“I did as you asked, Lord Rahl.” Shale’s face had lost some of its color.
Richard nodded. “Thank you. I don’t imagine Dori’s mother took the news well.”
“No, she did not,” Shale admitted. “But she did tell me something I think you should know. When I told her what you said, that her daughter had been possessed by evil and died because of it, she didn’t act surprised. She cried at the loss, of course, but then told me that Dori had been acting strange ever since arriving at the palace.”
“Strange how?” he asked.
“Cold and distant. She said that was unlike Dori and she began to fear that her daughter had been possessed by something depraved. That was the word she used, ‘depraved.’”
Richard stared off into distant thoughts for a moment. “I have seen too many mothers lose their children. With the great war finally over, I thought I had seen the last of it. But now I know otherwise. We have only seen the beginning of it.”
“A mother feeling that something was off about her daughter is understandable,” Shale said, apparently trying to distract him from grim thoughts. “A mother would know. But, how did you?”
Richard let out a sigh. “She wouldn’t look at me.”
Shale looked skeptical. “Children usually are too shy to look at strangers, especially an authority figure. Being shy is not exactly unusual, especially not when meeting a frightening person like the Lord Rahl.”
“I realize that,” Richard said, “but there was something about the way she avoided looking at me that wasn’t quite natural.” He thought about it a moment before going on.
“Remember when we questioned Nolo? He wouldn’t look at me, either. The Golden Goddess used Nolo to demand that we surrender, and if we did she would in return offer us a quick death. Later Nolo told us that the Golden Goddess called me the shiny man because she found it painful to look at me because of my gift. I remembered the way he wouldn’t look at me in the great hall the other day. That was the goddess not wanting to look at me.”
“That’s it?” Kahlan asked, throwing her hands up. “Just that she wouldn’t look at you? Richard, that hardly seems enough to prove that the Golden Goddess was watching through Dori’s eyes.”
“Well,” Richard admitted, “that, and what she did when I leaned down close and told her that I wanted to surrender.”
“What?” Shale asked.
Richard nodded. “When told her that I wanted to surrender, she looked up at me and grinned.”
Kahlan still wasn’t entirely convinced that meant that Dori was acting on behalf of the Golden Goddess. “Children often smile at the strangest times. I’ve seen little kids smile at me as they were wetting their pants.”
Richard looked over at her, shaking his head. “Not like this. This was as evil a smile as I’ve ever seen. Once I told her that I wanted to surrender and took her into the library, she dropped all pretense and there was no longer any question about it. The goddess was possessing Dori.
“I closed the drapes and blew out all but one lamp to make her more comfortable—to make the goddess more comfortable looking at me. The shy little girl was gone; there was only the contemptuous Golden Goddess.”
“You mean she showed her true self because you told her you wanted to surrender?” Kahlan asked.
“That’s right. She thought she had me where she wanted me—surrendering and ready to die. But the thing that was really making her confident was the mistake she made.”
“What mistake?” Berdine blurted out, too curious to keep quiet at a lull in his story when he stared off into the memory.
Richard smiled at her eagerness. Berdine was an old friend, and the two of them had a special bond. Berdine was something of a scholar, and they had grown close when searching through books together for answers about things such as the omen machine.
Vika was Richard’s personal bodyguard. She was muscular, strong-headed, and reacted instantly with profound violence to any threat to Richard. Berdine would also protect Richard with her life, but the two had known each other for a long time, and he really did love her, although not more than the others.
“The mistake the Golden Goddess made was in the choice of a host. I don’t know how she can do it, and she wasn’t able to tell me, but somehow, she invaded Dori’s mind in much the same way as she had used Nolo. But this time she wormed her way in deeper and for longer.”
“Why choose a little girl?” Kahlan asked. “Just to look less suspicious?”
Richard folded his arms. “No. She chose Dori because her mother was bringing her to the palace, where we are, but more importantly, because Dori’s mother has the gift. The gift may not be strong in her, but the Golden Goddess didn’t know that. The goddess is wary of magic, so she wanted to have time to observe the mother’s magic and take the measure of it, thinking magic is magic—all magic is the same. So, she chose the daughter of a gifted person, a gifted person who was going to the palace where we live. She thought she had an additional stroke of luck when the mother was called up here to meet with me.”
“Well, it actually was a stroke of luck,” Shale said.
Richard shook his head. “Not exactly. I suspected that the goddess would want to get close to a gifted person, or even try to get in the mind of a gifted person. That’s why I called all the gifted up here to meet with us.
“If she had invaded the mind of a gifted person, I wanted to give the goddess a chance to get close to me. I knew she very well might inadvertently make herself known by being afraid to look into my eyes. Dori was the one, though, who wouldn’t look at me. When I leaned down and told her that I wanted to surrender, she took the bait—or at least, the goddess did. The reason I had invited all the gifted up to this place, besides suspecting the goddess might be among them, was that I hoped to get the goddess into a containment field if she was in one of them.”
Shale slapped the palm of a hand to her forehead. “You mean you thought that you could kill the goddess?”
“I told you,” Berdine said, “he gets crazy ideas.”
“No, I didn’t think I could kill her,” he said in a mocking tone over his shoulder at Berdine. “And it wasn’t a crazy idea. I was hoping to get more information out of her, maybe learn their weaknesses. Maybe find at least something we could use against them.”
“So, you lied to her?” Shale asked, sounding as if that was somehow cheating.
Richard showed her a lopsided smile. “I sure did. I lied through my teeth. She bought it, too. The goddess is arrogant. She believes that she is so terrifying that I would be afraid, feel hopeless, and simply give up.”
“All right. All well and good.” Kahlan pointed impatiently. “But, exactly, what happened in there?”
20
Richard pulled in a deep breath. “Well, the Golden Goddess decided, because of being around Dori’s mother, that magic wasn’t really so dangerous after all. Since she doesn’t understand magic, she didn’t grasp that the mother’s gift wasn’t very strong, and assumed that because the mother had magic, and that her magic wasn’t very dangerous, then my magic and magic in general weren’t really anything to be worried about.
“As I had hoped, she wanted her kind to come and see that there was nothing to fear from us, so she summoned a horde of them into the room. Hundreds. She wanted them to see how weak magic actually is by letting them kill me and then tell others, so that her kind would no longer need to be cautious.”
Kahlan leaned in, expectantly. “What did they look like?”
He looked into her eyes. “It was just like you described it—at first, anyway. They first appear as what you called a scribbly man. But that is only the initial phase as they are coming to our world, not what they really look like. It’s simply some kind of transitional phase as they begin to materialize here. It went fully dark before that one that attacked you completed its transition into our world, so you never actually saw what they look like.”