Chainfire (23 page)

With the palm of his left hand resting on the hilt of his sword, he scanned the darkness again, checking for any threat. “I think Cara and I had better be on our way. Considering what happened to Victor’s men, I’m concerned about what will happen if that thing comes back here after me. I’d not like that kind of beast rampaging through the city in a blood frenzy. I don’t want any more people to be needlessly hurt or killed. Whatever that thing is—the beast Jagang had his Sisters conjure, or something we don’t even know about—it seems to me that I’ll have a better chance to stay alive if I keep moving. Sitting in one place feels too much like waiting for the executioner to arrive.”

“I don’t think that you are necessarily making logical assumptions,” Nicci said.

“Nonetheless I need to be going anyway and I’d feel better if it was sooner rather than later—for a variety of reasons.” He hoisted his pack higher on his back. “I have to find Victor and Ishaq.”

Resigned, Nicci gestured behind her. “After the attack I went and got them. They are both over at the stables, back there. Ishaq has the horses you requested. Some of the men helped him gather supplies for you.” She put a hand on his arm. “Some of the relatives of Victor’s men, the ones who were killed, are there, too. They want to hear from you.”

Richard nodded as he let out a deep breath. “I hope I can offer them some comfort. Grief is fresh in my mind.” He gave Cara a quick squeeze on her shoulder. “But mine has been lifted.”

Richard hitched his bow higher up onto his shoulder as he started away. In little more than a blink he dissolved into the darkness.

As Cara went past, following in Richard’s wake, Nicci caught the Mord-Sith’s arm, holding her back until she could speak without Richard hearing.

“How are you, Cara? Really?”

Cara met Nicci’s direct gaze with a steady look of her own. “I’m tired, but I’m fine, now. Lord Rahl made it right.”

Nicci nodded her satisfaction. “Cara, may I ask you a personal question?”

“As long as I don’t have to promise I’ll answer it.”

“Do you have a man for whom you care greatly named Benjamin Meiffert?”

Even in the dim light, Nicci could see Cara’s face go as scarlet as her red leather outfit. “Who told you such a thing?”

“Do you mean to say, then, that it’s a secret and no one knows?”

“Well, that’s not what I’m saying, exactly,” Cara stammered. “I mean…you’re trying to trip me into saying something I don’t intend.”

“I’m not trying to trip you into saying anything, especially something that isn’t true. I only asked about Benjamin Meiffert.”

Cara’s brow drew tight. “Who told you such a thing?”

“Richard.” Nicci arched an eyebrow. “Is it true?”

Cara pressed her lips tight. At last she looked away from Nicci to glare off into the night. “Yes.”

“So you told Richard all about how you care a great deal for this soldier?”

“Are you crazy? I would never have told such a thing to Lord Rahl. Where could he have heard it?”

For a moment, Nicci listened to the cicadas singing their incessant mating songs as she considered the Mord-Sith.

“Richard said that Kahlan told him all about it.”

Cara stood with her mouth agape. She at last touched her fingers to her forehead as she worked to gather her senses.

“Well that’s just crazy…. I, I must have told him myself. I guess I just
forgot. We talk about so much. It’s hard to recall everything I told him—but now that you bring it up, I think I do recall mentioning it one night when we were both talking about such sentimental things. I think that must have been when I told him about Benjamin Meiffert. I guess I pushed such a personal discussions to the back of my mind. I guess he didn’t. I ought to learn to keep my mouth shut.”

“You have no need to fear anything you tell Richard. You have no better friend in the world. And you have no need to fear me knowing such things, either. He told me about it in the depth of his grief for you because he wanted me to know that you are more than just Mord-Sith, that you’re a person with a life and desires of your own and you had come to value a good man. He was honoring you by telling me. But I will keep it to myself. Your feelings are safe with me, Cara.”

Cara idly tugged at strands of hair at the end of her single braid. “I guess I never looked at it quite that way—I mean about him honoring me by telling you. That’s kind of…nice.”

“Love is a passion for life shared with another person. You fall in love with a person who you think is wonderful. It’s your deepest appreciation of the value of that individual, and that individual is a reflection of what you value most in life. Love, for sound reasons, can be one of life’s greatest rewards. You shouldn’t be ashamed or embarrassed about being in love. I mean, if you really do love Benjamin, that is.”

Cara thought it over a moment. “I’m not ashamed of it; I am Mord-Sith.” Some of the tension went out of her shoulders. “But I don’t know if I’m in love with him, either. I don’t know for certain what I think about it. I know I care greatly for him. I’m not sure it’s love, though. Maybe it’s only the first step along the path to love. It’s kind of hard for me to tell about such things. I’m not used to it mattering what I think or how I feel.”

Nicci nodded as she began walking slowly through the shadows. “For a lot of my life I didn’t understand what love was either. Jagang used to sometimes think that he was in love with me.”

“Jagang? Seriously? He’s in love with you?”

“No, he’s not really in love with me; he just thinks he is. Even back then I knew that it wasn’t love, even if I didn’t understand why. Jagang’s measure of worth runs from hate to lust. He scorns and defiles anything that’s good about life, so he couldn’t possibly experience true love. He can
only discern it as the faint fragrance of something tantalizing and mysterious beyond his reach and he longs to possess it.

“He imagined that he could experience love by grabbing me by my hair and forcing me down on him. He interpreted his enjoyment as he watched as feelings of love. He thought that I should be grateful that he had such powerful feelings for me that he would be overcome with desire for me to the exclusion of everything else. Since he believed that forcing himself on me was an expression of his love, he thought I should accept it as an honor.”

“He would have liked Darken Rahl,” Cara muttered. “They would have gotten along splendidly.” She looked over, suddenly puzzled. “You’re a sorceress. Why didn’t you use your power to incinerate the bastard?”

Nicci let out a deep breath. How could she simply explain a lifetime of indoctrination?

“I don’t think that a day goes by that I don’t wish I would have killed that vile man. But, brought up as I was under the teachings of the Fellowship of Order, the same as he, I believed that moral virtue was only realized through self-sacrifice. Under their tenets, your duty is to those in need. Such dictates are imposed under the banner of the common good, or the betterment of mankind, or dutiful obedience to the Creator.

“By the ideology of the Order we were to devote ourselves not to those we regarded as the best among mankind, but to those who we ourselves regarded as the worst among men—not because they had earned it, but precisely because they hadn’t. This, the Order claims, is the heart of morality and the only means by which we earn our entry into the everlasting light of the Creator in the afterlife. It’s the sacrifice of the virtuous into servitude to the vile. It is never done under the banner of what it really is: naked greed for the unearned.

“Jagang’s worldly needs revolved around his crotch. I had what he believed he needed, so I was morally required to sacrifice myself to his need. Especially since he is the leader bringing the Order’s moral teachings to the heathens of the world.

“When Jagang would beat me until I was only half conscious and then throw me on his bed to have his way with me, I was doing what I had been taught was not only right, but my selfless moral duty. I thought I was evil for hating it.

“Since I believed that I was evil for such self-interest, I felt that I deserved all the pain I got in this world and eternal punishment in the next. I couldn’t kill a man who was, under the creed taught to me by the Fellowship of Order, morally superior to me by virtue of his need. How could I possibly harm someone who I had been taught to serve? How could I possibly object to the harm done to me when I so deserved all I got and more? What could I object to? Justice? That’s the endless, miserable trap of teachings about your duty to the greater good.”

They strolled in silence as Nicci endured an array of ghastly memories.

“What changed?” Cara finally asked.

“Richard,” Nicci said softly. Right then, she was glad for the darkness. Despite her tears, she lifted her head with pride. “The Imperial Order’s teachings can only endure through brutality. Richard showed me that no one has a right to my life, not the whole of it, nor pieces of it. He showed me that my life is mine to live for myself, for my own purpose, and does not belong to others.”

Cara watched with a kind of knowing sympathy. “I guess that you had a great deal in common with Mord-Sith under the rule of Darken Rahl. D’Hara was once a place of darkness, as life is now under the Imperial Order. Richard didn’t just kill Darken Rahl, he ended that kind of sick doctrine for D’Hara. He gave us the same thing he gave you; he gave us back our lives.

“I guess Lord Rahl could understand us because he was treated much the same.”

Nicci wasn’t sure what Cara meant. “The same?”

“He was once a captive of a Mord-Sith named Denna. At the time it was our duty to torture Darken Rahl’s enemies to death. Denna was the best of the best. Darken Rahl had personally selected her to capture Richard and be in charge of his training. Darken Rahl had been hunting Richard for quite a while because he knew something important about the boxes of Orden. Darken Rahl wanted that information. It was Denna’s job to torture Richard into being eager to answer any question Darken Rahl asked.”

Nicci glanced over and saw tears glistening in Cara’s eyes as she slowed to a halt. She lifted her Agiel, staring at it as she rolled it in her fingers. Nicci knew all about Denna and what she had done to Richard, but she decided that right then it might be best to remain silent and simply lis
ten. Sometimes people needed to say things for themselves more than they needed to say them for others. Nicci thought that perhaps after coming so close to dying, this was one of those times for Cara.

“I was there,” Cara said in a near whisper as she stared at her Agiel. “He doesn’t remember because Denna had tortured him until he was delirious and only partially conscious, but I saw him there, at the People’s Palace, and I saw some of what she did to him…. of what we all did.”

Nicci’s breath paused. She cautiously glanced over at Cara. “Of what you all did? What do you mean?”

“It was standard practice for Mord-Sith to pass their captives around. It made it more difficult for them to learn to endure any particular pattern of torture from one individual. It helped to keep them confused and afraid. Fear is an integral part of torture. That’s something a Mord-Sith learns from the first moment she is taken to be trained to become Mord-Sith—that fear and the unknown makes any pain infinitely worse. Most of the time Denna let a Mord-Sith named Constance share in training Richard. But sometimes Denna wanted to use others, besides Constance.”

Cara stood stock-still as she stared at her Agiel. “It was not long after he arrived at the People’s Palace. Richard doesn’t remember—I don’t think he even knew his own name at the time because Denna had him in a fog of delirium, in a state of madness from the things she had done to him…but he spent a day with me.”

This, Nicci hadn’t known. She stood frozen, afraid to say anything. She had no idea what she could say.

“Denna took Richard as her mate,” Cara said. “I don’t think she understood love any better than Jagang or Darken Rahl. At the end, though, she came to have a deep and genuine love for Richard. I saw the change coming over her. As you described it, she came to value him as an individual. She came to have sincere passion for him. She loved him so much that in the end she let him kill her so that he could escape.

“But before then, when Denna was still torturing him, I saw him there more than once, hanging helpless, covered in blood and begging for the release of death.” A tear ran down Cara’s cheek. “Dear spirits, I too made him beg for death as I stood over him.”

Cara seemed to suddenly realize what she had just said aloud. Panic flooded her eyes. “Please don’t say anything to him. It was so long ago—it’s over and everything has changed, now. I don’t want him to
know…about me there with him like that.” Tears ran down her face. “Please…”

Nicci took up one of Cara’s hands in both of hers. “Of course I wouldn’t say anything about it. I, of all people, understand the way you feel; I too, once did terrible things to him, only for a great deal longer than anyone else. As you say, that’s over.” Nicci let out a deep sigh. “I guess we all three know a little about what love is, and what it isn’t.”

Cara nodded not just her relief, but her sincere appreciation that Nicci understood. “We’d better catch up with Lord Rahl.”

Nicci gestured casually toward the stables. “Richard is talking to the relatives of Victor’s men who were killed.” She tapped the side of her forehead. “I can just barely hear him with my gift.” She reached out and gently wiped a tear from Cara’s cheek. “We have the time to gather our senses before we get there.”

As they started slowly walking toward the stable, Cara said, “Nicci, could I tell you something, then…something personal?”

On a night of such surprises, this was yet another. “Of course.”

“Well…” Cara began as she frowned, trying to find the words, “when Lord Rahl came to me—to heal me—he was close to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he was lying there with me, in the bed with me, with his arms around me—you know, protecting me and keeping me warm.” She rubbed her arms as if the memory had brought the chill back. “I was so cold.” Cara stole a quick glance over at Nicci. “I guess that, well, I guess that in my condition, and all, I was kind of holding on to him, too.”

Nicci lifted an eyebrow. “I see.”

“And the thing is, I felt things when he came into me—and if you tell him this I’ll kill you, I swear I will.”

Nicci smiled as she nodded her assurance. “We both care a great deal about him. I assume that what you’re telling me is only because you are concerned for him.”

“That’s right.” She rubbed her arms again as she went on. “When he came to…to pull me back, or whatever it is he did, it was like he was inside me, inside my head, I mean. It was a kind of intimacy unlike any other.

“Lord Rahl healed me once before when I was seriously hurt, but this was different. Parts were the same, some of the feelings were the same,
the sincere caring and such that I felt from him, but this was different, somehow—really different. That time he was healing my physical injury.” Cara leaned closer in an effort to try to get her point across. “This time it was more; this time the touch of that evil thing was inside me, like it was poisoning me, poisoning my existence, my will to live.”

She straightened, then, seemingly frustrated and unable to think of how to explain it better.

“I know the difference you’re trying to define,” Nicci offered. “This time it was a more personal connection between the two of you.”

Cara nodded as if relieved that Nicci seemed to understand.

“Yes, that’s right, it was more personal. A lot more personal,” she added under her breath. “It was like my soul was laid bare to him. It was kind of like…well, never mind.”