Witch's Oath

16

Following the corridor from the octagonal room, they came to a complex of passageways. Leaning in a little to look into each of them, Richard saw no light spheres. He knew all too well that there were few places as dark as it was underground. Except, of course, the underworld. But that was an entirely different kind of darkness.

In their situation, light wasn’t just safety, it was life, so when Shale pointed and before venturing into the blackness of the opening to the far left, Richard lifted one of the glowing glass spheres from a bracket and took it with him. Each of the Mord-Sith followed his example. Together the group of spheres cast a warm yellowish light a good ways into the distance.

Shale tilted her head toward the first narrow hall to the left. “This way. I can smell the witch man.”

Berdine looked bewildered. “I don’t smell anything other than dust and dankness. What does he smell like?”

Shale gave her a look like it should be obvious. “He smells like a witch.”

“Ah. That makes sense.” Berdine turned her face back toward Richard and rolled her eyes.

Now, instead of their Agiel, each of the Mord-Sith had a knife in her fist. While Mord-Sith were formidable enough with an Agiel, years of training made them more than a little dangerous with a blade. They knew how to cut a person both to cause pain, to cripple, and to bring a swift death, and they weren’t timid about doing either.

Richard didn’t want to dissuade them from keeping knives in hand, but he knew that it wasn’t time yet. The witch man was still quite a distance away and moving quickly. Soon enough he would go to ground.

Kahlan didn’t have her knife out, but from time to time she rested her palm on its hilt, making sure it was still there. Shale did the same. Richard had never seen the sorceress draw her knife, but he suspected she was just as talented with it as she was at so many other things. For that matter, he sometimes thought she could wound with a look.

Richard didn’t bother with his knife. He wasn’t going to use it.

At each room they encountered, one of the Mord-Sith, holding a light sphere in her free hand, slipped in to check for the elusive Moravaska Michec. They had no luck. Richard knew they wouldn’t but he let them check anyway because it was easier and faster than an argument or having to explain.

“The smell of him is getting stronger,” Shale told them. “We’re getting closer to him.”

Rikka and Cassia took that news seriously and went out ahead to check in the darkness.

“All I smell is dust and dampness,” Berdine said to no one in particular.

Richard didn’t bother to tell the Mord-Sith to stay behind. They would likely have ignored the order, and besides, he knew that while Shale said they were closer, they weren’t yet close enough.

Michec had spent years down in the complication. He had trapped people in it, he had kept them prisoner in it, he had turned victims loose in it so he could hunt them. As a result, he knew the place like the back of his hand. Fortunately, because Richard had spent time studying the drawings Edward Harris had shown them, he had a map of the complication in his head and was able to know exactly where they were. He could envision all of the intersections and passageways ahead of them.

Besides knowing the corridors, Richard understood how the wounded witch man thought, the choices he would likely make, and why. As they came to branching passageways, he knew other things as well, and made sure they went the right way. Shale confirmed his conviction at each of the intersections he took without asking her.

In some places they came to large rooms they had to pass through. Those were secondary nodes in the spell-form. Some had smaller rooms off to the sides. He knew Michec wasn’t in any of them, and for the sake of safety from other dangers, he wouldn’t let the Mord-Sith check them. It took a look from him for the Mord-Sith to follow his order and stay out of those rooms.

The witch man was leading them through the most dangerous parts of the complication, hoping they would venture into an ancillary node, the way Kahlan and Shale had dived into a room without a floor that had turned out to be filled with water. Richard didn’t want the Mord-Sith running into trouble by entering places he knew were dangerous, but not necessarily why. When the Mord-Sith again wanted to check, Richard had to reassure them that Michec had gone on ahead, and not to look in those places because they had dangerous magic. Mord-Sith didn’t want anything to do with magic and so didn’t argue.

Because he knew the place so well from the plans, Richard knew that Michec was trying to draw them into a trap. Because the man was wounded from Vika cutting him, he would want to get to a place that would give him an advantage. He would want a place that could help him surprise them and trap them with magic. Richard worried about what kind of magic Michec had at his disposal.

For those reasons and more, Richard knew that the witch man was deliberately heading for a complex dead end. He didn’t really need Shale’s nose to tell him which route Michec was taking, but he let her point out the correct choices at each intersection or cross corridor they encountered. Each time she confirmed what he suspected, it further narrowed down the possible outcomes toward the one he had believed from the first.

With Kahlan being pregnant with the twins, Richard didn’t at all like the idea of taking chances. She had lost their first child. If she lost the twins because they went after the witch man, Richard would never forgive himself. Even so, he knew that the bigger risk was in leaving Michec for some other day. In a way, that was the mistake the witch man had made by leaving Richard alive.

While Richard already knew a great deal about what lay ahead, there was no telling precisely what Michec might be able to do, or what harm he might be able to cause. At the same time, they didn’t really have a choice. It was either try to surprise and fight Michec now, on Richard’s terms, or fight him later at a time of Michec’s choosing and after he had recovered. He might be a dangerous wounded animal, but he was also a weakened animal, so their best chance was to go after him before he could recover.

When they came to a place with four closely placed openings into dark passageways at one side of a spacious room, and one passageway on the opposite side, Shale immediately started for the far-right opening of the four.

Richard reached out and grabbed her arm. “Not that way.”

She shot a puzzled look back over her shoulder. “But I can smell that he went this way.”

“Don’t stand in the opening, yet.” Richard guided her to the passageway to the left of the one she had been about to take. “We are going to need to go this way.”

“Why wouldn’t you want to follow him? We’ve been following him all this way. If you really want to catch him, he went that way. Why stop now?”

“Because that’s a special kind of dead end. It’s a twinned spiral. It’s a deadly part of the constructed spell-form. He intends to use it against us, and trap us in there.”