Faith of the Fallen (40 page)

With a gentle touch of her fingers, Kahlan urged Warren to back away. He reluctantly complied.

“This isn’t the first of Jagang’s wizards we’ve captured,” she said, offhandedly, to Warren. Her words, though, were not meant for Warren.

Kahlan looked up into Cara’s stern blue eyes and then glanced off to the side, hoping the Mord-Sith understood the instruction.

“Marlin Pickard,” Kahlan said, as if recalling the name for Warren, but her words were still meant for Cara. “He was grown, and even with this pompous pretend emperor directing him, Marlin still wasn’t able to give us much trouble.”

Marlin had in fact given them a great deal of trouble. He had nearly killed Cara and Kahlan both. Kahlan hoped Cara remembered how tenuous was her control over someone possessed by the dream walker.

The mood in the quiet woods was still and tense as the boy glared up at Kahlan.

“We discovered your scheme in time, Jagang. You made a mistake thinking you could get by our scouts. I hope you’re with those men, so that when we wipe them out we can cut your throat.”

The bloody grin widened. “A woman like you is wasted on the side of the weak,” the boy said in the menacing voice of a man. “You’d have a much better time serving strength, and the Order.”

“I’m afraid my husband likes me right where I am.”

“And where is your husband, darlin? I was hoping to say hello.”

“He’s around,” Kahlan said in the same dispassionate voice.

She saw Warren, when she had spoken the words, move in a way that was a little too much like surprise.

“Is he, now?” The boy’s eyes turned from Warren, back to Kahlan. “Why is it I don’t believe you?”

She wanted to kick the boy’s teeth in as she watched his cruel grin. Kahlan’s mind raced, trying to figure out what Jagang could possibly know, and what he was trying to discover.

“You’ll see him soon enough, when we get this poor child back to camp. I’m sure Richard Rahl will want to laugh in your cowardly face when I tell him how we discovered the great emperor’s plan to sneak troops north. He’ll want to personally tell you what a fool you are.”

The boy tried to take a step toward her, but Cara’s fist in his hair restrained him. He was a cougar on a leash, still testing its chains. The bloody smile remained, but it was not as self-satisfied as it had been. In the brown eyes, Kahlan thought she saw hesitation.

“Ah, but I don’t believe you,” he said, as if losing interest. “We both know he’s not there at all. Don’t we, darlin?”

Kahlan resolved to take a risk. “You’ll see him for yourself, soon enough.” She made to look as if she were going to turn away, but turned back to him instead.

Kahlan let a sarcastic smile taint her lips. “Oh—you must mean Nicci?”

The smile vanished from the boy’s face. The brow drew down, but he managed to keep any anger out of his voice.

“Nicci? I don’t know what you’re talking about, darlin.”

“Sister of the Dark? Shapely? Blond hair? Blue eyes? Black dress? Surely, you would remember a woman that hauntingly beautiful. Or, besides your other shortcomings, are you also a eunuch?”

The eyes watched, and in them Kahlan could see careful calculations weighing her every word. But it was Nicci’s words about Jagang that Kahlan was remembering.

“I know who Nicci is. I know every private inch of her. One day, I will come to know you as intimately as I know Nicci.”

Such an obscene threat was somehow more chilling, coming as it did from the mouth of a boy. It made her sick to her stomach to hear a child express Jagang’s vile thoughts.

The boy’s arm gestured for his master. “One of my beauties, and quite the lethal lady, besides.” Kahlan thought she detected in Jagang’s gravelly growl a hint of the false bravado of a bluff. Almost in afterthought, he added, “You haven’t really seen her.”

Kahlan heard in the assertion the ghost of a question he dared not ask, and knew by it that there was something more to this. She wished she knew what.

She shrugged again. “Lethal? I wouldn’t know.”

He licked the blood from his lips. “That’s what I thought.”

“I wouldn’t know because she didn’t seem all that lethal. She didn’t manage to harm any of us.”

The grin returned. “You lie, darlin. If you really saw Nicci, she would have killed at least some of you, even if she didn’t manage to kill you all. You couldn’t best that one without her scratching someone’s eyes out, first.”

“Really? So sure, are we?”

The boy let out a belly laugh. “Darlin, I know Nicci. I’m sure.”

Kahlan smiled her contempt into the boy’s brown eyes. “You know I’m telling you the truth.”

“Really?” he said, still chuckling. “How’s that?”

“You know it’s the truth because she’s one of your slaves, so you should be able to enter her mind. You can’t, though. I know why you can’t. Even though you aren’t too bright, I don’t suppose you’ll need to think too long to imagine why not.”

Fierce rage fired the boy’s eyes. “I don’t believe you.”

Kahlan shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

“If you saw her, then where is she now?”

As she turned her back on him, Kahlan told him the brutal, bitter truth and let him interpret it his own way. “Last I saw her, she was on her way into oblivion.”

Kahlan heard the bellow behind her. She spun back to see Cara trying to stop him with her Agiel. Kahlan heard the bone in his arm snap. It didn’t even slow him. The boy, in a wild rage, his hands clawed, his teeth bared, lunged for Kahlan.

Half turned back to him, Kahlan lifted her hand against the full weight of the boy crashing toward her as he leaped for her throat. His small chest contacted her hand. His feet were clear of the ground. It felt not as if he were throwing himself at her, but no more than dandelion fluff, floating to her on a breath of air.

Time was hers.

It was not necessary for Kahlan to invoke her birthright, but merely to withdraw her restraint of it. Her feelings could provide her no safe haven; only the truth would serve her now.

This was not a small boy, hurt, alone, afraid.

This was the enemy.

The inner violence of her power’s cold coiled force slipping its bounds was breathtaking. It surged up from that deep dark core within, obediently inundating every fiber of her being.

She could count each small rib under her fingers.

She contained no hate, no rage, no horror…no sorrow. In that infinitesimal spark of time, her mind was in a void where there was no emotion, only the all-consuming rush of time suspended.

He had no chance. He was hers.

Kahlan did not hesitate.

She unleashed her power.

From an ethereal state as part of her innermost essence, that power became all.

Thunder without sound jolted the air—exquisite, violent, and for that pristine instant, sovereign.

The boy’s face was twisted by the hate of the man who had controlled him. In that singular moment, if she was the absence of emotion, then he was the embodiment of it. Kahlan stared back into that lost child’s face, knowing that he saw only her merciless eyes.

His mind, who he was, who he had been, was already gone.

Trees all around shook from the force of the concussion. Snow dropped from branches and boughs. The terrible shock to the air lifted a ring of snow that grew around the two of them in an ever-expanding circle.

Kahlan had known that Jagang could slip into and out of a person’s mind between thought, when time itself did not exist. She had no choice but to do as she had done. She could not afford to hesitate. With Jagang in a person’s mind, even Cara could not control them.

Jagang had burned his bridges behind him as he fled the young mind.

The boy fell dead at Kahlan’s feet.

Kahlan swayed on her feet as she stood over the crumbled body of the boy, feeling her emotions flood back in. As always happened, using her Confessor’s power left her drained and exhausted. In the aftermath, the forest sat in silent judgment. Here and there, the virgin snow around the small body exhibited its red evidence.

Only then did Kahlan even pause to consider if she might have killed Cara, too.

A Mord-Sith would not live long after the touch of a Confessor. There had been no choice. She had done her best to warn Cara, to let her know to get clear, but in the end Kahlan couldn’t allow her decision to be influenced by any consideration other than what had to be done. Hesitation could have meant disaster.

Now that it was over, though, dread roiled through.

Kahlan looked around, and to the right saw Cara sprawled in the snow. If she had been touching the boy when Kahlan unleashed her power…

Cara groaned. Kahlan staggered to her and dropped to a knee. She clutched the fur at Cara’s shoulder and with a mighty effort pulled her over.

“Cara—are you all right?”

Cara squinted up with a look of disgust working its way to the surface of pain. “Well of course I’m all right. You didn’t think I would be foolish enough to hang on to him, did you?”

Kahlan smiled in thankful relief. “No, of course not. I only thought you might have broken your neck jumping away.”

Cara spat snow and dirt. “Nearly did.”

Warren helped them both to their feet. Grimacing, he rubbed his shoulders and then his elbows. From what Kahlan had often been told, being too close to a Confessor unleashing her power was a painful experience, sending a shock of agony through every joint. Fortunately, it did no real damage and the suffering faded quickly.

As Warren glanced over at the dead boy, she knew that there was other pain that would not leave so quickly.

“Dear Creator,” Warren whispered to himself. He looked back at Kahlan and Cara. “He was just a boy. Was it really necessary—”

“Yes,” Kahlan said in a forceful voice. “I’m positive. Cara and I have encountered this situation before—with Marlin.”

“But Marlin was grown. Lyle was so small…so young. What real harm—”

“Warren, don’t start down the path of what-might-have-been. Jagang controlled his mind, just as he controlled Marlin’s mind. We know about this. He was a deadly threat.”

“If I couldn’t hold him,” Cara said, “nothing could.”

Warren sighed in misery. He sank to his knees at the boy’s side. Warren whispered a prayer as his fingers stroked the boy’s temple.

“I guess the blame rightly lies at Jagang’s feet.” Warren stood and brushed the snow from his knees. “Ultimately, Jagang is the one who brought this about.”

Kahlan could see the distant figures of their men, rushing up the hillside to rescue her. She started down toward them.

“If it pleases you to think so.”

Cara stayed right with her. Warren struggled through the snow to catch up. He snatched Kahlan’s arm and pulled her to a stop.

“You mean Ann, don’t you?”

Kahlan schooled her anger as she studied Warren’s blue eyes.

“Warren, you were a victim of that woman, too. You were taken to the Palace of the Prophets when you were young, weren’t you?”

“I guess so, but—”

“But nothing. They came and took you. They came and took that poor dead child back there.” Kahlan’s fingernails dug into her palms. “They came and took Richard.”

Warren pressed his hand gently to the side of Kahlan’s arm. “I know how it seems. Prophecy is often—”

“There!” Kahlan angrily pointed back at the corpse. “There is prophecy! Death and misery—all in the sacred name of prophecy!”

Warren didn’t try to answer her rage.

Kahlan forced control into her voice, if not the emotion behind it. “How many are going to die needlessly in a perverted devotion to seeing prophecy carried out? Had Ann not sent Verna here for Richard, none of this would be happening.”

“How do you know that? Kahlan, I can understand how you feel, but how can you be sure?”

“The barrier stood for three thousand years. It could only be brought down by a wizard born with both sides of the gift. There has been none until Richard. Ann sent Verna to get him. Had she not, the barrier would still be there. Jagang and the Order would be on the other side. The Midlands would be safe. That boy would be playing ball somewhere.”

“Kahlan, it’s not so simple as you make it seem.” Warren opened his hands in an expression of frustration. “I don’t want to argue this with you, but I want you to understand that prophecy gets fulfilled in many ways. It often seeks its own solution. It could be that had Ann not sent for Richard, he would have, for some other reason, ventured down there and brought down the barrier. Who is to know the reason? Don’t you see? It could be that it was bound to happen, and Ann was simply the means. If not her, then another.”

Kahlan pulled angry breaths through gritted teeth. “How much blood, how many corpses, how much grief will it take before you see the harm prophecy has inflicted upon the world?”

Warren smiled sadly. “I am a prophet. I’ve always wanted to be a prophet in order to help people. I wouldn’t put my faith in it if I truly thought it was the cause of harm.” He smiled more brightly with a memory. “Don’t forget, without prophecy, you would never have come to meet Richard. Aren’t you better off having had him come into your life? I know I am.”

Kahlan’s look of cold fury took the warm smile from his face.

“I would rather have been condemned to a lonely life without love, than to know that harm has come to him because he came into my life. I would rather never have met him, than to have come to know his value, and know that that value is being dashed on the rocks of this mad faith in prophecy.”

Warren stuck his hands in the opposite sleeves of his purple robes as his gaze sank to the ground. “I understand how you can feel that way. Please, Kahlan, talk to Verna.”

“Why? She’s the one who carried out Ann’s orders.”

“Just talk to her. I almost lost Verna because she felt the same way as you do now.”

“Verna?”

Warren nodded. “She came to believe she had been used maliciously by Ann. For twenty years she was on a fruitless search for Richard, when all the while Ann knew right where he was. Can you imagine how Verna felt when she discovered that? There were other things, too. Ann tricked us into believing she was dead. She maneuvered Verna into being Prelate.” Warren pulled a hand from his sleeve and held his first finger and thumb an inch apart. “She was once this close to throwing her journey book into a fire.”

“She should have.”

Warren’s sad smile returned. “I’m just saying it might make you feel better to talk to her. She will understand how you feel.”

“What good is that going to do?”

Warren shrugged. “Even if you’re right, so what? What’s done is done. We can’t undo it. Nicci has Richard. The Imperial Order is here in the New World. Whatever caused the events, they are upon us and we must now deal with that reality.”

Kahlan appraised his sparkling blue eyes. “You learned this studying prophecy?”

His smile widened into a grin. “No. That was what Richard taught me. And, a pretty smart woman I know just told me not to start down the path of what-might-have-been.”

As much as she was of a mind to hold on to it, Kahlan felt her anger slipping away. “I’m not so sure how smart she is.”

Warren waved down at the troops charging up the hill with their swords drawn, signaling the all-clear. The men slowed to a fast walk, but didn’t sheathe their weapons.

“Well,” Warren said, “she was smart enough to figure out Jagang’s plan, and in the middle of being attacked by his gifted minion to keep her wits about her and to trick him into thinking she had fallen for his scheme.”

Kahlan drew her face into a peevish scowl. “How old are you, Warren?”

He looked surprised by the question. “I turned one hundred fifty-eight not long ago.”

“That explains it,” Cara griped, starting off down the hill. “Stop looking so young and innocent all the time, Warren. It’s just plain irritating.”

By the time Kahlan, Cara, Warren, and their escort of guard troops arrived back in camp several hours later, it was a scene of furious activity. Wagons were being loaded, horses hitched, and weapons readied. Tents were not yet being taken down, but soldiers in their leather and chain-mail armor, and still eating the remnants of their dinners, were gathered around officers, listening to instructions for when the order was given to send a force out to intercept the enemy moving north. Other officers in tents Kahlan passed were bent over maps.

The aroma of stew drifting through the afternoon air reminded her how hungry she was. Winter darkness came early, and the overcast made it feel like it was already evening. The endless cloudy days were getting to be depressing. There was little chance to see much of the sun; soon, heavier snow would make it down this far south.

Kahlan dismounted and let a young soldier take her horse. She no longer rode a big warhorse. She, and most of the cavalry, had switched to smaller, more agile mounts. For a clash between large units, big warhorses added weight to a charge, but since the D’Haran Empire forces were so outnumbered, they had decided it would be best to trade weight for speed and maneuverability.

By changing tactics in such a way, not just with the cavalry but with their entire army, Kahlan and General Meiffert had been able to keep the Order off balance for weeks. They let the enemy put a huge effort into a crushing attack, and then dodged it just enough to save themselves while letting the Order, being tantalizingly close, wear themselves out. When the Order tired from the effort of such massive attacks and paused to rest, General Meiffert sent in glancing attacks to step on their toes and make them dance. Once the Order dug in for the expected attack, Kahlan withdrew their forces to a more distant spot, rendering useless the Order’s effort at building defenses.

If the Order tried the same thing again, the D’Harans continued to harry them day and night, buzzing around them like angry hornets, but staying out of reach of a heavy swat. If the Imperial Order tired of not being able to sink their teeth into their enemy, and turned their forces to go after population centers, then Kahlan had her men jump on their tails and put arrows in their backs as they struggled to get free. Eventually, they would have to forget their thoughts of plunder and turn back toward the threat.

The Imperial Order was maddened by the D’Harans’ constant badgering tactics. Jagang’s men were insulted by that kind of fighting; they believed real men met face-to-face in the field of battle, and exchanged blow for blow. Of course, it didn’t trouble their dignity that they greatly outnumbered the D’Harans. Kahlan knew such a meeting would be bloody and only to the Order’s advantage. She didn’t care what they thought, only that they died.

The more angry and frustrating the Imperial Order became, the more recklessly they behaved, launching impetuous attacks into well-ordered defenses, or heedlessly pressing men into doomed attacks trying to take ground they couldn’t possibly take in such a fashion. It sometimes stunned Kahlan to watch so many of the enemy march into range below their archers, fall dead, only to have yet more men march right in behind them, continuously adding corpses to a battlefield already choked with the dead and dying. It was insanity.

The D’Harans had suffered several thousand dead or seriously wounded. On the other hand, Kahlan and General Meiffert estimated that they had killed or wounded in excess of fifty thousand of the enemy. It was the equivalent of stepping on one ant as the colony poured out of its anthill. She could think of nothing else to do but to keep at it. They had no choice.

Kahlan, with Cara at her side, crossed a river of men to get to the command tents sporting blue cloth strips. Unless you knew the day’s color code, finding the command tents would be nearly impossible. Because of the fear of an infiltrator or an enemy gifted finding and being able to kill a group of senior officers gathered together, they met in nondescript tents. Colored cloth strips marked many of the tents—the men used them as as system of finding their units when they had to move on short notice and so often—so Kahlan got the idea of using the same system to identify the command tents. They changed the color code often so no one color would become known as the officers’ colors.

Inside the cramped tent, General Meiffert looked up from where he bent over a table with a map unfurled at a cockeyed angle. Lieutenant Leiden, of Kelton, was there along with Captain Abernathy, the commander of the Galean forces Kahlan had brought down with her weeks before.

Adie was sitting quietly in the corner, as the representative of the gifted, watching the goings-on with her completely white eyes. Blinded as a young woman, Adie had learned to see using her gift. She was a remarkably talented sorceress. Adie was quite proficient at using that talent to do the enemy harm. Now she was there to help coordinate the Sister’s abilities with the needs of the army.

When Kahlan inquired, Adie told her, “Zedd be down at the southern lines, checking on details.”