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“If I don’t come back, then you will just have to do your best. Hopefully, even if
they kill me, I will be able to take Kronos out with me. Either way, we’ve laid a lot of surprises for them.”
“Does Richard know what you had planned?” Ishaq asked as he squinted up at her.
“I expect he knew. He had the good grace, though, not to make me feel any more afraid by arguing with me about what I know I must do. This is not a game. We are all fighting for our very lives. If we fail, then innocent, decent people are going to be slaughtered in numbers that stagger the imagination. I’ve been on the other end of attacks like this. I know what’s coming. I’m trying to prevent it. If you don’t want to help, then just stay out of my way.”
Nicci looked at each man in turn. Chagrined, they both kept silent.
Victor went back to his work and quickly finished up with binding her wrists. He pulled a knife from his boot and sliced off the excess length of rope.
“Who do you want to take you to the soldiers who are waiting?” Ishaq asked.
“I think you’d better take me, Ishaq. While Victor alerts everyone and sees to the preparations, you will be a representative of the mayor.”
“All right,” he said as he scratched the hollow of his cheek.
“Good,” she said as she picked up the reins.
Before she could say anything else, Victor cleared his throat. “There is one other matter I’ve been meaning to talk to you about. But we’ve both been busy…”
Victor uncharacteristically looked away from her.
“What is is?” she asked him.
“Well, ordinarily I wouldn’t say anything, but I think maybe you ought to know.”
“Know what?”
“People are beginning to question Richard.”
Nicci frowned. “Question him? What do you mean? Question him in what way?”
“Word has gotten around about why he left. People are worried that he is abandoning them and their cause to chase phantoms. They question if they should be following such a man. There is talk that he’s…that he’s, you know, deranged or something. What should I tell them?”
Nicci took a deep breath as she collected her thoughts. This was what she had feared. This was one of the reasons she had thought it important that he not leave—especially the way he did, right before the attack.
“Remind them,” she said as she leaned toward him, “that Lord Rahl is a wizard, and a wizard can see things—such as hidden, distant threats—that they cannot. A wizard does not go around explaining his actions to people.
“The Lord Rahl has many responsibilities other than just this one place. If the people here wish to live free, to live their own lives as they wish, then they must choose to do so for their own sake. They must trust that Richard, as the Lord Rahl and as a wizard, is off doing what is best for our cause.”
“And do you believe that?” the blacksmith asked.
“No. But there is a difference. I can follow the ideals he has shown me while at the same time working to bring Richard back to his senses. The two are not incompatible. But the people must trust in their leader. If they think he is a madman they may fall back on fear and give up. Right now we can’t afford that risk.
“Whether Richard is sane or not it doesn’t change the validity of the cause. The truth is the truth—Richard or no Richard.
“Those troops coming to murder us are real. If they win, then those who are not killed will be enslaved once more under the yoke of the Imperial Order. If Richard is alive, dead, sane, or mad, it does not change that fact.”
Victor, his arms folded, nodded.
Nicci moved her leg back and pressed her heel into Sa’din’s side, moving his rump closer to the wall. She turned the back of her shoulders to the blacksmith standing on that wall beside her. “Pull my dress down to my waist, and be quick about it—the sun will be setting soon.”
Ishaq turned away, shaking his head.
Victor hesitated a moment, then sighed in resignation and did as she had instructed.
“All right, Ishaq, let’s go. Lead the way.” She looked back over her shoulder at Victor. “I will bring you the enemy, chasing the setting sun.”
“What should I tell the men?” Victor asked.
Nicci shrouded herself in the cold exterior she had used so often throughout her life, the cold calm of Death’s Mistress.
“Tell them to think dark and violent thoughts.”
For the first time, Victor’s glower twisted into a grim smile.
Chapter 26
The soldiers atop huge warhorses peered down at Nicci as Ishaq led her horse to a stop beside the community well in the small square at the eastern edge of the city. Her stallion, Sa’din, felt small in the presence of such huge beasts. Armored plate down the front of their heads lent them a threatening appearance. These were cavalry horses and the armor helped protect them from arrows as they charged enemy lines. They pawed the ground and snorted their disdain for the smaller horse come among them. Sa’din backed a step, just out of range of one of the warhorse’s teeth when it snapped, but he didn’t shy away.
If the horses looked to be frightening animals, the men were clearly their masters. Dressed in dark leather armor plates and shirts of chain mail and carrying an array of sinister weapons, these men were not merely brutish-looking but larger than any of the men defending the city. Nicci knew that they would have been selected for the mission because of the way they looked. The Order liked sending such intimidating messages to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies.
From dark windows, recessed doorways, narrow streets, and the shadows in alleyways people who had retreated out of the open watched the woman stripped to her waist, her wrists bound, being handed over to the soldiers. Nicci had endured the ride through the city by not thinking about it and instead focusing on her need to get this over with so she could catch up with Richard. That was what mattered. So people looked at her—what difference did it make? She had had to endure far worse at the hands of the men of the Order.
“I am an aide to the mayor,” Ishaq said in a subservient tone to the powerfully built man atop a towering, brown, bull neck gelding. The butt of the pole with the white flag rested on the man’s saddle between his legs, his meaty fist gripping it halfway up the length of the stout shaft. The man sat mute, waiting. Ishaq licked his lips as he bowed before going on. “He sent me in his place with his woman, his wife…as a gift to the great Kronos to show our sincerity in agreeing with his wishes.”
The soldier, a midlevel officer of some sort, smirked at Nicci after taking a long and deliberate look at her breasts. Broad leather belts held several knives, a flail, a short sword, and a crescent-bladed axe. The mail and metal rings along studded straps crossing his broad chest jangled when his horse stomped its hooves. She was relieved not to recognize the man and kept her head turned down to hide her face from the men with him.
Still, the officer said nothing.
With one hand Ishaq swept his hat off his head. “Please relay our message of peace to—”
The officer tossed the pole with the white flag down to Ishaq. Ishaq swiftly replaced his hat in order to catch the pole with one hand, his other still tightly gripping the reins just below Sa’din’s bit. The pole looked heavy, but Ishaq had been loading wagons for most of his life and had no trouble with it.
“Kronos will let you know if the offering is satisfactory,” the officer growled.
Ishaq cleared his throat, rather than say anything else, and again bowed politely. The soldiers all snickered at him before taking another knowing look at Nicci’s exposed condition. They obviously greatly enjoyed exerting their dominance over others.
Most of them had metal rings or pointed metal rivets pierced through their noses, ears, and cheeks in an attempt to make them look more fierce. Nicci thought that it simply made them look silly. Several of the dozen men had wild, dark, tattooed designs sweeping across their faces, also intended to intimidate. These were men who had risen to their highest ideal in life: to be savages.
It was somewhat common for
many of the women in the cities surrendering to advancing Imperial Order troops to come out stripped to the waist as a petition for leniency. Because it was such a common form of submission, the soldiers were not at all surprised by the manner in which the wife of the mayor was being surrendered. That, of course, was one of the reasons why Nicci had done it. Such bids for mercy and gentle treatment were never honored, but the women who offered themselves in such a manner didn’t know that.
Nicci knew because she had often been with the Order troops when they took such women captive. Such obliging people imagined that surrender in such a subservient manner would be ingratiating and elicit reasonable treatment. They had no idea that they had willingly given themselves over to incomprehensible horrors. The soldiers’ treatment of women captives was dismissed by the intellectuals of the Order as a trivial matter compared to the greater good the Order was bringing to the nonbelievers.
Nicci sometimes longed for death rather than continue to live with such memories and the knowledge that she had once been a party to such horrors. What she wanted now, though, was to set things right as only she could do. She wanted to participate in wiping the scourge of the Order from existence.
The grim officer who had carried the white flag into Altur’Rang bent down and now took the reins to her horse from Ishaq. He stepped his mount close to her. As he leaned toward her he casually seized her left nipple, twisting it as he spoke intimately to her.
“Brother Kronos tires quickly of a woman, no matter how beautiful she is. I expect it will be no different with you. When he moves on to the next he gives us the one he is finished with. Know that I will be first.”
The men with him chuckled. He flashed her a grin. His dark eyes gleamed with menace. He twisted harder until she gasped in pain and tears stung her eyes. Satisfied with himself and her timid reaction, he released her. Nicci squeezed her eyes shut as she pressed the back of her bound wrists to herself trying to ease the throbbing pain.
