“Thomas Covenant, I am going to die.” Once again, he withdrew, muttering half to himself. “That is intolerable.”
He was gone for several moments. When he returned, he set a stool before the chair and sat on it. His eyes were level with Covenant's. With one skeletal finger, he tapped Covenant's half-hand.
“But you possess white gold.” Behind their rheum, his orbs seemed to have no colour. "It is an imperfect metal-an unnatural alliance of metals-and in all the Earth it exists nowhere but in the ring you bear. My arts have spoken to me of such a periapt, but never did I dream that the white gold itself would fall to me. The white gold! Thomas Covenant, you reck little what you wield. Its imperfection is the very paradox of which the Earth is made, and with it a master may form perfect works and fear nothing.
“Therefore” — with one hand, he moved a lens so that it covered Covenant's eyes, distorting everything-“I mean to have that ring. As you know-or have known-I may not frankly sever it from you. It will be valueless to me unless you choose to give it. And in your present strait you are incapable of choice. Thus I must first pierce this veil which blinds your will. Then, while you remain within my grasp, I must wrest the choice I require from you,” A smile uncovered the old cruelty of his teeth. “Indeed, it would have been better for you if you had succumbed to the Lady Alif.”
Covenant began his warning. But before he could complete it, Kasreyn lifted his ocular, focused his left eye through it and the lens. As that gaze struck Covenant's, his life exploded in pain.
Spikes drove into his joints; knives laid bare all his muscles; daggers dug down the length of every nerve. Tortures tore at his head as if the skin of his skull were being flayed away. Involuntary spasms made him writhe like a madman in his bonds. He saw Kasreyn's eye boring into him, heard the seizing of his own respiration, felt violence hacking every portion of his flesh to pieces. All his senses functioned normally.
But the pain meant nothing. It fell into his emptiness and vanished-a sensation without content or consequence. Even the writhings of his body did not inspire him to turn his head away.
Abruptly, the attack ended. The Kemper sat back, began whistling softly, tunelessly, through his teeth while he considered his next approach. After a moment, he made his decision. He added two more lenses to the distortion of Covenant's vision. Then he applied his eye to the ocular again.
Instantly, fire swept into Covenant as if every drop of his blood and tissue of his flesh were oil and tinder. It howled through him like the wailing of a banshee. It burst his heart, blazed in his lungs, cindered all his vitals. The marrow of his bones burned and ran like scoria. Savagery flamed into his void as if no power in all the world could prevent it from setting fire to the hidden relicts of his soul.
All his senses functioned normally. He should have been driven irremediably mad in that agony. But the void was more fathomless than any fire.From this, too, the Elohim had defended him.
With a snarl of frustration, Kasreyn looked away again. For a moment, he seemed at a loss.
But then new determination straightened his back. Briskly, he removed one of the lenses he had already used, replaced it with several others. Now Covenant could see nothing except an eye-watering smear. In the centre of the blur appeared Kasreyn's golden ocular as the Kemper once again bent his will inward.
For one heartbeat or two, nothing happened. Then the smear expanded, and the lucubrium began to turn. Slowly at first, then with vertiginous speed, the chamber spun. As it wheeled, the walls dissolved. The chair rose, though Kasreyn's compelling orb did not waver, Covenant went gyring into night.
But it was a night unlike any he had known before. It was empty of every star, every implication. Its world-spanning blackness was only a reflection of the inward void into which he fell. Kasreyn was driving him into himself.
He dropped like a stone, spinning faster and faster as the plunge lengthened. He passed through a fire which seared him-traversed tortures of knives until he fell beyond them. Still he sped down the gullet of the whirling, the nausea of his old vertigo. It impelled him as if it meant to hurl him against the blank wall of his doom.
Yet he saw everything, heard everything. Kasreyn's eye remained before him, impaling the smear of the lenses. In the distance, the Kemper's voice said sharply, “Slay him.” But the command was directed elsewhere, did not touch Covenant.
Then up from the bottom of the gyre arose images which Covenant feared to recognize. Kasreyn's gaze coerced them from the pit. They flew and yowled about Covenant's head as he fell.
The destruction of the Staff of Law.
Blood pouring in streams to feed the Banefire.
Memla and Linden falling under the na-Mhoram's Grim because he could not save them.
His friends trapped and doomed in the Sandhold. The quest defeated. The Land lying helpless under the Sunbane. All the Earth at Lord Foul's mercy.
Because he could not save them.
The Elohim had deprived him of everything which might have made a difference. They had rendered him helpless to touch or aid the people and the Land he loved.
Wrapped in his leprosy, isolated by his venom, he had become nothing more than a victim. A victim absolutely. The perceptions which poured into him from Kasreyn's orb seemed to tell the whole truth about him. The gyre swept him downward like an avalanche. It flung him like a spear, a bringer of death, into the pith of the void.
Then he might have broken. The wall defending him might have been pierced, leaving him as vulnerable as the Land to Kasreyn's eye. But at that moment, he heard a series of thuds. The sounds of combat; blows exchanged, gasp and grunt of impact. Two powerful figures were fighting nearby.
Automatically, reflexively, he turned his head to see what was happening.
With that movement, he broke Kasreyn's hold.
Freed from the distortion of the lenses,his vision reeled back into the lucubrium. He sat in the chair where the Kemper had bound him. The tables and equipment of the chamber were unchanged.
But the guard lay on the floor, coughing up the last of his life. Over The Husta stood Hergrom. He was poised to spring. Flatly, he said, "Kemper, if you have harmed him you will answer for it with blood."
Covenant saw everything. He heard everything.
Emptily, he said, "Don't touch me."
Sixteen: The gaddhi's Punishment
FOR a long time, Linden Avery could not sleep. The stone of the Sandhold surrounded her, limiting her percipience. The very walls seemed to glare back at her as if they strove to protect a secret cunning. And at the edges of her range moved the hustin like motes of ill. The miscreated Guards were everywhere, jailers for the Chatelaine as well as for the company. She had watched the courtiers at their banquet and had discerned that their gaiety was a performance upon which they believed their safety depended. But there could be no safety in the donjon which the Kemper had created for himself and his petulant gaddhi.