скачать книгу бесплатно
“What are you talking about, eaten alive? Eaten alive by what?”
“Dark things, Mistress. Dark things come for my babies. Dark things, feral things, coming in the night.”
“So you had a vision and because of that you decided to kill them yourself.”
It was a charge, not a question. Nonetheless, the woman thought it was and nodded, eager to please her mistress.
“Yes. I slit their throats. They bled out and lost consciousness quickly as they faded gently into death. They did not have to suffer what fate would have had them suffer.”
“Faded gently?” Kahlan asked through gritted teeth and barely contained fury. “Are you trying to tell me that they didn’t suffer, didn’t struggle?”
Richard had seen people’s throats cut, and so had Kahlan. They did not go gently into death by any means. They fought for their lives in terrifying, mortal pain, and as they fought for the breath of life they choked and drowned on their own blood. It was a horrifically violent death.
The woman frowned a little as she tried to recall. “Yes, some, I guess. But not for long, Mistress. It was a brief struggle. Not as long as they would have struggled if they lived and the things in the night had come and gorged on their innards.”
When Kahlan’s eyes turned up at the sound of worried whispers being exchanged, the crowd fell silent.
“This is what happens when you think you can see into the future.” She clenched her jaw as she glared at the people watching. “This is the result— lives cut short.”
Kahlan turned that glare back down to the woman at her feet. “You intended to use your knife on me, didn’t you? You intended to kill me.”
“Yes, Mistress.” Tears sprang forth anew. “That’s why I had to tell you what I had done.”
“What do you mean?”
“I had to tell you why I had killed my children so that you would understand why I must kill you. I meant to spare you, Mistress.”
“Spare me? Spare me from what?”
“The same fate, Mistress.” Tears began to run down her cheeks. “Please, Mistress. I cannot bear the thought of such a death as I saw awaiting you. I can’t bear the thought of your body being ripped open as you scream, all alone, no one to help you. That’s why I have to kill you— to spare you that fate like I spared my children.”
Richard’s knees felt like they might again give out.
“And what is it that is supposed to be eating me in this illusion of yours?”
“The same thing as would have eaten my children, Mistress. Dark things. Dark things stalking you, running you down. You won’t be able to escape them.”
The woman extended pleading hands. “May I have my knife back? Please? I must spare you that fate. Please, Mistress, allow me to suffer the pain of such a murder to spare you the agony and horror you will otherwise face. Please, Mistress, allow me to kill you swiftly.”
Kahlan regarded her would-be murderer with a look devoid of all emotion.
“No.”
The woman’s bloody hands went to her chest, clutching her bloody blue robes. She gasped for breath that wouldn’t come. Her eyes opened wide as her face reddened. Her lips turned as blue as her robes. She slumped to her side where she convulsed once in death. What air she had left finally wheezed from her lungs.
Kahlan’s gaze rose to the stunned onlookers, a silent indictment of anyone thinking prophecy could help them.
Her green eyes, beginning to brim with tears, finally turned to Richard. It was a look that nearly broke his heart.
He slipped an arm around her waist. “Come on. You need to rest for a while.”
Kahlan nodded as she leaned into him just a little, welcoming his solace. Already Cara, Zedd, Nathan, and Benjamin were moving in protectively around her. Mord-Sith and men of the First File screened them from the gathered throng.
Kahlan gave Cara’s arm a squeeze. “I’m so sorry. I wanted this celebration to be perfect for you.”
“But it was, Mother Confessor. The woman failed to harm you, you’re alive and well, and a would-be assassin is dead. What could be more perfect than that? On top of that, I now get to lecture you on letting people get that close to you.”
Kahlan smiled as she started away with Richard helping to hold her up.
CHAPTER 11
How is she?” Zedd asked when Richard closed the door behind himself.
“She’s fine.” Richard flicked a hand to dismiss his grandfather’s concern. “She just needs to rest.”
Zedd nodded. As a wizard who’d once worked with Confessors, he probably understood better than anyone that a Confessor needed time to recover after unleashing her power, but none of them could recover as quickly as Kahlan. In the past, when the situation called for it, she had sometimes for-gone resting at all.
Kahlan was stronger than the others had been in a number of ways. For those reasons her sister Confessors had chosen her as their leader, the Mother Confessor. Now all those others were dead.
Still, using her power was exhausting, not only physically but emotionally. It was near to the equivalent of carrying out an execution.
Yet that wasn’t really the worst of it. The real core of her weariness this time was the knowledge that something sinister was going on and it had taken innocent lives. Kahlan didn’t believe, any more than Richard did, that this was one lone individual acting on a delusional vision she’d had. There was something more to all of it. That, on top of using her power, and it coming during such a joyful celebration in front of guests, was what had really left Kahlan drained.
Zedd looked up at Richard with one of those looks Richard knew all too well. “It’s rather peculiar that the woman dropped dead.”
Richard nodded. “That’s been bothering me, too.”
“A person touched by a Confessor’s power is concerned with nothing other than pleasing the Confessor who touched them.” Zedd arched an eyebrow. “They can’t very well please her if they’re dead. Unless, of course, she tells them that they can please her by dying, and Kahlan didn’t do that.”
Apparently, his grandfather had been thinking along the same lines as Richard. “It doesn’t make any sense,” he agreed. “People don’t just drop dead from a Confessor’s touch. Something else is going on.”
Zedd rubbed a bony finger back and forth along his jaw. “Could be that the woman understood how utterly repulsed Kahlan was by her killing her children and so she thought that Kahlan would want her dead.”
“I don’t know, Zedd. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. The whole purpose of a Confessor is to obtain confessions from killers, to find out the truth of what happened, of what terrible things they’ve done. They aren’t repulsed by confessing their crimes. On the contrary, they’re usually overjoyed that they can please a Confessor by telling her the truth when she asks for it. They want to live so that they can please her.”
Cara folded her arms. “Well, I’m not moving from this spot until the Mother Confessor is recovered and on her feet again.”
Richard laid a hand gently on Cara’s shoulder. “Thanks, Cara.”
Richard’s mind was already on to other things, on to putting the pieces together. When the woman with the knife had tried to kill Kahlan, as frightening as it must have looked to the people there, she’d actually had no real chance of success. No knife attack was fast enough to beat a Confessor releasing her power. Cara standing in the way could not have stopped the woman as effectively as Kahlan was capable of doing herself. No single attacker had a chance against a Confessor.
But she couldn’t use her power again until she recovered. Richard was more than happy to have Cara watch over Kahlan in the meantime.
He turned to Benjamin. “General, would you please post men at either end of the hall?”
Benjamin gestured up the corridor. “Already done, Lord Rahl.”
Richard saw then the contingent of the First File off in the distance. It was enough men to fight a war. “Why don’t you stay here with Cara. Keep her company. Kahlan needs to rest for a couple hours.”
“Of course, Lord Rahl.” Benjamin cleared his throat. “While you were in there with the Mother Confessor, we found the woman’s two children. Their throats had been cut, just as she said.”
Richard nodded. He hadn’t doubted the woman. Someone touched by a Confessor couldn’t lie. Still, the news left him feeling sick at heart.
“Please do something else for me, General. Send someone to find Nicci. I haven’t seen her since yesterday at your wedding. Tell her I need to see her.”
Benjamin lightly tapped his right fist to his heart in salute. “I’ll send someone right away, Lord Rahl.”
Richard turned to the prophet. “Nathan, I’d like you to take me to see the woman you spoke about. The one you said could see things. The one who claims to have a message for me.”
Nathan nodded. “Lauretta.”
Zedd and Richard both followed behind Nathan. A group of guards stayed with them but at a distance. Rikka, in her red leather, took the lead in front of them.
Nathan took a slightly longer route through the private corridors, rather than the public passageways, to get to the area where staff and other workers lived. Richard was glad to avoid the public areas. People would undoubtedly want to stop him to talk with him. He didn’t feel like talking about trade issues or petty matters of squabbles over authority to set rules. Or prophecy. Richard had more important things on his mind.
At the top of the list was what the dead woman had said about her vision. She had called the threat “dark things.” She had said that those dark things were stalking Kahlan.
The boy down in the market earlier that morning had said that there was darkness in the palace.
Richard wondered if he was putting things together too easily, things that didn’t really belong together and only sounded like they did because they shared the word “dark.” He wondered if he was letting his imagination get the best of him.
As he marched along beside Zedd, with Nathan leading the way, he glanced down at the book Nathan was holding and remembered the lines in the book that matched what he’d heard that day about there being darkness in the palace, and decided that he wasn’t overreacting.
The corridor they passed through was paneled with mahogany that had mellowed with age to a dark, rich tone. Small paintings of country scenes hung in each of the raised panels along the hall. The limestone floor was covered with carpet runners of deep blue and gold.
Before long they made their way into the connecting service passageways that provided workers with access to the Lord Rahl’s private areas within the palace. The halls were simpler, with plastered, whitewashed walls. In places the hall ran along the outside wall of the palace to their left. Those outside walls were made of tightly fit granite blocks. At regular intervals deep-set windows in the stone wall provided light. They also let in a little of the frigid air each time a gust rattled the panes.
Out those windows Richard saw heavy, dark clouds scudding across the sky, brushing towers in the distance. The greenish gray clouds told him that he was right about the coming storm.
Snowflakes danced and darted in the gusty wind. He was sure that it wouldn’t be long before the Azrith Plain was in the grip of a spring blizzard. They were going to have guests at the palace for a while.
“Down this way,” Nathan said as he gestured through a double set of doors to the right. They led out of the private areas and into the service passageways used by workers and those who lived at the palace.
People in the halls, workers of every sort, moved to the side as they encountered the procession. Everyone, it seemed, gave Richard and the two wizards with him worried looks. No doubt the word of the trouble had already been to every corner of the vast palace and back three times over. Everyone would know about it.
By the looks on the somber faces he saw, people were no longer in a celebratory mood. Someone had tried to kill the Mother Confessor, Lord Rahl’s wife. Everyone loved Kahlan.
Well, he thought, not everyone.
But most people sincerely cared about her. They would be horrified by what had happened.
Now that peace had returned, people had come to feel an expectant joy about what the future might hold. There was a growing sense of optimism. It seemed like everything was possible and that better days were ahead.
This new fixation on prophecy threatened to destroy all that. It had already ended the lives of two children.
Richard recalled Zedd’s words that there was nothing as dangerous as peacetime. He hoped his grandfather was wrong.
CHAPTER 12
Richard and Zedd followed Nathan into a narrow hallway lit by a window at the end. It led them through a section of quarters where many of the palace staff lived. With its whitewashed, plastered walls and a wood plank floor that had been worn down from a millennium of traffic, the passageway was simpler than even the service hallways. Most doors, though, were decorated with painted flowers, or country scenes, or colorful designs, giving each place an individual, homey feel.
“Here,” Nathan said as he touched a door with a stylized sun painted on it. When Richard nodded, Nathan knocked.
No answer came in response. Nathan knocked harder. When that, too, received no answer he banged the side of his fist against the door.
“Lauretta, it’s Nathan. Please open the door?” He banged his fist on the door again. “I told Lord Rahl what you said, that you have a message for him. I brought him along. He wants to see you.”
The door opened a crack, just wide enough for one eye to peer out into the hallway. When she saw the three of them waiting she immediately opened the door all the way.
“Lord Rahl! You came!” She grinned as she licked her tongue out between missing front teeth.
Layers of clothes covered her short, heavyset form. From what Richard could see, she was wearing at least three sweaters over her dark blue dress. The buttons on the dingy, off-white sweater on the bottom strained to cover her girth. Over that sweater she had on a faded red sweater and a checkered flannel shirt with sleeves that were too long for her.
She pulled up a sleeve and then pushed stringy strands of sandy-colored hair back off her face. “Please, won’t you all come in?”
She waddled back into the dark depths of her home, grinning— giddy, apparently— to have company come to visit.
As strange as Lauretta was, it was her home that was strangest of all. In order to enter, since he was taller than she was, Richard had to hold aside yarn objects hanging just inside the door. Each of the dozens of yarn contraptions was different, but all of them had been constructed in roughly the same manner. Yarn of various colors had been wound around crossed sticks into designs that resembled spiderwebs. He couldn’t imagine what they were for. By no stretch of the imagination could they be considered attractive, so he didn’t think they were intended to be decorative.
When Zedd saw him frowning at them he leaned close to speak confidentially. “Meant to keep evil spirits from her door.”
Richard didn’t comment on the likelihood of evil spirits who had managed to make it this far on a journey from the dark depths of the underworld being stopped cold by sticks and yarn.
To each side of the entrance, papers, books, and boxes were stacked nearly to the ceiling. There was a tunnel of sorts going back through the mess into the interior of her home. Lauretta just fit down the narrow aisle. It reminded him of a mole trundling down into its burrow. The rest of them followed in single file to reach a hollowed-out area in the main room where there was space for a small table and two chairs. A window not far away, visible through a narrow gap in the teetering piles, provided gloomy light.
A counter behind the table was stacked high with papers. The whole place looked like nothing so much as a lair carved into a midden heap. It smelled nearly as bad.
“Tea?” Lauretta asked back over her shoulder.
“No thank you,” Richard said. “I heard that you wanted to speak with me about something.”
Zedd held up a hand. “I wouldn’t mind some tea.”
“And some sweet crackers to go with it?” she asked, hopefully.
Zedd returned the grin in kind. “That would be nice.”
Nathan rolled his eyes. Richard shot his grandfather a look. Lauretta rooted behind a sloppy pile of papers.
While Zedd sat at the table, waiting to be served, Lauretta retrieved a pot from an iron stand on a counter to the side. The pot was kept warm by a candle beneath the iron stand. The stand was surrounded by disorderly stacks of papers. Richard was alarmed to see fire being used.
“Lauretta,” he said, trying to sound helpful. “It’s dangerous to have fire in here.”
She looked up from pouring Zedd’s tea. “Yes, I know. I’m very careful.”
“I’m sure you are, but it’s still very—”
“I have to be careful with my predictions.”
