The Pillars of Creation (Sword of Truth 7)

She immediately set to tightening the bandage of blood-soaked curtain that Jennsen had started to apply. She snatched up more cloth from the rubble.

“Did you get her?” Jagang asked as the Sister worked at pulling the injury closed with the filthy strip of cloth. “Where is she? Sebastian!” He used a board to lever himself upright, peering this way and that around the company of soldiers as they helped Sebastian make his way through to the emperor. “There you are. Where’s the Mother Confessor? Did you get her?”

“It isn’t her,” Jennsen answered in his place.

“What?” The emperor glanced around angrily at the people watching him. “I saw the bitch. I know the Mother Confessor when I see her! Why didn’t you get her!”

“You saw a wizard and a sorceress,” Jennsen told him. “They were using magic to make you think you were seeing Lord Rahl and the Mother Confessor. It was a trick.”

“I think she’s right,” Sebastian put in before Jagang could scream at her. “I was standing right beside her and while I saw the Mother Confessor, Jennsen didn’t.”

Jagang turned a dark scowl on her. “But if the others saw her, how could you not…”

Understanding seemed to come over him. For some reason that Jennsen couldn’t exactly fathom, he suddenly recognized the truth in her words.

“But why?” the Sister tending the emperor’s injury asked, looking up from her work of bandaging the wound.

“Both the wizard and the sorceress seemed to be in a hurry,” Jennsen said. “They must be up to something.”

“It’s a diversion,” Jagang whispered, staring off down the empty hall littered with rubble. “They wanted to keep us occupied. Keep us away, and busy thinking about something else.”

“Keep us away from what?” Jennsen asked.

“The main force,” Sebastian said, catching Jagang’s line of thought.

Another Sister, casting surreptitious glances to the other Sisters after inspecting Sebastian’s wound, worked quickly at pressing a padded bandage against his ribs and then wrapping a long strip of cloth around his chest to hold it in place.

“This will only help for a short time,” she muttered, half to herself. “This is not good.” She glanced again to the other Sister. “We’re going to need to tend to this. We can’t do it here.”

Sebastian winced in pain, ignoring her, then spoke. “It’s a trick. They keep us here, puzzling over where they could be, kept us chasing after illusions, while they attack our main force.”

Jagang growled a curse. He looked off out the hole the wizard’s fire had blasted in the wall, peering out toward the army they had left a long ride back down the river valley. He clenched his fist and gritted his teeth.

“That bitch! They wanted us busy so our main force would be sitting in place while they attack. That filthy scheming bitch! We have to get back!”

The small force moved quickly through the halls. Jagang was carried with a man under each arm, as was Sebastian, so that they could make quick progress back out of the Confessors’ Palace. Sebastian was looking worse.

Along the way, they gathered up more of their men. Jennsen was astounded that there were still any others alive. Compared with the force they had come in with, though, they had been cut to pieces. Had they all stayed together, rather than the way the emperor and Sebastian continually divided them up, they might have all been killed at once. As it was, the Order would still have to leave behind a great many dead.

Once on the lower level, they worked their way along service halls, toward the side of the palace, Sebastian advising that it would be best not to go out by the main entrance, where they had entered, for fear that such a move might be expected and they very well could be struck down before they could get away. Everyone moved as silently as possible through the empty kitchens, emerging to a gray day in a side courtyard. It was secluded, with a wall screening it off from the city.

The sight as they came around the side of the palace was horrifying. It looked like the entire force had been cut down, that none of the cavalry could possibly still be alive. Jennsen couldn’t stand the sight of so much carnage, yet it was so overwhelming that she could not look away. The dead, horses as well as men, lay tangled in a ragged line down the hillside, fallen in the place where they met the foe head-on at a full charge. In the distance, near the trees, a few scattered horses, their riders no doubt dead, nibbled at the grass.

“There are no enemy dead,” Jagang said, surveying the sight as he limped along with the aid of a pike a soldier had handed him. “What could have done this?”

“Nothing living,” a Sister said.

As they moved quickly down the hill, making their way past the silent battle line, not far in front of the heaps of corpses, others of the cavalry, far down the slope on the other side of a wall in an area among small garden buildings and trees, spotted the emperor and raced out to protect him. Soldiers on horseback—numbering less than a thousand out of the over forty thousand they started with—swept in to surround the company returning from the palace. A number of the Sisters rode in, pulling in close to the emperor to provide an inner circle of defense.

Rusty, trailed by Pete, trotted across the lawns, accompanying the tattered remnants of the cavalry. When Jennsen whistled, Rusty recognized the call and rushed in to be close to her. The mare, nuzzling Jennsen’s shoulder, voiced a plaintive whinny, eager for comfort. Rusty and Pete weren’t cavalry horses, trained to be accustomed to the terrors of war. Jennsen ran a soothing hand over the horse’s trembling neck and rubbed her ears. She gave similar comfort to Pete when he pressed his forehead against the back of her shoulder.

“What happened!” Jagang called out in a rage. “How could you let yourselves be taken like this?”

The officer leading the men on horseback looked around in dismay. “Excellency, it was…out of the clear air. It wasn’t anything we could fight.”

“Are you trying to tell me it was ghosts!” Jagang bellowed.

“I think it was the horses the scout smelled,” another officer said. His arm was bandaged up high but soaked in blood.

“I want to know what’s going on,” Jagang said as he glared around at the faces watching him. “How could this have happened?”

As men brought extra horses, Sister Perdita dismounted close by. “Excellency, it was some kind of attack involving magic—phantom horsemen invoked by wizardry is the only explanation I have.”

His menacing eyes were leveled at her in a way that made even Jennsen quail. “Then why didn’t you and your Sisters stop it?”

“It wasn’t anything like the conjured magic we ordinarily encounter. I believe it had to be a form of constructed magic, or we would have not only

detected it, but been able to stop it. At least, that’s what I assume. I’ve never actually seen any constructed magic, but I’ve heard of it. Whatever this was that attacked us would not respond to anything we tried.”

The emperor was still frowning darkly at her. “Magic is magic. You should have stopped it. That’s what you were here for.”

“Constructed magic is different than conjured, Excellency.”

“Different? How?”

“Rather than using the gift on the spot, constructed magic has already been made up in advance. It can be preserved for a great period of time—thousands of years, maybe even forever. When it’s needed, the spell is triggered and the magic is loosed.”

“Triggered by what?” Sebastian asked.

Sister Perdita shook her head in frustration. “By just about anything, as I’ve heard it told. It just depends on how it was constructed. No wizard now is able to construct such a spell. We know little about those ancient wizards or what they could do, but from what little we do know, a constructed spell could be something kept dry that comes to life when you get it wet—for example something to help fertilize crops when the spring rains come. It could be triggered by heating, like a cure taken for a fever—the cure carries a construction in and the fever triggers it. Others are triggered by a little magic, some by an elaborate application of incredibly intricate wizardry and great power.”

“So,” Jennsen reasoned, “someone with magic must have unleashed something so powerful as these phantom horsemen? A wizard, or a sorceress, or something?”

Sister Perdita shook her head. “It could be that kind of constructed magic, but it could just as easily be a spell—albeit an incredibly powerful one—kept in a thimble, and triggered by exposing the construction to…anything—horse dung, even.”

Emperor Jagang waved off the very notion. “But something that small and easily triggered wouldn’t be this powerful.”

“Excellency,” the Sister said, “in this, you can’t equate the apparent material size of the construction or its trigger with the result—they have no relational value, at least not in the terms in which most people think. The trigger has no bearing on the power of the construction. Even the construction and its trigger are not necessarily relational. There is simply no rule by which to judge a construction.”