Faith of the Fallen (Sword of Truth 6)

He wheezed an annoyed sigh. “What is it you want?”

Nicci leaned closer, close enough to smell the man’s stale sweat. “The name of the person who reported my husband. The one who rightly brought Richard Cypher to justice.”

Nicci knew that he was thinking that men were more likely to be welcomed into the fellowship when they helped collect great sums for those in need. The matter of the name would only be a gnat bothering his pleasant thoughts. He pulled some papers close and scanned through them, flipping them aside as he searched.

“Here it is,” Protector Muksin said at last. “Richard Cypher’s name was reported by a young soldier volunteering in the Imperial Order army. His name is Gadi. The report is months old. It took some time to see justice done, but the Order always sees justice done in the end. That is why they call our great emperor ‘Jagang the Just.’”

Nicci straightened. “Thank you, Protector Muksin.”

Her calm face concealed her inner fury that the little thug was out of her reach. Gadi deserved to suffer.

The Protector wrote out his sentence for a civil crime as he spoke. “Take the order of fine I gave you to the workers’ group at the docks and return here when you have seals to prove that his fine of twenty-two gold marks was paid in full.

“Richard Cypher is further ordered to report to the carver’s committee for work assignment.” He handed her the paper with the orders. “Richard Cypher is now a stone carver for the Order.”

The sun was setting by the time they returned with all the papers and seals. The blacksmith was impressed with the way she had handled the official when the offer of gold failed to work. Ishaq thanked her a hundred times. It only mattered to her that Richard would be freed.

She was relieved to know that she had been wrong, that Richard wasn’t a cheat and a thief after all. It had been such an ugly feeling, thinking ill of Richard. It had for a time tainted her whole world. She had never been so happy to be wrong.

Better yet, they had done it; she was to have him back.

At the side door to the stronghold, Mr. Cascella, Ishaq, and Nicci waited. The shadows grew darker. Finally, the door opened. Two guards held Richard between them as they came out onto the landing. When they saw Richard, his condition, Mr. Cascella cursed under his breath. Ishaq whispered a prayer.

The guards released Richard with a shove. He stumbled forward. The blacksmith and Ishaq raced to the steps to help him.

Richard caught himself and straightened, a dark form upright in the last of the light, defiant of the long shadows around him. He held a hand out, commanding the two men to stay where they were. Both stopped with a foot on the bottom step, ready to run up to him should he need them. Nicci couldn’t imagine what pain it had to cost Richard to walk so steadily, proudly, smoothly down the stairs without help, as if he were a free man.

He did not yet know what she had done to him.

Nicci knew there could be no worse plight for Richard. The torture down in the depths of the stronghold was not as bad as what she had just condemned him to.

Nicci was sure that this was the one thing, at last, that would force out the answer she sought, if there really was an answer to be found.

Chapter 57

Brother Narev paused behind Richard’s shoulder, a shadow come to visit. He often lurked nearby, making sure the carvings were progressing as directed. This was the first time the great man himself had stopped to watch Richard work.

“Don’t I know you?” The voice was like stone grating on stone.

Richard let his arm holding the hammer drop to his side as he looked up. He wiped the dusty sweat from his brow with the back of his left hand, still holding the clawed stone chisel.

“Yes, Brother Narev. I was a laborer hauling iron, at the time. I was bringing a load to the blacksmith one day when I was honored to meet you.”

Brother Narev frowned suspiciously. Richard allowed no crack in his façade of innocent calm.

“A laborer, and now a carver?”

“I have ability which I am joyful to contribute to my fellow man. I am grateful for the opportunity the Order has given me to earn my reward in the next life by sacrificing in this.”

“Joyful.” Neal, the shadow of the shadow, stepped forward. “You are joyful to carve, are you?”

“Yes, Brother Neal.”

Richard was joyful that Kahlan was alive. He didn’t think about the rest of it. He was a prisoner, and what he had to do to keep Kahlan alive, he would do; that was all there was to it. What was, was.

Brother Neal smirked his superiority at Richard’s obeisance. The man had come often to lecture the carvers, and Richard had come to know him all too well. The carvers’ work, being the influential face the palace would show to the people, was critically important to the Fellowship of Order. Richard was frequently the object of Neal’s harangues. Neal, a wizard, not a sorcerer like Brother Narev, always seemed to feel the need to prove his moral authority around Richard. Richard gave him no rough edge to grip, yet Neal still persisted in clawing for one.

Brother Narev believed his own words with grim conviction: mankind was evil; only through selfless sacrifice to your fellow man had you any hope to redeem yourself in the afterlife. There was no joy in his faith, simply a ruthless duty to it.

Neal, on the other hand, bubbled over with his feelings. He believed in the Order’s doctrine with an impassioned, incandescent, arrogant pride, gleefully convinced the world needed iron-fisted direction which only enlightened intellectuals, such as himself, could provide—with grudging deference to Brother Narev, of course.

Richard had more than once overheard Neal proclaim with conviction that if he had to order the tongues cut out of a million innocent men, it would be better than to allow one man to blaspheme against the self-evident, righteous nature of the Order’s ways.

Brother Neal, a fresh-faced young man—no doubt deceptively young, considering that Nicci said he had once lived at the Palace of the Prophets—frequently accompanied Brother Narev, basking in his mentor’s approval. Neal was Brother Narev’s chief lieutenant. His face might have been fresh, but his ideas were not; tyranny was ancient, even if Neal deluded himself in believing it the bright new salvation of mankind when applied by him and his fellows. His ideas were a paramour he embraced with a lover’s boundless, blind passion—a truth discovered with a lover’s lust.

Nothing stirred him to anger quicker than the whiff of argument or contradiction, no matter how reasoned. In the heat of his passion, Neal was perfectly willing to destroy any dissension, torture any opposition, kill any number, who failed to bow before the pedestal upon which stood his irrefutably noble ideals.

No misery, no failure, no amount of wailing and anguish and death, could dim his glowing conviction that the ways of the Order were the only correct course for mankind.

The other disciples, all, like Neal, wearing hooded brown robes, were an incongruous collection of the cruel, the pompously idealistic, the bitterly greedy, the resentful, the spiteful, the timid, and, most of all, the dangerously deluded. All shared an underlying, caustic, inner loathing for mankind which manifested itself in a conviction that anything pleasurable for the people could only be evil and accordingly only sacrifice could be good.

All, with the exception of Neal, were blind followers and completely under the spell of Brother Narev. They believed Brother Narev far closer to the Creator than to man. They hung on his every word, believing each to be divinely inspired. Were he to tell them they must kill themselves for the cause, Richard was sure they would break their necks rushing for the nearest knife.

Neal was alone in that he believed in the divinity of his own words, in addition to Brother Narev’s. Every leader had to have a successor. Richard was pretty sure Neal had already decided who would best serve as the next incarnation of the Order.

“A peculiar choice of words, joyful.” Brother Narev circled a knobby finger toward the cowering, deformed, frightened figures Richard was working o

n. “This makes you…joyful?”

Richard gestured to the Light he had carved so as to shine down on the wretched men. “This, Brother Narev, is what makes me joyful—being able to show men cowering before the perfection of the Creator’s Light. It makes me joyful to show mankind’s wickedness for all to see, for in this way they will know their duty to the Order above all else.”

Brother Narev made a suspicious sound deep in his throat. The sunlight hooded his dark eyes more than usual and seemed to deepen the creases around his mouth as he regarded Richard with a look sharing mistrust and loathing, laced with apprehension. Only the apprehension was any different than the look he gave everyone. Richard fed him a vacant stare. The brother’s mouth finally twisted with the dismissal of his private thoughts.

“I approve… I forgot your name. But then, names are not important. Men are not important. Individually, each man is but a meaningless cog in the great wheel of mankind. How that wheel turns is all that matters, not the cogs.”

“Richard Cypher.”

One brow, flocked in tangled white and black hair, lifted.

“Yes… Richard Cypher. Well, I approve of your carving, Richard Cypher. You seem to understand better than most how man is properly depicted.”

Richard bowed. “It is not my hand, but the Creator guiding it to help the Order show the way.”

The suspicious look was back, but Richard’s expression made Brother Narev finally believe the words. Brother Narev, his hands clasped behind his back, glided away to see to other matters. Neal, like a child sticking close to his mother’s skirts, scurried to stay close to Brother Narev’s robes. He cast a scowl back over his shoulder. Richard almost expected to see Neal stick out his tongue.

As best as Richard could figure, there were about fifty of the brown-robed disciples. He saw them often enough to come to know their nature. Victor had mentioned to Richard that one of the foundries had cast in pure gold, from the master that the blacksmith had made, somewhere near the same numbers of the spell-forms. Victor thought them only decorations. Richard had seen several of the gold spell-forms being installed onto the tops of huge, ornate stone pillars set out around the grounds of the Retreat. The pillars, in polished marble, were designed and placed to look like grand decorations for a grand place. Richard suspected they were more.