“You don’t have to tell me. I don’t mean it to sound like an order, or anything. I was just wondering, woman to woman. You know so much about me, and I hardly know anything about you, except that you are Mord-Sith.”
“I wasn’t always Mord-Sith,” Cara whispered. Her eyes had lost the menace, and she looked like nothing so much as a frightened little girl. Kahlan could tell that Cara was no longer seeing the empty stone hall.
“I guess that there is no reason not to tell you. As you said, I am not to blame for what was done to me. Others were responsible.
“Every year, in D’Hara, they would select a few girls to be trained as Mord-Sith. It is said that the greatest cruelty is drawn from those with the kindest hearts. Rewards were paid for the names of girls who fit the requirements. I was an only child, one of the requirements, and of the right age. The girl, and her parents, are taken, the parents to be murdered in the training of a Mord-Sith. My parents didn’t know that our names had been sold to the hunters.”
Cara’s face and tone had lost their emotion. She had gone blank, as if she were telling of last year’s beet harvest. But her words, if not her tone, carried more than enough emotion.
“My father and I were out back of the house, butchering chickens. When the hunters came, I had no idea what it meant. My father did. He saw them coming down the hill, through the trees. He surprised them. But there were more than he had seen, or could handle, and he had the advantage for only a few moments.
“He screamed at me, ‘Cari, the knife! Cari, get the knife!’ I snatched it up because he said to. He was holding three of the men. My father was big.
“He screamed again. ‘Cari, stab them! Stab them! Hurry!’”
Cara looked into Kahlan’s eyes. “I just stood there. I hesitated. I didn’t want to stab someone. To hurt someone. I just stood there. I couldn’t even kill the chickens. He did that part.”
Kahlan didn’t know if Cara was going to go on. In the dead silence, she decided that if she didn’t, the questions would end there. Cara looked away from Kahlan’s eyes, staring off into the visions, and then she did go on.
“Someone walked up beside me. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. I looked up, and there was this woman, this beautiful woman, the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, with blue eyes and blond hair in a long braid. The sunlight coming through the leaves danced in little patches across her red leather outfit.
“She smiled down at me as she took the knife out of my hand. Not a pretty smile, but a smile like a snake. That’s what I always called her, in my mind, after that—Snake. When she straightened, she said, ‘Isn’t that sweet. Little Cari doesn’t want to hurt anyone with her knife. That hesitation just made you a Mord-Sith, Cara. It begins.’”
Cara stood rigid, as if turned to stone. “They kept me in a little room, with little grates in the bottom of the door. I couldn’t get out. But the rats could get in. At night, when I finally could stay awake no longer, and fell asleep, the rats would sneak into my empty little room and bite my fingertips, and my toes.
“Snake beat me nearly to death for blocking the grate. Rats like blood. It excites them.
“I learned to sleep in a ball, with my hands in fists and tucked in against my belly, where they couldn’t get at my fingers. But they could usually get at my toes. I tried taking my shirt off and wrapping it around my bare feet, but then if I didn’t sleep on my stomach, they would bite my nipples. Laying bare-chested on the cold stone, with my hands under my stomach, was a torture in itself, but it usually kept me awake longer. If the rats couldn’t get at my toes, they would bite me somewhere else—my ears, or nose, or legs—until I woke with a start and scared them away.
“In the night, I could hear the other girls cry out when a rat bit them awake. I could always hear one of them weeping in the night, calling for her mother. Sometimes, I realized it was my own voice I heard.
“Sometimes, I would wake when rats scratched my face with their little claws, their whiskers brushing my cheeks as their cold little noses pressed against my lips, sniffing for a crumb. I thought to stop eating what they brought me, and left the bowl of gruel and slab of bread on the floor, hoping the rats would eat my dinner and leave me alone.
“It didn’t work. The food only brought hordes of rats, and then, when it was gone… . I always ate every scrap of dinner, after that, when Snake brought it.
“Sometimes she would taunt me when she brought my dinner. She would say, ‘Don’t hesitate, Cara, or the rats will get your dinner.’ I knew what she meant by saying, ‘Don’t hesitate.’ It was her way of reminding me what my hesitation had cost me and my parents. When they tortured my mother to death in front of me, Snake said, ‘See what happens, Cara, because you hesitated? Because you were too timid?’
“We were taught that Darken Rahl was ‘Father Rahl.’ We had no father but he. At my third breaking, when they told me to torture my real father to death, Snake told me not to hesitate. I didn’t. My father begged for mercy. ‘Cari, please,’ he wept. ‘Cari, spare yourself becoming what they want.’ But I never hesitated. After that, my only father was Father Rahl.”
Cara brought her Agiel up and stared at it as she rolled it in her fingers. “I earned my Agiel for that. The very same Agiel they trained me with. I earned the appellation Mord-Sith.”
Cara looked back into Kahlan’s eyes, as if from a great distance, not merely the two steps that separated them. From the other side of madness. A madness others had put there. Kahlan felt as if she, too, was turned to stone by what she saw in the depths of those blue eyes.
“I have been Snake. I have stood in the dappled sunlight, over young girls, and taken the knife from their hands when they hesitated, not wanting to hurt anyone.”
Kahlan had always hated snakes. She hated them more now.
Tears tickled her face as they ran down her cheeks leaving wet tracks. “I’m sorry, Cara,” she whispered. Her stomach roiled. She wanted nothing more than to put her arms around the woman in red leather before her, but she couldn’t make herself move so much as a finger.
Torches hissed. In the distance, she heard muffled snippets of conversation from the guards. A soft ripple of laughter floated up the hall. Water weeping from the stone ceiling echoed as it splashed in a little green puddle not far away. Kahlan could hear her own heart pounding in her ears.
“Lord Rahl freed us from that.”
Kahlan remembered Richard telling her that he had almost wept at the sight of the other two Mord-Sith giggling like little girls as they fed seeds to chipmunks. Kahlan understood the leap that was a simple giggle. Richard understood the madness. Kahlan didn’t know if these women could ever return from it, but if they were to have a chance, it was only because of Richard.
The iron returned to Cara’s grim expression. “Let’s go find out how Marlin planned to harm Lord Rahl. But don’t expect me to be gentle if he hesitates in confessing every detail.”
Under Sergeant Collins’s watchful eye, a D’Haran soldier unlocked the iron door and backed away, as if the rusty lock was the only thing protecting everyone in the palace from the sinister magic below, in the pit. Two more big soldiers effortlessly dragged the heavy ladder closer.
Before Kahlan could pull open the door, she heard approaching voices and footsteps. Everyone turned to look up the hall.
It was Nadine, with four soldiers escorting her.
Nadine rubbed her hands together, as if to warm them, as she stepped through the ring of hulking, leather-clad guards.
Kahlan didn’t return the woman’s bright smile.
“What are you doing down here?”
“Well, you said I was a guest. As pretty as your rooms are, I wanted to go for a walk. I asked the guards to show me the way down here. I want to see this killer.”
“I told you to wait upstairs in your room. I told you that I didn’t want you coming down here.”
Nadine’s dainty brow drew together. “I’m getting just a little tired of being treate
d like a backwater bumpkin.” She lifted her delicate nose. “I’m a healer. I’m respected, where I come from. People listen when I speak. When I tell someone to do something, they do it. If I tell a councilman to take a potion three times a day and to stay in bed, he very well drinks his medicine three times a day from his bed until I tell him he can leave it.”
“I don’t care who jumps when you speak,” Kahlan said. “Here, you jump when I speak. Do you understand?”
Nadine pressed her lips together as she planted her fists on her hips. “Now, you look here. I’ve been cold and hungry and scared. I’ve been played for a fool by people I don’t even know. I was minding my own business, going about my life, when I was sent on this pointless journey, only to arrive at a place where people treat me like a leper as my thanks for coming to help. I’ve been yelled at by people I don’t know and humiliated by a boy I grew up with.
“I thought I was going to marry the man I wanted, but I had that rug yanked out from under my feet. He doesn’t want me, he wants you. Well, so be it. Now someone is trying to kill the man I traveled all this way to see, and you tell me it isn’t any of my business!”
She shook a finger at Kahlan. “Richard Cypher saved me from Tommy Lancaster laying claim to me. If it wasn’t for Richard, I’d be married to Tommy, now. Instead, Tommy had to marry Rita Wellington. If it wasn’t for Richard, I’d be the one with black eyes all the time. I’d be barefoot back at his shack and pregnant with the offspring of that pig-faced bully.
“Tommy ridiculed me for fixing herbs to help people. He said it was stupid for a girl to mix herbs. He said my father should have had a boy, if he wanted someone to work in his shop touching herbs that sick people needed. I’d never have any hope of being a healer if it wasn’t for Richard.
“Just because I’m not the one to be his wife, that doesn’t mean that I don’t care about him. I grew up with him. He’s still a boy from my home. We take care of our own, like they’re family, even if they aren’t. I’ve a right to know what danger he’s in! I’ve a right to see what sort of man from your world would want to kill a boy from my home who’s helped me!”
Kahlan was in no mood to argue. She was also in no mood to spare the woman what she might see.
She studied Nadine’s brown eyes, trying to tell if what Cara had said, that Nadine still wanted Richard, was true. If it was, Kahlan couldn’t tell simply by looking into her eyes.
“You want to see a man who wants to kill us, Richard and me?” Kahlan gripped the lever and threw open the door. “Fine. You shall have your wish.”
She gestured to the men with the ladder. They pushed it through the opening and down into the darkness until it thudded in place. Kahlan yanked a torch from a bracket and thrust it in Cara’s hand.
“Let’s show Nadine what she wishes to see.”
Cara checked Kahlan’s resolve, found it rock solid, and then started down the ladder.
Kahlan held her arm out in invitation. “Welcome to my world, Nadine. Welcome to Richard’s world.”
Nadine’s determination faltered for only an instant before she huffed and started down the ladder after Cara.
Kahlan glanced around at the guards. “Sergeant Collins, if he comes up through this door before us, he had better not get out of this hall alive. He wants to kill Richard.”
“On my word as a D’Haran soldier, Mother Confessor, harm won’t get a glimpse of Lord Rahl.”
With a hand signal from Sergeant Collins, soldiers drew steel. Archers nocked arrows. Big hands unhooked crescent-bladed axes from weapons belts.
Kahlan gave the sergeant a nod of approval, took another torch, and started down the ladder.
9
Dank, heavy air wafted up from the pit as Kahlan followed Nadine down the ladder. Using the hand with the torch to also hold the side of the ladder made her have to endure the heat of the flame near the side of her face, but she was almost happy for the smell of pitch because it covered the stink of the air in the pit. Lower down, the wavering light from the torches lit more than the stone walls; they lit the dark figure in the center of the room.
Kahlan stepped off the ladder as Cara rammed her torch into a bracket on the slime-covered wall. Kahlan slipped hers into one on the opposite wall. Nadine stood transfixed, looking at the man covered in dried blood hunched before them. Kahlan stepped past her to stand beside Cara.
Cara’s brow drew down as she peered at Marlin.
His head hung forward, and his eyes were closed. His breathing was deep, slow, and even.
“He’s asleep,” Cara whispered.
“Asleep?” Kahlan whispered back. “How can he be asleep while he’s standing up like that?”
“I… don’t know. We always make new prisoners stand, sometimes for days. With no one to talk to and nothing to do but consider their doom, it drains their resolve—takes the fight right out of them. It’s an insidious form of torment. I have had men beg to be beaten, rather than have to stand, alone, hour after hour.”
Marlin was snoring softly. “How often does this happen—that they simply fall asleep?”
Cara put one hand on a hip as she wiped her mouth with the other. “I’ve had them fall asleep, but that wakes them for sure. If they move from the spot where we’ve told them to stand, the link brings on the pain. We don’t have to be there; the link works no matter where we are. I have never even heard of a man falling asleep and remaining on his feet.”
Kahlan looked over her shoulder, past Nadine, and up the long ladder to the light coming through the doorway. She could see the tops of soldiers’ heads, but none were so bold as to stare down into the pit, where there were apt to be deeds of magic.
Nadine stuck her head between them. “Maybe it’s a spell. Magic, of some sort.”
She straightened, pulling her head back, when she received only glares in answer.
More out of curiosity than an attempt to wake him, Cara lightly jabbed Marlin’s shoulder. She pushed her finger into his chest, and his stomach.
“Hard as a rock. His muscles are all locked rigid.”
“That must be how he’s able to stand there like that. Maybe it’s some sort of trick he learned as a wizard.”
Cara didn’t seem convinced. With a twitch of her hand so slight Kahlan almost missed it, Cara spun her Agiel up into her fist. The pain Kahlan knew it caused her to hold her Agiel didn’t show on her face. It never did.
Kahlan snatched Cara’s wrist. “You don’t need to do that. Just wake him. And don’t use your link with his mind, his magic, to give him pain, unless it’s absolutely necessary. Unless I tell you so.”
Displeasure registered on Cara’s face. “I think it’s necessary. I can’t have this. I can’t hesitate to exert my control.”
“Cara, there is a great gulf between prudence and hesitation. This whole thing with Marlin has been more than odd from the first. Let’s just take it one step at a time. You’ve said that you have control over him; let’s not be impetuous. You do have control, don’t you?”
A slow smile spread on Cara’s lips. “Oh, I have control, no doubt of that. But if you insist, I will wake him the way we sometimes wake our pets, then.”
Cara bent forward at the waist, slipped her left arm around his neck, tilted her head, and gently gave Marlin a long kiss on the mouth. Kahlan felt her face go red. She knew that Denna sometimes awakened Richard like that, before torturing him again.
With a satisfied smirk, Cara drew back.
Like a cat coming awake from a nap, Marlin’s lids slid open.
His eyes had that quality in them again—that quality that made Kahlan’s very soul want to shrink back.
This time, she saw more than she had before. These eyes were not merely those of great age. These were eyes unvisited by fear.
As he regarded the three of them with slow, unflinching, calculating deliberation, he bent his fisted hands back at the wrists and arched his back in a feline stretch.
A depraved grin spread onto his face, a ta
int of wickedness expanding like blood seeping through white linen.
“So. My two darlins have returned.” His disquieting eyes seemed to see more than they should, to know more than they should. “And they’ve brought a new bitch with ‘em.”
Marlin’s voice had been almost boyish, before. Now, it was deep and gravelly, as if coming from a muscled man weighing twice as much—a voice steeped with unquestioned power and authority. It exuded invincibility. Kahlan had never heard such a dangerous voice.
She retreated a step, clutching Cara’s arm and pulling her back with her.
Though Marlin didn’t move, she felt the coiling of menace.
“Cara”—Kahlan put a hand behind, forcing Nadine back as she withdrew another step—“Cara, tell me you’ve got him. Tell me you have control.”
Cara was staring, mouth agape, at Marlin. “What…?”
She abruptly unleashed a powerful strike. Her armored fist only snapped his head a few inches to the side. It should have taken him from his feet.
Marlin regarded her with a bloody smile. He spit out broken teeth.
“Nice try, darlin,” Marlin said in a rough voice. “But I’ve got control of your link with Marlin.”
Cara rammed her Agiel in his gut. His body flinched with the jolt, his arms flopping ineffectually. His eyes, though, never lost the deadly look. The smile didn’t falter as he watched her.
Cara took two steps back on her own.
“What’s going on?” Nadine whispered. “What’s wrong? I thought you said he was helpless.”
“Get out,” Cara whispered urgently to Kahlan. “Now.” She glanced up the ladder. “I’ll hold him off. Lock the door.”
“Wanting to leave?” Marlin asked in the grating voice as they moved toward the ladder. “So soon? And before we’ve had a little talk. I’ve enjoyed listening to the talks you two have had. I’ve learned so much. I never knew about Mord-Sith. But I do, now.”
Kahlan halted. “What are you talking about?”
His predatory gaze moved from Cara to Kahlan. “I learned of your touching love for Richard Rahl. It was so thoughtful of you to reveal the limits of his gift. I suspected much of it, but you confirmed the extent. You also confirmed my suspicion that he would be able to recognize another with the gift, and that it would raise his suspicions. Even you were able to see something wrong in Marlin’s eyes.”