She watched him with a kind of calm seriousness that he found disturbing in the extreme. “But you were,” she finally said in a way that carried great meaning concealed in simplicity.
Richard blinked. “Are you saying that he did something while he was at the Temple of the Winds so that someone would again be born with Subtractive Magic?”
“By ‘someone,’ I presume that you mean . . . you?” She arched an eyebrow as if to underscore the sobriety of the question.
“What are you suggesting?”
“None has been born with Subtractive Magic and more, born a war wizard, since then, since the Temple was sent from this world.”
“Look, I don’t know for sure if that’s true but even if it is that doesn’t mean—”
“Do you know what war wizard Baraccus did upon his return from the Temple of the Winds?”
Richard was taken aback by the question, wondering what relevance it could have. “Well, yes. When he returned from the Temple of the Winds . . . he committed suicide.” Richard gestured weakly to the vast complex above them. “He threw himself off the side of the Wizard’s Keep, off the outer wall overlooking the valley and the city of Aydindril below.”
His mother nodded sorrowfully. “Overlooking the place where the Confessors’ Palace would eventually be built.”
“I suppose so.”
“But first, before he threw himself off that wall, he left something for you.”
Richard stared down at her, not completely sure that he’d heard her correctly. “For me? Are you sure?”
His mother nodded. “The account you read was not privy to everything. You see, when he returned from the Temple of the Winds, before he threw himself from the side of the Keep, he gave his wife a book and sent her with it to his library.”
“His library?”
“Baraccus had a secret library.”
Richard felt like was was tiptoeing across fresh ice. “I didn’t even know he had a wife.”
“But Richard, you know her.” His mother smiled in a way that made the already stiff hair at the back of his neck stand out even more.
Richard could hardly breathe. “I know her? How is that possible?”
“Well,” his mother said with a one-shouldered shrug, “you know of her. Do you know the wizard who created the first Confessor?”
“Yes,” Richard said, confused by her change of subject. “His name was Merritt. The first Confessor was a woman named Magda Searus. There is a painting of them across the ceiling down in the Confessors’ Palace.”
His mother nodded in a way that made his stomach knot. “That’s the woman.”
“What woman?”
“Baraccus’s wife.”
“No . . .” Richard said as he touched his fingers to his forehead, trying to think it through. “No, she was the wife of Merritt, the wizard who had made her into a Confessor, not Baraccus.”
“That was later,” his mother said with a dismissive gesture. “Her first husband was Baraccus.”
“Are you sure?”
She nodded firmly. “When Baraccus returned from the Temple of the Winds, Magda Searus was waiting for him, where he had asked her to wait, in the First Wizard’s enclave. For days she had waited, fearful that he would never return to her. To her great relief he finally did. He kissed her, told her of his undying love, and then, in confidence, and after securing her oath of eternal silence, he sent her with a book to his hidden, private, secret library.
“After she had gone he left his outfit—the one you now wear, including those leather-padded silver wristbands, the cape that looks as if it has been spun from gold, and that amulet—in the First Wizard’s enclave, left them for the wizard he had just insured would be born into the world of life . . . left them for you, Richard.”
“For me? Are you sure that they were really meant for me, specifically?”
“Why do you think that there as so many prophecies that speak of you, that wait for you, that name you—‘the one born true,’ ‘the pebble in the pond,’ ‘the bringer of death,’ ‘the Caharin’? Why do you think those prophecies that revolve around you came about? Why do you think that you have been able to understand some of them when no one else for centuries, for millennia, has been able to decipher them? Why do you think that you have fulfilled others?”
“But that doesn’t mean that it was explicitly meant to be me.”
With an indifferent gesture, his mother declined to either support or deny his assertion. “Who is to say what came first, the Subtractive side finally finding a child to be born in, or it finally finding the specific child it was meant to be born in. Prophecy needs a kernel to spark its growth. Something must be there to engender what will be, even if it is merely the color of your eyes that has been passed down to you. Something must make it come about. In this case, is it chance or intent?”
“I would like to think a chance series of events.”
“If it pleases you. But at this point, Richard, does it really matter? You are the one born with the ability that Baraccus released from its confinement in another world. You are the one he intended to be born, either by chance or specific intent. In the end, the only thing that matters is what is: you are the one born with that ability.”
Richard supposed that she was right; exactly how it came to be didn’t change what was.
His mother sighed as she went on with the story. “Anyway, it was only then, after he had made his preparations for what he had insured would come about, that Baraccus emerged from his enclave and leaped to his death. Those who wrote the accounts did not know that he had already been back long enough to send his wife on an urgent covert mission. She returned to discover that he was dead.”
Richard’s head spun. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He felt dizzy from the unexpected account of ancient events. He knew, though, from having been to the Temple of the Winds, that such things were possible. He had given up the knowledge that he had gained there as the price of returning to the world of life. Even though he’d lost that knowledge, he was left with a sense of how profound it had been. The one who had demanded the price of leaving behind what he had learned in exchange for his return to Kahlan had been the spirit of Darken Rahl, his real father.
“In her grief, Magda Searus volunteered herself to be the subject of a dangerous experiment that Merritt had come up with, volunteered to become a Confessor. She knew there was a good chance that she would not live through the unknown hazards of that conjuring, but in her grief, with her beloved husband, the First Wizard, dead, her world had ended. She didn’t think that there was anything for her to live for, other than finding out who was responsible for the fateful events that had resulted in her husband’s death, so she volunteered for what everyone expected might very well be a fatal experiment.
“Yet she survived. It was only much later that she began to fall in love with Merritt, and he with her. Her world came back to life with him. The accounts of that time are in spots blurred, with pieces missing or misplaced in the chronology of events, but the truth is that Merritt was her second husband.”
Richard had to sit down on the marble bench. It was almost too much to take in. The implications were staggering. He had trouble reconciling the coincidences: that he had been the first in thousands of years to be born with Subtractive Magic, that Baraccus had been the last one to go to the Temple of the Winds until Richard himself, that Baraccus had been married to a woman who became the first Confessor, that Richard had fallen in love with and married a Confessor—the Mother Confessor herself, Kahlan.
“When Magda Searus used her newborn Confessor power on Lothain, they discovered what he had done at the Temple of the Winds, what only Baraccus had known.”
Richard looked up. “What did he do?”
His mother gazed into his eyes as if she were looking into his soul. “Lothain betrayed them when he was at the Temple by seeing to it that a very specific magic that had been locked away there would at some future point be released
into the world of life. Emperor Jagang was born with the power that Lothain allowed to seep out of the safety of its confinement in another world. That magic was the power of a dream walker.”
“But why would Lothain, the head prosecutor, do such a thing? After all, he had seen to it that the Temple team was executed for the damage they had done.”
“Lothain had probably come to believe, as did the enemy in the Old World, that magic should be eliminated from the race of man. I guess his zealotry found a new fixation: he imagined himself as savior of mankind. To that end he insured the return of a dream walker to the world of life, to purge the world of magic.
“For some reason, Baraccus was unable to seal the breach created by Lothain, unable to undo the treason. He did the next best thing. He saw to it that there would be a balance, a counter, to the damage done, someone to fight against those forces bent on destroying those with the gift, someone with the required ability.
“That would be you, Richard. Baraccus saw to it that you would be born to counter what had been done by Lothain. That is why you, Richard Rahl, are the only one who can stop the Order.”
Richard thought he might be sick. It all made him feel as if he were but a cosmic pawn being used for a hidden purposes, a dupe doing nothing more than playing out the plan for his life contrived by others, performing his predetermined part in a battle across the sweep of millennia.
As if reading his mind, Shota, still looking and sounding for all the world like his mother, laid a compassionate hand on his shoulder. “Baraccus saw to it that there was a balance to counter this damage. He did not preordain how that balance would function or how it would act. He did not take your free will out of the equation, Richard.”
“You think not? It seems to me that I’m merely the final piece of this game being put into play at long last. I don’t see my free will, my own life, my choice, in any of it. It would seem others have determined my path.”
“I don’t think that is true, Richard. You might say that what they have done is not unlike training a soldier to fight. That training creates the possibility of accomplishing the goal of winning the battle should a battle come to pass. It doesn’t mean that when the battle does comes the soldier won’t run away, that he will instead stand and fight, or even that if he does fight to the best of his ability and training that he will win. Baraccus saw to it that you have the potential, Richard, the armor, the weapons, the ability, to fight for your own life and your own world should the need arise, nothing more. He was just giving you a helping hand.”
A helping hand sent across the gulf of time. Richard felt drained and confused. He almost felt as if he no longer knew himself, knew who he really was, or how much of his own life was of his own making.
It felt to him as if Baraccus had suddenly materialized out of the dust of ancient bones, a phantom come to haunt Richard’s life.
Chapter 20
There was one thing that still nagged at him, one other bit that still didn’t make sense. How could the head prosecutor, Lothain, turn on his beliefs, turn on everyone in the New World? It struck Richard as too convenient an explanation that he fell under the power, the allure, of the beliefs of the Old World.
And then it came to him—realization welling up through him in a rush with the power of floodwaters. The substance of it nearly took his breath. Something about the ancient accounts had always bothered him. Shota had stirred his memory of the things that had happened and in so doing all the existing pieces suddenly fell into place. Now he understood what was wrong with the story, what had always bothered him about it. Once he understood, he didn’t know why he hadn’t realized it long before.
“Lothain was a zealous prosecutor,” Richard said, half to himself. It all came out in a rush as he spoke, his eyes wide and unblinking. “He didn’t find a new fixation for his zealotry. He didn’t turn on them.
“He wasn’t a traitor. He was a spy.
“He had always been a spy. He was like a mole, tunneling ever closer to his objective. Over a long period of time he worked himself into a position of power. He also had accomplices covertly working under him.
“Lothain was a wizard who had become not just widely respected but powerful. With his political power he had access to the highest places. When the opportunity finally presented itself, an opportunity that he had helped engineer, he acted. He saw to it that his co-conspirators were assigned to the Temple team. Just like the Order today, Lothain and his men had a strong faith in their cause. They were the ones who corrupted the mission. It wasn’t a change of heart, a misguided act of conscience. It had been planned all along. It was deliberate.
“They were all willing to sacrifice themselves, to die for what they believed was a higher cause. I don’t know how many of the team were actually spies, or if all of them were, but the fact is that enough were that they accomplished their goal. It could even be that they convinced the others to go along with them out of a confused sense of moral obligation.
“It was inevitable, of course, that the other wizards at the Keep would soon enough realize that the Temple of the Winds project had been compromised. When they did, Lothain was only too ready to prosecute the entire Temple team, and saw to it that they were all executed. He didn’t want anyone left alive who could betray the extent of what they had actually done.
“Lothain had intended all along for their precise actions to be kept secret so that successful countermeasures could not be undertaken. Those spies whom Lothain had assigned to the Temple team went to their graves willingly, taking their secrets with them. By prosecuting and sentencing the entire Temple team, Lothain was able to bury the entire conspiracy that he had devised. He eliminated everyone who had any knowledge of the true damage that had been done. He was confident in the knowledge that one day his cause would sweep aside all opposition and they would rule the world. When that happened, he would be the greatest hero of the war.
“There was only one minor problem remaining. After the trial, those in charge insisted that someone must go to the Temple of the Winds to repair the damage. Lothain couldn’t allow anyone else to go, of course, because they would find out the true extent of the sabotage and might possibly be able to undo it, so he volunteered to go himself. That had been his plan all along—to follow up on the team himself, if need be, and cover up the truth.
“Because he was the head prosecutor, everyone believed that he had the absolute conviction to set matters right. When Lothain finally reached the Temple of the Winds, he not only saw to it that the damage could not be repaired, he used the knowledge he gained there to make it worse, to make sure that no one would find and fix the breach. He then covered up what he had done, intending to make it appear as if all had been set right.
“There was only one problem: the alterations he made, using the knowledge of the Temple itself, turned out to be enough to set off the Temple’s protective alarms. From the Temple, in that other world, Lothain was unaware of the red moons the Temple had awakened in this world, and when he returned he was caught. Even so, he didn’t care; he looked forward to dying, to gaining eternal glory in the afterlife for all that he had accomplished, just as Nicci explained about the way the people of the Old World think.
“The wizards at the Keep needed to know the extent of the damage Lothain had caused. Even though he was tortured, Lothain did not reveal the extent of the plan. To discover the truth of what had happened, Magda Seams became a Confessor. But she was inexperienced at the task and still learning as she went. Even though she used her Confessor power, she didn’t realize, at the time, the importance of asking the right questions.”
Richard looked up at the face of his mother. “Kahlan told me once that just getting a confession was easy. The hard part was understanding how to ask the right questions to get the truth. Merritt had only just devised the powers of a Confessor. No one yet understood the way those powers functioned.
“Kahlan was trained her whole life to be able to do it properly, but back then, t
housands of years ago, Magda Searus didn’t yet grasp how to ask all the right questions, in the right order. Even though she believed she had gotten Lothain to confess to what he had done, she failed to uncover the true extent of his treachery. He was a spy, and despite the use of the first Confessor, they failed to discover it. As a result, they never knew the full extent of the subversion carried out by Lothain’s men on the Temple team.”
His mother studied him from under a brow set in concentration. “Are you sure of this, Richard?”
He nodded. “It finally all makes sense to me. With what you’ve added to the story, all the pieces that I could never before fit in place now fit. Lothain was a spy and he went to his death never revealing who he really was, or that he had placed his own men on the Temple team. They all died without ever revealing the true extent of the damage they had done. No one, not even Baraccus, realized the full extent of it.”
His mother sighed as she stared off. “That certainly explains some of the missing gaps in what came to me.” She looked back at him as if in a new light. “Very good, Richard. Very good indeed.”
Richard wiped a hand across his weary eyes. He didn’t feel any great sense of pride in reaching down into the dark muck of history and pulling up such despicable deeds, deeds that were still slipping across time to haunt him.
“You said that Baraccus left a book for me?”
She nodded. “He sent it away with his wife for safekeeping. It was meant for you.”
Richard sighed. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.” His mother carefully folded her fingers together. “While still at the Temple of the Winds, Baraccus wrote the book with the aid of knowledge that he gathered there. No eyes but his have ever read it. No living person has so much as opened the cover since Baraccus finished writing it and closed the cover himself. It has, since that time, been lying untouched in his secret library.”
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