Faith of the Fallen (Sword of Truth 6)

“As we marched into the city, the wagon with Ann’s cage never showed up,” Sister Georgia went on. “One of the drivers finally came around with a bloody head and reported that the last thing he saw before the world went dark was Sister Alessandra. Now the two of them are gone.”

Nicci felt her fingernails digging into her palms. She made herself relax her fists. “So, Ann offered you all freedom, and you chose instead to continue to be slaves.”

The three women lifted their noses. “We did what is best for everyone,” Sister Georgia said. “We are Sisters of the Light. Our duty is not to ourselves, but to relieve the suffering of others—not cause it.”

“Besides,” Sister Aubrey added, “we don’t see you leaving. Seems you’ve been free of His Excellency from time to time, and you don’t go.”

Nicci frowned. “How do you know that?”

“Well, I, I mean…” Sister Aubrey stammered.

Nicci seized the woman by the throat. “I asked you a question. Answer it.”

Sister Aubrey’s face reddened as Nicci added the force of her gift to the grip. The tendons in her wrist stood out with the strain. The woman’s eyes showed white all around as Nicci’s power began squeezing the life from her. Unlike Nicci, Jagang possessed their minds, and they were prohibited from using their power except at his direction.

Sister Georgia gently placed a hand on Nicci’s forearm. “His Excellency questioned us about it, that’s all, Sister. Let her go. Please?”

Nicci released the woman but turned her glare on Sister Georgia. “Questioned you? What do you mean? What did he say?”

“He simply wanted to know if we knew why he was from time to time blocked from your mind.”

“He hurt us,” Sister Rochelle said. “He hurt us with his questions, because we had no answer. We don’t understand it.”

For the first time, Nicci did.

Sister Aubrey comforted her throat. “What is it with you, Sister Nicci? Why is it His Excellency is so curious about you? Why is it you can resist him?”

Nicci turned and walked away. “Thank you for the help, Sisters.”

“If you can be free of him, why do you not leave?” Sister Georgia called out.

Nicci turned back from the doorway. “I enjoy seeing Jagang torment you Witches of the Light. I stay around so that I might watch.”

They were unmoved by her insolence—they were accustomed to it.

“Sister Nicci,” Rochelle said, smoothing back her frizz of hair. “What did you do that made His Excellency so angry?”

“What? Oh, that. Nothing of importance. I just had the men tie Commander Kardeef to a pole and roast him over a fire.”

The three of them gasped as they straightened as one. They reminded Nicci of three owls on a branch.

Sister Georgia fixed Nicci with a grim glare, a rare blaze of authority born of seniority.

“You deserve everything Jagang does to you, Sister—and what the Keeper will do to you, too.”

Nicci smiled and said, “Yes, I do,” before ducking through the tent opening.

Chapter 10

The city of Fairfield had returned to a semblance of order. It was the order of a military post. Little of what could be said to make a city was left. Many of the buildings remained, but there were few of the people who had once lived and worked in them. Some of the buildings had been reduced to charred beams and blackened rubble, others were hulks with windows and doors broken out, yet most were much the same as they had been before, except, of course, that all had been emptied in the wanton looting. The buildings stood like husks, only a reminder of past life.

Here and there, a few toothless old people sat, legs splayed, leaning against a wall, watching with empty eyes the masses of armed men moving up and down their streets. Orphaned children wandered in a daze, or peered out from dark passageways. Nicci found it remarkable how quickly civilization could be stripped from a place.

As she walked through the streets, Nicci thought she understood how many of the buildings would feel if they could feel: empty, devoid of life, lacking purpose while they waited for someone to serve; their only true value being in service to the living.

The streets, populated as they were by grim-faced soldiers, gaunt beggars, the skeletal old and sick, wailing children, all amongst the rubble and filth, looked much like some of the streets Nicci remembered from when she was little. Her mother often sent her out to streets like this to minister to the destitute.

“It’s the fault of men like your father,” her mother had said. “He’s just like my father was. He has no feelings, no concern for anyone but himself. He’s heartless.”

Nicci had stood, wearing a freshly washed, frilly blue dress, her hair brushed and pinned back, her hands hanging at her sides, listening as her mother lectured on good and evil, on the ways of sin and redemption. Nicci hadn’t understood a lot of it, but in later years it would be repeated until she would come to know every word, every concept, every desolate truth by heart.

Nicci’s father was wealthy. Worse, to Mother’s way of thinking, he wasn’t remorseful about it. Mother explained that self-interest and greed were like the two eyes of a monstrous evil, always looking for yet more power and gold to feed its insatiable hunger.

“You must learn, Nicci, that a person’s moral course in this life is to help others, not yourself,” Mother said. “Money can’t buy the Creator’s blessing.”

“But how can we show the Creator we’re good?” Nicci asked.

“Mankind is a wretched lot, unworthy, morbid, and foul. We must fight our depraved nature. Helping others is the only way to prove your soul’s value. It’s the only true good a person can do.”

Nicci’s father had been born a noble, but all his adult life he had worked as an armorer. Mother believed that he had been born with comfortable wealth, and instead of being satisfied with that, he sought to build his legacy into a shameless fortune. She said wealth could only be had by fleecing it from the poor in one fashion or another. Others of the nobility, like Mother and many of her friends, were content not to squeeze an undeserved share from the sweat of the poor.

Nicci felt great guilt for Father’s wicked ways, for his ill-gotten wealth. Mother said she was doing her best to try to save his straying soul. Nicci never worried for her mother’s soul, because people were always saying how caring, how kindhearted, how charitable Mother was, but Nicci would sometimes lie awake at night, unable to sleep with worry for Father, worry that the Creator might exact punishment before Father could be redeemed.

While Mother went to meetings with her important friends, the nanny, on the way to the market, often took Nicci to Father’s business to ask his wishes for dinner. Nicci relished watching and learning things at Father’s work. It was a fascinating place. When she was very young, she thought she might grow up to be an armorer, too. At home, she would sit on the floor and play at hammering on an item of clothing meant to be armor laid on an upturned shoe used as an anvil. That innocent time was her fondest memory of her childhood.

Nicci’s father had a great many people working for him. Wagons brought foursquare bars and other supplies from distant places. Heavy cast-metal sows came in on barges. Other wagons, with guards, took goods to far-off customers. There were men who forged metal, men who hammered it into shape, and yet other men who shaped glowing metal into weapons. Some of the blades were made from costly “poison steel,” said to inflict mortal wounds, even in a small cut. There were other men who sharpened blades, men who polished armor, and men who did beautiful engraving and artwork on shields, armor, and blades. There were even women who worked for Nicci’s father, helping to make chain mail. Nicci watched them, sitting on benches at long wooden tables, gossiping a bit among themselves, tittering at stories, as they worked with their pincers burring over tiny rivets in the flattened ends of all those thousands of little steel rings that together went into the making of a suit of chain-mail armor. Nicci thought it remarkable that man’s inventiveness c

ould turn something as hard as metal into a suit of clothes.

Men from all around, and from distant places, too, came to buy her father’s armor. Father said it was the finest armor made. His eyes, the color of the blue sky on a perfect summer day, sparkled wonderfully when he spoke of his armor. Some was so beautiful that kings traveled from great distances to have armor ordered and fitted. Some was so elaborate that it took skilled men hunched at benches many months to make.

Blacksmiths, bellowsmen, hammermen, millmen, platers, armorers, polishers, leatherworkers, riveters, patternmakers, silversmiths, guilders, engraving artists, even seamstresses for the making of the quilted and padded linen, and, of course, apprentices, came from great distances, hoping to work for her father. Many of those with skills lugged along samples of their best work to show him. Father turned away far more than he hired.

Nicci’s father was an impressive figure, upright, angular, and intense. At his work, his blue eyes always seemed to Nicci to see more than any other person saw, as if the metal spoke to him when his fingers glided over it. He seemed to move his limbs precisely as much as was needed, and no more. To Nicci, he was a vision of power, strength, and purpose.