Into Darkness

47

Richard dismounted and handed the reins to Berdine. Nyda took the reins to Vika’s horse as she slipped to the ground. He gave the rest of them a commanding gesture to get into the Keep. They all recognized the seriousness of the command. Reluctantly, they all followed his orders and rode off toward the arched opening in the Keep wall. He watched Kahlan, with Mord-Sith surrounding her, ride in under the arch and then inside until he knew she was no longer in danger.

Just before she disappeared inside, she turned back to give him a last, brief look. Finally, she disappeared through the opening in the wall, to be greeted by people he could see waiting inside. He wasn’t able to see who they were, but he hoped there were Sisters of Light among them who would be able to protect her. He hoped Chase was still at the Keep. He would certainly protect her.

“Lord Rahl, what are you planning?” Vika asked. “The Mother Confessor said that you have a crazy idea.”

Richard nodded as he continued to share a look with the lone Glee. “She isn’t wrong.”

“So, what is your crazy idea this time?” she asked with a long-suffering sigh.

He flashed her a smile. “I think that Glee wants to talk to us. Let’s go find out what it has to say.”

“The Glee don’t talk. They only come to kill.”

“My crazy idea is that I don’t think that this one intends us any harm.”

She nodded as she started after him. “That is indeed a crazy idea. If you are wrong, and it’s a trap?”

“Then we will deal with it.”

Together, Richard and Vika walked back down the road toward the bridge, scanning the area for trouble as they went. He looked back over his shoulder, up at those ramparts and crenellations in the walls he could see from such a low perspective, but he didn’t see anyone. Kahlan was now safe inside the fortress.

The Glee on the bridge had not moved from where it stood, waiting. Richard continually swept his gaze in every direction, looking for a mass attack, but not actually expecting one. Vika also kept up a sweep of the area, especially the woods, but unlike him, she did expect an attack.

Each time he looked back at the Glee, it hadn’t moved. It watched him coming with big, glossy black eyes. Occasionally its third eyelid would blink across the surface to keep it wet.

The creature, with its soft, moist, mottled black skin, hairless head, big glossy eyes, two small holes for a nose, and wicked claws, looked completely alien standing there on the bridge built by men. Glee weren’t typically anxious. But given how uneasy this one appeared, he thought it must be here for a reason it felt was important enough to overcome its apprehension.

As Richard slowed to a halt in front of the dark creature, he held his hand back and out to the side a little to let Vika know that he wanted her to stay back out of his way and give him room in case he needed to draw his sword. He really didn’t think that was going to be necessary, but as he had learned so often before, it was better to be prepared to act and not need to, than to not be prepared and find out all too suddenly that you should have been ready.

The Glee tipped its head to the side and blinked with its third eyelids, as if studying Richard’s face up close for the first time. It was a disconcerting appraisal by such a dangerous creature. At least its lips weren’t drawn back to expose its needle-sharp teeth.

“I am called Sang.”

Richard blinked in surprise. While it hadn’t said the words out loud, and its mouth hadn’t moved, Richard could clearly hear the words in his head. It was an unnerving sensation to have a voice talk to him from inside his own head.

Vika gasped. “I heard him talk in my head!”

“We can both hear him,” Richard told her under his breath. He looked back at the Glee.

“How is it that I can hear you speak in my head”—he tapped a finger to his temple to show what he meant—“but you make no words that I can hear with my ears?”

Sang cocked his head the other way. “It is how we communicate. The goddess comes into the minds of your kind in much the same way so that she may look through their eyes to see where you are. She has talked to some of you in the way that I talk to you now, in your mind. In that same way, I can speak into your mind in a way that you understand.”

“Can all of your kind do this?”

“Yes. This is how we communicate with each other. I have tried to speak to others in different worlds in this way, but they could not hear me in their minds. Only you and your kind can hear us speak in this way, as some have heard the goddess.”

“Why did you try to speak to those others, in other worlds?” Richard asked.

“For the same reason I speak now to you. But they could not hear me and unlike you, they could be of no help.”

Richard didn’t like riddles but decided to let it slide for the moment.

“I have seen you before, Sang,” he said aloud.

“Yes. I have watched you fight a number of times now.”

“Why have you watched me fight but not participated in those battles with the rest of your kind?”

“I am also Glee, but I am not like those who attacked you. I watched because I wanted to learn about you.”

Richard found that rather worrisome, but at the same time, it was what he had been beginning to believe.

“What have you learned?”

“I have watched and seen you finally discover how to fight the Glee. It is not easy, and no other has ever been able to learn what you have learned. The Glee are very, very dangerous. But you have grasped the way of fighting them effectively. You understand what I am meaning?”

Richard nodded. “Yes. I have learned that their claws, while deadly when used for ripping and tearing at people, are not really made for fighting. I think they are meant for something else. Even so, those claws are obviously very deadly. I have learned how those who fight us use them, and how to defeat them by using their weaknesses.”

Sang cocked his head. “And what are their weaknesses?”

“Most of their arm strength is in close range, not when they extend their arms out to slash. Their shoulders and upper arms are not as strong when extended. I have learned the limitations of their movements, and where in those movements they are slowest and more awkward, and thus most vulnerable. The farther they reach, the weaker their ability to use their arms and the more cumbersome their strikes.”

Sang nodded. “Your kind thinks we are deadly, and that is obviously true in most cases, but in reality, you, Lord Rahl, are more deadly by far.”

Richard was somewhat troubled that Sang knew his name and title, but on the other hand, it told him that this individual shared information with others of his kind, which from what he had observed was rather unusual among Glee. This was obviously a thinking, reasoning creature, even if very different from him.

“Is there a point to all of this?” he asked. “A reason you have been watching me?”

Sang tapped his claws together several times, as if to demonstrate something. They made a clacking sound.

“My kind uses our claws to feed. We eat water plants called flutter weed and float weed. We harvest it with our claws. The webs between our claws help us to maneuver in water.

“We also use our claws to eat muscle snails that stick themselves down to rocks and can hold tight. They are at least as big as your hand and have a broad, powerful foot to hold themselves against rocks. They provide us nourishment.

“We must get our sharp claws in under their broad, shallow shells and then pry and pull them off the rocks. We use our teeth—” He drew his lips back to expose his tightly packed, needle-sharp white teeth. “—to rake the muscle snail’s meat from inside the recess of its shell.

“We also eat other kinds of water plants, delicious varieties of thick, ruffled plants that grow low and tight on rock. We use our teeth to scrape them from the surface of rocks. It is the only way we are able to collect and eat them. We also eat a variety of other snails and use our claws to extract the meat. Mostly, though, the flutter and float weed and the muscle snail are our staple foods which grow in abundance and what our kind has lived on for as long as any of us knows.”

“But something happened, and as a result of that event some of you developed a taste for the flesh of creatures from other worlds?”

Sang let his claws drop back to his sides as he let out a kind of hiss that Richard took for a sigh. He looked somehow remorseful.

“Yes. Some time back, before any of us now living were alive, we were visited by a race from another world. We thought of them as gods. These gods left us a gift. With this gift, we were able to visit other worlds much like they did. In these worlds the Glee visited, they eventually found other things we could eat.

“At first, it was a wondrous device to explore worlds with different kinds of edible plants. In some of these places the Glee found the kind of water weeds and snails that were similar to our favorites and they brought them back for our young.”

Richard and Vika shared a look.

“You mean to say you care for your young?” he asked.

“Of course. We love our young. A male and female Glee will together care for and protect her eggs until they hatch. From the time they hatch, the mother and father bring them food until they grow enough to be able to learn to gather food for themselves.” Sang cocked his head again. “Did the goddess tell your kind something different?”

Richard let out a troubled sigh. “As a matter of fact, we were led to believe that the Glee simply reproduce, somehow, but that you don’t experience love and bonding the way we do. From what we were told, it sounded like your kind didn’t pair together, and producing young was not a meaningful act.”

Sang looked distressed. “That is not true. When we find a mate, we bond for life.”

Richard hooked his thumbs behind his belt as he stole another quick glance at Vika. “This is not what the goddess led us to believe. She gave us a picture of a cold-blooded race that cared only about collecting other worlds and hunting creatures in those worlds for sport as well as to eat. She made it seem that they were born for this purpose and it was all they cared about. We were told that even if the goddess grew old and died, it was not important because they are all the same and of a like mind and basically interchangeable. She said her death would not matter because there would always be another to take her place.”

Sang let out the same kind of hissing sigh as he had before. “The one who calls herself the Golden Goddess lies as easily as she breathes. She lies in order to strike fear into the hearts of those she intends her followers to hunt. They have developed a taste for the flesh of other creatures, including, most of all, your kind.”

“A taste for people?”

Sang nodded. “You are the only thinking creatures we know of that are in some ways similar to us. We have so far discovered no others. The other worlds we have discovered have at most lower creatures such as insects and other small creatures without the ability to understand our voice, much like float weed and muscle snails cannot hear our voices.

“The goddess and her followers find great satisfaction in hunting down, killing, and eating your kind more than any that has been found before in the worlds she collects. She will tell anyone from your world anything that makes it easier for the Glee to succeed in hunting and killing, hoping your kind never learns any of our weaknesses, as you have. Creatures that are terrified don’t fight back effectively. That makes them easier to kill.

“The goddess and her followers have come to highly desire the flesh of other creatures more advanced than the muscle snails of our world, and especially after the game of hunting your kind. The hunting has become the purpose of many, and they do not even devour all they catch. The fighters the goddess sends out to other worlds are all males, like me. They bring some of their kills back to feed their females, the young, and the goddess.

“Those of us like me find the idea of eating thinking, reasoning creatures like you to be not only wrong, but abhorrent. Those with the goddess don’t care about our objections, and as you have seen, they have embraced violence and they now eat your kind exclusively. They are even willing to use violence against their own kind in order to hold power so that they may continue doing as they wish.”

Richard was disturbed to learn how much of what they had been told wasn’t true. It changed everything.

“I have noticed that unlike all the rest of the Glee, you have a greenish iridescence to your flesh, especially over the top of your head.”

Sang nodded. “It is because of the flutter and float weed as well as some other plants of our world that we eat. Those plants we prefer to eat have this same shimmering green color. Those who have turned to eating the flesh of creatures in other worlds, especially your kind, no longer eat the food from our world and so they quickly lose this coloring.”

That certainly explained the color Richard noticed on Sang that he hadn’t seen on the other Glee. “I’m glad that there are some of you who don’t want to eat us. I would much rather cooperate with you and those like you.”

“It is the same with the others who side with me. You are the first creatures that I found who will fight back, which, of course, excites those who follow the goddess. And among your kind, you are the most effective at fighting and killing the Glee to stop them. I have been looking for one like you for a very, very long time, hoping all the time that I would find one.”

“For what purpose?”

“To help us kill the goddess, of course.”

“Of course,” Richard said.