Faith of the Fallen (Sword of Truth 6)

She at least could work to correct the harm she had caused.

Kahlan could hardly believe the size of the crowd. By the light of the moon brightening the thin layer of hazy clouds, and by torches here and there throughout the valley, it looked like the open area as far as she could see was packed with people. The numbers had to be in the hundreds of thousands.

Thunderstruck, Kamil threw up his arms. “It’s the middle of the night. I’ve never seen so many people out here. What are they all doing here?”

“How would we know?” Cara sniped. She was in a foul mood, unhappy that they hadn’t found Richard, yet.

The city had been crowded with people, too. With the city guards prowling the streets, uneasy about all the late-night activity, it had been necessary to restrain their eagerness in favor of caution. It had taken them hours to get out to the site by way of back streets, dark roads, and Kamil’s guided tour of alleyways.

The lad pointed. “It’s up there.”

They followed him up a road lined with workshops, most closed up and dark. A few had men inside, still working at benches by the light of lamps or candles.

Kahlan reached under her cloak and curled her fingers around the hilt of her sword when she saw a man running in their direction. He saw them and skidded to a halt.

“Have you seen it?”

“Seen what?” Kahlan asked.

He pointed excitedly. “Down at the palace. In the plaza.” He started running again. He called behind as he went. “I have to go get my wife and sons. They have to see it.”

Kahlan and Cara shared a look in the near darkness.

Kamil ran over to a shop and tugged on a door, but it was shut up tight. “Victor isn’t here.” His voice couldn’t conceal his disappointment. “It’s too late.”

“Do you know what’s down in the plaza?” Kahlan asked him.

He thought a moment. “The plaza? I know the place, but…wait, that’s where Richard told me to go. The plaza. He said to go to the plaza tomorrow.”

“Let’s go down there now and have a look,” Kahlan said.

Kamil waved a hand, pointing. “This is the shortest way, down the hill behind the blacksmith shop.”

So jammed was the place with people, that it took them over an hour just to make it down the hill and across the expanse of grounds around the palace. Even though it was the middle of the night, more people kept arriving all the time.

Once they reached the palace, Kahlan discovered that they couldn’t get to the plaza. There was a huge mob of people stretching back forever along the front wall, waiting to go up to the plaza. When Kahlan, Cara, and Kamil tried to go around and get up there to see what was going on, it nearly started a riot. People had been waiting a long time to reach the plaza, and they didn’t like having others try to push ahead. Kahlan saw several men try to get ahead by going around the waiting crowd. They were set upon by the mob.

Cara pulled her hand out from under her cloak and casually showed Kahlan her Agiel.

Kahlan shook her head. “Long odds with Jagang’s army are one thing, but the three of us against a few hundred thousand does not sound good to me.”

“Really?” Cara asked. “I thought it roughly even.”

Kahlan only smiled. Even Cara knew better than to go against a mob. Kamil frowned in puzzlement at Cara’s humor. When they found the back of the line, they melted in.

It wasn’t long before the line behind them grew so large that they could no longer see the back end winding out into the grounds. The people all around seemed filled with a strange kind of nervous expectancy.

A round woman in front, bundled up in little more than rags, turned a plump grin on them. She held out what looked like a loaf of bread.

“Would you like some?” she asked.

“Thank you, no,” Kahlan said. “But that’s very kind of you to offer.”

“I’ve never made such an offer, before.” The woman giggled. “Seems the right thing to do, now, doesn’t it?”

Kahlan had no idea what the woman was talking about, but said, “Yes, it does.”

Throughout the night, the line inched along. Kahlan’s back ached painfully. She even saw Cara grimace as she stretched.

“I still think we just ought to draw weapons and get up there,” Cara finally complained.

Kahlan leaned in close. “What difference does it make? Where have we to go before morning? When morning comes, we can go up to the blacksmith’s place or to the carving areas over there and hopefully find Richard, but we can do nothing tonight.”

“Maybe he will be at his room, now.”

“You want to run into Nicci again? You know what she’s capable of. The next time we may not be so lucky to escape. We haven’t come all this way to battle her—I just want to see Richard. Even if Richard goes back there—and we don’t know that he will—we do know he’s got to return here in the morning.”

“I suppose,” Cara grouched.

The sky was taking on a faint reddish glow by the time they made it to the foot of the marble steps. They could hear moaning and wailing up ahead. Kahlan couldn’t see the cause, but people up on the plaza were weeping freely. Oddly enough, some people could be heard to laugh joyfully. A few others cursed, as if they had been robbed of their life savings at the point of a knife.

As they slowly made their way up the steps, Kahlan and Cara tried to stay low behind the people surrounding them so as not to draw attention to themselves. The plaza above was lit by dozens of torches, their flickering light giving an indication of the vastness of the crowds. The smell of the burning pitch mixed sourly with the stale sweat of the packed multitude.

Through a momentary gap between people in front of her, Kahlan snatched a quick glance ahead. She blinked at what she saw, but it was gone almost as fast as she saw it, screened by the throng. The people ahead wept—some, it sounded, with joy.

Kahlan began to make out the polite voices of men asking the crowd to keep moving, imploring them to give others a chance. The ragtag collection of people steadily advanced up onto the white marble of the plaza, like beggars at a coronation. The torchlight was finally being replaced by radiant daylight as the sun cleared the horizon. Golden rays washed the face of the palace.

The scenes carved in the stone up on the walls were disturbing. If they were any different from the others she had seen in the Old World, it was only in that they were more gruesome, more horrifying, more desolately hopeless, and more plentiful.

Kahlan’s mind played over the lines of her statue of Spirit. The idea of Richard having to carve such things as she saw up on the walls sickened her.

She felt a sense of gloom overcoming her. This was the Order: pain, suffering, death. This was what was in store for the New World at the hands of these monsters. She couldn’t take her eyes from the scenes on the walls, from the fate that awaited the people of her homeland—the fate so many blindly embraced.

Then, all of a sudden, as the people shuffle

d around and past, Kahlan beheld the white marble figures rising up before her. The sight took her breath in a gasp. The rays of dawn lit them as if the sun itself had risen just to caress the lustrous forms in all their glory.

Cara gripped Kahlan’s arm, her fingers digging in painfully as she, too, was taken by the sight. The statue of the man and woman seized Kahlan’s imagination with their nobility of spirit.

She felt tears run down her cheeks, and then she was weeping openly, like the people around her, at the majesty, the dignity, the beauty, of what stood before her. It was everything the carvings on the walls all around were not. It offered freely everything they denied.

LIFE, it said at the base.

Kahlan had to gasp through her tears to draw breath. She clutched at Cara’s arm, and Cara clutched at hers, the two of them holding on to each other for support as the crowd swept them along in a current of shared emotion. The man in the statue was not Richard, but there was much of Richard in it. The woman was not Kahlan, but there was enough of her form in it that Kahlan felt her face flushing at others seeing it.

“Please look and move along so that others may view it too,” the men at the sides kept calling. They weren’t wearing uniforms; they were as tattered-looking as everyone else. They appeared to be ordinary citizens who had just stepped in to help.

The woman who had offered the bread fell to her knees in wailing. Arms respectfully lifted her and helped her to move on. The woman, living in the Old World, had probably never seen a thing of such beauty.

As Kahlan shuffled around the statue, unable to take her eyes from it, she reached out to touch it, as did everyone else. As she was carried past, her fingers met the smooth flesh in stone, knowing it was also where Richard’s fingers had been. She wept all the harder.

As she moved past, Kahlan saw then that the curve of the sundial had words on the back:

“Your life is yours alone. Rise up and live it.”

The words were visible on the lips of many who saw them.

The crowd kept coming up the steps, forcing the people around the statue to move on. Men at the rear guided people between the columns, out through the rear of the partially built palace, and out of the way so that others could come up to view the statue.