“What you say is impossible. I have put nothing into play.”

You are named as the player.

“Named? Named by who?”

That you have been named as a new player is what matters. You are forewarned that you have one year from this day—and not one day longer—to complete the cleansing. Use your time well, Richard Rahl. Your life will be the price if you fail. All life will be the price if you fail.

“But it’s impossible!” Richard cried out as he lunged, locking both hands around the throat of the figure.

The cloak collapsed.

There was nothing inside it.

He heard a small, soft sound, like a doorway into the world of the dead closing.

He could see the little clouds of his panting breath rising into the black winter night.

After what seemed an empty eternity, Richard finally lay ba

ck down, using the cloak to cover his trembling body, but he could not force himself to close his eyes.

To the west distant lightning flickered at the horizon. To the east the dawn of the first day of winter fast approached.

Between lightning and dawn, in the middle of an enemy numbering in the millions, Richard Rahl, leader of the D’Haran Empire, lay chained to a wagon thinking about his captive wife, and the third child of trouble.

CHAPTER 3

Kahlan lay on the floor in the near darkness, unable to sleep. She could hear Jagang’s even breathing in the bed above her. On an ornately carved wooden chest against the far wall a single oil lamp, its wick turned down low, cast a weak glow through the gloom of the emperor’s inner sanctum.

The burning oil helped, if only to a small degree, to mask the stench of the encampment: the smells of soot from fires, fetid sweat, rancid refuse, the latrines, the horses and other animals, and manure all mingled together into a ubiquitous stink. In much the same way that the horrific memory of all of the maggot-infested, rotting corpses she had seen along her journey invariably brought to mind the unforgettable, unmistakable, gagging smell of death, it was impossible to contemplate the Imperial Order encampment without it also bringing to mind its singular, pervasive stink, a thing as vile as the Imperial Order itself. Since arriving in the encampment she was always reluctant to draw a breath too deeply. The smell would forever be linked in her mind to the suffering, misery, and death that the soldiers of the Imperial Order visited upon everything they touched.

As far as Kahlan was concerned, the people who believed in, supported, and fought for the convictions of the Imperial Order did not belong in the world of life among those who valued it.

Through the gauze fabric covering the vents in the top of the tent, Kahlan could see the furious flashes of lightning to the west illuminating the sky overhead to announce the approaching storms. The emperor’s tent, with its hangings, carpets, and padded walls, was relatively quiet, considering the constant din of the sprawling encampment out beyond, so it was hard to hear the thunder, but she could occasionally feel rumbles of it through the ground.

With the cold weather settling in, the rain would make it all the more miserable.

As tired as she was, Kahlan couldn’t stop thinking about the man from earlier that day, the man who had looked out from that cage as it had rolled through the camp, the man with the gray eyes, the man who had seen her—actually seen her—and had called out her name. It was a galvanizing moment for her.

For anyone to see her bordered on miraculous. Kahlan was invisible to almost everyone. Invisible wasn’t really accurate, though, because they actually did see her. They simply forgot having seen her as soon as they had, forgot that they had been aware of her only an instant before. So, while she wasn’t really invisible, she might as well have been.

Kahlan knew well the icy touch of oblivion. The same spell that made people forget her as soon as they’d seen her had also wiped out every memory she had of her past. What ever there was to her life before the Sisters of the Dark, it was now lost to her.

Among the millions of troops sprawled out across the vast, barren plain, her captors had found only a handful of soldiers who could see her—forty-three, to be exact. These forty-three were men who, like the collar around her neck, the Sisters, and Jagang himself, stood between her and freedom.

Kahlan made it her business to know every one of those forty-three men, to know their strengths, their weaknesses. She studied them silently, mentally making notes about each of them. Everyone had habits—ways of walking, of observing what was going on around them, of paying attention or failing to pay attention, of doing their job. She had learned everything she could about their individual characteristics.

The Sisters believed that an anomaly in the spell they had used was responsible for a handful of people being aware of Kahlan. It was possible that out among the Order’s vast army there were others who could see and remember her, but Jagang had so far not discovered any more. The forty-three soldiers were thus the only men able to serve as her guards.

Jagang, of course, could see her, as well as the Sisters who had used the spell in the first place. Much to the Sisters’ horror they had been captured by Jagang and they, too, had ended up with Kahlan in the wretched encampment of the Imperial Order. Other than the Sisters and Jagang, none of those few who could see her really knew her—knew her from her forgotten past, a past that even Kahlan didn’t know.

But that man in the cage was different. He had known her. Since she didn’t remember ever seeing him before, that could only mean that he was someone who knew her from her past.

Jagang had promised her that when she finally had her past back and knew who she was, when she knew everything, then the real horror for her would begin. He delighted in explaining in vivid detail exactly what he intended to do to her, how he would make her life one of endless torment. Since she didn’t remember her past, his promises of retribution didn’t mean as much to her as he would have liked. Still, the things he’d promised were terrifying enough in and of themselves.

Whenever Jagang promised such vengeance, Kahlan returned only a blank look. It was a way of walling off her emotions from him. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing her emotions, her fear. Despite what it would mean for her, Kahlan was proud to have earned the contempt of such a vile man. It gave her the confidence that what ever she had done in her past, her convictions could only have placed her in direct opposition to the will of the Order.

Because of Jagang’s ghastly oaths, Kahlan greatly feared remembering her past, yet after seeing the raw emotion in the captive man’s eyes she longed to know everything about herself. His joyous reaction to seeing her stood out in sharp contrast to all those around her who despised and reviled her. She had to know who she was, who the woman was that could be held in such regard by that man.

She wished she could have looked at the man for longer than the brief glimpse she had gotten. She’d had to turn away. If she had been caught showing any interest in a captive, Jagang surely would have killed him. Kahlan felt protective of the man. She didn’t want to inadvertently bring trouble to someone who knew her, someone so obviously overcome by the sight of her.

Yet again Kahlan tried to put her racing mind to rest. She yawned as she watched the flickers of lightning in the little patch of dark sky. Dawn was not far off and she needed sleep.

With that dawn, though, came the first day of winter. She didn’t know why, but the very idea of the first day of winter made her uneasy. She couldn’t imagine a reason. Something about the first day of winter seemed to knot her insides with anxiety. It seemed that beneath the surface of her ability to remember lurked dangers she could not begin to imagine.

Her head came up at the sound of something falling over. The noise had come from the outer room, the room outside Jagang’s bedroom. Kahlan propped herself up on an elbow, but she dared not get up from her spot on the floor beside the emperor’s bed. She knew well the consequences of disobeying his orders. If she was to endure the pain he could give her through the collar around her neck, it would have to be for something more than moving from the carpet.

In the darkness Kahlan heard Jagang, just above her on the bed, sit up.

Sudden cries and moans broke out on the other side of the padded walls of the bedroom. It sounded like it might have been Sister Ulicia. Since being captured by Jagang, Kahlan had had occasion enough to hear Sister Ulicia sobbing and crying. Kahlan herself had often enough been brought to tears, all because of those Sisters of the Dark, but especially Sister Ulicia.

Jagang threw the covers off. “What’s going on out there?”

Kahlan knew that for the crime of disturbing Emperor Jagang Sister Ulicia was soon going to have even more reason to be moaning.

Jagang stepped down onto the floor, straddling Kahlan on the carpet beside his bed. He looked down deliberately, making sure that in the dim light of the lantern glowing atop

the chest, she saw him naked and exposed over her. Satisfied with his silent, implied threat, he retrieved his trousers from a nearby chair. Hopping from one foot to the other he pulled them on as he started for the doorway. He didn’t bother putting on anything more.

He paused before the thick hanging that covered the doorway and turned back, crooking a finger at Kahlan. He wanted to keep an eye on her. As Kahlan rose to her feet, Jagang drew back the heavy covering over the doorway. Kahlan glanced to the side and saw the latest captive woman to be brought in as a prize for the emperor cowering on the bed, the blanket held in her fists up under her chin. Like almost everyone, the woman didn’t see Kahlan and had only been more confused and frightened the evening before when Jagang had spoken to the phantom in the room with him. That had been the least of the woman’s cause for fright that night.

Kahlan felt a jolt of pain sizzle down the nerves of her shoulders and arms—Jagang’s reminder through the collar not to linger in doing as she’d been told. Without letting him see how much it hurt, she hurried after him.

The sight that greeted her in the outer room was confusing. Sister Ulicia was rolling around on the floor, arms flailing as she babbled incoherently between moans and cries. Sister Armina, hunched over the woman at her feet, shuffled to and fro, following as Sister Ulicia writhed around on the floor, afraid to touch the woman, afraid not to, afraid of what might be the problem. She looked like she wanted to collect Sister Ulicia in her arms and quiet her lest she create a disturbance that would get the attention of the emperor. She didn’t yet realize that it was too late for that. Usually when one of those two was in any kind of agony it was agony inflicted by Jagang through his control of their minds, but now he, too, stood watching the strange sight, apparently unsure of what could be causing such behavior.

Sister Armina, already bent over the woman floundering on the floor, suddenly noticed Emperor Jagang and bowed deeper yet. “Excellency, I don’t know what is wrong with her. I’m sorry that she has disturbed your sleep. I will try to quiet her.”

Tags: Terry Goodkind Sword of Truth Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net