Stephen Donaldson - Lord Foul's Bane

In time, fatigue came back over him. Prothall called a rest halt on the ledge, and Covenant surprised himself nearly falling asleep that close to a crevice. But the High Lord was pushing toward his goal now, and did not let the company rest long. With his guttering torch, he led the Quest forward again, through darkness into darkness.

As the trek dragged on, their moment-by-moment caution began to slip. The full of the moon was coming, and somewhere ahead Drool was preparing for them. Prothall moved as if he were eager for the last test, and led them along the ledge at a stiff pace. As a result, the lone ur-vile took them all by surprise.

It had hidden itself in a thin fissure in the wall of the crevice. When Covenant passed it, it sprang out at him, threw its weight against his chest. Its roynish, eyeless face was blank with ferocity. As it struck him, it grappled for his left hand.

The force of the attack knocked him backward toward the crevice. For one flicker of time, he was not aware of that danger. The ur-vile consumed his attention. It pulled his hand close to its face, sniffed wetly over his fingers as if searching for something, then tried to jam his ring finger into its ragged mouth.

He staggered back one more step; his foot left the ledge. In that instant, he realized the hungry fall under him. Instinctively, he closed his fist against the ur-vile and ignored it. Clinging to his staff with all the strength of his halfhand, he thrust its end toward Bannor. The Bloodguard was already reaching for him.

Bannor caught hold of the staff.

For one slivered moment, Covenant kept his grip.

But the full weight of the ur-vile hung on his left arm. His hold tore loose from the staff. With the creature struggling to bite off his ring, he plunged into the crevice.

Before he could shriek his terror, a force like a boulder struck him, knocked the air from his lungs, left him gasping sickly as he plummeted. With his chest constricted and retching, unable to cry out, he lost consciousness.

When he roused himself after the impact, he was struggling for air against a faceful of dirt. He lay head down on a steep slope of shale and loam and refuse, and the slide caused by his landing had covered his face. For a long moment, he could not move except to gag and cough. His efforts shook him without freeing him.

Then, with a shuddering exertion, he rolled over, thrust up his head. He coughed up a gout of dirt, and found that he could breathe. But he still could not see. The fact took a moment to penetrate his awareness. He checked his face, found that his eyes were uncovered and open. But they perceived nothing except an utter and desolate darkness. It was as if he were blind with panic-as if his optic nerves were numb with terror.

For a time he did panic. Without sight, he felt the empty air suck at him as if he were drowning in quicksand. The night beat about him on naked wings like vultures dropping toward dead meat.

His heart beat out heavy jolts of fear. He cowered there on his knees, abandoned, bereft of eyes and light and mind by the extremity of his dread, and his breath whimpered in his throat. But as the first rush of his panic passed, he recognized it. Fear-it was an emotion he understood, a part of the condition of his existence. And his heart went on beating. Lurching as if wounded, it still kept up his life.

Suddenly, convulsively, he raised his fists and struck at the shale on either side of his head, pounded to the rhythm of his pulse as if he were trying to beat rationality out of the dirt. No! No! I am going to survive !

The assertion steadied him. Survive! He was a leper, accustomed to fear. He knew how to deal with it. Discipline-discipline.

He pressed his hands over his eyeballs; spots of colour jerked across the black. He was not blind. He was seeing darkness. He had fallen away from the only light in the catacombs; of course he could not see.

Hell and blood.

Instinctively, he rubbed his hands, winced at the bruises he had given himself.

Discipline.

He was alone-alone- Lightless somewhere on the bottom of a ledge of the crevice long leagues from the nearest open sky. Without help, friends, rescue, for him the outside of the mountain was as unattainable as if it had ceased to exist. Escape itself was unattainable unless—

Discipline-unless he found some way to die.

Hellfire!

Thirst. Hunger. Injury-loss of blood. He iterated the possibilities as if he were going through a VSE. He might fall prey to some dark-bred bane. Might stumble over a more fatal precipice. Madness, yes. It would be as easy as leprosy.

Midnight wings beat about his ears, reeled vertiginously across the blind blackscape. His hands groped unconsciously around his head, seeking some way to defend himself.

Damnation!

None of this is happening to me.

Discipline!

A fetal fancy came over him. He caught hold of it as if it were a vision. Yes! Quickly, he changed his position so that he was sitting on the shale slope. He fumbled over his belt until he found Atiaran's knife. Poising it carefully in his half-fingerless grip, he began to shave.

Without water or a mirror, he was perilously close to slitting his throat, and the dryness of his beard caused him pain as if he were using the knife to dredge his face into a new shape. But this risk, this pain, was part of him; there was nothing impossible about, it. If he cut himself, the dirt on his skin would make infection almost instantaneous. It calmed him like a demonstration of his identity.

In that way, he made the darkness draw back, withhold its talons.

When he was done, he mustered his resolution for an exploration of his situation. He wanted to know what kind of place he was in. Carefully, tentatively, he began searching away from the slopes on his hands and knees.

Before he had moved three feet across flat stone, he found a body. The flesh yielded as if it had not been dead long, but its chest was cold and slick, and his hand came back wet, smelling of rotten blood

He recoiled to the slope, gritted himself into motionlessness while his lungs heaved loudly and his knees trembled. The ur-vile- the ur-vile that had attacked him. Broken by the fall. He wanted to move, but could not. The shock of discovery froze him like a sudden opening of dangerous doors; he felt surrounded by perils which he could not name. How had that creature known to attack him? Could it actually smell white gold?

Then his ring began to gleam. The bloody radiation transformed it into a band of dull fire about his wedding finger, a crimson fetter. But it shed no light-did not even enable him to see the digit on which it hung. It shone balefully in front of him, exposed him to any eyes that were hidden in the dark, but it gave him nothing but dread.

He could not forget what it meant. Drool's bloody moon was rising full over the Land.

It made him quail against the shale slope. He had a gagging sensation in his throat, as if he were being force-fed terror. Even the uncontrollable wheeze of his respiration seemed to mark him for attack by claws and fangs so invisible in the darkness that he could not visualize them. He was alone, helpless, abject.

Unless he found some way to make use of the power of his ring.

He fell back in revulsion from that thought the instant it crossed his mind. No! Never! He was a leper; his capacity for survival depended-on a complete recognition, acceptance, of his essential impotence. That was the law of leprosy. Nothing could be as fatal to him-nothing could destroy him body and mind as painfully-as the illusion of power. Power in a dream. And before he died he would become as fetid and deformed as that man he had met in the leprosarium.

No!

Better to kill himself outright. Anything would be better.