“You both did a good job,” Richard told them, because they had. They didn’t make any smart remarks. They actually smiled.
Richard’s dinner was watery millet eaten by the light of a burning wick floating in linseed oil. The smell from the simple light went poorly with dinner, which was more water than millet. Nicci said she’d already eaten, and didn’t want any more. She encouraged him to finish it.
He didn’t give Nicci the details of his second job. She was insistent only that he work; the work itself was irrelevant to her. She tended to her household chores and expected him to earn them a living.
She seemed satisfied that he was learning how ordinary people had to work themselves sick just to make enough to get along in life. The promise of money to buy them more food seemed to spark a longing in her eyes that her lips did not express. He noticed that the black material covering her once full bosom was now slack and half empty. Her elbows and hands had become bony.
As he took another spoonful of millet, Nicci casually mentioned that the landlord, Kamil’s father, had come by.
Richard looked up from his soup. “What did he say?”
“He said that since you have a job, the area citizens’ building committee had assessed us extra rent in order to help pay the rent of those in the local buildings who can’t work. You see, Richard, how life under the ways of the Order cultivates caring in people, so that we all work together for the benefit of all?”
Nearly all of what was not taken by the workers’ group was taken by the area building committee, or some other committee, and all for the same purpose: for the betterment of the people of the Order. Richard and Nicci had next to nothing left for food. Richard’s clothes were getting looser all the time, but not as loose as Nicci’s dresses were getting.
She seemed smug about the fact that their rent was past due.
Foodstuffs, at least, were relatively inexpensive—when they were available.
People said that it was only by the grace of the Creator and the wisdom of the Order that they could afford any food at all. Richard had heard talk at Ishaq’s place that more plentiful and varied food could be had, for a price.
Richard didn’t have the price.
On his wagon ride with Jori to the foundry and the blacksmith, Richard had spotted distant houses that looked to be quite grand. Well-dressed people walked those streets. Occasionally, he saw them in carriages. They were people who neither dirtied their hands or soiled their morals with business. They were men of principle. They were officials of the Order who saw to it that those with the ability sacrificed for the cause of the Order.
“Self-sacrifice is the moral duty of all people,” she said in challenge to his clenched teeth.
Richard could not hold his tongue. “Self-sacrifice is the obscene and senseless suicide of slaves.”
Nicci gaped at him. It was as if he had just said that a mother’s milk was poison to her newborn.
“Richard, I do believe that that’s the cruelest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
“It’s cruel to say that I would not happily sacrifice myself for that thug, Gadi? Or for some other thug I don’t know? It’s cruel not to willingly sacrifice what’s mine to any greedy wretch who lusts to possess plundered goods, the unearned, even at the cost of their victim’s blood?
“Self-sacrifice for a value held dear, for a life held dear, for freedom and the freedom of those you respect—self-sacrifice such as mine for Kahlan’s life—is the only rationally valid sacrifice. To be selfless means you are a slave who must surrender your most priceless possession—your life—to any smirking thief who demands it.
“The suicide of self-sacrifice is but a requirement imposed by masters on slaves. Since there is a knife to my throat, it is not to my good that I am stripped of what I earn by my own hand and mind. It is only to the good of the one with the knife, and those who by weight of numbers but not reason dictate what is the good of allthose cheering him on so they might lap up any drop of blood their masters miss.
“Life is precious. That’s why sacrifice for freedom is rational: it is for life itself and your ability to live it that you act, since life without freedom is the slow, sure death of self-sacrifice to the ‘good’ of mankind—who is always someone else. Mankind is just a collection of individuals. Why should everyone’s life be more important, more precious, more valuable than yours? Mindless mandatory self-sacrifice is insane.”
She stared, not at him, but at the flame dancing on the pool of linseed oil. “You don’t really mean that, Richard. You’re just tired and angry that you have to work at night, too, just to get by. You should realize that all those others you help are there to help society, including you, should you be the one in desperate need.”
Richard didn’t bother to argue with her, and said only, “I feel sorry for you, Nicci. You don’t evert know the value of your own life. Sacrifice could mean nothing to you.”
“That’s not true, Richard,” she whispered, “I sacrifice for you. . . . I saved what millet we had for you, that you might have strength.”
“The strength to stand upright when I throw my life away? Why did you sacrifice your dinner, Nicci?”
“Because it was the right thing to do—it was for the good of others.”
He nodded as he peered at her in the dim light. “You would endanger your life to starvation for others—for any others.” He pointed a thumb back over his shoulder. “How about that thug, Gadi? Would you starve to death so he might eat? It might mean something, Nicci, if it was a sacrifice for someone you value, but it isn’t; it’s a sacrifice to some mindless gray ideal of the Order.”
When she didn’t answer, Richard pushed the rest of his dinner before her. “I don’t want your meaningless sacrifice.”
She stared at the bowl of millet for an eternity.
Richard felt sorry for her, for what she couldn’t understand as she stared at the bowl. He thought about what would happen to Kahlan if Nicci were to fall sick from not getting enough to eat.
“Eat, Nicci,” he said softly.
She finally picked up her spoon and did as he said.
When she had finished, she looked up with those blue eyes that seemed so eager for the sight of something he could not make her see. She slid the empty bowl to the center of the table.
“Thank you, Richard, for the meal.”
“Why thank me? I am a selfless slave, expected to sacrifice for any worthless person who presents their need to me.”
He strode to the door. With his hand on the loose knob, he turned back.
“I have to go, or I will lose my work.”
Her big blue eyes were brimming with tears as she nodded.
Richard made the first trip from the foundry through the dark streets to Victor’s shop carrying five bars. From windows along the way, a few people blinked out at the man lugging a load past. They blinked without comprehension at the meaning of what he was doing. He was working for nothing but his own benefit.
Bent under the weight, Richard kept telling himself that carrying five bars each time would make it only ten trips, and the less trips, the better.
He carried five the second trip, and the third. By the fourth time he returned to the foundry, he decided that he would have to make an extra trip in order to give himself a break and only carry four bars for a few of the trips. He lost track of how many times he went back and forth throughout the empty night. The next to last time, he struggled to lift but two bars. That left three. He forced himself to carry all three the last time, trading the extra effort for the lesser distance.
He got the last three bars to Victor’s place before dawn. His shoulders were bruised and painful. He had to walk all the way to his job at Ishaq’s place, so he couldn’t wait for Victor to arrive to complete his payment of the last quarter gold mark.
The day of work was a break from the night of exhausting lugging of iron bars. Jori didn’t talk unless spoken to, so Richard lay in the wagon bed with a load of charcoal and
snatched a few minutes of sleep here and there as the wagon bounced along. He only felt relieved that he had done as he had promised.
As he returned home after an interminable day, Richard looked up and saw Kamil and Nabbi standing at the head of the stairs. They both had on shirts.
“We’ve been waiting for you to come home and finish the job,” Kamil said.
Richard swayed on his feet. “What job?”
“The stairs.”
“We did that last night.”
“You did only the stairs in the front. You said you intended to fix the stairs. The front is only part of the stairs. The back stairs are twice as long and in worse shape than the front were. You don’t want your wife and the other women of the building to fall and break their necks when they go out back to the cooking hearth or the privy, do you?”
This was their idea of a little test. Richard knew he would lose an opportunity if he put them off. He was so tired he couldn’t think straight.
Nicci stuck her head out the front door. “I thought I heard your voice. Come in to dinner. I have soup waiting on you.”
“Got any tea?”
Nicci cast a sidelong glance at the two in shirts. “I can make tea. Come on, and I’ll get it while you have your soup.”
“Please bring it out to the back,” Richard said. “I promised to fix the stairs.”
“Now?”
“There are still a couple hours of light. I can eat while we’re working.”
Kamil and Nabbi asked more questions than the evening before. The third youth, Gadi, passed by occasionally as Richard and the other two worked.
Gadi, without his shirt, made a point of looking Nicci up and down when she brought Richard his soup and tea.
When Richard had finally finished, he went to the room that had once been Ishaq’s parlor, and was now his and Nicci’s home. He took off his shirt and splashed water on his face from the washbasin. His head was throbbing.
“Wash your hair,” Nicci said. “You’re filthy. I don’t want lice in here.”
Rather than argue that he had no lice, Richard dipped his face in the water and scrubbed his head with the cake of coarse soap. It was easier than talking her out of it so he could go to sleep. Nicci hated lice.
He was thankful, he supposed, that she was at least a clean wife in their fraudulent arrangement. She kept the room, bedding, and his clothes clean, despite the difficulty of hauling water from the well down the street. She never objected to any work necessary to simulate the lives of normal people.
She seemed to want something so badly that she often lost herself in the role to the extent that while he never forgot she was a Sister of the Dark and his captor, she occasionally did. He dunked his head again, swishing his hair, rinsing out the soap.
As a stream of water ran off his chin and back into the basin, he asked, “Who is Brother Narev?”
Nicci, sitting on her pallet sewing, paused and looked up. Her sewing suddenly looked out of place, as if her parody of domestic life lost its aura for her.
“Why do you ask?”
“I met him yesterday, out at the blacksmith’s.”
“Out at the site of the project?”
Richard nodded. “I had to deliver iron out there.”
She bent back to her needlework. Richard watched in the light of the linseed-oil lamp sitting beside her as she took a few more stitches in the patch to the knees of a pair of his pants. She finally paused and let her arms, one sheathed in his pant leg, sink to her lap.
“Brother Narev is the high priest of the Fellowship of Order—an ancient sect devoted to doing the Creator’s will in this world. He is the heart and soul of the Order—their moral guide—so to speak. He and his disciples lead the righteous people of the Order in the ways of the everlasting Light of the Creator. He is an advisor to Emperor Jagang.”
Richard was taken aback. He hadn’t expected her to be so versed on the subject. His caution, along with the hair at the back of his neck, lifted.
“What sort of advisor?”
She took another stitch, pulling the long thread through. “Brother Narev was Jagang’s pedagogue—his teacher, advisor, and mentor. Brother Narev put the fire in Jagang’s belly.”
“He’s a wizard, isn’t he.” It was more statement than question.
She looked up from her sewing. He could see in her blue eyes that she was weighing whether or not to tell him, or perhaps how much she wanted to tell him. His steady gaze told her that he was expecting the whole truth.
“In the language of the street, you could describe him as such.”
“What does that mean?”
“Common people, those who understand little about magic, would describe him as a wizard. Strictly speaking, though, he is not a wizard.”
“Then what is he? Strictly speaking.”
“Actually, he is a sorcerer.”
Richard could only stare at her. He had always assumed that a wizard and a sorcerer were the same thing. When he thought about it, he realized that people who knew about magic spoke exclusively of a male with the gift as a wizard. He had never heard any of those people mention a sorcerer.
“You mean he’s like you, like a sorceress, only male?”
The question stymied her for a moment. “I suppose you could think of it that way, but that’s not really right. If you want to compare it, then you would have to say he has more in common with a wizard, since both are male. The concept of sorceress introduces irrelevant issues.”
Richard swiped water from his face. “Please, Nicci, I’ve been up all last night working, and I’m dead on my feet. Don’t go all abstract and complex on me? Just tell me what it means?”
She set her sewing aside and gestured to his pallet for him to sit near her, in the light. Richard pulled his shirt back on. He yawned as he crossed his legs under himself on his pallet.
“Brother Narev is a sorcerer,” she began. “I’m sorry, but the distinction is just not something simply explained. It’s a very complex matter. I will try to make it as clear as I can, but you must understand that I can’t boil it down too much or it will lose any real flavor of the truth.
“Sorcerers are much the same as wizards, but different—in much the way that water and oil are both liquids, you might say. Both pour and can dissolve things, but they don’t mix and they dissolve different things. Neither do the magic of a wizard and a sorcerer mix, nor do they work on the same things.
“Anything he did against a wizard’s gift, or anything a wizard did against his, would not work. While both are the gift, they are different aspects—they don’t mix. The magic of each nullifies the other, making it just sort of . . . fizzle.”
“You mean like Additive and Subtractive are opposites?”
“No. While on the surface, that would seem a good way to understand it, it’s entirely the wrong way to think of it.” She lifted her hands as if to begin again, but then let them drop back into her lap. “It’s very hard to explain the difference to one such as you who has little understanding of how his own gift works; you have no basis in which to ground anything I could tell you. There are no words which are both accurate and which you would understand; this is beyond your understanding.”
“Well . . . do you mean that, much like a wolf and a cougar are both predators, they are not the same sort of creature?”
“That’s a little closer to it.”
“How common are these sorcerers?”
“About as common as dream walkers . . .” she said as she gave him a meaningful look, “or war wizards.”
Even though he couldn’t understand it and she couldn’t explain it, Richard, for some reason, found that bit of news troubling.
“What is it, though, that he does differently?”
Nicci let out a sigh. “I’m no expert, and I’m not entirely sure, but I believe he does the same basic sort of things a wizard would do, but just does them with a sorcerer’s unique quality of magic—liquor and ale both get you drunk, but they are
different kinds of drink made from different things.”
“One of those is stronger.”
“Not so with wizards and sorcerers. Do you see why words and these kinds of comparisons are so inadequate? The strength of a wizard and sorcerer’s gift is dependent on the individual, it is not influenced by the fundamental nature of his magic.”
Richard scratched his stubble as he considered her words. In view of the fact that both could do magic, he couldn’t come up with any distinction that seemed of any practical importance.
“Is there anything that he can do that a wizard can’t?” He waited. She didn’t look like she was thinking about his question, but more like she was considering whether she wanted to answer it at all. “Nicci, you told me when you first captured me that you would tell me the truth about things. You said you had no reason to deceive me.”
She watched his eyes, but finally looked away as she pulled her blond hair back from her face. The gesture unexpectedly, painfully, reminded him of Kahlan.
“Perhaps. I believe he may have learned how to replicate the spell that surrounded the Palace of the Prophets. It took wizards, thousands of years ago, with both sides of the gift to create that particular spell. I believe that one of the ways sorcerers are different is that their power is not divisible into its constituent elements, as it is in wizards. So, while his magic works differently, he may have learned enough of how the wizards—who at that time possessed both sides of the gift, as do you—were able to create the spell around the Palace of the Prophets to be able to replicate it in his own fashion.”
“You mean the spell that slowed aging? You think he can cast such a web?”
“Yes. Jagang intimated as much to me. I knew Brother Narev when I was young. He was a grown man then, a visionary, preaching the doctrine of the Order. He spoke pensively about wishing to live long enough to see his vision of the Order come to fruition. When I was taken to live at the palace in Tanimura, I believe that may have given him the idea as he not long after went there, too.
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