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Frowning in confusion, Jennsen looked back and forth between Cara and the blowing sand.
“What do you see?” Richard asked.
Jennsen threw her hands up in a gesture of frustration. “Black-tipped races. Five of them. That, and the blinding blowing sand is all. Is there someone out there? Do you see people coming?”
She didn’t see it.
Tom pulled the bow and quiver from the wagon and ran for the rest of them. Two of the races, as if noting Tom running in with the bow, lifted a wing and circled wider. They swept around him once before disappearing into the darkness. The other three, though, continued to circle, as if bearing the floating form in the blowing sand beneath them.
Closer still the races came, and the form with them. Richard couldn’t imagine what it was, but the sense of dread it engendered rivaled any nightmare. The power from the sword surging through him had no such fear or doubt. Then why did he? Storms of magic within, beyond anything storming across the wasteland, spiraled up through him, fighting for release. With grim effort, Richard contained the need, focused it on the task of doing his bidding should he choose to release it. He was the master of the sword and had at all times to consciously exert that mastery. By the sword’s reaction to what the currents of sand revealed, there could be no doubt as to Richard’s conviction of the nature of what stood before him. Then what was it he sensed from the sword?
From back by the wagon, a horse screamed. A quick glance over his shoulder revealed Friedrich trying to calm them. All three horses reared against the rope he held fast. They came down stamping their hooves and snorting. From the corner of his eye, Richard saw twin streaks of black shoot in out of the darkness, skimming in just above the ground. Betty let out a terrible wail.
And then, as quickly as they’d appeared, they were gone, vanished back into the thick gloom.
“No!” Jennsen cried out as she ran for the animals.
Before them, the unmoving shape watched. Tom reached out, trying to stop Jennsen on the way past. She tore away from him. For a moment, Richard worried that Tom might go after her, but then he was again running for Richard.
Out of the dark swirling murk, the two races suddenly appeared, so close Richard could see the quills running down through their flight feathers spread wide in the wind. Swooping in out of the swirling storm of dust to rejoin the circle, each carried a small, limp, white form in its powerful talons.
Tom ran up holding the bow out in one hand and the quiver in the other. Making his choice, Richard slammed his sword into its scabbard and snatched up the bow.
With one smooth motion he bent the bow and attached the string. He yanked an arrow from the leather quiver Tom held out in his big fist.
As Richard turned to the target, he already had the arrow nocked and was drawing back the string. Distantly, it felt good to feel his muscles straining against the weight, straining against the spring of the bow, loading its force for release. It felt good to rely on his strength, his skill, his endless hours of practice, and not have to depend on magic.
The still form of the man who wasn’t there seemed to watch. Eddies of sand sluiced over the shape, marking the outline. Richard glared at the head of the form beyond the razor-sharp steel tip of the arrow. Like all blades, it fell comfortingly familiar to Richard. With a blade in his hands, he was in his element and it mattered not if it was stone dust his blade drew, or blood. The steel-tipped arrow was squarely centered on the empty spot in the curve of blowing sand that formed the head.
The piercing cry of races carried above the howl of the wind.
String to his cheek, Richard savored the tension in his muscles, the weight of the bow, the feathers touching his flesh, the distance between blade and objective filled with swirling sand, the pull of the wind against his arm, the bow, and the arrow. Each of those factors and a hundred more went into an inner calculation that after a lifetime of practice required no conscious computation yet decided where the point of the arrow belonged once he called the target.
The form before him stood watching.
Richard abruptly raised the bow and called the target.
The world became not only still but silent for him as the distance seemed to contract. His body was drawn as taut as the bow, the arrow becoming a projection of his fluid focused intent, the mark before the arrow his purpose for being. His conscious intent invoked the instant sum of the calculation needed to connect arrow and target.
The swirling sand seemed to slow as the races, wings spread wide, dragged through the thick air. There was no doubt in Richard’s mind what the arrow would find at the end of a journey only just begun. He felt the string hit his wrist. He saw the feathers clear the bow above his fist. The arrow’s shaft flexed slightly as it sprang away and took flight.
Richard was already drawing the second arrow from the quiver in Tom’s fist as the first found its target. Black feathers exploded in the crimson dawn. The bird tumbled gracelessly through the air and with a hard thud hit the ground not far from the shape floating just above the ground. The bloody white form was free of the talons, but it was too late.
The four remaining races screamed in fury. As the birds pumped their wings, clawing for height, one railed at Richard with a shrill scream. Richard called the target.
The second arrow was off.
The arrow ripped right into the race’s open throat and out the back of the head, cutting off the angry cry. The flightless weight plummeted to the ground.
The form below the remaining three races began to dissolve in the swirling sand.
The three remaining birds, as if abandoning their charge, wheeled around, racing toward Richard with angry intent. He calmly considered them from behind feathers of his own. The third arrow was away. The race in the center lifted its right wing, trying to change direction, but took the arrow through its heart. Rolling wing over wing, it spiraled down through the blowing sand, crashing to the hardpan out ahead of Richard.
The remaining two birds, screeching defiant cries, plunged toward him.
Richard pulled string to cheek, placing the fourth arrow on target. The range was swiftly closing. The arrow was away in an instant. It tore through the body of the black-tipped race still clutching in its talons the bloody corpse of the tiny kid.
Wings raked back, the last angry race dove toward Richard. As soon as Richard snatched an arrow from the quiver an impatient Tom held out, the big D’Haran heaved his knife. Before Richard could nock the arrow, the whirling knife ripped into the raptor. Richard stepped aside as the huge bird shot past in a lifeless drop and slammed into the ground right behind him. As it tumbled, blood sprayed across the windswept rock and black-tipped feathers flew everywhere.
The dawn, only moments ago filled with the the bloodcurdling screams of the black-tipped races, was suddenly quiet but for the low moan of the wind. Black feathers lifted in that wind, floating out across the open expanse beneath a yellow-orange sky.
At that moment, the sun broke the horizon, throwing long shadows out over the wasteland.
Jennsen clutched one of the limp white twins to her breast. Betty, bleating plaintively, blood running from a gash on her side, stood on her hind legs trying to arouse her still kid in Jennsen’s arms. Jennsen bent to the other twin sprawled on the ground and laid her lifeless charge beside it. Betty urgently licked at the bloody carcasses. Jennsen hugged Betty’s neck a moment before trying to pull the goat away. Betty dug in her hooves, not wanting to leave her stricken kids. Jennsen could do no more than to offer her friend consoling words choked with tears.
When she stood, unable to turn Betty from her dead offspring, Richard sheltered Jennsen under his arm.
“Why would the races suddenly do that?”
“I don’t know,” Richard said. “You didn’t see anything other than the races, then?”
Jennsen leaned against Richard, holding her face in her hands, giving in briefly to the tears. “I just saw the birds,” she said as she used the back of her sleeve
to wipe her cheeks.
“What about the shape defined by the blowing sand?” Kahlan asked as she placed a comforting hand on Jennsen’s shoulder.
“Shape?” She looked from Kahlan to Richard. “What shape?”
“It looked like a man’s shape.” Kahlan drew the curves of an outline in the air before her with both hands. “Like the outline of a man wearing a hooded cape.”
“I didn’t see anything but black-tipped races and the clouds of blowing sand.”
“And you didn’t see the sand blowing around anything?” Richard asked. “You didn’t see any shape defined by the sand?”
Jennsen shook her head insistently before returning to Betty’s side.
“If the shape involved magic,” Kahlan said in a confidential tone to Richard, “she wouldn’t see that, but why wouldn’t she see the sand?”
“To her, the magic wasn’t there.”
“But the sand was.”
“The color is there on a painting but a blind person can’t see it, nor can they see the shapes that the brush strokes, laden with color, help define.” He shook his head in wonder as he watched Jennsen. “We don’t really know to what degree someone is affected by other things when they can’t perceive the magic that interacts with those other things. For all we know, it could be that her mind simply fails to recognize the pattern caused by magic and just reads it as blowing sand. It could even be that because there is a pattern to the magic, only we can see those particles of sand directly involved with defining the pattern, while she sees them all and therefore the subordinate pattern is lost to her eyes.
“It could even be that it’s something like the boundaries were; two worlds existing in the same place at the same time. Jennsen and we could be looking at the same thing, and see it through different eyes—through different worlds.”
Kahlan nodded as Richard bent to one knee beside Jennsen to inspect the gash through the goat’s wiry brown hair.
“We’d better stitch this,” he told Jennsen. “It’s not life-threatening, but it needs attention.”
