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the appropriate ability and authority granted by spells keyed to the
particular defenses in that area, such as metal plates that had to be
touched by an authorized wizard, the shields killed whatever entered them.
The shields killed animals as infallibly, as effectively, as they would kill
any intruder.
Such dangerous shields gave warnings of heat, light, or tingling as a
warning so as to prevent people from unintentionally going near them--after
all, with the size of the place, it was easy enough to become lost. Such
warnings worked for the animals, too, but occasionally a cat chased a
panicked mouse into a lethal shield, and sometimes the cat, racing after,
would run right into it as well.
As Zedd waited, listening, the silence stretched on, unbroken. If he
really had heard something, it could have been the Keep moving, or an animal
squeaking when it approached a shield, or even a gust of wind coming through
one of the hundreds of openings. Whatever it was, it was silent, now. The
wooden spoonful of stew finally completed its journey.
"Umm ..." Zedd declared to no one in particular. "Good!"
To his great disappointment when he'd first tasted it, he had found
that the stew wasn't done. Rather than hurry the process with a bit of
magic, and possibly incur Adie's wrath for meddling with her cooking, Zedd
had sat down on the couch and resigned himself to doing a bit of reading.
There was no end to the reading. Books offered the potential of
valuable information that could aid them in ways they couldn't foretell.
From time to time, as he read, he checked the progress of the stew, rather
patiently, he thought.
Now, as he tasted it, it finally seemed to be done. The chunks of ham
were so tender they would fall apart when his tongue pressed them to the
roof of his mouth. The whole delightfully bubbling pot had taken on the
heady melding of onions and oils, carrots and turnips, a hint of garlic and
a dizzying swirl of complementary spices, all crowded with nuggets of ham,
some still with crisp fat along one edge.
To his great annoyance, Zedd had long ago noticed that Adie hadn't made
any biscuits. Stew went well with biscuits. There should be biscuits. He
decided that a bowl of stew would hold him until she returned and made some.
There should be biscuits. It was only right.
He didn't know where Adie had gone. Since he had been down in Aydindril
most of the day, he reasoned that she had probably gone off to one of the
libraries to search through books for anything that might be of help. She
was a great help ferreting potentially relevant books out of the libraries.
Being from Nicobarese, Adie sought out books in that language. There were
books all over the Keep, so there was no telling where she was.
There were also storerooms filled with racks and racks of bones. Other
rooms contained rows of tall cabinets, each with hundreds of drawers. Zedd
had seen bones of creatures there that he had never seen in life. Adie was
an expert of sorts on bones. She had lived for a good portion of her life in
seclusion in the shadow of the boundary. People living in the area had been
afraid of her; they called her the bone woman because she collected bones.
They had been everywhere in her house. Some of those bones protected her
from the beasts that came out of the boundary.
Zedd sighed. Books or bones, there was no telling where she was.
Besides that, there were any number of other things in the Wizard's Keep
that would be of great interest to a sorceress. She might even have simply
wanted to go for a walk, or up on a rampart to gaze at the stars and think.
It was much easier to wait for her to come back to her stew than for
him to go looking for her. Maybe he should have put one of the bells around
her neck.
Zedd hummed a merry tune to himself as he spooned stew into a wooden
bowl. No use waiting on an empty stomach, he always said; that only made a
person grouchy. It was really better to have a snack and be in good humor
than to wait and be miserable. He would only be bad company if he was
miserable.
On the eighth spoon of stew into the bowl, he heard a sound.
His hand froze above the bubbling pot.
Zedd thought he'd heard a bell tinkle.
Zedd wasn't given to flights of imagination or to being unreasonably
jumpy, but a cold shiver tingled across his flesh as if he'd been touched by
the icy fingers of a spirit reaching out from another world. He stood
motionless, partly bent toward the pot in the fire, partly turned toward the
hall, listening.
It could be a cat. Maybe he hadn't tied the thin cord high enough and
as a cat went under the line its tail had swished up and rung the bell.
Maybe a cat was being mischievous and as it sat on its haunches, tail
swishing back and forth, it had batted a bell. It could be a cat.
Or maybe a bird had landed on the line to roost for the night. A person
couldn't get past the shields in order to trip a belled cord. Zedd had
placed extra shields. It had to be an animal--a cat, or a bird.
If so, if no one could get past the regular shields and the extras he
had placed, then why had he strung bells?
Despite the likely explanations, his hair was trying to stand on end.
He didn't like the way the bell had rung; there was something about the
character of the sound that told him it wasn't an animal. The sound had been
too firm, too abrupt, too quick to stop.
He realized fully, now, that a bell had in fact rung. He wasn't
imagining it. He tried to re-create the sound in his mind so that he might
be able to put shape to the form that had tripped the cord.
Zedd silently set the bowl down on the side of the granite hearth. He
rose up, listening with an ear turned toward the passage from where he had
heard the bell. His mind raced through a map of all the bells he'd placed.
He needed to be sure.
He slipped through the door and into the passageway, the back of his
shoulder brushing the plastered wall as he moved down to the first
intersection on his right, watching not just ahead but behind as well.
Nothing moved in the hallway ahead. He paused, leaning ahead to take a quick
glance down the hall to the right. When he found it clear, he took the turn.
Zedd moved quickly past closed doors, past a tapestry of vineyards that
he had always thought was rather poorly executed, past an empty doorway to a
room with a window that looked out over a deep shaft between towers on a
high rampart, and past three more intersections until he reached the first
stairway. He swept around the corner to the right, up the stairs that curved
around to the left as they climbed up and crossed over the hall he'd just
been in. In this way he could head back toward a network of halls where he'd
placed a web of bells without using those same halls.
Zedd followed a mental map of a complex tangle of passages, halls,
rooms, and dead ends that, over a lifetime, he had come to know intimately.
Being First Wizard, he had access to every place in the Keep except those
places that required Subtractive Magic. There were a few places where he
could get confused, but this was not one of them.
He knew that unless someone was following in his footsteps, they would
have to either go back or pass a place where he had set traps of elaborate
magic as well as simple string. Then, if they didn't see the cord, they
would ring another bell. Then he would be sure.
Maybe it was Adie. Maybe she simply hadn't seen the inky cord stretched
across a doorway. Maybe she had been annoyed that he'd strung bells and
maybe she'd rung one just to vex him.
No, Adie wasn't like that. She might shake her finger at him and
deliver a scathing lecture on why she didn't agree with him that stringing
bells was an effective thing to do, but she wouldn't pull a trick about
something she would recognize as intended to warn of danger. No, Adie might
possibly have accidentally rung the bell, but she wouldn't have rung it
deliberately.
Another bell rang. Zedd spun to the sound and then froze.
The bell had come from the wrong direction--from where he'd set a bell
on the other side of a conservatory. It was too far from the first for
anyone to have made it this soon. They would have had to go up a tower
stairway, across a bridge to a rampart, along a narrow walkway in the dark,
past several intersections to the correct turn that would descend a spiral
ramp and make it down through a snarl of passageways in order to break the
cord.
Unless there was more than one person.
The bell had chimed with a quick jerk and then clattered as it
skittered across stone. It had to be a person tripping over the cord and
sending the bell skipping across the stone floor.
Zedd changed his plan. He turned and raced down a narrow passageway to
the left, climbing the first stairwell, running up the oak treads three at a
time. He took the right fork at the landing, raced to the second circular
stairwell of cut stone and climbed as fast as his legs would carry him. His
foot slipped on the narrow wedges of spiraling steps and he banged his shin.
He paused to wince only for a second. He used the time to consult his mental
map of the Keep, and then he was moving again.
At the top, he dashed down a short paneled hall, sliding to a stop on
the polished maple floor. He shouldered open a small, round-topped oak door.
A starry sky greeted him. He sucked deep draughts of cool night air as he
raced along the narrow rampart. He paused twice along the way to peer down
through the slots in the crenellated battlements. He didn't see anyone. That
was a good sign--he knew where they had to be if they weren't moving by an
outer route.
He ran on across the swaying span between towers, robes flying behind,
crossing over the entire section of the Keep where both bells had rung far
below, going over the top of the area in order to get behind whoever had
tripped the cords. While they had tripped bells on opposite sides of the
conservatory, they had to have come in through the same wing--he knew that
much. He wanted to get behind them, bottle them in before they could get to
an unprotected section where they would encounter a bewildering variety of
passageways. If they were to make it there and hide in that area, he could
have a time of rooting them out.
His mind raced as fast as his feet as he tried to think, tried to
recall all the shields, tried to figure how someone could have gotten past
the defenses to get to that specific wing where the bells that had rung were
placed. There were shields that should have made it impossible. He had to
consider thousands of corridors and passageways in the Keep, trying to come
up with all the potential routes. It was like a complex multilevel puzzle,
and despite how thorough he'd been, it was possible he'd missed something.
He had to have missed something.
There were rooms or even entire sections that were shielded and could
not be entered, but often they could be circumvented. Even if a hall was
shielded at both ends, so as to prevent anyone from getting to the rooms in
that hall, you could still usually get around to the other end of the hall
and make your way to whatever lay beyond. That was deliberate; while the
rooms might have held dangerous items of magic that had to be kept
contained, there needed to be ways to get to them, and get beyond to other
rooms that might, from time to time, also have to be restricted. Most of the
Keep was like that--a three-dimensional maze with almost endless possible
routes.
For the unwary, it could also be a killing field of traps. There were
places layered with warning barriers and other devices that would keep any
innocent person away. Beyond those protective layers, the shields gave no
warning before they killed. Trespassers would not know there were shields
embedded beyond, and that they were stepping into a trap. Such shields were
designed that way in order to kill invaders who penetrated that deep; the
lack of warning was deliberate.
Zedd supposed it was possible for someone to bypass all the shields and
work their way into the depths of the place in order to ring those
particular bells, but for the life of him, he couldn't trace all the steps
necessary. But whoever it was, no matter how lucky they were, they would
soon get themselves stuck in the labyrinth and then, if they weren't killed
by a shield, he could deal with them.
Zedd gazed out past towers, ramparts, bridges, and open stairs to rooms
projecting from soaring walls, out on the city of Aydindril far below, now
all dark and dead-looking. How had someone gotten past the stone bridge up
to the Keep?
A Sister of the Dark, maybe. Maybe one of them had figured out how to
use Subtract!ve Magic to take his shield down. But even if one had, the
shields in the Keep were different. Most of them had been placed by the
wizards in ancient times, wizards with both sides of the gift. A Sister of
the Dark would not be able to breach such shields-- they had been designed
to withstand enemy wizards of that time. They were far more powerful than
any mere Sister of the Dark.
And where was Adie? She should have been back. He wished now that he
had gone and found her. She needed to know that there was someone in the
Keep. Unless she already knew. Unless they had her.
Zedd turned and raced down the rampart. At the projecting bastion, he
seized the railing to the side to halt his forward rush and spin himself
around the corner. He raced down the dark steps as if he were running down a
hill.
With his gift, he could sense that there was no one in the vicinity.
Since there was no one near, that meant that he had managed to get behind
them. He had them trapped.
At the bottom of the steps he threw open the door and flew into the
hallway beyond.
He crashed into a man standing there, waiting.
Zedd's momentum knocked the big man from his feet. They fell in a
tangle, sliding together along the polished green and yellow marble floor,
both grappling for control.
Zedd could not have been more surprised. His gifted sense told him the
man was not there. His gifted sense was obviously wrong. The disorientation
of encountering a man when he had sensed that the hall was empty was more
jarring than the headlong tumble.
Even as he was rolling, Zedd was casting webs to tangle the man in a
snare of magic. The man, in turn, lunged to tangle Zedd in meaty arms.
In desperation, despite the close range, Zedd pulled enough heat from
the surrounding air to unleash a thunderous blast of lightning and cast it
directly into the man. The blinding flash burned a lacing line through the
stone block wall beyond him.
Only too late did Zedd realize that the discharge of deadly power had
lanced through the man without effect. The hall filled with shards of stone
whistling about, ricocheting from walls and ceiling, skipping along the
floor.
The man landed on Zedd, driving the wind from him. Desperately yelling
for help, the man wrestled Zedd on the slippery floor. Zedd concocted a weak
and fumbling defense, to give the man a false sense of confidence, until he
was able to suddenly land a knee sharply at the point of his attacker's
sternum. The man cried out in surprise as much as in pain as he flipped
backward off Zedd, gasping to get his wind back.
Having sucked so much heat from the air had left it as frigid as a
winter night. Clouds of their breath filled the cold air as both men panted
with the effort of the struggle. The man again cried out for help, hoping to
bring comrades to his aid.
Zedd would assume that anyone would fear to attack a wizard by muscle
alone. This man, though, had no need to fear magic. Even if he hadn't known
that before, certainly the evidence was now all too clear. Yet, despite the
man being at least twice the size of his opponent, less than a third his
age, and having immunity from the conjuring being thrown at him, Zedd
thought that he fought rather... squeamishly.
However timid the man was, he was determined. He scrambled to attack
again. If he broke Zedd's neck, it wouldn't matter that he did so timidly.
As the man regained his feet and lunged, Zedd drew back his arms,
elbows cocked, fingers spread, and cast more of the lightning, but this time
he knew better than to waste his effort trying to cut down a man not touched
by magic. Instead, Zedd sought to rake the floor with the conjured bolts of
power. It slammed into the stone with unrestrained violence, ripping and
splintering whole sections, throwing sharp jagged shards streaking through
the air.
A fist-sized block of stone hurtling at tremendous speed crashed into
the man's shoulder. Above the boom of thunderous power, Zedd heard bones
snap. The impact spun the man around and knocked him back against the wall.
Since Zedd now knew that this intruder could not directly be harmed by
magic, he instead filled the hall with a deafening storm of magic designed
not to assail the man directly but to tear the place apart into a cloud of
deadly flying fragments.
The man, as he recoiled from striking the wall, again threw himself at
Zedd. He was met by a shower of deadly shards whistling through the air
toward him. Blood splattered across the wall beyond as the man was ripped to
shreds. In a blink, he was killed and dropped heavily to the floor.
From beyond the smoke and dust filling the hall, two more men suddenly
flew at Zedd. His gifted sense told him that, like the first man, these men
were not there, either.
Zedd threw yet more lightning to rip up the floor and unleash flying
stone at the men, but they were already through the flares of power, diving
onto him. He crashed to his back, the men atop him. They seized his arms.
Zedd struggled frantically to let loose a blast to bring down the
ceiling. He began to whirl the air above the men to tear the hall to pieces,
and them with it.
A beefy hand with a filthy white rag clamped down over Zedd's face. He
gasped, only to inhale a powerful smell that made his throat want to clench
shut, but too late.
With the cloth and the big hand covering his whole face, Zedd couldn't
see. The world spun sickeningly.
Soft, silent blackness pressed in around him as he fought to resist it,
until he lost consciousness.
Zedd woke, his head spinning, his stomach heaving with rippling waves
of nausea. He didn't think that in his entire life he had ever felt so sick.
He hadn't known it was possible to feel so intense an urge to vomit, without
actually throwing up. He couldn't lift his head. If he could just die right
then, it would be a welcome release from such dizzying agony.
He started to put his hands over the light hurting his eyes, but found
his wrists were tied behind his back.
"I think he's waking," a man said in a subservient voice.
Despite his nausea, Zedd instinctively tried to use his gift to sense
how many people were around him. For some reason, his gift that ordinarily
flowed as easily as thought, as simply as using his eyes to see, his ears to
hear, felt thick and slow, as if mired in molasses. He reasoned that it was
probably the result of whatever vile substance it was they had soaked the
rag in to cause him to pass out when held over his face. Still, he managed
to sense that there was only one person around him.
Powerful hands seized his robes and yanked him to his feet. Zedd gave
himself permission to vomit. Against all expectation, it didn't happen. The
dark night swam before his blurred vision. He could make out trees against
the sky, stars, and the looming black shape of the Keep.
Suddenly, a tongue of flame ignited in midair. Zedd blinked at the
unexpected brightness. The small flame, wavering with a lazy motion, floated
above the upturned palm of a woman with wiry gray hair. Zedd saw other
people in the shadows; his gifted sense was wrong. Like the man who had
attacked him, these, too, had to be people not affected by magic.
The woman standing before him peered at him intently. Her expression
twisted with satisfied loathing.
"Well, well, well," she said with patronizing delight. "The great
wizard himself awakes."
Zedd said nothing. It seemed to amuse her. Her fearsome scowl and
humped nose, lit from the side by the flame she held above her palm, floated
closer.
"You are ours, now," she hissed.
Zedd, having waited patiently to gather his resolve, abruptly initiated
the required mental twist to the gift all the way down to his soul in order
to simultaneously call down lightning, focus air to slice this woman in two,
and gather every stone and pebble from all around to crush her under an
avalanche of rock. He expected the night to light with such power as he
unlocked and sent forth.
Nothing happened.
Not waiting to waste the time to analyze what could be the difficulty,
he was forced to abandon attempts at satisfying his emotional preferences,
and to ignite wizard's fire itself to consume her.
Nothing happened.
Not only did nothing happen, but it felt as if the attempt itself were
but a pebble falling endlessly into a vast, dark well. The expectation
withered in the face of what he found within himself: a kind of dreadful
emptiness.
Zedd felt as if he couldn't light a tongue of flame to match hers if
his life depended on it. He was somehow cut off from forming his ability
into much of anything useful other than to use it for a bit of dim
awareness. Probably a lingering result of the foul-smelling substance they
had pressed over his face to make him lose consciousness.
Since Zedd couldn't muster any power, he did the only thing he could:
he spit in her face.
With lightning speed, she backhanded him, knocking him from the arms of
the men holding him. Unable to use his hands to break his fall, he hit the
ground unexpectedly hard. He lay in the dirt for a time, his ears ringing in
the aftereffect of the hit he'd taken, waiting for someone to lean over and
kill him.
Instead, they hauled him to his feet again. One of the men seized his
hair and pulled his head up, forcing him to look into the woman's face. The
scowl he saw there looked like it spent a great deal of time on her face.
She spit in his face.
Zedd smiled. "So, here we have a spoiled child playing the game of tit
for tat."
Zedd grunted with the sudden shock of a wallop of pain that twisted
inside of his abdomen. Had the men not been holding him under his arms he
would have doubled over and fallen to the ground. He wasn't quite sure how
she had done it--probably with a fist of air delivered with all the power of
her gift behind it. She had left the gathered air loosely formed, rather
than focusing it to a sharp edge, or it would have torn him in two. As it
was, he knew it would leave his middle black and blue.
It was a long and desperate wait before he was able to at last draw a
breath.
The men who his gift said weren't there pulled him straight.
"I'm disappointed to discover I'm in the hands of a sorceress who can
be no more inventive than that," Zedd mocked.
That brought a smile to her scowl. "Don't you worry, Wizard Zo-rander,
His Excellency very much wants your scrawny hide. He will be playing a game
of tit for tat that I believe you will find quite inventive. I have learned
that when it comes to inventive cruelty, His Excellency is peerless. I'm
sure he will not disappoint you."
"Then what are we standing around for? I can't wait to have a word with
His Excellency."
As the men held his head back for her, she ran a fingernail down the
side of his face and across his throat, not hard enough to draw blood, but
enough to hint at her own restrained cruelty. She leaned in again. One
eyebrow lifted in a way that ran a chill up Zedd's spine.
"I imagine you have grand ideas about such a visit, about what you
think you will do or say." She reached out and hooked a finger around
something at his neck. When she gave it a firm tug, he realized that he was
wearing a collar of some sort. By the way it dug into the flesh at the back
of his neck, it had to be metal.
"Guess what this is," she said. "Just guess."
Zedd sighed. "You really are a tedious woman. But I imagine you've
heard that ofttimes before."
She ignored his gibe, eager to be the messenger of bad news. Her
scowling smile widened. "It's a Rada'Han."
Zedd's sense of alarm rose, but he kept any trace of it from his face.
"Really." He paused for an extended, bored yawn. "Well, I'd not expect
a woman of your limited intellect to think up something clever."
She slammed a knee into his groin. Zedd doubled over in pain, unable to
contain his groan. He hadn't been expecting something so crude.
The men pulled him up straight, not allowing him pause to recover.
Being pulled up straight brought a gasp of agony. His teeth were clenched,
his eyes were watering, and his knees wanted to buckle, but the men held him
upright.
Her smile was getting annoying. "You see, Wizard Zorander? Being clever
isn't necessary at all."
Zedd saw her point but didn't say so.
He was already preparing to unlock the cursed collar from his neck.
He'd been "captured" before--by the Prelate herself--and had had a Rada'Han
put around his neck, like some boy born with the gift who needed training.
The Sisters of the Light put such a collar around those boys so that the
gift wouldn't harm them before they could learn to control their gift.
Richard had been captured and put in such a Rada'Han right after his gift
came to life in him.
The collar was also used to control the young wizard wearing it, to
give pain, when the Sisters thought it necessary. Zedd understood the
Prelate's reasons for wanting Richard's help, since they knew he had been
born with both sides of the gift, and, too, they worried about the dark
forces that pursued him, but he could never forgive her for putting Richard
in a collar. A wizard needed to be trained by a wizard, not some misguided
gaggle like the Sisters of the Light.
The Prelate, though, had harbored no delusion of actually training
Richard to be a wizard. She had collared him in order to smoke out the
traitors among her flock: the Sisters of the Dark.
Unlike Richard, though, Zedd knew how to get such a disgusting
contrivance off his neck. In fact, he had done it before, when the Prelate
had thought to collar him and thus force his cooperation.
Zedd used a thread of power to probe at the lock, not overtly, so as
this woman might notice it, but just enough to find the twist in the spell
where he would be able to focus his ability to snap the conjured lock.
When the time was right, when he had his feet solidly under him, when
his head stopped spinning long enough, he would break the collar's hold. In
that same instant, before she knew what had happened, he would release
wizard's fire and incinerate this woman.
She hooked a finger under the collar again and gave it another tug.
"The thing is, my dear wizard, I would expect that a man of your
renowned talent might know how to get such a device off."
"Really? I'm renowned?" Zedd flashed her a grin. "That's very
gratifying."
Her utter contempt brought her a smile of pure disdain. With her finger
through the collar she pulled him close to her twisted expression. She
ignored his words and went on.
"Since His Excellency would be extremely displeased should you get the
collar off, I've taken measures to insure that such a thing would not
happen. I used Subtractive Magic to weld it on."
Now, that was a problem.
She nodded to the men. Zedd glanced to them at each side and noticed
for the first time that their eyes were wet. It shocked him to realize they
were weeping.
Weeping or not, they followed her orders, unceremoniously lifting him
and heaving him in the back of a wagon as if he were firewood.
Zedd landed beside someone else.
"Glad to see you be alive, old man," a soft voice rasped.It was Adie.
The side of her face was swollen and bleeding. It looked like they'd clubbed
her nearly to death. Her wrists were tied behind her back as well. He saw,
too, tears on her cheeks.
It broke his heart to see her hurt. "Adie, what did they do to you?"
She smiled. "Not as much as they intend to, I fear."
In the dim light of a lantern, Zedd could see that she, too, wore one
of the awful collars.
"Your stew was excellent," he said.
Adie groaned. "Please, old man, do not mention food to me right now."
Zedd cautiously turned his head and saw more men waiting in the
darkness off to the side. They had been behind him, so he hadn't noticed
them before. His gift had not told him they were there.
"I think we're in a great deal of trouble," he whispered to no one in
particular.
"Really?" Adie rasped. "What be your first clue?"
Zedd knew she was only trying to make him smile, but he could not even
manage a small one.
"I be sorry, Zedd."
He nodded, as best he could lying on his side with his wrists bound
behind his back. "I thought I was so clever, laying every kind of trap I
could think of. Unfortunately, such traps didn't work for those who are not
affected by magic."
"You could not know of such a thing," Adie said in a comforting tone.
His mood sank into bitter regret. "I should have taken it into account
after we encountered that one down at the Confessors' Palace, in the spring.
I should have realized the danger." He stared off into the darkness. "I
served our cause no better than a fool."
"But where did all of them come from?" She looked on the verge of
losing herself to panic. "I have never encountered a single such person in
my entire life, and now there be a whole gang of them standing there."
Zedd hated to see Adie so distraught. Adie only knew there were a
number of them by the telltale sounds they made. At least he could see the
men with his eyes, if not his gift.
The men stood around, heads hanging, waiting to be commanded.
They didn't look pleased by what was happening. They all looked young,
in their twenties. Some were crying. It seemed strange to see such big men
weeping. Zedd almost regretted killing one of them. Almost.
"You three," the woman growled to more of the men waiting in the
shadows as she lifted another lantern from one of them and sent the flame
she held into it, "get in there and start the search."
Adie's completely white eyes turned to Zedd, her expression grave.
"Sister of the Dark," she whispered.
And now they had the Keep.
And just how can you be sure that it was a Sister of the Dark you saw?"
Verna asked, absently, as she dipped her pen again.
She scrawled her initials at the bottom of the request for a Sister to
travel to a town down south to see to a local sorceress's plans for a
defense of their area. Even in the field, the paperwork of the office of the
Prelate seemed to have chased after and found her. Their palace had been
destroyed, the prophet himself was at large and the real Prelate was off
alone chasing after him, some of the Sisters of the Light had pledged their
souls to the Keeper of the underworld and in so doing had brought the Keeper
a step closer to having them all in the dark forever of eternity, a good
number of the Sisters--both Sisters of the Light and Sisters of the
Dark--were in the cruel hands of the enemy and doing his bidding, the
barrier separating the Old and New World was down, the whole world had been
turned upside down, the only man--Richard Rahl--whom prophecy named as
having a chance of defeating the threat of the Imperial Order was off
who-knew-where doing who-knew-what, and yet, the paperwork managed to
survive it all and persist to vex her.
Some of Verna's assistants handled the paperwork and the requests, but,
as much as she disliked dealing with such tedious matters, Verna felt a
sense of duty to keep an eye on it all. Besides, as much as paperwork vexed
her, it also occupied her mind, preventing her from dwelling on the
might-have-been.
"After all," Verna added, "it could just as easily have been a Sister
of the Light. Jagang uses both for their ability with magic. You can't
really be sure it was a Sister of the Dark. He's been sending Sisters to
accompany his scouts all winter and spring."
The Mord-Sith placed her knuckles on the small desk and leaned in. "I'm
telling you, Prelate, it was a Sister of the Dark."
Verna saw no point in arguing, since it mattered little, so she didn't.
"If you say so, Rikka."
Verna turned over the paper to the next in the stack, a request for a
Sister to come and speak to children on the calling of the Sisters of the
Light, with a lecture on why the Creator would be against the ways of the
Imperial Order and on their side. Verna smiled to herself, imagining how
Zedd would fume at the very idea of a Sister, in the New World, lecturing
her views on such a subject.
Rikka withdrew her knuckles from the desk. "I thought you might say as
much."
"Well, there you go, then," Verna mumbled as she read the next message
from the Sisters of the Light to the south reporting on the passes through
the mountains and the methods that had been used to seal them off.
"Wait right here," Rikka growled before flying out of the tent.
"I'm not going anywhere," Verna said with a sigh as she scanned the
written account, but the fiery, blond-headed woman was already gone.
Verna heard a commotion outside the tent. Rikka was delivering a
scathing lecture to someone. The Mord-Sith was incorrigible. That was
probably why, despite everything, Verna liked her.
Since Warren had died, Verna's heart was no longer in much of anything,
though. She did as she had to, did her duty, but she couldn't make herself
feel anything but despair. The man she loved, the man she had married, the
most wonderful man in the world... was gone.
Nothing much mattered after that.
Verna tried to do her part, to do as was needed, because so many people
depended on her, but, if truth be told, the reason she worked herself nearly
to death was to try to keep her mind occupied, to think of something else,
anything else, except Warren. It didn't really work, but she kept at it. She
knew that people counted on her, but she just couldn't make herself truly
care.
Warren was gone. Life was empty of what mattered most to her. That was
the end of it, the end of her caring about much of anything.
Verna idly pulled her journey book from her belt. She didn't know what
made her do so, except perhaps that it had been some time since she had last
looked for a message from the real Prelate. Ann was having her own crisis of
caring ever since Kahlan had laid the blame for so much of what had gone
wrong, including being the cause of the war itself, right at the Prelate's
feet. Verna thought that Kahlan had been wrong about much of it, but she
understood all too well why she thought that Ann had been responsible for
tangling up their lives; Verna had felt the same way for a time.
Holding the journey book off to the side with one hand, flipping the
pages with a thumb, Verna saw a message flash by.
Rikka swept back into the tent. She plunked a heavy sack down on
Verna's desk, right on top of the reports.
"Here!" Rikka said, fury powering her voice.
It was then, when Verna looked up, that she saw for the first time the
strange way Rikka was dressed. Verna's mouth fell open. Rikka was not
wearing the skintight red leather that the Mord-Sith typically wore, except
for occasionally when they were relaxing and then they sometimes wore brown
leather, instead. Verna had never seen the woman in anything other than
those leather outfits.
Now Rikka had on a dress.
Verna could not remember being so astonished.
Not just a dress, but a pink dress that no decent woman of Rikka's age,
probably her late twenties or early thirties, would be caught dead in. The
neckline plunged down to reveal ample cleavage. The twin mounds of exposed
flesh were shoved up and nearly spilling out the top. Verna was amazed that
Rikka's nipples had managed to remain covered, what with the way her breasts
heaved with her heated breathing.
"You, too?" Rikka snapped.
Verna finally looked up into Rikka's blazing blue eyes. "Me, too,
what?"
"You, too, can't get enough of looking at my chest?"
Verna felt her face go scarlet. She gave her red face an excuse by
shaking a finger at the woman.
"What are you doing dressed like that in an army camp! Around all these
soldiers! You look like a whore!"
Despite how their leather outfits went all the way up to their necks,
the tight leather left little to the imagination. Seeing the woman's flesh,
though, was altogether different, and quite shocking.
Verna realized, only then, because she had finally looked up at the
woman's face, that Rikka's single braid was undone. Her long blond hair was
as free as a horse's mane. Verna had never seen one of the Mord-Sith out in
public without her hair done up in the single braid that in large part
identified their profession of Mord-Sith.
Even seeing the woman's cleavage exposed was not as shocking as seeing
her hair undone. It was that, more than anything, Verna realized, that lent
a lewd look to the woman. Something about her braid being undone seemed
sacrilegious, even though Verna could not condone a profession dedicated to
torture.
Verna remembered, then, that she had asked one of the Mord-Sith, Cara,
to do her worst to the young man--a boy, really--who had murdered Warren.
Verna had sat up the entire night listening to that young man scream his
life away. His suffering had been monstrous, and yet it had not been nearly
enough to suit her.
At times, Verna wondered if in the next life the Keeper of the
underworld would have something wholly unpleasant in store for her for all
eternity in recompense for what Verna had done. She didn't really care; it
had been worth whatever the price might be.
Besides, she decided, if she was to be punished for condemning that man
to just retribution, then the very concept of justice would have to be
invalid, rendering living a life of good or evil to have no meaning. In
fact, for the justice she had meted out to that vile amoral animal walking
the world of life in the form of a man who had murdered Warren, she should
be rewarded in the afterlife by being eternally in the warmth of the
Creator's light, along with the good spirit of Warren, or else there was no
justice.
General Meiffert swept into the tent, fists at his sides, coming to a
halt beside Rikka. He raked his blond hair back when he saw Verna sitting
behind her little desk, and cooled visibly.
He'd had the carpenters nail together the tiny desk for her out of
scrap furniture left in an abandoned farm. It was nothing like the desks at
the Palace of the Prophets, of course, but it had been given with more
concern and meaning behind it than the grandest gold-leafed desk she had
ever seen. General Meiffert had been proud at seeing how useful Verna found
it.
With a quick glance, he took in Rikka's dress and her hair. "What's
this about?"
"Well," Verna said, "I'm not sure. Something about one of Jagang's
Sisters scouting a pass."
Rikka folded her bare arms atop her nearly bare bosom. "Not just a
Sister, but a Sister of the Dark."
"Jagang has been sending Sisters scouting the passes all winter," the
young general said. "The Prelate has laid traps and shields." His level of
concern rose. "Are you telling us that one of them got through?"
"No, I'm telling you that I went hunting for them."
Verna frowned. "What are you talking about? We lost half a dozen
Mord-Sith trying that. After you found the heads of two of your sister
Mord-Sith mounted on pikes, the Mother Confessor herself ordered you to stop
throwing their lives away on such useless missions."
Rikka at last smiled. It was the kind of satisfied smile, especially
coming from a Mord-Sith, that tended to give people nightmares.
"Does this look useless?"
Rikka reached into her sack and pulled out a human head. Holding it by
the hair, she brandished it in front of Verna's face. She turned, shook it
at General Meiffert as well, and then plunked it down on the desk. Gore
oozed out over the reports.
"Like I said, a Sister of the Dark."
Verna recognized the face, even as twisted in death as it was. Rikka
was right, it was a Sister of the Dark. The question was, how did she know
it was a Sister of the Dark, and not one of the Light?
Outside Verna could hear horses clopping past her tent. Some of the
soldiers called out greetings to men returning from patrols. In the distance
could be heard conversations and men issuing orders. Hammers on steel rang
like bells as men worked hot metal into useful shapes for repairs to
equipment. Nearby, horses frisked in a corral. As men made their way past
Verna's tent, their gear jingled. Fires crackled as wood was added for the
cooks or roared as bellows pumped to turn it white-hot for the blacksmiths.
"You touched her with your Agiel?" Verna asked in a quiet voice. "Your
Agiel doesn't work effectively on those the dream walker controls."
Rikka's smile turned sly. She spread her arms. "Agiel? Do you see an
Agiel."
Verna knew that no Mord-Sith would ever let her Agiel out of her
control. With a glance to the woman's cleavage, she could only imagine where
she had it hidden.
"All right," General Meiffert said, his tone no longer indulgent. "I
want to know what's going on, and I want to know right now."
"I was down near Dobbin Pass, checking around, and what do I find but
an Imperial Order patrol."
The general nodded as he let out a frustrated sigh. "They've been
coming in that way from time to time. But how did you manage to come across
such an enemy patrol? Why hadn't one of our Sisters already snared them?"
Rikka shrugged. "Well, this patrol was still on the other side of the
pass. Back at that deserted farm." She tapped Verna's desk with her toe.
"Where you got the wood for this."
Verna twisted her mouth with displeasure. Rikka wasn't supposed to be
beyond the pass. The Mord-Sith, though, recognized no orders but those from
Lord Rahl himself. Rikka had only followed Kahlan's orders because, during
his absence, Kahlan was acting on Richard's behalf. Verna suspected that it
was simpler than that, though; she suspected that they had only followed the
Mother Confessor's orders because she was wife to Lord Rahl, and if they
didn't it would bring Lord Rahl's wrath down on them. As long as such orders
weren't viewed by the Mord-Sith as troublesome, they went along. When they
decided otherwise, they did as they wished.
"The Sister was by herself," Rikka went on, "having one
powerful-looking headache."
"Jagang," Verna said. "Jagang was issuing his order, or punishing her
for something, or giving her a lecture in her mind. He does that from time
to time. It isn't pleasant."
Rikka stroked the hair on the woman's head sitting on Verna's desk,
making a mess of the reports. "The poor thing," she mocked. "While she was
off among the pines staring at nothing while she pressed her fingers to her
temples, her men were back at the farmhouse, having their way with a couple
of young women. The two were squealing and crying and carrying on, but the
men weren't put off by it any."
Verna lowered her eyes as she let out a heavy breath. Some people had
refused to believe the necessity of fleeing before the arrival of the
Imperial Order.
Sometimes, when people refused to recognize the existence of evil, they
found themselves having to face precisely that which they had never been
willing to admit existed.
Rikka's satisfied smile returned. "I went in and took care of the brave
soldiers of the Imperial Order. They were so distracted, they paid no
attention as I snuck up behind them. The women were so terrorized that they
screamed even though I was saving them. The Sister hadn't been paying any
attention to the screaming before, and didn't then, either.
"One of the young women was blond and about my size, so an idea struck
me. I put on her dress and took out my braid, so I might be mistaken for
particular defenses in that area, such as metal plates that had to be
touched by an authorized wizard, the shields killed whatever entered them.
The shields killed animals as infallibly, as effectively, as they would kill
any intruder.
Such dangerous shields gave warnings of heat, light, or tingling as a
warning so as to prevent people from unintentionally going near them--after
all, with the size of the place, it was easy enough to become lost. Such
warnings worked for the animals, too, but occasionally a cat chased a
panicked mouse into a lethal shield, and sometimes the cat, racing after,
would run right into it as well.
As Zedd waited, listening, the silence stretched on, unbroken. If he
really had heard something, it could have been the Keep moving, or an animal
squeaking when it approached a shield, or even a gust of wind coming through
one of the hundreds of openings. Whatever it was, it was silent, now. The
wooden spoonful of stew finally completed its journey.
"Umm ..." Zedd declared to no one in particular. "Good!"
To his great disappointment when he'd first tasted it, he had found
that the stew wasn't done. Rather than hurry the process with a bit of
magic, and possibly incur Adie's wrath for meddling with her cooking, Zedd
had sat down on the couch and resigned himself to doing a bit of reading.
There was no end to the reading. Books offered the potential of
valuable information that could aid them in ways they couldn't foretell.
From time to time, as he read, he checked the progress of the stew, rather
patiently, he thought.
Now, as he tasted it, it finally seemed to be done. The chunks of ham
were so tender they would fall apart when his tongue pressed them to the
roof of his mouth. The whole delightfully bubbling pot had taken on the
heady melding of onions and oils, carrots and turnips, a hint of garlic and
a dizzying swirl of complementary spices, all crowded with nuggets of ham,
some still with crisp fat along one edge.
To his great annoyance, Zedd had long ago noticed that Adie hadn't made
any biscuits. Stew went well with biscuits. There should be biscuits. He
decided that a bowl of stew would hold him until she returned and made some.
There should be biscuits. It was only right.
He didn't know where Adie had gone. Since he had been down in Aydindril
most of the day, he reasoned that she had probably gone off to one of the
libraries to search through books for anything that might be of help. She
was a great help ferreting potentially relevant books out of the libraries.
Being from Nicobarese, Adie sought out books in that language. There were
books all over the Keep, so there was no telling where she was.
There were also storerooms filled with racks and racks of bones. Other
rooms contained rows of tall cabinets, each with hundreds of drawers. Zedd
had seen bones of creatures there that he had never seen in life. Adie was
an expert of sorts on bones. She had lived for a good portion of her life in
seclusion in the shadow of the boundary. People living in the area had been
afraid of her; they called her the bone woman because she collected bones.
They had been everywhere in her house. Some of those bones protected her
from the beasts that came out of the boundary.
Zedd sighed. Books or bones, there was no telling where she was.
Besides that, there were any number of other things in the Wizard's Keep
that would be of great interest to a sorceress. She might even have simply
wanted to go for a walk, or up on a rampart to gaze at the stars and think.
It was much easier to wait for her to come back to her stew than for
him to go looking for her. Maybe he should have put one of the bells around
her neck.
Zedd hummed a merry tune to himself as he spooned stew into a wooden
bowl. No use waiting on an empty stomach, he always said; that only made a
person grouchy. It was really better to have a snack and be in good humor
than to wait and be miserable. He would only be bad company if he was
miserable.
On the eighth spoon of stew into the bowl, he heard a sound.
His hand froze above the bubbling pot.
Zedd thought he'd heard a bell tinkle.
Zedd wasn't given to flights of imagination or to being unreasonably
jumpy, but a cold shiver tingled across his flesh as if he'd been touched by
the icy fingers of a spirit reaching out from another world. He stood
motionless, partly bent toward the pot in the fire, partly turned toward the
hall, listening.
It could be a cat. Maybe he hadn't tied the thin cord high enough and
as a cat went under the line its tail had swished up and rung the bell.
Maybe a cat was being mischievous and as it sat on its haunches, tail
swishing back and forth, it had batted a bell. It could be a cat.
Or maybe a bird had landed on the line to roost for the night. A person
couldn't get past the shields in order to trip a belled cord. Zedd had
placed extra shields. It had to be an animal--a cat, or a bird.
If so, if no one could get past the regular shields and the extras he
had placed, then why had he strung bells?
Despite the likely explanations, his hair was trying to stand on end.
He didn't like the way the bell had rung; there was something about the
character of the sound that told him it wasn't an animal. The sound had been
too firm, too abrupt, too quick to stop.
He realized fully, now, that a bell had in fact rung. He wasn't
imagining it. He tried to re-create the sound in his mind so that he might
be able to put shape to the form that had tripped the cord.
Zedd silently set the bowl down on the side of the granite hearth. He
rose up, listening with an ear turned toward the passage from where he had
heard the bell. His mind raced through a map of all the bells he'd placed.
He needed to be sure.
He slipped through the door and into the passageway, the back of his
shoulder brushing the plastered wall as he moved down to the first
intersection on his right, watching not just ahead but behind as well.
Nothing moved in the hallway ahead. He paused, leaning ahead to take a quick
glance down the hall to the right. When he found it clear, he took the turn.
Zedd moved quickly past closed doors, past a tapestry of vineyards that
he had always thought was rather poorly executed, past an empty doorway to a
room with a window that looked out over a deep shaft between towers on a
high rampart, and past three more intersections until he reached the first
stairway. He swept around the corner to the right, up the stairs that curved
around to the left as they climbed up and crossed over the hall he'd just
been in. In this way he could head back toward a network of halls where he'd
placed a web of bells without using those same halls.
Zedd followed a mental map of a complex tangle of passages, halls,
rooms, and dead ends that, over a lifetime, he had come to know intimately.
Being First Wizard, he had access to every place in the Keep except those
places that required Subtractive Magic. There were a few places where he
could get confused, but this was not one of them.
He knew that unless someone was following in his footsteps, they would
have to either go back or pass a place where he had set traps of elaborate
magic as well as simple string. Then, if they didn't see the cord, they
would ring another bell. Then he would be sure.
Maybe it was Adie. Maybe she simply hadn't seen the inky cord stretched
across a doorway. Maybe she had been annoyed that he'd strung bells and
maybe she'd rung one just to vex him.
No, Adie wasn't like that. She might shake her finger at him and
deliver a scathing lecture on why she didn't agree with him that stringing
bells was an effective thing to do, but she wouldn't pull a trick about
something she would recognize as intended to warn of danger. No, Adie might
possibly have accidentally rung the bell, but she wouldn't have rung it
deliberately.
Another bell rang. Zedd spun to the sound and then froze.
The bell had come from the wrong direction--from where he'd set a bell
on the other side of a conservatory. It was too far from the first for
anyone to have made it this soon. They would have had to go up a tower
stairway, across a bridge to a rampart, along a narrow walkway in the dark,
past several intersections to the correct turn that would descend a spiral
ramp and make it down through a snarl of passageways in order to break the
cord.
Unless there was more than one person.
The bell had chimed with a quick jerk and then clattered as it
skittered across stone. It had to be a person tripping over the cord and
sending the bell skipping across the stone floor.
Zedd changed his plan. He turned and raced down a narrow passageway to
the left, climbing the first stairwell, running up the oak treads three at a
time. He took the right fork at the landing, raced to the second circular
stairwell of cut stone and climbed as fast as his legs would carry him. His
foot slipped on the narrow wedges of spiraling steps and he banged his shin.
He paused to wince only for a second. He used the time to consult his mental
map of the Keep, and then he was moving again.
At the top, he dashed down a short paneled hall, sliding to a stop on
the polished maple floor. He shouldered open a small, round-topped oak door.
A starry sky greeted him. He sucked deep draughts of cool night air as he
raced along the narrow rampart. He paused twice along the way to peer down
through the slots in the crenellated battlements. He didn't see anyone. That
was a good sign--he knew where they had to be if they weren't moving by an
outer route.
He ran on across the swaying span between towers, robes flying behind,
crossing over the entire section of the Keep where both bells had rung far
below, going over the top of the area in order to get behind whoever had
tripped the cords. While they had tripped bells on opposite sides of the
conservatory, they had to have come in through the same wing--he knew that
much. He wanted to get behind them, bottle them in before they could get to
an unprotected section where they would encounter a bewildering variety of
passageways. If they were to make it there and hide in that area, he could
have a time of rooting them out.
His mind raced as fast as his feet as he tried to think, tried to
recall all the shields, tried to figure how someone could have gotten past
the defenses to get to that specific wing where the bells that had rung were
placed. There were shields that should have made it impossible. He had to
consider thousands of corridors and passageways in the Keep, trying to come
up with all the potential routes. It was like a complex multilevel puzzle,
and despite how thorough he'd been, it was possible he'd missed something.
He had to have missed something.
There were rooms or even entire sections that were shielded and could
not be entered, but often they could be circumvented. Even if a hall was
shielded at both ends, so as to prevent anyone from getting to the rooms in
that hall, you could still usually get around to the other end of the hall
and make your way to whatever lay beyond. That was deliberate; while the
rooms might have held dangerous items of magic that had to be kept
contained, there needed to be ways to get to them, and get beyond to other
rooms that might, from time to time, also have to be restricted. Most of the
Keep was like that--a three-dimensional maze with almost endless possible
routes.
For the unwary, it could also be a killing field of traps. There were
places layered with warning barriers and other devices that would keep any
innocent person away. Beyond those protective layers, the shields gave no
warning before they killed. Trespassers would not know there were shields
embedded beyond, and that they were stepping into a trap. Such shields were
designed that way in order to kill invaders who penetrated that deep; the
lack of warning was deliberate.
Zedd supposed it was possible for someone to bypass all the shields and
work their way into the depths of the place in order to ring those
particular bells, but for the life of him, he couldn't trace all the steps
necessary. But whoever it was, no matter how lucky they were, they would
soon get themselves stuck in the labyrinth and then, if they weren't killed
by a shield, he could deal with them.
Zedd gazed out past towers, ramparts, bridges, and open stairs to rooms
projecting from soaring walls, out on the city of Aydindril far below, now
all dark and dead-looking. How had someone gotten past the stone bridge up
to the Keep?
A Sister of the Dark, maybe. Maybe one of them had figured out how to
use Subtract!ve Magic to take his shield down. But even if one had, the
shields in the Keep were different. Most of them had been placed by the
wizards in ancient times, wizards with both sides of the gift. A Sister of
the Dark would not be able to breach such shields-- they had been designed
to withstand enemy wizards of that time. They were far more powerful than
any mere Sister of the Dark.
And where was Adie? She should have been back. He wished now that he
had gone and found her. She needed to know that there was someone in the
Keep. Unless she already knew. Unless they had her.
Zedd turned and raced down the rampart. At the projecting bastion, he
seized the railing to the side to halt his forward rush and spin himself
around the corner. He raced down the dark steps as if he were running down a
hill.
With his gift, he could sense that there was no one in the vicinity.
Since there was no one near, that meant that he had managed to get behind
them. He had them trapped.
At the bottom of the steps he threw open the door and flew into the
hallway beyond.
He crashed into a man standing there, waiting.
Zedd's momentum knocked the big man from his feet. They fell in a
tangle, sliding together along the polished green and yellow marble floor,
both grappling for control.
Zedd could not have been more surprised. His gifted sense told him the
man was not there. His gifted sense was obviously wrong. The disorientation
of encountering a man when he had sensed that the hall was empty was more
jarring than the headlong tumble.
Even as he was rolling, Zedd was casting webs to tangle the man in a
snare of magic. The man, in turn, lunged to tangle Zedd in meaty arms.
In desperation, despite the close range, Zedd pulled enough heat from
the surrounding air to unleash a thunderous blast of lightning and cast it
directly into the man. The blinding flash burned a lacing line through the
stone block wall beyond him.
Only too late did Zedd realize that the discharge of deadly power had
lanced through the man without effect. The hall filled with shards of stone
whistling about, ricocheting from walls and ceiling, skipping along the
floor.
The man landed on Zedd, driving the wind from him. Desperately yelling
for help, the man wrestled Zedd on the slippery floor. Zedd concocted a weak
and fumbling defense, to give the man a false sense of confidence, until he
was able to suddenly land a knee sharply at the point of his attacker's
sternum. The man cried out in surprise as much as in pain as he flipped
backward off Zedd, gasping to get his wind back.
Having sucked so much heat from the air had left it as frigid as a
winter night. Clouds of their breath filled the cold air as both men panted
with the effort of the struggle. The man again cried out for help, hoping to
bring comrades to his aid.
Zedd would assume that anyone would fear to attack a wizard by muscle
alone. This man, though, had no need to fear magic. Even if he hadn't known
that before, certainly the evidence was now all too clear. Yet, despite the
man being at least twice the size of his opponent, less than a third his
age, and having immunity from the conjuring being thrown at him, Zedd
thought that he fought rather... squeamishly.
However timid the man was, he was determined. He scrambled to attack
again. If he broke Zedd's neck, it wouldn't matter that he did so timidly.
As the man regained his feet and lunged, Zedd drew back his arms,
elbows cocked, fingers spread, and cast more of the lightning, but this time
he knew better than to waste his effort trying to cut down a man not touched
by magic. Instead, Zedd sought to rake the floor with the conjured bolts of
power. It slammed into the stone with unrestrained violence, ripping and
splintering whole sections, throwing sharp jagged shards streaking through
the air.
A fist-sized block of stone hurtling at tremendous speed crashed into
the man's shoulder. Above the boom of thunderous power, Zedd heard bones
snap. The impact spun the man around and knocked him back against the wall.
Since Zedd now knew that this intruder could not directly be harmed by
magic, he instead filled the hall with a deafening storm of magic designed
not to assail the man directly but to tear the place apart into a cloud of
deadly flying fragments.
The man, as he recoiled from striking the wall, again threw himself at
Zedd. He was met by a shower of deadly shards whistling through the air
toward him. Blood splattered across the wall beyond as the man was ripped to
shreds. In a blink, he was killed and dropped heavily to the floor.
From beyond the smoke and dust filling the hall, two more men suddenly
flew at Zedd. His gifted sense told him that, like the first man, these men
were not there, either.
Zedd threw yet more lightning to rip up the floor and unleash flying
stone at the men, but they were already through the flares of power, diving
onto him. He crashed to his back, the men atop him. They seized his arms.
Zedd struggled frantically to let loose a blast to bring down the
ceiling. He began to whirl the air above the men to tear the hall to pieces,
and them with it.
A beefy hand with a filthy white rag clamped down over Zedd's face. He
gasped, only to inhale a powerful smell that made his throat want to clench
shut, but too late.
With the cloth and the big hand covering his whole face, Zedd couldn't
see. The world spun sickeningly.
Soft, silent blackness pressed in around him as he fought to resist it,
until he lost consciousness.
Zedd woke, his head spinning, his stomach heaving with rippling waves
of nausea. He didn't think that in his entire life he had ever felt so sick.
He hadn't known it was possible to feel so intense an urge to vomit, without
actually throwing up. He couldn't lift his head. If he could just die right
then, it would be a welcome release from such dizzying agony.
He started to put his hands over the light hurting his eyes, but found
his wrists were tied behind his back.
"I think he's waking," a man said in a subservient voice.
Despite his nausea, Zedd instinctively tried to use his gift to sense
how many people were around him. For some reason, his gift that ordinarily
flowed as easily as thought, as simply as using his eyes to see, his ears to
hear, felt thick and slow, as if mired in molasses. He reasoned that it was
probably the result of whatever vile substance it was they had soaked the
rag in to cause him to pass out when held over his face. Still, he managed
to sense that there was only one person around him.
Powerful hands seized his robes and yanked him to his feet. Zedd gave
himself permission to vomit. Against all expectation, it didn't happen. The
dark night swam before his blurred vision. He could make out trees against
the sky, stars, and the looming black shape of the Keep.
Suddenly, a tongue of flame ignited in midair. Zedd blinked at the
unexpected brightness. The small flame, wavering with a lazy motion, floated
above the upturned palm of a woman with wiry gray hair. Zedd saw other
people in the shadows; his gifted sense was wrong. Like the man who had
attacked him, these, too, had to be people not affected by magic.
The woman standing before him peered at him intently. Her expression
twisted with satisfied loathing.
"Well, well, well," she said with patronizing delight. "The great
wizard himself awakes."
Zedd said nothing. It seemed to amuse her. Her fearsome scowl and
humped nose, lit from the side by the flame she held above her palm, floated
closer.
"You are ours, now," she hissed.
Zedd, having waited patiently to gather his resolve, abruptly initiated
the required mental twist to the gift all the way down to his soul in order
to simultaneously call down lightning, focus air to slice this woman in two,
and gather every stone and pebble from all around to crush her under an
avalanche of rock. He expected the night to light with such power as he
unlocked and sent forth.
Nothing happened.
Not waiting to waste the time to analyze what could be the difficulty,
he was forced to abandon attempts at satisfying his emotional preferences,
and to ignite wizard's fire itself to consume her.
Nothing happened.
Not only did nothing happen, but it felt as if the attempt itself were
but a pebble falling endlessly into a vast, dark well. The expectation
withered in the face of what he found within himself: a kind of dreadful
emptiness.
Zedd felt as if he couldn't light a tongue of flame to match hers if
his life depended on it. He was somehow cut off from forming his ability
into much of anything useful other than to use it for a bit of dim
awareness. Probably a lingering result of the foul-smelling substance they
had pressed over his face to make him lose consciousness.
Since Zedd couldn't muster any power, he did the only thing he could:
he spit in her face.
With lightning speed, she backhanded him, knocking him from the arms of
the men holding him. Unable to use his hands to break his fall, he hit the
ground unexpectedly hard. He lay in the dirt for a time, his ears ringing in
the aftereffect of the hit he'd taken, waiting for someone to lean over and
kill him.
Instead, they hauled him to his feet again. One of the men seized his
hair and pulled his head up, forcing him to look into the woman's face. The
scowl he saw there looked like it spent a great deal of time on her face.
She spit in his face.
Zedd smiled. "So, here we have a spoiled child playing the game of tit
for tat."
Zedd grunted with the sudden shock of a wallop of pain that twisted
inside of his abdomen. Had the men not been holding him under his arms he
would have doubled over and fallen to the ground. He wasn't quite sure how
she had done it--probably with a fist of air delivered with all the power of
her gift behind it. She had left the gathered air loosely formed, rather
than focusing it to a sharp edge, or it would have torn him in two. As it
was, he knew it would leave his middle black and blue.
It was a long and desperate wait before he was able to at last draw a
breath.
The men who his gift said weren't there pulled him straight.
"I'm disappointed to discover I'm in the hands of a sorceress who can
be no more inventive than that," Zedd mocked.
That brought a smile to her scowl. "Don't you worry, Wizard Zo-rander,
His Excellency very much wants your scrawny hide. He will be playing a game
of tit for tat that I believe you will find quite inventive. I have learned
that when it comes to inventive cruelty, His Excellency is peerless. I'm
sure he will not disappoint you."
"Then what are we standing around for? I can't wait to have a word with
His Excellency."
As the men held his head back for her, she ran a fingernail down the
side of his face and across his throat, not hard enough to draw blood, but
enough to hint at her own restrained cruelty. She leaned in again. One
eyebrow lifted in a way that ran a chill up Zedd's spine.
"I imagine you have grand ideas about such a visit, about what you
think you will do or say." She reached out and hooked a finger around
something at his neck. When she gave it a firm tug, he realized that he was
wearing a collar of some sort. By the way it dug into the flesh at the back
of his neck, it had to be metal.
"Guess what this is," she said. "Just guess."
Zedd sighed. "You really are a tedious woman. But I imagine you've
heard that ofttimes before."
She ignored his gibe, eager to be the messenger of bad news. Her
scowling smile widened. "It's a Rada'Han."
Zedd's sense of alarm rose, but he kept any trace of it from his face.
"Really." He paused for an extended, bored yawn. "Well, I'd not expect
a woman of your limited intellect to think up something clever."
She slammed a knee into his groin. Zedd doubled over in pain, unable to
contain his groan. He hadn't been expecting something so crude.
The men pulled him up straight, not allowing him pause to recover.
Being pulled up straight brought a gasp of agony. His teeth were clenched,
his eyes were watering, and his knees wanted to buckle, but the men held him
upright.
Her smile was getting annoying. "You see, Wizard Zorander? Being clever
isn't necessary at all."
Zedd saw her point but didn't say so.
He was already preparing to unlock the cursed collar from his neck.
He'd been "captured" before--by the Prelate herself--and had had a Rada'Han
put around his neck, like some boy born with the gift who needed training.
The Sisters of the Light put such a collar around those boys so that the
gift wouldn't harm them before they could learn to control their gift.
Richard had been captured and put in such a Rada'Han right after his gift
came to life in him.
The collar was also used to control the young wizard wearing it, to
give pain, when the Sisters thought it necessary. Zedd understood the
Prelate's reasons for wanting Richard's help, since they knew he had been
born with both sides of the gift, and, too, they worried about the dark
forces that pursued him, but he could never forgive her for putting Richard
in a collar. A wizard needed to be trained by a wizard, not some misguided
gaggle like the Sisters of the Light.
The Prelate, though, had harbored no delusion of actually training
Richard to be a wizard. She had collared him in order to smoke out the
traitors among her flock: the Sisters of the Dark.
Unlike Richard, though, Zedd knew how to get such a disgusting
contrivance off his neck. In fact, he had done it before, when the Prelate
had thought to collar him and thus force his cooperation.
Zedd used a thread of power to probe at the lock, not overtly, so as
this woman might notice it, but just enough to find the twist in the spell
where he would be able to focus his ability to snap the conjured lock.
When the time was right, when he had his feet solidly under him, when
his head stopped spinning long enough, he would break the collar's hold. In
that same instant, before she knew what had happened, he would release
wizard's fire and incinerate this woman.
She hooked a finger under the collar again and gave it another tug.
"The thing is, my dear wizard, I would expect that a man of your
renowned talent might know how to get such a device off."
"Really? I'm renowned?" Zedd flashed her a grin. "That's very
gratifying."
Her utter contempt brought her a smile of pure disdain. With her finger
through the collar she pulled him close to her twisted expression. She
ignored his words and went on.
"Since His Excellency would be extremely displeased should you get the
collar off, I've taken measures to insure that such a thing would not
happen. I used Subtractive Magic to weld it on."
Now, that was a problem.
She nodded to the men. Zedd glanced to them at each side and noticed
for the first time that their eyes were wet. It shocked him to realize they
were weeping.
Weeping or not, they followed her orders, unceremoniously lifting him
and heaving him in the back of a wagon as if he were firewood.
Zedd landed beside someone else.
"Glad to see you be alive, old man," a soft voice rasped.It was Adie.
The side of her face was swollen and bleeding. It looked like they'd clubbed
her nearly to death. Her wrists were tied behind her back as well. He saw,
too, tears on her cheeks.
It broke his heart to see her hurt. "Adie, what did they do to you?"
She smiled. "Not as much as they intend to, I fear."
In the dim light of a lantern, Zedd could see that she, too, wore one
of the awful collars.
"Your stew was excellent," he said.
Adie groaned. "Please, old man, do not mention food to me right now."
Zedd cautiously turned his head and saw more men waiting in the
darkness off to the side. They had been behind him, so he hadn't noticed
them before. His gift had not told him they were there.
"I think we're in a great deal of trouble," he whispered to no one in
particular.
"Really?" Adie rasped. "What be your first clue?"
Zedd knew she was only trying to make him smile, but he could not even
manage a small one.
"I be sorry, Zedd."
He nodded, as best he could lying on his side with his wrists bound
behind his back. "I thought I was so clever, laying every kind of trap I
could think of. Unfortunately, such traps didn't work for those who are not
affected by magic."
"You could not know of such a thing," Adie said in a comforting tone.
His mood sank into bitter regret. "I should have taken it into account
after we encountered that one down at the Confessors' Palace, in the spring.
I should have realized the danger." He stared off into the darkness. "I
served our cause no better than a fool."
"But where did all of them come from?" She looked on the verge of
losing herself to panic. "I have never encountered a single such person in
my entire life, and now there be a whole gang of them standing there."
Zedd hated to see Adie so distraught. Adie only knew there were a
number of them by the telltale sounds they made. At least he could see the
men with his eyes, if not his gift.
The men stood around, heads hanging, waiting to be commanded.
They didn't look pleased by what was happening. They all looked young,
in their twenties. Some were crying. It seemed strange to see such big men
weeping. Zedd almost regretted killing one of them. Almost.
"You three," the woman growled to more of the men waiting in the
shadows as she lifted another lantern from one of them and sent the flame
she held into it, "get in there and start the search."
Adie's completely white eyes turned to Zedd, her expression grave.
"Sister of the Dark," she whispered.
And now they had the Keep.
And just how can you be sure that it was a Sister of the Dark you saw?"
Verna asked, absently, as she dipped her pen again.
She scrawled her initials at the bottom of the request for a Sister to
travel to a town down south to see to a local sorceress's plans for a
defense of their area. Even in the field, the paperwork of the office of the
Prelate seemed to have chased after and found her. Their palace had been
destroyed, the prophet himself was at large and the real Prelate was off
alone chasing after him, some of the Sisters of the Light had pledged their
souls to the Keeper of the underworld and in so doing had brought the Keeper
a step closer to having them all in the dark forever of eternity, a good
number of the Sisters--both Sisters of the Light and Sisters of the
Dark--were in the cruel hands of the enemy and doing his bidding, the
barrier separating the Old and New World was down, the whole world had been
turned upside down, the only man--Richard Rahl--whom prophecy named as
having a chance of defeating the threat of the Imperial Order was off
who-knew-where doing who-knew-what, and yet, the paperwork managed to
survive it all and persist to vex her.
Some of Verna's assistants handled the paperwork and the requests, but,
as much as she disliked dealing with such tedious matters, Verna felt a
sense of duty to keep an eye on it all. Besides, as much as paperwork vexed
her, it also occupied her mind, preventing her from dwelling on the
might-have-been.
"After all," Verna added, "it could just as easily have been a Sister
of the Light. Jagang uses both for their ability with magic. You can't
really be sure it was a Sister of the Dark. He's been sending Sisters to
accompany his scouts all winter and spring."
The Mord-Sith placed her knuckles on the small desk and leaned in. "I'm
telling you, Prelate, it was a Sister of the Dark."
Verna saw no point in arguing, since it mattered little, so she didn't.
"If you say so, Rikka."
Verna turned over the paper to the next in the stack, a request for a
Sister to come and speak to children on the calling of the Sisters of the
Light, with a lecture on why the Creator would be against the ways of the
Imperial Order and on their side. Verna smiled to herself, imagining how
Zedd would fume at the very idea of a Sister, in the New World, lecturing
her views on such a subject.
Rikka withdrew her knuckles from the desk. "I thought you might say as
much."
"Well, there you go, then," Verna mumbled as she read the next message
from the Sisters of the Light to the south reporting on the passes through
the mountains and the methods that had been used to seal them off.
"Wait right here," Rikka growled before flying out of the tent.
"I'm not going anywhere," Verna said with a sigh as she scanned the
written account, but the fiery, blond-headed woman was already gone.
Verna heard a commotion outside the tent. Rikka was delivering a
scathing lecture to someone. The Mord-Sith was incorrigible. That was
probably why, despite everything, Verna liked her.
Since Warren had died, Verna's heart was no longer in much of anything,
though. She did as she had to, did her duty, but she couldn't make herself
feel anything but despair. The man she loved, the man she had married, the
most wonderful man in the world... was gone.
Nothing much mattered after that.
Verna tried to do her part, to do as was needed, because so many people
depended on her, but, if truth be told, the reason she worked herself nearly
to death was to try to keep her mind occupied, to think of something else,
anything else, except Warren. It didn't really work, but she kept at it. She
knew that people counted on her, but she just couldn't make herself truly
care.
Warren was gone. Life was empty of what mattered most to her. That was
the end of it, the end of her caring about much of anything.
Verna idly pulled her journey book from her belt. She didn't know what
made her do so, except perhaps that it had been some time since she had last
looked for a message from the real Prelate. Ann was having her own crisis of
caring ever since Kahlan had laid the blame for so much of what had gone
wrong, including being the cause of the war itself, right at the Prelate's
feet. Verna thought that Kahlan had been wrong about much of it, but she
understood all too well why she thought that Ann had been responsible for
tangling up their lives; Verna had felt the same way for a time.
Holding the journey book off to the side with one hand, flipping the
pages with a thumb, Verna saw a message flash by.
Rikka swept back into the tent. She plunked a heavy sack down on
Verna's desk, right on top of the reports.
"Here!" Rikka said, fury powering her voice.
It was then, when Verna looked up, that she saw for the first time the
strange way Rikka was dressed. Verna's mouth fell open. Rikka was not
wearing the skintight red leather that the Mord-Sith typically wore, except
for occasionally when they were relaxing and then they sometimes wore brown
leather, instead. Verna had never seen the woman in anything other than
those leather outfits.
Now Rikka had on a dress.
Verna could not remember being so astonished.
Not just a dress, but a pink dress that no decent woman of Rikka's age,
probably her late twenties or early thirties, would be caught dead in. The
neckline plunged down to reveal ample cleavage. The twin mounds of exposed
flesh were shoved up and nearly spilling out the top. Verna was amazed that
Rikka's nipples had managed to remain covered, what with the way her breasts
heaved with her heated breathing.
"You, too?" Rikka snapped.
Verna finally looked up into Rikka's blazing blue eyes. "Me, too,
what?"
"You, too, can't get enough of looking at my chest?"
Verna felt her face go scarlet. She gave her red face an excuse by
shaking a finger at the woman.
"What are you doing dressed like that in an army camp! Around all these
soldiers! You look like a whore!"
Despite how their leather outfits went all the way up to their necks,
the tight leather left little to the imagination. Seeing the woman's flesh,
though, was altogether different, and quite shocking.
Verna realized, only then, because she had finally looked up at the
woman's face, that Rikka's single braid was undone. Her long blond hair was
as free as a horse's mane. Verna had never seen one of the Mord-Sith out in
public without her hair done up in the single braid that in large part
identified their profession of Mord-Sith.
Even seeing the woman's cleavage exposed was not as shocking as seeing
her hair undone. It was that, more than anything, Verna realized, that lent
a lewd look to the woman. Something about her braid being undone seemed
sacrilegious, even though Verna could not condone a profession dedicated to
torture.
Verna remembered, then, that she had asked one of the Mord-Sith, Cara,
to do her worst to the young man--a boy, really--who had murdered Warren.
Verna had sat up the entire night listening to that young man scream his
life away. His suffering had been monstrous, and yet it had not been nearly
enough to suit her.
At times, Verna wondered if in the next life the Keeper of the
underworld would have something wholly unpleasant in store for her for all
eternity in recompense for what Verna had done. She didn't really care; it
had been worth whatever the price might be.
Besides, she decided, if she was to be punished for condemning that man
to just retribution, then the very concept of justice would have to be
invalid, rendering living a life of good or evil to have no meaning. In
fact, for the justice she had meted out to that vile amoral animal walking
the world of life in the form of a man who had murdered Warren, she should
be rewarded in the afterlife by being eternally in the warmth of the
Creator's light, along with the good spirit of Warren, or else there was no
justice.
General Meiffert swept into the tent, fists at his sides, coming to a
halt beside Rikka. He raked his blond hair back when he saw Verna sitting
behind her little desk, and cooled visibly.
He'd had the carpenters nail together the tiny desk for her out of
scrap furniture left in an abandoned farm. It was nothing like the desks at
the Palace of the Prophets, of course, but it had been given with more
concern and meaning behind it than the grandest gold-leafed desk she had
ever seen. General Meiffert had been proud at seeing how useful Verna found
it.
With a quick glance, he took in Rikka's dress and her hair. "What's
this about?"
"Well," Verna said, "I'm not sure. Something about one of Jagang's
Sisters scouting a pass."
Rikka folded her bare arms atop her nearly bare bosom. "Not just a
Sister, but a Sister of the Dark."
"Jagang has been sending Sisters scouting the passes all winter," the
young general said. "The Prelate has laid traps and shields." His level of
concern rose. "Are you telling us that one of them got through?"
"No, I'm telling you that I went hunting for them."
Verna frowned. "What are you talking about? We lost half a dozen
Mord-Sith trying that. After you found the heads of two of your sister
Mord-Sith mounted on pikes, the Mother Confessor herself ordered you to stop
throwing their lives away on such useless missions."
Rikka at last smiled. It was the kind of satisfied smile, especially
coming from a Mord-Sith, that tended to give people nightmares.
"Does this look useless?"
Rikka reached into her sack and pulled out a human head. Holding it by
the hair, she brandished it in front of Verna's face. She turned, shook it
at General Meiffert as well, and then plunked it down on the desk. Gore
oozed out over the reports.
"Like I said, a Sister of the Dark."
Verna recognized the face, even as twisted in death as it was. Rikka
was right, it was a Sister of the Dark. The question was, how did she know
it was a Sister of the Dark, and not one of the Light?
Outside Verna could hear horses clopping past her tent. Some of the
soldiers called out greetings to men returning from patrols. In the distance
could be heard conversations and men issuing orders. Hammers on steel rang
like bells as men worked hot metal into useful shapes for repairs to
equipment. Nearby, horses frisked in a corral. As men made their way past
Verna's tent, their gear jingled. Fires crackled as wood was added for the
cooks or roared as bellows pumped to turn it white-hot for the blacksmiths.
"You touched her with your Agiel?" Verna asked in a quiet voice. "Your
Agiel doesn't work effectively on those the dream walker controls."
Rikka's smile turned sly. She spread her arms. "Agiel? Do you see an
Agiel."
Verna knew that no Mord-Sith would ever let her Agiel out of her
control. With a glance to the woman's cleavage, she could only imagine where
she had it hidden.
"All right," General Meiffert said, his tone no longer indulgent. "I
want to know what's going on, and I want to know right now."
"I was down near Dobbin Pass, checking around, and what do I find but
an Imperial Order patrol."
The general nodded as he let out a frustrated sigh. "They've been
coming in that way from time to time. But how did you manage to come across
such an enemy patrol? Why hadn't one of our Sisters already snared them?"
Rikka shrugged. "Well, this patrol was still on the other side of the
pass. Back at that deserted farm." She tapped Verna's desk with her toe.
"Where you got the wood for this."
Verna twisted her mouth with displeasure. Rikka wasn't supposed to be
beyond the pass. The Mord-Sith, though, recognized no orders but those from
Lord Rahl himself. Rikka had only followed Kahlan's orders because, during
his absence, Kahlan was acting on Richard's behalf. Verna suspected that it
was simpler than that, though; she suspected that they had only followed the
Mother Confessor's orders because she was wife to Lord Rahl, and if they
didn't it would bring Lord Rahl's wrath down on them. As long as such orders
weren't viewed by the Mord-Sith as troublesome, they went along. When they
decided otherwise, they did as they wished.
"The Sister was by herself," Rikka went on, "having one
powerful-looking headache."
"Jagang," Verna said. "Jagang was issuing his order, or punishing her
for something, or giving her a lecture in her mind. He does that from time
to time. It isn't pleasant."
Rikka stroked the hair on the woman's head sitting on Verna's desk,
making a mess of the reports. "The poor thing," she mocked. "While she was
off among the pines staring at nothing while she pressed her fingers to her
temples, her men were back at the farmhouse, having their way with a couple
of young women. The two were squealing and crying and carrying on, but the
men weren't put off by it any."
Verna lowered her eyes as she let out a heavy breath. Some people had
refused to believe the necessity of fleeing before the arrival of the
Imperial Order.
Sometimes, when people refused to recognize the existence of evil, they
found themselves having to face precisely that which they had never been
willing to admit existed.
Rikka's satisfied smile returned. "I went in and took care of the brave
soldiers of the Imperial Order. They were so distracted, they paid no
attention as I snuck up behind them. The women were so terrorized that they
screamed even though I was saving them. The Sister hadn't been paying any
attention to the screaming before, and didn't then, either.
"One of the young women was blond and about my size, so an idea struck
me. I put on her dress and took out my braid, so I might be mistaken for