Kahlan finally stepped back. “All right, go ahead.”
They all watched as Dreier wasted no time in laying his hands on Richard’s chest. He closed his eyes a moment, then placed one hand on Richard’s forehead. The air in the room began to hum. The sound built until the glass in the window rattled. A momentary glow came to Richard’s body as the room darkened.
Dreier lifted his hands back.
“It is done.”
Kahlan stood by the bed and stared at Richard for a moment. “I don’t see anything different.”
“I told you, the man is dead. Nothing is going to change that.” He gestured in frustration at Richard. “I did what I told you I would do. He will be preserved for now. He will not go stiff in death and decompose. He will stay as he was when alive. You will be able to tell for yourself when in a short time he does not get stiff as the dead always do.”
Kahlan went to the window set back in the thick stone wall, looking out at the dawn of the gray day. She put a hand over her stomach. She felt like she might be sick. She leaned under the arch and opened the window to get some fresh air on her face.
She had never thought she would see another day. Now, she didn’t care if she did.
“You may go,” she said without looking back over her shoulder to Dreier. “Commander, see that he has safe passage out of the citadel. I want him out of here, and I want him out now.”
As they all watched and waited on her, Kahlan took a breath to steady her voice.
“But I gave my word as the Mother Confessor. Don’t you or any of your men do anything to break my word. Get him out of the citadel and let him go. Do it at once.”
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Commander Fister reluctantly clapped a fist to his heart. “Of course, Mother Confessor.”
He gestured to his sergeant. “Take some of the archers and see to getting him out.”
Kahlan didn’t look back. “Laurin, Vale, please go with them to make sure the abbot is promptly sent out and on his way.”
Dreier was eager to leave before she could change her mind. In a moment they were gone. The commander fidgeted for a time after the door closed as she stared out the window.
“Kahlan,” Nicci finally asked in a quiet voice, “do you really think what Dreier did was of any use? Do you really think that it gives us any hope at all?”
Kahlan was silent for a time, staring out the window without seeing anything, as tears ran down her face and dripped off her jaw.
“No,” she finally said in a frail voice as she stared out at nothing. “Richard is gone. He took my place in the underworld. I saw the winged demons take him down into the depths of darkness. He is lost to us.”
Nicci stepped closer. “You saw that?” she asked in a soft, fearful voice. She had been a Sister of the Dark and knew full well what such a thing meant. “You saw the dark ones take him down?”
Kahlan nodded without looking back.
“Dear spirits…” Nicci whispered. She covered her mouth with a hand, holding back a cry of anguish at having sent him to that fate.
“Mother Confessor,” Commander Fister said, “there must be some small hope that Lord Rahl will somehow…”
“Come back from the dead?” Kahlan slowly shook her head, tears streaming down her face. “I would love to believe it. I would hold out hope if I could. For a brief time I thought I could. I tried. But my whole life I have been devoted to the truth, no matter how harsh and cold the truth may be. I am the Mother Confessor and I can’t believe in something I know isn’t true.”
The room behind her fell silent again as she stared out the window.
Kahlan wiped tears from her cheek as she turned to one of the men. “May I have your bow, please?”
Puzzled, he handed it over. Nicci, wondering what Kahlan was doing, went to the window beside her.
Kahlan nocked the arrow and drew the string to her cheek. She settled herself and called the target to her the way Richard had taught her.
Nothing else existed.
Time slowed.
She didn’t even feel herself release the bowstring. Like a breath of breeze, the arrow was away.
Kahlan watched its flight, watched it going exactly where she had envisioned it to fly.
The arrow hit Ludwig Dreier square in the back of his head on the left side, exiting his right eye socket. Dreier dropped, dead before he hit the road leading away from the citadel.
“Beautiful shot, Mother Confessor,” the archer said, sounding sincerely impressed when she handed him back his bow.
“Richard taught me to shoot. You wouldn’t believe how good he is … was…” she said, her voice trailing off.
Nicci arched an eyebrow. “Not that I object, but you broke your word. You said you would let him go in exchange for what he did.”
Kahlan met Nicci’s gaze with an iron look. “I kept my word. I told him I would let him go. I never said how far.” She gestured out the window. “I didn’t tell him that that was as far as I ever intended on letting him go.”
Some of the men smiled just a little. That was the Mother Confessor they knew, the Mother Confessor they had fought beside. The Mother Confessor with an iron will and an unwavering sense of justice.
Kahlan softly asked everyone to leave, then. She wanted to be alone with Richard.
She sat on the edge of the bed beside him, looking down at him, as everyone started quietly filing out.
Nicci shared a silent, tearful, sympathetic look with Kahlan before gently closing the doors behind her as she left.
Kahlan didn’t know how she was going to go on, or what she was going to do.
She was lost.
Everything was lost.
She understood how Cara felt.
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After crying in desolate solitude for hours as she lay beside Richard’s body, desperately wanting more than anything to have him reach out and hold her in his arms, after being certain that she would die of inconsolable grief, after wishing she could die and have the suffering end, Kahlan finally wiped her tears, straightened her clothes, and emerged from the bedroom.
Nicci, a number of soldiers of the First File, and the three Mord-Sith were standing silent vigil outside the bedroom, but down the hallway a respectful distance, not wanting to appear to be standing by the door, listening to her cry. When Kahlan started off in silence down the corridor to go speak with Commander Fister, they all followed behind her. They were thoughtful enough, though, to give her plenty of space to be alone in her grief. Even Nicci hung back with the others. She could tell that it would be best to give Kahlan some privacy and not ask any questions.
There was no comforting such inner agony and they all knew it. They were grieving, too, but Kahlan’s grief was different.
She had lost her entire world.
She had lost her soul mate.
As she came around a corner, Erika suddenly appeared from a dark doorway right in front of her.
The Mord-Sith again had on her black leather outfit. Gripping her Agiel in a tight fist, she was considerably closer to Kahlan than any of the people back down the hall following behind. And the Mord-Sith was already moving at a dead run as she emerged from the doorway. Kahlan had fought in the war with Cara enough to recognize the way Erika was holding her weapon. It was a killing stance, meant to deliver a single strike to stop the heart of an enemy.
Erika’s eyes were filled with hate.
Instinctively, Kahlan had already raised her hand as Erika flew toward her.
Kahlan’s fingers just began to contact the center of the woman’s chest, just below her throat.
In that instant, time became hers.
The contact of her fingers was still ever so slight, barely more than that of a lover’s warm breath on a cheek.
Time was hers. Kahlan could have counted every hair at the hairline on Erika’s forehead and then every eyelash.
Although Erika’s face was filled with hate, Kahlan felt no
hate. She felt no pity, no rage, no anger, no sorrow. There was no mercy in Erika’s eyes, and there was none in Kahlan’s, either.
In that infinitesimal spark of time, Kahlan’s mind was without emotion, filled only with the all-consuming rush of time suspended.
As she watched Erika before her, frozen in time in the midst of rushing in for the kill, Kahlan knew that the woman had no chance.
None.
She was already dead. That fact simply hadn’t caught up with her yet. Kahlan could see in the woman’s eyes that she did not yet comprehend what was about to happen. She still thought that she was in control of what was about to happen.
She was not.
The cold ferocity of Kahlan’s power slipping its bounds was breathtaking. She felt it welling up from that deep core within her, obediently inundating every fiber of her being in its onward rush.
In that instant in time, her power was all.
As Kahlan had done countless times before, she released her restraint on that wave of power just as it was cresting through her.
Erika’s mind, who she was, who she had been, every desire she had ever had, was already gone.
In a timeless instant of pristine violence, thunder without sound jolted the air of the hallway.
Glass chimneys on the nearby lamps shattered. A window exploded outward. The floor and walls shook from the concussion. Nearby doors blew open. The ripple of power lifted the carpet, rolling it in a wave racing away in both directions. The terrible shock of it cracked the plaster of the walls all up and down the hall.
Behind her, people were thrown to the ground. Those closest felt the searing pain of it the most.
Screaming, Erika collapsed. Her arms and legs twitched as they began pulling in, drawing her up into a ball as she screamed. Bones snapped. Flesh ripped. The woman could do nothing to stop the pain of her body coming apart as the lethal result of her Mord-Sith ability absorbed the unleashed power of a Confessor.
As the woman in black leather writhed in agony, the men, who had finally recovered and scrambled to their feet, came rushing forward to make sure the threat was subdued. The threat had been subdued before they had even seen the woman.
The threat had been ended the instant Kahlan had seen her.
Cassia, Laurin, and Vale, all in red leather, closed in beside Kahlan, looking down at the result of a Confessor unleashing her power on a Mord-Sith.
This time, there would be no begging to carry out the wishes of the Confessor who had touched her. It was different when a Mord-Sith was touched by a Confessor’s power. For a Mord-Sith, such a touch meant a long and agonizing death.
“Pick her up and take her down to the dungeons,” Kahlan said to the men. “Leave her down there where her screams won’t bother anyone. No need to lock her in. She won’t be going anywhere, but she will be the rest of the day and probably the entire night dying.”
“I had heard the stories,” Cassia said in a whisper as she watched the men picking up the twisting, screaming woman dripping a trail of blood as they carried her down the hallway. “The truth is a lot worse than the rumors.”
Kahlan nodded. “She chose her own fate the day she eagerly swore allegiance in her heart to Ludwig Dreier.”
As the men vanished down the hall, carrying the screaming Erika away, Nicci took Kahlan by the arm and pulled her close.
“Kahlan, the poison you carry in you, Jit’s touch of death, cut you off from your power, preventing you from using your ability. So how did you do that?”
“I no longer carry Jit’s poisonous touch of death in me.”
Nicci blinked in surprise. “What?”
“When I was in the underworld, Richard removed it. Because we were in the world of the dead, the touch of death could cause no harm when it was pulled out of me, the way it would have here in the world of life. The world of the dead is, in effect, a containment field for death. The veil keeps death on that side. Thanks to Richard, Jit’s touch of death was left in the world of the dead where it belonged.”
Nicci put a hand to her heart as she let out an audible sigh. “That’s wonderful. Dear spirits, that’s wonderful.”
Kahlan nodded. “A good spirit healed me. Richard’s spirit.”
Cassia brightened. “Then you aren’t going to die?”
Kahlan shook her head. “No, but I have nothing to live for, now. Ironic that when I was dying, I wanted to live, and now that I’m going to live, I only want to die.”
Nicci put her arms around Kahlan, giving her a silent hug in sympathy.
When they parted, Nicci’s expression turned suspicious. “If you could use your power, then why wouldn’t you have used it on Dreier? You could have simply taken him with your power and not have had to go through all that.”
“It’s not as simple as it sounds.”
“Maybe not,” Nicci said, “but still, had you taken him with your power you would have been certain that you had gotten the truth out of him.”
“I did get the truth out of him. I’ve spent my life getting the truth out of people like him. I don’t always need to unleash my power. He told us the truth. That was all he could do for us—for Richard.”
Nicci gestured back toward the bedroom. “He wouldn’t have been able to pose a threat had you touched him and he might have also been a valuable source of information.”
Kahlan shook her head. “I made a calculated decision.”
“What do you mean?”
“Other than animating corpses, they couldn’t really bring the dead back to life. I don’t think there was much of anything he could have told us that would have been worth the risk of trying to use my power on him.”
Nicci flicked a hand toward the blood on the floor. “What risk? You took Erika with your power.”
Kahlan gave Nicci a look. “Erika didn’t have occult powers.”
Nicci straightened. “Oh. I guess there is that.”
“Indeed there is. I’ve never used my Confessor ability on someone with occult powers. We know that regular Additive Magic doesn’t work on those with such power. My ability is partially Additive Magic. Even Zedd couldn’t stop those like Dreier with powerful occult abilities.”
“So it might not have worked?” Cassia guessed.
“Having it not work would have been the least of it. My power doesn’t work the same on everyone. Mord-Sith, for example, can capture a person’s magic when the person tries to use it on them, yet when they try to capture a Confessor’s power it turns deadly, as you saw with Erika.
“It is entirely possible that had I tried to use my Confessor power on Dreier, he could have turned it back on me in a similar way and used the opportunity to have us all. It could easily have been a fatal mistake for all of us. The risk was too great, and besides, I believe we got all we could from him, so there was no point. That was the calculated decision I made.”
Nicci nodded with a sigh. “I should have known you would have thought it through.”
Kahlan stared off into her thoughts. “Richard taught me to think of the solution, not the problem. That’s what I was trying to do.”
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“What are we going to do, now,” Commander Fister asked when Nicci and Kahlan parted and the hallway fell silent again.
Kahlan swallowed. “Richard isn’t coming back. We need to face that. I was only fooling myself. The awful truth is that Richard is dead.
“We know what he had wanted done with Zedd’s remains. He would want us to do the same for him. He is gone now, lost to those of us left behind in this world. We owe it to him to take care of his worldly remains. We are going to have to prepare a funeral pyre and say our good-byes.”
Tears slowly ran down the faces of all three Mord-Sith.
“Kahlan, are you sure?” Nicci asked. “What Ludwig Dreier did used occult power. We don’t know if there might still be hope.”
“Hope?” Kahlan asked. She shook her head as she swallowed at the painful agony of the memory she stil
l couldn’t get out of her mind. “You didn’t see what I saw. Those dark, winged demons chased him, caught him, hooked their claws into him so he couldn’t get away, and then wrapped their black wings around him to smother his soul as they carried him down into oblivion.”
Everyone stared in silent horror.
“There must be some hope,” Nicci finally said in a weak voice. “Richard would want us to have hope.”
Kahlan felt empty. The world of life was dead to her.
“Hope? Hannis Arc and Emperor Sulachan are headed for the People’s Palace. Sulachan wants to break the world of life. He wants to loose the world of the dead on all of us.
“The only one named in prophecy who had a chance to stop that was Richard. Prophecy has named Richard every step of the way, in everything he did, as the pebble in the pond, as the only one who had a chance to set things right.
“Prophecy says that the only hope to stop this threat from the third kingdom being set free on us all is for Richard to end prophecy. He is the only one with a chance.
“Now, he is dead. We have no hope without Richard. In a way, since there was so much prophecy involving him, since he was so tightly woven into so much of prophecy, since he was fuer grissa ost drauka, that means that with him dead, prophecy, too, has ended. It died with Richard. After all, what can it say about him now that he is gone? He was the one, and now he is gone.
“In a very real way, by dying Richard has ended prophecy.
“There is no one else who can stop evil from darkening the world. Time and hope has run out for life.
“To tell you the truth, I can’t think of a reason to care.”
“Kahlan,” Nicci said in a comforting manner, “Richard wouldn’t let that happen. The people of D’Hara need him. Richard would return from the dead to protect them. He is the Lord Rahl. He is bonded to them and they to him. He would come back from the world of the dead to protect them.”
Kahlan swallowed back the grief, trying to hold back the tears by trying to maintain a Confessor face.
“I understand the sentiment, Nicci, and the words are very noble—they really are—but they are just words. It takes more than wishes and words. You know in your heart as well as I do that there is no way for him to return, that he is gone.”