Chainfire: Chainfire Trilogy Part 1

Chapter 63

Nicci had hardly gotten her bearings, hardly recognized that they were in a marble room, hardly let the sliph out of her lungs and pulled in a desperate gasp of air, when Richard was already pulling her up over the wall by the hand.

Despite everything, she was still able, in some dim part of her mind, to thrill at holding his hand, for whatever reason.

She had thought that while in the sliph traveling to the People’s Palace, that she would be able to give thought to Richard’s strange new twist of finding a bit of a vine and leaping to the conclusion that the boxes of Orden were in play—all in an attempt to prove that Kahlan was real.

The room they were in was shielded. Richard pulled her and Cara through the powerful shield. They ran up a marble hall and out a double silver door with a lake embossed into the metal.

“I know this place,” Cara said. “I know where we are.”

“Good,” Richard said, “then you lead the way. And hurry.”

There were times when Nicci almost wished that she had gone along with Zedd, Ann, and Nathan’s plan to purge him of his memory of Kahlan.

Except for one thing. She had tried the theory on one of Jagang’s men back in Caska. She had tried to use Subtractive Magic to eliminate the man’s memory of the emperor. It sounded simple enough. She had done just as the three had wanted Nicci to do to Richard.

There had only been one problem.

It had killed the man. Killed him in a most horrifying fashion.

When she thought about how she had almost done that to Richard, how for a time she had let them talk her into it and had been committed to doing it, she had gotten so weak and dizzy that she had to sit down on the ground next to the dead soldier. Cara had thought Nicci had been about to pass out. The idea of what she had almost done left her shaking for an hour.

“Here,” Cara said as she led them up stairs that emptied into a broad corridor with parts of the roof glassed.

The light flooding in was reddish, so it was either almost sunset or just after dawn, Nicci didn’t know which. It was a disorienting feeling not to know if it was day or night.

The halls were filled with people. Many of them stopped to stare at the three people running along the corridor. Guards also noticed and came running, hands to weapons, until they saw Cara in her red leather outfit. Many of the people recognized Richard and dropped to a knee, bowing as he ran past. He didn’t slow to acknowledge them.

They went up a dizzying array of passages, over bridges, along balconies, between columns, and through rooms. Intermittently they ran up stairs. Occasionally Cara took them through service halls, undoubtedly as shortcuts.

Nicci took note of how magnificent the palace was, how remarkably beautiful. The patterned stone floors were laid with rare precision. There were grand statues—none as remarkable as the statue Richard had carved, but grand nonetheless. She saw a tapestry that was larger than any she had seen in her life. It depicted a sprawling battle and must have had several hundred horses in it.

“This way,” Cara said, pointing down a hall as she rushed toward it.

As they came around the corner, Cara crossed over to the other side of the passageway as she ran down it. Nicci, pulled along by her hand, would have liked to have discussed a number of things, to have asked some important and pointed questions, but it was all she could do to get her breath as she ran. Running was not something she really ever did until she met Richard.

Cara slid to slow down as she came to a pair of carved mahogany doors. Nicci was revolted to see the snakes carved into them. Without pause, Richard seized one of the door handles, a bronze skull, and yanked the door open.

Inside the quiet, carpeted room, four guards immediately sprang to block Richard’s path. They saw Cara, and looked at Richard again, uncertain.

“Lord Rahl?” one asked.

“That’s right,” Cara snapped. “Now, get out of the way.”

The men immediately pulled back, each putting a fist to their hearts.

“Has anything happened recently?” Richard asked as he caught his breath.

“Happened?”

“Intruders? Has anyone slipped in this way?”

The man snorted a laugh. “Hardly, Lord Rahl. We’d know if that happened and we’d not allow it.”

Richard nodded his thanks and raced to the marble stairs, nearly pulling Nicci’s arm out of the socket in the process. As they ran up the steps, Nicci thought that her legs might simply quit. Her muscles were so exhausted from the long run up through the palace that she could hardly make them go on, but she had to, for Richard.

At the top of the stairs, soldiers were running toward them, crossbows loaded with red-fletched arrows at the ready. They didn’t know it was the Lord Rahl. They thought someone was trying to get into the restricted area. Nicci hoped that someone got hold of their senses before one of the men got careless.

But by their reactions, Nicci realized that these men were highly trained and not prone to shooting arrows before they were sure of their target. Lucky for them, because she would have been faster.

“Commander General Trimack?” Richard asked an officer pushing his way through the ring of steel that had surrounded them.

The man stiffened and clapped a fist to his heart. “Lord Rahl!” He spotted the Mord-Sith. “Cara?”

Cara nodded in greeting.

Richard clasped arms with the man. “General, someone has gotten in here. They’ve taken the boxes in the Garden of Life.”

The general was momentarily struck speechless. “What? Lord Rahl, that’s not possible. You have to be mistaken. No one could get past us without our knowing it. It’s been peaceful as can be up here for ages. Why, we’ve only had one visitor.”

“Visitor? Who?”

“The Prelate. Verna. It was a while back. She was in the palace checking on something about books of magic, she said. She said that as long as she was here, she wanted to have a look to make sure the boxes were safe.”

“So you let her go in there?”

The general looked a bit indignant. A long scar stood out white when his face went red.

“No, Lord Rahl. I wouldn’t let her go in there. What we ended up doing was opening the doors so she could look in to see that everything was safe.”

“Look in?”

“That’s right. We surrounded her with men, all pointing these special arrows at her—arrows Nathan Rahl found for us that will stop even the gifted. We had her ringed in steel. The poor woman looked like a pincushion about to happen.”

Men all around nodded at the general’s words.

“She looked in the garden and said she was relieved to see that everything was fine. I took a look myself and saw the three black boxes sitting on the stone slab across the room. But I never let the woman set foot beyond the doors, I swear.”

Richard heaved a sigh. “And that’s it? No one else has opened those doors?”

“No, Lord Rahl. No one else has even been up here but my men. No one. We don’t let anyone even use these halls around the Garden of Life. As you may recall, you were rather insistent about it the last time you were here.”

Richard nodded, thinking. He looked up. “Well, let’s go have a look.”

The men, all jangling with weapons and armor, followed the surprise visitors down the polished granite hall until they reached two huge, gold covered doors.

Without waiting for someone else to do it, Richard pulled one of the heavy doors open and started into the room. The soldiers paused at the doors. This was apparently sacred ground, a sanctuary for the master of the palace alone, and unless invited by the Lord Rahl, none of them would enter. Richard didn’t invite them as he rushed off on his own.

Despite how tired she was, Nicci hurried after him as he made his way down a path among beds of flowers. Overhead, through a glassed roof, she could see that the sky had turned to a darker purple, so she knew it was night, rather than dawn.

Just like Richard, Nicci paid little attention to the vine covered walls, or the trees, or all the other things growing all around. The garden was a magnificent place, to be sure, but her gaze was riveted on the stone altar she saw in the distance. She didn’t see any of the three boxes that were supposed to be there. There was something else standing on the slab of granite, but she couldn’t tell what it was.

By the way Richard’s chest was heaving, he did know what was standing there.

They crossed a ring of grass, and the open dirt. In the dirt, Richard stopped cold in mid-stride and stared down at the ground.

“Lord Rahl,” Cara asked, “what is it?”

“Her tracks,” he whispered. “I recognize them. These aren’t covered by magic. She was here alone.” He gestured to the dirt. “Two sets. She was in here twice.” He looked back at the grass, following what he could see that they couldn’t. “She was on her knees there, in the grass.”

He took off and ran the rest of the way to the stone altar. Nicci and Cara sprang into a run to keep up with him.

When they reached the slab of granite, Nicci knew at last what it was that stood there all alone.

It was the statue of the woman that had been carved in marble in Liberty Square in Altur’Rang. The original statue Richard had told them he had carved. The statue he said belonged to Kahlan. Nicci could see that there were bloody handprints all over it.

Richard picked up the carved wooden figure in trembling hands and drew it to his breast, gasping back a sob. Nicci thought that he might fall to the ground, but he didn’t.

When he had held it for a moment, he turned to them, tears running down his face. He held out to Cara and Nicci the statue of the proud figure, her head thrown back, her hands fisted at her sides.

“This is the statue I carved for Kahlan. This is Spirit. This is the statue I told you could not be in Altur’Rang because she had it with her. If they copied this statue in stone down in Altur’Rang in the Old World, then how did it get here?”

Nicci stared at it, her eyes wide, trying to reconcile what she was seeing. She couldn’t comprehend the contradiction. She remembered Richard trying to understand what he had seen at the grave site where the Mother Confessor was buried. Now she knew how he had felt.

“Richard, I don’t understand how that could have gotten here.”

“Kahlan left it here! She left it here for me to find! She took the boxes of Orden for the Sisters! Don’t you get it? Don’t you at last see the truth standing before you?”

Unable to say more, he pulled the statue back to his chest as if it were the most precious treasure in the world.

In that moment, seeing the pain trembling through him, Nicci wondered what it would be like to have him love her that much.

At the same time, despite her confusion, despite sadness for what she was seeing, for the pain he was so obviously in, she felt joy, joy that Richard had someone who meant that much to him, someone who could make him feel that way—even if she was imaginary. Nicci was not yet convinced that she wasn’t.

“Do you understand now?” he asked. “Do you two get it, now?”

Cara, looking as stunned as Nicci felt, shook her head. “No, Lord Rahl, I don’t understand.”

He lifted the small statue. “No one remembers her. She probably walked right past those men and they forgot her, just like you forgot all the thousands of times you’ve seen her. She’s all alone, in the hands of those four Sisters, and they made her come in here and get the boxes. Do you see the blood all over it? Her blood? You should understand that. Can you imagine how she feels, all alone, forgotten by everyone? She left this, probably hoping someone would see it and know she exists.”

He thrust it at Cara, then at Nicci. “Look at it! It’s covered in blood! There’s blood on the altar. There’s blood on the floor. There are her footprints. How do you think the boxes are gone and this is here? She was here.”

The indoor garden was dead silent. Nicci was so confused she didn’t know what to believe. She knew what she was seeing, but it didn’t seem possible.

“Do you believe me, now?” Richard asked them both.

Cara swallowed. “Lord Rahl, I believe what you are saying, but I still don’t remember her.”

When his raptor gaze slid to Nicci, she, too, swallowed at the power of that look.

“Richard, I don’t know what is going on. What you say is certainly powerful evidence, but, like Cara says, I still don’t remember her. I’m sorry, but I can’t lie to you and tell you what you want to hear just to make you happy. I’m telling you the truth. I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I know you don’t,” he said with sudden, quiet, remarkable sympathy. “It’s what I’ve been telling you. Something terrible is happening. No one remembers her. Anything that could cause such an event is undoubtedly powerful and extremely dangerous conjuring, able to be engendered only by the most powerful people who have command of both sides of the gift. Magic so dangerous that it would be hidden in a book buried in a catacomb behind shields where the wizards who put it there hoped no one would ever find it.”

“Chainfire,” Nicci breathed. “But from the brief bit I saw of it, this somehow has the power to undo the world of life.”

“What do the Sisters care?” Richard asked in a bitter voice. “They’ve already put the boxes of Orden in play. It is their intent to end life on behalf of the Keeper of the dead. You should understand that better than anyone.”

Nicci put a hand to her forehead. “Dear spirits, I think you may be right.” She couldn’t feel her fingertips. She was tingling all over with dread. “From the little bit I read, Chainfire sounds like it might be something along the lines of what Zedd, Ann, and Nathan wanted me to do to you—use Subtractive Magic to make you forget Kahlan. If what you say is true, then in a way, that might be what the Sisters did—they made everyone else forget her.”

Nicci looked up into his gray eyes, eyes she could lose herself in. She felt tears of fright run down her cheeks.

“Richard, I tried that.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I tried what they wanted me to do to you. I tried it on one of Jagang’s men, back at Caska. Tried to make him forget Jagang. It was fatal. What if that’s what Chainfire does to everyone?”

Richard heaved an angry breath. “Come on.”

He marched out of the garden to a general and his guards waiting out in the polished granite hallway, huddled around the entrance to the Garden of Life.

“Lord Rahl,” the general said, “I don’t see the boxes any more.”

“They’ve been stolen.”

Jaws of men standing all around dropped in stunned astonishment. General Trimack’s eyes went wide. “Stolen—but, who could have stolen them?”

Richard held up the statue and waggled it in front of the man. “My wife.”

General Trimack looked like he didn’t know whether to scream in fury or commit suicide on the spot. He instead rubbed a hand back and forth on his mouth as he thought through everything he’d heard and apparently tried to put it together with any other information he had. He looked up at Richard with the kind of intent look that few men other than generals could muster.

“I get reports all the time, Lord Rahl. I insist that I see all reports—you never can tell what bit of information you might learn that could turn out to be helpful. General Meiffert sends me reports as well. Since he’s now close by, I get them within hours. Soon he and the troops will be moving south and it will take longer, but for now, I get them fresh.”

“I’m listening.”

“Well, I don’t know if it means anything, but the latest report I got early this morning said that they came across a woman, an old woman, who had been stabbed by a sword. She’s in bad shape, according to the report. I don’t know why he sent me a report on such a thing, but General Meiffert is a pretty smart fellow, and I have to think that there was just something bloody odd about it for him to want me to know.”

“How close is he?” Richard asked. “The army, I mean. How close?”

The general shrugged. “By horse? Ride half way hard and they’re not more than an hour or two away.”

“Then get me some horses. Immediately.”

General Trimack clapped a fist over his heart at the same time as he signaled a couple men forward. “Run on ahead and get some horses ready for the Lord Rahl.” He looked at Richard, then glanced at Cara and Nicci. “Three horses?”

“Yes, three,” Richard confirmed.

“And an escort of the First File to show him the way and provide protection.”

The two men nodded and took off at a dead run for the stairs.

“Lord Rahl, I don’t know what to say. I will of course resign . . .”

“Don’t be silly. This isn’t something you could have done anything about; it was deception by magic. It’s my fault for letting this happen. I’m the Lord Rahl. I’m supposed to be the magic against magic.”

Nicci could only think that he had been trying to be, but no one would believe him.

Without sparing any time to rest, Richard, Cara, and Nicci, escorted by a company of the palace guards, rushed through the grand, wide corridors of Richard’s ancestral home. People along their route scattered out of the way of the wedge of guards coming down the halls. Behind the guards, Cara marched out in front of Richard. Nicci rushed along at his side.

As they made their way down a smaller corridor, with fewer people, Richard slowed and then stopped. The guards stopped far enough away to be handy, but to give him his privacy. As everyone waited, Richard gazed down a side passageway. Cara looked uncomfortable.

“Quarters for Mord-Sith,” Cara explained to Nicci in answer to the unspoken question in her eyes.

“Denna’s room was down that hall.” Richard gestured the other way. “Your room was down there, Cara.”

Cara blinked. “How do you know that?”

He looked at her for a moment, his expression unreadable. “Cara, I remember being there.”

Cara turned as red as her leather outfit. “You remember?” Richard nodded. “You know?” she whispered, panic coming into her eyes.

“Cara,” he said gently, “of course I know.”

Her eyes brimmed with tears. “How did you know?”

He gestured to her right wrist. “When I’ve touched your Agiel, it hurts. An Agiel only hurts when a person touches it if it was used to train them, or if the Mord-Sith intends it to hurt.”

She closed her eyes. “Lord Rahl—I’m sorry.”

“It was a long time ago, when you were a different person, and I was the enemy of your Lord Rahl. Things change, Cara.”

“Are you sure I’ve changed enough?”

“Others made you into who you were. You made yourself into what you have become.” He smiled. “Remember when the beast hurt you, and I healed you?”

“How could I ever forget it?”

“Then you know how I feel.”

She smiled at that.

Richard’s brow drew together. “Touch . . .” His eyes lit up with sudden recognition.

“The sword.”

“What?” Nicci asked.

“The Sword of Truth. That morning, when I was asleep, I think the Sisters cast a spell to make me sleep more soundly so they could take Kahlan. But I put my hand on the sword. I was touching the Sword of Truth when they took her and made everyone forget Kahlan. The sword protected me from that magic. That’s why I remember her. The Sword of Truth was a countermeasure to what they did.”

Richard started out again. “Come on, we need to get to the encampment and see who that injured woman is.”

Baffled, Nicci followed after him.