard, he studied himself for a moment in the mirror. He saw a gray, gaunt man with leprosy riding the background of his eyes like a plague ship in a cold sea. And the sight gave him an explanation for his delusion. It was the doing of his subconscious mind-the blind despair work or cowardice of a brain that had been bereft of everything which had formerly given it meaning. The revulsion of his fellow human beings taught him to be revolted at himself, and this self-despite had taken him over while he had been helpless after his accident with the police car. He knew its name: it was a death wish. It worked in him subconsciously because his conscious mind was so grimly devoted to survival, to avoiding the outcome of his illness.
But he was not helpless now. He was awake and afraid.
When morning finally came, he called his lawyer, Megan Roman-a woman who handled his contracts and financial business-and told her what had happened to Joan's stables.
He could hear her discomfort clearly through the connection. "What do you want me to do, Mr. Covenant?"
"Get the police to investigate. Find out who did it. Make sure it doesn't happen again."
She was silent for a long, uncomfortable moment. Then she said, "The police won't do it. You're in Sheriff Lytton's territory, and he won't do a thing for you. He's one of the people who thinks you should be run out of the county. He's been sheriff here a long ,; time, and he gets pretty protective about `his' county. He thinks you're a threat. Just between you and me, I don't think he has any more humanity than he absolutely needs to get reelected every two years."
She was talking rapidly as if to keep him from saying anything, offering to do anything. "But I think I ; can make him do something for you. If I threaten him -tell him you're going to come into town to press charges-I can make him make sure nothing like this happens again. He knows this county. You can bet he already knows who burned your stables."
Joan's stables, Covenant answered silently. I don't .` like horses.
"He can keep those people from doing anything else. And he'll do it-if I scare him right."
Covenant accepted this. He seemed to have no choice.
"Incidentally, some of the people around here have been trying to find some legal way to make you move. They're upset about that visit of yours. I've been telling them it's impossible-or at least more trouble than it's worth. So far, I think most of them believe me."
He hung up with a shudder. He gave himself a thorough VSE, checking his body from head to foot for-: danger signs. Then he went about the task of trying to recover all his self-protective habits.
For a week or so, he made progress. He paced through the charted neatness of his house like a robot curiously aware of the machinery inside him, searching despite the limited functions of his programming-for one good answer to death. And when he left the house, walked out the driveway to pick up his groceries, or hiked for hours through the woods along Righters Creek in back of Haven Farm, he moved with an extreme caution, testing every rock and branch and breeze as if he suspected it of concealing malice.
But gradually he began to look about him, and as he did so some of his determination faltered. April was on the woods-the first signs of a spring which should have appeared beautiful to him. But at unexpected moments his sight seemed to go suddenly dim with sorrow as he remembered the spring of the Land. Compared to that, where the very health of the sap and buds was visible, palpable, discernible by touch and scent and sound, the woods he now walked looked sadly superficial. The trees and grass and hills had no savor, no depth of beauty. They could only remind him of Andelain and the taste of aliantha.
Then other memories began to disturb him. For several days, he could not get the woman who had died for him at the battle of Soaring Woodhelven out of his thoughts. He had never even known her name, never even asked her why she had devoted herself to him. She was like Atiaran and Foamfollower and Lena; she assumed that he had a right to such sacrifices.
Like Lena, about whom he could rarely bear to think, she made him ashamed; and with shame came anger-the old familiar leper's rage on which so much of his endurance depended. By hell! he fumed. They had no right. They had no right! But then the uselessness of his passion rebounded against him, and he was forced to recite to himself as if he were reading the catechism of his illness, Futility is the defining characteristic of life. Pain is the proof of existence. In the extremity of his moral solitude, he had no other answers.
At times like that, he found bitter consolation in psychological studies where a subject was sealed off from all sensory input, made blind, deaf, silent, and immobile, and as a result began to experience the most horrendous hallucinations. If conscious normal men and women could be placed so much at the mercy of their own inner chaos, surely one abject leper in a coma could have a dream that was worse than chaos -a dream specifically self-designed to drive him mad. At least what had happened to him did not altogether surpass comprehension.
Thus in one way or another he survived the days for nearly three weeks after the fire. At times he was almost aware that the unresolved stress within him was building toward a crisis; but repeatedly he repressed the knowledge, drove the idea down with anger. He did not believe he could endure another ordeal; he had handled the first one so badly.
But even the concentrated vitriol of his anger was not potent enough to protect him indefinitely. One Thursday morning, when he faced himself in the mirror to shave, the crisis abruptly surged up in him, and his hand began to shake so severely that he had to drop the razor in the sink in order to avoid cutting his jugular.
Events in the Land were not complete. By regaining the Staff of Law, the Lords had done exactly what Lord Foul wanted them to do. That was just the first step in Foul's plotting-machinations which had begun when he had summoned Covenant's white gold ring to the Land. He would not be done until he had gained the power of life and death over that entire Earth. And to do that, Foul needed the wild magic of the white gold.
Covenant stared desperately at himself in the mirror, trying to retain a grip on his own actuality. But he saw nothing in his own eyes capable of defending him.
He had been deluded once.
It could happen again.
Again? he cried, in a voice so forlorn that it sounded like the wail of an abandoned child. Again? He could not master what had happened to him in his first delusion; how could he so much as live through a second?
He was on the verge of calling the doctors at the leprosarium-calling them to beg!-when he recovered some of his leper's intransigence. He would not have survived this long if he had not possessed some kind of fundamental capacity to refuse defeat if not despair, and that capacity stopped him now. What could I tell them that they would believe? he rasped. I don't believe it myself.
The people of the Land had called him the Unbeliever. Now he found that he would have to earn that title whether the Land actually existed or not.
And for the next two days he strove to earn it with a grimness which was as close as he could come to courage. He only made one compromise: since his hands shook so badly, he shaved with an electric razor, pushing it roughly at his face as if he were trying to remold his features. Beyond that, he acknowledged nothing. At night, his heart quivered so tangibly in his chest that he could not sleep; but he clenched his teeth and did without sleep. Between himself and delusion he placed a wall of DDS and VSEs; and whenever delusion threatened to breach his defense, he drove it back with curses.
But Saturday morning came, and still he could not silence the dread which made his hands shake.
Then at last he decided to risk going among his fellow human beings once more. He needed their actuality, their affirmation of the reality he understood, even their revulsion toward his illness. He knew of no other antidote to delusion; he could no longer face his dilemma alone.

Two: Halfhand


BUT that decision itself was full of fear, and he did not act on it until evening. He spent most of the day cleaning his house as if he did not expect to return to it. Then, late in the afternoon, he shaved with the electric razor and showered meticulously. For the sake of prudence, he put on a tough pair of jeans, and laced his feet into heavy boots; but over his T-shirt he wore a dress shirt, tie, and sports coat, so that the informality of his jeans and boots would not be held against him. His wallet-generally so useless to him that he did not carry it-he placed in his coat pocket. And into a pocket of his trousers he stuffed a small, sharp penknife-a knife which he habitually took with him in case he lost control of his defensive concentration, and needed something dangerous to help him refocus himself. Finally, as the sun was setting, he walked down his long driveway to the road, where he extended his thumb to hitch a ride away from town.
The next place down the road was ten miles from Haven Farm, and it was bigger than the town where he had had his accident. He headed for it because he was less likely to be recognized there. But his first problem was to find a safe ride. If any of the local motorists spotted him, he was in trouble from the beginning.
In the first few minutes, three cars went by without stopping. The occupants stared at him in passing as if he were some kind of minor freak, but none of the drivers slowed down. Then, as the last sunlight faded into dusk, a large truck came toward him. He waved his thumb, and the truck rode to a halt just past him on the loud hissing of air brakes. He climbed up to the door, and was gestured into the cab by the driver.
The man was chewing over a black stubby cigar, and the air in the cab was thick with smoke. But through the dull haze, Covenant could see that he was big and burly, with a distended paunch, and one heavy arm that moved over the steering wheel like a piston, turning the truck easily. He had only that one arm; his right sleeve was empty, and pinned to his shoulder. Covenant understood dismemberment, and he felt a pang of sympathy for the driver.
"Where to, buddy?" the big man asked comfortably.
Covenant told him.
"No problem," he responded to a tentative inflection in Covenant's tone. "I'm going right through there." As the automatic transmission whined upward through. its gears, he spat his cigar out the window, then let go of the wheel to unwrap and light a new smoke. While his hand was busy, he braced the wheel with his belly. The green light of the instrument panel did not reach his face, but the glow of the cigar coal illuminated massive features whenever he inhaled. In the surging red, his face looked like a pile of boulders.
With his new smoke going, he rested his arm on the wheel like a sphinx, and abruptly began talking. He had something on his mind.
"You live around here?"
Covenant said noncommittally, "Yes"
"How long? You know the people?"
"After a fashion."
"You know this leper-this Thomas something-or-other Thomas Covenant?"
Covenant flinched in the gloom of the cab. To disguise his distress, he shifted his position on the seat. Awkwardly, he asked, "What's your interest?"
"Me? I got no interest. Just passing through-hauling my ass where they give me a load to go. I never even been around here before. But where I et at back in town I heard talk about this guy. So I ask the broad at the counter, and she damn near yaks my ear off. One question-and I get instant mouth with everything I eat. You know what a leper is?"
Covenant squirmed. "After a fashion."
"Well, it's a mess, let me tell you. My old lady reads about this stuff all the time in the Bible. Dirty beggars. Unclean. I didn't know there was creeps like that in America. But that's what we're coming to. You know what I think?"
"What do you think?" Covenant asked dimly.
"I think them lepers ought to leave decent folks alone. Like that broad at the counter. She's okay, even with that motor mouth, but there she is, juiced to the gills on account of some sick bastard. That Covenant guy ought to stop thinking of his self. Other folks don't need that aggravation. He ought to go away with every other leper and stick to his self, leave decent folks alone. It's just selfishness, expecting ordinary guys like you and me to put up with that. You know what I mean?"
The cigar smoke in the cab was as thick as incense, and it made Covenant feel light-headed. He kept shifting his weight, as if the falseness of his position gave him an uncomfortable seat. But the talk and his vague vertigo made him feel vengeful. For a moment, he forgot his sympathy. He turned his wedding ring forcefully around his finger. As they neared the city limits, he said, "I'm going to a nightclub just up the road here. How about joining me for a drink?"
Without hesitation, the trucker said, "Buddy, you're on. I never pass up a free drink."
But they were still several stoplights from the club. To fill the silence, and satisfy his curiosity, Covenant asked the driver what had happened to his arm.
"Lost it in the war." He brought the truck to a stop at a light while adjusting his cigar in his lips and steering with his paunch. "We was on patrol, and walked right into one of them antipersonnel mines. Blew the squad to hell. I had to crawl back to camp. Took me two days-I sort of got unhinged, you know what I mean? Didn't always know what I was doing. Time I got to the doc, it was too late to save the arm.
"What the hell, I don't need it. Least my old lady says I don't-and she ought to know by now." He chuckled. "Don't need no two arms for that."
Ingenuously, Covenant asked, "Did you have any trouble getting a license to drive this rig?"
"You kidding? I can handle this baby better with my gut than you can with four arms and sober." He grinned around his cigar, relishing his own humor.
The man's geniality touched Covenant. Already he regretted his duplicity. But shame always made him angry, stubborn-a leper's conditioned reflex. When the truck was parked behind the nightclub, he pushed open the door of the cab and jumped to the ground as if he were in a hurry to get away from his companion.
Riding in the darkness, he had forgotten how far off the ground he was. An instant of vertigo caught him. He landed awkwardly, almost fell. His feet felt nothing, but the jolt gave an added throb to the ache of his ankles.
Over his moment of dizziness, he heard the driver say, "You know, I figured you got a head start on the booze."
To avoid meeting the man's stony, speculative stare, Covenant went ahead of him around toward the front of the nightclub.
As he rounded the corner, Covenant nearly collided with a battered old man wearing dark glasses. The old man stood with his back to the building, extending n bruised tin cup toward the passersby, and following their movements with his ears. He held his head high, but it trembled slightly on his thin neck; and he was singing "Blessed Assurance" as if it were a dirge. Under one arm he carried a white-tipped cane. When Covenant veered away from him, he waved his cup vaguely in that direction.
Covenant was leery of beggars. He remembered the tattered fanatic who had accosted him like an introduction or preparation just before the onset of his delusion. The memory made him alert to a sudden tension in the night. He stepped close to the blind man and peered into his face.
The beggar's song did not change inflection, but he turned an ear toward Covenant, and poked his cup at Covenant's chest.
The truck driver stopped behind Covenant. "Hell," he growled, "they're swarming. It's like a disease. Come on. You promised me a drink."
1n the light of the streetlamp, Covenant could see that this was not that other beggar, the fanatic. But still the man's blindness affected him. His sympathy for the maimed rushed up in him. Pulling his wallet out of his jacket, he took twenty dollars and stuffed them in the tin cup.
"Twenty bucks!" ejaculated the driver. "Are you simple, or what? You don't need no drink, buddy. You need a keeper."
Without a break in his song, the blind man put out a gnarled hand, crumpled the bills, and hid them away somewhere in his rags. Then he turned and went tapping dispassionately away down the sidewalk, secure in the private mysticism of the blind-singing as he moved about "a foretaste of glory divine."
Covenant watched his back fade into the night, then swung around toward his companion. The driver was a head taller than Covenant, and carried his bulk solidly on thick legs. His cigar gleamed like one of Drool Rockworm's eyes.
Drool, Covenant remembered, Lord Foul's mad, Cavewightish servant or pawn. Drool had found the Staff of Law, and had been destroyed by it or because of it. His death had released Covenant from the Land.
Covenant poked a numb finger at the trucker's chest, trying vainly to touch him, taste his actuality. "Listen," he said, "I'm serious about that drink. But I should tell you"-he swallowed, then forced himself to say it "I'm Thomas Covenant. That leper."
The driver snorted around his cigar. "Sure, buddy. And I'm Jesus Christ. If you blew your wad, say so. But don't give me that leper crap. You're just simple, is all."
Covenant scowled up at the man for a moment longer. Then he said resolutely, "Well, in any case, I'm not broke. Not yet. Come on."
Together, they went on to the entrance of the nightclub. It was called The Door. In keeping with its name, the place had a wide iron gate like a portal into Hades. The gate was lit in a sick green, but spotlighted whitely at its center was a large poster which bore the words:
Positively the last night America's newest singing sensation SUSIE THURSTON
Included was a photograph which tried to make Susie Thurston look alluring. But the flashy gloss of the print had aged to an ambiguous gray.
Covenant gave himself a perfunctory VSE, adjured his courage, and walked into the nightclub, holding his breath as if he were entering the first circle of hell.
Inside, the club was crowded; Susie Thurston's farewell performance was well attended. Covenant and his companion took the only seats they could find-at a small table near the stage. The table was already occupied by a middle-aged man in a tired suit. Something about the way he held his glass suggested that he had been drinking for some time. When Covenant asked to join him, he did not appear to notice. He stared in the direction of the stage with round eyes, looking as solemn as a bird.
The driver discounted him with a brusque gesture. He turned a chair around, and straddled it as if bracing the burden of his belly against the chair back. Covenant took the remaining seat and tucked himself close to the table, to reduce the risk of being struck by anyone passing between the tables.
The unaccustomed press of people afflicted him with anxiety. He sat still, huddling into himself. A fear of exposure beat on his pulse, and he gripped himself hard, breathing deeply as if resisting an attack of vertigo; surrounded by people who took no notice of him, he felt vulnerable. He was taking too big a chance. But they were people, superficially like himself. He repulsed the urge to flee. Gradually, he realized that his companion was waiting for him to order.
Feeling vaguely ill and defenseless, he raised his arm and attracted the waiter's attention. The driver ordered a double Scotch on the rocks. Apprehension momentarily paralyzed Covenant's voice, but then he forced himself to request a gin and tonic. He regretted the order at once; gin and tonic had been Joan's drink. But he did not change it. He could hardly help sighing with relief when the waiter moved away.
Through the clutch of his tension, he felt that the order came with almost miraculous promptitude. Swirling around the table, the waiter deposited three drinks, including a glass of something that looked like raw alcohol for the middle-aged man. Raising his glass, the driver downed half his drink, grimaced, and muttered, "Sugar water." The solemn man poured his alcohol past his jumping Adam's apple in one movement.
A part of Covenant's mind wondered if he were going to end up paying for all three of them.
Reluctantly, he tasted his gin and tonic, and almost gagged in sudden anger. The lime in the drink reminded him intensely of aliantha. Pathetic! he snarled at himself. For punishment, he drank off the rest of the gin, and signaled to the waiter for more. Abruptly he determined to get drunk.
When the second round came, the waiter again brought three drinks. Covenant looked stiffly at his companions. Then the three of them drank as if they had tacitly engaged each other in a contest.
Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, the driver leaned forward and said, "Buddy, I got to warn you. It's your dough. I can drink you under the table."
To give the third man an opening, Covenant replied, "I think our friend here is going to last longer than both of us."
"What, a little guy like him?" There was humor in the trucker's tone, an offer of comradeship. "No way. No way at all."
But the solemn man did not recognize the driver's existence with even a flick of his eyes. He kept staring into the stage as if it were an abyss.
For a while, his gloom presided over the table. Covenant ordered again, and a few minutes later the waiter brought out a third round-three more drinks. This time, the trucker stopped him. 1n a jocose way as if he were assuming responsibility for Covenant, he jerked his thumb at the middle-aged man and said, "I hope you know we ain't payin' for him."
"Sure." The waiter was bored. "He has a standing order. Pays in advance." Disdain seemed to tighten his face, pulling it together like the closing of a fist around his nose. "Comes here every night just to watch her and drink himself blind." Then someone else signaled to him, and he was gone.
For a moment, the third man said nothing. Slowly, the houselights went down, and an expectant hush dropped like a shroud over the packed club. Then into the silence the man croaked quietly, "My wife."
A spotlight centered on the stage, and the club MC came out of the wings. Behind him, musicians took their places-a small combo, casually dressed.
The MC flashed out a smile, started his spiel. "It makes me personally sad to introduce our little lady tonight, because this is the last time she'll be with us for a while, at least. She's going on from here to the places where famous people get famouser. We at The Door won't soon forget her. Remember, you heard her here first. Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Susie Thurston!"
The spotlight picked up the singer as she came out, carrying a hand microphone. She wore a leather outfit -a skirt that left most of her legs bare and a sleeveless vest with a fringe across her breasts, emphasizing their movement. Her blond hair was bobbed short, and her eyes were dark, surrounded by deep hollow circles like bruises. She had a full and welcoming figure, but her face denied it; she wore the look of an abandoned waif. In a pure, frail voice that would have been good for supplication, she sang a set of love ballads defiantly, as if they were protest songs. The applause after each number was thunderous, and Covenant quaked at the sound. When the set was over and Susie Thurston retired for a break, he was sweating coldly.
The gin seemed to be having no effect on him. But he needed some kind of help. With an aspect of desperation, he signaled for another round. To his relief, the waiter brought the drinks soon.
After he had downed his Scotch, the driver hunched forward purposefully, and said, "I think I got this bastard figured out."
The solemn man was oblivious to his tablemates. Painfully, he croaked again, "My wife."
Covenant wanted to keep the driver from talking about the third man so openly, but before he could distract him, his guest went on, "He's doing it out of spite, that's what."
"Spite?" echoed Covenant helplessly. He missed the connection. As far as he could tell, their companionns doubt happily or at least doggedly married, no doubt childless-had somehow conceived a hopeless passion for the waifwoman behind the microphone. Such things happened. Torn between his now-grim fidelity and his obdurate need, he could do nothing but torment himself in search of release, drink himself into stupefaction staring at the thing he wanted and both could not and should not have.
With such ideas about their tablemate, Covenant
was left momentarily at sea by the driver's comment. But the big man went on almost at once. "Course. What'd you think, being a leper is fun? He's thinking he'll just sort of share it around. Why be the only one, you know what I mean? That's what this bastard thinks. Take my word, buddy. I got him figured out." As he spoke, his cobbled face loomed before Covenant like a pile of thetic rubble. "What he does, he goes around where he ain't known, and he hides it, like, so nobody knows he's sick. That way he spreads it; nobody knows so they don't take care, and all of a sudden we got us an epidemic. Which makes Covenant laugh hisself crazy. Spite, like I tell you. You take my word. Don't go shaking hands when you don't know the guy you're shaking with."
Dully, the third man groaned, "My wife."
Gripping his wedding band as if it had the power to protect him, Covenant said intently, "Maybe that isn't it. Maybe he just needs people. Do you ever get lonely -driving that rig all alone, hour after hour? Maybe this Thomas Covenant just can't stand to go on living without seeing other faces once in a while. Did you think about that?"
"So let him stick to lepers. What call is he got to bother decent folks? Use your head."
Use my head? Covenant almost shouted. Hellfire! What do you think I'm doing? Do you think I like doing this, being here? A grimace that he could not control clutched his face, Fuming, he waved for more drinks. The alcohol seemed to be working in reverse, tightening his tension rather than loosening it. But he was too angry to know whether or not he was getting drunk. The air swarmed with the noise of The Door's patrons. He was conscious of the people behind him as if they lurked there like ur-viles.
When the drinks came, he leaned forward to refute the driver's arguments. But he was stopped by the dimming of the lights for Susie Thurston's second set.
Bleakly, their tablemate groaned, "My wife." His voice was starting to blur around the edges; whatever he was drinking was finally affecting him.
In the moment of darkness before the MC came on, the driver responded, "You mean that broad's your wife?"
At that, the man moaned as though in anguish.
After a quick introduction, Susie Thurston reseated herself within the spotlight. Over a querulous accompaniment from her combo, she put some sting into her voice, and sang about the infidelities of men. After two numbers, there were slow tears running from the dark wounds of her eyes.
The sound of her angry laments made Covenant's throat hurt. He regretted fiercely that he was not drunk. He would have liked to forget people and vulnerability and stubborn survival-forget and weep.
But her next song burned him. With her head back so that her white throat gleamed in the light, she sang a song that ended,
Let go my heart Your love makes me look small to myself. Now, I don't want to give you any hurt, But what I feel is part of myself: What you want turns what I've got to dirt so let go of my heart.
Applause leaped on the heels of her last note, as if the audience were perversely hungry for her pain. Covenant could not endure any more. Buffeted by the noise, he threw dollars-did not count them-on the table, and shoved back his chair to escape.
But when he moved around the table, he passed within five feet of the singer. Suddenly she saw him. Spreading her arms, she exclaimed joyfully, "Berek!"
Covenant froze, stunned and terrified. No!
Susie Thurston was transported. "Hey!" she called, waving her arms to silence the applause, "Get a spot out here! On him! Berek! Berek, honey!"
From over the stage, a hot white light spiked down at Covenant. Impaled in the glare, he turned to face the singer, blinking rapidly and aching with fear and rage.
No!
"Ladies and gentlemen, kind people, I want you to meet an old friend of mine, a dear man." Susie Thurston was excited and eager. "He taught me half the songs I know. Folks, this is Berek." She began clapping for him as she said, "Maybe he'll sing for us:" Good-naturedly, the audience joined her applause.
Covenant's hands limped about him, searching for support. In spite of his efforts to control himself, he stared at his betrayer with a face full of pain. The applause reverberated in his ears, made him dizzy.
No!
For a long moment, he cowered under Susie Thurston's look. Then, like a wash of revelation, all the houselights came on. Over the bewildered murmurs and rustlings of the audience, a commanding voice snapped, "Covenant."
Covenant spun as if to ward off an attack. In the doorway, he saw two men. They both wore black hats and khaki uniforms, pistols in black holsters, silver badges; but one of them towered over the other. Sheriff Lytton. He stood with his fists on his hips. As Covenant gaped at him, he beckoned with two fingers. "You, Covenant. Come here."
"Covenant?" the trucker yelped. "You're really Covenant?"
Covenant heeled around awkwardly, as if under tattered canvas, to meet this fresh assault. As he focused his eyes on the driver, he saw that the big man's face was flushed with vehemence. He met the red glare as bravely as he could. "I told you I was."
"Now I'm going to get it!" the driver grated. "We're all going to get it! What the hell's the matter with you?"
The patrons of The Door were thrusting to their feet to watch what was happening. Over their heads, the sheriff shouted, "Don't touch him!" and began wading through the crowd.
Covenant lost his balance in the confusion. He tripped, caught something like a thumb or the corner of a chair in his eye, and sprawled under a table.
People yelled and milled around. The sheriff roared orders through the din. Then with one heave of his arm, he knocked away the table over Covenant.
Covenant looked gauntly up from the floor. His bruised eye watered thickly, distorting everything over him. With the back of his hand, he pushed away the tears. Blinking and concentrating fiercely, he made out two men standing above him-the sheriff and his former tablemate.
Swaying slightly on locked knees, the solemn man looked dispassionately down at Covenant. In a smudged and expended voice, he delivered his verdict. "My wife is the finest woman in the world."
The sheriff pushed the man away, then bent over Covenant, brandishing a face full of teeth. "That's enough. I'm just looking for something to charge you with, so don't give me any trouble. You hear me? Get up. »
Covenant felt too weak to move, and he could not see clearly. But he did not want the kind of help the sheriff might give him. He rolled over and pushed himself up from the floor.
He reached his feet, listing badly to one side; but the sheriff made no move to support him. He braced himself on the back of a chair, and looked defiantly around the hushed spectators. At last, the gin seemed to be affecting him. He pulled himself erect, adjusted his tie with a show of dignity.
"Get going," the sheriff commanded from his superior height.
But for one more moment Covenant did not move. Though he could not be sure of anything he saw, he stood where he was and gave himself a VSE.
"Get going," Lytton repeated evenly.
"Don't touch me." When his VSE was done, Covenant turned and stalked grayly out of the nightclub.
Out in the cool April night, he breathed deeply, steadying himself. The sheriff and his deputy herded him toward a squad car. Its red warning lights flashed balefully. When he was locked into the back seat behind the protective steel grating, the two officers climbed into the front. While the deputy drove away in the direction of Haven Farm, the sheriff spoke through the grating.
"Took us too long to find you, Covenant. The
Millers reported you were trying to hitch a ride, and we figured you were going to try your tricks somewhere. Just couldn't tell where. But it's still my county, and you're walking trouble. There's no law against you-I can't arrest you for what you've done. But it sure was mean. Listen, you. Taking care of this county is my business, and don't you forget it. I don't want to hunt around like this for you. You pull this stunt again, and I'll throw you in the can for disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct, and everything else I can think of. You got that?"
Shame and rage struggled in Covenant, but he could find no way to let them out. He wanted to yell through the grate, It isn't catching! It's not my fault! But his throat was too constricted; he could not release the wail. At last, he could only mumble, "Let me out. I'll walk."
Sheriff Lytton regarded him closely, then said to the deputy, "All right. We'll let him walk. Maybe he'll have an accident." Already they were well out of town.
The deputy drove to a halt on the beret, and the sheriff let Covenant out. For a moment, they stood together in the night. The sheriff glared at him as if trying to measure his capacity to do harm. Then Lytton said, "Go home. Stay home." He got back into the car. It made a loud squealing turn and fled back toward town. An instant later, Covenant sprang into the road and cried after the taillights, "Leper outcast unclean!" They looked as red as blood in the darkness.
His shout did not seem to dent the silence. Before long, he turned back toward Haven Farm, feeling as small as if the few stars in the dense black sky were deriding him. He had ten miles to walk.
The road was deserted. He moved in empty stillness like a hiatus in his surroundings; though he was retreating into open countryside, he could hear no sounds, no night talk of birds or insects. The silence made him feel deaf and alone, vulnerable to the hurrying vultures at his back.
It was a delusion! He raised his protest like a defiance; but even to his ears, it had the hollow ring of despair, composed equally of defeat and stubbornness. Through it, he could hear the girl shouting Berek! like the siren of a nightmare.
Then the road went through a stand of trees which cut out the dim light of the stars. He could not feel the pavement with his feet; he was in danger of missing his way, of falling into a ditch or injuring himself against a tree. He tried to keep up his pace, but the risk was too great, and finally he was reduced to waving his arms before him and testing his footing like a blind man. Until he reached the end of the woods, he moved as if he were wandering lost in a dream, damp with sweat, and cold.
After that, he set a hard pace for himself. He was spurred on by the cries that rushed after him, Berek! Berek! When at last, long miles later, he reached the driveway into Haven Farm, he was almost running,
In the sanctuary of his house, he turned on all the lights and locked the doors. The organized chastity of his living space surrounded him with its unconsoling dogma. A glance at the kitchen clock told him that the time was just past midnight. A new day, Sunday -a day when other people worshiped. He started some coffee, threw off his jacket, tie, and dress shirt, then carried his steaming cup into the living room. There he took a position on the sofa, adjusted Joan's picture on the coffee table so that it looked straight at him, and braced himself to weather the crisis.
He needed an answer. His resources were spent, and he could not go on the way he was.
Berek!
The girl's shout, and the raw applause of her audience, and the trucker's outrage, reverberated in him like muffled earth tremors. Suicide loomed in all directions. He was trapped between mad delusion and the oppressive weight of his fellow human beings.
Leper outcast unclean!
He gripped his shoulders and hugged himself to try to still the gasping of his heart.
I can't stand it! Somebody help me!
Suddenly, the phone rang-cut through him as stridently as a curse. Disjointedly, like a loose collection of broken bones, he jumped to his feet. But then he did not move. He lacked the courage to face more hostility, indemnification.
The phone shrilled again.
His breath shuddered in his lungs. Joan seemed to reproach him from behind the glass of the picture frame.
Another ring, as insistent as a fist.
He lurched toward the phone. Snatching up the receiver, he pressed it to his ear to hold it steady.
"Tom?" a faint, sad voice sighed. "Tom-it's Joan. Tom? I hope I didn't wake you. I know it's late, but I had to call. Tom?"
Covenant stood straight and stiff, at attention, with his knees locked to keep him from falling. His jaw worked, but he made no sound. His throat felt swollen shut, clogged with emotions, and his lungs began to hurt for air.
"Tom? Are you there? Hello? Tom? Please say something. I need to talk to you. I've been so lonely. I -I miss you." He could hear the effort in her voice.
His chest heaved fiercely, as if he were choking. Abruptly he broke through the block in his throat, and took a deep breath that sounded as if he were between sobs. But still he could not force up words.
"Tom! Please! What's happening to you?"
His voice seemed to be caught in a death grip. Desperate to shatter the hold, to answer Joan, cling to her voice, keep her on the line, he picked up the phone and started back toward the sofa-hoping that movement would ease the spasm that clenched him, help him regain control of his muscles.
But be turned the wrong way, wrapping the phone cord around his ankle. As he jerked forward, he tripped and pitched headlong toward the coffee table. His forehead struck the edge of the table squarely. When he hit the floor, he seemed to feel himself bounce.
Instantly, his sight went blank. But he still had the receiver clutched to his ear. During a moment of white stillness, he heard Joan's voice clearly. She was becoming upset, angry.
"Tom, I'm serious. Don't make this any harder for me than it already is. Don't you understand? I want to talk to you. I need you. Say something. Tom. Tom! Damn you, say something!"
Then a wide roaring in his ears washed out her voice. No! he cried. No! But he was helpless. The rush of sound came over him like a dark tide, and carried him away.

Three: The Summoning


THE wide roar modulated slowly, changing the void of his sight. On the surge of the sound, a swath of gray-green spread upward until it covered him like a winding sheet. The hue of the green was noxious to him, and he felt himself smothering in its close, sweet, fetid reek-the smell of attar. But the note which filled his ears grew more focused, scaled up in pitch. Droplets of gold bled into view through the green. Then the sound turned softer and more plaintive, higher still in pitch, so that it became a low human wail. The gold forced back the green. Soon a warm, familiar glow filled his eyes.
As the sound turned more and more into a woman's song, the gold spread and deepened---cradled him as if it were carrying him gently along the flood of the voice. The melody wove the light, gave it texture and shape, solidity. Helpless to do otherwise, he clung to the sound, concentrated on it with his mouth stretched open in protest.
Slowly, the singing throat opened. Its harmonic pattern became sterner, more demanding. Covenant felt himself pulled forward now, hurried down the tide of the song. Arching with supplication, it took on words.
Be true, Unbeliever-
Answer the call.
Life is the Giver:
Death ends all.
The promise is truth,
And banes disperse
With promise kept:
But soul's deep curse
On broken faith
And faithless thrall,
For doom of darkness
Covers all.
Be true, Unbeliever-
Answer the call.
Be true.
The song seemed to reach back into him, stirring memories, calling up people he had once, in one fey mood, thought had the right to make demands of him. But he resisted it. He kept silent, held himself in.
The melody drew him on into the warm gold.
At last, the light took on definition. He could locate its shape before him now; it washed out his vision as if he were staring into the sun. But on the last words of the song, the light dimmed, lost its brilliance. As the voice sang, "Be true," it was seconded by many throats: "Be true!" That adjuration stretched him like: the tightening of a string to its final pitch.
Then the source of the light fell into scale, and he could see beyond it.
He recognized the place. He was in the Close, the council chamber of the Lords in the heart of Revel-.: stone. Its tiers of seats reached above him on all sides toward the granite ceiling of the hall.
He was surprised to find himself standing erect on . the bottom of the Close. The stance confused his sense of balance, and he stumbled forward toward the pit of graveling, the source of the gold light. The fire-stones burned there before him without consumption, filling the air with the smell of newly broken earth.
Strong hands caught him by either arm. As his fall was halted, drops of blood spattered onto the stone floor at the edge of the graveling pit.
Regaining his feet, he cried hoarsely, "Don't touch me!"
He was dizzy with confusion and rage, but he braced himself while he put a hand to his forehead. His fingers came away covered with blood. He had cut himself badly on the edge of the table. For a moment, he gaped at his red hand.
Through his dismay, a quiet, firm voice said, "Be welcome in the Land, ur-Lord Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever and Ringthane. I have called you to us. Our need for your aid is great."
"You called me?" he croaked.
"I am Elena," the voice replied, "High Lord by the choice of the Council, and holder of the Staff of Law. I have called you."
"You called me?" Slowly, he raised his eyes. Thick wetness ran from the sockets as if he were weeping blood. "You called me?" He felt a crumbling inside him like rocks breaking, and his hold over himself cracked. In a voice of low anguish, he said, "I was talking to Joan."
He saw the woman dimly through the blood in his eyes. She stood behind the stone table on the level above him, holding a long staff in her right hand. There were other people around the table, and behind them the gallery of the Close held many more. They were all watching him.
"To Joan, do you understand? I was talking to Joan. She called me. After all this time. When I needed-needed. You have no right." He gathered force like a storm wind. "You've got no right! I was talking to loan!" He shouted with all his might, but it was not enough. His voice could not do justice to his emotion. "To Joan! to Joan! do you hear me? She was my wife!"
A man who had been standing near the High Lord hurried around the broad open C of the table, and came down to Covenant on the lower level. Covenant recognized the man's lean face, with its rudder nose mediating between crooked, humane lips and acute, gold flecked, dangerous eyes. He was Lord Mhoram.
He placed a hand on Covenant's arm, and said softly, "My friend. What has happened to you?"
Savagely, Covenant threw off the Lord's hand. "Don't touch me!" he raged in Mhoram's face. "Are you deaf as well as blind?! I was talking to Joan! On the phone!" His hand jerked convulsively, struggling to produce the receiver out of the empty air. "She needed"-abruptly his throat clenched, and he swallowed roughly-"she said she needed me. Me!" But his voice was helpless to convey the crying of his heart. He slapped at the blood on his forehead, trying to clear his eyes.
The next instant, he grabbed the front of Mhoram's sky-blue robe in his fists, hissed, "Send me back! There's still time! If I can get back fast enough!"
Above them, the woman spoke carefully. "Ur-Lord Covenant, it grieves me to hear that our summoning has done you harm. Lord Mhoram has told us all he could of your pain, and we do not willingly increase it. But it is our doom that we must. Unbeliever, our need is great. The devastation of the Land is nearly upon us."
Pushing away from Mhoram to confront her, Covenant fumed, "I don't give a bloody damn about the Land!" His words came in such a panting rush that he could not shout them. "I don't care what you need. You can drop dead for all I care. You're a delusion! A sickness in my mind. You don't exist! Send me back! You've got to send me back. While there's still time!"
"Thomas Covenant." Mhoram spoke in a tone of authority that pulled Covenant around. "Unbeliever. Listen to me."
Then Covenant saw that Mhoram had changed. His face was still the same-the gentleness of his mouth still balanced the promise of peril in his gold concentrated irises-but he was older, old enough now to be Covenant's father. There were lines of use around his eyes and mouth, and his hair was salted with white. When he spoke, his lips twisted with self-deprecation, and the depths of his eyes stirred uneasily. But he met the fire of Covenant's glare without flinching.
"My friend, if the choice were mine, I would return you at once to your world. The decision to summon you was painfully made, and I would willingly undo it. The Land has no need of service which is not glad and free. But, ur-Lord he gripped Covenant's arm again to steady him-"my friend, we cannot return you."
"Cannot?" Covenant groaned on a rising, half hysterical note.
"We have no lore for the releasing of burdens. I know not how it is in your world-you appear unchanged to my eyes but forty years have passed since we stood together on the slopes of Mount Thunder, and you freed the Staff of Law for our hands. For long years we have striven-"
"Cannot?" Covenant repeated more fiercely.
"We have striven with power which we fail to master, and Lore which we have been unable to penetrate. It has taken forty years to bring us here, so that we may ask for your aid. We have reached the limit of what we can do."
"No!" He turned away because he could not bear the honesty he saw in Mhoram's face, and yelled up at the woman with the Staff, "Send me back!"
For a moment, she looked at him squarely, measuring the extremity of his demand. Then she said, "I entreat you to understand. Hear the truth of our words. Lord Mhoram has spoken openly. I hear the hurt we have done you. I am not unmoved." She was twenty or thirty feet away from him, beyond the pit of graveling and behind the stone table, but her voice carried to him clearly through the crystal acoustics of the Close. "But I cannot undo your summoning. Had I the power, still the Land's need would deny me. Lord Foul the Despiser-"
Head back, arms thrown wide, Covenant howled, "I don't came!'
Stung into sharpness, the High Lord said, "Then return yourself. You have the power. You wield the white gold."
With a cry, Covenant tried to charge at her. But before he could take a step, he was caught from behind. Wrestling around, he found himself in the grasp of Bannor, the unsleeping Bloodguard who had warded him during his previous delusion.
"We are the Bloodguard," Bannor said in his toneless alien inflection. "The care of the Lords is in our hands. We do not permit any offer of harm to the High Lord."
"Bannor," Covenant pleaded, "she was my wife."
But Bannor only gazed at him with unblinking dispassion.
Throwing his weight wildly, he managed to turn in the Bloodguard's powerful grip until he was facing Elena again. Blood scattered from his forehead as he jerked around. "She was my wife!"
"Enough," Elena commanded.
"Send me back!"
"Enough!" She stamped the iron heel of the Staff of Law on the floor, and at once blue fire burst from its length. The flame roared vividly, like a rent in the fabric of the gold light, letting concealed power shine through; and the force of the flame drove Covenant back into Bannor's arms. But her hand where she held the Staff was untouched. "I am the High Lord," she said sternly. "This is Revelstone Lord's Keep, not Foul's Creche. We have sworn the Oath of Peace."
At a nod from her, Bannor released Covenant, and he stumbled backward, falling in a heap beside the graveling. He lay on the stone for a moment, gasping harshly. Then he pried himself into a sitting position His head seemed to droop with defeat. "You'll get Peace," he groaned. "He's going to destroy you all.: Did you say forty years? You've only got nine left. Or have you forgotten his prophecy?"
"We know;" Mhoram said quietly. "We do not forget." With a crooked smile, he bent to examine Covenant's wound.
While Mhoram did this, High Lord Elena quenched the blaze of the Staff, and said to a person Covenant could not see, "We must deal with this matter now, if we are to have any hope of the white gold. Have the captive brought here."
Lord Mhoram mopped Covenant's forehead gently, peered at the cut, then stood and moved away to consult with someone. Left alone, with most of the blood out of his eyes, Covenant brought his throbbing gaze into focus to take stock of where he was. Some still-uncowed instinct for self-preservation made him try to measure the hazards around him. He was on the lowest level of the tiered chamber, and its high vaulted and groined ceiling arched over him, lit by the gold glow of the graveling, and by four large smokeless lillianrill torches set into the walls. Around the center of the Close, on the next level, was the three-quarters-round stone council table of the Lords, and above and behind the table were the ranked seats of the gallery. Two Bloodguard stood at the high massive doors, made by Giants to be large enough for Giants, of the main entryway, above and opposite the High Lord's seat.
The gallery was diversely filled with warriors of the Wayward of Lord's Keep, Lorewardens from the Loresraat, several Hirebrands and Gravelingases dressed respectively in their traditional cloaks and tunics, and a few more Bloodguard. High up behind the High Lord sat two people Covenant thought he recognized-the Gravelingas Tohrm, a Hearthrall of Lord's Keep; and Quaan, the Warhaft who had accompanied the Quest for the Staff of Law. With them were two others-one a Hirebrand, judging by his Woodhelvennin cloak and the circlet of leaves about his head, probably the other Hearthrall; and one the First Mark of the Bloodguard. Vaguely, Covenant wondered who had taken that position after the loss of Tuvor in the catacombs under Mount Thunder.
His gaze roamed on around the Close. Standing at the table were seven Lords, not counting the High Lord and Mhoram. Covenant recognized none of them. They must all have passed the tests and joined the Council in the last forty, years. Forty years? he asked dimly. Mhoram had aged, but he did not look forty years older. And Tohrm, who had been hardly more than a laughing boy when Covenant had known him, now seemed far too young for middle age. The Bloodguard were not changed at all. Of course, Covenant groaned to himself, remembering how old they were said to be. Only Quaan showed a believable age: white thinning hair gave the former Warhaft the look of sixty or sixty-five summers. But his square commanding shoulders did not stoop. And the openness of his countenance had not changed; he frowned down on the Unbeliever with exactly the frank disapproval that Covenant remembered.
He did not see Prothall anywhere. Prothall had been the High Lord during the Quest, and Covenant knew that he had survived the final battle on the slopes of Mount Thunder. But he also knew that Prothall had been old enough to die naturally in forty years. In spite of his pain, he found himself hoping that the former High Lord had died as he deserved, in peace and honor.
With a sour mental shrug, he moved his survey to the one man at the Lords' table who was not standing. This individual was dressed like a warrior, with high, soft-soled boots over black leggings, a black sleeveless shirt under a breastplate molded of a yellow metal, and a yellow headband; but on his breastplate were the double black diagonal marks which distinguished him as the Warmark, the commander of the Wayward, the Lords' army. He was not looking at anyone. He sat back in his stone chair, with his head down and his eyes covered with one hand, as if he were asleep.
Covenant turned away, let his gaze trudge at random around the Close. High Lord Elena was conferring in low tones with the Lords nearest her. Mhoram stood waiting near the broad stairs leading up to the main doors. The acoustics of the chamber carried the commingled voices of the gallery to Covenant, so that the air was murmurous about his head. He wiped the gathering blood from his brows, and thought about dying.
It would be worth it, he mused. After all it would be worth it to escape. He was not tough enough to persevere when even his dreams turned against him. He should leave living to the people who were potent for it.
Ah, hellfire, he sighed. Hellfire.
Distantly, he heard the great doors of the Close swing open. The murmuring in the air stopped at once; everyone turned and looked toward the doors. Forcing himself to spend some of his waning strength, Covenant twisted around to see who was coming.
The sight struck him cruelly, seemed to take the last rigor out of his bones.
He watched with bloodied eyes as two Bloodguard came down the stairs, holding upright between them a green-gray creature that oozed with fear. Though they were not handling it roughly, the creature trembled in terror and revulsion. Its hairless skin was slick with sweat. It had a generally human outline, but its torso was unusually long, and its limbs were short, all equal in length, as if it naturally ran on four legs through low caves. But its limbs were bent and useless-contorted as if they had been broken many times and not reset. And the rest of its body showed signs of worse damage.
Its head was its least human feature. Its bald skull had no eyes. Above the ragged slit of its mouth, in the center of its face, were two wide, wet nostrils that quivered fearfully around the edges as the creature smelled its situation. Its small pointed ears perched high on its skull. And the whole back of its head was gone. Over the gap was a green membrane like a scar, pulsing against the remaining fragment of a brain.
Covenant knew immediately what it was. He had seen a creature like it once before-whole in body, but dead, lying on the floor of its Waymeet with an iron spike through its heart.
It was a Waynhim. A Demondim-spawn, like the ur-viles. But unlike their black roynish kindred, the Waynhim had devoted their lore to the services of the Land.
This Waynhim had been lavishly tortured.
The Bloodguard brought the creature down to the bottom of the Close, and held it opposite Covenant. Despite his deep weakness, he forced himself to his feet, and kept himself up by leaning against the wall of the next level. Already, he seemed to be regaining some of the added dimension of sight which characterized the Land. He could see into the Waynhim could feel with his eyes what had been done to it. He saw torment and extravagant pain--saw the healthy body of the Waynhim caught in a fist of malice, and crushed gleefully into this crippled shape. The sight made his eyes hurt. He had to lock his knees to brace himself up. A cold mist of hebetude and despair filled his head, and he was, glad for the blood which clogged his eyes; it preserved him from seeing the Waynhim.
Through his fog, he heard Elena say, "Ur-Lord Covenant, it is necessary to burden you with this sight. We must convince you of our need. Please forgive such a welcome to the Land. The duress of our plight leaves us little choice.
"Ur-Lord, this poor creature brought us to the decision of your summoning. For years we have known that the Despiser prepares his strength to march against the Land-that the time appointed in his prophecy grows short for us. You delivered that prophecy unto us, and the Lords of Revelstone have not been idle. From the day in which Lord Mhoram brought to Lord's Keep the Staff of Law and the Second Ward of Kevin's Lore, we have striven to meet this doom. We have multiplied the Warward, studied our defenses, trained ourselves in all our skills and strengths. We have learned some of the uses of the Staff. The Loresraat has explored with all its wisdom and devotion the Second Ward. But in forty years, we have gained no clear knowledge of Lord Foul's intent. After the wresting of the Staff from Drool Rockworm, the Despiser's presence left Kiril Threndor in Mount Thunder, and soon reseated itself in the great thronehall of Ridjeck Thome, Foul's Creche, the Gray Slayer's ancient home. And since that time, our scouts have been unable to penetrate Lord Foul's demesne.
Power has been at work there-power and ill-but we could learn nothing of it, though Lord Mhoram himself assayed the task. He could not breach the Despiser's forbidding might.
"But there have been dim and dark foreboding movements throughout the Land. Kresh from the east and ur-viles from Mount Thunder, griffins and other dire creatures from Sarangrave Flat, Cavewights, little-known denizens of Lifeswallower, the Great Swamp-we have heard them all wending toward the Spoiled Plains and Foul's Creche. They disappear beyond the Shattered Hills, and do not return. We need no great wisdom to teach us that the Despiser prepares his army. But still we have lacked clear knowledge. Then at last knowledge came to us. During the summer, our scouts captured this creature, this broken remnant of a Waynhim, on the western edges of Grirrimerdhore Forest. It was brought here so that we might try to gain tidings from it."
"So you tortured it to find out what it knows." Covenant's eyes were sticky with blood, and he kept them shut, giving himself up to useless rage and mist.
"Do you believe that of us?" The High Lord sounded hurt. "No. We are not Despisers. We would not so betray the Land. We have treated the Waynhim as gently as we could without releasing it. It has told us willingly all that we would know. Now it begs us to kill it. Unbeliever, hear me. This is Lord Foul's handiwork. He possesses the Illearth Stone. This is the work of that bane."
Through the grayness in his mind, Covenant heard the doors open again. Someone came down the stairs and whispered with Lord Mhoram. Then Mhoram said, "High Lord, hurtloam has been brought for the Unbeliever. I fear that his wound extends far beyond this simple cut. There is other ill at work in him. He must be tended without delay."
"Yes, at once," High Lord Elena responded promptly. "We must do all that we can to heal him."
With a steady stride, Mhoram came toward Covenant.
At the thought of hurtloam, Covenant pushed himself away from the wall, rubbed the caked blood out of his eyes. He saw Mhoram holding a small stoneware bowl containing a light mud spangled with gold gleams that seemed to throb in the glow of the Close.
"Keep that stuff away from me," he whispered.
Mhoram was taken aback. "This is hurtloam, ur-Lord. It is the healing soil of the Earth. You will be renewed by it."
"I know what it does!" Covenant's voice was raw from all the shouting he had done, and it sounded spectral and empty, like the creaking of a derelict. "I've had it before. You put that stuff on my head, and before you know it the feeling comes back into my fingers and toes, and I go around ra-" He barely caught himself. "Hurting people."
He heard Elena. say softly, "I know," but he disregarded her.
"That's the real lie," he snarled at the bowl, "that stuff there. That's what makes me feel so healthy I can't stand it." He took a long breath, then said fervidly, "I don't want it."
Mhoram held Covenant in a gaze intense with questions. And when Covenant did not waver, the Lord asked in a low voice, a tone of amazement, "My friend, do you wish to die?"
"Use it on that poor devil over there," Covenant replied dully. "It's got a right to it."
Without bending the straitness of his look, Mhoram said, "We have made the attempt. You have known us, Unbeliever. You know that we could not refuse the plea of such distress. But the Waynhim is beyond all our succor. Our Healers cannot approach its inner wound. And it nearly died at the touch of hurtloam,"
Still Covenant did not relent.
Behind him, High Lord Elena continued what Mhoram had been saying. "Even the Staff of Law cannot match the power which has warped this Waynhim. Such is our plight, ur-Lord. The Illearth Stone surpasses us.
"This Waynhim has told us much. Much that was obscure is now clear. Its name was dharmakshetra, which in the Waynhim tongue means, `to brave the enemy.' Now it calls itself dukkha-'victim.' Because its people desired knowledge of the Despiser's plotting, it went to Foul's Creche. There it was captured, and-and wronged-and then set free-as a warning to its people, I think. It has told us much.
"Unbeliever, we know that when you first delivered the Despiser's prophecy to High Lord Prothall son of Dwillian and the Council of Lords forty years ago, many things were not understood concerning the Gray Slayer's intent. Why did he warn the Lords that Drool Rockworm had found the Staff of Law under- Mount Thunder? Why did he seek to prepare us for our fate? Why did he aid Drool's quest for dark might, and then betray the Cavewight? These questions are now answered. Drool possessed the Stag, and with it unearthed the buried bane, the Illearth Stone. By reason of these powers, the Despiser was at Drool's mercy while the Cavewight lived.
"But with Lord Mhoram and High Lord Prothall, you retrieved the Staff and brought the threat of Drool Rockworm to an end. Thus the Stone fell into Lord Foul's hands. He knew that the Stone, joined with his own lore and power, is a greater strength than the Staff of Law. And he knew that we are no masters for even that little might which we possess.
"In forty years, we have not rested. We have spoken to all the people of the Land. The Loresraat has grown greatly, giving us warriors and Lorewardens and Lords to meet our need. The rhadhamaerl and lillianrill have labored to the utmost. And all have given themselves to the study of the Two Wards, and of the Staff. Gains have been made. Trothgard, where the Lords swore their promise of healing to the Land, has flowered, and we have made there works undreamed by our forefathers. The Staff meets many needs. But the heart of our failure remains.
"For all our lore, all our knowledge of the Staff and the Earthpower, comes to us from Kevin, High Lord of the Old Lords. And he was defeated-yes, and worse than defeated. Now we face the same foe, made greatly stronger by the Illearth Stone. And we have recovered only Two of the Seven Wards in which
Kevin left his Lore. And at their core these Two are beyond us. Some weakness of wisdom or incapacity of spirit prevents our grasp of their mystery. Yet without mastery of the Two we cannot gain the rest, for Kevin, wise to the hazards of unready knowledge and power, hid his Wards each in its turn, so that the comprehension of one would lead to the discovery of the next.
"For forty years, this failure has clung to us. And now we have learned that Lord Foul, too, has not been idle. We have learned from this Waynhim. The Land's enemy has grown power and armies until the region beyond the Shattered Hills teems with warped life-myriads of poor bent creatures like dukkha, held by the power of the Stone in soul chattelry to Lord Foul. He has built for himself a force more ill than any the Land has known, more fell than any we can hope to conquer. He has gathered his three Ravers, the servants of his right hand, to command his armies. It may be that his hordes are already afoot against us.
"So it is that we have called you, ur-Lord Covenant, Unbeliever and white gold wielder. You are our hope at the last. We summoned you, though we knew it might carry a cost hard for you to bear. We have sworn our service to the Land, and could not do otherwise. Thomas Covenant! Will you not help us?"
During her speech, her voice had grown in power and eloquence until she was almost singing. Covenant could not refuse to listen. Her tone reached into him, and made vivid all his memories of the Land's beauty. He recalled the bewitching Dance of the Celebration of Spring, and the lush, heart-soothing health of the Andelainian Hills, the uneasy eldritch gleaming of Morinmoss, the stern swift Plains of Ra and the rampant Ranyhyn, the great horses. And he remembered what it was like to feel, to have lively nerves in his fingers, capable of touching grass and stone. The poignancy of it made his heart ache.
"Your hope misleads you," he groaned into the stillness after Elena's appeal. "I don't know anything about power. It has something to do with life, and I'm as good as dead. Or what do you think life is? Life is feeling. I've lost that. I'm a leper."
He might have started to rage again, but a new voice cut sharply through his protest. "Then why don't you throw away your ring?"
He turned, and found himself confronting the warrior who had been sitting at the end of the Lords' table. The man had come down to the bottom of the Close, where he faced Covenant with his hands on his hips. To Covenant's surprise, the man's eyes were covered with dark, wraparound sunglasses. Behind the glasses, his head moved alertly, as if he were studying everything. He seemed to possess a secret. Without the support of his eyes, the slight smile on his lips looked private and unfathomable, like an utterance in an alien tongue.
Covenant grasped the inconsistency of the sunglasses-they. were oddly out of place in the Close but he was too stung by the speaker's question to stop for discrepancies. Stiffly, he answered, "It's my wedding ring."
The man shrugged away this reply. "You talk about your wife in the past tense. You're separated-or divorced. You can't have your life both ways now. Either get rid of the ring and stick to whatever it is you seem to think is real, or get rid of her and do your duty here."
"My duty?" The affront of the man's judgment gave Covenant the energy to object. "How do you know what my duty is?"
"My name is Hile Troy." The man gave a slight bow. "I'm the Warmark of the Warward of Lord's Keep. My job is to figure out how to meet Foul's army."
"Rile Troy," added Elena slowly, almost hesitantly, "comes from your world, Unbeliever."
What?
The High Lord's assertion seemed to snatch the ground from under Covenant. The enervation in his bones suddenly swamped him. Vertigo came over him as if he were on the edge of a cliff, and he stumbled.
Mhoram caught him as he dropped heavily to his knees.
His movement distracted the Bloodguard holding dukkha. Before they could react, the Waynhim broke away from them and sprang at Covenant, screaming with fury.
To save Covenant, Mhoram spun and blocked dukkha's charge with his staff. The next instant, the Bloodguard recaptured the Waynhim. But Covenant did not see it. When Mhoram turned away from him, he fell on his face beside the graveling pit. He felt weak, overburdened with despair, as if he were bleeding to death. For a few moments, he lost consciousness.
He awoke to the touch of cool relief on his forehead. His head was in Mhoram's lap, and the Lord was gently spreading hurtloam over his cut brow.
He could already feel the effect of the mud. A soothing caress spread from his forehead into the muscles of his face, relaxing the tension which gripped his features. Drowsiness welled up in him as the healing earth unfettered him, anodyned the restless bondage of his spirit. Though his weariness, he saw the trap of his delusion winding about him. With as much supplication as he could put into his voice, he said to Mhoram, "Get me out of here."
The Lord seemed to understand. He nodded firmly, then got to his feet, lifting Covenant with him. Without a word to the Council, he turned his back and went up the stairs, half carrying Covenant out of the Close.

Four: "May Be Lost"


COVENANT hardly heard the shutting of the great doors behind him; he was hardly conscious of his surroundings at all. His attention was focused inward on the hurtloam's progress. It seemed to spread around his skull and down his flesh, soothing as it radiated within him. It made his skin tingle, and the sensation soon covered his face and neck. He scrutinized it as if it were a poison he had taken to end his life.
When the touch of the loam reached past the base of his throat into his chest, he stumbled, and could not recover. Bannor took his other arm. The Lord and the Bloodguard carried him on through the stone city, working generally upward through the interlocking levels of Lord's Keep. At last, they brought him to a spacious suite of living quarters. Gently, they bore him into the bedroom, laid him on the bed, and undressed him enough to make him comfortable.
Then Mhoram bent close to him and said reassuringly, ",This is the power of the hurtloam. When it works upon a dire wound, it brings a deep sleep to speed healing. You will rest well now. You have done without rest too long." He and Bannor turned to go.
But Covenant could feel the cool, tingling touch near his heart. Weakly, he called Mhoram back. He was full of dread; he could not bear to be alone. Without caring what he said-seeking only to keep Mhoram near him-he asked, "Why did that-dukkha attack me?"
Again, Lord Mhoram appeared to understand. He brought a wooden stool near the head of the bed, and seated himself there. In a quiet, steady voice, he said,
"That is a searching question, my friend. Dukkha has been tormented out of all recognition, and I can only guess at the sore impulses which drive it. But you must remember that it is a Waynhim. For many generations after the Desecration, when the new Lords began their work at Revelstone, the Waynhim served the Land-not out of allegiance to the Lords, but rather out of their desire to expiate to the Land for the dangerous works and dark lore of the ur-viles. Such a creature still lives, somewhere far within dukkha. Despite what has been done to it-even if its soul has been enslaved by the power of the Stone, so that now it serves the Despiser-it still remembers what it was, and hates what it is. That is Lord Foul's way in all things-to force his foes to become that which they most hate, and to destroy that which they, most love.
 "My friend, this is not pleasant to say. But it is in my heart that dukkha attacked you because you refuse to aid the Land. The Waynhim knows the might you possess-it is of the Demondim, and in all likelihood comprehends more of the uses and power of white gold than any Lord. Now it is in pain too great to allow it to understand you. The last remnant of itself saw dimly that you-that you refuse. For a moment, it became its former self enough to act.
"Ah, ur-Lord. You have said that the Land is a dream for you-and that you fear to be made mad But madness is not the only danger in dreams. There is also the danger that something may be lost which can never be regained."
Covenant sighed. The Lord had given him an explanation he could grasp. But when Mhoram's steady voice stopped, he felt how much he needed it-how close he was to the brink of some precipice which appalled him. He reached a hand outward, into the void around him, and felt his fingers clasped firmly in Mhoram's. He tried once more to make himself understood.
"She was my wife," he breathed. "She needed me She-she'll never forgive me for doing this to her."
He was so exhausted that he could no longer see Mhoram's face. But as he ran out of consciousness, he felt the Lord's unfaltering hold on his hand. Mhoram's care comforted him, and he slept.
Then he hung under a broad sky of dreams, measurable only by the strides of stars. Out of the dim heavens, a succession of dark shapes seemed to hover and strike. Like carrion, he was helpless to fend them off. But always a hand gripped his and consoled him. It anchored him until he returned to consciousness.
Without opening his eyes, he lay still and probed himself tentatively, as if he were testing buboes. He was enfolded from his chest down in soft clean sheets. And he could feel the fabric with his toes. The cold numbness of dead nerves was gone from them, warmed away by a healing glow which reached into the marrow of his bones.
The change in his fingers was even 'more obvious. His right fist was knotted in the sheets. When he moved his fingers, he could feel the texture of the cloth with their tips. The grip on his left hand was so hard that he could feel the pulse in his knuckles.
But nerves do not regenerate-cannot
Damnation! he groaned. The sensation of touch prodded his heart like fear. Involuntarily, he whispered, "No. No." But his tone was full of futility.
"Ah, my friend," Mhoram sighed, "your dreams have been full of such refusals. But I do not understand them. I hear in your breathing that you have resisted your own healing. And the outcome is obscure to me. I cannot tell whether your denials have brought you to good or ill."
Covenant looked up into Mhoram's sympathetic face. The Lord still sat beside the bed; his iron-shod staff leaned against the wall within easy reach of his hand. But now there were no torches in the room. Sunlight poured through a large oriel beside the bed.
Mhoram's gaze made Covenant acutely conscious of their clasped hands. Carefully, he extricated his fingers. Then he propped himself up on his elbows, and asked how long he had been asleep. His rest after the shouting he had done in the Close made his voice rattle harshly in his throat.
"It is now early afternoon," Mhoram replied. "The summoning was performed in the evening yesterday."
"Have you been here-all that time?"
The Lord smiled. "No. During the night How shall I say it? I was called away. High Lord Elena sat with you in my absence." After a moment, he added, "She will speak with you this evening, if you are willing." Covenant did not respond. The mention of Elena reawakened his outrage and fear at the act which had compelled him into the Land. He thought of the summoning as her doing; it was her voice which had snatched him away from Joan. Joan! he wailed. To a cover his distress, he climbed out of bed, gathered up his clothes, and went in search of a place to wash himself.
In the next room, he found a stone basin and tub j connected to a series of balanced stone valves which allowed him to run water where he wanted it. He filled , the basin. When he put his hands into the water, its sharp chill thrilled the new vitality of his nerves. Angrily, he thrust his head down into the water, and did not raise it until the cold began to make the bones of his skull hurt. Then he went and stood dripping over a warm pot of graveling near the tub.
While the glow of the fire-stones dried him, he silenced the aching of his heart. He was a leper, and knew down to the core of his skeleton the vital importance of recognizing facts. Joan was lost to him; that was a fact, like his disease, beyond any possibility of change. She would become angry when he did not speak to her, and would hang up, thinking that he had deliberately rebuffed her appeal, her proud, brave effort to bridge the loneliness between them. And he could do nothing about it. He was trapped in his delusion again. If he meant to survive, he could not afford the luxury of grieving over lost hopes. He was a leper; all his hopes were false. They were his enemies. They could kill him by blinding him to the lethal power of facts.
It was a fact that the Land was a delusion. It was a fact that he was trapped, caught in the web of his own weakness. His leprosy was a fact. He insisted on these things while he protested weakly to himself, Not I can't stand it! But the cold water dried from his skin, and was replaced by the kind, earthy warmth of the graveling. Sensations ran excitedly up his limbs from his fingers and toes. With a wild, stubborn look as if he were battering his head against a wall, he gave himself a VSE.
Then he located a mirror of polished stone, and used it to inspect his forehead. No mark was there the hurtloam had erased his injury completely.
He called out, "Mhoram!" But his voice had an unwanted beseeching tone. To counter it, he began shoving himself into his clothes. When the Lord appeared in the doorway, Covenant did not meet his eyes. He pulled on his T-shirt and jeans, laced up his boots, then moved away to the third room of his suite.
There he found a door opening onto a balcony. With Mhoram behind him, he stepped out into the open air. At once, perspectives opened, and a spasm of vertigo clutched at him. The balcony hung halfway up the southern face of Revelstone-more than a thousand feet straight above the foothills which rested against the base of the mountain. The depth of the fall seemed to gape unexpectedly under his feet. His fear of heights whirred in his ears; he flung his arms around the stone railing, clung to it, clutched it to his chest.
In a moment, the worst of the spasm passed. Mhoram asked him what was wrong, but he did not explain. Breathing deeply, he pushed himself erect, and stood with his back pressed against the reassuring stone of the Keep. From there, he took in the view.
As he remembered it, Revelstone filled a long wedge of the mountains which stood immediately to the west. It had been carved out of the mountain promontory by the Giants many centuries ago, in the time of Old Lord Damelon Giantfriend. Above the Keep was a plateau which went beyond it west and north, past Furl Falls for a distance of a league or two before rising up into the rugged Westron Mountains. The Falls were too far away to be seen, but in the distance
the White River angled away south and slightly east from its head in the pool of Furl Falls.
Beyond the river to the southwest, Covenant made out the open plains and hills that led toward Trothgard. In that direction, he saw no sign of cultivation or habitation; but eastward from him were ripe fields, stands of trees, streams, villages-all glowing under the sun as if they were smiling with health. Looking over them, he sensed that the season was early autumn. The sun stood in the southern sky, the air was not as warm as it seemed, and the breeze which blew gently up the face of Revelstone was flavored with the loamy lushness of fall.
The Land's season-so different from the spring weather from which he had been wrenched away gave him a renewed sense of discrepancy, of stark and impossible translation. It reminded him of many things, but he forced himself to begin with the previous evening. Stiffly, he said, "Has it occurred to you that Foul probably let that poor Waynhim go just to get you to call me here?"
"Of course," Mhoram replied. "That is the Despiser's way. He intends you to be the means of our destruction."
"Then why did you do it? Hellfire! You know how I feel about this-I told you often enough. I don't want-I'm not going to be responsible for what happens to you."
Lord Mhoram shrugged. "That is the paradox of white gold. Hope and despair run together for us. How could we refuse the risk? Without every aid which we can find or make for ourselves, we cannot meet Lord Foul's might. We trust that at the last you will not turn your back on the Land."
"You've had forty years to think about it. You ought to know by now how little I deserve or even want your trust."
"Perhaps. Warmark Hile Troy argues much that way-though there is much about you that he does not know. He feels that faith in one who is so unwilling is folly. And he is not convinced that we will lose this war. He makes bold plans. But I have heard the
Despiser laughing. For better or worse, I am seer and oracle for this Council. I hear-I approve the High Lord's decision of summoning. For many reasons.
"Thomas Covenant, we have not spent our years in seclusion here, dreaming sweet dreams of peace while Lord Foul grows and moves against us. From your last moment in the Land to this day, we have striven to prepare our defense. Scouts and Lords have ridden the Land from end to end, drawing the people together, warning them, building what lore we have. I have braved the Shattered Hills, and fought on the mange of Hotash Slay-but of that I do not speak. I brought back knowledge of the Ravens. Dukkha alone did not move us to summon you."
Even in the direct beam of the sun, the word Ravens gave Covenant a chill he could not suppress. Remembering the other Waynhim he had seen, dead, with an iron spike through its heart-killed by a Raven-he asked, "What about them? What did you learn?"
"Much or little," Mhoram sighed, "according to the uses of the knowledge. The importance of this lore cannot be mistaken-and yet its value eludes us.
"While you were last in the Land, we learned that the Ravens were still aboard-that like their master they had not been undone by the Ritual of Desecration, which Kevin Landwaster wreaked in his despair. Some knowledge of these beings had come to us through the old legends, the Lore of the First Ward, and the teachings of the Giants. We knew that they were named Sheol, Jehannum, and Herem, and that they lived without bodies, feeding upon the souls of others. When the Despiser was powerful enough to give them strength, they enslaved creatures or people by entering into their bodies, subduing their wills, and using the captured flesh to enact their master's purposes. Disguised in forms not their own, they were well hidden, and so could gain trust among their foes. By that means, many brave defenders of the Land were lured to their deaths in the age of the Old Lords.
"But I have learned more. There near Foul's Creche, I was beaten-badly overmastered. I fled through the Shattered Hills with only the staff of Variol my father between me and death, and could not prevent my foe from laying hands upon me. I had thought that I was in battle with a supreme loremaster of the ur-viles. But I learned-I learned otherwise.",
Lord Mhoram stared unseeing into the depths of the sky, remembering with grim, concentrated eyes what had happened to him. After a moment, he continued: "It was a Raven I fought-a Raven in the flesh of an ur-vile. The touch of its hand taught me much. In the oldest time-beyond the reach of our most hoary legends, even before the dim time of the coming of men to the Land, and the cruel felling of the One Forest-the Colossus of the Fall had both power and purpose. It stood on Landsdrop like a forbidding fist over the Lower Land, and with the might of the -' Forest denied a dark evil from the Upper Land."
Abruptly, he broke into a slow song like a lament, a quiet declining hymn which told the story of the Colossus as the Lords had formerly known it, before the son of Variol had gained his new knowledge. In restrained sorrow over lost glory, the song described the Colossus of the Fall--the huge stone monolith, upraised in the semblance of a fist, which stood beside the waterfall where the River Landrider of the Plains of Ra became the Ruinwash of the Spoiled Plains.
Since a time that was ancient before Berek Lord
Fatherer lost half his hand, the Colossus had stood in -lone somber guard above the cliff of Landsdrop; and the oldest hinted legends of the Old Lords told of a ` time, during the ages of the One Forest's dominion in the Land, when that towering fist had held the power to forbid the shadow of Despite-held it, and did not wane until the felling of the Forest by that unsuspected enemy, man, had cut too deeply to be halted. But then, outraged and weakened by the slaughter of the trees, the Colossus had unclasped its interdict, and let the shadow free. From that time, from the moment of that offended capitulation, the Earth had slowly lost the power or the will or the chance to defend itself. So the burden of resisting the Despiser had fallen to a race which had brought the shadow upon itself, and the Earth lay under the outcome.
"But it was not Despite which the Colossus resisted," Mhoram resumed when his song was done. "Despite was the bane of men. It came with them into the Land from the cold anguish of the north, and from the hungry kingdom of the south. No, the Colossus of the Fall forbade another foe-three tree- and soil-hating brothers who were old in the Spoiled Plains before Lord Foul first cast his shadow there. They were triplets, the spawn of one birth from the womb of their long forgotten mother, and their names were samadhi, moksha, and turiya. They hated the Earth and all its growing things, just as Lord Foul hates all life and love. When the Colossus eased its interdict, they came to the Upper Land, and in their lust for ravage and dismay fell swiftly under the mastery of the Despiser. From that time, they have been his highest servants. They have performed treachery for him when he could not show his hand, and have fought for him when he would not lead his armies.
"It was samadhi, now named Sheol, who mastered the heart of Berek's liege-Sheol who slaughtered the champions of the Land, and drove Berek, halfunhanded and alone, to his extremity on the slopes of Mount Thunder. It was turiya and moksha, Herem and Jehannum, who lured the powerful and austere Demondim to their breeding dens, and to the spawning of the ur-viles. Now the three are united with Lord Foul again-united, and clamoring for the decimation of the Land. But alas-alas for my ignorance and weakness. I cannot foresee what they will do. I can hear their voices, loud with lust for the ripping of trees and the scorching of soil, but their intent eludes me. The Land is in such peril because its servants are weak."
The rough eloquence of Mhoram's tone carried Covenant along, and under its spell the brilliant sunlight seemed to darken in his eyes. Grimly, unwillingly, he caught a sense of the looming and cruel ill which crept up behind the Land's spirit, defying its inadequate defenders. And when he looked at himself, he saw nothing but omens of futility. Other people who s had protested their weakness to him had suffered terribly at the hands of his own irreducible and immedicable impotence. Harshly-more harshly than he intended-he asked, "Why?"
Mhoram turned away from his private visions, and cocked an inquiring eyebrow at Covenant.
"Why are you weak?"
The Lord met this with a wry smile. "Ah, my friend -I had forgotten that you ask such questions. You lead me into long speeches. I think that if I could reply to you briefly, I would not need you so." But Covenant did not relent, and after a pause Mhoram said, "Well, I cannot refuse to answer. But come-there is food waiting. Let us eat. Then I will make what answer I can." '
Covenant refused. Despite his hunger, he was unwilling to make any more concessions to the Land until he knew better where he stood.
Mhoram considered him for a moment, then replied in a measured tone, "1f what you say is true-if Land and Earth and all are nothing more than a dream, a threat of madness for you-then still you must eat. Hunger is hunger, and need is need. How else-7"
"No." Covenant dismissed the idea heavily.
At that, the gold flecks in Mhoram's eyes flared, as ' if they reflected the passion of the sun, and he said levelly, "Then answer that question yourself. Answer it, and save us. If we are helpless and unfriended, it is your doing. Only you can penetrate the mysteries which surround us."
"No," Covenant repeated. He recognized what Mhoram was saying, and refused to tolerate it. No, he responded to the heat of Mhoram's look. That's too much like blaming me for being a leper. It's not my fault. "You go too far."
"Ur-Lord," Mhoram replied, articulating each word distinctly, "there is peril upon the Land. Distance will not restrain me."
"That isn't what I meant. I meant you're taking what I said too far. I'm not the-the shaper. I'm not in control. I'm just another victim. All I know is what you tell me.
"What I want to know is why you keep trying to make me responsible. What makes you any weaker than I am? You've got the Staff of Law. You've got the rhadhamaerl and lillianrill. What makes you so bloody weak?"
The heat slowly faded from the Lord's gaze. Folding his arms so that his staff was clasped across his chest, he smiled crookedly. "Your question grows with each asking. If I require you to ask again, I fear that nothing -less than a Giant's tale will suffice for answer. Forgive me, my friend. I know that our peril cannot be laid on your head. Dream or no-there is no difference for us. We must serve the Land.
"Now, I must first remind you that the rhadhamaerl and lillianrill are another question, separate from the weakness of the Lords. The .stone-lore of the rhadhamaerl, and the wood-lore of the lillianrill, have been preserved from past ages by the people of Stonedown and Woodhelven. In their exile after the Ritual of Desecration, the people of the Land lost much of the richness of their lives. They were sorely bereft, and could cling only to that lore which enabled them to endure. Thus, when they returned to the Land, they brought with them those whose work in exile was to preserve and use. the lore-Gravelingases of the rhadhamaerl , and Hirebrands of the lillianrill. It is the work of Hirebrand and Gravelingas to make the lives of the villages bounteous-warm in winter and plentiful in summer, true to the song of the Land.
'Me Lore of High Lord Kevin Landwaster is another matter. That knowledge is the concern of the Loresraat and the Lords.
"The age of the Old Lords, before Lord Foul broke into open war with Kevin son of Loric, was among the bravest and gladdest and strongest of all the times of the Land. Kevin's Lore was mighty with Earthpower, and pure with Landservice. Health and gaiety flowered in the Land, and the bright Earth jewel of Andelain bedizened the Land's heart with precious woods and stones. That was a time "Yet it came to an end. Despair darkened Kevin, and in the Ritual of Desecration he destroyed that which he loved, intending to destroy the Despiser as well. But before the end, he was touched with prophecy or foresight, and found means to save much of power and beauty. He warned the Giants and the Ranyhyn, so that they might flee. He ordered the Bloodguard into safety. And he left his Lore for later ages-hid it in Seven Wards so that it would not fall into wrong or unready hands. The First Ward he gave to the Giants, and when the exile was ended they gave it to the first of the new Lords, the forebearers of this Council. In turn, these Lords conceived the Oath of Peace and carried it to all the people of the Land-an Oath to guard against Kevin's destroying passion. And these Lords, our forebearers, swore themselves and their followers in fealty and service to the Land and the Earthpower.
"Now, my friend, you know we have found the Second Ward. The Two contain much knowledge and much power, and when they are mastered they will lead us to the Third Ward. In this way, mastery will guide us until all Kevin's Lore is ours. But we fail we fail to penetrate. How can I say it? We translate the speech of the Old Lords. We learn the skills and rites and songs of the Lore. We study Peace, and devote ourselves to the life of the Land. And yet something lacks. In some way, we miscomprehend-we do not suffice. Only a part of the power of this knowledge answers to our touch. We can learn nothing of the other Wards-and little of the Seven Words which evoke the Earthpower. Something-ur-Lord, it is something in us which fails. I feel it in my heart. We lack. We have not the stature of mastery."
The Lord fell silent, musing with his head down and his cheek pressed against his staff. Covenant watched him for a time. The warmth of the sun and the cool breeze seemed to underscore Mhoram's stern self judgment. Revelstone itself dwarfed the people who inhabited it.
Yet the Lord's influence or example strengthened Covenant. At last, he found the courage to ask his most important question. "Then why am I here? Why did he let you summon me? Doesn't he want the white gold?"
Without raising his head, Mhoram said, "Lord Foul is not yet ready to defeat you. The wild magic still surpasses him. Instead, he strives to make you destroy yourself. I have seen it."
"Seen it?" Covenant echoed softly, painfully,
"In gray visions I have caught glimpses of the Despiser's heart. In this matter, I speak from sure comprehension. Even now, Lord Foul believes that his might is not equal to the wild magic. He is not yet ready to battle you.
"Remember that forty years ago Drool Rockworm held both Staff and Stone. Desiring still more power desiring all power-he exerted himself against you in ways which the Despiser would not have chosen ways which were wasteful or foolish. Drool was mad. And Lord Foul had no wish to teach him wisdom.
"Matters are otherwise now. Lord Foul wastes no power, takes no risks which do not gain his ends. He seeks indirectly to make you do his bidding. If it comes to the last, and you are still unmastered, he will fight you-but only when he is sure of victory. Until that time, he will strive to bend your will so that you will choose to strike against the Land-or to withhold your hand from our defense, so that he will be free to destroy us.
"But he will make no open move against you now. He fears the wild magic. White gold is not bound by the law of Time, and he must prevent its use until he can know that it will not be used against him."
Covenant heard the truth of Mhoram's words. The Despiser had told him much the same thing, high on Kevin's Watch, when he had first appeared in the Land. He shivered under the livid memory of Lord Foul's contempt-shivered and felt cold, as if behind the clean sunlight over Revelstone blew the dank mist of Despite, dampening his soul with the smell of attar, filling his ears on a level just beyond hearing with the rumble of an avalanche. Looking into Mhoram's eyes, he knew that he had to speak truly as well, reply as honestly as he could.
"I don't have any choice." Even this made him want to duck his head in shame, but he forced himself to hold the Lord's gaze. "I'll have to do it that way. Even if that's not the one good answer-even if madness is not the only danger in dreams. Even if I believed in this wild magic. I haven't got one idea how to use it."
With an effort, Mhoram smiled gently. But the somberness of his glance overshadowed his smile. He met Covenant's eyes unwaveringly, and when he spoke, his voice was sad. "Ah, my friend, what will you do?"
The uncritical softness of the question caught Covenant by the throat. He was not prepared for such sympathy. With difficulty, he answered, "I'll survive."
Mhoram nodded slowly, and a moment later he turned away, back toward the room. As he reached the door, he said, "I am late. The Council waits for me. I must go."
But before the Lord could leave, Covenant called after him, "Why aren't you the High Lord?" He was trying to find some way to thank Mhoram. "Don't they appreciate you around here?"
Over his shoulder, Mhoram replied simply, "My time has not yet come." Then he left the room, closing the door carefully behind him.