Zedd clenched a fist at how close he had come to finishing Jagang that day. At least he had dealt a mighty blow to his army.
And Zedd might have had Jagang had it not been for that strange young woman. He shook his head at the memory of actually seeing one who could not be touched by magic. He'd known, in theory, of their existence, but had never before known it for certain to be true. Vague references in old books made for interesting abstract speculation, but seeing it with his own eyes was quite something else.
It had been an unsettling sight. Adie had been shaken by the encounter even more than he; she was blind, yet with the aid of the gift could see better than he could. That day, she had not been able to see the young woman who was there, but, in some ways, not there. To Zedd's eyes, if not his gift, she was a beautiful sight, with some of Darken Rahl's looks, but different and altogether captivating. That she was half sister to Richard was clear; she shared some of his features, especially the eyes. If only Zedd could have stopped her, kept her out of the way, convinced her that she was making a terrible mistake by being with the Order, or even if he could have killed her, Jagang would not have escaped justice.
Still, Zedd held no illusions about ending the threat of the Imperial Order simply by killing Jagang. Jagang was merely the brute who led other brutes in enforcing blind faith in the Order, a blind faith that embraced death as salvation from what it preached was the corrupt misery of life, a blind faith in which life itself had no value but as a bloody sacrifice upon the altar of altruism, a blind faith that blamed the failure of its own ideas on mankind for being wicked and for failing to offer sufficient sacrifice in an endless quest for some illusive greater good that grew ever more distant, a blind faith in an Order that clung to power by feeding off the carcasses of the productive lives it ruined.
A faith that by its very beliefs rejected reason and embraced the irrational could not long endure without intimidation and force- without brutes like Jagang to enforce such faith.
While Emperor Jagang was brutally effective, it was a mistake to think that if Jagang were to die that very day it would end the threat of the Order. It was the Order's ideas that were so dangerous; the priests of the Order would find other brutes.
The only real way to end the Order's reign of terror was to expose the naked evil of its teachings to the light of truth, and for those suffering under its doctrines to throw off the Order's yoke. Until then, they would have to fight the Imperial Order back as best they could, hoping at least to eventually contain them.
Zedd poked his head around a corner, watching, listening, sniffing the wind for any trace of anyone who might be lurking about. The city was deserted, but on a number of occasions stray Imperial Order soldiers had wandered in out of the mountains.
After the destruction caused by the light web, panic had swept through the Order's encampment. Many soldiers had scattered to the hills. Once the army had regrouped, a large number of men had decided to desert instead of returning to their units. Tens of thousands of such deserters were rounded up and executed, their bodies left to rot as a warning of what happened to those who abandoned the cause of the greater glory of the Imperial Order, or as the Order liked to put it, the cause of the greater good. Most of the rest of the men who had run to the hills had then had a change of heart and straggled back into camp.
There were still some, though, who had not wanted to go back and had not been caught. For a time, after Jagang's army had moved on, they had wandered into the city, sometimes alone, sometimes in small groups, half starved, to search for food and to loot. Zedd had lost count of how many such men he had killed.
He was reasonably sure that all of those stragglers were dead, now. The Order was made up of men mostly from cities and towns. Such men weren't used to living in the wild. Their job was to overwhelm the enemy, to kill, rape, terrorize, and plunder. A whole corps of logistics personnel provided them with support, delivering and dispensing a constant stream of supplies that rolled in to feed and care for the soldiers. They were violent men, but they were men who needed to be tended, who depended on the group for their survival. They didn't last long on their own in the trackless forested mountains surrounding Ay-dindril.
But Zedd hadn't seen any of them for quite some time. He was reasonably sure that the stragglers had starved, been killed, or had long ago headed back south, to the Old World.
