Hateful Things

15

Vika stepped in front of the little girl’s mother as she started to reach for her daughter. Vika lifted her Agiel and, with the weapon pointed toward the mother, began backing her away.

“What a very, very wise decision,” the girl said in a low, husky voice. It was a voice that sounded as if it could crush bone.

Without looking back, Richard lifted a finger behind himself when he sensed Kahlan starting to come forward. At his warning, she stopped in her tracks.

“Please”—Richard rose and held out his hand in invitation—“let’s go in here where we can talk in private.”

Richard didn’t wait for an answer or explain to the others. He strode to the room and opened the double glass doors without slowing, one hand on each handle as he swept into the room, his cape billowing out behind him. The girl glided in after him, glancing over to give Kahlan a murderous look on her way past. Once she was in the room, Richard turned and closed the doors. He twisted the lock so that no one else could enter. With the doors secure, he pulled the thick drapes over them. They had squares of special glass that people couldn’t actually see through, but light could still come in. The drapes prevented that.

Dori, her back straight, slowly strolled around the center of the room, gazing at the walls of books, looking up and around, taking in everything as if viewing it from an alien world.

As large as the room was, it was actually one of the smaller libraries in the palace. All the walls except the one at the end with the glass were lined with shelves reaching up to a high, beamed ceiling. A brass rail with a ladder hooked to it ran past shelf after shelf packed tight with books of every size.

The tooled leather covers on some of the books looked timeworn. Even with their great age, it was easy to see the care with which they had been made to denote their importance. Richard knew, though, that the most dangerous volumes in the library looked simple and not at all important, and that the most important-looking books, crafted with great care and skill, were not actually all that special. It was a simple method the wizards of old used to throw off would-be thieves and those who had no business looking for dangerous spells. It was something, among a great many other things, that Zedd, his grandfather, had taught him.

Each side of the long room had three rows of freestanding bookcases. Some of the cases held enormous, oversize volumes. Some of the covers and spines of those had titles in gold foil. One of the cases had locked glass doors covering the entire face of it, further restricting access to the books it contained in a room that was already highly restricted.

The glass doors weren’t simply locked. Richard knew that the books behind those glass doors were some of the most dangerous of the books in the library, books so dangerous that the wizards of the time when the library had been created did not want to trust the simple trick of making those books look unimportant. Those glass doors were sealed with spells that required considerable skill and Subtractive Magic to open.

Richard knew that many of the most dangerous books, those on the shelves and those behind locked glass doors, spoke of him. They called him by many different names. They spoke of him centuries before he had even been born. They expressed grave warnings, and profound hopes.

On the distant side of the room to Richard’s left, beyond the rows of bookcases, there was a sitting area with three comfortable-looking chairs. Except that he couldn’t imagine anyone using them, because they had the same ugly orange stripes as the chairs in the sitting area outside the library. Richard knew the true purpose of the ugly orange stripes.

In the center of the room, between the rows of bookcases to each side, stood a long, heavy oak table with massive, turned wooden legs. A few wooden chairs sat at random angles around it, as if the people using them had just gotten up for a moment, but never came back. Richard had been one of those people.

A number of simple, unimportant-looking books lay open on the table. Richard was the one, quite a while back, who had left those books there. A few small stacks of books on the table were ones he had collected from the shelves and left there in case he needed to come back to search them for things that could help him. The whole library looked like a cozy, inviting place to read. But Richard knew that, like some others, this room was more than simply a library, and it was anything but cozy.

As Dori gazed about the room, he went to the end of the far wall on his right and pulled the heavy drapes across the tall windows made up of squares of thick, clouded glass. It was a very special type of glass that only the most knowledgeable wizards in an age long past knew how to make. It took not only Additive Magic to create such spiraled glass, but Subtractive as well, to say nothing of special knowledge and arcane skills.

“What are you doing?” Dori asked. She sounded annoyed and impatient.

“Just hoping to make you comfortable,” Richard said over his shoulder as he made sure the drapes were light-tight.

When satisfied, he blew out the flame on one of the nearby reflector lamps. He smiled at her.

“I know how you prefer the dark.”

“I have spent time with that woman, the mother of this body. She has magic,” Dori added with growling distaste. “Magic is not the incomprehensible mystery I thought at first. I have observed the woman and it is not so strong a thing, this magic your kind has.”

“No,” Richard agreed with a sigh. “I suppose not.”

He blew out the flame of another lamp on his way by. With the heavy drapes drawn over the windows and doors, only two lamps, one at either end of the room, were left to light the grand library. They were woefully inadequate for the task and left the middle of the room in deep shadows. Dori smiled her approval. Richard had to be careful not to run into the rows of bookcases.

“What are the terms for my surrender?” he asked as he returned to the center of the room.

“Terrrrms?” she rasped. “No terrrrms.” The very word was obviously distasteful to her. “Surrender is unconditional. In return for saving me the trouble of having to hunt you down and kill you, I will grant you the indulgence of a quick death. It will be terrifyingly painful, of course, but quick. That is your reward for surrendering. That, and the knowledge that you will not have to witness what is to come for the rest of your world. You should be groveling at my feet in gratitude for sparing you that.”

“What about the Mother Confessor?”

Dori frowned her displeasure. “She did not offer to surrender. Unlike you, she still resists the inevitable. She will again feel our claws, but this time, as she screams her lungs out, she will also feel our teeth as they rip her face from her skull. We will suck out her eyes and brains and gorge on her flesh. We will smear her blood on ourselves for the pleasure of the warm, wet, greasy feel of it.”

Richard desperately wanted to draw his sword. Its magic was screaming for release. He denied that magic its urgent need. He controlled his own rage, as the Sisters of the Light had for so long sought to teach him. As he smiled at the little girl, it occurred to him that the Sisters would be proud of how far he had come.

What they wouldn’t have understood, though, was how he was able to turn that fury inward. Richard blew out one of the two remaining lamps by the ugly orange chairs and then returned to the center of the room. In the murky light of the one remaining lamp off in the distance behind him, he could barely see Dori at the opposite end of the long table.

“Who are you, exactly?” Richard asked across the length of the heavy table. “It seems I should be allowed to know who you are, since I have agreed to surrender.”

“I am the Golden Goddess.”

Richard shrugged. “Well, I know that much. What I mean is”—he leaned in—“who are you? What are you?”

Dori effortlessly sprang up onto the top of the other end of the heavy oak table like something out of a nightmare. She slowly walked down the length of the table toward him, her heels clicking with each measured step, a predator locked on to its prey.

“I am the bringer of the tide of my kind,” she said in a low, guttural growl. “A coming tide that will wash over your kind, wash over your world, and drown you all.” She came to a halt above him at his end of the table. She glared down at him. “I am the Golden Goddess, the bringer of that tide.”

In the dead silence, with shadows all around her, she slowly lifted both arms out at her sides and opened her fingers, palms up, summoning that tide forth.

First one began to appear, then another; then the whole room started coming alive with movement. It was just as Kahlan had described it, like scribbles in the air, dizzyingly fast lines upon swirling lines, faster and faster, arcing, looping, tracing through the air, indications of their shape and mass and size. Because it was impossible to make it all fit any notion of what was real, what was solid, what existed, and what didn’t, it was a disorienting sight.

At least it was until those scribbly lines began to thicken, as if they were now being drawn in gooey, muddy water. Those thickening lines began to fuse together, revealing their true forms, until they finally materialized in the gloom all around him. The whole process took only seconds, but in those few seconds, the whole world seemed to change as it suddenly came alive with creatures more terrifying than anything he could have imagined.

“My children,” Dori said in a low, menacing snarl as she held out her arms, this time in introduction. “They have come for you.”

All around, more and more of those scribbles in midair were coalescing into dark, wet shapes, tall, massive, and muscular. They stood on two legs, hunched a little. He could just make out the claws at the ends of powerful arms. Steam or vapor of some kind rose from the black, glistening bodies. Globs of gelatinous material slid down off their lumpy, amphibious-like skin, dripping from the creatures to splash on the floor.

“Who are you?” Richard asked in a whisper as more and more of the creatures were continually materializing in the shadows all around, each one scribbles at first, then becoming its full form, until they packed the room with their tall, black, steaming, dripping shapes.

When their wide mouths opened and their thin lips drew back in a kind of snarl, Richard could see their long, sharp, pointed teeth. Those sharp white teeth stood out against the wet, black bodies. Slime drew out in thin strands between the top and bottom teeth as they opened their mouths wider, hissing with threat.

“Who are you?” Richard asked Dori again, appalled at what he was seeing all around him. “I mean, who are your kind? What are you? What are you called?”

“We are the Gleeeee,” she said, dragging the name out in a guttural growl that was bone-chilling.

Hundreds of them, it seemed, surrounded him, packed into every available space in the library, some even crouched atop the rows of bookcases, all leaning in toward him. The steam rising from their wet bodies collected like a cloud near the ceiling. Their lumpy black skin shimmered in the shadowy light. Their teeth clacked as they snapped their jaws at him.

“The Glee,” Richard repeated.

“Yessss,” she said as she grinned with evil intent.

“But how are you able to be in the body of this girl? How do the Glee travel from your world to ours?”

“I am able to put my mind into this body.”

Richard frowned. “But how?”

“Because I am the one who presently serves as the Golden Goddess, my mind is able to go to those places where I send the Gleeeee. I am able to enter the mind of another. I am now in this pathetic, weak, skin creature.”

Richard gestured up at all the menacing creatures behind her. “And how are your kind able to come here, to our world?”

“We come.” Dori cocked her head. “We collect other worlds. It is what we do.”

Richard realized that, for whatever reason, he wasn’t going to be able to get any better explanation out of her, possibly because she didn’t know how they did it, only that they did. He guessed that maybe it was something like someone asking him how he breathed, how he walked, and how he was able to talk. Like her, he just knew that he did.

He gazed around at the hundreds of creatures packed into the library, their wet bodies sliding against one another as they vied for a better position, trying to get closer to their prey.

“Why did you need to bring so many just to kill me?”

“Because I wanted the Gleeeee to see that your magic is not to be feared so they can tell others. With caution about magic dispelled, we will become a tide that will wash over your world. I am the Golden Goddess. I am the bringer of that tide.”