Chainfire: Chainfire Trilogy Part 1

"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."