Naked Empire

"The men who were with me wanted me to be their speaker, to go to talk with these great speakers, to convince them that we must do something to stop the Imperial Order and cast them out of Bandakar.

"I journeyed to the great city, a place I had never been before, and I was inspired at seeing a place that such a great culture as ours had built.

A culture about to be destroyed, if I could not convince these great speakers and the Wise One to think of something to do to stop the Order.

"I spoke before them with great urgency. I told them of all the Order had done. I told them of the men I had in hiding, waiting for word of what they were to do.

"The great speakers said that I cannot know the true nature of the.

Order from what I and a few men had seen-that the Imperial Order was a vast nation and we saw only a tiny speck of their people. They said that men cannot do such cruel acts as I described because it would cause them to shrink back in horror before they could complete them. To prove it, they suggested that I try to skin one of them. I admitted that I could not, but I told them that I had seen the men of the Order do this.

"The speakers scorned my insistence that it was real. They said I must always keep in mind that reality is not for us to know. They said that the men of the Imperial Order were probably frightened that we might be a violent people, and simply wanted to test our resolve by tricking us into believing that the things I described were real so that they could see how we reacted-if peace was really our way, or if we would attack them.

"The great speakers said, then, that I could not know if I really saw all the things I said, and that even if I did, I could not judge if they were for the bad, or the good-that I was not the person to judge the reasons of men I did not know, that to do so would be to believe that I was above them, and to put myself above them would be an act of prejudiced hostility.

"I could only think of all the things I had seen, of the men with me who all agreed that we must convince the great speakers to act to preserve our empire. I could only see in my mind the face of Luchan. And then, I thought of Marilee in the hands of this man. I thought of the sacrifice she had made, and how her life was cast away into this horror for nothing.

"I stood up before the great speakers and screamed that they were evil."

Cara snorted a laugh. "Seems you can tell what's real, when you put your mind to it."

Richard shot her a withering glare.

Owen glanced up and blinked. His thoughts had been so distant as he told his story that he hadn't really heard her. He looked up at Richard.

"That was when they banished me," he said.

"But the boundary seal had failed," Richard said. "You had already come and gone through the pass. How could they enforce a banishment with the boundary down?"

Owen waved dismissively. "They do not need the wall of death.

Banishment is in a way a sentence of death-the death of the person as a citizen of Bandakar. My name would be known throughout the empire, at least what was left of it, and every person would shun me. I would be turned away from every door. I was one of the banished. No one would want to have any contact with me. I was now an outcast. It does not matter that they could not put me beyond the barrier; they put me beyond my people. That was worse.

"I went back to my men in the hills to collect my things and confess to them that I had been banished. I was going to go out beyond our homeland, as I had been commanded by the will of our people through our great speakers.

"But my men, those in the hills, they would not see me go. They said that the banishment was wrong. These men had seen the things I had seen.

They had wives, mothers, daughters, sisters who had been taken away. They all had seen their friends murdered, seen the men skinned alive and left to suffer in agony as they died, seen the races come to circle over them as they hung on those poles. They said that since all our eyes had seen these things, then these things must be true, must be real.

"They all said that we had gone into the hills because we love our land and want to restore the peace we once had. They said that the great speakers were the ones whose eyes did not see and they were condemning our people to murder at the hands of savage men and those of our people who lived to a cruel life under the rule of the Imperial Order, to be used as breeding stock or as slaves.

"I was shocked that these men would not reject me for being banished-that they wanted me to stay with them.

"It was then that we decided that we would be the ones to do something, to come up with the plan we always wanted the speakers to decide. When I asked what would be our plan, everyone said the same thing.

"They all said that we must get Lord Rahl to come and give us freedom.

They all spoke with one voice.

"We decided, then, what we would do. Some men said that one such as the Lord Rahl would come to cast out the Order when we asked.