CHAPTER 9

Again Sammie tried to turn away. Again Richard turned her back.

“What do you mean, you saw death? You need to get yourself under control and talk to me. What do you mean?”

Panting in fear, Sammie swiped at the tears running down her cheeks. She gulped a few quick breaths and pointed, as if it was plain as day, as if he should be able to see it, too.

“She has death in her.”

As she again tried to twist away, Richard tightened his grip on her shoulders. “Calm down. Take a deep breath. Kahlan is unconscious. She can’t hurt you. I’m here with you. I need you to explain what you’re talking about so that we can figure out what you saw. Kahlan is alive. She’s not dead.”

Sammie’s face wrinkled up as tears sprang anew. “But I saw—”

“You’re a sorceress,” he said in a firm voice. “Act like one. Your mother is gone. She may need help, too. This is important. She would want you to stand in her place and do what is needed. You can do that, I know you can.”

Sammie sniffled, trying her best to hold back her tears. She finally nodded.

Ester laid a hand on the girl’s back. “You’re safe, Sammie. Do as Lord Rahl says, now.”

Sammie’s lower lip trembled. She looked from Ester back to Richard.

“Is that what my father saw when he died? Is that what it’s like? Did he have to face that? Did my mother see that too? Is that what we all face when we die?”

Richard squeezed her shoulders in sympathy and spoke softly. “I’m sorry, Sammie, but I can’t answer that. I don’t know what we see when we die. I don’t know what you saw in Kahlan. Now, take a deep breath.”

She took two.

“Better?”

She nodded as she pushed her thatch of dark hair back from the sides of her face.

“All right,” Richard said, “now explain to me what happened.”

Sammie took another steadying breath and then flicked a hand toward Kahlan. “I was connected to her, feeling her pain—you know, the pain of her smaller injuries, like you suggested. I was, well, I was trying to gather up a lot of that pain, collect it, and take it into myself.”

“I understand,” Richard said as he cautiously released her shoulders. “Then what?”

Sammie put one hand on a hip as she pressed the trembling fingers of her other hand to her forehead, trying to remember what had happened. “Well, I don’t know exactly. I don’t know how to explain it.”

“Do your best, child,” Ester urged.

Sammie glanced at her and then looked up at Richard’s eyes. “Do you know the way the sensation of beginning to do a healing is like being caught up in a flow that draws you in, draws you deeper, seeking more of the trouble within the person?”

“Yes, I know what you mean,” Richard said. “It’s like you lose your sense of who you are as you become more and more focused on them and their pain. It feels like you are dissolving into the other person, losing yourself as you slip down into who they are. It seems to gather power from you and in that way pulls you onward.”

Sammie was nodding as he spoke. “That’s what it felt like. When I’ve healed other people, though, I wasn’t pulled in like that. This was stronger than I’ve ever felt before.”

“That’s most likely because they weren’t as badly hurt. It’s the need that draws you toward it. The more serious the trouble, the stronger the need, so the more powerfully it pulls you in. You don’t need to be afraid of that sensation. From what I know, that’s not unusual.”

“That wasn’t the frightening part,” Sammie said as she cast a worried look at Kahlan. Her lower lip started quivering again. She seemed transfixed, unable to look away from Kahlan lying so still on the lambskin.

Richard put a finger under Sammie’s chin and turned her face back toward his. “Go on. Tell me what you saw.”

Sammie knitted her fingers together as she frowned while recalling the experience. “When I started slipping down into her, I began to be drawn in faster and faster. It took me deeper than I had expected. I realized that I wasn’t trying to go down into her, it was just that something kept pulling me down. It was like losing my footing as I slid down a steep, slippery slope.”

“I told you, that’s pretty normal.”

“That’s what I thought at first. But I soon realized that I wasn’t simply going down into her need the way I have with others I’ve healed. I wasn’t just being pulled in. I was being drawn toward something.”

“Toward something? Toward what?” Richard asked.

“Something dark. Something dark and sinister. As I got closer, I heard voices.”

That was something Richard had not expected. “Voices? What kind of voices?”

“At first I didn’t know what the sound was. At first it was a distant buzzing. As I sank ever faster toward the darkness within her, I realized that what I was hearing were screams.”

Richard frowned. “Screams? I don’t understand. What do you mean, you were hearing screams? How could you hear screams?”

Sammie stared off, as if experiencing it again. “It was like a thousand screams all melted together.” She shook her head at her own description, or maybe in an effort to escape the memory. She looked back up at him. “No, not like a thousand. Like a million. Like a million million. It was like an infinite number of screams welling up from a dark place. They were the most horrific, terrifying, anguished screams you can imagine. The kind of screams that seemed as if they might sear the flesh from your bones.”

Richard couldn’t help glancing back down at Kahlan. “Did you see anything?” he asked. “Did you see where these screams were coming from?”

Sammie twisted her hands, bending her fingers as she tried to find words. “I, I was being pulled toward darkness. But then I saw that it wasn’t darkness, exactly.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was more like a writhing mass of forms. That was where the screams were coming from. A turning, churning, tumbling mass of spirits that were all wriggling, struggling, squirming, and screaming at once.”

Richard stood stunned, unable to imagine what was going on.

Sammie looked frustrated trying to come up with the right words for what she had seen. “I’m sorry that I can’t explain it very well, but when I saw it, felt it, I knew that it was death I was seeing. It was death itself. I knew it, that’s all.”

Richard made himself take a breath. “That certainly sounds frightening, and while I can’t explain it, that doesn’t mean that it was death you were seeing.”

Sammie tilted her head to the side as she frowned up at him. “But it was, Lord Rahl. I know it was.”

Richard was impatient to get the young sorceress back to the task of healing Kahlan, but he reminded himself that he had to be understanding of not only her age and inexperience, but her fears. This was all new to her, and her mother was not there to help her. He suspected that she was simply misinterpreting the pain resulting from the seriousness of Kahlan’s injuries.

“Sammie, it was probably the terrible pain, the profound hurt within Kahlan, that you were encountering. I’ve healed grievously injured people before, so I know how frightening it can be. Being immersed in their suffering is a dark and daunting experience. Time seems to stop. The world of life can seem distant. Lost in that strange place with their pain, you know that what is hurting them could kill them, and only you can stop it. You know that they’re facing death if you can’t help them.”

“No,” Sammie insisted as she shook her head. “When I looked through that shimmering green curtain, I knew I was looking beyond the veil into the world of the dead.”

Richard froze still as stone. The room seemed too quiet, too small, too hot.

“What did you say?”

Her tongue darted out to wet her lips. “When I looked beyond that curtain, I knew that I was looking beyond the veil into—”

“You said it was green.”

Sammie’s brow bunched as she fought back new tears. “That’s right.”

“Why would you say it’s green?”

Perplexed, she frowned up at him. “Because it was. It was like a shimmering green curtain of fog. It rippled, brighter and darker, something like a wispy, sheer, transparent green curtain moving in a breath of breeze. It’s kind of hard to describe.

“Beyond that awful veil of green I saw what looked to me like a churning mass of spirits. They were all screaming as if in terrible agony. That was the sound I heard. Some of the forms ripped apart as they screamed, while yet more of them constantly boiled up from the blackness below to take the place of those that disintegrated, in turn adding their ghastly screams to the sea of souls, all fusing into one, long, hopeless cry.

“Some of them saw me and tried to grab for me, but they couldn’t reach through that green veil. Others beckoned me to come to them instead. It was death calling to me, trying to pull me in.”

Richard turned and stared down at Kahlan. He had encountered the underworld a number of times. The veil before the world of the dead was always an eerie green color.

He slowly sank to his knees beside the unconscious form of the woman he loved more than life itself. “Dear spirits, what is going on?”