Witch's Oath

14

They all moved cautiously through the eerie green light and the still, hazy trailers of smoke left from the fire that consumed Michec’s underworld minions. Those long, hanging tendrils of smoke swirled around them as they made their way among the forest of corpses and the stench of the dead, eager to be away from the place.

“While you were still in the underworld,” Kahlan told Richard from close behind him, “Michec conjured demons that nearly killed us all.”

Richard paused at the opening out into the hallway and looked back at her. “I know. I saw the prophecy that he was going to do that. He has the power to somehow open the veil just enough to pull some of those things into the world of life to do his bidding.”

“Wait.” Shale stepped closer, her hackles up again. “What do you mean, you ‘saw the prophecy that he was going to do that’? You said there is no more prophecy. I have been able to see into the flow of time my whole life. Now I can’t. While I’m not at all happy about it, you said it is because you had to end prophecy to save the world of life.”

Richard leaned out and peered both ways down the hall as far as the visibility from light spheres in brackets on the walls would allow.

“Well, while for all practical purposes that’s true,” Richard said when he pulled his head back from the edge of the opening, “it’s not technically accurate that I ended prophecy. Prophecy is an underworld property and as such it was harmful being here in the world of life, so I sent it back to the underworld where it belongs. In so doing, it ended prophecy in this world, the world of life. But prophecy still exists in the underworld. It can’t be destroyed. It’s a functional part of the underworld. Think of it as an elemental part of eternity playing out every possible outcome as events branch into the future.”

The more he talked, the more Shale’s agitation seemed to bubble up. “Yes, I know, the flow of time and all of its many tributaries that I used to be able to tap into. But if you banished it, how were you able to see it and how could you possibly use it?”

“I’m the one who sent it back to the underworld. I was just in the underworld. See what I mean?”

Shale was still frowning. “No.”

Richard took a patient breath. “Because I was there, in the underworld, where it exists, I had access to prophecy. So, among other things, I took advantage of it while I was there. Since I’m the one who sent it home, it has a certain … familiarity with me.”

“Oh, so now it’s alive?”

“It’s complicated.”

Shale cocked her head. “But you used it?” The way she said it made it sound as if she thought that quite unfair, considering that she no longer could. “You used prophecy?”

“Yes, that’s right. Prophecy is frequently misunderstood.” He turned back to lean toward her a little with an intimidating look. “Even among witch women. I’m a war wizard. Part of my gift is prophecy. That means I can understand prophecy in ways that no other, including witch women, could ever begin to comprehend.

“So, while there, I took the opportunity to access it. When I did, I found a prophecy flowing out of present events that revealed that Michec was going to open the veil enough to pull some of those underworld beings into the world of life.

“I could see that it was a forked prophecy—a this-or-that type. I knew I had to act to block the wrong fork or you would all die. So, when he pulled them through, I was ready.”

Kahlan grabbed a handful of his shirtsleeve. “You were ready? What does that mean?”

“It means that when he fulfilled the first part of the prophecy and pulled those creatures through into this world, at the appropriate moment, I was able to shift it to the alternate fork by blasting them back to where they came from.”

“That was the fire?” Berdine asked as she leaned forward in rapt attention. “You blasted those things apart from the underworld? You burned them to ashes?”

Richard nodded. “Sorry I couldn’t have been quicker. It was rather … difficult to do from where I was at the time.”

“But how?” Berdine asked, caught up in the story. “I mean, if you were there, how could you do that here?”

“The Grace,” he said. “Everything is connected through the Grace. Those creatures were the souls of evil people. But they had once been created through the spark of life that is the Grace. I used that interconnection of everything in order to destroy their existence in this world where they don’t belong. In much the same as I used my ability from there to heal Vika, here.”

“If you could do that,” Shale asked, folding her arms as if she had caught him in a mistake, “then why couldn’t you simply come back through the breach in the veil that Michec created.”

“I could have.” Richard sighed. “But then I wouldn’t have been able to destroy those things and you all could easily have been killed. I had to make a choice—return to fight them and maybe end up having us all be killed, or destroy those things in the world of life before they killed you all. Had I chosen to come back to fight them, the prophecy was not favorable. So, I did what I was sure would work.

“In the end, I was able to do both things, destroy those things and return, because Kahlan thought of a means to show me the way home again. She gave me a path back. It was a much better path than the one Michec had created. His was ugly. Hers was profoundly beautiful.”

After checking the hallway again, Richard motioned to the rest of them. “Come on. We have to catch up with Michec. Everyone keep your eyes open. There is no telling where he could be hiding or what he might try to do.”

“The goddess sent a horde of Glee,” Kahlan said into the silence of the dimly lit hallway. “Shale got rid of them by conjuring snakes.” She realized it sounded like she was tattling on the sorceress. Maybe she was.

Richard looked back with a frown. “Really? How?” he asked the witch woman.

“Ah,” Shale said with a sly smile, “so now you want to know how I did something that you don’t understand and can’t do?”

“That’s right. I would very much like to know how you could do such a thing. It sounds extremely useful. So, how did you make snakes appear?” Richard asked as he gestured ahead, indicating they were going to need to take the hallway that forked to the right.

Shale shrugged, looking rather smug about it. “I thought them into existence.”

Richard paused at the next, dark intersection of stone passageways, bringing them all to a halt again so he could look in both directions. “You thought them into existence?” He turned back to her. “How does that work?”

“I am daughter to a witch woman. As a witch woman myself, I can bring thoughts into physical reality by breaching the separation between thought and reality.”

Richard was the one who now looked astonished. “You mean to say that you can think things into existence? It’s not just an illusion of something, like snakes? They are real?”

“In a way. Those things we bring into reality, because they are a physical manifestation of our thoughts, are in a way part of us. Because of that, they are also in that way connected to us.”

Richard was still staring at her. “But I still don’t get how you can make thoughts real.”

Shale shrugged again, but this time looking earnest. “Remember when you said that a plan for building the People’s Palace and the complication was a way to make the spell-form real? The results of that plan, or spell-form, depend on how you draw it, with how many rooms, how many floors, and so on. In other words, the plan is thought, the building follows the thought into reality.”

“That’s incredible,” Richard said, looking genuinely fascinated.

“Not so incredible. At least not to me. You seem to have breached the veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead—now that is incredible. A witch’s ability is to breach the veil, you might say, but only between thought and reality. If we can think it, in certain case, we can make it real.”

Kahlan remembered all too well those snakes Shale brought into reality. It gave her shivers just thinking about the slithering mass of vipers. She had another thought.

“So then, those vipers the witch woman Shota put on me before could really have killed me?”

Shale gave Kahlan a hard look. “Absolutely.”

Kahlan took a deep breath at the thought. “If it’s something you can do, then why did you collapse at the end. Were you simply exhausted from the effort?”

“Partly,” Shale said as they all started down the dark hallway once more.

She looked uneasy about the question, but when Kahlan keep staring at her, she went on. “When we think something into being, as I said, it is in a way part of us. It is a creation of thought, our thought, and in that way still connected to us. You could even say it remains an integral part of us.”

“So?” Kahlan asked as she watched Richard pick a light sphere up out of a bracket and hold it out ahead as he poked his head into a room to the right.

Shale gave Kahlan a troubled look. “I didn’t recall those thoughts. They were taken away.”

Richard looked back over his shoulder. “What?”

Shale licked her lips with a troubled look. “The snakes attacked the Glee. They were killing them. That was what I intended, why I thought them into existence because I knew they could be deadly. Since the Glee can somehow vanish back into their own world, I knew the danger of doing such a thing. But I only had an instant to do something. It was the only way I could think to stop them before we were all killed.”

Richard’s brow lifted as he smiled. “In other words, it was an act of desperation?”

Shale nodded unhappily as they started out again. “I guess you could put it that way.”

“So what’s the danger part?” Kahlan pressed.

“Well, the problem was, once they were attacked, many of the Glee began to vanish back to their home world, the fangs of many of the snakes, now creatures that existed, holding fast onto them. When they vanished, they took those snakes with them.”

Richard stopped and turned back. “Why is that a problem?”

“Once I think them into existence, they act according to their nature. They do what the real creature would do. In this case they viciously attacked what I consciously thought of as their prey. In a way, they are real creatures, yet they aren’t. Because they were conjured from my thoughts, they acted according to my will. Ordinarily I would simply withdraw the thought that brought them into existence, and they would cease to exist.

“But because there were so many Glee, I had to react out of desperation. I conjured hundreds of them, all at once, and because the snakes were attacking, doing what they do by their nature, they were on the Glee when many of those monsters went back to their own world. I couldn’t withdraw the snakes because there were still Glee coming for us. The Glee that vanished took many of the snakes with them.”

Richard shared a look with Kahlan. She knew that he had realized something significant, but she didn’t know what. It was a look she was all too familiar with. She knew that if she asked, he wouldn’t yet be ready to tell her what he had now realized.

Shale swallowed. “When they were taken away like that, rather than me withdrawing the thought,”—she rubbed her arms—“it feels like something is being ripped out from inside me. It was a rather … brutal sensation. That sensation overwhelmed me, and I lost consciousness for a time.”

Kahlan glanced over at Richard. “That’s when Michec showed up.”

“He wanted to humiliate me for only being able to conjure snakes,” Shale said. “So he made the snakes vanish and brought those demons up from the underworld to show me his power and superiority.”

Richard looked like he just had another thought. “Can you bring anything bigger and more frightening than snakes into existence?”

“It isn’t big and scary that matters,” Shale admonished. “What matters is what works.”

Richard let out a sigh as he started them all moving ahead again. “That’s true enough.”

“The snakes worked,” Shale said. “They did as I intended. They kept the Glee from slaughtering us—from slaughtering your two children.”

Richard nodded his appreciation as he moved into the darkness ahead.

Kahlan put a hand on the back of Shale’s shoulder in appreciation for what she had done, even at great cost to herself.