Naked Empire

Chapter 19

“And just how can you be sure that it was a Sister of the Dark you saw?” Verna asked, absently, as she dipped her pen again.

She scrawled her initials at the bottom of the request for a Sister to travel to a town down south to see to a local sorceress’s plans for a defense of their area. Even in the field, the paperwork of the office of the Prelate seemed to have chased after and found her. Their palace had been destroyed, the prophet himself was at large and the real Prelate was off alone chasing after him, some of the Sisters of the Light had pledged their souls to the Keeper of the underworld and in so doing had brought the Keeper a step closer to having them all in the dark forever of eternity, a good number of the Sisters—both Sisters of the Light and Sisters of the Dark—were in the cruel hands of the enemy and doing his bidding, the barrier separating the Old and New World was down, the whole world had been turned upside down, the only man—Richard Rahl—whom prophecy named as having a chance of defeating the threat of the Imperial Order was off who-knew-where doing who-knew-what, and yet, the paperwork managed to survive it all and persist to vex her.

Some of Verna’s assistants handled the paperwork and the requests, but, as much as she disliked dealing with such tedious matters, Verna felt a sense of duty to keep an eye on it all. Besides, as much as paperwork vexed her, it also occupied her mind, preventing her from dwelling on the might-have-been.

“After all,” Verna added, “it could just as easily have been a Sister of the Light. Jagang uses both for their ability with magic. You can’t really be sure it was a Sister of the Dark. He’s been sending Sisters to accompany his scouts all winter and spring.”

The Mord-Sith placed her knuckles on the small desk and leaned in. “I’m telling you, Prelate, it was a Sister of the Dark.”

Verna saw no point in arguing, since it mattered little, so she didn’t.

“If you say so, Rikka.”

Verna turned over the paper to the next in the stack, a request for a Sister to come and speak to children on the calling of the Sisters of the Light, with a lecture on why the Creator would be against the ways of the Imperial Order and on their side. Verna smiled to herself, imagining how Zedd would fume at the very idea of a Sister, in the New World, lecturing her views on such a subject.

Rikka withdrew her knuckles from the desk. “I thought you might say as much.”

“Well, there you go, then,” Verna mumbled as she read the next message from the Sisters of the Light to the south reporting on the passes through the mountains and the methods that had been used to seal them off.

“Wait right here,” Rikka growled before flying out of the tent.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Verna said with a sigh as she scanned the written account, but the fiery, blond-headed woman was already gone.

Verna heard a commotion outside the tent. Rikka was delivering a scathing lecture to someone. The Mord-Sith was incorrigible. That was probably why, despite everything, Verna liked her.

Since Warren had died, Verna’s heart was no longer in much of anything, though. She did as she had to, did her duty, but she couldn’t make herself feel anything but despair. The man she loved, the man she had married, the most wonderful man in the world . . . was gone.

Nothing much mattered after that.

Verna tried to do her part, to do as was needed, because so many people depended on her, but, if truth be told, the reason she worked herself nearly to death was to try to keep her mind occupied, to think of something else, anything else, except Warren. It didn’t really work, but she kept at it. She knew that people counted on her, but she just couldn’t make herself truly care.

Warren was gone. Life was empty of what mattered most to her. That was the end of it, the end of her caring about much of anything.

Verna idly pulled her journey book from her belt. She didn’t know what made her do so, except perhaps that it had been some time since she had last looked for a message from the real Prelate. Ann was having her own crisis of caring ever since Kahlan had laid the blame for so much of what had gone wrong, including being the cause of the war itself, right at the Prelate’s feet. Verna thought that Kahlan had been wrong about much of it, but she understood all too well why she thought that Ann had been responsible for tangling up their lives; Verna had felt the same way for a time.

Holding the journey book off to the side with one hand, flipping the pages with a thumb, Verna saw a message flash by.

Rikka swept back into the tent. She plunked a heavy sack down on Verna’s desk, right on top of the reports.

“Here!” Rikka said, fury powering her voice.

It was then, when Verna looked up, that she saw for the first time the strange way Rikka was dressed. Verna’s mouth fell open. Rikka was not wearing the skintight red leather that the Mord-Sith typically wore, except for occasionally when they were relaxing and then they sometimes wore brown leather, instead. Verna had never seen the woman in anything other than those leather outfits.

Now Rikka had on a dress.

Verna could not remember being so astonished.

Not just a dress, but a pink dress that no decent woman of Rikka’s age, probably her late twenties or early thirties, would be caught dead in. The neckline plunged down to reveal ample cleavage. The twin mounds of exposed flesh were shoved up and nearly spilling out the top. Verna was amazed that Rikka’s nipples had managed to remain covered, what with the way her breasts heaved with her heated breathing.

“You, too?” Rikka snapped.

Verna finally looked up into Rikka’s blazing blue eyes. “Me, too, what?”

“You, too, can’t get enough of looking at my chest?”

Verna felt her face go scarlet. She gave her red face an excuse by shaking a finger at the woman.

“What are you doing dressed like that in an army camp! Around all these soldiers! You look like a whore!”

Despite how their leather outfits went all the way up to their necks, the tight leather left little to the imagination. Seeing the woman’s flesh, though, was altogether different, and quite shocking.

Verna realized, only then, because she had finally looked up at the woman’s face, that Rikka’s single braid was undone. Her long blond hair was as free as a horse’s mane. Verna had never seen one of the Mord-Sith out in public without her hair done up in the single braid that in large part identified their profession of Mord-Sith.

Even seeing the woman’s cleavage exposed was not as shocking as seeing her hair undone. It was that, more than anything, Verna realized, that lent a lewd look to the woman. Something about her braid being undone seemed sacrilegious, even though Verna could not condone a profession dedicated to torture.

Verna remembered, then, that she had asked one of the Mord-Sith, Cara, to do her worst to the young man—a boy, really—who had murdered Warren.

Verna had sat up the entire night listening to that young man scream his life away. His suffering had been monstrous, and yet it had not been nearly enough to suit her.

At times, Verna wondered if in the next life the Keeper of the underworld would have something wholly unpleasant in store for her for all eternity in recompense for what Verna had done. She didn’t really care; it had been worth whatever the price might be.

Besides, she decided, if she was to be punished for condemning that man to just retribution, then the very concept of justice would have to be invalid, rendering living a life of good or evil to have no meaning. In fact, for the justice she had meted out to that vile amoral animal walking the world of life in the form of a man who had murdered Warren, she should be rewarded in the afterlife by being eternally in the warmth of the Creator’s light, along with the good spirit of Warren, or else there was no justice.

General Meiffert swept into the tent, fists at his sides, coming to a halt beside Rikka. He raked his blond hair back when he saw Verna sitting behind her little desk, and cooled visibly.

He’d had the carpenters nail together the tiny desk for her out of scrap furniture left in an abandoned farm. It was nothing like the desks at the Palace of the Prophets, of course, but it had been given with more concern and meaning behind it than the grandest gold-leafed desk she had ever seen. General Meiffert had been proud at seeing how useful Verna found it.

With a quick glance, he took in Rikka’s dress and her hair. “What’s this about?”

“Well,” Verna said, “I’m not sure. Something about one of Jagang’s Sisters scouting a pass.”

Rikka folded her bare arms atop her nearly bare bosom. “Not just a Sister, but a Sister of the Dark.”

“Jagang has been sending Sisters scouting the passes all winter,” the young general said. “The Prelate has laid traps and shields.” His level of concern rose. “Are you telling us that one of them got through?”

“No, I’m telling you that I went hunting for them.”

Verna frowned. “What are you talking about? We lost half a dozen Mord-Sith trying that. After you found the heads of two of your sister Mord-Sith mounted on pikes, the Mother Confessor herself ordered you to stop throwing their lives away on such useless missions.”

Rikka at last smiled. It was the kind of satisfied smile, especially coming from a Mord-Sith, that tended to give people nightmares.

“Does this look useless?”

Rikka reached into her sack and pulled out a human head. Holding it by the hair, she brandished it in front of Verna’s face. She turned, shook it at General Meiffert as well, and then plunked it down on the desk. Gore oozed out over the reports.

“Like I said, a Sister of the Dark.”

Verna recognized the face, even as twisted in death as it was. Rikka was right, it was a Sister of the Dark. The question was, how did she know it was a Sister of the Dark, and not one of the Light?

Outside Verna could hear horses clopping past her tent. Some of the soldiers called out greetings to men returning from patrols. In the distance could be heard conversations and men issuing orders. Hammers on steel rang like bells as men worked hot metal into useful shapes for repairs to equipment. Nearby, horses frisked in a corral. As men made their way past Verna’s tent, their gear jingled. Fires crackled as wood was added for the cooks or roared as bellows pumped to turn it white-hot for the blacksmiths.

“You touched her with your Agiel?” Verna asked in a quiet voice. “Your Agiel doesn’t work effectively on those the dream walker controls.”

Rikka’s smile turned sly. She spread her arms. “Agiel? Do you see an Agiel.”

Verna knew that no Mord-Sith would ever let her Agiel out of her control. With a glance to the woman’s cleavage, she could only imagine where she had it hidden.

“All right,” General Meiffert said, his tone no longer indulgent. “I want to know what’s going on, and I want to know right now.”

“I was down near Dobbin Pass, checking around, and what do I find but an Imperial Order patrol.”

The general nodded as he let out a frustrated sigh. “They’ve been coming in that way from time to time. But how did you manage to come across such an enemy patrol? Why hadn’t one of our Sisters already snared them?”

Rikka shrugged. “Well, this patrol was still on the other side of the pass. Back at that deserted farm.” She tapped Verna’s desk with her toe. “Where you got the wood for this.”

Verna twisted her mouth with displeasure. Rikka wasn’t supposed to be beyond the pass. The Mord-Sith, though, recognized no orders but those from Lord Rahl himself. Rikka had only followed Kahlan’s orders because, during his absence, Kahlan was acting on Richard’s behalf. Verna suspected that it was simpler than that, though; she suspected that they had only followed the Mother Confessor’s orders because she was wife to Lord Rahl, and if they didn’t it would bring Lord Rahl’s wrath down on them. As long as such orders weren’t viewed by the Mord-Sith as troublesome, they went along. When they decided otherwise, they did as they wished.

“The Sister was by herself,” Rikka went on, “having one powerful-looking headache.”

“Jagang,” Verna said. “Jagang was issuing his order, or punishing her for something, or giving her a lecture in her mind. He does that from time to time. It isn’t pleasant.”

Rikka stroked the hair on the woman’s head sitting on Verna’s desk, making a mess of the reports. “The poor thing,” she mocked. “While she was off among the pines staring at nothing while she pressed her fingers to her temples, her men were back at the farmhouse, having their way with a couple of young women. The two were squealing and crying and carrying on, but the men weren’t put off by it any.”

Verna lowered her eyes as she let out a heavy breath. Some people had refused to believe the necessity of fleeing before the arrival of the Imperial Order.

Sometimes, when people refused to recognize the existence of evil, they found themselves having to face precisely that which they had never been willing to admit existed.

Rikka’s satisfied smile returned. “I went in and took care of the brave soldiers of the Imperial Order. They were so distracted, they paid no attention as I snuck up behind them. The women were so terrorized that they screamed even though I was saving them. The Sister hadn’t been paying any attention to the screaming before, and didn’t then, either.

“One of the young women was blond and about my size, so an idea struck me. I put on her dress and took out my braid, so I might be mistaken for her. I gave the one girl some of the men’s clothes to wear and told them both to run for the hills, in the opposite direction of the Sister, and not to look back. I didn’t have to tell them twice. Then I sat down on a stool outside the barn.

“Sure enough, in a while the Sister came back. She saw me sitting there, hanging my head, pretending to be crying. She thought the other woman was still inside, with the men. She said, ‘It’s time those foolish bastards in there were done with you and your friend. His Excellency wants a report, and he wants it now—he’s ready to move.’ ”

Verna came up out of her chair. “You heard her say that?”

“Yes.”

“Then what?” General Meiffert asked.

“Then the Sister made for the side door into the barn. When she stormed past me, I rose up behind her and cut her throat with one of the men’s knives.”

General Meiffert leaned toward Rikka. “You cut her throat? You didn’t use your Agiel?”

Rikka gave him a look that suggested she thought he hadn’t been paying attention. “Like the Prelate said, an Agiel doesn’t work very well on those the dream walker controls. So I used a knife. Dream walker or not, cutting her throat worked just fine.”

Rikka lifted the head before Verna again. One of the reports stuck to the bottom of it as it swung by the hair. “I sliced the knife through her throat and around her neck. She was thrashing about quite a bit, so I had a good hold on her as she died. All of a sudden, there was an instant when the whole world went black—and I mean black, black as the Keeper’s heart. It was as if the underworld had suddenly taken us all.”

Verna looked away from the head of a Sister she had known for a very long time and had always believed was devoted to the Creator, to the light of life. She had been devoted, instead, to death.

“The Keeper came to claim one of his own,” Verna explained in a quiet voice.

“Well,” Rikka said, rather sarcastically, Verna thought, “I didn’t think that when a Sister of the Light died such a thing happened. I told you it was a Sister of the Dark.”

Verna nodded. “So you did.”

General Meiffert gave the Mord-Sith a hurried clap on the back of the shoulder. “Thanks, Rikka. I’d better spread the word. If Jagang is starting to move, it won’t be many days before he’s here. We need to be sure the passes are ready when his force finally gets here.”

“The passes will hold,” Verna said. She let out a silent sigh. “At least for a while.”

The Order had to come across the mountains if they were to conquer D’Hara. There were few ways across those formidable mountains.

Verna and the Sisters had shielded and sealed those passes as well as it was possible to seal them. They had used magic to bring down walls of rock in places, making the narrow roads impassable. In other places, they had used their power to cleave away roads cut into the steep sides of mountains, leaving no way through, except to clamber over rubble. To prevent that, and in other places, the men had worked all winter constructing stone walls across the passes. Atop those walls were fortifications from which they could rain down death on the narrow passes below. Additionally, in every one of those places, the Sisters had set snares of magic so deadly that coming through would be a bloody ordeal that would only get worse, and that was before they encountered the walls lined with defenders.

Jagang had Sisters of the Dark to try to undo the barriers of both magic and stone, but Verna was more powerful, in the Additive anyway, than any of them. Besides that, she had joined her power with other Sisters in order to invest in those barriers magic that she knew would prove formidable.

Still, Jagang would come. Nothing Verna, her Sisters, and the D’Haran army could do would ultimately be able to withstand the numbers Jagang would throw at them. If he had to command his men to march through passes filled a hundred feet deep with their fallen comrades, he would not flinch from doing so. Nor would it matter to him if the corpses were a thousand feet deep.

“I’ll be back a little later, Verna,” the general said. “We’ll need to get the officers and some of the Sisters together and make sure everything is ready.”

“Yes, of course,” Verna said.

Both General Meiffert and Rikka started to leave.

“Rikka,” Verna called. She gestured down at the desk. “Take the dear departed Sister with you, would you please?”

Rikka sighed, which nearly spilled her bosom out of the dress. She made a long-suffering face before snatching up the head and vanishing out of the tent behind the general.

Verna sat down and put her head in her hands. It was going to start all over again. It had been a long and peaceful, if bitterly cold, winter.

Jagang had made his winter encampment on the other side of the mountains, far enough away that, with the snow and cold, it was difficult to launch effective raids against his troops. Just as it had the summer before, the summer Warren had died, now that the weather was favorable, the Order would begin to move. It was starting all over again. The killing, the terror, the fighting, running, hunger, exhaustion.

But what choice was there, other than to be killed. In many ways, life had come to seem worse than death.

Verna abruptly remembered, then, about the journey book. She worked it out of the pocket in her belt and pulled the lamp closer, needing the comfort as well as the light. She wondered where Richard and Kahlan were, if they were safe, and she thought, too, about Zedd and Adie all alone guarding the Wizard’s Keep. Unlike everyone else, at least Zedd and Adie were safe and at peace where they were—for the time being, anyway. Sooner or later, D’Hara would fall and then Jagang would return to Aydindril.

Verna tossed the small black book on the desk, smoothed her dress beneath her legs, and scooted her chair closer. She ran her fingers over the familiar leather cover on an object of magic that was over three thousand years old. The journey books had been invested with magic by those mysterious wizards who so long ago had built the Palace of the Prophets. A journey book was twinned, and as such, they were priceless; what was written in one appeared at the same time in its twin. In that way, the Sisters could communicate over vast distances and know important information as it happened, rather than weeks or even months later.

Ann, the real Prelate, had the twin to Verna’s.

Verna, herself, had been sent by Ann on a journey of nearly twenty years to find Richard. Ann had known all along where Richard had been. It was for that reason that Verna could understand Kahlan’s rage at how Ann had seemed to twist her and Richard’s life. But Verna had come to understand that the Prelate had sent her on what was actually a mission of vital importance, one that had brought change to the world, but also brought hope for the future.

Verna opened the journey book, holding it a little sideways to see the words in the light.

Verna, Ann wrote, I believe I have discovered where the prophet is hiding.

Verna sat back in surprise. After the palace had been destroyed, Nathan, the prophet, had escaped their control and had since been roaming free, a profound danger.

For the last couple of years, the rest of the Sisters of the Light had believed that the Prelate and the prophet were dead. Ann, when she’d left the Palace of the Prophets with Nathan on an important mission, had feigned their deaths and named Verna Prelate to succeed her. Very few people other than Verna, Zedd, Richard, and Kahlan knew the truth. During that mission, however, Nathan had managed to get his collar off and escape Ann’s control.

There was no telling what catastrophe that man could cause.

Verna leaned over the journey book again.

I should have Nathan within days, now. I can hardly believe that after all this time, I nearly have my hands on that man. I will let you know soon.

How are you, Verna? How are you feeling? How are the Sisters and how go matters with the army? Write when you can. I will be checking my journey book nightly. I miss you terribly.

Verna sat back again. That was all there was. But it was enough. The very notion of Ann finally capturing Nathan made Verna’s head swim with relief.

Even that momentous news, though, failed to do much to lift her mood.

Jagang was about to launch his attack on D’Hara and Ann was about to finally have Nathan under control, but Richard was somewhere off to the south, beyond their control. Ann had worked for five hundred years to shape events so that Richard could lead them in the battle for the future of mankind, and now, on the eve of what could very well prove to be that final battle, he was not there with them.

Verna drew the stylus out of the journey book’s spine and leaned over to write Ann a report.

My dearest Ann, I’m afraid that things here are about to become very unpleasant.

The siege of the passes into D’Hara is about to begin.