Naked Empire (Sword of Truth 8)

“Cured of not having been born gifted,” she said in a flat tone of incredulity.

“Not exactly. They weren’t trying to make them into wizards, but they thought they could at least be cured of not having that infinitesimal spark of the gift that simply enabled them to interact with magic.”

Kahlan took a purging breath. “So then what happened?”

“This book was written after the great war had ended—after the barrier had been created and the Old World had been sealed away. It was written after the New World was at peace, or, at least, after the barrier kept the Old World contained.

“But remember what we found out before? That we think that during the war Wizard Ricker and his team had done something to halt Subtractive Magic’s ability to be passed on to the offspring of wizards? Well, after the war, those born with the gift started becoming increasingly uncommon, and those who were being born were being born without the Subtractive side.”

“So, after the war,” she said, “those who were born with the gift of both Additive and Subtractive were rapidly becoming nonexistent. We already knew that.”

“Right.” Richard leaned toward her and lifted the book. “But then, when there are fewer wizards being born, all of a sudden the wizards additionally realize that they have all these pristinely ungifted—breaks altogether in the link to magic—on their hands. Suddenly, on top of the problem of the birth rate of those with the gift to be wizards dropping, they were faced with what they called pillars of Creation.”

Kahlan swayed in the saddle as she thought about it, trying to imagine the situation at the Keep at the time. “I can see that they would have been pretty concerned.”

His voice lowered meaningfully. “They were desperate.”

Kahlan laid her reins over, moving in behind Richard as his horse stepped around an ancient, fallen tree that had been bleached silver from the sweltering sun.

“So, I suppose,” Kahlan asked as she walked her horse back up beside him, “that the wizards started to do the same thing Zedd did? Trained those who had the calling—those who wished to be wizards but had not been born with the gift?”

“Yes, but back then,” Richard said, “they trained those with only Additive to be able to use the Subtractive, too, like full wizards of the time. As time went on, though, even that was being lost to them, and they were only able to do what Zedd did—train men to be wizards but they could only wield Additive Magic.

“But that isn’t really what the book is about,” Richard said as he gestured dismissively. “That was just a side point to record what they had attempted. They started out with confidence. They thought that these pillars of Creation could be cured of being pristinely ungifted, much like wizards with only Additive could be trained to use both sides of the magic, and those without the gift for wizardry could be made wizards able to use at least the Additive side of it.”

The way he used his hands when he talked reminded her of the way Zedd did when he became worked up. “They tried to modify the very nature of how these people had been born. They tried to take people without any spark of the gift, and alter them in a desperate attempt to give them the ability to interact with magic. They weren’t just adding or enhancing, they were trying to create something out of nothing.”

Kahlan didn’t like the sound of that. They knew that in those ancient times the wizards had great power, and they altered people with the gift, manipulated their gift, to suit a specific purpose.

They created weapons out of people.

In the great war, Jagang’s ancestors were one such weapon: dream walkers. Dream walkers were created to be able to take over the minds of people in the New World and control them. Out of desperation, the bond of the Lord Rahl was created to counter that weapon, to protect a people from the dream walkers.

Any number of human weapons were conjured from the gifted. Such changes were often profound, and they were irrevocable. At times, the creations were monsters of boundless cruelty. From this heritage, Jagang had been born.

During that great war, one of the wizards who had been put on trial for treason refused to reveal what damage he had done. When even torture failed to gain the man’s confession, the wizards conducting the trial turned to the talents of a wizard named Merritt and ordered the creation of a Confessor. Magda Searus, the first Confessor, extracted the man’s confession. The tribunal was so pleased with the results of Wizard Merritt’s conjuring that they commanded that an order of Confessors be created.

Kahlan felt no different than other people felt, she was no less human, no less a woman, loved life no less, but her Confessor’s power was the result of that conjuring. She, too, was a descendant of women altered to be weapons—in this case weapons designed to find the truth.

“What’s the matter?” Richard asked.

She glanced over and saw the look of concern on his face. Kahlan forced a smile and shook her head that it was nothing.

“So what is it that you discovered by jumping ahead in the book?”

Richard took a deep breath as he folded his hands over the pommel of the saddle. “Essentially, they were attempting to use color in order to help people born without eyes…to see.”

From Kahlan’s understanding of magic and of history, this was fundamentally different from even the most malevolent experiments to alter people into weapons. Even in the most vile of these instances, they were attempting to take away some attribute of their humanity and at the same time add to or enhance an elemental ability. In none of it were they trying to create that which was not there at all.

“In other words,” Kahlan summed up, “they failed.”

Richard nodded. “So, here they were, the great war was long over and the Old World—those who had wanted to end magic, much like the Imperial Order—was safely sealed away beyond the barrier that had been created. Now they find out that the birth rate of those carrying the gift of wizardry is plummeting, and that the magic engendered by the House of Rahl, the bond with his people designed to stop the dream walkers from taking them, has an unexpected consequence—it also gives birth to the pristinely ungifted, who are an irreversible break in the lineage of magic.”

“They have two problems, then,” Kahlan said. “They have fewer wizards being born to deal with problems of magic, and they have people being born with no link at all to the magic.”

“That’s right. And the second problem was growing faster than the first. In the beginning, they thought they would find a solution, a cure. They didn’t. Worse, as I explained before, those born of the pristinely ungifted, like Jennsen, always bear children the same as they. In a few generations, the number of the people without the link to the gift was growing faster than anyone ever expected.”

Kahlan let out a deep breath. “Desperate indeed.”

“It was becoming chaos.”

She hooked a loose strand of hair back. “What did they decide?”

Richard regarded her with one of those looks that told her he was pretty disturbed by what he’d found.

“They chose magic over people. They deemed that this attribute—magic, or those who possessed it—was more important than human life.” His voice rose. “Here they took the very thing they fought the war over, the right of those who were born the way they were—in that case people born with magic—to their own lives, to exist, and they turned it all around to be that this attribute was more important than the life which held it!”

He let out a breath and lowered his voice. “There were too many to execute, so they did the next best thing—they banished them.”

Kahlan’s eyebrows went up. “Banished them? To where?”

Richard leaned toward her with fire in his eyes. “The Old World.”

“What!”

Richard shrugged, as if speaking on behalf of the wizards back then, mocking their reasoning. “What else could they do? They could hardly execute them; they were friends and family. Many of those normal people with the spark of the gift—but who were not gift

ed as wizards or sorceresses and so didn’t think of themselves as gifted—had sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, neighbors who had married these pristinely ungifted, these pillars of Creation. They were part of society—a society which was less and less populated by the truly gifted.

“In a society where they were increasingly outnumbered and mistrusted, the ruling gifted couldn’t bring themselves to put all these tainted people to death.”

“You mean they even considered it?”

Richard’s eyes told her that they had and what he thought of the notion. “But in the end, they couldn’t. At the same time, after trying everything, they now realized that they couldn’t ever restore the link to magic once it was broken by these people, and such people were marrying and having children, and the children were marrying and having children—who in every case passed along this taint. And, those so tainted were increasing in numbers faster than anyone had imagined.

“As far as the gifted were concerned, their very world was threatened, in much the same way it had been threatened by the war. That was, after all, what those in the Old World had been trying to do—destroy magic—and here it was, the very thing they feared, happening.

“They couldn’t repair the damage, they couldn’t stop it from spreading, and they couldn’t put to death all those among them. At the same time, with the taint multiplying, they knew that they were running out of time. So, they settled on what to them was the only way out—banishment.”

“And they could cross the barrier?” she asked.

“Those with the gift, for all practical purposes, were prevented from crossing the barrier, but for those who were pillars of Creation, magic did not exist; they were unaffected by it, so, to them, the barrier was not an obstacle.”

“How could those in charge be sure they had all the pillars of Creation? If any escaped, the banishment would fail to solve their problem.”

“Those with the gift—wizards and sorceresses—can somehow recognize those pristinely ungifted for what they are: holes in the world, as Jennsen said those like her were called. The gifted can see them, but not sense them with their gift. Apparently, it wasn’t a problem to know who the pillars of Creation were.”