Witch's Oath Read online

  “Because of the Law of Nines, the nine of us together have a kind of cumulative ability that none of us alone would have. Neither Shale nor I by ourselves have the ability to do a healing of injuries as life-threatening as the ones Vika has.”

  Shale was giving him a look, part skepticism and part analytical interest. “So, because of this Law of Nines, you think all of us together can somehow heal her?”

  “In a way, yes.”

  “In a way.” Shale folded her arms. “How?”

  “We need to all join hands. Shale, you will be holding Vika’s right hand as you were a moment ago. Then all the Mord-Sith will line up around Vika, all holding hands. Kahlan will be at the end of them, then me. I will be holding Vika’s left hand with my right, in that way linking us all together. When we are joined in that ring, I believe the Law of Nines will give me what I need to help me heal her.”

  Shale still had her arms folded as she glowered at him from under her brow. “And how long do you think this will take?” By her tone, she was clearly growing even more suspicious of exactly what it was he intended to do.

  “From our side it will be almost instantaneous. That’s the advantage of what I plan to do.”

  Kahlan leaned in, her suspicion now exceeding Shale’s. “From our side? What exactly are you saying?”

  Richard didn’t want to fool any of them, but at the same time he had to tell them at least part of what he intended. “Once we are linked, I will use all our combined gifts to stay connected to Vika in the underworld.”

  Jaws dropped.

  Kahlan reached out and gripped his arm. “What?”

  “It’s the only way.”

  Shale’s arms had come unfolded as she leaned in along with Kahlan. “The only way to do what? Die with her?”

  “Well, I should hope not,” Richard said, offering a smile to her surprise. That clearly wasn’t what any of them expected to hear. “You have to trust me on this. It’s the only way to have the time we need to do this.”

  Only Kahlan understood. “Of course … but Richard—”

  “Of course what?” Shale interrupted.

  Kahlan cast a worried look at the sorceress. “The underworld is eternal. There is no such thing as time in an eternal world, because with no beginning and no end there is no way to measure it or determine how much time has passed. What might be an instant here could be days, or even centuries in the underworld.”

  Richard could see that Shale was about to unleash a hundred questions and a thousand objections. He didn’t want to hear any of it.

  “I intend to save Vika, the same as I would save any of you. I view this as necessary to help us get Kahlan and these children of D’Hara to the safety of the Keep. It needs to be done. We are wasting time.”

  In the underworld he would have an eternity of time, among other things.

  “I want everyone to kneel down around Vika in a circle,” he told them. “Shale, you take her right hand. The rest of you join hands like I explained. Kahlan, you take my hand.”

  “Lord Rahl,” Vika said in a weak voice as they all knelt around her, “I don’t want to endanger any of you. Please don’t—”

  “It endangers us more if we lose you. As the Lord Rahl I judge that this is what we must do. Now, put your trust in me.” Richard gestured to the others. “Everyone, join hands.”

  8

  Richard picked up Vika’s Agiel, which he had pulled from her gut wound earlier and had thrown on the floor.

  “Vika, I want you to hold this in your teeth. I gave you some of my strength, before. Do you think you can do that? I need you back at that place.”

  Knowing that he meant that place on the cusp between worlds, she nodded. In a way, the pain of an Agiel was an insane kind of familiar comfort to a Mord-Sith. Richard had already tensed the muscles of his abdomen to help him endure the pain of holding the Agiel. Unlike the Mord-Sith, he found no comfort in such pain. When he held it out in front of her she pulled her lips back and clamped her teeth down on it. Her pupils dilated as the wall of pain hit her and her jaws clenched tighter.

  He didn’t need to tell her to bite down.

  Once he saw that she had, he carefully picked up the small pile of her intestines coiled on the floor beside her. He did his best to carefully wipe off any specks of dirt or crumbled rock. Once he had inspected them to see that they didn’t have any foreign matter stuck to them, he stretched out and pushed the tips of his fingers into the wound in order to spread open the sides to give him room to guide the warm mass back inside her abdomen.

  Her eyes wide, Vika stared at the ceiling as she trembled. Each breath was a ragged pull; then she would tighten her muscles and bear down again until she needed another breath.

  “All right, that’s the worst of it,” he told her.

  She nodded without looking over at him. It didn’t look like it had helped with the pain. Her face had gone a bloodless white, telling him that, if anything, the pain was worse.

  He put a bloody hand on her shoulder. “Hold on, Vika. It won’t be long. You are already on the cusp. The pain of the Agiel will help you take that final step through the veil. I will be holding your hand. I will be here, but also with you, and watching over you when you cross over.”

  The last part wasn’t exactly true, but he needed to say it for those listening, especially Kahlan. This was no time for questions he dare not answer honestly.

  “When you get to that place beyond, to that world, it will be tempting to let yourself go into that forever world,” he told her. “Believe me, I know. You will find comfort there in being free of the pain, free of misery, fear, and worry—free of everything. You will want to let yourself drift away into that eternal world where struggles of life are a thing of the past and you can be at peace. If it’s all too much for you, you have my permission to accept that world.”

  He didn’t want her to make that choice, but he wanted to give her a choice to be better able to endure what she was about to face. He knew that by having the option of a way out, it sometimes helped endure a hard choice.

  “But I need you, Vika. Kahlan needs you. Our children need you. D’Hara needs you. So I hope you will have the strength to let me heal you while your spirit is there and then return to us.”

  She finally looked over into his eyes and nodded. He could see her doing her best to fight the pain of both her injuries and the Agiel she held clamped in her teeth.

  “This is insanity,” Shale said in a low voice.

  Kahlan looked like she might agree, but she didn’t say so. Richard knew that despite her well-founded fear, Kahlan was doing her best to put her trust in his judgment that what he was doing was necessary to help get their unborn children to safety. He fervently hoped that her trust was warranted.

  Richard looked up at the sorceress on the other side of Vika. “You may be right. I do know that without you to make up nine of us, this will likely fail. But just as I’m not forcing Vika to do this, I’m not forcing you to be a part of it, either. If you can’t commit to helping me, to helping us all, and especially to helping Vika, then that must be your choice. Either way, I intend to attempt it, with or without you, but without you, without the Law of Nines as an aid, my chances of being successful go down. So it’s up to you.” He leaned a little closer to her across Vika’s body. “Choose.”

  Shale’s gaze took in all the Mord-Sith on their knees around the supine Vika. She met Kahlan’s gaze for a long moment, but Kahlan, despite the bruises and the eye swollen nearly shut, was wearing her Confessor’s face. Finally Shale looked down at Vika, the Agiel between her teeth as she did her best to draw each breath. At last, she looked back up at Richard.

  “I didn’t come all the way from the Northern Waste to deny you my help now. You are the Lord Rahl. Do as you must. I will support you.”

  Richard smiled his appreciation. “All right, I want everyone to concentrate on Vika. Imagine giving her your strength and imagine her being whole again. Shale, please add what abil
ity you have at healing to mine.”

  “Do you really think that will help?” Cassia asked. “Us concentrating on Vika, I mean? We can’t do magic.”

  “You’re not doing magic. You are magic, through the power of the Law of Nines and through your bond to me. You are part of that whole. It’s that whole that matters.

  “You and your sisters have all been on the cusp of death. You remember being partway into that world, don’t you?”

  Cassia looked grim. “More times that I care to remember.”

  “When you are on the cusp, you are actually partially in the underworld, or you couldn’t really know that you were on the cusp, now could you? Vika knows. She is there now at that threshold, at the brink of death itself. She told me that she was already in some ways looking out at me from the world of the dead. It is that experience of being on the cusp that you bring to the circle. It is that experience of coming back into the light of this world that we need. Vika is crossing over as we speak.

  “Now please, all of you, just do as I ask. I have to save her while I still can. We are all holding hands to give Vika a link back to this world. You know both. This is a time when we show how much life means to us all. You all are her sisters and her way back.”

  Vika squeezed his hand at his words. As she trembled from the pain of the Agiel clamped between her teeth, a tear rolled from the corner of her eye. Holding her hand, he could feel the pain pulling him under with her. He had to will himself to ignore it to do what needed to be done.

  Richard squeezed Kahlan’s hand. Her wrist was still oozing blood. He needed to heal that as well, to say nothing of the obviously painful, swollen bruises on her face.

  Once they all had gone quiet, with their eyes closed and heads bowed, Richard turned his mind to what he needed to do, to what he couldn’t tell them he was going to do. He took a deep breath against the enormity of the task ahead of him.

  If he was to have the time necessary to do what needed to be done, the only place with enough time was a place without time.

  He remembered all too well dying and going beyond the veil. He remembered all too well being in the world of the dead. As he concentrated, he embraced the devastating pain of the Agiel radiating up his arm to the base of his skull as motivation to help him go to that numb place of refuge from the pain of life. Thankfully, the others, because Vika’s Agiel had never been used against them, could not feel the pain he felt from it.

  With the overpowering need of being free of pain pushing him ever onward, he used the power of his gift to do one of the most frightening things imaginable.

  He willed his heart to stop.

  He ignored the crushing pain that started radiating from the center of his chest by concentrating instead on the pain of the Agiel that didn’t let up even though his heart had gone still.

  He felt Kahlan’s hand tighten on his as she sucked back a sob of fear for him, not really realizing what he had just done.

  The world faded away. Kahlan’s grip seemed to dissolve as his muscles went slack. Richard saw darkness beyond darkness.

  He heard the faint sound of voices—the countless voices of the dead from beyond the veil. As he sank into that dark void, swirling masses of souls swept through a darkness blacker than black and began to surround him. In that void, ghostly arms and writhing fingers reached for him. Hints of light wheeled around him. He held on to Vika, knowing that she was seeing the same thing.

  Richard did his best to ignore the voices and the reaching hands. He did his best not to recognize the spectral faces. He couldn’t afford the distraction of familiar voices, familiar faces, familiar emotions and longing.

  Despite his best efforts, those he had killed, evil people who fought in the world of life for the cause of death, smiled out at him from the darkness as they swept in closer, eager for the chance to rip and tear at his soul. Claws sank painfully into his spirit. As they tried to drag him down among them, Richard held onto an awareness of the light from above, of the light of Kahlan’s soul and those with her beyond the veil. As he did, evil lost its grip on him and sank away. He pulled Vika up with him, away from the terrible evil that lusted for them both.

  As they rose up through endless darkness, the multitude of souls appeared to be nothing more than the soft flickers of stars massing and moving together like folds of gossamer in a faint breeze, rippling, twisting, rolling as one insubstantial mass. Even as they revolved around him, a curtain of eternal inhabitants of darkness, they knew he did not belong.

  But they wanted him to.

  They whispered to him, promising him the end of pain, the end of sorrow, the end of a life of constant struggle. They whispered to Vika as well.

  He had but to let himself accept what was all around him.

  He knew that they were also appealing to Vika to join them in their eternal rest. He knew how much those whispers and tender touches would lure her toward their world for all eternity. He knew how she ached to accept their call.

  Richard circled a comforting arm around her shoulders as she gazed about in wonder, the pain of the world of life far distant. In this dark world, she was free of the mortal pain of her injuries, even if her physical form was not yet free of those injuries. Richard held her close, silently reassuring her that he was with her, not letting her feel alone.

  When she listened to him, the darkness shifted, the souls twisting away as if in eddies from a current sweeping past, carrying them with it. Richard held Vika close as the two of them drifted through layers of darkness teeming with spirits. Those streams of darkness carried them through rolling undercurrents formed out of nothing. All the time the soft glowing mass of souls followed along, distant, hesitant, yet drawn to them, these alien beings in their world. It was bewitchingly beautiful and terrifying all at the same time.

  Richard had to remind himself continually of Kahlan’s hand in his, still back there beyond the veil in the world of life, and his love for her. She and the other souls there with her were his anchor—and Vika’s anchor—to the world back beyond the veil.

  He had to remind himself of their two children back in the world of life. The twins needed him if they were to be born and their Graces were to be completed. And they all needed Vika. He wanted more than anything to be back with Kahlan, and with her unborn babies.

  To do that, he needed to get on with the job at hand.

  As Vika turned to him, not knowing what to do, not knowing what choice to make, he reached into himself to the depths of his gift, into the network of connections linking his magic to his soul, linking it to the world of life, searching for the exact gossamer threads he needed.

  At the same time, he reached into Vika with his gift. Were they still in the world of life, she would have let out a gasp at the power of it.

  9

  Kahlan, her eyes closed, her head bowed, tried to focus her thoughts on Vika, hoping it would somehow help Richard heal her and at the same time keep her grounded in the world of life. Berdine, to Kahlan’s left, held her hand in a tight grip that revealed her fears. Kahlan knew that, like her, they were all terrified by what Richard was doing. It involved magic that none of them understood and they all feared. Kahlan was only obliquely familiar with it, and her understanding of it was in large part theory. Sometimes, she had to put her trust in Richard even when she greatly feared what he was doing.

  As the room grew deadly quiet, she couldn’t seem to calm her anxiety.

  In that silence, Kahlan heard a sound that didn’t belong.

  Oddly enough, it sounded like something wet.

  With sudden realization of what it was, she opened her eyes, despite Richard’s instructions, and glanced back over her shoulder. In the dim, greenish light beyond the forest of hanging corpses, she saw dark shapes running as yet more scribbles were forming in the air.

  “Richard!” When he didn’t respond, she screamed his name again.

  Richard slumped, partly bent over on his side, one hand reaching back to hold hers, the other holdi
ng Vika’s hand. Kahlan saw, then, that Vika had stopped breathing. She urgently pulled away from Berdine to put both hands on the side of Richard’s chest, shoving him, trying to wake him from his state of deep concentration.

  With a jolt of horror she realized that Richard wasn’t breathing, either. She was momentarily confused, unable to understand why he would not be breathing.

  If she lost him because she went along with his crazy idea, she would never forgive herself. The twins would never forgive her.

  Despite her worry for him, there was no time to figure it out. She had to do something about the dire threat coming into their world from across the room. As she sprang to her feet, she stole a quick glance back to check that the sword was there at Richard’s left hip. Once she saw it, she dropped down and grabbed the hilt. The blade rang, hot with rage, as she yanked it free of the scabbard. She knew that rage all too well.

  “Shale!” Over on the other side of the still Vika, the woman’s head was bowed, her eyes closed. “Shale!”

  The sorceress’s head jerked up. “What—”

  More of the dark, wet shapes materialized out of nowhere to rush forward, their bodies steaming as they came around the hanging corpses. Clear, gelatinous blobs slid off them and splashed across the floor. She realized that was the wet sound she had heard at first.

  “Do something!” Kahlan screamed at the sorceress in order to be heard over the sudden sound of murderous shrieks and howls from the Glee, excited at finding her vulnerable with no witch man to stop them.

  One of the monsters, apparently the one she had heard materialize first, was out well ahead of the others. She leaped back as wicked claws swiped at her, first one and then the other in rapid succession. Kahlan had been trained in the use of a sword growing up. She reacted instinctively. She swung the sword around and brought it down with all her might, lopping off the second arm that had taken a swipe at her, severing it between wrist and elbow.