Passing men gazed at Nicci in her wet clinging clothes, never seeing her face. Her hair was plastered to her skull, her jaw quivered, and her hands trembled, yet she didn’t complain about the cold, as did everyone else. They had been told that they couldn’t get another list, with any new rooms that might have recently become available, until the next day, so Nicci was trying to keep this one whole, but in the rain it was a losing battle.
Mangy horses slogged through the mud, some of the wagons they pulled squeaking and groaning under the weight of a load. Only the main thoroughfares, like the one they were on, were wide enough to allow teams of horses and full-size wagons to easily pass in both directions. Some streets were only wide enough for wagons to go in one direction. Some of those, with no room to pull aside, were choked off by broken-down wagons. Richard saw a dead horse in one narrow street, the rotting animal, attended by a cloud of flies, still hitched to its wagon as it awaited someone to come haul it away. The blocked streets only added to the congestion of the others. Some streets were wide enough only for handcarts. In many of the narrower passageways only foot traffic could fit.
The smell of garbage and the stench of streets that also functioned as open sewers had been enough to gag Richard for the first week until he’d become numb to it. The alleyways where he and Nicci had slept were the worst. The rain only served to flush the filth out of every hole and carry it out into the open, but at least as long as he was standing it washed off some of the dirt.
All the cities Richard had seen after they’d entered the Old World and traveled south from Tanimura were similar to this one, all suffering under grinding poverty and inhuman conditions. Everything seemed caught in a timeless trap, a morass of rot, as if the cities had once been vibrant with life and people striving to fulfill dreams, had once been places of hope and ambition, but somewhere the dreams had disintegrated into a gray pall of stagnation and decay. No one seemed to much care. Everyone seemed in a daze, biding their time, waiting for their lot in life to improve without even having a concept of the shape of that better life or how it might come to be. They existed on disembodied faith, confident only that the afterlife would be perfect.
The cities Richard had seen were startlingly similar to what Richard envisioned the future held for the New World under the yoke of the Order.
This place, though, was the single largest city Richard had ever seen. He would never have believed the size of it had he not seen it himself. Dilapidated buildings entangled by streets teeming with people sprawled over a sweep of low hills, across a broad bottomland, for miles along the convergence of two rivers. Squat ramshackle huts built haphazardly of wattle and daub, scraps of wood, or salvaged mud and straw bricks beset the city’s core to a great distance out into the surrounding land, like fetid scum surrounding a rotting log in a stagnant pond.
It was the city of Altur’Rang—the namesake of the land which was now the heart of the Old World and the Imperial Order—the home city of Emperor Jagang.
When they had first entered the Old World on their way south toward Altur’Rang, Richard and Nicci had stopped at the northernmost large city in the Old World, Tanimura, where the Palace of the Prophets had once stood. Tanimura, one of the last places in the Old World to fall under the rule of the Imperial Order, was a grand place, with wide boulevards lined with trees and ornate buildings soaring several stories high, faced with columns and arches and windows that let in the light. Tanimura, as large as it was, turned out to be but an outpost of the Old World, far enough away that the rot was only now reaching it.
For a span of a little over a month, Richard had found work in Tanimura as a mason’s tender, one of a dozen, hauling stone and mixing mortar for a squat, unattractive building. The masons had simple huts the workers and their families lived in, so Nicci had shelter. The master came to trust Richard to keep up with his masons. When one of the stonecutters fell sick, Richard was asked to stand in at squaring the blocks of granite for the masons.
He found holding a chisel and mallet in his hands, cutting stone—shaping it to his will—a revelation. In some ways, it was like carving wood…but somehow much more.
From time to time, the master stood with fists on his hips, watching Richard chisel square edges into the hard granite. Occasionally, in a gruff voice, he would make minor corrections to Richard’s method. After a time, as the master saw that Richard took to the job and could cut a block square and true, he no longer bothered watching. Before long Richard’s blocks were chosen first by the masons as cornerstones.
Other stonecutters arrived to do more demanding work—the adornments. When they had first shown up, Richard had been eager to see their work. They cut into the face of blocks, meant to surround the entrance, a large flame representing the Light of the Creator. Below that, they carved a crowd of cowering people.
Richard had seen a number of stone carvings in the various places he had been, from the Confessors’ Palace in Aydindril to the People’s Palace in D’Hara, but he had never seen anything like the figures he saw being cut on that building in Tanimura. They were not graceful, or grand, or inspiring, but just the opposite. They were distorted, thick-limbed, cringing figures recoiling below the Light. Richard was told by one of the artisans that this was the only proper representation of mankind—profane, hideous, sinful. Richard kept his mind on cutting square stones.
When the stonework to the Order’s headquarters building was finished, the job ended. The carpenters didn’t need any more help. The artisans said they could use some assistance carving the anguish of mankind and offered Richard the work. He declined, telling them that he had no ability for carving.
Besides, Nicci had been eager to move on; Tanimura had only been a place to earn some money to buy provisions for the long journey ahead of them. Richard was glad to be away from the depressing sight of the carving going on.
Along the way southeast to Altur’Rang, in the cities they passed through, Richard saw many carvings on buildings, and many more freestanding in public squares, or in front of entrances. They depicted horrors: people being whipped by a grinning Keeper of the underworld; people stabbing out their own eyes; suffering people twisted, deformed, and crippled; people like packs of dogs, running on all fours, attacking women and children; people reduced to walking skeletons or covered in sores; woeful people throwing themselves into graves. In most such scenes the pitiful people were watched over by the Light of the all-perfect Creator represented by the flame.
The Old World was a celebration of misery.
Along the way south, they had stopped in a number of cities when Richard could find menial work temporary enough not to require waiting on lists. He and Nicci went for stretches eating cabbage soup that was mostly water. Sometimes they had rice or lentils or buckwheat mush, and, on occasion, the luxury of salt pork. Sometimes, Richard was able to catch fish, birds, or the odd hare. Living off the land in the Old World, though, was difficult. A lot of other people had the same idea. They both had gotten thinner on their long march. Richard began to understand the carvings of the skeletal people.
Nicci had set their destination, but dictated little else, leaving most decisions to him, complying without complaint. Week in and week out, they walked, occasionally paying a few copper pennies to ride in wagons headed their way. They crossed rivers straddled by cities large enough to have numbers of stone bridges, and went through town after town. There were vast fields of wheat, millet, sunflower, and any number of other crops, though much of the land lay fallow. They saw flocks of sheep and herds of cattle.
Farmers sold the travelers goat cheese and milk. Ever since the gift had awakened in him, Richard was able to eat meat only when not doing any fighting. He thought it might be part of the requirement to balance his need to sometimes take life. Since he wasn’t doing any fighting, he could eat meat without it making him sick. Unfortunately, they could rarely afford meat. Cheese, which he had once loved, he could hardly stomach since his gift had come to life in him. Unfortunately, it was often eat cheese, or starve.
But it was the size of the Old World, and in particular its population, that most unsettled him. Richard had naively thought that the New and the Old Worlds must be somewhat alike. They were not. The New World was but a flea on the back of the Old.
From time to time on their journey south, vast columns of men at arms moved past them on their way north to the Midlands. Several times, it had taken days for all the soldiers to march past. Whenever he saw the rank upon rank of troops, he felt a wave of relief that Kahlan was trapped in their mountain home. He would hate to think of her fighting in an army facing as many men as he saw going to the war.
By spring, when she could finally get out of the mountain home, and all those Imperial Order troops could truly begin their siege of the New World, whatever resistance the D’Haran Empire put up would be crushed. Richard hoped General Reibisch chose not to go up against the Order. He hated to think of all those brave men being slaughtered under the weight of the coming onslaught.
At one small city, Nicci had gone to a stream to wash their clothes while Richard worked the day mucking out stalls at a large stable. A number of officials had come to town and there were more horses than the stablemaster could handle. Richard had been at the right place at the right time to get the job. Not long after the officials arrived and took all the rooms at the inns, a large unit of the Imperial Order troops marched in behind them and set up camp at the city limits.
Fortunately, Nicci was on the other side of the city doing their washing. Unfortunately, a squad of men passing through the city, and doing some drinking, decided to accept volunteers. Richard kept his head down as he carried water to the horses, but the sergeant saw him. At the wrong place at the wrong time, Richard was “volunteered” into the Imperial Order. The new volunteers were quartered in the center of the immense encampment.
That night, after it was dark and most of the men were asleep, Richard unvolunteered himself. It took him until three hours before sunrise to extract himself from his service to the Imperial Order. Nicci had gone to the stable and found out what had happened to him. Richard found her at their camp, pacing in the darkness. They quickly collected their things and marched south for the rest of the night. They went cross country, since the moon was out, rather than on the roads, in case a patrol came looking for him. From then on, whenever Richard saw soldiers he did his best to become invisible.
In general, though, it wasn’t a serious concern. Hordes of youths, lusting after the promise of plunder, were only too eager to join the army. They often had to wait weeks or months to be accepted into training, so many were the numbers joining. Richard had seen crowds of them in the cities, playing games, gambling, drinking, fighting—young men dreaming of the glory of killing the evil foes of the great empire of the Order. They enjoyed the adoration of the populace when they joined the army to go off and fight the frightful wickedness and sin that was said to infect the New World.
Richard was horrified to see the numbers of people living in the Old World, because it meant that the Order’s army already in the New World was hardly a drain on the populace—and only the beginning. He had thought that perhaps the Order might lose their enthusiasm for a war conducted so far from their homeland, or that the people of the Old World would tire of the hardship necessary to conduct such a war. He now knew that thought had been but a feeble daydream.
It didn’t take a wizard, or a prophet, to know that the armies the New World could raise, even given wildly optimistic conditions, had no hope whatsoever of prevailing against the millions upon millions of soldiers Richard had seen pouring north, to say nothing of the ones he hadn’t seen who would be taking other routes. The Midlands was doomed.
Ever since the people of Anderith chose the Order over freedom, he had known in his heart that the New World was going to fall to the Order. He felt no satisfaction in realizing how right he had been. Seeing the size of the enemy, he realized that freedom was lost, and resisting the Order was but suicide.
The course of events seemed irrevocable, the world lost to the Order. The future for him and Kahlan seemed no less hopeless.
By far the strangest place he and Nicci had visited in their journey southeast, a place she never spoke of afterward, had been less than a week south of Tanimura. Richard had still been in a dismal mood thinking about the carvings he had seen, when Nicci took an old, seldom-used track off the main road. It led back toward the hills, to a rather small city beside a quiet river.
Most of the businesses had been abandoned. The wind, at will, carried dust through the broken windows of warehouses. Many of the homes had fallen to ruin, their roofs caved in, weeds and vines doing their best to bring down crooked walls. Only the homes on the outskirts were still occupied, mostly by people raising animals and farming the surrounding land.
On the northern side of the city, one small store remained to sell staples to surrounding farmers. There was also a leather shop, a fortune-teller, and a lonely inn. In the center of town stood the bones of buildings, long since picked clean by scavengers. Several of the buildings still stood, but most had long ago collapsed. Richard and Nicci walked through the center of town watched only by a fitful wind.
At the southern edge, they arrived at the remains of what had once been a large brick building. Without a word, Nicci turned off the road and marched deliberately into the forlorn site. The wood beams and roof had been consumed by fire. A thick mat of weeds and brush were devouring the wood floor. The brick walls were all that was left, really, and they were mostly fallen to rubble, with only a portion of the east wall still tall enough to contain a lone window frame.