Into Darkness

59

Sang had been right. As the sun set and night descended on them, the two small but bright moons certainly did provide enough light to see by, especially out in the windswept drylands. Everything, though, was a different shade of gloomy, dark red that seemed to weigh down Richard’s spirits. He wanted to rub his eyes to clear away the bleak shades of reddish color to everything. He had never really appreciated color so much as he did after being in this place. He longed to see the simple colors of his world again.

Thick, heavy clouds frequently scudded past to sometimes obscure the moons, but when that happened they were backlit by the moons and in that way provided enough light to see where they were going. When the moons came out from behind the clouds, it was about as bright as a night with a full moon in his world. It was easily bright enough for their journey, especially in such an open, sandy landscape.

Although the ominous clouds scudding past looked thick and heavy, they didn’t bring rain to this desolate place, and didn’t look like they ever had, making Richard wonder if they could actually be more dust than rain clouds. If they did carry rain, he guessed that for some reason they didn’t release the rain they carried until they reached the swampy parts of this strange world.

Richard had thought at first that the sand would be hard to walk across, but he found instead that in many places it had been packed hard by the howling winds that left ripples in their wake across the face of the dunes. In other places, especially on the lee side of the dunes, the sand was deep and loose, making progress difficult and time-consuming. They hadn’t been traveling long and Richard’s legs already ached from the effort of walking through the places of deep sand.

Enormous, soaring rock peaks thrust up through the sand to impossible heights in random spots all around them, like islands in the sea of sand. The massive stone monarchs watched them pass at their feet. In places when they passed close to the stone towers it hid the two moons, casting them into gloomy shadows.

The rock of those strange peaks was so rough and rugged, composed of faceted, stacked, sheer cliff faces, that Richard couldn’t imagine they could be climbed. He was happy to instead make their way past in the shadows of those rocky peaks.

It looked to Richard that those craggy, monumental prominences of rock stood so tall that they often pierced up into the dark, ruddy clouds continually sweeping past, and that had over the ages caused them to crumble under the forces of wind and weather. All the decaying rock created both the sloping skirts of crumbled rock, and the sandy surface between each of those monstrous stone outcroppings. As the decomposing rock gradually and continually added pieces of debris to the low places between them, the wind tumbled it around and around, breaking it down, until it all turned to sand. Once it was small and light enough, the wind lifted it and carried it across the face of the landscape, shaping it into dunes.

Some of the dunes couldn’t be avoided without a long detour and had to be climbed. The windward sides were sloped gradually enough to be an easy climb, but the lee sides were often quite steep and the sand soft. They had to run down the steepest sections to keep from falling face-first. A few of the dunes were quite high. At the top it gave them a good view of the bleak landscape out ahead of them. From those views, Richard thought it looked endless.

That landscape greatly concerned the Glee, but in their wet wrappings of water weeds, they at least weren’t complaining about being dry. The weeds were tough and were proving surprisingly durable. Richard thought that they were surely mostly worried about fighting the followers of the Golden Goddess. These were not warriors, but they seemed to grasp the necessity of what they were doing and were so far willing.

Some of the followers of the goddess had already visited Richard’s world and fought the people there. Those that hadn’t yet had that experience were probably eager for it. The Glee with Richard were not at all eager to fight.

None of them carried weapons, but of course they didn’t need to. They had wicked weapons at the end of each arm. He had discovered just how skillfully those claws could handle the most delicate of tasks. He hoped that when the time came, they would also be able to fight with them. Their lives would depend on it.

As if reading his thoughts, Vika leaned close. “Do you think they will fight, or run?”

Richard leaned over slightly to speak to her in a low voice. “To tell you the truth, I’ve been wondering that very thing myself. I think, though, that their usefulness may actually be in the shock value they will provide.

“It’s a sure bet that the other Glee with the goddess will never have seen anything like these Glee all wrapped in water weeds come walking out of the drylands. I’m hoping that surprise will make them stop and stare. That hesitancy will give you and me the opportunity to get to the goddess.”

“You’re thinking, then, that if you can take her out quickly, that may take the fight out of her followers?”

Richard nodded. “I’m hoping so. If nothing else, it should cause a lot of confusion. Confused people—and Glee—are easier to take down.”

“What if another one of them is eager, once they see her killed, to become the leader?”

Richard tucked his head down and turned to the side as he leaned a shoulder into a hot gust of wind-driven, reddish sand. He had to wait for it to die down a little before he could answer.

“Then we will simply have to take out any of them who think they would like to become the leader. I have my doubts that the Glee with us will have the nerve to do that. It’s going to be up to you and me. If a different Glee steps up to be in charge only to swiftly meet our blades, I’m hoping that will take the fight out of any of the others who would think to be a leader, and the ones who would be followers willing to fight. If they don’t have a leader, then their whole defense may very well collapse like an army without officers.”

Vika lifted an eyebrow. “Well, that’s not the craziest idea you’ve ever had, but it’s certainly one of the more optimistic ones.”

Richard didn’t want to tell her his doubts and fears. “I’m glad you are with me, Vika.”

She smiled. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

The thought of living in this strange world for the rest of his life had hopeless depression continually clawing at him to take over his emotions. He tried his best to tell himself to worry about one thing at a time. For now, they had a big enough problem to overcome with a fighting force of Glee that had never fought before and seemed more kind and cooperative than vicious. He worried about what they would do when they saw their kind dying.

“When this is done, I need to get back to the device and destroy it,” he told her. “If there are Glee that escape during our attempts to get to the goddess, they could eventually get the same notion as the goddess had to travel to other worlds. We can’t allow the Glee to ever again get to our world.”

“You will get no argument from me.”

Richard glanced over at her. “When that time comes, before I destroy the device, I am going to first have Sang activate it so we can send you back.”

Vika stopped in her tracks and glared at him. “You are going to do no such thing.”

“Vika, there is no reason for both of us—”

“Yes, there is every reason. I am Mord-Sith. I have sworn to protect you with my life.”

“I don’t want you to sacrifice a future you could have in our world.”

Vika stepped closer as she flipped her single braid forward over her shoulder and gripped it in a fist, as if deciding on using that instead of pointing her Agiel at him.

“You gave me a choice in the beginning of how I wished to live my life. This is how I wish to live my life—at your side, protecting you. I never wanted anything else. If I returned without you, my life would have no meaning. This, here, is the choice I made for my life.”

Richard would want her to return and then devote herself to protecting Kahlan and the twins but decided that this wasn’t the time and place to task her with that duty. She would say that there were other Mord-Sith to do that. He didn’t want to argue with her. She still existed partly in that place of madness.

The Glee behind them had slowed to a stop, waiting.

“But you would have a life, Vika,” he said, simply.

“It is my choice, not yours, and besides, maybe I like this world much better than a world full of people. I often find people intolerable.

“You once told me to choose what I wanted to do with my life. I am here by that choice. Do you now intend to revoke your word and deny me the right to choose for myself what I will do with my life?”

Richard slowly let out a deep breath as he scanned the horizon. “No, Vika. I will not deny you the right to choose what you want to do. If it is really your wish to stay here with me, then I will be happy not to be so alone.”

“Good.”

Sang came a little closer and pointed to an outcropping of rock. “That place there will protect us from the wind so we can get a little sleep. There is still a long way to go.”

In was deep in the night. Richard knew they were all tired. He nodded. Sang started back to the others, motioning for them to gather in the protection of the rock for a bit of sleep.

Vika gestured to a spot in the shelter of an overhang of rock where the Glee were headed. “Now that that subject is closed, let’s get some sleep. We have a war waiting on us tomorrow.”