Naked Empire (Sword of Truth 8)

When Richard saw Kahlan shivering in the cold drizzle, he withdrew his hot glare from Owen and retrieved her cloak from her pack in the wagon. With the utmost gentleness and care, he wrapped it around her shoulders. By the look on his face, he seemed to have had all he could take of listening to Owen.

Kahlan seized his hand, holding it to her cheek for a moment. There was some small good in the story they had heard from Owen.

“This means that the gift isn’t killing you, Richard,” she said in a confidential tone. “It was the poison.”

She was relieved that they hadn’t run out of time to get him help, as she had so feared on that brief, eternal wagon ride when he’d been unconscious.

“I had the headaches before I ran into Owen. I still have the headaches. The sword’s magic as well faltered before I was poisoned.”

“But at least this now gives us more time to find the solutions to those problems.”

He ran his fingers back through his hair. “I’m afraid we have worse problems, now, and not the time you think.”

“Worse problems?”

Richard nodded. “You know the empire Owen comes from? Bandakar? Guess what ‘Bandakar’ means.”

Kahlan glanced at Owen sitting hunched on the crate and all by himself. She shook her head as her gaze returned to Richard’s gray eyes, troubled more by the suppressed rage in his voice than anything else.

“I don’t know, what?”

“In High D’Haran it’s a name. It means ‘the banished.’ Remember from the book, The Pillars of Creation, when I was telling you what it said about how they decided to send all the pristinely ungifted people away to the Old World—to banish them? Remember that I said no one ever knew what became of them?

“We just found out.

“The world is now naked before the people of the Bandakaran Empire.”

Kahlan frowned. “How can you know for certain that he is a descendant of those people?”

“Look at him. He’s blond and looks more like full-blooded D’Harans than he does the people down here in the Old World. More importantly, though, he’s not affected by magic.”

“But that could be just him.”

Richard leaned in closer. “In a closed place like he comes from, a place shut off from the rest of the world for thousands of years, even one pillar of Creation would have spread that ungifted trait throughout the entire population by now.

“But there wasn’t just one; they were all ungifted. For that, they were banished to the Old World, and in the Old World, where they tried to establish a new life, they were again all collected and banished to that place beyond those mountains—a place they were told was for the bandakar, the banished.”

“How did the people in the Old World find out about them? How did they keep them all together, without a single one surviving to spread their ungifted trait to the general population, and how did they manage to then put them all in that place—banish them?”

“Good questions, all, but right now not the important ones.

“Owen,” Richard called as he turned back to the others, “I want you to stay right there, please, while the rest of us decide what will be our single voice about what we must do.”

Owen brightened at a method of doing things with which he identified and felt comfortable. He didn’t seem to detect, as did Kahlan, the undercurrent of sarcasm in Richard’s voice.

“You,” Richard said to the man Kahlan had touched, “go sit beside him and see that he waits there with you.”

While the man scurried to do as he was told, Richard tilted his head in gesture to the rest of them, calling them away with him. “We need to talk.”

Friedrich, Tom, Jennsen, Cara, and Kahlan followed Richard away from Owen and the man. Richard leaned back against the chafing rail of the wagon and folded his arms as they all gathered close around him. He took time to appraise each face looking at him.

“We have big problems,” Richard began, “and not just from the poison Owen gave me. Owen isn’t gifted. He’s like you, Jennsen. Magic doesn’t touch him.” His gaze remained locked on Jennsen’s. “The rest of his people are the same as he, as you.”

Jennsen’s jaw fell open in astonishment. She looked confused, as if unable to reconcile it all in her mind. Friedrich and Tom looked nearly as startled. Cara’s brow drew down in a dark frown.

“Richard,” Jennsen finally said, “that just can’t be. There’s too many of them. There’s no way that they can all be half brothers and sisters of ours.”

“They aren’t half brothers and sisters,” Richard said. “They’re a line of people descended from the House of Rahl—people like you. I don’t have time right now to explain all of it to you, but remember how I told you that you would bear children who were like you, and they would pass that pristinely ungifted trait on to all future generations? Well, back a long time ago, there were people like that spreading in D’Hara. The people back then gathered up all these ungifted people and sent them to the Old World. The people down here then sealed them away beyond those mountains, there. The name of their empire, Bandakar, means ‘the banished.’”

Jennsen’s big blue eyes filled with tears. She was one of those people, people so hated that they had been banished from the rest of the people in their own land and sent into exile.

Kahlan put an arm around her shoulders. “Remember how you said that you felt alone in the world?” Kahlan smiled warmly. “You don’t have to feel alone anymore. There are people like you.”

Kahlan didn’t think her words seemed to help much, but Jennsen welcomed the comfort of the embrace.

Jennsen abruptly looked back up at Richard. “That can’t be true. They had a boundary that kept them locked in that place. If they were like me they wouldn’t be affected by a boundary of magic. They could have come out of there any time they wished. Over all this time, at least some of them would have come out into the rest of the world—the magic of the boundary couldn’t have held them back.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Richard said. “Remember when you saw the sand flowing sideways in that warning beacon that Sabar brought us? That was magic, and you saw it.”

“That’s right,” Kahlan said. “If she’s a pillar of Creation, then how is such a thing possible?”

“That’s right,” Jennsen agreed. “How could that be, if I’m truly ungifted?” Her eyebrows went up. “Richard—maybe it’s not true after all. Maybe I have a bit of the spark of the gift—maybe I’m not really, truly ungifted.”

Richard smiled. “Jennsen, you’re as pure as a snowflake. You saw that magic for a reason. Nicci wrote us in her letter that the warning beacon was linked to the wizard who created it—linked to him in the underworld. The underworld is the world of the dead. That means that the statue functioned partly through Subtractive Magic—magic having to do with the underworld. You may be immune to magic, but you are not immune to death. Gifted or not, you’re still linked to life, and thus death.

“That’s why you saw some of the magic of the statue—the part relating to the advancement of death.

“The boundary was a place in this world where death itself existed. To go into that boundary was to enter the world of the dead. No one returns from the dead. If any pristinely ungifted person in Bandakar had gone into the boundary, they would have died. That was how they were sealed in.”

“But they could banish people through the boundary,” Jennsen pressed. “That would have to mean that the boundary didn’t really affect them.”

Richard was shaking his head even as she was protesting. “No. They were touched by death, the same as anyone. But there was a way left through the boundary—much like the one that once divided the three lands of the New World. I got through that boundary without being touched by it. There was a pass through it, a special, hidden place to get through the boundary. This one was the same.”

Jennsen wrinkled her nose. “That makes no sense, then. If that was true, and it wasn’t hidden from them—since

they all knew of this passage through the boundary—then why couldn’t they all just leave if they wanted to? How could it seal the rest of them in, if they could send banished people through?”

Richard sighed, wiping a hand across his face. It looked to Kahlan like he wished she hadn’t asked that question.

“You know the area we passed a while back?” Richard asked her. “That place where nothing grew?”

Jennsen nodded. “I remember.”