Naked Empire

Chapter 25

Richard spun around. “Nicholas? You heard him say that name?”

Owen blinked in surprise. “Yes. I’m sure of it. He said Nicholas.”

Kahlan felt a weary hopelessness settle over her, like the cold, wet mist.

Richard gestured urgently. “Go on.”

“Well, I wasn’t sure that they were talking about you—about the Lord Rahl and the Mother Confessor—when the commander said ‘them,’ but by the grim excitement in their voices I had the impression that it was so. Their voices reminded me of the first time the Order came, at the way Luchan smiled at me in a way I had never seen before, like he might eat me.

“I thought that this information was my best chance to find you. So I started out at once.”

Borne on a light gust, drizzle replaced the morning mist. Kahlan realized that she was shivering with the cold.

Richard pointed at the man sitting on the ground not far away, the man with the notch in his right ear, the man Kahlan had touched. Some of the storm within Richard boiled to the surface.

“There is the man the orders from Nicholas were sent to. He brought with him those men you saw at our last camp. Had we not defended ourselves, had we put our own sincere hatred of violence above the nature of reality, we would be as lost as Marilee.”

Owen stared at the man. “What is his name?”

“I don’t know and it doesn’t matter to me in the least. He fought for the Imperial Order—fought to uphold a view of all life, including his, as unimportant, interchangeable, expendable in the mindless pursuit of an ideal that holds individual lives as worthless in themselves—a tenet that demands sacrifice to others until you are nothing.

“He fights for the dream of everybody to be nobody and nothing.

“The beliefs of the Order hold that you had no right to love Marilee, that everyone is the same and so your duty should be to marry someone who could best use your help. In that way, through selfless sacrifice, you would properly serve your fellow man. Despite how you struggle not to see what’s before your eyes, Owen, I think somewhere beneath all your regurgitated teachings, you know that that is the greatest horror brought by the Order—not their brutality, but their ideas. It is their beliefs that sanction brutality, and yours that invite it.

“He didn’t value his own life, who he was; why should I care what his name was. I give him what was his greatest ambition: nothingness.”

When Richard saw Kahlan shivering in the cold drizzle, he withdrew his hot glare from Owen and retrieved her cloak from her pack in the wagon. With the utmost gentleness and care, he wrapped it around her shoulders. By the look on his face, he seemed to have had all he could take of listening to Owen.

Kahlan seized his hand, holding it to her cheek for a moment. There was some small good in the story they had heard from Owen.

“This means that the gift isn’t killing you, Richard,” she said in a confidential tone. “It was the poison.”

She was relieved that they hadn’t run out of time to get him help, as she had so feared on that brief, eternal wagon ride when he’d been unconscious.

“I had the headaches before I ran into Owen. I still have the headaches. The sword’s magic as well faltered before I was poisoned.”

“But at least this now gives us more time to find the solutions to those problems.”

He ran his fingers back through his hair. “I’m afraid we have worse problems, now, and not the time you think.”

“Worse problems?”

Richard nodded. “You know the empire Owen comes from? Bandakar? Guess what ‘Bandakar’ means.”

Kahlan glanced at Owen sitting hunched on the crate and all by himself.

She shook her head as her gaze returned to Richard’s gray eyes, troubled more by the suppressed rage in his voice than anything else.

“I don’t know, what?”

“In High D’Haran it’s a name. It means ‘the banished.’ Remember from the book, The Pillars of Creation, when I was telling you what it said about how they decided to send all the pristinely ungifted people away to the Old World—to banish them? Remember that I said no one ever knew what became of them?

“We just found out.

“The world is now naked before the people of the Bandakaran Empire.”

Kahlan frowned. “How can you know for certain that he is a descendant of those people?”

“Look at him. He’s blond and looks more like full-blooded D’Harans than he does the people down here in the Old World. More importantly, though, he’s not affected by magic.”

“But that could be just him.”

Richard leaned in closer. “In a closed place like he comes from, a place shut off from the rest of the world for thousands of years, even one pillar of Creation would have spread that ungifted trait throughout the entire population by now.

“But there wasn’t just one; they were all ungifted. For that, they were banished to the Old World, and in the Old World, where they tried to establish a new life, they were again all collected and banished to that place beyond those mountains—a place they were told was for the bandakar, the banished.”

“How did the people in the Old World find out about them? How did they keep them all together, without a single one surviving to spread their ungifted trait to the general population, and how did they manage to then put them all in that place—banish them?”

“Good questions, all, but right now not the important ones.

“Owen,” Richard called as he turned back to the others, “I want you to stay right there, please, while the rest of us decide what will be our single voice about what we must do.”

Owen brightened at a method of doing things with which he identified and felt comfortable. He didn’t seem to detect, as did Kahlan, the undercurrent of sarcasm in Richard’s voice.

“You,” Richard said to the man Kahlan had touched, “go sit beside him and see that he waits there with you.”

While the man scurried to do as he was told, Richard tilted his head in gesture to the rest of them, calling them away with him. “We need to talk.”

Friedrich, Tom, Jennsen, Cara, and Kahlan followed Richard away from Owen and the man. Richard leaned back against the chafing rail of the wagon and folded his arms as they all gathered close around him. He took time to appraise each face looking at him.

“We have big problems,” Richard began, “and not just from the poison Owen gave me. Owen isn’t gifted. He’s like you, Jennsen. Magic doesn’t touch him.” His gaze remained locked on Jennsen’s. “The rest of his people are the same as he, as you.”

Jennsen’s jaw fell open in astonishment. She looked confused, as if unable to reconcile it all in her mind. Friedrich and Tom looked nearly as startled. Cara’s brow drew down in a dark frown.

“Richard,” Jennsen finally said, “that just can’t be. There’s too many of them. There’s no way that they can all be half brothers and sisters of ours.”

“They aren’t half brothers and sisters,” Richard said. “They’re a line of people descended from the House of Rahl—people like you. I don’t have time right now to explain all of it to you, but remember how I told you that you would bear children who were like you, and they would pass that pristinely ungifted trait on to all future generations? Well, back a long time ago, there were people like that spreading in D’Hara. The people back then gathered up all these ungifted people and sent them to the Old World. The people down here then sealed them away beyond those mountains, there. The name of their empire, Bandakar, means ‘the banished.’ ”

Jennsen’s big blue eyes filled with tears. She was one of those people, people so hated that they had been banished from the rest of the people in their own land and sent into exile.

Kahlan put an arm around her shoulders. “Remember how you said that you felt alone in the world?” Kahlan smiled warmly. “You don’t have to feel alone anymore. There are people like you.”

Kahlan didn’t think her words seemed to help much, but Jennsen welcomed the comfort of the embrace.

Jennsen abruptly looked back up at Richard. “That can’t be true. They had a boundary that kept them locked in that place. If they were like me they wouldn’t be affected by a boundary of magic. They could have come out of there any time they wished. Over all this time, at least some of them would have come out into the rest of the world—the magic of the boundary couldn’t have held them back.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Richard said. “Remember when you saw the sand flowing sideways in that warning beacon that Sabar brought us? That was magic, and you saw it.”

“That’s right,” Kahlan said. “If she’s a pillar of Creation, then how is such a thing possible?”

“That’s right,” Jennsen agreed. “How could that be, if I’m truly ungifted?” Her eyebrows went up. “Richard—maybe it’s not true after all. Maybe I have a bit of the spark of the gift—maybe I’m not really, truly ungifted.”

Richard smiled. “Jennsen, you’re as pure as a snowflake. You saw that magic for a reason. Nicci wrote us in her letter that the warning beacon was linked to the wizard who created it—linked to him in the underworld. The underworld is the world of the dead. That means that the statue functioned partly through Subtractive Magic—magic having to do with the underworld. You may be immune to magic, but you are not immune to death. Gifted or not, you’re still linked to life, and thus death.

“That’s why you saw some of the magic of the statue—the part relating to the advancement of death.

“The boundary was a place in this world where death itself existed. To go into that boundary was to enter the world of the dead. No one returns from the dead. If any pristinely ungifted person in Bandakar had gone into the boundary, they would have died. That was how they were sealed in.”

“But they could banish people through the boundary,” Jennsen pressed. “That would have to mean that the boundary didn’t really affect them.”

Richard was shaking his head even as she was protesting. “No. They were touched by death, the same as anyone. But there was a way left through the boundary—much like the one that once divided the three lands of the New World. I got through that boundary without being touched by it. There was a pass through it, a special, hidden place to get through the boundary. This one was the same.”

Jennsen wrinkled her nose. “That makes no sense, then. If that was true, and it wasn’t hidden from them—since they all knew of this passage through the boundary—then why couldn’t they all just leave if they wanted to? How could it seal the rest of them in, if they could send banished people through?”

Richard sighed, wiping a hand across his face. It looked to Kahlan like he wished she hadn’t asked that question.

“You know the area we passed a while back?” Richard asked her. “That place where nothing grew?”

Jennsen nodded. “I remember.”

“Well, Sabar said he came through another one, a little to the north of here.”

“That’s right,” Kahlan said. “And it ran toward the center of the wasteland, toward the Pillars of Creation—just like the one we saw. They had to be roughly parallel.”

Richard was nodding to what she was beginning to suspect. “And they were to either side of the notch into Bandakar. They weren’t very far apart. We’re in that place right now, between those two boundaries.”

Friedrich leaned in. “But Lord Rahl, that would mean that if someone was banished from the Bandakaran Empire, when they emerged from that boundary they would find themselves trapped between the walls of these two boundaries out here, and there wasn’t much room between them. A person would have nowhere to go but . . .”

Friedrich covered his mouth as he turned west, looking off into the gloom.

“The Pillars of Creation,” Richard finished with quiet finality.

“But, but,” Jennsen stammered, “are you saying that someone made it that way? Made these two boundaries deliberately to force anyone who was sent out of the Bandakaran Empire to go into that place—the Pillars of Creation? Why?”

Richard looked into her eyes for a long moment. “To kill them.”

Jennsen swallowed. “You mean, whoever banished these people wanted anyone they in turn sent out, anyone they exiled, to die?”

“Yes,” Richard said.

Kahlan pulled her cloak tighter around herself. It had been hot for so long she could hardly believe that the weather had so suddenly turned cold.

Richard swiped a lock of wet hair back off his forehead as he went on.

“From what Adie told me once, boundaries have to have a pass to create balance on both sides, to equalize the life on both sides. I suspect that those down here in the Old World who banished these people wanted to give them a way to get rid of criminals and so told the people about the existence of the pass. But they didn’t want such people to be loosed on the rest of the world. Criminals or not, they were ungifted. They couldn’t be allowed to run free.”

Kahlan immediately saw the problem with his theory. “But all three boundaries would have had to have a pass,” she said. “Even if the other two passes, in the remaining two boundaries, were secret, that still left the possibility that anyone exiled and sent through the notch might find one of them and so not try to escape through the Pillars of Creation where they would die. That left the chance that they might still escape into the Old World.”

“If there really were three boundaries, such might be the case,” Richard said. “But I don’t think there were three. I think there really was only one.”

“Now you’re not making any sense,” Cara complained. “You said there was the one going north and south blocking the pass, and then there were these two parallel ones out here, going east and west, to funnel anyone who came out of the empire through that first boundary, toward the Pillars of Creation where they would die.”

Kahlan had to agree. It seemed that there might be a chance for someone to escape through one of the other two.

“I don’t think there were three boundaries,” Richard repeated. “I think there was only one. That one boundary wasn’t straight—it was bent in half.”

He held two fingers up, side by side. “The bottom of the bend went across the pass.” He pointed at the web between the two fingers. “The two legs extended out here, parallel, going off to where they ended at the Pillars.”

Jennsen could only ask “Why?”

“It seems to me, by how elaborate the whole design was, that the ones who sealed those people in wanted to give them a way to rid themselves of dangerous people, possibly knowing from what they had learned of their beliefs that they would balk at executing anyone. When these people were banished here to the Old World, they may have already had at least the core of the same beliefs they hold now. Those beliefs leave them completely vulnerable to those who are evil. Protecting their way of life, without executing criminals, meant they had to cast such people out of their community or be destroyed by them.

“The banishment away from D’Hara and the New World, across the barrier into the Old World, must have terrified them. They stuck together as a means of survival, a common bond.

“Those down here in the Old World who put them behind that boundary must have used those people’s fear of persecution to convince them that the boundary was meant to protect them, to keep others from harming them. They must have convinced those people that, since they were special, they needed such protection. That, along with their well-established need to stick together, had to have reinforced in them a terrible fear of being put out of their protected place. Banishment had a special terror to those people.

“They must have felt the anguish of being rejected by the rest of the peoples of the world because they were ungifted, but, together as they were, they also felt safe behind the boundary.

“Now that the seal is off, we have big problems.”

Jennsen folded her arms. “Now that there’s more than one of us—more than one snowflake—you’re having worries about a snowstorm?”

Richard fixed her with a reproachful look. “Why do you think the Order came in and took some of their people?”

“Apparently,” Jennsen said, “to breed more children like them. To breed precious magic out of the race of man.”

Richard ignored the heat in her words. “No, I mean why would they take men?”

“Same reason,” Jennsen said. “To mate with regular women and give them ungifted children.”

Richard drew in a patient breath and let it out slowly. “What did Owen say? The men were taken to see the women and told that if they didn’t follow orders those women would be skinned alive.”

Jennsen hesitated. “What orders?”

Richard leaned toward her. “What orders, indeed. Think about it,” he said, looking around at the rest of them. “What orders? What would they want ungifted men for? What is it they would want ungifted men to do?”

Kahlan gasped. “The Keep!”

“Exactly.” Richard’s unsettling gaze met each of them in turn. “Like I said, we have big problems. Zedd is protecting the Keep. With his ability and the magic of that place he can no doubt single-handedly hold off Jagang’s entire army.

“But how is that skinny old man going to resist even one young ungifted man who is untouched by magic and comes up and grabs him by the throat?”

Jennsen’s hand came away from her mouth. “You’re right, Richard. Jagang, too, has that book—The Pillars of Creation. He knows how those like me aren’t touched by magic. He tried to use me in that very way. That’s why he worked so hard to convince me that you were trying to kill me—so that I would think my only chance was to kill you first. He knew I was ungifted and couldn’t be stopped by magic.”

“And, Jagang is from the Old World,” Richard added. “In all likelihood he would have known something about the empire beyond that boundary. For all we know, in the Old World Bandakar might be legendary, while those in the New World, beyond the great barrier for three thousand years, would never have known what happened to those people.

“Now, the Order has been taking men from there and threatening them with the brutal murder of their defenseless women—women who are loved ones—if those men don’t follow orders. I think those orders are to assault the Wizard’s Keep and capture it for the Imperial Order.”

Kahlan’s legs shook. If the Keep fell, they would lose the one real advantage, however limited, they had. With the Keep in the hands of the Order, all those ancient and deadly things of magic would be available to Jagang. There was no telling what he might unleash. There were things in the Keep that could kill them all, Jagang included. He had already proven with the plague he’d unleashed that he was willing to kill any number to have his way, that he was willing to use any weapon, even if such weapons decimated his own people as well.

Even if Jagang did nothing with the Keep, just him having control of it denied the D’Haran Empire the possibility of finding something there that could help them. That was, in addition to protecting the Keep, what Zedd was doing while he was there—trying to find something that would help them win the war, or at least find a way to put the Imperial Order back behind a barrier of some kind and confine them to the Old World.

Without the Keep, their cause would likely be hopeless. Resistance would be nothing more than delaying the inevitable. Without the Keep on their side, all resistance to Jagang would eventually be crushed. His troops would pour into every part of the New World. There would be no stopping them.

With trembling fingers Kahlan clutched her cloak closed. She knew what awaited her people, what it was like when the Imperial Order invaded and overpowered places. She had been with the army for nearly a year, fighting against them. They were like a pack of wild dogs. There was no peace with such animals after you. They would be satisfied only when they could tear you apart.

Kahlan had been to cities, like Ebinissia, that had been overrun by Imperial Order soldiers. In a wild binge of savagery that went on for days, they had tortured, raped, and murdered every person trapped in the city, finally leaving it a wasteland of human corpses. None, no matter their age, had been spared.

That was what the people of the New World had to look forward to.

With enemy troops overrunning all of the New World, any trade that was not already disrupted would be brought to a standstill. Nearly all businesses would fail. The livelihood of countless people would be lost.

Food would quickly become scarce, and then simply unavailable at any cost.

People would have no means of supporting themselves and their families.

People would lose everything for which they had worked a lifetime.

Cities, even before the troops arrived, would be in a destructive panic. When the enemy troops arrived, most people would be burned out of their homes, driven from their cities and their land. Jagang would steal all supplies of food for his troops and give conquered land to his favored elite. The true owners of that land would perish, or become slaves working their own farms. Those who escaped before the invading horde would desperately cling to life, living like animals in wild areas.

Most of the population would be in flight, running for their lives.

Hundreds of thousands would be out in the elements without shelter. There would be little food, and no ability to prepare for winter. When the weather turned harsh, they would perish in droves.

As civilization crumbled and starvation became the norm, disease would sweep across the land, catching up those on the run. Families would collapse as those they depended on suffered agonizingly slow and painful deaths.

Children and the weak would be alone, to be preyed upon as a source of food for the starving.

Kahlan knew what such widespread disease was like. She knew what it was to watch people dying by the thousands. She had seen it happen in Aydindril when the plague was there. She saw scores stricken without warning. She had watched the old, the young—such good people—contract something they could not fight, watched them suffer in misery for days before they died.

Richard had been stricken with that plague. Unlike everyone else, though, he had gotten it knowingly. Taking the plague deliberately had been the price to get back to her. He had traded his life just to be with her again before he died.

That had been a time beyond horror.

Kahlan knew, firsthand, savage desperation. It was then that she had taken the only chance available to her to save his life. It was then that she had loosed the chimes. That act had saved Richard’s life. She hadn’t known at the time that it would also be a catalyst that would set unforeseen events into motion.

Because of her desperate act, the boundary to this empire had lost its power and failed. Because of her, all magic might eventually fail.

Now, because of that boundary failing, the Wizard’s Keep, their last bastion to work a solution against the Order, was in terrible jeopardy.

Kahlan felt as if it was all her fault.

The world was on the brink of destruction. Civilization stood at the threshold of obliteration in the name of the Order’s mindless idea of a greater good. The Order demanded sacrifice to that greater good; what they were determined to sacrifice was reason, and, therefore, civilization itself. Madness had cast its shadow across the world and would have them all.

They now stood in the edge of the shadow of a dark age. They were all on the eve of the end times.

Kahlan couldn’t say that, though. She couldn’t tell them how she felt.

She dared not reveal her despair.

“Richard, we simply can’t allow the Order to capture the Keep.” Kahlan could hardly believe how calm and determined her voice sounded. She wondered if anyone else would believe that she thought they still stood a chance. “We have to stop them.”

“I agree,” Richard said.

He sounded determined, too. She wondered if he saw in her eyes the true depths of her despair.

“First,” he said, “the easy part: Nicci and Victor. We have to tell them that we can’t come now. Victor needs to know what we would say to him. He will need to know that we agree with his plans—that he must proceed and that he can’t wait for us. We’ve talked with him; he knows what to do. Now, he must do it, and Priska must know that he has to help.

“Nicci needs to know where we’re going. She needs to know that we believe we’ve discovered the cause of the warning beacon. She has to know where we are.”

He left unsaid that she had to come to help him if he couldn’t get to her because his gift was killing him.

“She needs to know, too,” Richard said, “that we only had a chance to read part of her warning about what Jagang was doing with the Sisters of the Dark in creating weapons out of people.”

Everyone’s eyes widened. They hadn’t read the letter.

“Well,” Kahlan said, “with all the other problems we have, at least that’s one we won’t have to deal with for now.”

“We have that much on our side,” Richard agreed. He gestured to the man watching, the man waiting for Kahlan to command him. “We’ll send him to Victor and Nicci so they will know everything.”

“And then what?” Cara asked.

“I want Kahlan to command him that when he’s finished with carrying out that part of his orders, he’s then to go north and find the Imperial Order army. I want him to pretend to be one of them to get close enough to assassinate Emperor Jagang.”

Kahlan knew how implausible such a scheme was. By the way everyone stared in astonishment, they had a good idea, too.

“Jagang has layers of men to protect him from assassination,” Jennsen said. “He’s always surrounded by special guards. Regular soldiers can’t even get close to him.”

“Do you really think he has any chance at all to accomplish such a thing?” Kahlan asked.

“No,” Richard admitted. “The Order will most likely kill him before he can get to Jagang. But he will be driven by the need to fulfill your orders. He will be single-minded. I expect he will be killed in the effort, but I also suspect he will at least make a good attempt of it. I want Jagang to at least lose some sleep knowing that any of his men might be assassins. I want him to worry that he will never know who might be trying to kill him. I don’t want him ever to be able to sleep soundly. I want him to be haunted by nightmares of what might be coming next, of who among his men might be waiting for an opening.”

Kahlan nodded her agreement. Richard appraised the grim faces waiting for the rest of what he had to say.

“Now, to the most important part of what must be done. It’s vital we get to the Keep and warn Zedd. We can’t delay. Jagang is ahead of us in all this—he’s been planning and acting and we never realized what he was up to. We don’t know how soon those ungifted men might be sent north. We haven’t a moment to lose.”

“Lord Rahl,” Cara reminded him, “you have to get to the antidote before time runs out. You can’t go running off to the Keep to . . . Oh, no. Now you just wait a minute—you’re not sending me to the Keep again. I’m not leaving you at a time like this, at a time when you’re next to defenseless. I won’t hear of it and I won’t go.”

Richard laid a hand on her shoulder. “Cara, I’m not sending you, but thanks for offering.”

Cara folded her arms and shot him a fiery scowl.

“We can’t take the wagon up into Bandakar—there’s no road—”

“Lord Rahl,” Tom interrupted, “without magic you’ll need all the steel you have.” He sounded only slightly less emphatic than Cara had.

Richard smiled. “I know, Tom, and I agree. It’s Friedrich who I think must go.” Richard turned to Friedrich. “You can take the wagon. An older man, by himself, will raise less suspicion than would any of the rest of us. They won’t see you as a threat. You will be able to make better time with the wagon and without having to worry that the Order might snatch you and put you in the army. Will you do it, Friedrich?”

Friedrich scratched his stubble. A smile came to his weathered face. “I guess I’m at last being called upon to be a boundary warden, of sorts.”

Richard smiled with him. “Friedrich, the boundary has failed. As the Lord Rahl, I appoint you to the post of boundary warden and ask that you immediately undertake to warn others of the danger come from out of that boundary.”

Friedrich’s smile departed as he put a fist to his heart in salute and solemn pledge.