Faith of the Fallen (Sword of Truth 6)

“It amused me to hear the great Kadar Kardeef cry for mercy, and then to deny it.”

Jagang roared again, a beastly sound out of place for such a mannerly bedchamber. She saw the blur of his arm swinging for her. The room whirled violently around her. She expected to hit something with a bone-breaking impact. Instead, she upended and crashed onto unexpected softness: the bed, she realized. Somehow, she had missed the marble and mahogany posts at the corners—they surely would have killed her. Fate, it seemed, was trifling with her. Jagang landed atop her.

She thought he might beat her to death now. Instead, he studied her eyes from inches away. He sat up, straddling her hips. His meaty hands pulled at the laces on the bodice of her dress. With a quick yank of the material, he exposed her breasts. His fingers squeezed her bared flesh until her eyes watered.

Nicci didn’t watch him, or resist, but instead went limp as he pushed her dress up around her waist. Her mind began its journey away, to where only she alone could go. He fell on her, driving the wind from her lungs in a helpless grunt.

Arms lying at her sides, her fingers open and slack, eyes unblinking, Nicci stared at the folds of the silk in the canopy of the bed, her mind unaffected in the distant quiet place. The pain seemed remote. Her struggle to breathe seemed trivial.

As he went about his coarse business, she focused her thoughts instead on what she was going to do. She had never believed possible what she now contemplated; now she knew it was. She had only to decide to do it.

Jagang slapped her, causing her to focus her mind back on him. “You’re too stupid to even weep!”

She realized he had finished; he was not happy that she hadn’t noticed. She had to make an effort not to comfort her jaw, stinging from what to him was a smack, but to the person receiving it was a blow nearly strong enough to cripple. Sweat dripped from his chin onto her face. His powerful body glistened from the exertion she had not perceived.

His chest heaved as he glared down at her. Anger, of course, powered the glare, but Nicci thought she saw a tinge of something else there, too: regret, or maybe anguish, or maybe even hurt.

“Is that what you wish me to do, then, Excellency? Weep?”

His voice turned bitter as he flopped onto his side beside her. “No. I wish you to react.”

“But I am,” she said as she stared up at the canopy. “It is simply not the reaction you wish.”

He sat up. “What’s the matter with you, woman?”

She gazed up at him a moment, and then turned her eyes away.

“I have no idea,” she answered honestly. “But I think I must find out.”

Chapter 14

Jagang gestured. “Take off your clothes. You’re spending the night. It’s been too long.” This time, it was he who stared off at the walls. “I’ve missed you in my bed, Nicci.”

She didn’t answer. She did not believe that in his bed he missed anything. She didn’t believe she could conceive of him understanding what it was to miss a person. What he missed, she thought, was being able to miss someone.

Nicci sat up and threw her legs over the side of the bed as she untangled herself from the black dress. She pulled it off over her head and then laid it out across the back of a padded leather chair. She reclaimed her underthings from the tangles of the bed covering and tossed them on the chair before drawing off her stockings and placing them, too, on the seat of the chair. He watched her body the whole time, watched her as she tended to her dress, smoothing it to straighten what he had done to it, watched the mysterious allure of a woman acting a woman.

When she had finished she turned back to him. She stood proudly, to let him see that which he could have only by force, and never as a willing gift. She could detect the sense of privation in his expression. This, was the only victory she could have: the more he took her by force, the more he understood that that was the only way he could ever have her, and the more it maddened him. She would just as soon die as willingly give him the satisfaction of that gift, and he knew the brutal truth of that.

He finally forced himself away from his private, bitter longing and looked up into her eyes. “Why’d you kill Kadar?”

She sat on the edge of the bed opposite him, just out of his easy reach, but within range of his lunge, and shrugged her bare shoulders.

“You are not the Order. The Order is no single man, but an ideal of equity. As such, it will survive any one person. You serve that ideal and the Order, for now, in the capacity of but a brute. The Order could use any brute to serve its purpose. You, Kadar, or another. I simply eliminated someone who might one day have been a threat to you before you can rise above your present role.”

He grinned. “You expect me to believe that you were doing me a kindness? Now you mock me.”

“If it pleases you to think so, then do.”

Her smooth white limbs were a vivid contrast to the heavy, dark, variegated verdant bedcover and sheets. He lay back atop them against several rumpled pillows, immodestly displayed before her. His eyes looked even darker than usual.

“What’s all this talk I keep hearing about ‘Jagang the Just’?”

“Your new title. It is the thing that will save you, the thing that will win for you, the thing that will bring you more glory than anything else. Yet, in return for eliminating a future threat to your standing, and for making you a hero to the people, you draw my blood.”

He put an arm behind his head. “Sometimes you make me believe the stories that people tell, that you really are crazy.”

“And if you kill everyone?”

“Then they will be dead.”

“I have recently been through towns visited by your soldiers. It seems they didn’t harm the people—at least, they didn’t slaughter everyone in sight, as they did when they began their march into the New World.”

He lunged and seized a fistful of her hair. With a snarl, he yanked her onto her back beside him. She caught her breath as he rose up on an elbow and directed his disturbing gaze down into her eyes.

“It is your job to make examples of people, to show them that they must contribute to our cause; to make them fear the Imperial Order’s righteous wrath. That is the task I assigned you.”

“Is that so? Then why did the soldiers not make examples, too? Why did they let those towns be? Why did they not contribute to striking fear into the hearts of the people? Why didn’t they lay waste to every city and town in their path?”

“And then who would I rule but my soldiers? Who would do the work? Who would make things? Who would grow the food? Who would pay tribute? To whom will I bring the hope of the Order? Who will there be to glorify the great Emperor Jagang, if I kill them all?”

He flopped onto his back. “You may be called Death’s Mistress, but we can’t have it your way and kill everyone. In this world you are bound to the Order’s purpose. If people feel the Order’s arrival can mean nothing but their death, they will resist to the end. They must know that it is only their resistance which will bring a swift and sure death. If they realize our arrival offers them a moral life, a life which puts man under the Creator and the welfare of man above all else, they will embrace us.”

“You dealt death to this city,” she taunted, forcing him to unwittingly prove the validity of what she had done. “Even though they chose the Order.”

“I’ve given orders that any people of the city still alive be allowed to go back to their homes. The rampage is ended. The people here betrayed their promises and thus invited brutality; they saw it, but now that is finished and a new day of order has come. The old ideas of separate lands are over, as it was ended in the Old World. All people will be governed together, and will enter a new age of prosperity together—under the Imperial Order. Only those who resist will be crushed—not because they resist, but because, ultimately, they are traitors to the well-being of their fellow man and must be eliminated.

“Here, in Anderith, was the turning point in our struggle. Richard Rahl was at last cast out by

the people themselves, who came to see the virtue of what we offer. No longer can he claim to represent them.”

“Yet you came in and slaughtered—”

“The leaders here betrayed certain promises to me—who knows how much of the general population may have collaborated in that—and so the people had to pay a price, but collectively they have also earned a place in the Order for their courage in emphatically rejecting Lord Rahl and the outdated, selfish, uninspired morals he offered them.

“The tide has turned. People no longer have faith in Lord Rahl, nor can he now have any faith in them. Richard Rahl is a fallen leader.”

Nicci smiled inwardly, a sad smile. She was a fallen woman, and Richard was a fallen man. Their fate was sealed.