Confessor: Chainfire Trilogy Part 3

Chapter 12

Nicci’s eyes popped open. She gasped in panic.

Dim shapes swam in her vision. She could make no sense of the indistinct forms she saw. In an effort to get her bearings her mind snatched at memories of every sort, frantically searching through their ever-changing essence, trying to find ones that seemed relevant, ones that fit. The great store of all of her thoughts seemed in as much disarray as a library full of books scattered by the twisting winds of a thunderstorm. Nothing seemed to make sense to her. She couldn’t understand where she was.

“Nicci, it’s me, Cara. You’re safe. Calm down.”

A different voice in the murky, blurry distance said, “I’ll go get Zedd.” Nicci saw the dark shape move and then vanish into yet more darkness.

She realized that it had to be the person who had spoken going through a doorway. That was the only thing that made sense. She thought she might cry with relief at finally being able, out of all the shapes and shadows, to grasp the simple concept of a doorway, and the vastly more complex concept of a person.

“Nicci, calm down,” Cara repeated.

Nicci only then realized that she was struggling mightily, trying to move her arms, and that she was being held down. It was as if her mind and body were both jumbled, trying to function through turmoil and confusion, trying to get a grip on something solid.

But she was beginning to make sense of things.

“Six,” she said with great effort. “Six.”

The black memory loomed up in her mind as if she had summoned it and it had returned to finish her.

She fixated on the meaning of that word, that name, that dark form floating there in her mind. She pulled random bits inward, building them together around it. When one memory fit—the memory of the hallway with Rikka, Zedd, and Cara up ahead frozen in place on the stairs—she went on to the next and worked to add another piece.

By the sheer force of her will, order began tumbling into place. Her thoughts fused into coherence. Her memories began to coalesce.

“You’re safe,” Cara said, still holding Nicci’s arms. “Be still, now.”

Nicci wasn’t safe. None of them were safe. She had to do something.

“Six is here,” she managed through gritted teeth as she struggled to push Cara out of the way. “I have to stop her. She has the box.”

“She’s gone, Nicci. Just calm down.”

Nicci blinked, still trying to clear her vision, still trying to catch her breath. “Gone?”

“Yes. We’re safe for the time being.”

“Gone?” Nicci clutched a fistful of red leather, pulling the Mord-Sith closer. “Gone? She’s gone? How long has she been gone?”

“Since yesterday.”

The memory of the dark figure seemed to stretch away into the distance, out of reach.

“Yesterday,” Nicci breathed as she sank back against the pillow. “Dear spirits.”

Cara finally straightened. Nicci no longer cared if she got up.

Everything had been for nothing.

She thought she might not ever want to get up again.

She stared off at nothing. “Was anyone else hurt?”

“No. Just you.”

“Just me,” Nicci repeated in a flat tone. “She should have killed me.”

Cara frowned. “What?”

“Six should have killed me.”

“Well, I’m sure she probably would have liked to, but she didn’t manage to accomplish it. You’re safe.”

Cara hadn’t understood what Nicci had meant.

“All for nothing,” Nicci mumbled to herself.

Everything was lost. All the work had been for nothing. All that Nicci had accomplished had unraveled, melting away in a dark shadow’s echoing laughter. All the studying, the piecing together, the monumental effort to finally understand how it all actually functioned, the work to invoke such power, to control it, to direct it—all of it had been in vain.

It had been one of the most difficult things she had ever done . . . and now it was all in ashes.

Cara dunked a cloth in a basin of water on a side table. Water ran back as she wrung the cloth. The sound of each drop falling back into the basin was pronounced, penetrating, painful.

Rather than a blur of shapes and shadows, as it had been when she’d first awakened, now everything had focused into raw sharpness. Colors seemed blindingly bright, sounds strident. The dozen candles in the nearby stand shone like twelve little suns.

Cara pressed the damp cloth to Nicci’s forehead. The red color of the Mord-Sith’s leather outfit hurt Nicci’s eyes, so she closed them. The cloth felt like a thorned hedge being pressed against her tender flesh.

“There is other trouble,” Cara said in a quiet, confidential voice.

Nicci opened her eyes. “Other trouble?”

Cara nodded as she blotted the cloth on the sides of Nicci’s neck.

“Trouble with the Keep.”

Nicci glanced past the foot of her bed to the heavy dark blue and gold drapes over the narrow window. The drapes were drawn closed, but there was no light at all leaking in, so she realized that it had to be nighttime.

As she looked back at Cara, Nicci frowned even though doing so hurt. “What do you mean, trouble with the Keep? What sort of trouble?”

Cara opened her mouth to speak, but then turned at the sound of a commotion coming from behind her across the room.

Zedd swooped into the room without knocking, his elbows pumping up and out to the sides in time with each long stride, his simple robes billowing behind him as if he were the king of the place come to see to kingly business. Nicci supposed that, in a way, he was.

“Is she awake?” he demanded of Cara before he had even arrived at the bedside. His wavy white hair seemed especially disheveled.

“I’m awake,” Nicci answered for herself.

Zedd came to an abrupt halt, looming over her. He leaned down, scowling, having a look for himself as if not trusting her word for it.

He pressed the tips of his long, bony fingers to her forehead. “Your fever has broken,” he announced.

“I had a fever?”

“Of a sort.”

“What do you mean, of a sort? A fever is a fever.”

“Not always. The fever you had was induced by the exertion of forces, rather than by illness. In this case, to be precise, your own forces. The fever was your body’s reaction to the stress of it. Rather like the way a piece of metal gets hot when you bend it back and forth.”

Nicci pushed herself up on her elbows. “You mean I had a fever caused by what Six did to me?”

Zedd straightened his robes on his angular shoulders. “In a way. The stress of exerting force against all that witchery she was doing threw your body into a feverish condition.”

Nicci looked from one to the other. “Why weren’t you affected? Or Cara?”

Zedd impatiently tapped his temple. “Because I was smart enough to cast a web. It protected Cara and me, but you were too far away. At that distance its protective properties weren’t adequate to keep you from harm, but I dared not try any harder. Even though it wasn’t enough to protect you from all harm, it was enough to at least save your life.”

“Your spell protected me?”

Zedd shook a finger at her as if she had misbehaved. “You certainly weren’t doing anything to defend yourself.”

Nicci blinked in surprise. “Zedd, I was trying. I don’t think I’ve ever tried harder to use my Han. I tried with all my strength to cast my power—I swear. It just wouldn’t work.”

“Of course not.” He threw his arms up in exasperation. “That was your problem.”

“What was my problem?”

“You were trying too hard!”

Nicci sat up the rest of the way. The world suddenly started spinning. She had to put a hand over her eyes. The spinning was making her sick to her stomach.

“What are you talking about?” She lifted her hand just enough to squint up at him in the candlelight. “What do you mean I was trying too hard?”

She thought she might throw up. As if annoyed by the distraction, Zedd pushed his sleeves up his arms and then reached out, pressing a finger of each hand to the opposite sides of her forehead. Nicci recognized the tingling sensation of Additive Magic crawling under her skin. It felt a little odd to her not to feel any of the Subtractive side as an element of his power, but he had no Subtractive Magic.

The sick feeling lifted.

“Better?” he asked in a tone that suggested he thought it had all been her own fault.

Nicci turned her head this way and that, stretching the muscles of her neck, testing her equilibrium. She tried to feel the nausea, fearing it would well up suddenly, but it didn’t.

“Yes, I guess I am.”

Zedd smiled at the small triumph. “Good.”

“What do you mean I was trying too hard?”

“You can’t fight a witch woman the way you were trying to do it—especially not a witch woman as powerful as that one. You were pushing too hard.”

“Pushing too hard?” She felt as uncomfortable as she had as a novice when she’d been unable to grasp a lesson being taught by an impatient Sister. “What do you mean?”

Zedd gestured vaguely. “When you use your force to try to push against what she’s doing, she simply turns it back around on you. You can’t reach her with your power because the force you use hasn’t yet established a foundational link between the two of you, between principal and object; it’s still in its free-floating, formative stage.”

Nicci understood what he was saying, in theory, she just didn’t know if it fit in this case.

“Are you trying to say that it’s like lightning needing to find a tree, or something tall, to anchor its connection to the ground so it can ignite? That if there is no place within range to link to, it simply jumps back and ignites within the cloud? Turns in on itself?”

“I never thought of it in those terms, but I guess you could say that it’s something like that. You might say that your power turned back in on you, like lightning turns back within a cloud when it isn’t able to make it to ground. A witch woman is one of the few people who instinctively understands the precise nature of the exertion of force, the intricacies of its needs for connections, and the ways in which specific spells link at both ends.”

“You mean she knows how lightning works,” Cara said, “and she pulled the rug out from under Nicci.”

Zedd shot the woman a dumbfounded look. “You really don’t know anything about magic, do you? Or about a mixed-up token turn of a phrase.”

Cara’s expression darkened. “If I pull that rug out from under you, I think you’ll understand it well enough.”

Zedd rolled his eyes. “Well, it’s an oversimplification, but I guess you could put it that way. . . . Sort of,” he added under his breath.

Nicci wasn’t really listening; her mind was elsewhere. She remembered that she herself had done something involving those same relationships of power and connections when the beast had been attacking Richard in the shielded part of the Keep. She had created a linking node but denied that link the power to complete it. That expectancy, without being fulfilled, drew the nearest power—lightning—to the beast, eliminating it for the moment. Because the beast was not really alive, though, it couldn’t actually be destroyed, in much the same way a corpse, because it was already dead, couldn’t be killed, or made any more dead.

But this was different. This was well beyond what Nicci had done with the beast. This, in a way, was the opposite of what she had done.

“Zedd, I don’t understand how such a thing is possible. It’s like throwing a rock; once thrown, the trajectory is set. The rock would follow that trajectory to a termination point.”

“She hit you on the head with your own rock before you’d even thrown it,” Cara said.

Zedd fixed her in a murderous scowl, as if she were an impetuous student who had just spoken out of turn. Cara’s mouth took on an obstinate twist, but she kept it closed.

Nicci ignored the interruption as she went on. “She would have needed to act on specific power as it was engendered—before it was even fully formed—as it began to ignite. That’s when the foundational node is formed as well. At that point the full nature and power of the spell wouldn’t even have come into being, yet.”

Zedd gave Cara a sidelong glance to make sure she intended to keep quiet. When she folded her arms and remained mute, Zedd turned back to Nicci.

“That’s precisely what she does,” he said.

Having never actually encountered a witch woman before, the explicit mechanisms they used were a mystery to Nicci. “How?”

“A witch woman rides eddies of time. She sees the flow of events into the future. Their ability is in many ways an ancillary form of prophecy. That means she is ready for the spell before you cast it. She knows what is coming. Her own ability, her own gift, allows her to act against you before you can complete what you are doing to her.

“It all comes naturally to them—like lifting an arm when someone throws a punch at you. Her block is there as your web forms—as you begin to throw your punch. She is denying you a foundational link so that your web can’t even begin to form. As I said, she has the ability to turn it back before that link between principal and object is established. Your power falls inward on itself—on you.

“It doesn’t take great power on her part. Her strength is your strength. The harder you try to do something, the more difficult it becomes. She doesn’t increase her effort, she merely denies yours a completing node. The harder you push, the more force it feeds back at you from her block.

“A witch woman uses you. That force, your force, folds back in on you, over and over, as you try all the harder. Much the way bending a piece of metal back and forth makes it hot, your own force bent back in on you, over and over as you tried to conjure your ability to overpower her, sent your body into a fever.”

“Zedd, that can’t be. You used magic. I saw you, I saw the web you cast and it didn’t harm you. It merely fizzled out.”

The old wizard smiled. “No, it did not fizzle out. It was a fizzle from the beginning. I was using so little power that she couldn’t draw strength from it. Since she couldn’t draw strength from it, she couldn’t block it or bend it back. There wasn’t enough for her to grab hold of.”

“What kind of spell can do such a thing?”

“I cast a protection web laced inside a simple tranquillity spell. You should have done the same.”

Nicci wiped a hand across her face. “Zedd, I’ve been a sorceress for a very long time. I’ve never even heard of a tranquillity spell.”

He shrugged. “Well, I guess you don’t know everything, now, do you? I used a tranquillity spell for the shell because if I misjudged and made it just a little too strong, and she cast it back at me, well, she would simply be making me more tranquil. Being even more calm would have helped me. I would then know the threshold had been surpassed, and I would be more calm to try again and have a better chance at success the second time.”

Nicci shook her head in amazement. “It’s for sure that I didn’t know enough to deal with the likes of Six. What you did may not have been able to reach me, but at least it was enough to keep her from killing me.”

Zedd only smiled.

She looked up at him. “Where did you learn such a trick?”

He shrugged. “Harsh experience. I’ve dealt with witch women before, so I knew that there was only one thing I could do.”

“You mean Shota?”

“In part,” he said. “When I took the Sword of Truth back from her I had a great deal of trouble. That woman is cunning, clever, and trouble behind sparkling eyes and a crafty smile. I found out that doing things the usual way simply didn’t work. She found my struggles amusing. The more force I used, the worse I made things for myself, and the wider she smiled.”

He smiled himself as he leaned in a little. “That was her mistake—smiling.” He lifted a finger to make his point. “Her smile tipped me off that what I was doing was my own undoing. I realized in that instant that my use of force was what was giving her the power she needed.”

“So you didn’t use force.”

He spread his hands as if she had finally grasped the lesson. “Sometimes doing what you would most like to do can be the very worst thing to do. Sometimes to accomplish what you want in the end, you have to hold back in the beginning.”

As the concept he’d expressed sank in, yet more of her disordered memories—perplexing pieces of some grand puzzle that had never before fit anywhere—having been freed from where they languished in the dark corners of her mind, tumbled into place. It was as if she was seeing everything in a new light.

The sudden realizations were jolting.

Nicci’s jaw fell open. Her eyes went wide.

“I understand, now. I know what it meant. Dear spirits, I understand. I know the purpose of the sterile field.”