Terry Goodkind - The Third Kingdom

“I know,” he said in a measured voice. “I have to admit, it’s pretty hard for me to take in, too.”

CHAPTER

27

Richard turned his attention back to the symbols carved into the wall and read ahead for a few minutes as Samantha waited patiently. Her eyes tracked his finger from time to time as he traced a particularly difficult emblematic design while working out the translation in his head.

“So what else does it say?” she asked, her patience finally growing thin.

Richard swiped a hand back across his face. “Well, there’s a lot about how Emperor Sulachan wanted to convert as many people as possible into this new race of subhumans, these half people living without a soul in this altered timeline so that they could continue to serve his cause. He also planned on eliminating any opposition to his grand scheme by first eliminating any of the gifted who would oppose him.”

Samantha frowned up at him. “What grand plan is she talking about?”

Richard went to the next line, taking it all in for a moment. He read it twice, making sure it actually said what he thought it said.

“Well?” Samantha asked. “Can you read it or not?”

Richard let out a troubled sigh. “I can read it. I’m having trouble believing it, but I can read it. It’s no wonder that the people of the New World were willing to go to war to stop him.”

“Why, what does it say?”

“It says that Emperor Sulachan wanted to unite the world in what he called the People’s Alliance, with him ruling over it all.”

Richard had fought the Old World over many of these same kinds of tyrannical ideas of a greater good that some people believed transcended the lives of individuals. What that greater good always came down to was submitting to the rule of a tyrant and sacrificing to their cause, or dying. Enforcing the belief in a greater good required the massacre of anyone who disagreed, since such beliefs could not endure the light of differing beliefs.

Richard had thought that with the latest emperor from the Old World dead, the struggle was at last over. Now, he wasn’t so sure. Evil always seemed to emerge to try to destroy any good that came about, any peace that had settled in, or any prosperity that had emerged. As long as mankind existed, he supposed that there would always be those who thought that their vision of a better world required murdering anyone in the way.

It was now evident that the ancient struggle, started so long ago by Emperor Sulachan, and the frightening weapons he had developed, hadn’t been entirely eradicated. Some of those weapons loosed on the world of life had long ago been sealed away behind barriers and walls where they waited to fight another day. Where other barriers had come down, so, too, had this one finally given way.

“Seems to me like someone always wants to rule,” Samantha said as she scanned the writing she couldn’t understand.

“That’s certainly true enough,” Richard said as he tapped the wall of engraved symbols, “but the dangerous difference is that Sulachan believed that his cause transcended life as a larger cause for the good of all existence.”

Samantha’s mouth twisted a bit. “I don’t understand.”

“Sulachan envisioned the world of life and the world of the dead as one grand, interconnected entity, one whole, just as the Grace is one whole, interconnected concept. He wanted to unite the world of life and the world of the dead under his rule.”

Samantha shook her head as she watched him reading the language of Creation. “That’s madness.”

He looked over at her. “I don’t disagree with you, but sometimes lunatics are so driven they can take the whole world into madness with them.”

“I don’t see how normal people could go along with such beliefs.”

Richard straightened with a sigh. “Oftentimes it’s easier for lunatics to attract impassioned followers than it is for sensible people to get people to listen to reason. People are often more willing to believe lies than the truth. Lies can be made to sound pleasant. The truth, by its very nature, isn’t always so attractive.

“That leaves peaceful people no choice but to fight for their lives or fall to the blades of madmen. In such a situation, there is no middle ground. There is no such thing as compromise between civilization and savagery. Civilization must always defend itself against savagery or else fall to it.”

“I guess that’s our part in this?”

Richard nodded. “I’ve never wanted to fight, to be in a war, to see good people die, to have to kill. I just wanted to live my life in peace. But others wouldn’t allow me that life of peace. The battles I fight have always been a fight to survive and live in peace, not to conquer. That’s how I came to be here instead of back in Hartland where I grew up.”

He swept his hand past the writing on the wall. “In this case, here, with the people of the New World, it looks as if they had no stomach for fighting and kept out of the conflict as long as possible, but those of the Old World didn’t care that these people wanted to live in peace. In such a case, the aggressor prevails unless those wanting peace are willing to fight back.

“According to Naja, Emperor Sulachan and his followers were determined to create whatever weapons they needed, no matter how terrifying or deadly, in order to conquer all those who opposed their plans. The reanimated dead and the half people were two such weapons. She says here that Sulachan’s plan was to eventually rule both the living and the dead, from the world of the dead.”

Samantha paced off a few strides in agitation, then retuned. Her mood was as black as her hair. “I can understand a madman starting a fight, I’ve seen such things happen on a very small scale among pigheaded people here in our village, but what you’re describing sounds just plain crazy.” She jabbed a finger at the side of her head. “Crazy, crazy.”

“Naja says the same thing, but she also warns that even if his ideas were as deluded, impractical, or preposterous as many knowledgeable people believed them to be, and even if in the end they did indeed prove to be impossible to carry out, he was willing to slaughter untold numbers of innocent people in the attempt, and that was what mattered to those in his way. The people of the New World were in his way.

“She says that he had no intention of stopping the killing as long as life existed. He believed that in the end, there would be only the reanimated dead and the legions of half people here in the world of life, and he would control their souls forever from the underworld.”

“Are you sure that he wasn’t the Keeper himself brought to life?” Samantha asked, sarcastically, as she folded her arms.

“He was just a man,” Richard said. “A man like so many others who in one way or another, whether they have been aware of it or not, have been devoted to death.

“I guess he was simply more shameless about it than most madmen. Naja says, in fact, that he believed the act of bringing death to so many and on such a grand scale was a transcendent experience.”

Samantha threw up her hands. “This sounds so deluded that I can’t even fathom it. But the thing that really confuses me is why people would believe in such a madman and fight for his crazy cause. I mean, I’m not even grown-up yet, and I can see that this is lunacy.”

Richard turned from the account on the wall. “There are plenty of people drawn to such a way of life. Following such a leader gives them license to be savages themselves, to be an anonymous thug and take what they have been told they are entitled to. Some people find it intoxicating to have the power and permission to destroy others.

“But that’s really beside the point. The point is that Sulachan was powerful enough to bring about immense destruction and loss of life. Even if he was deluded and his ideas were crazy, he, his gifted, and his vast, rampaging armies had the might to bring the world under the darkness of a great war.