Faith of the Fallen (Sword of Truth 6)

Richard sighed. “Priska has a tongue as smooth as his castings.”

“Would you have some lardo with me?” Victor asked as he stood.

The sun was already well up. Richard stretched his neck and peered down at the site.

“I’d best not. I need to get to work.” Richard squatted down and lifted one end of the pedestal. “First, though, let me show you where this goes.”

Victor grabbed the other end and together they lugged the bronze casting around the shop. When Richard opened the double doors, Victor saw the statue for the first time, even if it was covered in a tarp that revealed only the round bulges that were the two heads. Even so, Victor’s eyes feasted. It was apparent in those eyes how his vivid imagination was filling in some of it with his fondest hopes.

“Your statue is going well?” Victor nudged Richard with an elbow. “Beauty?”

Richard was overcome with a blissful smile. “Ah, Victor, you will see for yourself soon enough. The dedication is only a couple weeks off. I will be ready. It will be something to bring a song to our hearts…before they kill me, anyway.”

Victor dismissed such talk with a flourish of his hand. “I am hoping that when they see such beauty again, and at their palace, they will approve.”

Richard held out no such illusion. He remembered then, and reached into a pocket to pull out a piece of paper. He handed it to the blacksmith.

“I didn’t want Priska to cast words on the back of the dial because I didn’t want the wrong people to see them. I would ask you to engrave these words on the back surface—about the same height as the symbols on the front.”

Victor took the paper and unfolded it. His grin melted away. He looked up at Richard with an open look of surprise.

“This is treason.”

Richard shrugged. “They can only kill me once.”

“They can torture you a long time before they kill you. They have very unpleasant ways to kill people, too, Richard. Have you ever seen a man buried in the sky while he was still alive, bleeding from a thousand cuts, his arms bound, so that the vultures could feast on his living flesh?”

“The Order binds my arms, now, Victor. As I work down there, as I see the death around me, I am bleeding from a thousand cuts. The vultures of the Order are already feasting on my flesh.” With grim resolve, Richard held Victor’s gaze. “Will you do it?”

Victor glanced down at the paper again. He took a deep breath and then let it slowly out as he studied the paper in his hand. “Treason though these words be, I like them. I will do it.”

Richard clapped him on the side of the shoulder and gave him a confident smile. “Good man. Now, look here, where the pedestal is to be attached.”

Richard lifted the tarp enough to uncover the base. “I’ve carved you a flat face tilted at the proper angle. I didn’t know where the holes in the casting would be, so I left it for you to drill the holes and fill them with lead for the pins. Once you attach the pedestal, then I can calculate the angle of the hole I’ll need to drill for the gnomon.”

Victor nodded. “The gnomon pole will be ready soon. I will make you a drill bit the proper size for it.”

“Good. And a round rasp to do final fitting in the hole?”

“You will have it,” Victor said as they both stood. He waved his hand toward the covered statue. “You trust me not to peek while you are off carving your ugly work?”

Richard chuckled. “Victor, I know you want more than anything to see the nobility of this statue when it is finally finished. You would not spoil that experience for yourself for anything.”

Victor let out his rolling belly laugh. “I guess you are right. Come after your work, and we will have lardo and talk of beauty in stone and the way the world once was.”

Richard hardly heard Victor. He was staring at what he knew so well. Even though it was covered from his eyes, it was not hidden from his soul.

He was ready to begin the process of polishing. To make flesh in stone.

Her head bent, her scarf protecting her from the chill winter wind, Nicci hurried down the narrow alleyway. A man coming the other way bumped against her shoulder, not because he was rushing, but because he simply didn’t seem to care where he was going. Nicci threw a fiery scowl at his empty eyes. Her fierce look fell away down a bottomless well of indifference.

She clutched her sack of sunflower seeds closer to her stomach as she moved on through the muddy alleyway. She stayed close to the rough wooden walls of the buildings so she wouldn’t be jostled by the people going the other way. People bundled against the current cold snap moved through the alleyway toward the street beyond, looking for rooms, for food, for clothes, for jobs. She could see men beyond the alley sitting on the ground, leaning against buildings on the far side of the street, watching without seeing as wagons rumbled down the roads, taking supplies out to the site of the emperor’s palace.

Nicci wanted to get to the bread shop. She had been told they might have butter today. She wanted to get butter for Richard’s bread. He would be home for dinner—he had promised. She wanted to make him a good meal. He needed to eat. He had lost some weight, though it only added distracting definition to his muscular build. He was like a statue in the flesh—like the statues she used to see, long ago.

She remembered how when she was little her mother’s servants made cakes out of sunflower meal. She had been able to buy enough to make him some sunflower cakes, and maybe she would have butter to put on them.

Nicci was growing increasingly anxious. The dedication was to take place in a few days. Richard said his statue would be ready. He seemed too calm about it, as if he had come to some inner peace.

He seemed almost like a man who had accepted his imminent execution.

Whenever Richard spoke to her, despite the conversation, his mind seemed elsewhere, and his eyes held that quality which she so valued. In the wasteland that was life, the misery that was existence, this was the only hope left to her. All around her, people looked forward only to death. Only in her father’s eyes when she was younger, and more so now in Richard’s, did she see any evidence that there was something to make it all worthwhile, some reason for existence.

Nicci was slowed to a halt by the clink-clink-clink of pebbles rattling in a cup. The sound was the unmistakable rattle of her chains. She had been a servant to need her whole life, and as much as she tried, there it was, the cup of some poor beggar, still rattling for her help.

She could not deny it.

Tears filled her eyes. She had so wanted to serve Richard butter with his bread. But she had only one silver penny, and this beggar had nothing. She at least had some bre

ad and some sunflower seeds. How could she want butter for Richard’s bread and cakes, when this man had nothing?

She was evil, she knew, for wanting to keep her silver penny, the penny Richard had earned with his own sweat and effort. She was evil for wanting to buy butter for Richard with it. Who was Richard, to have butter? He was strong. He was able. Why should he have more, while others had none?

Nicci could almost see her mother slowly shaking her head in bitter disappointment that the penny was still in Nicci’s fist, and not helping the man in need.

How was it that she could never seem to live up to her mother’s example of morality? How was it she could never overcome her evil nature?

Nicci turned slowly and dropped her silver penny in the beggar’s cup.

People gave the beggar a wide berth. Without seeing him, they avoided coming near him. They were deaf to the rattle of his cup. How could people not yet have learned the Order’s teachings? How could they not help those in need? It was always left to her.

She looked at him, then, and recoiled at the sight of the hideous man swathed in filthy rags. She pulled back more when she saw lice hopping through his thatch of greasy hair. He peered out at her through a slit in the rags draped around his face.

But it was what she saw through that slit that caught her breath in her throat. The scars were gruesome, to be sure, as if he had been melted by the Keeper’s own fires, yet it was the eyes that gripped her as the man slowly rose to his feet.

The man’s grimy fingers, like a claw, curled around her arm. “Nicci,” he hissed in startled triumph, drawing her close.

Caught in the grip of his powerful fingers, and his burning glare, she was unable to move. She was so close she could see his lice hopping at her.

“Kadar Kardeef.”

“So, you recognize me? Even like this?”