The Scribbly Man

15

The man hanging in the restraints thrashed and screamed with the pain of having his eyes plucked out.

“Nolo, be still and listen,” Kahlan commanded.

His agonized cries died out almost immediately in choking fits. He lifted his head, even though he could no longer see anything. Tears of blood ran from his ruined eye sockets.

“Mistress… please… command me.”

There at last was the person Kahlan’s power had taken. Shale had broken the Golden Goddess’s link to the man. The veneer of her control was gone. Nolo hung nearly naked before the Confessor who had taken him with her power, fat, sweaty, smelly, and now unconditionally compliant.

“Tell me who this Golden Goddess is.”

“She came to haunt me. She made me do things I didn’t want to do,” he confessed in a tearful voice. “I don’t know how.”

“I know that much,” Kahlan said. “What else do you know about her? Tell me who she is.”

“She is from another world. She is a collector of worlds. Her people are marauders. She finds worlds for them to raid.”

“How does she get here?”

“I don’t know, Mistress.” He shrugged in misery because he couldn’t adequately answer the question. “She has looked into our world before, but it was always far too distant for her kind to come here. Now, somehow, our world has come into her realm. It is now within her reach.”

Shale motioned Kahlan to step over to her and Richard, out of earshot of Nolo. “This isn’t making any sense. I can’t believe he is really telling the truth.”

“Someone touched by a Confessor’s power has to tell the truth,” Kahlan said. “They have no choice. Their mind, who they were, is gone. All that is left is unfiltered devotion to the Confessor who took them and to what she wants to know.”

“That may be, but this can’t be right. It doesn’t make any sense. This Golden Goddess and her people can’t travel to different worlds, or”—she twirled her hand overhead—“roam among the stars. Such a thing is simply not possible.”

“I’m afraid it is,” Richard said, drawing her attention.

“What are you talking about?”

“Kahlan and I have both traveled to a different world.”

“What world?” the frowning sorceress asked.

“The world of the dead,” Richard said. “We went beyond the veil. We left the world of life, went to the world of the dead, and returned to our world.”

“That’s different,” Shale declared in a fit of annoyance. “The world of life and the world of the dead are both here, in the same place at the same time. They are two sides of the same coin. Only the veil separates them. They function together.

“While it may have been an incredible feat, one I don’t entirely understand, it’s very different from what Nolo is talking about. He is saying that the Golden Goddess’s people venture among the stars, visiting other worlds. That’s simply not possible,” she insisted.

Richard hooked his thumbs in his weapon belt. “I’m afraid it is. I know because I’ve done it.”

Shale’s disbelief was obvious. “You’ve traveled to other worlds.”

“Well, not me.”

“I thought not,” she huffed.

“But I’ve sent other people to a different world.”

Taken off guard, the sorceress made a face. “What are you talking about?”

“When we won the war with the Old World and defeated Emperor Jagang there were many people who didn’t want to live here, in a world with magic. That had been what the war had been about—Jagang and his followers wanted to end magic. So, when we won the war, I sent those people who didn’t want to live in a world with magic to, well, another world, a world without magic.”

Shale planted her fists on her hips. “You sent people to another world.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I used a spectral fold.”

She threw her hands up. “A spectral fold. Of course.” She leaned in with an angry whisper. “What in the name of Creation is a spectral fold?”

“Well,” Richard said as he pinched his lower lip, trying to think how to explain it as simply as possible, “it’s a way of making different worlds that are far away come together so that you can step from one world into the other.”

“Bring worlds together?” She stared with her jaw hanging. She finally gathered her senses. “Have you lost your mind? Such a thing simply isn’t possible.”

“It is,” Kahlan confirmed. “Richard has already done it. I was there. I saw it done.”

“How? And don’t give me any of that spectral-fold nonsense. How could you bring another world, a distant world, together with our world so that you could step from one to another?”

“Here is the easiest way I can explain it. Imagine if you took a piece of paper and put a dot of ink on one side at the edge and then turned the paper over and put another dot on the other side of the paper, but on the edge farthest away from the first dot. You might say they are worlds apart and on opposite sides of the paper. Right? How could you bring those dots—those worlds—together?”

After a moment of thought, Shale folded her arms across her breasts. “You can’t. You can’t bring things together that are physically separated like that.”

“Yes you can. You simply fold the paper around into a cylinder until the dots touch. Dots on different edges, and different sides of the paper, now touch each other.” Richard smiled. “A spectral fold.”

Shale looked off into the distance as she puzzled it out in her head. Finally, once she grasped the concept, she turned back to regard him for a moment with a stern scowl.

“You are a scary man, Richard Rahl.”

“War wizards are supposed to be scary. Part of the job.”

Shale seemed to compose herself as she came to grips with the notion of moving between worlds. “And so you think that is what the Golden Goddess and her people can do? A spectral fold? Bring our worlds together and simply step out of one and into the other?”

Richard shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m only saying that I know it’s possible to go between worlds because I’ve sent people from our world to another one. My half sister wanted to go to that world to start a new life. She left this world and went to that one to live without magic. So what I’m saying is that we can’t discount what Nolo is telling us about them coming here from another world simply because we don’t know how they’re doing it.”

Shale nodded, still thinking of how to reconcile what he had just told her with what she knew. She had a sudden thought.

“What if the scribbly man the Mother Confessor saw, and the tracks I told you about, are them in the process of stepping through. You know, like they are still in that interface between worlds. What if that was what Kahlan saw—one of them in the midst of coming into our world? What if what she saw was him still in transition between worlds?”

Kahlan looked between Shale and Richard. “That actually might make sense. It didn’t seem like he was, I don’t know, all there, I guess you could say. Maybe he was in the process of materializing here. Before our worlds were close enough, they used to try and we would only see a glimmer of them. Now they can come through, so that’s what I saw here.”

Richard considered it a moment. “That certainly might explain it. Why don’t you see what else we can learn from Nolo?”

Kahlan left the two of them to go back to stand before the prisoner. “How will the Golden Goddess try to take our world?”

Nolo struggled to shrug against his helpless fear that he couldn’t properly answer her. “I’m not sure, Mistress—I swear! I do know that she doesn’t understand our world.”

“What do you mean? Our language? Our ways? What doesn’t she understand?”

“No, not those things. Of all the worlds she has found and raided, she has never before encountered a world like ours.”

“You already said that.” Kahlan made a face. “What doesn’t she understand about our world?”

He cried out in terror that he had displeased her by not answering in the way she wished. “Forgive me, Mistress!”

“Pay attention. Answer the question. She has never encountered a world like ours. What has she never encountered before? What doesn’t she understand?”

“Magic.”

Kahlan was taken aback. “She doesn’t understand magic?”

“She has never before encountered a world with magic. The gift—magic—confuses her. She has never seen magic before. She does not understand it.”

Kahlan paused to look over at Richard. This was certainly unexpected. Then again, in a way, it wasn’t. It was entirely possible that magic was unique to their world alone.

“The world Lord Rahl sent those people to was a world without magic,” Shale whispered. “Her world must be like that. That would explain why she doesn’t understand magic.”

Kahlan nodded her agreement before she turned back to Nolo. “Does she fear it? Does she fear magic?”

“She doesn’t know what it is. She is wary of it because it is an unknown to her. She fears you. You have power she cannot comprehend. That is why she tried to kill you, earlier. She will have you dead. But there is one thing she fears more than you and your power.”

“What would that be?”

“She fears the shiny man most of all.”