Into Darkness

24

Richard raced forward, going for Shota, but in response she again cast out an arm. A wall of shimmering light stopped him cold. He dropped to the floor, clutching his middle in agony.

As Richard hit the floor from what Shota had done to him, every one of the Mord-Sith spun her Agiel up into her fist. They had seen enough. All six of them, their single braids flying out behind them, leaped over Richard on their way to Shota. They screamed in lethal fury as they were still in midair.

They had only just started their attack when specters of horribly deformed dead appeared to catch each of the Mord-Sith in spirit arms. Like Michec, they appeared semitransparent, but they were solid enough to snatch up the Mord-Sith, the bones of the dead showing through their tattered flesh. Even as they were being lifted from the ground, each of the Mord-Sith attacked the specters with her Agiel in one hand and a knife in the other, but it had no effect on the phantoms from another world.

All of the Mord-Sith were swiftly carried backward, powerless to stop the underworld beings holding them, until each of the six were smashed into a stone raven, between its opened wings. A stone wing of each of the six raven statues swept around the Mord-Sith to trap them there. The spirits, their task completed, vanished back into the world of the dead.

The other wing of each of the six ravens held out its stone bowl of burning oil. The large stone wings were plenty big enough to hold the Mord-Sith fast. Dust and bits of stone drizzled down from where the stone wings had broken as they turned in order to grab and hold the Mord-Sith.

Out of the corner of her eye, as Richard struggled to get to his feet or possibly to conjure some kind of power to fight back, Kahlan saw two of the witches leave the line of their sister witches and start toward her.

Shota continued to hold the hand out toward Richard, as if pressing him to the ground, her power preventing him from getting up or doing anything else to stop her. She brought her other hand up when she saw Kahlan try to run to Richard. Whatever kind of magic Shota was using, she was effortlessly able to bring up a solid wall of air to prevent Kahlan from moving any closer despite how desperately she tried to push against it.

As Kahlan struggled to move through the thick air, her feet sliding against the floor as she shoved her shoulder against it, two women rushed up from behind and seized her arms. One was a short, squat, bulky woman in an outfit made of patches of different kinds of burlap sewn haphazardly together. It hung from her broad shoulders all the way to the floor, making her body look square. The wrinkles and lines of her face were pinched in toward her close-set eyes and wart-covered nose. Her downturned mouth made her look like she had a mouthful of bile she couldn’t spit out. Her thin, frizzy hair stuck out all around her head like a dirty white thundercloud.

Kahlan tried to pull her arm back out of the witch’s grasp, but the woman, while not tall, was at least three times as wide as Kahlan, and held her arm in the powerful grip of her fat fingers. Her mass made Kahlan feel like she was trying to pull against an oak tree that had her in its clutches.

The witch who grabbed her other arm was as thin as the other was burly. The tattered, hanging, dark dress she wore looked like she gutted fish in it daily and the filth had never once been washed off. The skin of her bare arms was wrinkled and withered, almost looking like tree bark. Her bony fingers had long, sickly yellowish fingernails that were ragged on the ends and scratched Kahlan’s arms. The witch also had filthy rags wrapped around her head, one part around the top to hold in her shock of unruly, inky-black hair, and another part down and around her head going under her chin and tied back on top as if it was trying to keep her jaw from falling off.

A number of long strings of bones, teeth, and feathers hung around her neck, swinging back and forth and clattering as the witch yanked on Kahlan’s arm. She had similar strings of collected animal parts around her wrists, some of them still in the process of rotting. The gagging stench of dead things was overpowering.

Her large, round black eyes did not look human. She had the dead stare of a corpse. Although she was much smaller than the woman who had Kahlan’s other arm, she was, with that dead stare, more frightening than the blocky, angry-looking woman on the other side, and by the hand clutching Kahlan’s arm, just as strong.

Together, the women began dragging Kahlan backward with an urgency she wouldn’t have thought either could muster. She fought against them, but she was no match for their strength, and they were not even using their powers.

Looking back over her shoulder, Kahlan could see that they were dragging her toward one of the dark openings at the bottom of the towering wall. As they went past the throne, another witch left the line to join the other two and walk, leaning in, facing Kahlan as she was being pulled backward, her heels dragged across the stone floor.

This witch, unlike the two who had iron grips on her arms, was not monstrous. She was, in fact, shapely and, in a dark sort of way, pretty. She wore a black, formfitting bodice that was cut low and edged with black lace. Her skirt, which hung nearly to the floor, was made up of what had to be hundreds of knotted and beaded strips of leather. Some of the beads sparkled and reflected the light of the burning bowls of oil held by the stone ravens. They allowed her bare knees to part the strings and show through when she walked. Around her neck she wore a broad, black lace choker.

Her hair was red, long, and stringy. It mimicked the look of her strange, stringy skirt: the veil of small, ropy strands of hair hung down in front of her face the way the skirt veiled her legs. Beyond the screen made of the strands of hair, her pale blue eyes lined with black, despite their beauty, were far more menacing than any of the others’ eyes.

As she walked close in front of Kahlan, leaning in, while she was being dragged backward by the two older witch women, the strands of her skirt swished around her legs, allowing the beads to clatter together, making a distracting, enchanting, almost musical sound. That beguiling sound for some reason made it difficult for Kahlan to think clearly. As they walked face-to-face, the young witch leaned in more, to within inches of Kahlan’s face, with a look that made goose bumps race up Kahlan’s arms to the nape of her neck.

“Stay green for me,” she said in a low, smoky voice that matched both the beauty and the menace of her blue eyes, “until I can cut those squirming little brats out of your womb and twist off their heads and eat them while you watch.”

Kahlan didn’t know what “stay green” meant, but the intent was clear enough.

Kahlan was helpless as she was dragged backward toward one of cavelike openings at the bottom of the towering wall and into the labyrinth of tunnels beyond. With the third witch leaning in, her face inches away, the musical jangle of the beads wove a tune that made Kahlan feel limp.

Even so, with fear choking her breathing, Kahlan gathered all her strength as she drew a big breath and then screamed Richard’s name.

Even as he was held fast by Shota’s power, he managed to turn to the sound of her shriek, and the terror in it.

Richard’s fury was evident at hearing the fright in her voice as she cried out his name. He threw his arms up as he screamed in rage. Whatever he did broke Shota’s hold on him and staggered her back a step.

The witch woman’s anger looked the match of Richard’s. She again forced her hands out. At first, the air shimmered, but then spiderwebs of lightning ignited from her fingertips. As she did that, Richard did the same, but the crackling lightning coming from his hands was the black void of Subtractive Magic. The way it twisted and whipped around, it looked like it was tied to his hands and frantically trying to get away. Where it hissed and snapped against the walls, it cut through the stone. In places the stone above that had lost its support began to fall, making the walls look like they were beginning to come down.

And then they both halted what they were doing as they each seemed to gather their strength to redouble their efforts. They both cast their power out at the same time. Kahlan leaned her head a little to the side to look around the redheaded witch glaring at her. As they both projected their gift, Kahlan saw a wavering wall where that power collided suddenly come to life. The room shook with the thunder from the continual, flickering lightning they both were generating.

Neither of their magic could get past the other’s wall of power, and the collision of their opposing powers created a blinding explosion of light in the center of the massive chamber. That sizzling light expanded outward in all directions, blasting into the stone to all sides—but far more critically, that sheer plane of power also shot vertically with a thunderous boom. Kahlan recognized that it was a hot brew of Additive and Subtractive Magic coming together. Both of their powers were clashing together in ways that weren’t ever supposed to happen.

As the discharge of that explosive energy shot upward, it cut through the ceiling, the same as it sliced through the walls to the sides, going straight up through the entire palace, severing walls and floors above in the massive, ripping blast. Kahlan could hear the thunder of walls and ceilings on all the floors above collapsing inward.

And then, with so much above them destroyed, the ceiling of the massive chamber started caving in.

The other witches all ran for the safety of the caverns at the rear of the great chamber. Shota began retreating with them as she continued to use her power to hold Richard at bay and keep him where he was.

The redheaded witch in front of Kahlan slammed the heel of her hand into the center of Kahlan’s chest to force her back. At the same time, the two holding her arms yanked her back with them into the darkness of the tunnels.

The ground shook and the air filled with rolling, choking dust as unimaginable tons of rock from the palace above as well as the mountain itself began cascading down into the vast chamber just as the witch women dragged her back into the safety of the labyrinth.

Kahlan tried to reach out as she screamed Richard’s name, but even as she did, she knew he would never be able to hear her in the deafening thunder of everything from above collapsing in on him.

She lost sight of him in the cascade of stone and the swirling clouds of dust.