Richard nodded as he continued to share a look with the lone Glee. “She isn’t wrong.”
“So, what is your crazy idea this time?” she asked with a long-suffering sigh.
He flashed her a smile. “I think that Glee wants to talk to us. Let’s go find out what it has to say.”
“The Glee don’t talk. They only come to kill.”
“My crazy idea is that I don’t think that this one intends us any harm.”
She nodded as she started after him. “That is indeed a crazy idea. If you are wrong, and it’s a trap?”
“Then we will deal with it.”
Together, Richard and Vika walked back down the road toward the bridge, scanning the area for trouble as they went. He looked back over his shoulder, up at those ramparts and crenellations in the walls he could see from such a low perspective, but he didn’t see anyone. Kahlan was now safe inside the fortress.
The Glee on the bridge had not moved from where it stood, waiting. Richard continually swept his gaze in every direction, looking for a mass attack, but not actually expecting one. Vika also kept up a sweep of the area, especially the woods, but unlike him, she did expect an attack.
Each time he looked back at the Glee, it hadn’t moved. It watched him coming with big, glossy black eyes. Occasionally its third eyelid would blink across the surface to keep it wet.
The creature, with its soft, moist, mottled black skin, hairless head, big glossy eyes, two small holes for a nose, and wicked claws, looked completely alien standing there on the bridge built by men. Glee weren’t typically anxious. But given how uneasy this one appeared, he thought it must be here for a reason it felt was important enough to overcome its apprehension.
As Richard slowed to a halt in front of the dark creature, he held his hand back and out to the side a little to let Vika know that he wanted her to stay back out of his way and give him room in case he needed to draw his sword. He really didn’t think that was going to be necessary, but as he had learned so often before, it was better to be prepared to act and not need to, than to not be prepared and find out all too suddenly that you should have been ready.
The Glee tipped its head to the side and blinked with its third eyelids, as if studying Richard’s face up close for the first time. It was a disconcerting appraisal by such a dangerous creature. At least its lips weren’t drawn back to expose its needle-sharp teeth.
“I am called Sang.”
Richard blinked in surprise. While it hadn’t said the words out loud, and its mouth hadn’t moved, Richard could clearly hear the words in his head. It was an unnerving sensation to have a voice talk to him from inside his own head.
Vika gasped. “I heard him talk in my head!”
“We can both hear him,” Richard told her under his breath. He looked back at the Glee.
“How is it that I can hear you speak in my head”—he tapped a finger to his temple to show what he meant—“but you make no words that I can hear with my ears?”
Sang cocked his head the other way. “It is how we communicate. The goddess comes into the minds of your kind in much the same way so that she may look through their eyes to see where you are. She has talked to some of you in the way that I talk to you now, in your mind. In that same way, I can speak into your mind in a way that you understand.”
“Can all of your kind do this?”
“Yes. This is how we communicate with each other. I have tried to speak to others in different worlds in this way, but they could not hear me in their minds. Only you and your kind can hear us speak in this way, as some have heard the goddess.”
“Why did you try to speak to those others, in other worlds?” Richard asked.
“For the same reason I speak now to you. But they could not hear me and unlike you, they could be of no help.”
Richard didn’t like riddles but decided to let it slide for the moment.
“I have seen you before, Sang,” he said aloud.
“Yes. I have watched you fight a number of times now.”
“Why have you watched me fight but not participated in those battles with the rest of your kind?”
“I am also Glee, but I am not like those who attacked you. I watched because I wanted to learn about you.”
Richard found that rather worrisome, but at the same time, it was what he had been beginning to believe.
“What have you learned?”
“I have watched and seen you finally discover how to fight the Glee. It is not easy, and no other has ever been able to learn what you have learned. The Glee are very, very dangerous. But you have grasped the way of fighting them effectively. You understand what I am meaning?”
Richard nodded. “Yes. I have learned that their claws, while deadly when used for ripping and tearing at people, are not really made for fighting. I think they are meant for something else. Even so, those claws are obviously very deadly. I have learned how those who fight us use them, and how to defeat them by using their weaknesses.”
Sang cocked his head. “And what are their weaknesses?”
“Most of their arm strength is in close range, not when they extend their arms out to slash. Their shoulders and upper arms are not as strong when extended. I have learned the limitations of their movements, and where in those movements they are slowest and more awkward, and thus most vulnerable. The farther they reach, the weaker their ability to use their arms and the more cumbersome their strikes.”
Sang nodded. “Your kind thinks we are deadly, and that is obviously true in most cases, but in reality, you, Lord Rahl, are more deadly by far.”
Richard was somewhat troubled that Sang knew his name and title, but on the other hand, it told him that this individual shared information with others of his kind, which from what he had observed was rather unusual among Glee. This was obviously a thinking, reasoning creature, even if very different from him.
“Is there a point to all of this?” he asked. “A reason you have been watching me?”
Sang tapped his claws together several times, as if to demonstrate something. They made a clacking sound.
“My kind uses our claws to feed. We eat water plants called flutter weed and float weed. We harvest it with our claws. The webs between our claws help us to maneuver in water.
“We also use our claws to eat muscle snails that stick themselves down to rocks and can hold tight. They are at least as big as your hand and have a broad, powerful foot to hold themselves against rocks. They provide us nourishment.
“We must get our sharp claws in under their broad, shallow shells and then pry and pull them off the rocks. We use our teeth—” He drew his lips back to expose his tightly packed, needle-sharp white teeth. “—to rake the muscle snail’s meat from inside the recess of its shell.
“We also eat other kinds of water plants, delicious varieties of thick, ruffled plants that grow low and tight on rock. We use our teeth to scrape them from the surface of rocks. It is the only way we are able to collect and eat them. We also eat a variety of other snails and use our claws to extract the meat. Mostly, though, the flutter and float weed and the muscle snail are our staple foods which grow in abundance and what our kind has lived on for as long as any of us knows.”
“But something happened, and as a result of that event some of you developed a taste for the flesh of creatures from other worlds?”
Sang let his claws drop back to his sides as he let out a kind of hiss that Richard took for a sigh. He looked somehow remorseful.