Chainfire (Sword of Truth 9)

“I grant the possibility that you may be right. I suppose it’s possible that there is some complex nature behind the beast’s seeming disorder, but if that is the case, I can tell you that it is so far beyond our ability to understand that for our purposes it functions by chaos.”

“I’m not sure I understand you,” Richard said. “Give me an example.”

“For instance, the beast will not learn from what it does. It may try the same failed tactic three times in a row, or it may try something even weaker the next time that obviously has no chance of success. What it does appears random. But if it is driven by some grand, complex equation, it is not revealed through its actions; we see only chaotic results.

“What’s more, it has no consciousness, as we would think of it, anyway. It has no soul. While it has a goal, it doesn’t care if it succeeds. It doesn’t get angry if it fails. It’s devoid of mercy, empathy, curiosity, enthusiasm, or worry. It was given a mission—kill Richard Rahl—and it randomly uses its myriad abilities to achieve that goal, but it has no emotional or intellectual interest in seeing its purpose accomplished.

“Living things have self-interest in seeing themselves succeed at their goals, whether it’s a bird flying to a berry bush, or a snake following a mouse down a hole. They act to further their life. The blood beast does not.

“It’s just a mindless thing advancing toward the completion of its built-in conjured objective. You might say it’s like the rain, given the mission of ‘get Richard wet.’ The rain tries and tries, a downpour, a drizzle, a quick shower, and all fail. The rain doesn’t care that it failed to get you wet. It may idle itself with a drought. It doesn’t get eager or angry. It doesn’t redouble its efforts. It will just go on raining in different ways until eventually it drenches you. When it does, it will feel no joy.

“The beast is irrational in that sense—but make no mistake, it is vicious, fierce, and mindlessly cruel in its actions.”

Richard wearily wiped a hand across his face. “Shota, that still makes no sense to me. How could it be like that? If it’s a beast, it has to be driven by purpose of some sort. Something has to drive it.”

“Oh, it is driven by something: the need to kill you. It was created to be a creature that acts with pure disorder so that you may not counter it. In a way, you have proven yourself to be an opponent so difficult to defeat that Jagang had to come up with something that would work by avoiding your striking abilities, rather than overpowering them.”

“But if it was created to kill me, then it has purpose.”

Shota shrugged. “True enough, but that one bit of information is of no use to you in predicting how, when, or where it will try to kill you. As you should know by now, its actions toward that goal are random. You should clearly see the profound danger in that tactic. If you know the enemy will attack with spears, you can carry a shield. If you know that one assassin with a bow is hunting you, you can have an army search for a man with a bow. If you know a wolf is hunting you, you can set a trap, or stay indoors.

“The blood beast has no preferred method of killing or hunting, so from the standpoint of defending yourself from it, it’s profoundly difficult to protect against. One day it may attack and easily kill a thousand soldiers who are protecting you. The next time it may timidly withdraw after mauling a single child who toddles in front of you. What it does one time can tell you nothing about what it will do the next time. That, too, is part of the terror engendered by such a beast—the terror of not knowing how the attack will come.

“Its strength, its lethality, is that it isn’t anything in particular. It isn’t strong, or weak, or fast, or slow. It’s constantly changing yet it sometimes stays the same or reverts to a previous state, even an unsuccessful one.

“The only thing that mattered after it was created was the first time you used your gift. That’s when it locked on to you. After that, you can never know what it will do next or when it will do it. You know only that it’s coming for you and no matter how many times you escape its clutches, it will continue to come—maybe several times in the same day, maybe not again for a month, or a year, but you can be sure it will eventually come after you again. It will never quit.”

Richard wondered how much of what Shota was telling him she knew to be fact and how much she was filling in with what she thought, or maybe even imagined.

“But you’re a witch woman,” Cara said. “Surely, you can tell him something that will help counter it.”

“Part of my ability is the capacity to see how events flow in the river of time, to see where they’re going, you might say. Since the blood beast cannot be predicted, it, by that practical definition of its character, exists outside my ability to predict. My ability is linked in a way to prophecy. Richard is a man who in a way also exists outside prophecy, a man others often find frustratingly unpredictable—as the Mord-Sith have no doubt discovered. With this beast I can offer him no advice about what might happen or what he must avoid.”

“So then, books of prophecy would be of no use?” Richard asked.

“Just as I am blind to it, so is all prophecy. Prophecy cannot see a blood beast any more than it can see any chaotic, chance event. Prophecy may be able to say that a person will be shot with an arrow in the morning of a day that it will rain, but prophecy cannot name every day it will rain, or which of those days that it does rain the arrow will precede it. You might say that the most prophecy can predict is that sooner or later it will rain and you will get wet.”

With his left hand resting on his sword, Richard nodded reluctantly. “I have to admit, that’s close to my own views on prophecy—that it might be able to tell you that the sun will rise tomorrow but not what you will choose to do with your day.”

He frowned at her. “So, you can tell me nothing about what this blood beast will do, because your ability is with the flow of time.” When she nodded, he asked, “So then how do you seem to know so much about it?”

“The flow of events through the river of time is not my only ability,” she said, rather cryptically.

Richard sighed, not wanting to argue with her. “So that’s all you can tell me, then.”

Shota nodded. “That’s all I am able to tell you about the blood beast and what such a thing holds for you. If it continues to exist, sooner or later it will likely get you. But, because it’s not predictable, even that outcome is not able to be predicted. When, where, or how soon it will get you is impossible to know. It may be today, or, for all I know, it may be that before it is able to find you and kill you, you will first die of old age.”

“Well, there is that possibility, then,” Richard muttered.

“Not much to lay your hopes on,” she said in a sympathetic tone. “As long as you live, Richard, as long as blood pumps in your veins, the blood beast will hunt you.”

“Are you suggesting that it finds me by my blood? The way a heart hound is said to be able to find a person by the sound of their beating heart?”

Shota lifted a hand as if to forestall the notion. “Only in a manner of speaking. It has tasted your blood, in a sense. But your blood, as you are thinking of it, is not what it is meaningful to this beast. What is material is what it sensed from that taste: your ancestry.

“It already knew that you live. It was already hunting you. Your use of your gift the first time was enough to bind it to you for all eternity. It is the gift carried in your blood that it sensed and that caused it to change.”

Richard had so many questions he didn’t know what to ask first. He started with what he thought might be the easiest to understand. “Why is it linked to the underworld? Is there a purpose for that?”

“A couple that I’m aware of. The underworld is eternal. Time has no meaning in eternity. Therefore, time means nothing to the beast. It will feel no urgency to kill you. Urgency would make it act with a kind of conscious intent that would give it a nature. It feels no pressure with every setting sun to finish the job. One day is the same as the next. The

days are never-ending.

“Because it has no sense of time, it needs no nature. Time helps give dimension to every living thing. It allows you to put off chores that you know can be done later. It makes you rush to set up camp before it gets dark. It makes a general act to get his defenses in place before the enemy arrives. It makes a woman want to have children while she still has time. Time is one element that helps shape the nature of everything. Even a moth that emerges from its cocoon to live a life with wings for only a single day must mate in that day and lay eggs or there will be no more of its kind.

“The beast is untouched by time. A constituent element of its makeup is the eternity of the underworld, which is antithetical to the very notion of Creation, since the underworld is the undoing of Creation. That mix, that internal conflict, is part of the driving mechanism which churns its actions and makes it chaotic. When Nicci used Subtractive Magic to eliminate your spent blood, the beast, from its roots in the underworld, got its taste of you, or, more accurately, a measure of your magic.

“Your blood carries both Additive and Subtractive Magic. The beast was created to be able to know you by your essence, magic, thereby allowing it to transcend typical worldly limits. The beast needed you to use magic the first time so that it could link to you. Through that link, it could hunt you. But when it received that taste of your blood, it became able to know you in a whole different way.

“The unique element of magic carried in your blood, inherited from Zedd’s side and from Darken Rahl’s side, is what the beast tasted. That taste is what mutated it from the beast that Jagang’s minions created.

“It’s not your blood itself that it senses, but rather it detects those elements of magic inherent in it. That’s why any use of magic will draw the beast—that’s how it became more dangerous. It now recognizes any use of your magic anywhere in the world. Each person’s magic is unique. The beast now knows yours. That’s why you must not use your gift.

“For this very reason, the Sisters who brought the beast into existence for Jagang would have loved to have been able to use your blood in the beginning, but they had no way of getting any. They could link the beast to your gift, but without your blood, it was a weak link that didn’t really know the full measure of your magic.

“Nicci gave the beast what it really needed, right after it had been awakened by your first use of the gift. She may have done it to save your life, and she may have had no choice, but she did it. Now, any use of magic can much more easily bring the blood beast to you. It would seem that Nicci has, in a way, fulfilled her oath as a Sister of the Dark.”

The hair at the back of Richard’s neck had lifted. He wanted to think of a way to prove Shota wrong, to find a chink in the armor of the monster she had given shape to in his mind.

“But the beast has attacked when I wasn’t using magic. Just this morning it attacked at our camp. I wasn’t using magic.”