Naked Empire

Chapter 18

Zedd woke, his head spinning, his stomach heaving with rippling waves of nausea. He didn’t think that in his entire life he had ever felt so sick.

He hadn’t known it was possible to feel so intense an urge to vomit, without actually throwing up. He couldn’t lift his head. If he could just die right then, it would be a welcome release from such dizzying agony.

He started to put his hands over the light hurting his eyes, but found his wrists were tied behind his back.

“I think he’s waking,” a man said in a subservient voice.

Despite his nausea, Zedd instinctively tried to use his gift to sense how many people were around him. For some reason, his gift that ordinarily flowed as easily as thought, as simply as using his eyes to see, his ears to hear, felt thick and slow, as if mired in molasses. He reasoned that it was probably the result of whatever vile substance it was they had soaked the rag in to cause him to pass out when held over his face. Still, he managed to sense that there was only one person around him.

Powerful hands seized his robes and yanked him to his feet. Zedd gave himself permission to vomit. Against all expectation, it didn’t happen. The dark night swam before his blurred vision. He could make out trees against the sky, stars, and the looming black shape of the Keep.

Suddenly, a tongue of flame ignited in midair. Zedd blinked at the unexpected brightness. The small flame, wavering with a lazy motion, floated above the upturned palm of a woman with wiry gray hair. Zedd saw other people in the shadows; his gifted sense was wrong. Like the man who had attacked him, these, too, had to be people not affected by magic.

The woman standing before him peered at him intently. Her expression twisted with satisfied loathing.

“Well, well, well,” she said with patronizing delight. “The great wizard himself awakes.”

Zedd said nothing. It seemed to amuse her. Her fearsome scowl and humped nose, lit from the side by the flame she held above her palm, floated closer.

“You are ours, now,” she hissed.

Zedd, having waited patiently to gather his resolve, abruptly initiated the required mental twist to the gift all the way down to his soul in order to simultaneously call down lightning, focus air to slice this woman in two, and gather every stone and pebble from all around to crush her under an avalanche of rock. He expected the night to light with such power as he unlocked and sent forth.

Nothing happened.

Not waiting to waste the time to analyze what could be the difficulty, he was forced to abandon attempts at satisfying his emotional preferences, and to ignite wizard’s fire itself to consume her.

Nothing happened.

Not only did nothing happen, but it felt as if the attempt itself were but a pebble falling endlessly into a vast, dark well. The expectation withered in the face of what he found within himself: a kind of dreadful emptiness.

Zedd felt as if he couldn’t light a tongue of flame to match hers if his life depended on it. He was somehow cut off from forming his ability into much of anything useful other than to use it for a bit of dim awareness. Probably a lingering result of the foul-smelling substance they had pressed over his face to make him lose consciousness.

Since Zedd couldn’t muster any power, he did the only thing he could: he spit in her face.

With lightning speed, she backhanded him, knocking him from the arms of the men holding him. Unable to use his hands to break his fall, he hit the ground unexpectedly hard. He lay in the dirt for a time, his ears ringing in the aftereffect of the hit he’d taken, waiting for someone to lean over and kill him.

Instead, they hauled him to his feet again. One of the men seized his hair and pulled his head up, forcing him to look into the woman’s face. The scowl he saw there looked like it spent a great deal of time on her face.

She spit in his face.

Zedd smiled. “So, here we have a spoiled child playing the game of tit for tat.”

Zedd grunted with the sudden shock of a wallop of pain that twisted inside of his abdomen. Had the men not been holding him under his arms he would have doubled over and fallen to the ground. He wasn’t quite sure how she had done it—probably with a fist of air delivered with all the power of her gift behind it. She had left the gathered air loosely formed, rather than focusing it to a sharp edge, or it would have torn him in two. As it was, he knew it would leave his middle black and blue.

It was a long and desperate wait before he was able to at last draw a breath.

The men who his gift said weren’t there pulled him straight.

“I’m disappointed to discover I’m in the hands of a sorceress who can be no more inventive than that,” Zedd mocked.

That brought a smile to her scowl. “Don’t you worry, Wizard Zorander, His Excellency very much wants your scrawny hide. He will be playing a game of tit for tat that I believe you will find quite inventive. I have learned that when it comes to inventive cruelty, His Excellency is peerless. I’m sure he will not disappoint you.”

“Then what are we standing around for? I can’t wait to have a word with His Excellency.”

As the men held his head back for her, she ran a fingernail down the side of his face and across his throat, not hard enough to draw blood, but enough to hint at her own restrained cruelty. She leaned in again. One eyebrow lifted in a way that ran a chill up Zedd’s spine.

“I imagine you have grand ideas about such a visit, about what you think you will do or say.” She reached out and hooked a finger around something at his neck. When she gave it a firm tug, he realized that he was wearing a collar of some sort. By the way it dug into the flesh at the back of his neck, it had to be metal.

“Guess what this is,” she said. “Just guess.”

Zedd sighed. “You really are a tedious woman. But I imagine you’ve heard that ofttimes before.”

She ignored his gibe, eager to be the messenger of bad news. Her scowling smile widened. “It’s a Rada’Han.”

Zedd’s sense of alarm rose, but he kept any trace of it from his face.

“Really.” He paused for an extended, bored yawn. “Well, I’d not expect a woman of your limited intellect to think up something clever.”

She slammed a knee into his groin. Zedd doubled over in pain, unable to contain his groan. He hadn’t been expecting something so crude.

The men pulled him up straight, not allowing him pause to recover.

Being pulled up straight brought a gasp of agony. His teeth were clenched, his eyes were watering, and his knees wanted to buckle, but the men held him upright.

Her smile was getting annoying. “You see, Wizard Zorander? Being clever isn’t necessary at all.”

Zedd saw her point but didn’t say so.

He was already preparing to unlock the cursed collar from his neck.

He’d been “captured” before—by the Prelate herself—and had had a Rada’Han put around his neck, like some boy born with the gift who needed training.

The Sisters of the Light put such a collar around those boys so that the gift wouldn’t harm them before they could learn to control their gift.

Richard had been captured and put in such a Rada’Han right after his gift came to life in him.

The collar was also used to control the young wizard wearing it, to give pain, when the Sisters thought it necessary. Zedd understood the Prelate’s reasons for wanting Richard’s help, since they knew he had been born with both sides of the gift, and, too, they worried about the dark forces that pursued him, but he could never forgive her for putting Richard in a collar. A wizard needed to be trained by a wizard, not some misguided gaggle like the Sisters of the Light.

The Prelate, though, had harbored no delusion of actually training Richard to be a wizard. She had collared him in order to smoke out the traitors among her flock: the Sisters of the Dark.

Unlike Richard, though, Zedd knew how to get such a disgusting contrivance off his neck. In fact, he had done it before, when the Prelate had thought to collar him and thus force his cooperation.

Zedd used a thread of power to probe at the lock, not overtly, so as this woman might notice it, but just enough to find the twist in the spell where he would be able to focus his ability to snap the conjured lock.

When the time was right, when he had his feet solidly under him, when his head stopped spinning long enough, he would break the collar’s hold. In that same instant, before she knew what had happened, he would release wizard’s fire and incinerate this woman.

She hooked a finger under the collar again and gave it another tug.

“The thing is, my dear wizard, I would expect that a man of your renowned talent might know how to get such a device off.”

“Really? I’m renowned?” Zedd flashed her a grin. “That’s very gratifying.”

Her utter contempt brought her a smile of pure disdain. With her finger through the collar she pulled him close to her twisted expression. She ignored his words and went on.

“Since His Excellency would be extremely displeased should you get the collar off, I’ve taken measures to insure that such a thing would not happen. I used Subtractive Magic to weld it on.”

Now, that was a problem.

She nodded to the men. Zedd glanced to them at each side and noticed for the first time that their eyes were wet. It shocked him to realize they were weeping.

Weeping or not, they followed her orders, unceremoniously lifting him and heaving him in the back of a wagon as if he were firewood.

Zedd landed beside someone else.

“Glad to see you be alive, old man,” a soft voice rasped. It was Adie.

The side of her face was swollen and bleeding. It looked like they’d clubbed her nearly to death. Her wrists were tied behind her back as well. He saw, too, tears on her cheeks.

It broke his heart to see her hurt. “Adie, what did they do to you?”

She smiled. “Not as much as they intend to, I fear.”

In the dim light of a lantern, Zedd could see that she, too, wore one of the awful collars.

“Your stew was excellent,” he said.

Adie groaned. “Please, old man, do not mention food to me right now.”

Zedd cautiously turned his head and saw more men waiting in the darkness off to the side. They had been behind him, so he hadn’t noticed them before. His gift had not told him they were there.

“I think we’re in a great deal of trouble,” he whispered to no one in particular.

“Really?” Adie rasped. “What be your first clue?”

Zedd knew she was only trying to make him smile, but he could not even manage a small one.

“I be sorry, Zedd.”

He nodded, as best he could lying on his side with his wrists bound behind his back. “I thought I was so clever, laying every kind of trap I could think of. Unfortunately, such traps didn’t work for those who are not affected by magic.”

“You could not know of such a thing,” Adie said in a comforting tone.

His mood sank into bitter regret. “I should have taken it into account after we encountered that one down at the Confessors’ Palace, in the spring. I should have realized the danger.” He stared off into the darkness. “I served our cause no better than a fool.”

“But where did all of them come from?” She looked on the verge of losing herself to panic. “I have never encountered a single such person in my entire life, and now there be a whole gang of them standing there.”

Zedd hated to see Adie so distraught. Adie only knew there were a number of them by the telltale sounds they made. At least he could see the men with his eyes, if not his gift.

The men stood around, heads hanging, waiting to be commanded.

They didn’t look pleased by what was happening. They all looked young, in their twenties. Some were crying. It seemed strange to see such big men weeping. Zedd almost regretted killing one of them. Almost.

“You three,” the woman growled to more of the men waiting in the shadows as she lifted another lantern from one of them and sent the flame she held into it, “get in there and start the search.”

Adie’s completely white eyes turned to Zedd, her expression grave.

“Sister of the Dark,” she whispered.

And now they had the Keep.