Naked Empire

"I don't know and it doesn't matter to me in the least. He fought for the Imperial Order-fought to uphold a view of all life, including his, as unimportant, interchangeable, expendable in the mindless pursuit of an ideal that holds individual lives as worthless in themselves-a tenet that demands sacrifice to others until you are nothing.

"He fights for the dream of everybody to be nobody and nothing.

"The beliefs of the Order hold that you had no right to love Marilee, that everyone is the same and so your duty should be to marry someone who could best use your help. In that way, through selfless sacrifice, you would properly serve your fellow man. Despite how you struggle not to see what's before your eyes, Owen, I think somewhere beneath all your regurgitated teachings, you know that that is the greatest horror brought by the Order-not their brutality, but their ideas. It is their beliefs that sanction brutality, and yours that invite it.

"He didn't value his own life, who he was; why should I care what his name was. I give him what was his greatest ambition: nothingness."

When Richard saw Kahlan shivering in the cold drizzle, he withdrew his hot glare from Owen and retrieved her cloak from her pack in the wagon. With the utmost gentleness and care, he wrapped it around her shoulders. By the look on his face, he seemed to have had all he could take of listening to Owen.

Kahlan seized his hand, holding it to her cheek for a moment. There was some small good in the story they had heard from Owen.

"This means that the gift isn't killing you, Richard," she said in a confidential tone. "It was the poison."

She was relieved that they hadn't run out of time to get him help, as she had so feared on that brief, eternal wagon ride when he'd been unconscious.

"I had the headaches before I ran into Owen. I still have the headaches. The sword's magic as well faltered before I was poisoned."

"But at least this now gives us more time to find the solutions to those problems."

He ran his fingers back through his hair. "I'm afraid we have worse problems, now, and not the time you think."

"Worse problems?"

Richard nodded. "You know the empire Owen comes from? Ban-dakar? Guess what 'Bandakar' means."

Kahlan glanced at Owen sitting hunched on the crate and all by himself.

She shook her head as her gaze returned to Richard's gray eyes, troubled more by the suppressed rage in his voice than anything else.

"I don't know, what?"

"In High D'Haran it's a name. It means 'the banished. Remember from the book, The Pillars of Creation, when I was telling you what it said about how they decided to send all the pristinely ungifted people away to the Old World-to banish them? Remember that I said no one ever knew what became of them?

"We just found out.

"The world is now naked before the people of the Bandakaran Empire."

Kahlan frowned. "How can you know for certain that he is a descendant of those people?"

"Look at him. He's blond and looks more like full-blooded D'Harans than he does the people down here in the Old World. More importantly, though, he's not affected by magic."

"But that could be just him."

Richard leaned in closer. "In a closed place like he comes from, a place shut off from the rest of the world for thousands of years, even one pillar of Creation would have spread that ungifted trait throughout the entire population by now.

"But there wasn't just one; they were all ungifted. For that, they were banished to the Old World, and in the Old World, where they tried to establish a new life, they were again all collected and banished to that place beyond those mountains-a place they were told was for the bandakar, the banished."

"How did the people in the Old World find out about them? How did they keep them all together, without a single one surviving to spread their ungifted trait to the general population, and how did they manage to then put them all in that place-banish them?"

"Good questions, all, but right now not the important ones.

"Owen," Richard called as he turned back to the others, "I want you to stay right there, please, while the rest of us decide what will be our single voice about what we must do."

Owen brightened at a method of doing things with which he identified and felt comfortable. He didn't seem to detect, as did Kahlan, the undercurrent of sarcasm in Richard's voice.

"You," Richard said to the man Kahlan had touched, "go sit beside him and see that he waits there with you."

While the man scurried to do as he was told, Richard tilted his head in gesture to the rest of them, calling them away with him. "We need to talk."

Friedrich, Tom, Jennsen, Cara, and Kahlan followed Richard away from Owen and the man. Richard leaned back against the chafing rail of the wagon and folded his arms as they all gathered close around him. He took time to appraise each face looking at him.