Suddenly, Sang put both claws around his arm and urged him back out. Richard pulled his head out of the hole and turned to look back at Sang. Sang shook his head in warning. It seemed clear to Richard that Sang didn’t want to talk about whatever lived in those caves. Richard could tell from the looks of the others that whatever was in the holes scared the other Glee speechless.
Right then, the device was Richard’s priority, so he didn’t want to waste the time to be concerned about the holes and what might be in them. He would have to ask later.
After he nodded his thanks for the warning to Sang, he turned back to the trail and kept going. But now he was concerned about what lived in those holes that he and Vika might one day have to deal with. Unlike the Glee, the two of them weren’t equipped with claws for protection.
Lightning flashed nearby, and the ground shook with a sudden thunderclap. While the rain didn’t bother the Glee, the lightning clearly made them nervous. It made Richard nervous as well. The Glee looked around, as if they thought they would have time to run if they saw lightning. Some of them sought shelter behind rocks whenever there was a particularly bright flash and crack of thunder. Richard knew that hiding like that was pointless, because by the time you saw a close bolt strike, it was already too late to run from it. Richard disregarded what some of them did and kept climbing.
“Being up high like this is dangerous when there is lightning,” Sang said, almost apologetically.
Richard looked back over his shoulder as he pulled himself up over a projecting shelf of rock. “I understand. I know the way from here, so you don’t need to go the rest of the way up to the device. You can all go back, now, and when I’m finished destroying it, I will come back and join you.”
As he and Vika waited, Sang consulted with a number of others. Richard couldn’t hear that debate in his mind, so he didn’t know what was being said, but he was hoping they would turn back. He didn’t particularly want an audience. Flashes of lightning lit clouds from the inside in a frightening display of the power of the storm that was rolling in on them. The heads of some of the Glee sank into their shoulders as they cast worried looks to the sky.
Finally, Sang returned. “We will go with you. I want to see the device destroyed, and so do many of the others. It has ruined many Glee lives. We want it ended once and for all. The ones who used to follow the goddess wish to go as well.”
Richard worried about those Glee, but didn’t want to get into any kind of disagreement that could prevent him from destroying the device. So, he simply nodded and then turned back to the trail up through the rocks.
They had to scramble up steep areas of scree, almost running in order to make progress against the ground sliding away underfoot. The rock was loose and difficult enough to climb in the dry, but when it was wet it was even harder to get up because the water coming down helped it to slide out from underfoot. After an exhausting climb up through the loose, wet rock, they finally made it up into rock that was still slippery in the wet, but at least solid and much easier to climb. Richard’s legs ached, but he didn’t want to stop to rest. He could rest once the task was completed.
As they climbed higher into the low clouds, the fog became so thick that it was difficult to see very far. Richard could see Vika’s dark shadow behind him, along with a couple of the Glee, with what looked like ghosts following them, but the rest were lost in the poor visibility.
Thunder rumbled almost continually through the desolate landscape. Lightning flickered somewhere off in the distance, illuminating the cloud they were in. Because they couldn’t see where it was coming from, the light and sound instead seemed to be everywhere. It was unsettling.
Richard didn’t like the idea of being on a mountain in a storm with such violent lightning, but his need to destroy the device made him ignore the danger and drove him onward. After he destroyed it, they would be forever trapped in this awful, wet world.
After hours of climbing, they finally began to emerge above the cloud cover and into the strange, dry forest of small rock towers. The sun was still obscured by an even higher layer of clouds, but at least it wasn’t raining, and it was brighter. The lightning moved some distance away along with the huge, dark, billowing clouds, but Richard could still see the near-constant flickers of lightning inside those clouds down below them, lighting them with an eerie reddish, firelike glow.
He didn’t know that he would ever be able to get used to this strange world, but he knew that he didn’t really have a choice. It made him wonder if life would be worth living here after he destroyed the device.
As Richard and Vika wove their way through the maze of rock spires that had been carved, shaped, and softened by the weather, they finally reached the cathedral of those stone shapes surrounding and overlooking the device. It sat across the way at the edge of an expanse of white sand.
He could tell that Vika, not usually given to emotion, was feeling as despondent as he was at the prospect of destroying their way back to their own world. But it had to be done.
Richard drew his sword.
66
The sound of the blade being drawn from its scabbard rang out, echoing back from the complex shapes of the stone walls all around them. It was the forlorn sound of finality, of all his hopes and dreams ending. That distinctive ringing sound caused the massive crowd of Glee following them, who had seen the sword kill the goddess, pause with concern before backing away. Many moved back among the safety of the standing stones.
In his mind’s eye, Richard could see Kahlan’s smile. He had to force the image from his thoughts lest it be too unbearable or even prevent him from doing what he knew he had to do to protect her and all the people in her world. He hoped that one day his home world would again have a Lord Rahl, one who cared about his people: his son. One day it would also have a new Confessor to help protect them: his daughter.
For now, though, Richard was the only protection for that world, and to protect it, he had to destroy the device that allowed the Glee to go there. None of his people would ever know what he had done to save their world, and one day the Glee would only be a terrible memory. New generations would likely not even know anything about them or the horrors they had brought to the world.
He looked up overhead when he noticed that it was getting brighter. He saw that the clouds had parted enough to give them a rare glimpse of the sky. The sun itself wasn’t in view, but the sky was a bright reddish orange. Because it was still late in the day, he thought it likely that it was near sunset. He couldn’t yet see the stars, but if he could, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to recognize them from a strange world he didn’t want to be in.
So far, since he had arrived, the sky was rarely visible. The continual, heavy, rolling, boiling clouds seemed to make this world all that much gloomier. He didn’t know if it was simply a seasonal weather pattern, or a habitual one.
Kahlan was out there, somewhere, among stars he couldn’t yet see. He wondered if in her world, when she looked up, she might one day look toward the forsaken place in the sky where he would be forever stranded.
His joy at having a glimpse of the reddish sky instead of the continual overcast vista was short-lived when his gaze reluctantly settled on the device waiting for him across the sand.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Vika whispered from close behind him. “Once you do, there is no going back.”