Witch's Oath

22

“Look,” Rikka said, pointing. “Blood. And I can see more out ahead.”

“There’s quite a lot of it, too,” Cassia said as she leaned down, taking a better look. “That will certainly make it easier to follow him. At some point it should start slowing him down, too.”

Richard thought about it briefly and then turned back to Shale. “You can conjure things. So can you conjure blood?”

Shale frowned a little as she considered the question. “I’ve never thought about it before, but now that you ask, I imagine so. If nothing else, I could conjure a pretty good imitation of it.”

“Go ahead and try.” Richard gestured down at the long drizzle of blood on the stone floor. “See if you can make a blood trail that looks like that one.”

Shale lifted her hands, her fingers wavering as she closed her eyes a moment in concentration. A wet swath of blood appeared on the floor, looking very much like the splash beside it that Rikka had found.

“Like that?” she asked as her eyes came open and she dropped her arms.

“Yes, that’s good.”

“Obviously,” Shale said, “you are suggesting that the trail of blood may be a trick?”

Richard put a hand on his hip as he tried to put himself in Michec’s place and think what he would be likely to do. “We have to assume that it’s a possibility. He’s wounded. He doesn’t want to have to fight us right now. He would want to divert us until he can deal with his injuries. The best way to do that would be to lead us into a trap. There are certainly plenty of those down here.”

“You mean like the spiraled dead end.”

Richard nodded to the sorceress.

“How did you know that you could bring the ceiling down like that?” Shale asked, finally getting back to the question she had been burning to ask.

“When I studied the plans, I saw it there. The plans were drawn so that such a trap would be constructed when the place was originally built. The way it was constructed, that ceiling was designed to fall to either trap or crush people. You just had to know how to initiate the trap. When I studied those plans, I could see how the trap could be triggered. It wasn’t too hard. You just had to know the weak spot.”

Shale arched an incriminating eyebrow. “And did you also see the Glee hiding back in there on those same plans?”

“Of course not,” Richard said, waving a hand dismissively. “I saw that in a prophecy while I was in the underworld.”

“Ah. Again a prophecy.” She gestured for him to continue. “And what else did you see?”

“I saw a prophecy that revealed where Michec would go. That’s why I had Vika go there and wait—so that she could stab him just as the prophecy said she would.”

“Then why wasn’t he killed right there and then?” Kahlan asked. “If it was in the prophecy, why didn’t it end right there as the prophecy said?”

Richard let out an unhappy sigh. “Because it was a forked prophecy. I saw that he would go to that spot, Vika would stab him, then we would either kill him or, if events took a less likely turn down the other fork, he would escape. Unfortunately, we are in a complication. A complication has an effect and it can twist events in prophecy.

“It fell the wrong way for us and events in that prophecy ended up taking the other fork. That fork was less clear and soon ends without resolution. Forks in prophecy often aren’t always resolved in the particular prophecy where the first fork occurs. If it takes one of those secondary forks, then you need to find another prophecy that picks up where that particular fork left off. That’s often the problem with prophecy.”

“So then, on the fork in which he escaped, where does he go next?” She looked off down the passageway, as if she might chance to see him. “When and where will we be able to catch him? Could you at least tell that much?”

Richard wiped a hand over his mouth. “That particular prophecy ended either with his death, or his escape down the other fork, but that prophecy didn’t go down that secondary fork. I would have to look for the next prophecy in the chronology to hope to be able to reestablish the event line and tell where he went after he took the fork in which he escaped. I didn’t do that because once prophecy starts forking, the possibilities multiply exponentially.”

Kahlan gave him a dark look. “If you’re thinking of returning to the world of the dead so you can look for that prophecy, you can just forget it. These two children need their father.”

Richard flashed her a reassuring smile. “No, I promise you on my word as a wizard, I have no desire or intention of returning to the underworld to look for that prophecy.”

Kahlan leaned in and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “That’s my boy.”

“So what do we do now?” Shale asked. “Follow this blood trail, or assume it’s a trick?”

Richard put a hand back on his hip, staring down the corridor, thinking. He at last turned to her.

“Send your wasps after him again. Let’s see where they go.”

Shale looked off into the darkness. “I can do that, but we won’t be able to follow them for long. They fly fast.”

“Let’s see if we can follow them long enough to see if they follow the blood or take a different route.”

“How are you going to have the wasps follow him if you don’t know where he is or which way he went?” Berdine asked.

Shale’s mouth widened with a sly smile. “Wasps have an excellent sense of smell. I will give them his scent and they will find him.”

“All right, good,” Richard said. “Send them.”

Shale again lifted her hands and waggled her fingers.

She opened her eyes. “Done.”

Richard looked off down the hall and saw where the buzzing swarm appeared and headed off down the corridor.

“Come on,” he said as he started running. “We need to keep sight of them as long as possible.”