Naked Empire (59 page)

“Remember back just after we’d met you, and I told you that there were times when there was no choice but to act?”

Jennsen nodded, her tears returning.

“This is one of those times. Richard is getting sicker by the day. He’s dying. If he doesn’t get the antidote, he has no chance and will soon be dead. That’s the truth of the way things are.

“How can we let this chance slip away from us? There are no more opportunities after this. Our chances to save him will forever be lost. It will be the end. I don’t want to live without him. I don’t want the rest of our people to live without him.

“If I do this, then Richard will live. If Richard lives, then there will still be a chance for me, too. I can touch Nicholas with my power, or Richard and the rest of you can think of something to do to save me.

“But if Richard dies, then our chances end.”

“But, Mother Confessor,” Jennsen sobbed, “if you do this, then we’ll lose you….”

Kahlan looked to each face, her anger rising. “If any of you have a better idea, then put words to it. Otherwise, you are risking me losing the only chance left.”

No one had anything to say. Kahlan was the only one with a realistic plan of action. The rest of them had only wishes. Wishing would not save Richard.

Kahlan started out once again, hurrying her pace to get there in time.

Kahlan paused in the quiet darkness not far from the bridge. She could just make out what appeared to be a burly man standing on the other side. He was all alone. She couldn’t see his face, or tell what he looked like. She scanned the far bank of the river, along with the trees and buildings she could make out in the moonlight, looking for soldiers, or anyone else.

Jennsen clutched her arm. “Kahlan…please.” Her voice was choked with tears.

Kahlan felt oddly calm. There were no options for her to weigh, so she suffered no gnawing indecision; there was only one choice. Richard lived, or he died. It was as simple as that. The choice was clear.

Her mind was made up, and with that came clarity and determination. She could now focus on what she was to do.

The river through the city was larger than Kahlan had expected. The steep banks to each side, in this area, anyway, were a few dozen feet high and lined with stone blocks. The bridge itself, wide enough for wagons to pass each other, had two arches to make the span and side rails with simple stone caps. The waters below were dark and swift. It was not a river she would want to have to try to swim.

Kahlan approached as far as the foot of the bridge and stopped. The man on the other side watched her.

“Do you have the antidote?” she called over to him.

He lifted what looked like a little bottle high above his head. He lowered the arm and pointed to the bridge. He wanted her to come across.

“Mother Confessor,” Owen pleaded, “won’t you reconsider?”

She gazed into his wet eyes. “Reconsider what? If I will have Richard live rather than let him succumb to the poison? If I will try to kill Nicholas in order to make it possible to defeat them and for your people to have a better chance to free themselves? How would I ever live with myself if Richard died without the antidote and I knew there was something I could have done that would have saved him and also have given me a chance to get close enough to Nicholas to eliminate him?

“I couldn’t live with myself if I failed to do this.

“We are fighting this war to stop people like this, people who bring death upon us, people who want us dead because they cannot stand that we live our lives as we wish, that we are successful and happy. These people hate life; they worship death. They demand that we do the same and join them in their misery.

“As Mother Confessor, I decreed vengeance without mercy against the Imperial Order. Changing from our course is suicide. I will not reconsider.”

“What would you have us tell Lord Rahl?” Tom asked.

She smiled. “That I love him, but he knows that.”

Kahlan unbuckled her sword belt and handed it to Jennsen. “Owen, come with me.”

Kahlan started out, but Jennsen threw her arms around her and hugged her fiercely. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “We’ll get the antidote to Richard, and then we’ll come back for you.”

Kahlan hugged Jennsen briefly, whispered her thanks, and then started onto the bridge. Owen walked at her side, saying nothing.

The man on the far side watched, but stayed where he was.

In the center of the bridge, Kahlan stopped. “Bring the bottle,” she called across.

“Come over here and you can have it.”

“If you want me, you will come to the center of the bridge and give the bottle to this man to take back, as Nicholas offered.”

The man stood for a time, as if considering. He looked like a soldier. He didn’t match the description of Nicholas that Owen had given her. Finally, he started onto the arch of the bridge. Owen whispered that it looked like the commander he had seen with Nicholas. Kahlan waited, watching the man walk through the moonlight. He wore a knife at one side and a sword at his other hip.

When he had almost reached her, he came to a halt and waited.

Kahlan held her hand out. “The note said we were to trade. Me for what Nicholas has.”

The man, his crooked nose flattened to the side, smiled. “So we were.”

“I am the Mother Confessor. Either give me the bottle or you die here, now.”

He pulled the square-sided bottle from his pocket and placed it in her hand. Kahlan saw that it was full of clear liquid. She pulled the cork and smelled it. It had the slight aroma of cinnamon, as had the other bottles of the antidote.

“He goes back with this,” Kahlan said to the grim-looking man as she handed Owen the bottle.

“And you come with me,” the man said as he grabbed her wrist. “Or we all die on this bridge. He may go, as agreed, but if you try to run you will die.”

Kahlan glanced to Owen. “Go,” she growled.

Owen looked over at the man with black hair, then back to her. He looked like he had a lot to say, but he nodded and then ran back over the bridge to where Tom and Jennsen stood waiting, watching.

When Owen reached the other two, the man said, “Let’s go, unless you’d like to die here.”

Kahlan yanked her arm back. When he turned and started out, she followed behind him as they crossed the rest of the way over the bridge. She scanned the shadows among the trees on the far side of the river, the thousand hiding places among buildings beyond, the streets in the distance. She didn’t see anyone, but that didn’t really make her feel any better.

Nicholas was there, somewhere, hiding in the darkness, waiting to have her.

Suddenly, the night lit up from behind. Kahlan spun and saw the bridge enveloped in a boiling ball of flame. The fire turned black as it billowed up. Stones sailed into the air above the inferno. As the luminous cloud rose, she could see the bridge beneath the roaring fireball crumpling. The arches caved in on themselves and the entire structure began the long drop into the river.

With icy dread, Kahlan wondered if there were any more bridges across the river. How would she get back to Richard if she succeeded? How was help going to get to her if she didn’t?

On the far side, Kahlan could see Tom, Jennsen, and Owen running back up the road toward where Richard slept. They were not about to waste time watching a bridge being destroyed. At the thought of Richard, Kahlan almost let out a sob.

The man unexpectedly shoved her. “Move.”

She glared at him, at his self-satisfied smile, at the smug confidence she saw in his eyes.

As she walked ahead of this man and he occasionally shoved her, Kahlan’s temper was on a low boil. She had the urge to use her power and take out the despicable brute, but she had to concentrate on the task at hand: Nicholas.

Walking up the street leading away from the river, she was just able to make out soldiers hanging back in the shadows on the dark side streets, blocking every escape route. It didn’t matter. At the moment, she wasn’t interested in escape, but in her objective. The man behind her, as arrogantly as he was behaving, was also wary and treated her with cautious contempt.

The farther she walked into the city on the far side of the river, the closer the clusters of small buildings were packed together. Side streets of narrow twisting warrens ran off among the ramshackle structures. What trees there were grew crowded in close to the street. Their branches hung out over her like arms raised to snatch her in their claws. Kahlan tried not to think about how deep she was getting into enemy territory, and how many men were surrounding her.

The last time she had been surrounded and trapped by such savage men she had been beaten and had come perilously close to dying. Her unborn child had died. Her child. Richard’s child.

She had also lost a kind of innocence that day, a simplistic sense of her invincibility. In its place had come the understanding of how frail life was, how frail her own life was, and how easily it could be lost. She knew how much it had hurt Richard to fear he might lose her. She remembered the terrible agony in his eyes every time he had looked at her. It was completely different from the pain she saw in his eyes from his gift. It had been a helpless suffering for her. She hated the thought of that pain returning to haunt him.

From the shadows to the right side, a man stepped out from behind a building. He wore black robes, covered in layers of what looked like strips of cloth, almost as if he were covered in black feathers. They lifted in the breeze created by his stride, lending him an unsettling, floating fluidity as he moved.

His hair was slicked back with oils that glistened in the moonlight. Close-set, small black eyes rimmed in red peered out at her from an altogether unwholesome face. He held his wrists to his chest, as if he were holding back claws tipped with black fingernails.

Kahlan needed no introduction to know that this was Nicholas the Slide. She had taken confessions from men who appeared to be no more than polite young men, working fathers, or kindly grandfathers but in truth were men who had carried out acts of ruthless cruelty. To look at them behind their bench where they made shoes, or behind a counter where they sold bread, or in a field tending their animals it would be difficult to believe them capable of their vile crimes. But looking at Nicholas, Kahlan saw such utter corruption that it tainted everything about the man, right down to the indecent squint of his eyes.

“The prize of prizes,” Nicholas hissed. He reached out, making a fist. “And I have her.”

Kahlan hardly heard him. She was already lost to the commitment of wielding her power. This was the man who held the lives of innocent people hostage. This was the man who brought suffering and death in his shadow. This was the man who would kill her and Richard, if given the chance.

She snatched his outstretched wrist capped with his fist.

He appeared no more than a statue before her.

The night, sprinkled with a vault of stars, seemed cold and distant. Beneath her grip of him, Kahlan could feel Nicholas tense, as if to draw back his arm. But it was too late.

He had no chance. He was hers.

Time was hers.

The men all around, who had begun rushing in, were far too distant to matter. They could never reach her in time to save Nicholas. Not even the man who had brought her from the bridge, who now stood not more than a few paces away, was close enough to matter.

Time was hers.

Nicholas was hers.

She gave no thought to what those men would do to her. Right then, it didn’t matter. Right then, nothing but her ability to do what needed doing mattered. This man had to be eliminated.

This was the enemy.

This was the man who had invaded a land to torture, rape, and murder innocent people in the name of the Imperial Order. This was a man who had been mutated by magic into a monster designed to destroy them. This man was a tool of conquest, a being of evil.

This was the man who held Richard’s life in the balance.

The power within raged to be released.

All her emotions evaporated before the heat of that power. She no longer felt fear, hate, anger, horror. The emotions behind her reasons were now gone. In the all-consuming race of time suspended before the violent rush of her power, she felt only a resolute determination. Her power had become an instrument of pure reason.

All her barriers fell before it.

In an infinitesimal spark of time as she watched the beady eyes staring at her, her power became all.

As she had done countless times before, Kahlan released her restraint on it, and released herself into the flux of violence focused to a singular purpose.

Where she should have felt the exquisite release of merciless force, she felt instead a terrifying emptiness. Where there should have been the fierce twisting of her power through this man’s mind, there was…nothing.

Kahlan’s eyes went wide as she gasped.

As she felt hot pain knife through her.

As she felt the thrust of something foreign and terrible beyond anything she could have imagined.

Hot agony lanced through her consciousness all the way into her very soul.

It felt as if her insides were being ripped apart.

She tried to scream but couldn’t.

The night went blacker still.

Kahlan heard laughter echoing through her soul.

Richard’s eyes popped open. He felt suddenly, completely, horrifyingly wide awake.

The hair at the back of his neck lifted. It felt as if all his hair wanted to stand on end. His heart raced nearly out of control.

He shot to his feet. Cara, right beside him, caught his arm, surprised to see him suddenly stand up. Looking as if she feared he might fall, she frowned in concern.

“Lord Rahl, what’s the matter? Are you all right?”

The room was silent. Startled faces all around stared up at him.

“Get out!” he yelled. “Get your things! Everyone out! Now!”

Richard snatched up his pack. He didn’t see Kahlan, but saw her pack and grabbed it as well. He wondered if he might still be dreaming. But he never remembered his dreams. He wondered if the feeling might be some lingering dread from a dream. No. It was real.

At first made confused and indecisive by Richard’s sudden commands, when the men saw him urgently picking up his gear, everyone scooped up their things and scrambled to their feet. Men everywhere were snatching anything they saw lying about, no matter whose it was.

“Move!” Richard yelled as he pushed hesitant men toward the door. “Go. Move, move, move.”

It felt as if something brushed against him, a sliding caress of his flesh, something warm and wicked. Goose bumps tingled up his arms.

“Hurry!”

Men scrambled wildly up the dark stairs ahead of him. Betty, caught up in the mood of panicked escape, shot between his legs and ran up the steps. Cara was close behind him.

The hair at the nape of his neck prickled as if lightning was about to strike. Richard scanned the dark, empty room.

“Where’s Kahlan and Jennsen?”

“They went outside before,” Cara said.

“Good. Let’s go!”

Just as Richard reached the top of the stairs, a fiery blast from back in the room knocked him sprawling. Cara fell on his legs. The stairwell lit in a flash of yellow and orange light as the entire basement filled with flames. Gouts of fire rolled up the stairwell.

Richard seized Cara’s arm and dove with her through the open doorway. As they burst out into the night, the building behind them erupted in a thunderous roar of flames. Parts of the building broke apart, lifting in the billowing blaze. Richard and Cara ducked as flaming boards fell all around them, bouncing and flipping across the ground lit by the glow.

Finally away from the burning building, Richard made a quick appraisal of the alley, looking to see if there were any soldiers about to set upon them. Not seeing anyone he didn’t recognize, he started the men moving down the alley to put some distance between them and the burning building.

“We have to get away from here,” Richard told Anson. “Nicholas knew we were here. The fire will draw attention and troops. We haven’t much time.”

Looking around, he still didn’t see Kahlan anywhere. His concern rising, he spotted Jennsen, Tom, and Owen running up the alley toward him. By the looks on their faces, he immediately knew that something was wrong.

Richard seized Jennsen’s arm as she ran up close. “Where’s Kahlan?”

Jennsen gulped air. “Richard—she, she—”

Jennsen burst into tears. Owen waved a square-sided bottle and a piece of paper, as he, too, wept uncontrollably.

Richard looked at Tom, expecting an answer, and fast. “What’s going on?”

“Nicholas found the antidote. He offered it in trade…for the Mother Confessor. We tried to stop her, Lord Rahl—I swear we did. She wouldn’t listen to any of us. She insisted that she was going to get the antidote and then stop Nicholas. After you have the antidote, if she fails to stop Nicholas and return, she wants you to come for her.”

The leaping flames lit the grim faces around him.

“Once her mind is made up,” Tom added, “there’s no talking her out of it. She has a way of making you do as she says.”

Richard knew the truth of that. Amid the roar and crackle of the fire, the building groaned and popped. The roof began to fall in, sending showers of sparks skyward.

Owen urgently handed the square-sided bottle to Richard. “Lord Rahl, she did it to get the antidote. She wanted you to have it so you could be well. She said that comes first—before it is too late.”

Richard pulled the cork on the bottle. It had the slight aroma of cinnamon. He took the first swallow, expecting a thick, sweet, spicy taste. It didn’t taste that way at all.

He looked at Jennsen’s and Owen’s faces. “This is water.”

Jennsen’s eyes went wide. “What?”

“Water. Water with a little cinnamon in it.” Richard poured it on the ground. “It’s not the antidote. She traded herself to Nicholas for nothing.”

Jennsen, Owen, and Tom stood in mute shock.

Richard felt a kind of detached calm. It was over. It was the end of everything. He now had a limited amount of time to do what had to be done…and then everything was at an end for him.

“Let me see this note,” he said to Owen.

Owen handed it over. Richard had no trouble reading by the light coming from the fire. As Cara, Tom, Jennsen, and Owen watched, he read it over three times.

Finally, his arm lowered. Cara snatched the note away and read it for herself.

Richard gazed up the alleyway at the burning building, trying to figure it out. “How did Nicholas know that someone was coming for the antidote? He said we had an hour. How did he know we were here, this close, and coming for it, in order to write in the note that he gave us an hour?”

“Maybe he didn’t,” Cara said. “Maybe he wrote the note days ago. Maybe he just wrote that to make us rush without thinking.”

“Maybe.” Richard gestured behind him. “But how did he know we were here?”

“Magic?” Jennsen offered.

Richard didn’t like the idea that Nicholas apparently knew so much and was always one step ahead of them.

“How did you know that Nicholas was about to set this place ablaze?” Cara asked him.

“I woke suddenly,” Richard said. “My headache was gone and I just knew we had to get out at once.”

“So your gift worked?”

“I guess so. It does that—it works sometimes to warn me.”

He wished he could somehow make it more dependable. At least this time it had been, or they would all be dead.

Tom peered out into the night. “So, you think Nicholas is close? That he knew where we were and set the place afire?”

“No. I think he wants us to believe he’s close. He’s a wizard. He could have sent wizard’s fire from a great distance. I’m no expert on magic; he might have used some other means to set the fire from a distance.”

Richard turned to Owen. “Take me to this building where you hid the antidote, where Nicholas was when you first saw him.”

Without hesitation, Owen started out. The rest of the small group followed after him.

“Do you think she will be there?” Jennsen asked.

“There’s only one way to find out.”

By the time they reached the river they were out of breath. Richard was furious to find the bridge gone, with stone blocks from it scattered on the banks far below; the rest of it had apparently vanished beneath the dark water. Owen and some of the other men said that there was another bridge farther to the north, so they took off in that direction, following the road that twisted along beside the river.

Before they reached the bridge, a knot of soldiers rushed out from a side street with weapons raised, yelling battle cries.

The night rang with the distinctive sound of Richard’s sword being drawn. While the blade was free, its magic was not. With the heart-pounding threat, it didn’t matter. Richard had anger to spare and met the enemy with a cry of his own.

The first man lunged. Richard’s strike was so violent it cleaved the burly man down through the leather armor over his shoulder to his opposite hip. As Richard spun without pause to a soldier coming at him from behind, he brought the sword around with such speed that the man was beheaded before he had cocked his sword arm. Richard drew his elbow back, smashing the face of a man rushing in to stab him from behind. A quick thrust took down another man before Richard could turn to finish the man behind, who had dropped to his knees, his hands covering his bleeding face. A moonlit flash of Richard’s sword brought measured death.

Tom slashed through the men at the same time as Cara’s Agiel took others down. Cries of surprised pain shattered the quiet of the night. All the while, Richard swept through the enemy like a wind-borne shadow.

In mere moments, the night was again silent. Richard, Tom, and Cara had eliminated the enemy squad before any of their men could react to the threat that had come out of the darkness. Scarcely had they caught their breath when Richard was already charging onward to the bridge.

When they reached it, two slouching Imperial Order soldiers stood guard, pikes standing upright. The guards seemed to be surprised that people would be running toward them at night. Probably because the people of Bandakar had never before dared to cause them any trouble, the two guards stood watching Richard come until he pulled his sword from behind and took them down with a rapid thrust to the first man and a powerful sweeping slice that cut the second in two along with the pike standing at his side.

The small company raced unopposed across the bridge and into the darkness among the crowded buildings. Owen directed Richard at every turn as they rushed onward toward the place where Owen had hidden the antidote and where he had recovered, instead of the antidote, the note demanding Kahlan in exchange for Richard’s life, in exchange for the lives of an empire naked to the dark talents of Nicholas the Slide.

In the somber heart of the city made up of small, squat, mostly single-story buildings, Owen pulled Richard to a stop. “Lord Rahl, down here, at the corner, we turn to the right. A short distance beyond is a square where people often gather. At the far end of the square will be a building taller than those around it. That is the place. Down a small street to the side of it, there will be an alleyway that runs behind the building. That is the way I got in, before.”

Richard nodded. “Let’s go.”

Without waiting to see if the tired men were with him, he started out, keeping in close to the buildings, to the shadows cast by the moon. Richard moved around the building at the corner. Hung over a small front window was a carved sign displaying loaves of bread. It was still too early for the baker to be at work.

Richard looked up and froze. There before him was the square with trees and benches. The building across the open square was in ruin. Only smoldering timbers remained. A small crowd had gathered around, watching what had hours ago obviously been a large fire.

“Dear spirits,” Jennsen whispered in horror. She covered her mouth, fearing to speak aloud the worry on everyone’s mind.

“She wouldn’t be in there,” Richard said in answer to the unspoken fear. “Nicholas wouldn’t take her back here just to kill her.”

“Then why do this?” Anson asked. “Why burn the place down?”

Richard watched the wisps of smoke slowly curling up into the cool night air, at his hopes disappearing. “To send me a message that he has her and I’ll not find her.”

“Lord Rahl,” Cara said under her breath, “I think we had better get out of here.”

From the darkness around the building that had burned down, Richard could just start to make out the sight of soldiers by the hundreds, no doubt waiting to catch them.

“I feared as much,” Owen said. “That’s why I brought us in by such a circuitous route. See that road over there, where all the soldiers are? That’s the road coming from the bridge we crossed.”

“How do they always know where we are, or where we will be?” Jennsen whispered in frustration. “And when?”

Cara grabbed Richard’s shirt and started pulling him back. “There are too many. We don’t know how many more are around us. We need to get out of here.”

Richard was loath to admit it, but she was right.

“We have men waiting for us,” Tom reminded him. “And a lot more coming.”

Richard’s mind raced. Where was she?

Finally he nodded. The instant he did, Cara took him by his arm and they dashed off into the darkness.