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“I will do whatever it takes to make her help me.”
“Richard, please, put this off for at least a day or two. We can talk it through. Let me help you properly consider your options.”
Richard pulled the reins around, letting his horse and the ones tethered to it start toward the door. “Going to Shota is my best chance of getting answers. I’m going.”
Richard ducked under the big doorway as they rode out into the night. Out across the expanse of grounds the cicadas droned on.
He pulled his horse around to see Nicci standing in the doorway, lit from behind by the lanternlight. “You be careful,” he told her. “If not for yourself, then for me.”
That, at least, made her smile. She shook her head in resignation. “By your command, Lord Rahl.”
He waved his farewell to Victor and Ishaq.
“Safe journey,” Ishaq said as he removed his hat.
Victor saluted with a fist over his heart. “Come back to us when you can, Richard.”
Richard promised them he would.
As they started down the road, Cara shook her head. “I don’t know why you bothered going to all the trouble to save my life. We’re going to die, you know.”
“I thought you were coming with me to prevent that from happening.”
“Lord Rahl, I don’t know if I can protect you against a witch woman. I’ve never faced their power, nor have I heard of any Mord-Sith who has. A Confessor’s power used to be deadly to Mord-Sith; it could be that witch woman’s power is just as fatal. I will do my best, but I just think you should know that I might not be able to protect you from a witch woman.”
“Oh, I’d not worry about it, Cara.” Richard said as he squeezed his legs and shifted his weight, urging his horse into a canter. “If I know Shota, she won’t let you get anywhere near her, anyway.”
Chapter 25
As she marched down the side of a wide thoroughfare leading a small knot of men, Nicci thought that in a way it seemed like the sun had gone out since Richard had left. She missed just being able to look into his eyes, at the spark of life in them. For two days she had tirelessly gone about the urgent preparations for the imminent attack, but, without Richard around, life seemed empty, less bright, less…less of everything.
At the same time, when he had been around, his single-minded determination to find his imagined love had been draining. In fact, she had sometimes wanted to strangle him. She had tried everything from patience to anger in an attempt to get him to come around to seeing the truth, but it had been like trying to push against a mountain. In the end, nothing she’d done or said had made any difference.
For his own sake she earnestly wanted to help him to come to grips with reality. To do so she had to challenge him in an effort to try to get him to come to his senses before something terrible happened, but at the same time trying to make him see the truth somehow always seemed to cast her as a villain working against him. She hated being in that position.
Nicci hoped that by the time she finished helping to rid Altur’Rang of the threat of the approaching Imperial Order troops and their wizard, Kronos, she could quickly catch up with Richard and Cara. With spare horses and as fast as she knew he would ride, Nicci realized that she would not be able to catch up with him until after he reached the witch woman. If he even made it that far. If Shota didn’t kill him once he did.
From what Nicci knew of witches, Richard’s chances of coming out of her lair alive were pretty slim. He would have to face the witch woman without Nicci’s help and protection. Still, he knew the woman, and she was a woman in every sense, from what Nicci had heard of her, so maybe Richard would at least be civil. It was not at all wise to be impolite to witches.
But even surviving an encounter with a witch woman he would still be devastated if she didn’t help him and Nicci knew she couldn’t because there was no missing woman for Richard to find. At times it infuriated her that he was so obstinate about something so obviously nothing more than an illusion. At other times she worried that he really was losing his mind. That was too chilling a thought to contemplate.
Nicci paused at the side of the road with a sudden, terrible realization.
The men following her lurched to a halt when she did, bringing her out of her thoughts. They were all with her either to see to her instructions in regard to some of the defenses of the city or else to carry messages as needed. Now they stood silent and uneasy, not knowing why she had stopped.
“Up there,” she said to the men, pointing at a three story brick building on the corner across the street. “Make sure that we can use that place to good advantage and put at least a couple dozen archers in the windows. See that they have a large supply of arrows.”
“I will go take a look,” one of the men said before running off across the road, dodging wagons, horses, and hand-drawn carts.
People rushed along the side of the street passing around Nicci and the men with her as if they were a rock in a swiftly moving river. Passersby spoke in hushed tones among themselves as they coursed between clusters of hawkers calling out trying to sell their goods, or people gathered to urgently discuss the impending battle for the city and what they would do to protect themselves. Wagons of every sort, from big freight wagons pulled by teams of six horses to small wagons pulled by a single horse, sped past in a hurry to complete the stockpiling of provisions or other necessary work while they still could.
Despite the din of horses, wagons, and people, Nicci didn’t really hear any of it; she was thinking about the witch woman.
Nicci had suddenly realized that Shota might not simply be unwilling to help Richard, but she might not tell him so. Witch women had their own way of doing things, and their own ends.
If this woman thought Richard was being too insistent or assertive, she very well might decide to get rid of him by sending him on a useless quest to the ends of the world. She very well might do such a thing simply to amuse herself, or to doom him to die a slow death on an endless march across some distant desert. A witch woman might do such a thing just because she could. Richard, in his urgency to find his fantasy woman, wouldn’t consider those possibilities. He would promptly head off to where she pointed.
Nicci was furious with herself for letting him leave to go to such a dangerous woman. But what could she do? She couldn’t very well forbid him from going.
Her only chance was to get rid of Brother Kronos and his troops as swiftly as possible and then go after Richard and do what she could to protect him.
She spotted the man she had sent to check the brick building sidestepping his way between the wagons and horses as he ran back across the road. Nicci noticed that even with all the people out traveling the roads of the city, it was still much less busy than an ordinary day. People everywhere were making preparations; some had already holed up in places where they thought they might be safe. Nicci had been with the Order when they swept into a city; there was no safe place.
The man dodged his way around an empty wagon bouncing past and at last reached Nicci’s side. He stood silently waiting. He was afraid to speak until she requested his report. He was afraid of her. Everyone was afraid of her. She wasn’t just a sorceress; she was a sorceress in a bad mood and they all knew it.
No one understood why she seemed so ill-tempered, but for two days everyone had walked on egg shells when they were around her. It had nothing to do with them, and not even anything to do with Richard racing off on his mad search for a woman who didn’t exist, but none of them knew that. Nicci was mentally immersed in preparing herself for the ferocity of the violence to come, rehearsing in her mind the various things she might need to do, and hardening herself to it all.
When on the brink of unleashing almost inconceivable savagery, one did not hum a merry tune and remark on the lovely day. One nursed dark thoughts.
Nicci never bothered to try to explain her mood; going through the effort of doing so would drain some of her store of energy. Preparing in her mind to ga
ther every bit of skill, knowledge, wisdom, and power she had at her disposal required a certain kind of withdrawal. There were violent and deadly forces these people could never begin to comprehend that she had to be ready to unleash in an instant. She couldn’t explain all of that to everyone. They would just have to deal with it.
“Well?” she calmly asked the man as he stood silently catching his breath.
“It will work,” he said. “They do knitting and make cloth there. All three floors are pretty open so archers will be able to quickly and easily move from window to window to get the best shot.”
Nicci nodded. She put a hand to her brow to shield her eyes from the low sun as she looked back to the west along the wide boulevard. She studied the layout of the roads and the angles at which they crossed. She finally decided that the crossroads where they stood, with the brick building across the way, was the best spot. With as wide as both thoroughfares were, these roads would likely be the choice of enemy cavalry in the eastern part of the city. She knew the way the Order ran their attacks. They liked width so as to present the strongest front, the most powerful blow in order to break the enemy apart. She was pretty sure that they would send cavalry in this way if they came in from the east, as she expected.
“Good,” she told the man. “See to getting archers here along with a heavy supply of arrows. Be quick about it—I don’t think we have much time.”
As he ran to see to it, Nicci spotted Ishaq in the distance racing up the road in a wagon pulled by two of his big draft horses. He looked to be in a hurry. She had a good idea why he was coming for her, but she tried not to think about it. She turned to another of the men with her.
“Back there, just after the brick building where we will station the archers, I want spikes placed. The span of the road is hemmed in by buildings on both sides.” She gestured to the road that crossed the main thoroughfare before the brick building. “Down the street to each side as well, so that if the remaining men charging in try to take either route to escape they will get the same.”
