THE POWER THAT PRESERVES

by default

  While he held the specter's gaze, Foamfollower gauged his position measured distances around him. Kinslaughterer's words affected him. In them, he saw the sweetness of retribution. He knew the fury of killing, the miserable, involuntary delight of crushing flesh with his hands. He quivered as if he were eager, poised the gnarled might of his muscles for a leap.

  "Attempt me, then," the dead Giant went on. "Unleash the lust which fills you. Do you believe you can vindicate yourself against me? Are you so blind? Comrade! There is nothing that justifies you. If you shed blood enough to wash the Land from east to west, you cannot wash out the ill of yourself. Imbecile! Anile fool! If the master did not control you, you would do his work for him so swiftly that he would be unable to take pleasure in it. Come then, comrade! Attempt me. I am slain already. How will you bring me to death again?"

  ''I will attempt it,'' Foamfollower grated softly, "in my own way.'' The specter's unnecessary goading told him what he needed to know. The creatures could have slain him at any time-yet they waited while Kin-slaughterer strove to provoke him. Therefore Soulcrusher still had something to gain from him; therefore Covenant was still alive, still unbeaten. Perhaps Lord Foul hoped to use Foamfollower himself against the Unbeliever.

  But Foamfollower had survived the caamora of Hotash Slay. He poised himself, his whole body tensed. Yet when he sprang suddenly into motion, he did not attack Kinslaughterer. Straining mightily, thrusting with all the power of his legs, he launched himself at the guards before the door of the thronehall.

  They ducked under the suddenness of his assault. He dove headlong over them, forearms braced, so that his entire force struck the doors.

  They had not been made to withstand such an impact. With a sharp cry of splintering stone, they burst inward.

  Foamfollower fell in a flurry of door shards, somersaulted, snapped to his feet in the thronehall of Ridjeck Thome.

  The room was a wide round hall like the one he had just left, but it had fewer doors, and its ceiling was far higher, as if to accommodate the immense powers which occupied it. Opposite Foamfollower was the great throne itself. On a low mound against the far wall, old grisly rock had been upreared to form the Despiser's seat in the shape of jaws, raw hooked teeth bared to grip and tear. It and its base were the only things he had seen in Foul's Creche which were not perfectly carved, utterly polished. It appeared to have been irremediably crippled, grotesqued, by the age-long weight of Lord Foul's malice. It looked like a prophecy or foretaste of ultimate doom for all Ridjeck Thome's immaculate rock.

  Set into the floor directly before it was the Illearth Stone.

  The Stone was not as large as Foamfollower had expected it to be; it did not appear so big or heavy that he could not have lifted it in his arms. Yet its radiance staggered him like the blow of a prodigious fist. It was not extremely bright-its illumination in the thronehall was only a little stronger than the light elsewhere-but it blazed in its setting like an incarnation of absolute cold. It pulsed like a mad heart, sent out unfetter-able gouts and flares of force, radiated violently its power for corruption. Foamfollower slammed into the glare and Stopped as if he could already feel the gelid emerald turning his skin to ice.

  He stared at the Stone for a moment, horrified by its strength. But then his staggered senses became aware of another might in the thronehall. This power seemed oddly subdued in comparison to the Stone. But it was only subtler, more insidious-not weaker. As Foamfollower turned toward it, he knew that it was the Stone's master.

  Lord Foul.

  He located the Despiser more by tactile impression than by sight. Lord Foul was essentially invisible, though he cast an impenetrable blankness in the air like the erect shadow of a man-a shadow of absence rather than presence which showed where he would have been if he had been physically corporeal-and around the shadow shone a penumbra of glistering green. From within it, he reeked of attar.

  He stood to one side of the Stone, with his back to the door and the Giant. And before him, facing Foamfollower, was Thomas Covenant.

  They were alone; after delivering Covenant, the ur-vile had left the thronehall.

  Covenant seemed unaware of the chains shackling his wrists. He did not appear to be struggling at all. He was already in the last stages of starvation and cold. Pain dripped like dank sweat down his emaciated cheeks; and his gaunt, desolate eyes met Lord Foul as if the Despiser's power were clenched in the ugly wound on his forehead.

  Neither of them took any notice of Foamfollower's loud entrance; they were concentrated on each other to the exclusion of everything else. Some interchange had taken place between them-something Foamfollower had missed. But he saw the result. Just as he focused his attention on Lord Foul and Covenant, the Despiser raised one penumbral arm and struck Covenant across the mouth.

  With a roar, Foamfollower charged to his friend's aid.

  Before he had taken two strides, an avalanche of creatures rushed through the shattered doorway and fell on him. They pounded him to the floor, pinned him under their weight, secured his limbs. He fought wildly extravagantly, but his opponents were many and strong. They mastered him in a moment. They dragged him to the side wall and fettered him there with chains so massive that he could not break them. When the creatures left him, hurried out of the thronehall, he was helpless.

  The dead Giant was not with them. Already it had served or failed its purpose; it had been banished again.

  He had been placed in a position where he could watch Lord Foul and Covenant-where their conflict would be enacted with him as its audience.

  As soon as the creatures had departed, the Despiser turned toward him for the first time. When the gleaming green penumbra had shifted itself to face him, he saw the Despiser's eyes. They were the only part of Lord Foul that was visible within his aura.

  He had eyes like fangs, carious and yellow-fangs so vehement in malice that they froze Foamfollower's voice, gagging him on the encouragement he had tried to shout for Covenant's sake.

  "Be silent," Lord Foul said venomously, "or I will roast you before your time."

  Foamfollower obeyed without volition. He gaped as if he were choking on ice and watched with helpless passion in his throat.

  The Despiser's eyes blinked in satisfaction. He turned his attention back to Covenant.

  Covenant had been knocked from his feet by Lord Foul's blow, and he knelt now with his shackled hands covering his face in a gesture of the most complete abjection. His fingers seemed entirely numb; they pressed blindly against his face, as incapable as dead sticks of exploring his injury, of even identifying the dampness of his blood. But he could feel the disease gnawing at his nerves as if Lord Foul's presence amplified it, made the senseless erosion tangible; and he knew that his leprosy was in full career now, that the fragile arrest on which his life depended had been broken. Illness reached down into his soul like tendrils of affectlessness, searching like tree roots in a rock for cracks, flaws, at which the rock could be split asunder. He was as weak and weary as any nightmare could make him without causing the labor of his heart to stop.

  But when he lowered his bloodied hands-when the swift poison of Foul's touch made his lip blacken and swell so acutely that he could no longer bear to touch it-when he looked up again toward the Despiser, he was not abject. He was unbeaten.

  Damn you, he muttered dimly. Damn you. It's not that easy. Deliberately, he closed his fingers of his halfhand around his ring.

  The Despiser's eyes raged at him, but Lord Foul controlled himself to say in a sneering, fatherly tone, "Come, Unbeliever. Do not prolong this unpleasantness. You know that you cannot stand against me. In my own name I am wholly your superior. And I possess the Illearth Stone. I can blast the moon in its course, compel the oldest dead from their deep graves, spread ruin at my whim. Without effort I can tear every fiber of your being from its moor and scatter the wreck of your soul across the heavens."

  Then do it, Covenant muttered.

  "Yet I choose to forbear. I do
not purpose harm against you. Only place your ring in my hand, and all your torment will be at an end. It is a small price to pay, Unbeliever."

  It's not that easy.

  "And I am not powerless to reward you. If you wish to share my rule over the Land, I will permit you. You will find I am not an uncongenial master. If you wish to preserve the life of your friend Foamfollower, I will not demur-though he has offended me." Foamfollower thrashed in his chains, struggled to protest, but he could not speak. "If you wish health, that also I can and will provide. Behold!"

  He waved one penumbral arm, and a ripple of distortion passed over Covenant's senses. At once, feeling flooded back into his hands and feet; his nerves returned to life in an instant. While they flourished, all his distress-all pain and hunger and weakness-sloughed off him. His body seemed to crow with triumphant life.

  He was unmoved. He found his voice, breathed wearily through his teeth. "Health isn't my problem. You're the one who teaches lepers to hate themselves."

  "Groveler!" Lord Foul snapped. Without transition, Covenant became leprous and starved again. "You are on your knees to me! I will make you plead for the veriest fragments of life! Do lepers hate themselves? Then they are wise. I will teach you the true stature of hatred!"

  For a moment, the Despiser's own immitigable hate gouged down at Covenant from his carious eyes, and Covenant braced himself for an onslaught. But then Lord Foul began to laugh. His scorn shone from him, shook the air of the thronehall like the sound of great boulders crushing each other, made even the hard stone of the floor seem as insidious as a quagmire. And when he subsided, he said, "You are a dead man before me, groveler-as crippled of life as any corpse. Yet you refuse me. You refuse health, mastery, even friendship. I am interested-I am forbearant. I will allow you time to think better of your madness. Tell me why you are so rife with folly."

  Covenant did not hesitate. "Because I loathe you."

  "That is no reason. Many men believe that they loathe me because they are too craven to despise stupidity, foolhardiness, pretension, subservience. I am not misled. Tell me why, groveler."

  "Because I love the Land."

  "Oh, forsooth!" Lord Foul jeered. "I cannot believe that you are so anile. The Land is not your world-it has no claim upon your small fidelity. From the first, it has tormented you with demands you could not meet, honor you could not earn. You portray yourself as a man who is faithful unto death in the name of a fashion of apparel or an accident of diet-loyal to filthy robes and sand. No, groveler. I an unconvinced. Again, I say, tell me why." He pronounced his why as if with that one syllable he could make Covenant's entire edifice founder.

  The Land is beautiful, Covenant breathed to himself. You're ugly. For a time, he felt too weary to respond. But at last he brought out his answer.

  "Because I don't believe."

  "No?" the Despiser shouted with glee. "Still?" His laughter expressed perfect contempt. "Groveler, you are pathetic beyond price. Almost I am persuaded to keep you at my side. You would be a jester to lighten my burdens." Still he catechized Covenant. "How is it possible that you can loathe or love where you do not believe?"

  "Nevertheless."

  "How is it possible to disbelieve where you loathe or love?"

  "Still."

  Lord Foul laughed again. "Do my ears betray me? Do you-after my Enemy has done all within his power to sway you-do you yet believe that this is a dream?"

  "It isn't real. But that doesn't matter. That's not important."

  "Then what is, groveler?"

  "The Land. You."

  Once more, the Despiser laughed. But his mirth was short and vicious now; he sounded disturbed, as if there were something in Covenant which he could not understand. "The Land and Unbelief," he jeered. "You poor, deranged soul! You cannot have both. They preclude each other."

  But Covenant knew better; after all that he had been through, he knew better. Only by affirming them both, accepting both poles of the contradiction, keeping them both whole, balanced, only by steering himself not between them but with them, could he preserve them both, preserve both the Land and himself, find the place where the parallel lines of his impossible dilemma met. The eye of the paradox. In that place lay the reason why the Land had happened to him. So he said nothing as he stared up at the blank shadow and the emerald aura and the incalculable might of the Despiser. But in himself, he gritted, No they don't, Foul. You're wrong. It's not that easy. If it were easy, I would have found it long ago.

  "But I grow weary of your stupid assertions," Lord Foul went on after a moment. "My patience is not infinite. And there are other questions I wish to ask. I will set aside the matter of your entry into my demesne. It is a small matter, easily explained. In some manner unknown to me, you suborned a number of my chattel, so that twice I received false reports of your death. But set it aside. I will flay the very souls from their bones, and learn the truth. Answer this question, groveler." He moved closer to Covenant, and the intensity of his voice told Covenant that the Despiser had reached the heart of his probing. "This wild magic is not a part of your world. It violates your Unbelief. How can you use this power in which you do not believe?"

  There Covenant found the explanation of Lord Foul's forbearance. The Despiser had spent his time interrogating Covenant rather than simply ripping the fingers off his hand to take the ring because he, Lord Foul, feared that Covenant had secretly mastered the wild magic-that he had concealed his power, risked death in the Spoiled Plains and Hotash Slay and Kurash Qwellinir, permitted himself to be taken captive, so that he could surprise the Despiser, catch Lord Foul from a weak or blind side.

  Foul had reason for this fear. The Staff of Law had been destroyed.

  For an instant, Covenant thought he might use this apprehension to help himself in some way. But then he saw that he could not. For his own sake, so that his defense would not be flawed by his old duplicity, he told the truth.

  "I don't know how to use it." His voice stumbled thickly past his swollen lip. "I don't know how to call it up. But I know it is real in the Land. I know how to trigger it. I know how to bring this bloody icebox down around your ears."

  The Despiser did not hesitate, doubt. He seemed to expand in Covenant's sight as he roared savagely, "You will trigger nothing! I have endured enough of your insolence. Do you say that you are a leper? I will show you leprosy!"

  Power swarmed around Covenant like a thousand thousand mad wasps. Before him, the Despiser's blank shadow grew horribly, swept upward larger and larger until it dwarfed Covenant, dwarfed Foamfollower, dwarfed the thronehall itself; it filled the air, the hall, the entire Creche. He felt himself plunging into the abyss of it. He cried out for help, but no help came. Like a stricken bird, he plummeted downward. The speed of his fall roared in his ears as if it were trying to suck him out of himself. He could sense the rock on which he would be shattered, unutterably far below him.

  In the void, an attar-laden voice breathed, "Worship me and I will save you."

  Giddy terror-lust rushed up in him. A black whirlwind hurled him at the rock as if all the puissance of the heavens had come to smash him against the unbreakable granite of his fate. Despite screamed in his mind, demanding admittance, demanding like the suicidal paradox of vertigo to overwhelm him. But he clung to himself, refused. He was a leper; the Land was not real; this was not the way he was going to die.

  He clenched his fist on the ring with all the frail strength of his arm.

  At the crash of impact, pain detonated in his skull. Incandescent agony yowled and yammered through his head, shredded him like claws ferociously tearing the tissue of his brain. Foul rode the pain as if it were a tidal wave, striving to break down or climb over the seawall of his will. But he was too numb to break. His hands and feet were blind, frozen; his forehead was already inured to harm; and the black swelling in his lip was familiar to him. The green, ghastly cold could not bend the rigor of his bones. Like a dead man, he was stiff with resistance.

 
; Lord Foul tried to enter him, tried to merge with him. The offer was seductively sweet-a surcease from pain, a release from the long unrest which he had miscalled his life. But he was harnessed to himself in a way that allowed no turning aside, no surrender. He was Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever and leper. He refused.

  Abruptly, his pain fell into darkness. Harm, injury, crushing, assault-all turned to ashes and blew away on windless air. In their place came his own numbness, his irreparable lack of sensation. In the great, unlimited abyss, he found that he could see himself.

  He was standing nowhere, surrounded by nothing; he was staring as if in dumb incomprehension at his hands.

  At first they seemed normal. They were as gaunt as sticks, and the two missing digits of his right hand gave him a sense of loss, unwholeness, that made him groan. But his ring was intact; it hung inertly on his index finger, an argent circle as perfect and inescapable as if it had some meaning.

  But as he watched, dim purple spots began to appear on his hands-on his fingers, the backs of his knuckles, the heels of his palms. Slowly, they spread and started to suppurate; they bulged slightly like blisters, then opened to show abscesses under his skin. Fluid oozed from the sores as they grew and spread. Soon both his hands were covered with infection.

  They became gangrenous, putrescent; the cloying stench of live, rotten flesh poured from them like the effluvium of some gnawing fungus, noisome and cruel. And under the infection, the bones of his fingers began to gnarl. Unmarrowed, flawed by rot, stressed by tendons whose nerves had died, leaving them perpetually taut, perpetually clenched against each other, the bones twisted, broke, and froze at crooked angles. In the rot and the disease, his hands maimed themselves. And the black, sick swelling of gangrene began to eat its way up his wrists.