Naked Empire (Sword of Truth 8)

Jagang turned his nightmare eyes on Zedd. “My men have a great deal of experience at torturing people. When you hear the screams coming from the tents all around, you will have no doubt as to their skill, or their determination. I think you should know that they can keep their guests alive under torture for days, but they cannot work miracles. People, especially such young, tender souls, cannot survive indefinitely. But, should these children die before you agree to cooperate, there are plenty more families with children who can take their place.”

Zedd could not halt the tears that ran down his face to drip off his chin as Sister Tahirah took his arm and pulled him toward the doorway. The crowd of parents fell on him, clawing at his clothes, screaming and crying for him to do as the emperor asked.

Zedd dug in his heels and struggled to a stop before the table. Desperate hands clutched at his robes. As he looked around at their tear-stained faces, meeting the eyes of each, they fell silent.

“I hope you people can now understand the nature of what it is we are fighting. I am so sorry, but I cannot dull the pain of this darkest hour of your lives. If I were to do as this man wants, countless more children would be subjected to this tyrant’s brutality. I know that you will not be able to weigh this against the precious lives of your children, but I must. Pray the good spirits take them quickly, and take them to a place of eternal peace.”

Zedd could not say more to them, to their desperate gazes. He turned his watery eyes to Jagang. “This will not work, Jagang. I know you will do it anyway, but it will not work.”

Behind the heavy table, Jagang slowly rose. “Children in this land of yours are plentiful. How many are you prepared to sacrifice before you allow mankind to be free? How long are you willing to persist in your stubborn refusal to allow them to have a future free from suffering, want, and your uninspired morals?”

The heavy gold and silver chains around his neck, the looted medallions and ornaments resting against his muscled chest, and the rings of kings on his fingers all sparkled in the candlelight.

Zedd felt the numb weight of a hopeless future under the yoke of the monstrous ideals of this man and his ilk.

“You cannot win in this, wizard. Like all those who fight on your side to oppress mankind, to allow the common people to be left to cruel fate, you are not even willing to sacrifice for the sake of the lives of children. You are brave with words, but you have a cold soul and a weak heart. You don’t have the will to do what must be done to prevail. I do.”

Jagang tilted his head and the Sister shoved Zedd toward the door. The screaming, crying, begging crowd of people closed in around Zedd and Adie, clawing and pawing at them in wild desperation.

In the distance, Zedd could hear the horrifying screams of their terrified children.

Chapter 39

“They aren’t far,” Richard said as he stepped back in among the trees. He stood silently watching as Kahlan straightened the shoulders of her dress.

The dress showed no ill effects from its long confinement in their packs. The almost white, satiny smooth fabric glistened in the eerie light of the churning overcast. The flowing lines of the dress, cut square at the neck, bore no lace or frills, nothing to distract from its simple elegance. The sight of Kahlan in that dress still took his breath away.

She looked out through the trees when they heard Cara’s whistle. The warning signal Richard had taught Cara was the plaintive, high, clear whistle of a common wood pewee, although Cara didn’t know that’s what it was. When he’d first told Cara that he wanted to teach her a pewee birdcall as a warning signal, she said she wasn’t going to learn the call of any bird named a pewee. Richard gave in and told her that he would instead teach her the call of the small, fierce, short-tailed pine hawk, but only if she would be willing to work hard at getting it right, since it was more difficult. Satisfied to have her way, Cara had agreed and readily learned the simple whistle. She was good at it and used it often as a signal. Richard never told her that there was no such thing as a short-tailed pine hawk, or that hawks didn’t make whistles like that.

Out through the screen of branches, the dark form of the statue stood guard over an area of the pass that for thousands of years had been deserted. Richard wondered again why the people back then would have put such a statue in a pass no one was likely to ever again visit. He thought about the ancient society that had placed it, and at what they must have thought, sealing people away for the crime of not having a spark of the gift.

Richard brushed pine needles off the back of the sleeve of Kahlan’s dress. “Here, hold still; let me look at you.”

Kahlan turned back, arms at her sides, as he smoothed the fabric at her upper arms. Her unafraid green eyes, beneath eyebrows that had the graceful arch of a raptor’s wings in flight, met his gaze. Her features seemed to have only grown more exquisite since he had first met her. Her look, her pose, the way she gazed at him as if she could see into his soul, struck a chord in him. Clearly evident in her eyes was the intelligence that had from the first so captivated him.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

Despite everything, he couldn’t hold back his smile. “Standing there like that, in that dress, your long hair so beautiful, the green of the trees behind you…it just suddenly reminded me of the first time I saw you.”

Her special smile, the smile she gave no one but him, spread radiantly through her bewitching eyes. She put her wrists on his shoulders and locked her fingers behind his neck, pulling him into a kiss.

As it always did, her kiss so completely consumed him with his need of her that he momentarily lost track of the world. She melted into his embrace. For that moment there was no Imperial Order, no Bandakar, no D’Haran Empire, no Sword of Truth, no chimes, no gift turning its power against him, no poison, no warning beacons, no black-tipped races, no Jagang, no Nicholas, no Sisters of the Dark. Her kiss made him forget everything but her. In that moment there was nothing but the two of them. Kahlan made his life complete; her kiss reaffirmed that bond.

She pulled back, gazing up into his eyes again. “Seems like you’ve had nothing but trouble ever since that day you found me.”

Richard smiled. “My life is what I’ve had since that day I found you. When I found you, I found my life.”

Holding her face in both hands, he kissed her again.

Betty nudged his leg and bleated.

“You two about ready?” Jennsen called down the hill. “They’ll be here, soon. Didn’t you hear Cara’s whistle?”

“We heard,” Kahlan called up to Jennsen. “We’ll be right there.”

Turning back, she smiled as she looked him up and down. “Well, Lord Rahl, you certainly don’t look the way you did the first time I saw you.” She straightened the tooled leather baldric lying over the black tunic banded in gold. “But you look exactly the same, too. Your eyes are the same as I saw that day.” She cocked her head as she smiled up at him. “I don’t see the headache of the gift in your eyes.”

“It’s been gone for a

while, but after that kiss, it would be impossible to have a headache.”

“Well, if it comes back,” she said with intimate promise, “just tell me and I’ll see what I can do to make it go away.”

Richard ran his fingers through her hair and gazed one last time into her eyes before slipping his arm around her waist. Together they walked through the cathedral of trees that was their cover off to the side near the crown of the ridge, and out toward the open slope. Between the trunks of the pines, he could see Jennsen running down the hill, leaping from rock to rock, avoiding the patches of snow. She rushed in to meet them just within the small cluster of trees.

“I spotted them,” she said, breathlessly. “I could see them down in the gorge on the far side. They’ll be up here soon.” A grin brightened her face. “I saw Tom leading them.”

Jennsen took in the sight of both of them, then—Kahlan in the white dress of the Mother Confessor and Richard in the outfit he had in part found in the Keep that had once been worn by war wizards. By the surprise on Jennsen’s face, he thought she might curtsy.

“Wow,” she said. “That sure is some dress.” She looked Richard up and down again. “You two look like you should rule the world.”

“Well,” Richard said, “let’s hope Owen’s people think so.”

Cara pushed a spruce bough aside as she ducked in under the limbs of trees. Dressed again in her skintight red leather outfit, she looked as intimidating as she had the first time Richard had seen her in the grand halls of the People’s Palace in D’Hara.

“Lord Rahl once confided in me that he intended to rule the world,” Cara said, having heard Jennsen’s pronouncement.

“Really?” Jennsen asked.

Richard sighed at her awe. “Ruling the world has proven more difficult than I thought it would be.”

“If you would listen more to the Mother Confessor and to me,” Cara advised, “you would have an easier time of it.”