Soul of the Fire

  “That’s not yours,” the woman said. “Give it here before you boys get hurt.”

  Morley didn’t like being called a boy anymore, at least not by some lone woman. Fitch could see his powerful muscles tense.

  The woman put her fists on her hips. For a woman by herself with the two of them more than her match, she had a lot of nerve. Fitch didn’t think he’d seen many women who could scowl as good as she could, but he wasn’t really afraid. He was a man on his own, now, and he didn’t have to answer to no one.

  Fitch remembered how helpless Claudine Winthrop had been. He remembered how easy it was to hold her helpless. This was a woman, just like Claudine, no more.

  “What are you two doing in here?” she asked.

  “I guess we could ask you the same,” Morley said.

  She glared at him and then held her hand out to Fitch. “That doesn’t belong to you.” She waggled her fingers. “Hand it over before I lose my temper and I end up hurting you.”

  At the same instant, Fitch and Morley bolted in opposite directions. The woman went for Fitch. Fitch tossed the sword to Morley. Morley, laughing, caught the sword, waving it at the woman, teasing her with it.

  Fitch cut around her back and headed toward the door. She lunged for Morley. He tossed the sword over her head and outstretched arms.

  The three of them raced across the sunken floor in the center of the room. She dove for Fitch and caught his leg, tripping him. As he went down, he heaved the sword to Morley.

  She was up and running before Fitch could roll to his feet. Morley shouldered one of the white marble columns, toppling it across the red carpet before her. The bowl atop the column crashed to the floor, shattering into a thousand shards that skittered across the marble and carpet with a soft chiming, almost musical, tinkling sound.

  “You two don’t have any idea what you’re doing!” she yelled. “Stop it at once! That isn’t yours! This is no child’s game! You’ve no right to touch anything in this place! You could be causing great harm! Stop it! Lives are at stake!”

  She and Morley danced around the opposite sides of another column. When she lunged for him, he shoved the column toward her. She cried out when the heavy gold vase atop the column tumbled and hit her shoulder. Fitch didn’t know if it was pain or rage that caused her to shout.

  The three of them serpentined around the columns on both sides of the red carpet, heading ever closer to the door. Fitch and Morley tossed the sword back and forth between them, keeping her off guard. Fitch pushed over one of the columns to slow her and was shocked at how heavy it was. The way Morley shoved them over Fitch had thought they would be easy to topple; they weren’t, so he didn’t try another.

  She was yelling at them to stop destroying the priceless things of magic, but when Morley toppled the one with the inky black bottle atop it, she screamed. The column crashed down. The bottle tumbled through the air.

  She dove across the floor, her long blond braid flying out behind as she hit and slid. The bottle bounced through her hands, flipping up, then hit the carpet and rolled, but it didn’t break.

  By the look on her face, Fitch would have thought it was her own life that was just spared by the bottle not breaking.

  She scrambled to her feet and charged for them as they went through the door. Outside, Morley, chuckling, tossed the sword to Fitch as they ran along the edge of the rampart.

  “You boys have no idea what is at stake. I need that sword. This is important. It doesn’t belong to you. Give it to me, please, and I will let you go.”

  Morley had that look in his eye, the look like he wanted to hurt her. Hurt her bad. He’d had that look with Claudine Winthrop.

  Fitch just wanted the sword, but he could see they were going to have to do something serious to stop her, else she was going to cause them no end of trouble. He wasn’t about to give up the sword. Not now, not after everything they’d been through.

  “Hey, Fitch,” Morley called, “I think it’s time you had your turn at a woman. This one’s even free. What say I hold her down for you?”

  Fitch surely thought she was a good enough looking woman. And she was the one causing them trouble. It would be her own fault. She wouldn’t let them be. She wouldn’t mind her own business. She had it coming.

  Fitch knew that since he was doing it for the right reasons, for good reasons, he deserved to be the Seeker of Truth. This woman had no right to interfere with that.

  Out in the bright sun, her red leather seemed an angrier color. Her face surely was. She looked like someone had lifted her up by her long blond braid, and dunked her in blood.

  “I try to do it his way,” she muttered to herself. “I try to please him.” Fitch thought she might be crazy, standing there, hands on hips, talking to the sky. “And what does it get me? This. Enough. I’ve had enough of this.”

  She forced out an angry breath, then pulled free red leather gloves she had tucked over her double strap belt cinching the top of her outfit tight at the waist. The way she drew on the gloves, wigging her fingers into them, had a frightening finality to it.

  “I’m not warning you boys again,” she said, this time in a growl that lifted the hair at the back of Fitch’s neck. “Give it over, and give it over now.”

  While she was glaring grimly at Fitch, Morley moved on her. He swung his big fist to punch the side of her head. As hard as he swung, Fitch thought he was going to kill her with the first blow.

  The woman didn’t even look Morley’s way. She caught his fist in the flat of her hand, yanked it around, and in a blink spun under it, twisting his arm around behind him. Her teeth clenched, and she drove his arm up. Fitch was shocked to hear Morley’s shoulder let out a sickening pop. Morley cried out. The pain dropped him to his knees.

  This woman was like no woman Fitch had ever seen before. Now, she was coming for him. She wasn’t running, but striding with a determination that caught Fitch’s breath short.

  He stood frozen, not knowing what to do. He didn’t want to abandon his friend, but his feet wanted to run. He didn’t want to give up the sword, either. He blindly groped the crenellated wall behind him as he started backing along it.

  Morley was up. He rushed the woman. She just kept coming for Fitch—for the sword. Fitch decided he might have to take the sword out and stab her—in the leg, or something, he speculated. He could wound her.

  But then it didn’t look like he was going to have to; Morley was closing on her, an enraged bull at full charge. There would be no stopping the big man this time.

  Without even turning to the onrushing Morley, she smoothly sidestepped—never taking her glare from Fitch—and brought her arm up, ramming her elbow squarely into Morley’s face.

  His head snapped back. Blood sprayed out.

  Not even breathing hard, she turned and seized Morley’s good left hand. With her fingers in his palm and her thumb on the back of his hand, she bent it down at the wrist until Morley’s knees were buckling as she backed him toward the wall.

  Morley was whimpering like a child, begging her to stop. His other arm was useless. His nose had been flattened horribly. Blood gushed from his face. It had to be all over her, too, but with her red leather, Fitch couldn’t tell.

  She backed Morley steadily, mercilessly, to the wall. Without a word, she seized him by the throat with her other hand, and, calmly, indifferently, shoved him backward through the notch of a crenellation, out into thin air.

  Fitch’s jaw dropped. He never expected her to do that—for it to go that far.

  Morley screamed his lungs out as he dropped backward down the side of the mountain. Fitch stood frozen, listening to his friend from the flat place of Anderith plummet down the side of a mountain. Morley’s scream abruptly ended.

  The woman wasn’t talking anymore, making any more demands. She was simply coming for Fitch, now. Her blue eyes fixed on him. He knew without doubt that if she caught him, she’d kill him, too.

  This was no Claudine Winthrop. This was no woman
who was going to call him “sir.”

  Fitch’s feet finally got their way.

  If there was one thing about Fitch that was better than Morley and all his muscles, it was that Fitch could run like the wind. Now, he ran like a gale.

  A quick glance back shocked him; the woman could run faster. She was tall, and had longer legs. She was going to catch him. If she did, she’d smash his face, just as easily as she smashed Morley’s. She’d throw him to his death, too. Or take the sword from him and cut out his heart.

  Fitch could feel tears streaming down his cheeks. He’d never run so fast. She was running faster.

  He flew down steps, falling more than running. He dove over the side of the landing and down the next flight. Everything was a blur. Stone walls, windows, railings, steps—all flashed by in a smear of light and dark.

  Fitch, clutching the Sword of Truth to his chest, sailed through a doorway, caught the edge of the thick door with his free hand, and slammed it shut. As the door was still banging closed in its frame, he toppled a big stone pedestal across the floor behind the door. It was heavier than the white marble columns, but his terror gave him strength.

  Just as the granite pedestal hit the floor, she crashed into the heavy oak door. The impact drove the door open a few inches. Dust billowed up. Everything was still for a moment; then the woman let out a dazed groan and Fitch knew she’d been hurt.

  Not wasting the chance, he ran on through the Wizard’s Keep, closing doors, pushing things over behind them if there was anything handy. He didn’t even know if he was going the right way. His lungs burned as he ran, crying for his friend. Fitch could hardly believe it had happened, that Morley was dead. He kept seeing the image over and over in his mind. He almost expected the big dumb fool to catch up and grin and say it was a joke.

  The sword in Fitch’s arms had cost Morley his life. Fitch had to wipe at his eyes so he could see. A look over his shoulder showed a long, twisting, empty hallway.

  But he could hear doors crashing open. She was coming.

  She wasn’t going to quit for nothing. She was an avenging spirit come to take his life in return for him removing the Sword of Truth from its place in the Wizard’s Keep. He ran on, faster.

  Fitch burst out into the sunlight, disoriented for a moment. He twisted around and saw the horses. Three. His and Morley’s, and the woman’s. Saddlebags with her things hung on the fence.

  In order to free his hands, Fitch ducked his head under the sword’s baldric, setting the leather strap over his right shoulder and diagonally across his chest to let the weapon hang at his left hip as it was designed. He caught up the rains of all three horses. He seized the saddle of the one closest and sprang up.

  With a cry to urge them on, he gave his horse his heels. It was her horse; the stirrups were adjusted too long and his feet wouldn’t reach them, so he hugged his legs to the horse’s belly and hung on for his life as the big animal galloped through the paddock gate with the other two horses being pulled along behind.

  As the horses hit the road at full speed, the woman in red stumbled out of the Keep, blood all over the side of her face. She clutched a black bottle in one hand. It was the bottle from back in the Keep, the bottle that had fallen but not broken.

  He bent forward over the horse’s neck as it raced down the road. Fitch glimpsed back over his shoulder. The woman was running down the road after them. He had her horse. She was on foot, a long way from another horse.

  Fitch tried to push thoughts of Morley from his mind. He had the Sword of Truth. Now he could go home and use it to help him prove he didn’t rape Beata, and that he did what he did to Claudine Winthrop to protect the Minister from her ruinous lies.

  Fitch looked over his shoulder again. She was a lot farther back, but still running. He knew he dare not stop for anything. She was coming. She was coming after him and she wasn’t going to stop for anything or anyone.

  She wasn’t going to give up. She wasn’t going to rest. She wasn’t going to stop. If she caught him, she’d tear his heart out.

  Fitch thumped his heels against the horse, urging her to run faster.

  55

  Kahlan bent over Richard’s shoulder and rubbed his back as he sat at the little table.

  “Anything?” she asked.

  He swiped his hair back from his forehead. “I’m not sure, yet.” He tapped the vellum scroll. “But there’s something about this.… It has more specific information than most of Ander’s writings back at the library at the Minister’s estate.”

  Kahlan smiled. “I hope so. I’m going to stretch my legs, check on the others.”

  A sound of assent eased from deep in his throat as he studied the scroll.

  They had spent two days at the library in the estate, going over everything there about or from Joseph Ander. It was mostly his writings about himself, and what he believed to be previously undiscovered insights into human behavior. He went on at great length about how his observations were more relevant to the course of human events than were those of anyone who had come before him.

  A lot of the reading was accompanied by raised eyebrows. It was almost like listening to an adolescent who thought he knew everything, and failed to see how genuinely ignorant he was. One was left to silently read his words, helpless to correct some of the more grandiose declarations that any adult should have long before outgrown.

  Joseph Ander believed he had the perfect place where he could shepherd people in the ideal life, without any exterior forces being able to upset his “balanced community,” as he called it. He explained that he realized he no longer needed the support or advice of others—meaning the wizards at the Keep in Aydindril, Richard believed—and that he had even come to realize such outside contamination was profoundly harmful because it corrupted the people in his collective community with the evil of self-interest.

  Not one name but his own was ever recorded by Joseph Ander. He referred to people as “a man,” or “a woman,” or said that “the people” built, planted, gathered, or worshiped.

  Joseph Ander seemed to have found the perfect place for himself: a land where his powers exceeded anyone else’s, and where the people all adored him. Richard believed Joseph Ander was misinterpreting fear as adoration. In any event, the situation allowed the man to establish himself as an esteemed and celebrated leader—a virtual king—with unquestioned authority over a society where no one else was allowed to display individualism or exert superiority.

  Joseph Ander believed he had established a blissful land where suffering, greed, and envy had been eliminated—where cooperation replaced avarice. Purification of the culture—public executions—brought this harmonious state of the collective community into balance. He called it “burning away the chaff.”

  Joseph Ander had come to be a tyrant. People professed their belief in him and lived by his ways, or they died.

  Richard squeezed Kahlan’s hand before she turned to go. The little building wasn’t big enough for the others to fit inside. It was only big enough for the little table and Joseph Ander’s chair, which, to the horror of the old man whose duty it was to watch over the priceless artifacts, Richard was occupying. The old man didn’t have the courage to refuse Richard’s request.

  Richard wanted to sit in Joseph Ander’s chair to get a feel for the man. Kahlan had enough of a feel for the totalitarian despot.

  Down the path a ways, people from the town of Westbrook were gathered. They stared in awe as Kahlan lifted her hand in a wave of acknowledgment. Many went to a knee simply because she had looked their way.

  Soldiers had already brought word of the approaching vote, as they had carried word to many a place. With Richard and Kahlan here, the people hoped to hear them speak on the subject of joining with the D’Haran Empire as most of the rest of the Midlands was. To these people, the Midlands, even though they were part of it, seemed a strange and distant land. They lived their lives in this one small place, most hearing little word, other than rumor, of the outsi
de world.

  D’Haran guards gently kept the crowd at a distance while Richard viewed the artifacts of their luminary founder and namesake to their land. Baka Tau Mana blade masters backed the guards. Richard had told the soldiers to act friendly and “be nice.”

  Walking down the path, Kahlan spotted Du Chaillu alone, off the path, resting on a bench made of a split log and set in the shade beneath a spreading cedar. Kahlan had come to respect the spirit woman’s firm resolution. She seemed to have righteously insisted on coming for no reason other than her determination to help Richard—her “husband,” the Caharin to her people. Kahlan, after Du Chaillu had helped him that day he fell from his horse, was less dismayed to have her along.

  While Du Chaillu had several times reminded Richard that as his wife she would be available should he desire her, she never made any advances on behalf of herself. In a bizarre way, it seemed nothing more than her being polite. It appeared that while Du Chaillu would be perfectly happy to serve and submit in any and every capacity as his wife, she offered services more out of duty and respect for her people’s laws than from personal desires.

  Du Chaillu worshiped what Richard represented. She did not worship Richard, as such. While Richard found little comfort in that, Kahlan did.

  As long as it stayed that way, Du Chaillu and Kahlan observed an uneasy truce. Kahlan still didn’t entirely trust the woman, not when Richard was the object of her attention—duty or otherwise.

  For her part, Du Chaillu viewed Kahlan, in her role as leader of her people, in her magic, and as wife to Richard, not as a superior, but simply as an equal. Kahlan was ashamed to admit to herself that in all of it, she was irritated by that more than anything.