Thomas Covenant 03: Power That Preserves (50 page)

Slowly fragments of other senses returned to him. He discovered that he could hear the wind hissing ravenously past him like a river thrashing across rapids; and behind it was a deep, muffled booming like the thunder of a waterfall.

“Up!” the harsh voice repeated. “Must I beat you senseless to awaken you?”

Mordant laughter echoed after the demand as if it were a jest.

Abruptly the rough hands caught hold of his robe and yanked him off the ground. He was still too weak to carry his own weight, too weak even to hold up his head. He leaned against the man’s chest and panted at his pain, trying with futile fingers to grasp the man’s shoulders.

“Where—?” he croaked at last. “Where—?”

The laughter ridiculed him again. Two unrecognizable voices were laughing at him.

“Where?” the man snapped. “Thomas Covenant, you are at my mercy. That is the only where which signifies.”

Straining Covenant heaved up his head and found himself staring miserably into Triock’s dark scowl.

Triock? He tried to say the name, but his voice failed him.

“You have slain everything that was precious to me. Think on that, Unbeliever”—he invested the title with abysms of contempt—“if you require to know where you are.”

Triock?

“There is murder and degradation in your every breath. Ah! you stink of it.” A spasm of revulsion knotted Triock’s face, and he dropped Covenant to the ground again.

Covenant landed heavily amid sarcastic mirth. He was still too dazed to collect his thoughts. Triock’s disgust affected him like a command; he lay prostrate with his eyes closed, trying to smell himself.

It was true. He stank of leprosy. The disease in his hands and feet reeked, gave off a rotten effluvium out of all proportion to the physical size of his infection. And its message was unmistakable. The ordure in him, the putrefaction of his flesh, was spreading—expanding as if he were contagious, as if at last even his body had become a violation of the fundamental health of the Land. In some ways, this was an even more important violation than the Despiser’s winter—or rather his stench was the crown of the wind, the apex of Lord Foul’s intent. That intent would be complete when his illness became part of the wind, when ice and leprosy together extinguished the Land’s last vitality.

Then, in one intuitive leap, he understood his sense of bereavement. He identified his loss. Without looking to verify the perception, he knew that his ring had been taken from him; he could feel its absence like destitution in his heart.

The Despiser’s manipulations were complete. The coercion and subterfuge which had shaped Covenant’s experiences in the Land had borne fruit. Like a Stone-warped tree, they had fructified to produce this unanswerable end. The wild magic was now in Lord Foul’s possession.

A wave of grief rushed through Covenant. The enormity of the disaster he had precipitated upon the Land appalled him. His chest locked in a clench of sorrow, and he huddled on the verge of weeping.

But before he could release his pain, Triock was at him again. The Stonedownor gripped the shoulders of his robe, shook him until his bones rattled. “Awaken!” Triock rasped viciously. “Your time is short. My time is short. I do not mean to waste it.”

For a moment, Covenant could not resist; inanition and unconsciousness and grief crippled him. But then Triock’s gratuitous violence struck sparks into the forgotten tinder of Covenant’s rage. Anger galvanized him, brought back control to his muscles. He twisted in Triock’s grip, got an arm and a leg braced on the ground. Triock released him, and he climbed unevenly to his feet, panting, “Hell and blood! Don’t touch me, you—Raver!”

Triock stepped forward as Covenant came erect and stretched him on the dirt again with one sharp blow. Standing over Covenant, he shouted in a voice full of outrage, “I am no Raver! I am Triock son of Thuler!—the man who loved Lena Atiaran-child—the man who took the part of a father for Elena daughter of Lena because you abandoned her! You cannot deny any blow I choose to strike against you!”

At that, Covenant heard laughter again, but he still could not identify its source. Triock’s blow made the pain in his forehead roar; the noise of the hurt confused his hearing. But when the worst of the sound passed, his eyes seemed to clear at last. He forced himself to look up steadily into Triock’s face.

The man had changed again. The strange combination of loathing and hunger, of anger and fear, was gone; the impression he had created that he was using his own anguish cunningly was gone. In the place of such distortions was an extravagant bitterness, a rage not controlled by any of his old restraints. He was himself and not himself. The former supplication of his eyes—the balance and ballast of his long acquaintance with gall—had foundered in passion. Now his brows clenched themselves into a knot of violence above the bridge of his nose; the pleading lines at the corners of his eyes had become as deep as scars; and his cheeks were taut with grimaces. Yet something in his eyes themselves belied the focus of his anger. His orbs were glazed and milky, as if they were blurred by cataracts, and they throbbed with a vain intensity. He looked as if he were going blind.

The sight of him made Covenant’s own rage feel in condign, faulty. He was beholding another of his victims. He had no justification for anger. “Triock!” he groaned, unable to think of any other response. “Triock!”

The Stonedownor paused, allowing him a chance to regain his feet, then advanced threateningly.

Covenant retreated a step or two. He needed something to say, something that could penetrate or deflect Triock’s bitterness. But his thoughts were stunned; they groped ineffectually, as if they had been rendered fingerless by the loss of his ring. Triock swung at him. He parried the blow with his forearms, kept himself from being knocked down again. Words—he needed words.

“Hellfire!” he shouted because he could not find any other reply. “What happened to your Oath of Peace?”

“It is dead,” Triock growled hoarsely. “It is dead with a spike of wood in its belly!” He swung again, staggered Covenant. “The Law of Death is broken, and all Peace has been laid waste.”

Covenant regained his balance and retreated farther. “Triock!” he gasped. “I didn’t kill her. She died trying to save my life. She knew it was my fault, and she still tried to save me. She would fight you now if she saw you like this! What did that Raver do to you?”

The Stonedownor advanced with slow ferocity.

“You’re not like this!” Covenant cried. “You gave your whole life to prove you’re not like this!”

Springing suddenly, Triock caught Covenant by the throat. His thumbs ground into Covenant’s windpipe as he snarled, “You have not seen what I have seen!”

Covenant struggled, but he had no strength to match Triock’s. His fingers clawed and clutched, and had no effect. The need for air began to hum in his ears.

Triock released one hand, cocked his fist deliberately, and hit Covenant in the center of his wounded forehead. He pitched backward, almost fell. But hands caught him from behind, yanked him upright, put him on his feet—hands that burned him like the touch of acid.

He jerked away from them, then whirled to see who had burned him. Fresh blood ran from his yammering forehead into his eyes, clogged his vision, but he gouged it away with numb fingers, made himself see the two figures that had caught him.

They were laughing at him together. Beat for beat, their ridicule came as one, matched each other in weird consonance; they sounded like one voice jeering through two throats.

They were Ramen.

He saw them in an instant, took them in as if they had been suddenly revealed out of midnight by a flash of dismay. He recognized them as two of Manethrall Kam’s Cords, Lal and Whane. But they had changed. Even his truncated vision could see the alteration which had been wrought in them, the complete reversal of being which occupied them. Contempt and lust submerged the former spirit of their health. Only the discomfortable spasms which flicked their faces, and the unnecessary violence of their emanations, gave any indication that they had ever been unlike what they were now.

“Our friend Triock spoke the truth,” they said together, and the unharmonized unison of their voices mocked both Covenant and Triock. “Our brother is not with us. He is at work in the destruction of Revelstone. But Triock will take his place—for a time. A short time. We are
turiya
and
moksha
, Herem and Jehannum. We have come to take delight in the ruin of things we hate. You are nothing to us now, groveler—Unbeliever.” Again they laughed, one spirit or impulse uttering contempt through two throats. “Yet you—and our friend Triock—amuse us while we wait.”

But Covenant hardly heard them. An instant after he comprehended what had happened to them, he saw something else, something that almost blinded him to the Ravers. Two other figures stood a short distance behind Whane and Lal.

The two people he had most ached to see since he had regained himself in Morinmoss: Saltheart Foamfollower and Bannor.

The sight of them filled him with horror.

Foamfollower wore a host of recent battle-marks among his older scars, and Banner’s silvering hair and lined face had aged perceptibly. But all that was insignificant beside the grisly fact that they were not moving.

They did not so much as turn their heads toward Covenant. They were paralyzed, clenched rigid and helpless, by a green force which played about them like a corona, enveloped them in coercion. They were as motionless as if even pulse and respiration had been crushed out of them by shimmering emerald.

And if they had been able to look at Covenant, they would not have seen him. Their eyes were like Triock’s, but much more severely glazed. Only the faintest outlines of pupil and iris were visible behind the white blindness which covered their orbs.

Bannor! Covenant cried. Foamfollower! Ah!

While his body swayed on locked joints, he cowered inwardly. His arms covered his head as if to protect it from an ax. The plight of Bannor and Foamfollower dealt him an unendurable shock. He could not bear it. He quailed where he stood as if the ground were heaving under him.

Then Triock caught hold of him again. The Stonedownor bent him to the dirt, hunched furiously over him to pant, “You have not seen what I have seen. You do not know what you have done.”

Weak, ringless, and miserable though he was, Covenant still heard Triock, heard the whelming passion with which Triock told him that even now he did not know the worst, had not faced the worst. And that communication made a difference to him. It pushed him deep into his fear, down to a place in him which had not been touched by either capture or horror. It drove him back to the calm which had been given to him in Morinmoss. He seemed to remember a part of himself that had been hidden from him. Something had been changed for him in the Forest, something which could not be taken away. He caught hold of it, immersed himself in the gift.

A moment later, he raised his head as if he had come through a dark gulf of panic. He was too weak to fight Triock; he had lost his ring; blood streamed from his damaged forehead into his eyes. But he was no longer at the mercy of fear.

Blinking rapidly to clear his vision, he gasped up at Triock, “What’s happened to them?”

“You have not seen!” Triock roared. Once more, he raised his fist to hammer the Unbeliever’s face. But before he could strike, a low voice commanded simply, “Stop.”

Triock jerked, struggling to complete his blow.

“I have given you time. Now I desire him to know what I do.”

The command held Triock; he could not strike. Trembling he wrenched away from Covenant, then spun back to point lividly toward the stone column and shout, “There!”

Covenant lurched to his feet, wiped his eyes.

Midway between him and the upreared fist of stone stood Elena.

She was robed in radiant green velure, and she bore herself proudly, like a queen. She seemed swathed in an aura of emeralds; her presence sparkled like gems when she smiled. At once, without effort of assertion, she showed that she was the master of the situation. The Ravers and Triock waited before her like subjects before their liege.

In her right hand she held a long staff. It was metal-shod at both ends, and between its heels it was intricately carved with the runes and symbols of theurgy.

The Staff of Law.

But the wonder of its appearance there meant nothing to Covenant compared with the miracle of Elena’s return. He had loved her, lost her. Her death at the hands of dead Kevin Landwaster had brought his second sojourn in the Land to an end. Yet she stood now scarcely thirty feet from him. She was smiling.

A thrill of joy shot through him. The love which had tormented his heart since her fall rushed up in him until he felt he was about to burst with it. Blood streamed from his eyes like tears. Joy choked him so that he could not speak. Half blinded, half weeping, he shrugged off his travail and started toward her as if he meant to throw himself down before her, kiss her feet.

Before he had crossed half the distance, she made a short gesture with the Staff, and at once a jolt of force hit him. It drove the air from his lungs, pitched him to his hands and knees on the hard ground.

“No,” she said softly, almost tenderly. “All your questions will be answered before I slay you, Thomas Covenant, ur-Lord and Unbeliever—beloved.” On her cold lips, the word beloved impugned him. “But you will not touch me. You will come no closer.”

A great weight leaned against his shoulders, held him to the ground. He retched for air, but when he gasped it into his lungs, it hurt him as if he were inhaling disease. The atmosphere around him reeked with her presence. She pervaded the air like rot. On a scale that dwarfed him, she smelled as he did—smelled like—leprosy.

He forced up his head, gaped gasping at her from under the streaming spike of his wound.

With a smile like a smirk or leer, she extended her left hand toward him and opened it, so that he could see lying in her palm his white gold wedding band.

Elena! he retched voicelessly. Elena! He felt that he was being crushed under a burden of impenetrable circumstance. In supplication and futility, he reached toward her, but she only laughed at him quietly, as if he were a masque of impotence enacted for her pleasure.