“Bring worlds together?” She stared with her jaw hanging. She finally gathered her senses. “Have you lost your mind? Such a thing simply isn’t possible.”
“It is,” Kahlan confirmed. “Richard has already done it. I was there. I saw it done.”
“How? And don’t give me any of that spectral-fold nonsense. How could you bring another world, a distant world, together with our world so that you could step from one to another?”
“Here is the easiest way I can explain it. Imagine if you took a piece of paper and put a dot of ink on one side at the edge and then turned the paper over and put another dot on the other side of the paper, but on the edge farthest away from the first dot. You might say they are worlds apart and on opposite sides of the paper. Right? How could you bring those dots—those worlds—together?”
After a moment of thought, Shale folded her arms across her breasts. “You can’t. You can’t bring things together that are physically separated like that.”
“Yes you can. You simply fold the paper around into a cylinder until the dots touch. Dots on different edges, and different sides of the paper, now touch each other.” Richard smiled. “A spectral fold.”
Shale looked off into the distance as she puzzled it out in her head. Finally, once she grasped the concept, she turned back to regard him for a moment with a stern scowl.
“You are a scary man, Richard Rahl.”
“War wizards are supposed to be scary. Part of the job.”
Shale seemed to compose herself as she came to grips with the notion of moving between worlds. “And so you think that is what the Golden Goddess and her people can do? A spectral fold? Bring our worlds together and simply step out of one and into the other?”
Richard shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m only saying that I know it’s possible to go between worlds because I’ve sent people from our world to another one. My half sister wanted to go to that world to start a new life. She left this world and went to that one to live without magic. So what I’m saying is that we can’t discount what Nolo is telling us about them coming here from another world simply because we don’t know how they’re doing it.”
Shale nodded, still thinking of how to reconcile what he had just told her with what she knew. She had a sudden thought.
“What if the scribbly man the Mother Confessor saw, and the tracks I told you about, are them in the process of stepping through. You know, like they are still in that interface between worlds. What if that was what Kahlan saw—one of them in the midst of coming into our world? What if what she saw was him still in transition between worlds?”
Kahlan looked between Shale and Richard. “That actually might make sense. It didn’t seem like he was, I don’t know, all there, I guess you could say. Maybe he was in the process of materializing here. Before our worlds were close enough, they used to try and we would only see a glimmer of them. Now they can come through, so that’s what I saw here.”
Richard considered it a moment. “That certainly might explain it. Why don’t you see what else we can learn from Nolo?”
Kahlan left the two of them to go back to stand before the prisoner. “How will the Golden Goddess try to take our world?”
Nolo struggled to shrug against his helpless fear that he couldn’t properly answer her. “I’m not sure, Mistress—I swear! I do know that she doesn’t understand our world.”
“What do you mean? Our language? Our ways? What doesn’t she understand?”
“No, not those things. Of all the worlds she has found and raided, she has never before encountered a world like ours.”
“You already said that.” Kahlan made a face. “What doesn’t she understand about our world?”
He cried out in terror that he had displeased her by not answering in the way she wished. “Forgive me, Mistress!”
“Pay attention. Answer the question. She has never encountered a world like ours. What has she never encountered before? What doesn’t she understand?”
“Magic.”
Kahlan was taken aback. “She doesn’t understand magic?”
“She has never before encountered a world with magic. The gift—magic—confuses her. She has never seen magic before. She does not understand it.”
Kahlan paused to look over at Richard. This was certainly unexpected. Then again, in a way, it wasn’t. It was entirely possible that magic was unique to their world alone.
“The world Lord Rahl sent those people to was a world without magic,” Shale whispered. “Her world must be like that. That would explain why she doesn’t understand magic.”
Kahlan nodded her agreement before she turned back to Nolo. “Does she fear it? Does she fear magic?”
“She doesn’t know what it is. She is wary of it because it is an unknown to her. She fears you. You have power she cannot comprehend. That is why she tried to kill you, earlier. She will have you dead. But there is one thing she fears more than you and your power.”
“What would that be?”
“She fears the shiny man most of all.”
16
Kahlan frowned and leaned in as if she hadn’t heard him correctly. “She fears what?”
“The shiny man.” He tilted his head in Richard’s direction. “Lord Rahl.”
“She fears Lord Rahl most of all?”
Nolo nodded as he cried out, “Yes!”
“Why does she call him the shiny man?”
“His magic. His abilities. His power. His gift. His sword. Everything about him strengthens the magic of this world—especially his bond as the Lord Rahl with his people. That bond is open-ended, without limits. The shiny man lights this world with this strange thing: magic.”
“How could his gift give the magic of this world strength?”
“The same way his bond powers the Agiel of the Mord-Sith in ways that we cannot see. But she sees it shining. She sees the shiny threads of it.
“Magic shrouds this world, veils it, obscuring her ability to see into it very well. For that reason she uses people here, peering out through their eyes, like she was seeing through my eyes in the great hall when I came before you to give you her demand that you surrender. She was watching you both through my eyes. Through that imperfect, murky vision of looking through another’s eyes—through my eyes—she couldn’t see what Lord Rahl really looks like. His gift makes him look shiny to her. That terrible shine hurts her vision. No one else looks like that to her, just him. That’s why she calls him the shiny man.”
Richard remembered the way Nolo had kept looking away from him in the great hall, avoiding eye contact. This would explain why.
“So she hates him,” Kahlan said, “because of his gift.”
“Oh yes,” Nolo said, nodding furiously. “She hates him. She wants him dead. Your magic reinforces his gift. She hates you. She wants you dead. Once you both are dead then this confusing shroud of magic around this world will fade away and her hordes will have free run.”
“But our magic protects us. Lord Rahl’s magic can defeat them.”
“Forgive me, Mistress, for not being clear,” he whined. “They don’t understand magic, so they are cautious… for now. But don’t mistake caution for fear and especially not for weakness. They are anything but weak.
“Up to now she has only allowed a few of her kind through to our world, like the one who attacked you. Allowed them to come here to hunt, to feed, to probe, mostly far away from you both, far away from your magic, to test our species. As she learns more about our world, she will send more of her kind.”
“But my magic protected me?”