The Power That Preserves

Foul! Covenant shrieked. Damn you!

Then he saw other figures pressing forward behind Joan. Mhoram was there; Lena and Atiaran were there; Bannor and Hile Troy were there. Mhoram’s whole face had fallen into yellow rot and running chancrous sores; his eyes cried out through the infection as if they were drowning in a quagmire of atrocious wrong. All Lena’s hair had fallen out, and her bald scalp bristled with tubercular nodules. Atiaran’s eyes were drowning in milky blindness. The grotesque gnarling of Banner’s limbs entirely crippled him. Troy’s eyeless face was one puckered mass of gangrene, as if the very brain within his skull were festering.

And behind these figures stood more of the people Covenant had known in the Land. All were mortally ill, rife and hideous with leprosy. And behind them crowded multitudes more, numberless victims-all the people of the Land stricken and destitute, abominable to themselves, as ruined as if Covenant had brought a plague of absolute virulence among them.

At the sight of them, he erupted. Fury at their travail spouted up in him like lava. Volcanic anger, so long buried under the weight of his complex ordeal, sent livid, fiery passion geysering into the void.

Foul! he screamed. Foul! You can’t do this!

“I will do it,” came the mocking reply. “I am doing it.”

Stop it!

“Give me the ring.”

Never!

“Then enjoy what you have brought to pass. Behold! I have given you companions. The solitary leper has remade the world in his own image, so that he will not be alone.”

I won’t let you!

The Despiser laughed sardonically. “You will aid me before you die.”

“Never! Damn you! Never!”

Fury exalted Covenant-fury as hot as magma. A rage for lepers carried him beyond all his limits. He took one last look at the victims thronging innumerably before him. Then he began to struggle for freedom like a newborn man fighting his way out of an old skin.

He seemed to be standing in the nowhere nothingness of the abyss, but he knew that his physical body still knelt on the floor of the thronehall-With a savage effort of will, he disregarded all sensory impressions, all appearances that prevented him from perceiving where he was. Trembling, jerking awkwardly, he levered his gaunt frame to its feet. The eyes of his body were blind, still caught in Lord Foul’s control, but he grated fiercely, “I see you, Foul.” He did not need eyes. He could sense with the nerves of his stiff cheeks the emanations of power around him.

He took three lumbering, tottering steps, and felt Foul suddenly surge toward him, rush to stop him. Before the Despiser could reach him, he raised his hands and fell fists-first at the Illearth Stone.

The instant his wedding band struck the Stone, a hurricane of might exploded in his hand. Gales of green and white fire blasted through the air, shattered it like a bayamo. The veil of Lord Foul’s assault was shredded in a moment and blown away. Covenant found himself lying on the floor with a tornado of power gyring upward from his halfhand.

He heaved to his feet. With one flex of his arms, he freed his wrists as if the shackles were a skein of lies.

Foul’s penumbral shadow crouched in battle-readiness across the Stone from him. The Despiser brandished his carious eyes as if he were frantic to drive them into Covenant’s heart. “Fool!” he howled shrilly. “Groveller! It is I who rule here! Alone I am your rightful master-and I command the Stone! I will destroy you. You will not so much as touch me!”

As he yelled, he threw out a flare of force which struck Covenant’s hand, embedded itself deep in the core of his ring. Amid its raging gale, the white gold was altered. Cold ill soaked into the metal, forced itself into the ring until all the argent had been violated by green. Again, Covenant felt himself falling out of the thronehall.

Without transition, he found himself on Kevin’s Watch. He stood on the stone platform like a titan, and with his malefic band he alone levied a new Ritual of Desecration upon the Land. All health withered before him. Great Gilden trees splintered and broke. Flowers died. Aliantha grew barren and became dust. Soil turned to sand. Rivers ran dry. Stonedowns and Woodhelvens were overthrown. Starvation and homelessness slew every shape of life that walked upon the earth. He was the Lord of a ruin more absolute than any other, a desolation utterly irreparable.

Never!

With one violent thrust of his will, he struck the green from his ring and returned to the thronehall. His wedding band was immaculate silver, and the slashing wind of its power was wild beyond all emerald mastery.

He almost laughed. The Stone could not corrupt him; he was already as fundamentally diseased as any corruption could make him.

To the Despiser, he rasped, “You’ve had your chance. You’ve used your filthy power. Now it’ s my turn. You can’ t stop me. You’ve broken too many Laws. And I’m outside the Law. It doesn’t control wild magic, it doesn’t control me. But it was the only thing that might have stopped me. You could have used it against me. Now it’s just me-it’s my will that makes the difference.” He was panting heavily; he could not find enough air to support the extremity of his passion. “I’m a leper, Foul. I can stand anything.”

At once, the Despiser attacked him. Foul put his hands on the Illearth Stone, placed his power on the pulsing heart of its violence. He sent green might raving at Covenant.

It fell on him like the collapse of a mountain, piled onto him like tons of wrecked stone. At first he could not focus the ring on it, and it drove him staggering backward. But then he found his error. He had tried to use the wild magic like a tool or weapon, something which could be wielded. But High Lord Mhoram had told him, You are the white gold. It was not a thing to be commanded, employed well or ill as skill or awkwardness allowed. Now that it was awake, it was a part of him, an expression of himself. He did not need to focus it, aim it; bone and blood, it arose from his passion.

With a shout, he threw back the attack, shattered it into a million droplets of rank fever.

Again Lord Foul struck. Power that fried the air between them sprang at Covenant, strove to interrupt the white, windless gale of the ring. Their conflict coruscated through the thronehall like a mad gibberish of lightning, green and white blasting, battering, devouring each other like all the storms of the world gone insane.

Its sheer immensity daunted Covenant, tried like a landslide to sweep the feet of his resolve from under him. He was unacquainted with power, unadept at combat. But his rage for lepers, for the Land, for the victims of Despite, kept him upright. And his Unbelief enabled him. He knew more completely than any native of the Land could have known that Lord Foul was not unbeatable. In this manifestation, Despite had no absolute reality of existence. The people of the Land would have failed in the face of Despite because they were convinced of it. Covenant was not. He was not overwhelmed; he did not believe that he had to fail. Lord Foul was only an externalized part of himself-not an immortal, not a god. Triumph was possible.

So he threw himself heart and soul and blood and bone into the battle. He did not think of defeat; the personal cost was irrelevant. Lord Foul beat him back until he was pressed to the wall at Foamfollower’s side. The savagery of the Stone made a holocaust around him, tore every last flicker of warmth from the air, shot great lurid icicles of hatred at him. But he did not falter. The wild magic was passionate and unfathomable, as high as Time and as deep as Earth-raw power limited only by the limits of his will. And his will was growing, raising its head, blossoming on the rich sap of rage. Moment by moment, he was becoming equal to the Despiser’s attack.

Soon he was able to move. He forged away from the wall, waded like a strong man through the tempest toward his enemy. White and green blasts scalded the atmosphere; detonations of savage lightning shattered against each other. Lord Foul’s fiery cold and Covenant’s gale tore at each other’s throats, rent each other, renewed themselves and tore again. In the virulence of the battle, Covenant thought that Ridjeck Thome would surely come crashing down. But the Creche stood; the thronehall stood. Only Covenant and Lord Foul shook in the thunderous silence of the power storm.

Abruptly, he succeeded in driving Lord Foul back from the Stone. At once, his own fire blazed still higher. Without direct contact, the Despiser’s control over his emerald bane was less perfect. His exertions became more frenzied, erratic. Unmastered force rocked the throne, tore ragged hunks of stone from the ceiling, cracked the floor. He was screaming now in a language Covenant could not understand.

The Unbeliever grabbed his opportunity. He moved forward, rained furious gouts and bolts of wild magic at