“Why do they have wooden people here?”

A headless mannequin rested at an angle against a window-sill, tipped halfway out of a shop. The elaborate blue dress the mannequin wore was trimmed with white beads draped in layers about the waist. Glad to have a diversion from the thoughts swirling in her head, Kahlan changed direction a little, toward the mannequin in the blue dress.

This is a tailor’s shop. The people who owned this shop specialized in making clothes. This wooden person is simply a form to display what they make, so others may know the fine work they do. It’s a demonstration of pride in their work.”

She stopped before the large window. All the panes of glass were broken out. A few of the yellow-painted mullions hung crookedly from the top of the frame. The shade of blue of the gorgeous gown reminded Kahlan of her wedding dress. She could feel the blood pounding in the veins of her neck as she swallowed back a cry. Chandalen watched both directions up and down the street as her hand slowly reached out to touch the frozen, blue fabric.

Her vision focused past the mannequin, into the shop, where a square of sunlight fell across the snow-dusted floor and up and over a low work counter. Her hand faltered. A dead man with a balding head was pinned to the wall by a spear through his chest. A woman lay sprawled facedown over the counter, her dress and underskirts bunched up around her waist, exposing blue flesh. A pair of tailor’s scissors jutted from her back.

In the gloom at the far end of the room stood another mannequin, in a fine man’s coat. The front of the dark coat was shredded with hundreds of small cuts. The soldiers had evidently used the mannequin as a target for knife throwing while they waited their turn on the woman. Apparently, when they were finished with her, they stabbed her to death with her scissors.

Kahlan twisted away from the shop to find herself face-to-face with Chandalen. His was red. There was menace in his eyes.

“Not all men are the same. I would cut the throat of any man of mine if he did such a thing.”

Kahlan had no answer for him, and suddenly wasn’t in the mood to talk. As she started off again, she loosened the mantle at her neck, needing the feel of cold air.

In silence, but for the low, baleful moan of the breeze between the buildings, they slogged past stables of horses, their throats all cut, and past inns and grand houses, their cornices high overhead shading them from the bright, slanting sunlight. Fluted, wooden columns to each side of one door had been hacked at with a sword, seemingly for no purpose but to deface the elegance of the home.

It was colder in the shade, but she didn’t care. They stepped over corpses that lay facedown in the snow with wounds in their backs, and around overturned wagons and coaches and dead horses and dead dogs. It all melted into a meaningless madness of destruction.

Eyes cast to the ground before her, she trudged on through the snow. The cold air bit into her flesh, and she pulled her mantle closed once more. The cold was sapping her of not only warmth, but strength. With grim determination she put one foot in front of the other, continuing on toward her destination, hoping, somehow, that she would never reach it.

With the frozen dead of Ebinissia all about, she filled her crushing loneliness with a silent prayer.

Please, dear spirits, keep Richard warm.

Naked under the sun’s fury, the parched, dead flat ground stretched endlessly before them, in the distance offering up shimmering images to waver and dance in the sun’s furnace glare, like phantom hostages surrendered to an omnipotent foe. Behind, the fractured hills ended in a bank of rocky rubble. The silence was as oppressive as the heat.

Richard wiped sweat from his brow on the back of his sleeve. The leather of his saddle creaked as he shifted his weight while he waited. Bonnie and the other two horses waited, too, their ears pricked ahead, as they occasionally pawed the cracked, dry earth and voiced apprehensive snorts.

Sister Verna sat motionless atop Jessup, scrutinizing the nothingness of the distance as if viewing an event of great import. Except for the way her brown curls hung limp, she didn’t appear to be affected by the heat.

“I don’t understand this weather. It’s winter; I’ve never heard of it being hot like this in winter.”

“The weather is different in different places,” she murmured.

“No it’s not. When it’s winter, it’s cold. It’s only hot like this in high summer.”

“Have you ever seen snow on mountaintops in the summer?”

Richard reversed the positions of his hands resting on the pommel. “Yes. But that’s just on mountaintops. The air is colder up there. We’re not on a mountaintop.”

Still she did not move. “Not just mountaintops have different weather. In the south the weather is not so cold as it is in the north. But this place is different still. It’s like an inexhaustible well of heat.”

“And just what is this place?”

“The Valley of the Lost,” she whispered.

“Who was lost in it?”

“Those who created it, and whoever enters.” At last she turned a bit to peer at him. “It’s the end of the world. Your world, anyway.”

He shifted his weight to the other side when Bonnie did the same. “If it’s the end of the world, why are we here?”

Sister Verna held her hand up to the land behind. “Just as there is Westland, where you were born, separated from the Midlands, and the Midlands from D’Hara, so, too, are those lands separated from what lies on the far side of this place.”

Richard frowned. “And what lies on the other side of here?”

She turned back to the expanse before them. “You lived in the New World. Across this valley lies the Old World.”

The Old World? I never heard of the Old World.”

“Few in the New World have. It has been sealed away and forgotten. This valley, the Valley of the Lost, separates them, much the same way the boundary used to separate the three lands of the New World. The last of the country we have been crossing has been inhospitable, a desert wasteland. Anyone venturing through it and into this valley never returns. People think there is nothing beyond, that this is the southern end of the Midlands and D’Hara, with nothing beyond but what you see here: an endless waste, where one could die of thirst and hunger and you could have your bones baked by the heat of the sun.”

Richard eased Bonnie up next to the Sister. “so, what is beyond? And why can’t anyone cross? And if no one can cross, how can we?”

She looked over out of the corner of her eye. “simple questions, but not simply answered.” She relaxed back in her saddle a little. “The land between the New and the Old Worlds narrows somewhat, with the sea to each side.”

“The sea?”

“You have never seen the ocean?”

Richard shook his head. “In Westland, it lies far to the south, and people don’t live there. Or, so I’ve been told. I’ve heard others speak of the ocean, but I’ve never seen it. They say it’s more vast than any lake ever imagined.”

Sister Verna gave him a little smile. They speak true.” She turned ahead, pointing off to the right. “some distance that way lies the sea.” She pointed left, to the southeast. “Off even farther in that direction is also the sea. Though the land is vast between them, it is still the narrowest place between the New and the Old Worlds. Because of that, a war was fought here. A war between wizards.”

Richard straightened in his saddle. “Wizards? What war?”

“Yes, wizards. It was ages ago, when there were many wizards. What you see before you is the result of that war. It’s all that remains, as a reminder, of what wizards who have more power than wisdom can conjure.”

He didn’t like the accusing look she gave him. “Who won?”