His grandfather Zedd had taught him that many dangerous things of magic had fail-safes that prevented anyone who wasn’t supposed to from using them. He worried that maybe the things the gateway had revealed it needed to function and reset might be one of those fail-safe traps to not only prevent him from successfully using something that he was not meant to use but kill him in the process.
Many fail-safes were, after all, lethal.
He mentally ran through everything he had done, trying to make sure he hadn’t overlooked anything. He knew he had done a thorough analysis and as a result he had disarmed all the fail-safe sequences he had found from the interior perspective of the verification web. He tried to think if it was possible there had been any that he could have missed. But if there were, it was too late now.
He knew he needed to focus, so he finally put those concerns from his mind.
He called the target.
He tried as hard as he could not to let any other thoughts but that target enter his mind. Around the fringes of his awareness, though, a continual stream of little things nagged and nibbled, calling to him, trying to pull him away to think about each of them. He redoubled his effort to put them from his mind.
As he did when he shot his bow, he saw the target in his mind, centered on it, and pulled it toward him.
He didn’t feel anything trying to force him from the stone, or Vika from his grip, but he dared not loosen his hold on either. He had to remind himself what mattered and put both of those thoughts from his mind as he concentrated on calling the target.
He stole a quick peek. It was hard to see anything through the sparkling points of light, but he could detect the windswept stone all around them rapidly getting increasingly wavy. He thought it might be that his eyes were watering, so he blinked and returned to concentrating on calling the target.
He had done everything to the best of his ability. He knew he could no longer dare to spare the mental effort to worry about any of it. Now, he simply focused on calling the target. That was all that mattered. It was everything that mattered.
Suddenly there was a thunderous rumbling sound, low, intense, powerful. Even with his eyes closed, he could see the flash of light that had caused it.
The next thing he was aware of, before he could begin to understand what had just happened, was darkness beyond dark.
Abruptly, there was no longer any sound at all. The profound silence rang in his ears until it hurt, and then even that sensation was gone.
Richard felt nothing. It was a complete lack of any sights or sounds or sensations. He couldn’t tell up from down.
He couldn’t feel if he still had hold of Vika’s hand or if he was still holding the stone. He desperately hoped that he was. If he wasn’t, then it had all been for nothing and he would go forever into darkness until even his thoughts gradually disintegrated into nothing and became part of the void.
He had absolutely no sense of time. He didn’t know if it had been minutes, hours, or even days since the silent darkness had abruptly collapsed in on him. Even that sensation of falling and the awful expectation of hitting the bottom left him. Having done this before made it easier to do again. He told himself that this was no different than it had been last time.
But somehow, in some indescribable way, this was different.
Very different. Profoundly different.
Despite having done this before, it was a sensation of no sensation that left him feeling hollow and lost.
Since he had done this before, it was relatively easy to talk himself out of any panic. He knew that eventually it had to end—in one way or the other—so he tried his best to disregard the sensation, or rather, the lack of sensation, and focus only on calling the target. That was his only job, now.
To keep his mind from wandering into disturbing places even as he concentrated on calling the target, he thought of Kahlan in the background behind the target.
He pictured her face in his mind.
He smiled when she smiled.
77
Suddenly, light and sound and sensation slammed in all around him. It was such a powerful awareness that it made him gasp. It was so totally different from the void of all sensation that the abrupt weight and light and sound hurt.
He could feel himself still holding Vika’s hand and he still had his other arm around the gateway stone.
Richard opened his eyes, afraid he would see the same terrible place in the Glee’s world.
Instead he saw his target brought to life all around him.
Despite having expected it, he blinked in surprise.
Vika turned all the way around, her eyes wide with wonder.
“You did it! You did it! Lord Rahl, you did it! You got us home!”
The gateway stone was right there beside him the way it had been, except that now wisps of vapor rose off of it. The gold ring sat in the white sand, like it had been before. But this sand was white. Really white.
All around him, in all its glory, was the Garden of Life.
He could see the stand of trees off to one side, with the path meandering back through them. It made him feel so good to see trees again that he thought his chest might burst. When he looked up, he saw the glassed skylight overhead that let in the sunlight … sunlight of his world. The sky was a clear, bright blue, not red. All around him there was color—greens of every shade and browns and whites. Color had never looked so luscious, so vibrant before.
He and Vika stared around at the place. It didn’t seem possible that it could be real.
This was the target he had called, and it was all around them, and it was real.
They were in the People’s Palace. They were home again in their own world.
Vika finally gripped him by his shoulders as she looked into his eyes. She had to swallow to be able to use her voice.
“Lord Rahl, I will never ever again, for as long as I live, doubt any of your crazy ideas.”
Richard smiled as he used a thumb to wipe tears from under her eyes. “Don’t be so quick to make that pledge. You have not yet heard what other crazy ideas I have.”
By the look in her eyes, she didn’t care. He turned more serious.
“I expect all those I love to occasionally doubt my crazy ideas, because questions from ones I care about and trust make me have to be sure, for their sake, before I act. So don’t ever stop questioning my crazy ideas.”
She smiled. “All right. But now what? I’m afraid that we’re back where we started. The Mother Confessor and the rest of them are a long way off at the Wizard’s Keep.”
He looked over at the gateway stone sitting beside him. The vapor was finally beginning to abate. It was still making a soft humming sound, as it had back in the Glee’s world when he had activated it.
Vika gestured at the slanted top. “Don’t forget your knife.”
Richard could see that several of the emblems were still glowing red and a couple were blue.
“I’m not done yet. While the reset process is still active, I have to put in a fail-safe.”
“A fail-safe?”
“Yes, a procedure that prevents just anyone with the gift from being able to reset it or use it. Believe it or not, if you activate the gateway in the way I’ve done, you can actually create a duplicate.”
Vika frowned. “What for?”
Richard shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe so that you can play that you are gods by gifting a gateway to other worlds. Maybe this one is a duplicate and that is how the Glee came to have it. Maybe the ones who gave it to them wanted to play at being gods.”
“But you know for sure that there was no duplication this time, right? Are you sure this device is the one from the Glee’s world, and that they don’t have one anymore, maybe a duplicate of this one?”