Into Darkness

50

Richard stood unmoving, terrified at the thought of never being able to see Kahlan again. She was his world. He would never see their children, never be able to teach them and watch them grow. Never see them have the life he and Kahlan had fought so hard for them to have.

He would never see Kahlan’s special smile and her beautiful green eyes again.

Richard had never been so frozen in fear and uncertainty before.

Through that fear, though, he realized that if he didn’t do this, it would be the end of his world and the end of Kahlan and their children’s world. If he didn’t take this chance, how could he ever look Kahlan in the eye again once she knew he might have been able to stop the slaughter of everyone in their world, and he hadn’t tried?

Richard looked over at Vika. “What do you think?”

She arched an eyebrow. “You are the Lord Rahl. You care about everyone in this world or you would not have sacrificed everything you did to win freedom for everyone. You fought those long wars for those who depend on you, and because you care that they have a life.

“I know you are going, and I know that nothing I could say would stop you. So why are you even asking me?

“But I am going with you and that is final. I will fight beside you in the struggle you face there, in that world, no less than I have in this world.”

Richard swallowed as he nodded. She was right, of course. She would also be sacrificing everything she knew and the possibility of what the future might bring for her.

He had only entertained the idea of not going as he desperately tried to think of another solution, but deep down inside, just as Vika said, he knew that he had no choice. This was the only way of ending the threat. He had to go, no matter what it cost him, personally.

The lives of everyone in the D’Haran Empire were his responsibility. Not only that, but he cared that the people of his world could live their lives as they wished and in peace. The Grace told the story of each of their lives and it needed to live on. It was not simply a matter of being the Lord Rahl and it being his responsibility. He sincerely wanted people to be able to live their lives as they wanted, to achieve their hopes and dreams. If he didn’t do this, they would know only terror and death.

He was still filled with questions, though. Some, he knew, had no answer, but at least some did.

“How did you get here from your world? You had to have used this device you spoke of, but isn’t it guarded by the goddess or her followers? That device is their way to raid other worlds.”

“The device is in a high place that is very dry,” Sang said. “No one guards it because no one uses it except the goddess and her followers. Only they wish to go to other worlds, so there is no reason to endure such a dry place except when they use the device. They know that it cannot be destroyed, so there is no reason that they would need to guard it.

“Other than her followers, I am the only one who has used it. I went to other worlds they raided to try to find help but I could find none until I saw you fight. I needed to use the device to come here to observe you and see if I thought you could possibly be the one to help stop this. I finally came to know that you are the one.”

“So then you simply went up to where it is and used the device to come here?”

“Yes.”

As Richard considered it, he thought that it made sense. “But the device is not here, in this world, or any of the worlds the goddess collects for hunting grounds. So how do you return to your world without the device to send you back?”

“It is hard to explain.”

“Do your best.”

“You have seen my kind when they fear being killed and they simply vanish?” Sang asked.

“Yes. They sort of turn all scribbly and then they disappear. We all assume they are returning to their own world.”

Sang nodded. “They were. When the device sends us somewhere, it creates a link to our minds. So, when I desire, because I am connected to it through my mind, the device knows my thought that I want to return, and it pulls me back. It does the same with all the Glee you have seen vanish.”

Richard grasped the general idea but couldn’t imagine how it could work. It sounded like magic of some kind, a very powerful, advanced, and incomprehensible magic.

As if he could see that Richard was having trouble understanding it, Sang idly clacked his claws as he tried to think of a better way to explain it. “The way to think of it is that we become attached to the device by a lifeline that it creates when it sends us to another world. Imagine if you went in dangerous water, and you suddenly wanted to go back to shore. When you called out, others pulled you back to shore by that lifeline. In much that way, when we want to go home, the device pulls us back by that lifeline.”

Richard nodded as he considered, still not entirely satisfied. “What you expect of me will not be so easy. If I agreed to come to your world with you, would those who believe as you do fight with me to defeat the goddess and her kind?”

Sang stared at him a long moment. “I cannot say for sure. They are not fighters.”

“This is about their world and their way of life,” Richard pointed out with a rising sense of angry frustration.

Sang nodded. “You are a great leader in your world. Leaders become leaders because they are able to convince others to follow them. The goddess is like this. Although those with me are not fighters, I believe that they might be willing to follow you. At the very least, they can help you in many ways, such as getting you to the goddess and her followers.”

“I need a lot more than having them point me in the right direction.” Richard drummed his fingers on the handle of his sword as he considered. “I think I can understand what you say about how you are able to go back. But how could Vika and I go there, too? We don’t have that link, that lifeline as you called it, for the device to use to pull us there.”

“That is the easy part. When a number of injured Glee returned, they confirmed a theory many of us have. One time when they attacked your people, one of the women with you used magic to create snakes. Many of those snakes bit the Glee, and while we do not fear the snakes in our world, these snakes from your world were killing those Glee with venom. The snakes, once they bit into a Glee, would not let go. The Glee being bitten panicked, called on their lifeline, and the device pulled them back. All they needed to do was to merely think to return, and the device that had sent them was able to know that wish, and it snatched them back to our world.”

“What about this theory you had?”

“The important part is that when they returned, the snakes were still holding on tight to them. That confirmed our theory that if I hold on to something from this world, it will return with me. I myself tested this by holding a rock when I returned, and it came to my world with me. This was also confirmed when some of the Glee returned with parts of your people for the Golden Goddess and their offspring to eat. Those body parts were also used to convince others to join with her.”

Richard remembered quite vividly how the Glee down in the bowels of the People’s Palace had dismembered many of the bodies.

“You are saying, then, that we would hold on to you and we would go there with you to your world when you return? You think it is really that simple?”

Sang gave him a single nod. “Yes.”

Richard considered for a moment. He couldn’t imagine a device with such power, but then, on the other hand, he had sent those who didn’t want to live with magic, including his half sister, to another world without magic. He also had used a device that created a star shift and sent their entire world to another place in the sky. He had seen devices, such as the boxes of Orden and the omen machine, that had unimaginable power, power over the world of life and the world of the dead, so he supposed that even if he hadn’t seen the device the Glee had, he knew that such powerful devices existed. He didn’t really know where most of those devices came from, or who could have made them. For all he knew, it might as well be these same gods.

He looked over at Vika. She simply shrugged.

“If I were to agree to this crazy idea, what would we have to do? Simply hold on to you and we would be pulled back with you?”

“More than that,” Sang said as he stared at Richard for a long moment with a haunted look in his big black eyes. “It is more than simply being pulled back by a lifeline. There is more to it.”

“What do you mean?”

“We must go into darkness.”