Naked Empire (45 page)

“That’s why we needed you,” an older man said. “You must do this. You must rid us of the Order.”

“I told you, I can’t do it alone.” With an arm wrapped in a bloody bandage, Richard gestured emphatically. “Surrendering your will to men of the Order who would do such things as this solves nothing. It simply adds more victims. The men of the Order are evil; you must fight back.”

“But if only you would talk to those men like you talked to us, they would see their misguided ways. They would change, then.”

“No, they won’t. Life doesn’t matter to them. They’ve made their choice to torture, rape, and kill. Our only chance to survive, our only chance to have a future is to destroy them.”

“We can’t harm another person,” one of the men said.

“It’s wrong to harm another,” Owen agreed.

“It’s always immoral to hurt, much less kill, another person,” a middle-aged man said to the mumbled agreement of his fellows. “Those who do wrong are obviously in pain and need our understanding, not our hate. Hate will only invite hate. Violence will only begin a cycle of violence that never solves anything.”

Richard felt as if the ground he had gained with these men was slipping away from him. He was about to run his fingers back through his hair when he saw that they were covered in blood. He dropped his arm and shifted his approach.

“You poisoned me to get me to kill these men. By that act, you’ve already proven that you accept the reality that it’s sometimes necessary to kill in order to save innocent lives—that’s why you wanted me. You can’t hold a belief that it’s wrong to harm another and at the same time coerce me to do it for you. That’s simply killing by proxy.”

“We need our freedom,” one of them said. “We thought that maybe because of your command as a ruler you could convince these men, for fear of you, to leave us be.”

“That’s why you have to help me. You just said it—for fear of me. You must help me in this so that the threat, the fear, is credible. If they don’t believe the threat is real then why would they leave your land?”

One of the others folded his arms. “We thought you might rid us of the Order without violence, without killing, but it is up to you to do such killing if that is your way. We cannot kill. From our very beginning, our ancestors have taught us that killing is wrong. You must do this.”

Another, nodding his agreement, said, “It’s your duty to help those who cannot bring themselves to do what you can do.”

Duty. The polite name put to the chains of servitude.

Richard turned away, closing his eyes as he squeezed his temples between fingers and thumb. He’d thought that he was beginning to get through to these men. He’d thought he would be able to get them to think for themselves—in their own best interest—rather than to function spontaneously according to the rote dictates of their indoctrination.

He could hardly believe that after all he’d told them, these men would still rather have their loved ones endure torture and brutal murder than harm the men committing the crimes. By refusing to face the nature of reality, these men were willingly giving the good over to evil, life over to death.

He realized then that it was even more basic than that. In the most fundamental sense, they were willfully choosing to reject the reality of evil.

Deep inside him, every breath pulled a stitch of pain. He had to get the antidote. He was running out of time.

But that alone would not solve his problems; his gift was killing him just as surely as the poison. He felt so sick from the pounding pain of his headache that he thought he might throw up. Even the magic of his sword was failing him.

Richard feared the poison, but in a more central way, he feared the encroaching death from within, from his gift. The poison, as dangerous as it was, had a clearly defined cause and cure. With his gift, he felt lost.

Richard looked back into Kahlan’s troubled eyes. He could see that she had no solution to offer. She stood in a weary pose, her arm hanging straight with the weight of the warning beacon that seemed to tell him only that he was dying, but offered no answers. Its whole reason for being was to call him to a proclaimed duty to help replace the boundary, as if his life was not his own, but belonged to anyone who laid claim to it by shackling him with a declaration of duty.

That concept—duty—was no less a poison than that which these men had given him…a call to sacrifice himself.

Richard took the small statue from Kahlan’s hand and stared down at it. The inky black had already enveloped half the length of the figure. His life was being consumed. The sand continued to trickle away. His time was running out.

The stone figure of Kaja-Rang, the long-dead wizard who had summoned him with the warning beacon and charged him with an impossible task, loomed over him as if in silent rebuke.

Behind him, the men huddled close, affirming to one another their beliefs, their ways, their responsibility to their ancient ideals, that the men of the Order were acting as they were because they were misguided and could still be reformed. They spoke of the Wise One and all the great speakers who had committed them to the path of peace and non-violence. They all reaffirmed the belief that they must follow the path that had been laid down for them from the very beginning by their land’s founders, their ancestors, who had given them their customs, their beliefs, their values, their way of living.

Trying to elevate these men to understand what was right and necessary seemed as difficult as trying to lift them by a slender thread. That thread had broken.

Richard felt trapped by the deluded convictions of these people, by their poison, by the headaches, by Nicholas hunting them, and by a long-dead wizard who had reached out from the underworld to try to enslave him to a long-dead duty.

Anger welling up inside him, Richard cocked his arm and heaved the warning beacon at the statue of Kaja-Rang.

The men ducked as the small figure shot by just over their heads to shatter against the stone base of the statue. Amber fragments and inky black shards flew in every direction. The sand from inside splattered in a stain across the front of the granite pedestal.

The cowering men fell silent.

Overhead, wisps trailing from the sullen clouds drifted by, almost close enough to reach up and touch. A few icy flakes of snow floated along in the still air. All around, a frigid fog had moved in to envelop the surrounding mountains, leaving the top of the pass with the stone sentinel seeming isolated and otherworldly, as if this were all there was to existence. Richard stood in the dead quiet at the center of everyone’s attention.

The words written in High D’Haran on the statue’s base echoed through Richard’s mind.

Fear any breach of this seal to the empire beyond…for beyond is evil: those who cannot see.

The High D’Haran words streamed again and again through his mind. The translation of those words just didn’t feel right.

“Dear spirits,” Richard whispered in sudden realization. “I had it wrong. That’s not what it says.”

Kahlan felt as if her heart were being crushed by the ordeal these men were putting Richard through. Just when she’d thought he had gotten them to understand the truth of what was needed, it seemed to have slipped away as the men reverted to their willful blindness.

Richard, though, seemed almost to have forgotten the men. He stood staring at where the warning beacon had shattered against the statue. Kahlan stepped closer to him and whispered.

“What do you mean, you had it wrong, and that’s not what it says? What are you talking about?”

“The translation,” he said in what sounded like startled comprehension. He stood motionless, facing the towering statue of Kaja-Rang. “Remember how I told you that it was an odd way to phrase what it said?”

Kahlan glanced to the statue and then back to Richard. “Yes.”

“It wasn’t odd at all; I just had it wrong. I was trying to make it say what I thought it would say—that those beyond couldn’t see magic—instead of just seeing what was before me. What I told you before isn’t what it says….”

When his voice trailed off, Kahlan reached up and gripped his arm to draw his attention. “What do you mean, that’s not what it says?”

Richard gestured toward the statue. “I see what I did wrong with the phrasal sequence, why I was having trouble with it. I told you I wasn’t sure of the translation. I was right to have doubts. It doesn’t say, ‘Fear any breach of this seal to the empire beyond…for beyond is evil: those who cannot see.’”

Jennsen leaned in close beside Kahlan. “Are you sure?”

Richard looked back at the statue, his voice distant. “I am now.”

Kahlan pulled on his arm, making him look at her. “So what does it say?”

His gray eyes met her gaze briefly before turning to the eyes of the statue of Kaja-Rang staring out at the Pillars of Creation, at his final safeguard protecting the world from these people. Instead of answering her, he started away.

The men parted as Richard strode toward the statue. Kahlan stayed close on his heels, Cara following in her wake. Jennsen gathered up Betty’s rope and pulled her along. The men, already backing out of the way for Richard, kept a wary eye on the goat and her mistress as they passed. Tom stayed where he was, keeping a careful but unobtrusive watch over all the men.

At the statue, Richard swiped the dusting of snow off the ledge, revealing again the words carved in High D’Haran. Kahlan watched his eyes moving along the line of words, reading them to himself. He had a kind of excitement in his movements that told her he was racing after an important quarry.

For the moment, she could also see that his headache was gone. She couldn’t understand the way it ebbed from time to time, but she was relieved to see strength in the way he moved. Hands spread on the stone, leaning on his arms, he looked up from the words. Without the headache, there was a vibrant clarity in his gray eyes.

“Part of this story has been puzzling,” he said. “I understand now. It doesn’t say, ‘Fear any breach of this seal to the empire beyond…for beyond is evil: those who cannot see.’”

Jennsen’s nose wrinkled. “It doesn’t? You mean it wasn’t meant to be about these pristinely ungifted people?”

“Oh, it was about them, all right, but not in that respect.” Richard tapped a finger to the carved words. “It doesn’t say ‘for beyond is evil: those who cannot see,’ but something profoundly different. It says, ‘Fear any breach of this seal to the empire beyond…
for beyond are those who cannot see evil.
’”

Kahlan’s brow drew down. “…those who cannot see evil.”

Richard lifted his bandaged arm up toward the figure towering over them. “That’s what Kaja-Rang feared most—not those who couldn’t see magic, but those who could not see evil. That’s his warning to the world.” He aimed a thumb back over his shoulder, indicating the men behind them. “That’s what this is all about.”

Kahlan was taken aback, and a little perplexed. “Do you think it might be that because these people can’t see magic they also can’t recognize evil,” she asked, “or that because of the way they’re different they simply don’t have the ability to conceive of evil, in much the same way they can’t conceive of objective magic as having nothing to do with mysticism?”

“That might in part be what Kaja-Rang thought,” Richard said. “But I don’t.”

“Are you so sure?” Jennsen asked.

“Yes.”

Before Kahlan could make him explain, Richard turned to the men. “Here, in stone, Kaja-Rang left a warning for the world. Kaja-Rang’s warning is about those who cannot see evil. Your ancestors were banished from the New World because they were pristinely ungifted. But this man, this powerful wizard, Kaja-Rang, feared them for something else: their ideas. He feared them because they refused to see evil. That’s what made your ancestors so dangerous to the people of the Old World.”

“How could that be?” a man asked.

“Thrown together and banished to a strange place, the Old World, your ancestors must have clung desperately to one another. They were so afraid of rejection, of banishment, that they avoided rejecting one of their own. It developed into a strong belief that no matter what, they should try not to condemn anyone. For this reason, they rejected the concept of evil for fear they would have to judge someone. Judging someone as evil meant they would have to face the problem of removing them from their midst.

“In their flight from reality, they justified their practices by settling on the fanciful notion that nothing is real and so no one can know the nature of reality. That way, they wouldn’t have to admit that someone was evil. Better to deny the existence of evil than have to eliminate the evildoer in their midst. Better to turn a blind eye to the problem, ignore it, and hope it went away.

“If they admitted the reality of evil, then eliminating the evildoer was the only proper action, so, by extension, since they had been banished, they thought that they must have been banished because they were evil. Their solution was to simply discard the entire concept of evil. An entire belief structure developed around this core.

“Kaja-Rang may have thought that because they were pristinely ungifted and couldn’t see magic, they also couldn’t see evil, but what he feared was the infection of their beliefs spreading to others. Thinking requires effort; these people offered beliefs that needed no thought, but merely adopting some noble-sounding phrases. It was, in fact, an arrogant dismissal of the power of man’s mind—an illusion of wisdom that spurned the requirement of any authentic effort to understand the world around them or the nuisance of validation. Such simplistic solutions, such as unconditionally rejecting all violence, are especially seductive to the undeveloped minds of the young, many of whom would have eagerly adopted such disordered reasoning as a talisman of enlightenment.

“When they began fanatically espousing these empty tenets to others, it probably set off the alarm for Kaja-Rang.

“With the spread of such ideas, with the kind of rabid hold it has over some people, such as it has over you men, Kaja-Rang and his people saw how, if such beliefs ran free, it would eventually bring anarchy and ruin by sanctioning evil to stalk among their people, just as it leaves you men defenseless against the evil of the Imperial Order now come among you.

“Kaja-Rang saw such beliefs for what they were: embracing death rather than life. The regression from true enlightenment into the illusion of insight spawned disorder, becoming a threat to all of the Old World, raising the specter of a descent into darkness.”

Richard tapped his finger on the top of the ledge. “There is other writing up here, around the base, that suggests as much, and what became the eventual solution.

“Kaja-Rang had those who believed these teachings collected, not only all the pristinely ungifted banished from the New World, but also the rabid believers who had fallen under their delusional philosophy, and banished the whole lot of them.

“The first banishment, from the New World down to the Old, was unjust. The second banishment, from the Old World to the land beyond here, had been earned.”

Jennsen, twiddling the frayed end of Betty’s rope, looked dubious. “Do you really think there were others banished along with those who were pristinely ungifted? That would mean there were a great many people. How could Kaja-Rang have made all these people go along? Didn’t they resist? How did Kaja-Rang make them all go? Was it a bloody banishment?”

The men were nodding to her questions, apparently wondering the same thing.

“I don’t believe that High D’Haran was a common language among the people, not down here, anyway. I suspect that it was a dying language only used among certain learned people, such as wizards.” Richard gestured to the land beyond. “Kaja-Rang named these people Bandakar—the banished. I don’t think the people knew what it meant. Their empire was not called the Pillars of Creation, or some name referring only to the ungifted. The writing here suggests that it was because it was not only the pristinely ungifted who were banished, but all those who believed as they did. They all were Bandakar: the banished.

“They thought of themselves, of their beliefs, as enlightened. Kaja-Rang played on that, flattering them, telling them that this place had been set aside to protect them from a world not ready to accept them. He made them feel that, in many ways, they were being put here because they were better than anyone else. Not given to reasoned thinking, these people were easily beguiled in this fashion and duped into cooperating with their own banishment. According to what’s hinted at in the writing here around the statue’s base, they went happily into their promised land. Once confined to this place, marriage and subsequent generations spread the pristinely ungifted trait throughout the entire population of Bandakar.”

“And Kaja-Rang really believed they were such a terrible threat to the rest of the people of the Old World?” Jennsen asked. Again, men nodded, apparently in satisfaction that she had asked the question. Kahlan suspected that Jennsen might have asked the question on behalf of the men.

Richard gestured up at the statue of Kaja-Rang. “Look at him. What’s he doing? He’s symbolically standing watch over the boundary he placed here. He’s guarding this pass, watching over a seal keeping back what lies beyond. In his eternal vigilance his hand holds a sword, ever at the ready, to show the magnitude of the danger.

“The people of the Old World felt such gratitude to this important man that they built this monument to honor what he had done for them in protecting them from beliefs they knew would have imperiled their society. The threat was no trifling matter.

“Kaja-Rang watches over this boundary even in death. From the world of the dead he sent me a warning that the seal had been breached.”

Richard waited in the tense silence until all the men looked back at him before he quietly concluded.

“Kaja-Rang banished your ancestors not only because they couldn’t see magic, but, more importantly, because they couldn’t see evil.”

In restless disquiet, the men glanced about at their companions. “But what you call evil is just a way of expressing an inner pain,” one of them said, more as a plea than as an argument.

“That’s right,” another told Richard. “Saying someone is evil is prejudiced thinking. It’s a way of belittling someone already in pain for some reason. Such people must be embraced and taught to shed their fears of their fellow man and then they will not strike out in violent ways.”

Richard swept his glare across all the watching faces. He pointed up at the statue.

“Kaja-Rang feared you because you are dangerous to everyone—not because you are ungifted, but because you embrace evil with your teachings. In so doing, in trying to be kind, to be unselfish, in trying to be nonjudgmental, you allow evil to become far more powerful than it otherwise would. You refuse to see evil, and so you welcome it among you. You allow it to exist. You give it power over you. You are a people who have welcomed death and refused to denounce it.

“You are an empire naked to the shadow of evil.”

After a moment of thick silence, one of the older men finally spoke up. “This belief in evil, as you call it, is a very intolerant attitude and is far too simplistic a judgment. It’s nothing less than an unfair condemnation of your fellow man. None of us, not even you, can judge another.”

Kahlan knew that Richard had a great deal of patience, but very little tolerance. He had been very patient with these men; she could see that he had reached the end of his tolerance. She half expected him to draw his sword.

He walked among the men, his raptor glare moving individuals back as he passed. “Your people think of themselves as enlightened, as above violence. You are not enlightened; you are merely slaves awaiting a master, victims awaiting killers. They have finally come for you.”

Richard snatched up the small bag and stood before the last man who had spoken. “Open your hand.”

The man glanced to those at his sides. Finally, he held his hand out, palm up.

Richard reached into the bag and then placed a small finger, its flesh withered and stained with dried blood, in the man’s hand.

The man obviously didn’t want the little finger sitting in the palm of his hand, but after he looked up into Richard’s withering glower, he said nothing and made no attempt to rid himself of the gory trophy.

Richard walked among the men, ordering random men to open their hands. Kahlan recognized the ones he selected as men who had objected to the things he was trying to do to help them. He placed a finger in each upturned hand until the bag was empty.

“What you hold in your hand is the result of evil,” Richard said. “You men all know the truth of it. You all knew evil was loose in your land. You all wanted that to change. You all wanted to be rid of evil. You all wanted to live. You all wanted your loved ones to live.

“You all had hoped to do it without having to face the truth.

“I have tried to explain things to you so that you could understand the true nature of the battle we all face.”

Richard straightened the baldric over his shoulder.