Faith of the Fallen

The deadly dance with Jagang had begun. She dimly wondered again if this time she would lose her life.

Jagang had killed a number of the Sisters who had displeased him.

Nicci's safety hIm-such as it was-lay in her very indifference to her safety. Her utter Ikerest in her own life fascinated Jagang because he knew it was sincere.

"Sometimes, you're a fool," she said with true contempt, "too arrogant to see what is in front of your nose."

He twisted her arm until she thought it surely would snap. His panting breath was warn on her throbbing cheek. "I've killed people for saying much less than that."

She mocked him through the pain. "Do you intend to bore me to death, then? If you want to kill me, seize me by the throat and strangle me, or slash me to a bloody mess so that I will bleed to death at your feet-don't think you can suffocate me with the sheer weight of your monotonous threats.

If you wish to kill me, then be a man and do so! Or else shut your mouth."

The mistake most people made with Jagang was to believe, because of his capacity for such profound brutality, that he was an ignorant, dumb brute.

He was not. He was one of the most intelligent men Nicci had ever met.

Brutality was but his cloak. As an outgrowth of his access to the thoughts of so many different people's minds, he was directly exposed to their knowledge, wisdom, and ideas; such exposure augmented his intellect. He also knew what people most feared. If anything about him frightened her, it was not his brutality, but his intelligence, for she knew that intelligence could be a bottomless well of truly inventive cruelty.

"Why did you kill him, Nicci?" he asked again, his voice losing some of its fire.

In her mind, like a protective stone wall, was the thought of Richard.

He had to see it in her eyes. Part of Jagang's rage, she knew, was at his own impotence at penetrating her mind, of possessing her as he could so many others. Her knowing smirk taunted him with what he could not have.

"It amused me to hear the great Kadar Kardeef cry for mercy, and then to deny it."

Jagang roared again, a beastly sound out of place for such a mannerly bedchamber. She saw the blur of his arm swinging for her. The room whirled violently around her. She expected to hit something with a bone-breaking impact. Instead, she upended and crashed onto unexpected softness: the bed, she realized. Somehow, she had missed the marble and mahogany posts at the corners-they surely would have killed her. Fate, it seemed, was trifling with her. Jagang landed atop her.

She thought he might beat her to death now. Instead, he studied her eyes from inches away. He sat up, straddling her hips. His meaty hands pulled at the laces on the bodice of her dress. With a quick yank of the material, he exposed her breasts. His fingers squeezed her bared flesh until her eyes watered.

Nicci didn't watch him, or resist, but instead went limp as he pushed her dress up around her waist. Her mind began its journey away, to where only she alone could go. He fell on her, driving the wind from her lungs in a helpless grunt.

Arms lying at her sides, her fingers open and slack, eyes unblinking, Nicci stared at the folds of the silk in the canopy of the bed, her mind unaffected in the distant quiet place. The pain seemed remote. Her struggle to breathe seemed trivial.

As he went about his coarse business, she focused her thoughts instead on what she was going to do. She had never believed possible what she now contemplated; now she knew it was. She had only to decide to do it.

Jagang slapped her, causing her to focus her mind back on him. "You're too stupid to even weep!"

She realized he had finished; he was not happy that she hadn't noticed.

She had to make an effort not to comfort her jaw, stinging from what to him was a smack, but to the person receiving it was a blow nearly strong enough to cripple. Sweat dripped from his chin onto her face. His powerful body glistened from the exertion she had not perceived.

His chest heaved as he glared down at her. Anger, of course, powered the glare, but Nicci thought she saw a tinge of something else there, too: regret, or maybe anguish, or maybe even hurt.

"Is that what you wish me to do, then, Excellency? Weep?"

His voice turned bitter as he flopped onto his side beside her. "No. I wish you to react."

"But I am," she said as she stared up at the canopy. "It is simply not the reaction you wish."

He sat up. "What's the matter with you, woman?"

She gazed up at him a moment, and then turned her eyes away.

"I have no idea," she answered honestly. "But I think I must find out."

CHAPTER 14

Jagang gestured. "Take off your clothes. You're spending the night.

It's been too long." This time, it was he who stared off at the walls. "I've missed you in my bed, Nicci."

She didn't answer. She did not believe that in his bed he missed anything. She didn't believe she could conceive of him understanding what it was to miss a person. What he missed, she thought, was being able to miss someone.