Naked Empire (10 page)

“Yes,” she said, her blue-eyed glare sliding to Owen, “he certainly will be.”

“What is it?” Kahlan asked as she rode up beside the wagon.

Richard looked to be furious about something. She saw then that he had the book in one hand; his other was a fist. He opened his mouth, about to speak, but when Jennsen, up on the seat beside Tom, turned back to see what was going on, Richard said to her instead, “Kahlan and I are going to check the road up ahead. Keep your eye on Betty so she doesn’t jump out, will you, Jenn?”

Jennsen smiled at him and nodded.

“If Betty gives you any trouble,” Tom said, “just let me know and I’ll take her to a lady I know and have some goat sausages made up.”

Jennsen grinned at their private joke and gave Tom a good-natured elbow in his ribs. As Richard climbed over the side of the wagon and dropped to the ground, she snapped her fingers at the tail-wagging goat.

“Betty! You just stay there. Richard doesn’t need you tagging along every single time.”

Betty, front hooves on the chafing rail, bleated as she looked up at Jennsen, as if asking for her to reconsider.

“Down,” Jennsen said in admonishment. “Lie down.”

Betty bleated and reluctantly hopped back down into the wagon bed, but she would settle for no less than a scratch behind the ears as consolation before she would lie down.

Kahlan leaned over from her seat in the saddle and untied the reins to Richard’s horse from the back of the wagon. He stepped into the stirrup and gracefully swung up in one fluid motion. She could see that he was agitated about something, but it made her heart sing just to look at him.

He shifted his weight forward slightly, urging his horse ahead. Kahlan squeezed her legs to the side of her own horse to spur her into a canter to keep up with Richard. He rode out ahead, rounding several turns in the flatter land among the rough hillsides, until he caught up with Cara and Friedrich, patrolling out in the lead.

“We’re going to check out front for a while,” he told them. “Why don’t you fall back and check behind.”

Kahlan knew that Richard was sending them to the back because if he took Kahlan to the back under the pretense of watching anything that might come up on them from behind, Cara would keep falling back to check on them. If they were out front, Cara wouldn’t worry about them dropping back and getting lost.

Cara laid her reins over and turned back. Sweat stuck Kahlan’s shirt to her back as she leaned over her horse’s withers, urging her ahead as Richard’s horse sprang away. Despite the clumps of tall grass dotting the foothills and occasional sparse patches of woods, the heat was still with them. It cooled some at night, now, but the days were hot, with the humidity increasing as the clouds built up against the wall of mountains to their right.

Up close, the barrier of rugged mountains to the east was an intimidating sight. Sheer rock walls rose up below projecting plateaus heaped to their very edge with loose rock crumbled from yet higher plateaus and walls, as if the entire range was all gradually crumbling. With drops of thousands of feet at the fringe of overhanging shelves of rock, climbing such unstable scree would be impossible. If there were passes through the arid slopes, they were no doubt few and would prove difficult.

But making it past those gray mountains of scorching rock, they could now see, was hardly the biggest problem.

Those closer mountains spreading north and south in the burning heat at the edge of the desert partially hid what lay to the other side—a far more daunting range of snowcapped peaks rising up to completely block any passage east. Those imposing mountains were beyond the scale of any Kahlan had ever seen. Not even the most rugged of the Rang’Shada Mountains in the Midlands were their match. These mountains were like a race of giants. Precipitous walls of rock soared thousands of feet straight up. Harrowing slopes rose unbroken by any pass or rift and were so arduous that few trees could find a foothold. Lofty snow-packed peaks that ascended majestically above windswept clouds were jammed so close together that it reminded her more of a knife’s long jagged edge than separate summits.

The day before, when Kahlan had seen Richard studying those imposing mountains, she had asked him if he thought there was any way across them. He had said no, that the only way he could see to get beyond was possibly the notch he’d spotted before, when he had found the place where the strange boundary had once been, and that notch still lay some distance north.

For now, they skirted the dry side of the closer mountains as that range made its way north along the more easily traversed lowlands.

Along the base of a gentle hill covered in clumps of brown grasses, Richard finally slowed his horse. He turned in his saddle, checking that the others were still coming, if a goodly distance behind.

He pulled his horse close beside her. “I skipped ahead in the book.”

Kahlan didn’t like the sound of that. “When I asked you before why you didn’t skip ahead, you said that it wasn’t a wise thing to do.”

“I know, but I wasn’t really getting anywhere and we need answers.” As their horses settled into a comfortable walk, Richard rubbed his shoulders. “After all that heat I can’t believe how cold it’s getting.”

“Cold? What are you—”

“You know those rare people like Jennsen?” The leather of his saddle squeaked as he leaned toward her. “Ones born pristinely ungifted—without even that tiny spark of the gift? The pillars of Creation? Well, back when this book was written, they weren’t so rare.”

“You mean it was more common for them to be born?”

“No, the ones who had been born began to grow up, get married, and have children—ungifted children.”

Kahlan looked over in surprise. “The broken links in the chain of the gift that you were talking about, before?”

Richard nodded. “They were children of the Lord Rahl. Back then, it wasn’t like it has been in recent times with Darken Rahl, or his father. From what I can tell, all the children of the Lord Rahl and his wife were part of his family, and treated as such, even though they were born with this problem. It seems that the wizards tried to help them—both the direct offspring, and then their children, and their children. They tried to cure them.”

“Cure them? Cure them of what?”

Richard lifted his arms in a heated gesture of frustration. “Of being born ungifted—of being born without even that tiny spark of the gift like everyone else has. The wizards back then tried to restore the breaks in the link.”

“How did they think they would be able to cure someone of not having even the spark of the gift?”

Richard pressed his lips together as he thought of a way to explain it. “Well, you know the wizards who sent you across the boundary to find Zedd?”

“Yes,” Kahlan said in a suspicious drawl.

“They weren’t born with the gift—born wizards, that is. What were they—second or third wizards? Something like that? You told me about them, once.” He snapped his fingers as it came to him. “Wizards of the Third Order. Right?”

“Yes. Just one, Giller, was the Second Order. None were able to pass the tests to be a wizard of the First Order, like Zedd, because they didn’t have the gift. Being wizards was their calling, but they weren’t gifted in the conventional sense—but they still had that spark of the gift that everyone has.”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Richard said. “They weren’t born with the gift to be wizards—just the spark of it like everyone else. Yet Zedd somehow trained them to be able to use magic—to be wizards—even though they weren’t born that way, born with the gift to be wizards.”

“Richard, that was a lifetime of work.”

“I know, but the point is that Zedd was able to help them to be wizards—at least wizards enough to pass his tests and conjure magic.”

“Yes, I suppose. When I was young they taught me about the workings of magic and the Wizard’s Keep, about those people and creatures in the Midlands with magic. They may not have been born with the gift, but they had worked a lifetime to become wizards. They
were
wizards,” she insisted.

Richard’s mouth turned up with the kind of smile that told her that she had just framed the essence of his argument for him. “But they had not been born with that aspect, that attribute, of the gift.” He leaned toward her. “Zedd, besides training them, must have used magic to help them become wizards, right?”

Kahlan frowned at the thought. “I don’t know. They never told me about their training to become wizards. That was never germane to their relationship with me or my training.”

“But Zedd has Additive Magic,” Richard pressed. “Additive can change things, add to them, make them more than they are.”

“All right,” Kahlan cautiously agreed. “What’s the point?”

“The point is that Zedd took people who weren’t born with the gift to be wizards and he trained them but—more importantly—he must have also used his power to help them along that path by altering how they were born. He had to have added to their gift to make them more than they were born to be.” Richard glanced over at her as his horse stepped around a small, scraggly pine. “He altered people with magic.”

Kahlan let out a deep breath as she looked away from Richard and ahead at the gentle spread of grassy hills to either side of them, as she tried to fully grasp the concept of what he was saying.

“I never considered that before, but all right,” she finally said. “So, what of it?”

“We thought that only the wizards of old could do such a thing, but, apparently, it’s not a lost art nor would it be entirely so far-fetched as I had imagined for the wizards back then to believe they could change what was, into what they thought it ought to be. What I’m saying is that, like what Zedd did to give people that with which they were not born, so too did the wizards of old try to give people born as pillars of Creation a spark of the gift.”

Kahlan felt a chill of realization. The implication was staggering. Not just the wizards of old, but Zedd, too, had used magic to alter the very nature of people, the very nature of what they were, how they were born.

She supposed that he had only helped them to achieve what was their greatest ambition in life—their calling—by enhancing what they already had been born with. He helped them to reach their full potential. But that was for men who had the innate potential. While the wizards of long ago probably had done similar things to help people, they had also sometimes used their power for less benevolent reasons.

“So,” he said, “the wizards back then, who were experienced in altering people’s abilities, thought that these people called the pillars of Creation could be cured.”

“Cured of not having been born gifted,” she said in a flat tone of incredulity.

“Not exactly. They weren’t trying to make them into wizards, but they thought they could at least be cured of not having that infinitesimal spark of the gift that simply enabled them to interact with magic.”

Kahlan took a purging breath. “So then what happened?”

“This book was written after the great war had ended—after the barrier had been created and the Old World had been sealed away. It was written after the New World was at peace, or, at least, after the barrier kept the Old World contained.

“But remember what we found out before? That we think that during the war Wizard Ricker and his team had done something to halt Subtractive Magic’s ability to be passed on to the offspring of wizards? Well, after the war, those born with the gift started becoming increasingly uncommon, and those who were being born were being born without the Subtractive side.”

“So, after the war,” she said, “those who were born with the gift of both Additive and Subtractive were rapidly becoming nonexistent. We already knew that.”

“Right.” Richard leaned toward her and lifted the book. “But then, when there are fewer wizards being born, all of a sudden the wizards additionally realize that they have all these pristinely ungifted—breaks altogether in the link to magic—on their hands. Suddenly, on top of the problem of the birth rate of those with the gift to be wizards dropping, they were faced with what they called pillars of Creation.”

Kahlan swayed in the saddle as she thought about it, trying to imagine the situation at the Keep at the time. “I can see that they would have been pretty concerned.”

His voice lowered meaningfully. “They were desperate.”

Kahlan laid her reins over, moving in behind Richard as his horse stepped around an ancient, fallen tree that had been bleached silver from the sweltering sun.

“So, I suppose,” Kahlan asked as she walked her horse back up beside him, “that the wizards started to do the same thing Zedd did? Trained those who had the calling—those who wished to be wizards but had not been born with the gift?”

“Yes, but back then,” Richard said, “they trained those with only Additive to be able to use the Subtractive, too, like full wizards of the time. As time went on, though, even that was being lost to them, and they were only able to do what Zedd did—train men to be wizards but they could only wield Additive Magic.

“But that isn’t really what the book is about,” Richard said as he gestured dismissively. “That was just a side point to record what they had attempted. They started out with confidence. They thought that these pillars of Creation could be cured of being pristinely ungifted, much like wizards with only Additive could be trained to use both sides of the magic, and those without the gift for wizardry could be made wizards able to use at least the Additive side of it.”

The way he used his hands when he talked reminded her of the way Zedd did when he became worked up. “They tried to modify the very nature of how these people had been born. They tried to take people without any spark of the gift, and alter them in a desperate attempt to give them the ability to interact with magic. They weren’t just adding or enhancing, they were trying to create something out of nothing.”

Kahlan didn’t like the sound of that. They knew that in those ancient times the wizards had great power, and they altered people with the gift, manipulated their gift, to suit a specific purpose.

They created weapons out of people.

In the great war, Jagang’s ancestors were one such weapon: dream walkers. Dream walkers were created to be able to take over the minds of people in the New World and control them. Out of desperation, the bond of the Lord Rahl was created to counter that weapon, to protect a people from the dream walkers.