Temple of the Winds (75 page)

“
But that’s … crazy.”

“
Look at it this way. A sacrifice is something like a treaty wedding between two peoples. The bride is the sacrifice of one people to another, in the flesh of the new husband, all in the hope for a peaceful and productive future. The bride’s new people treat her with respect. The bride’s people treat the husband and his people with respect. It’s all an arrangement symbolizing unity, continuity, and hope for the future.

“
We are like the bride, being offered to the spirits. How would it look if the Nangtong offered an unworthy, demented bride? If you were one of the spirits, wouldn’t you be offended?”

“
If I got you in the bargain, I would be.”

Zedd howled at the sky. Ann winced and pulled away from him.

“
It’s our only chance, Ann.” He leaned close, whispering in her ear. “I swear an oath as First Wizard that I will never tell anyone how you behaved.”

He drew back and grinned at her. “Besides, it’s fun. Remember how much fun it was as a child to play outside? To play in the mud? Why, it was the grandest of things.”

“
But it might not work.”

“
Even if it doesn’t, wouldn’t you rather die having fun on the last day of your life, instead of sitting here, afraid and cold and dirty? Wouldn’t you rather have some childlike fun one last time? Let yourself go, Prelate, and recall what it was to be a child. Let yourself do anything that comes into your head. Have fun. Be a child.”

With a serious expression, Ann considered his words.

“
You won’t tell anyone?”

“
You have my word. You can act with childish glee, and no one but I will ever know—and the Nangtong, of course.”

“
Another of your acts of desperation, Zedd?”

“
The time for desperation is upon us. Let’s play.”

Ann smiled a sly smile. She stiff-armed him in the chest, knocking him back into the mud. With a riot of laughter, she leaped on top of him.

They wrestled like children, rolling through the slop. After a half dozen turns, Ann was a mud monster with arms, legs, and two eyes. The mud split, revealing a pink mouth as she howled with him at the sky.

They made mudballs and used the pigs as targets. They chased the pigs. They flopped onto the hard, round backs of the squealing creatures, riding them around until they were tossed off into the mud. Zedd doubted that Ann had ever been this dirty in her nine centuries of life.

He realized, while they were having a one-legged game of tag that involved more falling in the mud than hopping progress, that her laughter had changed.

Ann was having fun.

They stomped through puddles. They chased the pigs. They ran around the enclosure rattling sticks against the fence.

And then they hit upon the idea of making faces at the guards. They drew whimsical expressions on each other’s faces in mud. They made every rude noise they could think of. They jumped and laughed and pointed at the solemn guards.

Ann and Zedd got to laughing so hard that they couldn’t stand, and like two drunks, they rolled on the ground, holding their sides.

The crowd grew. Worried whispers swept through the onlookers.

Ann stuck her thumbs in her ears and wiggled her fingers as she made faces at them. Zedd stood on his head and sang a few lewd ballads he knew. Ann laughed hysterically as he mispronounced key words.

Zedd fell to laughing, and then fell in the mud, and then Ann fell on him. She sat on his stomach, pinning him to the ground as she tickled him under his arms, while he gasped for breath between laughter and tickled her ribs. The two of them had never had so much fun. The pigs cowered in the corner.

Suddenly, buckets of water were dumped over the both of them as they were furiously engaged in trying to find each other’s most ticklish spots. They looked up. More water rained down on them.

As fast as the mud was washed off them, they dived back into it. Ash-covered guards seized them by the arms and held them at spearpoint while they were once again washed off. Zedd peered over at Ann. She peered back. She looked ridiculous, her face emerging from streamers of slop. He giggled and made a face at her. She giggled and made a face back. The men yelled.

Zedd’s cheeks puffed with attempts to halt his laughing. The guards shoved them forward, spears poking in their backs. It reminded him of being tickled, and they both laughed.

It was as if once uncorked, the laughter had a life of its own. If they were to be sacrificed, what difference did it make? They might as well have the last laugh.

The crowd of shrouded figures parted as the two prisoners were led out of the pigs’ pen.

Giggling, Zedd held his arm high and waved. “Wave at the people, Annie.”

She made faces instead. Zedd liked the idea and imitated her. People shrank back, as if seeing a horrifying sight. Some of the women wept and wailed. Zedd and Ann laughed and pointed at them as the women ran from the crowd, seeking refuge from the lunatics.

The tents and onlookers were soon left behind as their captors prodded them on with spears. Before long, the two dirty, smelly, happy sacrifices were out in the hills. Thirty-five or forty Nangtong spirit hunters, all holding ready spears or bows, followed behind. Zedd noticed that some of them had brought packs and provisions.

First Wizard Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander and Prelate Annalina Aldurren skipped along ahead of the spears, laughing and making outrageous, ever-increasing claims as to how many onions they could eat without producing tears.

Zedd hadn’t a clue where they were going, but it was a fine morning to be going there, wherever it was.

“
It’s kind of funny, Lord Rahl,” Lieutenant Crawford said.

Richard gazed out over the boulder field. “What’s funny about it?”

The lieutenant bent his head back to peer up the cliff. “Well, I meant it’s odd. I grew up in rugged mountains, so I’ve seen places like these mountains my whole life, but this place is odd.” He turned and pointed. “See that mountain over there? You can see where the rockslide came from.”

Richard put a hand over his brow to shield his eyes from the low afternoon sun. The mountain the lieutenant was pointing to was rugged and covered with trees, except for the uppermost reaches. On the steep side facing them, a part of it had given way, leaving naked rock to scar the mountain where the rock had broken off. At the bottom of the barren scar lay a boulder field.

“
What about it?”

“
Well, look at all the rock at the bottom. That’s the portion that broke off the face of the mountain.” He gestured to the boulder field they stood atop. “This isn’t the same.”

Another soldier approached and saluted with a fist to his heart. He cast a wary glance at Ulic and Egan, who were standing with their arms folded, while he waited silently.

“
Nothing, Lord Rahl,” he said when Richard acknowledged him. “Not so much as a flake of rock that’s been worked with tools.”

“
Keep looking. Try the outer fringes of the boulder field. Look for places where you can crawl down under some of the larger boulders and check under there, too.”

The soldier saluted and hurried off. There wasn’t much of the day left. Richard had told them that he didn’t want to stay the next day. He wanted to get back to Aydindril. Kahlan would probably be back that night, or possibly tomorrow. He wanted to be there.

If she came back. If she was still alive.

He broke out in a sweat at the very thought. His knees felt weak.

He banished the thought. She would be back. That was all there was to it. She would be back. He made himself quit thinking about it, and put his mind to the problem at hand.

“
So what do you think, lieutenant?”

Lieutenant Crawford pitched a stone, watching it bounce first off one boulder, and then another. The sharp sound echoed off the cliff behind them.

“
It could be that the face of this mountain broke off much longer ago. Then, over all that time, things started growing in, dying, making soil for larger things to grow, and then they died, making yet more soil. It could be that it’s been covered over.”

Richard knew what Lieutenant Crawford was talking about. He knew how a forest, in time, could cover over rockslides. If you dug in the forest at the bottom of a cliff, you often encountered the bones of the fallen mountain.

“
I don’t think so, in this case.”

The lieutenant looked over at him. “May I ask why you think not, Lord Rahl?”

Richard stared across the rift to the next mountain. “Well, look at that cliff. The face of it is rough and uneven, yet the rock of the mountain left behind after the face fell away is weathered now, so much of it isn’t sharp. It’s been worn by time.

“
Some of it is sharp, though. Water gets in the cracks, freezes, and breaks off more of the rock with time. You can see some of those sharp places; but most of it has a softer look.

“
It has the look to me that it happened long before this slide here, yet you can still see most of the rock lying at the bottom of the cliff. Here, there’s much less scree.”

Egan unfolded his arms and brushed back his blond hair. “Could just be the lay of the land. This cliff faces south, letting the sun in to help things grow, whereas that one faces north, so it’s in shade most of the time. The forest wouldn’t grow in as well over there, and that would leave the scree exposed.”

Egan had a point.

“
There’s more to it.” Richard tilted his head back and looked up the thousands of feet of sheer cliff face towering above them. “Half this mountain is gone. That one over there is just a small slide, in comparison.

“
Look up at this mountain, and try to imagine what it would have looked like before this happened. It’s cleaved from the very top all the way down, like a log round split in half. All the rest of the mountains around here are more or less cone-shaped. This one is only half a cone.

“
Even if I’m wrong, and half the mountain isn’t gone, and it used to be shaped much as we see it now, there would still be an immense amount of rock down here. I mean, even if it used to be much this shape, and only a shell of rock ten or twenty feet thick collapsed, by the towering height alone there would have to be a huge pile of rubble.

“
This rock is sharp, so it might be pieces broken off by the working of water freezing, but probably, since I can’t see any time-worn places, it happened more recently. I just don’t see any evidence of the mass of rock that would have had to come off this mountain. Even if it had been covered over in time, I’d think that where we’re standing would be a huge mound.”

The lieutenant glanced about. “You have a point. This is pretty much level with the bottom of the rift. If all that rock broke off, there’s no mound under the forest down here.”

Richard watched the soldiers all about searching through the rock and woods for any sign of the Temple of the Winds. None looked to be finding anything.

“
I can’t see that it’s down here. I just don’t see any reason to believe that the mountain fell down here.”

Ulic and Egan folded their arms again, the matter settled as far as they were concerned.

Lieutenant Crawford cleared his throat. “Lord Rahl, if the half of Mount Kymermosst that used to be there isn’t down here, then where is it?”

Richard shared a long look with the man. “That’s what I’d like to know. If it isn’t down here, then it must be someplace else.”

The blond-headed lieutenant shifted his weight to his other foot. “Well, it didn’t just get up and walk away, Lord Rahl.”

Richard turned his scabbard out of the way as he started climbing down off the rocks. He realized he was frightening the man; Richard seemed to be suggesting something that hinted at magic.

“
It must be as you say, lieutenant. It must have fallen and grown over. Perhaps the cleft between the mountains was deeper back then, and the fall simply filled it in, rather than making a mound.”

The lieutenant liked the idea. It gave him a rock solid reality.

Richard didn’t believe it. The cliff face looked peculiar to him. It was too smooth, as if cleaved with a huge sword. Yes, there were jagged places, but that would explain the rock that was at the bottom. It looked to him as though the mountain had been cut off and taken away, and over time water and ice had worked at the smooth face of the cliff, breaking off pieces and making it more craggy; but it was nowhere near as rough as the other cliffs round about.