Yet he withheld-clamped his ripped and wailing spirit in a restraint as inhuman as his purpose. His features hardened; his gaze became bleak and desolate, like the Land under the scourge of the Sunbane. “You're right,” he muttered softly. “This is pathetic.”
Straightening his back, he started down the tunnel.
She clinched his numb half-hand and fled with him into darkness. Cries and blows shouted after them, echoed and were swallowed by the Wightwarrens.
As the reflected rocklight faded, they reached an intersection Covenant veered instinctively to the right; but she took the leftward turning because it felt less travelled. Almost at once. she regretted her choice. It did not lead away from the light. Instead, it opened into a wide chamber with fissures along one side that admitted the shining of the molten lake. Sulphur and heat clogged the air. Two more tunnels gave access to the chamber; but they did not draw off the accumulated reek.
The roadway along the rim of the abyss was visible through the fissures. This chamber had probably been intended to allow Mount Thunder's denizens to watch the road without being seen.
The First and Pitchwife were no longer upon the rim. They had retreated into the tunnel after Linden and Covenant. Or they had fallen—
Linden's senses shrilled an alarm. Too late: always too late. Bitterly, she wheeled to face the Cavewights that thronged into the chamber from all three entrances.
She and her companions must have been spotted from this covert when they first made their way past the abyss. And the brief time they had spent watching Vain and Findail had given the Cavewights opportunity to spring this trap.
In the tunnel Linden and Covenant had used, the First and Pitchwife appeared, battling tremendously to reach their friends. But most of the Cavewights hurried to block the Giants’ way. The Swordmain and her husband were beaten back.
Pitchwife's inchoate cry wrung Linden's heart. Then he and the First were forced out of sight. Cavewights rushed in pursuit.
Brandishing cudgels and axes, the rest of the creatures advanced on Covenant and Linden.
He thrust her behind him. took a step forward. Rocklight limned his desperate shoulders. “I'm the one you want.” His voice was taut with suppression and wild magic. “I'll go with you. Leave her alone.”
Rapt and grim, the Cavewights gave no sign that they beard turn. Their eyes smouldered.
“If you hurt her,” he gritted, “I’ll tear you apart.” One of them grabbed him, manacled both his wrists in a huge fist Another raised his club and levelled a crushing blow at Linden's head.
She ducked. The truncheon whipped through her hair, almost touched her skull. Launching herself from the wall, she dodged toward Covenant.
The Cavewights seemed slow. awkward. For a moment, they did not catch her.
Somehow, Covenant twisted his wrists free. He snatched his knife from his belt, began slashing frenetically about him. A Cavewight howled, hopped back. But the blade was deep in the creature's ribs, and Covenant's half-hand failed of its If grip; the knife was ripped from him.
Weaponless, he spun toward Linden. His face stretched as if he wanted to cry out. Forgive!
The Cavewights surrounded him. They did not use their cudgels or axes: apparently, they wanted him alive. With their fists, they beat him until he fell.
Linden tried to reach him. She was avid for power, futile without it. Her arms and legs were useless against the Cavewights. They laughed coarsely at her struggles. Wildly, she groped for Covenant's ring with her health-sense, tried to take hold of it. The infernal air choked her lungs. Bottomless and hungry through the fissures came the boiling of the molten lake. Vain and Findail had fallen. The First and Pitchwife were lost Covenant lay like a sacrifice on the stone. She had nothing left—
She was still groping when a blow came down gleefully on the bone behind her left ear. At once, the world turned over and sprawled into darkness.
Eighteen: No Other Way
THOMAS Covenant lay face down on the floor. It pressed like flat stone against his battered cheek. Bruises malformed the bones of his visage. Though he wanted nothing but peace and salvation, he had become what he was by violence-the consequences of his own acts. From somewhere in the distance arose a throaty murmuring, incessant and dire, like a litany of invocation, dozens of voices repeating the same word or name softly, but with different cadences, at varying speeds. They were still around him, the people who had come to bereave him. They were taunting his failure.
Joan was gone.
Perhaps he should have moved, rolled over, done something to soften the pain. But the effort was beyond him. All his strength was sand and ashes. And be had never been physically strong. They had taken her from him without any trouble at all. It was strange, he reflected abstractly, that someone who had as little to brag of as he did spent so much time trying to pretend he was immortal. He should have known better. God knew he had been given every conceivable opportunity to outgrow his arrogance.
Real heroes were not arrogant. Who could have called Berek arrogant? Or Mhoram? Foamfollower? The list went on and on, all of them humble. Even Hile Troy had finally given up his pride. Only people like Covenant himself were arrogant enough to believe that the outcome of the Earth depended on their purblind and fallible choices. Only people like himself. And Lord Foul. Those who were capable of Despite and chose to refuse it And those who did not Linden had told him any number of times that he was arrogant.
That was why he had to defeat Lord Foul-why the task devolved on him alone.
Any minute now, he told himself. Any minute now he was going to get up from the floor of his house and go exchange himself for Joan. He had put it off long enough. She was not arrogant-not really. She did not deserve what had happened to her. She had simply never been able to forgive herself for her weaknesses, her limitations.
Then he wanted to laugh. It would have done him a world of good to laugh. He was not so different from Joan after all. The only real difference was that he had been summoned to the Land while it was still able to heal him-and while he was still able to know what that meant He was sane-if he was sane-by grace, not by virtue.
In a sense, she actually was arrogant. She placed too much importance on her own faults and failures. She had never learned to let them go.
He had never learned that lesson either. But he was trying. Dear God, he was trying. Any minute now, he was going to take her place in Lord Foul's fire. He was going to let everything go.
But somehow the floor did not feel right. The murmurous invocation that filled his ears and his lungs and his bones called on a name that did not sound like the Despiser's. It perplexed him, seemed to make breathing difficult. He had forgotten something.
Wearily, he opened his eyes, blinked at the blurring of his vision, and remembered where he was.
Then be thought that surely his heart would fail. His bruises throbbed in his skull. He had received them from Cavewights, not from Joan's captors. He did not have long to live.
He lay near the centre of a large cave with rough walls and a ragged ceiling. The air smelled thickly of rocklight, which burned from special stones set into the walls at careless intervals. The cave was crudely oval in shape; it narrowed at both ends to dark, unattainable tunnels. The odour of the rocklight was tinged with a scent of ancient mouldering-rot so old that it had become almost clean again.