Into Darkness

by Terry Goodkind

  “You’re a liar,” Kahlan said.

  “Do tell,” Shota said, indulgently.

  “You may indeed plan to kill me after I give birth—as you have actually planned all along—but you have no intention of killing my two children. None.”

  39

  The smug smile vanished. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Really?” Kahlan cocked her head. “If you really wanted these children dead, they would already be dead. You’ve just said you intend to kill me. So if your intent really is to kill these children, and you admit that you also intend to kill me, you would do to me right now what you just did to Nea. Then my unborn children and I would all be dead. Isn’t that what you claim to want?”

  Shota didn’t answer.

  “But you can’t do that,” Kahlan went on, “because you actually have no intention of killing my children, and if you killed me now you would be killing those two children—the children you so desperately want to be born alive.”

  Shota acted perplexed, as if such a notion was utterly outlandish. “Where in the world would you come up with such a fanciful idea? After I have for so long promised you that I would not allow the children you and Richard create to live, why in the world would you now come up with this crazy notion I would not carry out my promises and kill those two little monsters?”

  “Because you intend to raise them.”

  Shota stood stock-still as she stared into Kahlan’s eyes for a long, dragging moment.

  “I can see that Lord Rahl does not wed stupid women.”

  “And certainly not one stupid enough to let you get away with it.”

  The menace returned to Shota’s face. “Oh, but you are wrong, there. I have already gotten away with it, we simply need to play out the final acts and it will be done. At least as far as your part in this is concerned.”

  “You seriously think I intend to let you raise these two children?”

  “You no longer have any say in it.” Shota gestured dismissively. “I will raise them in a way that you never could.”

  “You mean raise them as your two little underlings to follow in your footsteps, worship you as their mother, and do your bidding?”

  Shota glared. “I have seen into the flow of time. I told you that I saw that you and Richard would conceive a monster. It is possible, although it is a remote possibility, that it is as you have said, that the child I saw in the flow of time was the one you previously lost. But having seen into that complex flow, I don’t for a second believe that.

  “One of the children you now carry is the monster I saw in that prophecy.”

  “Richard ended prophecy.”

  “That doesn’t mean that prophecy wasn’t real, or true, or that when it was here in our world I wasn’t able to use it. You didn’t see what I saw in that flow of time, and you can’t begin to imagine it. Before Richard ended my ability to continue to use that flow, I saw this, saw what you two would create.”

  “Our children will be who we raise them to be. I told you, I don’t believe in destiny. No matter what you saw, that doesn’t mean one of these children will turn out the way you think.”

  Shota shook her head as she let out a weary breath. “You just can’t grasp the entirety of this, can you? You see only your little slice of it, your naive wishes, hopes, and dreams. Monster or not, they are both gifted with power from each of you.

  “You and Richard are not the ones to raise such a powerful pair—a girl with Confessor power combined with the power of her war-wizard father, and a boy war wizard with your Confessor power. Neither of you can begin to comprehend the enormity of what you have created.

  “You say that these children are needed to protect our world from the Glee by maintaining the web of magic they provide, and you are right. The power these two hold will be a web of magic so intense that it will drive the Glee from our world for all time. It will protect our world and protect the magic of it.

  “But you don’t see the bigger picture beyond that which our world needs to free us from the immediate threat of the Glee. You and Richard are too weak, too softhearted, too indulgent of what people under your rule wish to do with their lives. Those ebbing and flowing wishes of the ignorant masses would eventually lead our world over the brink and into ruin that even the Glee could not accomplish.

  “You two fought a long and terrible war against the Imperial Order. Do you think their destructive doctrine came from another world? No, it came from the people in our world, people who left to their own ignorant wishes will one day again fall under the seductive spell of such beliefs. It has always been that way, and it will always be that way, unless there is rule strong enough to exert control for the good of our world.

  “These two children you carry, together, with the gifts they will be born with, will have the ability to rule the world with the kind of power and authority that will prevent that kind of thing from ever happening again.

  “So you see, in a way, I, too, do not believe in destiny. I am the one who will prevent that terrible future from ever having the chance to fester and grow. What I do now saves countless lives in the future.

  “With these two under my protection, care, guidance, instruction, and preparation, they will be the two powerful instruments to both expel the Glee and control our world so that it can never be allowed to fall into the foolishness of ignorant masses too stupid to know what is in their own best interest. I will control those masses. With those two children, I will protect the best interest of the world. It will all be done for the greater good.

  “You and Richard do not have the strength to raise rulers like that. I do.

  “I will be the mother children such as these really need. The boy will see me as a vision of Richard’s mother, and the girl will see me as a vision of yours. They will both see me as their mother, think of me as their mother, and have total trust in me as their teacher.

  “They will both depend on me for everything. They will learn from me everything. They will come to believe from me everything. I will forge them both into the powerful force the world needs, into the powerful rulers the world needs in order for it to continue without the mindless, destructive beliefs of fools being allowed to flourish. In the past when people were allowed to force unworkable ideas on nations, it cast the world into wars in which countless masses died. I will not allow that to happen again.

  “These two will rule with iron fists and their power.

  “I will rule them both with mine.”

  Kahlan blinked in stunned surprise. She had known that Shota wanted both children in order to raise them and use their gifts for her own ends, but she hadn’t realized the full extent of her ideas.

  Shota intended to turn the twins into weapons she would shape and wield. It was she who would be pulling the strings of her two puppets in order to rule the world. It was now crystal clear that Shota had put a great deal of thought, to say nothing of effort, into her mad scheme. She was convinced of the need of doing this. She believed in what she was saying and that she was doing it for the greater good. She thought that she was ultimately doing the right thing.

  Richard had always said that the most dangerous person was the one who truly believed that their cause was right. Shota believed that what she was doing was inherently right. It was the greater good as she saw it.

  Kahlan knew that she had to stop the woman now, before she used her witch woman’s power to put her into a numb sleep until the babies were born. By then it would be too late.

  Because it would still be a while before her power returned, she could see no other way to do it.

  Since Kahlan couldn’t move her feet, while Shota was still close enough and before she moved away Kahlan leaned out with lightning speed and just that quick had her hands around Shota’s throat.

  She gritted her teeth and growled with the effort of squeezing the life out of the witch woman.

  But before she could crush her windpipe, Shota did something Kahlan hadn’t conside
red.

  40

  Kahlan gasped in pain as she felt the shock of a flash of power hit her. The abrupt jolt of it sizzled through every nerve in her body, making her involuntarily release her grip, and then, as she pulled her hands back, she suddenly felt the terror of snakes slithering up in under her shirt.

  Another snake, with multicolored scales, climbed up over her back and coiled its fat body around her neck, constricting enough that it made it difficult to breathe. She tightened her neck muscles as much as she could, hoping to protect the blood supply to her brain so that she wouldn’t lose consciousness. She didn’t know if that would actually work, but it was the only thing she could do.

  Another, with a diamond pattern along its back, came around her waist, then moved up and over her shoulder. The whole time its tail rattled a threat. Several long, thin, black vipers with red and yellow bands slithered right up the side of her face and into her hair. Colorful snakes writhed everywhere on her, tightening around her legs as they pressed their heads against her back in under her shirt.

  Shota didn’t back away—she didn’t need to. Kahlan was immobilized with fear. There were so many snakes everywhere on her that she feared to breathe.

  The smile that Kahlan had come to hate spread once more on Shota’s full lips. “I strongly suggest you don’t move, Mother Confessor. Agitated vipers”—Shota leaned in a little—“bite.”

  Kahlan didn’t have to be told not to move. She was too terrified to move. Her mind raced, trying to think what to do. When Shota had done this the first time they met the witch woman, Richard was there and made her stop it. Richard wasn’t there, now, to make Shota withdraw her vipers.

  Without looking away from Kahlan’s eyes, Shota lifted a hand and snapped her fingers back behind at the other witch women.

  “Niska, come here.”

  One of the women in the group rushed forward, shuffling her feet the whole way. Her shoulders were hunched in fear of the very angry grand witch.

  “Yes, Mistress?”

  Niska wasn’t at all malicious-looking, but she certainly was strange, and Kahlan had no trouble whatsoever believing she could be nothing other than a witch woman. She was youngish and slender, wearing floaty, flimsy white robes pinned together above each shoulder.

  What there was of the robes left her arms and lot of her flesh exposed, and every bit of that flesh was covered in writing.

  It ran up her arms, line after line, on all sides. On her right arm, from her biceps to her shoulder, the writing went in bands around her arm. On her upper shoulders and chest the writing followed the contours of her body. When she moved, and the material of her robes parted, Kahlan could see that her thighs, too, were covered in line after line of writing.

  There were several lines of symbols down the bridge of her nose, and horizontal lines of symbols following the contours of her face onto the sides of her nose, where they met the lines coming down the bridge of it. Line after line of the symbols ran all the way around her neck and continued back under her fall of satiny black hair.

  Kahlan could see in the light as she moved, by the way most of the strokes had a welted look to them, that it all had been tattooed in dark ink, not simply written or painted on her skin. Or else, she thought, perhaps the lines of writing had been branded into her flesh with magic.

  Kahlan couldn’t read the writing, but she did recognize the look of some of the symbols. They looked very much like the ancient symbols Richard had shown her several times. Those were the language of Creation. These looked like they were as well. The significance of that alone was unnerving.

  Niska stood meekly to the side and slightly behind Shota. Her shoulders were stooped, and her head was sunken down into those shoulders. She worried her fingers against one another as she stared at the ground.

  “Yes, Mistress? Do you wish something from me?”

  Kahlan could tell by the quality of her voice that although Niska was submissive in front of Shota, encountered by herself, this slight woman would be formidable.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do,” Shota said.

  Off behind Shota, the other witch women watched, not knowing what was coming but, after the things they had already seen, clearly fearing it.

  “Niska,” Shota said in her silky voice as she twirled a finger, “I’d like you to spin a sleep spell around the Mother Confessor. I want it to be irreversible.”

  “Irreversible?”

  “Yes, irreversible.” Shota shrugged. “We will not have cause to break it, since after she gives birth she will have to die, so yes, it may as well be irreversible. That kind is easier, and stronger, so we won’t have to worry that she might come awake in childbirth.”

  Niska bowed. “As you wish, Mistress.”

  Niska took a few steps away from Shota to give herself room, then began chanting words under her breath. As she went on in the singsong rhythm of the unfamiliar words, she pointed down at the ground and slowly began spinning a finger around and around.

  As she mumbled the strange words, and her finger revolved, her hand took up the turning, and then her whole arm began making circles as it hung like a pendulum from her shoulder.

  As her hanging arm revolved round and round in circles, the beautiful but incomprehensible words gradually became louder. They seemed to echo back through the trees and thick vegetation, their power resonating with the wild things back in the shadows, with nature itself, calling power forth.

  Kahlan began to see, off in that dense vegetation and out among the trees across the swampy bodies of water, a thickening mist all around begin to form and gradually start to revolve. As the strength of the words Niska chanted became stronger and deeper, the mist became thicker, and it gradually picked up speed as it circled around them all gathered there on the path through the swamp.

  As the circle of that mist gradually began to shrink inward, Kahlan could tell that she was at the center of that low, thick ring of haze.

  As she watched it closing in around her, she tried to move at least her feet, but she couldn’t. Her feet were bound together with a spell, but worse, there were snakes, hundreds of them it seemed, slithering all over her feet and up her legs. They were so many that some of them had to slither over the tops of others. She had no doubt that if she moved, they would bite her, so she reconsidered her attempt to move her feet. The only slight doubt in the worry that she would be bitten was that if the vipers did bite her, her babies would die with her, and since Shota was determined to have those two gifted children, she wouldn’t want to lose the opportunity. Still, as angry as Shota was, Kahlan didn’t feel at all confident that she wouldn’t let the snakes bite to kill her and the twins along with her.

  As Niska chanted and the revolving ring of thick mist came ever closer, Kahlan felt increasingly desperate, but she was also beginning to feel so tired that she caught herself starting to nod off. Each time, she jerked herself back awake, knowing that once that circling mist completely closed in on her, it would overwhelm her ability to stay awake and that would herald the end of her, and the end of her children’s chances to have a good life.

  She knew that once she did fall asleep, Shota would simply have to bide her time a little while longer, until Kahlan delivered, and then she would have the twins all to herself.

  As desperately as she tried, she could think of no solution to the spot she was in.

  Kahlan blinked with sleepiness, desperately trying to stay alert even as the weight of drowsiness pressed in on her. When she forced herself awake again, she saw a big white snake rise up along the length of her, slithering its way onward among the writhing net of other snakes. All the rest were different colors and covered with patterns. Only this one was white.

  Kahlan jerked her head again, trying to stay awake. She looked beyond Shota and Niska to the others standing together in a group.

  Kahlan saw, then, that Shale’s eyes were rolled up her in head and her fingers were moving.

  Kahlan blinked in disbelief when she su
ddenly realized what that meant.

  41

  Kahlan instantly recognized that this was her last chance, and despite her paralyzing fear of the snakes slithering all over her and the sleepiness incrementally tightening its grip on her, she had to take it. She didn’t know if Shota would let her snakes bite Kahlan, but she had no other choice but to act.

  The white snake turned its big head to look at her, its red tongue flicking out. It was frightening seeing such a deadly creature up close.

  Before it was too late, quick as a crack of lightning, Kahlan ignored her revulsion and snatched the white snake right behind its head. As she turned it and thrust it out, its mouth opened wide, exposing long fangs as sharp as needles.

  Kahlan slammed the snake against Shota’s neck before she had time to react. The fangs instantly sank in deep, hitting the main vein. Even though it already had its fangs in, Kahlan held it there, pressing the head against the witch’s neck. She felt the snake’s powerful muscles flex as it worked its mouth to pump venom into the jugular vein.

  The witch woman stumbled back with a shriek of shock and fear. The white snake had its fangs fastened in her neck and was pulled away from Kahlan’s grip as Shota staggered back. She grabbed at her throat, weakly trying to claw the snake away. As she did, it whipped coils of its white body around her arm and neck, preventing her from pulling it away from her.

  There was no faster way for the venom to get to Shota’s heart than the vein in her neck. Because that was where the venom entered her bloodstream, it acted all that much faster than it otherwise would have. Her heart would circulate it quickly to her brain and through the rest of her.

  Niska gasped in shock at seeing what had just happened. She stopped chanting and quickly stepped out of the way as Shota stumbled back, both hands fighting the thrashing white snake that had her by the throat. Without the chanted words, the circle of mist began to evaporate, losing its grip of sleepiness on Kahlan.