The Third Kingdom (55 page)

She was close, he knew she was.

When she said nothing, he gestured to the Mord-Sith. Without delay Erika pressed her Agiel into the back of the woman’s skull.

She shuddered in agony. The chains rattled. Her mouth twisted as it opened. No scream could come out, no sound.

Ludwig knew from experience that she was there, that she now hung between the world of life and the world of the dead. He knew that she was at last ready.

She was now in that realm of the third kingdom.

“You see it, don’t you?” he asked intimately as he ran a hand tenderly over her hair. “You see that place beyond the veil.”

The woman nodded as she trembled under his steady hand.

“You will first give me prophecy from the dark place you see. As soon as you do that, I will grant your wish and release you to cross over to eternal peace. You would like to cross over, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes …”

He could almost taste the prophecy right there, hanging within her like fresh fruit for the picking. He would have it.

The Mother Confessor had been correct when she had once told Ludwig that if he was the one who provided the prophecy that Hannis Arc needed to rule, then Hannis Arc wasn’t really the one ruling. Ludwig Dreier was.

At the time he hadn’t given it much thought.

But as he had thought about it, he had come to realize that she was more correct than he had at first given her credit for. He had always known that Hannis Arc was absorbed in his own work and distracted by his own goals, so he relied on the guidance of prophecy that Ludwig provided. Since that prophecy was carefully culled, it was, in reality, Ludwig’s surreptitious, carefully groomed guidance. Ludwig told Hannis Arc only what Ludwig wanted him to know from beyond the veil.

What the Mother Confessor had said that day had really cast it with crystal clarity. Ludwig was the hidden hand that moved the puppet.

Hannis Arc, as powerful as he was, as talented, as clever as he was, was too insulated, too consumed with his own narrow obsessions to know how things in the wider world worked. He could not accomplish what he did without Ludwig’s guidance.

Ludwig had always planned on one day seizing that rule for himself. He was, after all, the architect behind much of the power Hannis Arc wielded, so who better to rule than he. Ludwig rightly should be the one to rule.

It would require great care, though. In spite of everything else, Hannis Arc was a profoundly dangerous man. His occult abilities were not to be taken lightly.

With a gesture from Ludwig, Erika removed her Agiel from the back of the woman’s head.

She was ready. It was time.

Ludwig bent close and pressed his fingers to the sides of her
temples. He let the last necessary components of his own unique conjuring, conjuring he himself had created, finally flow into the woman. It would give her the last part of what she needed in order to be able to provide what he sought.

Her mouth hung open as she shook. Her one eye stared, unblinking.

He took his fingers away. She sagged.

“Speak of what you see,” he said in a voice edged with anticipation.

“They come,” she said in a hoarse voice.

Ludwig Dreier straightened with a frown. This was not typically how prophecy sounded, but he knew from everything that had been properly done that it somehow was prophetic.

“They come? Who comes?”

“Those with teeth,” the woman said in a hoarse, raw voice. “They come to devour you.”

Ludwig frowned. It was about the strangest prophecy he had ever heard. He had seen this phenomenon before. On rare occasion, rather than a distant prophecy, those he had prepared gave more of a vision of the immediate future, a telling of what they saw elsewhere in the world at that moment, of things about to take place.

“Those with teeth?”

“The unholy half dead,” she whispered. “They come.”

Ludwig made a face. “I don’t understand.”

“He does.”

“He does? Who? What are you talking about? Who understands, and what exactly does he understand? You need to be more—”

“He knows what you do, Ludwig Dreier, and he knows that
you will betray him. He is with a spirit from beyond the veil, now, a spirit from the world I can now see into, a spirit who knows of your treachery. The spirit king has told Hannis Arc what you do, what you have done, of your secret betrayals, and of what you plan to do.

“Hannis Arc knows of your deceptions and the things you keep from him, the lust you have in your heart for his rule. He knows, too, that in your vanity you have come to think of yourself as Lord Dreier. He knows it all. The spirit king has told him everything.

“Most of all, the spirit king knows of your meddling in the underworld—his world.

“He and Hannis Arc have sent the Shun-tuk—the half people—to hunt the abbey for your blood, to rip your heart out. For your treachery, he sent them to eat the flesh off your bones. They come. They come.”

Ludwig felt a trickle of sweat running down between his shoulder blades. He felt goose bumps on his arms, and panic swelling in his heart.

He looked up at the Mord-Sith. She looked confused, and more than worried. Seeing fear in a Mord-Sith’s eyes was something that made Ludwig’s heart race even faster. She was, after all, supposed to protect him.

But she knew what the Shun-tuk were. She had reason to feel fear.

He snatched up a knife from a small table to the side and pulled it deeply across the woman’s throat. She struggled to breathe through the burble of blood. Her tangled and broken arms thrashed a moment and then she sagged and began to go still as blood pumped out the opening in her throat.

Erika looked up. “What do we do now?”

He licked his lips as his mind raced. “We need more information. Better information. We need a better-quality person
to stand at the cusp between worlds, a person who is more familiar with such things and would be better able to pull more informative details from beyond for us.”

“The Mother Confessor?”

Ludwig Dreier nodded. “Have you started the preparations on her?”

“Yes, Abbot. I’ve been letting Otto, the eunuch, begin to prepare her, put her in pain. Dora has supervised the work and made sure that her agony has been properly begun. I have personally watched her struggle.”

Ludwig nodded through his distracted thoughts. “We can’t afford to wait any longer. Get another Mord-Sith to assist you.” He looked up into Erika’s blue eyes. “Come get me just as soon as you …” He gestured down at the twisted form at his feet, where he stood in the blood running across the floor. “As soon as you get her to the cusp.”

“You mean to try to rush her to the end, then? That’s dangerous. It may go too far, too fast, and then we would lose her without any results.”

“It’s the only way. We must hurry it along. We must try.”

“Abbot,” she said, an edge of urgency in her voice, “don’t you think that we should leave, instead? Shouldn’t we get away from here? I mean, if Lord Arc sent half people, and they are right now on their way here, we may not have that much time.”

Ludwig was having trouble ordering his thoughts. He looked around, as if searching for salvation.

“Yes, yes of course you may be right. Make preparations. Have the coach prepared and standing by at the ready. Meanwhile, have one of the others begin at once on the Mother Confessor. We need to learn more. Dora. Send Dora. Her impatient nature seems fitting. Her swift cruelty may be just what is needed. Let her have her way, for once.”

Erika looked skeptical but headed toward the door. “I’ll send Dora immediately—and get things ready for us to leave.”

She was out in the hallway for only a moment before she ran back in, her eyes wide.

“Abbot—we have to go, now.”

“What? It’s impossible for them to already be—”

Erika seized his arm and spun him toward the window. She pointed. “Look! Look on the far hills, there, in the distance. Do you see them? They all look the same. It’s the Shun-tuk.”

Ludwig stared in disbelief for a moment, then growled in anger at Hannis Arc for doing this to him. It wasn’t fair.

“Have Dora get the Mother Confessor. We’ll have to take her with us.”

Erika grabbed his coat sleeve as he started to turn away. “I don’t think we can wait that long.” She pointed out the window. Whitish figures poured down over the distant hills. “They will be here soon.”

He ran his hand across his throat as he glanced out the window. “You’re right.” He started toward the door. “But the Mother Confessor is too valuable to leave behind. Don’t take the time to explain it to Dora, just tell her to get the Mother Confessor and bring her along. Tell her to hurry.”

“That will still take time. Getting her unchained and down to the stables will take time. We would have to wait.”

“You’re right.” He licked his lips. “Tell her … tell her to bring the Mother Confessor to the citadel in Saavedra. You and I will start out immediately. She can meet us there.”

“What if she doesn’t get out of here in time?”

He angrily waved off the question. “What choice do we have? You and I have to get out of here now, while we still can. If she makes it out then she can join us.”

Erika looked relieved to hear that he wasn’t going to wait on them. “We’re going to Saavedra, then?”

He charged out the door, Erika right behind him. “I know what Hannis Arc wants. It has always been his ambition to overthrow the House of Rahl. He has no love for Fajin Province.
He has bigger plans. Now that he has set events in motion he will be headed to the People’s Palace with the Shun-tuk nation to seize power. He will not go back to Saavedra anytime soon—if ever. It’s the last place he would think to look for us.”

“That makes sense,” she said, her voice, along with the rapid strikes of their boots, echoing through the stone hall.

“There’s not a moment to lose. You tell Dora to get the Mother Confessor and meet us at the citadel in Saavedra. Don’t tell her anything else. I’ll get the coach. Meet me there.”

Together they raced down the hall. He had to get away. Later, he would figure out how to get his revenge against Hannis Arc. For now, he had to escape the fate that Hannis Arc had planned for him.

Kahlan thought she heard someone coming down the hall outside the windowless room where she was chained from the ceiling. It was hard to tell between the small, helpless, guttural grunts coming from deep in her throat. It took all her effort to balance on her toes in order to keep her weight off the manacles around her wrists. The wrist restraints were drawn tight by a chain running through a pulley on the ceiling and then hooked at the wall.

If she paused to take a rest from the struggle to stay up on her toes, she couldn’t put her feet on the floor, so it then put all her weight on her arms. That quickly made it difficult to breathe. As she started to panic from beginning to suffocate, she would have to get up on her toes again and stay there until her legs started to tremble from the effort, and then soon enough she would begin to slip and the manacles would take up her weight. Cuts from the manacles bled down her arms.

Her shoulder sockets burned with shooting pain. She couldn’t stand it anymore. But there was no way for her to bring it to an end. She thought she would go insane.

Off to the side, the fat, barefoot Otto sat gumming a hard crust of bread. He had a projecting underbite, and only two teeth that she could see, both on the bottom just left of center.
Both flat, yellow teeth tipped outward and hooked over his upper lip whenever he closed his mouth. His flattened nose looked to have been broken beyond repair ages ago, making it mostly useless for breathing. Since he usually breathed through his mouth, he rarely closed it.

It was Otto’s job to torment her. He would get up from time to time and use an oak rod as fat as his thumb to beat her across the back of her ribs until she slipped and lost her balance, making her weight drop into the manacles. When she eventually succumbed to tears from the agony and the hopelessness of it, he would be satisfied and go sit against the wall and gum his food, or pick at his filthy, bare feet. He seemed to have a fixation with pulling off strips of calluses.

He never spoke, and seemed to treat his job with all the enthusiasm of beating dirty rugs. He seemed satisfied when she lost control of her balance, and would go sit for a while.

When she would finally recover and bring herself under control, stop her crying, and stabilize her balance on her toes, he would then get up again, come over, and start the whole process over. Sometimes, rather than using the oak rod on her back, he would smack it across her thighs so that the stinging blows would make her weight drop.

Kahlan thought she might lose her mind before they ever got around to killing her. She felt a sense of abject hopelessness. She had no idea where Richard and the others were, and she knew that they wouldn’t know where she was. She was alone with merciless people who believed that torture would get them prophecy. She knew that, as it got increasingly worse, she would eventually want nothing so much as to die.

Which, she knew, was exactly what Ludwig Dreier was after. He believed that on the cusp of death a person could see into the eternal, timeless underworld, and give him prophecy in return for the mercy of death.

There was only so much a person could take. She expected that at some point, she, too, would end up pleading for death.

The footsteps were coming closer. The place echoed, so it was easier than it might have otherwise been to hear people coming. Otto was busy with his crust of bread, and wasn’t paying attention to the footsteps. They meant little for him, anyway. Kahlan’s heart sank, knowing that it was probably the Mord-Sith Dora.

The abbey was mostly stone. The rooms were cramped and filthy. It didn’t look like it had ever been swept. Dirt clung to cobwebs in all the corners.

A light scattering of straw covered the floor in her room. The straw looked to have been an attempt to soak up some of the blood. It had done a poor job, but at least most of it was long dried. She expected that there would eventually be a lot more of hers all over the floor.