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Sebastian rode near her, making sure she was safe and didn’t become lost in the crazy, headlong, willful stampede. The voice rode with her, too, and would not remain silent, despite how she tried to ignore it, or begged in her mind for it to leave her be. She needed to focus on what was happening, on what might soon happen. She couldn’t afford the distraction. Not now.
As it called her name, called for her to surrender her will, to surrender her flesh, called to her in mysterious but strangely seductive words, the surrounding roar of masking sound gave Jennsen the anonymity to finally scream at the top of her lungs “Let me be! Leave me alone!” without anyone noticing. It was a heady purification to be able to banish the voice with such unrestrained force and authority.
In what seemed an instant, they suddenly plunged into the city, leaping over fences, skirting poles, and flying past buildings with bewildering speed. With the way they had been in the open and then abruptly had to deal with all the things around them, it reminded her of racing into a stand of woods.
The wild charge was not what she had imagined it would be—an ordered marshaled run across open ground—but instead was a mad dash through a great city; along wide thoroughfares lined with magnificent buildings; then veering suddenly down dark canyonlike alleys made of tall stone walls that in some places bridged the narrow slice of open sky overhead; and then abruptly impetuous dashes through warrens of narrow twisting side streets among ancient, windowless buildings laid out to no design. There was no slowing for deliberation or decision, but, rather, it was one long, reckless, relentless rush.
It was made all the more surreal because there were no people anywhere. There should have been crowds scattering in wild panic, diving out of the way, screaming. In her mind’s eye, she overlaid scenes she had seen in cities before: peddlers pushing carts with everything from fish to fine linen; shopkeepers outside their businesses tending tables of bread, cheese, meat, wine; craftsmen displaying shoes, clothes, wigs, and leather goods; windows filled with wares.
Now, all those windows were strangely empty—some boarded up, some just left as if the owner would be opening any minute. All the windows lining their route stood empty. Streets, benches, parks, were mute witness to the onslaught of cavalry.
It was frightening to charge at full speed through the convoluted maze of streets, cutting around buildings and obstacles, dashing down dirt alleyways, flying at full speed along curving cobblestone roads, cresting rises only to plummet down the far side, like some bizarre, headlong, out-of-control snow sled ride plunging down an icy hill through the trees, and just as dangerous. Sometimes, as they galloped half a dozen abreast, the way suddenly narrowed with a wall or a corner of a building that stuck out. More than one rider went down with calamitous results. Buildings, colors, fences, poles, and intersecting streets flashed by in dizzying array.
Without the resistance of an enemy force, the unbridled rush felt to Jennsen like it was out of all control, yet she knew that these were the elite cavalry, so a wanton charge was their specialty. Besides, Emperor Jagang looked in complete control atop his magnificent stallion.
The horses kicked up a shower of sod as they suddenly broke past a wide opening in a wall to find themselves charging up the expansive lawns of the Confessors’ Palace. The fury of yelling riders spread out to each side, their horses tearing up the picturesque setting, the crude and filthy bloodthirsty invaders defiling the deceptively serene beauty of the grounds. Jennsen rode beside Sebastian, not far behind the emperor and several of his officers, between wide-spread flanks of howling men, straight up the wide promenade lined with mature maple trees, their bare branches, heavy with buds, laced together overhead.
Despite everything she had learned, everything she knew, everything she held dear, Jennsen couldn’t understand why she felt such a sense of being a participant in a profane violation.
The impression melted away as she focused her attention instead on something she spotted ahead. It stood not far from the wide marble steps leading up to the grand entrance of the Confessors’ Palace. It looked like a lone pole with something atop it. A long red cloth tied near the top of the shaft of the pole flew and flapped in the breeze, as if waving to them, calling for their attention, giving them all, at last, a destination. Emperor Jagang led the charge directly toward that pole with its red flag flying.
As they raced across the lawns, she concentrated on the heat of Rusty’s obedient and powerful muscles flexing beneath her, finding reassurance in her horse’s familiar movements. Jennsen couldn’t help gazing up at the white marble columns towering above them. It was a majestic entrance, imposing, yet elegant and welcoming. This day, the Imperial Order was at last to own the place where evil had, for so long, ruled unopposed.
Emperor Jagang held his sword high, signaling the cavalry to halt. The cheering, yelling, screaming battle cries died out as tens of thousands of men, all at once, brought their excited horses down from a charge to a stop. It amazed her, what with so many men with weapons out, that it all happened in seconds and without carnage.
Jennsen patted the sweaty side of Rusty’s neck before sliding down off her horse. She hit the ground among a confusion of men, mostly officers and advisors, but regular cavalry, too, all swarming in to protect the emperor. She had never been this close in among the regular soldiers before. They were intimidating as they eyed her in their midst. They all seemed impatient for an enemy to fight. The men were a filthy, grimy lot, and smelled worse than their horses. For some reason, it was that suffocating, sweaty, foul stink that frightened her the most.
Sebastian’s hand seized her arm and pulled her close. “Are you all right?”
Jennsen nodded, trying to see the emperor and what had stopped him. Sebastian, trying to see as well, pulled her along with him as he stepped through a screen of burly officers. Seeing it was him, they made way.
She and Sebastian halted when they saw the emperor standing several paces ahead, alone, his back to them, his shoulders slumped, his sword hanging from his fist at his side. It appeared that all his men were afraid to approach him.
Jennsen, with Sebastian quickly moving to catch up, closed the distance to reach emperor Jagang. He stood frozen before the spear planted butt end in the ground. He stared with those completely black eyes as if seeing an apparition. Tied beneath the long, barbed, razor-sharp metal point of the spear, the long red cloth flapped in the otherwise complete silence.
Atop the spear was a man’s head.
Jennsen winced at the arresting sight. The gaunt head, severed cleanly at mid-neck, looked almost alive. The dark eyes, beneath a deeply hooded brow, were fixed in an unblinking stare. A dark, creased cap rested halfway down the forehead. Somehow, the austere cap pressed down on the head seemed to match the severe countenance of the man. Wisps of wiry hair curled out from above his ears to ruffle in the wind. It seemed as if the thin lips, at any moment, might give them a forbidding smile from the world of the dead. The face looked as if the man, in life, had been as grim as death itself.
The way Emperor Jagang stood stupefied, staring at the head right before him impaled on the point of the spear, and the way not one of the thousands of men so much as coughed, had Jennsen’s heart hammering faster than when she had been riding Rusty at a reckless gallop.
Jennsen cautiously peered over at Sebastian. He, too, stood stunned. Her fingers tightened on his arm in sympathy for the look in his wide, tearful eyes. He finally leaned closer to her in order to whisper in a choked voice.
“Brother Narev.”
The shock of those two barely audible words hit Jennsen like a slap. It was the great man himself, the spiritual leader of the entire Old World, Emperor Jagang’s friend and closest personal advisor—a man who Sebastian believed was closer to the Creator than any man who had ever been born, a man whose teachings Sebastian religiously lived by, dead, his head impaled on a spear.
The emperor reached out and pulled free a small, folded piece of paper that was stuck in the side of Bro
ther Narev’s cap. As Jennsen watched Jagang’s thick fingers open the carefully folded small piece of paper, it reminded her unexpectedly of the way she had unfolded the paper she had found on the D’Haran soldier that fateful day she had discovered him lying dead at the bottom of the ravine, the day she had met Sebastian. The day before Lord Rahl’s men had finally located her and killed her mother.
Emperor Jagang lifted the paper out to silently read what it said. For a frightening long time, he just stared at the paper. At last, his arm lowered to his side. His chest heaved with a terrible, burgeoning wrath as he stared once more at Brother Narev’s head on the end of the spear. In a smoldering voice, bitter with indignation, Jagang repeated the words from the note just loud enough for those standing close to hear.
“Compliments of Richard Rahl.”
The stiff wind moaned through a stand of nearby trees. No one said a word as they all waited on Emperor Jagang for direction.
Jennsen’s nose wrinkled at a foul smell. She looked up to see the head, so perfect only moments before, beginning to putrefy before her very eyes. The flesh sagged heavily. The bottom eyelids drooped, revealing their red undersides. The jaw sank. The thin line of the mouth opened, almost looking as if the head were letting out a scream.
Jennsen, along with everyone else, including Emperor Jagang, took a step back as the flesh of the face decayed in sudden ghastly ruptures, revealing festering tissue beneath. The tongue swelled as the jaw dropped lower. The eyeballs sank forward out of their sockets as they shriveled. Reeking flesh fell away in clumps.
What would have been long months of decomposition took place in a matter of seconds, leaving the skull beneath that creased cap grinning at them through tattered bits of hanging flesh.
“It had a web of magic around it, Excellency,” Sister Perdita said, almost sounding as if she were answering a question unspoken. Jennsen hadn’t heard her come up behind them. “The spell preserved it in that condition until you pulled the note from the cap, triggering the dissolution of the magic preserving it. Once that magic was withdrawn, the…remains went through the decomposition that would ordinarily have taken place.”
Emperor Jagang was staring at her with cold dark eyes. What he might be thinking, Jennsen couldn’t be sure, but she could see the fury building within those nightmare eyes.
“It was a very complex and powerful ward that preserved it until the right person touched it—to pull the note free,” Sister Perdita said in a quiet voice. “The ward was likely keyed to your touch, Excellency.”
For a long, terrifying moment, Jennsen feared that Emperor Jagang might suddenly swing his sword with a wild cry and behead the woman.
To the side, an officer suddenly pointed up at the Confessors’ Palace.
“Look! It’s her!”
