Naked Empire

Chapter 49

Zedd frowned with the effort of concentrating on what it was Sister Tahirah had placed on the table before him. He looked up at her, at the way her scowl pinched in around her humped nose.

“Well?” she demanded.

Zedd looked down, squinting at the thing before him. It looked like a leather-covered ball painted with faded blue and pink zigzagged lines all around it.

What was it about it that seemed so familiar, yet so distant?

He blinked, trying to better focus his eyes. His neck ached something fierce. A father, hearing his young son in the next tent screaming in appalling agony, had grabbed Zedd by the hair and yanked him away from other parents who, pulling and pawing at him, made desperate demands of their own.

Because of the torn muscles in his neck, it was painful to hold up his head.

Compared to the torture he’d heard, though, it was nothing.

The dim interior of the tent, lit by several lamps hanging from poles, felt as if it were detached from the ground and swirling around him. The foul place stank. The heat and humidity only made the smell, and the spinning, worse. Zedd felt as if he might pass out.

It had been so long since he’d slept that he couldn’t even remember the last time he had actually lain down. The only sleep he got was when he fell asleep in the chair while Sister Tahirah was seeing to another object being unloaded from the wagons, or when she went to bed and the next Sister hadn’t yet arrived to take the next stint in their laborious cataloging of the items brought from the Keep. The catnaps he got were rarely longer than a few precious minutes at a time. The guards had orders not to allow him or Adie to lie down.

At least the screams of the children had ended. At least, as long as he cooperated, those cries of pain had stopped. At least, as long as he went along, the parents had hope.

A violent crack of pain suddenly hammered the side of his head, knocking him back. The chair toppled over, spilling him to the ground. With his arms bound behind his back, he couldn’t do anything to break the fall and he hit hard. Zedd’s ears rang, not only from the fall, but with the aftermath of the blow of the Sister’s power delivered through the collar around his neck.

He hated that wicked instrument of control. The Sisters were not shy about exercising that control. Because the collar locked him away from the use of his own gift, he could not use his ability to defend himself.

Instead, they used his power against him.

It took little or no provocation to send one of the Sisters into a fit of violence. Many of these women had once been kindly people devoting their lives to helping others. Jagang had enslaved them to a different cause. Now they did his bidding. Though they might have once been gentle, they were now, he knew, trying to keep one step ahead of the discipline Jagang meted out to them. That discipline could be excruciating beyond endurance. The Sisters were expected to get results; Jagang would not be interested in the excuse that Zedd was being difficult.

Zedd saw that Adie, too, had been knocked to the ground. Any punishment he received, she, too, endured. He felt more agony for her than for himself.

Soldiers standing to the side moved in to right the chair and lift Zedd into it. With his arms bound behind his back, he couldn’t get up by himself.

They sat him down hard enough to drive a grunt from his lungs.

“Well?” Sister Tahirah demanded. “What is it?”

Zedd once again leaned in, staring down at the round object sitting by itself in the center of the table. The faint blue and pink lines zigzagging all around it stirred deep feelings. He thought he should know this thing.

“It’s . . . it’s . . .”

“It’s what!” Sister Tahirah slammed the book against the edge of the table, causing the round object to bounce up and roll a few inches before it came to a stop closer to Zedd. She tucked the book under one arm as she leaned with the other on the table. She bent down toward him.

“What is it? What does it do?”

“I . . . I can’t remember.”

“Would you like me to bring in some children,” the Sister said in the soft, sweet tone of a very bitter threat, “and show you their little faces before they are taken to the tent next to us to be tortured?”

“I’m so tired,” he said. “I’m trying to remember, but I’m so tired.”

“Maybe while the children are screaming you would like to explain to their parents that you are tired and just can’t quite seem to remember.”

Children. Parents.

Zedd suddenly remembered what the object was. Painful memories welled up. He felt a tear run down his cheek.

“Dear spirits,” he whispered. “Where did you find this?”

“What is it?”

“Where did you find it?” Zedd repeated.

Huffing impatiently, the Sister straightened. She opened the book and made a noisy show of turning heatedly through the pages. Finally, she stopped and tapped a finger in the open book.

“It says here that it was found hidden in an open recess in the back of a black six-drawer chest in a corridor. There was a tapestry of three prancing white horses hanging above the chest.”

She lowered the book. “Now, what is it?”

Zedd swallowed. “A ball.”

The Sister glared. “I know it’s a ball, you old fool. What is it for? What does it do? What is its purpose?”

Staring at the ball no bigger than his fist, Zedd remembered. “It’s a ball for children to play with. Its purpose is to bring them pleasure.”

He remembered this ball, brightly colored back then, frequently bouncing down the halls of the Wizard’s Keep, his daughter giggling and chasing after it. He had given it to her for doing well in her studies.

Sometimes she would roll it down the halls, urging it along with a switch, as if she were walking a pet. Her favorite thing to do was to bounce it on the floor so that it would come up against a wall, after which it would bounce to another wall at an intersection of stone hallways. In that way she made it bounce around a corner. She would watch which hall it went down, left or right, then chase after it.

One day she came to him in tears. He asked her to tell him her troubles. She crawled up in his lap and told him that her ball had gone somewhere and gotten itself lost. She wanted him to get it unlost. Zedd told her that if she looked, she would likely find it. She spent days despondently wandering the halls of the Keep, searching for it. She couldn’t find it.

Finally, starting out one morning at sunrise, Zedd made the long walk down to the city of Aydindril, to the market on Stentor Street. That was where he had first come across a stand where they sold such toys and found the ball with the zigzagged lines. There he bought her another one—not just like it, but instead one with pink and green stars. He deliberately chose a ball unlike the one she’d lost because he didn’t want her to think that wishes could be miraculously fulfilled, but he did want her to know that there were solutions that could solve problems.

He remembered his daughter hugging his legs, thanking him for the new ball, telling him that he was the best father in all the world and that she would be ever so much more careful with the new ball and never lose it. He had smiled as he watched her put a little hand to her heart and recite a little-girl oath she had invented on the spot.

She treasured the ball with the pink and green stars. Since it was small, it was one of the few things she had been able to take with her, after she was grown, when she and Zedd ran away to Westland, after Darken Rahl had raped her.

When Richard had been young, he had played with that ball. Zedd remembered the smile on his daughter’s face as she watched her own child play with that precious ball. Zedd could see in her beautiful eyes the memories of her own childhood as she watched Richard play. She had kept that ball her whole life, kept it until she died.

This ball before him was the very same one his daughter had lost. It must have bounced up behind the chest and fallen into a recess in the back, where it had been for all those long years.

Zedd leaned forward, resting his forehead on the dusty ball surrounded with faded blue and pink zigzagged lines, the ball which her little fingers had once held, and wept.

Sister Tahirah seized a fistful of his hair and pulled him upright. “I don’t believe you’re telling me the truth. It’s an object of magic. I want to know what it is and what it does.” Holding his head back, she glared into his eyes. “You know that I will not hesitate to do what is necessary to make you cooperate. His Excellency accepts no excuses for failure.”

Zedd stared up at her, blinking away his tears. “It’s a ball, a toy. That’s all it is.”

With a sneer, she released him. “The great and powerful Wizard Zorander.” She shook her head. “To think that we once feared you. You are a pathetic old man, your courage crushed by nothing more than the cry of a child.” She sighed. “I must say, your reputation far exceeds the reality of your mettle.”

The Sister scooped up the ball, turning it in her fingers as she inspected it. She huffed with disgust and tossed it aside, as if it were worthless. Zedd watched the ball bounce and roll across the ground, coming to rest at the side of the tent, against the bench where Adie sat. He looked up into her completely white eyes to see her watching him. Zedd turned away, waiting while the Sister made notes in her book.

“All right,” she finally said, “let’s go have a look at what they’ve unloaded in the next tent.”

The soldiers lifted him from the chair before he had a chance to try to do it himself. His shoulders ached from his wrists being bound behind his back and from being lifted by his arms. Adie, too, was lifted to her feet.

The book snapped closed. Sister Tahirah’s wiry gray hair whipped around as she turned and led them out of the tent.

Because the Sisters knew how dangerous items of magic from the Wizard’s Keep could be, especially if the wrong combination of magic were to accidentally be allowed to combine or touch, they were cautious enough to bring the items, one at a time, out of each individual, protected, shielded crate in the wagons. Zedd knew that there were things in the Keep that, by themselves, were not dangerous, but became so in the presence of other things that, by themselves, were also not dangerous. Sometimes it was only the combination of specific items that created a desired outcome.

The Sisters had vast experience in the most esoteric things of magic and so they at least understood the principles involved. They treated the cargo with the care due such potentially hazardous goods. Once each object was uncrated, they placed it, by itself, in a tent to await examination.

They took Zedd and Adie from tent to tent so that Zedd could identify each treasure, tell them what it was, explain how it worked.

They had been at it for days—how many, Zedd couldn’t remember. Despite his best efforts, the endless days and nights had all begun to melt together in his mind.

Zedd did all he could to stall, but there was only so much he could do.

These women knew magic. They would not easily be fooled by any invented explanation. They had made very clear the consequences of any such deception.

And, Zedd didn’t know how much they knew. At times they feigned ignorance of something which they actually understood quite well, just to see if he was telling the truth.

Fortunately, as of yet, they had uncovered nothing that was extravagantly dangerous. Most of the items from the crates were simple-looking objects, but were actually for a narrowly focused purpose—a pole that could remotely judge the depth of water in a well, an iron decoration shaped like a fan of leaves that prevented words from carrying beyond an open door where it was placed, a large looking glass that revealed when a person entered another room. While possibly useful to Emperor Jagang, such items were not all that valuable or dangerous; they were not going to help him to conquer and rule the world.

What dangerous things the Sisters had uncrated and shown him were not really anything that a Sister couldn’t easily produce with a spell of her own. The most dangerous item had been a constructed spell held within an ornate vase that, under specific conditions, such as when the vase was filled with water, created a temperature inversion that produced a blast of flame. Zedd was not betraying his cause or putting innocent lives at risk by revealing how the spell worked; any Sister worth her salt could reproduce the same effect. The purpose of the spell was protective; had it touched other stolen items, which, because they were stolen, was a reversal of intended ownership that such a spell recognized, it would have ignited and destroyed those items, keeping them from covetous hands.

None of the things so far discovered would do Jagang any real good.

There were things in the Keep, though, that could cause him harm. There were spells there, such as the constructed spell in the vase, that recognized the nature of the person invoking their magic. Opened by the right person, such as Zedd, those things would do nothing, but, opened by a thief, they would create calamity.

The Keep had thousands of rooms. The looting of it had netted the Imperial Order a caravan of cargo wagons, but even that much hardly scratched the surface of the contents of the Keep.

So far, Zedd had not seen any plums.

He didn’t know if he would live to see any. The ride in the box after his capture had been brutal. He was still not recovered from the injuries inflicted after meeting Jagang. Guards let the parents do what they would to convince Zedd and Adie to give in, but they wouldn’t allow the parents to get so carried away that they killed such prize prisoners. The parents had known that they weren’t to kill them, but in the heat of such raw passion, Zedd knew that such orders were easy to forget. Zedd yearned for them to kill him and end it. The emperor, though, needed them alive, so the guards stood careful watch.

After the first few horrifying hours of listening to children being subjected to crippling torture, of being among their parents, who understandably demanded, quite forcefully, that he cooperate and tell the emperor what he wanted to know, Zedd had given in—not for the sake of the parents so much as to stop those brutal men from what they were doing to the children.

He had figured that he had nothing to lose, really, by giving in. It stopped the torture of the children for the time being. The Keep was vast; the things they brought were only a tiny portion of them. Zedd reasoned that the caravan of wagons probably didn’t hold anything of any real value to Jagang. It would take quite a while to catalog everything—it could be weeks more before they reached the last item. There was no purpose in allowing children to endure torture when there might not be anything useful for Zedd to betray to Jagang.

Once, when they were alone while the Sister had gone to check on the preparations in the next tent, Adie had asked what he would do if they presented him with something that would materially help Jagang win. Zedd hadn’t had a chance to answer; the soldiers had come in then and taken the two of them to the Sister in the next tent.

He was hoping to drag out the process for as long as possible. He hadn’t counted on how they would keep at it day and night.

It sometimes took quite a while for the Sisters to get out the next treasure and have it ready. They were understandably cautious and took no chances. Those strange men without any trace of the gift who helped them might not be harmed if any errant item of magic were to accidentally be set in motion, but everyone else certainly was vulnerable. Careful as they were, there were enough people working at the preparations that Zedd and Adie were not allowed to sleep for long before they were taken off to unravel the next puzzle for them.

As he and Adie were dragged through the dark camp to the next tent, Zedd’s legs would hardly hold him. Seeing his daughter’s long-lost ball had sapped much of his remaining strength. He had never felt so old, so feeble.

He feared that his will to go on was flagging.

He didn’t know how much longer he could keep his sanity.

He wasn’t at all sure that he actually still possessed it. The world seemed to have turned into a crazy place. At times the whole thing seemed dreamlike. What he knew and what he didn’t know sometimes seemed to have all twisted together into a knot of confusion.

As he was marched through the dark camp, through the humid heat, he began to imagine that he saw things—mostly people—from his past. He began to doubt that he really had seen that ball. He wondered if, like some of the other things he was seeing, he had imagined it as well. Could it maybe have been a simple ball, and he only thought that it was the one his daughter had lost? Had he imagined the zigzagged colors around it? He was beginning to question himself over every little thing.

Looking up at all the people in the crowded encampment, he thought he saw his long-dead wife, Erilyn, in the faces of the women held nearby under guard. They were mothers, their worst nightmares ready to come to life if Zedd didn’t cooperate. His gaze passed over children clutching their mother’s skirts, or their father’s legs. They looked at him. His wavy white hair in disarray, probably thinking he was some crazy man. Maybe he was.

The torches lit the sprawling camp with a kind of flickering light that made everything seem imaginary. The campfires, spread as far as he could see, looked like a star field lying across the ground, as if the world had turned upside down.

“Wait,” the Sister said to the guards.

Zedd was jerked to a halt as the Sister ducked inside the tent. Adie cried out as the man holding her wrenched her arm in the act of stopping her.

Zedd swayed on his feet, wondering if he might pass out. The whole nighttime camp wavered in his vision.

As he looked at one of the girls held captive across the way, he stared, astonished, thinking he recognized her. Zedd looked up at the emperor’s elite guard in the distance holding the child. Zedd blinked his blurred vision. The guard, in leather and mail armor, with a belt full of weapons, looked like a man Zedd used to know. Zedd turned away at the memory, only to see a Sister, making her way among the tents not far away, who also looked like someone else he knew. He looked around at soldiers going about their business. Elite soldiers guarding the emperor’s compound looked like men he thought he remembered.

Zedd truly was terrified, then. He was sure that he was losing his mind. He couldn’t possibly be seeing the people he thought he saw.

His mind was all he had. He didn’t want to be some babbling old man sitting by the side of a road begging.

He knew that people sometimes became irrational—lost their mind—when they got old or were pressed past their endurance. He had known people who had snapped, who had gone insane, and saw things that weren’t really there.

That’s what he was doing. He was having visions of people from his past who weren’t really there. That was a sure sign of insanity—seeing your past come to life, thinking you were back with long-lost loved ones.

His mind was the most important thing he had.

Now he was losing that, too.

He was losing his sanity.