Naked Empire

"We have big problems," Richard began, "and not just from the poison Owen gave me. Owen isn't gifted. He's like you, Jennsen. Magic doesn't touch him." His gaze remained locked on Jennsen's. "The rest of his people are the same as he, as you."

Jennsen's jaw fell open in astonishment. She looked confused, as if unable to reconcile it all in her mind. Friedrich and Tom looked nearly as startled. Cara's brow drew down in a dark frown.

"Richard," Jennsen finally said, "that just can't be. There's too many of them. There's no way that they can all be half brothers and sisters of ours."

"They aren't half brothers and sisters," Richard said. "They're a line of people descended from the House of Rahl-people like you. I don't have time right now to explain all of it to you, but remember how I told you that you would bear children who were like you, and they would pass that pristinely ungifted trait on to all future generations? Well, back a long time ago, there were people like that spreading in D'Hara. The people back then gathered up all these ungifted people and sent them to the Old World.

The people down here then sealed them away beyond those mountains, there.

The name of their empire, Bandakar, means 'the banished. »

Jennsen's big blue eyes filled with tears. She was one of those people, people so hated that they had been banished from the rest of the people in their own land and sent into exile.

Kahlan put an arm around her shoulders. "Remember how you said that you felt alone in the world?" Kahlan smiled warmly. "You don't have to feel alone anymore. There are people like you."

Kahlan didn't think her words seemed to help much, but Jennsen welcomed the comfort of the embrace.

Jennsen abruptly looked back up at Richard. "That can't be true. They had a boundary that kept them locked in that place. If they were like me they wouldn't be affected by a boundary of magic. They could have come out of there any time they wished. Over all this time, at least some of them would have come out into the rest of the world- the magic of the boundary couldn't have held them back."

"I don't think that's true," Richard said. "Remember when you saw the sand flowing sideways in that warning beacon that Sabar brought us? That was magic, and you saw it."

"That's right," Kahlan said. "If she's a pillar of Creation, then how is such a thing possible?"

"That's right," Jennsen agreed. "How could that be, if I'm truly ungifted?" Her eyebrows went up. "Richard-maybe it's not true after all.

Maybe I have a bit of the spark of the gift-maybe I'm not really, truly ungifted."

Richard smiled. "Jennsen, you're as pure as a snowflake. You saw that magic for a reason. Nicci wrote us in her letter that the warning beacon was linked to the wizard who created it-linked to him in the underworld. The underworld is the world of the dead. That means that the statue functioned partly through Subtractive Magic-magic having to do with the underworld.

You may be immune to magic, but you are not immune to death. Gifted or not, you're still linked to life, and thus death.

"That's why you saw some of the magic of the statue-the part relating to the advancement of death.

"The boundary was a place in this world where death itself existed.

To go into that boundary was to enter the world of the dead. No one returns from the dead. If any pristinely ungifted person in Bandakar had gone into the boundary, they would have died. That was how they were sealed in."

"But they could banish people through the boundary," Jennsen pressed.

"That would have to mean that the boundary didn't really affect them."

Richard was shaking his head even as she was protesting. "No. They were touched by death, the same as anyone. But there was a way left through the boundary-much like the one that once divided the three lands of the New World. I got through that boundary without being touched by it. There was a pass through it, a special, hidden place to get through the boundary. This one was the same."

Jennsen wrinkled her nose. "That makes no sense, then. If that was true, and it wasn't hidden from them-since they all knew of this passage through the boundary-then why couldn't they all just leave if they wanted to? How could it seal the rest of them in, if they could send banished people through?"

Richard sighed, wiping a hand across his face. It looked to Kahlan like he wished she hadn't asked that question.

"You know the area we passed a while back?" Richard asked her. "That place where nothing grew?"

Jennsen nodded. "I remember."

"Well, Sabar said he came through another one, a little to the north of here."

"That's right," Kahlan said. "And it ran toward the center of the wasteland, toward the Pillars of Creation-just like the one we saw. They had to be roughly parallel."

Richard was nodding to what she was beginning to suspect. "And they were to either side of the notch into Bandakar. They weren't very far apart.

We're in that place right now, between those two boundaries."