Wasteland

10

In a heartbeat, from not far off down the corridor, a massive mob of the huge, dark creatures with steaming, soft, dark, slippery skin raced toward Richard and his party. They had materialized all bunched together in a writhing, howling mass. At first, all the waving arms reminded him of nothing so much as a dark mass of wriggling worms. As they ran, gelatinous globs slid off their naked bodies to drip and drop all over the floor.

Mouths wide, they roared with ravenous intent, their howls echoing through the vast, multilevel corridor.

Their large, glossy, almond-shaped eyes seemed nearly as black and wet as their soft, moist flesh. When a thin, semitransparent third eyelid blinked in from the inside corner of each eye, the membrane gave their eyes a slightly milky appearance.

In an instant, Richard’s emotions went from exhausted relief to full fright. He had thought it was over, but now there were suddenly many times the number of Glee as in the attack that had just ended. He took a quick look over his shoulder. None were coming from behind. At least not yet. The soldiers back in that direction were still a long way off. They would never reach Richard and those with him in time.

All of those claws were terrifying enough, but even more frightening were the nasty, oily faces of the creatures. The thin wet skin wrinkled as their wide mouths gaped open, lips pulling back from long, needle-sharp teeth that glistened with stringy slime. The mouths full of white teeth stood out all the more against the dark mass of the creatures.

The few dozen soldiers racing to Richard and Kahlan’s defense from that same direction were suddenly beset by the tall dark shapes slashing away at them with hooked claws. They ran through the midst of the soldiers, overwhelming them with sheer numbers and brute force. The soldiers tried to fight back—even taking down a few of the Glee, which were then trampled underfoot—but they were being hopelessly engulfed and overrun.

Before the Mord-Sith could launch toward them, before Richard had time to think about it, he reacted out of instinct born of white-hot rage.

He thrust both hands toward the threat.

Clarity came to him in a frozen instant in time.

His birthright, that core of his gift deep within that he hadn’t been aware of growing up, but that he had come to know intimately when in the underworld, erupted forth as if it were wild fury brought to life.

In that fraction of a second, everyone seemed to be moving in a dreamlike state so slow that he could see the shock on every face as this sudden new threat materialized out of thin air. The fear and stark terror of what was coming for them was clearly evident on each of those faces. The Mord-Sith, though, lived to defend Richard and Kahlan with their lives, so their fear was layered over with grim resolve, a kind of acknowledgment that they were already dead, so they might as well take down as many of the enemy as they could before there was no power left in their muscles or blood in their veins.

Richard had time to look at each of their beautiful faces, each an image of intelligent beauty, reflecting what could have come of these women had they not been taken at a young age and twisted into killing machines. But now that was what they were, and that visage overlaid whatever else might lie beneath.

In that silent, otherworldly state, everyone seemed to Richard to be moving so slowly so as to almost be statues. He could see the fiercely determined expressions on all of the soldiers as the Glee around them ripped at them with claws and teeth. The whole scene, that instant in time, seemed frozen in midair.

At the same time, Richard could see all the ravenous, wrinkled faces of the Glee—big eyes, small nostril holes, enormous mouths and teeth—all of them struggling in the thick mass, tumbling over one another to be the first to get at Richard and Kahlan. It wasn’t a drive for glory, as a soldier in battle might have, but rather a voracious, communal hunger to kill, like beasts needing to feed.

Richard knew without a doubt by seeing their big, almond-shaped eyes that their gazes, frozen in that moment in time, were mostly fixed on Kahlan. They had also been sent for Richard, but more importantly, for her first. Their claws were all reaching out, trying to be the first to hook her, to be the first to rip her open, to sink those needle-sharp teeth into her flesh.

They had been sent to eliminate not merely Kahlan, but the children she carried, the hope she carried.

He could see in her face that Kahlan knew it as well.

From within the crackling cocoon of power, Richard could see it all, watch it all, as everyone moved only the width of a hair with each lazy tick of time.

A kind of sparkling, spiraling, hissing haze swirled up around him, colors flashing up and down within it. Eddies of light rippled through it. Tiny flashes, sparks of energy, ignited all throughout that haze, uncountable numbers glowing with glittering fluidity. Each of those embers sparked out, only to be reborn and set off yet another cascade of glimmering flashes. It was dazzling. The center of the vortex was warm and protective; it was the energy of his own gift expanding outward.

It reminded him of the first time he stood on Zedd’s wizard’s rock, the way the light threatened to ignite the air around him and the air itself rotated with a dull roar as it swirled like smoke. It engendered that same sense of wonder, that same recognition of unimaginable power being gathered together, of a world he had never known existed coming into being.

He could just see in his peripheral vision that Kahlan, knowing they were coming for her, had straightened her back, the Mother Confessor ready to release her own power. But Richard knew beyond any doubt that in this case, with as many of the dark creatures as there were charging through the soldiers to get at her, she didn’t stand a chance.

None of them did.

Only one thing could stop what was but a heartbeat away from becoming reality. He knew that in two heartbeats, they would all be dead.

Unless he stopped them.

Power, ignited by the spark of his rage and fuelled by the singular gift he carried, filled every fiber of his being, swelling through him, around him, a summoned haze of lethal force. It felt hot, sharp, and violent, as if it were erupting from his very soul and tearing its way through him, eager to get to his hands, eager to do his bidding.

In that quiet, clear instant of inner cognition, of wild rage and hate materialized, he also had time to reflect on everything he had been taught, everything he had read, and everything he had seen about the use of the gift. It was all there in his mind, the memories ready to serve his need. In that instant, it felt as if Zedd were there with him, because this was something Zedd had intimately known and understood.

Now, Richard felt it. It was him. It was wrath itself.

Through it all, even as memories of Zedd warmed him, the thing that stood out in his mind, the thing that mattered, was that he was a war wizard, born of a long line of those rare men.

He had always fought that reality. He had always tried to both master it and avoid it, never comfortable with who he was. But in that crystal-clear instant sparked by raw danger, it all came together.

This was his purpose, his calling, his need.

To his other side, Shale was also lifting a hand to use her power. He knew, in the silence of that soft yet unborn instant inside the swirling haze of rage sparkling all around him, that not only was it not enough, but it wasn’t going to be fast enough. What she was able to do couldn’t begin to match the speed and enormity of the threat. At most, she would only have time to take out one or two of what looked like well over a hundred attackers before the attackers overwhelmed and killed them all.

As much as he admired her courage, this was not for her to do. This was not for the soldiers to do. This was not for the Mord-Sith to do. This was not for the Mother Confessor to do. This was vastly more than any and all of them could begin to do.

This was for Richard to do.

In his mind he realized that the totality of it, while at first seeming overwhelming, simply required a computation of position, distance, degree of angles, numbers of each threat, and their rate of speed as they closed the short distance to their victims.

While the entirety of it was a complex algorithm of various factors, it was, at the same time, a known equation. He knew the foundational formulas from the language of Creation, from notes in a book he had found by First Wizard Baraccus, Secrets of a War Wizard’s Power, written expressly for Richard three thousand years before he had been born. There was also the underlying work done by Baraccus on azimuth observations, and what Richard had learned from the many other books he had read—even The Adventures of Bonnie Day, written by Nathan Rahl—as well as a variety of formulas in the Cerulean scrolls, and several useful ratios from a book his grandfather had once found in the Keep, Continuum Ratios and Viability Predictions. There were computations of gradient angles affected by speed that Richard had already made the same instant he saw the perspective and distances while computing reflective effects of what he intended. He had to factor in the power that he would bring to bear and how it would affect every one of the calculations.

He saw all of those calculations and computations in his mind’s eye in a flicker of time. They were done almost as soon as he saw what would be necessary.

Those calculations came together with instinct honed from every experience in his life, from every battle he had fought, every person and creature he had killed. He wondered why he had never realized it in quite that same way before.

Even as he wondered, he knew that his time spent in the eternity of the underworld—when he had straightened out tangled connections in his gift—had given him inestimable insight he could have gained nowhere else but in the world of the dead.

All of that power crackling around him, was him. It was a creation of his gift. He had brought it into being. It was his to direct. It was his to wield. It was an extension of his fury.

In that instant, at the peak of the swirling haze of colors and flashing points of light surging up from his soul, Richard unleashed his rage.

The air between him and the creatures distorted as it was violently compressed to an infinitely small point. Throughout the palace, through every open window and door, every place open to the sky, air rushed in to fill the void he had created up on the balcony by that sudden compression. It abruptly sucked the air from the lungs of everyone around him, instantly forming ice crystals around their noses and mouths. Their eyes bulged from the sudden pressure difference.

Richard leaned his body forward, arms out, projecting and directing his gift through his hands to push that point he had created toward the enemy. It shifted in among them as they were helplessly suspended in that moment frozen in time. Near the focal point of that pressure gradient some of their chests ripped open from the internal pressure of the air violently escaping as it tried to equalize the pressure in the vacuum around that compression point. Some of their eyes burst.

As Richard pushed that compression point through their midst to position it where it needed to be in the center of the mass, the tissue nearest the steepest portion of the pressure gradient vaporized. From his point of view, what Richard saw was a hole being tunneled right through the creatures, and unfortunately the soldiers, through flesh and bone and steel as he pushed it to where it was going to need to be. Flesh around the vaporizing tissue shredded as it was sucked in toward the point.

But that was only in the first infinitesimal fraction of time before he released the heat and energy he had pulled from the air he had compressed into that point.

Richard, that power’s origin, its genesis, its creator, its commander, gave it what it needed: command.

He pushed his hands out with the effort of pressing that point of concussion not only tighter but also into the midst of the Glee.

When he at last released that compressed energy at that central, infinitesimally small point, it expanded with such a violent detonation that it shook the palace and knocked everyone except Richard from their feet.

The heat of the explosive expansion ignited the air itself. Countless shards of elemental fire, like splinters of white-hot burning glass, tumbled, spun, and flew everywhere inside the expanding discharge of energy. Those glowing splinters of heat flared through everything within the shell of the expanding central point. Flesh, bone, blood, even the steel of the soldiers’ weapons, all fragmented into burning particles that blazed from white hot, to red, to ash, all in one explosive instant.

Richard, though, could see it all drawn out in its full dynamic display.

The air that had been sucked into the palace now had to leave, driven before a violent shockwave. The pressure that had built up broke windows in its brutal rush outward. Air that had been sucked from lungs suddenly rushed back in with a thump and an involuntary gasp.

In that instant of release—the center of it located in the center of the mass of Glee—the concussive energy violently reoccupied the void around the central point with such force that everything ignited in something akin to wizard’s fire, but not concentrated and not actually fire in the same magic-generated sense. This was something else entirely. This was elemental heat and force, a forge of a war wizard’s power unleashed.

To Richard it all was a predetermined, programmed formula unfolding in deliberate stages that he had calculated the instant before releasing the energy he had gathered. To anyone else seeing it happen, it was a sudden detonation that filled the corridor with a blinding flash and thunderous blast, and in that pristine instant of release, they would have felt the hammer of force against their chest as they saw the Glee explode into ash.

Richard felt it all as an extension of his rage unleashed, exquisite, pure, and profoundly violent. It was glorious.

In the ringing silence that followed, the greasy cloud of ash that had been the Glee floated through the air, gradually drifting down.

There were sooty piles of it similar to the ones left in the library’s containment field, even if created in a different manner. There were splatters and smears of it against the walls, the pillars, and on the short wall at the side of the balcony. It covered the floor in a thick mass like the aftermath of a black blizzard.

Amid that devastation were also the gray, ashen remains of the soldiers of the First File who had been coming to protect them. They had been there, caught up in the center of that maelstrom of energy Richard had released.

He had ached with sorrow, even as he had released his power, knowing it would also kill those brave men.