Confessor Read Free Page B

much the same way that the horrific memory of all of the maggot-infested, rotting corpses she had seen along her journey invariably brought to mind the unforgettable, unmistakable, gagging smell of death, it was impossible to contemplate the Imperial Order encampment without it also bringing to mind its singular, pervasive stink, a thing as vile as the Imperial Order itself. Since arriving in the encampment she was always reluctant to draw a breath too deeply. The smell would forever be linked in her mind to the suffering, misery, and death that the soldiers of the Imperial Order visited upon everything they touched.
    As far as Kahlan was concerned, the people who believed in, supported, and fought for the convictions of the Imperial Order did not belong in the world of life among those who valued it.
    Through the gauze fabric covering the vents in the top of the tent, Kahlan could see the furious flashes of lightning to the west illuminating the sky overhead to announce the approaching storms. The emperor’s tent, with its hangings, carpets, and padded walls, was relatively quiet, considering the constant din of the sprawling encampment out beyond, so it was hard to hear the thunder, but she could occasionally feel rumbles of it through the ground.
    With the cold weather settling in, the rain would make it all the more miserable.
    As tired as she was, Kahlan couldn’t stop thinking about the man from earlier that day, the man who had looked out from that cage as it had rolled through the camp, the man with the gray eyes, the man who had seen her—actually seen her—and had called out her name. It was a galvanizing moment for her.
    For anyone to see her bordered on miraculous. Kahlan was invisible to almost everyone. Invisible wasn’t really accurate, though, because they actually did see her. They simply forgot having seen her as soon as they had, forgot that they had been aware of her only an instant before. So, while she wasn’t really invisible, she might as well have been.
    Kahlan knew well the icy touch of oblivion. The same spell that made people forget her as soon as they’d seen her had also wiped out every memory she had of her past. What ever there was to her life before the Sisters of the Dark, it was now lost to her.
    Among the millions of troops sprawled out across the vast, barren plain, her captors had found only a handful of soldiers who could see her—forty-three, to be exact. Theseforty-three were men who, like the collar around her neck, the Sisters, and Jagang himself, stood between her and freedom.
    Kahlan made it her business to know every one of those forty-three men, to know their strengths, their weaknesses. She studied them silently, mentally making notes about each of them. Everyone had habits—ways of walking, of observing what was going on around them, of paying attention or failing to pay attention, of doing their job. She had learned everything she could about their individual characteristics.
    The Sisters believed that an anomaly in the spell they had used was responsible for a handful of people being aware of Kahlan. It was possible that out among the Order’s vast army there were others who could see and remember her, but Jagang had so far not discovered any more. The forty-three soldiers were thus the only men able to serve as her guards.
    Jagang, of course, could see her, as well as the Sisters who had used the spell in the first place. Much to the Sisters’ horror they had been captured by Jagang and they, too, had ended up with Kahlan in the wretched encampment of the Imperial Order. Other than the Sisters and Jagang, none of those few who could see her really knew her—knew her from her forgotten past, a past that even Kahlan didn’t know.
    But that man in the cage was different. He had known her. Since she didn’t remember ever seeing him before, that could only mean that he was someone who knew her from her past.
    Jagang had promised her that when she finally had her past