The Third Kingdom (43 page)

Not much farther along, Hannis Arc stopped and turned, watching Richard, Vika, and the mass of silent, whitewashed half people coming up around and behind Richard. When Richard came to a halt, Hannis Arc silently gestured to the Mord-Sith.

She understood what he wanted.

“Give me your sword,” she said as she moved around in front of Richard. “You won’t be needing it.”

Handing over his sword was about the last thing in the world he wanted to do, but his options were pretty limited. He could draw the weapon and fight, but there was no way he could hold off the horde of Shun-tuk all around him. His first target, of course, would have been Hannis Arc, but the man had already demonstrated his occult powers, so such an attack would swiftly prove pointless. Lastly, trying to use the weapon against a Mord-Sith was a mistake that he had made once before in his life. He would not make that same mistake again.

Vika lifted her hands out. Richard pulled the baldric off over his head and laid the sheathed sword in her upturned palms.

She looked a bit surprised. “Very good, Lord Rahl. If I didn’t know better, I would think that you had already been trained by a Mord-Sith.”

Without saying anything, Hannis Arc gestured to the half people crowded in close.

One of the Shun-tuk shoved Richard, turning him down a different tunnel to the left side. Once into the opening, Hannis Arc gracefully lifted a hand and a glimmering green veil rose over the opening, trapping Richard behind it.

Richard, feeling naked without his sword, looked around in his sudden solitude, the greenish veil providing light enough to see by. He paced for a time, frustrated, angry, and feeling cornered not only by the shimmering green luminescence confining him in a chamber in the rock, but by the entire situation.

He had hoped that this would lead him to where Zedd, Nicci, Cara, and the others were being held captive. He suspected that he had to be close to them, but locked in such a spot he didn’t know how he would get to them.

It was obvious that Hannis Arc had long been plotting something, and Richard had been completely unaware of the man’s treacherous scheming. Richard didn’t know for sure what the man had planned or what his ultimate goal was, but Richard had some ideas and none of them were good.

He hated the feeling of being too far behind the flow of events, of feeling that he had been trapped before he even realized that anything was going on. Not only had the barrier to the third kingdom, built in Naja Moon’s time back during the ancient war, finally failed, but at the same time Hannis Arc was planning something ominous. It seemed obvious enough
that the two events, the barrier failing and Hannis Arc capturing Richard, were connected.

He admonished himself for concentrating so much mental effort on the problem rather than trying to think of a way out of the situation. He was in the dark about Hannis Arc’s plans. He couldn’t know the extent of the problem and it was useless guessing.

At least Samantha had gotten away. That meant the situation wasn’t hopeless. Hannis Arc either didn’t care about her, or he hadn’t yet managed to catch her. Most likely he didn’t consider her a serious threat and so he didn’t concern himself with her. It was Richard he wanted.

Richard knew that he had to think of solutions rather than fret about the problem. He needed to tackle the obstacles one at a time. The immediate solution he needed was to see if there was a way to get out of the prison he found himself in. He had to put his mind to that, first.

Setting aside the swirl of worries and questions, he began exploring the irregular area in which he found himself confined.

There was a wooden bucket of water near a wall, but no food. He soon discovered that there were openings everywhere through the rock. Most of them were small dark holes he could fit no more than a finger or hand into. There were a few other openings barely large enough to possibly squeeze himself through, but they were dark as pitch. Richard suspected they led nowhere, so he would save them as a last resort to try. It would do him no good to try to wriggle through and get stuck. There were larger openings, like the one he had come in through, but they, too, were blocked with the glowing green walls.

Richard was careful to stay clear of that wavering greenish luminescence. He had been uncomfortably close to such boundaries to the underworld before, but he was unsure of
the exact properties of the ones in this place. After all, Hannis Arc had commanded them into existence. It was impossible to know if the boundary between life and death behaved differently in the third kingdom, where life and death existed together, or if they behaved like others he had encountered in the past. More importantly, after coming through the gates into the third kingdom, those boundaries were not fixed—they moved. He didn’t want to be too close and have one of these unexpectedly engulf him. All the more reason to keep his distance from the wavering greenish veil.

As he glanced around, the thought occurred to him that the boundary veils blocking him in the prison might start closing in on him in order to pull him into the underworld. That seemed unlikely, though. Hannis Arc could have simply let the Shun-tuk have him if he had wanted Richard dead.

No, Hannis Arc had wanted him alive for some purpose. Maybe the same reason he had taken the others captive rather than kill them. Richard wished he knew what that purpose could be.

Sighing in frustration, he stuffed his hands into his back pockets as he walked around, inspecting every inch of his prison. He saw nothing useful and no way out. It seemed a very secure dungeon.

He hoped that Samantha hadn’t been caught by the Shun-tuk. In the back of his mind he constantly worried about her.

He considered the way he had able to call to her beyond the greenish veil trapping him. He remembered that she could hear him, but could not see him through the greenish veil.

That thought gave him an idea.

He went to one of the passages covered over with a glimmering sheet of the green light.

“Is anyone there?” he called out.

When he called out again and still received no answer back other than the echo of his own voice, he went down the line
to the next veil blocking an opening, and then another, calling out at each one.

“Can anyone hear me? Is anyone there?”

“Richard?” came the weak echo of a voice he knew.

Richard spun around to where the voice had come from across the irregular chamber. He rushed to the other side of his prison, to the green veil floating in the opening on that side.

“Zedd? Zedd is that you?”

“Dear spirits—Richard!” the voice echoed back.

It sounded distant, as if it was several chambers away, and it wasn’t very loud, but it was enough to hear and it was unmistakable. Zedd’s voice sounded choked with tears. That tormented sound in his grandfather’s voice terrified Richard.

“Zedd, yes, it’s me. Are you all right?”

The answer was a long moment in coming.

“Yes, my boy. I’m alive.”

That wasn’t the answer Richard had been hoping for.

“Zedd, are you all right? What are they doing to you?”

He waited a moment until the answer finally came. “They’re bleeding us.”

“Bleeding you? They’re taking your blood?”

“Yes.”

Richard pounded a fist against the stone wall beside the opening blocked by the greenish luminescence.

“Why?”

“It’s a long story. I’ve seen a few of the others. And some people I don’t know. They bleed them as well, gifted and non-gifted alike.”

Richard remembered how Jit had been bleeding Kahlan and drinking her blood. He had to remind himself to slow his breathing and stay calm. He had to keep his wits if he was to figure something out.

It was all he could do not to try to dive through the greenish boundary of the underworld to get to his grandfather.

“I’m sorry they have you, too, my boy. But it is heartwarming to hear your voice.”

The anguish in Zedd’s voice was unmistakable. Zedd rarely sounded that despairing.

“Zedd, hang on. I’ll think of something.”

Richard could hear a soft chuckle. “That’s the Richard I’ve missed so much.”

Richard swallowed. “Zedd, what do they want with your blood. Why are they taking your blood?”

“They are using it to try to raise the dead.”

Richard blinked. “What?”

“They don’t do much talking, but from what I can gather, they think that the blood of the gifted can somehow bring the dead back to life.”

“That’s crazy, but it’s far from the craziest thing I’ve heard recently.”

The silence dragged on for a moment before Zedd spoke again.

“So tired … Richard, I have to rest. So tired …”

Richard was nodding. “It’s all right, Zedd. Rest. I’ll think of something. I’ll get us out of here, I swear I will. Hang on. Rest for now. Save your strength.”

“Hush. They’re coming for me again. I love you, my boy.… ”

Zedd’s voice trailed off.

Richard pounded the side of his fist against the wall again as he heard his grandfather cry out in the distance as he was being dragged away.

Richard had to do something.

Kahlan caught the handle on the side to help herself stay upright when the coach bounced over a rut. Abruptly rocking so violently hurt her abdominal muscles injured by the Agiel. It still hurt to take a deep breath.

Both the Mord-Sith and the abbot were watching her as they rode through a gloomy landscape of towering trees and craggy, inhospitable terrain. Kahlan turned her eyes to look out the window so that she wouldn’t have to look at the two of them. It made her anger boil to look at them. It made her furious that they were doing this.

The New World had for years fought a gruesome war with the Old World. Emperor Jagang had caused incalculable suffering. There was no way to tell how many hundreds of thousands of people had lost their lives in that war. Families lost fathers, mothers, brothers, daughters and sons. Entire generations of people had been wiped out. More people yet would be crippled for life. Many would not be entirely healed for years, if ever.

And for what?

So that Emperor Jagang could rule the world, so that the Imperial Order could bring about their vision that everyone must live for the Imperial Order and their beliefs, live as subjects
of those twisted ideas of the common good imposed by force.

Like so many other rulers who preached a common good, they had been willing to kill everyone who didn’t agree with their delusion of a better life. They had been willing to wipe out entire cities, the entire New World if need be, to have their way.

The suffering they’d brought to the world had been staggering, all in the absurd notion of a better life for all.

But Richard had led the New World to victory. Freedom had prevailed. The long ordeal, the suffering and sacrifice that sometimes seemed as if it would never end, was now over.

The world was at peace.

And now these people from some forsaken dark land wanted to throw the world into chains again, just as the Imperial Order had done? And for what? So that they could rule?

It was insane.

Kahlan clenched her jaw as she glared out the window.

“What was it like?”

Kahlan frowned back at the abbot sitting on the seat across from her.

“What?”

His self-satisfied smile seemed comfortably at home on his features as he watched her. He could see how angry she was, and he was enjoying it. He was enjoying that he had taken her prisoner, that the Mother Confessor, the Lord Rahl’s wife, the woman who had helped defeat the Imperial Order, was now nothing more than his chattel.

“I asked what it was like.”

Kahlan glared at him without answering. She turned her gaze out the window at the endless expanse of dark woods. The leaden overcast made all the trees look a greenish gray. The forest looked ancient, as if the world of man had not touched it. It was an uncharted wilderness, a primal, inhospitable wasteland where death and decay was the way of life.

The crooked limbs arching over the small road nearly closed them in, turning the poorly made road into a somber tunnel through hostile territory. They seemed to her to be like the great arms of monsters continually reaching for victims. It was as malicious-looking a woods as she had ever seen.

A sudden, violent blow to her face sent Kahlan sprawling across the seat.

She gasped from the pain and shock of the blow from the Mord-Sith’s fist. Her world seemed to tilt as it spun. For a moment, Kahlan had trouble understanding where she was or what was happening. Her arms lay limp, one across her legs, the other hanging down over the front of the black leather seat.

Kahlan groaned as the pain from the blow started to blossom. Her jaw throbbed. Her lips and nose tingled as if from a thousand needles.

Erika yanked Kahlan upright by her hair and then backhanded her across the other side of the face, finally shoving her back into her seat.

As Kahlan sat, arms dangling limp at her sides, she felt warm blood running down her chin, dripping onto her pants.

“The abbot asked you a question,” the Mord-Sith growled. “You had better learn to respect your superiors. If you don’t wish to do that, then I would be only too happy to ask the driver to stop the coach so that I can drag you out onto the road and teach you to show proper deference and obedience.”

She leaned forward, again grabbing Kahlan by the hair, pulled her forward, and put her face close. “Would you like that?”

“No,” Kahlan said before the Mord-Sith struck her again.

Erika smirked as she released Kahlan’s hair, leaned back in her seat, and folded her arms.

With the back of her wrist Kahlan wiped the blood from her mouth.

Abbot Dreier watched in quiet satisfaction for a moment before finally repeating the question.

“I asked, what was it like? I expect an answer. Erika expects an answer. We are both burning with curiosity.”

Kahlan shot him a black look. “What are you talking about? What was what like?”