Sang nodded. “They were. When the device sends us somewhere, it creates a link to our minds. So, when I desire, because I am connected to it through my mind, the device knows my thought that I want to return, and it pulls me back. It does the same with all the Glee you have seen vanish.”
Richard grasped the general idea but couldn’t imagine how it could work. It sounded like magic of some kind, a very powerful, advanced, and incomprehensible magic.
As if he could see that Richard was having trouble understanding it, Sang idly clacked his claws as he tried to think of a better way to explain it. “The way to think of it is that we become attached to the device by a lifeline that it creates when it sends us to another world. Imagine if you went in dangerous water, and you suddenly wanted to go back to shore. When you called out, others pulled you back to shore by that lifeline. In much that way, when we want to go home, the device pulls us back by that lifeline.”
Richard nodded as he considered, still not entirely satisfied. “What you expect of me will not be so easy. If I agreed to come to your world with you, would those who believe as you do fight with me to defeat the goddess and her kind?”
Sang stared at him a long moment. “I cannot say for sure. They are not fighters.”
“This is about their world and their way of life,” Richard pointed out with a rising sense of angry frustration.
Sang nodded. “You are a great leader in your world. Leaders become leaders because they are able to convince others to follow them. The goddess is like this. Although those with me are not fighters, I believe that they might be willing to follow you. At the very least, they can help you in many ways, such as getting you to the goddess and her followers.”
“I need a lot more than having them point me in the right direction.” Richard drummed his fingers on the handle of his sword as he considered. “I think I can understand what you say about how you are able to go back. But how could Vika and I go there, too? We don’t have that link, that lifeline as you called it, for the device to use to pull us there.”
“That is the easy part. When a number of injured Glee returned, they confirmed a theory many of us have. One time when they attacked your people, one of the women with you used magic to create snakes. Many of those snakes bit the Glee, and while we do not fear the snakes in our world, these snakes from your world were killing those Glee with venom. The snakes, once they bit into a Glee, would not let go. The Glee being bitten panicked, called on their lifeline, and the device pulled them back. All they needed to do was to merely think to return, and the device that had sent them was able to know that wish, and it snatched them back to our world.”
“What about this theory you had?”
“The important part is that when they returned, the snakes were still holding on tight to them. That confirmed our theory that if I hold on to something from this world, it will return with me. I myself tested this by holding a rock when I returned, and it came to my world with me. This was also confirmed when some of the Glee returned with parts of your people for the Golden Goddess and their offspring to eat. Those body parts were also used to convince others to join with her.”
Richard remembered quite vividly how the Glee down in the bowels of the People’s Palace had dismembered many of the bodies.
“You are saying, then, that we would hold on to you and we would go there with you to your world when you return? You think it is really that simple?”
Sang gave him a single nod. “Yes.”
Richard considered for a moment. He couldn’t imagine a device with such power, but then, on the other hand, he had sent those who didn’t want to live with magic, including his half sister, to another world without magic. He also had used a device that created a star shift and sent their entire world to another place in the sky. He had seen devices, such as the boxes of Orden and the omen machine, that had unimaginable power, power over the world of life and the world of the dead, so he supposed that even if he hadn’t seen the device the Glee had, he knew that such powerful devices existed. He didn’t really know where most of those devices came from, or who could have made them. For all he knew, it might as well be these same gods.
He looked over at Vika. She simply shrugged.
“If I were to agree to this crazy idea, what would we have to do? Simply hold on to you and we would be pulled back with you?”
“More than that,” Sang said as he stared at Richard for a long moment with a haunted look in his big black eyes. “It is more than simply being pulled back by a lifeline. There is more to it.”
“What do you mean?”
“We must go into darkness.”
51
Richard’s brow tightened. “Into darkness?”
Sang nodded again. “I am afraid that it is the only way.”
“I don’t understand. What do you mean we have to go into darkness?”
Sang stared off again with a haunted look. He seemed to be looking again into that place that obviously frightened him.
“That is the only way I can say it for you,” he finally told them as he looked first at Vika and then at Richard. “There is no way I can explain such a thing in a way that would make you truly understand. The only way I can say it is that we must go into darkness. It is what happens when we use the device. Once you have done it, you will understand. You will know what those words mean. If you have not done it, then there is no way for me to make you understand.”
“Into darkness,” Richard said as he stared at Sang.
Sang nodded. “Into darkness. That is really the only way I can begin to describe it, yet the words are so hollow. Into darkness is something such as you have never experienced before. It seems to consume you. It is falling into darkness, and it is … terrifying. You think that it will never end, that it never could end. Each time I go into darkness, I fear that this is the time it will not end, and I will forever be in that place of darkness.”
Richard wondered if it was anything like the underworld.
“So,” Richard finally asked, “is there a risk that we would be lost there, in that darkness? Especially since we aren’t attached to the device by this lifeline?”
The Glee bowed. “To find what you seek, you must sometimes go into the darkness, even though there is always the risk that you will become lost.”
Richard thought that was a pretty vague philosophical answer. It didn’t really tell him anything. He shared a look with Vika. He had of course been to the world of the dead. For that matter, he had actually been dead and then managed to return. In a way, he had been pulled back by his connection to those still living. That was a place of eternal darkness. A lifeline of sorts had pulled him back.
He couldn’t imagine any place or experience that could be darker than that, but he got the impression from what Sang said that this place might be darker even than the world of the dead. Although he didn’t think that Sang had ever been to the underworld to judge the difference.
Vika had been to the cusp of that world. She had looked into the dark world of the dead. He could see by the haunted look in her eyes that she was remembering that experience.
“The longer you think about it,” Sang said, “the greater the risk grows that the others will go to the device in order to come here before they can be stopped. If we delay too long, we risk arriving as they come up to the device, and then you would have to battle them when you are disoriented from having just come out of darkness and into my world. That would not be good. All three of us could be killed before we are able even to run.”