Terry Goodkind - The Pillars of Creation

“Fire!”

Jennsen rushed to him. “Hurry. She might be asleep. We have to warn her.”

Sebastian considered for only an instant, then burst through the door. Jennsen was right on his heels. She had difficulty making sense of what she saw inside. The place was washed in whirling orange light that cast monstrous shadows up the walls. In that wavering light, everything seemed surreal, out of scale, and out of place.

When she spotted the debris in the center of the room, it became only too real. She saw a woman’s open hand sticking out beyond the top of what looked to be a tall wooden cabinet that had fallen. Jennsen drew a choking gasp of smoke and the smell of lamp oil. Thinking that maybe the cabinet had toppled and hurt the old sorceress, Jennsen rushed to help.

As she raced around the foot of the splintered chest, she caught the full view of what was left of Lathea.

The shock of it stiffened her. She couldn’t move, couldn’t blink her wide eyes. She gagged on the sickly stench of butchery and blood. As Jennsen stared, her anguished cry was lost in the leaping roar of flames and crackle of burning wood.

Sebastian briefly took in the remains of Lathea nailed to the back of the cabinet, only one detail of many as his gaze scanned the room. By his calculated movements, she surmised that he had seen such things enough that the human element no longer arrested his attention as it did hers.

Jennsen.

Jennsen’s fingers tightened around the hilt of her knife. She could feel the ornately worked ridges of metal pressing against her palm, the worked metal peaks and whorls that made up the letter “R.” As she gasped her breath past the nausea welling up inside, she pulled the blade free.

Surrender.

“They’ve been here,” she whispered. “The D’Haran soldiers have been here.”

What she detected in his eyes was more like surprise, or confusion, than anything else.

He frowned as he glanced around again. “Do you really think so?”

Jennsen.

She ignored the echo of the dead voice in her head and thought back to the man they had met out on the road after they had come to see the sorceress the first time. He was big, blond, and good-looking, like most D’Haran soldiers. She hadn’t thought at the time that he was a soldier. Could he have been one, though?

No, if anything, he had seemed more intimidated by them than they were of him. Soldiers didn’t behave the way that man had.

“Who else? We didn’t see all of them, before. It had to be the rest of the quad from back at my house. When we escaped out the back way, they must have somehow followed us.”

He was still peering about as the flames grew, now licking at the ceiling. “I guess you could be right.”

Surrender.

“Sebastian, we have to get out of here, now, or we’ll be next.” Jennsen clutched the cloak at his shoulder, pulling him away. “They may be near—right now.”

“But, how could they know?”

“Dear spirits, Lord Rahl is a wizard! How does he do anything he does? How did he find my house?”

Sebastian was still looking, prodding at the rubble with his sword. Jennsen tugged again at his cloak, urging him toward the open door.

“Your house . . .” he said, frowning. “Yes, I see what you mean.”

“We have to get out of here before they catch us!”

He nodded, reassuring her. “Where do you want to go?”

They both watched the dark doorway over their shoulders as well as the growing conflagration to their other side.

“We’ve no choice, now,” Jennsen said. “Lathea was our only hope to find an answer. We have to go to the People’s Palace, now. Find her sister, Althea. She’s the only one with any answers. She’s a sorceress, too, and the only one who can see the holes in the world—whatever that means.”

“Are you sure that’s what you want to do?”

She thought about the voice. It sounded so cold and lifeless in her head. It had surprised her. She hadn’t heard it since her mother’s murder.

“What other choice do we have, now? If I’m ever to know why Lord Rahl wants to kill me, why he murdered my mother, why I’m hunted, and maybe how to escape his clutches for good, then I have to go find this woman, Althea. I have to!”

He hurried with her through the door and out into the bitter night. “We better go back and get our things together. We can get an early start.”

“With them this close, I fear to be trapped in the inn while we sleep. I have the money from my mother. You have what you took from the men. We can buy horses. We have to leave tonight and hope that no one saw us come here earlier, or again, now.”

Sebastian sheathed his sword. His breath streamed out into the night as he considered their options.

He glanced back through the door. “With the fire, at least there won’t be any evidence of what happened here. We have that much going for us. No one saw us come here earlier, so no one will have cause to ask us questions. No one will know we were here again. They won’t have any reason to tell soldiers about us.”

“As long as we get out of here before it’s discovered and everyone gets suspicious,” Jennsen said. “Before soldiers start asking about strangers in town.”

He took her arm. “All right. Let’s be quick, then.”

Well, wasn’t this just something. Stranger and stranger. This night was full of new things, one right after another.

From his hiding place just around the corner of the house, Oba had been able to hear much of the conversation between the two. At first, he had been sure they would run off to get help. Oba didn’t think the fire could be extinguished, but for a time he had been concerned, fearing that the man and woman might pull Lathea out of the house—rescue her from the blaze so that people could have a look. It would be just like the troublesome sorceress to find a way to come back to torment him, and after all his work.

But both the man and the woman wanted to leave Lathea to the fire. They, too, hoped the fire would cover the evidence of the sorceress’s true end. They almost sounded like thieves, the woman talking about taking money from her mother and him taking money from men. That sounded suspicious.

If they had found gold and silver there, they might have taken it. Had they worked and slaved their whole lives, as he had, to finally recover money that was their due? Or had they been forced to suffer the abuse of swallowing Lathea’s cursed cures their whole life? Oba didn’t think so. It had been different for him. He had simply recovered money that was rightfully his all along. He felt a little indignant to be almost in the company of common thieves.

This night was just one startling thing after another. It seemed amazing to him how his life had gone along, day after day, month after month, year after year, always the same, same chores, same work, same everything. Now, in one night, all that seemed to have changed.

First, he had become invincible and in so doing unleashed his righteous inner self, only to discover that Rahl blood coursed through his veins, and now this odd pair showed up to help him conceal Lathea’s true end. Stranger and stranger.

The startling news that he was in fact the son of Darken Rahl still had him in a state of astonished shock. He, Oba Schalk, as it turned out, was someone quite important, someone of noble blood, someone of noble birth.

He wondered whether or not he should now properly think of himself as Oba Rahl. He wondered if he was, in fact, a prince.

That was an intriguing notion. Unfortunately, his mother had raised him simply, so he didn’t know much about such matters, what station or title was rightfully his.