Witch's Oath

by Terry Goodkind

  Kahlan glanced over at Richard. “That’s when Michec showed up.”

  “He wanted to humiliate me for only being able to conjure snakes,” Shale said. “So he made the snakes vanish and brought those demons up from the underworld to show me his power and superiority.”

  Richard looked like he just had another thought. “Can you bring anything bigger and more frightening than snakes into existence?”

  “It isn’t big and scary that matters,” Shale admonished. “What matters is what works.”

  Richard let out a sigh as he started them all moving ahead again. “That’s true enough.”

  “The snakes worked,” Shale said. “They did as I intended. They kept the Glee from slaughtering us—from slaughtering your two children.”

  Richard nodded his appreciation as he moved into the darkness ahead.

  Kahlan put a hand on the back of Shale’s shoulder in appreciation for what she had done, even at great cost to herself.

  15

  Richard cautiously followed a long, curved passageway, watching for anything out of the ordinary as things ahead gradually materialized out of the darkness. In some places the passageway ascended a half-dozen steps beyond stone columns holding up barreled ceilings that denoted more important sections of the spell-form. In some of those places ornate decorations meant to indicate dominant and subordinate flows of magic within the spell-form had been carved into the stone walls.

  Along the way Richard checked each room they came to, leaning back and pushing closed doors open with a foot. While he did find long-dead, mummified corpses in a few, there was no sign of the witch man in any of them. He didn’t expect to find Michec in any of those rooms, but he still had to check them just in case.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” Cassia asked in a whisper that seemed appropriate in such sinister, ornate passageways.

  Richard simply nodded as he kept going.

  At regular intervals massive stone archways separated sections of what was an important element of the spell-form from less significant supporting elements. In places those elements and thus the archways and sections of passageways could be quite complex, reflecting the intricacy of the complication itself.

  It still felt disorienting to him to be back in the world of life. Solid ground was hard to get accustomed to again. He had begun to fear that he would be forever imprisoned in the underworld. He cherished the memory, though, of seeing the light of Kahlan’s soul when he had been in that dark world. It was a wondrous thing that was like seeing the light of her love for him visualized.

  But now that he was back, even that memory seemed very dreamlike and distant. It was just as well those memories faded away since such a place was best forgotten.

  As they passed under another soaring archway with columns of gray stone carved into ornamental spiral forms, it opened into a broad room with eight sides. A column in each corner supported a rib holding up the complex vaulted ceiling. On each of the other seven walls before them there was a stone archway just like the one they had entered under.

  “Lord Rahl,” Vika said in a quiet voice that betrayed her concern, “Moravaska Michec captured all of us. You know what happened then. If we’re going after him, well, I mean, what good will it do? Aren’t you worried that he will simply capture us again? He likes to play with his captives, but this time I don’t think he will make that same mistake again before he kills you and the Mother Confessor.”

  “I hate to admit it,” Kahlan said as she leaned in closer, “but Vika is right. He already had us all once and it seemed effortless. If we catch up with him, he might just as easily have us all in his clutches again.”

  Richard looked to all the worried faces. “Do any of you know the mistake we made?”

  The Mord-Sith all shook their heads. Kahlan bit her lower lip. She didn’t have an answer either.

  “Sure,” Shale said. “The mistake we made was coming down here after him in the first place when we should have been on our way to the Keep.”

  Richard smiled. “No. The Mord-Sith know what we did wrong, don’t you?” he asked them.

  They all looked puzzled.

  “What happens,” he asked them, “when someone tries to use magic against you?”

  They all huffed as if it were a silly question.

  “If they were foolish enough to do that, then we would capture them by the very magic they tried to use against us,” Nyda said.

  “Michec is no Mord-Sith,” Cassia objected.

  “No, he’s not,” Richard said. He looked from one to the next. “What is he, then?”

  Rikka shrugged. “A witch man.”

  Richard shook his head. He gestured to Nyda. “What is he?”

  Nyda shrugged. “Like Rikka says, he’s a witch man.”

  Richard shook his head again. “No. Berdine, what is he?”

  She made a face. “He’s a bastard witch man.”

  Richard smiled then looked at Vale. “What is he?”

  She lifted her hands out in frustration. “He is called the butcher?”

  Richard finally looked at Vika.

  “Think, Vika,” Richard said. “What is he?”

  She frowned in thought as she shared a long look with him. Finally her eyes lit with understanding. “Michec is a trainer of Mord-Sith. When I encountered him up at the stables, I immediately tried to use my Agiel on him. That was my mistake. It was over in that instant. He had me. That was how he did it.”

  “That’s what happened to me!” Berdine said. The others nodded that they, too, had tried to use their Agiel against him.

  Richard snapped his fingers. “Exactly. In order to train Mord-Sith, Darken Rahl must have instilled in him the same power instilled into a young woman when she is initiated into the sisterhood of the Mord-Sith. They are given power, through the bond, to use a person’s magic against them to capture them.

  “I once made the mistake of trying to use the magic of my sword against a Mord-Sith. I made that same mistake again when I tried to use my sword against Michec. He captured me the same way Denna did the first time I tried it.”

  Shale looked a bit sheepish. “I tried to use magic to stop him as well.”

  Kahlan was frowning. “I don’t remember what happened, but I guess I must have tried to use my ability against him. Used against a Mord-Sith, that would be a very bad death. So why didn’t my power work against him?”

  Richard looked at her with a sad smile. “He isn’t a Mord-Sith. He is a witch man and Darken Rahl gave him the ability to capture those with magic. I’m afraid that I made the same mistake as the rest of you.”

  Kahlan let out a heavy sigh. “That’s how he had us all.”

  Richard’s gaze passed over them all. “So don’t make that same mistake again.”

  “I cut him with my knife,” Vika said. “Since that’s not magic, he couldn’t capture me again. Now he’s wounded. So we can hurt him, just not with our Agiel or with your magic.”

  “Exactly,” Richard said. “Using your knife was the right thing to do. But now he’s a wounded animal. Now that we understand what his trick was, remember not to try to use your Agiel on him. If you get the chance, use your knives. But that shouldn’t be necessary. I will take care of him.”

  “Not with your sword,” Kahlan admonished in alarm.

  “No, not my sword. But I will take care of him.”

  “Lord Rahl,” Vika said with a serious look, “promise me that you will let me cut him.”

  He looked into the iron in her eyes. “You got it.”

  He had a sudden thought and looked at Shale. “Can you use your ability as a witch woman, not to make something come into existence, but to make something go out of existence?”

  Shale looked confused. “What do you mean?”

  Richard gestured at the stone column they were standing beside. “Well, for example, could you make this column, or this wall, cease to exist? Make them disappear?”

  Shale made a face like he must be craz
y. “Of course not.”

  Richard let out a disappointed sigh. “That’s a shame. All right.” He gestured into the eight-sided room. “He went down one of the other seven corridors leading out of here. Which hallway did he take?”

  Shale’s dark expression returned. “How am I supposed to know?”

  “You said you could smell a witch. Smell the air at each archway entrance and see if you can smell which one he took.”

  The dark look left Shale’s face. She blinked. “Oh. That’s a good idea, actually.”

  Richard smiled. “And here you thought I was crazy.”

  Shale smirked. “Not entirely. Just somewhat.”

  They all followed as Shale started around the large room, pausing in the entryways to sniff the air. She stopped at the fifth archway she came to and spent some time smelling the air. Finally she lifted an arm, pointing.

  “He went this way.”

  16

  Following the corridor from the octagonal room, they came to a complex of passageways. Leaning in a little to look into each of them, Richard saw no light spheres. He knew all too well that there were few places as dark as it was underground. Except, of course, the underworld. But that was an entirely different kind of darkness.

  In their situation, light wasn’t just safety, it was life, so when Shale pointed and before venturing into the blackness of the opening to the far left, Richard lifted one of the glowing glass spheres from a bracket and took it with him. Each of the Mord-Sith followed his example. Together the group of spheres cast a warm yellowish light a good ways into the distance.

  Shale tilted her head toward the first narrow hall to the left. “This way. I can smell the witch man.”

  Berdine looked bewildered. “I don’t smell anything other than dust and dankness. What does he smell like?”

  Shale gave her a look like it should be obvious. “He smells like a witch.”

  “Ah. That makes sense.” Berdine turned her face back toward Richard and rolled her eyes.

  Now, instead of their Agiel, each of the Mord-Sith had a knife in her fist. While Mord-Sith were formidable enough with an Agiel, years of training made them more than a little dangerous with a blade. They knew how to cut a person both to cause pain, to cripple, and to bring a swift death, and they weren’t timid about doing either.

  Richard didn’t want to dissuade them from keeping knives in hand, but he knew that it wasn’t time yet. The witch man was still quite a distance away and moving quickly. Soon enough he would go to ground.

  Kahlan didn’t have her knife out, but from time to time she rested her palm on its hilt, making sure it was still there. Shale did the same. Richard had never seen the sorceress draw her knife, but he suspected she was just as talented with it as she was at so many other things. For that matter, he sometimes thought she could wound with a look.

  Richard didn’t bother with his knife. He wasn’t going to use it.

  At each room they encountered, one of the Mord-Sith, holding a light sphere in her free hand, slipped in to check for the elusive Moravaska Michec. They had no luck. Richard knew they wouldn’t but he let them check anyway because it was easier and faster than an argument or having to explain.

  “The smell of him is getting stronger,” Shale told them. “We’re getting closer to him.”

  Rikka and Cassia took that news seriously and went out ahead to check in the darkness.

  “All I smell is dust and dampness,” Berdine said to no one in particular.

  Richard didn’t bother to tell the Mord-Sith to stay behind. They would likely have ignored the order, and besides, he knew that while Shale said they were closer, they weren’t yet close enough.

  Michec had spent years down in the complication. He had trapped people in it, he had kept them prisoner in it, he had turned victims loose in it so he could hunt them. As a result, he knew the place like the back of his hand. Fortunately, because Richard had spent time studying the drawings Edward Harris had shown them, he had a map of the complication in his head and was able to know exactly where they were. He could envision all of the intersections and passageways ahead of them.

  Besides knowing the corridors, Richard understood how the wounded witch man thought, the choices he would likely make, and why. As they came to branching passageways, he knew other things as well, and made sure they went the right way. Shale confirmed his conviction at each of the intersections he took without asking her.

  In some places they came to large rooms they had to pass through. Those were secondary nodes in the spell-form. Some had smaller rooms off to the sides. He knew Michec wasn’t in any of them, and for the sake of safety from other dangers, he wouldn’t let the Mord-Sith check them. It took a look from him for the Mord-Sith to follow his order and stay out of those rooms.

  The witch man was leading them through the most dangerous parts of the complication, hoping they would venture into an ancillary node, the way Kahlan and Shale had dived into a room without a floor that had turned out to be filled with water. Richard didn’t want the Mord-Sith running into trouble by entering places he knew were dangerous, but not necessarily why. When the Mord-Sith again wanted to check, Richard had to reassure them that Michec had gone on ahead, and not to look in those places because they had dangerous magic. Mord-Sith didn’t want anything to do with magic and so didn’t argue.

  Because he knew the place so well from the plans, Richard knew that Michec was trying to draw them into a trap. Because the man was wounded from Vika cutting him, he would want to get to a place that would give him an advantage. He would want a place that could help him surprise them and trap them with magic. Richard worried about what kind of magic Michec had at his disposal.

  For those reasons and more, Richard knew that the witch man was deliberately heading for a complex dead end. He didn’t really need Shale’s nose to tell him which route Michec was taking, but he let her point out the correct choices at each intersection or cross corridor they encountered. Each time she confirmed what he suspected, it further narrowed down the possible outcomes toward the one he had believed from the first.

  With Kahlan being pregnant with the twins, Richard didn’t at all like the idea of taking chances. She had lost their first child. If she lost the twins because they went after the witch man, Richard would never forgive himself. Even so, he knew that the bigger risk was in leaving Michec for some other day. In a way, that was the mistake the witch man had made by leaving Richard alive.

  While Richard already knew a great deal about what lay ahead, there was no telling precisely what Michec might be able to do, or what harm he might be able to cause. At the same time, they didn’t really have a choice. It was either try to surprise and fight Michec now, on Richard’s terms, or fight him later at a time of Michec’s choosing and after he had recovered. He might be a dangerous wounded animal, but he was also a weakened animal, so their best chance was to go after him before he could recover.

  When they came to a place with four closely placed openings into dark passageways at one side of a spacious room, and one passageway on the opposite side, Shale immediately started for the far-right opening of the four.

  Richard reached out and grabbed her arm. “Not that way.”

  She shot a puzzled look back over her shoulder. “But I can smell that he went this way.”

  “Don’t stand in the opening, yet.” Richard guided her to the passageway to the left of the one she had been about to take. “We are going to need to go this way.”

  “Why wouldn’t you want to follow him? We’ve been following him all this way. If you really want to catch him, he went that way. Why stop now?”

  “Because that’s a special kind of dead end. It’s a twinned spiral. It’s a deadly part of the constructed spell-form. He intends to use it against us, and trap us in there.”

  17

  Shale looked even more bewildered. “What do you mean, he intends to trap us in there? How do you know this?”

  Rather than answer the sorcer
ess, Richard turned to Vika. “I need you to do something for me.”

  Vika pulled her braid forward over her shoulder and held it in one fist as she nodded eagerly. “Yes, Lord Rahl?”

  “You need to do exactly as I say.”

  She added a confused look to Shale’s. “All right. What do you need me to do?”

  Richard gestured, pointing a thumb back over his shoulder at the opening beside the one Michec had taken. “I’m going after Michec down this way.”

  “But Shale said he took the other passageway.”

  “I know what Shale said.” He pointed, then, across the broad room to another corridor by itself. “I need you to go down that way.”

  After she looked back over her shoulder to where he had pointed, her expression turned dark. “You promised me I could cut him.”

  Richard nodded. “And I meant it. Until then, if we are to have a chance, you need to listen to me, and do exactly as I say.”

  Vika pulled both leather sleeves down tighter as she considered for a moment. “All right, I’m listening.”

  No Mord-Sith would ever have dared to hesitate at any order Darken Rahl, or any of his predecessors, gave them. To do so would have meant a swift death. Richard, on the other hand, was pleased that Vika had hesitated. It was just another indication that she was beginning to think for herself.

  “Go down that passageway, there, until it forks,” he said, waggling his hand across the room. “When you get there, take the left fork. A short time later you will come to a steel door. Behind it is another major node. Remember the one we crossed before? The one with the stone bridge?”

  Vika nodded. “The bridge that collapsed.”

  “That’s right. Go through that door, cross the bridge and through the steel door on the other side—”

  “Is this bridge going to fall in, too?”