Chainfire: Chainfire Trilogy Part 1

Chapter 11

Driven by worried curiosity, Ann immediately started down the dusty steps. Jennsen followed close on her heels. A landing turned them to the right and down another flight. At a third landing, a long run of stairs turned to the left. The dusty stone walls were uncomfortably close together. The ceiling hunkered low, even for Ann; Jennsen had to crouch. It felt to Ann like she was being swallowed down though a moldering guild into the graveyard’s belly.

At the bottom of the steps she halted to stare in disbelief. Jennsen lei out a low whistle. Beyond was not a dungeon, but a strange, twisting room unlike any Ann had ever seen. The stone walls zigged and zagged at odd angles, each of its own design and independently of the others. Plastering covered some of the stone walls. In a series of the convoluted angles, the whole room snaked off into the distance, disappearing around projections and pointed corners.

The place had a strange orderly disorder about it that Ann found somewhat unsettling. Dark niches here and there in the plastered walls were surrounded with faded blue symbols and decorations that had flaked off in places. There were words as well, but they were too old and dull to be legible without careful study. Bookshelves as well as ancient wooden tables, all layered in dirt, sat in several places up against the angled walls.

Dead-still cobwebs, heavy with dust, hung everywhere like drapes meant to decorate the room beneath the graves. Dozens of candles sat on tables and in some of the empty niches, giving the whole place a soft, otherworldly glow, as if all the dead above Ann’s head must periodically descend to this place to discuss matters important only to the deceased, and to welcome new members into their eternal order.

Beyond the diaphanous curtains of dust-choked cobwebs, amongst four massive tables that had been dragged together, stood Nathan. Disorderly stacks of books were piled high all around him on the tables.

“Ah, there you are,” Nathan called from his book foil.

Ann cast a sidelong glance at Jennsen.

“I had no idea that this place was down here,” the young woman said in answer to the question that remained unasked on Ann’s tongue. Points of candlelight danced in her blue eyes. “I didn’t even know this place existed.”

Ann looked around again. “I doubt anyone in the last few thousand years knew this place existed. I wonder how he found it.”

Nathan snapped a book shut and placed it on a pile behind him. His straight white hair brushed his broad shoulders as he turned back. His hooded, dark azure eyes fixed on Ann.

Ann caught the unspoken meaning in Nathan’s gaze. She turned to Jennsen. “Why don’t you go up and wait with Tom, my dear. It can be a lonely job standing watch in a graveyard.”

Jennsen looked disappointed, but seemed to understand their need to be left to their business. She flashed a smile. “Sure. I’ll be right up top if you need anything.”

As the sound of Jennsen’s footsteps on the stone stairs dwindled away into a distant, echoing whisper, Ann struck a weaving course through the vails of cobwebs.

“Nathan, what in the world is this place?”

“No need to whisper,” he said. “See how the walls turn at all those odd angles? It cuts the echo.”

Ann was a little surprised to hear that he was right. Usually, the echo in stone rooms was annoying, but this odd twisting room had the hush of the dead.

“There’s something strangely familiar about the shape of this place.”

“Concealment spell,” the prophet said, offhandedly.

Ann frowned. “What?”

“The configuration of the whole thing is in the form of a concealment spell.” He gestured to each side when he saw the puzzled look she gave him. “It’s not the layout of the entire place, the placement of rooms and the course of the various halls and passageways—like at the People’s Palace—that is the spell-form, but rather it’s the precise line of the walls themselves that make up the spell-form, as if someone drew the spell large on the ground and then simply built the walls touching right against that line before hollowing out the middle. Because the walls are a uniform thickness, that means that the outside of the walls are also the shape of the spell-form, so that lends to reinforce the whole thing. Quite clever, actually.”

For such a spell to work, it had probably been drawn in blood and with the aid of human bones. There would have been ample supply of those at hand.

“Someone certainly went to a lot of trouble,” Ann said as she appraised the space again. This time she began to recognize some of the shapes and angles in opposition. “What exactly is this place used for?”

“I’m not entirely sure,” he admitted with a sigh. “I don’t know if these books were meant to be buried with the dead for all time, or they were being hidden, or there was some other purpose.” Nathan beckoned with his hand. “This way. Let me show you something.”

Ann followed him through several of the zigzags, around turns, and past yet more shelves lined with dusty books, until they reached an area of niches three high to each side.

Nathan leaned an elbow against the wall. “Look there,” he said as he pointed a long finger downward, indicating one of the low, arched openings in the stone wall.

Ann stooped and peered inside. It contained a body.

All that was left were bones clothed in dusty tatters of robes. A leather belt circled the waist while a strap crossed over one shoulder. Skeletal arms were folded over the chest. Gold chains hung around the neck. Ann could see by the glint of light off the medallion on one of the chains that Nathan must have lifted it for a look, and in so doing his fingers had cleaned off the dust.

“Any idea who he is?” she asked as she straightened and folded her hands before herself.

Nathan leaned down close to her.

“I believe he was a prophet.”

“I thought there was no need to whisper.”

He arched an eyebrow as he straightened his frame to its considerable height. “There are a number of other people interred here.” He flicked a hand off toward the darkness. “Back that way.”

Ann wondered if they could all be prophets as well. “And the books?”

Nathan leaned down again, and whispered again. “Prophecy.”

She frowned and looked back the way they had come. “Prophecy? You mean all of them? Those are all books of prophecy?”

“Most of them.”

Excitement bubbled up through her. Books of prophecy were invaluable. They were the rarest of jewels. Such books could offer guidance, provide answers they needed, spare them futile endeavors, fill in gaps in their knowledge. Perhaps more than at any other time in history, they needed those answers. They needed to know more about the final battle in which Richard was supposed to lead them.

As of yet they had not discovered when this battle was to take place. With the frustrating vagary of prophecy, it could yet be many years off. For that matter, it was even possible that it was not to take place until Richard was an old man. With all the difficulties they had faced in the past several years, they could only hope that it was still many years off and they would have time to prepare. Prophecy could help with that.

The vaults at the Palace of the Prophets had been filled with thousands of volumes of prophecy, but they had all been destroyed along with the palace to prevent it from falling into the hands of Emperor Jagang. Better to lose such works for all time than allow evil to look upon their pages.

But no one knew of this place. This place was hidden beneath a concealment spell. The dizzying possibilities spun through Ann’s mind.

“Nathan—this is wonderful.”

She turned and looked up at the man. He was watching her in a way that made her fidgety. She reached out and placed a hand on his arm.

“Nathan, this is more than we could ever have hoped.”

“This is something more than that,” he said cryptically as he started hack. “There are books here that make me doubt my sanity,” he said with a sullen flourish of an arm.

“Ah,” Ann quipped as she followed along in his wake, “verification at last.”

He halted and turned a glare on her. “This is nothing to joke about.”

Ann felt goose flesh ripple up her arms. “Show me then,” she said in a serious tone. “What is it you’ve found?”

He shook his head, seeming to lose his momentary flash of ill humor. “I’m not even sure.” His usual flamboyance was nowhere in evidence as he moved in among the tables he’d dragged together. His dark mood turned guarded. “I’ve been sorting the books.”

Ann wanted to hurry him along and get to the meat of his discovery, but she knew that when he was troubled it was best to let Nathan explain things in his own way, especially when there was arcane speculation involved.

“Sorting them?”

He nodded. “These here in this pile don’t appear to be of any real use to us. Most are prophecy long since outdated, contain only irrelevant records, or are in unknown languages—things like that.”

He turned and slapped a hand to the top of another stack. Dust boiled up. “These here are all books that we had back at the palace.” He swept his hand back and forth in front of the stacks of books piled high on the table behind him. “All of them. This whole tableful.”

Her eyes wide, Ann glanced at the shelves and niches going back along the strange room. “There are a great many more books other than these you have here on the tables. This is only a fraction of them.”

“Indeed. I haven’t had a chance to even begin to look at them all yet. I finally decided that I’d better send Tom off to find you. I wanted you to see what I’ve discovered. That, and there is a lot of reading to do. I’ve been pulling out one book at a time, checking through it, and placing it in one of the piles on these tables.”

Ann wondered how many books could still be viable, could still be usable, alter thousands of years underground. She had found books before that had been ruined by the effects of time and the elements, especially mildew and water. She peered around, inspecting the walls and ceiling, bill she saw no evidence of water leaking through.

“At first glance, none of these books look to be damaged by water. How can this place underground be so dry? It would seem that water would seep in through the joints in the stone and make everything down here wet and moldy. I can hardly believe that the books appear to be in such good condition.”

“Appear being the operative word,” Nathan said under his breath.

She turned back to scowl at him. “What do you mean?”

He waved a hand irritably. “In a moment. In a moment. The interesting thing is, the ceiling and walls are sheathed in lead to help keep out the water. The place also has a shield of magic around it for even more protection. The entrance, too, was shielded.”

“But the Bandakar people have no magic and their land was sealed off. There was no one with magic to shield against.”

“That seal to their banished land finally failed, though,” Nathan reminded her.

“Yes, that’s right, it did.” Ann tapped a finger against her chin. “I wonder how that happened.”

Nathan shrugged. “How isn’t so important for now, although I am concerned about it.”

He flipped a hand, as if setting aside the issue. “For the moment, that it did is what’s meaningful. Whoever put these books here wanted them hidden and protected—and they went to a great deal of trouble to insure that it ley remained that way. The ungifted people here wouldn’t be hindered by shields, the weight of the stone monument would be an obstacle in and of itself, but they would have no reason to want to move it in the first place unless they had a good reason to believe something was under it. What would cause them to suspect such a thing? The fact that this place has remained undisturbed for thousands of years proves that they never realized that this place was down here. I believe that the shields were placed to ward any invaders who might eventually make it into Bandakar, like Jagang’s men did.”

“That makes sense, I suppose,” she murmured as she considered it. “Not really expecting that the seal to Bandakar would ever be breached, the shields were a simple act of precaution.”

“Or prophecy,” Nathan added.

Ann look up. “There is that.” It would take a wizard of Nathan’s ability to breach such shields. Even Ann didn’t have the ability necessary for some shields. She knew, too, that there were shields placed in ancient times that could only be passed with the aid of Subtractive Magic.

“It’s also possible that these books were simply placed here as a way of safekeeping such valuable works—in case anything happened to others of their kind.”

“You really think they would go to this much trouble to do such a thing?” she asked.

“Well, all the books at the Palace of the Prophets were lost, now, weren’t they? Books of prophecy are always at risk. Some have been destroyed, some have fallen into enemy hands, and some have simply disappeared. Places like this provide a backup for those other works—especially if prophecy foretells the need of such a contingency.”

“I guess you could be right. I have heard about rare finds of prophecy that had been secreted away to preserve them, or to keep innocent eyes from viewing them.” She shook her head as her gaze scanned the room. “Still, I’ve never heard of any find to approach the likes of this one.”

Nathan handed her a book. Its ancient red leather cover was laded nearly to brown. Even so, there was something familiar-looking about it, about the faded gilded ribs on the spine. She lifted the cover and the first blank page.

“My, my, my,” Ann softly mused as she saw the title. “The Glendhill Book of Deviation Theory. How very wonderful to hold this in my hands again.” She closed the cover and clasped the book to her breast. “It’s like an old friend come back from the dead.”

The book had been one of her favorite volumes on forked prophecy. Because it was a pivotal volume that held valuable information about Richard, she had studied it and referred to it so often over the centuries as she waited for him to be born that she practically knew it by memory. She had been heartbroken that it had to be destroyed along with all the rest of the books in the vaults at the Palace of the Prophets. There was still a great deal of information in it about the possibilities of what was yet to come.

Nathan plucked another volume from a stack and waggled it before her as he arched an eyebrow. “Precession and Binary Inversions.”

“No!” She snatched it from his hands. “It can’t be.”

None of the accounts could ever say for sure that the elusive volume had in fact ever really existed. Ann herself had hunted for it, at Nathan’s request, whenever she traveled. She’d also had trusted Sisters look for it whenever they went on a journey. There had been leads, but none of the clues ever resulted in anything but dead ends.

She looked up at the tall prophet. “Is this real? Many accounts deny that it ever really existed.”

“Missing, according to some. A mere myth, according to others. I read a little of it and by the branches of prophecy it fills in, it can only be genuine—or a brilliant fake. I’d have to study it further to tell which, but from what I’ve seen, so far, I tend to believe it’s genuine. Besides, what purpose would there be in hiding a fake? Fakes are generally created in order to exchange them for gold.”

That was true enough. “And here it was all the time. Buried beneath the bones.”

“Along with what I suspect may be a great many other volumes that are just as valuable.”

Ann clicked her tongue as she again gazed about at all the books, her sense of awe growing by the moment. “Nathan, you’ve uncovered a treasure. A treasure of incalculable value.”

“Perhaps,” he said. When she shot him a puzzled frown, he lifted a hefty tome off the top of another stack. “You won’t even believe what this is. Here. Open it and read the title yourself.”

Ann reluctantly set down Precession and Binary Inversions in order to take the heavy book from Nathan. She set it on the table, too, and bent close. With great care, she lifted open the cover. She blinked, then straightened.

“Selleron’s Seventh Task!” She gapped at the prophet. “But I thought there was only one copy and it was destroyed.”

One side of Nathan’s mouth cocked with a quirky smile. He held up another book. “Twelve Words Left for Reason. I found Destiny’s Twin as well.” He waggled a finger at a pile. “It’s in there somewhere.”

Ann’s jaw worked for a moment until the words finally came. “I thought we had lost those prophecies for all time.” The odd smile still on his lips, he only watched her. She reached out and gripped his arm. “Could we be so fortunate that there really were copies made?”

Nathan nodded, confirming her guess. The smile ghosted away.

“Ann,” he said as he handed her Twelve Words Left for Reason, “take a look through here and tell me what you think.”

Puzzled by the grim expression that had settled on his face, she placed the book in a clear spot and began carefully turning pages. The writing was a little faded, but no more so than any book its age. For as old as it was, it was still in good condition and quite legible.

Twelve Words Left for Reason was a book containing twelve core prophecies and a number of ancillary branches. Those ancillary branches, when carefully cross-referenced, connected actual events to a number of other books of prophecy that were otherwise impossible to place chronologically. The twelve core prophecies actually weren’t all that important. It was the ancillary branches that served to link other trunks and branches in the tree of prophecy that made Twelve Words Left for Reason so invaluable.

Chronology was often the most trying problem facing those working with prophecy. It was often impossible to tell if a prophecy was going to unfold the next day, or the next century. Events were in a constant state of flux. The setting of prophecy in the context of time was essential, not just to know when a particular prophecy was to become viable, but because what was of overriding importance next year might be nothing more than an unimportant minor event if set in the environment of the year after. Unless they knew which year the prophecy took place, they didn’t know if it foretold danger or simply a matter of note.

Most prophets, when they set down their prophecy, left it up to those who would come later to fit it into its proper place in real-world events. There was no clear consensus on whether this had been done deliberately, through carelessness, or because the prophet, in the throes of having his visions, had never realized how important, and difficult, it would later be to chronologically place his vision. She had often observed with Nathan that a prophecy was so crystal-clear to the prophet himself that he simply failed to comprehend how formidable a task it would be for others to read and fit into the puzzle of life.

“Wait,” Nathan said as she turned the pages. “Go back a page.”

Ann glanced up at him and then flipped the vellum back.

“There,” Nathan said as he tapped a finger to the page. “Look here. There are several lines missing.”

Ann peered at the small gap in the writing, but didn’t see what was so meaningful about it. Books often had spaces left blank for a wide variety of reasons.

“So?”

Rather than answer, he rolled his hand, motioning for her to go on. She started flipping over the pages. Nathan thrust his hand in to stop her and tapped another blank spot so she would note it. He then urged her to continue.

Ann noticed that the blank places became more frequent. Finally, she came to entire pages that were blank. Even that, though, was not unheard of. There were any number of books that simply ended in the middle. It was thought that the prophet who had been working on such books had most likely died and those coming after didn’t want to interfere with what a predecessor had done, or perhaps they wanted to work on branches of prophecy which were more interesting or relevant to them.

“Twelve Words Left for Reason is one of the few books of prophecy that is chronological,” he reminded her in a soft voice.

She knew that, of course. That was what made the book such a valuable tool. She couldn’t imagine, though, why he had felt it important to point it out.

“Well,” Ann said with a sigh as she reached the end, “it is odd, I suppose. What do you make of the blank places?”

Rather than answer her directly, he handed her another book. “Subdivision of Burkett’s Root. Take a look.”

Ann turned the pages of yet another priceless find, looking for something out of the ordinary. She came across three blank pages followed by more prophecy.

She was growing impatient with Nathan’s game. “What am I supposed to see?”

Nathan was a moment in answering. When he finally did, his voice had that quality about it that tended to run shivers up her spine.

“Ann, we had that book down in the vaults.”

She was still not following what was obviously of critical importance In him. “Yes, we did. I remember it quite well.”

“The copy we had didn’t have those blank pages.”

She frowned and then turned back to the book. She leafed through the pages again until she found the empty spot.

“Well,” she said as she studied the place where the prophecy ended and then where an entirely new branch of prophecy resumed after the empty pages, “maybe whoever made this copy, for some reason, decided not to include some of it. Perhaps they had sound reason to believe that the particular branch had been a dead end and, rather than include dead wood in the tree of prophecy, they simply left it out. Such pruning is not uncommon. Then, because they didn’t want to make it appear they were trying to deceive anyone, they went ahead and left the appropriate space blank to denote the deletion.”

She looked up. The prophet’s azure eyes were fixed on her. Ann felt sweat trickle down between her shoulder blades.

“Take a look at The Glendhill Book of Deviation Theory,” he said in a quiet voice without taking his penetrating gaze from her.

Ann broke contact with that gaze and pulled the copy of The Glendhill Book of Deviation Theory close. She flipped through the pages as she had done with the previous book, if a little faster.

There were blank pages, only more of them.

She shrugged. “Not a very accurate copy, I’d say.”

Nathan impatiently reached in with a long arm and turned the stack of pages back to the front.

There, on a page at the beginning, all alone, was the author’s mark.

“Dear Creator,” Ann whispered when she saw the little symbol. It still glimmered with the magic the author had invested in his mark. She fell goose bumps tingle up from her toes. “This is isn’t a copy. It’s the original.”

“That’s right. If you recall, the one we had in the vaults was a copy.”

“Yes, I remember that ours was a copy.”

She had assumed this one as well had been one of a number of copies. Many of the books of prophecy were copies, but that didn’t diminish their value. They were checked and marked by respected scholars who then left their own mark to vouch for the copy’s accuracy. A book of prophecy was valued for the precision and veracity of its content, not because it was the original. It was the prophecy itself that was valuable, not the hand that had set it down.

Still, to see the original of a book she loved as much as she love this particular volume was a memorable experience. This was the actual book, written in the hand of the prophet who had given these precious prophecies.

“Nathan—what can I say. This is a personal delight for me. You know how much this book means to me.”

Nathan look a patient breath. “And the blank pages?”

Ann shrugged with one shoulder. “I don’t know. I’m not really prepared to venture a guess. What are you getting at?”

“Look at the place where the blanks fit into the text.”

Ann turned her attention back to the book. She read a little of the text before one of the blank areas, then read some of what followed. It was a prophecy about Richard. She randomly picked another blank place, reading before the blank area and after. It was another section about Richard.

“It would seem,” she said as she studied a third place, “that the blanks appear in places where it talks about Richard.”

Nathan was getting more edgy looking by the moment. “That’s only because most of The Glendhill Book of Deviation Theory is about Richard. That pattern of blank pages associated with him doesn’t hold true when you start looking at the other books.”

Ann lifted her arms and let them fall to her sides. “Then I give up. I don’t see what you see.”

“It’s what we’re not seeing. It’s the blank places that are the problem.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because,” he said with a little more force in his voice, “there is something quite odd about those blank sections.”

Ann pushed a stray wisp of gray hair back into the bun she always wore at the back of her head. She was becoming frazzled.

“Like what?”

“You tell me,” he said. “I would bet that you could practically quote The Glendhill Book of Deviation Theory.”

Ann shrugged. “Perhaps.”

“Well, I can quote it. The copy we had back in the vaults, anyway. I went through this book, testing it against my memory.” For some reason, Ann’s stomach was churning with anxiety. She began to dread that the copy they had back in the vaults at the palace might have had fraudulent prophecy filling in what the original author had left blank. That was almost too overwhelming a deception to contemplate.

“And what did you discover?” she asked.

“That I can quote this original exactly. No more, no less.”

Ann sighed in relief. “Nathan, that’s wonderful. That means that our copy wasn’t filled with fabricated prophecy. Why would you be troubled because you can’t remember blank places? They are blank, there is nothing there. There is nothing to remember.”

“The copy we had back at the palace didn’t have any blank places.”

Ann blinked as she thought back. “No, it didn’t. I remember it well.” She offered the prophet a warm smile. “But don’t you see? If you can quote this one, no more or no less, and you learned it from our copy, then that means that whoever made the copy simply pulled the text together rather than include the meaningless blank places left by the original prophet. The prophet probably left blank places as a provision in case he had any further visions about the prophecies and he needed to add to what he had already written. Apparently, he never had that need, so the blanks remain.”

“I know that there were more pages in our copy.”

“I’m not following you, then.”

This time it was Nathan who threw up his hands. “Ann, don’t you see? Here, look at the book.” He turned it toward her. “Look at this next-to-last branch of prophecy. It’s one page and then six blank pages. Do you remember any branch of prophecy in our copy of The Glendhill Book of Deviation Theory that was only one page? No. None were this short. They were too complex. You know that there is more to this prophecy, I know there is more to the prophecy, but my mind is as blank as these pages. What was there is not only missing from the book, but it’s missing from my mind as well. Unless you can quote me the rest of the prophecy that you know should be there, then it’s missing from your mind as well.”

“Nathan, that’s just not—I mean, I don’t see how . . .” Ann sputtered in confusion.

“Here,” he said as he snatched a book from behind him. “Collected Origins. You must remember this.”

Ann reverently lifted the book from his hands. “Oh, Nathan, of course I remember it. How could one forget such a short but beautiful book.”

Collected Origins was an exceedingly rare prophecy in that it was written entirely in story form. Ann loved the story. She had a soft spot for romance, although she never admitted it to anyone. Since this tale of romance was actually a prophecy, that made it an official requirement that she be familiar with it.

She smiled as she lifted open the cover of the small book.

The pages were blank.

All of them.

“Tell me,” Nathan said in that quietly commanding, deep Rahl voice, “what is Collected Origins about?”

Ann opened her mouth, but no words would come forth.

“Tell me, then,” Nathan went on in that quietly powerful voice of his that seemed as if it could crack stone, “a single line of this beloved volume. Tell me who it is about. Tell me how it started, how it ended, or anything in the middle.”

Her mind was stark naked blank.

As she stared up into Nathan’s cutting gaze, he leaned a little closer. “Tell me one single thing you remember from this book.”

“Nathan,” she finally managed to whisper, her own eyes wide, “you often used to keep this book in your rooms. You know it better than I do. What do you remember about Collected Origins?”

“Not—one—thing.”