Richard watched as the golden light coming from the box of Orden lifted the seven Sisters.
Kahlan’s hand tightened on his. The others in the room watched with a mix of awe and terror. This was something unlike anything that any of them had ever seen, or would ever see again.
Richard glanced at Nicci. Even she was transfixed by the sparkling light that swirled around the Sisters. Jagang, standing beside her, was smiling. Richard could just see the metal of the collar peeking through the front of the vest. Jagang knew that his cause would have the power of Orden, even if he didn’t live to see it. He believed that was all that mattered. He believed in their cause.
The Sisters within the golden glow appeared to be delighted by the heady power of Orden.
It was short-lived.
The light darkened as it swept them all up into the air, carrying them toward the darkening sea of sorcerer’s sand.
The floating Sisters glided together, collecting in a tight cluster above the ground. They all began to rotate helplessly in the sparkling amber light. The room darkened as a few flashes of lightning began to flicker about over their
heads. Several Sisters screamed. A low roar grew to fill the room.
The ground trembled as the tight clump of seven Sisters floated out over the sorcerer’s sand.
The sand beneath them began to rotate along with the light. The sparkles within the light connected with the fits of lightning dancing around the room, giving the sisters a flickering appearance.
“What’s going on!” Sister Ulicia screamed.
Richard let go of Kahlan’s hand and walked across the grass to the edge of the sorcerer’s sand that was slowly darkening from honey-colored to amber to a burnt brown. Richard could smell it burning.
“What’s going on!” Sister Ulicia again demanded as her panicked gaze found him.
“Did you read
The Book of Life
?” he calmly asked her.
“Of course! You have to use
The Book of Life
to put the boxes of Orden in play. We all read it! We followed every formula and instruction exactly!”
“You may have followed the instructions contained within the book, but you didn’t abide by its meaning. You read what you wanted to read—the formulas and spell-forms.”
Several of the Sisters screamed as lightning cracked through the air right near their faces.
Sister Ulicia was enraged. “What are you talking about!”
Richard clasped his hands behind his back. “At the very beginning there was only one thing all by itself on the first page to emphasize how important—how central—it was. It wasn’t a formula, or a spell-form, but it was the first thing
The Book of Life
said. It was first for a very important reason. In your arrogance, your greed to have what you wanted, you ignored it.
“The introductory statement to
The Book of Life
is a warning to anyone who would use the book.
“It says, ‘Those who have come here to hate should leave now, for in their hatred they only betray themselves.’”
“What are you babbling about?” one of the other Sisters asked, not concerned with what they saw as a dusty aphorism.
“I’m talking about a book of instruction on using the power of Orden.
The Book of Life
is the very first thing needed to use that power. Such power is dangerous almost beyond measure. Those who created it wanted to protect it. Most dangerous things of magic are protected by guards, defensive shields, and fail-safes.
“Orden was designed to counter Chainfire, but because it needed to be profoundly powerful to do that, that also made it profoundly dangerous. Those who created it came up with a fail-safe that is at once both striking in its simplicity, and foolproof.
“That safeguard says, ‘Those who have come here to hate should leave now, for in their hatred they only betray themselves.’”
“So what!” Sister Ulicia screamed.
“So,” Richard said with a shrug, “it’s a warning—about as deadly a warning as there can be. It’s telling you that hate will trigger a deadly reaction from the power of Orden. If you want to use Orden to cause harm then that can only mean that you would have to be someone who hates. Only those with hate in their hearts would scheme to use such a thing to harm others.”
“That doesn’t make any sense! How would it harm someone who is evil?” she asked. “How could you use Orden to stop us? You hate us, you would be using Orden for hate.”
Richard shook his head. “You mistake hate and justice. Eliminating those like you who harm innocent people is not done out of hate, but out of love for those who have done no wrong and are being hurt and killed. It’s love and respect for innocent life.
“Eliminating such people is not hate. It is a product of reasoned justice.”
“But we don’t hate!” another Sister cried out. “We want to eliminate those who are heathens, sinners, and are only selfishly concerned with themselves.”
“No,” Richard said, “you hate those you envy. You hate that they are happy.”
“But we used
The Book of Counted Shadows
!” Sister Ulicia cried in desperation. “We followed the original exactly. It still should have worked.”
“Well,” Richard said as he strolled before the blackening sorcerer’s sand, “even if you disregard the safeguard in
The Book of Life,
I’m afraid that you made a mistake thinking that
The Book of Counted Shadows
would be of any use.”
“But it’s the real book! The original!”
Richard smiled as he nodded. “It’s the original of yet another fail-safe. Didn’t you read the first thing in that book as well? It also put the important warning first.”
“What warning!”
“The warning to use a Confessor.”
“But we had the original! We had no need of a Confessor!”
“The warning wasn’t that you need a Confessor. The warning was the mention of a Confessor at all.”
Zedd, unable to contain himself, held up a hand. “Richard, what in the world are you talking about?”
Richard smiled at his grandfather. “Who was the first Confessor?”
“Magda Searus.”
Richard nodded. “The woman who had been married to Baraccus. That was during the war. After the great barrier was up and the war was over the wizards up here discovered that the prosecutor in the trial over the Temple of the Winds, Lothain, was a traitor. To discover how he betrayed them, Wizard Merritt used Magda Searus to create a Confessor.”
“Yes, yes,” Zedd said, nodding. “So what?”
“The boxes of Orden were created during the great war. The first Confessor was not brought into being until long after the war. How could
The Book of Counted Shadows
be the key created to open the boxes if Confessors had not even been dreamed up when Orden was created?”
Zedd blinked in surprise. “
The Book of Counted Shadows
couldn’t possibly be a key to open the boxes of Orden.”
“That’s right,” Richard said. “They were merely a trick to prevent the misuse of the power of Orden. Using them, even the original can only get you killed.
The Book of Counted Shadows
is not the key to opening the power of Orden.”
Richard turned to the pandemonium of a building rumble. Vapor, smoke, shadows, and light spun with a roar. The ground shook violently. The sorcerer’s sand, now black as pitch, was sucked into the vortex. With a grating sound the whole of it rotated over the abyss. The sounds of the world of life and the underworld mixed in a terrible howl.
The Sisters spun in the maelstrom, arms and legs sticking out in every direction, their screams lost in the thundering clamor.
Blinding light ignited in the center of the spinning mass. Beams of white-hot light shot upward through the windows overhead and downward into the blackness of the abyss. The air shimmered with heat, light, and a piercing shriek.
With a wailing roar the blackened sand under the Sisters ripped open. Violet light shot up to engulf the terrified women. The rotating light, black sand, and lightning tightened as it built momentum.
Without the benefit of a spirit guide, the Sisters spiraled down into the world of the dead. They went still alive. They went screaming.
A flash lit everything to a blinding white, and then there was silence as everything went black as death.
When the light gradually returned, the Garden of Life
was silent. The hole in the ground was gone. The sorcerer’s sand was gone. The Sisters were gone.
Jagang’s personal guard who had been in the Garden of Life were also gone. Being in the room with the power of Orden had been fatal to them as well as the Sisters.
Jagang, wearing the collar that was under the dominion of Nicci, was still there, looking even more angry, if that was possible.
Men of the First File streamed through the double doors into the Garden of Life to protect Richard.
“Close and bolt the doors,” Richard ordered.
The men rushed to do his bidding.
Richard went to the altar and flipped the open box of Orden closed.
“You may have had your little success,” Jagang said with a sneer, “but it means little. It changes nothing.”
When he fell silent with a choking sound, Richard held up a hand. “Let him speak, Nicci.”
She brought the emperor forward.
“The Imperial Order will still get in here and rip this place and all you miserable people apart,” Jagang said. “They do not need me to pursue the just cause we fight for. The Order will cleanse mankind of the scourge of you selfish people. Our cause is not only moral but divine. The Creator is on our side. Our faith proves it.”
“Truth has advocates who seek understanding,” Richard said. “Corrupt ideas have miserable little fanatics who attempt to enforce their beliefs through intimidation and brutality…through faith. Savage force is faith’s obedient servant. Violence on an apocalyptic scale can only be born of faith because reason, by its very nature, disarms senseless cruelty. Only faith thinks to justify it.”
Jagang’s face went red. “We do the Creator’s work! Devout devotion to the Creator is the only true and moral way
of this life. Strict adherence to our pious duties will bring us salvation and everlasting life! It is the blood of nonbelievers like your people that lifts us to the side of the Creator Himself.”
Richard made a face. “That doesn’t even make sense.”
“You are a fool! Our faith alone proves us right! We alone will be rewarded in the afterlife for our reverence to Him. We are his true children, and will live forever in his Light.”
Richard sighed as he shook his head. “It’s always been difficult for me to believe that a grown man could actually believe such nonsense.”
Jagang ground his teeth in fury. “Put me to your tortures! I accept your hatred of me because I have faithfully performed my duties to a greater good for mankind.”
“You will not serve some grand place on the stage of life,” Nicci said. “You will not be paraded in chains. You will not serve as a martyr or be venerated for a glorious death.
“You are irrelevant. You will simply die and be buried, and in that way no longer be able to threaten decent, innocent people. You are irrelevant to the future of mankind.”
“You must extract your revenge on me for all to see!”
Richard leaned close to the man. “There will be other problems, as there always are in life, but you will not be one of them. You will be yesterday’s garbage, rotting back to dust, your life having meant nothing worthwhile.”
Jagang tried to lunge at Richard, but Nicci’s control of him through the collar kept him back like a chained animal. “You arrogantly think you are better than us, but you are not. You too are but a miserable creature that the Creator placed in this vile world. You are no different than us except that you refuse to repent and worship Him. This is about hatred. That’s all it is. It’s just about you venting your hatred of the Order.”
Richard rested the palm of his left hand on the hilt of his
sword. “Justice is not the exercise of hatred, it is the celebration of civilization.”
“You can’t simply—”
With a signal from Richard, Nicci opened a flow of her power into the collar. Jagang’s black eyes opened wide as he felt death fill his empty soul. He toppled face-first to the ground.
Nicci gestured to several men of the First File. “I’m sure that there are soon going to be a great many dead. Throw his corpse in the mass grave with the others of his kind.”
As simply as that, the emperor of the Imperial Order was gone. As Richard had commanded, there was no grand end. There would be no celebration through violence and mutilation, no torture, no forced confessions of wrongdoing. Reasoned people understood the wrongdoing quite well enough. The threat to reasoned people was removed; that was all that mattered. Jagang’s death was no more significant than that.
Without delay, Richard went to the stone altar where the boxes of Orden sat.
He drew his sword.
The distinct metallic ring filled the Garden of Life.
“Richard,” Zedd said in a rising tone of warning, “what do you think you’re doing?”
Richard ignored his grandfather. He instead gazed into Kahlan’s eyes.
“Are you with me, Kahlan?”
She stepped to within a few paces of him.
“I have always been with you, Richard. I love you, and I know you love me.”
Richard’s eyes closed for a moment.
He had no choice.
He turned to the boxes of Orden and closed his eyes as he lifted the blade to touch his forehead.
“Blade,” he whispered, “be true this day.”
He brought the Sword of Truth down and drew it across the inside of his arm, letting blood run down until it dripped off the tip.
He placed the blade on top of the box on the right, the one that Sister Ulicia had opened.
The blade turned as black as the box itself.
He withdrew the blade and it returned to its shiny state.
He placed the sword on the box on the left. Again, it turned as black as the underworld itself.
He withdrew it, letting it return to its normal state.
Richard took a deep breath, and then laid the flat of the blade on the center box. He thought about all the innocent people who simply wanted to live their lives. He thought about all those like Cara and the other Mord-Sith who had been driven mad until they would serve a tyrant. He thought about Nicci, indoctrinated her whole life with hate, driven to a miserable life of sacrificing herself to twisted beliefs. He thought about Bruce, his left wing man, who, when he saw strength without hate, was drawn to it.
He thought about Denna.
When he opened his eyes, the blade had turned white. The box beneath it was just as white.
Gripping the hilt in both hands, Richard lifted the point of the Sword of Truth high over the white box…and with the killing thrust from the dance with death, drove it down, pinning the box to the altar.
The Garden of Life went white. The entire world of life went white. Time stopped.
In that moment, Richard stood in the center of a white world with nothing around him. He looked around, but there was no one there, and at the same time everyone was there with him—every individual in the world of life was there with him.
He understood. This was in many ways the opposite of the last journey he had taken in this room when he went into the world of darkness and in a way every soul there had been with him.
In this place, in this state, he had the conscious awareness of every living person. In this moment, in this place, they all waited for what the man who commanded the
power of Orden would say, and what he would do. This was Orden, the power of life itself.
“Every person makes choices as to how they will live,” Richard began.
“Evil does not exist independent of man. Men do evil by choice. Choice involves the requirement to think, even if ineffectually. The most basic choice you can make is to think or not to think, to let others do the thinking and tell you what to do, even if they tell you to do evil.
“Wise choices require more, they require rational thinking. Refusal to think rationally affords one the ability to maintain the illusion of knowledge, wisdom, even sanctity while committing evil. If you follow the teaching of others who do your thinking for you and who have you do evil, the innocent victims are harmed just the same as if you choose to harm them yourself.
“Dead is dead. Their life is over.
“Teachings that defy reason defy reality; what defies reality defies life. Defying life is embracing death.
“Celebrating faith over reason is merely a way of denying what is, in favor of embracing any whim that strikes your fancy.
“The followers of the Fellowship of Order have decided how they wish to live their lives. If it stopped there, none of us who value our individual liberty would care how they choose to live, but they have made the choice—made a conscious choice—that they will not allow others to live their own lives as they wish.
“It is that choice, made of their own free will, which we cannot abide. We will not allow them to impose their evil choice on us. It ends here, now.
“I give them their wish for a world in which they can live as they have chosen. I grant them the thing they want most in life—the life they choose.
“I could condemn them to no worse fate.
“From this moment on there are now two worlds, twins in most ways. This world will remain as it is.
“The power of Orden has just duplicated, in many ways, this world, giving them a world of their own. Their world will be theirs.
“They may not ever come to realize the foolishness of their choice, but they will certainly suffer for it. They will have the lives of misery they so fervently cling to. They will have the lives of suffering they piously embrace. They will have the lives of hopeless dread and fear they have chosen to impose on themselves by refusing to use their own minds to think rationally.
“They have chosen to throw their lives into the caldron of all-consuming hatred. I grant them their wish. It is the last time wishing will ever bring them anything. They will live out their existence wishing and hoping, endlessly lost in the darkness they have imposed on their own minds—in their own self-loathing. But they will never be able to harm us again.
“They believe that those who are free cause all of their hardship. They blame us for their woes. They attack us, saying we are the root of evil because we exist, because we are prosperous, because we are happy. They wish to destroy us so that they may have the world be the way they wish it.”
Richard turned his attention to the followers of the Order already in that other world, already at the other end of the gateway that was open. Those in his world could hear as well.
“I grant you your wish.
“You now have what you always claimed to want, a world in which your beliefs rule. A world without magic, without free men and free minds. You can believe as you wish, live as you wish.
“But you will not have us as the excuse for the misery you create for yourselves. You will not have us as an excuse to fuel your hate.
“You will be without any enemy but your miserable selves. Your world will be yours to rule as you see fit, to crumble around you as you wallow in your own hate.
“Your children, witness to the senseless cruelty of your willfully ignorant beliefs, will in time hopefully change your world for the better, will make their own adult lives worthwhile and joyful. But that will be entirely up to them. They will have to choose for themselves to use reason rather than force to deal with each other. Like anyone else, they will have to make choices as to how they will live their only life.
“This world will be ours.
“This will be a world without the teachings of the Imperial Order. Without those who wish to use force to impose those beliefs on us. Without those who would murder us for wanting to choose how to live our own lives.
“This world will be a world with all the imperfections and uncertainty of life, with all the consequences of poor choices, with all the hardships and failures that life presents, but it will be a world in which we have a chance to make what we will of our lives, a world in which our lives are our own and our achievements are our own, a world in which man can learn, create, accomplish, and keep the products of his mind and labors. This will be a world of liberty, a world in which people have the right to live their life as they wish, to believe as they wish, as long as they follow reasoned laws and do not use force to impose their will on others.
“Not everyone in this world will succeed, or be happy, or even understand how to make a moral life for themselves. For now, though, for those of us who are living, it will be a world without the followers of the Order.
“This is a world of life. Life is what we make of it. We may fail. But for the time being, we will have the freedom to succeed or to fail. How we honor that freedom will be up to each of us.
“Perhaps our children will throw all this away, wanting to sink back into the misery of faith, of wishing, of force, but that, too, will be the world they create anew for themselves. That will be their choice, their life. They, too, will have to suffer the consequences if they fail to mind the lessons learned through our struggle. That is their responsibility to themselves, to their own lives.
“But for now, for those of us actually alive, those of us who exist now, this will be a world where reason is free to allow us to live our lives, lives without the beliefs of the Imperial Order to blight us.
“Despite the harm those in that newly distant world have inflicted on us, I will not kill them. I don’t need to kill them. My responsibility to myself and those I love is to remove the threat so that we may live. I have done that.
“Our revenge will be to live lives filled with love, laughter, and joy.
“We will turn our attention and precious lives to the meaningful matters of life, to those we love and care about, to our future.
“Those of you in the newly distant world can look forward to what you would have brought us: a thousand years of darkness.
“I expect that you shall forever worship that to which you no longer will have any connection, or any possibility of a connection, that you will forever pray for an afterlife with the Creator in the spirit world, but you will be forever cut off from any world but your own. In that distant world you will have your own lives, and after you die you will be dead. Your spirits will no longer exist. Your souls will extinguish along with your lives.
“You will have your lives, and if you waste them by continuing to worship other worlds, wishing for invented visions of eternal salvation, wanting an escape from the reality of existence, you will reap only the emptiness of death
after enduring lives unlived. You will have a chance at life; it will be up to you to value those precious lives or to cast them away for nothing.
“You wanted a new dawn of mankind. You wanted a world of life in which pining for other realms invented in your minds alone was the righteous cause of mankind. I grant you your wish. Now you must live with it.
“We will be free of you.
“Your world will be yours. You can never return to this world, for there will be no way back. Once this gateway closes, there will be no underworld for you as a conduit back, no other world for you but your own. There will be no means to get to this world and what ever worlds layer it.
“Those of us who remain behind will continue in our world as it has been, with what ever other realms have always existed around this world, the world of life.
“Your world will be surrounded by no other realms. It will be an island of life. Eternity will separate you from everything here. That means that you will be cut off from the underworld, the world of the dead.
“Your existence in your world is finite. You will have your lives, but when you die your souls will cease to exist. You have only one existence—in your world of life. If you continue to waste it, if you fail to use your minds to properly grasp the reality of your world, your singular existence, you will lose out on the priceless value of your only life.
“You have life. You now have your own world. You can never return to this one. You can never again harm us. I give you what you have wanted: a world without dragons…and without all that goes with magic. You will forever be left longing for what you no longer can have.
“I am sure that every new day will bring us challenges to overcome, but the beliefs of the Order will not be one of them. As Nicci said, you are irrelevant.”