Faith of the Fallen tsot-6

by Terry Goodkind

  Victor smiled wistfully. “This way, as it is, I can enjoy the beautiful statue inside the stone.”

  “I understand, Victor—I really do. The way you describe it, I can see it, too.”

  “We will both enjoy my statue the way it is, then.” Victor took his hand from the stone and pointed to the base. “Besides, you see there? There is an imperfection in the stone. It runs all the way through. That is why I could afford this piece of marble—because it has this flaw. Were most anyone to carve this, it would endanger the stone. If not done just right, and with the flaw taken in mind, the entire piece could easily shatter. I have never been able to think of how to carve this stone to take advantage of its beauty, but to also avoid the flaw.”

  “Perhaps, someday, it will come to you how to carve the stone, to create a thing of nobility.”

  “Nobility. Ali, but wouldn’t that be something—the most sublime form of beauty.” He shook his head. “But I will not do it. Not unless the revolt comes.”

  “Revolt?”

  Victor’s careful gaze swept the hillside through the open door. “The revolt. It will come. The Order cannot stand—evil cannot stand, not forever, anyway. In my homeland, when I was young, there used to be beauty, and there used to be freedom. They were shamed into giving up their lives, their freedom, bit by bit, to the cause of fairness to all men. People didn’t know what they had, and let freedom slip away for nothing but the hollow promise of a better world, a world without effort, without struggle to achieve, without productive work. It was always someone else who would do these things, who would provide, who would make their lives easy.

  “We used to be a land of abundance. Now, what food is grown, rots, while it awaits committees to decide who should have it, who should move it, and what it should cost. Meanwhile, people starve.

  “Insurgents, those disloyal to the Order, are blamed for all the starvation and strife that slowly destroys us, and so ever more people are arrested and put to death. We are a land of death. The Order continually proclaims its feelings for mankind, but their ways can but cultivate death. On my way here, I have seen corpses by the thousands go uncounted and unburied. The New World is blamed for every ill, every failure, and young men, eager to smite their oppressors, march off to war.

  “Many people, though, have come to see the truth. They, and the children of these people—me, and others like me—hunger for freedom to live our own lives, rather than be slaves to the Order and their reign of death. There is unrest in my homeland, as there is here. A revolt is coming.”

  “Unrest? Here? I’ve seen no unrest.”

  Victor smiled a sly smile. “Those with revolt in their hearts do not show their true feelings. The Order, always fearful of insurrection, tortures confessions from those they wrongly arrest. Every day more are put to death. Those who want things to change know better than to make themselves targets before the time has come. Someday, Richard, revolt will come.”

  Richard shook his head. “I don’t know, Victor. Revolt takes resolve. I don’t think such real resolve exists.”

  “You have seen people who are unhappy with the way things are. Ishaq, those at the foundries, my men and me. All those you deal with, other than the officials you bribe, hunger for change.” Victor lifted an eyebrow at Richard. “Not one of them complains to any board or committee about what you do. You may want nothing to do with it, as I believe is your right, but there are those who listen to the whispers of the freedom to the north.”

  Richard tensed. “Freedom to the north?”

  Victor nodded solemnly. “They speak of a savior: Richard Rahl. He leads them in the fight for freedom. They say that this Richard Rahl will bring us our revolt.”

  Had it not all been so overwhelmingly tragic, Richard would have burst out laughing.

  “How do you know this Rahl character is worth following?”

  Victor fixed Richard with a look that Richard remembered from the first time he met the blacksmith.

  “You can judge a man by his enemies. Richard Rahl is hated by the emperor, and by Brother Narev, and by his disciples, as no other man is hated. He is the one. He bears the torch of revolution.”

  Richard could muster only a desolate smile. “He is but a man, my friend. Don’t worship a man. Worship his cause, but not him.”

  Victor’s glare, so full of his emotion, his burning hunger for freedom, turned back to his wolfish grin.

  “Ah, but that is what Richard Rahl would say. That is why he is the one.”

  Richard thought it would be best to change the subject. He saw that it was getting light.

  “Well, I have to get going. I’m sure you’ll figure out what to do with the stone, Victor. It will come to you when the time is right.”

  The blacksmith feigned a scowl, but it was a poor spoof of the very real one that had just departed. “That is always what I thought, too.”

  Richard scratched his head. “Have you ever carved anything, Victor?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Are you sure you are able to carve? That you have the ability?”

  Victor tapped his temple, as if to dissuade a skeptic. “In here I have ability. In here I have beauty. That is all that matters to me. If I never touch steel to this stone, then I will always have the beauty of what it could be, and that, the Order can never take away from me.”

  Chapter 51

  Nicci wiped the sweat off her brow as she went down the line, checking to see if her clothes were dry. Summer was only around the corner, and it was already hot. Her back hurt from her earlier work at the washtub and various other chores. The other women were chatting in the warm sunshine.

  They occasionally giggled over some quirk that one of them, after a round of amiable urging, would divulge about her husband. Everyone in the building, it seemed, had begun coming alive along with the new spring growth.

  Nicci knew that spring had nothing to do with it.

  That knowledge drew frustration up from her darkest recesses. She couldn’t figure out how Richard did it. No matter how hard she tried, she just couldn’t unravel the knot he seemed to tie around everything. She was beginning to believe that if she took him down into the deepest cave she could find, the sunlight would make its way into the darkest recesses to shine on him. She would think it was some kind of magical luck, except she knew beyond doubt that he had not used any magic whatsoever.

  The backyard, such an overgrown tangled place, so filthy, with piles of scrap and garbage, was now a garden. The men who lived in the building, after they came home from work, had rid the yard of the refuse. Even several of the ones who didn’t work had come out of their rooms to help cart away an item or two. After it was cleared out, the women of the building had turned the soil and planted a garden. They were going to have vegetables.

  Vegetables! There was talk of getting a few chickens.

  The single latrine off in the back corner, so overused and so foul, was now two privies in good repair. Now, there was rarely a wait to use a privy and there were no more urgent pleas or frayed tempers. Kamil and Nabbi had helped Richard build them—partly out of scraps of lumber salvaged from the refuse piles in the yard, before they were hauled away, and some they collected from other rubbish heaps.

  Nicci had hardly believed her eyes when she had seen Kamil and Nabbi—in shirts—digging the holes for the new privies. Everyone thanked them profusely. The two toughs beamed with pride.

  The outdoor cooking hearth had been repaired, so the women could set more pots in it and cook at the same time, requiring less wood to be hauled.

  Richard and some of the other men of the building built stands for the washtubs, so the wives wouldn’t have to bend so far or chafe their knees raw. The men made a simple roof of canvas salvaged from the refuse so that the women could cook and wash without getting wet when it rained.

  The people in the buildings to either side, at first surly and suspicious of the activity, began asking curt questions. Richard, Kamil, and Nabbi went over and
explained what they had done, and how they could put their place in shape, too, and even helped them get started. Nicci had yelled at Richard for spending his time at other people’s places. He said that she was the one who had told him that it was his duty to help others. Nicci had no answer—at least, none that made any sense so as she could say it aloud and not sound a fool.

  When Richard showed people how to improve their homes, he didn’t lecture, or teach, but rather, somehow—Nicci couldn’t understand how—managed to infect them with his enthusiasm. He hadn’t told them what to do, but rather he’d made them pant to figure out for themselves how they could make things better for themselves. Everybody took a liking to Richard. It made her growl under her breath.

  Nicci collected her washing in the woven basket Richard had shown the women of the building how to make from thin strips of wood. Nicci had to admit that the basket was easy enough to make, and a better way to lug clothes.

  She climbed the sturdy stairs—stairs that she’d once thought would be the end of her. The hallway inside was spotless. The floors had been washed.

  Somewhere; Richard had come up with ingredients for paint, and the men had a grand time of mixing it up and painting over the stains on the walls. One of the men in the building knew about roofs, so he fixed the roof so it wouldn’t leak and stain the walls again.

  As Nicci walked down the hall, she saw Gadi, without his shirt, sitting up the stairway, in the shadows. He was using his big knife to whittle at a piece of wood and in so doing make clear his dangerous nature. Later, the women living in the building would tsk and clean it up. Gadi, not happy about people nagging at him of late, leered down at her. She now had something for him to leer at, now that she had gained her weight back.

  Richard’s second job at night enabled him to be able to afford more food. He brought home things she had missed for months—chicken, oil, spices, bacon, cheese, and eggs. She could never find such things in the city stores, Nicci had thought they sold the same food everywhere in the city shops, but Richard’s travels while delivering things, he said, took him to places where they sold a wider variety of food.

  Kamil and Nabbi, sitting on the front steps, saw her through the open door. They stood and bowed politely as she came down the hall.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Cypher,” Kamil said.

  “Could we help you carry that?” Nabbi asked.

  She found it all the more irritating because she knew for a fact that they were sincere; they liked her because she was Richard’s wife.

  “Thank you, no. I’m there, now.”

  They held the door for her and closed it behind her when she had passed into her room.

  She thought of them as Richard’s soldiers. He seemed to have a private army of people who broke into grins when they saw him coming. Most people seemed only too pleased to do whatever they thought Richard might like done.

  Kamil and Nabbi would have washed diapers, if he asked it, for the chance to ride with him at night in the wagon as he picked up and delivered things around Altur’Rang. He only rarely took them with him, saying that he could get in trouble with the workers’ group. The youths didn’t want Richard to get in trouble and lose his job, so they patiently waited for the rare times when he tilted his head for them to come along.

  Their room had been transformed. The ceiling had been cleaned and whitewashed. The flyblown walls had been scrubbed and painted a salmon color—a color she had picked, thinking that Richard would not possibly be able to come up with the rare ingredients needed for the color. The walls were now mockingly salmon.

  One day a man had shown up with an armload of tools. Kamil said that Richard had sent him over to fix their room. The man spoke a language Nicci didn’t understand. He waved his arms a lot and chattered and laughed good-naturedly, as if she must understand at least a little of what he told her. He pointed around at walls and asked questions. She hadn’t the foggiest notion of what he was there to do.

  She suspected he had come to fix the wobbly table. She rapped the top with the flat of her hand and then showed him how it wobbled. He nodded and grinned and chattered. She finally left him to his work while she went to the city store to wait in line to buy bread. She was there the entire morning. In the afternoon, she waited in line for millet.

  When Nicci finally returned home, the man was gone. The old window, broken and not only long painted over but also painted shut, had new glass, and it was raised. And, they had a new window in the other wall. Both windows were open. A cool cross-breeze let fresh air into the stuffy room.

  Nicci stood in the center of the room, stunned to be looking through the window to the building next door. She gaped out the window in the wall where there had been no window before. She was able to see the street. Mrs. Sha’Rim, from next door, had smiled and waved as she’d walked past.

  Nicci set down the wash basket and opened the window at the side, to get some air into the stifling room. She pushed the curtains back. With windows you could see though, she had decided that curtains were in order.

  Richard somehow got her fabric. When she was finished, he told her she had done a wonderful job. Nicci found herself grinning just as everyone else grinned when Richard told them they had done well.

  She had brought Richard to the worst place in the Old World, to the worst building she could find, and he somehow ended up making everything better just as she had insisted was his duty.

  But she had never meant it to be like this.

  She didn’t know what she’d meant.

  She only knew that she lived for the times Richard was with her. Even though she knew he hated her, and wanted nothing more than to be away from her and back with his Kahlan, Nicci could not help feeling her heart rise into her throat when he came home. Through the link to Kahlan, she thought that at times she could feel the woman’s longing for him. Every inch of her ached with understanding of Kahlan’s longing.

  The room grew darker as she waited. Life didn’t start until Richard came home. As the daylight faded, the lamplight took its place. They had a real lamp, now, not just a wick through a wooden button floating in linseed oil.

  The door opened. Richard put one foot inside. He was speaking to Kamil as the young man was going off to his family’s place upstairs. It was getting late. Finally, still smiling, Richard came in and shut the door. The smile faded, as it always did.

  He held out a burlap sack. “I came across some onions, carrots, and some pork. I thought you might like to make a stew.”

  Nicci lifted a hand weekly toward the millet she had spent the afternoon in line to buy. It had bugs in it. It was moldy.

  “I bought millet. I thought I would make you a soup.”

  Richard shrugged. “If you prefer. Your millet soup saw us through some pretty lean times.”

  Nicci felt that flash of pride that he had acknowledged what she had done as valuable.

  She shut the windows. It was dark out. With her back to the windows as she watched him, she closed the curtains tight.

  Richard stood in the center of the room, watching her, a puzzled frown creasing his brow between his eyes. Nicci closed the distance to him. She was aware of the exposed flesh of her bosom rising and falling above the top of her black dress. Gadi had just been staring at her bosom. She wanted Richard to stare at her like that. Richard watched only her eyes.

  Her fingers tightened around his muscled arms.

  “Make love to me,” she whispered.

  His brow drew down. “What?”

  “Richard, I want you to make love to me. Now.”

  He appraised her eyes for an eternity. Her heart thundered in her ears.

  Every fiber of her being screamed out for him to take her. She teetered on the edge, waiting, her life suspended in the exquisite anguish of expectation.

  His voice came, not at all harsh. If anything, it was tender, but it was also resolute. “No.”

  Nicci felt as if a thousand needles of ice were dancing up her arms.

  Hi
s refusal stunned her. No man had ever refused her.

  It hurt to her core—worse than anything Jagang or any other man had ever done. She had thought . . .

  Blood rushed to her face, melting the ice in a flash of heat. Nicci flung open the door. “Come out into the hall and wait,” she commanded in a shaky voice.

  He was standing in the center of their room, looking into her eyes. The lamp on the table cast harsh shadows across his face. His shoulders looked so broad, tapering down to his waist, a waist she ached to encircle with her arms. She wanted to scream. Instead she spoke softly, but with authority he could not mistake.

  “You will come out into the hall and wait, or . . .”

  Nicci made a snipping gesture with two fingers.

  By the look in his eyes, he knew that she was not bluffing. Kahlan’s life now hung by a thread, and if he didn’t do as she ordered, she would not hesitate to cut that thread.

  With his gray eyes on her the whole time, Richard stepped out into the hall. She put a finger to the center of his chest and pushed until his back was against the wall beside their door.

  “You are to wait right there, on that spot, until I tell you that you may move from it.” She gritted her teeth. “Or Kahlan will die. Do you understand?”

  “Nicci, you’re better than this. Think about what you’re—”

  “Or Kahlan will die. Do you understand?”

  He let out a breath. “Yes.”

  Nicci marched to the stairwell. Gadi stood halfway up the stairs, his dark eyes watching. He arrogantly descended toward her, until he was at the bottom with her. He had a fine form, she supposed, displayed as it was without a shirt. He was close enough to feel the heat of him.

  Nicci looked him in the eye. He was the same height as she.

  “I want you to have sex with me.”

  “What?”

  “My husband does not adequately take care of my needs. I wish you to.”