Thomas Covenant 03: Power That Preserves (56 page)

The Giant stared at him as if he had said something incomprehensible.

“The mud pits! We can hide in one of them—until the fire passes. If you can keep us from drowning.”

Still Foamfollower stared. Covenant feared that the Giant was too far gone in rage to understand what he said. But a moment later Foamfollower took hold of himself. With a sharp convulsion of will, he mastered his desire to fight. “Yes!” he snapped. “Come!” At once, he scuttled away toward the fire.

They raced to find a pool of the bubbling clay near the fire before the hunters caught up with them. Covenant feared that they would be too late; even through the wild roar of the fire, he could hear his pursuers howling.

But the blaze moved with frightful rapidity. While the creatures were still several hundred yards distant, he slapped into the heat of the flames and veered aside, searching for one of the pits.

He could not find one. The rush of heat stung his eyes, half blinded him. He was too close to the fire. It chewed its way through the tree tops toward him like a world-devouring beast. He called to Foamfollower, but his voice made no sound amid the tumult of the blaze.

The Giant caught his arm, snatched him up. Running crouched like a cripple, he headed toward a pool directly under the wall of flame. The twigs and thorns nearest the pit were already bursting into hot orange flower as if they had been brought back to life by fire.

Foamfollower leaped into the mud.

His impetus carried them in over their heads, but with the prodigious strength of his legs he thrust them to the surface again. The mounting heat seemed to scorch their faces instantly. But Covenant was more afraid of the mud. He thrashed frantically for a moment, then remembered that the swiftest way to die in quicksand was to struggle. Straining against his instinctive panic, he forced himself limp. At his back, he felt Foamfollower do the same. Only their heads protruded from the mud.

They did not sink. The fire swept over them while they floated, and long moments of pain seared Covenant’s face as he hung in the wet clay, hardly daring to breathe. His intense helplessness seemed to increase as the fire passed.

When the flames were gone, he and Foamfollower would be left floating in mire to defend themselves as best they could against three wedges of ur-viles without so much as moving their arms.

He tried to draw a large enough breath to shout to Foamfollower. But while he was still inhaling, hands deep in the mud pit caught his ankles and pulled him down.

EIGHTEEN: The Corrupt

He struggled desperately, trying to regain the surface. But the mud clogged his movements, sucked at his every effort, and the hands on his ankles tugged him downward swiftly. He grappled toward Foamfollower, but found nothing. Already he felt he was far beneath the surface of the pit.

He held his breath grimly. His obdurate instinct for survival made him keep on fighting though he knew that he could never float to the surface from this cold depth. Straining against the mud, he bent, worked his hands down his legs in an effort to reach the fingers which held him. But he could not find them. They pulled him downward—he felt their wet clench on his ankles—but his own hands passed through where those hands should have been, must have been.

In his extremity, he seemed to feel the white gold pulsing for an instant. But the pulse gave him no sensation of power, and it disappeared as soon as he reached toward it with his mind.

The air in his lungs began to fail. Red veins of light intaglioed the insides of his eyelids. He began to cry wildly, Not like this! Not like this!

The next moment, he felt that he had changed directions. While his lungs wailed, the hands pulled him horizontally, then began to take him upward. With a damp sucking noise, they heaved him out of the mud into dank, black air.

He snatched at the air in shuddering gasps. It was stale and noisome, like the air in a wet crypt, but it was life, and he gulped it greedily. For a long moment, the red blazonry in his brain blinded him to the darkness. But as his respiration subsided into dull panting, he squeezed his eyes free of mud and blinked them open, tried to see where he was.

The blackness around him was complete.

He was lying on moist clay. When he moved, his left shoulder touched a muddy wall. He got to his knees and reached up over his head; an arm’s length above him, he found the ceiling. He seemed to be against one wall of a buried chamber in the clay.

A damp voice near his ear said, “He cannot see.” It sounded small and frightened, but the surprise of it startled him, made him jerk away and slip panting against the wall.

“That is well,” another timorous voice responded. “He might harm us.”

“It is not well. Provide light for him.” This voice seemed more resolute, but it still quavered anxiously.

“No! No, no.” Covenant could distinguish eight or ten speakers protesting.

The sterner voice insisted. “If we did not intend to aid him, we should not have saved him.”

“He may harm us!”

“It is not too late. Drown him.”

“No.” The sterner voice stiffened. “We chose this risk.”

“Oh! If the Maker learns—!”

“We chose, I say! To save and then slay—that would surely be Maker-work. Better that he should harm us. I will”—the voice hesitated fearfully—“I will provide light myself if I must.”

“Stand ready!” speakers chorused, spreading an alarm against Covenant.

A moment later, he heard an odd slippery noise like the sound of a stick being thrust through mud. A dim red glow the color of rocklight opened in the darkness a few feet from his face.

The light came from a grotesque figure of mud standing on the floor of the chamber. It was about two feet tall, and it faced him like a clay statue formed by the unadept hands of a child. He could discern awkward limbs, vague misshapen features, but no eyes, ears, mouth, nose. Reddish pockets of mud in its brown form shone dully, giving off a scanty illumination.

He found that he was in the end of a tunnel. Near him was a wide pit of bubbling mud, and beyond it the walls, floor, and ceiling came together, sealing the space. But in the opposite direction the tunnel stretched away darkly.

There, at the limit of the light, stood a dozen or more short clay forms like the one in front of him.

They did not move, made no sound. They looked inanimate, as if they had been left behind by whatever creature had formed the tunnel. But the tunnel contained no one or nothing else that might have spoken. Covenant gaped at the gnarled shapes, and tried to think of something to say.

Abruptly the mud pit began to seethe. Directly in front of Covenant, several more clay forms hopped suddenly out of the mire, dragging two huge feet with them. The glowing shape quickly retreated down the tunnel to make room for them. In an instant, they had heaved Foamfollower out onto the floor of the tunnel and had backed away from him to join the forms which stood watching Covenant.

Foamfollower’s Giantish lungs had sustained him; he needed no time at all to recover. He flung himself around in the constricted space and lurched snarling toward the clay forms with rage in his eyes and one heavy fist upraised.

At once, the sole light went out. Amid shrill cries of fear, the mud creatures scudded away down the tunnel.

“Foamfollower!” Covenant shouted urgently. “They saved us!”

He heard the Giant come to a stop, heard him panting hoarsely. “Foamfollower,” he repeated. “Giant!”

Foamfollower breathed deeply for a moment, then said, “My friend?” In the darkness, his voice sounded cramped, too full of suppressed emotions. “Are you well?”

“Well?” Covenant felt momentarily unbalanced on the brink of hysteria. But he steadied himself. “They didn’t hurt me. Foamfollower—I think they saved us.”

The Giant panted a while longer, regaining his self-command. “Yes,” he groaned. “Yes. Now I have taught them to fear us.” Then projecting his voice down the tunnel, he said, “Please pardon me. You have indeed saved us. I have little restraint—yes, I am quick to anger, too quick. Yet without purposing to do so you wrung my heart. You took my friend and left me. I feared him dead—despair came upon me. Bannor of the Bloodguard told us to look for help wherever we went. Fool that I was, I did not look for it so near to Soulcrusher’s demesne. When you took me also, I had no thought left but fury. I crave your pardon.”

Empty silence answered him out of the darkness.

“Ah, hear me!” he called intently. “You have saved us from the hands of the Despiser. Do not abandon us now.”

The silence stretched, then broke. “Despair is Maker-work,” a voice said. “It was not our intent.”

“Do not trust them!” other voices cried. “They are hard.”

But the shuffling noise of feet came back toward Covenant and Foamfollower, and several of the clay forms lit themselves as they moved, so that the tunnel was filled with light. The creatures advanced cautiously, stopped well beyond the Giant’s reach. “We also ask your pardon,” said the leader as firmly as it could.

“Ah, you need not ask,” Foamfollower replied. “It may be that I am slow to recognize my friends—but when I have recognized them, they have no cause to fear me. I am Saltheart Foamfollower, the”—he swallowed as if the words threatened to choke him—“the last of the Seareach Giants. My friend is Thomas Covenant, ur-Lord and bearer of the white gold.”

“We know,” the leader said. “We have heard. We are the
jheherrin
—the
aussat jheherrin Befylam
. The Maker-place has no secret that the
jheherrin
have not heard. You were spoken of. Plans were made against you. The
jheherrin
debated and chose to aid you.”

“If the Maker learns,” a voice behind the leader quavered, “we are doomed.”

“That is true. If he guesses at our aid, he will no longer suffer us. We fear for our lives. But you are his enemies. And the legends say—”

Abruptly the leader stopped, turned to confer with the other
jheherrin
. Covenant watched in fascination as they whispered together. From a distance, they all looked alike, but closer inspection revealed that they were as different as the clay work of different children. They varied in size, shape, hue, timidity, tone of voice. Yet they shared an odd appearance of unsolidity. They bulged and squished when they moved as if they were only held together by a fragile skin of surface tension—as if any jar or blow might reduce them to amorphous wet mud.

After a short conference, the leader returned. Its voice quivered as if it were afraid of its own audacity as it said, “Why have you come? You dare— What is your purpose?”

Foamfollower answered grimly, so that the
jheherrin
would believe him, “It is our purpose to destroy Lord Foul the Despiser.”

Covenant winced at the bald statement. But he could not deny it. How else could he describe what he meant to do?

The
jheherrin
conferred again, then announced rapidly, anxiously, “It cannot be done. Come with us.”

The suddenness of this made it sound like a command, though the leader’s voice was too tremulous to carry much authority. Covenant felt impelled to protest, not because he had any objection to following the
jheherrin
, but because he wanted to know why they considered his task impossible. But they forestalled him by the celerity of their withdrawal; before he could frame a question, half the lights were gone and the rest were going.

Foamfollower shrugged and motioned Covenant ahead of him down the tunnel. Covenant nodded. With a groan of weariness, he began to crouch along behind the
jheherrin
.

They moved with unexpected speed. Bulging and oozing at every step, they half trotted and half poured their way down the tunnel. Covenant could not keep up with them. In his cramped crouch, his lungs ached on the stale air, and his feet slipped erratically in the slimy mud. Foamfollower’s pace was even slower; the low ceiling forced him to crawl. But some of the
jheherrin
stayed behind with them, guiding them past the bends and intersections of the passage. And before long the tunnel began to grow larger. As the number and complexity of the junctions increased, the ceiling rose. Soon Covenant was able to stand erect, and Foamfollower could move at a crouch. Then they traveled more swiftly.

Their journey went on for a long time. Through intricate clusters of intersections where tunnels honeycombed the earth, and the travelers caught glimpses of other creatures, all hastening the same way, through mud so wet and thick that Covenant could barely wade it and shiny coal-lodes reflecting the rocklight of the
jheherrin
garishly, they tramped for leagues with all the speed Covenant could muster. But that speed was not great, and it became steadily less as the leagues passed. He had been two days without food and closer to ten without adequate rest. The caked mud throbbed like fever on his forehead. And the numbness in his hands and feet—a lack of sensation which had nothing to do with the cold—was spreading.

Yet he trudged on. He was not afraid that he would cripple himself; in his weariness, that perpetual leper’s dread had lost its power over him. Feet, head, hunger—the conditions for his return to his own world were being met. It was not the fear of leprosy which drove him. He had other motivations.

The conditions of the trek gradually improved. Rock replaced the mud of the tunnel; the air grew slowly lighter, cleaner; the temperature moderated. Such things helped Covenant keep going. And whenever he faltered, Foamfollower’s concern and encouragement steadied him. League after league, he went on as if he were trying to erase the troublesome numbness of his feet on the bare rock.

At last he lapsed into somnolence. He took no more notice of his surroundings or his guides or his exhaustion. He did not feel the hand Foamfollower placed on his shoulder from time to time to direct him. When he found himself unexpectedly stationary in a large, rocklit cavern full of milling creatures, he stared at it dumbly as if he could not imagine how he had arrived there.

Most of the creatures stayed a safe distance from him and Foamfollower, but a few dragged themselves forward, carrying clay bowls of water and food. As they approached, they oozed with instinctive fear. Nevertheless they came close enough to offer the bowls.