Naked Empire (27 page)

“They all said that we must get Lord Rahl to come and give us freedom. They all spoke with one voice.

“We decided, then, what we would do. Some men said that one such as the Lord Rahl would come to cast out the Order when we asked. Others thought you might not be willing, since you are unenlightened and not of our ways, not of our people. When we considered that possibility, we decided that we must have a way to insure you would have to come, should you refuse us.

“Since I was banished, I said that it was upon me to do this thing. Except to live in the hills with my men, I could have no life among our people unless we cast out the Imperial Order and our ways were restored to us. I told the men that I did not know where I could find the Lord Rahl, but that I would not give up until I did so.

“First, though, one of the men, an older man who had spent his life working with herbs and cures, made me the poison I put into your waterskin. He made me the antidote as well. He told me how the poison worked, and how it could be counteracted, since none of us wished to consider that it would come to murder, even of an unenlightened man.”

By the sidelong look Richard gave her, Kahlan knew that he wanted her to hold her tongue, and knew that she was having difficulty doing so. She redoubled her effort.

“I was worried about how I would find you,” Owen said to Richard, “but I knew I had to. Before I could go in search of you, though, I had to hide the rest of the antidote, as was our plan.

“While in a city where the Order had won the people to their side, I heard some people at a market say that it was a great honor that the very man who had come to their city was the most important man among all those of the Imperial Order in Bandakar. The thought struck me that this man might know something of the man the Order hated most—Lord Rahl.

“I stayed in the city for several days, watching the place where this man was said to be. I watched the soldiers come and go. I saw that they sometimes took people in with them, and then later the people came back out.

“One day I saw people come back out and they did not appear to be harmed, so I made my way close to them to hear what they might say. I heard them talk that they had seen the great man himself. I could not hear much of what they said of their visit inside, but none said that they were hurt.

“And then I saw the soldiers come out, and I suspected that they might be going to get more people to take them in to see this great man, so I went before them into a central gathering square. I waited, then, near the open isles between the public benches. The soldiers rushed in and gathered up a small crowd of people and I was swept up with the others.

“I was terrified of what would happen to me, but I thought this might be my only chance to go in the building with this important man, my only chance to see what he looked like, to see the place where he was so I could know where to sneak back and listen, as I had learned to do when living in the hills with my men. I had resolved to do this to see if I could learn any information on Lord Rahl. Still, I was trembling with worry when they took us all into the building and down halls and up stairs to the top floor.

“I feared that I was being led to the slaughter and wanted to run, but I thought, then, of my men back in the hills, depending on me to find the Lord Rahl and get him to come to Bandakar and give us freedom.

“We were taken through a heavy door into a dim room that filled me with fear because it stank of blood. The windows on two walls of the stark room were closed off by shutters. I saw that across the room there was a table with a broad bowl and, nearby, a row of fat, sharpened wooden stakes standing nearly as tall as my chest. They were stained dark with blood and gore.

“Two women and a man with us fainted. Out of anger, the soldiers kicked them in the heads. When the people did not rise, the soldiers dragged them away by their arms. I saw blood trails smear along the floor behind them. I didn’t want to have my head caved in by the boot of one of these gruesome men, so I resolved not to faint.

“A man swept into the room, suddenly, like a chill wind. I had not ever been afraid of any man, even Luchan, like I was afraid of this man. He was dressed in layer upon layer of cloth strips that flowed out behind as he moved. His jet black hair was swept back and smoothed with oils that made it glisten. His nose seemed to stick out even more than it would have, had he not slicked back his hair. His small black eyes were rimmed in red. When those beady eyes fixed on me, I had to remind myself that I had vowed not to faint.

“He peered at each person in turn as he slowly walked past us, as if he were picking out a turnip for dinner. It was then, as his knobby fingers came out from his odd clothes to point in a waving manner at one person and then another until he had pointed out five people, that I saw that his fingernails were all painted as black as his hair.

“His hand waved, dismissing the rest of us. The soldiers moved between the five people this man had pointed out and the rest of us. They started pushing us toward the door, but just then, before we could be ushered out, a commander with a nose that had been flattened to the side, as if from being broken repeatedly, came in and said that the messenger had arrived. The man with the black hair ran his black nails back through his black hair and told the commander to tell the messenger to wait, that by morning he would have the latest information.

“I was then led out and down the stairs along with the rest of the people. We were taken outside and told to go away, that our services wouldn’t be needed. The soldiers laughed when they said this. I left with the others, so as not to make the men angry. The people all whispered about having seen the great man himself. I could think only of what the latest information might be.

“Later, after dark, I sneaked back, and in the rear of the building I discovered, behind a gate through a high wooden fence, a narrow alleyway. In the dark, I entered the alley and hid myself inside a doorway entrance to the back hall of the building. There were passageways beyond, and, in the candlelight, I recognized one passage as the place I had been earlier.

“It was late and there was no one in the halls. I moved deeper into the passageways. Rooms and recesses lined each side of the hall, but with the late hour no one came out. I sneaked up the stairs and crept to the big thick door to the room where I had been taken.

“It was there, in that dark hall before the big door, that I heard the most horrifying cries I have ever heard. People were begging and weeping for their lives, crying for mercy. One woman pleaded endlessly to be put to death to end her suffering.

“I thought I would vomit, or faint, but one thought kept me still and hidden, kept me from running as fast as my legs would carry me. That was the thought that this was the fate of all my people if I did not help them by bringing Lord Rahl.

“I stayed there all night, in a dark recess in a hall across from the big door, listening to those poor people in unimaginable agony. I don’t know what the man was doing to them, but I thought I would die of sorrow for their slow suffering. The whole of the night, the moans of agony never ceased.

“I shivered in my hiding place, weeping, and told myself that it wasn’t real, that I shouldn’t be afraid of what was not real. I imagined the people’s pain, but told myself that I was putting my imagination on top of my senses—the very thing I had been taught was wrong. I put my thoughts to Marilee, the times we had been together, and ignored the sounds that were not real. I could not know what was real, what these sounds really were.

“Early in the morning the commander I had seen before returned. I peeked carefully out from my dark hiding place. The man with the black hair came to the door. I knew it was him because when his arm came out of the room to hand the man a scrolled paper, I saw his black fingernails.

“The man with the black hair said to the commander with the flattened, crooked nose, he called him ‘Najari,’ that he had found them. That’s what he said—‘them.’ Then he said, ‘They’ve made it to the east edge of the wasteland and are now heading north.’ He told the man to give the messenger the orders right away. Najari said, ‘Shouldn’t be long, then, Nicholas, and you will have them and we’ll have the power to name our price.’”

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.”