Shroud of Eternity Read online

  “Even though the outside world always had interest in us,” Maxim interjected, cocking a grin. “My dear Thora possesses no curiosity.” He rose from the throne in a fluid, catlike movement, stepping toward Nicci. “Welcome to Ildakar. We are always eager to meet intrepid explorers from the hostile world outside of our protective bubble.” He waved his left hand to indicate generalized but unidentified lands beyond the boundaries of the city.

  While Bannon hung back, clearly out of his depth, Nathan followed Nicci’s lead. The former wizard fluffed the front of his ruffled shirt, adjusted his own cape, and tried to make himself presentable. He broke in, smiling. “We have much knowledge to share, and we can benefit greatly from one another.” He brushed back his long hair, seeming oddly uncertain, even nervous. Nicci knew how badly he wanted answers.

  Gathering his courage, Bannon stepped up to join Nicci and Nathan. Before she could caution him to remain silent, the young man blurted out, “We saw your city from Kol Adair. We came from over the mountains. I am from Chiriya Island. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”

  “Islands are in the sea,” Sovrena Thora said. “And the sea is far from here, miles downriver and beyond the estuary.”

  “Then perhaps we should know more about it, my dear,” said Maxim. “Knowledge equals power.”

  “We have enough power,” Thora said.

  “Never enough power.”

  “You two must be married,” Nathan pointed out, striking a light tone. “Is that true?”

  “For nearly two thousand years,” Maxim said, “even before General Utros came to lay siege to the city.”

  Thora’s icy expression indicated that she had stopped counting the years of marriage long ago, and simply endured.

  The doors opened on the side of the receiving room, and six wizards hurried in, gifted men and a woman wearing robes and amulets, carrying staffs or other obvious trappings of their position. High Captain Avery rose to his feet and stepped back. “The wizards’ duma has arrived.”

  Still sitting on her throne, Thora said, “Thank you for summoning them, Captain. The duma members should hear what these guests have to say.” She paused. “In case any of it is relevant.”

  Wizard Commander Maxim strolled down from the dais and crossed the blue marble floor to the long stone tables as the other six wizards took their seats. He swept his hands out in a grand gesture, looking back at the guests. “Allow me to introduce the other primary wizards of Ildakar—Damon, Elsa, Quentin, Ivan, Andre, and Renn.”

  Nathan gave a brief respectful bow, but he raised his eyebrows in a question. “An even number of voters on a council? You must all be in agreement.”

  “They are,” Thora said.

  “We used to have an odd number, but one sorceress decided to challenge the sovrena. Very unwise.” Maxim stroked his dark goatee. “And as you see, she lost her bid. Poor Lani.” He indicated a white statue standing on display opposite the wall of windows—a tall, regal-looking woman whose hair was in ringlets, all preserved in stone. Her face looked angry, her hand outstretched, her fingers curled as if about to release a spell. But she had been petrified in place.

  “That happened a century ago,” Thora said. “No one has challenged me since.”

  “We have done just fine without Lani, hmmm?” said the wizard named Andre. He had a shaved head and a gray-brown beard tightly braided like a thick brush that protruded from the point of his chin. “We have our own work in Ildakar, each of us with our special areas of expertise.”

  Nicci looked from Maxim to Thora, noting the icy, invisible curtain that seemed to hang between them. She couldn’t help but contrast this coldness with the depthless love that Richard and Kahlan had for each other. The sovrena and the wizard commander clearly had no such bond, at least not anymore.

  “Fifteen centuries of peace,” mused Elsa, a matronly woman who wore deep purple robes. “At one time we all banded together to defend Ildakar, and we succeeded. Now we have Ildakar … exactly as it is.”

  “Exactly as it is,” Thora agreed. “We preserved Ildakar. We built our own perfect society, just as we wish it to be.”

  “We saw the army outside,” Nathan said. “Hundreds of thousands of warriors turned to stone. That is quite an impressive display of your magic. They’ve been here—petrified, all those centuries?”

  “Challenging our city was the greatest mistake General Utros made,” said Maxim. “That fool Emperor Kurgan thought that if he had a big enough army, he could simply walk all over the world, take anything he liked.” Maxim tugged at the silk fabric of his open shirt, as if he’d grown hot in the chamber. “But as you could see, even an army so huge was no match for the wizards of Ildakar.” He strolled in front of the seated duma members. “While Iron Fang lounged in his capital and let his general do all the fighting for him, our city built up defenses that proved to be his downfall.”

  Thora picked up the story, as if to upstage her husband. “General Utros brought his armies over the mountains. According to our scouts, he started with an army half a million strong, but only part of it survived to lay siege to Ildakar. But how does one feed an army of such size?”

  “Or half that size, for that matter,” the wizard Damon interjected. He had shoulder-length dark hair and long drooping mustaches, each tip adorned with a pearl.

  Ivan, a gruff and burly man with thick black hair and an unruly black beard, hunched at his bench, as if looking for something to break. He wore a tan jerkin of animal hide branded with strange symbols. With a sharp realization, Nicci thought the leather jerkin looked much like Mrra’s marked hide. Ivan grumbled, “We may have done them a favor by turning them to stone. We should have left them to starve out there. Or fester with disease. Let them rot and die while we laughed at them from inside the city.”

  “By joining together, we defeated them with a single blow,” Thora said, still sitting in her tall chair. “We worked massive magic, unleashed power from the soul of our people. And, oh, the cost…” She looked at her husband with grudging respect. “The wizard commander was the focal point for the petrification spell. Maxim used the magic and turned them all to stone.”

  He seemed immensely pleased with himself. “I was always the best sculptor in Ildakar, although my dear wife has potent magic as well—which she used against dear Lani.”

  “We stopped the siege and defeated Utros’s army, but we knew more war would come,” Thora continued. “Emperor Kurgan might raise another force to get revenge, or if not Kurgan, then some other despot. We were weary of it.” The sovrena’s porcelain face grew flushed.

  “We were also bored with it,” Maxim added, flashing a smile at Nicci. She stiffened. Was he flirting with her? The wizard commander continued, “So, we removed ourselves from the perilous outside world. We built the proper spell-forms throughout the walls of the city and then raised a shroud that encapsulated us in a protective reality where we have remained safe for one thousand five hundred years.” He crossed his thin arms over his open shirt.

  Thora slid one slender leg over the other, rippling her sky-blue skirts. “Thus leaving us free to create our perfect society here.” She looked down at the visitors, and her smile reminded Nicci of the curve of a sharp knife.

  CHAPTER 9

  As they descended the last line of mountains heading west, far from Cliffwall, the two young scholars paused to stare at the wide band of water ahead of them. Yes, they were on an important mission for the sorceress Nicci, but would wonders never cease?

  Oliver blinked several times, trying to focus his eyes. After all his years in the isolated archive, his vision was better suited for close-up reading, studying countless documents in faded handwriting by lamplight. This expansive landscape stretched his imagination. “Is that the ocean?” he asked with a clear sense of awe. “I’ve never seen the ocean.”

  “No one from Cliffwall has,” said Peretta, “not in our lifetimes.” Standing all too close to him, the skinny young woman shaded her eyes against the slanting after
noon sun. She was a memmer, one of those who used their gift to memorize countless volumes of magical and historical lore from the wizards’ archive. Unfortunately, that ability seemed to make Peretta think she knew everything. “But that isn’t the sea.” She extended her thin arm, pointing a stern finger as if she were about to lecture him. “It’s just a river flowing down toward the ocean, exactly as the people of Lockridge told us. You can see the bank on the opposite side.”

  Oliver squinted again. Yes, there was a bank on the other side, not even terribly far away. “It’s so much wider than the water running through the Cliffwall canyons.”

  Peretta sniffed. “All we had was a stream. This is a real river.”

  Oliver adjusted his pack on his shoulders. His muscles were sore from so many days of walking across the Old World, and the straps had chafed his skin. “And I’ve never seen a real river either.” He knew he and his companion still had a long way to go to deliver their important message back to Lord Richard Rahl.

  Peretta flashed him a rare smile. “Neither have I.”

  The girl was quite pretty when she let the stern, know-it-all expression fade away. Peretta was eighteen years old, gangly and awkward, even scrawny. Her best features, Oliver thought, were her large brown eyes and the ringlets of brunette hair that stood out like a spray of dandelion puff around her head. Despite his dim eyesight, he could see his companion quite clearly when he looked at her up close—and they had spent a great deal of time up close since leaving the hidden canyons that held the great archive.

  With the river in front of them, the two set off out of the foothills, following a worn track that grew wider, rutted from wagon wheels. On either side of the track, grasses, weeds, and flowers grew tall, interspersed with wild rosebushes or low willows. The very idea that others had traveled this way, maybe even recently, made him feel less homesick. They were such a long way from Cliffwall.

  Oliver began to hope they might find a village up ahead, where friendly people would offer a good meal and evening conversation, not to mention nice lodgings, two separate beds … or even a single lumpy mattress if necessary. He and Peretta had learned how to make the best of their situation. They both had the same goal since the sorceress Nicci had dispatched them on their mission.

  The people of Cliffwall—and the whole world—owed a great debt to Nicci and her companions. First, the sorceress had defeated the Lifedrinker, whose powers threatened to suck the world dry; after that, Nicci had destroyed Victoria and her destructive explosion of growth. That had cost the life of the poor orphan girl Thistle, and in great grief they had laid Thistle to rest overlooking the valley the girl had helped to save.

  But Nicci and Nathan had their own goals as well. In gratitude for their services, and also because it was the right thing to do, the people of Cliffwall had dispatched two volunteers to make the long journey across the uncharted continent, to make their way up to Tanimura and the D’Haran Empire. Oliver and Peretta carried letters to Lord Rahl, along with copies of the information Nathan had written in his life book. Most importantly, Lord Rahl and the Sisters of the Light needed to know about the wealth of magical knowledge held in Cliffwall.

  Caught up in the excitement of the moment, Oliver had volunteered to go on the trek, thinking of the possibilities of the wide world he had only read about. He hadn’t known a whit about what he had agreed to do.

  Peretta agreed to accompany him, representing her fellow memmers, who were often at odds with traditional scholars like Oliver. Because evil Victoria had been the leader of the memmer faction, he wondered if Peretta felt driven by guilt or obligation. No one had questioned why either of them wanted to go. They just went.

  While packing for the journey, Oliver had combed through the archive, looking for reference works on the inhabited lands west of the mountains, the coastline, and the immense ocean. He was a fidgety, skittish young man, often sickly in his younger years. Growing up in the book-crowded tunnels within the great mesa, he had immersed himself in reading and cataloging. Cliffwall students were supposed to inventory thousands of volumes, simply marking down titles, organizing the books, scrolls, and tablets. But nothing more—the archived magical lore was not to be used, because it was deemed too dangerous. And it was.

  “Before true learning can begin, we must know the contents of our library,” scholar-archivist Simon had once told them. Unfortunately, Oliver often became so engrossed in what he was reading that he would spend hours studying histories, legends, geography, and intricate magical lore … and entirely forget about the task of cataloging.

  Before leaving, he made a point of studying the known western maps, and when he was ready to depart, an impatient Peretta had met him outside the canyon city. “I was already prepared to go.” She tapped her forehead. “I have all the necessary knowledge up here. You didn’t need to bother.”

  Heading out of the canyons and the high desert plateau, the two had retraced their path, following Nathan’s detailed descriptions and cartographical notes. Thanks to the Lifedrinker’s deadly influence for years, most of the settlements around the great valley had been abandoned, and little remained except for ghostly foundations of homes and empty streets.

  Up in the mountains, however, the two travelers found villagers, miners, farmers, shepherds in little settlements that seemed to have awakened from a deep and confusing sleep. They reached the town of Lockridge, and when Oliver invoked the names of Nicci and Nathan, the two travelers were exuberantly welcomed and given everything they could need.

  Now, many days later as he and Peretta walked along the river road, listening to the gentle slosh of the current, Oliver considered the journey ahead of them, how far Nicci, Nathan, and Bannon had come from the D’Haran Empire. His sore feet made him despondent about the countless steps still to be taken, but he chided himself with a philosophical adage he had always used as inspiration back in Cliffwall. You can finish even the thickest book if you read one page at a time. And you can read the entire library, one book at a time, one shelf at a time, one room at a time.

  Oliver decided to view their journey in the same way.

  A speckled trout leaped out of the river with a splash, snatched a fly in the air, then plunged back into the water. Oliver paused to watch the dissipating ripples. “I’m impressed with this river,” he said. “I know we’re going the right direction, because rivers flow to the sea—and we need to get to the sea.”

  “I already knew that,” Peretta said, tossing her brunette ringlets. She marched ahead of him, leading the way along the dirt path.

  * * *

  Heading downriver, they found more villages, and the people welcomed the weary travelers, who had no coins to pay for food or lodgings. They did have stories, however.

  More important, the villagers gave them directions, which helped the two orient themselves. Oliver knew their next main destination was the fishing town of Renda Bay on the coast, where Nicci and her companions had driven away the Norukai slavers.

  One afternoon they walked under the hazy sunlight, miserable in the humid air, which was far different from the dry desert. The river spawned lush vegetation, tall cattails, and wild daisies, but also countless gnats and mosquitoes. Oliver waved his hand in front of his face, but did not succeed in driving them away. “I think they want to drink our sweat … as if there wasn’t enough water all over the place.”

  Peretta tossed her curls. “They’re not after our sweat. They drink blood. I know all about it from one of the volumes I memorized.”

  “Of course you do,” Oliver muttered under his breath.

  She frustrated him. Sometimes he delighted in the girl’s company. They would exchange stories to pass the time as they covered mile after mile. He would tell her things he had read, and she would recite passages from particularly interesting books. Then her mood would change, and she seemed to consider their companionship a competition. Oliver had put up with it, not wanting to pick a fight.

  Once, though, she had stumbled i
n midsentence, forgetting words she’d memorized, and she reacted as if the mistake were a devastating failure. Tears brimmed in Peretta’s dark brown eyes, and her lip trembled. She dashed into the tall weeds, insisting that she needed to use the bushes. She was gone a long time, and Oliver knew she was crying, but he didn’t understand why.…

  They continued along the well-traveled river road, reaching a point where the hills opened up. The two stopped as the river spread out in front of them, widening as it drained into a bay. The world ahead was an endless landscape of blue water laced with white foamy waves. Oliver’s stomach sank at the thought of all that water. He couldn’t see any end to it, but not because his eyesight was weak. The water did extend forever, vanishing over the horizon.

  Next to him, Peretta stopped in midsentence, blinking her big brown eyes. With a gasp, she reached out to touch his arm. “Dear spirits, it looks like half the world is flooded!”

  “I think that’s the ocean,” he said.

  Peretta nodded, and for once, she didn’t argue. “I believe you are correct.”

  At the mouth of the river they found the village of Renda Bay, exactly as they were expecting. Feeling a spring in their step, they walked into the town, recalling the stories the visitors had told about the slaver raid, how Bannon, Nathan, and Nicci had fought back the ruthless Norukai, leaving the villagers to pick up the pieces.

  When the people of Renda Bay saw Oliver and Peretta coming down the inland road, they reacted without surprise. Apparently, trade was commonplace up and down the river.

  As they approached, Oliver and Peretta raised their hands in greeting. Several people came forward wearing curious expressions, and Oliver invoked the name that he knew would inspire a welcome. “The sorceress Nicci sent us here, and we are on our way to D’Hara.”

  “It’s a very long way,” Peretta said. “We hope you can help us.”

  A murmur of recognition and surprise rippled among the villagers. Oliver looked around and saw the bright, bare wood of new construction in the main town, as well as stone towers being built on either side of the bay’s headlands.