8
Richard picked up Vika’s Agiel, which he had pulled from her gut wound earlier and had thrown on the floor.
“Vika, I want you to hold this in your teeth. I gave you some of my strength, before. Do you think you can do that? I need you back at that place.”
Knowing that he meant that place on the cusp between worlds, she nodded. In a way, the pain of an Agiel was an insane kind of familiar comfort to a Mord-Sith. Richard had already tensed the muscles of his abdomen to help him endure the pain of holding the Agiel. Unlike the Mord-Sith, he found no comfort in such pain. When he held it out in front of her she pulled her lips back and clamped her teeth down on it. Her pupils dilated as the wall of pain hit her and her jaws clenched tighter.
He didn’t need to tell her to bite down.
Once he saw that she had, he carefully picked up the small pile of her intestines coiled on the floor beside her. He did his best to carefully wipe off any specks of dirt or crumbled rock. Once he had inspected them to see that they didn’t have any foreign matter stuck to them, he stretched out and pushed the tips of his fingers into the wound in order to spread open the sides to give him room to guide the warm mass back inside her abdomen.
Her eyes wide, Vika stared at the ceiling as she trembled. Each breath was a ragged pull; then she would tighten her muscles and bear down again until she needed another breath.
“All right, that’s the worst of it,” he told her.
She nodded without looking over at him. It didn’t look like it had helped with the pain. Her face had gone a bloodless white, telling him that, if anything, the pain was worse.
He put a bloody hand on her shoulder. “Hold on, Vika. It won’t be long. You are already on the cusp. The pain of the Agiel will help you take that final step through the veil. I will be holding your hand. I will be here, but also with you, and watching over you when you cross over.”
The last part wasn’t exactly true, but he needed to say it for those listening, especially Kahlan. This was no time for questions he dare not answer honestly.
“When you get to that place beyond, to that world, it will be tempting to let yourself go into that forever world,” he told her. “Believe me, I know. You will find comfort there in being free of the pain, free of misery, fear, and worry—free of everything. You will want to let yourself drift away into that eternal world where struggles of life are a thing of the past and you can be at peace. If it’s all too much for you, you have my permission to accept that world.”
He didn’t want her to make that choice, but he wanted to give her a choice to be better able to endure what she was about to face. He knew that by having the option of a way out, it sometimes helped endure a hard choice.
“But I need you, Vika. Kahlan needs you. Our children need you. D’Hara needs you. So I hope you will have the strength to let me heal you while your spirit is there and then return to us.”
She finally looked over into his eyes and nodded. He could see her doing her best to fight the pain of both her injuries and the Agiel she held clamped in her teeth.
“This is insanity,” Shale said in a low voice.
Kahlan looked like she might agree, but she didn’t say so. Richard knew that despite her well-founded fear, Kahlan was doing her best to put her trust in his judgment that what he was doing was necessary to help get their unborn children to safety. He fervently hoped that her trust was warranted.
Richard looked up at the sorceress on the other side of Vika. “You may be right. I do know that without you to make up nine of us, this will likely fail. But just as I’m not forcing Vika to do this, I’m not forcing you to be a part of it, either. If you can’t commit to helping me, to helping us all, and especially to helping Vika, then that must be your choice. Either way, I intend to attempt it, with or without you, but without you, without the Law of Nines as an aid, my chances of being successful go down. So it’s up to you.” He leaned a little closer to her across Vika’s body. “Choose.”
Shale’s gaze took in all the Mord-Sith on their knees around the supine Vika. She met Kahlan’s gaze for a long moment, but Kahlan, despite the bruises and the eye swollen nearly shut, was wearing her Confessor’s face. Finally Shale looked down at Vika, the Agiel between her teeth as she did her best to draw each breath. At last, she looked back up at Richard.
“I didn’t come all the way from the Northern Waste to deny you my help now. You are the Lord Rahl. Do as you must. I will support you.”
Richard smiled his appreciation. “All right, I want everyone to concentrate on Vika. Imagine giving her your strength and imagine her being whole again. Shale, please add what ability you have at healing to mine.”
“Do you really think that will help?” Cassia asked. “Us concentrating on Vika, I mean? We can’t do magic.”
“You’re not doing magic. You are magic, through the power of the Law of Nines and through your bond to me. You are part of that whole. It’s that whole that matters.
“You and your sisters have all been on the cusp of death. You remember being partway into that world, don’t you?”
Cassia looked grim. “More times that I care to remember.”
“When you are on the cusp, you are actually partially in the underworld, or you couldn’t really know that you were on the cusp, now could you? Vika knows. She is there now at that threshold, at the brink of death itself. She told me that she was already in some ways looking out at me from the world of the dead. It is that experience of being on the cusp that you bring to the circle. It is that experience of coming back into the light of this world that we need. Vika is crossing over as we speak.
“Now please, all of you, just do as I ask. I have to save her while I still can. We are all holding hands to give Vika a link back to this world. You know both. This is a time when we show how much life means to us all. You all are her sisters and her way back.”
Vika squeezed his hand at his words. As she trembled from the pain of the Agiel clamped between her teeth, a tear rolled from the corner of her eye. Holding her hand, he could feel the pain pulling him under with her. He had to will himself to ignore it to do what needed to be done.
Richard squeezed Kahlan’s hand. Her wrist was still oozing blood. He needed to heal that as well, to say nothing of the obviously painful, swollen bruises on her face.
Once they all had gone quiet, with their eyes closed and heads bowed, Richard turned his mind to what he needed to do, to what he couldn’t tell them he was going to do. He took a deep breath against the enormity of the task ahead of him.
If he was to have the time necessary to do what needed to be done, the only place with enough time was a place without time.
He remembered all too well dying and going beyond the veil. He remembered all too well being in the world of the dead. As he concentrated, he embraced the devastating pain of the Agiel radiating up his arm to the base of his skull as motivation to help him go to that numb place of refuge from the pain of life. Thankfully, the others, because Vika’s Agiel had never been used against them, could not feel the pain he felt from it.
With the overpowering need of being free of pain pushing him ever onward, he used the power of his gift to do one of the most frightening things imaginable.
He willed his heart to stop.
He ignored the crushing pain that started radiating from the center of his chest by concentrating instead on the pain of the Agiel that didn’t let up even though his heart had gone still.
He felt Kahlan’s hand tighten on his as she sucked back a sob of fear for him, not really realizing what he had just done.
The world faded away. Kahlan’s grip seemed to dissolve as his muscles went slack. Richard saw darkness beyond darkness.