Naked Empire

Chapter 22

Richard opened his eyes, only to squint at the light, even though it was far from sunny. By the layered streaks of violet tinting the iron gray sky, it appeared to be just dawn. A heavy overcast hung low overhead. Or it could be sunset—he wasn’t really sure. He felt strangely disoriented.

The dull throbbing in his head ached back down through his neck. His chest burned with every breath he drew. His throat was raw. It hurt to swallow.

The heavy pain, though, the pain that had squeezed so hard it had taken his breath and had made the world go black, seemed to have ebbed. The bone-chilling grip of cold had lifted, too.

Richard felt as if he had lost contact with the world for a time—how long a time he didn’t know. It seemed like it had been an eternity, as if the world of life was a distant memory from his past. He also felt as if he had come close to never waking again. It brought a flash of sweat to his brow to feel that he had been close to losing his life, to realize that he might never have awakened.

The surroundings were different from those he remembered. Close by, a wall of straw-colored rock with sharp fractured edges rose nearly straight up. To the side he saw a stand of twisted bristlecone pine. Pale, bare wood stood out in naked relief where sections of dark bark had peeled open. The imposing mountains loomed closer than he remembered, and there were more trees on the slopes of the nearby hills.

Jennsen lay curled up in a blanket beside Betty, her back against the rear wheel of the wagon. Tom was asleep not too far away right beside his draft horses. Friedrich sat on a rock standing watch. Richard couldn’t make sense of the two men who lay at Friedrich’s feet. Richard thought one of them must be the man Kahlan had touched with her power. The other one, though, he wasn’t sure of, although Richard thought there was something familiar about him.

Kahlan was sound asleep up against him. His sword lay on his other side, close by his hand. On the other side of Kahlan lay her sword, sheathed, but at the ready.

All the Seekers who had used the Sword of Truth before Richard, the good and the evil, had left within the sword’s magic the essence of their skill. By mastering the sword as the true Seeker for whom the makers of the sword intended its power, Richard had learned to tap that ability and make it his own, to draw on all the skill and knowledge of those before him. He had become a master of the blade, in more ways than one, and part of that had come from the blade itself.

Kahlan had been taught to use a sword by her father, King Wyborn Amnell, once king of Galea before Kahlan’s mother had taken him for her mate. Richard had completed Kahlan’s training, teaching her how to use a sword in ways she had never been shown, ways that used her size and speed to her best advantage, rather than fighting like the enemy and depending on strength.

Despite his pounding head, and the pain when he drew a breath, the warm feel of Kahlan against his side brought him a smile. She looked so beautiful, even with her hair all in a tangle. She made his heart ache with longing. He had always loved her long beautiful hair. He loved to watch her sleep almost as much as he loved to gaze into her arresting green eyes. He loved to make her hair a tangled mess.

He remembered, back when he had first met her, watching her sleep on the floor of Adie’s home, watching her slow heartbeat in the vein in her neck. He remembered, as he’d watched, being struck by the life in her. She was just so alive, so passionately filled with life. He couldn’t stop smiling as he looked at her.

Gently, he bent and kissed the top of her head. She stirred, nuzzling up tighter to him.

Suddenly, she jerked upright, sitting on a hip as she stared wide-eyed at him.

“Richard!”

She threw herself down beside him, her head on his shoulder, her arm across his chest. She clutched him for dear life. A single gasp of a sob that terrified him with its forlorn misery escaped her throat.

“I’m all right,” he soothed as he smoothed her hair.

She pushed herself up again, slower, gazing at him as if she hadn’t seen him in an eternity. Her special smile, the one she gave only him, spread incandescent across her face.

“Richard . . .” She seemed only able to stare at him and smile.

Richard, still lying back trying to let his head clear, lifted an arm just enough to point. “Who is that?”

Kahlan looked back over her shoulder. She turned back and took up Richard’s hand.

“Remember that fellow a week or so back? Owen? That’s him.”

“I thought I recognized him.”

“Lord Rahl!” Cara dropped to the ground on the side of him opposite Kahlan. “Lord Rahl . . .”

She, too, seemed to have trouble finding words. Instead, she took up his free hand. That, in itself, said a world to him.

Richard took the hand back, kissed his first two fingers and touched the fingers to her cheek.

“Thanks for watching out for everyone.”

Jennsen hobbled over, the blanket still tangled around her legs.

“Richard! The antidote worked! It worked, dear spirits, it worked!”

Richard rose up onto an elbow. “Antidote?” He frowned at the three women around him. “Antidote to what?”

“You were poisoned,” Kahlan told him. She aimed a thumb back over her shoulder. “Owen. When he came to us the first time, you gave him a drink. In thanks, he put poison in your waterskin. He intended to poison me with it, too, but only you drank it.”

Richard’s glare settled on the men at Friedrich’s feet, watching them. He nodded his confirmation that it was true, as if he should be commended for it.

“One of those little mistakes,” Jennsen said.

Richard puzzled at her. “What?”

“You said that even you made mistakes, and even a little one could cause big trouble. Don’t you remember? Cara said you were always making mistakes, especially simple ones, and that’s why you need her around.” Jennsen flashed him a teasing smile. “I guess she was right.”

Richard didn’t correct the story, but said, as he stood, “It just goes to show how you can be taken by surprise by something as simple as that fellow over there.”

Kahlan was watching Owen. “I have a suspicion he isn’t so simple.”

Cara put her arm out for Richard to grab hold of in order to steady himself.

“Cara,” he said as he had to sit down on a nearby crate from the wagon, “bring him over here, would you?”

“Gladly,” she said as she started across their camp. “Don’t forget to tell him about Owen,” Cara said to Kahlan.

“Tell me what?”

Kahlan leaned close as she watched Cara haul Owen to his feet. “Owen is pristinely ungifted—like Jennsen.”

Richard raked his hair back, trying to make sense of it. “Are you saying that he’s also my half brother?”

Kahlan shrugged. “We don’t know that; we know only that he’s pristinely ungifted.” A wrinkle of puzzlement tightened on her brow. “By the way, back at the camp where those men attacked us, you were about to tell me something important you figured out when we were questioning the man that I touched, but you never got the chance.”

“Yes”—Richard squinted, trying to recall what the man had told them—“it was about the one he said gave the orders sending him to capture us: Nicholas . . . Nicholas something.”

“The Slide,” Kahlan reminded him. “Nicholas the Slide.”

“Right. Nicholas told him where to find us—at the eastern edge of the wasteland, heading north. How could he know?”

Kahlan mulled over the question. “Come to think of it, how could he know? We’ve seen no one, at least no one we were aware of, who could have reported where we were. Even if someone had seen us, by the time they reported our position and Nicholas sent the men, we would have been far from here. Unless Nicholas is close.”

“The races,” Richard said. “It has to be that he’s the one watching us through the races. We’ve seen no one else. That’s the only way anyone could have known where we were. This Nicholas the Slide had to have seen us, to have seen where we were, through those birds that have been shadowing us. That’s how he was able to give our location along with the orders.”

Richard rose as the man approached.

“Lord Rahl,” Owen said, arms spread in a gesture of relief as he scurried forward, Cara holding a fistful of his coat at his shoulder to keep him reined in. “I’m so relieved you’re better. I never meant for the poison to hurt you as it did—and it never would have, had you had the antidote sooner. I tried to get to you sooner—I meant to—I swear I did, but all those men you slaughtered . . . it wasn’t my fault.” He added a small smile to the pleading expression he gave Kahlan. “The Mother Confessor knows, she understands.”

Kahlan folded her arms as she looked up at Richard from under her frown. “It’s our fault, you see, that Owen didn’t make it to us sooner with the antidote to the poison. Owen got to our last camp, intending to hand over the antidote to cure you, only to find that we had murdered all those men and then up and left. So, it’s not his fault—his intentions were good and he tried; we spoiled his effort. Very inconsiderate of us.”

Richard stared, not sure if Kahlan was giving him a sarcastic summation of what Owen had told her, or an accurate portrayal of Owen’s excuse, or if his head still wasn’t clear.

Richard’s mood turned as dark as the thick overcast.

“You poisoned me,” he said to Owen, wanting to be sure he had the man’s story straight, “and then you brought an antidote to where we were camped, but when you got to that camp, you came across the men who had attacked us and you found we had gone.”

“Yes.” His cheer that Richard had it right abruptly faded. “Such savagery from the unenlightened is to be expected, of course.” Owen’s blue eyes filled with tears. “But still, it was so . . .” He hugged himself and closed his eyes as he rocked his weight from side to side, from one foot to the other. “Nothing is real. Nothing is real. Nothing is real.”

Richard seized the man’s shirt at his throat and yanked him closer.

“What do you mean, nothing is real?”

Owen paled before Richard’s glare. “Nothing is real. We can’t know if what we see, if anything, is real or not. How could we?”

“If you see it, then how can you possibly think it isn’t real?”

“Because our senses all the time distort the truth of reality and deceive us. Our senses only delude us into the illusion of certainty. We can’t see at night—our sight tells us that the night is empty—but an owl can snatch up a mouse that with our eyes we couldn’t sense was there. Our reality says the mouse didn’t exist—yet we know it must, in spite of what our vision tells us—that another reality exists outside our experience. Our sight, rather than revealing truth, hides the truth from us—worse, it gives us a false idea of reality.

“Our senses deceived us. Dogs can smell a world of things we can’t, because our senses are so limited. How can a dog track something we can’t smell, if our senses tell us what is real and what isn’t. Our understanding of reality, rather than being enhanced by, is instead limited by, our flawed senses.

“Our bias causes us to mistakenly think we know what is unknowable—don’t you see? We aren’t equipped with adequate senses to know the true nature of reality, what is real and what isn’t. We only know a tiny sampling of the world around us. There is a whole world hidden from us, a whole world of mysteries we don’t see—but it’s there just the same, whether we see it or not, whether we have the wisdom to admit our inadequacies to the task of knowing reality, or not. What we think we know is actually unknowable. Nothing is real.”

Richard leaned down. “You saw those bodies because they were real.”

“What we see is only an apparent reality, mere appearances, a self-imposed illusion, all based on our flawed perception. Nothing is real.”

“You didn’t like what you saw, so you choose, instead, to say it isn’t real?”

“I can’t say what’s real. Neither can you. To say otherwise is unenlightened arrogance. A truly enlightened man admits his woeful ineffectiveness when confronting his existence.”

Richard pulled Owen closer. “Such whimsy can only bring you to a life of misery and quaking fear, a life wasted and never really lived. You had better start using your mind for its true purpose of knowing the world around you, instead of abandoning it to faith in irrational notions. With me, you will confine yourself to the facts of the world we live in, not fanciful daydreams as concocted by others.”

Jennsen tugged on Richard’s sleeve, pulling him back to hear her as she whispered. “Richard, what if Owen is right—not necessarily about the bodies, but about the general idea?”

“You mean you think his conclusions are all wrong, and yet, somehow, the convoluted idea behind them must be right.”

“Well, no—but what if what he says really is true? After all, look at you and me. Remember the conversation we had a while back, the one where you were explaining how I was born without eyes to see”—she glanced briefly at Owen and apparently abbreviated what she had intended to say—“certain things. Remember that you said that, for me, such things don’t exist? That reality is different for me? That my reality is different than yours?”

“You’re getting what I said wrong, Jennsen. When most people get into a patch of poison ivy, they blister and itch. Some rare people don’t. That doesn’t mean the poison ivy doesn’t exist, or, more to the point, that its existence depends on whether or not we think it’s there.”

Jennsen pulled him even closer. “Are you so sure? Richard, you don’t know what it’s like to be different from everyone else, to not see and feel what they do. You say there’s magic, but I can’t see it, or feel it. It doesn’t touch me. Am I to believe you on faith, when my senses say it doesn’t exist? Maybe because of that I can understand a little better what Owen means. Maybe he doesn’t have it all wrong. It makes a person wonder what’s real and what’s not, and if, like he says, it’s only your own point of view.”

“The information our senses give us must be taken in context. If I close my eyes the sun doesn’t stop shining. When I go to sleep I’m consciously unaware of anything; that doesn’t mean that the world ceases to exist. You have to use the information from your senses in context along with what you’ve learned to be true about the nature of things. Things don’t change because of the way we think about them. What is, is.”

“But, like he says, if we don’t experience something with our own senses, then how can we know it’s real?”

Richard folded his arms. “I can’t get pregnant. So would you argue that for me women don’t exist.”

Jennsen backed away, looking a little sheepish. “I guess not.”

“Now,” Richard said, turning back to Owen, “you poisoned me—you admit that much.” He tapped his fist against his own chest. “It hurts in here; that’s real. You caused it.

“I want to know why, and I want to know why you brought the antidote. I’m not interested in what you think of the camp where the men who attacked us lay dead. Confine yourself to the matter at hand. You brought the antidote for the poison you gave me. That can’t be the end of it. What’s the rest?”

“Well,” Owen stammered, “I didn’t want you to die, that’s why I saved you.”

“Stop telling me your feelings about what you did and tell me instead what you did and why. Why poison me, and why then save me? I want the answer to that, and I want the truth.”

Owen glanced around at the grim faces watching him. He took a breath as if to gather his composure.

“I needed your help. I had to convince you to help me. I asked, before, for your help and you refused, even though my people have great need. I begged. I told you how important it was for them to have your help, but you still said no.”

“I have my own problems I must deal with,” Richard said. “I’m sorry the Order invaded your homeland—I know how terrible that is—but I told you, I’m trying to bring them down and our doing so will only help you and your people in your effort to rid yourselves of them. You aren’t the only one who has had their home invaded by those brutes. We have men of the Order murdering our loved ones as well.”

“You must help us, first,” Owen insisted. “You and those like you, the unenlightened ones, must free my people. We can’t do it ourselves—we are not savages. I heard what you all had to say about eating meat. Such talk made me ill. Our people are not like that—we can’t be, because we are enlightened. I saw how you murdered all those men back there. I need you to do that to the Order.”

“I thought that wasn’t real?”

Owen ignored the question. “You must give my people freedom.”

“I already told you, I can’t!”

“Now, you must.” He looked at Cara, Jennsen, Tom, and Friedrich. His gaze settled on Kahlan. “You must see to it that Lord Rahl does this—or he will die. I have poisoned him.”

Kahlan seized Owen’s shirt. “You brought him the antidote to the poison.”

Owen nodded. “That first night, when I told you all of my great need, I had just given him the poison.” His gaze returned to Richard. “You had just drunk it, within hours. Had you agreed to give my people the freedom they need, I would have given you the antidote then, and you would be free of the poison. It would have cured you.

“But you refused to come with me, to help those who cannot help themselves, as is your duty to those in need. You sent me away. So, I did not offer you the antidote. In the time since, the poison has worked its way through your body. Had you not been selfish, you would have been cured back then.

“Instead, the poison is now established in you, doing its work. Since it was so long since you drank the poison, the antidote I had with me was no longer enough to cure you, only to make you better for a while.”

“And what will cure me?” Richard asked.

“You will have to have more of the antidote to rid you of the rest of the poison.”

“And I don’t suppose you have any more.”

Owen shook his head. “You must give my people freedom. Only then, will you be able to get more of the antidote.”

Richard wanted to shake the answers out of the man. Instead, he took a breath, trying to stay calm so that he could understand the truth of what Owen had done and then think of the solution.

“Why only then?” he asked.

“Because,” Owen said, “the antidote is in the place taken by the Imperial Order. You must rid us of the invaders if you are to be able to get to the antidote. If you want to live, you must give us our freedom. If you don’t, you will die.”