Warheart

CHAPTER 31

“The only problem,” Richard said into the silence, “is what you mentioned, that I have that poison in me, which means my gift doesn’t work, so I don’t know how I’m going to be able to do any of those things that need to be done.” He lifted a hand and let it fall back to rest on top of an opened scroll. “Without my gift, against these kind of enemies, I don’t have the weapons I need.”

Kahlan wiped a tear from under her eye as she stood. “You have your mind, Richard. How many times did Zedd tell you that is all you need? Your mind is your weapon. It always has been. It’s what has figured all this out.”

He smiled a special smile just for her, and that was answer enough. His heart was in the fight. The Warheart was committed to the fight.

“What I remember,” he said, “is Zedd telling me that nothing is ever easy.”

“Has it ever been?”

“No.” He smiled again, this time with a hint of sadness for his grandfather. “I guess not.”

Kahlan folded her arms as she paced a short distance and then back. Nicci was still asleep. Having helped Richard translate the scrolls for most of the night, Kahlan knew that the sorceress would already know most everything Richard had just explained.

Cassia, over by the door, having heard everything Richard had said as well as what he and Nicci had discussed during the night, looked like she was proud to be the Mord-Sith protecting the Warheart. When had Mord-Sith ever had the chance to fight for a Lord Rahl who in turn fought for them? He truly was the magic against magic.

Except that for now his magic was out of his reach.

Kahlan finally slowed to a stop before him. “We have no choice, then. We are going to have to race as swiftly as possible back to the People’s Palace. We need to get to the containment field. You can’t do any of those important things you’ve learned about in the scrolls if you’re dead. We have to get that poison out of you, first.”

Richard raked his fingers back through his thick hair. “I know it sounds like that would be the solution, Kahlan, but it’s simply too far. I can feel how the poison is advancing in me, and I know roughly how much time I have, and I know how long it would take to ride to the palace. We wouldn’t make it in time–and that’s even if we could ride right in without having to first get past Sulachan, Hannis Arc, and all those half people.”

Kahlan spread her arms in frustration. “What choice do we have but to try? You won’t live long with that poison in you, and if you die then Sulachan wins. We have to try, Richard.

“Maybe the poison won’t work as fast as you think. After all, you said that being in the underworld caused it to regress some. Maybe it slowed its advance enough for you to make it to the palace in time.

“Besides, you have to make it. You said yourself that the scrolls say you are the balance, the counter, to what Sulachan and Hannis Arc intend to do.”

“They do say that,” Richard told her with a sigh as he glanced over at the scroll lying open on the desk, “but they don’t say which side will win.”

“Well, you can’t win if the poison kills you, now can you? That means we have to get there in time,” she insisted, “that’s all there is to it. Everything depends on it.”

As the silence dragged on, Richard rose slowly out of his chair. He wore an expression that Kahlan knew all too well. It was a look that told her that some inner calculation had been running through his head as he tried to fit all the pieces of the puzzle together. The look on his face told her that he might have just found the missing piece.

While it was a look that meant he had thought of something, in the past that something had not always been what she wanted to hear. It was a look that meant some crazy idea had just come to him. It was a look that usually meant trouble and sent them off in a direction she had never expected.

But she also knew that those crazy ideas he came up with often ended up being the solution they needed.

“What?” She took hold of his arms, looking him in the eye. “What are you thinking?”

Rather than look at her, he stared off into the distance, lost in thought and not really hearing her. Kahlan recognized that, too. She knew he was still making mental connections, running through all the possibilities, going down roads and pathways and blind alleys, trying to see where they all led. He was trying to see if there was another way, or if he really had found the right course to guide them.

It was not unlike what she had learned one did when playing chess. You didn’t make the move until you had exhausted every possible outcome that you could think of. Of course, sometimes that move still resulted in you losing because you hadn’t thought of the one fatal possibility.

“It’s too far,” he said to himself with an odd frown. He finally looked down at her. “You said it yourself–we have to get there in time. But it’s too far to get there in time.”

“What of it?”

“Time.” He grabbed hold of her arms in the same way she had taken hold of his. “There wouldn’t have been enough time for them, either.”

“Who?” Kahlan squinted her bewilderment at him. “What are you talking about?”

Richard ignored her as he rushed over to the chair where Nicci was curled up asleep. He shook her foot.

“Wake up. Nicci, wake up.”

The sorceress jerked awake. “What is it? What? What’s happened?”

“We’re leaving.”

Nicci wiped her eyes and then looked at Kahlan for an explanation. Kahlan shrugged.

“Cassia,” Richard called out.

She leaped forward. “Yes, Lord Rahl?”

“Go find Commander Fister. Tell him that I said we need horses–for us and a dozen of the men. Extra horses we can switch out as well. We will need to leave at once. And tell him I want the guides we used before–the men who grew up in the Dark Lands–to come with us.”

Cassia looked confused. “We’re leaving? Where are we going?”

“Move!” he yelled at the woman. “There is no time to waste. Do it now. Get going.” He called her name when she was almost to the door. She turned back. “And get Mohler,” he added. “Tell him that I need him.”

Cassia quickly clapped a fist to her heart before turning and racing out the door. The other two Mord-Sith peered around the edge of the doorway, looking back in to try to see what the yelling was all about.

Before they had time to question, Cassia snatched them by their arms and turned them around, telling them to help her find Commander Fister and the guides. All three raced off down the hallway, past bewildered soldiers of the First File.

“Did he tell you about Warheart?” Nicci asked Kahlan as Richard paced off a ways, once again completely absorbed in thought.

“Yes. And the ‘highlights’ as he put it.”

Nicci’s blue eyes turned back to Kahlan after watching Richard pace between the desk and the door for a moment. “I know it all sounds far-fetched. I had my doubts about the whole thing at first, but I have to tell you, Kahlan, the more I read, the more I realized he’s right–about all of it.

“I’ve been reading and studying prophecy and prophetic theory for most of my life. I’ve never looked at any of it in this light before. For that matter, I never even imagined it in this light before. I feel like I’m starting to understand prophecy, really understand it in a fundamental way, for the first time in my life.”

“So you’re convinced that prophecy really does originate in the underworld?”

Nicci looked over to watch Richard pace for a moment. “Before everything we read during the night, I would never have believed it. It isn’t simply reading it, though, but reading it all in context, reading all the explanations of how things are connected going back to the time before the great war that Emperor Sulachan started. Now, I can’t believe that I never suspected any of this before. Including the part about me.”

Kahlan’s brow twitched. “About you?”

The sorceress nodded. “About me taking him to the Old World being part of the prophecy in the scrolls.”

“I don’t know about that part. He hasn’t had the time to tell me everything,” Kahlan said.

Nicci held up a finger, asking Kahlan to have patience and wait. “Richard,” Nicci called across the room, “what have you thought of? What’s going on?”

He hurried over to them. “I’m not completely sure, yet.”

“I see,” Nicci said. “So we are are going to get on horses and race back to the People’s Palace. You’re right, that makes the most sense.”

It wasn’t a question and she obviously knew that wasn’t his intent. Nicci obviously knew that Richard had no intention of trying to ride to the palace in time. He was too dead set against it. He had thought of something else but wasn’t saying what. Kahlan was a little amazed that Nicci knew exactly how to get his actual intent out of him.

“What is this place for?” he asked Nicci. He held an arm up and gestured around. “This citadel. Why is it here?”

Nicci clasped her hands behind her back, playing along, if reluctantly. “It’s a prison outpost. It was meant to hold for execution anyone who had occult powers because that power could only have leaked out of the barrier to the third kingdom. Executing them was the only way to stop the spread of the contamination. If not stopped, it would be the same as the barrier itself failing.”

“Right,” he said with a nod as he looked back and forth between them. “And what, then, was the purpose of Stroyza?”

Kahlan shrugged, answering this time. “It’s a first line of defense, meant to send a warning that the barrier has been breached and the half people and those with occult abilities are escaping. They are meant to watch and when the barrier to the third kingdom failed, they were supposed to go to Aydindril and warn the wizards’ council at the Keep.”

“There hasn’t been a wizards’ council at the Keep for ages, but the people of Stroyza didn’t know that,” he said. “They still think the council rules the New World. So how were they going to get there in time to warn everyone before the half people attack towns and cities, or reached the Keep, first?

“The people on the other side of the barrier were from the Old World. They would have headed for the seat of power, just as Hannis Arc and Emperor Sulachan are doing now. Except back then, that was the Wizard’s Keep, not the People’s Palace. So, how were the people of Stroyza going to manage to do that–to get to the Keep first, before the hordes of half people?”

“I guess they would have to hurry,” Kahlan said, not quite following what he was getting at.

“The people of Stroyza live in a remote area that isn’t near roads or even good paths,” he said.

Kahlan shrugged. “That’s because the people back in the great war put the third kingdom in the most remote area they could find. They wanted it as far away from civilization as possible.”

Richard nodded. “That’s right. But even so, there are roads closer to the barrier than Stroyza going back in that direction. Even the paths that are near Stroyza go to other places for the purpose of trade and supplies, not toward Aydindril and the Keep. The people of Stroyza live in caves and don’t use horses. As Ester told me, Stroyza is their home and they have nowhere else to go, so travel isn’t an important part of their lives.”

“Maybe they used to travel,” Nicci said. “It could be that they forgot to keep horses in the same way they lost so many of the things they were told when Stroyza was founded back in the great war. After all, they don’t even know how to read all the messages left for them on the walls of the caves because they lost the ability to read the language of Creation.”

“We can use horses,” he said, “and we won’t be able to get there first.”

“That’s only because they have a good lead on us,” Kahlan said.

“Yes, but even if we caught them, we have to worry about getting past them. They have incredible numbers, many with occult powers. They have a spirit king risen from the dead. They have thousands of half people–tens of thousands. They’re spread out across the land. Worse, Sulachan can reanimate as many of the dead as he needs. He’s a wizard with great power. He can use occult abilities.

“So how was one lone person from Stroyza supposed to get past all that, keep from being captured, and get to the Keep in enough time for them to mobilize forces to protect people? By the time the people in Stroyza would realize that the barrier was breached, it would be too late to get to the Keep in time to warn them.”

Nicci scratched her cheek. “That does seem like a pretty ill-conceived solution to the problem of the barrier.”

Richard nodded. “Especially since the people back in the great war–the ones who built that barrier in the first place and put the dangerous half people and occult powers they couldn’t destroy behind the wall–knew that it was eventually going to fail. They didn’t put Stroyza there in case it failed, they put it there because they knew it was going to fail, and they wanted us to have ample warning to defend ourselves. They didn’t take the threat lightly. They wouldn’t have let the fate of the world depend on such a tenuous method of warning people.”

Kahlan was frowning in thought. “When you put it that way, it doesn’t make much sense.” She looked up. “So, what are you thinking? You believe they had some other way to warn people?”

“I do.”

Before he could say more, Commander Fister rushed in, holding his sword against his hip to keep it from flopping as he ran. He had several men with him. Kahlan recognized the men as the scouts who grew up in the Dark Lands.