The Law of Nines

by Terry Goodkind

  Somewhere between the sporadic flashes of lightning the man wasn’t there anymore. It still seemed impossible the way he simply vanished. Alex glanced into the truck. The blood that had been splattered all over and running down the side of the dashboard was gone as well. It looked as if it had never been there, as if nothing had happened.

  “Alex, we need to go. Men like that usually travel in pairs. The second will be here any—”

  There was a soft thud to the air that Alex felt as a thump deep in his chest. For an instant it seemed like there was a dark smudge swirling in the air right beside Jax. As soon as he saw it, the indistinct, dark stain in the night changed into a vortex of vapor in the humid air.

  The vapor almost instantly condensed into a shape.

  Alex was already starting to draw the gun even as he could still feel the thump deep in his chest. The shape came into being before his weapon had cleared the holster. Jax was already spinning toward the threat.

  There was no question in Alex’s mind; he had just seen a man step out of another world and hit the ground running, charging at them out of the downpour. The vapor rising from his beefy arms evaporated into the rain as he came at them.

  Before Alex could get the gun up and on target to fire, Jax spun, slashing open the man’s abdomen.

  As the man stumbled to a stop to stare down in shock at his insides erupting out of the long gash just as he had appeared in a new world, Jax rammed her knife up through his eye. The blade went in hilt-deep. It was as effective as the hollow-point round had been.

  The man went down before he’d known what happened.

  In the quiet whisper of rain, Jax looked up at Alex. “Like I said, usually in pairs.”

  Ben had always said that in close-quarters combat, a knife was often faster than a gun. Alex was a believer.

  As she hurriedly squatted down to repeat her task of activating the man’s lifeline, Alex holstered his Glock. “Let’s get away from here before we find out they travel in quads.”

  Jax glanced up, giving him the oddest look. She then gestured. “You said that you had to push the, the . . . what did you call that thing?”

  “Truck. I have to push it down the drive to get it to start,” he said as he ducked in and released the parking brake. He leaned his weight into the windshield pillar to get the truck rolling. “Hurry with him while I get the truck started. When I do, jump in.”

  The truck rolled down the drive, picking up speed. Alex ran beside it, pushing, then when it was going at a good clip he hopped in and put it in gear. As he turned to the right out into the street, in the downhill direction, he lifted his foot off the clutch. The engine caught. He pumped the gas a few times to make sure it wouldn’t stall, then put it in reverse, spinning the wheels on the wet pavement as he backed to the drive. Jax ran down the driveway to meet him. The second man was gone.

  Alex rolled his hand, urging her to hurry.

  Jax pressed up against the door. She slapped the palms of her hands against the passenger window as the truck started rolling forward.

  “Alex! Wait! How do I get in?”

  Rather than try to explain where the handle was and how to push the button, he leaned across and popped open the door. The woman had opened a doorway between dimensions or worlds or something, and yet she couldn’t open a truck door.

  Jax jumped in. “Sometime you will have to teach me how to do that on my own.”

  As he shifted into second, leaving his house in the distance behind, he noticed that she had a death grip on the console and the door’s armrest.

  “Do we have to go so fast?” she asked in a breathless voice.

  Alex glanced down at the speedometer. “We’re only doing thirty.”

  “Can you make it go slower, please?”

  For someone who had just gutted a man three times her size and given him a lobotomy for good measure, she suddenly seemed pretty squeamish. He guessed that he was starting to feel pretty squeamish himself. He slowed down a little to let her get used to the sensation.

  With her blond hair plastered against her head she looked half drowned. He noticed, too, that her hair was no longer stained with blood. Her wet dress was a shambles from the brief battle. Seeing her alive, though, he doubted that she could have looked any better to him. At least she also looked like she was starting to relax, if only a little.

  “I’m sorry, Alex.”

  “About what?”

  She waited until he looked over at her. “That you had to kill that man.”

  “I’m just thankful that he wasn’t able to hurt you.”

  As they raced away slowly down the street, he noticed her hands fisted in her lap. She looked like she wanted to pound rocks.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She stared off through the passenger window. “I should have been paying more attention. It’s not like me to be so careless. I almost got us both killed.”

  Alex was angry as well, but for a different reason. He was still in the grip of rage—rage at a man who had tried to hurt her and had come so close to doing so.

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself. We’re both alive and they’re both dead. That’s what matters.”

  “Not to me,” she said under her breath as she looked away. “I didn’t come here to be stupid.” He could detect a catch in her voice when she said, “People are depending on me.”

  “Jax, look at me.” Reluctantly, she did. “We survived. I don’t think those people depending on you would give you points for style. They’d only care that we survived so that we can find out how to stop this.”

  She smiled a bit at last. “You’re right. We survived. I would lecture you for being so sloppy, Alexander Rahl, but I was no better. Let’s hope that we both are more careful so that the next time it isn’t nearly so close.”

  He returned the smile. “Deal.”

  22.

  ALEX SLOWED AS HE TURNED the truck into the well-lit parking lot. Even in the middle of the night it was half full.

  “What is this place?” Jax asked.

  Alex pointed off to the right. “That’s a gambling casino over there. Gambling isn’t legal on land, but it’s allowed on boats, so they build the whole place on big barges and tie them to docks at the edge of the river.”

  “Do you spend time at this place?”

  Alex knew what she was getting at. He remembered her admonition about places he was known to frequent. He had been afraid, though, that if he simply parked in a strange neighborhood or an empty lot they would draw unwanted attention.

  “I know of it, but I’ve never been here before.”

  She pulled a strand of hair back off her face. “Good.”

  “This place is always busy, so we won’t look suspicious parked here. We can pull the cargo cover over the back and sleep under it.

  It will be cramped, but it will keep us out of sight for the rest of the night.”

  “I’m not so tired. I’ll stay up and stand watch.”

  Alex shot her a look. “Stand watch? Anyone sitting in a parked car might attract attention. You, in that dress, with that long blond hair, this time of night, are bound to draw a crowd. That’s the last thing we need.”

  “I look a mess,” she said as she glanced down at her dress. “Besides, I wore this dress so that I wouldn’t draw attention.”

  “Trust me,” he said. “A crowd.”

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw her start combing her fingers through waves of her damp hair, trying to coax it back into place. Alex thought that her disheveled condition somehow made her look all the more alluring. He had always thought that if he saw a beautiful woman with her clothes and hair in disarray and he still thought she was beautiful, then she truly was beautiful. Jax was more than that. She was gorgeous.

  A thought he definitely didn’t like crossed his mind. He wondered if her looks helped her get close to men she intended to kill.

  He forced his thoughts off of how attractive she was and pulled into a parking place between a
couple of minivans. They would make the Jeep harder to spot for anyone looking for it. Centered between towering light poles, it was as dark a place as he could manage in the casino lot.

  He knew that casinos had cameras that watched their parking lots, but as long as no one approached his Cherokee he doubted there would be any reason for security to notice them. People darted through the rainy night, hurrying to get to their cars or into the casinos. He hoped that none of those figures hidden by shadows and rain were looking for him and Jax.

  Once he had turned off the wipers, with the way the rain was coming down, it was hard to see much in the blur of water flowing down the windows. Alex gestured off to the left.

  “Over there are some outlet stores. We can get some more clothes there, but they don’t open until morning.”

  She gazed into the distance where he pointed. “Morning is still hours away.”

  “So we’d better get what rest we can.”

  “But I—”

  “Didn’t you say that you weren’t paying good enough attention and you almost got us killed? You need sleep to stay alert.”

  Jax sighed. “I suppose you’re right. Maybe we should try to get some rest while we can.”

  Rather than go out in the rain and get wet going in through the tailgate—and risk being watched by security—they both climbed over the seats into the rear cargo area. With the way the rain was coming down he was pretty sure that any security camera that happened to be pointed in their direction wouldn’t be able to see anything inside the Jeep.

  Alex kept a blanket and a small duffel bag filled with emergency gear in the back. He spread the blanket over the floor, then pulled the cargo shade over them and hooked it in place. Once it was secure he turned on a small LED light from the bag. It wasn’t bright, but in the confined space it was more than ample. Jax watched him as he squirmed out of his jacket.

  “Lie down,” he told her.

  She didn’t object. He put the duffel bag under her head for a pillow, then draped his jacket over her, covering her as best he could. She had to pull her knees up to fit in the small area.

  “Thanks,” she said as she watched him.

  Alex nodded as he leaned back against the wheel arch. It wasn’t very comfortable, but he found it far preferable to being someplace where guys from another world could suddenly pop up and break his neck.

  Once they were settled he turned off the light. Yellowish lamp-light from the tall poles leaked in around the edges of the cargo shade. The rain running down the windows made the light waver softly on her face. She was still watching him.

  “We need to figure out our next move.”

  Alex shrugged. “Maybe not. Maybe it’s over.”

  Her face was a picture of incredulity. “Over?”

  “Maybe we’ve finished it, tonight. Bethany is dead. Once they all realize that they’ve lost their leader, isn’t it likely they’ll quit? Maybe you’ve already accomplished what you came here to do.”

  Jax twisted a thread sticking out from the edge of the blanket for a moment as if trying to find words, or maybe trying to decide how much she wanted to tell him.

  “I can see why it would seem that way to you, Alex—I really can—but it’s more complicated than that. Queen Bethany wasn’t the real problem.”

  She certainly had seemed like a problem to Alex. “What are you talking about? She came here from your world. You said that they have probably been interfering with my family for a long time. She killed Ben—you said so yourself. She wanted a Rahl heir for herself, and then she planned to kill me.” Alex folded his arms. “She even had some guy buy my paintings and ruin them.”

  “The man who did that had no connection with her.”

  Alex frowned. “How do you know that?”

  “Because when I was looking for you through the mirror in the gallery I saw the man who ruined your paintings. His name is Sedrick Vendis. He had nothing to do with Queen Bethany.”

  “Sedrick Vendis? Who the hell is he? And what do you mean he had nothing to do with Bethany? What’s this all about?”

  Jax lifted a hand, urging him to calm down. “Queen Bethany was on the same side as these people, but lately she’s been operating outside of areas where she belonged.”

  “You lost me.”

  Jax sighed. “Bethany was a petty queen, but she was ambitious, so she aligned herself with powerful people. In the course of helping them she apparently learned about you and saw an opportunity for herself. Somewhere along the line she hatched a scheme to gain more power. She snuck here behind their backs.

  “The people who have been coming here, who have caused your family trouble, the people who are endangering both our worlds, weren’t aware of what she has been up to. If Sedrick Vendis had known that Queen Bethany had taken to meddling—especially if he had known what she was trying to do with you—he would have killed her himself.”

  “So who is this Vendis character?”

  “He’s the right-hand man to Radell Cain, the real power behind all the trouble. I could hardly believe it when I saw Vendis here that day. It’s a bad sign that Vendis himself would come here, and that he was that close to you. Vendis is the one Cain sends to do his dirty work.”

  “What do you mean about them endangering your world? What’s Cain after?”

  Jax sighed. “Power. In the end it’s nothing more complicated than that. Just like other people throughout history, he lusts for power. He doesn’t care what or who is destroyed in the process, as long as he gets what he wants. It’s hard to believe, but deaths in the millions mean nothing to men like that. They only care about power for themselves.

  “For the longest time we had peace and prosperity. People valued hard work and achievement. Most of us had a sense of the goodness of life. Over time, though, those kinds of things came to be seen as outmoded by more and more people who felt entitled to prosperity without effort. They resented being told that their desires were a recipe for ruin.”

  “You mean they blamed the messenger.”

  Jax nodded. “There are always people like Radell Cain who are ready to take advantage of public resentment. He played on people’s emotions by blaming everything on those who were still productive and prosperous, saying that they were uncaring and insensitive. People swooned at Cain’s simplistic, populist notions. He made what was really nothing more than simple greed sound somehow morally righteous. He made taking what others had worked to earn sound like justice. People ate it up.

  “In the middle of unrest and difficult times, Cain won people over with promises of change—a new vision, a new direction. He made change sound like a miracle solution to all our problems. People mindlessly embraced the notion of change.”

  “I guess people love hearing that nothing is their fault,” Alex said, “that other people are to blame for their troubles.”

  Jax nodded. “For a lot of people it beats hard work and personal responsibility.”

  “So, what was the great change that Radell Cain wanted?”

  “He made magic into a scapegoat. He said that it tainted everything it touched because it was unfair. So, to solve all our problems, he called for bold change: a world without magic.”

  Alex shrugged. “I live in a world without magic. What’s wrong with that?”

  “But you live in a world with technology. In many ways technology and magic are interchangeable. You could almost make the case that for all practical purposes they’re really the same thing. Most of us don’t really understand the complexities of magic, like with my journey book, we simply use it. In your world there must be people who understand the complex technology of phones, but I bet that most people using phones don’t really know how they work.

  “Technology, like magic, helps everyone live better. It doesn’t merely help you to survive, it helps you to be prosperous and healthy, to live longer, to live better. But because magic is used by everyone, and actually understood by so few, that knowledge has become distrusted and viewed as someho
w sinister. Radell Cain plays on those common fears.”

  “How is it that you know so much about the technology we have and yet you didn’t know how to make tea?”

  “We’ve studied things here as best we could, learned what we could, but it’s only a dim overview captured in small snatches. We partially grasp the great sweep of how technology applies to life here, but we never understood all the details.

  “We know, for example, that you somehow use cars and trucks to help you get places, deliver food and goods, but we don’t understand how those machines work. We know they’re important only because we see them all the time. We’ve seen people talk on phones, and while we never understood exactly what they were, we got the general idea. We once saw a red vehicle arrive to help an injured person, saw hoses and boxes and strange technology used to save their life. While we don’t know what was being done or how it worked, we grasped that it was something like a healer in my world would do.

  “What little we know is mostly a result of trying to learn about the Rahls in your world as we tried to figure out what Radell Cain is after, here. During that search we saw things, learned a little about the technology you use. Our view, however, is profoundly limited. It’s like a deaf blind man trying to recount a visit to a new place.

  “While our tools are limited, we did the best we could. It took decades just to isolate the Rahl line here. That’s why I know a little about your grandfather’s history and how technology is woven into your lives. We know a few random, isolated things. Making tea just wasn’t one of them.”

  “So you’re saying that what Radell Cain wants to do in your world is the equivalent of stopping us from using technology?”

  Jax nodded. “It’s not the same, exactly, but it’s a good enough comparison. And he doesn’t merely want to stop people from using it—he wants to entirely strip the world of it, take it entirely out of existence. He paints it as a utopian world.”

  “Do you think it would be as bad as you fear?”

  “Some of us understand exactly what it would mean for us, and we’re terrified.”