Naked Empire

The Keep had thousands of rooms. The looting of it had netted the Imperial Order a caravan of cargo wagons, but even that much hardly scratched the surface of the contents of the Keep.

So far, Zedd had not seen any plums.

He didn't know if he would live to see any. The ride in the box after his capture had been brutal. He was still not recovered from the injuries inflicted after meeting Jagang. Guards let the parents do what they would to convince Zedd and Adie to give in, but they wouldn't allow the parents to get so carried away that they killed such prize prisoners. The parents had known that they weren't to kill them, but in the heat of such raw passion, Zedd knew that such orders were easy to forget. Zedd yearned for them to kill him and end it. The emperor, though, needed them alive, so the guards stood careful watch.

After the first few horrifying hours of listening to children being subjected to crippling torture, of being among their parents, who understandably demanded, quite forcefully, that he cooperate and tell the emperor what he wanted to know, Zedd had given in-not for the sake of the parents so much as to stop those brutal men from what they were doing to the children.

He had figured that he had nothing to lose, really, by giving in. It stopped the torture of the children for the time being. The Keep was vast; the things they brought were only a tiny portion of them. Zedd reasoned that the caravan of wagons probably didn't hold anything of any real value to Jagang. It would take quite a while to catalog everything-it could be weeks more before they reached the last item. There was no purpose in allowing children to endure torture when there might not be anything useful for Zedd to betray to Jagang.

Once, when they were alone while the Sister had gone to check on the preparations in the next tent, Adie had asked what he would do if they presented him with something that would materially help Jagang win. Zedd hadn't had a chance to answer; the soldiers had come in then and taken the two of them to the Sister in the next tent.

He was hoping to drag out the process for as long as possible. He hadn't counted on how they would keep at it day and night.

It sometimes took quite a while for the Sisters to get out the next treasure and have it ready. They were understandably cautious and took no chances. Those strange men without any trace of the gift who helped them might not be harmed if any errant item of magic were to accidentally be set in motion, but everyone else certainly was vulnerable. Careful as they were, there were enough people working at the preparations that Zedd and Adie were not allowed to sleep for long before they were taken off to unravel the next puzzle for them.

As he and Adie were dragged through the dark camp to the next tent, Zedd's legs would hardly hold him. Seeing his daughter's long-lost ball had sapped much of his remaining strength. He had never felt so old, so feeble.

He feared that his will to go on was flagging.

He didn't know how much longer he could keep his sanity.

He wasn't at all sure that he actually still possessed it. The world seemed to have turned into a crazy place. At times the whole thing seemed dreamlike. What he knew and what he didn't know sometimes seemed to have all twisted together into a knot of confusion.

As he was marched through the dark camp, through the humid heat, he began to imagine that he saw things-mostly people-from his past. He began to doubt that he really had seen that ball. He wondered if, like some of the other things he was seeing, he had imagined it as well. Could it maybe have been a simple ball, and he only thought that it was the one his daughter had lost? Had he imagined the zigzagged colors around it? He was beginning to question himself over every little thing.

Looking up at all the people in the crowded encampment, he thought he saw his long-dead wife, Erilyn, in the faces of the women held nearby under guard. They were mothers, their worst nightmares ready to come to life if Zedd didn't cooperate. His gaze passed over children clutching their mother's skirts, or their father's legs. They looked at him. his wavy white hair in disarray, probably thinking he was some crazy man. Maybe he was.

The torches lit the sprawling camp with a kind of flickering light that made everything seem imaginary. The campfires, spread as far as he could see, looked like a star field lying across the ground, as if the world had turned upside down.

"Wait," the Sister said to the guards.

Zedd was jerked to a halt as the Sister ducked inside the tent. Adie cried out as the man holding her wrenched her arm in the act of stopping her.

Zedd swayed on his feet, wondering if he might pass out. The whole nighttime camp wavered in his vision.