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“The palace. This is official business, so D’Hara will supply you with the money you will need.”
Friedrich shook his head. “I thank you for coming and offering your sympathy. But I’m the wrong man. Send another.”
“You are the man who is to go. Althea would have known it. She would have left you a letter, telling you that you are needed in this struggle. She would have asked you to accept when called upon. Lord Rahl needs you. I am calling upon you.”
“You know of the letter?” Friedrich asked as he rose to his feet once more.
“It’s one of the precious few things I know about in this matter. From prophecy, I know you are the one to go. But you must do so of your own free will. I am calling upon you to do so.”
Friedrich shook his head, this time with more conviction. “I’m not the one to do this. You don’t understand. I’m afraid that I just don’t care anymore.”
Nathan drew something out from under his cloak. He held it out. Friedrich saw then that it was a small book.
“Take it,” the wizard commanded, his voice suddenly full and rich with authority.
Friedrich did so, letting his fingers roam the ancient leather cover as he inspected words embossed with gold leaf. There were four words on the cover, but Friedrich had never seen the language before.
“This book is from the time of a great war, thousands of years ago,” Nathan said. “I only just discovered it in the People’s Palace after a frantic search among the thousands of tomes there. As soon as I located it, I rushed here. I haven’t had time to translate it, so I don’t even know what’s written in it.”
“It’s all written in a different language.”
Nathan nodded. “High D’Haran, a language I helped teach Richard. It’s vitally important he get this book.”
“Richard?”
“Lord Rahl.”
The way he said those two words gave Friedrich a chill. “If you’ve not read it, how do you know it’s the right book?”
“By the title, there, on the front.”
Friedrich ran his fingers lightly over the mysterious words. The gilding was still good after all this time. “May I ask the book’s title?”
“The Pillars of Creation.”
Chapter 41
Oba opened his eyes, but for some reason that didn’t seem to help; he couldn’t see. Dismay stiffened him. He was lying on his back, on something like rough cold stone. It was a complete mystery to him as to where he could be or how he had gotten there, but his first and most important concern was that he had somehow gone blind. Trembling from head to foot, Oba blinked, trying to clear his vision, but still he could not see.
A thought worse by far was what really ignited his panic: he wondered if he was back in the pen.
He feared to move and prove the suspicion true. He didn’t know how they had done it, but he despaired that those three conniving women—the troublesome sorceress sisters and his lunatic mother—had somehow managed to once again lock him in his dark, childhood prison. They had probably been plotting from beyond the grave, and in his sleep, they had pounced.
Paralyzed by his plight, Oba couldn’t gather his wits.
But then, he heard a noise. He turned his eyes toward the sound and saw movement. He realized as things came into focus that it was only some dark room and not his pen, after all. Relief washed through him, followed by chagrin. What had he been thinking? He was Oba Rahl. He was invincible. It would serve him well to remember that.
Though he was relieved to know it wasn’t what he had at first feared, prudence kept him cautious; the place felt strange and dangerous. He concentrated, trying to recall what had taken place and how he could have come to be in such a cold dark place, but it wouldn’t come to him. His memory was all foggy, just a collection of random impressions; dizzying illness, pounding headache, profound weakness and nausea, being carried, hands everywhere on him, light hurting his eyes, darkness. He felt battered and bruised.
Someone nearby coughed. From another direction, a man grumbled at him to shut up. Oba lay still as a mountain lion, his muscles tensed. He worked at gathering his senses, letting his gaze carefully roam the dark room. It wasn’t completely dark, as he had feared at first. On the wall opposite him a weak light, possibly wavering candlelight, came in through a square opening. There were two dark vertical lines in the opening.
Oba’s head still pounded, but it was much better than it had been before. He remembered, then, how sick he had been. Looking back on it, he realized that he hadn’t even grasped at the time how truly ill he had been. As a youngster he’d had a fever, once. This had been like that, he supposed, a fever. He had probably gotten it visiting Althea, the awful swamp-witch.
Oba sat up, but that made him feel light-headed, so he leaned back against the wall. It was rough stone, like the floor. He rubbed his cold, stiff legs, and then stretched his back. He wiped his knuckles across his eyes, trying to banish the lingering haze in his head. He saw rats, whiskers twitching, nosing along the edge of the wall. Oba was starving, despite the rank stench of the place. It smelled of sweat and urine and worse.
“Look, the big ox is awake,” someone across the room said. The voice was deep and mocking.
Oba peered up and saw men looking at him. Altogether, there were five others in the room with him. They looked a scruffy lot. The man who had spoken, off in the corner to the right, was the only other man beside Oba sitting. He leaned back into the corner as if he owned it. His humorless grin showed that what teeth weren’t missing were crooked as could be.
Oba looked around at the other four men standing watching him. “You all look like criminals,” he said.
Laughter echoed around the room.
“We’re all being wrongly persecuted,” the man in the corner said.
“Yeah,” someone else agreed. “We were minding our own business when those guards snatched us up and threw us in here for nothing at all. They locked us up like we was common criminals.”
More laughter rang out.
Oba didn’t think he liked being in a room with criminals. He knew he didn’t like being locked in a room. That felt too much like his pen. A cursory inspection proved his suspicion true, his money was gone. From across the room, under the crack of the door, a rat watched with beady little rat eyes.
Oba looked up from the rat, to the opening with the light. He saw then that the two lines were bars.
“Where are we?”
“In the palace prison, you big ox,” crooked-teeth said. “Does it look like a proper whorehouse to you?”
The other men all laughed at his joke. “Maybe the kind he visits,” one of them said, and the rest laughed all the louder. Over to the side, another rat watched.
“I’m hungry. When will they feed us?” Oba asked.
“He’s hungry,” one of the standing men said in a taunting voice. He spat in disgust. “They don’t feed us unless they feel like it. You might starve, first.”
Another man squatted in front of him. “What’s your name?”
“Oba.”
“What did you do to get yourself thrown in here, Oba? Rob an old maid of her virginity?”
The men guffawed with him.
Oba didn’t think the man was funny. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. He didn’t like these men. They were criminals.
“So, you’re innocent, eh?”
“I don’t know why they would put me in here.”
“We heard different,” the man squatting before him said.
“Yeah,” the keeper of the corner agreed. “We heard the guards talking, saying that you beat a man to death with your bare hands.”
Oba frowned in true bewilderment. “Why would they put me in here for that? The man was a thief. He left me out in a desolate place to die after he’d robbed me. He only got what was coming to him.”
“Says you,” crooked-teeth said. “We heard you was probably the one robbing him.”
“What?” Oba was incredulous, as
well as indignant. “Who said that?”
“The guards,” came the answer.
“They’re lying, then,” Oba insisted. The men started in laughing again. “Clovis was a thief and a murderer.”
The laughter cut off. Rats stopped and looked up. They sniffed the air, their noses twitching.
The keeper of the corner sat up straight “Clovis? Did you say Clovis? You mean the man who sold charms?”
