The pillars of creation

She immediately set to tightening the bandage of blood-soaked curtain that Jennsen had started to apply. She snatched up more cloth from the rubble.

"Did you get her?" Jagang asked as the Sister worked at pulling the injury closed with the filthy strip of cloth. "Where is she? Sebastian!" He used a board to lever himself upright, peering this way and that around the company of soldiers as they helped Sebastian make his way through to the emperor. "There you are. Where's the Mother Confessor? Did you get her?"

"It isn't her," Jennsen answered in his place.

"What?" The emperor glanced around angrily at the people watching him. "I saw the bitch. I know the Mother Confessor when I see her! Why didn't you get her!"

"You saw a wizard and a sorceress," Jennsen told him. "They were using magic to make you think you were seeing Lord Rahl and the Mother Confessor. It was a trick."

"I think she's right," Sebastian put in before Jagang could scream at her. "I was standing right beside her and while I saw the Mother Confessor, Jennsen didn't."

Jagang turned a dark scowl on her. "But if the others saw her, how could you not. ."

Understanding seemed to come over him. For some reason that Jennsen couldn't exactly fathom, he suddenly recognized the truth in her words.

"But why?" the Sister tending the emperor's injury asked, looking up from her work of bandaging the wound.

"Both the wizard and the sorceress seemed to be in a hurry," Jennsen said. "They must be up to something."

"It's a diversion," Jagang whispered, staring off down the empty hall littered with rubble. "They wanted to keep us occupied. Keep us away, and busy thinking about something else."

"Keep us away from what?" Jennsen asked.

"The main force," Sebastian said, catching Jagang's line of thought.

Another Sister, casting surreptitious glances to the other Sisters after inspecting Sebastian's wound, worked quickly at pressing a padded bandage against his ribs and then wrapping a long strip of cloth around his chest to hold it in place.

"This will only help for a short time," she muttered, half to herself. "This is not good." She glanced again to the other Sister. "We're going to need to tend to this. We can't do it here."

Sebastian winced in pain, ignoring her, then spoke. "It's a trick. They keep us here, puzzling over where they could be, kept us chasing after illusions, while they attack our main force."

Jagang growled a curse. He looked off out the hole the wizard's fire had blasted in the wall, peering out toward the army they had left a long ride back down the river valley. He clenched his fist and gritted his teeth.

"That bitch! They wanted us busy so our main force would be sitting in place while they attack. That filthy scheming bitch! We have to get back!»

The small force moved quickly through the halls. Jagang was carried with a man under each arm, as was Sebastian, so that they could make quick progress back out of the Confessors' Palace. Sebastian was looking worse.

Along the way, they gathered up more of their men. Jennsen was astounded that there were still any others alive. Compared with the force they had come in with, though, they had been cut to pieces. Had they all stayed together, rather than the way the emperor and Sebastian continually divided them up, they might have all been killed at once. As it was, the Order would still have to leave behind a great many dead.

Once on the lower level, they worked their way along service halls, toward the side of the palace, Sebastian advising that it would be best not to go out by the main entrance, where they had entered, for fear that such a move might be expected and they very well could be struck down before they could get away. Everyone moved as silently as possible through the empty kitchens, emerging to a gray day in a side courtyard. It was secluded, with a wall screening it off from the city.

The sight as they came around the side of the palace was horrifying. It looked like the entire force had been cut down, that none of the cavalry could possibly still be alive. Jennsen couldn't stand the sight of so much carnage, yet it was so overwhelming that she could not look away. The dead, horses as well as men, lay tangled in a ragged line down the hillside, fallen in the place where they met the foe head-on at a full charge. In the distance, near the trees, a few scattered horses, their riders no doubt dead, nibbled at the grass.

"There are no enemy dead," Jagang said, surveying the sight as he limped along with the aid of a pike a soldier had handed him. "What could have done this?"

"Nothing living," a Sister said.