Faith of the Fallen (Sword of Truth 6)

“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?”

Warre

n 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.”

Kahlan nodded her thanks. “Warren went down there to help, too.”

Kahlan scrunched up her freezing toes in her boots, trying to bring feeling back to them. She blew warm air into her cupped hands and then turned her attention to the waiting general.

“We need to get together a good-sized force—maybe twenty thousand men.”

General Meiffert sighed his frustration. “So they are moving an army up past us.”

“No,” she said. “It’s a trick.”

The three officers frowned their puzzlement as they waited for an explanation.

“I ran into Jagang—”

“You what!” General Meiffert shouted in unbridled panic.

Kahlan waved a hand, allaying his fears. “Not like you’re thinking. It was through the body of one of his slaves.” She stuck her hands under her arms to warm them. “The important thing is that I played along with Jagang’s scheme so that he would think we were falling for his plan.”

Kahlan explained how Jagang’s ruse of troop movements was meant to work and how its t

rue design was to draw away a good-sized force so as to leave those remaining behind weaker. The men listened as she laid it all out while pointing to the locations on the map.

“If we were to send that many men out,” Lieutenant Leiden asked, “wouldn’t that be just what Emperor Jagang wanted?”

“It would be,” she told him, “but that’s not what we’re going to do. I want those men to ride out of camp, to make it look as if we were doing what he expected.”

She leaned over the map, using a piece of charcoal to sketch in some of the nearby mountains she had just traveled through, and showed them a lowland pass around several.

Captain Abernathy spoke up. “We have my Galean troops—they’re close to the number you need to serve as the decoy.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” General Meiffert said.

“Done,” Kahlan said. She pointed at the map again. “Circle around these mountains, here, Captain, so that when the Order attacks our camp, thinking to roll over us, your men can stick them in their soft side, right here, where they won’t expect it.”

Captain Abernathy, a trim man with a graying bushy mustache that matched his eyebrows, nodded as he watched Kahlan pointing out the route on the map. “Don’t worry, Mother Confessor, the Order will believe we’re gone, but we’ll be standing ready to drive right into their ribs when they come for you.”

Kahlan turned her attention back to the general. “We’ll also need to secretly trickle another force out of camp to wait at the opposite side of the valley from Captain Abernathy, so that when the Order comes up the valley in the middle, we can drive into their ribs from both sides at once. They won’t want to let us cut off and trap part of their force, so they’ll turn tail. Then our main force can drive steel into their vulnerable backs.”

The three officers considered her plan in silence, while outside the confusion of noise went on. Horses galloped past, wagons creaked and bounced along, snow underfoot crunched as soldiers shuffled past, and men called out orders.

Lieutenant Leiden’s eyes turned up toward Kahlan. “Mother Confessor, my Keltans could be that other force. They’ve all served together a long time, and work well in our own units under my command. We could begin slipping out of camp at once and gather down there to wait for the attack. You could send a Sister with us to verify a prearranged signal, and then I could take my men in when Captain Abernathy attacks from the opposite side.”