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.”
“Groveller!” 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, groveller-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, groveller.”
“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, honour 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, groveller. 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. “Groveller, 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?”
