Lord Foul's Bane Read Free

of the kind of bonhomie in which lawyers and ministers specialize. Covenant needed that pause to recover from the dismay of the lawyer's glance. He felt involuntarily ashamed to be the cause of such dismay. For a moment, he could not recollect the conviction which had brought him into town.
But almost at once he began to fume silently. Shame and rage were inextricably bound together in him. I'm not going to let them do this to me, he rasped. By hell! They have no right. Yet he could not so easily eradicate the lawyer's expression from his thoughts. That revulsion was an accomplished fact, like leprosy- immune to any question of right or justice. And above all else a leper must not forget the lethal reality of facts.
As Covenant paused, he thought, I should write a poem.

These are the pale deaths 
which men miscall their lives: 
for all the scents of green things growing, 
each breath is but an exhalation of the grave. 
Bodies jerk like puppet corpses, 
and hell walks laughing-

Laughing- now there's a real insight. Hellfire.
Did I do a whole life's laughing in that little time?
He felt that he was asking an important question. He had laughed when his novel had been accepted- laughed at the shadows of deep and silent thoughts that had shifted like sea currents in Roger's face laughed over the finished product of his book laughed at its presence on the best-seller lists. Thousands of things large and small had filled him with glee. When Joan had asked him what he found so funny, he was only able to reply that every breath charged him with ideas for his next book. His lungs bristled with imagination and energy. He chuckled whenever he had more joy than he could contain.
But Roger had been six months old when the novel had become famous, and six months later Covenant still had somehow not begun writing again. He had too many ideas. He could not seem to choose among them.
Joan had not approved of this unproductive luxuriance. She had packed up Roger, and had left her husband in their newly purchased house, with his office newly settled in a tiny, two-room but overlooking a stream in the woods that filled the back of Haven Farm- left him with strict orders to start writing while she took Roger to meet his relatives.
That had been the pivot, the moment in which the rock had begun rolling toward his feet of clay- begun with rumbled warnings the stroke which had cut him off as severely as a surgeon attacking gangrene. He had heard the warnings, and had ignored them. He had not known what they meant.
No, rather than looking for the cause of that low thunder, he had waved goodbye to Joan with regret and quiet respect. He had seen that she was right, that he would not start to work again unless he were alone for a time; and he had admired her ability to act even while his heart ached under the awkward burden of their separation. So when he had waved her plane away over his horizons, he returned to Haven Farm, locked himself in his office, turned on the power to his electric typewriter, and wrote the dedication of his next novel:
“For Joan, who has been my keeper of the possible.”
His fingers slipped uncertainly on the keys, and he needed three tries to produce a perfect copy. But he was not sea-wise enough to see the coming storm.
The slow ache in his wrists and ankles he also ignored; he only stamped his feet against the ice that seemed to be growing in them. And when he found the numb purple spot on his right hand near the base of his little finger, he put it out of his mind. Within twenty-four hours of Joan's departure, he was deep into the plotting of his book. Images cascaded through his imagination. His fingers fumbled, tangled themselves around the simplest words, but his imagination was sure. He had no thought to spare for the suppuration of the small wound which grew in the centre of that purple stain.
Joan brought Roger home after three weeks of family visits. She did not notice anything wrong until that evening, when