The folly of a cavalry attack into a city was becoming all too apparent. The killing was as swift as it was brutal. The gruesome sight of so many horses and men torn open seemed somehow unreal. The stench of blood was gagging.
When she saw a column of the enemy turn down an alleyway to make an escape, Nicci cast her Han outward, using a concentrated spike of force to snap the bones of the lead horse. As the animal’s legs folded under it the horses following crashed into it at full speed, breaking their legs as the first horse rolled under them before they were able to leap up out of the way. A few of the horses following behind, seeing what was happening and having more time to react, were able to jump clear. Nicci saw the men at the far end of the narrow alleyway close off their escape route.
Nicci cut around the corner to reach the main bottleneck and help prevent any Imperial Order cavalry from escaping the trap. As she rounded the final building, she encountered a knot of cavalry as they broke through the lines of men with spears. Nicci sent a molten ball of flame howling toward the enemy. It cleared the heads of the defenders and hit the street, splashing liquid fire across the horses’ flanks. The animals, their hides ablaze, reared up, allowing the flames to roll up onto the men on their backs.
Nicci raced around tightly packed buildings to come up behind the tail end of the center trap that had ensnared a large number of the enemy. The men of the city had already set upon them. For once, the cavalrymen were outnumbered, disorganized, and unable to break free of the onslaught. Men fighting for their freedom had a burning determination that the soldiers had not expected to encounter. Their tactics of intimidation and simple slaughter had fallen apart.
In the fading light of dusk, Nicci spotted Victor swinging a heavy mace at any Imperial Order head he could find. She urged Sa’din through the slaughter.
“Victor!”
The man looked up with a murderous scowl. “What!” he cried out over the din of the battle, blood dripping from the steel blades of his weapon.
Nicci stepped her horse closer. “The soldiers are coming right behind the cavalry. They will be the real test. We don’t dare let them change their mind about attacking now. Just in case they are having any second thoughts, I’m going to go give them something irresistible to chase into the city.”
Victor flashed her a grim grin. “Good. We will be ready for them.”
Once the army poured into Altur’Rang, there was no way they would be able to stay together. They would split up to move down different streets. Once they did that, each of those groups could be further divided by the defenders. As each group fled or charged, they would face hidden archers and groups of men with spears, to say nothing of the numerous traps.
Altur’Rang was huge. As darkness took the city, many of the invaders would become disoriented and lost. Because of the narrow warren of streets they wouldn’t be able to stay together to present a coordinated attack. They would not be allowed to go where they wished, as they wished, attacking helpless people; they would be relentlessly pursued and harried. Each group would get smaller all the time, both because they would be whittled down while under constant attack, and because some of their men would try other routes to find a way to safety. Nicci had made sure that there was no place of safety in the city.
“There is blood all down the front of you.” Victor called up to her. “Are you all right?”
“I got clumsy and fell off my horse. I’m fine. This must end tonight,” she reminded Victor.
“In a hurry to go after Richard?”
She smiled but didn’t answer his question. “I’d better go whack the hornets’ nest. I will bring them on my heels.”
He nodded. “We’re ready.”
When she spotted three soldiers in the distance trying to make an escape without their horses, Nicci paused to cast a shimmering spell down a narrow twisting street. With three rapid thuds, the lance of power slammed through flesh and bone to drop the three.
“And Victor,” she said turning back to the man, “there’s one last thing.”
“What would that be?”
“No one gets away alive. No one.”
With the sounds of battle raging behind him, he appraised her eyes for a moment. “I understand. Ishaq will be waiting for you; try to get the hornet’s nest there as quickly as you can.”
Nicci, checking the reins to hold Sa’din in place, nodded. “I will bring the soldiers right down . . .”
She turned to the sudden whoosh of flame. Great gouts of fire flared up to the east. She knew that it could mean only one thing.
Victor cursed and climbed up to stand on the carcass of a dead war-horse as he craned his neck, trying to get a view over the rooftops at the thick smoke billowing up into the darkening sky.
He cast a suspicious scowl at Nicci. “You failed to get Kronos?”
“I got Kronos,” she growled through gritted teeth, “and another wizard. It would appear that they have another gifted with them. I guess they came prepared.” Nicci laid the reins over, turning Sa’din toward the distant sounds of screams. “But they didn’t come prepared for Death’s Mistress.”
Chapter 29
“What do you think it could mean?” Berdine asked.
Verna glanced over at the Mord-Sith’s blue eyes. “Ann didn’t say.”
The library was dead quiet but for the soft hiss of oil lamps. What with the row upon row of aisles along with the woodwork and shelves of dark walnut, the lamps and candles did little to illuminate the vast inner sanctuary. Had Verna lit all of the reflector lamps lining the walls and hung on the end caps of shelves, the place could have been made to be considerably brighter but, for their purpose, she didn’t think it necessary.
In a way, Verna felt that if they were to light too many lamps, pull out too many ancient volumes, disturb the sanctum to a large degree, it might wake the ghosts of all the Master Rahls who haunted the place.
Heavy beams divided the dark, frame and panel woodwork of deep-set ceiling coves. Gilded carvings of vines and leaves meandered up columns to the side that supported those massive timbers. Strange yet beautiful symbols were painted in rich colors across the faces of the beams. Underfoot were spread luxurious carpets woven with elaborate designs in muted colors.
And everywhere, around the outer walls in cases behind glassed doors and in freestanding shelves marching through the library in orderly row upon row, were books by the thousands. Their leather bindings, mostly in deep colors with at least some gold or silver leaf on the spines, added a rich, mottled texture to the place. Verna had rarely seen libraries so grand. The vaults at the Palace of the Prophets where she had spent a great deal of time in study had also held thousands of books, but the place had been utilitarian, serving only the function of storing books and providing a practical place to read them. This palace revealed a reverence for the books and the knowledge they contained.
Knowledge was power, and throughout the ages each Lord Rahl in turn had such power at his fingertips. Whether or not he used that knowledge wisely was another question. The only problem with such vast amounts of information would be accessing a specific item, or even knowing that it existed in such an immense collection.
Of course, in times long past there would have been scribes who, besides their work of making copies of important works, attended the libraries and were responsible for specific sections. The master could then easily ask a few relevant questions, narrowing the search to the individual dedicated to the particular area of interest, and be pointed in the right direction. Now, without such specialists tending the libraries, the priceless information contained in the countless volumes was considerably more difficult to retrieve. In a way, the magnitude of information became a hinderance to its own purpose, and, like a soldier carrying so many weapons he couldn’t move, nearly useless.
The books held in this one library alone represented almost an unimaginable amount of work by countless scholars and a great many prophets. A short stroll through the isles had revealed works
here on history, geography, politics, the natural world, and prophecy that Verna had never seen before. A person could spend a lifetime lost in the place, and yet, Berdine had said that the People’s Palace had a number of such libraries, from some that a variety of people were allowed to visit, to some that no one but the Lord Rahl, and, Verna assumed, his most trusted confidants, could enter. This library was one of the latter.
Berdine had said that because she knew High D’Haran, Darken Rahl had sometimes brought her into the most private of the libraries to get her opinion on translations of obscure passages in ancient texts. As a result, Berdine was in a unique position to know at least something about the wealth of potentially hazardous knowledge stored in the palace.
Not all prophecy was equally troublesome, though. A lot of it turned out to be incidental and rather harmless. What most people didn’t realize was that a lot of prophetic space was taken up with what amounted to little more than the stuff of gossip.
But by no means was all prophecy so congenial or frivolous, and wandering through the titillating trivia of everyday lives tended to lull one into complacency and then when you least expected it, dark things came out of the pages to snatch at your soul.
While there were volumes that were by and large completely harmless, there were others that were, for anyone but the untrained, unsafe from the first words to the last. This particular library held some of the most dangerous books of prophecy Verna knew of, books that at the Palace of the Prophets were considered so volatile that they were not kept in the main vault, but in smaller, heavily shielded vaults restricted to all but a handful of people at the palace. The presence of those books was probably the reason why this particular library was a very private retreat for Master Rahl alone; Verna seriously doubted that the guards would have allowed her in had a Mord-Sith not been escorting her.
Verna could happily spend a great deal of time in such a cozy place, exploring countless books she had never seen before. Unfortunately, she didn’t have the luxury of time. She idly wondered if Richard had ever even seen what was now his as the Lord Rahl.
Berdine tapped a finger to the blank page in The Glendhill Book of Deviation Theory. “I’m telling you, Prelate, I studied this book with Lord Rahl at the Wizard’s Keep in Aydindril.”
“So you said.”
Verna found it interesting, to say the least, that Richard knew of The Glendhill Book of Deviation Theory. She found it even more curious, considering his distaste for prophecy and the fact that this book of prophecies was mostly about him, that he’d studied it.
There seemed no end to the curious little things that from time to time Verna discovered about Richard. Part of his dislike for prophecy, she knew, was his aversion to riddles: He hated them. She also knew, though, that in large measure his animus toward prophecy was due to his belief in free will, his belief that he himself, and not the hand of destiny, made his own life what it was.
While enormously complex and with layers of meaning beyond most people’s comprehension, prophecy certainly did revolve around core elements of the preordained in its nature, and yet Richard had more than once fulfilled prophecy while at the same time proving it wrong.
Verna sourly suspected that, in a perverse way, prophecy had foretold of Richard’s birth just so that he could come into the world to prove the concept of prophecy invalid.
Richard’s actions had never been easy to predict, even, or perhaps especially, for prophecy. In the beginning Verna had been baffled by the things he would do and was perpetually unable to predict how he would react to situations or what he might do next. She had come to learn, though, that what she had thought was his confounding switching in a blink from one matter to something completely unrelated was, simply, at its core, his singular consistency.
Most people were not able to remain riveted to a goal with such dedicated determination. They tended to become distracted by a variety of other urgent matters requiring their attention. Richard, as if in a sword fight with a number of opponents at once, prioritized those ancillary events, holding them in abeyance or dispatching them as need be, while always keeping his goal firmly fixed in his mind. It sometimes gave people the false impression that he was skipping from one unrelated thing to another, when in reality he was, to him, innocently dancing across rocks in the river of events around him as he worked his way steadily toward the opposite bank.
At times he was the most wonderful man Verna had ever met. At other times, the most exasperating. She’d long ago lost track of how often she had wanted to strangle him. Besides being the man born to lead them in the final battle, he had by force of his own will become their leader, the Lord Rahl, the linchpin of everything she had struggled for as a Sister of the Light.
Just as prophecy foretold.
But not at all in the manner it had so carefully laid out.
Perhaps more than anything else he meant to them all, Verna valued Richard as a friend. She ached for him to be happy, the way she had once been happy with Warren. Her time with Warren after they were married and before he had been killed had been the most alive she had ever felt. Since then, she felt like the living dead, alive but not part of life.
Verna hoped that some day, maybe when they finally won the struggle against the Order, that Richard could find someone to love. He loved life so much; he needed someone to share that with.
She smiled inwardly. From the first day she had met him and put the collar around his neck to take him back to the Palace of the Prophets to be trained to use his gift, her life had felt as if it had been caught up in the whirlpool that was Richard. She vividly remembered that snowy day, back at the Mud People’s village, when she had taken him away. It had been profoundly sad, because it had been against his will, and at the same time it had been a momentous relief after having searched for him for twenty years.
To be sure, he had not gone willingly into such benevolent captivity. In fact, two of the Sisters with Verna had died in the effort to make Richard put on that collar he so hated.
Verna frowned—put on the collar.
That was odd. She tried to recall exactly how it was that she had managed to get him to put the collar around his neck, as it had to be done. Richard hated collars—especially after having once been a captive of a Mord-Sith—and yet he had put it on of his own free will. For some peculiar reason, though, she couldn’t seem to recall just how she had managed to get him to—
“Verna, this is really strange . . .” The brown leather of Berdine’s outfit creaked as she leaned in a little more, peering intently at the last of the text in the ancient volume laid open on the table before her. She carefully turned a page, checking, and then turned it back. She looked up. “I know this book had writing in it before. That writing is now missing.”
As Verna watched the candlelight dance in Berdine’s blue eyes, she set aside memories from long ago and returned her full attention to the important matters at hand.
“But it wasn’t this book, now, was it?” When Berdine frowned, Verna went on to explain. “It may have been the same title, but it wasn’t this very book. You were at the Keep; it was a different copy of this book. Yes?”
“Well, sure, I guess you’re right that it wasn’t this actual book . . .” Berdine straightened and scratched her head of wavy brown hair. “But if it’s the same title, then why do you think that the copy at the Wizard’s Keep has all the writing in it while this one has big sections of the writing missing?”
“I didn’t say that the copy there still has all the writing in it. I’m only saying that the copy at the Keep, not this one, was the one you studied with Richard. That you recall reading it and not seeing any blank pages doesn’t prove anything because it wasn’t this very same book. But even more importantly, this book might in fact be identical in that it contains all the same text, but the scribe who made this duplicate might have simply left blank pages among that text for any number of reasons.”
Berdine looked skeptical. “What reasons?”
/> Verna shrugged. “Sometimes books with incomplete prophecy, such as these here, have blank places left in them to provide room for future prophets to finish the prophecy.”
Berdine planted her fists on her hips. “Fine, but answer me one question. When I look through this book I recall the things I’m reading. I may not understand most of it, but I remember it in a general sense, remember reading these passages. So why is it that I can’t remember a single thing about the sections that are missing from the book?”
“The simple explanation is that you don’t recall anything of the blank sections because they are simply that, blank places, as I said, that were left in the book by the person who made the copy.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. I mean, I recall the general nature of the prophecies—the length of them. As a gifted person you would be more attuned to what you’re reading. I wouldn’t. Since I never really understood these prophecies, I instead remember more of the way they looked. I remember how long they were. These are no longer complete. I didn’t understand them, and I remember how long they seemed and how hard it was to make sense of such long prophecies.”
“When something is hard to understand it always seems longer than it really is.”
“No.” Berdine screwed up her face with conviction. “That’s not it.” She turned to the last prophecy and tapped the page. “This one here is only a page long followed by a number of blank pages. I can’t say that I remember the others so well, but for some reason I paid more attention to the last one. I’m telling you, I remember that this one for sure was a lot longer. I can’t swear to how long the others were, or how long this one is supposed to be, but I do know for certain that this last one, at least, was more than a page. It wasn’t incomplete, as this one here is, now. No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to remember how long it was, or what it said, but I know that it was more than a single page.”
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