The Third Kingdom (20 page)

“It would seem so,” Richard said in desolate agreement.

Samantha shook her head in dismay. “Even Jit stayed in her lair. As dangerous as the rest of the Dark Lands can be, we’ve
never before had to face anything as terrifying as these walking dead. I can’t imagine anything worse.”

Richard, still reading ahead in Naja’s account, lightly skimmed his fingers over the next line written in the language of Creation inscribed in the wall.

“It says here that the half people are far worse.”

“Lord Rahl, your face just turned white. What’s wrong? What in the world are half people? Does it say what they are?” Samantha leaned in. “Lord Rahl, answer me. What’s wrong?”

Richard pressed his fingertips to his forehead a moment as he double-checked the translation. He ran it through his head again while trying to grapple with such an alien concept.

“It says that the half people are living people who have been stripped of their souls.”

“Stripped of their souls?” She cocked her head toward him. “Are you serious?”

Richard couldn’t help scanning it yet again before going on to read the following section of the sobering account. He finally backed away, staring at the writing on the wall.

“I’m afraid so.” He pointed out a complex symbol. “This is the part here where it warns that those beyond the barrier have no souls.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. How can people not have a soul? Our souls are part of us all. They are ‘us.’ It’s like saying …” She cast about, trying to find the words. “… that, that living people aren’t alive.”

“I’m afraid that in a way that’s exactly what it’s saying. Naja
says that the half people aren’t exactly human, but they almost are. She says they are somewhere in between human and not human.”

Samantha’s nose wrinkled as she made a face. “How can that be?”

“Apparently, the dead and the half people share certain things in common and that’s what keeps the half people from being fully human. At least not in the accepted sense.”

Samantha leaned in with a look of dismay. “Accepted sense? What does that mean?”

Richard took a deep breath. “Well, the accepted sense is that living people have souls. But what does that mean? How does it make us human? In some part, having a soul means having the full intellectual ability to reason. Do you understand?”

“I don’t think so. What does reasoning have to do with it?”

“The ability to reason is what gives us our capacity to have empathy for others, to value life itself. Our ability to judge right from wrong, to value all life, is only possible through our ability to reason. Reason is what powers morality.

“Naja says that these half people have no empathy and she also makes the specific point that they don’t have the ability to reason fully. I think that she wanted us to see that the two are connected. That part of them that enabled them to reason out their larger self-interest has been destroyed through Subtractive Magic. That ability to reason was the source of their empathy, their humanity.

“She says that because of the way their minds have been reduced, with what is left of them they can only reason in part, the way a predator reasons in order to hunt.

“Without the ability to reason in that broader sense, they are not the same as us. They are not human. They have no context for their lives, no transcending aspirations, no understanding or feelings for others. They make weapons, they hunt, they
kill, they eat, they reproduce. They have human form, but that’s all.”

Samantha gave him a crooked look. “I can understand Sulachan wishing to have this mindless army, but do you think that it’s really even possible to do such a thing?”

“Apparently,” Richard said as he scanned the symbols, translating the gist of it for her. “In this line here, Naja says that the Grace and so their very being was ripped asunder. After that, they invested them with magic that is similar to that used to reanimate the dead. In this way the emperor’s makers were able to create a race of half people to serve him.

“What’s more, because of what was done with Subtractive Magic to the husk of their living bodies, half people age very slowly, almost imperceptibly.”

Samantha, looking more than a little skeptical, folded her arms. “Magic can do a lot of things, but it can’t slow people from aging. If it could, the gifted would all do that to keep themselves from getting old.”

“It can be done,” Richard said. “I’ve seen it myself at the Palace of the Prophets. Ancient spells altered time there. The people living inside that spell seemed to age slowly compared to the rest of us. It was originally done when the palace was built in order to give the sorceresses there enough time to complete the task of training young wizards.

“I know people who once lived there who are hundreds of years old—at least by our measurement of time outside that spell, if not theirs from within it. I even know an ancestor of mine, Nathan Rahl, who lived there most of his life and is close to a thousand years old.”

“A thousand years.… ” Samantha stared for a long moment, finally shaking her head. “I wish I could see such wonders that must exist out beyond the Dark Lands. I’ve always known that I’m doomed to stay here in this little isolated place,
like all my ancestors, never to see the world beyond. But I’ve dreamed of seeing such wonders.”

“I don’t know if I would call them ‘wonders.’ Oftentimes, like with what we’re facing here, it’s nothing more than a whole lot of trouble.”

After considering his words a moment she finally returned to the issue at hand. “But, how was it possible to keep these half people from aging? They’re not living inside a spell like you described.”

“It necessarily involves Subtractive Magic—”

“But only those ancient wizards back when they created these half people could wield Subtractive Magic, right? No one now has the ability to use Subtractive Magic.”

“Even today there are a very few who can still call upon that side of the gift.” He didn’t go into the fact that he was one of those—at least when his gift was working. Her eyes were wide again, so he simply continued with what he had been explaining.

“So, in this case, since Subtractive Magic had been used to bring about such changes in the Grace, that would inescapably involve the underworld and in that way their aging was slowed.”

“The underworld? Why would involving the underworld slow their aging?”

“Because our lives have limits—we are born, we live, and then we die—but we’re dead forever, right?”

“Right,” she conceded with a confused nod. “So?”

“So, we live for a finite time, but since death is forever there is no way to measure it. Life gives dimension to time.”

“But our spirits begin their time in the underworld when we die, much the same as we begin our lives when we are born into the world of life.”

“Except that our lives have an end, so we can say how long a person’s life was. In the underworld there is only that beginning when we die. Since there is no end to being dead, there is
no way to measure time in the underworld. That’s why the Grace shows life with a beginning at Creation and an end at death, but once our spirits go beyond into the underworld, it goes on forever.”

She still looked confused. “But that is when the length of time there starts. You start measuring time from that point.”

“Yes but there is only that beginning point. It’s like trying to determine how long a rope is when there is only one end. If you can’t ever reach the other end because the rope goes on forever, then how could you measure how long it is? Life, from beginning to end, is a known quantity. Death has no end.”

Samantha squinted as she tried to imagine such a thing.

“Each day lived,” Richard said, “is one less of our limited number of days gone forever. Time therefore has relevance and meaning to us. Life is precious, so time is precious. Time is how we put value on things such as love. We give our most precious commodity, our time—a part of our lives—over to those we love.”

“I never thought of it in that way. I know how much I treasure the time I spent with my parents, and how much I miss my time with them. What about time in the underworld?”

“We’re dead forever. So a spirit in the underworld has no sense of getting old because spirits don’t get old. They have no sense of their time running out because it doesn’t run out. They remain dead forever, so in the underworld a day or a thousand days or even a million doesn’t measure anything meaningful out of an infinite amount of time. You are still dead and you always will be.

“As a consequence, because death is inalterable and the length of time you will be dead is limitless, there can be no value in being dead, and thus no value to time.”

“But what does that have to do with these half people living a long time?”

Richard arched an eyebrow. “The half people have no soul.
That part of them is already dead. Time for the dead is limitless. The half people exist in a third kingdom in violation of the principles of the Grace, in a kingdom with its own set of principles where life and death exist together without clear separation, where they can intermingle in unexpected ways.

“Each of those half people carries that third kingdom, thus death, within them, so time moves differently for them. Emperor Sulachan’s makers apparently used that link to the timeless world of the dead to make these people they turned into weapons long-lived so they could better serve his cause. Time was important to Sulachan because he was alive, so he used the opposites of both life and death to manipulate time for his purpose.”

She stared at him. “That’s all pretty hard to take in.”

Richard nodded, aware that he had seen things she couldn’t yet imagine and were hard for her to grasp.

He was also all too aware that because of the Hedge Maid, death now held a claim on both him and Kahlan, and in that way made the two of them a part of that third kingdom. The difference was that they were not going to be able to live a long time. Their contact with that kingdom, through the touch of the Hedge Maid, was deadly, and the world of the dead would soon call that debt due.

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

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.