Naked Empire

Chapter 11

“What is it?” Kahlan asked as she rode up beside the wagon.

Richard looked to be furious about something. She saw then that he had the book in one hand; his other was a fist. He opened his mouth, about to speak, but when Jennsen, up on the seat beside Tom, turned back to see what was going on, Richard said to her instead, “Kahlan and I are going to check the road up ahead. Keep your eye on Betty so she doesn’t jump out, will you, Jenn?”

Jennsen smiled at him and nodded.

“If Betty gives you any trouble,” Tom said, “just let me know and I’ll take her to a lady I know and have some goat sausages made up.”

Jennsen grinned at their private joke and gave Tom a good-natured elbow in his ribs. As Richard climbed over the side of the wagon and dropped to the ground, she snapped her fingers at the tail-wagging goat.

“Betty! You just stay there. Richard doesn’t need you tagging along every single time.”

Betty, front hooves on the chafing rail, bleated as she looked up at Jennsen, as if asking for her to reconsider.

“Down,” Jennsen said in admonishment. “Lie down.”

Betty bleated and reluctantly hopped back down into the wagon bed, but she would settle for no less than a scratch behind the ears as consolation before she would lie down.

Kahlan leaned over from her seat in the saddle and untied the reins to Richard’s horse from the back of the wagon. He stepped into the stirrup and gracefully swung up in one fluid motion. She could see that he was agitated about something, but it made her heart sing just to look at him.

He shifted his weight forward slightly, urging his horse ahead. Kahlan squeezed her legs to the side of her own horse to spur her into a canter to keep up with Richard. He rode out ahead, rounding several turns in the flatter land among the rough hillsides, until he caught up with Cara and Friedrich, patrolling out in the lead.

“We’re going to check out front for a while,” he told them. “Why don’t you fall back and check behind.”

Kahlan knew that Richard was sending them to the back because if he took Kahlan to the back under the pretense of watching anything that might come up on them from behind, Cara would keep falling back to check on them.

If they were out front, Cara wouldn’t worry about them dropping back and getting lost.

Cara laid her reins over and turned back. Sweat stuck Kahlan’s shirt to her back as she leaned over her horse’s withers, urging her ahead as Richard’s horse sprang away. Despite the clumps of tall grass dotting the foothills and occasional sparse patches of woods, the heat was still with them. It cooled some at night, now, but the days were hot, with the humidity increasing as the clouds built up against the wall of mountains to their right.

Up close, the barrier of rugged mountains to the east was an intimidating sight. Sheer rock walls rose up below projecting plateaus heaped to their very edge with loose rock crumbled from yet higher plateaus and walls, as if the entire range was all gradually crumbling. With drops of thousands of feet at the fringe of overhanging shelves of rock, climbing such unstable scree would be impossible. If there were passes through the arid slopes, they were no doubt few and would prove difficult.

But making it past those gray mountains of scorching rock, they could now see, was hardly the biggest problem.

Those closer mountains spreading north and south in the burning heat at the edge of the desert partially hid what lay to the other side—a far more daunting range of snowcapped peaks rising up to completely block any passage east. Those imposing mountains were beyond the scale of any Kahlan had ever seen. Not even the most rugged of the Rang’Shada Mountains in the Midlands were their match. These mountains were like a race of giants. Precipitous walls of rock soared thousands of feet straight up. Harrowing slopes rose unbroken by any pass or rift and were so arduous that few trees could find a foothold. Lofty snow-packed peaks that ascended majestically above windswept clouds were jammed so close together that it reminded her more of a knife’s long jagged edge than separate summits.

The day before, when Kahlan had seen Richard studying those imposing mountains, she had asked him if he thought there was any way across them. He had said no, that the only way he could see to get beyond was possibly the notch he’d spotted before, when he had found the place where the strange boundary had once been, and that notch still lay some distance north.

For now, they skirted the dry side of the closer mountains as that range made its way north along the more easily traversed lowlands.

Along the base of a gentle hill covered in clumps of brown grasses, Richard finally slowed his horse. He turned in his saddle, checking that the others were still coming, if a goodly distance behind.

He pulled his horse close beside her. “I skipped ahead in the book.”

Kahlan didn’t like the sound of that. “When I asked you before why you didn’t skip ahead, you said that it wasn’t a wise thing to do.”

“I know, but I wasn’t really getting anywhere and we need answers.” As their horses settled into a comfortable walk, Richard rubbed his shoulders. “After all that heat I can’t believe how cold it’s getting.”

“Cold? What are you—”

“You know those rare people like Jennsen?” The leather of his saddle squeaked as he leaned toward her. “Ones born pristinely ungifted—without even that tiny spark of the gift? The pillars of Creation? Well, back when this book was written, they weren’t so rare.”

“You mean it was more common for them to be born?”

“No, the ones who had been born began to grow up, get married, and have children—ungifted children.”

Kahlan looked over in surprise. “The broken links in the chain of the gift that you were talking about, before?”

Richard nodded. “They were children of the Lord Rahl. Back then, it wasn’t like it has been in recent times with Darken Rahl, or his father. From what I can tell, all the children of the Lord Rahl and his wife were part of his family, and treated as such, even though they were born with this problem. It seems that the wizards tried to help them—both the direct offspring, and then their children, and their children. They tried to cure them.”

“Cure them? Cure them of what?”

Richard lifted his arms in a heated gesture of frustration. “Of being born ungifted—of being born without even that tiny spark of the gift like everyone else has. The wizards back then tried to restore the breaks in the link.”

“How did they think they would be able to cure someone of not having even the spark of the gift?”

Richard pressed his lips together as he thought of a way to explain it. “Well, you know the wizards who sent you across the boundary to find Zedd?”

“Yes,” Kahlan said in a suspicious drawl.

“They weren’t born with the gift—born wizards, that is. What were they—second or third wizards? Something like that? You told me about them, once.” He snapped his fingers as it came to him. “Wizards of the Third Order. Right?”

“Yes. Just one, Giller, was the Second Order. None were able to pass the tests to be a wizard of the First Order, like Zedd, because they didn’t have the gift. Being wizards was their calling, but they weren’t gifted in the conventional sense—but they still had that spark of the gift that everyone has.”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Richard said. “They weren’t born with the gift to be wizards—just the spark of it like everyone else. Yet Zedd somehow trained them to be able to use magic—to be wizards—even though they weren’t born that way, born with the gift to be wizards.”

“Richard, that was a lifetime of work.”

“I know, but the point is that Zedd was able to help them to be wizards—at least wizards enough to pass his tests and conjure magic.”

“Yes, I suppose. When I was young they taught me about the workings of magic and the Wizard’s Keep, about those people and creatures in the Midlands with magic. They may not have been born with the gift, but they had worked a lifetime to become wizards. They were wizards,” she insisted.

Richard’s mouth turned up with the kind of smile that told her that she had just framed the essence of his argument for him. “But they had not been born with that aspect, that attribute, of the gift.” He leaned toward her. “Zedd, besides training them, must have used magic to help them become wizards, right?”

Kahlan frowned at the thought. “I don’t know. They never told me about their training to become wizards. That was never germane to their relationship with me or my training.”

“But Zedd has Additive Magic,” Richard pressed. “Additive can change things, add to them, make them more than they are.”

“All right,” Kahlan cautiously agreed. “What’s the point?”

“The point is that Zedd took people who weren’t born with the gift to be wizards and he trained them but—more importantly—he must have also used his power to help them along that path by altering how they were born. He had to have added to their gift to make them more than they were born to be.” Richard glanced over at her as his horse stepped around a small, scraggly pine. “He altered people with magic.”

Kahlan let out a deep breath as she looked away from Richard and ahead at the gentle spread of grassy hills to either side of them, as she tried to fully grasp the concept of what he was saying.

“I never considered that before, but all right,” she finally said. “So, what of it?”

“We thought that only the wizards of old could do such a thing, but, apparently, it’s not a lost art nor would it be entirely so far-fetched as I had imagined for the wizards back then to believe they could change what was, into what they thought it ought to be. What I’m saying is that, like what Zedd did to give people that with which they were not born, so too did the wizards of old try to give people born as pillars of Creation a spark of the gift.”

Kahlan felt a chill of realization. The implication was staggering. Not just the wizards of old, but Zedd, too, had used magic to alter the very nature of people, the very nature of what they were, how they were born.

She supposed that he had only helped them to achieve what was their greatest ambition in life—their calling—by enhancing what they already had been born with. He helped them to reach their full potential. But that was for men who had the innate potential. While the wizards of long ago probably had done similar things to help people, they had also sometimes used their power for less benevolent reasons.

“So,” he said, “the wizards back then, who were experienced in altering people’s abilities, thought that these people called the pillars of Creation could be cured.”

“Cured of not having been born gifted,” she said in a flat tone of incredulity.

“Not exactly. They weren’t trying to make them into wizards, but they thought they could at least be cured of not having that infinitesimal spark of the gift that simply enabled them to interact with magic.”

Kahlan took a purging breath. “So then what happened?”

“This book was written after the great war had ended—after the barrier had been created and the Old World had been sealed away. It was written after the New World was at peace, or, at least, after the barrier kept the Old World contained.

“But remember what we found out before? That we think that during the war Wizard Ricker and his team had done something to halt Subtractive Magic’s ability to be passed on to the offspring of wizards? Well, after the war, those born with the gift started becoming increasingly uncommon, and those who were being born were being born without the Subtractive side.”

“So, after the war,” she said, “those who were born with the gift of both Additive and Subtractive were rapidly becoming nonexistent. We already knew that.”

“Right.” Richard leaned toward her and lifted the book. “But then, when there are fewer wizards being born, all of a sudden the wizards additionally realize that they have all these pristinely ungifted—breaks altogether in the link to magic—on their hands. Suddenly, on top of the problem of the birth rate of those with the gift to be wizards dropping, they were faced with what they called pillars of Creation.”

Kahlan swayed in the saddle as she thought about it, trying to imagine the situation at the Keep at the time. “I can see that they would have been pretty concerned.”

His voice lowered meaningfully. “They were desperate.”

Kahlan laid her reins over, moving in behind Richard as his horse stepped around an ancient, fallen tree that had been bleached silver from the sweltering sun.

“So, I suppose,” Kahlan asked as she walked her horse back up beside him, “that the wizards started to do the same thing Zedd did? Trained those who had the calling—those who wished to be wizards but had not been born with the gift?”

“Yes, but back then,” Richard said, “they trained those with only Additive to be able to use the Subtractive, too, like full wizards of the time. As time went on, though, even that was being lost to them, and they were only able to do what Zedd did—train men to be wizards but they could only wield Additive Magic.

“But that isn’t really what the book is about,” Richard said as he gestured dismissively. “That was just a side point to record what they had attempted. They started out with confidence. They thought that these pillars of Creation could be cured of being pristinely ungifted, much like wizards with only Additive could be trained to use both sides of the magic, and those without the gift for wizardry could be made wizards able to use at least the Additive side of it.”

The way he used his hands when he talked reminded her of the way Zedd did when he became worked up. “They tried to modify the very nature of how these people had been born. They tried to take people without any spark of the gift, and alter them in a desperate attempt to give them the ability to interact with magic. They weren’t just adding or enhancing, they were trying to create something out of nothing.”

Kahlan didn’t like the sound of that. They knew that in those ancient times the wizards had great power, and they altered people with the gift, manipulated their gift, to suit a specific purpose.

They created weapons out of people.

In the great war, Jagang’s ancestors were one such weapon: dream walkers. Dream walkers were created to be able to take over the minds of people in the New World and control them. Out of desperation, the bond of the Lord Rahl was created to counter that weapon, to protect a people from the dream walkers.

Any number of human weapons were conjured from the gifted. Such changes were often profound, and they were irrevocable. At times, the creations were monsters of boundless cruelty. From this heritage, Jagang had been born.

During that great war, one of the wizards who had been put on trial for treason refused to reveal what damage he had done. When even torture failed to gain the man’s confession, the wizards conducting the trial turned to the talents of a wizard named Merritt and ordered the creation of a Confessor.

Magda Searus, the first Confessor, extracted the man’s confession. The tribunal was so pleased with the results of Wizard Merritt’s conjuring that they commanded that an order of Confessors be created.

Kahlan felt no different than other people felt, she was no less human, no less a woman, loved life no less, but her Confessor’s power was the result of that conjuring. She, too, was a descendant of women altered to be weapons—in this case weapons designed to find the truth.

“What’s the matter?” Richard asked.

She glanced over and saw the look of concern on his face. Kahlan forced a smile and shook her head that it was nothing.

“So what is it that you discovered by jumping ahead in the book?”

Richard took a deep breath as he folded his hands over the pommel of the saddle. “Essentially, they were attempting to use color in order to help people born without eyes . . . to see.”

From Kahlan’s understanding of magic and of history, this was fundamentally different from even the most malevolent experiments to alter people into weapons. Even in the most vile of these instances, they were attempting to take away some attribute of their humanity and at the same time add to or enhance an elemental ability. In none of it were they trying to create that which was not there at all.

“In other words,” Kahlan summed up, “they failed.”

Richard nodded. “So, here they were, the great war was long over and the Old World—those who had wanted to end magic, much like the Imperial Order—was safely sealed away beyond the barrier that had been created. Now they find out that the birth rate of those carrying the gift of wizardry is plummeting, and that the magic engendered by the House of Rahl, the bond with his people designed to stop the dream walkers from taking them, has an unexpected consequence—it also gives birth to the pristinely ungifted, who are an irreversible break in the lineage of magic.”

“They have two problems, then,” Kahlan said. “They have fewer wizards being born to deal with problems of magic, and they have people being born with no link at all to the magic.”

“That’s right. And the second problem was growing faster than the first. In the beginning, they thought they would find a solution, a cure. They didn’t. Worse, as I explained before, those born of the pristinely ungifted, like Jennsen, always bear children the same as they. In a few generations, the number of the people without the link to the gift was growing faster than anyone ever expected.”

Kahlan let out a deep breath. “Desperate indeed.”

“It was becoming chaos.”

She hooked a loose strand of hair back. “What did they decide?”

Richard regarded her with one of those looks that told her he was pretty disturbed by what he’d found.

“They chose magic over people. They deemed that this attribute—magic, or those who possessed it—was more important than human life.” His voice rose. “Here they took the very thing they fought the war over, the right of those who were born the way they were—in that case people born with magic—to their own lives, to exist, and they turned it all around to be that this attribute was more important than the life which held it!”

He let out a breath and lowered his voice. “There were too many to execute, so they did the next best thing—they banished them.”

Kahlan’s eyebrows went up. “Banished them? To where?”

Richard leaned toward her with fire in his eyes. “The Old World.”

“What!”

Richard shrugged, as if speaking on behalf of the wizards back then, mocking their reasoning. “What else could they do? They could hardly execute them; they were friends and family. Many of those normal people with the spark of the gift—but who were not gifted as wizards or sorceresses and so didn’t think of themselves as gifted—had sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, neighbors who had married these pristinely ungifted, these pillars of Creation. They were part of society—a society which was less and less populated by the truly gifted.

“In a society where they were increasingly outnumbered and mistrusted, the ruling gifted couldn’t bring themselves to put all these tainted people to death.”

“You mean they even considered it?”

Richard’s eyes told her that they had and what he thought of the notion. “But in the end, they couldn’t. At the same time, after trying everything, they now realized that they couldn’t ever restore the link to magic once it was broken by these people, and such people were marrying and having children, and the children were marrying and having children—who in every case passed along this taint. And, those so tainted were increasing in numbers faster than anyone had imagined.

“As far as the gifted were concerned, their very world was threatened, in much the same way it had been threatened by the war. That was, after all, what those in the Old World had been trying to do—destroy magic—and here it was, the very thing they feared, happening.

“They couldn’t repair the damage, they couldn’t stop it from spreading, and they couldn’t put to death all those among them. At the same time, with the taint multiplying, they knew that they were running out of time. So, they settled on what to them was the only way out—banishment.”

“And they could cross the barrier?” she asked.

“Those with the gift, for all practical purposes, were prevented from crossing the barrier, but for those who were pillars of Creation, magic did not exist; they were unaffected by it, so, to them, the barrier was not an obstacle.”

“How could those in charge be sure they had all the pillars of Creation? If any escaped, the banishment would fail to solve their problem.”

“Those with the gift—wizards and sorceresses—can somehow recognize those pristinely ungifted for what they are: holes in the world, as Jennsen said those like her were called. The gifted can see them, but not sense them with their gift. Apparently, it wasn’t a problem to know who the pillars of Creation were.”

“Can you tell any difference?” Kahlan asked. “Can you sense Jennsen as being different? Being a hole in the world?”

“No. But I’ve not been taught to use my ability. How about you?”

Kahlan shook her head. “I’m not a sorceress, so I guess that I don’t have the ability to detect those like her.” She shifted her weight in her saddle. “So, what happened with those people back then?”

“The people of the New World collected all those ungifted offspring of the House of Rahl and their every single last descendant, and sent the whole lot of them across the great barrier, to the Old World, where the people had professed that they wanted mankind to be free of magic.”

Richard smiled with the irony, even of such a grim event as this. “The wizards of the New World, in essence, gave their enemy in the Old World exactly what they professed to want, what they had been fighting for: mankind without magic.”

His smile withered. “Can you imagine deciding that we had to banish Jennsen and send her into some fearful unknown, simply because of the fact that she can’t see magic?”

Kahlan shook her head as she tried to envision such a time. “What a horror, to be uprooted and sent away, especially to the enemy of your own people.”

Richard rode in silence for a time. Finally, he went on with the story.

“It was a terrifying event for those banished, but it was also traumatic almost beyond endurance to those who were left. Can you even imagine what it must have been like. All those friends and relatives suddenly ripped out of your life, your family? The disruption to trade and livelihood?” Richard’s words came with bitter finality. “All because they decided some attribute was more important than human life.”

Just listening to the story, Kahlan felt as if she had been through an ordeal. She watched Richard riding beside her, staring off, lost in his own thoughts.

“Then what?” she finally asked. “Did they ever hear from those who were banished?”

He shook his head. “No, nothing. They were now beyond the great barrier. They were gone.”

Kahlan stroked her horse’s neck, just to feel the comfort of something alive. “What did they do about those who were born after that?”

Still he stared off. “Killed them.”

Kahlan swallowed in revulsion. “I can’t imagine how they could do that.”

“They could tell, once the child was born, if it was ungifted. It was said to be easier then, before it was named.”

Kahlan couldn’t find her voice for a moment. “Still,” she said in a weak voice, “I can’t imagine it.”

“It’s no different from what Confessors did about the birth of male Confessors.”

His words cut through her. She hated the memory of those times. Hated the memory of a male child being born to a Confessor. Hated the memory of them being put to death by command of the mother.

There was said to be no choice. Male Confessors in the past had had no self-control over their power. They became monsters, started wars, caused unimaginable suffering.

It was argued that there was no choice but to put a male child of a Confessor to death, before they were named.

Kahlan couldn’t force herself to look up into Richard’s eyes. The witch woman, Shota, had foretold that she and Richard would conceive a male child.

Neither Kahlan nor Richard would ever for an instant consider harming any child of theirs, a child resulting from their love for one another, from their love of life. She couldn’t imagine putting a child of theirs to death for being born a male child of her as a Confessor, or an ungifted male or female child of Richard for being a Rahl. How could anyone say that such a life had no right to exist because of who they were, what they were like, or what they might possibly become.

“Somewhere along the line after this book was written,” Richard said in a quiet voice, “things changed. When this book was written, the Lord Rahl of D’Hara always married, and they knew when he produced an offspring. When the child was pristinely ungifted, they ended its life as mercifully as they could.

“At some point, ruling wizards of the House of Rahl became like Darken Rahl. They took any woman they wanted, whenever they wanted. The details, such as if an ungifted child born of those couplings was actually a pillar of Creation, became unimportant to them. They simply killed any offspring, except the gifted heir.”

“But they were wizards—they could have told which ones were like that and at least not killed the rest.”

“If they wanted, I suppose they could have, but, like Darken Rahl, their only interest was in the single gifted heir. They simply killed the rest.”

“So, such offspring hid for fear of their life and one managed to escape the grasp of Darken Rahl until you killed him first. And so you have a sister, Jennsen.”

Richard’s smile returned. “And so I do.”

Kahlan followed his gaze and saw distant specks, black-tipped races, watching, as they soared on the updrafts of the high cliffs of the mountains to the east.

She took a purging breath of the hot, humid air. “Richard, those ungifted offspring that were banished to the Old World, do you think they survived?”

“If the wizards in the Old World didn’t slaughter them.”

“But everyone down here in the Old World is the same as in the New World. I’ve fought against the soldiers from here—with Zedd and the Sisters of the Light. We used magic of every sort to try to halt the Order’s advance. I can tell you firsthand that all those from the Old World are affected by magic, so that means they all are born with that spark of the gift. There are no broken links in the chain of magic in the Old World.”

“From everything I’ve seen down here, I’d have to agree.”

Kahlan wiped sweat from her brow. It was running into her eyes. “So what happened to those banished people?”

Richard gazed off toward the mountains beneath the races. “I can’t imagine. But it must have been horrifying for them.”

“So you think that maybe that was the end of them? That maybe they perished, or were put to death?”

He regarded her with a sidelong glance. “I don’t know. But what I’d like to know is why that place back there is named the same as they were called in this book: the Pillars of Creation.” His eyes took on a menacing gleam. “And far worse yet, I’d like to know why, as Jennsen told us, a copy of this book is among Jagang’s most prized possessions.”

That troublesome thought had been running through Kahlan’s mind as well.

She looked up at him from beneath a frown. “Maybe you shouldn’t have skipped ahead in your reading of the book, Lord Rahl.”

Richard’s fleeting smile wasn’t all she’d hoped for. “I’ll be relieved if that’s the biggest mistake I’ve made, lately.”

“What do you mean?”

He raked his hair back. “Is anything different about your Confessor’s power?”

“Different?” Almost involuntarily, his question caused her to draw back, to focus inwardly, to take stock of the force she always felt within herself. “No. It feels the same as always.”

The power coiled in the core of her being did not need to be summoned when there was need of it. As always, it was there at the ready; it only required that she release her restraint of it for it to be unleashed.

“There’s something wrong with the sword,” he said, catching her by surprise. “Wrong with its power.”

Kahlan couldn’t imagine what to make of such a notion. “How can you tell? What’s different?”

Richard idly stroked his thumbs along the reins turned back over his fingers. “It’s hard to define exactly what’s different. I’m just used to the feeling of it being at my beck and call. It responds when I need it, but for some reason it seems to be hesitant about doing so.”

Kahlan felt that now, more than ever, they needed to get back to Aydindril and see Zedd. Zedd was the keeper of the sword. Even though they couldn’t take the sword through the sliph, Zedd would be able to give them insight about any nuance of its power. He would know what to do. He would be able to help Richard with the headaches, too.

And Kahlan knew that Richard needed help. She could see that he wasn’t himself. His gray eyes held a glaze of pain, but there was something more etched in his expression, in the way he moved, the way he carried himself.

The whole explanation of the book and what he had discovered seemed to have sapped his strength.

She was beginning to think that it wasn’t she, after all, who was the one running out of time, but that it was Richard. That thought, despite the warm afternoon sun, sent cold terror racing through her.

Richard checked the others over his shoulder. “Let’s go back to the wagon. I need to get something warmer to put on. It’s freezing today.”