In spite of the High Lord’s weight, Quaan ran and vaulted onto Drinny’s back. Shouting to the Warward, “Retreat! Return to the Keep! The Grey Slayer has not lost his hold!” he clapped Drinny with his heels and took the Ranyhyn at a full gallop toward the open gates of Revelstone.
Sixteen: Colossus
THERE were gaps in the darkness during which Covenant knew dimly that rank liquids were being forced into him. They nourished him despite their rancid taste; his captors were keeping him alive. But between these gaps nothing interrupted his bereavement, his loss of everything he could grasp or recognize. He was dismembered from himself. The shrill vermilion nail of pain which the ur-viles had driven through his forehead impaled his identity, his memory and knowledge and awareness. He was at the nadir-captured, conquered, bereft-and only that iron stab in his forehead stood between him and the last numbness of the end.
So when he began to regain consciousness, he jerked toward it like a half-buried corpse, striving to shift the weight which enfolded him like the ready arms of his grave. Cold ebbed into him from the abyss of the winter. His heart laboured; shuddering ran through him like a crisis. His hands clutched uselessly at the frozen dirt.
Then rough hands flopped him onto his back. A grim visage advanced, receded. Something struck his chest. He gasped at the force of the blow. Yet it helped him; it seemed to break him free of imminent hysteria. He began to breathe more easily. In a moment, he became aware that he was beating the back of his head against the ground. With an effort, he stopped himself. Then he concentrated on trying to see.
He wanted to see, wanted to find some answer to the completeness of his loss. And his eyes were open-must have been open, or he would not have been able to perceive the shadowy countenance snarling over him. Yet he could not make it out. His eyeballs were dry and blind; he saw nothing but cold, universal grey smeared around the more compact grey of the visage.
“Up, Covenant,” a harsh voice rasped. “You are of no use as you are.”
Another blow knocked his head to the side. He lurched soddenly. Through the pain in his cheek, he felt himself gaping into the raw wind. He blinked painfully at the dryness of his eyes, and tears began to resolve his blindness into shapes and spaces.
“Up, I say!”
He seemed to recognize the voice without knowing whose it was. But he lacked the strength to turn his head for another look. Resting on the icy ground, he blinked until his sight came into focus on a high, monolithic fist of stone.
It was perhaps twenty yards from him and forty feet tall-an obsidian column upraised on a plinth of native rock, and gnarled at its top into a clench of speechless defiance. Beyond it he could see nothing; it stood against a background of clouds as if it were erect on the rim of the world. At first, it appeared to him a thing of might, an icon of Earthpower upthrust or set down there to mark a boundary against evil. But as his vision cleared, the stone seemed to grow shallow and slumberous, blank; while he blinked at it, it became as inert as any old rock. If it still lived, he no longer had the eyes to see its life.
Slowly, fragments of other senses returned to him. He discovered that he could hear the wind hissing ravenously past him like a river thrashing across rapids; and behind it was a deep, muffled booming like the thunder of a waterfall.
“Up!” the harsh voice repeated. “Must I beat you senseless to awaken you?”
Mordant laughter echoed after the demand as if it were a jest.
Abruptly, the rough hands caught hold of his robe and yanked him off the ground. He was still too weak to carry his own weight, too weak even to hold up his head. He leaned against the man’s chest and panted at his pain, trying with futile fingers to grasp the man’s shoulders.
“Where-?” he croaked at last. “Where-?”
The laughter ridiculed him again. Two unrecognizable voices were laughing at him.
“Where?” the man snapped. “Thomas Covenant, you are at my mercy. That is the only where which signifies.”
Straining, Covenant heaved up his head and found himself staring miserably into Triock’s dark scowl.
Triock? He tried to say the name, but his voice failed him.
“You have slain everything that was precious to me. Think on that, Unbeliever”-he invested the title with abysms of contempt-“if you require to know where you are.”
Triock?
“There is murder and degradation in your every breath. Ah! you stink of it.” A spasm of revulsion knotted Triock’s face, and he dropped Covenant to the ground again.
Covenant landed heavily amid sarcastic mirth. He was still too dazed to collect his thoughts. Triock’s disgust affected him like a command; he lay prostrate with his eyes closed, trying to smell himself.
It was true. He stank of leprosy. The disease in his hands and feet reeked, gave off a rotten effluvium out of all proportion to the physical size of his infection. And its message was unmistakable. The ordure in him, the putrefaction of his flesh, was spreading-expanding as if he were contagious, as if at last even his body had become a violation of the fundamental health of the Land. In some ways, this was an even more important violation than the Despiser’s winter-or rather his stench was the crown of the wind, the apex of Lord Foul’s intent. That intent would be complete when his illness became part of the wind, when ice and leprosy together extinguished the Land’s last vitality.
Then, in one intuitive leap, he understood his sense of bereavement. He identified his loss. Without looking to verify the perception, he knew that his ring had been taken from him; he could feel its absence like destitution in his heart.
The Despiser’s manipulations were complete. The coercion and subterfuge which had shaped Covenant’s experiences in the Land had borne fruit. Like a Stone-warped tree, they had fructified to produce this unanswerable end. The wild magic was now in Lord Foul’s possession.
A wave of grief rushed through Covenant. The enormity of the disaster he had precipitated upon the Land appalled him. His chest locked in a clench of sorrow, and he huddled on the verge of weeping.
But before he could release his pain, Triock was at him again. The Stonedownor gripped the shoulders of his robe, shook him until his bones rattled. “Awaken!” Triock rasped viciously. “Your time is short. My time is short. I do not mean to waste it.”
For a moment, Covenant could not resist; inanition and unconsciousness and grief crippled him. But then Triock’s gratuitous violence struck sparks into the forgotten tinder of Covenant’s rage. Anger galvanized him, brought back control to his muscles. He twisted in Triock’s grip, got an arm and a leg braced on the ground. Triock released him, and he climbed unevenly to his feet, panting, “Hell and blood! Don’t touch me, you-Raver!”
Triock stepped forward as Covenant came erect and stretched him on the dirt again with one sharp blow. Standing over Covenant, he shouted in a voice full of outrage, “I am no Raver! I am Triock son of Thuler! — the man who loved Lena Atiaran-child- the man who took the part of a father for Elena daughter of Lena because you abandoned her! You cannot deny any blow I choose to strike against you!”
At that, Covenant heard laughter again, but he still could not identify its source. Triock’s blow made the pain in his forehead roar; the noise of the hurt confused his hearing. But when the worst of the sound passed, his eyes seemed to clear at last. He forced himself to look up steadily into Triock’s face.