Wizard's First Rule (50 page)

His eyes opened partway, the visage of wanton passion burning in them. His breathing was ragged; his hands trembled slightly. He gazed down at the boy.

“Carl,” he said in a husky whisper, “I love you.”

“I love you, Father Rahl.”

Rahl’s eyes slid closed. “Put your mouth over the horn, my boy, and hold tight.”

While Carl did as he was told, Rahl chanted the last charm, his heart pounding. The torches hissed and spit while they burned, the sound intertwining with that of the spell.

And then he poured the contents of the crucible into the horn.

Carl’s eyes snapped wide, and he both inhaled and swallowed involuntarily when the molten lead hit him, searing into his body.

Darken Rahl shuddered with excitement. He let the empty crucible slip from his hands to the ground.

The Master went on to the next set of incantations, the sending of the boy’s spirit to the underworld. He said the words, every word in the proper order, opening the way to the underworld, opening the void, opening the dark emptiness.

As his hands extended upward, dark forms swirled around him. Howls filled the night air with the terror of their calls. Darken Rahl went to the cold stone altar, knelt in front of it, stretched his arm across it, put his face to it. He spoke the words in the ancient language that would link the boy’s spirit to him. For a short while he cast the needed spells. When finished, he stood, fists at his side, his face flushed. Demmin Nass stepped forward, out of the shadows.

Rahl’s vision focused on his friend. “Demmin,” he whispered, his voice coarse.

“Master Rahl,” he answered in greeting, bowing his head.

Rahl stepped to Demmin, his face drawn and sweat-streaked. “Take his body from the ground, and put it on the altar. Use the bucket of water to wash him clean.” He glanced down at the short sword Demmin wore. “Crack his skull for me, no more, and then you may stand back, and wait.”

He passed his hands over Demmin’s head; the air about shuddered. “This spell will protect you. Wait for me then, until I return, just before dawn. I will need you.” He looked away lost in his thoughts.

Demmin did as asked, going about the grim task while Rahl continued to chant the strange words, rocking back and forth, his eyes closed, as if in a trance.

Demmin wiped his sword clean on his muscular forearm and returned it to its scabbard. He took one last look at Rahl, who was still lost in the trance. “I hate this part,” he muttered to himself. He turned and went back into the shadows of the trees, leaving the Master to his work.

Darken Rahl went to stand behind the altar, breathing in deeply. Suddenly, he cast his hand down at the fire pit, and flames leapt up with a roar. He held out both hands, fingers contorted, and the iron bowl lifted and floated over, setting itself down on the fire. Rahl pulled his curved knife from its sheath and laid it on the boy’s wet belly. He slipped his robes from his shoulders and let them drop to the ground, kicking them back out of the way. Sweat covered his lean form, ran down his neck in rivulets.

His skin was smooth and taut over his well-proportioned muscles, except on his upper left thigh, across part of his hip and abdomen, and the left side of his erect sex. That was where the scar was; where the flames sent by the old wizard had tasted him: the flames of the wizard’s fire that had consumed his father as he stood
at his right hand; flames that had licked him also, giving him the pain of the wizard’s fire.

It had been a fire unlike any other, burning, sticking, searing, alive with purpose, as he had screamed until he had lost his voice.

Darken Rahl licked his fingers, and reaching down ran them wetly over the bumpy scars. How he had so badly wanted to do that when he had been burned, how he had so badly wanted to do it to stop the terror of the unrelenting pain and burning.

But the healers wouldn’t let him. They said he mustn’t touch the burn, and so they bound him by his wrists, to keep him from reaching down. He had licked his fingers and instead rubbed them on his lips as he shook, to try to stop his crying, and on his eyes to try to wipe away the vision of having seen his father burned alive. For months he had cried and panted and begged to touch and soothe the burns, but they would not let him.

How he hated the wizard, how he wanted to kill him. How he wanted to push his hand into the wizard’s living body while he looked into his eyes—and pull his heart out.

Darken Rahl took his fingers away from the scar and, picking up the knife, put the thoughts of that time out of his mind. He was a man now. He was the Master. He put his mind back to the matter at hand. He wove the proper spell, and then plunged the knife into the boy’s chest.

With care, he removed the heart and put it into the iron bowl of boiling water. Next he removed the brain and added it to the bowl. Last, he took the testicles and added them, too; then, finally, he put the knife down. Blood mixed with the sweat that covered him. It dripped from his elbows.

He laid his arms across the body and offered prayers to the spirits. His face lifted to the dark windows above as he closed his eyes and continued the incantations, rolling them out without having to think. For an hour he went on with the words of the ceremony, smearing the blood on his chest at the proper time.

When he had finished with the runes from his father’s tomb, he went to the sorcerer’s sand where the boy had been buried for the time of his testing. With his arms he smoothed the sand; it stuck to the blood in a white crust. Squatting, he carefully began drawing the symbols, radiating from the center axis, branching in intricate patterns learned in years of study. He concentrated as he worked into the night, his straight blond hair hanging down, his brow wrinkled with intensity as he added each element, leaving out no line or stroke or curve, for that would be fatal.

At last finished, he went to the sacred bowl and found the water almost boiled away, as it should be. With magic, he floated the bowl back to the polished stone block and let it cool a little before he took a stone pestle and began grinding. He mashed, sweat running from his face, until he had worked the heart, brain, and testicles into a paste, to which he added magic powders from pockets in his discarded robes.

Standing in front of the altar, he held up the bowl with the mixture while he cast the calling spells. He lowered the bowl when finished, and looked around at the Garden of Life. He always liked to look upon beautiful things before he went to the underworld.

With his fingers, he ate from the bowl. He hated the taste of meat, and never ate anything but plants. Now, though, there was no choice, the way was the way. If he wanted to go to the underworld, he had to eat the flesh. He ignored the taste, and ate it all, trying to think of it as vegetable paste.

Licking his fingers clean, he set the bowl down and went to sit cross-legged on the grass in front of the white sand. His blond hair was matted in places with dried blood. He placed his hands palm up on his knees, closed his eyes, and took deep breaths, preparing himself for meeting the spirit of the boy.

At last ready, all preparation done, all charms spoken, all spells cast, the Master raised his head and opened his eyes.

“Come to me, Carl,” he whispered in the secret ancient language.

There was a moment of dead silence, and then a wailing roar. The ground shook.

From the center of the sand, the center of the enchantment, the boy’s spirit rose, in the form of the Shinga, the underworld beast.

The Shinga came, transparent at first, like smoke rising from the ground, turning, as if unscrewing itself from the white sand, lured by the drawing. Its head reared as it struggled to pull itself through the drawing, snorting steam from its flared nostrils. Rahl calmly watched as the fearsome beast rose, becoming solid as it came, ripping the ground and pulling the sand up with it, its powerful hind legs pulling through at last as it reared with a wail. A hole opened, black as pitch. Sand around the edges fell away into the bottomless blackness. The Shinga floated above it. Piercing brown eyes looked down at Rahl.

“Thank you for coming, Carl.”

The beast bent forward, nuzzling its muzzle against the Master’s bare chest. Rahl came to his feet and stroked the Shinga’s head as it bucked, calming its impatience to be off. When at last it quieted, Rahl climbed onto its back and held its neck tight.

With a flash of light, the Shinga, Darken Rahl astride its back, dissolved back into the black void, corkscrewing itself down as it went. The ground shuddered and the hole closed with a grating sound. The Garden of Life was left in the sudden silence of the night.

From the shadows of the trees, Demmin Nass stepped forward, forehead beaded with sweat. “Safe journey, my friend,” he whispered, “safe journey.”

The rain held off for the time being, but the sky remained thickly overcast, as it had been for almost as long as she could remember. Sitting alone on a small bench against the wall of another building, Kahlan smiled to herself as she watched Richard construct the roof of the spirit house. Sweat ran off his bare back, over the swell of his muscles, over the scars where the gar’s claws had raked his back.

Richard was working with Savidlin and some other men, teaching them. He had told her he didn’t need her to translate, that working with one’s hands was universal, and if they had to partly figure it out themselves, they would understand it better and have more pride in what they had done.

Savidlin kept jabbering questions Richard didn’t understand. Richard just smiled and explained things in words the others couldn’t understand, using his hands in a sign language he invented as needed. Sometimes the others thought it hilarious, and all would end up laughing. They had accomplished a lot for men who didn’t understand each other.

At first, Richard hadn’t told her what he was doing; he just smiled and said she would have to wait and see. First, he took blocks of clay, about one by two feet, and made wavelike forms. Half the block’s face was a concave trough, like a gutter, the other half a long rounded hump. He hollowed them out and asked the women who worked the pottery to fire them.

Next, he attached two uniform strips of wood to a flat board, one to each side, and put a lump of soft clay into the center. Using a rolling pin, he flattened the clay, the two strips of wood acting as a thickness gauge. Slicing off the excess at the top and bottom of the board, he ended up with slabs of clay of a uniform thickness and size, which he draped and smoothed over the forms the women had fired for him. He used a stick to poke a hole in the two upper corners.

The women followed him around, inspecting his work closely, so he enlisted their help. Soon he had a whole crew of smiling, chatting women making the slabs and forming them, showing him how to do it better. When the slabs were dry, they could be pulled from the forms. While these were being fired, the women, by then buzzing with curiosity, made more. When they asked how many they should make, he said to just keep making them.

Richard left them to their new work and went to the spirit house and began making a fireplace out of the mud bricks that were used for the buildings. Savidlin followed him around, trying to learn everything.

“You’re making clay roofing tiles, aren’t you?” Kahlan had asked him.

“Yes,” he had said with a smile.

“Richard, I have seen thatched roofs that do not leak.”

“So have I.”

“Then why not simply make their grass roofs over properly, so they don’t leak?”

“Do you know how to thatch roofs?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. But I know how to make tile roofs, so that’s what I have to do.”

While he was building the fireplace, and showing Savidlin how to do it, he had other men strip the grass off the roof, leaving a skeleton of poles that ran the length of the building, poles that had been used to tie down each course of grass. Now they would be used to secure the clay tiles.

The tiles spanned from one row of poles to the next, the bottom edge laid on the first pole, the top edge laid on the second, with the holes in the tiles used to lash them tight to the poles. The second course of tiles was laid so its bottom edge overlapped the top of the first, covering the holes that tied the tiles down, and owing to their wavelike form, each interlocked with the one before. Because the clay tiles were heavier than the grass, Richard had first reinforced the poles from underneath with supports running up the pitch of the roof, with cross members bracing them.

It seemed as if half the village was engaged in the construction. The Bird Man came by from time to time to watch the work, pleased with what he saw. Sometimes he sat with Kahlan, saying nothing, sometimes he talked with her, but mostly he just watched. Occasionally he slipped in a question about Richard’s character.

Most of the time while Richard was working, Kahlan was alone. The women weren’t interested in her offers of help; the men kept their distance, watching her out of the corners of their eyes; and the young girls were too shy to actually bring themselves to talk to her. Sometimes she found them standing, staring at her. When she would ask their names, they would only give their shy smiles, and run away. The little children wanted to approach, but their mothers kept them well clear. She wasn’t allowed to help with the cooking, or the making of the tiles. Her approaches were politely turned down with the excuse that she was an honored guest.