On the red moon will come the firestorm...
Wielding the Sword of Truth, Richard Rahl has battled death itself and come to the defense of the D'Haran people. But now the power-mad Emperor Jagang confronts Richard with a swift and inexorable foe: a mystical plague cutting a deadly swath across the land and slaying thousands of innocent victims.
To quench the inferno, he must seek remedy in the wind...
To fight it Richard and his beloved Kahlan Amnell will risk everything to uncover the source of the terrible plague-the magic sealed away for three millennia in the Temple of the Winds.
Lightning will find him on that path...
But when prophecy throws the shadow of betrayal across their mission and threatens to destroy them, Richard must accept the Truth and find a way to pay the price the winds demand...or he and his world will perish.
Temple of the Winds (1996) 882 pages by Terry Goodkind. Sword of Truth book 4.
This is the fourth book in the Sword of Truth series. Richard and Kahlan rode the sliph back to Aydindril and finished The Blood of the Fold -- Where there was trouble with the mriswith, and the Palace of the Prophets ended up destroyed. Richard is still in the midst of uniting D'Hara and the Midlands so that they can stand against the Imperial Order.
Richard and Kahlan have to delay their wedding because one thing after another is happening. First it's the D'Haran soldiers getting dysentery. Then the plague accompanied by prophecies. Somehow the answer is going to come from the temple of the winds. But getting into the Winds is no simple matter. Meanwhile Shoata has guided Nadine, a girl Richard knows from Hartland, to come and be his bride. A half brother, Drefan Rahl, a healer, also shows up.
There is a plot line following Nathan Rahl, the prophet, as he is working in the Old World. The tenderness of the Nathan/Clarissa relationship is a stark [and refreshing] contrast to the goriness that tends to creep in, and the total lack of respect for human dignity that the evil characters in this series tend to possess.
Goodkind developed the characters of the Mord-Sith, Cara, Berdine and Raina, throughout the book. Nathan as well. I think he wanted to put Richard and Kahlan in mental anguish, give them a dilemma that had no satisfactory outcome. He used the term double-bind, in conjunction with prophecy.
I know that Richard is a hands on type of ruler, but there were just some things -- visiting the individual homes of the Ja'la players -- that a ruler just would not have time to do.
The book had a good flow to it, and it does stop at a stopping point, not a cliff hanger. It pretty much ends where Blood of the Fold ends. Richard has a few more of the Midland kingdoms signed up, but Jagang and the Imperial Order still pose a major threat.
