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«Dear spirits,» Victor whispered. Rage twisted his face. «That's Ferran.»
Richard scanned the area, but saw nothing moving in the shadows. «Whatever happened here, I don't think anyone escaped.» He noticed that on the ground where Ferran's blood dripped there were no tracks.
Kahlan's tracks were gone as well.
The pain, the horror, of wondering if this might be the same thing that had happened to Kahlan nearly buckled his knees. Not even the sword's rage was enough to shield him from the agony of that pain.
Nicci, right behind him, leaned close. «Richard,» she said in a near whisper, «we need to get out of here.»
Cara leaned in beside Nicci. «I agree.»
Victor lifted his mace. «I want those who did this.» His knuckles were white around the steel grip. «Can you track them?» he asked Richard.
«I don't think that would be a good idea,» Nicci said.
«Good idea or not,» Richard told them, «I don't see any tracks.» He looked into Nicci's blue eyes. «Perhaps you would like to try to convince me that I am imagining this, as well?»
She didn't break eye contact with him, but she didn't answer his challenge, either.
Victor gazed up at Ferran. «I told his mother that I'd watch over him. What am I going to say to his family now?» Tears of rage and hurt glistened in his eyes as he pointed with the mace back to the rest of the remains. «What am I going to say to their mothers and wives and children?»
«That evil murdered them,» Richard said. «That you will not rest until you know justice is done. That vengeance will be had.»
Victor nodded, his anger flagging, misery now filling his voice. «We have to bury them.»
«No,» Nicci said with grim authority. «As much as I understand your
want to care for them, your friends are no longer here, among these pieces of wrecked bodies. Your friends are now with the good spirits. It is up to us not to join them.»
Victor's anger resurfaced. «But we must.»
«No,» Nicci snapped. «Look around. This was a blood frenzy. We don't want to get caught in it. We can't help these men. We need to get out of here.»
Before Victor could argue, Richard leaned close to the sorceress. «What do you know about this?»
«I told you before, Richard, that we needed to talk. But this is not the time or place to do it.»
«I agree,» Cara growled. «We need to get away from here.»
Looking from the remains of Ferran back to the bloody mess beneath the maple, Richard suddenly felt a sense of overwhelming loneliness. He wanted Kahlan so bad it hurt. He wanted her comfort. He wanted her safe. The agony of not knowing if she was alive and well was unbearable.
«Cara is right.» Nicci urgently gripped Richard's arm. «We don't know enough about what we're up against, but whatever did all this, I fear that as weak as you are your sword can't protect us from it-and right now, neither can I. If it's still in these woods, now is not the time to confront it. Justice and vengeance need us to see them done. To do that, we must be alive.»
With the back of a hand, Victor wiped tears of grief and anger from his cheek. «I hate to admit it, but I think Nicci's right.»
«Whatever was looking for you, Lord Rahl,» Cara said. «I don't want you here if it should happen to return.»
Richard noted the way Cara, in her red leather, no longer seemed out of place in the woods. She blended right in with all the blood.
Still not ready to abandon the search for whatever had killed these men, and with a dark sense of alarm rising within him, Richard frowned at the Mord-Sith. «What makes you think it was after me?»
«I told you,» Nicci said through gritted teeth, answering in Cara's stead, «now is not the time and this is not the place to talk about it. There is nothing we can hope to accomplish here. These men are beyond our help.»
Beyond help. Was Kahlan beyond help as well? He couldn't allow himself to believe that.
He looked north. Richard didn't know where to search for her. Just because the rock that had been kicked out of its resting place had been found to the north of their camp didn't mean that whoever took Kahlan went that way. They might have simply gone north, trying to avoid contact with Victor and his men and with the soldiers guarding the supply convoy. They might have only been trying to avoid being spotted until they got out of the immediate area. After that, they could have gone anywhere.
But where?
Richard knew that he needed help.
He tried to think of who could help him with something like this. Who would believe him? Zedd might believe him, but Richard didn't think his grandfather could offer the specific kind of help he needed in this circumstance. It was awfully far to go if it ended up that Zedd's abilities didn't fit this particular kind of problem.
Who would be willing to help him, and might know something?
Richard turned suddenly to Victor. «Where can I get horses? I need horses. Where's the closest place?»
Victor was taken off guard by the question. He let the heavy mace hang and with his other hand wiped rainwater back off his forehead as he considered the question. His brow bunched back up.
«Altur'Rang would probably be the closest place,» he said after a moment's thought.
Richard slid his sword back into its sheath. «Let's go. We need to hurry.»
Pleased with the decision to leave, Cara gave him a helpful shove in the direction of Altur'Rang. Suspicion lurked in Nicci's eyes, but she was so relieved to have him start away from the site of so much death that she didn't ask why he wanted horses.
Weariness forgotten, the four of them hurried away from men beyond any help. As heartsick as they felt about leaving, each of them understood that it would be too dangerous to stay to try to bury these men. A burial of the dead was not worth the risk to their lives.
With his sword put away, the anger extinguished. In its place welled up the crushing pain of grief for the dead. The forest seemed to weep with them.
Worse yet was the dread of wondering what could have happened to Kahlan. If she was in the hands of this evil— Think of the solution, Richard reminded himself.
If he was to find her, he would need help. To get help, he needed horses. That was the immediate problem at hand. They still had half a day of daylight. He intended not to waste a moment of it.
Richard led them away through the tangled woods at an exhausting pace. No one complained.
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
Richard scanned the area, but saw nothing moving in the shadows. «Whatever happened here, I don't think anyone escaped.» He noticed that on the ground where Ferran's blood dripped there were no tracks.
Kahlan's tracks were gone as well.
The pain, the horror, of wondering if this might be the same thing that had happened to Kahlan nearly buckled his knees. Not even the sword's rage was enough to shield him from the agony of that pain.
Nicci, right behind him, leaned close. «Richard,» she said in a near whisper, «we need to get out of here.»
Cara leaned in beside Nicci. «I agree.»
Victor lifted his mace. «I want those who did this.» His knuckles were white around the steel grip. «Can you track them?» he asked Richard.
«I don't think that would be a good idea,» Nicci said.
«Good idea or not,» Richard told them, «I don't see any tracks.» He looked into Nicci's blue eyes. «Perhaps you would like to try to convince me that I am imagining this, as well?»
She didn't break eye contact with him, but she didn't answer his challenge, either.
Victor gazed up at Ferran. «I told his mother that I'd watch over him. What am I going to say to his family now?» Tears of rage and hurt glistened in his eyes as he pointed with the mace back to the rest of the remains. «What am I going to say to their mothers and wives and children?»
«That evil murdered them,» Richard said. «That you will not rest until you know justice is done. That vengeance will be had.»
Victor nodded, his anger flagging, misery now filling his voice. «We have to bury them.»
«No,» Nicci said with grim authority. «As much as I understand your
want to care for them, your friends are no longer here, among these pieces of wrecked bodies. Your friends are now with the good spirits. It is up to us not to join them.»
Victor's anger resurfaced. «But we must.»
«No,» Nicci snapped. «Look around. This was a blood frenzy. We don't want to get caught in it. We can't help these men. We need to get out of here.»
Before Victor could argue, Richard leaned close to the sorceress. «What do you know about this?»
«I told you before, Richard, that we needed to talk. But this is not the time or place to do it.»
«I agree,» Cara growled. «We need to get away from here.»
Looking from the remains of Ferran back to the bloody mess beneath the maple, Richard suddenly felt a sense of overwhelming loneliness. He wanted Kahlan so bad it hurt. He wanted her comfort. He wanted her safe. The agony of not knowing if she was alive and well was unbearable.
«Cara is right.» Nicci urgently gripped Richard's arm. «We don't know enough about what we're up against, but whatever did all this, I fear that as weak as you are your sword can't protect us from it-and right now, neither can I. If it's still in these woods, now is not the time to confront it. Justice and vengeance need us to see them done. To do that, we must be alive.»
With the back of a hand, Victor wiped tears of grief and anger from his cheek. «I hate to admit it, but I think Nicci's right.»
«Whatever was looking for you, Lord Rahl,» Cara said. «I don't want you here if it should happen to return.»
Richard noted the way Cara, in her red leather, no longer seemed out of place in the woods. She blended right in with all the blood.
Still not ready to abandon the search for whatever had killed these men, and with a dark sense of alarm rising within him, Richard frowned at the Mord-Sith. «What makes you think it was after me?»
«I told you,» Nicci said through gritted teeth, answering in Cara's stead, «now is not the time and this is not the place to talk about it. There is nothing we can hope to accomplish here. These men are beyond our help.»
Beyond help. Was Kahlan beyond help as well? He couldn't allow himself to believe that.
He looked north. Richard didn't know where to search for her. Just because the rock that had been kicked out of its resting place had been found to the north of their camp didn't mean that whoever took Kahlan went that way. They might have simply gone north, trying to avoid contact with Victor and his men and with the soldiers guarding the supply convoy. They might have only been trying to avoid being spotted until they got out of the immediate area. After that, they could have gone anywhere.
But where?
Richard knew that he needed help.
He tried to think of who could help him with something like this. Who would believe him? Zedd might believe him, but Richard didn't think his grandfather could offer the specific kind of help he needed in this circumstance. It was awfully far to go if it ended up that Zedd's abilities didn't fit this particular kind of problem.
Who would be willing to help him, and might know something?
Richard turned suddenly to Victor. «Where can I get horses? I need horses. Where's the closest place?»
Victor was taken off guard by the question. He let the heavy mace hang and with his other hand wiped rainwater back off his forehead as he considered the question. His brow bunched back up.
«Altur'Rang would probably be the closest place,» he said after a moment's thought.
Richard slid his sword back into its sheath. «Let's go. We need to hurry.»
Pleased with the decision to leave, Cara gave him a helpful shove in the direction of Altur'Rang. Suspicion lurked in Nicci's eyes, but she was so relieved to have him start away from the site of so much death that she didn't ask why he wanted horses.
Weariness forgotten, the four of them hurried away from men beyond any help. As heartsick as they felt about leaving, each of them understood that it would be too dangerous to stay to try to bury these men. A burial of the dead was not worth the risk to their lives.
With his sword put away, the anger extinguished. In its place welled up the crushing pain of grief for the dead. The forest seemed to weep with them.
Worse yet was the dread of wondering what could have happened to Kahlan. If she was in the hands of this evil— Think of the solution, Richard reminded himself.
If he was to find her, he would need help. To get help, he needed horses. That was the immediate problem at hand. They still had half a day of daylight. He intended not to waste a moment of it.
Richard led them away through the tangled woods at an exhausting pace. No one complained.
CHAPTER 7
In the deepening gloom of approaching nightfall, Richard and Cara used thin, wiry pine tree roots they'd pulled up from the spongy ground to lash together the trunks of small trees. Victor and Nicci foraged the understory along the base of the heavily forested slope, cutting and collecting balsam boughs. As Richard held the logs together, Cara tied off the ropelike root. Richard cut the excess for use elsewhere and slipped the knife back into its sheath at his belt. Once he had the log framework securely in place against an overhang of rock, he started stacking the balsam boughs along the bottom. Cara tied random branches on from inside to keep them all in place for the night as Richard continued layering more up the poles. Victor and Nicci dragged armfuls of boughs close to keep him supplied as he worked.
The area under the overhanging roof of rock was dry enough, it just wasn't large enough. The lean-to would expand the shelter so as to provide a snug place to sleep. Without a fire it wouldn't be especially warm, but at least it would be dry.
Throughout the day, the drizzle had turned to a slow, steady rain. While they had been on the move they had been warm enough because of their exertion, but now that they had to stop for the night, the inexorable embrace of the cold had begun. Even in chilly weather that wasn't truly cold, being wet sapped a person of their necessary warmth and thus their strength. Richard knew that, over time, constant exposure to even mildly chilly wet weather could steal enough vital heat from the body to severely debilitate and sometimes even kill a person.
With as little sleep as he knew Nicci and Cara had gotten over the previous three days, and in his own weakened condition, Richard recognized that they needed a dry, warm place to get some rest or they would all be in trouble. He couldn't allow anything to slow him down.
For the whole of the afternoon and evening they had set a steady, rapid pace on their march toward Altur'Rang. After the brutal slaughter of the men, the four of them hadn't been particularly hungry, but they knew that they had to eat if they were to have the strength for the journey, so they nibbled on dried meats and travel biscuits as they made their way through the trackless wilderness.
Richard was so exhausted he could hardly stand. Both to cut the distance and to avoid being spotted by anyone, he had guided the others through dense forest, most of it tough going and all of it well off any trails. It had been a grueling day's travel. His head ached. His back ached. His legs ached. If they started early and kept up the strenuous pace, though, they might be able to reach Altur'Rang in one more day's travel. After they got horses, the going would be easier as well as swifter.
He wished he didn't need to go so far, but he didn't know what else to do. He couldn't spend forever searching the vast forests all around, on the off chance he would find another rock that had been disturbed so that he then might have an idea of which direction Kahlan had gone. He might never find another such rock, and even if he did, there was no reason to believe that if he kept going in that direction he would find Kahlan. Whoever took her might change direction without ever again disturbing a rock in a way that he would find it.
Their regular tracks were gone. Richard knew no way to track someone when magic had made their tracks vanish. Nicci's gift wasn't able to help. Wandering around aimlessly wasn't going to solve anything. As reluctant as he was to leave the area where he had last seen Kahlan, Richard didn't think that he had any other choice but to go for help.
He went through the motions of building the shelter without giving the work much thought. In the failing light, Cara, concerned for his well-being, kept watching him out of the corner of her eye. She looked like she expected him to fall over at any moment and if he did she intended to catch him.
As he worked, Richard mulled over the remote but real possibility that Imperial Order soldiers might be searching the woods for them. At the same time he fretted about what could have killed all of Victor's men —and might now be chasing them. He considered what other precautions he might take, and he deliberated over how he would fight whatever could have done such violence.
Through it all, he kept trying to think of where Kahlan might be. He went over everything he could remember. He brooded over whether or not she was hurt. He agonized over what he might have done wrong. He imagined that she must be filled with fear and doubt, wondering why he wasn't coming to help her escape, why he hadn't yet found her, and if he ever would before her captors killed her.
He struggled to banish from his mind the gnawing fear that she might already be dead.
He tried not to think about what might be done to her as a captive that could be infinitely more gruesome than a simple execution. Jagang had ample reason to want her to live a good long time; only the living could feel pain.
From the beginning, Kahlan had been there to frustrate Jagang's ambitions and sometimes even reverse his success. The Imperial Order's very first expeditionary force in the New World, among other things, slaughtered all the inhabitants of the great Galean city of Ebinissia. Kahlan came upon the grisly sight shortly after a troop of young Galean recruits had discovered it. In their blind rage, despite being outnumbered ten to one, those young men had been bent on the glory of vengeance and victory, on meeting upon the battlefield the soldiers who had tortured, raped, and murdered all of their loved ones.
Kahlan came across those recruits, led by Captain Bradley Ryan, just before they were about to march into a textbook battle that she realized would be their death. In their bold inexperience, they were convinced that they could make such tactics work and snatch victory, despite being overwhelmingly outnumbered.
Kahlan knew how the experienced Imperial Order soldiers fought. She knew that if she allowed those young recruits to do as they planned, they would be marching into a merciless meat grinder and all of them would die. The results of their shortsighted notions of the righteous glory of combat would be that those Imperial Order soldiers would then go on, unopposed, to other cities and continue to murder and plunder innocent people.
Kahlan took command of the young recruits and set about dissuading them of their ignorant notions of a fair fight. She brought them to fully understand that their only goal was killing the invaders. It didn't matter how the Galeans came to stand over the corpses of those brutes, it only mattered that they did. In that undertaking of killing, there was no glory, there was simply survival. They were killing so that there could be life. Kahlan taught those recruits what they needed to know about fighting a force that greatly outnumbered them, and she shaped them into men who could accomplish the grim task.
The night before leading those young men into combat, Kahlan went alone into the enemy camp and killed their wizard along with some of the officers. The next day, those five thousand young men fought at her side, followed her instructions, learned from her, and along the way took terrible casualties, but they eventually killed every last one of the Imperial Order's fifty-thousand-man advance force. It had been an accomplishment rarely equaled in history.
That had been the first of many blows Kahlan struck against Jagang. In answer, he sent assassins after her. They failed.
In Richard's absence, after Nicci had taken him away to the heart of the Old World, Kahlan had gone to join Zedd and the D'Haran Empire forces. She found them dispirited and on the run after having lost a three-day battle. In Richard's place, carrying the Sword of Truth, the Mother Confessor pulled the army back onto its feet and immediately counterattacked, surprising the enemy and bloodying them. She brought backbone and fire to the D'Haran forces. She inspired them to the challenge. Captain Ryan's men arrived to join with her in the fight against Jagang's invading horde. For nearly a year, Kahlan led the D'Haran Empire forces as they frustrated Jagang's efforts to swiftly subdue the New World. She harried and harassed him without pause. She helped direct plans that resulted in Jagang's army losing hundreds of thousands of men.
Kahlan had bled the Imperial Order army, and helped grind them to a halt outside Aydindril. In winter, she had evacuated the people of Aydindril, and had the army take them over the passes into D'Hara. The D'Haran forces then sealed off those passes and, for the time being, held the Imperial Order at bay short of their final objective of conquering D'Hara and finally bringing the New World under the brutal rule of the Fellowship of Order.
Jagang's hatred for Kahlan was exceeded only by his hatred for Richard. Most recently, the dream walker had sent an extremely dangerous wizard named Nicholas after them. Richard and Kahlan had only narrowly escaped capture.
Richard knew that the Order relished seeing to it that captured foes suffered monstrous abuse, and there was no one, other than Richard, whom Emperor Jagang wanted to put to torture more than the Mother Confessor.
There were no lengths to which he would not go to get his hands on her. Emperor Jagang would reserve for Kahlan the most unspeakable torture.
Richard realized that he was standing frozen, trembling, his fingers gripping a fistful of balsam boughs. Cara silently watched him. He knelt and again started laying the branches in place while struggling to put terrible thoughts from his mind. Cara went back to her work. He put all his effort into concentrating on the task of completing their shelter. The sooner they got to sleep, the more rested they would be when they woke, and the faster they could travel.
Even though they were nowhere near any roads and a great distance from the trails, Richard still didn't want to have a fire for fear that scouting soldiers might spot it. Although they wouldn't be able see the fire's smoke through all the drizzle and fog, such weather tended to keep smoke low to the ground, drifting this way and that through the woods, so any Imperial Order patrols would be able to smell it. It was a real enough possibility that none of the others argued for a fire. Being cold was a lot better than having to fight for their lives.
Nicci dragged an armful of balsam boughs close as Richard continued to weave them up the lean-to. None of the others spoke, apparently absorbed in worry that whatever had killed the men might be out there, among the deepening shadows, hunting the four of them as they prepared to go to sleep in a fortress made of nothing more than balsam boughs.
Their first day's journey toward Altur'Rang had felt less like traveling and more like running for their lives. But whatever had killed Victor's men had not chased them. At least, Richard didn't think it had. He couldn't really imagine that whatever had the power to kill that many men in such a brutal fashion couldn't manage to catch up with them if it had their trail. Especially not something filled with a blood frenzy, as Nicci had described it.
Besides, when he was in the woods Richard usually knew when there were animals about and where they likely were, and, as a rule, he knew when people were close. Had Victor and his men not been camped quite so far from Richard, Kahlan, and Cara's camp, he would have known they were there. He also had a keen sense of when he was being pursued and if someone was following his trail. As a guide, he sometimes tracked people lost in the woods. He and other guides sometimes had contests to track one another. Richard knew how to watch for someone tracking him.
This, however, was less a matter of suspecting that someone was following them and more a feeling of icy dread, as if they were being chased by a murderous phantom in a blood frenzy. That fear constantly urged them to run. He knew, too, that running was often the trigger that made a predator pounce.
Richard realized, though, that it was only his imagination making him feel the hot breath of pursuers. Zedd had taught him that it was always important to understand why you had specific feelings so that you could decide if those feelings were caused by something that warranted attention, or something that didn't. Other than the palpable fear caused by the brutality of the slaughter, Richard had no evidence that they were being chased, so he tried to keep the emotion in proper perspective.
Fear itself often proved to be the greatest threat. Fear made people do thoughtless things that often got them into trouble. Fear made people stop thinking. When they stopped thinking, they often made foolish choices.
Several times when he was growing up, Richard had tracked people who had gotten lost in the vast forests around Hartland. One boy Richard had tracked for two days kept running in the dark until he eventually fell from a cliff. Luckily it wasn't a long fall. Richard found him at the bottom of the steep bank with a twisted ankle that was swollen but not broken. The boy was only cold, tired, and frightened. It could have been far worse and he knew it. He had been very glad to see Richard appear and held him tightly around the neck all the way home.
There were any number of ways to die out in the woods. Richard had heard of people attacked by a bear, or a cougar, or bitten by a snake. But he couldn't imagine what had killed Victor's men. He'd never seen anything like it. He knew it hadn't been soldiers. He supposed that it could have been the gifted using some kind of terrible power to slaughter the men, but he just didn't think that was the explanation.
He realized, then, that he was already thinking of it as a beast.
Whatever killed the men, Richard had taken precautions as they had set out. He followed shallow streams until they were a good distance from the sight of the slaughter. He was careful to lead them up out of the rushing water and away from the stream across ground where it would be much more difficult to track them. More than once throughout the day he had led them over bare rock or through water to make it extremely time-consuming for someone good at tracking to follow them. The shelter, too, was designed to blend into the surrounding woods. It would be hard to spot, unless someone passed very near to it.
Victor dragged a heavy load of balsam boughs close and laid them at Richard's feet. «Need more?»
With the toe of his boot, Richard nudged the pile, judging by its density how much and how well it would cover the remaining poles. «No, I think these and the ones Nicci is bringing should be enough.»
Nicci dropped her load beside Victor's. It seemed odd to him seeing Nicci doing such work. Even dragging balsam boughs she had a regal look about her. While Cara was a strikingly beautiful woman as well, her audacious bearing made it seem rather natural for her to be building a shelter-or a spiked flail cocked to kill intruders. Nicci, though, looked unnatural working in the woods-as if she would complain about getting her hands dirty, although she never once did. It wasn't that she was at all unwilling to do whatever Richard needed her to do, it was just that she looked completely out of place doing it. She simply had a noble bearing that seemed too stately for the task of hauling branches for a shelter in the woods.
Now that she had brought all the balsam boughs that Richard needed, Nicci stood quietly under the dripping trees, hugging herself as she shivered. Richard's fingers were numb with cold as he quickly wove on the remaining boughs. He saw Cara, as she worked to secure the limbs, occasionally putting her hands under her armpits. Only Victor showed no outward appearance of being cold. Richard imagined that the blacksmith's glower was enough to warm him most of the time.
«Why don't you three get some sleep,» Victor said as Richard placed the last of the boughs over the shelter. «I'll take watch for now if no one objects. I'm not much sleepy.»
From the undercurrent of anger in the man's voice, Richard imagined that Victor might not be sleepy for quite a long while. He could certainly understand Victor's bitter sorrow. The man would no doubt spend his watch trying to think of what he would say to Ferran's mother and the relatives of the other men.
Richard laid an understanding hand on Victor's shoulder. «We don't know what we're up against. Don't hesitate to wake us if you hear or see anything at all unusual. And don't forget to come inside and have your share of sleep; tomorrow will be a long day of traveling. We all need to be strong.»
Victor nodded. Richard watched as the blacksmith picked up his cloak and threw it around his shoulders before seizing roots and clinging vines to help him scale the rock above the shelter to where he would watch over them. Richard wondered if perhaps the outcome might have been different had Victor been with the men. Then he thought about the aftermath of splintered trees, deep gouges in the ground carved with such force that it had overturned rocks and torn thick roots apart. He remembered the ripped leather armor, the shattered bones, the rent bodies, and was glad that Victor had not been with the men when the attack had come. Even a heavy mace wielded in anger by the powerful arms of the master blacksmith would not have stopped whatever had come into that clearing.
Nicci pressed a hand to Richard's forehead, testing for fever. «You need rest. No watch for you tonight. The three of us will each take a turn.»
Richard wanted to argue, but he knew that she was right. This was not a battle he should take up, so he didn't and instead nodded his agreement. Cara, obviously prepared to take Nicci's side if he argued, turned back from watching them from out of the small opening between the boughs.
From the gathering darkness all around a grating sound had begun to build into a shrill chirr. Now that they were finished with the effort of building the shelter, the noise was hard to ignore. It made the whole forest seem alive with raucous activity. Nicci finally took notice of it and paused to look around.
She frowned. «What is that sound, anyway?»
Richard plucked an empty skin from a tree trunk. Everywhere throughout the forest the trees were covered with the pale, tannish, thumb-sized husks.
«Cicadas.» Richard smiled to himself as he let the gossamer ghost of the creature that had once lived inside roll into his palm. «This is what's left after they molt.»
Nicci glanced at the empty skin in his hand and briefly looked at some of the others clinging to the trees. «While I spent most of my life in towns and cities, and indoors, I've spent a great deal of time outdoors since leaving the Palace of the Prophets. These insects must be unique to these woods; I don't recall ever seeing them before-or hearing them.»
«You wouldn't have. I was a boy the last time I saw them. This kind of cicada emerges from underground every seventeen years. Today is the first day they all have begun to emerge. They will only be around for a few weeks while they mate and lay their eggs. Then we won't see them again for another seventeen years.»
«Really?» Cara asked as she poked her head back out. «Every seventeen years?» She thought it over for a moment and then scowled up at Richard. «They better not keep us awake.»
«Because of their numbers they create quite an unforgettable sound. With countless of the cicadas all trilling together, you can sometimes hear the harmonic rise and fall of their song moving through the forest in a wave. In the quiet of night, their stridulation may seem deafening at first, but, believe it or not, it will actually lull you to sleep.»
Satisfied to know that the noisy insects would not keep her charge awake, Cara disappeared back inside.
Richard recalled his wonder when Zedd had walked with him through the woods, showing him the newly emerged creatures, telling him all about their seventeen-year life cycle. To Richard, as a boy, it was a memorable wonder. Zedd told him how he would be grown up when they came again, that he had first seen them as a boy, and the next time he would see them as a grown man. Richard remembered marveling at the event and promising himself that when they came again, he would be sure to spend more time watching the rare creatures when they appeared from the ground.
Richard felt a wave of profound sadness for the loss of that innocent time in life. As a boy, the emergence of the cicadas had seemed like just about the most amazing phenomenon he could imagine, and waiting seventeen years until they returned seemed like the hardest thing he would ever have to do. And now they were back.
And now he was a man. He cast the empty husk aside.
After Richard removed his wet cloak and crawled in behind Nicci, he pulled branches together to cover over the opening to the snug shelter. The thick branches toned down the high-pitched song of the cicadas. The ceaseless buzzing was making him sleepy.
He was pleased to see that the balsam boughs worked to shed the rain, leaving the cavelike refuge dry, if not warm. They had laid down a bed of boughs over the exposed ground so they would have a relatively soft and dry platform upon which to sleep. Even without rain dripping on them, though, the humidity and fog still dampened everything. Their breath came out in ephemeral clouds.
Richard was weary of being wet. Handling trees had left him covered with bark and needles and dirt. His hands were sticky from tree sap. He couldn't remember ever being so miserable with grime and grit clinging to his wet skin and wet clothes. At least the pine and balsam pitch left the shelter smelling pleasant.
He wished he could have a hot bath. He hoped that Kahlan was warm and dry and unharmed.
Tired as he was, and as sleepy as the sound of the cicadas was making him, there were things Richard needed to know. There were matters far more important to him than sleep, or his simple boyhood wonder.
He needed to find out what Nicci knew about what had killed Victor's men. There were too many connections to ignore. The attack had come right near where Richard, Kahlan, and Cara had been camped a few days before. More importantly, whatever had killed the men didn't seem to have left any tracks, at least none that he been able to find in his brief search, and, other than that displaced rock, Richard couldn't find any tracks from either Kahlan or her abductor.
Richard intended, before he slept, to find out what Nicci knew about what had killed the men.
The area under the overhanging roof of rock was dry enough, it just wasn't large enough. The lean-to would expand the shelter so as to provide a snug place to sleep. Without a fire it wouldn't be especially warm, but at least it would be dry.
Throughout the day, the drizzle had turned to a slow, steady rain. While they had been on the move they had been warm enough because of their exertion, but now that they had to stop for the night, the inexorable embrace of the cold had begun. Even in chilly weather that wasn't truly cold, being wet sapped a person of their necessary warmth and thus their strength. Richard knew that, over time, constant exposure to even mildly chilly wet weather could steal enough vital heat from the body to severely debilitate and sometimes even kill a person.
With as little sleep as he knew Nicci and Cara had gotten over the previous three days, and in his own weakened condition, Richard recognized that they needed a dry, warm place to get some rest or they would all be in trouble. He couldn't allow anything to slow him down.
For the whole of the afternoon and evening they had set a steady, rapid pace on their march toward Altur'Rang. After the brutal slaughter of the men, the four of them hadn't been particularly hungry, but they knew that they had to eat if they were to have the strength for the journey, so they nibbled on dried meats and travel biscuits as they made their way through the trackless wilderness.
Richard was so exhausted he could hardly stand. Both to cut the distance and to avoid being spotted by anyone, he had guided the others through dense forest, most of it tough going and all of it well off any trails. It had been a grueling day's travel. His head ached. His back ached. His legs ached. If they started early and kept up the strenuous pace, though, they might be able to reach Altur'Rang in one more day's travel. After they got horses, the going would be easier as well as swifter.
He wished he didn't need to go so far, but he didn't know what else to do. He couldn't spend forever searching the vast forests all around, on the off chance he would find another rock that had been disturbed so that he then might have an idea of which direction Kahlan had gone. He might never find another such rock, and even if he did, there was no reason to believe that if he kept going in that direction he would find Kahlan. Whoever took her might change direction without ever again disturbing a rock in a way that he would find it.
Their regular tracks were gone. Richard knew no way to track someone when magic had made their tracks vanish. Nicci's gift wasn't able to help. Wandering around aimlessly wasn't going to solve anything. As reluctant as he was to leave the area where he had last seen Kahlan, Richard didn't think that he had any other choice but to go for help.
He went through the motions of building the shelter without giving the work much thought. In the failing light, Cara, concerned for his well-being, kept watching him out of the corner of her eye. She looked like she expected him to fall over at any moment and if he did she intended to catch him.
As he worked, Richard mulled over the remote but real possibility that Imperial Order soldiers might be searching the woods for them. At the same time he fretted about what could have killed all of Victor's men —and might now be chasing them. He considered what other precautions he might take, and he deliberated over how he would fight whatever could have done such violence.
Through it all, he kept trying to think of where Kahlan might be. He went over everything he could remember. He brooded over whether or not she was hurt. He agonized over what he might have done wrong. He imagined that she must be filled with fear and doubt, wondering why he wasn't coming to help her escape, why he hadn't yet found her, and if he ever would before her captors killed her.
He struggled to banish from his mind the gnawing fear that she might already be dead.
He tried not to think about what might be done to her as a captive that could be infinitely more gruesome than a simple execution. Jagang had ample reason to want her to live a good long time; only the living could feel pain.
From the beginning, Kahlan had been there to frustrate Jagang's ambitions and sometimes even reverse his success. The Imperial Order's very first expeditionary force in the New World, among other things, slaughtered all the inhabitants of the great Galean city of Ebinissia. Kahlan came upon the grisly sight shortly after a troop of young Galean recruits had discovered it. In their blind rage, despite being outnumbered ten to one, those young men had been bent on the glory of vengeance and victory, on meeting upon the battlefield the soldiers who had tortured, raped, and murdered all of their loved ones.
Kahlan came across those recruits, led by Captain Bradley Ryan, just before they were about to march into a textbook battle that she realized would be their death. In their bold inexperience, they were convinced that they could make such tactics work and snatch victory, despite being overwhelmingly outnumbered.
Kahlan knew how the experienced Imperial Order soldiers fought. She knew that if she allowed those young recruits to do as they planned, they would be marching into a merciless meat grinder and all of them would die. The results of their shortsighted notions of the righteous glory of combat would be that those Imperial Order soldiers would then go on, unopposed, to other cities and continue to murder and plunder innocent people.
Kahlan took command of the young recruits and set about dissuading them of their ignorant notions of a fair fight. She brought them to fully understand that their only goal was killing the invaders. It didn't matter how the Galeans came to stand over the corpses of those brutes, it only mattered that they did. In that undertaking of killing, there was no glory, there was simply survival. They were killing so that there could be life. Kahlan taught those recruits what they needed to know about fighting a force that greatly outnumbered them, and she shaped them into men who could accomplish the grim task.
The night before leading those young men into combat, Kahlan went alone into the enemy camp and killed their wizard along with some of the officers. The next day, those five thousand young men fought at her side, followed her instructions, learned from her, and along the way took terrible casualties, but they eventually killed every last one of the Imperial Order's fifty-thousand-man advance force. It had been an accomplishment rarely equaled in history.
That had been the first of many blows Kahlan struck against Jagang. In answer, he sent assassins after her. They failed.
In Richard's absence, after Nicci had taken him away to the heart of the Old World, Kahlan had gone to join Zedd and the D'Haran Empire forces. She found them dispirited and on the run after having lost a three-day battle. In Richard's place, carrying the Sword of Truth, the Mother Confessor pulled the army back onto its feet and immediately counterattacked, surprising the enemy and bloodying them. She brought backbone and fire to the D'Haran forces. She inspired them to the challenge. Captain Ryan's men arrived to join with her in the fight against Jagang's invading horde. For nearly a year, Kahlan led the D'Haran Empire forces as they frustrated Jagang's efforts to swiftly subdue the New World. She harried and harassed him without pause. She helped direct plans that resulted in Jagang's army losing hundreds of thousands of men.
Kahlan had bled the Imperial Order army, and helped grind them to a halt outside Aydindril. In winter, she had evacuated the people of Aydindril, and had the army take them over the passes into D'Hara. The D'Haran forces then sealed off those passes and, for the time being, held the Imperial Order at bay short of their final objective of conquering D'Hara and finally bringing the New World under the brutal rule of the Fellowship of Order.
Jagang's hatred for Kahlan was exceeded only by his hatred for Richard. Most recently, the dream walker had sent an extremely dangerous wizard named Nicholas after them. Richard and Kahlan had only narrowly escaped capture.
Richard knew that the Order relished seeing to it that captured foes suffered monstrous abuse, and there was no one, other than Richard, whom Emperor Jagang wanted to put to torture more than the Mother Confessor.
There were no lengths to which he would not go to get his hands on her. Emperor Jagang would reserve for Kahlan the most unspeakable torture.
Richard realized that he was standing frozen, trembling, his fingers gripping a fistful of balsam boughs. Cara silently watched him. He knelt and again started laying the branches in place while struggling to put terrible thoughts from his mind. Cara went back to her work. He put all his effort into concentrating on the task of completing their shelter. The sooner they got to sleep, the more rested they would be when they woke, and the faster they could travel.
Even though they were nowhere near any roads and a great distance from the trails, Richard still didn't want to have a fire for fear that scouting soldiers might spot it. Although they wouldn't be able see the fire's smoke through all the drizzle and fog, such weather tended to keep smoke low to the ground, drifting this way and that through the woods, so any Imperial Order patrols would be able to smell it. It was a real enough possibility that none of the others argued for a fire. Being cold was a lot better than having to fight for their lives.
Nicci dragged an armful of balsam boughs close as Richard continued to weave them up the lean-to. None of the others spoke, apparently absorbed in worry that whatever had killed the men might be out there, among the deepening shadows, hunting the four of them as they prepared to go to sleep in a fortress made of nothing more than balsam boughs.
Their first day's journey toward Altur'Rang had felt less like traveling and more like running for their lives. But whatever had killed Victor's men had not chased them. At least, Richard didn't think it had. He couldn't really imagine that whatever had the power to kill that many men in such a brutal fashion couldn't manage to catch up with them if it had their trail. Especially not something filled with a blood frenzy, as Nicci had described it.
Besides, when he was in the woods Richard usually knew when there were animals about and where they likely were, and, as a rule, he knew when people were close. Had Victor and his men not been camped quite so far from Richard, Kahlan, and Cara's camp, he would have known they were there. He also had a keen sense of when he was being pursued and if someone was following his trail. As a guide, he sometimes tracked people lost in the woods. He and other guides sometimes had contests to track one another. Richard knew how to watch for someone tracking him.
This, however, was less a matter of suspecting that someone was following them and more a feeling of icy dread, as if they were being chased by a murderous phantom in a blood frenzy. That fear constantly urged them to run. He knew, too, that running was often the trigger that made a predator pounce.
Richard realized, though, that it was only his imagination making him feel the hot breath of pursuers. Zedd had taught him that it was always important to understand why you had specific feelings so that you could decide if those feelings were caused by something that warranted attention, or something that didn't. Other than the palpable fear caused by the brutality of the slaughter, Richard had no evidence that they were being chased, so he tried to keep the emotion in proper perspective.
Fear itself often proved to be the greatest threat. Fear made people do thoughtless things that often got them into trouble. Fear made people stop thinking. When they stopped thinking, they often made foolish choices.
Several times when he was growing up, Richard had tracked people who had gotten lost in the vast forests around Hartland. One boy Richard had tracked for two days kept running in the dark until he eventually fell from a cliff. Luckily it wasn't a long fall. Richard found him at the bottom of the steep bank with a twisted ankle that was swollen but not broken. The boy was only cold, tired, and frightened. It could have been far worse and he knew it. He had been very glad to see Richard appear and held him tightly around the neck all the way home.
There were any number of ways to die out in the woods. Richard had heard of people attacked by a bear, or a cougar, or bitten by a snake. But he couldn't imagine what had killed Victor's men. He'd never seen anything like it. He knew it hadn't been soldiers. He supposed that it could have been the gifted using some kind of terrible power to slaughter the men, but he just didn't think that was the explanation.
He realized, then, that he was already thinking of it as a beast.
Whatever killed the men, Richard had taken precautions as they had set out. He followed shallow streams until they were a good distance from the sight of the slaughter. He was careful to lead them up out of the rushing water and away from the stream across ground where it would be much more difficult to track them. More than once throughout the day he had led them over bare rock or through water to make it extremely time-consuming for someone good at tracking to follow them. The shelter, too, was designed to blend into the surrounding woods. It would be hard to spot, unless someone passed very near to it.
Victor dragged a heavy load of balsam boughs close and laid them at Richard's feet. «Need more?»
With the toe of his boot, Richard nudged the pile, judging by its density how much and how well it would cover the remaining poles. «No, I think these and the ones Nicci is bringing should be enough.»
Nicci dropped her load beside Victor's. It seemed odd to him seeing Nicci doing such work. Even dragging balsam boughs she had a regal look about her. While Cara was a strikingly beautiful woman as well, her audacious bearing made it seem rather natural for her to be building a shelter-or a spiked flail cocked to kill intruders. Nicci, though, looked unnatural working in the woods-as if she would complain about getting her hands dirty, although she never once did. It wasn't that she was at all unwilling to do whatever Richard needed her to do, it was just that she looked completely out of place doing it. She simply had a noble bearing that seemed too stately for the task of hauling branches for a shelter in the woods.
Now that she had brought all the balsam boughs that Richard needed, Nicci stood quietly under the dripping trees, hugging herself as she shivered. Richard's fingers were numb with cold as he quickly wove on the remaining boughs. He saw Cara, as she worked to secure the limbs, occasionally putting her hands under her armpits. Only Victor showed no outward appearance of being cold. Richard imagined that the blacksmith's glower was enough to warm him most of the time.
«Why don't you three get some sleep,» Victor said as Richard placed the last of the boughs over the shelter. «I'll take watch for now if no one objects. I'm not much sleepy.»
From the undercurrent of anger in the man's voice, Richard imagined that Victor might not be sleepy for quite a long while. He could certainly understand Victor's bitter sorrow. The man would no doubt spend his watch trying to think of what he would say to Ferran's mother and the relatives of the other men.
Richard laid an understanding hand on Victor's shoulder. «We don't know what we're up against. Don't hesitate to wake us if you hear or see anything at all unusual. And don't forget to come inside and have your share of sleep; tomorrow will be a long day of traveling. We all need to be strong.»
Victor nodded. Richard watched as the blacksmith picked up his cloak and threw it around his shoulders before seizing roots and clinging vines to help him scale the rock above the shelter to where he would watch over them. Richard wondered if perhaps the outcome might have been different had Victor been with the men. Then he thought about the aftermath of splintered trees, deep gouges in the ground carved with such force that it had overturned rocks and torn thick roots apart. He remembered the ripped leather armor, the shattered bones, the rent bodies, and was glad that Victor had not been with the men when the attack had come. Even a heavy mace wielded in anger by the powerful arms of the master blacksmith would not have stopped whatever had come into that clearing.
Nicci pressed a hand to Richard's forehead, testing for fever. «You need rest. No watch for you tonight. The three of us will each take a turn.»
Richard wanted to argue, but he knew that she was right. This was not a battle he should take up, so he didn't and instead nodded his agreement. Cara, obviously prepared to take Nicci's side if he argued, turned back from watching them from out of the small opening between the boughs.
From the gathering darkness all around a grating sound had begun to build into a shrill chirr. Now that they were finished with the effort of building the shelter, the noise was hard to ignore. It made the whole forest seem alive with raucous activity. Nicci finally took notice of it and paused to look around.
She frowned. «What is that sound, anyway?»
Richard plucked an empty skin from a tree trunk. Everywhere throughout the forest the trees were covered with the pale, tannish, thumb-sized husks.
«Cicadas.» Richard smiled to himself as he let the gossamer ghost of the creature that had once lived inside roll into his palm. «This is what's left after they molt.»
Nicci glanced at the empty skin in his hand and briefly looked at some of the others clinging to the trees. «While I spent most of my life in towns and cities, and indoors, I've spent a great deal of time outdoors since leaving the Palace of the Prophets. These insects must be unique to these woods; I don't recall ever seeing them before-or hearing them.»
«You wouldn't have. I was a boy the last time I saw them. This kind of cicada emerges from underground every seventeen years. Today is the first day they all have begun to emerge. They will only be around for a few weeks while they mate and lay their eggs. Then we won't see them again for another seventeen years.»
«Really?» Cara asked as she poked her head back out. «Every seventeen years?» She thought it over for a moment and then scowled up at Richard. «They better not keep us awake.»
«Because of their numbers they create quite an unforgettable sound. With countless of the cicadas all trilling together, you can sometimes hear the harmonic rise and fall of their song moving through the forest in a wave. In the quiet of night, their stridulation may seem deafening at first, but, believe it or not, it will actually lull you to sleep.»
Satisfied to know that the noisy insects would not keep her charge awake, Cara disappeared back inside.
Richard recalled his wonder when Zedd had walked with him through the woods, showing him the newly emerged creatures, telling him all about their seventeen-year life cycle. To Richard, as a boy, it was a memorable wonder. Zedd told him how he would be grown up when they came again, that he had first seen them as a boy, and the next time he would see them as a grown man. Richard remembered marveling at the event and promising himself that when they came again, he would be sure to spend more time watching the rare creatures when they appeared from the ground.
Richard felt a wave of profound sadness for the loss of that innocent time in life. As a boy, the emergence of the cicadas had seemed like just about the most amazing phenomenon he could imagine, and waiting seventeen years until they returned seemed like the hardest thing he would ever have to do. And now they were back.
And now he was a man. He cast the empty husk aside.
After Richard removed his wet cloak and crawled in behind Nicci, he pulled branches together to cover over the opening to the snug shelter. The thick branches toned down the high-pitched song of the cicadas. The ceaseless buzzing was making him sleepy.
He was pleased to see that the balsam boughs worked to shed the rain, leaving the cavelike refuge dry, if not warm. They had laid down a bed of boughs over the exposed ground so they would have a relatively soft and dry platform upon which to sleep. Even without rain dripping on them, though, the humidity and fog still dampened everything. Their breath came out in ephemeral clouds.
Richard was weary of being wet. Handling trees had left him covered with bark and needles and dirt. His hands were sticky from tree sap. He couldn't remember ever being so miserable with grime and grit clinging to his wet skin and wet clothes. At least the pine and balsam pitch left the shelter smelling pleasant.
He wished he could have a hot bath. He hoped that Kahlan was warm and dry and unharmed.
Tired as he was, and as sleepy as the sound of the cicadas was making him, there were things Richard needed to know. There were matters far more important to him than sleep, or his simple boyhood wonder.
He needed to find out what Nicci knew about what had killed Victor's men. There were too many connections to ignore. The attack had come right near where Richard, Kahlan, and Cara had been camped a few days before. More importantly, whatever had killed the men didn't seem to have left any tracks, at least none that he been able to find in his brief search, and, other than that displaced rock, Richard couldn't find any tracks from either Kahlan or her abductor.
Richard intended, before he slept, to find out what Nicci knew about what had killed the men.
CHAPTER 8
Richard untied the leather thongs beneath his pack and opened his bedroll, spreading it out in the narrow space left between the other two.
«Nicci, back at the place where the men were killed you said that it had been a blood frenzy.» He leaned back against the rock wall underneath the overhang. «What did you mean?»
Nicci folded herself into a sitting position to his right, atop her own bedroll. «What we saw back there wasn't simply killing. Isn't that obvious?»
He supposed she had a point. He had never witnessed a scene so shaped by rage. He was well aware, though, that she knew far more about it.
Cara curled up to his left. «I'm telling you,» she said to Nicci, «I don't think he knows.»
Richard cast a leery gaze at the Mord-Sith and then at the sorceress. «Knows what?»
Nicci ran her fingers back through her wet hair, pulling strands off her face. She looked a little puzzled. «You said that you got the letter I sent.»
«I did.» It had been quite a while back. He tried to remember through the daze of weariness and worry everything Nicci's letter had said —something about Jagang creating weapons out of people. «Your letter was valuable in helping figure out what was happening at the time. And I did appreciate your warning about Jagang's darker pursuits of creating weapons out of the gifted; Nicholas the Slide was as nasty a piece of work.»
«Nicholas.» Nicci spat the name before wrapping a blanket around her shoulders. «He is but a flea on the rump of the wolf.»
If Nicholas was the flea, Richard hoped never to run into the wolf. Nicholas the Slide had been a wizard whom the Sisters of the Dark had altered to have abilities that were well beyond any human traits. It had been thought that accomplishing such conjuring with people was not only a lost art but impossible because, among other things, such nefarious work required the use of not only Additive but Subtractive Magic. While a rare few had learned to manipulate it, until Richard's birth there hadn't been anyone born with the actual gift for Subtractive Magic in thousands of years.
But there had been those who, even though they had not been born with that side of the gift, still had managed to gain the use of Subtractive Magic. Darken Rahl had been one such person. It was said that he had traded the pure souls of children to the Keeper of the underworld in exchange for dark indulgences, including the ability to use Subtractive Magic.
Richard supposed that it could also have been through morbid promises to the Keeper that the first Sisters of the Dark had contrived to obtain the knowledge of how to use Subtractive Magic, thereafter passing it on in secret to their covert disciples.
When the Palace of the Prophets had fallen, Jagang had captured many of the Sisters, both Sisters of the Light and Sisters of the Dark, but their numbers were dwindling. From what Richard had learned, the dream walker's ability enabled him to enter every part of a person's mind and thereby control them. There was no private thought he did not know or intimate deed he could not witness. It was an inner violation so complete that no hidden corner of the mind was safe from the dream walker's direct scrutiny. What was worse, the victim could not always tell if Jagang was lurking there, in their mind, witness to their most secret thoughts.
Nicci had said that the haunting possession by the dream walker had driven a few of the Sisters mad. Richard also knew that through that link Jagang could measure out excruciating pain and, if he wished it, death. With such control, the dream walker could make the Sisters do anything he wished.
Through an ancient magic created by one of Richard's ancestors to protect his people from the dream walkers of that time, those who swore fidelity to the Lord Rahl were protected. Along with the rest of his gift, Richard had inherited that bond and, with a dream walker again born into the world, it now safeguarded those loyal to him from Jagang stealing into their minds and enslaving them. While a formal devotion was spoken by the people of D'Hara to their Lord Rahl, the protection that the bond provided was actually invoked through the conviction of the person bonded —through their doing what they thought was called for by their fidelity.
Both Ann, the Prelate of the Sisters of the Light, and Verna, the woman Ann had named as her successor, had stolen into the Imperial Order's camp and tried to rescue their Sisters. The captive Sisters had been offered the protection of the bond-all they had to do was accept in their hearts their loyalty to Richard-but most were so terrified of Jagang that more than once they had refused their chance at freedom. Not everyone was willing to embrace liberty; liberty required not just effort, but risk. Some people chose to delude themselves and see their chains as protective armor.
Nicci had once been in servitude to the Fellowship of Order, the Sisters of the Light, and then the Sisters of the Dark, and finally to Jagang. She no longer was; she had instead embraced Richard's love of life. Her steadfast loyalty to him and what he believed in had freed her from the clutches of the dream walker, but far more than that, it had freed her from the yoke of servitude she had worn her whole life. Her life was now hers alone. He thought that maybe that might have something to do with the resolute nobility of her bearing.
«I didn't read the whole letter,» Richard admitted. «Before I was able to finish it, we were attacked by men that Nicholas had sent to capture us. I told you about it before-that was when Sabar was killed. During that fight the letter fell into the fire.»
Nicci slouched back. «Dear spirits,» she murmured. «I thought you knew.»
Richard was tired and at the end of his patience. «Knew what?»
Nicci let her arms slip to her sides. She looked up at him in the dim light and let out a frazzled sigh.
«Jagang found a way for the Sisters of the Dark he holds captive to use their ability to begin creating weapons out of people, as had been done during the great war. In many ways, he is a brilliant man. He makes it his business to learn. He collects books from the places he sacks. I've seen some of those books. Among all sorts of tomes, he has ancient handbooks of magic from around the time of the great war.
«The problem is, while he may be a dream walker and brilliant in certain areas, he does not have the gift and so his understanding of it, of exactly what Han is and how this force of life functions, is crude at best. It's not easy for one without magic to comprehend such things. You have the gift and yet even you don't really understand it or know very much about how it works. But because Jagang doesn't know how to work magic, he blunders around demanding that things be done simply because he has dreamed them up, because he is the great emperor and he wishes his visions to be brought to life.»
Richard rubbed his fingers back and forth on his brow, rolling off the dirt. «Don't sell him short in that regard. It's possible that he knows more about what he's doing than you realize.»
«What do you mean?»
«I may not know a lot about the subject of magic, but one of the things I have learned is that magic can also be thought of much like an art form. Through artistic expression-for lack of a better term-magic that has never been before can be created.»
Nicci stared in astonished disbelief. «Richard, I don't know where you could have heard such a thing, but it just doesn't work that way.»
«I know, I know. Kahlan thinks I'm out on a limb with this, too. Having been raised around wizards, she knows a lot about magic and in the past she has flatly insisted that I'm wrong. But I'm not. I've done it before. Using the gift in such a way, in new and original ways, got me out of what would otherwise have been unbreakable traps.»
Nicci was peering at him in that analytical way of hers. He suddenly realized why. It wasn't only what he'd said about magic. He was talking about Kahlan again. The woman who did not exist, the woman he had dreamed. Cara's expression betrayed her mute concern.
«Anyway,» Richard said, getting back to the crux of the matter, «just because Jagang doesn't have the gift, doesn't mean he can't still dream up things-dream up nightmares-like Nicholas. It is through such original conceptualization that the most deadly things, for which there may be no conventional counter, are created. I suspect that this may have been the method those wizards in ancient times used for creating weapons out of people in the first place.»
Nicci was beside herself with bottled agitation.
«Richard, magic just doesn't work like that. You can't dream up whatever you'd like to have, wish for what you want. Magic functions by the laws of its nature, just like all other things in the world. Whim will not make boards out of trees; you must cut the tree to the desired form. If you want a house, you can't wish up bricks and boards to stack themselves into a dwelling; you must use your hands to craft the structure.»
Richard leaned toward the sorceress. «Yes, but it's the human imagination that makes those concrete actions not just possible, but effective. Most builders think in terms of houses or barns; they do what's been done before simply because that was what was done before. Much of the time they don't want to think, so they never envision anything more. They limit themselves to repetition and as an excuse they insist that it must be done that way because it has always been done that way. Most magic is like that-the gifted simply repeating what has already been done before, believing that it must be done that way with no more justification than that it has always been done that way.
«Before a grand palace can be built, it first has to be imagined by someone bold enough to have a vision of what could be. A palace will not spontaneously spring forth to the surprise of all while men are attempting to build a barn. Only the conscious act of conceptualization can bring about the reality.
«For that act of creative imagination to bring about the existence of a palace, it cannot violate any of the laws of the nature of the things that are used. On the contrary, the person who imagines a grand palace with the goal of seeing it built must be intimately aware of the nature of all the things he will use in the construction. If he isn't, the palace will fall down. He must know the nature of the materials better than the man who uses them to build a simple barn. It's not a matter of wishing for something that transcends the laws of nature, but a matter of original thinking based on those laws of nature.
«I grew up in the woods around Hartland, never having seen a palace.» Richard spread his arms, as if to show her the things he had seen since leaving his homeland. «Until I saw the castle at Tamarang, the Wizard's Keep and the Confessors' Palace in Aydindril, or the People's Palace in D'Hara, I never imagined that such places existed-or even that they could exist. They were beyond the scope of my thinking at the time.
«And yet, even though I never imagined that such places could be built, other men thought them up, and they were built. I think that one of the important functions of grand creations is that they inspire people.»
Nicci appeared not only to be swept up in his explanation, but to be considering his words with serious interest. «Do you mean to say, then, that you think an art form can also shape such important things as the function of magic?»
Richard smiled. «Nicci, you could not grasp the importance of life until I carved the statue back in Altur'Rang. When you saw the concept in tangible form you were able at last to put together all the things you had learned throughout your life and finally grasp its meaning. An artistic creation touched your soul. That's what I mean about an important function of great works is that they inspire people.
«Because it inspired you with the beauty of life, with the nobility of man, you acted to become free-something you had never thought was possible. Because the people of Altur'Rang as well could see in that statue what could and should be, they were stirred to stand up to the tyranny crushing their lives. It was not accomplished by copying other statues, by doing what was the accepted norm for statues in the Old World of showing man as weak and ineffective, but by an idea of beauty, a vision of nobility, that shaped what I carved.
«I didn't violate the nature of the marble I used, but rather I used the nature of the stone to accomplish something different than what others routinely did with it. I studied the properties of stone, I learned how to work it, and I sought to understand what more I could do with it in order to bring about my objective. I had Victor make me the finest tools that would enable me to do the work in the way it needed to be done. In that way I brought to reality what I wanted to create, what had never been before.
«I think that magic can work this way as well. I believe that such original ideas played a part in how weapons were once created out of people. After all, when such weapons were made, they were effective in large part because they were original, because they had never been thought of or seen before. In many instances, the other side in the war then had to work to create entirely new things out of magic that were able to counter those weapons. In many cases they were able to render the weapon obsolete by creating a countermagic, and then someone on the other side immediately went to work thinking up some new horror. If using magic creatively was not possible, then how did the wizards of old create weapons with it? You can't say they simply got the knowledge from a book, or from past experience; where and how would the first such weapons have originated if not with an original idea? Someone had to have used magic creatively in the first place.
«I think that Jagang is again doing this very thing with magic. He has studied some of what was done in the great war, what weapons were created, and learned from that. He sometimes may direct that what was once created to be created again, such as with Nicholas, but in other instances I think he imagines what has never been, what goes beyond what has been done before, and has it brought to reality by those who know how to use magic to build what he wants.
«In these acts of creation it isn't the work that is the most remarkable aspect, but the idea and vision that makes the labor effective, just as carpenters and bricklayers who built houses and barns can be employed to construct a palace. It wasn't so much their labor that was remarkable in the creation of palaces, but the act of insight and creation that gave it direction.»
Nicci nodded ever so slightly in concentration as she weighed his words. «I can see that your notion isn't at all the wild idea I thought it was at first. This is a line of reasoning that I've never encountered. I'll have to think about the possibilities. You may be the first to really understand the mechanism behind Jagang's scheme-or, for that matter, behind the creations of wizards in ancient times. This would explain a great many things that have nagged at me over the years.»
«Nicci, back at the place where the men were killed you said that it had been a blood frenzy.» He leaned back against the rock wall underneath the overhang. «What did you mean?»
Nicci folded herself into a sitting position to his right, atop her own bedroll. «What we saw back there wasn't simply killing. Isn't that obvious?»
He supposed she had a point. He had never witnessed a scene so shaped by rage. He was well aware, though, that she knew far more about it.
Cara curled up to his left. «I'm telling you,» she said to Nicci, «I don't think he knows.»
Richard cast a leery gaze at the Mord-Sith and then at the sorceress. «Knows what?»
Nicci ran her fingers back through her wet hair, pulling strands off her face. She looked a little puzzled. «You said that you got the letter I sent.»
«I did.» It had been quite a while back. He tried to remember through the daze of weariness and worry everything Nicci's letter had said —something about Jagang creating weapons out of people. «Your letter was valuable in helping figure out what was happening at the time. And I did appreciate your warning about Jagang's darker pursuits of creating weapons out of the gifted; Nicholas the Slide was as nasty a piece of work.»
«Nicholas.» Nicci spat the name before wrapping a blanket around her shoulders. «He is but a flea on the rump of the wolf.»
If Nicholas was the flea, Richard hoped never to run into the wolf. Nicholas the Slide had been a wizard whom the Sisters of the Dark had altered to have abilities that were well beyond any human traits. It had been thought that accomplishing such conjuring with people was not only a lost art but impossible because, among other things, such nefarious work required the use of not only Additive but Subtractive Magic. While a rare few had learned to manipulate it, until Richard's birth there hadn't been anyone born with the actual gift for Subtractive Magic in thousands of years.
But there had been those who, even though they had not been born with that side of the gift, still had managed to gain the use of Subtractive Magic. Darken Rahl had been one such person. It was said that he had traded the pure souls of children to the Keeper of the underworld in exchange for dark indulgences, including the ability to use Subtractive Magic.
Richard supposed that it could also have been through morbid promises to the Keeper that the first Sisters of the Dark had contrived to obtain the knowledge of how to use Subtractive Magic, thereafter passing it on in secret to their covert disciples.
When the Palace of the Prophets had fallen, Jagang had captured many of the Sisters, both Sisters of the Light and Sisters of the Dark, but their numbers were dwindling. From what Richard had learned, the dream walker's ability enabled him to enter every part of a person's mind and thereby control them. There was no private thought he did not know or intimate deed he could not witness. It was an inner violation so complete that no hidden corner of the mind was safe from the dream walker's direct scrutiny. What was worse, the victim could not always tell if Jagang was lurking there, in their mind, witness to their most secret thoughts.
Nicci had said that the haunting possession by the dream walker had driven a few of the Sisters mad. Richard also knew that through that link Jagang could measure out excruciating pain and, if he wished it, death. With such control, the dream walker could make the Sisters do anything he wished.
Through an ancient magic created by one of Richard's ancestors to protect his people from the dream walkers of that time, those who swore fidelity to the Lord Rahl were protected. Along with the rest of his gift, Richard had inherited that bond and, with a dream walker again born into the world, it now safeguarded those loyal to him from Jagang stealing into their minds and enslaving them. While a formal devotion was spoken by the people of D'Hara to their Lord Rahl, the protection that the bond provided was actually invoked through the conviction of the person bonded —through their doing what they thought was called for by their fidelity.
Both Ann, the Prelate of the Sisters of the Light, and Verna, the woman Ann had named as her successor, had stolen into the Imperial Order's camp and tried to rescue their Sisters. The captive Sisters had been offered the protection of the bond-all they had to do was accept in their hearts their loyalty to Richard-but most were so terrified of Jagang that more than once they had refused their chance at freedom. Not everyone was willing to embrace liberty; liberty required not just effort, but risk. Some people chose to delude themselves and see their chains as protective armor.
Nicci had once been in servitude to the Fellowship of Order, the Sisters of the Light, and then the Sisters of the Dark, and finally to Jagang. She no longer was; she had instead embraced Richard's love of life. Her steadfast loyalty to him and what he believed in had freed her from the clutches of the dream walker, but far more than that, it had freed her from the yoke of servitude she had worn her whole life. Her life was now hers alone. He thought that maybe that might have something to do with the resolute nobility of her bearing.
«I didn't read the whole letter,» Richard admitted. «Before I was able to finish it, we were attacked by men that Nicholas had sent to capture us. I told you about it before-that was when Sabar was killed. During that fight the letter fell into the fire.»
Nicci slouched back. «Dear spirits,» she murmured. «I thought you knew.»
Richard was tired and at the end of his patience. «Knew what?»
Nicci let her arms slip to her sides. She looked up at him in the dim light and let out a frazzled sigh.
«Jagang found a way for the Sisters of the Dark he holds captive to use their ability to begin creating weapons out of people, as had been done during the great war. In many ways, he is a brilliant man. He makes it his business to learn. He collects books from the places he sacks. I've seen some of those books. Among all sorts of tomes, he has ancient handbooks of magic from around the time of the great war.
«The problem is, while he may be a dream walker and brilliant in certain areas, he does not have the gift and so his understanding of it, of exactly what Han is and how this force of life functions, is crude at best. It's not easy for one without magic to comprehend such things. You have the gift and yet even you don't really understand it or know very much about how it works. But because Jagang doesn't know how to work magic, he blunders around demanding that things be done simply because he has dreamed them up, because he is the great emperor and he wishes his visions to be brought to life.»
Richard rubbed his fingers back and forth on his brow, rolling off the dirt. «Don't sell him short in that regard. It's possible that he knows more about what he's doing than you realize.»
«What do you mean?»
«I may not know a lot about the subject of magic, but one of the things I have learned is that magic can also be thought of much like an art form. Through artistic expression-for lack of a better term-magic that has never been before can be created.»
Nicci stared in astonished disbelief. «Richard, I don't know where you could have heard such a thing, but it just doesn't work that way.»
«I know, I know. Kahlan thinks I'm out on a limb with this, too. Having been raised around wizards, she knows a lot about magic and in the past she has flatly insisted that I'm wrong. But I'm not. I've done it before. Using the gift in such a way, in new and original ways, got me out of what would otherwise have been unbreakable traps.»
Nicci was peering at him in that analytical way of hers. He suddenly realized why. It wasn't only what he'd said about magic. He was talking about Kahlan again. The woman who did not exist, the woman he had dreamed. Cara's expression betrayed her mute concern.
«Anyway,» Richard said, getting back to the crux of the matter, «just because Jagang doesn't have the gift, doesn't mean he can't still dream up things-dream up nightmares-like Nicholas. It is through such original conceptualization that the most deadly things, for which there may be no conventional counter, are created. I suspect that this may have been the method those wizards in ancient times used for creating weapons out of people in the first place.»
Nicci was beside herself with bottled agitation.
«Richard, magic just doesn't work like that. You can't dream up whatever you'd like to have, wish for what you want. Magic functions by the laws of its nature, just like all other things in the world. Whim will not make boards out of trees; you must cut the tree to the desired form. If you want a house, you can't wish up bricks and boards to stack themselves into a dwelling; you must use your hands to craft the structure.»
Richard leaned toward the sorceress. «Yes, but it's the human imagination that makes those concrete actions not just possible, but effective. Most builders think in terms of houses or barns; they do what's been done before simply because that was what was done before. Much of the time they don't want to think, so they never envision anything more. They limit themselves to repetition and as an excuse they insist that it must be done that way because it has always been done that way. Most magic is like that-the gifted simply repeating what has already been done before, believing that it must be done that way with no more justification than that it has always been done that way.
«Before a grand palace can be built, it first has to be imagined by someone bold enough to have a vision of what could be. A palace will not spontaneously spring forth to the surprise of all while men are attempting to build a barn. Only the conscious act of conceptualization can bring about the reality.
«For that act of creative imagination to bring about the existence of a palace, it cannot violate any of the laws of the nature of the things that are used. On the contrary, the person who imagines a grand palace with the goal of seeing it built must be intimately aware of the nature of all the things he will use in the construction. If he isn't, the palace will fall down. He must know the nature of the materials better than the man who uses them to build a simple barn. It's not a matter of wishing for something that transcends the laws of nature, but a matter of original thinking based on those laws of nature.
«I grew up in the woods around Hartland, never having seen a palace.» Richard spread his arms, as if to show her the things he had seen since leaving his homeland. «Until I saw the castle at Tamarang, the Wizard's Keep and the Confessors' Palace in Aydindril, or the People's Palace in D'Hara, I never imagined that such places existed-or even that they could exist. They were beyond the scope of my thinking at the time.
«And yet, even though I never imagined that such places could be built, other men thought them up, and they were built. I think that one of the important functions of grand creations is that they inspire people.»
Nicci appeared not only to be swept up in his explanation, but to be considering his words with serious interest. «Do you mean to say, then, that you think an art form can also shape such important things as the function of magic?»
Richard smiled. «Nicci, you could not grasp the importance of life until I carved the statue back in Altur'Rang. When you saw the concept in tangible form you were able at last to put together all the things you had learned throughout your life and finally grasp its meaning. An artistic creation touched your soul. That's what I mean about an important function of great works is that they inspire people.
«Because it inspired you with the beauty of life, with the nobility of man, you acted to become free-something you had never thought was possible. Because the people of Altur'Rang as well could see in that statue what could and should be, they were stirred to stand up to the tyranny crushing their lives. It was not accomplished by copying other statues, by doing what was the accepted norm for statues in the Old World of showing man as weak and ineffective, but by an idea of beauty, a vision of nobility, that shaped what I carved.
«I didn't violate the nature of the marble I used, but rather I used the nature of the stone to accomplish something different than what others routinely did with it. I studied the properties of stone, I learned how to work it, and I sought to understand what more I could do with it in order to bring about my objective. I had Victor make me the finest tools that would enable me to do the work in the way it needed to be done. In that way I brought to reality what I wanted to create, what had never been before.
«I think that magic can work this way as well. I believe that such original ideas played a part in how weapons were once created out of people. After all, when such weapons were made, they were effective in large part because they were original, because they had never been thought of or seen before. In many instances, the other side in the war then had to work to create entirely new things out of magic that were able to counter those weapons. In many cases they were able to render the weapon obsolete by creating a countermagic, and then someone on the other side immediately went to work thinking up some new horror. If using magic creatively was not possible, then how did the wizards of old create weapons with it? You can't say they simply got the knowledge from a book, or from past experience; where and how would the first such weapons have originated if not with an original idea? Someone had to have used magic creatively in the first place.
«I think that Jagang is again doing this very thing with magic. He has studied some of what was done in the great war, what weapons were created, and learned from that. He sometimes may direct that what was once created to be created again, such as with Nicholas, but in other instances I think he imagines what has never been, what goes beyond what has been done before, and has it brought to reality by those who know how to use magic to build what he wants.
«In these acts of creation it isn't the work that is the most remarkable aspect, but the idea and vision that makes the labor effective, just as carpenters and bricklayers who built houses and barns can be employed to construct a palace. It wasn't so much their labor that was remarkable in the creation of palaces, but the act of insight and creation that gave it direction.»
Nicci nodded ever so slightly in concentration as she weighed his words. «I can see that your notion isn't at all the wild idea I thought it was at first. This is a line of reasoning that I've never encountered. I'll have to think about the possibilities. You may be the first to really understand the mechanism behind Jagang's scheme-or, for that matter, behind the creations of wizards in ancient times. This would explain a great many things that have nagged at me over the years.»