Confessor: Chainfire Trilogy Part 3

Johnrock took an anxious breath. "Why do I have to be first?"

"Because you are my right wing man."

Johnrock didn't have an immediate answer. He pulled his chin away from Richard's grip. "Do you really think this will help us win?"

"It will," Richard said as he straightened, "if we all follow through with the rest of it. Paint all by itself isn't going to win games for us, but the paint will add something important, something that merely winning could not accomplish-it will help to forge a reputation. That reputation will unsettle those who have to face us next."

"Come on, Johnrock," one of the other men said as he impatiently folded his arms.

The rest of the team gathered around watching nodded their agreement. None of them really wanted to be first. Most of them, but not all, had at least been won over by Richard's explanation of what the paint would do for them.

Johnrock, looking around at all the men waiting, finally grimaced. "All right, go ahead."

Richard glanced past his wing man to the guards with arrows nocked and at the ready. Now that the chains had been removed from the captives, the guards watched for any sign of trouble as they waited to take the team to their first match. Commander Karg always stationed a heavy guard whenever Richard and the other captives were not chained. Richard noted, though, that most of the arrows were pointed in his direction.

Focusing again on Johnrock, he spread his fingers and grabbed the top of the man's head to hold him still.

Richard had been fretting about what he would paint on the faces of the team. When he'd first come up with the idea, he had thought that maybe he would simply have each man paint his own face in whatever manner he wanted. After brief consideration he realized that he couldn't leave it up to the men. Too much was at risk.

Besides that, they all wanted Richard to do it. He was the point man. It had been his idea. He figured that most of them had been hesitant because they believed that they were going to be laughed at, and so they had wanted it to be by his hand rather than their own.

Richard dipped his finger in the small bucket of red paint. He had decided against using the brush Commander Karg had brought along with the paint.

Richard wanted to feel the act of drawing directly.

In the little time he'd had, he'd given a great deal of thought to what he would paint. He knew that it had to be something that would accomplish what he'd intended in the first place.

In order to make it work the way he'd described, he had to draw the things he knew.

He had to draw the dance with death.

The dance with death, after all, was ultimately centered on life, yet the meaning of the dance with death was not merely the singular concept of survival. The purpose of the forms was to be able to meet evil and destroy it. in that manner enabling one to preserve life, even one's own. It was a fine distinction, but an important one: it required recognizing the existence of evil in order to be able to fight for life.

While the vital necessity of recognizing the existence of evil was obvious to Richard, it was clearly a concept that many people willfully refused to face. They chose to be blind, to live in a fantasy world. The dance with death would not allow such lethal fantasies. Survival required the clear and conscious recognition of reality; therefore the dance with death required that one recognize truth. It was all part of a whole and would not succeed if parts were ignored or left out.

The elements of the dance with death-their forms-were at their base the components of every manner of combat, from a debate, to a game, to nghting to the death. Drawn in a language of emblems, those components built the concepts making up the dance. Using those concepts involved seeing what was really happening-in part and in whole-in order to counter it. The ultimate purpose of the dance with death was winning life. The translation of Ja'La dh Jin was "the Game of Life."

The things that belonged to a war wizard all played some part in the dance with death. In that way a war wizard was devoted to life. Among other items, the symbols on the amulet Richard had worn were a picture, a condensed diagram, forming the core concept of the dance. He knew those moves from fighting with the Sword of Truth.

Even if he didn't have the sword any longer, he grasped the totality of what was involved in the meaning of the dance with death, and therefore the knowledge he'd gained from using the sword remained with him whether or not he had the sword itself. As Zedd had often reminded him in the beginning, the sword was just a tool; it was the mind behind the weapon that mattered.

Along the way, since Zedd had first given Richard the sword, he had come to understand the language of emblems. He knew their meaning. They spoke to him. He recognized the symbols belonging to a war wizard, and understood what they meant.