The Third Kingdom (47 page)

He was the one.

He was the only one to end the coming terror of the awakened dead and the half people, of the boundary between life and death ripped aside to let death loose in the world of life.

At the same time, he was also the one to bring back their king and free those monsters upon the world.

He was both, he realized. He was life and death together. He was savior and destroyer together.

That, too, had been the warning that Magda Searus had left for him.

Richard watched tears of pain drip down onto the floor of the cave covered with the blood of so many people. Zedd’s blood. Probably Nicci’s, and Cara’s, and those soldiers who
had protected him so many times. Those people had come to help him. They had been willing to lay down their lives for him if they had to. In the past, many like them had.

For all those people and more, he couldn’t allow himself to be weak. For them, if not for himself, he had to be strong and endure whatever they did to him so that once beyond the ordeal, he could find a way to help save everyone from what was descending on the world of life. It was up to him to protect their lives in return.

They had been the steel against steel. He now had to be the magic against magic, even if he couldn’t use his gift.

As the ringing in his head subsided, he began to hear the Shun-tuk all around beginning to chant softly in some language Richard didn’t recognize. The haunting sound echoed around the vast chamber, almost making the whole place hum.

In a perverse way, it reminded him of the ancient devotion to the Lord Rahl. It was probably something like that, he guessed, some chant of dedication to their long-dead king.

As the half people chanted softly, Hannis Arc worked over the body of the dead man. He spoke in the same dead language, conjuring things Richard couldn’t imagine. Some of the Shun-tuk brought bowls of oily potions forward. From time to time Hannis Arc dipped a tattooed finger in them and used it to draw symbols on the dead man.

As Richard watched as he recovered, Hannis Arc next drew emblems on the forehead of the corpse. The greasy lines of the design began to glow a dull, yellowish orange, as if lit from within. Hannis Arc lifted his arms, urgently signaling the watching horde, and the Shun-tuk murmured a new chant. As the sound of it built, he bent back over the body.

Richard then saw the most remarkable sight. A sight both so terrifying and spellbinding at the same time that he could not look away.

Hannis Arc’s tattoos began to glow.

As he spoke the words of the dead language, the lines composing different symbols on his body brightened to the same luminous yellow-orange color as the symbol aglow on the forehead of the dead king. First one, then another tattoo brightened for a brief moment only to fade as another began to illuminate from within in a continually rolling, ever-changing series.

Hannis Arc turned to those watching and lifted a hand as he shouted a series of words Richard didn’t recognize.

The coordinated shouts of sacred words in answer to each prompt from the man in the center rumbled through the chamber like thunder.

As Hannis Arc worked, laying down symbols in glowing lines on the body while symbols on his own flesh glowed in sequence as if in response to the symbols he drew, the Shun-tuk began a new chant, a steady beat repeated over and over. Each beat seemed to ignite a different symbol. As the drone of it went on, the sound gradually built until even Richard felt caught up in its power, its perverse majesty.

The symbols all over Hannis Arc glowed in rhythm with the chanting, first one, then another, each brightening in sequence then dimming as another took its place, one at a time in rapid succession, as if different symbols meaning different things were responding in turn to the murmur of the chant.

Richard had never imagined a conjuring so complex, or one that involved so many others.

At last the tattooed man turned to the Mord-Sith with a grim look that she had been anticipating.

“Get up,” Vika commanded from behind Richard.

Her voice, more than anything else, seemed less than real and more like a memory from the darkest times of his life. Richard didn’t move. He wasn’t sure he could.

She leaned down and growled in his ear. “I said, get up.”

He could only nod weakly as he struggled to get his feet
under himself. He felt her hand under his arm, helping to lift him and get him upright.

With Vika’s help, he walked the rest of the distance to the corpse lying on the stone table.

Hannis Arc turned with a flourish of his black robes, like some frightening apparition from another world. His red eyes fixed on Richard with fiery intensity.

Vika pressed her Agiel to the back of Richard’s head, immobilizing him in place. His vision blurred and twisted. He opened his mouth to cry out, but he couldn’t make the sound.

Vika pushed his arm forward. Hannis Arc seized Richard’s wrist and pulled it close, over the withered corpse. Richard was helpless to do anything about it. He watched as if from a different world.

Hannis Arc pulled out a stone knife, its blade as black as the darkest depths of the underworld.

He slashed the blade across Richard’s forearm.

Richard didn’t feel pain from the cut. The pain of the Agiel overrode anything else.

Anything physical, anyway.

It didn’t override the sudden, ripping agony inside. It felt as if the knife had cut into that place of death within him, bleeding that along with his life’s blood and his soul.

Blood gushed from the gash in Richard’s arm and out over the body of the king. Rivulets of it ran down the depressions between each rib.

Hannis Arc pulled Richard’s arm farther forward, holding it over the desiccated mouth of the king.

When he seemed satisfied with the amount of blood splashed across the carcass of the king, Hannis Arc shoved Richard back out of his way. Richard saw his blood soaking the robes and dried flesh of the dead man. Bright red runnels ran down the rounded sides of the platform to join the darker blood all over the floor.

After Hannis Arc had shoved him aside, Vika pulled Richard back out of the way. He was too weak to resist. There was no point in trying. They were going to do what they were going to do and there was nothing Richard could do about it right then.

Richard went to his knees, too weary to stand. Hannis Arc’s attention, along with all the Shun-tuk, was on the body laid out on the platform. He was too absorbed in what he was doing to care about Richard.

Vika leaned over and put her mouth close to his ear.

“Put your other hand over it.”

Richard heard her talking, but didn’t really know what she meant. The lingering pain from the Agiel, even though long since withdrawn, was still scrambling his thoughts.

She grasped his left hand and placed it over the bleeding gash on his right arm.

“Press,” she said in a low, confidential voice. “Press your hand there and hold it tight.”

Richard nodded. “Thank you …”

He wasn’t sure what he was thanking her for. It just seemed the right thing to do.

Richard saw that the king’s whole body was beginning to glow, as if the symbols had lit something from within and there were a ghost now emerging from the dead husk of his body.

Vika helped lift Richard to his feet. He felt dizzy and faint, likely from loss of blood. As the effects of the contact of the Agiel to the back of his head gradually faded, he began feeling slightly more stable on his feet. Still, she had to help balance him to make sure he wasn’t going to fall over before he fully recovered.

It was the sickness inside—the pain of the poison from death’s touch—more than the touch of the Agiel, that threatened to overwhelm him. He remembered Samantha telling him that he was going to get worse.

He felt himself getting worse. What Vika and especially Hannis Arc had done with that wicked-looking blade had made him suddenly worse, had weakened him and made him more susceptible to the sickness deep inside him.

The weapon Hannis Arc had used had been a sinister-looking thing unlike any knife Richard had ever seen before. It had a bone handle of some sort, no doubt a human bone, and a blade made of the blackest of glassy stone affixed to that handle with thin strips of leather that also looked suspiciously like it had been made from human skin. The flaked edge of the blade had been so razor-sharp that Richard hadn’t really
felt it cutting him. It had that in common with the Sword of Truth.

The painted heads of the half people bobbed up and down as they shouted in unison with grim exultation at what was happening. The entire chamber reverberated with the chanting. They were at last fulfilling their purpose. This was what they had been trying to accomplish for thousands of years.

And Richard had been the one to help them accomplish their purpose.

He glanced down at the Grace on the ring he wore and remembered again the warning from Magda Searus that he could be the one to end the world of life. He feared that he very well might have done just that.

“What was that knife?” he asked Vika in a flat, hoarse voice.

“The one he used to cut you with?”

Richard nodded, not wanting to have to summon his voice again if he could help it.

Vika leaned close to his ear so that he could hear over the rumbling thunder of the chanting. She watched Hannis Arc to be sure he was busy. He wondered if she did not want to incur his wrath for disturbing him, or if there was another reason.

“It’s a knife made by the Shun-tuk,” Vika said. “Lord Arc has several weapons made by the Shun-tuk. The Shun-tuk say that their knives can slay the dead.”

“They talk?”

“When they want to.”

Richard wasn’t quite sure that he understood what that meant—a knife that could slay the dead—but he judged it clear enough that he didn’t feel the need to press for an explanation. He spotted a number of those dead that had been brought back from their graves and pressed into service as guardians for the Shun-tuk’s underground prison. Now, they stood like stiff
corpses around the perimeter of the cavern, their eyes glowing red as they watched the proceedings from the shadows. Richard knew all too well that if they wanted they could move with surprising speed.

He supposed that if they got out of control for some reason known only to the dead or the half people, having a weapon that could put them down would be handy, if not invaluable. Richard had fought the awakened dead. They were not easy to defeat. It was a difficult task, even with his sword.

He wished he still had his sword with him. He knew that in this place filled with the half people and the walking dead it wouldn’t be likely to do him a lot of good in fighting his way out, but it would still be comforting to have it at his hip.

If nothing else he might be able to be quick enough with it to hack the dead king to bits.

When he looked back to the altar just beyond Hannis Arc, Richard’s breath halted in his lungs when he saw the corpse take a breath.

A transparent, bluish, ghostlike form now lay in the same place as the king’s body. That filmy form began to stir. When it did, the body also stirred. The two, spirit body and dead body, moved as one. It looked like the corpse was possessed by a translucent ghost.

When the Shun-tuk saw the movement on the platform down at the center of the room, some of them howled in jubilation. Others cried out in what might have been fright. They were, after all, seeing a king who had the power to return to the world of life. This was not only a master to be honored, respected, and followed, but one to be greatly feared as well. Although this was something they had all wanted, the reality of seeing it actually happen was intimidating.

This was also a new beginning for them, a new era. After several thousand years of waiting, the gates to their land were open and at long last they had a real king. A king, Richard
feared, who would lead them out through those gates on a mission of conquest and domination.

Richard could tell that Vika, even though she had played a role in helping it come to pass, was disquieted by what she was seeing.

Richard hated that he was the one, though, who had played the pivotal role in bringing this evil man back to the world of life. This was a man who in an age long past had rained death and destruction down on the world. Now he was back, and Richard didn’t think that his stay in the underworld had mellowed him.

Without Richard, none of it would have been possible. The Shun-tuk might have played a part, Vika might have played a part, and Hannis Arc had certainly played a part, but Richard was the one who had made it possible.

He had the potential for both in him—death as well as life. He was of this kingdom. He carried life and death in him. Good and evil mixed together. He was the one.

Richard was the leader of the D’Haran Empire. He had been named
fuer grissa ost drauka
, High D’Haran for “the bringer of death.”

He had just served in his role as the bringer of death. He had just helped spawn a great evil by bringing death back into the world of life.

He knew that it was up to him to find a way to bring it to an end. There was no one else who had a chance to do anything to stop this.

All he had to do, he reminded himself, was to escape the clutches of Hannis Arc, a Mord-Sith, and untold thousands of half people who could raise an army of the dead. After that, he only needed to end prophecy.

And, he had to keep himself alive long enough.

The glowing figure of the king sat up. The Shun-tuk gasped with excitement and wonder.

It was a terrifying sight to see a dead man awaken, even for them, but especially for Richard, and especially because of what it meant.

The king’s dried flesh seemed to have grown pliable, softened no doubt by Richard’s blood as well as Hannis Arc’s dark conjuring that had united the spirit with its worldly form. With each passing moment, the dead man seemed to move with greater ease, even if not as fluidly as a living person. It was almost as if the transparent presence, the glowing spirit, was in part what animated the corpse.