Confessor: Chainfire Trilogy Part 3

Chapter 9

“Stop being a big baby and hold still,” Richard said.

Johnrock blinked frantically. “Don’t get it in my eyes.”

“I’m not going to get it in your eyes.”

Johnrock took an anxious breath. “Why do I have to be first?”

“Because you are my right wing man.”

Johnrock didn’t have an immediate answer. He pulled his chin away from Richard’s grip. “Do you really think this will help us win?”

“It will,” Richard said as he straightened, “if we all follow through with the rest of it. Paint all by itself isn’t going to win games for us, but the paint will add something important, something that merely winning could not accomplish—it will help to forge a reputation. That reputation will unsettle those who have to face us next.”

“Come on, Johnrock,” one of the other men said as he impatiently folded his arms.

The rest of the team gathered around watching nodded their agreement. None of them really wanted to be first. Most of them, but not all, had at least been won over by Richard’s explanation of what the paint would do for them.

Johnrock, looking around at all the men waiting, finally grimaced. “All right, go ahead.”

Richard glanced past his wing man to the guards with arrows nocked and at the ready. Now that the chains had been removed from the captives, the guards watched for any sign of trouble as they waited to take the team to their first match. Commander Karg always stationed a heavy guard whenever Richard and the other captives were not chained. Richard noted, though, that most of the arrows were pointed in his direction.

Focusing again on Johnrock, he spread his fingers and grabbed the top of the man’s head to hold him still.

Richard had been fretting about what he would paint on the faces of the team. When he’d first come up with the idea, he had thought that maybe he would simply have each man paint his own face in whatever manner he wanted. After brief consideration he realized that he couldn’t leave it up to the men. Too much was at risk.

Besides that, they all wanted Richard to do it. He was the point man. It had been his idea. He figured that most of them had been hesitant because they believed that they were going to be laughed at, and so they had wanted it to be by his hand rather than their own.

Richard dipped his finger in the small bucket of red paint. He had decided against using the brush Commander Karg had brought along with the paint.

Richard wanted to feel the act of drawing directly.

In the little time he’d had, he’d given a great deal of thought to what he would paint. He knew that it had to be something that would accomplish what he’d intended in the first place.

In order to make it work the way he’d described, he had to draw the things he knew.

He had to draw the dance with death.

The dance with death, after all, was ultimately centered on life, yet the meaning of the dance with death was not merely the singular concept of survival. The purpose of the forms was to be able to meet evil and destroy it, in that manner enabling one to preserve life, even one’s own. It was a fine distinction, but an important one: it required recognizing the existence of evil in order to be able to fight for life.

While the vital necessity of recognizing the existence of evil was obvious to Richard, it was clearly a concept that many people willfully refused to face. They chose to be blind, to live in a fantasy world. The dance with death would not allow such lethal fantasies. Survival required the clear and conscious recognition of reality; therefore the dance with death required that one recognize truth. It was all part of a whole and would not succeed if parts were ignored or left out.

The elements of the dance with death—their forms—were at their base the components of every manner of combat, from a debate, to a game, to nghting to the death. Drawn in a language of emblems, those components built the concepts making up the dance. Using those concepts involved seeing what was really happening—in part and in whole—in order to counter it. The ultimate purpose of the dance with death was winning life. The translation of Ja’La dh Jin was “the Game of Life.”

The things that belonged to a war wizard all played some part in the dance with death. In that way a war wizard was devoted to life. Among other items, the symbols on the amulet Richard had worn were a picture, a condensed diagram, forming the core concept of the dance. He knew those moves from fighting with the Sword of Truth.

Even if he didn’t have the sword any longer, he grasped the totality of what was involved in the meaning of the dance with death, and therefore the knowledge he’d gained from using the sword remained with him whether or not he had the sword itself. As Zedd had often reminded him in the beginning, the sword was just a tool; it was the mind behind the weapon that mattered.

Along the way, since Zedd had first given Richard the sword, he had come to understand the language of emblems. He knew their meaning. They spoke to him. He recognized the symbols belonging to a war wizard, and understood what they meant.

Using his finger, Richard began laying down those lines on Johnrock’s face. They were the lines of parts of the dance, the forms used to meet the enemy. Each combination of lines making up an element had meaning. Cut, sidestep, thrust, twist, spin, slash, follow through, deliver death swiftly even as you prepare to meet the next target. The lines he put on Johnrock’s right cheek were admonitions to watch for all that would come at you, without focusing too narrowly.

Besides the elements of the dance, Richard found himself drawing parts of spells he had seen. At first he didn’t realize he was doing it. At first, as he drew those components, he had trouble recalling where he’d seen them before. Then he remembered that they were parts of the spells that Darken Rahl had drawn in the sorcerer’s sand in the Garden of Life as he had invoked the magic necessary to open the boxes of Orden.

Richard realized only then that the visit by the strange, ghostly figure the previous night still weighed heavily on his mind. The voice had told him that he’d been named a player. This was the first day of winter. He had one year to open the correct box of Orden.

Richard had been exhausted, but he could think of little else after that encounter. He had been unable to get much sleep. Being distracted by the pain of the wound in his leg and the one on his back kept him from fully devoting his mind to reasoning it out. The first day of winter had brought the inspection by Jagang. With his sudden concern over how to avoid being recognized by Jagang and all the Sisters in the Order’s encampment, Richard hadn’t been able to consider how it was possible for him to be a player for the boxes of Orden.

He wondered if it could be some kind of mistake—some misdirection of magic caused by the contamination left by the chimes. Even if he had the knowledge, which he didn’t, his gift had been cut off by that witch woman, Six, so he didn’t see how he could have somehow inadvertently put the boxes in play. He couldn’t imagine how such a thing as opening the correct box would be able to be accomplished without his gift. He wondered if Six could be at the center of it all, if it could be some part of a plot he didn’t yet understand.

Back when Darken Rahl had been drawing those spells just before he opened one of the boxes, Richard had not understood anything about their composition. Zedd had told him that drawing such spells was dangerous in the extreme, and that one misplaced line, drawn by the right person, in the right circumstance, in the right medium, could invoke disaster. At the time all the drawings had seemed like arcane motifs executed with mysterious elements that were all part of some complex foreign language.

As Richard had come to learn more about magical designs and emblems, he had come to grasp the meaning behind some of their elements—in much the same way he had at first learned the ancient language of High D’Haran by first coming to recognize individual words. As his understanding of words grew, he was able to grasp the ideas the words were expressing.

In much that same way, he had come to learn that some of the parts of the spells Darken Rahl had drawn to open the boxes of Orden were also parts of the dance with death.

In a way that made sense. Zedd had once told him that the power of Orden was the power of life itself. The dance with death was really about preserving life, and Orden itself was centered around life and preserving it from the rampages of the Chainfire spell.

Richard dunked his finger back in the red paint and laid down an arcing line across Johnrock’s forehead, then supported it with lines that created a symbol for centering strength. He was using elements he understood, but combining them in new ways to alter them. He didn’t want a Sister to see the drawings and recognize their direct meaning. While the designs he was painting were composed of elements he knew, they were original.

The men who had gathered all around leaned in a little, spellbound by not just the process, but by the drawing itself. It had a kind of poetry to it. While they didn’t understand the meaning of the lines, they experienced the totality of them as expressive of meaningful purpose, as important, and as exactly what they were: threatening.

“You know what this whole thing, this drawing, reminds me of?” one of the men asked.

“What?” Richard murmured as he added more to the emblem that stood for a powerful strike meant to break an opponent’s strength.

“In a way it reminds me of the play of the game. I don’t know why, but the lines kind of look like the movements of certain attacks in Ja’La.”

Surprised that the man—another captive—could pick up such a significant trait from the drawing, Richard shot the man a questioning frown.

“When I was a farrier,” the man explained, “I had to understand horses if I was to shoe them. You can’t ask a horse what’s bothering him, but if you pay attention you can learn to pick up on things, like the way the horse moves, and after a time you start to understand the meaning behind certain body language. If you pay attention to those little movements you can avoid getting kicked, or bitten.”

“That’s very good,” Richard said. “That’s something like what I’m doing. I’m going to give each of you a kind of visual picture of power.”

“And how would you know so much about drawing symbols of power?” one of the men, Bruce, asked in a suspicious tone. He was one of the Order soldiers on the team—one of the men who slept in his own tent and resented having to follow the orders of a point man who was an unenlightened heathen, a man who was kept chained at night like an animal. “You people up here put a lot of stock in the outdated beliefs of magic and such, rather than devoting your minds to proper things, to matters of the Creator, to your responsibilities and duty to your fellow man.”

Richard shrugged. “I guess that what I meant by that is that it’s my vision, my idea, of symbols of power. My intention is to draw on each man what I think makes them look more powerful, that’s all.”

Bruce didn’t look satisfied by the answer. He gestured at Johnrock’s face. “What makes you think all them squiggly lines and such look like visions of power?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Richard said, trying to come up with something to make the man stop asking questions without having to actually reveal anything important, “the form of the lines just seem powerful to me.”

“That’s nonsense,” Bruce said. “Drawings don’t mean anything.”

Some of the soldiers on the team watched Bruce and waited for Richard’s answer as if considering a rebellion against their point man.

Richard smiled. “If you think so, Bruce, if you’re convinced that drawings don’t mean anything, then how about if I paint a flower on your forehead.”

All the men laughed—even the soldiers.

Bruce, suddenly looking a little less sure of himself as his gaze darted around at his chuckling teammates, cleared his throat.

“I guess, now that you put it that way, I can see some of what you mean. I guess I’d like to have some of your power drawings, too.” He thumped his chest with a fist. “I want the other teams to fear me.”

Richard nodded. “They will, if you all do as I say. Keep in mind that before this first game the men on the other teams will probably see this red paint on all our faces and think it’s foolish. You have to be prepared for that. When you hear them laughing at you, let that laughter make you angry. Let it fill your hearts with the desire to jam that laughter right back down their throats.

“In that very first moment when we step onto the field, the other team, as well as many of those watching, will probably not just laugh, but call us names. Let them. We want that. Let them underestimate us. When they do that, when they laugh at you or call you names, I want you to save up the anger you’re feeling. Fill your hearts with it.”

Richard met the eyes of each man in turn. “Keep in mind that we are here to be victorious in the tournaments. We are here to win the chance to play the emperor’s team. We alone are worthy of that chance. Those men who are laughing at you are the worthless dregs of Ja’La players. We must sweep them aside so that we can get at the emperor’s team. The men in the first games are in our way. They are in our way and they are laughing at us.

“When you step onto the field of play let their laughter ring in your ears. Soak it in, but keep silent. Let them see no emotion from you. Hold it inside until the right moment.

“Let them think us fools. Let them be distracted by believing that we will be easy marks, rather than focusing on how to play us. Let them lower their guard.

“Then, the instant the game begins, in a focused, coordinated manner unleash your rage against those who laughed at you. We have to hit them with our full force. We have to crush them. We have to make this game as important as if it were the emperor’s team we were playing.

“We can’t simply win this first game by a point or two as is usually the way it goes. That’s not good enough. We can’t be satisfied with that kind of piddling victory. We must be unyielding. We must overwhelm them. We must hammer them into the ground.

“We must beat them by at least ten points.”

The men’s jaws dropped. Eyebrows went up. Such lopsided victories happened only in children’s mismatched games. A Ja’La team on this level winning by more than four or five points was virtually unheard of.

“Every member of the losing team gets a lash of the whip for each point they lose by,” Richard said. “I want that bloody whipping to be on every tongue of every other team in this camp.

“From that moment on, no one will laugh. Instead, each team who has to face us will worry. When men worry, they make mistakes. Every time they make one of those mistakes we will be ready to pounce. We will make their worry warranted. We will bring their worst fears to life. We will prove every sleepless moment of cold sweat to have been justified.

“The second team we beat by twelve points.

“And then, the next team will be even more fearful of us.”

Richard waved his red finger in the direction of the soldiers on the team. “You know the effectiveness of such tactics. You crushed any city that stood against you so that those yet to be conquered trembled in fear as they waited for you to come. Those people knew your reputation and they greatly feared your arrival. Their fear allowed you to more easily conquer them.”

The soldiers grinned. They could now put Richard’s plan in a frame of reference that they understood.

“We want to make all the other teams afraid of the team with the red, painted faces.” Richard fisted his free hand. “Then, we will crush each of them in turn.”

In the sudden silence, the men all made fists to match his and thumped them to their chests in oaths that they would make it so. These men all wanted to win, each for his own reason.

None of those reasons was anything like Richard’s reason.

He hoped not to ever have to play the emperor’s team—he hoped to get his chance long before then—but he had to be prepared to go that far, if necessary. He knew that a good chance might not come along before then. Should it not, he had to insure that they reached the final game of the tournament, when he was more confident of getting the chance he would need.

Richard finally turned back to Johnrock and in short order completed the drawing with a few emblems that symbolized massive weight behind an attack, drawing them down each of Johnrock’s heavily muscled arms.

“Do me next, will you, Ruben?” one of the men asked.

“Then me,” another called out.

“One at a time,” Richard said. “Now, as I’m working, we need to go over our strategy. I want each man to go into this game knowing exactly what to do. We all have to know the plan so that we can all follow it. We all have to know the signals. I want for us to be ready to rush the opponent from the first instant. I want to knock the wind out of them while they’re still laughing.”

Each man in turn sat on the overturned bucket and let Richard paint his face. Richard approached each man as if the drawing was a matter of life and death. In a way it was.

The men had all been pulled in by Richard’s sober lecture. A solemn mood settled over them as they sat silently watching their point man draw what only Richard knew were some of the most deadly concepts he knew how to create. Even if they didn’t understand the language behind those symbols, they understood the meaning behind what Richard was doing. They could see that each man looked fearsome.

As each man was completed, Richard realized that it was like looking at a nearly complete collection of the designs that made up the dance with death, with elements of the boxes of Orden thrown in for good measure.

The only symbols he’d left out were the ones he was saving for himself, the elements of the dance that invoked the most deadly of cuts—the ones that cut into the enemy’s very soul.

One of the soldiers on his team offered Richard a polished piece of metal so that he could see himself as he began to apply the elements of the dance with death. He dunked his finger in the red paint, thinking of it as blood.

The men all watched in rapt attention. This was their leader in battle, the one they followed in Ja’La dh Jin. This was his new face and they were all serious about learning it.

As a final element, Richard added the lightning bolts of the Con Dar, the symbols representing a power Kahlan had invoked when the two of them had been trying to stop Darken Rahl from opening the boxes of Orden and she thought that Richard had been killed. It was a power meant for vengeance.

Thinking about Kahlan, her memory lost, her identity taken from her, being at the mercy of Jagang and the evil beliefs of the Order, as well as picturing her in his mind with that lurid bruise on her face, made his blood boil with rage.

Con Dar meant “Blood Rage.”