The Scribbly Man Read online

  Without a word, Shale walked briskly up to the man and held his sweaty head tightly between her hands. Fingers spread, she pressed her thumbs against his temples. She lowered her head as she closed her eyes. Nolo’s entire body began to shake, his chins rolled like waves in a storm, his fat belly jiggled, his teeth chattered.

  After a few minutes, still holding the man’s quivering head, Shale looked over at Richard. “She is using his vision. She is using him to look out through his eyes into our world.”

  “Well… what do we do about it?”

  “This,” Shale said.

  Without any hesitation she dug her thumbs into the inside corners of his eyes. She gritted her teeth with the effort of scooping out his eyeballs with her thumbs. It was shocking to see such a gorgeous woman engaged in such a brutal act.

  Nolo screamed his lungs out as she dug deep with her hooked thumbs. Shale at last ripped the eyeballs out. She pulled them away from the connecting tissues and then held one up in each bloody hand to show them. Nolo shrieked the whole time.

  “There. That should fix the problem,” the sorceress announced. She tossed his eyeballs off into a corner and then turned to a surprised Kahlan. “I’ve cut off her link. You will be able to talk to him now. The Golden Goddess is gone. Nolo’s core is yours now to do with as you will.”

  Vika, next to Richard’s left shoulder, leaned toward him. “I’m beginning to like her a lot more.”

  The other Mord-Sith nodded their eager agreement.

  15

  The man hanging in the restraints thrashed and screamed with the pain of having his eyes plucked out.

  “Nolo, be still and listen,” Kahlan commanded.

  His agonized cries died out almost immediately in choking fits. He lifted his head, even though he could no longer see anything. Tears of blood ran from his ruined eye sockets.

  “Mistress… please… command me.”

  There at last was the person Kahlan’s power had taken. Shale had broken the Golden Goddess’s link to the man. The veneer of her control was gone. Nolo hung nearly naked before the Confessor who had taken him with her power, fat, sweaty, smelly, and now unconditionally compliant.

  “Tell me who this Golden Goddess is.”

  “She came to haunt me. She made me do things I didn’t want to do,” he confessed in a tearful voice. “I don’t know how.”

  “I know that much,” Kahlan said. “What else do you know about her? Tell me who she is.”

  “She is from another world. She is a collector of worlds. Her people are marauders. She finds worlds for them to raid.”

  “How does she get here?”

  “I don’t know, Mistress.” He shrugged in misery because he couldn’t adequately answer the question. “She has looked into our world before, but it was always far too distant for her kind to come here. Now, somehow, our world has come into her realm. It is now within her reach.”

  Shale motioned Kahlan to step over to her and Richard, out of earshot of Nolo. “This isn’t making any sense. I can’t believe he is really telling the truth.”

  “Someone touched by a Confessor’s power has to tell the truth,” Kahlan said. “They have no choice. Their mind, who they were, is gone. All that is left is unfiltered devotion to the Confessor who took them and to what she wants to know.”

  “That may be, but this can’t be right. It doesn’t make any sense. This Golden Goddess and her people can’t travel to different worlds, or”—she twirled her hand overhead—“roam among the stars. Such a thing is simply not possible.”

  “I’m afraid it is,” Richard said, drawing her attention.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Kahlan and I have both traveled to a different world.”

  “What world?” the frowning sorceress asked.

  “The world of the dead,” Richard said. “We went beyond the veil. We left the world of life, went to the world of the dead, and returned to our world.”

  “That’s different,” Shale declared in a fit of annoyance. “The world of life and the world of the dead are both here, in the same place at the same time. They are two sides of the same coin. Only the veil separates them. They function together.

  “While it may have been an incredible feat, one I don’t entirely understand, it’s very different from what Nolo is talking about. He is saying that the Golden Goddess’s people venture among the stars, visiting other worlds. That’s simply not possible,” she insisted.

  Richard hooked his thumbs in his weapon belt. “I’m afraid it is. I know because I’ve done it.”

  Shale’s disbelief was obvious. “You’ve traveled to other worlds.”

  “Well, not me.”

  “I thought not,” she huffed.

  “But I’ve sent other people to a different world.”

  Taken off guard, the sorceress made a face. “What are you talking about?”

  “When we won the war with the Old World and defeated Emperor Jagang there were many people who didn’t want to live here, in a world with magic. That had been what the war had been about—Jagang and his followers wanted to end magic. So, when we won the war, I sent those people who didn’t want to live in a world with magic to, well, another world, a world without magic.”

  Shale planted her fists on her hips. “You sent people to another world.”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “I used a spectral fold.”

  She threw her hands up. “A spectral fold. Of course.” She leaned in with an angry whisper. “What in the name of Creation is a spectral fold?”

  “Well,” Richard said as he pinched his lower lip, trying to think how to explain it as simply as possible, “it’s a way of making different worlds that are far away come together so that you can step from one world into the other.”

  “Bring worlds together?” She stared with her jaw hanging. She finally gathered her senses. “Have you lost your mind? Such a thing simply isn’t possible.”

  “It is,” Kahlan confirmed. “Richard has already done it. I was there. I saw it done.”

  “How? And don’t give me any of that spectral-fold nonsense. How could you bring another world, a distant world, together with our world so that you could step from one to another?”

  “Here is the easiest way I can explain it. Imagine if you took a piece of paper and put a dot of ink on one side at the edge and then turned the paper over and put another dot on the other side of the paper, but on the edge farthest away from the first dot. You might say they are worlds apart and on opposite sides of the paper. Right? How could you bring those dots—those worlds—together?”

  After a moment of thought, Shale folded her arms across her breasts. “You can’t. You can’t bring things together that are physically separated like that.”

  “Yes you can. You simply fold the paper around into a cylinder until the dots touch. Dots on different edges, and different sides of the paper, now touch each other.” Richard smiled. “A spectral fold.”

  Shale looked off into the distance as she puzzled it out in her head. Finally, once she grasped the concept, she turned back to regard him for a moment with a stern scowl.

  “You are a scary man, Richard Rahl.”

  “War wizards are supposed to be scary. Part of the job.”

  Shale seemed to compose herself as she came to grips with the notion of moving between worlds. “And so you think that is what the Golden Goddess and her people can do? A spectral fold? Bring our worlds together and simply step out of one and into the other?”

  Richard shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m only saying that I know it’s possible to go between worlds because I’ve sent people from our world to another one. My half sister wanted to go to that world to start a new life. She left this world and went to that one to live without magic. So what I’m saying is that we can’t discount what Nolo is telling us about them coming here from another world simply because we don’t know how they’re doing it.”

  Shale nodded, st
ill thinking of how to reconcile what he had just told her with what she knew. She had a sudden thought.

  “What if the scribbly man the Mother Confessor saw, and the tracks I told you about, are them in the process of stepping through. You know, like they are still in that interface between worlds. What if that was what Kahlan saw—one of them in the midst of coming into our world? What if what she saw was him still in transition between worlds?”

  Kahlan looked between Shale and Richard. “That actually might make sense. It didn’t seem like he was, I don’t know, all there, I guess you could say. Maybe he was in the process of materializing here. Before our worlds were close enough, they used to try and we would only see a glimmer of them. Now they can come through, so that’s what I saw here.”

  Richard considered it a moment. “That certainly might explain it. Why don’t you see what else we can learn from Nolo?”

  Kahlan left the two of them to go back to stand before the prisoner. “How will the Golden Goddess try to take our world?”

  Nolo struggled to shrug against his helpless fear that he couldn’t properly answer her. “I’m not sure, Mistress—I swear! I do know that she doesn’t understand our world.”

  “What do you mean? Our language? Our ways? What doesn’t she understand?”

  “No, not those things. Of all the worlds she has found and raided, she has never before encountered a world like ours.”

  “You already said that.” Kahlan made a face. “What doesn’t she understand about our world?”

  He cried out in terror that he had displeased her by not answering in the way she wished. “Forgive me, Mistress!”

  “Pay attention. Answer the question. She has never encountered a world like ours. What has she never encountered before? What doesn’t she understand?”

  “Magic.”

  Kahlan was taken aback. “She doesn’t understand magic?”

  “She has never before encountered a world with magic. The gift—magic—confuses her. She has never seen magic before. She does not understand it.”

  Kahlan paused to look over at Richard. This was certainly unexpected. Then again, in a way, it wasn’t. It was entirely possible that magic was unique to their world alone.

  “The world Lord Rahl sent those people to was a world without magic,” Shale whispered. “Her world must be like that. That would explain why she doesn’t understand magic.”

  Kahlan nodded her agreement before she turned back to Nolo. “Does she fear it? Does she fear magic?”

  “She doesn’t know what it is. She is wary of it because it is an unknown to her. She fears you. You have power she cannot comprehend. That is why she tried to kill you, earlier. She will have you dead. But there is one thing she fears more than you and your power.”

  “What would that be?”

  “She fears the shiny man most of all.”

  16

  Kahlan frowned and leaned in as if she hadn’t heard him correctly. “She fears what?”

  “The shiny man.” He tilted his head in Richard’s direction. “Lord Rahl.”

  “She fears Lord Rahl most of all?”

  Nolo nodded as he cried out, “Yes!”

  “Why does she call him the shiny man?”

  “His magic. His abilities. His power. His gift. His sword. Everything about him strengthens the magic of this world—especially his bond as the Lord Rahl with his people. That bond is open-ended, without limits. The shiny man lights this world with this strange thing: magic.”

  “How could his gift give the magic of this world strength?”

  “The same way his bond powers the Agiel of the Mord-Sith in ways that we cannot see. But she sees it shining. She sees the shiny threads of it.

  “Magic shrouds this world, veils it, obscuring her ability to see into it very well. For that reason she uses people here, peering out through their eyes, like she was seeing through my eyes in the great hall when I came before you to give you her demand that you surrender. She was watching you both through my eyes. Through that imperfect, murky vision of looking through another’s eyes—through my eyes—she couldn’t see what Lord Rahl really looks like. His gift makes him look shiny to her. That terrible shine hurts her vision. No one else looks like that to her, just him. That’s why she calls him the shiny man.”

  Richard remembered the way Nolo had kept looking away from him in the great hall, avoiding eye contact. This would explain why.

  “So she hates him,” Kahlan said, “because of his gift.”

  “Oh yes,” Nolo said, nodding furiously. “She hates him. She wants him dead. Your magic reinforces his gift. She hates you. She wants you dead. Once you both are dead then this confusing shroud of magic around this world will fade away and her hordes will have free run.”

  “But our magic protects us. Lord Rahl’s magic can defeat them.”

  “Forgive me, Mistress, for not being clear,” he whined. “They don’t understand magic, so they are cautious… for now. But don’t mistake caution for fear and especially not for weakness. They are anything but weak.

  “Up to now she has only allowed a few of her kind through to our world, like the one who attacked you. Allowed them to come here to hunt, to feed, to probe, mostly far away from you both, far away from your magic, to test our species. As she learns more about our world, she will send more of her kind.”

  “But my magic protected me?”

  “During that moment when one of hers struck out at you, it was because you were at your weakest, but even so your magic kept the one who came from being bold enough to slaughter you as swiftly as she had intended.”

  “What exactly is their purpose, though? Their objective?”

  “Her kind considers us an inferior species. We are prey. They will hunt us like game. They will hunt us in ways we cannot even begin to imagine. Other worlds are merely sport to them. We are a new kind of species, a new kind of prey, one that is difficult to chase down and kill, one that has this strange thing, magic. All that makes us a new kind of sport for them, a more challenging sport. That excites them.”

  “There must be a way for us to show her that we are intelligent, thinking beings,” Kahlan said. “You’re a diplomat, tell us how we can reason with them to reach a peace between our worlds.”

  “Peace is repugnant to them. They regard themselves as a race of gods. They don’t live in peace with any inferior species. They hunt them.”

  Richard thought it ironic that the consul general, a man whose life had been devoted to diplomacy and negotiation in pursuit of peace, was explaining why there could be no peace with these beings.

  Kahlan still wasn’t convinced. “There must be a way to persuade them that hunting the people here isn’t right, that there are better ways to deal with each other even if we are different, even if they think we are inferior to them.”

  Nolo had been shaking his head as she spoke. “You are still thinking of them in human terms. They are not human. They are not anything like us. I don’t know what they are but I do know they are not like us. They even reproduce differently.”

  “What do you mean, they reproduce differently?”

  “For them reproduction does not involve bonding or love or any kind of pleasure. They simply replicate more of their kind through some sort of process as necessary to maintain their supremacy. They get no pleasure or satisfaction from it, and certainly no joy. There is no bonding with those they create.

  “The pleasure for their species comes from the singular act of inflicting terror and then killing their prey. The best way to explain it is that terrorizing prey is for them much the same pleasure we get from the act of sex. Bringing terror is a complex act to them, filled with nuance and excitement. After a period of this enjoyment building up from inflicting terror, killing, you might say, is their form of orgasm.

  “Sometimes they eat what they kill, sometimes they don’t. Either way, the object is terror and then the climax of killing. That is the central pursuit of their lives, much like some d
epraved individuals here are driven to get sick pleasure out of torturing and killing animals. We are just animals to the goddess and her kind. They have no empathy for prey.”

  “So they prey on other worlds?” Kahlan asked.

  “Yes. They search the worlds among the stars for hunting grounds. They have been to our world before, but it has always been too distant a place to come to and hunt successfully, or even visit except for the briefest of moments. Too short a time to kill. Now, our world has somehow come within reach. Now, they can prey on us.”

  “It is only magic, then, keeping them from flooding in and slaughtering us all?”

  “Yes, Mistress. Only the magic of this world gives the goddess pause—but only for the time being. You may not realize it, but only the power of the shiny man and you, Mistress, hold that net of magic together around our world. You two are the nexus of magic in our world. Lord Rahl’s bond, as shown through the devotion, gives strength and energy to the web of magic. Your gifts are what binds all kinds of magic together in countless ways and keeps it viable.

  “Even so, as soon as they learn more, her kind will use this world as they have used others within their grasp—for the sport of killing.”

  “But surely she must know that we aren’t going to let that happen. We will fight back.”

  Nolo nodded. “She is counting on that. Your defiance piques their interest. They know we have weapons and that we are often warlike. The shiny man is a war wizard, after all. The resistance that would be put up by our kind excites them, draws them. It will bring more numbers than usual. It will drive them to stalk every person in this world and hunt us to extinction.

  “In the end, there can be no salvation for our world. If you do not surrender, she will become bolder and then hunt you both down and kill you. If for some reason you could elude her, even that is not a problem. If she so decided, she has but to wait. It is only a matter of time.”

  “What do you mean, wait?” Kahlan asked. “Wait for what?”

  “Wait for you both to die. Each of you is the last of your kind. The last Confessor, the last Lord Rahl.