Chainfire by Terry Goodkind Page B

freedom far and wide so that Jagang can’t confine and crush it.”
    “Don’t fool yourself,” Richard said. “Altur’Rang is his home city. It’s where the revolt against the Order began. A popular uprising in the very city where Jagang was building his grand palace undermines everything the Imperial Order teaches. It was to be the city, the palace, from where Jagang and the high priests of the Fellowship of Order were for all time to rule over mankind in the name of the Creator. The people destroyed that palace and instead embraced freedom.
    “Jagang will not allow such subversion of his authority to stand. He must crush the rebellion there if the Order is to survive to rule the Old World—and the New. It will be a matter of principled belief for him; he considers opposition to the ways of the Fellowship of Order to be blasphemy against the Creator. He will not be shy about throwing his most brutal and experienced soldiers into the task. He will want to make a bloody example of you. I’d expect such an attack sooner rather than later.”
    Victor looked unsettled but not entirely surprised.
    “And don’t forget,” Nicci added, “the Brothers of the Fellowship of Order who escaped will be among those working to help to reestablish the Order’s authority. Such gifted men are no ordinary foe. We’ve hardly begun to root them out.”
    “All true enough, but you can’t work iron to your will until you get it good and hot.” Victor tightened a defiant fist before them. “At least we’ve begun to do what must be done.”
    Nicci conceded that much with a nod and a small smile to soften thedark picture she had helped paint. She knew that Victor was right, that the task had to begin somewhere and at some point. He had already helped ring the hammer of freedom for a people who had all but given up hope. She just didn’t want him to lose sight of the reality of the difficulty that lay ahead.
    Nicci would have been relieved to hear Richard dealing logically with the important matters at hand, but she knew better. When Richard locked on to something vital to him, he might address peripheral issues when necessary but it would be a grave mistake to think that it diminished in the least his focus on his objective. In fact, he had delivered his warnings to Victor in swift summary—a mere matter to be gotten out of the way. She could see in his eyes that he was preoccupied with matters of far more importance to him.
    Richard finally turned his riveting gray eyes on Nicci.
    “You weren’t with Victor and his men?”
    In a sudden flash of comprehension, Nicci realized why the matter of the soldiers and their supply convoy was important to him: It was a mere element of a greater equation. He was trying to unravel how and if the convoy figured into the illusion he still clung to. It was that calculation he was working to resolve.
    “No,” Nicci said. “We’d had no word and didn’t know what had happened to you. In my absence, Victor left to begin searching for you. Not long after, I returned to Altur’Rang. I found out where Victor had gone and set out to join him. I was still some distance behind at the end of my second day of travel, so the third day I started out before dawn, hoping to catch up with him. I’d been traveling for almost two hours when I arrived nearby and heard the battle. I reached the fighting right at the end.”
    Richard nodded thoughtfully. “I woke and Kahlan was gone. Since we were close to Altur’Rang, my first thought was that if I could find you, then maybe you could help me find Kahlan. That’s when I heard the soldiers coming through the woods.”
    Richard gestured up a rise. “I heard them coming through those trees, there. I had darkness on my side. They hadn’t seen me yet, so I was able to surprise them.”
    “Why didn’t you hide?” Victor asked.
    “More were coming down from that way, and others were coming in from that direction. I didn’t know how many there were, but