Stone of Tears tsot-2

by Terry Goodkind

  The muscles in her face relaxed. “As a Sister of the Light, I have no power to change things, and under obligation to save more lives, I had to uphold what has been for three thousand years. But I admit I hated it, and in a way I’m glad you have taken it out of my hands. But that does not negate the trouble it will cause, or the deaths. When you put the Rada’Han on, you told me that holding the leash to that collar would be worse than wearing it. Your words are proving true.”

  Her lower eyelids filled with glistening moisture. “You have made my greatest love, my calling, a misery.

  “I am past wanting to punish you for your disobedience. In a few days we will be at the palace, and I will at last be finished with you. They will have to deal with you.

  “We shall see how they handle you when you displease them. I believe you will find they are not prepared to be as tolerant as I have been. They will use that collar. And when they do, I also think they will come to regret holding your leash more than do I. I think they will come to regret trying to help you, as do I.”

  Richard put his hands in his back pockets as he stared off at the thick forest of oak and leather leaf. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Sister, but I guess I can understand it. Although I admit I have fought being your prisoner, what happened today was not about you and me.

  “This was about what is right. As one who would wish to teach me, I hoped you would share that moral stance. I hoped the Sisters would not want to teach the use of the gift to one who could easily bend his convictions to the circumstance.

  “Sister Verna, I was not trying to displease you. I simply could not live with myself if I had allowed a murder to take place under my nose, much less if I had participated in it.”

  “I know, Richard. But that only makes it worse, because it’s all one and the same.” She unclasped her hands and peered about at the fire and their supplies, finally pulling a cake of soap from a saddlebag. “I’ll make a stew, and bannock.” She tossed the cake of soap to him. “Du Chaillu needs a bath.”

  Du Chaillu folded her arms in a huff. “While I was chained to a wall, the dogs who came to mount me did not offer me water so I would smell pretty for you.”

  Sister Verna squatted down, pulling supplies out. “I meant no offense, Du Chaillu. I simply thought you would want to wash the dirt of those men off you. If it were me, I would want nothing more than to try to wash the feel of their hands from my flesh.”

  Du Chaillu’s indignation faltered. “Well of course I would!” She snatched the soap from Richard. “You smell of that beast you ride. You will wash too, or I will not want to be near you and will send you off to eat by yourself.”

  Richard chuckled. “If it will keep the peace with you, I’ll wash, too.”

  As Du Chaillu marched off toward the pond, Sister Verna called quietly to him. He waited next to her while she pulled a pot from a saddlebag.

  “Her people have been killing any “magic man” they could get their hands on for the last three thousand years. There is no time to give you history lessons.” She looked up to his eyes. “Old habits spring to hand as easily as a knife. Don’t turn your back on her. Sooner or later, she is going to try to kill you.”

  Her quiet tone unexpectedly raised bumps on his flesh. “I’ll try to keep myself alive, Sister, so you can deliver me to the palace and at last be free of your onerous charge.”

  Richard hurried toward the pond and caught up with Du Chaillu as she was walking through the reeds. “Why did you call that your prayer dress?”

  Du Chaillu held her arms out, letting the breeze ruffle the strips of cloth on her dress. “These are prayers.”

  “What are prayers? You mean the strips of cloth?”

  She nodded. “Each is a prayer. When the wind blows, and they fly, each sends a prayer to the spirits.”

  “And what do you pray for?”

  “Every one of these prayers is the same, from the heart of the person who gave me their prayer. They are all prayers to have our land returned to us.”

  “Your land? But you are in your land.”

  “No. This is where we live, but it is not our land. Many ages ago, our land was taken by the magic men. They banished us here.”

  They reached the edge of the pond. Puffs of breeze drew up ripples in dark patches. The bank was grassy with thick patches of rushes to each side, extending out into the water.

  “The magic men took your land? What land?”

  “They took our land from our ancestors.” She pointed in the direction of the Valley of the Lost. “The land on the other side of the Majendie. I was going to our land, with our prayers, to ask the spirits if they would help our land be returned to us. But the Majendie caught me, and I was not able to take our prayers to the spirits.”

  “How will the spirits return your land to you?”

  She shrugged. “The old words say only that we must send one every year to our land, to pray to the spirits, and if we do, our land will be returned.” She untied her belt and slipped it to the ground. With unsettling grace, she tossed the green-handled knife aside, sticking it in the round end of a branch on a log.

  “How?”

  She gave him a curious frown. “By sending us our master.”

  “I thought you were the Baka Ban Mana, those without masters.”

  She shrugged. “Because the spirits have not sent us one yet.”

  While Richard was puzzling over this, she reached down, took hold of her dress, and pulled it off over her head.

  “What do you think you’re doing!”

  She frowned. “It is me that I must wash, not my dress.”

  “Well, not in front of me!”

  She looked down at herself. “You have already seen me. I have not grown any different since this morning.” She looked up at him. “Your face is red again.”

  “Over there.” He pointed. “Go on the other side of the rushes. You on one side and me on the other.”

  He turned his back to her.

  “But we have only one soap.”

  “Well, you can throw it to me when you’re through.”

  She came around to the front of him. He tried to turn again but she followed him around, grabbing at his buttons.

  “I cannot scrub my own back. And it is not fair. You have seen me, so I should see you. That is why you are turning red, because you have not been fair. This will make you feel better.”

  He slapped her hands away. “Stop it. Du Chaillu, where I come from this is not proper. Men and women do not bathe together. It’s just not done.” He turned his back to her again.

  “Not even my third husband is as shy as you.”

  “Third! You have had three husbands?”

  “No. I have five.”

  Richard stiffened. “Have?” He turned to her. “What do you mean ‘have’?”

  She looked at him as if he had asked if trees grew in the forest. “I have five husbands. Five husbands and my children.”

  “And how many of those do you have?”

  “Three. Two girls, and a boy.” A wistful smile came to her. “It is a long time since I have held them.” Her smile turned sad. “My poor babies will have cried every night, thinking I am dead. No one ever returned from the Majendie before.” She grinned. “My husbands will be anxious to draw lots to see who will be the first to try to give me another child.” Her smile faded and her voice trailed off. “But I guess a Majendie dog has already done that.”

  Richard handed her the soap. “It will all turn out fine. You’ll see. Go bathe. I’ll go on the other side of the rushes.”

  He relaxed in the cool water, listening to her splash, waiting for her to finish with the soap. A mist thickened over the pond, stealing slowly, silently, into the surrounding trees.

  “I’ve never heard of a woman having more than one husband. Do all the Baka Ban Mana women have more than one husband?”

  She giggled. “No. Only me.”

  “Why you?”

  The water stopped splashing. “Because
I wear the prayer dress,” she said, as if it should be self-evident.

  Richard rolled his eyes. “Well, what does . . .”

  She came swimming through the rushes toward him. “Before you can have the soap, you must wash my back.”

  Richard let out an aggravated sigh. “All right, if I wash your back, will you then go back on your side?”

  She presented her back to him. “If you do a proper job.”

  When she was satisfied, she finally went back to get dressed while he washed. She told him over the chirp of bugs and the trill of frogs that she was hungry. He was pulling his pants on while she called for him to hurry so they could eat.

  He threw his shirt over his shoulder and ran to catch up with her as she headed toward the smell of cooking. She looked much better clean. Her hair looked like a normal person’s, instead of a wild animal’s. She looked no more like a savage, but somehow noble.

  It wasn’t dark yet, but getting close to it. The mist that had formed over the pond was drifting in around them from behind. The trees were disappearing in the gathering fog.

  As the two of them stepped into the ring of light around the fire, Sister Verna stood. Richard was putting his right arm through his sleeve when he froze at the wide-eyed look on Sister Verna’s face. She was staring at his chest, at the thing he had never let her see before.

  At the scar. At the handprint burned there. At the handprint that was a constant reminder of who fathered him.

  Sister Verna was as white as a spirit. Her voice was so soft he had to strain to hear her. “Where did you get that?”

  Du Chaillu was staring at the scar, too.

  Richard pulled his shirt closed. “I told you before, Darken Rahl burned me with his hand. You said I was only having visions.”

  Her gaze slowly rose to meet his. Her eyes were filled with something he had never seen in them before. Unbridled fear.

  “Richard,” she whispered, “you must not show anyone at the palace what you have upon you. Except the Prelate. She may know what to do. You must show her. But no one else.” She stepped closer. “Do you understand? No one!”

  Richard slowly buttoned his shirt. “Why?”

  “Because, if you do, they will kill you. That is the mark of the Nameless One.” Her tongue wet her lips. “Sins of the father.”

  From the distance came the plaintive howl of wolves. Du Chaillu shuddered and hugged herself as she stared off into the deepening fog.

  “People will die tonight,” Du Chaillu whispered.

  Richard frowned at her. “What are you talking about?”

  “Wolves. When wolves howl like that in the mist, they are foretelling that people are to die violently in the night, in the mist.”

  Chapter 44

  They materialized out of fog and mist, the white fangs of death. The startled prey, at first immobilized by bone-chilling fright, jumped to flee before the white death. Fangs of white steel ripped into them without mercy as they bolted for their lives. Death squeals tore the night air with their terror. Hysteria sent them running heedlessly onto the waiting cold, white steel.

  Fearless men tasted fear before they died.

  Pandemonium spread on a wild uproar of noise. The ringing chime of steel, the splintering of wood, the ripping of canvas, the groan of leather, the pop of bones, the whoosh of fire, the crash of wagons, the thuds of flesh and bone hitting ground, and the screams of man and beast all joined into one long cacophony of terror. The wave of white death drove the tumult before it.

  The sharp smell of blood washed through the air, over the sweet aroma of blazing wood, the acrid tang of igniting lamp oil, the smoky smack of flaming pitch, and the gagging stench of burning fur and flesh.

  What wasn’t wet with the cold mist was greasy-slick with hot blood.

  The white steel fangs now were coated with blood and gore; white snow became a soggy mat of red splashes. The cold air was seared by gouts of flame that leapt up to turn the white fog an incandescent orange. Sinister, dark clouds of smoke hugged the ground while the sky burned overhead.

  Arrows zipped past, spears arced through the air, splintered lances spun away into the mist, and severed pike heads whirled off into the darkness. Remnants of torn tents flapped and fluttered as if battered by a furious storm. Swords rose and fell in waves, driven by the grunts that accompanied frantic effort.

  Men ran in every direction, like frenzied ants. Some tumbled to the ground, spilling their viscera across the snow. One of the wounded, blinded by blood, stumbled aimlessly until a white shadow swept by, a spirit of death, cutting him down. A wagon wheel bounced past, its progress quickly obscured from view by dark curtains of acrid smoke that drifted past.

  No alarm had been raised; the sentries were long dead. Few in camp had realized what was happening until it was upon them.

  The camp of the Imperial Order had lately been a place of noise and wild celebration, and for many, in their drunken state, it was hard to tell that anything of consequence was happening. Many of the men, poisoned by the bandu in the ale, lay sick around fires. Many were so weak they burned to death without trying to escape flaming tents. Others were in such a drunken stupor that they actually smiled at the men who drove swords through their guts.

  Even the ones who were not drunk, or who were not drunk to the point of dullness, didn’t truly appreciate what was happening. Their camp was often a place of raucous noise and confusion. Huge bonfires roared throughout the night, for warmth and as gathering places. They were generally the only reference points in the disorderly layout, so the fires of destruction caused little concern, except in the immediate area.

  Among D’Harans, fighting in the camps was simply part of the revelry, and men screaming when they were stabbed in altercations was not noteworthy. What one had was only his if he was fierce enough to keep it from others who were always ready to take it. Alliances among D’Harans were shifting sands that could last a lifetime or, more commonly, for as little as an hour, when a new alliance became more advantageous or profitable. The drinking, and the poison, dulled their grasp of the sheer volume of screams.

  In battle they were disciplined, but when not in battle, they were ungoverned to the point of anarchy. Pay, for D’Harans on expeditions, was in large part a share of the plunder—they had looted Ebinissia, despite all their talk of a new law—and having that new plunder made them perhaps less than single-minded in their devotion to duty. At battle, or the first sound of an alarm, they became a single unified fighting machine, almost an entity of one mind, but in camp, without the overriding purpose of war, they became thousands of individuals, all bent on serving their own self-interest.

  Without an alarm to warn them, they paid the added noise and screaming little attention. Above the noise of their own business, trading, stories, laughter, drinking, gambling, fighting, and whoring, the unheralded battle a short distance away went largely unnoticed. The officers would call them if needed. Without that call to duty, their life was their own, and someone else’s troubles were not theirs. They were unprepared when the white death materialized.

  The sight of white spirits appearing among them was a paralyzing force. Many a man wailed in fear of the Shahari spirits. Many envisioned that the separation between the world of the living and the world of the dead had evaporated. Or that they had somehow been suddenly cast into the underworld.

  Without the ale, both poisoned and unadulterated, it might not be so. As it was, the drink, and their confidence in their numbers and strength, left them vulnerable as they would never be again. But not all were drunk, or dull. Some rose up fiercely.

  Kahlan watched it all from atop her dancing warhorse. In a sea of raw, unbridled emotion, she wore her Confessor’s face.

  These men were neither moral nor ethical; they were animals who lived by no rule but might. They had raped the women at the palace and had mercilessly butchered the people of Ebinissia, from the aged down to newborn babes.

  A man lunged through the ring of steel aroun
d her, grabbing at her saddle for support. He gaped at her, crying a prayer for mercy from the good spirits. She split his skull.

  Kahlan wheeled her horse to face Sergeant Cullen. “Have we captured the command tents?”

  The sergeant signaled, and one of the white, naked men ran off to check as they drove deeper into the camp of the Order. When she spotted the horses, she gave the signal. From behind she heard the sound of galloping hooves, and the sharp rattle of chains: scythes of death, come to reap a crop of the living.

  With a sound like a boy running past a picket fence with a stick in hand, the chain scythes being pulled at a full charge reaped a snapping of bone that meshed into a long, clacking roar. The beasts’ screams and the dull thuds as they slammed the ground drowned out the sound of galloping hooves and breaking bone.

  Even the drunken enemy turned from the white spirits to stare at the ghastly spectacle. It was the last thing they saw. Men stumbled from their tents, to watch without understanding what it was that was occurring before their eyes. Others wandered aimlessly, mugs in hand, as if at a fair, drunkenly looking from one sight to another. There were so many, some had to wait a bit for their turn to die.

  Some were not drunk and saw not spirits but men painted white. They saw an attack, and understood well-honed blades coming for them. A pocket of fierce counterattack was surrounded and broken, but not without cost. Kahlan rallied her men and drove her wedge of white steel deeper into the heart of the enemy’s camp.

  She saw two men on huge draft horses—she couldn’t see who they were—having cut down all the horses they could find, take to charging down a line of tents, reaping havoc as well as helpless men. The chain caught something as solid as bedrock. It whipped the horses around into a brutal collision. The riders went down. Men with swords and axes swarmed over them.