The Third Kingdom

“Get up,” Vika commanded from behind Richard.

Her voice, more than anything else, seemed less than real and more like a memory from the darkest times of his life. Richard didn’t move. He wasn’t sure he could.

She leaned down and growled in his ear. “I said, get up.”

He could only nod weakly as he struggled to get his feet under himself. He felt her hand under his arm, helping to lift him and get him upright.

With Vika’s help, he walked the rest of the distance to the corpse lying on the stone table.

Hannis Arc turned with a flourish of his black robes, like some frightening apparition from another world. His red eyes fixed on Richard with fiery intensity.

Vika pressed her Agiel to the back of Richard’s head, immobilizing him in place. His vision blurred and twisted. He opened his mouth to cry out, but he couldn’t make the sound.

Vika pushed his arm forward. Hannis Arc seized Richard’s wrist and pulled it close, over the withered corpse. Richard was helpless to do anything about it. He watched as if from a different world.

Hannis Arc pulled out a stone knife, its blade as black as the darkest depths of the underworld.

He slashed the blade across Richard’s forearm.

Richard didn’t feel pain from the cut. The pain of the Agiel overrode anything else.

Anything physical, anyway.

It didn’t override the sudden, ripping agony inside. It felt as if the knife had cut into that place of death within him, bleeding that along with his life’s blood and his soul.

Blood gushed from the gash in Richard’s arm and out over the body of the king. Rivulets of it ran down the depressions between each rib.

Hannis Arc pulled Richard’s arm farther forward, holding it over the desiccated mouth of the king.

When he seemed satisfied with the amount of blood splashed across the carcass of the king, Hannis Arc shoved Richard back out of his way. Richard saw his blood soaking the robes and dried flesh of the dead man. Bright red runnels ran down the rounded sides of the platform to join the darker blood all over the floor.

After Hannis Arc had shoved him aside, Vika pulled Richard back out of the way. He was too weak to resist. There was no point in trying. They were going to do what they were going to do and there was nothing Richard could do about it right then.

Richard went to his knees, too weary to stand. Hannis Arc’s attention, along with all the Shun-tuk, was on the body laid out on the platform. He was too absorbed in what he was doing to care about Richard.

Vika leaned over and put her mouth close to his ear.

“Put your other hand over it.”

Richard heard her talking, but didn’t really know what she meant. The lingering pain from the Agiel, even though long since withdrawn, was still scrambling his thoughts.

She grasped his left hand and placed it over the bleeding gash on his right arm.

“Press,” she said in a low, confidential voice. “Press your hand there and hold it tight.”

Richard nodded. “Thank you…”

He wasn’t sure what he was thanking her for. It just seemed the right thing to do.

Richard saw that the king’s whole body was beginning to glow, as if the symbols had lit something from within and there were a ghost now emerging from the dead husk of his body.

CHAPTER

68

Vika helped lift Richard to his feet. He felt dizzy and faint, likely from loss of blood. As the effects of the contact of the Agiel to the back of his head gradually faded, he began feeling slightly more stable on his feet. Still, she had to help balance him to make sure he wasn’t going to fall over before he fully recovered.

It was the sickness inside—the pain of the poison from death’s touch—more than the touch of the Agiel, that threatened to overwhelm him. He remembered Samantha telling him that he was going to get worse.

He felt himself getting worse. What Vika and especially Hannis Arc had done with that wicked-looking blade had made him suddenly worse, had weakened him and made him more susceptible to the sickness deep inside him.

The weapon Hannis Arc had used had been a sinister-looking thing unlike any knife Richard had ever seen before. It had a bone handle of some sort, no doubt a human bone, and a blade made of the blackest of glassy stone affixed to that handle with thin strips of leather that also looked suspiciously like it had been made from human skin. The flaked edge of the blade had been so razor-sharp that Richard hadn’t really felt it cutting him. It had that in common with the Sword of Truth.

The painted heads of the half people bobbed up and down as they shouted in unison with grim exultation at what was happening. The entire chamber reverberated with the chanting. They were at last fulfilling their purpose. This was what they had been trying to accomplish for thousands of years.

And Richard had been the one to help them accomplish their purpose.

He glanced down at the Grace on the ring he wore and remembered again the warning from Magda Searus that he could be the one to end the world of life. He feared that he very well might have done just that.