Soul of the Fire

The open plains suddenly seemed a very lonely place.

Cara pressed the wad of wet grass to the side of her head. "And even if he was disregarding his guard duty to chase a fish-hard to believe-why would he leave all his weapons? And how could he drown in inches of water, if he didn't fall and hit his head?"

The hunters wept silently as their hands caressed Juni's young face. Tenderly, Richard's hand joined theirs. "What I'd like to know is what he was chasing. What put that look in his eyes."

CHAPTER 4

Thunder rumbled in from the grassland, echoing through the narrow passageways as Richard, Cara, and Kahlan left the building where Juni's body had been laid out to be prepared for burial.

The building was no different from the other buildings in the Mud People's village: thick walls of mud brick plastered over with clay, and a roof of grass thatch. Only the spirit house had a tile roof. All the windows in the village were glassless, some covered with heavy coarse cloth to keep out the weather.

With the buildings being all the same drab color, it wasn't hard to imagine the village as lifeless ruins. Tall herbs, raised as offerings for evil spirits, grew in three pots on a short wall but lent little life to the passageway frequented mostly by the amorphous wind.

As two chickens scattered out of their way, Kahlan gathered her hair in one hand to keep the gusts from whipping it against her face. People, some in tears, rushed past, going to see the fallen hunter. It somehow made Kahlan feel worse to have to leave Juni in a place smelling of sour, wet, rotting hay.

The three of them had waited until Nissel, the old healer, had shuffled in and inspected the body. She said she didn't think the neck was broken, nor did she see any other kind of injury from a fall. She had pronounced that Juni had drowned.

When Richard asked how that could have happened, she seemed surprised by the question, apparently believing it to be obvious.

She had declared it a death caused by evil spirits.

The Mud People believed that in addition to the ancestors' spirits they called in a gathering, evil spirits also came from time to time to claim a life in recompense for a wrong. Death might be inflicted through sickness, an accident, or in some otherworldly manner. An uninjured man drowning in six inches of water seemed a self-evident otherworldly cause of death as far as Nissel was concerned. Chandalen and his hunters believed Nissel.

Nissel hadn't had the time to speculate on what transgression might have angered the evil spirits. She had to rush off to a more gratifying job; her help was needed in delivering a baby.

In her official capacity as a Confessor, Kahlan had visited the Mud People a number of times, as she had visited other peoples of the Midlands. Though some lands closed their borders to everyone else, no land of the Midlands, regardless of how insular, secluded, distrustful, or powerful, dared close its borders to a Confessor. Among other things, Confessors kept justice honest-whether or not rulers wished it so.

The Confessors were advocates before the council for all those who had no other voice. Some, like the Mud People, were distrustful of outsiders and sought no voice; they simply wanted to be left alone. Kahlan saw that their wishes were respected. The Mother Confessor's word before the council was law, and final.

Of course, that had all changed.

As with other peoples of the Midlands, Kahlan had studied not only the Mud People's language, but their beliefs.

In the Wizard's Keep in Aydindril, there were books on the languages, governance, faiths, foods, arts, and habits of every people of the Midlands.

She knew that the Mud People often left offerings of rice cakes and nosegays of fragrant herbs before small clay figures in several of the empty buildings at the north end of the village. The buildings were left for the exclusive use of the evil spirits, which the clay figures represented.

The Mud People believed that when the evil spirits occasionally became angered and took a life, the soul of the slain went to the underworld to join the good spirits who watched over the Mud People, and thus helped keep the malevolent spirits in check. Balance between worlds was thus only enhanced, and so they believed that evil was self-limiting.

Though it was early afternoon, it felt like dusk as Kahlan, Richard, and Cara made their way across the village. Low dark clouds seemed to boil just above the roofs. Lightning struck closer, the flash illuminating the high walls of buildings. A painfully sharp crack of thunder followed almost immediately, jarring the ground.

Gusty wind smacked fat drops of rain against the back of Kahlan's head. In a way she was glad for the rain. It would douse the fires. It wasn't right to have celebration fires burning when a man had died. The rain would spare someone the disconcerting task of having to put out what was left of the joyful fires.