The man raised his hand and waggled his first two fingers, ordering them forward The six women advanced across the cavernous room, that because of its dark stone that swallowed the firelight, seemed to close in about them. On an enormous bearskin before the table sat two more of the absurdly clad slaves. The women behind the table, against the wall, stood hands at their sides, bodies stiff and unmoving. Eaci. of the young women had a gold ring pierced through the center of her lower lip.

The fires behind them popped and snapped as the six Sisters advanced into the gloom. One of the men in white trousers poured wine into a mug for the man when he held it out to his side. None of the slaves looked at the six women. Their attentiot; was on the man sitting alone at the table.

Ulicia and her Sisters all recognized him, now.

Jagang.

He was of average height, but stout, with massive arms and chest. His bare shoulders bulged from a fur vest opened in the middle, displaying a few dozen gold and jeweled chains lying against the hair in the deep cleft between his prodigious chest muscles. The chains and jewels looked to have once belonged to kings and queens. Silver bands encircled his arms above bulky biceps. Each of his thick fingers bore a gold or silver ring.

Each of the Sisters knew well the pain those powerful fingers could inflict.

His shaved head gleamed in the fluttering firelight. It matched his brawn. Ulici couldn't imagine him with hair atop his head; it could only diminish his menace. His neck looked like it belonged to a bull. A gold ring in the flare of his left nostril held a thin gold chain running to another ring at midheight in his left ear. He was clean-shaven except for a two-inch braid of mustache growing only above the corners of his smirk, and another braid in the center under his lower lip.

His eyes, though, were what riveted anyone upon whom they settled. There were no whites to them at all. They were a murky gray, clouded over with sullen, dusk> shapes that shifted in a field of inky obscurity, yet the there was no doubt whatsoever as to when he was looking at you.

They were twin windows into nightmare.

The smirk departed, leaving in its place a treacherous glare. "You're late," he said in a deep, grating voice that they each recognized as readily as his nightmar? eyes, Ulicia wasted no time with a reply, nor did she betray any indication of what she was about to do. Twisting the flow of Han, she even controlled their hatred, allowing only one facet of their feelings — fear — to touch their faces, lest they give him any warning of their confidence, and betray a reason for it.

Ulicia committed to obliterating everything from her toes outward — for the next twenty miles.

With violent and unceremonious abruptness, she yanked the restraining blocks from the furious force bottled behind it. As quick as thought, with thundering fury, the Additive and Subtractive Magic exploded outward in a murderous blast. The very air howled as it burned. The room ignited with a blinding flash of twin magics — opposites that twisted in a deafening discharge of wrath.

Even Ulicia was stunned at what she had unleased.

The fabric of reality seemed to rip.

Her last thought was that surely, she had destroyed the entire world.

Like snowflake patches of a dark dream drifting down, everything came slowly back into her vision — the twin fires first, then the torches, then the dark stone walls, and finally the people.

Her whole body was numb for a stunned moment before the feeling returned to her flesh in a million painful pinpricks. She hurt everywhere.

Jagang lore off a big bite of roast pheasant. He chewed a moment, and then wagged the leg bone at her.

"You know your problem, Uiicia?" he asked, still chewing. "You use magic that you can unleash as quick as a thought."

The smirk returned to his greasy lips. "I, on the other hand, am a dream walker. I use the time between fragments of thought, in that stillness when there is nothing, to do what I do. I slip in where no other can go."

He gestured with the bone again as he swallowed. "You see, for me, in that Space between thought, time is infinite, and I can do as I wish. You might as well be stone statues trying to chase me."

Uiicia felt her Sisters through the link. It was still there.

"Crude. Very crude," he said. "I've seen others do it much better, but then they'd been practiced at it. I left the link — for now. For now, I want you all to feel each other. I'll break it later. Just as I can break the link, I can break your minds, too." He took a gulp of wine. "But I think that's so unproductive. How can you teach people a lesson, really teach them a lesson, if their minds don't understand it?"

Through the link, Uiicia felt Cecilia lose control of her bladder, and the warm urine running down her legs.

"How?" Uiicia heard herself ask in a hollow voice. "How can you use the time between thoughts?"

Jagang picked up his knife and sliced off a slab of meat on an ornate silver platter to his side. He stabbed the bloody center of the slice with the knifepoint and then rested his elbows on the table. "What are we all?" He waved around the skewered hunk of meat as it dripped red down his knife. "What is reality — the reality of our existence?"

He drew the meat off the knife with his teeth and chewed as he went on. "Are we our bodies? Is a small person less than a big person, then? If we were our bodies, then when we lost an arm, or a leg, would we be less, would we begin to fade from existence? No. We are the same person.

"We are not our bodies; we are our thoughts. As they form, they define who we are, and create the reality of our existence. Between those thoughts, there is nothing, simply the body, waiting for our thoughts to make us who we are.

"Between your thoughts, I come. In that space between your thoughts time has no meaning to you, but it has meaning to me." He took a swig of wine. "I am 3 shadow, slipping between the cracks of your existence."

Through the link, Ulicia could feel the others trembling. "That isn't possible, she whispered. "Your Han can't spread time, break it apart."

His condescending smile caught her breath short. "A small, simple wedge, inserted into a crack in the largest, most massive boulder, can split it apart. Destroy it.

"I am that wedge. That wedge is now hammered into the cracks in your minds."

She stood silently as his thumb gouged off a long strip of pork from a roasted suckling pig. "When you sleep, your thoughts float and drift and you are vulnerable. When you sleep, you are a beacon I can find. Then, my thoughts slip into the cracks The spaces where you fade in and out of existence are chasms to me."

"And what do you want with us?" Armina asked.

He tore off a bite of the pork dangling from his meaty fingers. "Well, among my uses for you, we have a mutual enemy: Richard Rahl. You know him as Richard Cypher." He arched an eyebrow over one of his dark, seething eyes. "The Seeker,

"Up until now he's been invaluable. He did me a huge favor by destroying the barrier, which kept me on this side. My body, anyway. You, the Sisters of the Dark, the Keeper, and Richard Rahl made it possible for me to bring the race of man to ascendancy."

"We have done no such thing," Tovi protested in a meek voice.

"Ah, but you have, You see, the Creator and the Keeper vied for dominance in this world, the Creator simply to prevent the Keeper from swallowing it into the world of the dead, and the Keeper simply because he has a insatiable appetite for the living."

His inky-eyed gaze rose to meet theirs. "In your struggle to free the Keeper, to give him this world, you gave the Keeper power here, and that, in turn, baited Richard Rahl to come to the defense of the living. He restored the balance.