Chainfire: Chainfire Trilogy Part 1

Chapter 54

The shadow hit the opening with such a resounding thud that Richard thought the passageway they were in would certainly be blown apart. What had been a somewhat cohesive, dark shape exploded apart like glass on granite, shattering into thousands of dark shards. Piercing wails of frightful anguish echoed through the passageway in terrible, heartbreaking finality as light ignited in a blinding crimson flash. At the shielded opening, black fragments of shadows tumbled back through the room that was filled with shimmering, sparkling reflections off the glass mosaics. With what looked like a year’s worth of meteor showers all compressed into a single instant, the shadowy fragments burst into bright flares that flew in every direction as they glimmered into nothingness.

It was suddenly quiet but for Richard and Nicci’s labored breathing.

The beast was gone. At least it was gone for the moment.

Richard let go of Nicci’s hand and they both flopped down heavily on the floor and slumped back against the iridescent silver wall as they panted in exhaustion.

“You were looking for one of those shields, weren’t you?” Nicci asked as she worked at recovering enough breath to talk.

Richard nodded. “Nothing Zedd or Nathan or Ann conjured did anything to stop the beast. What you did at least seemed to have had an effect, even if a small one. That made me think that there must be something that would be able to counter it, maybe not in totality, but at least in the form it presented this time.

“I knew that the wizards from the time back when this place was built needed to stop anything that didn’t belong in here—and the beast, after all, was something from back in those times, something that Jagang had found described in old books. So I figured that those who made the shields here must have had to take such eventualities into account.

“Since they’re made to stop such threats, it takes, at the least, an element of Subtractive Magic to get through the shields. But because the enemy would have had Subtractive powers as well, I think the shields must also somehow read the nature of who is trying to pass through them, perhaps thereby interpreting the potential level of threat. It could even be that as we were chased through the Keep and kept going through shields, they somehow gathered information on the nature not only of us, but of the beast as well so that when we reached these higher threshold shields, they had finally judged it a threat and stopped it.”

Nicci considered what he’d said as she pulled sweaty strands of blond hair back off her face. “No one really knows a great deal about the gifted back then, but it makes sense that such an ancient threat would be vincible to ancient defenses.” She frowned as if an idea had come to her. “Maybe such shields would even be a way to protect you if it reappears.”

“Sure,” he said, “if I want to live down here like a mole.”

She looked around. “Any idea where we are?”

“No,” he said, letting out an exhausted sigh, “but I guess we’d better try to find out.”

They struggled to their feet and made their way the rest of the distance down the short passageway. At the end they emerged into a simple room constructed of stone blocks once covered in plaster that was now crumbling. The room was no more than fifteen paces long and not nearly as wide, with books on shelves along most of the length of the wall to the left.

While it did have some books, it was not a library like so many others he had seen in the keep. For one thing, it was far too small. For another, it was not at all elegant, or even nice, but rather stark. At best, it could be called utilitarian. Besides the shelves, the room was only wide enough for a table at the far end beside a passageway leading out the other side. There was a fat candle on the table and a wooden stool under it. The far passageway looked very much like the one they had come in through.

When Richard took a look, he saw that it had the same shimmering silver stone walls and another shield that looked just like the one they had come in through at the other end of the room, so that, unlike a number of places in the Keep that had shields, there was no way to go around and get into the room by way of another route without such powerful shields. It was through one of the two shields or not at all.

“With all the dust in here,” Nicci said, “it doesn’t look like anyone has cleaned in here for thousands of years.”

She was right. The room was devoid of color other than the dirty gray color of the dust that coated everything. The hair at the nape of Richard’s neck stood on end as he fully realized why.

“That’s because no one has been in here for thousands of years.”

“Really?”

He gestured to the far passage he’d just inspected. “The only two ways into here are protected with shields that require Subtractive Magic to cross. Not even Zedd, the First Wizard himself, has ever been in here. He can’t pass Subtractive shields.”

Nicci brushed her hands together. “Especially these shields. I’ve dealt with shields most of my life. From what I felt of these, they’re deadly. I suspect that without your help even I might have had some difficulty getting through them the first time.”

Richard tilted his head to be able to better read the titles as he perused the books along the shelves. Some had no titles on the spines. Some were in languages he couldn’t read. Some looked like they might be journals. Several, though, looked curious. One small book, Gegendrauss, in High D’Haran meant Countermeasures. He pulled out another beside it of a similar small size titled Ordenic Theory. As he blew off a thick coating of dust, he realized then that it must have caught his attention because Ordenic reminded him of Orden, as in the boxes of Orden. He wondered if there was any connection.

“Richard, look at this,” Nicci called to him from the far passage.

Richard tossed the book on the table as he made his way into the passageway, toward the shield. “What is it?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice echoed, and then he saw the crimson glow brighten and finally fade.

He realized that she must have gone beyond the shield. Alarmed at first, Richard was hugely relieved that there had been no horrific results. Nicci was an experienced sorceress. He suspected that after having gone through the last shield, she must have known what dangers to look for to tell her if she could pass this one as well. He reasoned that perhaps the first shield, when he had helped her through it, had keyed to her, allowing her to cross shields like it.

Pushing on through the plane of pressure and briefly searing heat, he entered a small room beyond with glass mosaics, like the one at the other end of the little reading room. Both rooms had to be a kind of entryway before the shield to provide warning to anyone coming near, or maybe they were somehow an aid to the shields themselves. Nicci was standing just beyond, at an open iron door, her back to him, her thick fall of blond hair down around her shoulders.

At the railing on the platform beside her, Richard looked out into a round tower room at least a hundred feet across. Stairs spiraled up around the inside of the curving outer wall. The tower rose above them for over two hundred feet. At irregular intervals, small landings like the one where they stood interrupted the steps wherever there was a doorway. In the gloomy expanse above, shafts of light pierced the darkness.

The place smelled of rot. At the bottom of the tower, not too far below the landing were they stood, he saw a walkway with an iron railing that ringed the inside of the tower wall. Rain that could come in the openings above, along with seepage from the mountain itself, collected down in the center of the tower. Insects swarmed above the stagnant, inky water. Others skittered on its surface.

“I know this place,” Richard said as he peered around, getting his bearings.

“You do?”

He started down the steps. “Yes, come on.”

At the bottom, he followed the iron railing around to a wide platform in the walkway before a spot where a door had once been. The doorway had been blasted apart and the opening was now perhaps twice its previous size. The jagged edges of the broken stone were blackened in places. In other places the stone itself had been melted as if it were no more than candle wax. Twisting streaks on the surface of the stone wall ran off in every direction away from the blasted hole, marking where a kind of lightning had flailed against the wall and burned it.

Nicci stared in amazement. “What in the world happened here?”

“This room was once sealed away, along with the Old World. When I destroyed the barrier to the Old World, it blew this seal open.”

“Why? What’s in here?”

“The sliph’s well.”

“The thing you told me about that those in ancient times used to travel great distances? The thing you’ve traveled in?”

“That’s right,” he said as he stepped through the jagged opening that once had been a doorway.

The room inside was round, perhaps sixty feet across, its walls were also scorched in ragged lines as if lightning had gone wild in the place. A circular stone wall about waist-high, forming what looked like a huge well, occupied the center of the room.

The domed ceiling was nearly as high as the room was wide. There were no windows or other doors. To the far side of the sliph’s well was a table and a few shelves. That was where Richard had found the remains of the wizard who had in ancient times been sealed in the room when the barriers that had ended the great war had been brought to life. Thus trapped, the man had died in the sealed room. He had left behind a journal that the Mord-Sith Berdine now had. That journal had in the past, as Richard and Berdine had translated it, revealed valuable information.

Because of the importance of the information they’d gotten from the journal, they had called the man who wrote it Koloblicin, a High D’Haran word meaning “strong advisor.” Berdine and Richard had eventually taken to simply referring to the mysterious wizard as Kolo.

Nicci held her glowing globe over the side and peered down the well. The smooth walls fell away seemingly forever, the light illuminating the stone for hundreds of feet down before fading away into blackness.

“And you say that you put the sliph to sleep?”

“Yes, with these.” Richard tapped the insides of the leather padded silver wrist bands he wore against one another. “She told me that when she ‘sleeps,’ as she put it, she goes to be with her soul. She says it’s rapture for her to sleep.”

“And you can call her back the same way? By using those bands?”

“Well, yes, but, just like putting her to sleep, I would need to use my gift to do it. Not something I’d be at all eager to do again. I especially wouldn’t like to be inside this room, with only one door, calling the sliph, when the blood beast was also called by my gift.”

Nicci nodded as she saw his point. “Do you think the beast could follow you through the sliph?”

Richard thought it over for a moment. “I can’t say for sure, but I imagine it’s possible. But even if it couldn’t it still manages to appear wherever I am, so I’m not sure it would even need to bother with using the sliph. From what I’ve learned of its nature from you and Shota, as well as from experience, I suspect that the beast is able to travel the underworld.”

“And other people?” Nicci asked. “Can any of them use this?”

“To travel in the sliph you need to have at least some element of both sides of the gift. That made it a problem in the great war and that’s why they had a wizard always standing guard in this room and in the end why they had to seal it off—so the enemy couldn’t come through right into the heart of the Keep.

“Now, because of the requirement for an element of both sides of magic, there are few who can use the sliph. Cara has captured gifted people who have Additive Magic, and she captured a man who Kahlan said wasn’t entirely human and who happened to have an element of Subtractive Magic. It was enough so that Cara is able to travel in the sliph. A Confessor’s power is ancient and has an element of Subtractive to it, so Kahlan can travel in the sliph. Those are the only ones I know who could travel in the sliph—other than Sisters of the Dark. One of my former teachers, Merissa, went through the sliph after me. You could travel in the sliph as well. That’s about it.

“Still, it remains a danger if awakened because Jagang could theoretically send any of his Sisters of the Dark through it.”

“What happens if you don’t have at least some element of both sides?” Nicci asked. “If, for example, someone like Zedd, a gifted person had only Additive Magic, tried to travel?”

Richard reached over to rest his hand on the pommel of his sword, but his sword wasn’t there. It made him sick to expect it and then realize he’d given it to Shota—to Samuel, actually. He put the constant, haunting worry of it from his mind.

“Well, traveling takes you great distances, but it still takes some time—it isn’t an instant procedure. I think the time varies according to distance, but I know that it takes a number of hours, at least. The sliph looks something like living quicksilver. To remain alive within her while she takes you to the place you wish to travel, you must breathe her in, breathe in that silvery liquid. You breathe the sliph, that liquid, and it somehow keeps you alive. If you don’t have an element of both sides, it doesn’t work and you die. Simple as that.”

For a fleeting moment, Richard gave thought to waking the sliph to ask if she remembered Kahlan, but the ancient wizards, men of prodigious ability, had created the sliph out of a very exclusive and high-priced whore. She had become caught up in political intrigue that had eventually cost her life. The nature of that woman was still partly evident in the sliph; she never revealed the identity of one of her “customers.”

“We’d better get back up there and let Zedd know we’re all right.” Richard’s thoughts returned to the immediate problems. “Cara is probably fit to be tied by now.”

“Richard,” Nicci said in a soft voice as he started to leave.

He turned back to see her watching him. “Yes?”

“What are you going to do about Ann and Nathan?”

He shrugged. “Nothing. What do you mean?”

“I mean, what are you going to do about the things they had to say? What are you going to do about the war? The time has come, and I think you know it. You can’t go on chasing after your dream while the rest of the world faces the end of everything good—the end of all their hopes and dreams.”

He stared at her a moment. She didn’t shy away from his gaze.

“Like you said, that body down there didn’t prove anything.”

“No, but it certainly does prove one thing: that you were wrong about what we would find there. Digging up the grave failed to prove what you thought it would—at the very least. That begs the question of why? Why was it different than you said it would be? The only possible answer I can think of is that someone put it there with the idea that you would find it. But why?

“It’s been a while since that night down at the grave. Since then you’ve accomplished nothing. Maybe it’s time you thought about the bigger picture. And in the bigger picture, that prophecy makes the stakes pretty clear. I understand the value of one life you love—even if she were real—but to some extent don’t you think you have to balance that one life against the lives of everyone else?”

Richard slowly paced off a ways, trailing his fingers along the top of the stone wall around the sliph. The last time he had traveled in the sliph he had taken Kahlan to the Mud People so they could be married.

“I have to find her.” He looked back at Nicci. “I am not the tool of prophecy.”

“Where will you go? What can you do next? You’ve been to Shota, and you came here to Zedd. No one knows anything about Kahlan, or Chainfire, or the rest of it. You’ve exhausted all your ideas, all your options. If not now, then when is the time to finally face reality?”

Richard rubbed his fingertips across his brow. As much as he didn’t want to admit it, he feared that Nicci was right. What was he going to do?

He could think of nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. At least, nothing specific, not at the moment, anyway. He couldn’t imagine what good it would do him to wander around without a plan, without any idea where to look for Kahlan.

The room was dead quiet. The sliph’s well was empty, the sliph off somewhere with her soul. He wondered if Kahlan was still alive. He swallowed as he experienced one of those brief but terrifying moments when he wondered if she ever had been. He was so tired of the ever growing doubts, not just about Kahlan, but about himself.

At the same time, he was being crushed under the weight of guilt for not answering the call to lead the D’Haran people against the terrible threat to their freedom. He thought often of all the countless good people he didn’t even know who also had loved ones under mortal threat from the coming storm of the Imperial Order. Could he just desert all of them in order to chase around, forever looking for Kahlan?

Nicci moved closer.

“Richard,” she said in a soft, silken, sympathetic voice, “I know it’s hard to say it’s over—to say it’s over, and realize that you have to move on.”

Richard broke the gaze first. “I can’t do that, Nicci. I realize that I can’t explain it to anyone’s satisfaction, but I just can’t do that. I mean, if she got sick and died, then I would be devastated, yet eventually I know I would have to deal with the business of life. But this is different. It’s almost as if I know she’s in some dark river somewhere, calling for help, and I’m the only one who can hear her, who knows she in terrible danger of drowning.”

“Richard . . .”

“Do you really think I don’t care about all the innocent people under the threat of the horde coming to slaughter and enslave them? I do care. I can’t sleep with worry, and not only worry for Kahlan. Can you even begin to imagine how torn I feel?

“How would you feel if you were torn between someone you loved and doing what everyone else said was the right thing to do?

“I wake in a cold sweat in the dead of night not only seeing Kahlan’s face, but the faces of people who will never have a chance at life if Jagang isn’t stopped. When people tell me how all those people are depending on me, it breaks my heart—both because I want to help them, and because they think they need me, because they think that I, one man, can be the difference in a war involving millions of people. How dare they put that much responsibility on me?”

She came closer yet and gently put a hand to the side of his arm, rubbing up and down in a reassuring gesture. “Richard, you know that I wouldn’t want you to do anything that you thought was wrong. Not even when it was to let you believe she was dead based on what I knew wasn’t good evidence, even though I believe that evidence, if for other reasons.”

“I know.”

“But since that night when you dug up the grave, while you’ve been wandering around thinking about what you can do, I, too, have been doing a lot of thinking.”

Richard flicked small stone fragments from the top of the well, not wanting to have to look up at her. “And what have you come up with?”

“Among other things, as I watched you walk the ramparts, a troublesome idea came to me. I haven’t said anything about it yet partly because I don’t know for sure if it could be the answer to what is happening to you, and partly because if it is, then it would be even more trouble than any mere delusion caused by your injury. I don’t know if it’s really the answer, but I fear that it very well might be. Mostly, though, I haven’t said anything because the evidence is gone, so I have no way of proving it, but I think the time has arrived to broach the subject.”

“Evidence?” Richard asked. “You said that the evidence is gone?”

Nicci nodded. “The arrow you were shot with. I fear that this may have all been caused by that arrow, but in a different and far more disturbing way than we’ve realized.”

Richard was taken aback by her grave expression. “What do you mean?”

“Did you see who shot the arrow that hit you? Who held the crossbow?”

Richard took a deep breath while staring off as he sifted through the dim snatches of mental images of the morning of the fight. He’d only just awakened after hearing the howl of a wolf. Shadowy tree limbs had appeared to move about in the darkness. Then there had been soldiers all around him. He’d had to fight off men from all sides rushing in at him. He remembered quite vividly the feeling of holding the Sword of Truth, of feeling the wire wound hilt in his hand, of its power surging through him.

He recalled seeing men back in the trees shooting arrows at him. Most had bows, but there had been some with crossbows. That would have been rather typical for such a patrol of Imperial Order troops.

“No—I can’t say as I recall seeing who shot the bolt that hit me. Why? What is it that you’ve come up with?”

Nicci appraised his eyes for what seemed an eternity. Her ageless eyes sometimes reminded him of others with magic; Ann, the old Prelate; Verna, the new Prelate; Adie; Shota; and—Kahlan.

“The barbs on that arrow made it impossible to get it out of you in any ordinary way in time to save your life. I was in a desperate hurry. I never gave any thought to checking the arrow before I used Subtractive Magic to take it out of existence.”

Richard didn’t like the direction toward which her worry seemed to be drifting. “Check it for what?”

“A spell. A diabolically simple spell that would be profoundly destructive.”

Richard was now sure he didn’t like her idea even though he hadn’t heard it, yet.

“What kind of spell?”

“A glamour spell.”

“Glamour?” Richard frowned. “How would that work?”

“Well, think of it as a love potion.”

Richard stared at her in surprise. “A love potion?”

“Yes, after a fashion.” She lightly tapped the fingers of opposite hands together as she reflected on how best to explain it. “A glamour spell would cause you to have a mental vision of a woman, a real woman would be the normal object of the spell, but as I thought about it I realized that it would work just as well for an imaginary woman. Either way, it would make you fall in love with her. But even that is a rather weak way of describing such a powerful spell. Under a glamour spell the woman would become an obsession. Such an obsession would be to the exclusion of almost everything else.

“A glamour spell is a kind of dark secret among sorceresses, usually taught by a gifted mother. Such a spell would be used to make a specific person fixate on the subject of the spell, usually a real individual—the sorceress herself, in most cases. Like I said, it’s a kind of love spell.

“Some gifted women could not resist the lure of using a glamour on men. The spell is so effective that at the Palace of the Prophets it was a very serious matter for one of the Sisters to even be suspected of using a glamour. To be caught using a glamour was a grave crime, the moral equivalent to rape. The punishment was severe. The sorceress was at the least banished, but she could just as well be hanged. There have been sisters convicted of such a crime.

“As I recall, the last one caught at the palace was over fifty years ago. She was a novice, Valdora. The tribunal was split between hanging or banishment. The Prelate broke the tie and had the young novice banished.

“I would expect that Jagang’s Sisters know how to invoke a glamour spell. It wouldn’t have been all that hard for one of them to tag a glamour to that arrow, or a number of the arrows that morning. If the arrow didn’t kill you, it would spell you.”

“This is no spell,” Richard said, his tone turning darker.

Nicci ignored not just his tone, but his denial as well. “It would explain a great deal. A glamour spell seems absolutely real to the victim. It bends their mind, their thinking, around the subject of the obsession.”

Richard again raked his fingers back through his hair, trying not to get angry with Nicci. “What would be the purpose of doing such a thing? Jagang wants to kill me. You’re the one who came and told me that he created a beast to accomplish that task. The spell you’re talking about doesn’t make any sense.”

“Oh, but it makes all the sense in the world. It would accomplish far more than merely killing you, Richard. Don’t you see? It would destroy your credibility. It would leave you alive to destroy your cause yourself.”

“Myself? What do you mean?”

“It would make you obsessed with the subject of the glamour to the exclusion of anything else. It would make people think there was something wrong with you, think you were crazy.

“It would make people begin to doubt you, and therefore your cause.

“This spell would condemn you to a living death. It would destroy everything that means anything to you. It would give you a mad obsession that you totally believe is something real, but that you can never satisfy. There is good reason why using a glamour spell was a serous crime.

“In this case, at the same time as you go about trying to find the object of your manufactured memory, you see your cause begin to crumble because those you inspired and who believed in you now start to think that if you’re crazy, then maybe the things you’ve said were crazy as well.”

Richard imagined that a victim of such a web would not be able to recognize the glamour spell within himself. And it was certainly true that nearly everyone was coming to think he was crazy.

“Truth does not depend on the person who says it. The truth is still the truth even if stated by someone you don’t respect.”

“That may be true, Richard, but others don’t necessarily act with such clear insight.”

He sighed. “I guess not.”

“As far as the beast, Jagang does not necessarily count on just one thing to do the job and he has no reluctance to do more than is necessary to crush his opponents. He might have figured that two plagues will be more certain to end the threat of Richard Rahl than one alone.”

Richard certainly didn’t doubt what she said about Jagang. Still, he didn’t believe it. “Jagang didn’t even know where I was. Those troops just happened across me as they were sweeping the woods, checking for threat, for their supply convoy.”

“He knows you started the revolt down in Altur’Rang. He might have ordered that his troops in the area carry arrows that were spelled by his Sisters just in case they ran across you.”

Richard could see that she had indeed been doing a lot of thinking. She had an answer for everything.

He opened his arms out to the side and lifted his chin. “Then lay your hands on me, sorceress. Grab the spell and pull its wicked tentacles out of me. Restore my sanity. If you really believe that a glamour spell is the cause of all of this, then use your gift to seek it out and put an end to it.”

Nicci turned her gaze away and stared out the broken doorway at the gloom within the base of the huge tower.

“To do that, I would need the arrow. It no longer exists. I’m sorry, Richard. I never thought to check the arrow for a spell before I eliminated it. I was frantic to get it out of you in order to save your life. Still, I should have checked.”

He laid a hand on the back of her shoulder. “You didn’t do anything wrong, my friend. You saved my life.”

“Did I?” She turned to him. “Or did I condemn you to a living death?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. Like you said, you wouldn’t let me believe something if you thought the evidence was insufficient. That body buried down there wasn’t sufficient proof. Yet, at the same time, it shouldn’t have been there, so I’m convinced that it proves that something really is going on. I just haven’t figured out what.”

“Or it proves that maybe your story is nothing more than part of a fabrication spawned by the mad obsession of a glamour spell.”

“No one remembers what happened and that Kahlan isn’t buried there, but I do. It’s something solid that shows me, at least, that I’m not imagining all this.”

“Or it is simply part of the delusion—whatever its cause. Richard, this just can’t go on forever. It has to come to a close at some point. You’re at a dead end. Have you come up with anything else to try?”

He put his hands on the stone wall of the sliph’s well. “Look, Nicci, I admit that I’m running out of ideas, but I’m not ready to give up on her, to give up on her life. She means too much to me to do that.”

“And how long do you think you can wander around not giving up on her, all the while the Imperial Order marches ever closer to our forces? I don’t like Ann’s meddling in my life any more than you like her meddling in yours, but she isn’t doing it because she is trying to be malicious. She’s trying to preserve freedom. She’s trying to save innocent people from being slaughtered by brutes.”

Richard swallowed back the lump in his throat.

“I need to think about things, to gather my thoughts. I found some books in that room back there. I want to study them for a while, just a while, and try to think things through, try to see if I can figure out what’s happening and why. If I can’t think of something—I just need to think of what to do next.”

“And if you can’t think of what to do next?”

Richard leaned on both hands as he stared off into the dark well, doing his best to stifle his tears.

“Please . . .”

If he only knew who to fight, if only he could strike out at an enemy. He didn’t know how to fight shadows in his mind.

Nicci laid a hand gently on his shoulder. “All right, Richard. All right.”