Faith of the Fallen

Chapter 57

Brother Narev paused behind Richard’s shoulder, a shadow come to visit.

He often lurked nearby, making sure the carvings were progressing as directed. This was the first time the great man himself had stopped to watch Richard work.

“Don’t I know you?” The voice was like stone grating on stone.

Richard let his arm holding the hammer drop to his side as he looked up. He wiped the dusty sweat from his brow with the back of his left hand, still holding the clawed stone chisel.

“Yes, Brother Narev. I was a laborer hauling iron, at the time. I was bringing a load to the blacksmith one day when I was honored to meet you.”

Brother Narev frowned suspiciously. Richard allowed no crack in his facade of innocent calm.

“A laborer, and now a carver?”

“I have ability which I am joyful to contribute to my fellow man. I am grateful for the opportunity the Order has given me to earn my reward in the next life by sacrificing in this.”

“Joyful.” Neal, the shadow of the shadow, stepped forward. “You are joyful to carve, are you?”

“Yes, Brother Neal.”

Richard was joyful that Kahlan was alive. He didn’t think about the rest of it. He was a prisoner, and what he had to do to keep Kahlan alive, he would do; that was all there was to it. What was, was.

Brother Neal smirked his superiority at Richard’s obeisance. The man had come often to lecture the carvers, and Richard had come to know him all too well. The carvers’ work, being the influential face the palace would show to the people, was critically important to the Fellowship of Order.

Richard was frequently the object of Neal’s harangues. Neal, a wizard, not a sorcerer like Brother Narev, always seemed to feel the need to prove his moral authority around Richard. Richard gave him no rough edge to grip, yet Neal still persisted in clawing for one.

Brother Narev believed his own words with grim conviction: mankind was evil; only through selfless sacrifice to your fellow man had you any hope to redeem yourself in the afterlife. There was no joy in his faith, simply a ruthless duty to it.

Neal, on the other hand, bubbled over with his feelings. He believed in the Order’s doctrine with an impassioned, incandescent, arrogant pride, gleefully convinced the world needed iron-fisted direction which only enlightened intellectuals, such as himself, could provide—with grudging deference to Brother Narev, of course.

Richard had more than once overheard Neal proclaim with conviction that if he had to order the tongues cut out of a million innocent men, it would be better than to allow one man to blaspheme against the self-evident, righteous nature of the Order’s ways.

Brother Neal, a fresh-faced young man—no doubt deceptively young, considering that Nicci said he had once lived at the Palace of the Prophets—frequently accompanied Brother Narev, basking in his mentor’s approval. Neal was Brother Narev’s chief lieutenant. His face might have been fresh, but his ideas were not; tyranny was ancient, even if Neal deluded himself in believing it the bright new salvation of mankind when applied by him and his fellows. His ideas were a paramour he embraced with a lover’s boundless, blind passion—a truth discovered with a lover’s lust.

Nothing stirred him to anger quicker than the whiff of argument or contradiction, no matter how reasoned. In the heat of his passion, Neal was perfectly willing to destroy any dissension, torture any opposition, kill any number, who failed to bow before the pedestal upon which stood his irrefutably noble ideals.

No misery, no failure, no amount of wailing and anguish and death, could dim his glowing conviction that the ways of the Order were the only correct course for mankind.

The other disciples, all, like Neal, wearing hooded brown robes, were an incongruous collection of the cruel, the pompously idealistic, the bitterly greedy, the resentful, the spiteful, the timid, and, most of all, the dangerously deluded. All shared an underlying, caustic, inner loathing for mankind which manifested itself in a conviction that anything pleasurable for the people could only be evil and accordingly only sacrifice could be good.

All, with the exception of Neal, were blind followers and completely under the spell of Brother Narev. They believed Brother Narev far closer to the Creator than to man. They hung on his every word, believing each to be divinely inspired. Were he to tell them they must kill themselves for the cause, Richard was sure they would break their necks rushing for the nearest knife.

Neal was alone in that he believed in the divinity of his own words, in addition to Brother Narev’s. Every leader had to have a successor. Richard was pretty sure Neal had already decided who would best serve as the next incarnation of the Order.

“A peculiar choice of words, joyful.” Brother Narev circled a knobby finger toward the cowering, deformed, frightened figures Richard was working on. “This makes you . . . joyful?”

Richard gestured to the Light he had carved so as to shine down on the wretched men. “This, Brother Narev, is what makes me joyful—being able to show men cowering before the perfection of the Creator’s Light. It makes me joyful to show mankind’s wickedness for all to see, for in this way they will know their duty to the Order above all else.”

Brother Narev made a suspicious sound deep in his throat. The sunlight hooded his dark eyes more than usual and seemed to deepen the creases around his mouth as he regarded Richard with a look sharing mistrust and loathing, laced with apprehension. Only the apprehension was any different than the look he gave everyone. Richard fed him a vacant stare. The brother’s mouth finally twisted with the dismissal of his private thoughts.

“I approve . . . I forgot your name. But then, names are not important. Men are not important. Individually, each man is but a meaningless cog in the great wheel of mankind. How that wheel turns is all that matters, not the cogs.”

“Richard Cypher.”

One brow, flocked in tangled white and black hair, lifted.

“Yes . . . Richard Cypher. Well, I approve of your carving, Richard Cypher. You seem to understand better than most how man is properly depicted.”

Richard bowed. “It is not my hand, but the Creator guiding it to help the Order show the way.”

The suspicious look was back, but Richard’s expression made Brother Narev finally believe the words. Brother Narev, his hands clasped behind his back, glided away to see to other matters. Neal, like a child sticking close to his mother’s skirts, scurried to stay close to Brother Narev’s robes. He cast a scowl back over his shoulder. Richard almost expected to see Neal stick out his tongue.

As best as Richard could figure, there were about fifty of the brown-robed disciples. He saw them often enough to come to know their nature. Victor had mentioned to Richard that one of the foundries had cast in pure gold, from the master that the blacksmith had made; somewhere near the same numbers of the spell-forms. Victor thought them only decorations.

Richard had seen several of the gold spell-forms being installed onto the tops of huge, ornate stone pillars set out around the grounds of the Retreat. The pillars, in polished marble, were designed and placed to look like grand decorations for a grand place. Richard suspected they were more.

Richard went back to chiseling a thick, unbending limb. At least, now, his own limbs worked again. It had been a while, but he was healed. This, though, seemed no less a torture.

People gathered every day to view the low relief carvings already up on the walls. Some people knelt on the cobblestone walks before the scenes, praying, till their knees bled. Some brought rags to put beneath their knees as they prayed. Many simply stared with forsaken looks at the nature of mankind depicted in stone.

Richard could see in the faces of many who came that they had come with some kind of vague, undefinable hope, hungering for some essential answer to a question they could not formulate. The emptiness in their eyes as they left was heartbreaking. They were people being drained of life no less than those bled to death in the dungeons of the Order.

Some of those people gathered to watch the carvers work. In the two months Richard had worked at carving for the Retreat, the crowds grew larger to watch him than any of the other men. The people sometimes wept at what they saw emerge from beneath Richard’s chisels.

In the two months Richard had worked at carving for the Retreat, he had come to understand the nuance of carving in stone. What he carved was dispiriting, but the act of carving itself helped to make up for it. Richard reveled in the technical aspects of applying steel to stone, guided by intent.

As much as he hated the things he had to carve, he came to love working stone with a chisel. The marble seemed almost alive under his touch. He would often carve some tiny part with reverence for the subject—a finger gracefully lifted, a eye with knowing vision, a chest holding a heart of reason.

After he accomplished such grace, he would deface it to suit the Order.

More often than not, that was when people wept.

Richard invented impossibly stiff, stilted, contorted people bent under the weight of guilt and shame. If this was the way to preserve Kahlan’s life, then he would make everyone who saw the carvings weep their hearts out. In a way, they were doing the weeping for him, suffering over the carvings for him, being destroyed by what they saw, for him.

In this way, he was able to endure the torture.

When the shadows lengthened to dusk and the day was finished, the carvers started putting away their tools into simple wooden boxes before going home for the night. They all would return not long after first light.

The master builder provided them with orders for areas and shapes to be covered with carving so they could shape the stones to the correct size.

Brother Narev’s disciples came by to provide the details of the stories to be told in stone.

The stone Richard carved was for the grand entrance to the Retreat.

Marble steps swept around in a half circle, leading up to the huge, round plaza. A colonnade of pillars in a half circle, mirroring the steps, surrounded the back half of the plaza. Richard’s job was carving the sweep of scenes that were placed above those columns.

It was to be an entrance which set the tone for the entire palace. In the center of the plaza Brother Neal had told Richard that Brother Narev’s vision was that there would be the statue dominating the entrance to the palace, and it was to be a work which would strike down any observer with an overpowering sense of their own guilt and shame at mankind’s evil nature.

The statue, in its horror, was a call to selfless sacrifice, and was to be built into the form of a sundial, showing people cowering under the Light of their Creator.

Neal had described it with such delight that the image it created in Richard’s mind sickened him.

Richard was the last to leave the site. As he often did, he headed up the hill, along the winding road, to the workshops. Victor was in his shop, banking his coals for the night. With autumn upon them, the days weren’t insufferably hot, so the forge wasn’t the miserable place it had been in high summer. Winter this far south in the Old World was never harsh, but the forge in winter would be a good place to banish the chill that would come on cold rainy days.

“Richard! So good to see you.” The blacksmith knew why Richard was there. “Go on back. Maybe I will come sit with you when I’m finished, here?”

Richard gave his friend a smile and said, “I’d like that.”

Richard opened the double doors at the rear, letting the last of the light fill the room where stood the marble. He came often to see the monolith. Sometimes, after a day of carving ugliness, he had to come and look at the stone and imagine the beauty inside. That balance sometimes seemed as if it was all that sustained him.

Richard’s fingers, dusty from his work carving stone, reached out to feel the white Cavatura marble. It was slightly different from the stone he carved down at the site. He had the experience, now, to discern the subtle difference. The grain was finer in Victor’s stone, harder; it would better take and hold detail.

Under Richard’s fingers, the stone was as cool as moonlight, and just as chaste.

When he looked up, Victor was standing nearby, smiling wistfully, watching Richard and the stone.

“After carving such ugliness, it is good to look upon the beauty of my statue?”

Richard chuckled in answer.

Victor strode across the room, gesturing. “Come, sit with me and have some lardo.”

In the failing light, they sat on the threshold, eating thin slices of the heavy delicacy, savoring the cool air coming up the hill.

“You know, you don’t need to come here to look at my beautiful statue,” Victor said. “You have a beautiful wife to look at.”

Richard didn’t say anything.

“I never recalled you mentioning your wife. I never knew about her, until she came to me that day. For some reason, I always believed you had a good woman . . .”

Victor frowned off at the shell of the Retreat. “Why didn’t you ever mention her?”

Richard shrugged.

“I hope you don’t think me a terrible person, Richard, but she just doesn’t fit my idea of the woman I thought would be with you.”

“I don’t think you’re a terrible person, Victor. Everybody should have the right to think for themselves.”

“Do you mind if I ask you about her?”

Richard sighed. “Victor, I’m tired. I’d really rather not talk about my wife. Besides, there’s nothing to say. She’s my wife. What is, is.”

Victor grunted as he chewed a big bite of red onion. After he swallowed, he waved the half of onion he had left. “It’s not good for a man to carve such things in the day, and then at night have to go home to—What am I saying! What has gotten into me? Forgive me, Richard. Nicci is a beautiful woman.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“And she cares for you.”

Richard didn’t say anything.

“Ishaq and I tried to get you out of that place by bargaining for you with your gold. It wasn’t enough. The man was a pompous official. Nicci knew how to wiggleworm him. She used her words to turn the key on your prison door. Without Nicci, you would be buried in the sky.”

“So, she told them that I could carve—to save my life.”

“That’s right. It is she who got you the job of carver.”

Victor waited for more, and finally sighed in resignation when it wasn’t forthcoming.

“How are those chisels I sent down?”

“Good. They work well. I could use a clawed chisel with finer teeth, though.”

Victor handed Richard another small slice of lardo. “You will have it.”

“What about the steel?”

Victor waved his onion. “Not to worry. Ishaq is doing well in your place. Not as good as you, but he is doing well. He gets me what I need. Everyone likes Ishaq, and is happy he decided to fill in the need. The Order is so desperate for progress to continue that they turn a blind eye to his work. Faval the charcoal maker asked about you. He likes Ishaq, but misses you.”

Richard smiled at the memory of the nervous fellow. “I’m glad Ishaq is buying his charcoal.”

There were a lot of good people in the Old World. Richard had always envisioned them as the enemy, and now he was friends with a number of them.

It had happened to him so often and in the same way; people were basically the same everywhere, once you got to know them.

There were those who loved liberty, who cried out to live their own lives, to strive, to rise above, to achieve, and those bent on the mindless equality of stagnation brought about through the enforcement of an artificial, arbitrary, gray uniformitythose who wanted to transcend through their own effort, and those who wanted others to think for them and were willing to pay the ultimate price for it.

Kamil and Nabbi both stood and grinned when Richard climbed the steps.

“Nabbi and I worked on our carving, Richard. Will you come and see?”

Richard smiled and put an arm around Kamil’s shoulders. “Sure. Let’s see what you’ve done today.”

Richard followed them down the clean hallway and out to the back, where Kamil and Nabbi had carved faces in an old log. The carvings were terrible.

“Well, Kamil, it looks pretty good. Yours, too, Nabbi.”

The carvings of the faces wore smiles, and to Richard that alone was priceless. Despite how poorly done, they had more life to them than what Richard saw executed day in and day out in precious marble by master carvers.

“Really, Richard?” Nabbi asked. “You think Kamil and I could be carvers?”

“Someday, maybe. You need more practice—you still have much to learn—but all carvers have to practice to become adept. Here, look at this, right here, for example. What do you think of this? What’s wrong with it?”

Kamil folded his arms as he frowned in concentration at the face he’d carved. “I don’t know.”

“Nabbi?”

Ill at ease, Nabbi shrugged. “It doesn’t look like a real face. But I can’t tell why.”

“Look at my face, at my eyes. What’s different?”

“Well, I think your eyes are a different shape,” Kamil said.

“And they are closer together—not out at the side of the head,” Nabbi added.

“Very good.” Richard smoothed some of the dirt where the carrots had been pulled up, and then molded the moist dirt into a mound. He used his finger and thumb to shape a simple face. “See here? By putting the eyes closer, like this, it looks more like a real person.”

Both young men nodded as they studied what he had done.

“I see,” Kamil said. “I’ll start a new one, and do it better.”

Richard clapped him on the back. “Good man.”

“Maybe one day we can be carvers, too,” Nabbi said.

“Maybe” was all Richard said.

Nicci had dinner on the table, waiting for him. A bowl of soup sat next to the glowing lamp. The rest of the room was left to the evening gloom.

Nicci, too, sat at the table waiting.

“How was the carving today?” she asked as Richard went to the basin to wash the dirt from his hands.

He splashed the soapy water on his face, rinsing off the stone dust.

“Carving is carving.”

Nicci rubbed her thumb on the base of the lamp.

“Are you able to stand it?”

Richard wiped his hands. “What choice have I? I can either stand it, or I can end it all. What choice is that? Are you asking me if I am ready to commit suicide, yet?”

She looked up. “That isn’t what I meant.”

He tossed the towel down beside the basin. “Besides, how can I not be grateful for a job you got for me?”

Nicci’s blue eyes turned back to the table. “Victor told you?”

“It wasn’t all that hard to figure out. Victor said only that you were beautiful, and you saved my life.”

“I had no choice, Richard. They would only release you if you had a skill. I had to tell them.”

More than most days, he felt the essence of the engagement with her, the dance. She felt secure behind her shield of “had to tell them.” Yet it allowed her to watch him, to see how he would react.

All the effort of the day, moving heavy stone blocks, lifting the hammer countless times, had sapped his strength. His hands tingled with the effect of all those ringing blows. Now, he had begun yet again the battle with Nicci. He sat down, on his pallet as exhaustion took him.

Fatigue was part of any battle. As much as he ever felt it when he held the blade, he felt it now, that life-or-death dance. This was no less a battle than any Richard had ever fought. Nicci stood in opposition to freedom, to life.

This was a dance with death.

The dance with death was really the definition of life itself, since all people eventually must die.

“I want to know something, Nicci.”

She gazed expectantly at him. “What is it?”

“Can you tell if Kahlan is alive?”

“Of course. I can feel the link to her at all times.”

“And is she still alive, then?”

Nicci smiled in that assuring manner of hers. “Richard, Kahlan is fine. Don’t let that weigh on your mind.”

Richard stared at Nicci for a time. Finally, he withdrew his gaze and lay down in his prison bed. He rolled away from Nicci’s gaze, from the dance.

“Richard . . . I made you soup. Come eat.”

“I’m not hungry.”

He shut her from his mind and tried to remember Kahlan’s green eyes as weariness engulfed him.