Chainfire: Chainfire Trilogy Part 1

Chapter 43

Richard was so deep in thought that he wasn’t fully aware of the arduous climb up the steep face of the cliff and out of Agaden Reach. In the golden light of the valley below them the long shadows of trees lengthened across the green fields, yet the quiet beauty of the place as the sun sank behind the enfolding mountains was lost on him; he wanted to be far away from the valley and out of the swamp before darkness took hold for good. He tried to devote his efforts to that task, that mission, of putting one foot before the other, of moving, advancing.

By the time they reached the top of the cliff and the vast swamp guarding the approach to Shota’s home, it was an early dusk in the deep niche of the towering mountains that ringed the place. Because the walls of rock cut the sunlight off early, it left the sky overhead a deep blue, but that light was unable to effectively penetrate the forest canopy, so that in the late day the vast green bog seemed mired in a perpetual gloom of half-night. The deep shadows were very different than those in Shota’s valley. The shadows in the swamp concealed palpable but for the most part ordinary threats; the shadows around Shota concealed dangers that were not so easily appreciated, but that Richard suspected were far more pernicious.

The sounds of the dank swamp all around him, the chirps, the whistles, the hooting calls, the clicks, the distant cries, hardly registered in Richard’s consciousness. He was deep in his own world of despair and purpose tangled together in a titanic struggle.

While Shota had told him a great deal about the blood beast that was hunting him, Nicci had already told him that he was being hunted by a beast conjured at Jagang’s behest. The visit to Shota had not been worth the minutiae he learned about the beast. It was the precious few things that Shota had said at the end that really mattered to him. It was those things for which he had traveled to this place. It was for those things he had paid a price so dear that he was only now beginning to fully grasp its significance. His fingers itched to touch the hilt of his sword for reassurance, but that familiar and faithful weapon was no longer there.

He tried not to think about it, and yet he could think of little else. He felt relief that he had gained what he felt sure would be crucial information, but at the same time he felt a crushing sense of personal failure.

He paid only enough attention to where he was walking to keep from stepping on a yellow-and-black-banded snake he spotted coiled in the lap of a root, or letting the fuzzy spiders clinging to the underside of leaves silently slide down silken lines to alight on him. He skirted brush when something within hissed at him.

Richard followed the darkening trail as fast as safely possible while in his mind he went over Shota’s every word, concentrating on the treasure for which he had paid such a terrible price. Cara followed close on his heels, swinging and swatting at the cloud of bugs hovering around their faces. Occasionally a bat fluttered in out of the dark shadows to snatch up some of those bugs.

As he made his way through the tangle of growth, Richard pushed aside vines and branches and stepped carefully around snarls of roots—some of which writhed like a nest of snakes when they got too close. On his first visit Samuel had shown him how those roots could grab an ankle if you got too close. Richard was so totally absorbed in trying to figure out what “Chainfire” could possibly mean, or what it could be, that he nearly stepped into a stretch of black water that was hard to see in the murky light. Cara’s hand snatching his arm halted him just in time. He glanced around and spotted the log they had crossed on before and took to that route.

He racked his brain trying to think if he had ever heard the word Chainfire before, but his hopes grew as dim as the failing light. It was a strange enough word, it seemed, that he would have remembered it if he had ever heard it before. He wished that Shota would have known its source or meaning, but he believed that she was telling the truth about these kinds of answers coming to her without explanation or insight.

On the other hand, he feared that he knew all too well what Shota meant when she’d said, “What you seek is long buried.”

That warning made his chest ache. He dreaded that it very well might mean that Kahlan was already dead and long ago buried.

He’d felt lost ever since that morning he awoke to find her missing. Without Kahlan, everything else in the world seemed meaningless.

He couldn’t allow himself to envision her death as being true. Instead, he thought about her beautiful, intelligent green eyes, her special smile, her singular manner as being very real and very alive.

Shota’s words, though, kept returning to him. He had to figure out what meaning they could hold if he was to find Kahlan.

The last part, that he should “Beware the viper with four heads,” had made no sense to him at first, but the more he mulled it over, the more it began to feel to him like he should understand it, as if it was something that should make sense to him or something he should be able to figure out if he just thought about it hard enough. The implication that seemed obvious was that this four-headed viper—whatever it was—was somehow responsible for Kahlan’s disappearance.

He wondered if he only suspected that because it sounded sinister. He didn’t want to allow himself to start down the wrong roads on groundless impulses. That would only waste valuable time. He feared that he had already used too much time.

“Where are we going?” Cara asked, lifting him out of his snare of thoughts.

He realized that it was the first thing she had said since leaving Shota. “To get the horses.”

“You intend to try to make it over the pass tonight?”

Richard nodded. “Yes, if we can. If the storm has blown away, the moon will provide enough light.”

The first time he had come to see Shota, the witch woman had taken Kahlan back to her valley. Richard had followed their tracks over the pass at night. It wasn’t easy, but he knew it could be done. He knew how tired he was from the hard day of crossing the pass, and he knew that Cara had to be just as tired, but he didn’t intend to stop so long as he could still put one foot in front of the other.

It was obvious by the set of Cara’s jaw that she didn’t like the idea of making such a journey at night, but, instead of objecting, she asked something else.

“And when we get the horses? Then where?”

“To try to get answers to what I’ve found out so far.”

All around, the mist had slowly drifted in among the gnarled trees, hanging vines, and expanses of still water, as if it were coming closer to listen in on their conversation. There was no wind to move the trailers of moss, so they hung limp from crooked branches. Shadows moved in the dark places beneath vines and brush. Unseen things distantly splashed in the black stretches of stagnant water.

Richard didn’t really want to discuss the long and difficult ride ahead of them, so before Cara could say anything, he asked, “Have you ever heard the word Chainfire?”

Cara let out a sigh. “No.”

“Any guesses at all about what it could mean?”

She shook her head.

“What about the place of the bones in the Deep Nothing? Does that mean anything to you?”

Cara didn’t answer for a moment. “It seems like ‘the Deep Nothing’ might be vaguely familiar, like I might have heard it once before.”

Richard thought that that sounded encouraging. “Can you recall where, or anything about it?”

“No, I’m afraid not.” She reached out and casually plucked a heart-shaped leaf from a vine as she walked beside him. “The only thing I can think is that maybe I heard it as a child. I’ve tried and tried, but I just can’t recall if that’s really true—that I might have heard it—or it’s just that ‘deep’ and ‘nothing’ are common enough words and so that’s the reason it seems like I must know them.”

Richard let out a disappointed sigh. That was what he wondered, too—if they were simply common words and that was what was making the Deep Nothing sound like maybe he should know it.

“What about a viper with four heads?” he asked.

Cara shook her head again as she dropped back a step to fall in behind him in order to skirt a tree limb hanging over into the trail. A small leaf-green snake was curled on the branch, watching them pass close by, licking the air for the scent of them.

“It makes no sense to me,” she said as she twirled the leaf by its stem. “I’ve never heard of such a beast—or whatever it is. Maybe the four-headed viper lives in a place called the Deep Nothing.”

Richard had considered that possibility himself, but because of the way Shota mentioned them separately he doubted it. They had seemed to come to her as individual, distinctly different pieces of information. He supposed that since they were connected to his question about something that could help him discover the truth, they could be associated as Cara had suggested.

At the place in the trail where the trees opened up to the dark mass of the mountains rising up before them, Cara paused.

“Maybe Nicci will catch up with us soon. She knows a lot about magic and all sorts of things. She might know what Chainfire means, or even some of the rest of it. Nicci would be happy to do anything to help you.”

Richard hooked a thumb behind his belt. “Do you want to tell me what you and Nicci have cooked up?”

It seemed rather obvious to him, but he wanted to hear her admit the extent of it. He watched her eyes as he waited.

“Nicci had nothing to do with it. It was my idea.”

“What, exactly, was your idea?”

Cara turned away from his direct gaze and stared off up the pass. The sky was mostly clear, with stars beginning to appear. Ragged clouds scudded past on the silent wind higher up. It wouldn’t be long before the moon rose.

“When you healed me, I felt some of the terrible loneliness haunting you. I think that you may have thought up this woman, Kahlan, in order to fill that void. I don’t want you to have to suffer the terrible anguish I sensed in you. Someone who does not exist can’t ever fill such a void.”

When she didn’t say anything else, he did.

“And so you want that void to be filled by Nicci?”

She looked back to his eyes, frustration overtaking her features. “Lord Rahl, I only wanted to help you. I think you need someone to be with you—to share your life—like Shota wanted someone. Like she wanted you. But Shota is the wrong person—for both of you. I think Nicci would be good for you, that’s all.”

“So you thought that in my place you could give my heart away to someone?”

“Well—it sounds wrong the way you put it.”

“It is wrong.”

“No it’s not,” she insisted as her hands fisted at her sides. “You need someone. I know that right now you feel lost. I think you’re getting worse. Dear spirits, you just gave up your sword.

“You need someone, I know you do. You seem somehow incomplete. In all the time I’ve known you, you have never seemed that way to me before. My whole life I’ve never before thought of the Lord Rahl as being with just one woman, much less being married, but with you, it just seems that you need a soul mate.

“Nicci is a better fit than anyone else. She’s smart—Nicci is smart enough that you two can really talk. You share things about magic and such. I’ve seen the way you two talk, the way you both smile. You just look natural together. You’re both smart—and both gifted. And, she’s beautiful. You should have someone beautiful and Nicci is that.”

“And what part did Nicci play in your little plot?”

“Nicci had much the same objections you have—which in a way only proves that I’m right about you two being such a good fit.”

“So she didn’t like you planning her life, either?”

Cara shrugged one shoulder. “No, that’s not what I mean. She had the same objections for you—she spoke up on your behalf, not hers. She only cared about what you wanted. She seemed to know that you would take a dim view of such an idea.”

“Well, you’re right about one thing, she is smart.”

“I was only trying to get her to think about it. I wasn’t telling her to throw herself at you. I thought that maybe you two could complete each other, fill the void you both feel. I thought that maybe if I encouraged her to consider it, that nature could take its course, that’s all.”

Richard wanted to strangle her, but he kept his voice calm because Cara’s actions, while wrong, were so touchingly human, so caring, that at the same time he wanted to hug her. Who would ever have thought that a Mord-Sith could ever care about love and companionship. He guessed that he had. But still—

“Cara, what you’re trying to do is the same thing Shota was trying to do—decide for me what I should feel, how I should live.”

“No, it’s not the same.”

Richard’s brow drew down. “And how is it not the same?”

Cara pressed her lips together. He waited. She finally answered in a whisper.

“She doesn’t really love you. I do. But not that way,” she was quick to add.

Richard wasn’t in the mood to argue, or to yell. He knew that Cara’s intent was well-meaning, if misguided. More than anything, he could hardly believe what he had just heard her admit out loud. Were it not for everything else going on, he would have been overjoyed.

“Cara, I’m married to the woman I love.”

She sadly shook her head. “Lord Rahl, I’m sorry, but Kahlan just doesn’t exist.”

“If she doesn’t exist, then why was Shota able to give me clues that will help me prove the truth?”

Cara looked away again. “Because the truth is that there is no Kahlan. The things she told you will only help you discover that sad truth. Did you ever think of that?”

“Only in my nightmares,” he said as he started for the mountain pass.