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Sister Ulicia bowed her head. “Yes, Excellency.”
Jagang turned his glare on Richard. “Where is she?”
Richard gestured to one of the officers of the First File standing not far away, the man Richard had ready for this purpose. There were only a few of the First File present, all having waited with Richard for the Imperial Order to arrive. They were there to guard him until the bitter end.
“Take the emperor down to Nicci’s cell,” Richard told the officer.
The man saluted with a fist to his heart. Before leading Jagang away, the contented-looking emperor turned back to Richard.
“Looks like you lose at the final turn at Ja’La dh Jin this time as well.”
Richard wanted to say that the time had not run out and the game was not yet over, but instead he simply watched the man leaving as he waited for the nightmare to begin in earnest.
Kahlan stood silently at his side. The way she glanced up at him made him uneasy.
Zedd and Nathan looked lost in their own thoughts. Verna looked angry and bitter that it had come to this. Richard couldn’t blame her. Cara, standing beside Benjamin, took hold of his hand. Along with the rest of his party, Jagang had brought Jennsen into the Garden of Life. The royal guards kept her on the other side of the room. Tom’s gaze was fixed on her. She stared back at him, unable to say all the things she obviously wanted to say.
Cara inched closer. “What ever happens now, Lord Rahl, I’m with you until my last breath.”
Richard returned a smile of appreciation.
Zedd, not far away, nodded his agreement with Cara’s sentiment. Benjamin lightly clapped his fist to his heart. Even Verna finally smiled and gave him a single nod. They were all with him.
Kahlan, close at his side, whispered, “Would it be all right if you just held my hand?”
Richard could not imagine how alone she must feel at that moment. With a heavy heart that he couldn’t say anything, he took her hand.
CHAPTER 60
Nicci sat in the near darkness on the bench carved out of the same stone as the walls. The outer room, a second layer of protection guarding the room hollowed out of solid rock, was shielded. The only way in or out was through the double set of iron doors with the shielded room between them. This was where the most dangerous of prisoners were held, prisoners who could command magic.
There was no telling how many people had sat in this very room as they awaited their appointment with death, or worse.
Nicci could hear footsteps in the outer passageway beyond the two iron doors. Someone was coming.
She had known that it was only a matter of time until he came.
Nicci was in a state of utter calm. She knew why she was there. She knew why Richard had told Nathan to have her locked in this cell.
She heard the lock in the outer door clang open, the metallic sound echoing through the network of low corridors. She could hear someone grunting as they tugged in a series of muscular pulls, forcing the door bound up on rusty hinges to open enough to get through. When she saw shadows through the small opening in the door to her inner cell, Nicci blew out the flame on the lamp beside her on the stone bench that was the room’s bed and only furnishing.
A key scraped and then the lock to her cell sprang open. After being in complete silence for so long, she found the strident sound exceptionally loud. As the door grated open the light from a lantern flooded in. Dust from the rusty door floated up in that harsh yellow light.
Emperor Jagang ducked down as he stepped over the high sill to squeeze in through the doorway. Nicci stood.
He was wearing his sleeveless vest so as to display his muscular bulk. His shaved head reflected the single flame of the lantern he’d brought. His black eyes looked entirely at home in the depths of the dark hole in the rock. Those black eyes gleamed as he took in the sight of her. She had made sure to loosen the top of her dress so that he would have something to catch his attention. It worked.
“I’ve been dreaming of you, darlin,” he said as if he thought it would impress her.
He always had believed that his lust proved something to her, as if his lack of civility or restraint only demonstrated how overwhelmingly appealing she was to him. To Nicci it only served to prove that he was an unprincipled savage.
Nicci stood tall, saying nothing, refusing to shy away as Jagang moved in close. He circled his muscular arm around her waist, pulling her tight against his powerful bulk, demonstrating his command of her, his virility, his unchallenged authority.
Nicci had no desire to drag it out.
She casually reached her arms up around him and snapped the Rada’Han closed around his bull neck.
He staggered back a step in confusion.
She knew that he would feel the power of the collar piercing into every fiber of his being.
“What have you done?” he asked in a tone of anger bordering on a kind of horror she had never heard out of him before.
She had no desire to discuss the matter, so she simply exerted her control through the collar to prevent him from talking. If she knew Jagang, and she did, then Sister Ulicia would be up in the Garden of Life working to open the right box of Orden. She didn’t want Ulicia to realize what had just happened.
Jagang would have been impatient to get at Nicci. The nightmares Richard had sent had plagued him, but the dreams Richard had given him of Nicci had turned his obsession for her into a passion, a mania, that had slowly grown to the point where it was nearly intolerable. Jagang had always desired her, but after the dreams Richard had crafted, Jagang could think of little else but possessing her.
He had even been willing to leave Sister Ulicia to her work to come down to the dungeon and personally recover her.
It was a small gift Richard had given her. When Nathan had locked her in the cell, he had explained, from behind the shields that protected his words from the ears of any spies, that Richard had devised the scheme as his last gift for Nicci. Richard knew that they would have to surrender the palace. He knew that they were all going to die. The one thing he could give Nicci was Jagang.
The Rada’Han had been in the cell. It was the collar that Ann had left there when she had been imprisoned by Nathan for a time. That was what had been so important that Ann had been trying to tell Nicci before she had been killed.
Nathan had known that the Rada’Han was in the cell, behind the shields of the room. Richard wanted Nicci to have it, and to have a way to bring final justice to Jagang the Just.
Richard had no illusions that it defeated the Imperial Order. The corrupt beliefs of the Order tainted the minds of millions. Jagang was not its architect. That communal hatred would burn on without one man.
Nicci understood that as well. She had grown up with the teachings of the Order. She knew how they attempted to perform the alchemy turning suffering into virtue, wrongdoing into righteousness, death into salvation.
Such beliefs were born in man’s willful refusal to use his mind, in his lust for the unearned, his wish for success without effort. Such beliefs were the embodiment of hatred for all that was good, a hatred for virtue, hatred for value. It was ultimately a hatred of themselves, of life, of existence. I
t was that hate, that dedication to death, that was the true manifestation of evil.
Killing Jagang would not cure mankind of such irrational zealotry. The beliefs of the Order were not driven by one man. The Order would go on without Jagang.
Nor would killing Jagang stop those who had put the boxes of Orden in play, or the Chainfire spell, or the taint from the chimes, or the vast army who lay in wait, surrounding the palace, so eager for blood and plunder. This would not change any of that.
But Richard had wanted to give her the last gift of being able to see this small bit of justice done before her own life was snuffed out, along with the rest of them, by the Sisters invoking the power of Orden in service to the army devoted to the beliefs of the Fellowship of Order.
It was Richard’s only way to thank her for all she had done, to allow her this one small bit of final salvation from the man who had so terribly abused her.
Nicci stepped over the high sill. Her prisoner, unable to protest, followed. While her gift was limited within the People’s Palace, it was enough to easily use the unique nature of the Rada’Han. She could have dropped Jagang to the ground in overwhelming agony, but she used only the power necessary to overcome his unwillingness to follow her silent directives.
Outside the second door several officers of the First File, men who had brought Jagang down to his caged prize, waited. The passageway was so low and cramped that the men had to hunch under the low ceiling and stand in a line because they wouldn’t fit side by side.
They were shocked to see Nicci now in command of the emperor.
A big man in a uniform, the captain of the prison guards, was there with them. The man had been kind to her, offering to bring her anything she wanted. She now had what she wanted.
“Captain Lerner,” she said, “if you would be so kind as to show us out of this maze?”
He gazed at the muscular man behind her in a collar and then smiled at her. “I would be only too happy to do so.”
Once up into the immense halls of the palace, Nicci made Jagang lead the way. She followed close behind him, making sure that he kept going, that he talked to no one, that he acknowledged no one. He tried mightily to overcome the power of the collar. It was ridiculously easy for Nicci to overwhelm all of his resistance, all of his might and fury. He was as helpless as a puppet.
