kept himself from joining Foamfollower’s terrible scream. The Giant went on, propelled himself with his tortured legs as if he were treading water.
But finally he floundered to a stop. The weight and pain of the lava halted him. He could not wade any farther.
With one last, horrific exertion, he thrust himself upward, reared back, concentrated all his strength in his shoulders. Heaving so hard that he seemed to tear his arms from their sockets, he hurled Covenant toward the bank.
Covenant arched through the blazing light for an instant, clenched himself against the sudden pain of incineration.
He landed on dead cinders five feet from the edge of Hotash Slay. The ashes crunched under him, gave slightly, absorbed some of the impact. Gasping for breath, he rolled, staggered to his knees. He could not see; he was blind with tears. He gouged water out of his eyes with numb fingers, blinked furiously, forced his vision into focus.
Ten or more yards out in the lava, he saw one of Foamfollower’s hands still above the surface. It clenched uselessly for a moment, trying to find a grip on the brimstone air. Then it followed the Giant into the molten depths.
Foamfollower! Covenant cried soundlessly. He could not find enough air to scream aloud. Foamfollower!
The heat beat back at him furiously. And through the pounding blaze came dim shouts-the approaching clamour of pursuit.
Foamfollower! My friend!
Lumbering stiffly, he turned his back on the lava as if it were the grave of all his victims, and moved away into darkness.
After a short distance, he crossed a low, barren ridge, fell into the shallow gully beyond it. At once, a landfall of weariness buried him, and he abandoned himself to sleep. For a long time, he lay in his own night, dreaming of impossible sunlight.
Nineteen: Ridjeck Thome
HE awoke with the acrid taste of brimstone in his mouth, and ashes in his heart. At first, he could not remember where he was; he could not identify the ruined ground on which he lay, or the rasp of sulphur in his throat, or the sunless sky; he could not recollect the cause of his loneliness. How could anyone be so alone and still go on breathing? But after a time he began to notice a smell of sweat and disease under the brimstone. Sweat, he murmured. Leprosy. He remembered.
Frailly, he levered himself into a sitting position in the gully, then leaned his back against one crumbling wall and tried to grasp his situation.
His thoughts hung in tatters from the spars of his mind, shredded by a sale of inanition and loss. He knew that he was starving. That’s right, he said to himself. That’s the way it was. His feet were battered, scored with cuts, and his forehead hurt as if a spike had been driven through his skull. He nodded in recognition. That’s right. That’s the way it was. But his dirty skin was not burned, and his mud-stained robe showed no signs of heat damage. For a while, he sat without moving, arid tried to understand why he was still alive.
Foamfollower must have saved him from the heat by exerting power through him, in the same way that the Giants propelled boats by exerting power through Gildenlode rudders. He shook his head at Foamfollower’s valour. He did not know how he could go on without the help of a friend.
Yet he shed no tears over the Giant. He felt barren of tears. He was a leper and had no business with joy or grief. None, he claimed flatly. The crisis at the Colossus had taken him beyond himself, drawn responses from him which he did not properly possess. Now he felt that he had returned to his essential numbness, regained the defining touchstone of his existence. He was done pretending to be anything more than what he was.
But his work was not done. He needed to go on, to confront the Despiser-to complete, if he could, the purpose which had brought him here. All the conditions of his release from the Land had not yet been fulfilled. For good or ill, he would have to bring Lord Foul’s quest for white gold to an end.
And he would have to do it as Bannor and Foamfollower would have done it-dispassionately and passionately, fighting and refusing to fight, both at once-because he had learned one more reason why he would have to seek out the Despiser. Surrounded in his mind by all his victims, he found that there was only one good answer still open to him.
That answer was a victory over Despite.
Only by defeating Lord Foul could he give meaning to all the lives which had been spent in his name, and at the same time preserve himself, the irremediable fact of who he was.
Thomas Covenant: Unbeliever. Leper.
Deliberately, he looked at his ring. It hung loosely on his emaciated finger-dull, argent, and intractable. He groaned, and started to wrestle himself to his feet.
He did not know why he was still in the Land after Foamfollower’s death-and did not care. Probably the explanation lay somewhere in the breaking of the Law of Death. The Despiser could do anything. Covenant was prepared to believe that in Lord Foul’s demesne all the former Law of the Earth had been abrogated.
He began to make his way up the far side of the gully. He had no preparations to make, no supplies or plans or resources to get ready-no reason why he should not simply begin his task. And the longer he delayed, the weaker he would become.
As he neared the crest of the hill, he raised his head to look around.
There he got his first sight of Foul’s Creche.
It stood perhaps half a league away across a cracked, bare lowland of dead soil and rock, a place which had lain wrecked and riven for so long that it had forgotten even the possibility of life. From the vantage of the hill-the last elevation between him and Foul’s Creche-he could see that he was at the base of Ridjeck Thome’s promontory. Several hundred yards away from him on either side, the ground fell off in sheer cliffs which drew closer to each other as they jutted outward until they met at the tip of the promontory. In the distance, he heard waves thundering against the cliffs, and far beyond the lips of the wedge he could see the dark, grey-green waters of the Sea.
But he gave little attention to the landscape. His eyes were drawn by the magnet of the Creche itself. He had guessed from what he had heard that most of Lord Foul’s home lay underground, and now he saw that this must be true. The promontory rose to a high pile of rock at its tip, and there the Creche stood. Two matched towers, as tall and slender as minarets, rose several hundred feet into the air, and between them at ground level was the dark open hole of the single entrance. Nothing else of the Despiser’s abode was visible. From windows atop the towers, Lord Foul or his guards could look outward beyond the promontory, beyond Hotash Slay, beyond even the Shattered Hills, but the rest of his demesne-his breeding dens, storehouses, power works, barracks, thronehall-had to be underground, delved into the rock, accessible only through that one mouth and the tunnels hidden among Kurash Qwellinir.
Covenant stared across the promontory; and the dark windows of the towers gaped blindly back at him like soulless eyes, hollow and abhorred. At first, he was simply transfixed by the sight, stunned to find himself so close to such a destination. But when that emotion faded, he began to wonder how he could reach the Creche without being spotted by sentries. He did not believe that the towers would be as empty as they appeared. Surely the Despiser would not leave any approach unwatched. And if he waited for dark to conceal him, he might fall off a cliff or into one of the cracks.
He considered the problem for some time without finding any answer. But at last he decided that he would have to take his chances. They were no more impossible than they had ever been. And the ground he had to cross was blasted and rough, scarred with slag pits, ash heaps, crevices; he would be able to find cover for much of the distance.
