frail to lift his head, too weary to live any longer. Yet he had one more thing to do. He had promised that the Land would be safe. Now he had to ensure its safety.
“Foamfollower?” he wept. “My friend?” With his voice, he begged the Giant to understand him; he lacked the strength to articulate what he had to do.
“Do not fear for me,” Foamfollower replied. He sounded strangely proud, as if Covenant had honored him in some rare way. “Thomas Covenant, ur-Lord and Unbeliever, brave white gold wielder-I desire no other end. Do whatever you must, my friend. I am at Peace. I have beheld a marvelous story.”
Covenant nodded in the blindness of his tears. Foamfollower could make his own decisions. With the flick of an idea, he broke the Giant’s chains, so that Foamfollower could at least attempt to escape if he chose. Then all Covenant’s awareness of his friend became ashes.
As he shambled numbly across the floor, he tried to tell himself that he had found his answer. The answer to death was to make use of it rather than fall victim to it-master it by making it serve his goals, beliefs. This was not a good answer. But it was the only answer he had.
Following the nerves of his face, he reached toward the Illearth Stone as if it were the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of life and death.
As soon as he touched it, his ring’s waning might reawoke. Immense red-green fire pillared upward, towered out of the Stone and his ring like a pinnacle tall enough to pierce the heavens. As he felt its power tearing through the battered hull or conduit of his being, he knew that he had found his fire, the fire for which he was apt like autumn leaves or a bad manuscript. In the heart of the whirling gale, the pillar of force, he knelt beside the Stone and put his arms around it like a man embracing immolation. New blood from his poisoned lip ran down his chin, dripped into the green and was vaporized.
With each moment, the conjunction of the two powers produced more and more might. Like a lifeless and indomitable heart of fury, the Illearth Stone pulsed in Covenant’s arms, laboring in mindless, automatic reflex to destroy him rather than be destroyed. And he hugged it to his breast like a chosen fate. He could not slay the Corruption, but he could at least try to break this corruptive tool; without it, any surviving remnant of the Despiser would have to work ages longer to regain his lost power. Covenant embraced the Stone, gave himself to its fire, and strove with the last tatters of his will to tear it asunder.
The green-white, white-green holocaust grew until it filled the thronehall, grew until it hurricaned up through the stone out of the bowels of Ridjeck Thome. Like fighters locked mortally at each other’s throats, emerald and argent galled and blasted, gyring upward at velocities which no undefended granite could withstand. In long pain, the roots of the promontory trembled. Walls bent; great chunks of ceiling fell; weaker stones melted and ran like water.
Then a convulsion shook the Creche. Gaping cracks shot through the floors, sped up the walls, as if they were headlong in mad flight. The promontory itself began to quiver and groan. Muffled detonations sent great clouds of debris up through the cracks and crevices. Hotash Slay danced in rapid spouts. The towers leaned like willows in a bereaving wind.
With a blast that jolted the Sea, the whole center of the promontory exploded into the air. In a rain of boulders, Creche fragments as large as homes, villages, the wedge split open from tip to base. Accompanied by cataclysmic thunder, the rent halves toppled in ponderous, monumental agony away from each other into the Sea.
At once, ocean crashed into the gap from the east, and lava poured into it from the west. Their impact obscured in steam and fiery sibilation the seething caldron of Ridjeck Thome’s collapse, the sky-shaking fury of sea and stone and fire-obscured everything except the power which blazed from the core of the destruction.
It was green-white, savage wild-mounting hugely toward its apocalypse.
But the white dominated and prevailed.
Twenty One: Leper’s End
IN that way, Thomas Covenant kept his promise.
For a long time afterward, he lay in a comfortable grave of oblivion; buried in utter exhaustion, he floated through darkness-the disengaged no-man’s-land between life and death. He felt that he was effectively dead, insensate as death. But his heart went on beating as if it lacked the wit or wisdom to stop when it had no more reason to go on. Raggedly, frailly, it kept up his life.
And deep within him-in a place hidden somewhere, defended, inside the hard bone casque of his skull-he retained an awareness of himself. That essential thing had not yet failed him, though it seemed to be soaking slowly away into the warm soft earth of his grave.
He wanted rest; he had earned rest. But the release which had brought him to his present dim peace had been too expensive. He could not approve.
Foamfollower is dead, he murmured silently.
There was no escape from guilt. No answer covered everything. For as long as he managed to live, he would never be clean.
He did not think that he could manage to live very long.
Yet something obdurate argued with him. That wasn’t your fault, it said. You couldn’t make his decisions for him. Beyond a certain point, this responsibility of yours is only a more complex form of suicide.
He acknowledged the argument. He knew from experience that lepers were doomed as soon as they began to feel that they were to blame for contracting leprosy, were responsible for being ill. Perhaps guilt and mortality, physical limitation, were the same thing in the end-facts of life, irremediable, useless to protest. Nevertheless Foamfollower was gone, and could never be restored. Covenant would never hear him laugh again.
“Then take peace in your other innocence,” said a voice out of the darkness. “You did not choose this task. You did not undertake it of your own free will. It was thrust upon you. Blame belongs to the chooser, and this choice was made by one who elected you without your knowledge or consent.”
Covenant did not need to ask who was speaking; he recognized the voice. It belonged to the old beggar who had confronted him before his first experience in the Land-the old man who had urged him to keep his wedding band, and had made him read a paper on the fundamental question of ethics.
Dimly, he replied, “You must have been sure of yourself.”
“Sure? Ah, no. There was great hazard-risk for the world which I made-risk even for me. Had my enemy gained the white wild magic gold, he would have unloosed himself from the Earth-destroyed it so that he might hurl himself against me. No, Thomas Covenant. I risked my trust in you. My own hands were bound. I could not touch the Earth to defend it without thereby undoing what I meant to preserve. Only a free man could hope to stand against my enemy, hope to preserve the Earth.”
Covenant heard sympathy, respect, even gratitude in the voice. But he was unconvinced. “I wasn’t free. It wasn’t my choice.”
“Ah, but you were-free of my suasion, my power, my wish to make you my tool. Have I not said that the risk was great? Choiceless, you were given the power of choice. I elected you for the Land but did not compel you to serve my purpose in the Land. You were free to damn Land and Earth and Time and all, if you chose. Only through such a risk could I hope to preserve the rectitude of my creation.”
In his darkness, Covenant shrugged. “I still wasn’t free. That singer-who called me Berek. That revival. The kid who got herself snakebit. Maybe you left me free in the Land, but you didn’t leave me alone in my own life.”
“No,” the voice responded softly. “I had no hand in those chances. Had I done anything at all to shape you, you would have been my tool-effectless. Without freedom, you could not have mastered my enemy-without independence-without the sovereignty of your own allegiance. No, I risked too much when I spoke to you once. I interfered in no other way.”
Covenant did not like to think that he had been so completely free to ruin the Land. He had come so close! For a while, he mused numbly to himself, measuring the Creator’s risk. Then he asked, “What made you think I wouldn’t just collapse-wouldn’t give up in despair?”
The voice replied promptly. “Despair is an emotion like any other. It is the habit of despair which damns, not
