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She watched him for a moment, her voice finally coming much softer, as had his, as if without realizing it they had reached a wordless truce to lower the level of antagonism. “The beast that hunts you is no longer the beast it once was, the beast it was as it was created. Events have caused it to mutate.”
“Mutate?” Cara asked, looking alarmed. “What do you mean? What has it become?”
Shota appraised them both, as if to make sure they were paying attention.
“It has become a blood beast.”
Chapter 41
“A blood beast?” Richard asked.
Cara moved close to his side. “What’s a blood beast?”
Shota took a breath before explaining. “It is no longer simply a beast linked to the underworld, as it was when it was created. It was inadvertently given a taste of your blood, Richard. What’s worse, it was given that taste through Subtractive Magic—magic also linked to the underworld. That event changed it into a blood beast.”
“So…what does that mean?” Cara asked.
Shota leaned closer, her voice dropping to little more than a whisper. “That means that it is now oh so much more dangerous.” She straightened after she was sure she had made the intended impression. “I’m not an expert on ancient weapons created in the great war, but I believe that once such a beast as this one has tasted the blood of its mark in such a way, there is no turning it back, ever.”
“All right, so it won’t give up.” Richard rested his palm on the hilt of his sword. “What can you tell me to help me kill it, then? Or at least stop it, or send it back to the underworld. What does it do, precisely, how does it know that—”
“No, no.” Shota waved a dismissive hand. “You are trying to think of this in terms of some ordinary threat hunting you. You’re trying to put a nature to it, trying to give it a defining behavior. It has none. That is the peculiarity of this thing—the absence of a defining description, of a makeup. At least one that is of any use, since its nature is precisely that it has none. Because of that it therefore cannot be predicted.”
“That makes no sense.” Richard folded his arms, wondering if Shota really knew as much about this beast as she said she did. “It has to function by some fundamental nature. It has to behave in certain ways that we can at least come to understand and therefore begin to anticipate. We just need to figure it out. It can’t possibly have no nature.”
“Don’t you see, Richard? Right from the beginning, here you are trying to figure it out. Don’t you suppose that Jagang would know that you will try to figure it out so that you can defeat it? Haven’t you done that sort of thing with him in the past? He has figured out your nature, and to counter you he has created a weapon that, for that very reason, has no nature.
“You are the Seeker. You seek answers to the nature of people, or things, or situations. To a greater or lesser extent, all people do. Had the blood beast a specific nature, its actions could then be learned and understood. If something can be understood enough to predict its behavior, then precautions can be taken, a plan to counter it can be made. Decoding its nature is essential to effective action being taken. That’s why this thing has no nature—so that you can’t do those things to stop it.”
Richard ran his fingers back though his hair. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s not supposed to. That, too, is part of its trait—to have no trait. To make no sense in order to foil you.”
“I agree with Lord Rahl,” Cara said. “It still has to have some kind of makeup, some way of acting and reacting. Even people who think they are being clever by trying to be unpredictable still fall into patterns even though they may not realize it. This beast can’t just run around hither and thither hoping to come across Lord Rahl napping.”
“In order to prevent it from being understood and stopped, this beast was intentionally created as a creature of chaos. It was conjured to attack and kill you, but beyond that mission, it functions toward that end through disordered means.” Shota gathered up another floating point of her dress as she spoke. “Today it attacks with claws. Tomorrow it spits poison. The next day it burns with fire, or crushes with a blow, or sinks fangs into you. It attacks by random action. It does not choose a course of action based on analysis, previous experience, or even the situation at hand.”
Richard pinched the bridge of his nose as he thought about her explanation. So far, it seemed like Shota was right in that there had been no pattern to the attacks. They had come in completely different ways—so different, in fact, that they had questioned whether or not it was really the same beast Nicci had warned was after him.
“But Lord Rahl has evaded this beast several times now. He has proven that it can be bested.”
Shota smiled at the very idea, as if a child had come up with the assertion. She strolled off a ways and then returned as she considered the problem. The twitch of her brow told Richard that she had come up with a better way to explain it.
“Think of the blood beast as if it were rain,” she said. “Imagine that you want to stay out of the rain, like you would want to avoid being caught by the beast. Imagine that your goal is to stay dry. Today you may be inside when the rain comes, so you remain dry. Another day the rain may come on the other side of the valley and you again stay dry. Another day you leave an area just before the rain begins. Another day, you may decide not to travel, and there the rain visits. Maybe on another day as you walk down a road the rain moves in and falls in the field to your right, but on the road and to your left it remains dry. Each time the random rain event missed you, and you stayed dry—sometimes because you took preventative measures, such as staying inside, and sometimes by sheer chance.
“But, as often as it rains, you realize that it will sooner or later get you wet.
“So, you may decide that the best approach in the long run is to gain an understanding of exactly what you are up against. Therefore, in an effort to understand your adversary, you watch the sky and try to learn to predict the rain. Some patterns begin to reveal themselves as relatively reliable, so you use them as a means of prediction and as a result there will be times when you are correct and accurately anticipate the approaching rain. By this means you are able to stay inside when the rain comes and thus you stay dry. You have succeeded, it would seem, by applying what you’ve learned about how to anticipate and predict the rain.”
Shota’s intent, ageless eyes took in Cara and then fixed on Richard with such power that it almost halted his breathing. “But sooner or later,” she said in a voice than ran a shiver up his spine, “the rain will catch you. You may be taken by complete surprise. Or, you may have forecast that it was coming, but believed that you would have time to be able to take to shelter first, and then it suddenly sweeps in faster than you ever thought possible. Or, on a day when you are far from shelter because you thought that on that day there was no chance of rain at all and so you ventured far from your shelter, it unexpectedly catches you. The result of all these different events is the same. If it is the beast, rather than the rain, you are not wet, you are dead.
“Confidence in your ability to predict the rain will eventually be your downfall because, while you may be able to accurately predict it on a number of occasions, it is not in reality reliably predictable based on the amount of knowledge actually available to you or possibly your ability to understand all the information you do have. The more times you escape, though, the stronger your false sense of
confidence will become, making you all that much more vulnerable to a surprise event. Your best efforts to know the nature of rain will eventually fail you because even if you are right with a number of your forecasts, the things that brought about successful predictions are not always relevant, yet you have no way of knowing that. As a result, the rain will sneak up and envelope you when you are not expecting it.”
Richard glanced at the worried look on Cara’s face, but didn’t say anything.
“The blood beast is like that,” Shota said with finality. “It has no nature precisely so that you cannot predict its behavior by any patterns to its conduct.”
Richard took a patient breath. He couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “But all things that exist have to have a nature to them, laws of their existence, even if we don’t understand them—otherwise what you are proposing is that they could contradict themselves and they can’t.
“Lack of understanding on your part does not mean that you can pick an explanation of your choice. You can’t say that since you don’t know the nature of it, it therefore has none. You can say only that you don’t yet know the nature of this thing, that you haven’t yet been able to understand it.”
With a slight smile, Shota gestured toward the sky. “Like the rain? You may be theoretically correct, Richard, but some things, for all practical purposes, are so far beyond our understanding that they appear to be driven by happenstance—like the rain. For all I know, weather may very well have laws that drive it, but they are so complex and so far-reaching that we cannot realistically hope to comprehend or know them. The rain may not truly, in the end, be an event caused by chance, but it is still outside our ability to predict so to us the result is the same as if it were entirely random and without order or nature.
“A blood beast is like this. If there are in fact laws to its nature, as you believe, it would make no difference to you. All I can tell you is that from what I know, it’s a beast created specifically to act without order and the creation of it was successful to the degree that it functions consistently with having no discernible nature—at least none that is of any use in understanding or stopping it.
