Confessor

  That was the thing that bothered her the most—the constant, gnawing emptiness she felt, the terrible loneliness of being isolated from almost everyone else in the world. A part of her life was missing, too, and she didn’t know what it was. She didn’t even know who she was, other than her name and that she was the Mother Confessor. When she had asked Samuel what a Confessor was he had stared a long moment and then shrugged. She got the clear impression that he knew but didn’t want to say.

  Kahlan felt cut off not only from the world, but from herself. She wanted her life back.

  In the fading light she made her way over to the exhausted horse as he cropped at the clumps of long grass. There was no currycomb to brush out his coat, so she stroked her hand over the huge animal, cleaning it as best she could, checking for any injuries or burrs. She used her fingers to pry off dried clumps of mud from his legs and then the side of his belly. The horse turned his head back, watching her cleaning off the caked mud.

  The horse liked her care and gentle touch. He was an animal kept by men who were little more than animals themselves and wasn’t used to being treated with kindness and respect, so he knew the value of both.

  When she finished picking his hooves clean, she gave the horse a good scratch behind the ears. He neighed softly, nuzzling his head against her. Kahlan smiled and scratched some more, which pleased the horse just fine. His big eyes closed as he soaked in the attention. She felt closer to the horse than to Samuel.

  To Samuel, the horse was just a horse. He wanted to hurry, and the horse was his means of covering ground. Kahlan wasn’t sure if it was so much that he had somewhere to go, or if he simply wanted to put as much distance between them and the Imperial Order as possible.

  Since he kept to a steady course she supposed that he must have a real destination. If that was the case, then he had some reason to get there in a hurry. If he had a destination, and was eager to get there, then why wouldn’t he at least tell her where they were going?

  As she rubbed behind the horse’s ears, he pressed his head a little tighter against her in appreciation. She smiled at the nudge the horse gave her when she paused, urging her to continue. She thought that he was falling in love with her.

  Kahlan wondered if she was being less kind to Samuel. She didn’t mean to be deliberately cold toward him, but since he was being less than candid—and likely evasive—she had decided to trust her instincts and remain businesslike with him.

  Back at the fire, as Kahlan, sitting on her heels, fed another stick into the flames, she heard Samuel rushing back. She checked the knife at her belt.

  “Got one!” he called as he came into the light of the campfire.

  He held up a rabbit by its hind legs. She didn’t think that she’d ever seen Samuel so excited. He had to be hungry.

  She sat back, smiling. “I guess we get a hot meal tonight.”

  Samuel, grasping the hind legs in both hands, hastily ripped the rabbit apart. Kahlan sat up in surprise as he laid a bleeding half of a rabbit before her.

  Samuel squatted not far away, hunched down facing the fire, and began devouring the other half of the rabbit.

  Kahlan stared in shock as she watched him eating the raw catch. He tore off a bite of fur with his teeth and swallowed it down. He crunched right through bones. As blood ran down his chin he even ate the entrails.

  The sight was making her sick. Kahlan looked away to stare into the fire.

  “Eat,” Samuel said. “It’s good.”

  Kahlan picked up the hind leg and tossed her half to him. “I’m not very hungry.”

  Samuel didn’t argue. He tore into her half.

  Kahlan lay back, resting her head against the saddle, and watched the stars. To take her mind off Samuel she thought again about Richard, wondering who he really was, and what his connection to her was. She thought about how he fought with a blade. In many ways it reminded her of the way she fought. She didn’t know where she had learned what she knew. As she wandered through an internal landscape of shadowy uncertainties, she watched the moon slowly rise.

  She began wondering why she should continue to stay with Samuel. He had saved her life, after a fashion, after Richard told him how. She supposed that she did owe him some gratitude. But why stay with him? He wasn’t providing her any answers or real solutions. She didn’t owe him her dogged allegiance. She wondered if she should strike out on her own.

  She realized that even if she left Samuel and struck out on her own, without knowing who she was where would she go? She saw trees and mountains as they rode past, but she didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know where she grew up, where she lived, where she belonged. She didn’t recognize the land or even remember any towns or cities, other than the places of the dead that she’d gone through after the Sisters had captured her. She was lost in a world that didn’t know her and she didn’t remember.

  When she realized that the moon had risen above the trees, she looked over at Samuel. He had long ago finished his meal.

  He was polishing his sword as it lay in his lap.

  “Samuel,” she called. He looked up as if being yanked out of a trance. “Samuel, I need to know where we’re going.”

  “To a place where we will be safe.”

  “You’ve told me that before. If I’m going to continue to travel with you—”

  “You must! You must come with me! Please!”

  Kahlan was taken aback by his outburst of emotion. His eyes wide and round, he looked genuinely panicked.

  “Why?”

  “Because I will take us to safety.”

  “Maybe I can take myself to safety.”

  “But I can take you to someone who can help you get your memory back.”

  He had her attention. She sat up.

  “You know someone who can help me get my memory back?”

  Samuel nodded vigorously.

  “Who?”

  “A friend.”

  “How can I believe that you’re telling me the truth?”

  Samuel gazed down at the gleaming weapon in his lap. He ran adoring fingers over its curves.

  “I am the Seeker of Truth. You have a spell that has taken your memory. I have a friend who can help you recover your past, recover yourself.”

  Kahlan’s heart pounded with the abruptly unexpected prospect of having her memory back. All of her other questions seemed suddenly insignificant.

  Samuel had never told her that he was the Seeker of Truth. She didn’t know what the Seeker of Truth was, but she had seen the word TRUTH in gold wire woven through the silver wire of the hilt. It seemed an odd title for someone so reluctant to offer any information about anything.

  “When will I meet this person?”

  “Soon. She is close.”

  “How do you know?”

  Samuel looked up. His yellow eyes stared at her, looking like twin lanterns in the darkness.

  “I can feel her. You must stay if you want to recover your past.”

  Kahlan thought about Richard with those strange symbols painted all over him. That was the past she was really interested in. She wanted to know her connection to that man with the gray eyes.

  Richard knew that it was his only chance.

  Darkness unlike anything he had ever known pressed in all around him. It was suffocating, terrifying, crushing.

  Denna tried to protect him, but even she had no power to stop such a thing. No one did.

  “You can’t,” came Denna’s whispering voice in his mind. “This is a place of nothing. You can’t do that.”

  Richard knew that it was his only chance.

  “I have to try.”

  “If you do that, you will be naked to this place. Your protection will be stripped from you. You will not be able to be here any longer.”

  “I’ve done what I must.”

  “But you will not be able to find your way back.”

  Richard cried out in agony. The protective structure of the spell-forms that he had created was being
shredded. The blackness all around was seeping in and crushing the life from him. This was a place that did not tolerate life. This was a place that existed to draw life itself away into the dark eternity of nothing.

  The beast had followed him into that void of the underworld, and now it had him trapped in its own domain.

  Finding his way back was no longer what concerned him. That option was already lost to him. His connection to the entry point was gone, broken away by the beast as it tore apart the fabric of the protective spells. There was no way back to the Garden of Life, no way to find something in the middle of nothing.

  Now escape was all that mattered.

  The beast was a thing created of Subtractive Magic and it was in a Subtractive world. Richard was caught in its lair.

  In this place there was no help to be had. Denna could do nothing against a conjured creature of this sort, a creature in its own element.

  There was no way he could even make it back to the Hall of Sky, where the ceiling of stone was like a window showing the sky across its surface. Even that now seemed forever ago, forever distant across the eternity of nothing. His connection to it was lost somewhere in the blackness.

  As he felt the tormenting claws of death itself tearing to get at him he only wanted out.

  His mind held those essential elements he had come for in a death grip. The beast was trying to strip them away from him. Even if it cost him his life, he could not let those things go. If he lost those ephemeral aspects, there would be no point in going back to the world of life.

  “I have to do it,” he cried through the stunning pain of what was ripping at his very soul.

  Denna’s arms tightened protectively, desperately, around him, but there was no protection to be had in that embrace. Despite how much she wanted to help him, this was a thing she could not fight. She was his protector in this world, but only in the sense of being his guide to help him find what he needed while keeping him from straying into dangers that would suck him forever downward into darker places yet. She was not his guardian from what might come out of that darkness, and she had no ability to stop a conjured creature that did not exist.

  “I have to!” he cried out, knowing that there was nothing else to try.

  Shimmering tears traced their way down Denna’s beautiful, glowing face. “If you do this, I can’t protect you.”

  “If I don’t, what do you suppose will happen to me?”

  She smiled sadly. “You will die here.”

  “Then what choice do I have?”

  She began floating away, only her hand holding his.

  “None,” her silken voice said in his mind. “But I can’t be with you if you do this.”

  Twisting in pain as the beast tightened around him, Richard managed to nod. “I know, Denna. Thank you for all you have done. It was a true gift.”

  Her sad smile widened as she drifted farther away. “For me, too, Richard. I love you.”

  Richard felt her fingers still touching his. He nodded as best he could. “One way or another, you will always be in my heart.”

  He felt her kiss on his cheek. “Thank you, Richard, for that above all else.”

  And then she was gone.

  When she vanished, and Richard was suddenly alone, enveloped in incomparable solitude and darkness, in the absence of everything, he released Additive Magic into the beast in a world where it could not exist.

  In that instant, as the concussion of the Additive came into being in the heart of nowhere, the beast, unable to endure such an irreconcilable clash between what was and what was not, between the world of life and the world of the dead, between suddenly containing without any protective buffers an element of Additive in a world of Subtractive, disintegrated out of existence in both worlds.

  At the same time, Richard felt a stunning blow from every direction at once.

  There was suddenly ground under his feet.

  Unable to stand, he collapsed among skulls.

  Naked men, painted in wild designs, sat in a circle all around him.

  Shaking with pain and shock, he felt comforting, calming hands on him. From all around he heard words he didn’t understand.

  But then he began to see faces he recognized. He saw his friend Savidlin. At the head of the circle he saw the Bird Man.

  “Welcome back to the world of life, Richard with the Temper,” a familiar voice said. It was Chandalen.

  Still catching his breath, Richard blinked at the grim faces watching him. They were all painted in wild designs with black and white mud. He realized that he understood the symbols. When he had first come to these people and asked for a gathering, he had thought the black and white mud was simply random patterns. He knew now that it wasn’t. It had meaning.

  “Where am I?”

  “You are in the spirit house,” Chandalen said in his deep, grim-sounding voice.

  The men all around him speaking in the strange language were the Mud People elders. It was a gathering.

  Richard looked around at the spirit house. This was the village where he and Kahlan had been married. This was the place where they had spent their first night as husband and wife.

  The men helped Richard stand.

  “But what am I doing here?” he asked Chandalen, still not sure if he was dreaming…or dead.

  The man turned to the Bird Man. They exchanged brief words. Chandalen turned back to Richard.

  “We thought you would know, and that you could tell us. We were asked to have a gathering for you. We were told that it was a matter of life or death.”

  Richard frowned as he carefully stepped out of the collection of skulls of ancestors. “Who asked you to have a gathering?”

  Chandalen cleared his throat. “Well, at first we thought it might be a spirit.”

  “A spirit,” Richard said as he stared.

  Chandalen nodded. “But then we realized it was a stranger.”

  Richard tilted his head toward the man. “A stranger?”

  “She flew here on a beast, and then—” He stopped when he saw the look on Richard’s face. “Come, they will explain it.”

  “They?”

  “Yes, the strangers. Come.”

  “I’m naked.”

  Chandalen nodded. “We knew you were coming, so we brought clothes for you. Come, they are just outside, and you can talk to the strangers. They are eager to see you. They feared you would never come. We have been in here for two nights, waiting.”

  Richard wondered if it was Nicci and maybe Nathan. Who but Nicci could have known to do such a thing?

  “Two nights…” Richard mumbled as he was funneled out the door among all the elders as they touched him, patted his shoulder, and jabbered greetings. Despite the unexpected circumstances, they were pleased to see him. He was, after all, one of them, one of the Mud People.

  It was dark outside. Richard noticed the slender crescent of the moon. Attendants waited with clothes for all the elders. One of the men handed Richard buckskin trousers, and then a buckskin pullover shirt.

  Once Richard was dressed, the group of men swept him through the narrow passageways. Richard felt as if he had awakened in some past life. He remembered all these passageways through the buildings.

  Richard was eager to see Nicci. He couldn’t wait to find out what had happened, how she knew to help him escape. It was probably the prophet who had known of the problem he would face, and she must have figured a way to help him by providing a way for him to step back into the world of life. He couldn’t wait to tell her what he had managed to do in the underworld.

  The Bird Man laid an arm around Richard’s shoulder and spoke in the words Richard didn’t understand.

  Chandalen answered him, and then spoke to Richard. “The Bird Man wants you to know that he has spoken with many ancestors in a gathering, but in all his life he has never seen one of our people return from the spirit world.”

  Richard glanced over at the smiling Bird Man.

  “It’s a first for m
e as well,” he assured Chandalen.

  In the open center of the village large fires were burning, lighting the crowds attending the feast. Children ran through the legs of adults, enjoying the festivities. People were gathered on and around the platforms.

  “Richard!” a girl shouted.

  Richard turned to the sound and saw Rachel jump off a platform and run toward him. She threw her arms around his waist. She seemed a head taller than the last time he’d seen her. As he embraced her, he couldn’t help laughing with the joy of seeing her again.

  When he looked up, Chase was standing there as well. Chase made the largest among the Mud People look the size of children.

  “Chase, what are you doing here?”

  He folded his arms, looking unhappy. “It’s too incredible. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  Richard gave him a look. “I just came back from the underworld. I think I have you beat for incredible.”

  Chase thought it over. “Maybe. I was at camp. I’d been searching for Rachel. My mother visited me.”

  “Your mother? Your mother passed away years ago.”

  Chase made a face as if to say he knew that better than Richard. “That kind of thing gets your attention.”

  “Well,” Richard said, trying to grasp what was going on, “it obviously wasn’t your mother. Didn’t you think to ask who she really was?”

  Chase, his arms still folded, shrugged. “No.” He glanced off into the darkness. “It was a rather emotional experience. You would have had to have been there.”

  “I imagine you’re right,” Richard said. “Did she tell you why she had come to visit you?”

  “She told me that I had to come here as fast as I could. She said that Rachel would be here, and that you needed help.”

  Richard was dumbfounded. “Did she tell you what sort of help I needed?”

  Chase nodded. “Horses. Fast horses.”

  “My mother came to me, too,” Rachel said.

  Richard looked from the girl back up at Chase. Chase shrugged as if to say he had no answer.

  “Your mother?” Richard asked Rachel. “You mean Emma?”