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27
Like snowflake patches of a dark dream drifting down, everything came slowly back into her vision—the twin fires first, then the torches, then the dark stone walls, and finally the people.
Her whole body was numb for a stunned moment before the feeling returned to her flesh in a million painful pinpricks. She hurt everywhere.
Jagang tore off a big bite of roast pheasant. He chewed a moment, and then wagged the leg bone at her.
“You know your problem, Ulicia?” he asked, still chewing. “You use magic that you can unleash as quick as a thought.”
The smirk returned to his greasy lips. “I, on the other hand, am a dream walker. I use the time between fragments of thought, in that stillness when there is nothing, to do what I do. I slip in where no other can go.”
He gestured with the bone again as he swallowed. “You see, for me, in that space between thought, time is infinite, and I can do as I wish. You might as well be stone statues trying to chase me.”
Ulicia felt her Sisters through the link. It was still there.
“Crude. Very crude,” he said. “I’ve seen others do it much better, but then they’d been practiced at it. I left the link—for now. For now, I want you all to feel each other. I’ll break it later. Just as I can break the link, I can break your minds, too.” He took a gulp of wine. “But I think that’s so unproductive. How can you teach people a lesson, really teach them a lesson, if their minds don’t understand it?”
Through the link, Ulicia felt Cecilia lose control of her bladder, and the warm urine running down her legs.
“How?” Ulicia heard herself ask in a hollow voice. “How can you use the time between thoughts?”
Jagang picked up his knife and sliced off a slab of meat on an ornate silver platter to his side. He stabbed the bloody center of the slice with the knifepoint and then rested his elbows on the table. “What are we all?” He waved around the skewered hunk of meat as it dripped red down his knife. “What is reality—the reality of our existence?”
He drew the meat off the knife with his teeth and chewed as he went on. “Are we our bodies? Is a small person less than a big person, then? If we were our bodies, then when we lost an arm, or a leg, would we be less, would we begin to fade from existence? No. We are the same person.
“We are not our bodies; we are our thoughts. As they form, they define who we are, and create the reality of our existence. Between those thoughts, there is nothing, simply the body, waiting for our thoughts to make us who we are.
“Between your thoughts, I come. In that space between your thoughts time has no meaning to you, but it has meaning to me.” He took a swig of wine. “I am a shadow, slipping between the cracks of your existence.”
Through the link, Ulicia could feel the others trembling. “That isn’t possible,” she whispered. “Your Han can’t spread time, break it apart.”
His condescending smile caught her breath short. “A small, simple wedge, inserted into a crack in the largest, most massive boulder, can split it apart. Destroy it.
“I am that wedge. That wedge is now hammered into the cracks in your minds.”
She stood silently as his thumb gouged off a long strip of pork from a roasted suckling pig. “When you sleep, your thoughts float and drift and you are vulnerable. When you sleep, you are a beacon I can find. Then, my thoughts slip into the cracks. The spaces where you fade in and out of existence are chasms to me.”
“And what do you want with us?” Armina asked.
He tore off a bite of the pork dangling from his meaty fingers. “Well, among my uses for you, we have a mutual enemy: Richard Rahl. You know him as Richard Cypher.” He arched an eyebrow over one of his dark, seething eyes. “The Seeker.
“Up until now he’s been invaluable. He did me a huge favor by destroying the barrier, which kept me on this side. My body, anyway. You, the Sisters of the Dark, the Keeper, and Richard Rahl made it possible for me to bring the race of man to ascendancy.”
“We have done no such thing,” Tovi protested in a meek voice.
“Ah, but you have. You see, the Creator and the Keeper vied for dominance in this world, the Creator simply to prevent the Keeper from swallowing it into the world of the dead, and the Keeper simply because he has a insatiable appetite for the living.”
His inky-eyed gaze rose to meet theirs. “In your struggle to free the Keeper, to give him this world, you gave the Keeper power here, and that, in turn, baited Richard Rahl to come to the defense of the living. He restored the balance.
“In that balance, just as in the space between your thoughts, I come.
“Magic is the conduit to those other worlds, giving them power here. By reducing the amount of magic in the world I will lessen the Creator and the Keeper’s influence here. The Creator will still send his spark of life, and the Keeper will still take it away when its end has come, but beyond that, the world will belong to man. The old religion of magic will be consigned to the midden heap of history, and eventually, to myth.
“I am a dream walker; I have seen the dreams of men, I know their potential. Magic suppresses these boundless visions. Without magic, man’s mind, his imagination, will be unleashed, and he will be all-powerful.
“That’s why I have the army I do. When magic is dead, I will still have them. I keep them well practiced for that day.”
“And how is Richard Rahl your enemy?” Ulicia asked, hoping to keep him talking while she tried to think of w
hat they could do.
“He had to do as he did, of course, or you darlins would have given the world to the Keeper. That aided me, but now he interferes with my plans. He’s young, and ignorant of his talents. I, on the other hand, have spent the last twenty years perfecting my ability.”
He waved the knifepoint in front of his eyes. “Only in the last year have my eyes turned—the mark of a dream walker. Only now am I entitled to the most feared appellation in the ancient world. In the ancient tongue, ‘dream walker’ is synonymous with ‘weapon.’ The wizards who created this weapon came to regret it.”
He licked the grease off his knife as he watched them. “It’s a mistake to forge weapons with minds of their own. You are my weapons now. I don’t make the same mistake.
“My power allows me to enter the minds of anyone when they sleep. In those who don’t have the gift I can only exert a limited amount of influence, and they are of small use to me anyway, but in those who are gifted, like you six, I can do anything I wish. Once my wedge is in your mind, it is no longer yours. It’s mine.
“The magic of the dream walkers was powerful, but unstable. None has been born with the ability in the last three thousand years, since the barrier went up and trapped us here. But now, a dream walker treads this world again.”
He shook with a menacing chuckle. The tiny braids at the corners of his mouth danced. “That would be me.”
Ulicia almost told him to get to the point, but stopped herself just in time. She had no desire to see what he would do when he was done talking. She needed the time to try to think of something. “How do you know all this?”
Jagang tore a strip of charred fat from the roast and nibbled on it as he went on. “In a buried city in my homeland of Altur’Rang, I found an archive from the ancient times. Ironic, the value of books, to a warrior like me. The Palace of the Prophets has books of immense value, too, if you know how to use them. Too bad the prophet died, but I have other wizards.
