Faith of the Fallen Read Online Free PDF Page A

be able to express it in words.”
    Richard slipped the baldric over his head, laying it over his right shoulder. As he adjusted the sword against his left hip, light sparkled off the raised gold wire woven through the silver wire of the hilt to spell out the word TRUTH .
    His brow was smooth and his face calm. She knew she had at last brought him to the heart of the matter. His certainty would afford him no reason to keep it from her if she chose to hear it, and she did. His words rolled forth with quiet power, like prophecy come to life.
    “I have been a leader too soon. It is not I who must prove myself to the people, but the people who must now prove themselves to me. Until then, I must not lead them, or all hope is lost.”
    Standing there, erect, masculine, masterful in his black war wizard outfit, he looked as if he could be posing for a statue of who he was: the Seeker of Truth, rightfully named by Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander, the First Wizard himself—and Richard’s grandfather. It had nearly broken Zedd’s heart to do so, because Seekers so often died young and violently.
    While he lived, a Seeker was a law unto himself. Backed by the awesome power of his sword, a Seeker could bring down kingdoms. That was one reason it was so important to name the right person—a moral person—to the post. Zedd claimed that the Seeker, in a way, named himself by the nature of his own mind and by his actions, and that the First Wizard’s function was simply to act on his observations by officially naming him and giving him the weapon that was to be his lifelong companion.
    So many different qualities and responsibilities had converged in this man she loved that she sometimes wondered how he could reconcile them all.
    “Richard, are you so sure?”
    Because of the importance of the post, Kahlan and then Zedd had sworn their lives in defense of Richard as the newly named Seeker of Truth. That had been shortly after Kahlan had met him. It was as Seeker that Richard had first come to accept all that had been thrust upon him, and to live up to the extraordinary trust put in him.
    His gray eyes fairly blazed with clarity of purpose as he answered her.
    “The only sovereign I can allow to rule me is reason. The first law of reason is this: what exists, exists; what is, is. From this irreducible, bedrock principle, all knowledge is built. This is the foundation from which life is embraced.
    “Reason is a choice. Wishes and whims are not facts, nor are they a means to discovering them. Reason is our only way of grasping reality—it’s our basic tool of survival. We are free to evade the effort of thinking, to reject reason, but we are not free to avoid the penalty of the abyss we refuse to see.
    “If I fail to use reason in this struggle, if I close my eyes to the reality of what is, in favor of what I would wish, then we will both die in this, and for nothing. We will be but two more among uncounted millions of nameless corpses beneath the gray, gloomy decay of mankind. In the darkness that will follow, our bones will be meaningless dust.
    “Eventually, perhaps a thousand years from now, perhaps more, the light of liberty will again be raised up to shine over a free people, but between now and then, millions upon millions of people will be born into hopeless misery and have no choice but to bear the weight of the Order’s yoke. We, by ignoring reason, will have purchased those mountains of broken bodies, the wreckage of lives endured but never lived.”
    Kahlan found herself unable to summon the courage to speak, much less argue; to do so right then would be to ask him to disregard his judgment at a cost he believed would be a sea of blood. But doing as he saw they must would cast her people helpless into the jaws of death.
    Kahlan, her vision turning to a watery blur, looked away.
    “Cara,” Richard said, “get the horses hitched to the carriage. I’m going to scout a circle to make sure we don’t have any