Faith of the Fallen

In general, though, it wasn't a serious concern. Hordes of youths, lusting after the promise of plunder, were only too eager to join the army.

They often had to wait weeks or months to be accepted into training, so many were the numbers joining. Richard had seen crowds of them in the cities, playing games, gambling, drinking, fighting-young men dreaming of the glory of killing the evil foes of the great empire of the Order. They enjoyed the adoration of the populace when they joined the army to go off and fight the frightful wickedness and sin that was said to infect the New World.

Richard was horrified to see the numbers of people living in the Old World, because it meant that the Order's army already in the New World was hardly a drain on the populace-and only the beginning. He had thought that perhaps the Order might lose their enthusiasm for a war conducted so far from their homeland, or that the people of the Old World would tire of the hardship necessary to conduct such a war. He now knew that thought had been but a feeble daydream.

It didn't take a wizard, or a prophet, to know that the armies the New World could raise, even given wildly optimistic conditions, had no hope whatsoever of prevailing against the millions upon millions of soldiers Richard had seen pouring north, to say nothing of the ones he hadn't seen who would be taking other routes. The Midlands was doomed.

Ever since the people of Anderith chose the Order over freedom, he had known in his heart that the New World was going to fall to the Order. He felt no satisfaction in realizing how right he had been. Seeing the size of the enemy, he realized that freedom was lost, and resisting the Order was but suicide.

The course of events seemed irrevocable, the world lost to the Order.

The future for him and Kahlan seemed no less hopeless.

By far the strangest place he and Nicci had visited in their journey southeast, a place she never spoke of afterward, had been less than a week south of Tanimura. Richard had still been in a dismal mood thinking about the carvings he had seen, when Nicci took an old, seldom-used track off the main road. It led back toward the hills, to a rather small city beside a quiet river.

Most of the businesses had been abandoned. The wind, at will, carried dust through the broken windows of warehouses. Many of the homes had fallen to ruin, their roofs caved in, weeds and vines doing their best to bring down crooked walls. Only the homes on the outskirts were still occupied, mostly by people raising animals and farming the surrounding land.

On the northern side of the city, one small store remained to sell staples to surrounding farmers. There was also a leather shop, a fortune-teller, and a lonely inn. In the center of town stood the bones of buildings, long since picked clean by scavengers. Several of the buildings still stood, but most had long ago collapsed. Richard and Nicci walked through the center of town watched only by a fitful wind.

At the southern edge, they arrived at the remains of what had once been a large brick building. Without a word, Nicci turned off the road and marched deliberately into the forlorn site. The wood beams and roof had been consumed by fire. A thick mat of weeds and brush were devouring the wood floor. The brick walls were all that was left, really, and they were mostly fallen to rubble, with only a portion of the east wall still tall enough to contain a lone window frame.

The wind ruffled Nicci's sunlit hair as she looked down the length of the skeletal remains of the building. Her arms languid at her sides, her back not quite as straight as it usually was, she stood vulnerable where once a roof would have sheltered her.

For nearly an hour, she was lost among the ghosts.

Richard stood off to the side, leaning a hip against the charred remains of part of a workbench, one of the only things left inside the brick frame.

"Do you know this place?" he finally asked her.

She blinked at his question. She stared into his eyes for a long time, as if he, too, were a ghost. She stepped close to him then, her blue eyes finally looking away to let her fingers reminisce as they glided lightly over the remains of the workbench.

"I grew up in this town," she answered in a distant voice.

"Oh." Richard gestured around them. "And this place?"

"They made armor here," she whispered.

He couldn't imagine why she would want to see such a place. "Armor?"

"The best armor in all the land. Double-proofed standard. Kings and noblemen came here to buy armor."

Richard gazed around at the ruins of the place, wondering what more there must be to the story.

"Did you know the man who made the armor?"

Her blue eyes seeing ghosts again, she shook her head.

"No," she whispered. "I'm so sorry, but I never knew him."

A tear ran down her cheek to drip off her smooth jaw. She seemed very much a child at that moment, alone in the world, and frightened.