Faith of the Fallen

"Richard Cypher is further ordered to report to the carver's committee for work assignment." He handed her the paper with the orders. "Richard.

Cypher is now a stone carver for the Order."

-]--

The sun was setting by the time they returned with all the papers and seals. The blacksmith was impressed with the way she had handled the official when the offer of gold failed to work. Ishaq thanked her a hundred times. It only mattered to her that Richard would be freed.

She was relieved to know that she had been wrong, that Richard wasn't a cheat and a thief after all. It had been such an ugly feeling, thinking ill of Richard. It had for a time tainted her whole world. She had never been so happy to be wrong.

Better yet, they had done it; she was to have him back.

At the side door to the stronghold, Mr. Cascella, Ishaq, and Nicci waited. The shadows grew darker. Finally, the door opened. Two guards held Richard between them as they came out onto the landing. When they saw Richard, his condition, Mr. Cascella cursed under his breath. Ishaq whispered a prayer.

The guards released Richard with a shove. He stumbled forward. The blacksmith and Ishaq raced to the steps to help him.

Richard caught himself and straightened, a dark form upright in the last of the light, defiant of the long shadows around him. He held a hand out, commanding the two men to stay where they were. Both stopped with a foot on the bottom step, ready to run up to him should he need them. Nicci couldn't imagine what pain it had to cost Richard to walk so steadily, proudly, smoothly down the stairs without help, as if he were a free man.

He did not yet know what she had done to him.

Nicci knew there could be no worse plight for Richard. The torture down in the depths of the stronghold was not as bad as what she had just condemned him to.

Nicci was sure that this was the one thing, at last, that would force out the answer she sought, if there really was an answer to be found.

CHAPTER 57

Brother Narev paused behind Richard's shoulder, a shadow come to visit.

He often lurked nearby, making sure the carvings were progressing as directed. This was the first time the great man himself had stopped to watch Richard work.

"Don't I know you?" The voice was like stone grating on stone.

Richard let his arm holding the hammer drop to his side as he looked up. He wiped the dusty sweat from his brow with the back of his left hand, still holding the clawed stone chisel.

"Yes, Brother Narev. I was a laborer hauling iron, at the time. I was bringing a load to the blacksmith one day when I was honored to meet you."

Brother Narev frowned suspiciously. Richard allowed no crack in his facade of i

"A laborer, and now a carver?"

"I have ability which I am joyful to contribute to my fellow man. I am grateful for the opportunity the Order has given me to earn my reward in the next life by sacrificing in this."

"Joyful." Neal, the shadow of the shadow, stepped forward. "You are joyful to carve, are you?"

"Yes, Brother Neal."

Richard was joyful that Kahlan was alive. He didn't think about the rest of it. He was a prisoner, and what he had to do to keep Kahlan alive, he would do; that was all there was to it. What was, was.

Brother Neal smirked his superiority at Richard's obeisance. The man had come often to lecture the carvers, and Richard had come to know him all too well. The carvers' work, being the influential face the palace would show to the people, was critically important to the Fellowship of Order.

Richard was frequently the object of Neal's harangues. Neal, a wizard, not a sorcerer like Brother Narev, always seemed to feel,the need to prove his moral authority around Richard. Richard gave him no rough edge to grip, yet Neal still persisted in clawing for one.

Brother Narev believed his own words with grim conviction: mankind was evil; only through selfless sacrifice to your fellow man had you any hope to redeem yourself in the afterlife. There was no joy in his faith, simply a ruthless duty to it.

Neal, on the other hand, bubbled over with his feelings. He believed in the Order's doctrine with an impassioned, incandescent, arrogant pride, gleefully convinced the world needed iron-fisted direction which only enlightened intellectuals, such as himself, could provide-with grudging deference to Brother Narev, of course.

Richard had more than once overheard Neal proclaim with conviction that if he had to order the tongues cut out of a million i

Brother Neal, a fresh-faced young man-no doubt deceptively young, considering that Nicci said he had once lived at the Palace of the Prophets-frequently accompanied Brother Narev, basking in his mentor's approval. Neal was Brother Narev's chief lieutenant. His face might have been fresh, but his ideas were not; tyra

Nothing stirred him to anger quicker than the whiff of argument or contradiction, no matter how reasoned. In the heat of his passion, Neal was perfectly willing to destroy any dissension, torture any opposition, kill any number, who failed to bow before the pedestal upon which stood his irrefutably noble ideals.

No misery, no failure, no amount of wailing and anguish and death, could dim his glowing conviction that the ways of the Order were the only correct course for mankind.

The other disciples, all, like Neal, wearing hooded brown robes, were an incongruous collection of the cruel, the pompously idealistic, the bitterly greedy, the resentful, the spiteful, the timid, and, most of all, the dangerously deluded. All shared an underlying, caustic, i

All, with the exception of Neal, were blind followers and completely under the spell of Brother Narev. They believed Brother Narev far closer to the Creator than to man. They hung on his every word, believing each to be divinely inspired. Were he to tell them they must kill themselves for the cause, Richard was sure they would break their necks rushing for the nearest knife.

Neal was alone in that he believed in the divinity of his own words, in addition to Brother Narev's. Every leader had to have a successor. Richard was pretty sure Neal had already decided who would best serve as the next incarnation of the Order.

"A peculiar choice of words, joyful." Brother Narev circled a knobby finger toward the cowering, deformed, frightened figures Richard was working on. "This makes you. . joyful?"

Richard gestured to the Light he had carved so as to shine down on the wretched men. "This, Brother Narev, is what makes me joyful-being able to show men cowering before the perfection of the Creator's Light. It makes me joyful to show mankind's wickedness for all to see, for in this way they will know their duty to the Order above all else."

Brother Narev made a suspicious sound deep in his throat. The sunlight hooded his dark eyes more than usual and seemed to deepen the creases around his mouth as he regarded Richard with a look sharing mistrust and loathing, laced with apprehension. Only the apprehension was any different than the look he gave everyone. Richard fed him a vacant stare. The brother's mouth finally twisted with the dismissal of his private thoughts.

"I approve. . I forgot your name. But then, names are not important.