Chainfire (18 page)

“At the head of his list will be Altur’Rang. This is his home city. He will not allow the black mark of freedom to stand against his devout beliefs. He will turn loose on you his most vicious fighters—the sons of the Old World. You will be isolated and gutted by Jagang’s army of your fellow countrymen. You will die to a man, your male children will be murdered, and your wives and sisters and daughters will be used as rewards for the brutes who enforce the Order’s authority.”

The crowd stood in rapt silence. They were now in the grip of fear. This was not the brave and boastful talk they had expected to hear on the eve of battle.

Victor cleared his throat. “You are trying to tell us something, Richard?”

Richard nodded as he gazed out over the mute throng watching him
from below the landing where he stood. “Yes. I’m trying to tell you that you must do more than stand and defend yourselves when these men come. You can’t win that kind of war. You must strike out at the Imperial Order and help bring them down.”

Ishaq lifted a hand. “Bring them down? In what way?”

“As you all well know, life under the Order offers nothing but decay and ruin. There is little work, little food, little to look forward to…except the promise of glory in some afterworld life—but only in exchange for your selfless service in this one. The priests of the Fellowship of Order have nothing to offer you but misery, so they proclaim suffering a virtue and in exchange generously grant you extravagant, eternal rewards in some other world. Rewards that cannot be examined beforehand, rewards in a world that is unknowable, except, they claim, to them. Not one of you would be gullible enough to trade a dog for such hollow promises, and yet legions have been swindled into eagerly offering up their own lives, the only life they will ever have, in the unfair exchange.

“Jagang invokes the cause of the Creator, the fight for mankind’s future, and the elimination of those with the gift as the noble reasons for the Old World to invade the New World. He tells his subjects that the people far away to the north are immoral heathens and, as a duty to the Creator, they must be struck down.

“In reality, Jagang is doing nothing more than producing a diversion to cover the widespread poverty and unemployment created by the Imperial Order’s doctrines. A failed Old World of crushing poverty and widespread death is thus blamed on traitors among the people—that would be you—and on their supposedly wicked brethren to the north. Jagang gives hopeless young men an object of hatred upon which to extract revenge for their misery.

“In so doing, out of the ranks of the young men of the Old World, Jagang has created an army of zealots. You know yourselves the throngs of such young men who have departed from Altur’Rang to join the ‘noble’ cause. These men have little in life to look forward to and have grasped eagerly at the Order’s teachings. Jagang has given them someone to blame for all their woes: those who don’t submit to the teachings of the Order. These men have been indoctrinated in a culture of death and turned loose on those who have liberty, prosperity, and the most hateful thing of all, happiness. Most are well beyond reason or redemption.

“Fighting far from home, Jagang allows these savages to pillage and loot their way across the land, hoping they will forget the miserable future awaiting them back home. In the name of the Creator and the Order they slaughter all opposition and take vast territory as their own. With their great numbers they vanquish all who go up against them. They terrorize everyone in their path. The panic of waiting for the murdering horde to arrive is too much for many, and in the hopes of being spared the worst of what Jagang’s men would do, some places surrender and petition to join the cause of the Imperial Order.”

“You are saying it is hopeless to fight them?” someone asked into the tense evening silence.

“I am telling you the true nature of what we all face,” Richard said. “But it does not have to be hopeless if you understand the essence of the fight.

“For one thing, the Imperial Order has not fully grasped the corrosive effect of distance from their homeland. No matter how much they loot, they still need vast quantities of every kind of supply, from flour to make bread to feathers to make arrows. They can’t scavenge enough food to feed their numbers. They need craftsmen and workers to support their fighting men and they need a steady stream of new soldiers to replace the vast numbers lost in the battles of the campaign. It is difficult to fight in a strange and distant land. Their losses from sickness alone have been staggering. Yet with reinforcements always arriving they have been able to more than replace all they lose. Their army grows constantly, becoming more formidable with each passing day. But that means it also has more needs every day.

“Those convoys of supplies that are constantly streaming north are vital to the efforts of the Imperial Order in conquering the New World. The New World may seem a faraway problem to you, but it is your problem as much as those troops headed this way in a few days. Once those brutes up north are finished murdering my people, they will be coming back here to murder you. If the Order wins, all of us lose. It doesn’t matter where we are. There will be no place to hide.

“If you want to live, not just tomorrow, or the day after you defeat those troops headed this way, but to live next season, next year, and the year after; if you want to raise a family, keep what you earn, and better yourselves and the lives of your children; then you need to help to destroy the Order’s ability to survive.

“Victor and his men have already been doing this, but they are only able to whisper when they need to howl in fury. They need far more people to join them in the effort. You need to help in a determined effort to hit the Order’s supply convoys and destroy them. Kill their men going to fight. Cripple their ability to carry on. You need to deprive the Order of flour and feathers and reinforcements. Every man who dies of starvation in the trackless mountains to the north is a man the Order can’t send back to the Old World to shove his knife in your belly.

“In addition, there are other means to prevail.” Richard gestured to Cara and Nicci. “These two who now stand with me once stood against me. They were enemies of what I believe in—of what you have come to believe in—but when I helped them to understand that I fight for life, for the values of life, they came to realize the truth and became warriors in that same cause.”

Richard lifted a hand out at the crowd spread down the steps and across the lawns. “Look at all of you. Not all that long ago you were the enemies of the New World. Many of you for much of your lives might have believed the lies of the Order. But when given a glimpse of the bright flame of what life can and should be, you had the presence of mind to choose life. I now stand with former enemies, in the heart of enemy territory, among a people once my enemy. Yet now we are all believers in the same cause: that life is worth living for its own sake. Many of us have become fast friends. We are now all on the same side in the greatest struggle of our lives.

“It is possible to make some people who are working for the success of the Order see the wonder and beauty in this life. If you can do that, then you will have one less person who wants to kill you. It would be my choice to win them all over to the truth and to have a world of people living in peace.

“But there are those who are lost to the truth, lost to reason. They hate that you embrace what is good in life. If you can’t win these followers of the Order to our side, then you must kill them, for surely, given the chance, they will kill you and destroy everything you hold dear. You must spread the fight everywhere—leave no place safe for those who preach death. Yes, you will need to kill the wild-eyed fanatics eagerly fighting in the cause of the Order, but far more important than that, you must strike at the root and kill those who preach the doctrines of the Imperial Order.

“They are the ones who corrupt and poison unthinking minds and, if not stopped, they will breed an endless supply of newly minted brutes to come after you and your families. Men with such hate in their hearts recognize no boundaries. They will never allow you to exist because your prosperity and happiness puts the lie to what they teach.

“If you wish to live free, then you must see to it that these disciples of hatred know that there is no safe place for them, that their ways will not be tolerated by civilized men, and that you will not rest until they are all hunted down and killed because you understand that they want nothing less than to end civilization. You must not let them have what they lust after.

“You’ve all bravely taken the first step and thrown off your shackles. None of you need prove yourselves to me. But this is not about a single battle won. This is about the future of how you will live your lives from now on—how your children and your grandchildren will live their lives. You’ve fought bravely. Many have already lost their lives pursuing our common goal and many more yet will. But victory over evil is possible and within your power. You won a battle for something profound: your own lives to live as you see fit. But don’t now fail to see that the war for that ideal is a long way from being finished.

“You have won your right to live free today. Now you must have the fire to fight to live free always.”

“Freedom is never easy to keep and can easily be lost. All it takes is willful indifference.

Richard lifted an arm back toward the statue standing proudly in the afterglow of sunset. “That will to hold life dear, to be free, is the spirit of this statue we all so admire.”

“But Lord Rahl,” someone complained, “that is too big a task for us. We are simple people, not warriors. Maybe if you were to lead us it would be different.”

Richard laid a hand on his chest. “I was a simple woods guide when I realized that I had to rise to the challenges facing me. I, too, didn’t want to face the seemingly invincible evil that loomed over me. But a wise woman—the woman that statue is modeled after—made me see that I had to do so. I am no better than you, no stronger than you. I am simply a man who has come to understand the need to stand without compromise against tyranny. I have taken up that cause because I no longer wanted to live in fear, but to live my own life.

“Those people in the New World to the north are fighting and dying every day. They are simple people like you. None of them wishes to fight, but they must or they will surely die. Their fate today is your fate tomorrow. They can’t continue to stand alone and hope to win. When your time comes, neither will you. They need you to be a part of a free world, to attack those who bring the shadow of a dark age over all the world.”

A man near the front spoke up. “But aren’t you saying the same thing as the Order, that we must sacrifice for the greater good of mankind?”

Richard smiled at the very idea. “Those who wish to impose an idea of a greater good are simply haters of the good. It’s enlightened self-interest that causes me to lift a sword against the Imperial Order. It’s purely for your own self-interest, and your self-interest in those you love, that I think you should fight—in whatever way you think you can best help our common goal. I’m not forcing you to fight for the greater good of mankind, but trying to make you see that it’s a fight for your own life.

“Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking that such self-interest is wrong. Self-interest is survival. Self-interest is the substance of life.

“In your own reasoned self-interest, I suggest that you rise up and strike down the Order. Only then can you truly have freedom.

“The eyes of the Old World are upon you.”

The dark figures of all the people in fading light stretched back as far as Richard could see. He was relieved to see a lot of nodding heads.

Victor’s gaze swept over the men before he turned back to Richard. “I think we are of a mind, Lord Rahl. I will do what I can to see it through.”

Richard clasped arms with Victor as the crowd broke into cheering. Finally, as men all across Liberty Square began talking among themselves as to how best to meet the challenge, Richard turned away and took Nicci aside. Cara followed close on his heels.

“Richard, I know the value of what you have just done, but these people still need you to—”

“Nicci,” he said, cutting her off, “I have to leave in the morning. Cara is going with me. I’m not going to tell you what to do, but I think it would be a good idea if you were to choose to stay and help these people. They’re facing a terrible enough challenge just with the soldiers, but they additionally must face a wizard. You know a lot better than I how to counter that kind of threat. You could be a tremendous help to these people.”

She looked for a long time into his eyes before she glanced to the crowd not far off behind him and down the steps.

“I need to be with you,” she said in a measured tone, but it still sounded to him like a plea.

“Like I said, it’s your life and I’m not going to tell you what to do, just like I’d not like you trying to tell me what I must do.”

“You should stay and help,” she said. She broke eye contact and looked away. “But it’s your life and you must do what you think best. I guess, after all, you are the Seeker.” She again glanced at the men gathering around close to Victor, making plans. “These people may not right now voice objections to what you had to say, but they will be thinking about it and they may very well decide later, after they face the soldiers, after a terrible and bloody fight, that they don’t wish to do more.”

“I was kind of hoping that if you stayed and help them defeat this wizard and the troops coming this way, that you could then add your weight to my words and help convince them of what they need to do. Many of them are well aware of how much you know about the nature of the Order. They will put stock in what you say to them, especially if you’ve just helped them save their city and keep their families safe.” Richard waited until she looked up at him before he went on. “After that, you could then come to join Cara and me.”

She appraised his eyes as she folded her arms across her breasts. “You are saying that if I help stop the Order’s force coming to kill all these people, then you would allow me to join you?”