Terry Goodkind - Confessor - Chainfire Trilogy Part 3

As tired as Richard was, he had only been dozing from time to time. He found himself having difficulty sleeping. Something was wrong, something not connected to all the myriad troubles swirling around him. It was not even anything to do with the immediate worldly dangers of being a captive. This was something different, something inside him, something deep within him. In a way it reminded him a little of the times he’d been sick with a fever, but that wasn’t really it, either. No matter how carefully he tried to analyze it, the nature of the feeling remained elusive. He was so confused by the inexplicable sensation that he was left with nothing so much as an aching feeling of restless foreboding.

Besides that, he was too preoccupied thinking about Kahlan to be able to sleep. Held captive by Emperor Jagang himself, she was not all that far away.

Sometimes when he’d been alone with Nicci, late in the night sitting before a fire, she had stared into those flames and confided in him how Jagang had brutalized her. Those stories gnawed at Richard’s insides.

He couldn’t see the emperor’s compound, but as they had rolled in through the sprawling encampment earlier that day he had seen the impressive command tents. To find himself looking into Kahlan’s green eyes after all this time, even if for only a fleeting moment, had filled him with joy and relief. He had at long last found her, and she was alive. He had to find a way to get her out.

Reasonably sure that the latest woman to have stabbed him was no longer lurking in the shadows for another attempt, Richard finally pulled his hand away to inspect the wound. It wasn’t as bad as it might have been. If he had been sound asleep, like Johnrock, it might have gone much worse.

He guessed that perhaps the odd feeling that had been keeping him awake had actually served him well.

As much as the wound in his leg stung, it wasn’t serious. Holding his hand tightly over it had stopped the bleeding. The wound from earlier that night was also painful, but it, too, wasn’t anywhere as bad as it might have been. His shoulder blade had caught the tip of the woman’s knife and thwarted her attempt at murder.

Death had visited him twice that night and gone away empty-handed. Richard remembered the old saying that trouble sired three children. He hoped not to meet the third child.

He had just rolled onto his side to try again to get some sleep when he saw a shadow slipping up among the wagons. The stride appeared deliberate, though, rather than stealthy. Richard sat up as Commander Karg came to a halt over him.

In the dim light Richard could plainly see the tattooed scales covering the right side of the man’s face. Without the leather shoulder plates and breastplates that the commander usually wore, or even a shirt, Richard could see that the pattern of scales ran down over his shoulder and covered part of his chest as well. The tattoo made him look reptilian. Among themselves, Richard and Johnrock referred to the commander as “Snake-face.” The name fit in more ways than one.

“What do you think you’re doing, Ruben?”

Ruben Rybnik was the name Johnrock—and everyone else on the team—knew Richard by. It was the name Richard had given when he’d been taken prisoner. If there was one place that his real name would surely get him killed, Richard now sat right in the middle of it.

“Trying to get some sleep.”

“You have no business trying to force a woman to lie with you.” Commander Karg pointed an accusatory finger. “She came to me and told me all about what you tried to do to her.”

Richard’s brow lifted. “Did she, now.”

“I told you before, if you beat the emperor’s team—if you beat them—then you will get your choice of a woman. But in the meantime you get no favors. I won’t tolerate anyone disobeying my orders—least of all the likes of you.”

“I don’t know what she told you, Commander, but she came here with the intent of killing me. She wanted to make sure that the emperor’s team wouldn’t lose to us.”

The commander squatted down, resting his forearm on his knee as he peered at the point man for his Ja’La team. He looked ready to murder Richard himself.

“A poor lie, Ruben.”

The knife that only a short time ago he’d taken away from the woman was in Richard’s hand, pressed up along the inside of his wrist. At this distance he could have gutted the commander before the man knew what had happened.

But this was not the time or place. It wouldn’t help Richard get Kahlan back.

Without taking his gaze off the commander’s eyes, Richard spun the knife through his fingers and caught the point between his first finger and thumb. It felt good to have a blade in his hand, any blade, even one this small. He held the handle of the knife out toward the commander.

“This is why my leg was bleeding. She stabbed me with it. Where else do you think I could get a knife?”

The significance—and the danger—of a knife being in Richard’s possession was not lost on the man. He glanced at the wound on Richard’s thigh and then took the knife.

“If you want us to win this tournament,” Richard said with deliberate care, “then I need to get some rest. I would rest a lot easier if there were guards posted. If one skinny old woman, who probably has a bet on the emperor’s team, kills me while I’m asleep, then your team will be without a point man and has no chance to win.”

“Think a lot of yourself, don’t you, Ruben?”

“You think a lot of me, Commander, or you would have killed me long ago back in Tamarang after I killed dozens of your men.”

With his tattooed scales faintly lit by campfires, the commander looked like a snake considering a meal.

“It would appear that being point man is dangerous not just on the Ja’La field.” He finally rose up over Richard. “I’ll post a guard. Just keep in mind that a lot of people don’t think you’re so good—after all, you’ve already lost one game for us.”

They had lost that game because Richard had tried to protect one of his men, a captive named York, whose leg had just been broken in a concentrated charge by the opposing team. He had been a valuable man, a good player, and therefore targeted. The way the Order played Ja’La, the rules allowed such things.

With a badly broken leg York had suddenly become useless as a player, and as a slave. After he had been carried from the field, Commander Karg had unceremoniously cut the man’s throat. For protecting the downed player rather than continuing play by taking the broc upheld toward the opposing goal, the referee had penalized their team by banning Richard from the rest of the game. They had lost as a result.

“The emperor’s team lost a game, too, as I hear tell,” Richard said.

“His Excellency had that team put to death. His new team was created from the best men in all of the Old World.”

Richard shrugged. “We lose players for various reasons, too, and they get replaced. Any number have been hurt and can’t play. Not long ago one of our men broke a leg. You did no less than the emperor did with his losers.

“As I see it, the details of who used to be on his team don’t matter all that much. We’ve each lost a game. That makes us even. That’s all that really matters. We come into this contest on equal footing. They’re no better than us.”

The commander arched an eyebrow. “You think you are their equal?”

Richard didn’t shrink away from the man’s glare. “I am going to win us the chance to play the emperor’s team, Commander, and then we will see what happens.”

A sly smile curved into the scales. “Hoping for your choice of a woman, Ruben?”

Richard nodded without returning the smile. “As a matter of fact I am.”