The men and women on the street also stared because Mistress Erika rode beside him. The stunningly beautiful creature, her posture perfect as she swayed easily in her saddle, was worthy of more than a long look, but most people averted their eyes the first instant they recognized her for what she was and then quickly made themselves scarce. Those who did not look away quickly enough risked finding themselves looking into her cold, blue-eyed gaze.
A Mord-Sith in black leather was more than enough on her own to make people scatter without the horses urging them to move. Much like the abbot himself, people didn’t want a Mord-Sith taking note of them, especially not a Mord-Sith as intimidating as Erika. They believed such a woman’s gaze was capable of weighing their very soul.
Ludwig Dreier smiled to himself because that fear was closer to the truth than people realized.
Erika was a Mord-Sith who was more than merely talented at her craft. Others he had used were bumbling oafs in comparison to Erika. Their clumsy ability could hardly be compared to her talents. Erika was an artist.
She could hold a person at the cusp of death for days on end, suspended between the world of life and the world of the dead, from where, when Ludwig Dreier applied his own occult abilities, those people could look into the dark, timeless depths of the underworld and then draw from that dark well to trade him prophecy in exchange for the favor of finally being allowed to cross over and escape the pain that was all that life, and Erika, had left to offer them.
Demoralized people, once their choices were properly framed for them, begged for death, knowing full well that death was their only escape from Mistress Erika. When Ludwig Dreier added the final occult ingredients, they were more than willing to trade the task he asked of them in exchange for that escape.
In that way, Ludwig considered himself an agent of the Grace. He carried them along that thread of the gift coming from the heart of the Grace, and eventually across the boundary between life and death.
But Ludwig Dreier’s days as an abbot were over. That was merely a phase of his past, a period of edification, a stepping-stone to his wider future. He had always been considerably more than a mere abbot. No one recognized that, of course—especially Hannis Arc—but he was. In his modest occupation as the loyal abbot, he had remained inconspicuous and unnoticed from where he observed and learned as he waited. That anonymity was a powerful tool he used to leverage his inborn ability into powers he had kept hidden.
Until now.
Ludwig had been content to spend years in obscurity honing his craft and making his plans. All the while, he helped Hannis Arc toward the man’s wider goals. Ludwig helped him because it served Ludwig’s own plans, and for no other reason.
Ludwig had been born close to the profound occult powers contained for thousands of years beyond the great barrier to the north. All of that occult power could not be contained forever, and the barrier had failed to prevent it from occasionally escaping, even before the barrier itself had finally failed completely. Ludwig had always known that at least some of his innate ability had been a result of those powers slipping through the barrier, unnoticed, and settling in his spark of life at conception.
That had been the source of much of Hannis Arc’s ability, as well as many of the lesser talents of some of the cunning folk out in the wilds of the Dark Lands. But Ludwig had such abilities as well, and in greater abundance, augmenting his gift. For that reason, his abilities, and his powers, were unique even if they had remained unrecognized all this time.
He supposed that he had that in common with Richard Rahl. Lord Rahl had grown up completely unaware of his latent abilities. No one recognized those powers in him, much the same as no one recognized them in Ludwig Dreier, except that in Ludwig’s case he had been self-aware of his abilities. On his own, keeping to himself, he had studied, worked on, and developed those abilities.
Hannis Arc wore those ancient abilities he had been born with on his sleeve, literally, in the form of his tattoos. He wanted the world to see him standing out. Ludwig Dreier chose to keep his ability concealed until the time was right. With much of his planning coming to fruition, the time was finally right.
Hannis Arc was an agent of chaos, thinking that creating disorder and turmoil would make him powerful. But Ludwig understood that true power accrued to the one who could step into a world swamped by chaos and galvanize the masses to lift him up as the champion of a new order that they so desperately needed. At such a point, given the choices Ludwig would carefully frame for them, whatever order they were offered by him would be embraced as salvation compared to a world crumbling around them at Hannis Arc’s hands.