Soul of the Fire

  He glared at the entire line. “Keep that in mind. Keep in mind, too, that the sergeant has a responsibility to live up to her rank. If she fails in that, I expect you to report it when I come back for you when it’s your turn to be relieved.”

  “Supply wagons will be coming once every two weeks. Keep your supplies orderly and mind how long they must last.

  “Your primary duty is to tend the Dominie Dirtch. In that, you are the defense of our beloved land of Anderith. From up on the watch station of the Dominie Dirtch, you will be able to see the next Dominie Dirtch to each side. They extend along the entire border to guard the frontier. The squads on duty are not changed at the same time, so experienced soldiers are always to each side.

  “Sergeant Beata, it will be your responsibility, once your squad is trained and we depart, to see to it your soldiers are on duty at your Dominie Dirtch, and then to go meet with the squads to each side to coordinate with them all matters of defense.”

  Beata saluted with a hand to her brow. “Yes, Captain.”

  He smiled. “I’m proud of you all. You all are good Anderith soldiers, and I know you will do your duty.”

  Behind her towered the terrible Haken weapon of murder. Now, she was to be in charge of it in order to do good.

  Beata felt a lump in her throat. For the first time in her life, she knew she was doing good. She was living her dream, and it was good.

  44

  The burly soldier gave her the side of his boot on her rump. She had tried to hurry out of his way as soon as he kicked, but she wasn’t fast enough. She pressed her lips tight against the sting of it.

  If only the power of the gift worked, she would have done him a turn. She considered using her cane, but, keeping in mind her business, thought better of dispensing justice just then, no matter how sorely it was needed.

  Rattling her three copper coins in her tin cup, Annalina Aldurren, former Prelate of the Sisters of the Light, the most powerful women in the Old World for over three-quarters of a millennium, moved on to beg from the soldiers gathered round the next fire.

  Like most soldiers, the next bunch she came upon as she moved through the camp showed interest when she first approached, thinking she might be a whore, but their ardor for female companionship quickly faded when she came into the ring of firelight and gave them a big gap-toothed grin—or the illusion of one, anyway, with the aid of some greasy soot on a few selected teeth.

  It was quite convincing, actually, along with the rags she had layered over her dress, the dung-soaked head wrap—lest anyone decide they could overlook the craggy smile—and the walking cane. The cane was the worst; affecting a bad back was giving her one.

  Twice, soldiers got it in their heads they could disregard her shortcomings in view of the scarcity of women. While they were handsome enough, in that savage brute sort of a way, she had to politely decline their offers. Rejecting such insistent invitations had been messy. Fortunately, what with all the commotion of camp life, no one noticed a man dying of a suddenly slit throat. Such a death among men like those of the Imperial Order would not even be questioned.

  Taking a life was something Ann did only with great reluctance. Given the mission of these soldiers, and the use to which they would have put her before killing her, her reluctance was surmountable.

  Like the soldiers gathered around the next fire as they ate and told stories, none thought anything of her wandering among them. Most gave her a look-see, but quickly went back to their stew and coarse camp bread washed down with ale and bawdy stories. A beggar elicited little more than a grunt intended to keep them moving along.

  With an army this size, there was an entire culture of camp followers. Tradesmen traveled with their own wagons, or shared one with others. They followed in the wake of the army, offering a wide variety of services not provided by the Imperial Order. Ann had even seen an artist busy at drawing portraits of proud officers on a historic campaign. Like any artist wishing to have steady employment and the use of all his fingers, he used his talents to the customers’ best advantage, putting them in triumphant poses, showing them with knowing eyes and handsome smiles—or all-conquering glowers, depending on the men’s preference.

  Peddlers sold everything from meats and vegetables to rare fruits from back home—Ann herself hungered for such succulent reminders of the Old World. Business was brisk in amulets for good luck. If a soldier didn’t like the food provided by the Imperial Order, and he had money, there were people to make him nearly anything he desired. Like a cloud of gnats, gamblers, hucksters, harlots, and beggars buzzed around the huge army.

  In the guise of a beggar, Ann was easily able to negotiate the Order’s camp, searching as she would. It cost her only an occasional boot to the behind. Searching an army the size of this one was quite an undertaking, though. She had been at it nearly a week. She was bone weary and growing impatient.

  In that week she could have managed to live reasonably well from what she gathered under her cover of begging—as long as she didn’t mind eating maggot-infested rotting meat and moldering vegetables. She accepted such offerings graciously, and then discarded them when out of sight. It was a cruel joke by the soldiers, giving her the garbage they had intended to throw out. There were some among the beggars who would salt and pepper it through and then eat it.

  Each day when it got too late to search, she returned to the camp followers and spent a little of her own money to buy humble but somewhat more wholesome food. Everyone thought she earned the meager amount begging. The truth be known, she was not very good at the business of begging, and a business it was. A few of the beggars, feeling sympathy when they saw her act, tried to help her improve her technique.

  Ann endured such distractions lest it be discovered she was more than she presented herself to be. Some of the beggars made a good living at it. It was a mark of their talent that they could coax a coin from men such as these.

  She knew that by cruel fate people were occasionally thrust, against their wishes, into helpless begging. She also knew from hundreds of years of experience trying to give them help that most beggars clung tenaciously to the life.

  Ann trusted no one in the camp, but of all the people there, she trusted beggars least. They were more dangerous than the soldiers. Soldiers were what they were and made no pretense. If they didn’t want you around, they would order you away or give you the boot. Some would simply show her a blade in warning. If they intended you harm, or murder, they made their intent clear.

  Beggars, on the other hand, lived lives of lies. They lied from the time they opened their eyes in the morning until they told the Creator a lie in their bedtime prayers.

  Of all the Creator’s miserable creations, Ann most disliked liars—and those who repeatedly placed their trust and security in the hands of such liars. Liars were Creation’s jackals. Deception to a noble end, though regrettable, was sometimes necessary for a greater good. Lying for selfish reasons was the fertile dirt of immorality, from which sprouted the tendrils of evil.

  Trusting men who demonstrated a proclivity to lie proved you a fool, and such fools were nothing more to the liar than the dust beneath their boots—there to be trod upon.

  Ann knew liars were the Creator’s children, the same as she, and that she was duty bound to view them with patience and forgiveness, but she couldn’t. She simply couldn’t abide liars and that was that. She was resigned to the fact that in the afterlife she would have to take her lumps for it.

  Begging was proving to be time-consuming, so in order to cover as much ground as possible, Ann tried to do as little of it as possible. Every night the camp was jumbled all over again, making it impossible to rely on the merit of previous searches, so she determined to make as much of each foray as possible. Fortunately, because the army was so vast, they did tend to stay in roughly the same order—much like a string of cargo wagons stopping along a road for the night.

  In the mornings it was well over an hour after the leading edge started o
ut before the tail began to move. At night the lead was cooking dinner long before the rear guard halted. They didn’t cover a great deal of ground each day, but their progress was inexorable.

  Beyond their purpose, Ann was disturbed by their direction of travel. The Order had been gathering for quite some time down around Grafan Harbor in the Old World. When they finally began to move, they had streamed up from those shores into the New World, but they turned with the coast, following it west, to where Ann had unexpectedly encountered them.

  Ann was no military tactician, but it struck her immediately as an odd thing for them to do. She had assumed they would attack north into the New World. That they were heading in such a seemingly fruitless direction told her there must be a good reason; Jagang did nothing without reason. While he was ruthless, confident, and bold, he was not rash.

  Jagang was skilled in the fine art of patience.

  The people of the Old World had always been anything but a homogeneous society. Ann had, after all, been observing them for over nine centuries. She considered it charitable to merely say they were diverse, fractious, and intractable. There had been no two areas of the Old World that could agree on up from down.

  In the nearly twenty years she had been watching him, Jagang had methodically consolidated the seemingly ungovernable into a cohesive society. That it was brutal, corrupt, and inequitable was another matter; he had made them one and in so doing forged a force of unprecedented might.

  What the parents might have been—independent and loyal only to their small place in the world—the children were not. A large percentage of the Imperial Order troops and command had been babes or young children when the Order seized power. They had grown up under the rule of Jagang, and as children always did, believed as they were taught by those who led them, adopting the same values and morals.

  The Sisters of the Light, however, served a higher purpose than the affairs of governance. Ann had seen elected governments, kings, and other rulers come and go. The Palace of the Prophets and the Sisters, existing under the ancient spell that dramatically slowed their aging, always remained. While she and her Sisters did work to help bring out mankind’s better nature, their calling was in areas of the gift, not rule.

  But she did keep an eye to rulers, lest they interfere with the Creator’s gift. Jagang, in recently committing himself to the elimination of magic, had overstepped matters of rule. His reign had become material to her. Now, he was moving into the New World, in his efforts to extinguish magic.

  Ann had observed over time that whenever Jagang swallowed a new land or kingdom, he would settle in as he began to infiltrate the next, and the next after that. He would find willing ears and, with tempting promises of juicy slices of the graft to come, woo them into weakening their own defenses in the mask of virtue: peace.

  Some land’s discipline and defenses were so eviscerated from within that they threw out a welcoming carpet for Jagang rather than dare defy him. The foundations of some formerly strong lands became so riddled with the termites of diminished purpose, so decayed with the decadence of smug moderation, and so emaciated with the vacillating aims of appeasers, that even when they saw the enemy coming and did resist, they were easily toppled when the Imperial Order finally pushed.

  With the unexpected direction the Order was taking to the west, Ann was beginning to worry that Jagang had been doing the unimaginable: sending envoys on covert missions sailing around the great barrier—years before Richard destroyed the Towers of Perdition. Such missions would have been incredibly risky. Ann would know; she had done so herself.

  It was possible Jagang had books of prophecy, or wizards with the talent, who gave him reason to believe the barrier would come down. After all, Nathan had told Ann that very thing.

  If so, Jagang was not simply marching off for the purpose of exploration, exploitation, and conquest. From her experience watching him come to dominate the entirety of the Old World, she knew Jagang rarely rolled down a road he hadn’t first had widened and smoothed.

  Ann paused in the darkness between groups of men. She squinted off in several directions. Hard as it was for her to believe, she hadn’t even seen Jagang’s tents yet. She wanted to find them because she hoped they might give her a valuable clue in finding her Sisters of the Light; he likely would keep them near.

  She sighed in exasperation at not seeing anything but more fires and troops. In the darkness and confusion of the Order’s camp, she knew she could be close and still not see Jagang’s tents.

  The worst of it, though, was not having the gift to aid her. With the gift she could easily have listened to distant conversations, cast small spells, and conjured discreet aid. Without the gift, she found the search a frustrating and fruitless experience.

  She could hardly believe she could be this close to the Sisters of the Light and not find them. With the gift, she would have been able to sense them were she close enough.

  Beyond the aid it would have provided, there was more to it. Being unable to use the gift was like being denied the Creator’s love. Her lifetime of devotion to doing the Creator’s work, coupled with the glory of touching her inner magic—her Han, the force of life—had always been supremely gratifying. Not that there hadn’t been frustrations, fears, and failures, but there always was the opening of herself to her Han to make up for every trial.

  For over nine centuries her Han had been her constant companion through life. Her inability to touch her gift had on more than one occasion driven her to the verge of tears.

  She felt little different, for the most part—as long as she didn’t think about it. But when her thoughts turned to touching that inner light, and she couldn’t, it felt like a slow suffocation of the mind.

  As long as she didn’t try to use her gift, it seemed it was still there, waiting, like a comforting friend seen out of the corner of her eye. But when she reached for it, put the weight of thought against it, it felt as if the ground opened and she plummeted into a terrifying black abyss.

  Without her gift, and no longer living under the protection of the spell that had been around the Palace of the Prophets, Ann was no different than anyone else. She was, in reality, little more than a beggar. She was simply an old woman, aging like anyone else, with no more strength than any other old woman. The insights, knowledge, and—she hoped—wisdom of having lived as long as she had were her only advantages.

  Until Zedd banished the chimes, she would be, for the most part, helpless. Until Zedd banished the chimes. If Zedd banished the chimes…

  Ann picked the wrong route—between wagons standing close together—and came to an impasse with someone going the other way. She excused herself and started to back up out of the way. Beggars were obeisant, even though it was insincere.

  “Prelate?”

  Ann froze.

  “Prelate, is that you?”

  Ann looked up into the startled face of Sister Georgia Cifaro. They had known each other for more than five hundred years. The woman’s mouth was working as she tried to find words.

  Ann reached out and patted the hand holding a pail of steaming porridge. Sister Georgia flinched.

  “Sister Georgia, thank the Creator I’ve found one of you, at last.”

  Sister Georgia cautiously reached out and touched Ann’s face, seemingly testing if it were real.

  “You’re dead,” Sister Georgia said. “I was at your funeral ceremony. I saw… you and Nathan… your bodies were sent into the Light on the funeral pyre. I saw it. We prayed all night as we watched you and Nathan burn.”

  “Really? How sweet of you. You always were such a considerate person, Sister Georgia. That would be just like you, standing guard through the darkness, praying for me. I’m so appreciative.

  “But, it wasn’t me.”

  Sister Georgia flinched again. “But, but, Verna was named Prelate.”

  “Yes, I know. I wrote the orders, remember.” The woman nodded. Ann went on. “I had a reason. Nonetheless, I’m quite alive, as yo
u can well see.”

  At last, Sister Georgia set down the bucket and threw her arms around Ann.

  “Oh, Prelate! Oh, Prelate!”

  That was all Sister Georgia could get out before she started bawling like a baby. Ann managed to get her calmed down in short order with some short words. They were in no place to risk being seen in such a way. Their lives were at stake, and Ann couldn’t have them lost for no more reason than a woman weeping out of control.

  “Prelate, what’s wrong with you? You smell like dung, and you look a mess!”

  Ann chuckled. “I didn’t dare allow my beauty to be witnessed by all these men, or I would have more offers of marriage than I could turn down.”

  Sister Georgia laughed, but it dissolved into tears again. “They’re beasts. All of them.”

  Ann comforted her. “I know, Sister Georgia. I know.” She lifted the woman’s chin. “You are a Sister of the Light. Straighten yourself up, now. What is done to this body is not what matters. Our eternal souls are what concerns us. Beasts in this life can do what they will to your body, but they cannot touch your pure soul.

  “Now, act what you are: a Sister of the Light.”

  Sister Georgia smiled through the tears. “Thank you, Prelate. I needed to hear your scolding to remember my calling. Sometimes it’s all too easy to forget.”

  Ann went to her purpose. “Where are the others?”

  Sister Georgia lifted a hand to point off to Ann’s right and a little behind. “Over there.”

  “Are you all together?”

  “No. Prelate, some of the Sisters have sworn themselves to the Nameless one.” She bit her lower lip and wrung her hands. “There are Sisters of the Dark in our order.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “You do? Well, Jagang keeps them elsewhere. The Sisters of the Light are together, but I don’t know where the Sisters of the Dark are, nor do I care to.”

  “Praise the Creator,” Ann said with a sigh. “That was what I was hoping—that there wouldn’t be any of them among you.”