Temple of the Winds

Chapter 59

Kahlan froze. Thoughts crashed through her mind in a confusion of thundering terror.

Her scream came again, ripping through the night, loud enough to be heard over the sound of the thunder. She couldn’t make herself blink. She couldn’t tear her eyes from Richard’s face.

She couldn’t understand, couldn’t make sense of it. The world felt as if it had turned upside down. Everything tumbled around in her mind, making it impossible to think.

As the lightning lit the room again, she knew only one thing: this was Richard, not Drefan.

No look she had ever seen on Richard’s face was as terrifying to Kahlan as the one she saw now. There was nothing in his eyes. Not rage, not lethal commitment, not determination, not a deadly calm countenance, not jealousy, not even empty disinterest.

There was no . . . soul, in those gray eyes. No heart.

Kahlan covered her mouth with both trembling hands. She backed away until her back smacked into the stone wall.

He had known from the first instant she had come into the room. Richard could tell it was her coming into a room. He had known it was her the whole time—from the first instant Cara had led her in here.

He knew. He had tried to squeeze her hand, to reassure her, to let her know. She had pushed his hand away. He had been as gentle as he could. He had tried to brush her tears away, after. She had pushed his hand away. She hadn’t let him show her that it was him.

Kahlan collapsed to the floor with a wail of horror. “No! Dear spirits, no!”

Richard didn’t rush to her, didn’t speak words of comfort, didn’t yell. Instead, he went to where his clothes were lying, near the door, and began getting dressed.

Kahlan scurried to her things nearby. She raced to pull on her underthings, suddenly feeling the humiliation of her nakedness, its reminder of what she had just done.

She scooped up her dress. She paused, tears streaming down her face. She reached around the outside of the doorway and brought the sword and scabbard up before her face. It had a leather handle, just as she remembered seeing, not a wire-wound hilt. It wasn’t the Sword of Truth, Richard’s sword. It was Drefan’s sword.

Kahlan gripped Richard by his wrist as he picked up his pants. “How . . . this is Drefan’s sword, not yours. It’s Drefan’s sword!”

Richard took it from her and leaned it against the wall. “They took your power. You have no way to defend yourself. Drefan will be the one near you, now, not me. I gave him the Sword of Truth so that he could protect you.” His eyes finally met hers. “I guess this one finds the truth just as well as the other.”—Richard stuffed his leg into his pants.

Kahlan snatched his arm again. “Richard, don’t you see? It was you. It was you in here with me, not Drefan. The spirits mark a distinction—between intent and deed. It wasn’t him, it was you all along!”

He pulled his arm away. The spirits might mark a distinction, but he didn’t. To Richard, the intent was the same as the deed.

“Richard, you don’t understand. It wasn’t what you think.”

He shot her a glare of such power that it staggered her back a step. He waited as she stood frozen, unable to find any words to explain. He went back to dressing.

Kahlan pulled on her white Confessor’s dress. Outside, the lightning was coming closer. During some of the closer strikes, she could see an immense structure rising up at the edge of the cliff: the Temple of the Winds. When the flash extinguished, the temple vanished again, and she could see the distant mountains beyond, lit by the lightning farther away.

“Richard,” she wept as he pulled on a boot, “please, talk to me. Say something. Ask me to explain. Tell me there can be no explanation. Veil at me. Call me a whore. Tell me you hate me. Hit me. Do something! Don’t ignore me!”

He turned and picked up his black sleeveless undershirt. As he pulled it on over his head, she scooped up his black shirt and held it to her breast, hoping to halt his dressing. “Richard, please! I love you!”

His gaze again rose to hers. She thought he was going to say something, but instead he turned away and retrieved his belt with the leather packs on it. He snapped on his wristbands.

Kahlan held his shirt to her chest and shook as she watched him hook his belt together. She didn’t know what to do. He picked up Drefan’s sword and buckled it on.

“Richard, please talk to me. Say something. This is the doing of the spirits. Don’t you remember what I told you that grandfather’s spirit told me? The winds have decided that you are the path of the price. They did this to us!”

He shot her a look again. The intensity in his eyes extinguished. He saw that she wasn’t going to surrender his shirt, so he threw his golden cloak around his shoulders.

As he turned toward the door. Kahlan seized his arm with both her hands and turned him back to her.

“Richard, I love you. You’ve got to believe me. I’ll explain this in here to you later, but for now, you have to believe me. I love you. No other. My heart is yours alone. Dear spirits, please believe me.”

Richard gripped her jaw in his hand and wiped a thumb across her lips. He held his thumb up for her to see in the pandemonium of lightning.

“. . . for the one in white, his true beloved, will betray him in her blood.”

His words ripped her heart.

Kahlan covered her scream with his shirt as he swept out the door. The one thing she had sworn she would never do, she had done: she had betrayed him. It could have been no worse betrayal. It was a betrayal that had destroyed his heart.

Crying hysterically, Kahlan raced after him, out into the wild night. She had to do something to mend that heart. She couldn’t let him endure the pain she had caused him. She loved him more than life itself, and she had done the worst thing possible to him.

Outside, the wind howled across the mountain. She could see his black shape, his bare arms, in the flashes of lightning as he headed for the road.

As he reached the edge of the cliff at the end of the road, Kahlan threw herself on him, dragging him to a halt.

The sky was a savage show of violent discharges. Thunder thumped in her bones. Lightning ripped across the sky followed by deafening booms. Beyond the edge, when the most powerful of those bolts struck, the Temple of the Winds was there—but only during those fierce strikes. Between those strikes, there was nothing but empty space.

“Richard, what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to stop the plague.”

“When will you be back? I’ll wait here. When will you be back?”

He stared into her eyes a long moment as the storm raged around them. “There is nothing here for me.”

Kahlan clutched at him. “Richard, you have to come back. Come back. I’ll be here, waiting. I love you. Dear spirits, I need you. Richard, you have to come back to me!”

“You have a husband. You have given him an oath . . . and everything else.”

“Richard, don’t leave me alone,” Kahlan wailed, on the edge of hysteria. “If you don’t come back, I’ll never forgive you.”

Richard turned to the edge of the cliff.

“Richard, you have a wife! You have to come back!”

Thunder shuddered the mountain.

He looked back over his shoulder. “Nadine is dead. I am no longer bound by my oath to her. You have a husband, and an oath. There is nothing here for me.”

Brutal cords of lightning slammed into the road beyond the edge of the cliff, bringing the Temple of the Winds into full view. Golden cloak billowing out behind, Richard leaped into the lightning.

“Richard! I’m here! I’m here for you! We can find a way! Please come back to me!

When the frenetic flash cut off, the temple was gone. Another flash came, and the soaring towers were back for a second, weaker this time, and then gone again.

Kahlan dropped to the ground, clutching Richard’s black shirt to herself. She had destroyed him.

From the side, Kahlan saw a streak of red. It was Cara, racing for the edge of the cliff. She leaped just as another flash erupted, lighting the Temple of the Winds into the world of life. She landed on the road in the sky, and when the flash was gone, so was the Temple of the Winds, Richard, and Cara.

Devastated, Kahlan stared silently at the rampaging storm, seeing from time to time the towering, phantom temple in another world. It never looked solid enough again, or she would have jumped across. She should have. She couldn’t understand why she hadn’t. Why had she just stood here? Because Richard didn’t want her. She had betrayed him.

How could he do this to her? He said he would always love her. He said they would be together in the next world. He made her promises. He swore his eternal love. So had she, and she had betrayed him.

From somewhere out in the storm, Kahlan heard the distant sound of laughter. The malevolent chuckle made her skin crawl. Drefan strolled up beside her. He was alone.

“Where’s Nadine?” Kahlan asked.

Drefan cleared his throat. “When the lightning came, and she saw it was me, and not Richard, she screamed. She went crazy. She leaped over the edge of the mountain.”

Kahlan stared up at him. Richard knew. He told her Nadine was dead. Richard was a wizard. She had seen that, too, in his eyes, at the end, before he jumped across. She saw magic in his eyes.

“Where’s Richard?”

Kahlan stared out at the empty air, at the black wall of night. “Gone.”

On the road to the Temple of the Winds, in the eerie silence, Richard drew his sword. Its alien feel surprised him for an instant, until he recalled whose sword it was.

He was no longer the Seeker of Truth. He had had all the truth he could stand. It wasn’t night, here, nor day, yet there was light. It wasn’t like sunlight—more like an overcast day, with no hint of exactly where the sun was. But he knew that there was no sun here. This was not the world of life.

This was a part of the underworld—an isolated, remote, obscure niche in the world of the dead. It was as if the wizards had found an out-of-the-way hole in which to hide the Temple of the Winds. It had been similarly hidden when in the world of life.

The dark walls of the immense Temple of the Winds rose up before him, the twin towers soaring up into trailers of mist. The entire side of Mount Kymermosst was here—the whole part that was missing in the world of life.

Richard knew where he was going. He knew more than he had ever known before. Knowledge was flooding into his mind. He was a war wizard. The Temple of the Winds had opened a floodgate into his mind. It was feeding him all he needed to know, and more.

He felt as if he were sentient for the first time. Recompense, for the price demanded. “Lord Rahl!”

A breathless Cara ran up beside him. Agiel in hand, she took up a defensive position. Her Agiel would be useless here. For that matter, it would be useless back in the world of life now.

Richard turned to the winds and started out again. It wasn’t far. Not far at all. He knew the way in. “Cara, go home. You don’t belong here.”

“Lord Rahl, what happened? I—”

“Go home.”

She scowled at him as she pushed past to clear his way of any danger. She had no concept of the dangers here.

“I am Mord-Sith. I am here to protect the Lord Rahl.”

“I am no longer the Lord Rahl,” Richard whispered.

She gazed up at the huge black stone pillars beside the entrance ahead. Beside them on walls of inky stone banded with copper-colored caps, frozen in raven-black granite, stood the skrin, guardians of the boundary between worlds. Frozen only to Cara’s eyes, not to his.

Cara lifted a hand, bidding him to stay back as she peered down the passageway to the distant entry, checking for danger. There were bones at their feet. “Lord Rahl, what is this place?”

“You can’t go in here, Cara.”

“Why not?”

Richard turned and looked back toward the way he had come—at everything he was leaving behind. At nothing. “Because this is the Hall of the Betrayed.”

Richard glanced up at the twin skrin, guardians that had left the bones of two wizards here on this walkway, at their feet.

Richard remembered well the message the sliph had passed on from Wizard Ricker: Ward left in. Richard now knew what that meant.

He lifted his left arm, fist out, toward the skrin perched on the stone wall at the right. Ward left told him which arm to use and which skrin to ward. The wrong arm would have denied him entry into this place in the world of the dead. One of Ricker’s traps for the enemy.

His wristband heated. The leather pad protected his flesh from the power he focused in that band. A green glow enveloped his fist. The skrin to the right, to which he directed his birthright of authority, glowed in sympathy with his fist, immobilized for now, to allow Richard to enter.

Richard glanced up at the guardian of raven-black granite to his left. Richard called out its name, a guttural sound to which it answered. Black stone cracked and crumbled as the skrin turned to its master, awaiting instruction. Richard made the sound of its name again. He lifted his hand to Cara. “This one does not belong here. Ward her back to the world of life. Do not harm her. After, return to your post.”

The skrin sprang from the stone wall, enveloping Cara.

“Lord Rahl! When will you be home?”

Richard gazed into her blue eyes. “I am home.”

Light flared and silent thunder shook the soundless world as the skrin vanished on its journey with Cara, back to the world of life.

Richard turned to the winds. The four winds and the seer watched from their place up on the wall. Richard scanned the solid gold runes running up each side of the wall beside the entrance to the hall, reading the messages and warnings placed there by wizards past.

In a world without wind, Richard’s cloak billowed out behind, a telltale in a place with eddies of power and currents of force, as he strode onward, into the Hall of the Betrayed.

Kahlan threw up an arm before her face as lightning suddenly cracked before her. The road into the Temple of the Winds lit for an instant. In the distance, Kahlan could see Richard’s back as he strode resolutely into a passageway.

Cara tumbled to the ground on the road at the edge of the cliff, at Kahlan’s feet. With the boom of thunder, the temple, and Richard, were gone.

Cara rolled to her feet. With wild fury, she seized Kahlan by the shoulders. “What have you done!”

Kahlan hurt too much to speak. She stared at the ground.

“Mother Confessor, what have you done! I fixed it for you. What did you do to him?”

Kahlan’s head came up. “You what?”

“I swore an oath. We are sisters of the Agiel. I swore an oath to you that if anything ever happened, if anything went wrong, I would see to it that it was you, and not Nadine, who was with Richard.”

Kahlan’s mouth fell open. “Cara, what did you do?”

“What you wanted! I spoke the words of the winds as they came to me, but when I took you and Nadine to the buildings, I switched you both. I took Nadine to Drefan, and I took you to Lord Rahl.

“I wanted you to be with the man you truly loved. I took you to Richard! Didn’t you trust in me? Didn’t you have faith in me?”

Kahlan fell into Cara’s arms. “Oh, Cara, I’m sorry. I should have believed in you. Dear spirits, I should have trusted you.”

“Lord Rahl said he was going into the Hall of the Betrayed. I asked when he would be coming home. He said he was home. He isn’t coming back! What have you done!”

“The Hall of the Betrayed . . .” Kahlan crumpled to the ground. “I have fulfilled the prophecy. I have helped Richard get into the Temple of the Winds. I have helped him stop the plague.

“In so doing, I have destroyed him.

“In so doing, I have destroyed myself.”

“You have done more than that,” Cara whispered.

“What do you mean?”

Cara lifted her Agiel in her fist. “My Agiel. It has lost its power. The power of a Mord-Sith works only in the presence of the bond to our Lord Rahl. It exists to protect the Lord Rahl. Without a Lord Rahl, there is no bond. I have lost my power.”

“I am Lord Rahl now,” Drefan said as he strode up behind Kahlan.

Cara sneered at him. “You are no Lord Rahl. You do not have the gift.”

Drefan met her glare. “I’m all the Lord Rahl you have, now. Someone has to hold the D’Haran empire together.”

Kahlan clutched Richard’s black shirt to her stomach. “I am the Mother Confessor. I will hold the alliance together.”

“You, my dear, have lost your power, too. You are no longer a Confessor, much less the Mother Confessor.” He reached down and gripped Kahlan under her arm. His powerful fingers tightened painfully as he lifted her. “You are my wife, now, and you will do as I tell you to do. You have sworn an oath to obey me.”

Cara reached out to force him to let go of Kahlan. Drefan backhanded her across the mouth, knocking her to the ground.

“And you, Cara, are a toothless snake now. If you wish to stick around, then you will have to obey me. If not, I have no use for you. For now, only we know that your Agiel doesn’t work. Keep it that way. You will protect me as any Lord Rahl.”

Cara gave him a venomous look as she wiped the blood from her mouth. “You are not the Lord Rahl.”

“No?” He lifted the Sword of Truth, Richards sword, and let it drop back into its scabbard. “Well, I am the Seeker, now.”

“You are not the Seeker, either,” Kahlan growled. “Richard is the Seeker.”

“Richard? There is no Richard anymore. I am now Lord Rahl, and the Seeker.” Drefan pulled Kahlan against him, his Darken Rahl eyes burning into her. “And you are my wife. At least you will be, once we consummate the marriage. But this is neither the time nor place. We have to get back. There is work to be done.”

“Never. If you ever touch me, I’ll cut your throat.”

“You have sworn an oath before the spirits. You will do as you have sworn.” Drefan smiled. “You’re a whore. You’ll enjoy it. I want you to enjoy it, to be pleased, I really do.”

“How dare you call me that! I am no whore, especially yours!”

His smile widened. “Really? Then how did you betray Richard? Why would he walk away without even looking back? My guess would be that you enjoyed it, when you thought it was me. I’d say Richard saw you for the whore you are. When it really is me, you will find pleasure in it, then, too. I’ll like that.”