Now, all those windows were strangely empty—some boarded up, some just left as if the owner would be opening any minute. All the windows lining their route stood empty. Streets, benches, parks, were mute witness to the onslaught of cavalry.
It was frightening to charge at full speed through the convoluted maze of streets, cutting around buildings and obstacles, dashing down dirt alleyways, flying at full speed along curving cobblestone roads, cresting rises only to plummet down the far side, like some bizarre, headlong, out-of-control snow sled ride plunging down an icy hill through the trees, and just as dangerous. Sometimes, as they galloped half a dozen abreast, the way suddenly narrowed with a wall or a corner of a building that stuck out. More than one rider went down with calamitous results. Buildings, colors, fences, poles, and intersecting streets flashed by in dizzying array.
Without the resistance of an enemy force, the unbridled rush felt to Jennsen like it was out of all control, yet she knew that these were the elite cavalry, so a wanton charge was their specialty. Besides, Emperor Jagang looked in complete control atop his magnificent stallion.
The horses kicked up a shower of sod as they suddenly broke past a wide opening in a wall to find themselves charging up the expansive lawns of the Confessors’ Palace. The fury of yelling riders spread out to each side, their horses tearing up the picturesque setting, the crude and filthy bloodthirsty invaders defiling the deceptively serene beauty of the grounds. Jennsen rode beside Sebastian, not far behind the emperor and several of his officers, between wide-spread flanks of howling men, straight up the wide promenade lined with mature maple trees, their bare branches, heavy with buds, laced together overhead.
Despite everything she had learned, everything she knew, everything she held dear, Jennsen couldn’t understand why she felt such a sense of being a participant in a profane violation.
The impression melted away as she focused her attention instead on something she spotted ahead. It stood not far from the wide marble steps leading up to the grand entrance of the Confessors’ Palace. It looked like a lone pole with something atop it. A long red cloth tied near the top of the shaft of the pole flew and flapped in the breeze, as if waving to them, calling for their attention, giving them all, at last, a destination. Emperor Jagang led the charge directly toward that pole with its red flag flying.
As they raced across the lawns, she concentrated on the heat of Rusty’s obedient and powerful muscles flexing beneath her, finding reassurance in her horse’s familiar movements. Jennsen couldn’t help gazing up at the white marble columns towering above them. It was a majestic entrance, imposing, yet elegant and welcoming. This day, the Imperial Order was at last to own the place where evil had, for so long, ruled unopposed.
Emperor Jagang held his sword high, signaling the cavalry to halt. The cheering, yelling, screaming battle cries died out as tens of thousands of men, all at once, brought their excited horses down from a charge to a stop. It amazed her, what with so many men with weapons out, that it all happened in seconds and without carnage.
Jennsen patted the sweaty side of Rusty’s neck before sliding down off her horse. She hit the ground among a confusion of men, mostly officers and advisors, but regular cavalry, too, all swarming in to protect the emperor. She had never been this close in among the regular soldiers before. They were intimidating as they eyed her in their midst. They all seemed impatient for an enemy to fight. The men were a filthy, grimy lot, and smelled worse than their horses. For some reason, it was that suffocating, sweaty, foul stink that frightened her the most.
Sebastian’s hand seized her arm and pulled her close. “Are you all right?”
Jennsen nodded, trying to see the emperor and what had stopped him. Sebastian, trying to see as well, pulled her along with him as he stepped through a screen of burly officers. Seeing it was him, they made way.
She and Sebastian halted when they saw the emperor standing several paces ahead, alone, his back to them, his shoulders slumped, his sword hanging from his fist at his side. It appeared that all his men were afraid to approach him.
Jennsen, with Sebastian quickly moving to catch up, closed the distance to reach emperor Jagang. He stood frozen before the spear planted butt end in the ground. He stared with those completely black eyes as if seeing an apparition. Tied beneath the long, barbed, razor-sharp metal point of the spear, the long red cloth flapped in the otherwise complete silence.
Atop the spear was a man’s head.
Jennsen winced at the arresting sight. The gaunt head, severed cleanly at mid-neck, looked almost alive. The dark eyes, beneath a deeply hooded brow, were fixed in an unblinking stare. A dark, creased cap rested halfway down the forehead. Somehow, the austere cap pressed down on the head seemed to match the severe countenance of the man. Wisps of wiry hair curled out from above his ears to ruffle in the wind. It seemed as if the thin lips, at any moment, might give them a forbidding smile from the world of the dead. The face looked as if the man, in life, had been as grim as death itself.
The way Emperor Jagang stood stupefied, staring at the head right before him impaled on the point of the spear, and the way not one of the thousands of men so much as coughed, had Jennsen’s heart hammering faster than when she had been riding Rusty at a reckless gallop.
Jennsen cautiously peered over at Sebastian. He, too, stood stunned. Her fingers tightened on his arm in sympathy for the look in his wide, tearful eyes. He finally leaned closer to her in order to whisper in a choked voice.
“Brother Narev.”
The shock of those two barely audible words hit Jennsen like a slap. It was the great man himself, the spiritual leader of the entire Old World, Emperor Jagang’s friend and closest personal advisor—a man who Sebastian believed was closer to the Creator than any man who had ever been born, a man whose teachings Sebastian religiously lived by, dead, his head impaled on a spear.
The emperor reached out and pulled free a small, folded piece of paper that was stuck in the side of Brother Narev’s cap. As Jennsen watched Jagang’s thick fingers open the carefully folded small piece of paper, it reminded her unexpectedly of the way she had unfolded the paper she had found on the D’Haran soldier that fateful day she had discovered him lying dead at the bottom of the ravine, the day she had met Sebastian. The day before Lord Rahl’s men had finally located her and killed her mother.
Emperor Jagang lifted the paper out to silently read what it said. For a frightening long time, he just stared at the paper. At last, his arm lowered to his side. His chest heaved with a terrible, burgeoning wrath as he stared once more at Brother Narev’s head on the end of the spear. In a smoldering voice, bitter with indignation, Jagang repeated the words from the note just loud enough for those standing close to hear.
“Compliments of Richard Rahl.”
The stiff wind moaned through a stand of nearby trees. No one said a word as they all waited on Emperor Jagang for direction.
Jennsen’s nose wrinkled at a foul smell. She looked up to see the head, so perfect only moments before, beginning to putrefy before her very eyes. The flesh sagged heavily. The bottom eyelids drooped, revealing their red undersides. The jaw sank. The thin line of the mouth opened, almost looking as if the head were letting out a scream.
Jennsen, along with everyone else, including Emperor Jagang, took a step back as the flesh of the face decayed in sudden ghastly ruptures, revealing festering tissue beneath. The tongue swelled as the jaw dropped lower. The eyeballs sank forward out of their sockets as they shriveled. Reeking flesh fell away in clumps.
What would have been long months of decomposition took place in a matter of seconds, leaving the skull beneath that creased cap grinning at them through tattered bits of hanging flesh.
“It had a web of magic around it, Excellency,” Sister Perdita said, almost sounding as if she were answering a question unspoken. Jennsen hadn’t heard her come up behind them. “The spell preserved it in that condition until you pulled the note from the cap, triggering the di
ssolution of the magic preserving it. Once that magic was withdrawn, the . . . remains went through the decomposition that would ordinarily have taken place.”
Emperor Jagang was staring at her with cold dark eyes. What he might be thinking, Jennsen couldn’t be sure, but she could see the fury building within those nightmare eyes.
“It was a very complex and powerful ward that preserved it until the right person touched it—to pull the note free,” Sister Perdita said in a quiet voice. “The ward was likely keyed to your touch, Excellency.”
For a long, terrifying moment, Jennsen feared that Emperor Jagang might suddenly swing his sword with a wild cry and behead the woman.
To the side, an officer suddenly pointed up at the Confessors’ Palace.
“Look! It’s her!”
“Dear Creator,” Sebastian whispered as he, too, looked up and saw someone in the window.
Other men yelled that they saw her, too. Jennsen rose up on tiptoes, trying to see around the tall soldiers rushing forward, and the officers pointing, past the reflections on the glass, to the person she saw back within the dark interior. She shielded her eyes, trying to see better. Men whispered excitedly.
“There!” another officer on the other side of Jagang cried out. “Look! It’s Lord Rahl! There! It’s Lord Rahl!”
Jennsen froze from the jolt of those words. It didn’t seem real. She ran the man’s words through her mind again, so shocking were they to hear that she felt she had to check again if it really was what she thought she had heard.
“There!” another man yelled. “Moving down that way! It’s both of them!”
“I see them,” Jagang growled as he tracked the two fleeing figures in his black glare. “I’d recognize that bitch in the farthest reaches of the underworld. And there! Lord Rahl is with her!”
Jennsen could catch only fleeting flashes of two figures racing away past windows.
Emperor Jagang sliced the air with his sword, signaling his men. “Surround the palace so they can’t escape!” He turned to his officers. “I want the assault company to come with me! And a dozen Sisters! Sister Perdita—stay with the Sisters out here. Don’t let anyone get by you!”
His gaze sought Sebastian and Jennsen. When he found them among those standing close he fixed Jennsen in his hot glare.
“If you want your chance, girl, then come with me!”
Jennsen realized, as she and Sebastian raced away after Emperor Jagang, that she had her knife clenched in her fist.
Close on Jagang’s heels, in the shadows of towering marble columns, Jennsen raced up the wide expanse of white marble steps. Sebastian’s reassuring hand was on the small of her back the whole way. Fierce determination etched the faces of the savage men bounding up the steps all around her.
The men of the assault company, sheathed in layers of leather armor, chain mail, and tough hides, wielded short swords, huge crescent axes, or wicked flails in one hand, while on their other arm they all carried round metal shields for protection, but the shields were also set with long center spikes to make them weapons as well. The men were even swathed with belts and straps set with sharpened studs to make grappling with them in hand-to-hand combat treacherous, at best. Jennsen couldn’t imagine anyone with the nerve to go against such vicious men.
Storming up the steps, the burly soldiers growled like animals, crashing through the carved double doors as if they were made of sticks, never checking to see if the doors might be unlocked. Jennsen shielded her face with an arm as she flew through the shower of splintered wood fragments.
The thunder of the men’s boots echoed through the grand hall inside. Tall windows of pale blue glass set between polished white marble pillars threw slashes of light across the marble floor where the assault force stormed through. Men hooked the marble railing with big hands and swooped up the first stairway, going for the upper floors where they had seen the Mother Confessor and Lord Rahl. The sound of the soldiers’ boots on stone echoed up through the high-ceilinged stairwell decorated with ornate moldings.
Jennsen couldn’t help being wildly excited that this might be the day it all ended. She was but one mighty thrust of her knife from freedom. She was the one to do it. She was the only one who could. She was invincible.
The fact that she was going to kill a man was only dimly important to her. As she raced up the steps, she thought only about the horror Lord Rahl had brought to her life and the lives of others. Filled with righteous rage, she intended to end it once and for all.
Sebastian, racing right along with her, had his sword out. A dozen of the big brutes were in front of her, led by Emperor Jagang himself. Behind were hundreds more of the grim assault force, all determined to deliver merciless violence to the enemy. Between her and those charging soldiers behind, Sisters of the Light ran up the steps, without weapons but for their gift.
At the top of the flight of stairs, they all bunched to a halt on a slick oak floor. Emperor Jagang looked both ways down the hall.
One of the panting Sisters pushed through the men. “Excellency! This makes no sense!”
His only answer was a glare as he caught his breath, before his gaze moved, searching for his prey.
“Excellency,” the Sister insisted, if more quietly, “why would two people—so important to their cause—be alone here in the palace? Alone without even a guard at the door? It doesn’t make sense. They would not be here alone.”
Jennsen, as much as she wanted Lord Rahl under her knife, had to agree. It made no sense.
“Who says they’re alone?” Jagang asked. “Do you sense any conjuring of magic?”
He was right, of course. They might go through a door and encounter a surprise of a thousand swords waiting for them. But that chance seemed remote. It seemed more logical that a protecting force, if there was one here, would not have wanted to allow them to all get inside.
“No,” the Sister answered. “I sense no magic. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be called in an instant. Excellency, you are endangering yourself needlessly. This is dangerous to go chasing after such people when there are so many things about it that make no sense.”
She stopped short of calling it foolish. Jagang, seeming to pay minimal attention to the Sister as she spoke, signaled to his men, sending a dozen racing off in each direction down the hall. A snap of his fingers and a quick gesture sent a Sister with each group.
“You’re thinking like a green army officer,” Jagang said to the Sister. “The Mother Confessor is far more sly and ten times as cunning as you give her credit for. She is smarter than to think in such simple terms. You’ve seen some of the things she’s pulled off. I’ll not let her get away with this one.”
“Then, why would she and Lord Rahl be here alone?” Jennsen asked when she saw that the Sister feared to speak up further. “Why would they allow themselves to be so vulnerable?”
“Where better to hide than in an empty city?” Jagang asked. “An empty palace? Any guards would tip us to their presence.”
“But why would they even hide here, of all places?”
“Because they know that their cause is in jeopardy. They’re cowards and want to evade capture. When people are desperate and in a panic, they often run for their home to hide in a place they know.” Jagang hooked a thumb behind his belt as he analyzed the layout of halls around him. “This is her home. In the end, it’s only their own hides that they think of, not that of their fellow man.”
Jennsen couldn’t help herself from pressing, even as Sebastian was pulling her back, urging her to be quiet. She threw her arm out toward the expanse of windows. “Why would they allow themselves to be seen, then? If they’re trying to hide, as you suggest, then why would they let themselves be spotted?”
“They’re evil!” He leveled his terrible eyes at her. “They wanted to watch me find Brother Narev’s remains. They wanted to see me discover their profane and heinous butchery of a great man. They simply couldn’t resist such sick delight!”
“Bu
t—”
“Let’s go!” he called to his men.
As the emperor charged off, Jennsen seized Sebastian’s arm in exasperation, holding him back. “Do you really think it could be them? You’re a strategist—do you honestly think that any of this makes sense?”
He noted which way the emperor went, followed by a flood of men charging after him, then turned a heated glare on her.
“Jennsen, you wanted Lord Rahl. This may be your chance.”
“But I don’t see why—”
“Don’t argue with me! Who are you to think you know better!”
“Sebastian, I—”
“I don’t have all the answers! That’s why we’re in here!”
Jennsen swallowed past the lump in her throat. “I’m only worried for you, Sebastian, and Emperor Jagang. I don’t want your heads to end up on the end of a pike, too.”
“In war, you must act, not only by careful plan, but when you see an opening. This is what war is like—in war people sometimes do stupid or even seemingly crazy things. Maybe she and Lord Rahl have simply done something stupid. You have to take advantage of an enemy’s mistakes. In war, the winner is often the one who attacks no matter what and presses any advantage. There isn’t always time to figure everything out.”
Jennsen could only stare up into his eyes. Who was she, a nobody, to try to tell an emperor’s strategist how to fight a war?
“Sebastian, I was only—”
He snatched a fistful of her dress and yanked her close. His red face twisted in anger. “Are you really going to throw away what might turn out to be your only chance to avenge your mother’s murder? How would you feel if Richard Rahl really is crazy enough to be here? Or if he has some plan we can’t even conceive of? And you just stand here arguing about it!”
Jennsen was stunned. Could he be right? What if he was?
The Pillars of Creation tsot-7 Page 51
