“Do you want your mother to die?” Sister Cecilia asked from the doorway in that deadly calm voice of hers.
She was no less cruel or dangerous than Sister Armina, or Sister Ulicia, but she had a quiet, composed way of speaking that was somehow more terrifying than Sister Ulicia’s screaming. Sister Armina’s straightforward threats were simple and sincere but delivered with a bit more bile. Sister Tovi had a kind of sick glee in her approach to discipline and even torture. When any of them wanted something, though, Kahlan had long ago learned that to deny them would only bring nearly unimaginable suffering, and in the end what they had wanted in the first place.
“Do you?” Sister Cecilia repeated with calm directness.
“Answer her,” Kahlan whispered in the girl’s ear. “Please, answer her questions. Please.”
“No,” the girl managed.
“Then tell us where Tovi is.”
In the room behind Sister Cecilia, the girl’s mother gasped in a terrible rattle and then went silent. Kahlan heard bony thumps as the woman hit the wood floor. The house fell quiet.
From the dim, flickering light beyond the doorway, two more shadows glided up behind Sister Cecilia. Kahlan knew that Emmy would answer no more questions.
Sister Cecilia slipped into the room, closer to the girl Kahlan held tightly in her arms.
“The rooms are all empty. Why are there no guests in your inn?”
“None have come,” the girl managed as she shook. “Word of the invaders from the Old World has scared people away.”
Kahlan knew that that made sense. After leaving the People’s Palace in D’Hara and swiftly traveling south through mostly remote country on a small riverboat, they still had encountered detachments of Emperor Jagang’s troops more than once, or been through river settlements where those brutes had been. Word of such atrocities would have spread like an ill wind.
“Where is Tovi?” Sister Cecilia asked.
Holding the girl protectively away from the Sisters, Kahlan glared up at them. “She’s just a child! Leave her be!”
A shock of pain slammed into her. It felt to Kahlan as if every fiber of every muscle had violently ripped. For an instant, she didn’t know where she was or what was happening. The room spun. Her back hit the cupboards with bone-breaking force. Doors flew open. Pots, pans, and utensils cascaded out, bouncing and clattering across the wooden floor. Dishes and glasses shattered as they came crashing down.
Kahlan slammed facedown onto the floor. Jagged, broken shards of pottery slashed her palms as she tried unsuccessfully to break her fall. When she felt the end of something razor-sharp pressed against the side of her tongue in back she realized that a long sliver of glass had pierced her cheek. She clenched her jaw, snapping off the glass between her teeth so that it wouldn’t slash open her tongue. With effort she managed to spit out the bloody, daggerlike piece of glass.
She lay sprawled on the floor, stunned, disoriented, unable to fully gather her senses. Grunts escaped her throat as she tried without success to move. She found that as those sounds slipped out, she couldn’t draw a new breath back in. Each bit of air that escaped her lungs was a bit of air lost to her. Her muscles strained to pull the wind back into her lungs. The pain lancing through her middle was paralyzing, acting to counter her effort to get a breath.
In desperation she gasped, at last managing to pull in an urgent breath. She spat out more blood and sharp splinters of glass. She was just beginning to feel the twinge of pain from the fragment still stuck through her cheek. Kahlan couldn’t seem to make her arms work, couldn’t lift herself up from the floor, much less reach up to pull out the piece of glass.
She turned her eyes upward. She could make out the dark forms of the Sisters closing in around the girl. They lifted her and shoved her back against a heavy butcher block standing in the center of the room. A Sister held each arm as Sister Ulicia squatted down before the girl to meet her panicked gaze.
“Do you know who Tovi is?”
“The old woman!” the girl cried out. “The old woman!”
“Yes, the old woman. What else do you know about her?”
The girl gulped air, almost unable to get the words out. “Big. She was big. Old and big. She was too big to walk real good.”
Sister Ulicia leaned close, gripping the girl’s slender throat. “Where is she? Why isn’t she here? She was supposed to meet us here. Why is she gone?”
“Gone,” the girl cried. “She’s gone.”
“Why! When was she here? When did she leave? Why did she leave?”
“A few days back. She was here. She stayed with us for a while. But she left a few days back.”
Sister Ulicia, with a cry of rage, lifted the girl and heaved her against the wall. With all her effort, Kahlan struggled to her hands and knees. The girl crashed down to the floor. Ignoring how wobbly she felt, Kahlan crawled across the floor, across broken glass and pottery, and threw herself protectively across the girl’s body. The girl, not knowing what was happening, cried out all the more.
Footsteps came toward her. Kahlan saw a cleaver lying on the floor nearby. The girl cried and struggled to get away, but Kahlan held her protectively against the floor.
As the shadows of the woman came closer, Kahlan’s fingers closed around the wooden handle of the heavy cleaver. She wasn’t thinking, she was simply acting: threat, weapon. It was almost like watching someone else doing it.
But there was a kind of deep inner satisfaction at having a weapon in
her hand. Her fist tightened around the blood-slicked handle. A weapon was life. Flashes of lightning glinted off the steel.
When the women were close enough, Kahlan suddenly raised her arm to strike. Before she could begin to accomplish her task, she felt a gut-wrenching blow, as if she had been rammed by the butt end of a log. The power of that blow hurled her across the room.
A hard impact against the wall stunned her. The room seemed like it was far away, off at the far end of a long, dark tunnel. Pain swamped her. She tried to lift her head but couldn’t. Darkness pulled her in.
The next time she opened her eyes, Kahlan saw the girl cringing before the Sisters as they towered over her.
“I don’t know,” the girl was saying. “I don’t know why she left. She said she had to be on her way to Caska.”
The room rang with silence.
“Caska?” Sister Armina finally asked.
“Yes, that’s what she said. She had to get to Caska.”
“Did she have anything with her?”
“With her?” the girl whined, still sobbing and shivering. “I don’t understand. What do you mean, with her?”
“With her!” Sister Ulicia screamed. “What did she have with her! She had to be carrying things—a pack, a waterskin. But she had other things. Did you see anything else of what she had with her?”
When the girl hesitated, Sister Ulicia smacked her across the face hard enough to have loosened her teeth.
“Did you see anything she had with her?”
A long string of blood from the girl’s nose lay horizontally across her cheek. “When she was at supper one day, I went to take her clean towels and I saw something in her room. Something strange.”
Sister Cecilia leaned down. “Strange? Like what?”
“It was, it was like a…a box. She had it wrapped in a white dress, but the dress was silky smooth and it had partly slipped off the box. It was like a box—only it was all black. But not black like paint. It was black like night itself. Black like it would take the light right out of the day.”
The three Sisters straightened and stood in silence.
Kahlan knew exactly what the girl was talking about. Kahlan had gone in and taken all three of those boxes from the Garden of Life in the People’s Palace—from Lord Rahl’s palace.
When she had brought the first one out, Sister Ulicia had been furious at Kahlan for not bringing all three of them out at once, but they were larger than expected and there had been no room to hide them all in her pack, so Kahlan had at first brought out only one. Sister Ulicia had wrapped that vile thing in Kahlan’s white dress and had given it to Tovi, telling her to hurry and be on her way, that they would all meet up later. Sister Ulicia hadn’t wanted to risk getting caught in the palace with one of the three boxes and so she hadn’t wanted Sister Tovi to wait while Kahlan went back up into the Garden of Life after the other two boxes.
“Why did Tovi go to Caska?” Sister Ulicia asked.
“I don’t know,” the girl wept. “I don’t know, I swear I don’t. I only know that I heard her say to my parents that she had to be on her way to Caska. She left a few days back.”
In the quiet, lying against the floor, Kahlan struggled to breathe. Each breath sent agonizing stitches of pain through her ribs. She knew that it was only going to be the beginning of the pain. When the Sisters finished with the girl they would turn their attention to Kahlan.
“Maybe we had better get some sleep in out of the rain,” Sister Armina finally suggested. “We can start out early.”
Sister Ulicia, her fist with the dacra on her hip, paced between the girl and the butcher block, thinking. Shards of pottery crunched under her boots.
“No,” she said as she turned back to the others. “Something is wrong.”
“You mean with the spell-form? You mean because of the man?”
Sister Ulicia waved a hand dismissively. “An anomaly. Nothing more. No, something is wrong about the rest of it. Why would Tovi leave? She had explicit instructions to meet us here. And she was here—but then she leaves. There were no other guests, no Imperial Order troops in the area, she knew we were on our way, and yet she leaves. It makes no sense.”
“And why Caska?” Sister Cecilia asked. “Why would she head for Caska?”
Sister Ulicia turned back to the girl. “Who visited Tovi while she was here? Who came to see her?”
“I already told you, no one. No one at all came here while the old woman was staying with us. We had no other callers or guests. She was the only one here. This place is out of the way. People don’t come here for stretches.”
Sister Ulicia went back to her pacing. “I don’t like it. Something is wrong about this, but I can’t put my finger on it.”
“I agree,” Sister Cecilia said. “Tovi wouldn’t just leave.”
“And yet she did. Why?” Sister Ulicia came to a stop before the girl. “Did she say anything else, or leave a message—perhaps a letter?”
The girl, sniffling back a sob, shook her head.
“We have no choice,” Sister Ulicia muttered. “We’re going to have to follow Tovi to Caska.”
Sister Armina gestured toward the front door. “Tonight? In the rain? Don’t you think we ought to wait until morning?”
Sister Ulicia, deep in thought, looked up at the woman. “What if someone shows up? We don’t need any more complications if we’re to accomplish our task. We certainly don’t need Jagang or his troops getting a whiff of us being about. We need to get to Tovi and we need to get that box—we all know what’s at stake.” She took the measure of both women’s grave expressions before going on. “What we don’t need are any witnesses who can report that we were here and what we’re looking for.”
Kahlan knew very well what Sister Ulicia was getting at.
“Please,” she managed as she pushed herself up on shaky arms, “please, leave her be. She’s just a little girl. She doesn’t know anything of any value to anyone.”
“She knows Tovi was here. She knows what Tovi has with her.” Sister Ulicia’s brow drew tight with displeasure. “She knows we were here looking for her.”
Kahlan struggled to put force into her voice. “She is nothing to you. You’re sorceresses; she is but a child. She can do you no harm.”
Sister Ulicia glanced briefly over her shoulder at the girl. “She also knows where we’re going.”
Sister Ulicia looked deliberately into Kahlan’s eyes. Without turning to the girl behind her, and with sudden force, she slammed her dacra back into the girl’s midsection.
The girl gasped in shock.
Still staring down at Kahlan, Sister Ulicia smiled at such a deed as only evil could smile. Kahlan thought that this must be what it would be like looking into the eyes of the Keeper of the Dead in his lair in the darkest depths of the eternity of the underworld.
Sister Ulicia arched an eyebrow. “I don’t intend to leave any loose ends.”
Light seemed to flash from within the girl’s wide eyes. She went slack and fell heavily to the floor. Her arms sprawled out at crazy angles. Her lifeless gaze stared fixedly right at Kahlan as if to denounce her for not keeping her word.
Her promise to the girl—
I’ll protect you
—rang through Kahlan’s mind.
She cried out in helpless fury as she pounded her fists against the floor.
And then she cried out in sudden pain as she was flung back against the wall. Rather than crash to the floor, she stuck there as if held by a great strength. The strength, she knew, was magic.
She couldn’t breathe. One of the Sisters was using her power to constrict Kahlan’s throat. She strained, trying to get air, as she clawed at the iron collar around her neck.
Sister Ulicia approached and put her face close to Kahlan’s.
“You are lucky this day,” she said in a venomous voice. “We don’t have time to make you regret your disobedience—not right now, anyway. But don’t think that you are going to get away with it without suffering the consequences.”
“No, Sister,” Kahlan managed to say with great effort. She knew that not to answer would only make it worse yet.
“I guess that you’re simply too stupid to comprehend how insignificant and powerless you are in the face of your betters. Perhaps this time, when you are given another lesson, even one as lowly and ignorant as you will understand it.”
“Yes, Sister.”
Even though she knew quite well what they would make her endure to teach her that lesson, Kahlan would have done the same thing again. She regretted only failing to protect the girl, as she had promised. The day she had taken those three boxes out of Lord Rahl’s palace, she had left in their place her most prized possession: a small statue of a proud woman, her fists at her side, her back arched, and her head thrown back as if facing forces that would subdue her but could not.