Terry Goodkind - Naked Empire

The three remaining birds, as if abandoning their charge, wheeled around, racing toward Richard with angry intent. He calmly considered them from behind feathers of his own. The third arrow was away. The race in the center lifted its right wing, trying to change direction, but took the arrow through its heart. Rolling wing over wing, it spiraled down through the blowing sand, crashing to the hardpan out ahead of Richard.

The remaining two birds, screeching defiant cries, plunged toward him.

Richard pulled string to cheek, placing the fourth arrow on target. The range was swiftly closing. The arrow was away in an instant. It tore through the body of the black-tipped race still clutching in its talons the bloody corpse of the tiny kid.

Wings raked back, the last angry race dove toward Richard. As soon as Richard snatched an arrow from the quiver an impatient Tom held out, the big D’Haran heaved his knife. Before Richard could nock the arrow, the whirling knife ripped into the raptor. Richard stepped aside as the huge bird shot past in a lifeless drop and slammed into the ground right behind him. As it tumbled, blood sprayed across the windswept rock and black-tipped feathers flew everywhere.

The dawn, only moments ago filled with the the bloodcurdling screams of the black-tipped races, was suddenly quiet but for the low moan of the wind.

Black feathers lifted in that wind, floating out across the open expanse beneath a yellow-orange sky.

At that moment, the sun broke the horizon, throwing long shadows out over the wasteland.

Jennsen clutched one of the limp white twins to her breast. Betty, bleating plaintively, blood running from a gash on her side, stood on her hind legs trying to arouse her still kid in Jennsen’s arms. Jennsen bent to the other twin sprawled on the ground and laid her lifeless charge beside it. Betty urgently licked at the bloody carcasses. Jennsen hugged Betty’s neck a moment before trying to pull the goat away. Betty dug in her hooves, not wanting to leave her stricken kids. Jennsen could do no more than to offer her friend consoling words choked with tears.

When she stood, unable to turn Betty from her dead offspring, Richard sheltered Jennsen under his arm.

“Why would the races suddenly do that?”

“I don’t know,” Richard said. “You didn’t see anything other than the races, then?”

Jennsen leaned against Richard, holding her face in her hands, giving in briefly to the tears. “I just saw the birds,” she said as she used the back of her sleeve to wipe her cheeks.

“What about the shape defined by the blowing sand?” Kahlan asked as she placed a comforting hand on Jennsen’s shoulder.

“Shape?” She looked from Kahlan to Richard. “What shape?”

“It looked like a man’s shape.” Kahlan drew the curves of an outline in the air before her with both hands. “Like the outline of a man wearing a hooded cape.”

“I didn’t see anything but black-tipped races and the clouds of blowing sand.”

“And you didn’t see the sand blowing around anything?” Richard asked. “You didn’t see any shape defined by the sand?”

Jennsen shook her head insistently before returning to Betty’s side.

“If the shape involved magic,” Kahlan said in a confidential tone to Richard, “she wouldn’t see that, but why wouldn’t she see the sand?”

“To her, the magic wasn’t there.”

“But the sand was.”

“The color is there on a painting but a blind person can’t see it, nor can they see the shapes that the brush strokes, laden with color, help define.” He shook his head in wonder as he watched Jennsen. “We don’t really know to what degree someone is affected by other things when they can’t perceive the magic that interacts with those other things. For all we know, it could be that her mind simply fails to recognize the pattern caused by magic and just reads it as blowing sand. It could even be that because there is a pattern to the magic, only we can see those particles of sand directly involved with defining the pattern, while she sees them all and therefore the subordinate pattern is lost to her eyes.

“It could even be that it’s something like the boundaries were; two worlds existing in the same place at the same time. Jennsen and we could be looking at the same thing, and see it through different eyes—through different worlds.” Kahlan nodded as Richard bent to one knee beside Jennsen to inspect the gash through the goat’s wiry brown hair.

“We’d better stitch this,” he told Jennsen. “It’s not life-threatening, but it needs attention.”

Jennsen snuffled back her tears as Richard stood. “It was magic, then—the thing you saw?”

Richard stared off toward where the form had appeared in the blowing sand. “Something evil.”

Off behind them, Rusty tossed her head and whinnied in sympathy with inconsolable Betty. When Tom laid a sorrowful hand on Jennsen’s shoulder, she seized it as if for strength and held it to her cheek.

Jennsen finally stood, shielding her eyes against the blowing dust as she looked to the horizon. “At least we’re rid of the filthy races.”

“Not for long,” Richard said.

His headache came slamming back with such force that it nearly took him from his feet. He had learned a great deal about controlling pain, about how to disregard it. He did that now.

There were bigger worries.

Around midafternoon, as they were walking across the scorching desert, Kahlan noticed Richard carefully watching his shadow stretched out before him.

“What is it?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”

He gestured at the shadow before him. “Races. Ten or twelve. They just glided up behind us. They’re hiding in the sun.”

“Hiding in the sun?”

“They’re flying high and in the spot where their shadow falls on us. If we were to look up in the sky we wouldn’t be able to see them because we’d have to look right into the sun.”

Kahlan turned and, with her hand shielding her eyes, tried to see for herself, but it was too painful to try to look up anywhere near the merciless sun. When she looked back, Richard, who hadn’t turned to look with her, again flicked his hand toward the shadows.

“If you look carefully at the ground around your shadow, you can just make out the distortion in the light. It’s them.”

Kahlan might have thought that Richard was having a little fun with her were it not about a matter as serious as the races. She searched the ground around their shadows until she finally saw what he was talking about. At such a distance, the races’ shadows were little more than shifting irregularities in the light.

Kahlan glanced back at the wagon. Tom was driving, with Friedrich sitting up on the seat beside him. Richard and Kahlan were giving the horses a rest from being ridden, so they were tethered to the wagon.

Jennsen sat on blankets in the back of the wagon, comforting Betty as she bleated in misery. Kahlan didn’t think the goat had been silent for more than a minute or two all day. The gash wasn’t bad; Betty’s suffering was from other pain. At least the poor goat had Jennsen for solace.

From what Kahlan had learned, Jennsen had had Betty for half her life.

Moving around as she and her mother had, running from Darken Rahl, hiding, staying away from people so as not to reveal themselves and risk word drifting back to Darken Rahl’s ears, Jennsen had never had a chance to have childhood friends. Her mother had gotten her the goat as a companion. In her constant effort to keep Jennsen out of the hands of a monster, it was the best she could offer.

Kahlan wiped the stinging sweat from her eyes. She took in the four black feathers Richard had bundled together and strung on his upper right arm. He had taken the feathers when he’d retrieved the arrows that were still good. Richard had given the last feather to Tom for killing the fifth race with his knife. Tom wore his single feather like Richard, on his arm.