Into Darkness Read online

  Kahlan could see that it was like trying to reason with a stone wall.

  “You two have selfishly put your own wishes ahead of the greater good. Once they are old enough, the power those two children possess will be profound. Your teaching will not be able to control such corrupting power.”

  Richard’s features hardened. “You need to stop this right now, Shota. I will not allow you to harm us or our children.”

  Shota slowly shook her head as she gazed into his eyes. “Better you battle the Keeper of the underworld himself, than me.”

  Richard gripped her wrist and pulled her hand away from his throat. “You think so much of yourself, do you? We already faced your witch and your oath in the form of Moravaska Michec. You should know that he died with my hands around his throat and Kahlan twisting her knife in his heart.”

  Shota flicked her hand dismissively. “A warlock. Such men are a poor excuse for a true witch.”

  “He was a witch man,” Kahlan said. “You are a witch woman. A witch is a witch.”

  “Hardly,” she huffed. “Witch women and witch men are from two entirely different lines. A witch man is not a witch by being born of a witch woman. Similar to Confessors, witch women don’t give birth to boys. At least, none that live long. A witch man is the son of a witch man and a woman with no power. He does not carry the same heredity and power as a witch woman.

  “While they like to think of themselves as more than they are, and while they certainly have great power and can cause a great deal of trouble, they are but a mere shadow of a true witch. His power was but a flea on the back of a wolf compared to mine. I let him have a try at enforcing my witch’s oath, but in the end, he was an inferior witch and proved himself as much.

  “He originally attached himself to Darken Rahl because he intuitively grasped the reality of his limitations as a witch and so he sought to add to his power through his association with a powerful wizard. Darken Rahl allowed him to indulge his sick desires because he was useful in the same way a vicious dog can be useful. Michec was a cruel man whom people feared—with good reason. But he made the mistake of thinking that because people feared him, that made him a more important witch than he actually was.

  “With Darken Rahl gone, he sought an alliance with the Glee for the same reasons he had served Darken Rahl. He believed it made him a more powerful witch. His deluded beliefs ultimately proved to be his undoing.”

  “He was witch enough,” Richard said, drawing Shota’s glare away from Kahlan. “He was more powerful than you give him credit for. And we stopped him from carrying out your witch’s oath, just as we will stop you if we have to.”

  Shota showed him an icy smile. “You think so, child? You can’t begin to grasp how wrong you are about that. Michec groveled before me, the grand witch, as all witches do. He swore to carry out my oath, as all witches must. In his failure, he proved he was not a witch worthy of the task or my protection.”

  “I don’t care what, in your vanity, you think of witch men,” Richard said. “But I do care about your need to continue to pursue your nonsense about our children and what you saw while looking into the flow of time. Prophecy is dead. I ended it because prophecy is a corrupting influence and it was a danger to the world of life. Your blind obsession with it is proof of its corrupting nature.”

  Shota lifted her chin indignantly. “It was a true vision into the flow of time, into how events will unfold.”

  “The nature of prophecy is that it looks into possibilities that branch out endlessly from root events as the world moves forward and continually changes. You plucked one leaf from the tree of prophecy while ignoring the entire forest.”

  “The world may have changed, but the flow of time did not.”

  “You can’t see into the flow of time anymore, can you?”

  Shota squinted at him. “No, thanks to you. You destroyed one of our most valuable tools, a tool that belongs to witch women.”

  “It did not belong to witch women. It was an expression of possible futures belonging in the underworld. Once it was brought to the world of life, witches long ago latched on to it in order to deceitfully gain power for themselves. It was an underworld force that had never belonged in this world.”

  Shota took a threatening step closer to him. “I used the flow of time to know how certain events flow and unfold. I used it in the past to help you.”

  “And had we followed your advice born of prophecy, then on more than one occasion, we would all be dead by now.”

  “You were smart enough to use the prophecy I gave you to succeed in ways neither I nor you could foresee. But without that prophecy, you might not have saved anyone. That is part of the way the flow of time works. As you say, it branches into many possible futures.

  “I know far more about that flow of time and prophecy than you ever will, and that flow foretold that if you have a child with this Confessor it will be a monster. Such a child would risk bringing back the terror of the dark times, and worse, considering the power these twins will be born with. They will be bonded as twins and by the power they would be born with.

  “But you refuse to heed that warning of a dark future and instead would ignorantly visit upon the world a male Confessor. A male Confessor! You are selfish children, the both of you, without any care for how what you are doing would destroy lives of so many others if these monsters were to live.”

  She looked pointedly over at Kahlan, then turned back to Richard. “I won’t.”

  Richard lifted his hands out in frustration. “You don’t understand prophecy the way you so smugly think you do, Shota.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “You have used prophecy to survive.”

  “Yes, because prophecy was something that only a wizard with Subtractive Magic can rightly understand. That’s because prophecy is an underworld element. I alone understood its changeable nature and thus its limitations. I acted within those limitations, not in defiance of them.”

  She dismissed his words with a flick of a hand. “This is a different form of prophecy, meant for a witch woman only.”

  “Prophecy is prophecy, no matter how you wish to dress it up.”

  Shota considered his words only briefly before ignoring them. “I used the flow of time to see that if you two conceived a child, it would be a monster. And now, you have conceived twins, the worst possible sign of the terrors to come.”

  Richard sighed in exasperation. “We’re going around in circles. You said that we would conceive a monster, right?”

  “You already know that I did.”

  He gestured expansively. “All right, for the sake of argument, let’s say you were right.” Richard held up a finger as he leaned toward her. “But what you may not realize is that your look into prophecy has already come to pass. That flow of time has run its course and is over. It already happened.”

  Shota folded her arms. “What are you talking about?”

  “When the chimes caused magic to fail—caused the magic of the necklace you gave Kahlan to fail—we didn’t know that your necklace wasn’t working as you designed it, and as a result, we conceived a child. Unfortunately, Kahlan lost that child before it could be born. If your prophecy is true, that means the first child conceived, the one Kahlan lost, was in fact the monster you so fear, the very one you saw in the flow of time.

  “That means that the prophecy you saw in the flow of time has already happened and has already been fulfilled. Since Kahlan became pregnant but lost that first child, that means the child you saw in the flow of time that would be a monster, is already long dead. The world has already been saved from the dark times you saw in the flow of time caused by that monster.”

  Richard gestured at Kahlan as he went on. “This pregnancy is now a different one. This time, these children Kahlan now carries are exactly what the world needs to survive. They are not the monsters that would destroy the world, but rather they are the other side of that prophecy, the balance to it that magic requires: the saviors of the world
.”

  Shota scowled at him for a moment. “It is not possible for them to be saviors of our world.”

  “Yes, it is, because without them, our gift—mine and Kahlan’s—will eventually pass out of existence when we die. The Grace each of us was born with will carry us and our gift beyond the veil. Right now, our gift, Kahlan’s and mine, is what is holding magic together and preventing the Golden Goddess from completing her lust to take our world and kill everyone in it.

  “Don’t you see? Without our magic carrying on through these children of D’Hara, the Glee will be able to ravage our world. If you think the dark times were bad, you have not seen the terror visited upon people by the Glee. We have seen a small bit of it, and I can tell you that no one will survive. If these children don’t live, then no one will.

  “If you were to kill these children, you would, in essence, be killing everyone.”

  With her hands on her hips, Shota regarded Kahlan for a long moment before looking back at Richard and again folding her arms.

  “That’s a nice story, but I can’t risk the world on a nice story. I won’t risk it. I know of the Golden Goddess. What you don’t see is that she is not my concern.” She unfolded her arms to poke Richard’s chest with a finger. “The Glee are your concern, your responsibility, as the Lord Rahl. It is up to you to protect our world, and as such it is your responsibility to deal with the threat posed by the Glee. It is as simple as that.

  “My concern is the monsters you have conceived. It is my responsibility—since you abdicated it—to make sure the twins you two have conceived never come to be.”

  Richard’s hands fisted at his sides. “I don’t have any way to fight a threat from another world! Any hope for the future will slip away without these gifted children!”

  Richard took a settling breath to compose himself before going on. “Shota, your fault, your flaw, is that you are so focused on your narrow belief, that you are not able to see the bigger picture. You are fighting the last battle from dark times long forgotten.”

  “It is you who are not seeing the big picture and the obvious solution,” she said. “You simply need to stop the threat from the Golden Goddess and her kind, wizard. When you do that, then our world will be safe from the Glee. That is your duty as Seeker and as the Lord Rahl. Do your job. My concern is that these children are not allowed to live in this world. That is my job.

  “Had you not ended prophecy, I would be able to look into the flow of time and see if anything has changed and if your theory could possibly be true. But because you took it upon yourself to end prophecy, that opportunity is lost to us. Because the consequences would be too grave to risk doing otherwise, the original prophecy must stand.

  “My witch’s oath stands. It will be carried out.”

  Richard’s eyes took on the hawklike glare that Kahlan knew so well. “Shota,” he said in a low, dangerous tone, “if you have forced us to come all this way so that you can kill us along with these innocent children yet unborn, you have made a very big mistake. You have no right to their lives or ours, and as the Lord Rahl of the D’Haran Empire, I am telling you to once and for all to end your obsession.

  “Believe me, you do not want to fight me.” He gestured to Kahlan. “Nor do you want to fight the Mother Confessor. Have you ever seen a mother bear protect her cubs? I have. She is ferocious. You cross her at great peril.”

  23

  Kahlan felt solace at Richard’s words. Shota, however, looked like she was having none of it. Kahlan wondered how long the witch woman’s patience would last before she decided to simply kill them.

  Shota opened her hands as an empty smile spread on her lips. “Richard, just as you have so often misinterpreted my actions in the past, you misunderstand my resolve to be of assistance in this difficult time. You must believe me when I say that I have no malice toward you or the Mother Confessor. Nor do I have any desire to do battle with either of you. Most of all, I certainly have no intention of harming either one of you. I already told you: I am grateful to you both. Everything you falsely interpret as threatening is merely my desire to help you both.”

  Richard glared with incredulity. “You expect me to believe you are only interested in helping us? You want us to think that by murdering our children you are helping us?”

  Shota stepped close so she could rest an arm over Richard’s shoulder. She smiled warmly and batted her eyelashes, as if trying to charm him. Kahlan had absolutely no doubt that Richard was not charmed or attracted to the witch woman. Even so, it made her blood boil to see her trying to seduce Richard with her “charm.”

  “Think of me as doing a difficult chore for you, one that must be done, so that you don’t have to do it,” she said with a shrug. She idly ran a finger of her other hand down his chest, making Kahlan fume all the more. “I admit that my insistence on being of service to you could be taken the wrong way, but be assured, I certainly intend you no harm.”

  “If you intend us no harm, then why did you force us to come here?” Kahlan asked, drawing the witch woman’s attention away from her husband.

  Shota withdrew her arm from where it was resting on Richard’s shoulder and turned to Kahlan, clearly annoyed to be interrupted in mid-seduction. “I brought you here so you could give birth to the children you carry. I will see to it that you will be safe and comfortable while you are here until then. Once you give birth, both you and Richard, and”—she gestured offhandedly beyond Richard without taking her eyes off Kahlan—“your gaggle of Mord-Sith, will be free to leave and go about your lives.”

  “My children will not be born here, in this vile place, so that you can slaughter them.”

  Shota’s grin widened. “I’m afraid that you are once again getting the wrong idea. You see, you have no say in this. We will do our best to make you comfortable for the duration of your visit to my palace. After you give birth, as I said, you will be free to leave. But you will not be leaving with those children.”

  Kahlan’s hands fisted with fury. “You can’t have my babies so that you can murder them!”

  Shota pressed the tips of her fingers together and bowed her head for a moment, as if patiently thinking of how to explain something to a stubborn child. Her head finally came back up.

  “You claim to be protectors of your people. Well, so am I. Although we disagree about aspects of it, our goals are actually the same: the safety of our people. That is in fact what this is all about. You are blinded by maternal instinct, which is only natural, but it prevents you from having the vision and strength to do what is necessary for the greater good. I have both, so I am going to help with what must be done.”

  Kahlan fought back tears of rage. “The greater good?”

  Shota’s expression turned dark and dangerous as she leaned in. “I am finished with trying to reason with you two foolish children. It shall be as I say.”

  Kahlan knew how dangerous this witch woman was, but she was at the end of her patience. “Shota, if you do not withdraw your witch’s oath and let us go, there will be no turning back—for either of us. Know that, as the Mother Confessor, I will grant you no mercy and allow none.”

  Shota looked amused. “You think your Law of Nines will help you? I’m afraid that it no longer applies.”

  Richard glanced around at the group with him. The Mord-Sith, all in their red leather, looked not only resolute but positively dangerous as they watched the conversation, waiting to be let off their chain.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  Shota lifted her arm out behind, indicating the odd-looking group of women lined up to either side of her throne. “You see, I have come here, to Bindamoon, to my winter palace, to convene a coven.”

  Kahlan scanned the line of grim women to either side of Shota’s throne. There were six on one side of it, and five on the other side. Although all of the women looked very different from one another, they had one thing in common: they did indeed all look like witches. They all fit the stories she had hear
d as a young girl from the wizards who taught her. And they certainly all looked dangerous.

  She suddenly realized the flaw in Shota’s grand scheme.

  “I don’t want to tell you your business,” Kahlan said, “but a coven is thirteen witches. With you and the rest of these ladies, here, there are only twelve. You’re missing your last witch.”

  “Do tell,” Shota said with an amused smile.

  Kahlan shrugged. “We killed Moravaska Michec, your thirteenth witch. Without the thirteenth witch, your call to coven can’t authenticate the essential dictate so that you can initiate its power.”

  “Michec? A witch man? In a coven?” Shota said with distaste. She huffed dismissively. “Don’t be ridiculous. He could not possibly be part of a coven. He’s of more use to me dead than alive.” She once more smiled as she leaned toward Kahlan. “But thank you for the suggestion of using him.”

  Kahlan couldn’t imagine how Shota could use a dead Michec. Ignoring the distraction, she gestured to the women standing in the background.

  “Well, I hate to tell you, but in that case you’re a witch short of a coven. Like I said, including you, there are only twelve witches. Without thirteen witches you are not able to invoke the power of coven.”

  Shota smiled without humor. “Yes, I know. That’s why I had you bring me the thirteenth witch.”

  Kahlan blinked, suddenly worried by Shota’s calm confidence. “What are you talking about?”

  Her eyes flashing with menace, Shota walked over to Shale. With her face mere inches away from Shale’s, she pointed back behind. “Go and take your place with your sister witches.”

  Kahlan suddenly realized that Shale had been oddly quiet almost the entire time. Kahlan saw, then, that she seemed to be in a trance of some sort. She stared ahead without blinking.