Richard gestured angrily at the portly man pinned to the wall. “We need answers. Ask him what it was.”
Kahlan moved closer to stand in front of the prisoner.
“Nolo. Look at me.”
He looked up at her as if just coming awake from a deep sleep. Long strands of gray hair meant to cover his large bald spot instead hung down in front of his face. As he saw her, his expression turned to utter devotion to the Confessor who had taken his mind.
Then, a cunning smile thinned his puffy lips.
Richard had seen plenty of people touched by Kahlan’s power.
None of them had ever smiled.
“She sees you,” Nolo said in a raspy whisper.
“She?” Kahlan asked.
“The Golden Goddess. She sees you standing there. She sees into your world.” His voice was slow and sounded different than it had when he was in the great hall. If it even was his voice. “Your world will be hers. You should give it up now, and save yourself witnessing what is to come.”
“Who is the Golden Goddess?” Kahlan asked in a calm voice.
“She is the collector of worlds.”
Richard didn’t like the sound of that.
“What does she want with our world?” Kahlan asked. “Why does she want it?”
“You can’t win in the end,” he said in that slow, raspy whisper, which ran a shiver up Richard’s spine. “He is the last of the Rahl line. You are the last of the Confessors. Once you are both dead she will have your world.”
“Can you get him to be more specific?” Richard asked. “These are just threats. We need something that will help us.”
Kahlan nodded. “How will the Golden Goddess collect our world?”
“She will have your world. You can’t win. In the end, no matter what you do, she will have your world. Running will do you no good. Surrender now and she will kill you first. She will pick your bones clean and then you will not have to see the horror that will come for your people.”
Kahlan shook her head to herself.
It was obvious to Richard that this wasn’t working. “He is not behaving as he should after he has been touched by a Confessor,” he whispered to Shale, standing just to his right.
Without a word, Shale walked briskly up to the man and held his sweaty head tightly between her hands. Fingers spread, she pressed her thumbs against his temples. She lowered her head as she closed her eyes. Nolo’s entire body began to shake, his chins rolled like waves in a storm, his fat belly jiggled, his teeth chattered.
After a few minutes, still holding the man’s quivering head, Shale looked over at Richard. “She is using his vision. She is using him to look out through his eyes into our world.”
“Well… what do we do about it?”
“This,” Shale said.
Without any hesitation she dug her thumbs into the inside corners of his eyes. She gritted her teeth with the effort of scooping out his eyeballs with her thumbs. It was shocking to see such a gorgeous woman engaged in such a brutal act.
Nolo screamed his lungs out as she dug deep with her hooked thumbs. Shale at last ripped the eyeballs out. She pulled them away from the connecting tissues and then held one up in each bloody hand to show them. Nolo shrieked the whole time.
“There. That should fix the problem,” the sorceress announced. She tossed his eyeballs off into a corner and then turned to a surprised Kahlan. “I’ve cut off her link. You will be able to talk to him now. The Golden Goddess is gone. Nolo’s core is yours now to do with as you will.”
Vika, next to Richard’s left shoulder, leaned toward him. “I’m beginning to like her a lot more.”
The other Mord-Sith nodded their eager agreement.
15
The man hanging in the restraints thrashed and screamed with the pain of having his eyes plucked out.
“Nolo, be still and listen,” Kahlan commanded.
His agonized cries died out almost immediately in choking fits. He lifted his head, even though he could no longer see anything. Tears of blood ran from his ruined eye sockets.
“Mistress… please… command me.”
There at last was the person Kahlan’s power had taken. Shale had broken the Golden Goddess’s link to the man. The veneer of her control was gone. Nolo hung nearly naked before the Confessor who had taken him with her power, fat, sweaty, smelly, and now unconditionally compliant.
“Tell me who this Golden Goddess is.”
“She came to haunt me. She made me do things I didn’t want to do,” he confessed in a tearful voice. “I don’t know how.”
“I know that much,” Kahlan said. “What else do you know about her? Tell me who she is.”
“She is from another world. She is a collector of worlds. Her people are marauders. She finds worlds for them to raid.”
“How does she get here?”
“I don’t know, Mistress.” He shrugged in misery because he couldn’t adequately answer the question. “She has looked into our world before, but it was always far too distant for her kind to come here. Now, somehow, our world has come into her realm. It is now within her reach.”
Shale motioned Kahlan to step over to her and Richard, out of earshot of Nolo. “This isn’t making any sense. I can’t believe he is really telling the truth.”
“Someone touched by a Confessor’s power has to tell the truth,” Kahlan said. “They have no choice. Their mind, who they were, is gone. All that is left is unfiltered devotion to the Confessor who took them and to what she wants to know.”
“That may be, but this can’t be right. It doesn’t make any sense. This Golden Goddess and her people can’t travel to different worlds, or”—she twirled her hand overhead—“roam among the stars. Such a thing is simply not possible.”
“I’m afraid it is,” Richard said, drawing her attention.
“What are you talking about?”
“Kahlan and I have both traveled to a different world.”
“What world?” the frowning sorceress asked.
“The world of the dead,” Richard said. “We went beyond the veil. We left the world of life, went to the world of the dead, and returned to our world.”
“That’s different,” Shale declared in a fit of annoyance. “The world of life and the world of the dead are both here, in the same place at the same time. They are two sides of the same coin. Only the veil separates them. They function together.
“While it may have been an incredible feat, one I don’t entirely understand, it’s very different from what Nolo is talking about. He is saying that the Golden Goddess’s people venture among the stars, visiting other worlds. That’s simply not possible,” she insisted.
Richard hooked his thumbs in his weapon belt. “I’m afraid it is. I know because I’ve done it.”
Shale’s disbelief was obvious. “You’ve traveled to other worlds.”
“Well, not me.”
“I thought not,” she huffed.
“But I’ve sent other people to a different world.”
Taken off guard, the sorceress made a face. “What are you talking about?”
“When we won the war with the Old World and defeated Emperor Jagang there were many people who didn’t want to live here, in a world with magic. That had been what the war had been about—Jagang and his followers wanted to end magic. So, when we won the war, I sent those people who didn’t want to live in a world with magic to, well, another world, a world without magic.”
Shale planted her fists on her hips. “You sent people to another world.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I used a spectral fold.”
She threw her hands up. “A spectral fold. Of course.” She leaned in with an angry whisper. “What in the name of Creation is a spectral fold?”
“Well,” Richard said as he pinched his lower lip, trying to think how to explain it as simply as possible, “it’s a way of making different worlds that are far away come together so that you can step from one world into the other.”