You know I don’t want to do that, Nicci.
Without the pain, his voice was little more than a fly annoying her. She paid it no heed. She addressed the crowd.
“Do you people have any concept of the effort being put into the fight for your future? Or is it that you expect to benefit without contributing? Many of our brave men have given their lives fighting the oppressors of the people, fighting for our new beginning. We struggle so that all people will be able to share equally in the coming prosperity. You must help us in our effort on your behalf. Just as helping those in need is the moral obligation of every person, so, too, is this.”
Commander Kardeef, displaying a look of sour displeasure, planted himself in front of her. The sunlight slanting across his lined face cast his hooded eyes in deep shadows. She was not moved by his disfavor. He was never satisfied with anything. Well, she corrected herself, almost never.
“People can only achieve virtue through obedience and sacrifice. Your contribution to the Order is to implement their compliance. We are not here to hold civic lessons!”
Commander Kardeef was confident in his privileged mastery over her. He, too, had given her pain. She endured what Kadar Kardeef did to her with the same detachment with which she endured what Jagang did to her.
Only in the furthest depths of pain could she begin to feel anything. Even pain was preferable to the nothingness she usually felt.
Kadar Kardeef was probably unaware of the punishment Jagang had just completed, or his orders; His Excellency didn’t use Commander Kardeef’s mind. It was an arduous undertaking for Jagang to control those who didn’t possess the gift—he could do it, but it was rarely worth his effort; he had the gifted to control people for him. A dream walker somehow used the gift in those who possessed it in order to help complete the connection to their minds. In a way, the gifted made it possible for Jagang to so easily control them.
Kadar Kardeef glowered down at her as she gazed up at his darkly tanned and creased face. He was an imposing figure, with the studded leather straps that crossed his massive chest, his armored leather shoulder and breast plates, his chain mail, his array of well-used weapons. Nicci had seen him crush men’s throats in one of his big, powerful hands. As silent witness to his bravery in battle, he bore a number of scars. She had seen them all.
Few officers ranked higher or were more trusted than Kadar Kardeef. He had been with the Order since his youth, rising through the ranks to fight alongside Jagang as they expanded the empire of the Imperial Order out of their homeland of Altur’Rang to eventually subjugate the rest of the Old World. Kadar Kardeef was the hero of the Little Gap campaign, the man who almost single-handedly turned the course of the battle, breaking through enemy lines and personally slaying the three great kings who had joined forces to trap and crush the Imperial Order before it could seize the imaginations of the millions of people living in a patchwork of kingdoms, fiefdoms, clans, city-states, and vast regions controlled by alliances of warlords.
The Old World had been a tinderbox, waiting for the spark of revolution. The preachings of the Order were that spark. If the high priests were the Order’s soul, Jagang was its bone and muscle. Few people understood Jagang’s genius—they saw only a dream walker, or a ferocious warrior. He was far more.
It had taken Jagang decades to finally bring the rest of the Old World to heel—to put the Order on its final path to greater glory. During those years of struggle for the Order, while engaged in nearly constant war, Jagang toiled building the road system that allowed him to move men and supplies great distances with lightning speed. The more lands and peoples he annexed, the more laborers he put to the construction of yet more roads by which he could conquer yet more territory. He was thus able to maintain communications and to react to situations faster than anyone would have believed possible. Formerly isolated lands were suddenly connected to the rest of the Old World. Jagang had knitted them together with a net of roads. Along those roads, the people of the Old World had risen up to follow him as he forged the way for the Order.
Kadar Kardeef had been part of it all. More than once he had taken wounds to save Jagang’s life. Jagang had once taken a bolt from a crossbow to save Kardeef. If Jagang could be said to have a friend, Kadar Kardeef was as close as any came to it.
Nicci first met Kardeef when he had come to the Palace of the Prophets in Tanimura to pray. Old King Gregory, who had ruled the land including Tanimura, had disappeared without a trace. Kadar Kardeef was a solemnly devout man; before battle he prayed to the Creator for the blood of the enemy, and after, for the souls of the men he had killed. That day he was said to have prayed for the soul of King Gregory. The Imperial Order was suddenly the new rule in Tanimura. The people celebrated in the streets for days.
Over the course of three thousand years, the Sisters, from their home at the Palace of the Prophets in Tanimura, had seen governments come and go. For the most part, the Sisters, led by their prelate, considered matters of rule a petty foolishness best ignored. They believed in a higher calling. The Sisters believed they would remain at the Palace of the Prophets, undisturbed in their work, long after the Order had vanished into the dust of history. Revolutions had many times come and gone. This one, though, caught them up.
Kadar Kardeef had been nearly twenty years younger, then—a handsome conqueror riding into the city. Many of the Sisters were fascinated by the man. Nicci never was. But he was fascinated by her.
Emperor Jagang, of course, did not send such invaluable men as Commander Kardeef out to pacify conquered lands. He had entrusted Kardeef with a much more important task: guarding his valuable property—Nicci.
Nicci turned her attention away from Kadar Kardeef and back to the people.
She settled her gaze on the man who had spoken before. “We cannot allow anyone to shirk their responsibility to others and to our new beginning.”
“Please, Mistress…We have nothing—”
“Disregard of our cause is treasonous.”
He thought better of disagreeing with that pronouncement.
“You don’t seem to understand that this man behind me wants you to see that the Imperial Order is resolute in their devotion to their cause—if you don’t do your duty. I know you have heard the stories, but this man wants you to experience the grim reality. Imagining it is never quite the same. Never quit
e as gruesome.”
She stared at the man, waiting for his answer. He licked his weather-cracked lips.
“We just need some more time…. Our crops are doing well. When the harvest comes in…we could contribute our fair share toward the struggle for…for…”
“The new beginning.”
“Yes, Mistress,” he said, bobbing his head, “the new beginning.” When his gaze returned to the dirt at his feet, she moved on down the line.
Her purpose was not really to collect, but to cow.
The time had come.
A girl gazing up at her snagged Nicci to a stop, distracting her from what she had intended. The girl’s big, dark eyes sparkled with innocent wonder. Everything was new to her, and she was eager to see it all. In her dark eyes shone that rare, fragile, and most perishable of qualities: a guileless view of life that had yet to be touched by pain or loss or evil.
Nicci cupped the girl’s chin, staring into the depths of those thirsting eyes.
One of Nicci’s earliest memories was of her mother standing over her like this, holding her chin, looking down at her. Nicci’s mother was gifted, too. She said that the gift was a curse, and a test. It was a curse because it gave her abilities others didn’t have, and it was a test to see if she would wrongly exert that superiority. Nicci’s mother almost never used her gift. Servants handled the work; she spent most of her time nested among her clutch of friends, devoting herself to higher pursuits.
“Dear Creator, but Nicci’s father is a monster,” she would complain as she wrung her hands. Some of her friends would murmur their sympathy. “Why must he burden me so! I fear his eternal soul is beyond hope or prayer.” The other women would tsk in grim agreement.
Her mother’s eyes were the same dull brown as a cockroach’s back. To Nicci’s mind, they were set too close together. Her mouth, too, was narrow, as if fixed in place by her perpetual disapproval. While Nicci never really thought of her mother as homely, neither did she consider her beautiful, although her friends regularly reassured her that she most surely was.