Terry Goodkind - The Third Kingdom

The one eye stared at him, unable to look away. “Please … let me die.”

“Why, of course. That is why I’m here—to give you release from your agony.”

It had taken time to prepare her, to bring her to this state. It was not something that could be hurried or done with haste. Ludwig had learned over his years of study that patience yielded far better results than trying to force the issue.

Slowly building the tension, terror, and pain in the end brought far better, far more insightful prophecy. The proper, careful building of their journey toward the climax of their existence brought the exceptional visions when they looked beyond into that other, timeless world. Those were the sort he sought. Rushing the preparations simply didn’t produce quality results. Torture was a game of patience.

He knew from experience, and the work that had obviously been done on her, that what information she did give before he released her into death would be some of the better-quality prophetic perception. He was culling details from the darkest depths of the netherworld. He expected great things, this time. He could feel it. He had done this enough to know when the information was going to be special, to be important, to be meaningful.

Such especially significant tellings never went to the bishop. Ludwig kept those kind to himself. This one, he knew, would never leave the confines of the abbey.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said down to the agonized face watching him. “I could give you a bit of assistance. I could help you bring it forth. Would you like that?”

“Yes … please, help me. Please help me.”

“That’s why I’m here,” he said with a smile. “I’m here to help. Afterwards, I will grant you what you want most.”

She was close, he knew she was.

When she said nothing, he gestured to the Mord-Sith. Without delay Erika pressed her Agiel into the back of the woman’s skull.

She shuddered in agony. The chains rattled. Her mouth twisted as it opened. No scream could come out, no sound.

Ludwig knew from experience that she was there, that she now hung between the world of life and the world of the dead. He knew that she was at last ready.

She was now in that realm of the third kingdom.

“You see it, don’t you?” he asked intimately as he ran a hand tenderly over her hair. “You see that place beyond the veil.”

The woman nodded as she trembled under his steady hand.

“You will first give me prophecy from the dark place you see. As soon as you do that, I will grant your wish and release you to cross over to eternal peace. You would like to cross over, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes…”

He could almost taste the prophecy right there, hanging within her like fresh fruit for the picking. He would have it.

The Mother Confessor had been correct when she had once told Ludwig that if he was the one who provided the prophecy that Hannis Arc needed to rule, then Hannis Arc wasn’t really the one ruling. Ludwig Dreier was.

At the time he hadn’t given it much thought.

But as he had thought about it, he had come to realize that she was more correct than he had at first given her credit for. He had always known that Hannis Arc was absorbed in his own work and distracted by his own goals, so he relied on the guidance of prophecy that Ludwig provided. Since that prophecy was carefully culled, it was, in reality, Ludwig’s surreptitious, carefully groomed guidance. Ludwig told Hannis Arc only what Ludwig wanted him to know from beyond the veil.

What the Mother Confessor had said that day had really cast it with crystal clarity. Ludwig was the hidden hand that moved the puppet.

Hannis Arc, as powerful as he was, as talented, as clever as he was, was too insulated, too consumed with his own narrow obsessions to know how things in the wider world worked. He could not accomplish what he did without Ludwig’s guidance.

Ludwig had always planned on one day seizing that rule for himself. He was, after all, the architect behind much of the power Hannis Arc wielded, so who better to rule than he. Ludwig rightly should be the one to rule.

It would require great care, though. In spite of everything else, Hannis Arc was a profoundly dangerous man. His occult abilities were not to be taken lightly.

With a gesture from Ludwig, Erika removed her Agiel from the back of the woman’s head.

She was ready. It was time.

Ludwig bent close and pressed his fingers to the sides of her temples. He let the last necessary components of his own unique conjuring, conjuring he himself had created, finally flow into the woman. It would give her the last part of what she needed in order to be able to provide what he sought.

Her mouth hung open as she shook. Her one eye stared, unblinking.

He took his fingers away. She sagged.

“Speak of what you see,” he said in a voice edged with anticipation.

“They come,” she said in a hoarse voice.

CHAPTER

81

Ludwig Dreier straightened with a frown. This was not typically how prophecy sounded, but he knew from everything that had been properly done that it somehow was prophetic.

“They come? Who comes?”

“Those with teeth,” the woman said in a hoarse, raw voice. “They come to devour you.”

Ludwig frowned. It was about the strangest prophecy he had ever heard. He had seen this phenomenon before. On rare occasion, rather than a distant prophecy, those he had prepared gave more of a vision of the immediate future, a telling of what they saw elsewhere in the world at that moment, of things about to take place.

“Those with teeth?”

“The unholy half dead,” she whispered. “They come.”

Ludwig made a face. “I don’t understand.”

“He does.”

“He does? Who? What are you talking about? Who understands, and what exactly does he understand? You need to be more—”

“He knows what you do, Ludwig Dreier, and he knows that you will betray him. He is with a spirit from beyond the veil, now, a spirit from the world I can now see into, a spirit who knows of your treachery. The spirit king has told Hannis Arc what you do, what you have done, of your secret betrayals, and of what you plan to do.

“Hannis Arc knows of your deceptions and the things you keep from him, the lust you have in your heart for his rule. He knows, too, that in your vanity you have come to think of yourself as Lord Dreier. He knows it all. The spirit king has told him everything.

“Most of all, the spirit king knows of your meddling in the underworld—his world.

“He and Hannis Arc have sent the Shun-tuk—the half people—to hunt the abbey for your blood, to rip your heart out. For your treachery, he sent them to eat the flesh off your bones. They come. They come.”

Ludwig felt a trickle of sweat running down between his shoulder blades. He felt goose bumps on his arms, and panic swelling in his heart.

He looked up at the Mord-Sith. She looked confused, and more than worried. Seeing fear in a Mord-Sith’s eyes was something that made Ludwig’s heart race even faster. She was, after all, supposed to protect him.

But she knew what the Shun-tuk were. She had reason to feel fear.

He snatched up a knife from a small table to the side and pulled it deeply across the woman’s throat. She struggled to breathe through the burble of blood. Her tangled and broken arms thrashed a moment and then she sagged and began to go still as blood pumped out the opening in her throat.

Erika looked up. “What do we do now?”

He licked his lips as his mind raced. “We need more information. Better information. We need a better-quality person to stand at the cusp between worlds, a person who is more familiar with such things and would be better able to pull more informative details from beyond for us.”