The Third Kingdom Read online

  “Apparently,” Richard said as he scanned the symbols, translating the gist of it for her. “In this line here, Naja says that the Grace and so their very being was ripped asunder. After that, they invested them with magic that is similar to that used to reanimate the dead. In this way the emperor’s makers were able to create a race of half people to serve him.

  “What’s more, because of what was done with Subtractive Magic to the husk of their living bodies, half people age very slowly, almost imperceptibly.”

  Samantha, looking more than a little skeptical, folded her arms. “Magic can do a lot of things, but it can’t slow people from aging. If it could, the gifted would all do that to keep themselves from getting old.”

  “It can be done,” Richard said. “I’ve seen it myself at the Palace of the Prophets. Ancient spells altered time there. The people living inside that spell seemed to age slowly compared to the rest of us. It was originally done when the palace was built in order to give the sorceresses there enough time to complete the task of training young wizards.

  “I know people who once lived there who are hundreds of years old—at least by our measurement of time outside that spell, if not theirs from within it. I even know an ancestor of mine, Nathan Rahl, who lived there most of his life and is close to a thousand years old.”

  “A thousand years.…” Samantha stared for a long moment, finally shaking her head. “I wish I could see such wonders that must exist out beyond the Dark Lands. I’ve always known that I’m doomed to stay here in this little isolated place, like all my ancestors, never to see the world beyond. But I’ve dreamed of seeing such wonders.”

  “I don’t know if I would call them ‘wonders.’ Oftentimes, like with what we’re facing here, it’s nothing more than a whole lot of trouble.”

  After considering his words a moment she finally returned to the issue at hand. “But, how was it possible to keep these half people from aging? They’re not living inside a spell like you described.”

  “It necessarily involves Subtractive Magic—”

  “But only those ancient wizards back when they created these half people could wield Subtractive Magic, right? No one now has the ability to use Subtractive Magic.”

  “Even today there are a very few who can still call upon that side of the gift.” He didn’t go into the fact that he was one of those—at least when his gift was working. Her eyes were wide again, so he simply continued with what he had been explaining.

  “So, in this case, since Subtractive Magic had been used to bring about such changes in the Grace, that would inescapably involve the underworld and in that way their aging was slowed.”

  “The underworld? Why would involving the underworld slow their aging?”

  “Because our lives have limits—we are born, we live, and then we die—but we’re dead forever, right?”

  “Right,” she conceded with a confused nod. “So?”

  “So, we live for a finite time, but since death is forever there is no way to measure it. Life gives dimension to time.”

  “But our spirits begin their time in the underworld when we die, much the same as we begin our lives when we are born into the world of life.”

  “Except that our lives have an end, so we can say how long a person’s life was. In the underworld there is only that beginning when we die. Since there is no end to being dead, there is no way to measure time in the underworld. That’s why the Grace shows life with a beginning at Creation and an end at death, but once our spirits go beyond into the underworld, it goes on forever.”

  She still looked confused. “But that is when the length of time there starts. You start measuring time from that point.”

  “Yes but there is only that beginning point. It’s like trying to determine how long a rope is when there is only one end. If you can’t ever reach the other end because the rope goes on forever, then how could you measure how long it is? Life, from beginning to end, is a known quantity. Death has no end.”

  Samantha squinted as she tried to imagine such a thing.

  “Each day lived,” Richard said, “is one less of our limited number of days gone forever. Time therefore has relevance and meaning to us. Life is precious, so time is precious. Time is how we put value on things such as love. We give our most precious commodity, our time—a part of our lives—over to those we love.”

  “I never thought of it in that way. I know how much I treasure the time I spent with my parents, and how much I miss my time with them. What about time in the underworld?”

  “We’re dead forever. So a spirit in the underworld has no sense of getting old because spirits don’t get old. They have no sense of their time running out because it doesn’t run out. They remain dead forever, so in the underworld a day or a thousand days or even a million doesn’t measure anything meaningful out of an infinite amount of time. You are still dead and you always will be.

  “As a consequence, because death is inalterable and the length of time you will be dead is limitless, there can be no value in being dead, and thus no value to time.”

  “But what does that have to do with these half people living a long time?”

  Richard arched an eyebrow. “The half people have no soul. That part of them is already dead. Time for the dead is limitless. The half people exist in a third kingdom in violation of the principles of the Grace, in a kingdom with its own set of principles where life and death exist together without clear separation, where they can intermingle in unexpected ways.

  “Each of those half people carries that third kingdom, thus death, within them, so time moves differently for them. Emperor Sulachan’s makers apparently used that link to the timeless world of the dead to make these people they turned into weapons long-lived so they could better serve his cause. Time was important to Sulachan because he was alive, so he used the opposites of both life and death to manipulate time for his purpose.”

  She stared at him. “That’s all pretty hard to take in.”

  Richard nodded, aware that he had seen things she couldn’t yet imagine and were hard for her to grasp.

  He was also all too aware that because of the Hedge Maid, death now held a claim on both him and Kahlan, and in that way made the two of them a part of that third kingdom. The difference was that they were not going to be able to live a long time. Their contact with that kingdom, through the touch of the Hedge Maid, was deadly, and the world of the dead would soon call that debt due.

  “I know,” he said in a measured voice. “I have to admit, it’s pretty hard for me to take in, too.”

  CHAPTER

  27

  Richard turned his attention back to the symbols carved into the wall and read ahead for a few minutes as Samantha waited patiently. Her eyes tracked his finger from time to time as he traced a particularly difficult emblematic design while working out the translation in his head.

  “So what else does it say?” she asked, her patience finally growing thin.

  Richard swiped a hand back across his face. “Well, there’s a lot about how Emperor Sulachan wanted to convert as many people as possible into this new race of subhumans, these half people living without a soul in this altered timeline so that they could continue to serve his cause. He also planned on eliminating any opposition to his grand scheme by first eliminating any of the gifted who would oppose him.”

  Samantha frowned up at him. “What grand plan is she talking about?”

  Richard went to the next line, taking it all in for a moment. He read it twice, making sure it actually said what he thought it said.

  “Well?” Samantha asked. “Can you read it or not?”

  Richard let out a troubled sigh. “I can read it. I’m having trouble believing it, but I can read it. It’s no wonder that the people of the New World were willing to go to war to stop him.”

  “Why, what does it say?”

  “It says that Emperor Sulachan wanted to unite the world in what he called the People’s Alliance, with him ruling over it
all.”

  Richard had fought the Old World over many of these same kinds of tyrannical ideas of a greater good that some people believed transcended the lives of individuals. What that greater good always came down to was submitting to the rule of a tyrant and sacrificing to their cause, or dying. Enforcing the belief in a greater good required the massacre of anyone who disagreed, since such beliefs could not endure the light of differing beliefs.

  Richard had thought that with the latest emperor from the Old World dead, the struggle was at last over. Now, he wasn’t so sure. Evil always seemed to emerge to try to destroy any good that came about, any peace that had settled in, or any prosperity that had emerged. As long as mankind existed, he supposed that there would always be those who thought that their vision of a better world required murdering anyone in the way.

  It was now evident that the ancient struggle, started so long ago by Emperor Sulachan, and the frightening weapons he had developed, hadn’t been entirely eradicated. Some of those weapons loosed on the world of life had long ago been sealed away behind barriers and walls where they waited to fight another day. Where other barriers had come down, so, too, had this one finally given way.

  “Seems to me like someone always wants to rule,” Samantha said as she scanned the writing she couldn’t understand.

  “That’s certainly true enough,” Richard said as he tapped the wall of engraved symbols, “but the dangerous difference is that Sulachan believed that his cause transcended life as a larger cause for the good of all existence.”

  Samantha’s mouth twisted a bit. “I don’t understand.”

  “Sulachan envisioned the world of life and the world of the dead as one grand, interconnected entity, one whole, just as the Grace is one whole, interconnected concept. He wanted to unite the world of life and the world of the dead under his rule.”

  Samantha shook her head as she watched him reading the language of Creation. “That’s madness.”

  He looked over at her. “I don’t disagree with you, but sometimes lunatics are so driven they can take the whole world into madness with them.”

  “I don’t see how normal people could go along with such beliefs.”

  Richard straightened with a sigh. “Oftentimes it’s easier for lunatics to attract impassioned followers than it is for sensible people to get people to listen to reason. People are often more willing to believe lies than the truth. Lies can be made to sound pleasant. The truth, by its very nature, isn’t always so attractive.

  “That leaves peaceful people no choice but to fight for their lives or fall to the blades of madmen. In such a situation, there is no middle ground. There is no such thing as compromise between civilization and savagery. Civilization must always defend itself against savagery or else fall to it.”

  “I guess that’s our part in this?”

  Richard nodded. “I’ve never wanted to fight, to be in a war, to see good people die, to have to kill. I just wanted to live my life in peace. But others wouldn’t allow me that life of peace. The battles I fight have always been a fight to survive and live in peace, not to conquer. That’s how I came to be here instead of back in Hartland where I grew up.”

  He swept his hand past the writing on the wall. “In this case, here, with the people of the New World, it looks as if they had no stomach for fighting and kept out of the conflict as long as possible, but those of the Old World didn’t care that these people wanted to live in peace. In such a case, the aggressor prevails unless those wanting peace are willing to fight back.

  “According to Naja, Emperor Sulachan and his followers were determined to create whatever weapons they needed, no matter how terrifying or deadly, in order to conquer all those who opposed their plans. The reanimated dead and the half people were two such weapons. She says here that Sulachan’s plan was to eventually rule both the living and the dead, from the world of the dead.”

  Samantha paced off a few strides in agitation, then retuned. Her mood was as black as her hair. “I can understand a madman starting a fight, I’ve seen such things happen on a very small scale among pigheaded people here in our village, but what you’re describing sounds just plain crazy.” She jabbed a finger at the side of her head. “Crazy, crazy.”

  “Naja says the same thing, but she also warns that even if his ideas were as deluded, impractical, or preposterous as many knowledgeable people believed them to be, and even if in the end they did indeed prove to be impossible to carry out, he was willing to slaughter untold numbers of innocent people in the attempt, and that was what mattered to those in his way. The people of the New World were in his way.

  “She says that he had no intention of stopping the killing as long as life existed. He believed that in the end, there would be only the reanimated dead and the legions of half people here in the world of life, and he would control their souls forever from the underworld.”

  “Are you sure that he wasn’t the Keeper himself brought to life?” Samantha asked, sarcastically, as she folded her arms.

  “He was just a man,” Richard said. “A man like so many others who in one way or another, whether they have been aware of it or not, have been devoted to death.

  “I guess he was simply more shameless about it than most madmen. Naja says, in fact, that he believed the act of bringing death to so many and on such a grand scale was a transcendent experience.”

  Samantha threw up her hands. “This sounds so deluded that I can’t even fathom it. But the thing that really confuses me is why people would believe in such a madman and fight for his crazy cause. I mean, I’m not even grown-up yet, and I can see that this is lunacy.”

  Richard turned from the account on the wall. “There are plenty of people drawn to such a way of life. Following such a leader gives them license to be savages themselves, to be an anonymous thug and take what they have been told they are entitled to. Some people find it intoxicating to have the power and permission to destroy others.

  “But that’s really beside the point. The point is that Sulachan was powerful enough to bring about immense destruction and loss of life. Even if he was deluded and his ideas were crazy, he, his gifted, and his vast, rampaging armies had the might to bring the world under the darkness of a great war.

  “Fortunately, Naja and the people back then seem to have been able to at least create this barrier and contain some of the most menacing creations of his makers. It has protected the world for a very long time.

  “But those half people in the third kingdom, locked away for so long behind the barrier, have over the centuries likely continued growing in numbers. Now they are loose in the world of life. They are now again a problem.”

  Samantha, looking more than a little bitter, folded her arms. “You mean they’re our problem.”

  “Our problem,” Richard agreed with a nod. “All that really matters now is that the creations of Sulachan’s wizards in those ancient times have now once again been unleashed against the world. If we don’t figure out how to stop them, then we will be the ones who are wiped out.”

  CHAPTER

  28

  Samantha paced in nervous agitation while Richard read ahead in Naja’s account on the wall. He could sense the anguish in that account by the way the mysterious woman from so long ago went to great pains to ensure that future generations would understand the reasons behind the fears of the people back in her time and their horror at what had descended on them at the hands of so evil a man.

  They knew that life for the people of the New World would become one long dark night of terror if the half people were not stopped or somehow contained. It was obvious that she wanted to make sure that all those who came after her would also appreciate the danger that was locked away behind the barrier.

  “Dear spirits,” he murmured to himself.

  “What?” she asked, having heard the comment he hadn’t realized he’d said aloud.

  Richard took a deep breath at the description of the grim specifics. “Well, Naja says here that th
e half people began hunting for souls to replace the one they no longer had.”

  Samantha paused in her pacing and turned back to him. “Hunting for souls? What is she talking about?”

  Richard squinted in concentration, making sure of the translation before he went on with the account. “According to this, not having a soul drove the half people into a form of insanity that compelled them to hunt those who did have a soul in the hopes of taking that soul for themselves.”

  Richard abruptly paused in surprise.

  “And…?” Samantha asked when he fell silent.

  “And … they ate any living people they could catch in an attempt to take possession of their soul. Such an effort was futile, according to Naja, but that didn’t stop the half people from continuing to try.”

  Samantha rushed closer. “They eat living people? Are you sure that’s what it says?”

  Richard nodded. “It was an unintended consequence of the process used in creating the half people. The unanticipated behavior developed suddenly, Naja says, not long after they were stripped of their souls to make them into these living weapons for Sulachan. They unexpectedly became so compelled by a deranged need for a soul to replace the one they had lost that it overrode everything else. Although they had been created as weapons, they became uncontrollable. Despite all the efforts by the wizards who had been in charge, the half people were driven by a frenzied need for a soul.

  “Driven by this mad, single-minded lust to consume the living, they can’t comprehend that this thirst for a soul is impossible to quench. She says they would hunt alone but often they would congregate in order to coordinate a more effective attack on the living.”

  “You mean they started hunting in numbers? Like packs of wolves?”

  “So it would appear,” Richard told her. “Naja says that at first they rampaged out of control, in the beginning attacking those who had created them and then the troops they had been assigned to serve with before escaping out into the population at large. The half people tore through the ranks of makers who had created them. The wizard makers who hadn’t been eaten were terrified of their own creation. Many fled.