For that moment, Mhoram also only gaped and gasped. He could not believe his senses, could not believe the touch of the air on his cold-punished face. He seemed to be tasting something which had been lost from human experience.
Then Drinny lurched up, braced himself on splayed legs, and raised his head to neigh in recognition of the change. His whinny was weak and strained, but it lifted Mhoram’s heart like the trumpets of triumph.
While he and Satansfist and all the armies stared at it, the wind faltered. It limped, spurting and fluttering in the air like a wounded bird, then fell lifeless to the ground.
For the first time since Lord Foul’s preternatural winter had begun, there was no wind. Some support or compulsion had been withdrawn from samadhi Satansfist.
With a howl of rage, the Raver spun back toward Mhoram. “Fool!” he screamed as if the High Lord had let out a shout of jubilation.’ “That was but one weapon of many! I will yet drink your heart’ s blood to the bottom!” Reeling under the weight of his fury, he lifted his fists again to deliver the executing blow.
But now Mhoram felt the fire which burned against his flesh under his robe. In a rush of exaltation, he understood it, grasped its meaning intuitively. As the Stone reached its height over his head, he tore open his robe and grasped Loric’s krill.
Its gem blazed like a hot white brazier in his hands. It was charged to overflowing with echoes of wild magic; he could feel its keenness as he gripped its hilt.
It was a weapon strong enough to bear any might.
His eyes met Satansfist’s. He saw dismay and hesitation clashing against the Raver’s rage, against samadhi Sheol’s ancient malice and the supreme confidence of the Stone.
Before Satansfist could defend himself, High Lord Mhoram sprang up and drove the krill deep into his bosom.
The Raver shrieked in agony. With Mhoram hanging from the blade in his chest, he flailed his arms as if he could not find anything to strike, anywhere to exert his colossal outrage. Then he dropped to his knees.
Mhoram planted his feet on the ground and braced himself to retain his grip on the krill. Through the focus of that blade, he drove all his might deeper and deeper toward the Giant-Raver’s heart.
Yet samadhi did not die. Faced with death, he found a way to resist. Both his fists clenched the Stone only a foot above the back of Mhoram’s neck. With all the rocky, Giantish strength of his frame, he began to squeeze.
Savage power steamed and pulsed like the beating of a heart of ice-a heart labouring convulsively, pounding and quivering to carry itself through a crisis. Mhoram felt the beats crash against the back of his spine. They kept Satansfist alive while they strove to quench the power which drove the krill
But Mhoram endured the pain, did not let go; he leaned his weight on the blazing blade, ground it deeper and still deeper toward the essential cords of samadhi’s life. Slowly, his flesh seemed to disappear, fade as if he were being translated by passion into a being of pure force, of unfettered spirit and indomitable will. The Stone hammered at his back like a mounting cataclysm, and Satansfist’s chest heaved against his hands in great, ragged, bloody gasps.
Then the cords were cut.
Pounding beyond the limits of control, the Illearth Stone exploded, annihilated itself with an eruption that hurled Mhoram and Satansfist tumbling inextricably together from the knoll. The blast shook the ground, tore a hole in the silence over the battle. One slow instant of stunned amazement gripped the air, then vanished in the dismayed shrieks of the Despiser’s army.
Moments later, Warmark Quaan and the surviving remnant of his mounted Howard dashed to the foot of the knoll. Quaan threw himself from his horse and leaped to the High Lord’s side.
Mhoram’s robe draped his bloodied and begrimed form in tatters; it had been shredded by the explosion. His hands as they gripped the krill were burned so badly that only black rags of flesh still clung to his bones. From head to foot, his body had the look of pain and brokenness. But he was still alive, still breathing faintly, fragilely.
Fear, weariness, hesitation dropped off Quaan as if they were meaningless. He took the krill, wrapped it, and placed it under his belt, then with celerity and care lifted the High Lord in his arms. For an instant, he looked around. He saw Drinny nearby, shaking his head and mane to throw off the effects of the blast. He saw the Despiser’s army seething in confusion and carnage. He hoped that it would fall apart without the Raver’s leadership and coercion. But then he saw also that the ur-viles were rallying, taking charge of the creatures around them, reorganizing the hordes.
In spite of the High Lord’s weight, Quaan ran and vaulted onto Drinny’s back. Shouting to the Warward, “Retreat! Return to the Keep! The Grey Slayer has not lost his hold!” he clapped Drinny with his heels and took the Ranyhyn at a full gallop toward the open gates of Revelstone.
Sixteen: Colossus
THERE were gaps in the darkness during which Covenant knew dimly that rank liquids were being forced into him. They nourished him despite their rancid taste; his captors were keeping him alive. But between these gaps nothing interrupted his bereavement, his loss of everything he could grasp or recognize. He was dismembered from himself. The shrill vermilion nail of pain which the ur-viles had driven through his forehead impaled his identity, his memory and knowledge and awareness. He was at the nadir-captured, conquered, bereft-and only that iron stab in his forehead stood between him and the last numbness of the end.
So when he began to regain consciousness, he jerked toward it like a half-buried corpse, striving to shift the weight which enfolded him like the ready arms of his grave. Cold ebbed into him from the abyss of the winter. His heart laboured; shuddering ran through him like a crisis. His hands clutched uselessly at the frozen dirt.
Then rough hands flopped him onto his back. A grim visage advanced, receded. Something struck his chest. He gasped at the force of the blow. Yet it helped him; it seemed to break him free of imminent hysteria. He began to breathe more easily. In a moment, he became aware that he was beating the back of his head against the ground. With an effort, he stopped himself. Then he concentrated on trying to see.
He wanted to see, wanted to find some answer to the completeness of his loss. And his eyes were open-must have been open, or he would not have been able to perceive the shadowy countenance snarling over him. Yet he could not make it out. His eyeballs were dry and blind; he saw nothing but cold, universal grey smeared around the more compact grey of the visage.
“Up, Covenant,” a harsh voice rasped. “You are of no use as you are.”
Another blow knocked his head to the side. He lurched soddenly. Through the pain in his cheek, he felt himself gaping into the raw wind. He blinked painfully at the dryness of his eyes, and tears began to resolve his blindness into shapes and spaces.
“Up, I say!”
He seemed to recognize the voice without knowing whose it was. But he lacked the strength to turn his head for another look. Resting on the icy ground, he blinked until his sight came into focus on a high, monolithic fist of stone.
It was perhaps twenty yards from him and forty feet tall-an obsidian column upraised on a plinth of native rock, and gnarled at its top into a clench of speechless defiance. Beyond it he could see nothing; it stood against a background of clouds as if it were erect on the rim of the world. At first, it appeared to him a thing of might, an icon of Earthpower upthrust or set down there to mark a boundary against evil. But as his vision cleared, the stone seemed to grow shallow and slumberous, blank; while he blinked at it, it became as inert as any old rock. If it still lived, he no longer had the eyes to see its life.
Slowly, fragments of other senses returned to him. He discovered that he could hear the wind hissing ravenously past him like a river thrashing across rapids; and behind it was a deep, muffled booming like the thunder of a waterfall.
“Up!” the harsh voice repeated. “Must I beat you senseless to awaken you?”
Mordant laughter echoed after the
demand as if it were a jest.
Abruptly, the rough hands caught hold of his robe and yanked him off the ground. He was still too weak to carry his own weight, too weak even to hold up his head. He leaned against the man’s chest and panted at his pain, trying with futile fingers to grasp the man’s shoulders.
“Where-?” he croaked at last. “Where-?”
The laughter ridiculed him again. Two unrecognizable voices were laughing at him.
“Where?” the man snapped. “Thomas Covenant, you are at my mercy. That is the only where which signifies.”
Straining, Covenant heaved up his head and found himself staring miserably into Triock’s dark scowl.
Triock? He tried to say the name, but his voice failed him.
“You have slain everything that was precious to me. Think on that, Unbeliever”-he invested the title with abysms of contempt-“if you require to know where you are.”
Triock?
“There is murder and degradation in your every breath. Ah! you stink of it.” A spasm of revulsion knotted Triock’s face, and he dropped Covenant to the ground again.
Covenant landed heavily amid sarcastic mirth. He was still too dazed to collect his thoughts. Triock’s disgust affected him like a command; he lay prostrate with his eyes closed, trying to smell himself.
It was true. He stank of leprosy. The disease in his hands and feet reeked, gave off a rotten effluvium out of all proportion to the physical size of his infection. And its message was unmistakable. The ordure in him, the putrefaction of his flesh, was spreading-expanding as if he were contagious, as if at last even his body had become a violation of the fundamental health of the Land. In some ways, this was an even more important violation than the Despiser’s winter-or rather his stench was the crown of the wind, the apex of Lord Foul’s intent. That intent would be complete when his illness became part of the wind, when ice and leprosy together extinguished the Land’s last vitality.
Then, in one intuitive leap, he understood his sense of bereavement. He identified his loss. Without looking to verify the perception, he knew that his ring had been taken from him; he could feel its absence like destitution in his heart.
The Despiser’s manipulations were complete. The coercion and subterfuge which had shaped Covenant’s experiences in the Land had borne fruit. Like a Stone-warped tree, they had fructified to produce this unanswerable end. The wild magic was now in Lord Foul’s possession.
A wave of grief rushed through Covenant. The enormity of the disaster he had precipitated upon the Land appalled him. His chest locked in a clench of sorrow, and he huddled on the verge of weeping.
But before he could release his pain, Triock was at him again. The Stonedownor gripped the shoulders of his robe, shook him until his bones rattled. “Awaken!” Triock rasped viciously. “Your time is short. My time is short. I do not mean to waste it.”
For a moment, Covenant could not resist; inanition and unconsciousness and grief crippled him. But then Triock’s gratuitous violence struck sparks into the forgotten tinder of Covenant’s rage. Anger galvanized him, brought back control to his muscles. He twisted in Triock’s grip, got an arm and a leg braced on the ground. Triock released him, and he climbed unevenly to his feet, panting, “Hell and blood! Don’t touch me, you-Raver!”
Triock stepped forward as Covenant came erect and stretched him on the dirt again with one sharp blow. Standing over Covenant, he shouted in a voice full of outrage, “I am no Raver! I am Triock son of Thuler! — the man who loved Lena Atiaran-child- the man who took the part of a father for Elena daughter of Lena because you abandoned her! You cannot deny any blow I choose to strike against you!”
At that, Covenant heard laughter again, but he still could not identify its source. Triock’s blow made the pain in his forehead roar; the noise of the hurt confused his hearing. But when the worst of the sound passed, his eyes seemed to clear at last. He forced himself to look up steadily into Triock’s face.
The man had changed again. The strange combination of loathing and hunger, of anger and fear, was gone; the impression he had created that he was using his own anguish cunningly was gone. In the place of such distortions was an extravagant bitterness, a rage not controlled by any of his old restraints. He was himself and not himself. The former supplication of his eyes-the balance and ballast of his long acquaintance with gall-had foundered in passion. Now his brows clenched themselves into a knot of violence above the bridge of his nose; the pleading lines at the corners of his eyes had become as deep as scars; and his cheeks were taut with grimaces. Yet something in his eyes themselves belied the focus of his anger. His orbs were glazed and milky, as if they were blurred by cataracts, and they throbbed with a vain intensity. He looked as if he were going blind.
The sight of him made Covenant’s own rage feel in condign, faulty. He was beholding another of his victims. He had no justification for anger. “Triock!” he groaned, unable to think of any other response. “Triock!”
The Stonedownor paused, allowing him a chance to regain his feet, then advanced threateningly.
Covenant retreated a step or two. He needed something to say, something that could penetrate or deflect Triock’s bitterness. But his thoughts were stunned; they groped ineffectually, as if they had been rendered fingerless by the loss of his ring. Triock swung at him. He parried the blow with his forearms, kept himself from being knocked down again. Words-he needed words.
“Hellfire!” he shouted because he could not find any other reply. “What happened to your Oath of Peace?”
“It is dead,” Triock growled hoarsely. “It is dead with a spike of wood in its belly!” He swung again, staggered Covenant. “The Law of Death is broken, and all Peace has been laid waste.”
Covenant regained his balance and retreated farther. “Triock!” he gasped. “I didn’t kill her. She died trying to save my life. She knew it was my fault, and she still tried to save me. She would fight you now if she saw you like this! What did that Raver do to you?”
The Stonedownor advanced with slow ferocity.
“You’re not like this!” Covenant cried. “You gave your whole life to prove you’re not like this!”
Springing suddenly, Triock caught Covenant by the throat. His thumbs ground into Covenant’s windpipe as he snarled, “You have not seen what I have seen!”
Covenant struggled, but he had no strength to match Triock’s. His fingers clawed and clutched, and had no effect. The need for air began to hum in his ears.
Triock released one hand, cocked his fist deliberately, and hit Covenant in the centre of his wounded forehead. He pitched backward, almost fell. But hands caught him from behind, yanked him upright, put him on his feet-hands that burned him like the touch of acid.
He jerked away from them, then whirled to see who had burned him. Fresh blood ran from his yammering forehead into his eyes, clogged his vision, but he gouged it away with numb fingers, made himself see the two figures that had caught him.
They were laughing at him together. Beat for beat, their ridicule came as one, matched each other in weird consonance; they sounded like one voice jeering through two throats.
They were Ramen.
He saw them in an instant, took them in as if they had been suddenly revealed out of midnight by a flash of dismay. He recognized them as two of Manethrall Kam’s Cords, Lal and Whane. But they had changed. Even his truncated vision could see the alteration which had been wrought in them, the complete reversal of being which occupied them. Contempt and lust submerged the former spirit of their health. Only the discomfortable spasms which flicked their faces, and the unnecessary violence of their emanations, gave any indication that they had ever been unlike what they were now.
“Our friend Triock spoke the truth,” they said together, and the unharmonized unison of their voices mocked both Covenant and Triock. “Our brother is not with us. He is at work in the destruction of Revelstone. But Triock will take his place-for a time. A short time. We are turiya and moksha
, Herem and Jehannum. We have come to take delight in the ruin of things we hate. You are nothing to us now, groveller-Unbeliever.” Again they laughed, one spirit or impulse uttering contempt through two throats. “Yet you-and our friend Triock-amuse us while we wait.”
But Covenant hardly heard them. An instant after he comprehended what had happened to them, he saw something else, something that almost blinded him to the Ravers. Two other figures stood a short distance behind Whane and Lal.
The two people he had most ached to see since he had regained himself in Morinmoss: Saltheart Foamfollower and Bannor.
The sight of them filled him with horror.
Foamfollower wore a host of recent battle-marks among his older scars, and Banner’s silvering hair and lined face had aged perceptibly. But all that was insignificant beside the grisly fact that they were not moving.
They did not so much as turn their heads toward Covenant. They were paralyzed, clenched rigid and helpless, by a green force which played about them like a corona, enveloped them in coercion. They were as motionless as if even pulse and respiration had been crushed out of them by shimmering emerald.
And if they had been able to look at Covenant, they would not have seen him. Their eyes were like Triock’s, but much more severely glazed. Only the faintest outlines of pupil and iris were visible behind the white blindness which covered their orbs.
Bannor! Covenant cried. Foamfollower! Ah!
While his body swayed on locked joints, he cowered inwardly. His arms covered his head as if to protect it from an axe. The plight of Bannor and Foamfollower dealt him an unendurable shock. He could not bear it. He quailed where he stood as if the ground were heaving under him.
Then Triock caught hold of him again. The Stonedownor bent him to the dirt, hunched furiously over him to pant, “You have not seen what I have seen. You do not know what you have done.”
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