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He turned back to stare at her. “What difference? How can you ask such a thing? I made you as good as my queen. You asked me to trust you and allow you to go off to eliminate Lord Rahl. I wished you to remain here but instead I let you go. I trusted you.”
“So you say. If you really trusted me then you would trust me, not interrogate me. It would seem that you have difficulty understanding the concept represented by the word.”
“That was a year and a half ago. I haven’t seen you since. I’ve had no word.”
“You saw me with Tovi.”
He nodded. “I saw a lot of things through Tovi’s eyes—through the eyes of all four of these women.”
“They thought they were clever enough to use the bond to the Lord Rahl.” Nicci smiled slightly. “But you were watching them the whole time. You knew everything.”
He smiled with her. “You always were smarter than Ulicia and the rest of them.” He arched an eyebrow. “I trusted you when you said that you were going off to kill Richard Rahl. Instead, you end up having no trouble making the bond work for you. How is that possible, darlin? Such a bond would only work if you were devoted to him. Would you like to explain it to me?”
Nicci folded her arms. “I fail to see how it could be at all difficult to grasp. You destroy; he creates. You offer an existence devoted to death; he offers life. They aren’t empty words—from either of you. He never beat me bloody, or raped me.”
Jagang’s face, and his shaved head, went scarlet with rage. “Rape? If I wanted to rape you I would—and by right—but it isn’t rape. You wanted it. You’re just too stubborn to admit it. You hide your lustful desires for me behind feigned outrage.”
Nicci’s arms slipped to her sides as she leaned toward him as she spoke through rage of her own. “You can invent things to justify your actions all you want, but that does not make them true.”
With a murderous expression twisting his features, he turned away from the sight of her. Nicci fully expected him to suddenly round on her and hit her hard enough to break her skull. She wanted him to. A quick end was far preferable to drawn-out torture on the way to a slow death.
The myriad strident sounds from out in the night all around were muted by the thickly padded tent walls. To be out of the constant din of the camp was a luxury. Outside, the ground crawled with vermin. Inside the emperor’s tent there were slaves who constantly plucked up the roaches. The scented oils in the tent also covered some of the stench that hung thick in the air.
In a certain sense the emperor’s tent might seem to be a peaceful refuge, but it wasn’t. It was actually one of the most dangerous places in the entire camp. The emperor held absolute power of life and death. No matter what Jagang chose to do, he would never be questioned or challenged.
“So,” Jagang finally said, his back still to her, “answer my question. Do you love him?”
Nicci wiped a weary hand over her brow. “Since when have you cared what my feelings were? It’s never interfered with your ability to rape me.”
“Why this nonsense about rape all of a sudden!” he roared as he took a long stride back toward her. “You know that I have feelings for you! And I know that you have feelings for me!”
Nicci didn’t bother to answer. He was right in that she had never presented such objections to him before. She hadn’t known how to object. In that past she hadn’t believed that her life was her own. How could she object to the Order using her to their ends? Further, how could she object to the leader of the Order using her to his ends?
Because of Richard she had come to grasp that her life was her own. That meant that her body, too, was her own and she didn’t have to give it to anyone if she didn’t want to.
“I know what you’re doing, Nicci.” His hands fisted again. “You’re just using him to try to make me jealous. You’re using your womanly ways to get me to throw you on that bed and rip off your clothes—that’s what you’re really after and we both know it! You’re using him as a way to lure me into heated passion for you. It’s really me you want, but you hide your true passions behind protests of rape.”
Nicci coolly appraised his heated expression. “You are getting bad advice from your testicles.”
He drew back a fist. She stood her ground, glaring into the cloudy shapes shifting across the midnight landscape of his eyes.
The hand finally dropped to his side. “I have offered you what I have offered no other—to be as good as my queen, to be above all others. Richard Rahl can offer you nothing. Only I can offer you all that an emperor can offer. Only I can offer you a part in the power that will rule the world.”
Nicci swept an arm around at the royal tent. “Ah, the glamour of embracing evil. All mine if only I will give up my thinking mind and proclaim utter inequity to be a virtue.”
“I offered you the power to rule with me!”
Nicci shot him a cold glare as she let her arm drop. “No, you offered me the duty of being your whore and the chore of killing those who would not bow to your rule.”
“It is the Order’s rule! This war is not about bringing glory to me and you know it! This conflict is in the cause of the Creator—for the salvation of mankind. We bring the true will of the Creator to heathens. We bring the teachings of the Order to those hungering for meaning and purpose in their lives.”
Nicci stood mute. He was right. He might have greatly enjoyed the trappings of power but she knew that he sincerely believed that he was merely the champion of a greater good, a warrior who was serving the Creator’s true wishes by enforcing the Order’s teachings in this life so that mankind could go on to glory in the next.
Nicci knew very well what it was to believe. Jagang believed.
It struck her as almost laughable, though, how the ideology she herself had once advanced now seemed so profoundly foolish. Unlike Jagang, and most people who embraced the Order’s beliefs, Nicci had accepted them because she thought she had to, that it was the only way for her to achieve a moral life. She endured the yoke of servitude to others, all the while hating herself for not being happy about it. The Sisters of the Light had really been no better, offering her only a different flavor of the same selfless call to duty, so she remained in the helpless grip of the Fellowship of Order. As a numb subject of the Order, being used by Jagang was one of the many sacrifices she had believed was necessary in order to be a good and moral person.
And then all that had changed.
How she missed Richard.
“All you are going to bring to mankind is a thousand years of darkness,” she said, weary of arguing the truth to a true believer whose theological construct was based on what the Order preached, not on reality. “All you are going to do is cast the world into a long, dark, savage age.”
He glared at her a moment. “That’s not you talking, Nicci. I know it’s not. You’re just saying those things because Lord Rahl spouts such hate for his fellow man. You are repeating it to make me think you love him.”
“Maybe I do.”
He grinned. “No.” He shook his head. “No, you merely want to use him to twist me around your little finger. That’s the way of women—trying to maneuver and exploit men.”
Rather than letting him take her down the path of what her true feelings for Richard might be, Nicci changed the subject.
“Your plans of rule, your plans for the Order to bring its ideas to all the world, are not going to work. You need all three boxes of Orden. I was there when Sister Tovi died. She had the third box but it was stolen from her.”
“Ah yes, the brave Seeker, wielding the sword of truth”—he parodied a sword thrust—“stepping in to liberate the box of Orden from a wicked Sister of the Dark.” He gave her a sour look. “I was there, watching through her eyes, after all.”
He had been watching Nicci through Tovi’s eyes as well.
“The fact remains that the Sisters had all three boxes. You may now have those Sisters, but you only have two boxes.”
A sly smile replaced his annoyance. “Oh,
I don’t think that’s going to be as much of a problem as you think. Nor will it matter that you placed that box in play. I have ways around such petty difficulties.”
