“Shota, don’t you see the magnitude of the problem? Can’t you fathom how this has the potential to change everyone’s perception? If everyone forgets how Kahlan changed their individual lives, they will act without the benefit of the shifts they made in their thinking.”
Richard paced, one hand on a hip, gesturing with the other. “Think of someone you know.” He turned back to her, meeting her gaze. “Think of your mother. Now, just try to imagine all that you would lose if you lost every memory of her and everything she taught you, every one of your decisions in which she had an influence, both directly and indirectly.
“Now, imagine everyone forgetting someone important like your mother was to you—but imagine them being central to events important to everyone. Imagine for a moment how your life—your thinking—would be altered if you forgot that I exist and you no longer recalled the things you’ve done with me, the things you’ve done because of me. Can you begin to see the significance?
“You gave Kahlan that necklace as a wedding gift to both of us to prevent her from conceiving—at least for now. It was a gift that was more than that, though. It was a truce. It was peace between you and me as much as between you and Kahlan. What other truces, alliances, and oaths have been made because of Kahlan that, like the necklace, are now forgotten? How many important missions will be abandoned?
“Don’t you see? This holds the potential to throw the world into turmoil. I have no idea of the possible effects of such a wide-ranging event, but for all I know it could alter the complexion of the fight for freedom. It could usher in the dawn of the Imperial Order. For all I know, it could usher in the end of life itself.”
Shota looked astonished. “Life itself?”
“Something this significant does not happen randomly. It’s not an unfortunate accident or some casual mistake. There has to be a cause, and anything that could cause a universal event of this enormity carries sinister implications.”
For a time, Shota regarded him with an unreadable expression. She finally caught a floating corner of the layered material that made up her dress and turned away as she thought about his words. Finally she turned back.
“And what if you are simply suffering from a delusion? Since that is the simplest explanation, that makes it most likely the true answer.”
“While the simplest explanation is usually the true answer, it is not infallibly so.”
“This is no ordinary choice as you paint it, Richard. What you describe is extravagantly complicated. I’m having trouble even beginning to envision the complexities and consequences that would be involved in such an event. It would have to cause so many things to come undone, with such compounding disorder, that it would soon become all too obvious to everyone that something was terribly wrong in the world—even if they didn’t know what. That just isn’t happening.”
Shota swept her arm out in grand fashion. “Meanwhile, what damage to the world will you cause because of this mad mission you have undertaken to find a woman who does not exist?
“You came to me the first time to get help in stopping Darken Rahl. I helped you, and in so doing I helped you become the Lord Rahl.
“The war rages on, the D’Haran Empire fights desperately on, and now you are not there to be a part of it, as is your place as the Lord Rahl. You have been effectively removed from your position of authority by your own delusions and unthinking actions. A void is left where there should be leadership. All the help you would be able to provide is no longer available to those who fight for the cause you have championed.”
“I believe that I’m right,” Richard said. “If I am, then that means there is a grave danger that no one but me is even aware of. Therefore, no one but me can fight it. Only I stand opposed to some unknown but impending ruin. I can’t in good conscience ignore what I believe to be the truth of a hidden threat more monstrous than anyone realizes.”
“That makes a convenient excuse, Richard.”
“It’s not an excuse.”
Shota nodded mockingly. “And if the newly founded free empire of D’Hara falls in the meantime? If the savages of the Imperial Order raise their bloody swords over the corpses of all those brave men who will perish defending the cause of freedom while their leader is off chasing phantoms? Will all those brave men be any less dead because you alone see some inscrutable danger? Will their cause—will your cause—be any less ended? Will the world then be able to slide merrily into a long dark age where millions upon millions will be born into miserable lives of oppression, starvation, suffering, and death?
“Will chasing off after the enigma in your mind alone make liberty’s grave acceptable to you, Richard? A mere consequence of what you stubbornly think is right in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary?”
Richard had no answer. In fact, he feared to even attempt to give her one. After the way she’d put it, anything he said would sound hollow and selfish. He felt sure that he had sound reasons to stick to his convictions, but he also knew that to everyone else the proof had to seem pretty thin, so he thought that maybe it was best to just keep quiet.
More than that, though, lurking beneath the surface was the terrible shadow of fear that she could be right, that it was all some dreadful delusion in his mind alone and not some problem with everyone else.
What made him right and everyone else wrong? How could he alone be right? How could such a thing even be possible? How could he know himself that he was right? What proof, other than his own memory, did he have? There was not one concrete shred of evidence that he could hold, that he could point to.
The crack in his confidence terrified him. If that crack widened, if it ruptured, the weight of the world would crash in and crush him. He couldn’t bear that weight if she didn’t exist.
His word alone stood between Kahlan and oblivion.
He couldn’t go on without her. He didn’t want to go on in a world without her. She was everything to him. Until that moment, he had been pushing her personal, private, intimate loving memory aside and instead dealing with details in order to endure the pain of missing her for yet another day even as he worked toward finding her. But that pain was now tightening around his heart, threatening to take him to his knees.
With the pain of missing her came a flood of guilt. He was Kahlan’s only hope. He alone kept the flame of her alive above the torrent trying to drown out her existence. He alone worked to find her and bring her back. But he had not yet accomplished anything useful toward that end. The days marched past, but so far he hadn’t gained anything that would get him any closer to her.
To make matters all the worse, Richard knew that Shota was also right in one very important way. While he worked toward helping Kahlan, he was failing everyone else. He had been the one who, to a large extent, had made people believe in the idea, the very real possibility, of a free D’Hara, of a place where it was possible for people to live and work toward their own goals in their own lives.
He was only too aware that he was also largely responsible for the great barrier coming down, allowing Emperor Jagang to lead the Imperial Order into the New World to threaten the newfound freedom in the New World.
How many people would be at risk, or lose their lives, while he pursued this one person that he loved? What would Kahlan want him to do? He knew how much she cared for the people of the Midlands, the people she had once ruled. She would want him to forget her and to try to save them. She would say that there was too much at stake to come after her.
But if it was he who was missing, she would not abandon him for anything or anyone.
Despite what Kahlan might say, it was her life that was important to him, her life that meant the world to him.
He wondered if perhaps Shota was right, that he was merely using the concept of the danger Kahlan’s disappearance represented for the rest of the world, as an excuse.
He decided that the best thing to do for the moment, until he could think of a better way to get the help he needed, and to buy himself
time to gather his courage, to harden his resolve, was to change the subject.
“What about this thing,” Richard asked, gesturing vaguely, “this beast, that’s chasing me.” The passion was gone from his voice. He realized how tired he was from the long trek over the pass, to say nothing of the blur of days riding up from the Old World. “Is there anything you can tell me about it?”
He felt on safer ground with this question because the beast could interfere not only with his search for Kahlan, but with the mission Shota was urging him to return to.
She watched him for a moment, her voice finally coming much softer, as had his, as if without realizing it they had reached a wordless truce to lower the level of antagonism. “The beast that hunts you is no longer the beast it once was, the beast it was as it was created. Events have caused it to mutate.”
“Mutate?” Cara asked, looking alarmed. “What do you mean? What has it become?”
Shota appraised them both, as if to make sure they were paying attention.
“It has become a blood beast.”
Chapter 41
“A blood beast?” Richard asked.
Cara moved close to his side. “What’s a blood beast?”
Shota took a breath before explaining. “It is no longer simply a beast linked to the underworld, as it was when it was created. It was inadvertently given a taste of your blood, Richard. What’s worse, it was given that taste through Subtractive Magic—magic also linked to the underworld. That event changed it into a blood beast.”
“So…what does that mean?” Cara asked.
Shota leaned closer, her voice dropping to little more than a whisper. “That means that it is now oh so much more dangerous.” She straightened after she was sure she had made the intended impression. “I’m not an expert on ancient weapons created in the great war, but I believe that once such a beast as this one has tasted the blood of its mark in such a way, there is no turning it back, ever.”
“All right, so it won’t give up.” Richard rested his palm on the hilt of his sword. “What can you tell me to help me kill it, then? Or at least stop it, or send it back to the underworld. What does it do, precisely, how does it know that—”
“No, no.” Shota waved a dismissive hand. “You are trying to think of this in terms of some ordinary threat hunting you. You’re trying to put a nature to it, trying to give it a defining behavior. It has none. That is the peculiarity of this thing—the absence of a defining description, of a makeup. At least one that is of any use, since its nature is precisely that it has none. Because of that it therefore cannot be predicted.”
“That makes no sense.” Richard folded his arms, wondering if Shota really knew as much about this beast as she said she did. “It has to function by some fundamental nature. It has to behave in certain ways that we can at least come to understand and therefore begin to anticipate. We just need to figure it out. It can’t possibly have no nature.”
“Don’t you see, Richard? Right from the beginning, here you are trying to figure it out. Don’t you suppose that Jagang would know that you will try to figure it out so that you can defeat it? Haven’t you done that sort of thing with him in the past? He has figured out your nature, and to counter you he has created a weapon that, for that very reason, has no nature.
“You are the Seeker. You seek answers to the nature of people, or things, or situations. To a greater or lesser extent, all people do. Had the blood beast a specific nature, its actions could then be learned and understood. If something can be understood enough to predict its behavior, then precautions can be taken, a plan to counter it can be made. Decoding its nature is essential to effective action being taken. That’s why this thing has no nature—so that you can’t do those things to stop it.”
Richard ran his fingers back though his hair. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s not supposed to. That, too, is part of its trait—to have no trait. To make no sense in order to foil you.”
“I agree with Lord Rahl,” Cara said. “It still has to have some kind of makeup, some way of acting and reacting. Even people who think they are being clever by trying to be unpredictable still fall into patterns even though they may not realize it. This beast can’t just run around hither and thither hoping to come across Lord Rahl napping.”
“In order to prevent it from being understood and stopped, this beast was intentionally created as a creature of chaos. It was conjured to attack and kill you, but beyond that mission, it functions toward that end through disordered means.” Shota gathered up another floating point of her dress as she spoke. “Today it attacks with claws. Tomorrow it spits poison. The next day it burns with fire, or crushes with a blow, or sinks fangs into you. It attacks by random action. It does not choose a course of action based on analysis, previous experience, or even the situation at hand.”
Richard pinched the bridge of his nose as he thought about her explanation. So far, it seemed like Shota was right in that there had been no pattern to the attacks. They had come in completely different ways—so different, in fact, that they had questioned whether or not it was really the same beast Nicci had warned was after him.
“But Lord Rahl has evaded this beast several times now. He has proven that it can be bested.”
Shota smiled at the very idea, as if a child had come up with the assertion. She strolled off a ways and then returned as she considered the problem. The twitch of her brow told Richard that she had come up with a better way to explain it.
“Think of the blood beast as if it were rain,” she said. “Imagine that you want to stay out of the rain, like you would want to avoid being caught by the beast. Imagine that your goal is to stay dry. Today you may be inside when the rain comes, so you remain dry. Another day the rain may come on the other side of the valley and you again stay dry. Another day you leave an area just before the rain begins. Another day, you may decide not to travel, and there the rain visits. Maybe on another day as you walk down a road the rain moves in and falls in the field to your right, but on the road and to your left it remains dry. Each time the random rain event missed you, and you stayed dry—sometimes because you took preventative measures, such as staying inside, and sometimes by sheer chance.
“But, as often as it rains, you realize that it will sooner or later get you wet.
“So, you may decide that the best approach in the long run is to gain an understanding of exactly what you are up against. Therefore, in an effort to understand your adversary, you watch the sky and try to learn to predict the rain. Some patterns begin to reveal themselves as relatively reliable, so you use them as a means of prediction and as a result there will be times when you are correct and accurately anticipate the approaching rain. By this means you are able to stay inside when the rain comes and thus you stay dry. You have succeeded, it would seem, by applying what you’ve learned about how to anticipate and predict the rain.”
Shota’s intent, ageless eyes took in Cara and then fixed on Richard with such power that it almost halted his breathing. “But sooner or later,” she said in a voice than ran a shiver up his spine, “the rain will catch you. You may be taken by complete surprise. Or, you may have forecast that it was coming, but believed that you would have time to be able to take to shelter first, and then it suddenly sweeps in faster than you ever thought possible. Or, on a day when you are far from shelter because you thought that on that day there was no chance of rain at all and so you ventured far from your shelter, it unexpectedly catches you. The result of all these different events is the same. If it is the beast, rather than the rain, you are not wet, you are dead.
“Confidence in your ability to predict the rain will eventually be your downfall because, while you may be able to accurately predict it on a number of occasions, it is not in reality reliably predictable based on the amount of knowledge actually available to you or possibly your ability to understand all the information you do have. The more times you escape, though, the stronger your false sense of
confidence will become, making you all that much more vulnerable to a surprise event. Your best efforts to know the nature of rain will eventually fail you because even if you are right with a number of your forecasts, the things that brought about successful predictions are not always relevant, yet you have no way of knowing that. As a result, the rain will sneak up and envelope you when you are not expecting it.”
Richard glanced at the worried look on Cara’s face, but didn’t say anything.
“The blood beast is like that,” Shota said with finality. “It has no nature precisely so that you cannot predict its behavior by any patterns to its conduct.”
Richard took a patient breath. He couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “But all things that exist have to have a nature to them, laws of their existence, even if we don’t understand them—otherwise what you are proposing is that they could contradict themselves and they can’t.
“Lack of understanding on your part does not mean that you can pick an explanation of your choice. You can’t say that since you don’t know the nature of it, it therefore has none. You can say only that you don’t yet know the nature of this thing, that you haven’t yet been able to understand it.”
With a slight smile, Shota gestured toward the sky. “Like the rain? You may be theoretically correct, Richard, but some things, for all practical purposes, are so far beyond our understanding that they appear to be driven by happenstance—like the rain. For all I know, weather may very well have laws that drive it, but they are so complex and so far-reaching that we cannot realistically hope to comprehend or know them. The rain may not truly, in the end, be an event caused by chance, but it is still outside our ability to predict so to us the result is the same as if it were entirely random and without order or nature.
“A blood beast is like this. If there are in fact laws to its nature, as you believe, it would make no difference to you. All I can tell you is that from what I know, it’s a beast created specifically to act without order and the creation of it was successful to the degree that it functions consistently with having no discernible nature—at least none that is of any use in understanding or stopping it.
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