Into Darkness

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 suddenly realized what that meant.