He turned back to stare at her. “What difference? How can you ask such a thing? I made you as good as my queen. You asked me to trust you and allow you to go off to eliminate Lord Rahl. I wished you to remain here but instead I let you go. I trusted you.”
“So you say. If you really trusted me then you would trust me, not interrogate me. It would seem that you have difficulty understanding the concept represented by the word.”
“That was a year and a half ago. I haven’t seen you since. I’ve had no word.”
“You saw me with Tovi.”
He nodded. “I saw a lot of things through Tovi’s eyes—through the eyes of all four of these women.”
“They thought they were clever enough to use the bond to the Lord Rahl.” Nicci smiled slightly. “But you were watching them the whole time. You knew everything.”
He smiled with her. “You always were smarter than Ulicia and the rest of them.” He arched an eyebrow. “I trusted you when you said that you were going off to kill Richard Rahl. Instead, you end up having no trouble making the bond work for you. How is that possible, darlin? Such a bond would only work if you were devoted to him. Would you like to explain it to me?”
Nicci folded her arms. “I fail to see how it could be at all difficult to grasp. You destroy; he creates. You offer an existence devoted to death; he offers life. They aren’t empty words—from either of you. He never beat me bloody, or raped me.”
Jagang’s face, and his shaved head, went scarlet with rage. “Rape? If I wanted to rape you I would—and by right—but it isn’t rape. You wanted it. You’re just too stubborn to admit it. You hide your lustful desires for me behind feigned outrage.”
Nicci’s arms slipped to her sides as she leaned toward him as she spoke through rage of her own. “You can invent things to justify your actions all you want, but that does not make them true.”
With a murderous expression twisting his features, he turned away from the sight of her. Nicci fully expected him to suddenly round on her and hit her hard enough to break her skull. She wanted him to. A quick end was far preferable to drawn-out torture on the way to a slow death.
The myriad strident sounds from out in the night all around were muted by the thickly padded tent walls. To be out of the constant din of the camp was a luxury. Outside, the ground crawled with vermin. Inside the emperor’s tent there were slaves who constantly plucked up the roaches. The scented oils in the tent also covered some of the stench that hung thick in the air.
In a certain sense the emperor’s tent might seem to be a peaceful refuge, but it wasn’t. It was actually one of the most dangerous places in the entire camp. The emperor held absolute power of life and death. No matter what Jagang chose to do, he would never be questioned or challenged.
“So,” Jagang finally said, his back still to her, “answer my question. Do you love him?”
Nicci wiped a weary hand over her brow. “Since when have you cared what my feelings were? It’s never interfered with your ability to rape me.”
“Why this nonsense about rape all of a sudden!” he roared as he took a long stride back toward her. “You know that I have feelings for you! And I know that you have feelings for me!”
Nicci didn’t bother to answer. He was right in that she had never presented such objections to him before. She hadn’t known how to object. In that past she hadn’t believed that her life was her own. How could she object to the Order using her to their ends? Further, how could she object to the leader of the Order using her to his ends?
Because of Richard she had come to grasp that her life was her own. That meant that her body, too, was her own and she didn’t have to give it to anyone if she didn’t want to.
“I know what you’re doing, Nicci.” His hands fisted again. “You’re just using him to try to make me jealous. You’re using your womanly ways to get me to throw you on that bed and rip off your clothes—that’s what you’re really after and we both know it! You’re using him as a way to lure me into heated passion for you. It’s really me you want, but you hide your true passions behind protests of rape.”
Nicci coolly appraised his heated expression. “You are getting bad advice from your testicles.”
He drew back a fist. She stood her ground, glaring into the cloudy shapes shifting across the midnight landscape of his eyes.
The hand finally dropped to his side. “I have offered you what I have offered no other—to be as good as my queen, to be above all others. Richard Rahl can offer you nothing. Only I can offer you all that an emperor can offer. Only I can offer you a part in the power that will rule the world.”
Nicci swept an arm around at the royal tent. “Ah, the glamour of embracing evil. All mine if only I will give up my thinking mind and proclaim utter inequity to be a virtue.”
“I offered you the power to rule with me!”
Nicci shot him a cold glare as she let her arm drop. “No, you offered me the duty of being your whore and the chore of killing those who would not bow to your rule.”
“It is the Order’s rule! This war is not about bringing glory to me and you know it! This conflict is in the cause of the Creator—for the salvation of mankind. We bring the true will of the Creator to heathens. We bring the teachings of the Order to those hungering for meaning and purpose in their lives.”
Nicci stood mute. He was right. He might have greatly enjoyed the trappings of power but she knew that he sincerely believed that he was merely the champion of a greater good, a warrior who was serving the Creator’s true wishes by enforcing the Order’s teachings in this life so that mankind could go on to glory in the next.
Nicci knew very well what it was to believe. Jagang believed.
It struck her as almost laughable, though, how the ideology she herself had once advanced now seemed so profoundly foolish. Unlike Jagang, and most people who embraced the Order’s beliefs, Nicci had accepted them because she thought she had to, that it was the only way for her to achieve a moral life. She endured the yoke of servitude to others, all the while hating herself for not being happy about it. The Sisters of the Light had really been no better, offering her only a different flavor of the same selfless call to duty, so she remained in the helpless grip of the Fellowship of Order. As a numb subject of the Order, being used by Jagang was one of the many sacrifices she had believed was necessary in order to be a good and moral person.
And then all that had changed.
How she missed Richard.
“All you are going to bring to mankind is a thousand years of darkness,” she said, weary of arguing the truth to a true believer whose theological construct was based on what the Order preached, not on reality. “All you are going to do is cast the world into a long, dark, savage age.”
He glared at her a moment. “That’s not you talking, Nicci. I know it’s not. You’re just saying those things because Lord Rahl spouts such hate for his fellow man. You are repeating it to make me think you love him.”
“Maybe I do.”
He grinned. “No.” He shook his head. “No, you merely want to use him to twist me around your little finger. That’s the way of women—trying to maneuver and exploit men.”
Rather than letting him take her down the path of what her true feelings for Richard might be, Nicci changed the subject.
“Your plans of rule, your plans for the Order to bring its ideas to all the world, are not going to work. You need all three boxes of Orden. I was there when Sister Tovi died. She had the third box but it was stolen from her.”
“Ah yes, the brave Seeker, wielding the sword of truth”—he parodied a sword thrust—“stepping in to liberate the box of Orden from a wicked Sister of the Dark.” He gave her a sour look. “I was there, watching through her eyes, after all.”
He had been watching Nicci through Tovi’s eyes as well.
“The fact remains that the Sisters had all three boxes. You may now have those Sisters, but you only have two boxes.”
A sly smile replaced his annoyance. “Oh,
I don’t think that’s going to be as much of a problem as you think. Nor will it matter that you placed that box in play. I have ways around such petty difficulties.”
Nicci was somewhat alarmed to learn that he knew that she had put the box in play, but she tried not to let on.
“What ways?”
The smile only widened. “What kind of emperor would I be if I didn’t have plans for every eventuality? Don’t you worry, darlin, I have everything well in hand. All that matters is that in the end I will see to it that all three boxes are reunited. When they are once again together then I will at last use the power of Orden to end all resistance to the Order’s rule.”
“If you survive that long.”
His annoyance returned as he studied her blank expression. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She gestured into the distance. “Richard Rahl has loosed the wolves on your beloved flock.”
“Meaning?”
She arched an eyebrow. “The army you chased up here is gone. You weren’t able to destroy it, were you? Guess where that army is, now.”
“Scattered in fear for their lives.”
Nicci smiled at his scowl. “Not exactly. The D’Haran army has been charged with taking the war to those in the Old World who support that war, to those who gave birth to aggression with their teachings and set it upon the innocent. Those people are going to have to face the consequences of sending surrogate murderers north. They, no less than you, have the blood of innocent people on their hands. They think that distance sanitizes them, but being far removed from the evil they directly bring about will not absolve them of their crimes. They will pay the price.”
“I am aware of Lord Rahl’s latest sins.” The muscles in Jagang’s jaw flexed as he gritted his teeth. “Richard Rahl is a coward who goes after innocent women and children because he cannot bear to face real men.”
“That would be the worst kind of willful ignorance if you actually believed it, but you don’t. You want others to believe it, so you pluck carefully selected half-truths out of the context of reality in order to cloak your cause in pseudomorality. You seek to craft an excuse for the inexcusable. In a manner of speaking you hide behind women’s skirts as you shoot arrows so that when arrows come back at you, you can feign outrage at an atrocity.
“Your true purpose, though, is to strip the absolute right of self-defense from those you wish to destroy.
“Richard is a man who understands the reality of the threat represented by the beliefs of the Order. He is not sidetracked by rigged issues meant to obscure the truth. He understands that to survive he must be strong enough to eliminate the threat, no matter what form it takes—even if it is to destroy the fields that grow the food that gives your men the strength to slit the throats of people peacefully living their own lives. Anyone defending those fields is a party to murder.
“Richard knows the simple truth that without victory there is no survival for his people.”
“Those people bring suffering on themselves by resisting the righteous teachings of the Order,” Jagang said.
The muscles in his arms tightened along with his fists as he paced, looking on the verge of violence. He didn’t like it when anyone disputed his assertions, so he rounded on Nicci and repeated them more forcefully, as if his raised voice, and the threat in it, would settle the matter.
“Richard Rahl proves his depravity, and the immorality of those he leads, by sending his men off to kill the innocent women and children of the Old World instead of standing and fighting our soldiers. His atrocities against women and children prove what a cowardly criminal he really is. We have an obligation to rid the world of such sinful people.”
Nicci folded her arms as she fixed him in the kind of glare once reserved for those who would not bow to the will of the Order. It was a look that had frequently preceded actions that had earned her the title Death’s Mistress. It was a look that gave even the emperor pause.
“All the people of the New World are innocent,” she said. “They did not bring war to the Order, the Order brought war to them. It’s true that people in the Old World—including children—will be hurt or killed in the fighting. What choice is there for these people? Continue to be slaughtered and enslaved out of fear of harming someone innocent? They are all innocent. Their children are all innocent. They are being harmed, now.
“You know from being in the mind of Sister Ulicia the tactic she thought would deliver her the safety of the bond to Richard and protect her mind from you. Sister Ulicia knew that life is Richard’s highest value, so she hatched the scheme that when she used the power of Orden to free the Keeper of the underworld from his prison in the world of the dead, she would grant Richard Rahl eternal life. That Richard wouldn’t believe such a bargain was possible, much less accept it, was irrelevant in Ulicia’s mind. She thought that until the offer was made and refused, her intentions to grant him eternal life gave her immunity from your ability as a dream walker.
“But you were already secretly embedded in Ulicia’s mind. That’s how you learned what matters most to Richard, his greatest value: life.
“That’s a foreign concept to you. Life is not a value to the Order. They teach that our lives are a meaningless transitory state on our way to an eternal afterlife. They believe that this life is a mere vessel, a shell, to hold our soul until it can reach a higher plane of existence. The Order teaches that glory in the afterlife is our greatest value, and that that glory is earned through the sacrifice of this life to their cause. The Order, therefore, values death.
“You see those who value life as weak, inferior. You can’t understand what life, all life, means to someone like Richard, but you do know how to use what you learned.
“You use that value to try to intimidate Richard from facing the larger challenge of defending all of life. By advancing the propaganda that he is a killer of women and children you believe that you can cow his courage, shame him out of attacking for fear that civilians might be killed, and thus limit him to defending himself.
“As an experienced warrior you are well aware that wars are not won defensively. Without the total commitment of the force necessary to crush the vicious beliefs of an aggressor, you can never hope to win a war because those beliefs are what bring about war in the first place.
“Richard also knows that wars are not won defensively, that to end war as quickly as possible and with the smallest possible loss of life, the only way is to stop the aggressor’s ability to harm you and crush their devotion to beliefs that caused them to attack in the first place.
“Your aim, with such sensationalized charges against a man who so values life, is to discredit, dishonor, and disgrace him into fearing to act as he must if he is to win.
“You create a diversion with half-truths in order to turn all eyes away from the real implications of your beliefs and to win converts to the Order’s twisted ideology. You accuse others of the things you are actually guilty of, knowing that it will stir emotions.
“But in the end, such dramatic charges are merely a cover—an attempt to latch onto an excuse to legitimize your routine killing of unimaginable numbers of people.
“You and I both know the truth of the endless corpses of women and children the Order leaves in its wake, but those are ignored in your contrived moral outrage. Your brutality, savagery, and cruelty against those who have done nothing to the people in the Old World frame the true nature of your beliefs. The enormity of your depravity is only compounded by blaming the victim with the crimes you bring to his people, the same as you blame me for my own rape.
“I was there the day Richard gave those troops their orders. I know the truth.
“The truth is that the minds of most people of the Old World have been irrevocably blackened by their fanatical devotion to ideas that result only in suffering and death. Those people are beyond redemption by reason. Richard knows that the only way to deal with evil, to break a people’s bond to it, is to make holding on to such beliefs une
ndurable.
“The Order itself has made this a war to the end. Richard knows that his people cannot survive by trying to coexist with such evil, or by excusing those who nurture it.
“The Order seeks to exterminate liberty. The knife that the Order is trying to thrust into his heart is driven by devotion to the corrupt beliefs of the Order. Richard understands that he must eliminate the source of those beliefs or freethinking people everywhere will all die, murdered by men encouraged and fed by the people of the Old World.
“War is a terrible business. The faster it is ended the less suffering and death there will be. That is Richard’s goal. The weak-minded would shrink from what must be done for fear of being criticized by the wicked. Richard is not going to be deterred by the words of hypocrites and haters.
“The truth is that his orders were that, whenever possible, his soldiers should avoid harming people, but ending the war is their overriding objective. To do that, they must destroy the Order’s ability to wage war. As soldiers, that is the responsibility Richard Rahl charged them with—they are defending their people’s right to exist. He told them that anything else is just whistling on the way to their graves.
“This war is merely an extension of the great war that raged so long ago, but never really ended. The Old World again has fallen prey to the evil ideas of the Order. How many lives have been wasted because of those beliefs? How many yet will be?
“The last time, those defending against such teachings did not have the courage to crush them into cold, lifeless ashes and as a result this ancient war has once again rekindled at the hands of the Fellowship of Order. Just as back then, it is sparked by those same mindless ideas that everyone must believe the same as they do or die.
“Richard understands that this time it must be ended once and for all, that the world of life must be liberated from the poison of the Order. He has the courage to do just that. He will not be dissuaded by your taunts. He doesn’t care what other people think of him. He only cares that they can’t again harm him and those he cares about.