Naked Empire (12 page)

And Kahlan knew that Richard needed help. She could see that he wasn’t himself. His gray eyes held a glaze of pain, but there was something more etched in his expression, in the way he moved, the way he carried himself.

The whole explanation of the book and what he had discovered seemed to have sapped his strength.

She was beginning to think that it wasn’t she, after all, who was the one running out of time, but that it was Richard. That thought, despite the warm afternoon sun, sent cold terror racing through her.

Richard checked the others over his shoulder. “Let’s go back to the wagon. I need to get something warmer to put on. It’s freezing today.”

Zedd peered up the deserted street. He could have sworn that he saw someone. Using his gift to search for any sign of life told him that there was no one anywhere around. Still, he remained motionless as he stared.

The warm breeze pressed his simple robes against his bony frame and gently ruffled his disheveled white hair. A tattered, sun-faded blue dress that someone had pinned to a second-floor balcony railing to dry flapped like a flag in the wind. The dress, along with a city full of personal possessions, had long ago been left behind.

The buildings, their walls painted various colors from a rusty red to yellow with shutters in bright, contrasting hues, stuck out to slightly varying degrees on either side of the narrow cobbled street, making a canyon of colorful walls. Most of the second stories overhung the bottom floors by a few feet, and, with their eaves hanging out even more, the buildings closed off the better part of the sky except for a snaking slit of afternoon sunlight that followed the sinuous course of the street up and over the gentle hill. The doors were all tightly shut, most of the windows shuttered. A pale green gate to an alleyway hung open, squeaking as it swung to and fro in the breeze.

Zedd decided that it must have been a trick of the light that he’d seen, maybe a windowpane that had moved in the wind sending a flicker of light across a wall.

When he was at last sure that he had been mistaken about seeing anyone, Zedd started back down the street, yet remained close to one side, walking as quietly as possible. The Imperial Order army had not returned to the city since Zedd had unleashed the light web that had killed an enormous number of their force, but that didn’t mean that there couldn’t be dangers about.

No doubt Emperor Jagang still wanted the city, and especially the Keep, but he was no fool and he knew that a few more light webs ignited among his army, no matter how vast it was, would in that instant reduce his force by such staggering numbers that it could alter the course of the war. Jagang had fought against the Midland and D’Haran forces for a year and in all those battles he had not lost as many men as he’d lost in that one blinding moment. He would not casually risk another such event.

After such a blow Jagang would want to capture the Keep more than he had ever wanted it before. He would want Zedd more than ever before.

Had Zedd more of the light webs like the one his frantic search through the Keep had turned up, he would have already unleashed them all on the Order. He sighed. If only he had more.

Still, Jagang didn’t know that he had no more such constructed spells. As long as Jagang feared that there were more, it served Zedd’s purpose in keeping the Imperial Order out of Aydindril and away from the Wizard’s Keep.

Some harm had been done to the Confessors’ Palace when Jagang had been gulled into attacking, but Zedd judged that trying that trick had been worth the regrettable damage; it had almost netted him and Adie the emperor’s hide. Damage could always be repaired. He vowed that it would be repaired.

Zedd clenched a fist at how close he had come to finishing Jagang that day. At least he had dealt a mighty blow to his army.

And Zedd might have had Jagang had it not been for that strange young woman. He shook his head at the memory of actually seeing one who could not be touched by magic. He’d known, in theory, of their existence, but had never before known it for certain to be true. Vague references in old books made for interesting abstract speculation, but seeing it with his own eyes was quite something else.

It had been an unsettling sight. Adie had been shaken by the encounter even more than he; she was blind, yet with the aid of the gift could see better than he could. That day, she had not been able to see the young woman who was there, but, in some ways, not there. To Zedd’s eyes, if not his gift, she was a beautiful sight, with some of Darken Rahl’s looks, but different and altogether captivating. That she was half sister to Richard was clear; she shared some of his features, especially the eyes. If only Zedd could have stopped her, kept her out of the way, convinced her that she was making a terrible mistake by being with the Order, or even if he could have killed her, Jagang would not have escaped justice.

Still, Zedd held no illusions about ending the threat of the Imperial Order simply by killing Jagang. Jagang was merely the brute who led other brutes in enforcing blind faith in the Order, a blind faith that embraced death as salvation from what it preached was the corrupt misery of life, a blind faith in which life itself had no value but as a bloody sacrifice upon the altar of altruism, a blind faith that blamed the failure of its own ideas on mankind for being wicked and for failing to offer sufficient sacrifice in an endless quest for some illusive greater good that grew ever more distant, a blind faith in an Order that clung to power by feeding off the carcasses of the productive lives it ruined.

A faith that by its very beliefs rejected reason and embraced the irrational could not long endure without intimidation and force—without brutes like Jagang to enforce such faith.

While Emperor Jagang was brutally effective, it was a mistake to think that if Jagang were to die that very day it would end the threat of the Order. It was the Order’s ideas that were so dangerous; the priests of the Order would find other brutes.

The only real way to end the Order’s reign of terror was to expose the naked evil of its teachings to the light of truth, and for those suffering under its doctrines to throw off the Order’s yoke. Until then, they would have to fight the Imperial Order back as best they could, hoping at least to eventually contain them.

Zedd poked his head around a corner, watching, listening, sniffing the wind for any trace of anyone who might be lurking about. The city was deserted, but on a number of occasions stray Imperial Order soldiers had wandered in out of the mountains.

After the destruction caused by the light web, panic had swept through the Order’s encampment. Many soldiers had scattered to the hills. Once the army had regrouped, a large number of men had decided to desert instead of returning to their units. Tens of thousands of such deserters were rounded up and executed, their bodies left to rot as a warning of what happened to those who abandoned the cause of the greater glory of the Imperial Order, or as the Order liked to put it, the cause of the greater good. Most of the rest of the men who had run to the hills had then had a change of heart and straggled back into camp.

There were still some, though, who had not wanted to go back and had not been caught. For a time, after Jagang’s army had moved on, they had wandered into the city, sometimes alone, sometimes in small groups, half starved, to search for food and to loot. Zedd had lost count of how many such men he had killed.

He was reasonably sure that all of those stragglers were dead, now. The Order was made up of men mostly from cities and towns. Such men weren’t used to living in the wild. Their job was to overwhelm the enemy, to kill, rape, terrorize, and plunder. A whole corps of logistics personnel provided them with support, delivering and dispensing a constant stream of supplies that rolled in to feed and care for the soldiers. They were violent men, but they were men who needed to be tended, who depended on the group for their survival. They didn’t last long on their own in the trackless forested mountains surrounding Aydindril.

But Zedd hadn’t seen any of them for quite some time. He was reasonably sure that the stragglers had starved, been killed, or had long ago headed back south, to the Old World.

There was always the possibility, though, that Jagang had sent assassins to Aydindril; some of those assassins could be Sisters of the Light, or worse, Sisters of the Dark. For that reason, Zedd rarely left the safety of the Keep, and when he did, he was cautious.

Too, he hated poking around the city, seeing it so devoid of life. This had been his home for much of his life. He remembered the days when the Keep was a hub of activity—not as it once had been, he knew, but alive with people of all sorts. He found himself smiling at the memory.

His smile faded. Now the city was a joyless sight, forlorn without people filling the streets, people talking from one balcony to a neighbor across the street in another window, people gathering to trade goods in the market. Not so long ago men would have stopped to have conversations in doorways while vendors pulled carts of their wares along the narrow streets and children at play skipped through the throngs. Zedd sighed at the sad sight of such lifeless streets.

At least those lives were safe, if a long way from home. Although he had many fundamental differences with the Sisters of the Light, he knew that their Prelate, Verna, and the rest of the free Sisters would watch over them.

The only problem was that now that Jagang had nothing in Aydindril of any real value to conquer except the Keep, and much to lose, he had wheeled his army east toward the remnants of the Midland forces. To be sure, the D’Haran army waited across those mountains to the east and Zedd knew how formidable they were, but he couldn’t fool himself that they stood a chance against a force as immense as the Imperial Order.

Jagang had left the city in order to go after those D’Haran forces. The Imperial Order could not win the war by occupying an empty city; they needed to crush any resistance once and for all so that there would be no people left who could, by living prosperous, happy, peaceful lives, put the lie to the Order’s teachings.

Now that Jagang had come all the way up through the Midlands, he had cleaved the New World. Forces had been left all along the route to occupy cities and towns. Now the main force of the Order would turn its blood lust east, on a lone D’Hara. By dividing the New World in such a way, Jagang would be able to more efficiently crush opposition.

Zedd knew that it wasn’t for lack of trying that the New World had given ground. He and Kahlan, among a great many others, had worked themselves sick, month after month, trying to find a way to stop Jagang’s forces.

Zedd clutched his robes at his throat, at the painful memory of such ferocious fighting, at how nothing had worked against Jagang’s numbers, at the death and dying, at the friends he had lost. It was only a matter of time until all was lost to the hordes from the Old World.

Richard and Kahlan would not survive such a conquest by the Imperial Order. Zedd’s thin fingers covered his trembling lips at the ghastly thought of them being lost, too. They were the only family he had left. They were everything to him.

Zedd felt a crushing wave of hopelessness, and had to sit on the stump of a log section set outside a shoe shop that had been boarded closed. Once the Imperial Order finally annihilated all opposition, Jagang would return to take the city and lay siege to the Keep. Sooner or later, he would have it all.

The future, as Zedd imagined it, seemed to be a world shrouded in the gray pall of life under the Imperial Order. If the world fell under that pall, it would probably be a very long time before mankind ever emerged to live free again. Once liberty was surrendered to tyranny, it could be smothered for centuries before its flames again sprang to life and brightened the world.

Zedd hadn’t sat for long when he forced himself to his feet. He was First Wizard. He had been in hopeless straits before and had seen the foe turned back. There was still the possibility that he and Adie could find something in the Keep that would aid them, or that they might yet discover information in the libraries that would give them a valuable advantage.

As long as there was life, they could fight on toward their goal. They still had the ability to triumph.

He harrumphed to himself. He would triumph.

Zedd was glad that Adie wasn’t with him to see him in such a sorry state that he would have—if even momentarily—considered defeat. Adie would have never let him hear the end of it, and deservedly so.

He harrumphed again. He was hardly inexperienced, hardly without the wherewithal to handle challenges that arose. And if there were assassins about, gifted or not, they would find themselves caught up by one of the many little surprises he had left around. Very nasty surprises.

Chin up, Zedd smiled to himself as he turned down a narrow alley, making his way past a patchwork of yards with empty pens that had once held chickens, geese, ducks, and pigeons. His gaze passed over small back courtyards, their herbs and flowers growing untended, their wash lines empty, their wood and other materials stacked to the sides, waiting for people to return and work them into something useful.

Along the way he stopped in various vegetable gardens, harvesting the volunteer crops that had sprung up. There was lettuce aplenty, spinach, some small squash, green tomatoes, and still a few peas. He collected his bounty in a canvas sack and slung it over a shoulder as he walked the garden plots, checking on the progress of irregular patches of onions, beets, beans, and turnips. Still some growing to do, he concluded.

While the vegetables weren’t thick from a careful planting, the random growth in yards all over the city meant that he and Adie would have fresh vegetables for some time to come. Maybe she might even take to putting some things up for next winter. They could store root crops in the colder places in the Keep, and preserve more perishable vegetables. They would have more food than they could eat.

On his way up the alley, Zedd spied a bush off toward the corner, sprawled green and lush over a short back fence between two homes. The blackberry bush was loaded with ripe berries. He paused occasionally to check up and down the streets beyond while he made a nice-sized pile of the dark, plump berries in a square of cloth, then tied it up and placed it atop the heavier goods in his sack.

There were still plenty of ripe berries, and he hated to let them go to waste, or to the birds, so he worked at filling his pockets. He didn’t worry that it would spoil his dinner; it was a long walk back up the mountain to the Wizard’s Keep, so he could use a snack. Adie was making a thick stew from cured ham. There was no danger that he would spoil his appetite on mere berries. She would be pleased by the vegetables he brought and would no doubt want to add them to the stew straightaway. Adie was a wonderful cook, although he dared not admit it to her lest she get a big head.