Naked Empire (39 page)

“They aren’t far,” Richard said as he stepped back in among the trees. He stood silently watching as Kahlan straightened the shoulders of her dress.

The dress showed no ill effects from its long confinement in their packs. The almost white, satiny smooth fabric glistened in the eerie light of the churning overcast. The flowing lines of the dress, cut square at the neck, bore no lace or frills, nothing to distract from its simple elegance. The sight of Kahlan in that dress still took his breath away.

She looked out through the trees when they heard Cara’s whistle. The warning signal Richard had taught Cara was the plaintive, high, clear whistle of a common wood pewee, although Cara didn’t know that’s what it was. When he’d first told Cara that he wanted to teach her a pewee birdcall as a warning signal, she said she wasn’t going to learn the call of any bird named a pewee. Richard gave in and told her that he would instead teach her the call of the small, fierce, short-tailed pine hawk, but only if she would be willing to work hard at getting it right, since it was more difficult. Satisfied to have her way, Cara had agreed and readily learned the simple whistle. She was good at it and used it often as a signal. Richard never told her that there was no such thing as a short-tailed pine hawk, or that hawks didn’t make whistles like that.

Out through the screen of branches, the dark form of the statue stood guard over an area of the pass that for thousands of years had been deserted. Richard wondered again why the people back then would have put such a statue in a pass no one was likely to ever again visit. He thought about the ancient society that had placed it, and at what they must have thought, sealing people away for the crime of not having a spark of the gift.

Richard brushed pine needles off the back of the sleeve of Kahlan’s dress. “Here, hold still; let me look at you.”

Kahlan turned back, arms at her sides, as he smoothed the fabric at her upper arms. Her unafraid green eyes, beneath eyebrows that had the graceful arch of a raptor’s wings in flight, met his gaze. Her features seemed to have only grown more exquisite since he had first met her. Her look, her pose, the way she gazed at him as if she could see into his soul, struck a chord in him. Clearly evident in her eyes was the intelligence that had from the first so captivated him.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

Despite everything, he couldn’t hold back his smile. “Standing there like that, in that dress, your long hair so beautiful, the green of the trees behind you…it just suddenly reminded me of the first time I saw you.”

Her special smile, the smile she gave no one but him, spread radiantly through her bewitching eyes. She put her wrists on his shoulders and locked her fingers behind his neck, pulling him into a kiss.

As it always did, her kiss so completely consumed him with his need of her that he momentarily lost track of the world. She melted into his embrace. For that moment there was no Imperial Order, no Bandakar, no D’Haran Empire, no Sword of Truth, no chimes, no gift turning its power against him, no poison, no warning beacons, no black-tipped races, no Jagang, no Nicholas, no Sisters of the Dark. Her kiss made him forget everything but her. In that moment there was nothing but the two of them. Kahlan made his life complete; her kiss reaffirmed that bond.

She pulled back, gazing up into his eyes again. “Seems like you’ve had nothing but trouble ever since that day you found me.”

Richard smiled. “My life is what I’ve had since that day I found you. When I found you, I found my life.”

Holding her face in both hands, he kissed her again.

Betty nudged his leg and bleated.

“You two about ready?” Jennsen called down the hill. “They’ll be here, soon. Didn’t you hear Cara’s whistle?”

“We heard,” Kahlan called up to Jennsen. “We’ll be right there.”

Turning back, she smiled as she looked him up and down. “Well, Lord Rahl, you certainly don’t look the way you did the first time I saw you.” She straightened the tooled leather baldric lying over the black tunic banded in gold. “But you look exactly the same, too. Your eyes are the same as I saw that day.” She cocked her head as she smiled up at him. “I don’t see the headache of the gift in your eyes.”

“It’s been gone for a while, but after that kiss, it would be impossible to have a headache.”

“Well, if it comes back,” she said with intimate promise, “just tell me and I’ll see what I can do to make it go away.”

Richard ran his fingers through her hair and gazed one last time into her eyes before slipping his arm around her waist. Together they walked through the cathedral of trees that was their cover off to the side near the crown of the ridge, and out toward the open slope. Between the trunks of the pines, he could see Jennsen running down the hill, leaping from rock to rock, avoiding the patches of snow. She rushed in to meet them just within the small cluster of trees.

“I spotted them,” she said, breathlessly. “I could see them down in the gorge on the far side. They’ll be up here soon.” A grin brightened her face. “I saw Tom leading them.”

Jennsen took in the sight of both of them, then—Kahlan in the white dress of the Mother Confessor and Richard in the outfit he had in part found in the Keep that had once been worn by war wizards. By the surprise on Jennsen’s face, he thought she might curtsy.

“Wow,” she said. “That sure is some dress.” She looked Richard up and down again. “You two look like you should rule the world.”

“Well,” Richard said, “let’s hope Owen’s people think so.”

Cara pushed a spruce bough aside as she ducked in under the limbs of trees. Dressed again in her skintight red leather outfit, she looked as intimidating as she had the first time Richard had seen her in the grand halls of the People’s Palace in D’Hara.

“Lord Rahl once confided in me that he intended to rule the world,” Cara said, having heard Jennsen’s pronouncement.

“Really?” Jennsen asked.

Richard sighed at her awe. “Ruling the world has proven more difficult than I thought it would be.”

“If you would listen more to the Mother Confessor and to me,” Cara advised, “you would have an easier time of it.”

Richard ignored Cara’s cockiness. “Would you get everything together? I want to be up there with Kahlan before Tom arrives with Owen and his men.”

Cara nodded and started collecting the things they’d been working so hard to make, stacking some and taking a count of others. Richard laid a hand on Jennsen’s shoulder.

“Tie Betty up so that she’ll stay here for now. All right? We don’t need her in the way.”

“I’ll see to it,” Jennsen said as she fussed with ringlets of her red hair. “I’ll make sure she won’t be able to bother us or wander off.”

It was plainly evident how eager she was to see Tom again. “You look beautiful,” Richard assured her. Her grin returned to overpower the anxious expression.

Betty’s tail was a blur as she peered up at them, eager to go wherever the rest of them were going. “Come on,” Jennsen said to her friend, “you’re staying here for a while.”

Jennsen snatched Betty’s rope, holding her back, as Richard, with Kahlan close at his side, made his way out past the last of the trees and onto the open ledge. Somber clouds hung low against the face of surrounding mountains. With the towering snowcapped peaks hidden by the low, ominous clouds, Richard thought it felt like they were near the roof of the world.

The wind down at the ground had died, leaving the trees motionless and, by contrast, making the boiling movement of the cloud masses seem almost alive. The flurries of the day before had ended and then the sun had made a brief appearance to shrink the patches of snow on the pass. He didn’t think there was much chance of seeing the sun this day.

The towering stone sentinel waited at the top of the trail, watching forever over the pass and out toward the Pillars of Creation. As they approached it, Richard scanned the surrounding sky but saw only some small birds—flycatchers and white-breasted nuthatches—flitting among the nearby stand of spruce trees. He was relieved that the races had remained absent ever since they had taken this ancient trail up through the pass.

The first night up in the pass, farther back down the slope in the heavier forests, they had worked hard to build a snug shelter, just managing to get it done as darkness had settled into the vast woods. Early the next day, Richard had cleared snow off the statue and all around the ledges of the base.

He had discovered more writing.

He now knew more about this man whose statue had been placed there in the pass. Another small flurry had since dusted snow over the writing, burying again the long-dead words.

Kahlan placed a comforting hand on his back. “They will listen, Richard. They will listen to you.”

With every breath, pain pulled at him from deep inside. It was getting worse. “They’d better, or I’ll have no chance to get the antidote to this poison.”

He knew he couldn’t do it alone. Even if he knew how to call upon his gift and command its magic, he still would not be able to wave a hand or perform some grand feat of conjuring that would cast the Imperial Order out of the Bandakaran Empire. He knew that such things were beyond the scope of even the most powerful magic. Magic, properly used, properly conceived, was a tool, much like his sword, employed to accomplish a goal.

Magic was not what would save him. Magic was not a panacea. If he was to succeed, he had to use his head to come up with a way to prevail.

He no longer knew if he could even depend on the magic of the Sword of Truth. Nor did he know how long he had before his own gift might kill him. At times, it felt as if his gift and the poison were in a race to see which could do him in first.

Richard led Kahlan the rest of the way up and around to the back of the statue, to a small prominence of rock at the very top of the pass where he wanted to wait for the men. From that spot they could see through the gaps in the mountains and back into Bandakar. Out at the edge of the level area, Richard spotted Tom down below leading the men through the trees and up the switchback trail.

Tom peered up as he ascended the trail and spotted Richard and Kahlan. He saw how they were dressed, where they stood, and gave no familiar wave, realizing that doing so would be inappropriate. Through breaks in the trees, Richard could see men following Tom’s gaze up above them.

Richard lifted his sword a few inches, checking that it was clear in its scabbard. Overhead, the dark, towering clouds all around seemed to have gathered, as if they were all crowding into the confines of the pass to watch.

Standing tall as he gazed off to the unknown land beyond, to an unknown empire, Richard took Kahlan’s hand.

Hand in hand, they silently awaited what would be the beginning of a challenge that would change forever the nature of the world, or would be the end of his chance at life.

As the men following Tom emerged from the trees below and into the open, Richard was dismayed to see that their numbers were far less than Owen said had been hiding with him in the hills. Rubbing the furrows on his brow with his fingertips, Richard stepped back up to the short plateau where Kahlan waited.

Her own brow drew down with concern. “What’s wrong?”

“I doubt they brought fifty men.”

Kahlan took up his hand again, her voice coming in gentle assurance. “That’s fifty more than we had.”

Cara came up behind them, dropping her load off to the side. She took up station behind Richard to his left, on the opposite side from Kahlan. Richard met her grim gaze. He wondered how the woman always managed to look as if she fully expected everything to happen just as she wished it to happen, and that was the end of it.

Tom stepped up over the edge of the rock, the men following. He was sweating from the exertion of the climb, but a tight smile warmed his face when he saw Jennsen just coming up the other side of the rise. She returned the brief smile and then stood in the shadows beside the base of the statue, back out of the way.

When the unkempt band of men caught sight of Richard in his black pants and boots, black tunic trimmed in a band of gold around the edge, the broad leather belt, the leather-padded silver wristbands with ancient symbols circling them, and the gleaming silver-and-gold-wrought scabbard, they seemed to lose their courage. When they saw Kahlan standing beside him, they cowered back toward the edge, bowing hesitantly, not knowing what they were supposed to do.

“Come on, then,” Tom told them, prompting them all to come up onto the expanse of flat rock in front of Richard and Kahlan.

Owen whispered to the men as he moved among them, urging them to come forward as Tom was gesturing. They complied timidly, shuffling in a little closer, but still leaving a wide safety margin between themselves and Richard.

As the men all gazed about, unsure as to what they were supposed to do next, Cara stepped forward and held an arm out toward Richard.

“I present Lord Rahl,” she said in a clear tone that rang out over the men gathered at the top of the pass, “the Seeker of Truth and wielder of the Sword of Truth, the bringer of death, the Master of the D’Haran Empire, and husband to the Mother Confessor herself.”

If the men had looked timid and unsure before, Cara’s introduction made them all the more so. When they looked from Richard and Kahlan back to Cara’s penetrating blue eyes, seeing her waiting, they all went to a knee in a bow before Richard.

When Cara stepped deliberately to the fore, in front of the men, turned, and went to her knees, Tom got the message and did the same. Both bent forward and touched their foreheads to the ground.

In the silent, late-morning air, the men waited, still unsure what it was they were to do.

“Master Rahl, guide us,” Cara said in a clear voice so the men could all hear her. She waited.

Tom looked back over his shoulder at all the blond-headed men watching. When Tom frowned with displeasure, the men understood that they were expected to follow the lead. They all finally went to both knees and bowed forward, imitating Tom and Cara, until their foreheads touched the cold granite.

“Master Rahl, guide us,” Cara began again, never lifting her forehead from the ground.

This time, led by Tom, the men all repeated the words after her. “Master Rahl, guide us,” they said with a decided lack of unity.

“Master Rahl, teach us,” Cara said when they all had finished the beginning of the oath. They followed her lead again, but still hesitantly and without much coordination.

“Master Rahl, protect us,” Cara said.

The men repeated the words, their voices coming a little more in union.

“In your light we thrive.”

The men mumbled the words after her.

“In your mercy we are sheltered.”

They repeated the line.

“In your wisdom we are humbled.”

Again they spoke the words after her.

“We live only to serve.”

When they finished repeating the words, she spoke the last line in a clear voice: “Our lives are yours.”

Cara rose up on her knees when they finished and glared back at the men all still bowed forward but peeking up at her. “Those are the words of the devotion to the Lord Rahl. You will now speak it together with me three times, as is proper in the field.”

Cara again put her forehead to the ground at Richard’s feet.

“Master Rahl, guide us. Master Rahl, teach us. Master Rahl, protect us. In your light we thrive. In your mercy we are sheltered. In your wisdom we are humbled. We live only to serve. Our lives are yours.”

Richard and Kahlan stood above the people as they spoke the second and third devotion. This was no empty show put on by Cara for the benefit of the men; this was the devotion as it had been spoken for thousands of years and Cara meant every word of it.

“You may rise now,” she told the men.

The men cautiously returned to their feet, hunched in worry, waiting silently. Richard met all their eyes before he began.

“I am Richard Rahl. I am the man you men decided to poison so as to enslave me and thus force me to do your bidding.

“What you have done is a crime. While you may believe that you can justify your action as proper, or think of it as merely a means of persuasion, nothing can give you the right to threaten or take the life of another who has done you no harm nor intended none. That, along with torture, rape, and murder, is the means by which the Imperial Order rules.”

“But we meant you no harm,” one of the men called out in horror that Richard would accuse them of such a ghastly crime. Other men spoke up in agreement that Richard had it all wrong.

“You think I am a savage,” Richard said in a tone of voice that silenced them and put them back a step. “You think yourselves better than me and so that somehow makes it all right to do this to me—and to try to do it to the Mother Confessor—because you want something and, like petulant children, you expect us to give it to you.

“The alternative you give me is death. The task you demand of me is difficult beyond your imagination, making my death from your poison a very real possibility, and likely. That is the reality of it.

“I already came close to dying from your poison. At the last possible instant I was granted a temporary stay of my execution when one of you gave me a provisional antidote. My friends and loved ones believed I would die that night. You were the cause of it. You men consciously decided to poison me, thereby accepting the fact that you might be killing me.”

“No,” a man insisted, his hands clasped in supplication, “we never intended to harm you.”

“If there was not a credible threat to my life, then why would I do as you wish? If you truly mean me no harm and are not committed to killing me if I don’t go along with you, then prove it and give me the antidote so that I can have my life back. It’s my life, not yours.”

This time no one spoke up.

“No? So you see, then, it is as I say. You men are committed to either murder or enslavement. The only choice I have in it is which of those two it will be. I will hear no more of your feelings about what you intended. Your feelings do not absolve you of your very real deeds. Your actions, not your feelings, speak the truth of your intent.”

Richard clasped his hands behind his back as he paced slowly before the men. “Now, I could do as you people are fond of doing, and tell myself that I can’t know if any of it is true. I could do as you would do, declare myself inadequate to the task of knowing what’s real and refuse to face reality.

“But I am the Seeker of Truth because I do not try to hide from reality. The choice to live demands that the truth be faced. I intend to do that. I intend to live.

“You men must today decide what you will do, what will be the future of your lives and the lives of the ones you love. You are going to have to deal with reality, the same as I must, if you are to have a chance at life. Today you will have to face a great deal of the truth, if you are to have that which you seek.”

Richard gestured to Owen. “I thought you said there were more men than this. Where are the rest?”

Owen took a step forward. “Lord Rahl, to prevent violence, they turned themselves over to the men of the Order.”

Richard stared at the man. “Owen, after all you’ve told me, after all those men have seen from the Order, how could they possibly believe such a thing?”

“But how are we to know that this time it will not stop the violence? We can’t know the nature of reality or—”

“I told you before, with me you will confine yourself to what is, and not repeat meaningless phrases you have memorized. If you have real facts I want to hear them. I’m not interested in meaningless nonsense.”

Owen pulled his small pack off his back. He fished around inside and came up with a small canvas pouch. Tears welled up in his eyes as he gazed at it.

“The men of the Order found out that there were men hiding out in the hills. One of those men hiding with us has three daughters. In order to prevent a cycle of violence, someone in our town told the men of the Order which girls were his daughters.

“Every day the men of the Order tied a rope to a finger of each one of these three girls. One man held the girl while another pulled on the rope until her finger tore off. The men of the Order told a man from our town to go to the hills and give the three fingers to our men. Every day he came.”

Owen handed the bag to Richard. “These are the fingers from each of his daughters.”

“The man who brought them to our men was in a daze. They said he no longer seemed human. He talked in a dead voice. He repeated what he had been bidden to say. He had decided that since nothing was real, he would see nothing and do as he was told.

“He said that the men of the Order told him that some of the people from our town had given the names of the men in the hills and that they had the children of those other men, as well. They said that unless the men returned and gave themselves up, they would do the same to the other children.

“A little more than half the men hiding in the hills could not stand to think of themselves being the cause of such violence, and so they went back to our town and gave themselves over to the men of the Order.”

“Why are you giving me this?” Richard asked.

“Because,” Owen said, his voice filled with tears, “I wanted you to know why our men had no choice but to turn themselves in. They could not stand to think of their loved ones suffering such terrible agony because of them.”

Richard looked out at the mournful men watching him. He felt his anger boiling up inside, but he kept it in check as he spoke.

“I can understand what those men were trying to do by giving themselves up. I can’t fault them for it. It won’t help, but I couldn’t fault them for desperately wanting to spare their loved ones from harm.”

Despite his rage, Richard spoke in a soft voice. “I’m sorry that you and your people are suffering such brutality at the hands of the Imperial Order. But understand this: it is real, and the Order is the cause of it. Those men of yours, if they did as the Order commanded or if they failed to, were not the cause of violence. The responsibility for causing violence is entirely the Order’s. You did not go out and attack them. They came to you, they attacked you, they enslave and torture and murder you.”

Most of the men stood in slumped poses, staring at the ground.

“Do any of the rest of you have children?”

A number of the men nodded or mumbled that they did.

Richard ran his hand back through his hair. “Why haven’t the rest of you turned yourselves in, then? Why are you here and not trying to stop the suffering in the same way the others did?”

The men looked at one another, some seeming confused by the question while others appearing unable to put their reasons into words. Their sorrow, their distress, even their hesitant resolve, were evident on their faces, but they could not come up with words to explain why they would not turn themselves in.

Richard held up the small canvas bag with the gruesome treasure, not allowing them to avoid the issue. “You all knew about this. Why did you not return as well?”

Finally one man spoke up. “I sneaked to the fields at sunset and talked to a man working the crops, and asked what happened to those men who had returned. He said that many of their children had already been taken away. Others had died. All the men who had come in from the hills had been taken away. None were allowed to return to their homes, to their families. What good would it do for us to go back?”

“What good, indeed,” Richard murmured. This was the first sign that they grasped the true nature of the situation.

“You have to stop the Order,” Owen said. “You must give us our freedom. Why have you made us make this journey?”

Richard’s initial spark of confidence dimmed. While they might have in part grasped the truth of their troubles, they certainly weren’t facing the nature of any real solution. They simply wanted to be saved. They still expected someone to do it for them: Richard.

The men all looked relieved that Owen had at last asked the question; they were apparently too timid to ask it themselves. As they waited, some of the men couldn’t help stealing glances at Jennsen, standing to the rear. Most of the men also appeared troubled by the statue looming behind Richard. They could only see the back of it and didn’t really know what it was meant to be.

“Because,” Richard finally told them, “in order for me to do as you want, it’s important that you all come to understand everything involved. You expect me to simply do this for you. I can’t. You are going to have to help me in this or you and all of your loved ones are lost. If we are to succeed, then you men must help the rest of your people come to understand the things I have to tell you.

“You have gone this far, you have suffered this much, you have made this much of a commitment. You realize that if you do the same as your friends have been trying to do, if you apply those same useless solutions, you, too, will be enslaved or murdered. You are running out of options. You all have made a decision to at least try to succeed, to try to rid yourselves of the brutes killing and enslaving your people.