Confessor: Chainfire Trilogy Part 3

Chapter 16

Nicci paused and turned at the sound of her name called out from behind. It was Nathan. Ann followed close on his heels. For every one of Nathan’s long strides Ann had to take three just to keep up.

Their footsteps echoed off the golden-yellow and brown marble floor of the empty hallway. The rather simple hall was part of the private complex within the palace, used by the Lord Rahl, staff and officials, and, of course, Mord-Sith. It was a passageway of unadorned utility, making no pretense of grandeur.

In her modest gray dress buttoned to her throat, Ann looked about the same to Nicci as she had when Nicci had been a child. Short and compact, like a dense thundercloud scudding across the landscape, she always seemed about to throw off lightning. The woman had loomed as an imposing figure in Nicci’s mind from the time she’d first been sent to the Palace of the Prophets to become a young novice.

Annalina Aldurren had always been the kind of woman who could elicit a babbling confession with nothing more than a stony stare. She struck terror into novices, fear into young wizards, and trepidation into most of the Sisters. As a novice, Nicci had suspected that the Creator Himself would walk on eggshells in the presence of the forbidding prelate, and mind his manners as well.

“We got the message that you’ve just arrived from the Keep,” the tall prophet said in a deep, powerful voice as he and Ann caught up with Nicci and Cara.

Considering that he was nearly a thousand years old, Nathan was still ruggedly handsome. He had Rahl features in common with Richard, including a hawklike brow. His eyes, though, were a beautiful azure color, while Richard’s were gray. Despite his age, the prophet had a vigorous, purposeful stride.

His age, like Nicci’s, was relevant only to those who at the time had lived outside the spell of the Palace of the Prophets. Those in the palace aged just like anyone else, but at a slower rate only when compared to those who lived outside the spell. Time had moved differently within the palace. Now that the palace, the home of the Sisters of the Light for thousands of years, had been destroyed, Nathan, Ann, Nicci, and all the others who had once called the place home would age at the same rate as everyone else.

Nicci remembered the prophet as always wearing robes when he’d lived as a captive in his apartments at the Palace of the Prophets. As a Sister of the Light, it had sometimes been required that she visit him in those apartments to write down anything he claimed to be prophecy. Nicci never really thought one way or the other about the task; it was just one of many required of her. There were Sisters, though, who would not go down into Nathan’s apartments alone.

Now he was in brown trousers and a ruffled white shirt under a dark green vest. The hem of his maroon cape hovered just above the floor, swirling around his black boots after he came to a halt. Dressed as he now was, he cut an imposing figure.

Nicci couldn’t imagine why, but at his hip he wore a sword sheathed in an elegant scabbard. Wizards hardly needed swords. Being the only prophet those at the palace had known of in recent centuries, he had always been an unfathomable character.

Many of the Sisters at the palace used to believe that Nathan was crazy. Many feared him. It wasn’t so much that Nathan gave them cause for their fear as it was that their imagination provided colorful terrors that the mere sight of him somehow seemed to confirm. Nicci didn’t know if very many of the Sisters now thought any differently, but she did know that a number of them were greatly worried because he was no longer locked up behind powerful shields. While a few thought he was rather harmless, if a little odd, most of the Sisters considered him to be the most dangerous man alive. Nicci had come to see him differently.

Moreover, he was now the Lord Rahl, standing in for Richard.

“Where is Verna?” Nicci asked. “I need to talk with her as well.”

Coming to a halt beside Nathan, Ann tipped her head back toward the empty hallway. “She and Adie are off meeting with General Trimack about security issues. Since it’s getting late I told Berdine to let them both know that you and Cara just arrived from the Keep and that we will all shortly meet them in the private dining room.”

Nicci nodded. “That sounds like a good idea.”

“In the meantime,” Nathan pressed, “what news is there?”

Nicci was still disoriented from traveling in the sliph. It was a distracting experience in which time seemed to lose all meaning. On top of that, being in the People’s Palace only added to her discomfort. The entire palace existed within a spell that amplified the power of the Lord Rahl. At the same time, the spell diminished the power of every other gifted person. Nicci wasn’t used to the feeling. It made her restless and uneasy.

Being in the sliph also reminded her of Richard. She supposed that everything made her think of Richard. It seemed that her nerves were always on edge with worry for him.

It took a moment for Nicci to focus her mind on the question as she struggled to put thoughts of Richard aside. As improbable as it seemed, this man, not Richard, was now the Lord Rahl. Ann, the former prelate, his former jailer, stood beside him waiting to hear the answer to his question.

“I’m afraid that the news is not very good,” Nicci admitted.

“You mean about Richard?” Ann asked.

Nicci shook her head. “We’ve had no news about him, yet.”

Nathan’s brow took on an even more suspicious slant. “Then what news are you talking about?”

Nicci took a deep breath. It still felt strange breathing air after being in the sliph. Despite having traveled in the strange creature before, she didn’t think she would ever get used to breathing into her lungs the liquid silver essence that was the sliph.

Mentally gathering her thoughts, she gazed out over the short section of balcony railing. The particular portion of the hallway that they were in bridged a complex of expansive halls below. Overhead, out through the opening with the balcony, late-day light flooded into the palace through skylights above. The short balcony, between rather dark runs of the hallway beyond in either direction, was almost like a window looking out into the People’s Palace. Nicci imagined that, being a rather small opening, it was probably meant to allow a covert place to watch the halls below.

Now, far below, people filling the various passageways hurried in every direction. Their movements looked purposeful. Nearly all of the benches were empty. Nicci didn’t see people gathered in casual conversation the way they had in the past. This was a time of war; the People’s Palace was under siege. Worry was everyone’s constant companion. Guards patrolled, watching not just every person, but every shadow.

Trying to decide how to sum up the troubling news, Nicci ran her fingers through her hair, sweeping it back away from her face. “Remember Richard telling us about how the taint left by the chimes having been in the world of life was causing magic to fail?”

Ann flicked her hand in a dismissive gesture as she heaved a sigh, apparently annoyed to revisit an old topic. “We remember. But I hardly think that it’s our most pressing problem.”

“Maybe not,” Nicci said, “but it has begun to cause some very real trouble.”

Nathan lifted a hand, the backs of his fingers touching Ann’s shoulder, as if to implore her to let him handle the matter. “How so?”

“We’ve been forced to abandon the Wizard’s Keep,” Nicci told him. “For the time being, at least.”

Nathan’s eyebrows lifted. As he tilted his head toward her some of his long white hair fell forward over his broad shoulders. “Why? What happened?”

Nicci smoothed the black dress at her hips. “The magic of the Keep is beginning to fail.”

“How do you know?” Ann demanded.

“The witch woman, Six, got into the Keep,” Nicci said. “The alarms failed to warn us. A number of the shields are down. She was able to go where she pleased within the Keep without the shields stopping her.”

Ann poked a loose strand of gray hair back into the knot of hair at the back of her head as she considered Nicci’s words.

“That isn’t necessarily convincing evidence that the magic of the Keep is failing,” she finally said, “or even that magic is tainted by the chimes and failing. It’s difficult telling just how talented a woman like Six is liable to be. Just because there is some sort of problem with the Keep there is no way to know its cause, much less know that the chimes are the cause. With a place as complicated as the Keep it’s difficult to really know if it really is all that serious. It could simply be a temporary—”

“Blood is coming out of the stone walls of the Keep,” Nicci said in a tone that made it clear she didn’t want to debate it. She didn’t appreciate being treated like a novice frightened by shadows on her first night away from home. She needed to get on to other matters. “It’s worse down in the lower areas, in the foundation.”

Ann and Nathan both straightened.

Ann opened her mouth to say something, but Cara spoke first, apparently as disinterested in having to argue the point as Nicci. “The blood oozing out of the stone in various places all over the Keep is all human blood.”

Again, both the prophet and the former prelate went mute with surprise.

“Well now,” Nathan finally said as he scratched under his jaw with one finger, “that certainly is serious.” He gestured up the hall. “Where are you headed?”

“Cara and I need to go out to see how Jagang’s ramp is progressing. I also want to have a look at the Order’s army and see if I can tell how they’re doing. I’m hoping that Richard’s plan will work, that the D’Haran troops sent to the Old World will be able to cut the supply lines. If they succeed, Jagang is going to have a problem. If all those men down there can’t be supplied, they can’t sit there all winter. They’ll starve. I think it may turn out to be a race between the ramp and their supplies running out.”

Nathan nodded as he stepped past Nicci and Cara. “Come on, then. We’ll go with you and you can tell us about your encounter with this witch woman.”

Nicci stood her ground, not following after the prophet. “She took the box of Orden.”

Nathan turned back and stared at her. “What?”

“She stole the box of Orden we had. The one that the witch woman’s companion, Samuel, stole from Sister Tovi and that Rachel had then managed to get ahold of and bring to us. We thought it was safe in the Keep. Turns out it wasn’t.”

“It’s gone?” Ann seized Nicci’s sleeve. “Do you have any idea where she went with it?”

“I’m afraid not,” Nicci said. “I’m hoping that you two can give us some clues about the witch woman. We need to find her. Anything you can tell me about her, no matter how insignificant it seems, might be of help. We need to get that box back.”

“At least Nicci was able to put the power of Orden in play before the box was taken,” Cara said.

Nathan and Ann could not have looked more stunned.

“She did what?” Nathan whispered, seemingly unable to stop staring at Cara, as if hoping he might have heard her wrong or, if he hadn’t, that she might think better of what she’d said and recant the claim.

“Nicci put the power of Orden in play,” Cara said.

Nicci thought that the Mord-Sith sounded a bit proud of the accomplishment, proud of Nicci.

“Are you out of your mind!” Ann roared as she rounded on Nicci, her face going scarlet. “You named yourself a player for the power of Orden!”

“No, that’s not at all what happened,” Cara said, once more drawing the attention of the prophet and the former prelate. “She named Richard the player.”

Cara smiled just the slightest bit, as if pleased to prove that Nicci was better than Nathan and Ann seemed to think. For their part, Nathan and Ann stood thunderstruck.

While it had indeed been quite an accomplishment, Nicci didn’t feel any pride for having done such a thing—she had been driven to it out of desperation.

Standing there in the hallway in the vast complex of the People’s Palace, acutely aware of the interlocking layers of problems they faced, Nicci suddenly felt overwhelmingly weary, and it wasn’t from her power being drained by the spell around the People’s Palace. Besides the recent events, exhaustion was beginning to take its toll. There was so much to do and so little time.

Worse, only she had the necessary knowledge or ability to deal with many of the problems they faced. Who but she had a chance to teach Richard about the use of Subtractive Magic that was necessary to open the boxes of Orden? There was no one else. Nicci felt the terrible weight of that responsibility.

There were moments when the enormity of the battles facing them stood out for her in stark clarity. Sometimes when that happened Nicci’s courage wavered. She sometimes feared that she was deluding herself that they could actually solve the monumental problems they faced.

She remembered how, as a little girl, her mother had forced her to go out with bread to feed the poor and, later, how Brother Narev of the Fellowship of Order had shamed her into working tirelessly to serve the endless needs of people. No matter how much effort she put into solving the problems of all those who were needy, their problems only seemed to grow, outpacing her ability to satisfy them, binding her ever tighter in slavery to the growing ranks of those in need. She was taught that, because she had the ability, it was her duty to ignore her own wants and needs and to sacrifice her life to the wants and needs of others. Their inability, or unwillingness to try, made them her masters.

In those moments when she thought their present problems were insurmountable, she felt again the way she had as a child, like a slave to the problems. In those dark moments of self-doubt she wondered if she could ever really shed the mantle Jagang himself had laid around her shoulders when he named her the Slave Queen. He’d had no idea how apt the title really was.

In a way, that was how she sometimes felt in this struggle. While she knew that this cause was right, it still seemed hopeless to think that they could win when they were up against so many who sought to crush them.

Sometimes, in the face of the seemingly insurmountable, Nicci wanted nothing so much as to sit down and give up. In private moments in the past, Richard had confessed to having the same self-doubts as she felt, and yet she’d seen how he still forged ahead. Whenever Nicci felt discouraged, she thought of Richard, of how relentless he was, and she once again made herself get to her feet if for no other reason than to make him proud of her.

She believed in and fought for their cause, but that cause was crystallized in Richard.

They needed him. She didn’t know how they were ever going to find him or, if they did, how they would get him back. That was assuming he was still alive.

Richard being dead, though, was a thought that she refused to contemplate and so she immediately shoved the very idea aside.

Ann seized Nicci’s upper arm in a firm grip, bringing her out of her dark thoughts. “You put the boxes of Orden in play, and you named Richard the player?”

Nicci wasn’t in the mood to address the denouncement within the rhetorical question, to yet again have the same argument she’d already had with Zedd.

“That’s right. I had no choice. Zedd at first had the same reaction as you. When I explained it all to him, explained why I had to do as I had done, and once he’d calmed down, he came to see that there truly is no other way.”

“And who are you to decide such a thing?” Ann demanded.

Nicci chose not to rise to the insult and instead kept her voice, if not deferential, at least civil. “You yourself said that Richard is the one who must lead us in this battle. You and Nathan have waited nearly five hundred years for Richard to be born and worked to make sure that he could lead us. You yourself saw to it that he had The Book of Counted Shadows so that he could fight this fight. You seem to have decided a great deal for him before I ever came along.

“The Sisters of the Dark have already put Orden in play. I hardly need to tell you what their goal is. That makes this the final battle—the battle for life itself. Richard is the one who must lead us. If he is to succeed he must have the ability to fight them. You gave him a mere book. I gave him the power, the weapon, that he needs to win.”

Nathan laid a big hand on Ann’s shoulder. “Perhaps Nicci has a point.”

Ann glanced up at the prophet. She visibly cooled as she considered his words. Back when she’d lived at the Palace of the Prophets, Nicci would never have expected the prophet, of all people, to be able to bring the prelate to see reason. There had been few at the palace who thought that Nathan had the ability to reason.

“Well, done is done,” Ann said, her voice considerably calmer. “We’ll have to give some thought to what we must do next.”

“What about Zedd?” Nathan asked. “Does he have any ideas to help Richard?”

Nicci tried to keep her voice, as well as her expression, from betraying her level of concern. “Since Zedd believes that spells cast in the sacred caves in Tamarang are responsible for blocking Richard from the use of his gift, he, Tom, and Rikka are on their way there now. They hope to be able to help Richard by finding a way to eliminate whatever spell is barring him from his gift.”

“You make it sound simple,” Nathan said as he considered the problem. “Such a thing will be far from simple.”

Nicci lifted an eyebrow. “I doubt that standing around wishing for a solution will work better.”

Nathan grunted his agreement. “What about the Keep?”

Nicci turned and started down the hall, talking back over her shoulder.

“After Cara and I left in the sliph, and before he started out for Tamarang, Zedd was going to use a spell to close down the Keep.”

“What about the others—Chase, Rachel, and Jebra?” Nathan asked.

“Jebra vanished a while back. Zedd thinks it’s possible that she regained consciousness and because of everything she’s been through, she simply ran away.”

“Or the witch woman has been influencing her mind yet again,” Nathan suggested.

Nicci opened her hands. “That’s possible too. We just don’t know. Rachel vanished as well, just the other night, the night before Six arrived. Chase went looking for her.”

Nathan shook his head in frustration. “I hate being stuck here when so much is going on.”

“Zedd wanted you two to know about the trouble with the magic of the Keep,” Nicci said. “He said that there are defenses protecting the People’s Palace that may be similar to those at the Keep, so he wants you to be aware of the problem. There’s no telling how the contamination from the chimes will affect magic, whether it will hamper all similar power, or whether it’s a function of location—if the contamination might be confined to a specific area.”

“After we’re finished here,” Cara put in, “Nicci and I are going to travel in the sliph down to the Tamarang area to help Zedd get Lord Rahl’s power back. Then we’re going after Lord Rahl.”

Nathan didn’t object that he presently held the title of Lord Rahl. He, of all people, knew that Richard was the one that prophecy had named to lead them. Nathan was the one, after all, who had originally revealed that prophecy said they stood a chance against the coming storm only if Richard led them.

Cara’s plan that they were “going after Lord Rahl” was news to Nicci. If they knew where Richard was, Nicci would already be headed there.

As Nicci continued to answer Ann’s steady barrage of questions, Nathan led them through several rather simple passageways until they finally came to one with a heavy oak door at the end. As Nathan pulled the door open for them, cold air rushed in.

A bloodred sky greeted Nicci as she stepped out onto a platform high above the rampart of the outer wall. “Dear spirits,” she whispered to herself. “Every time I see them it’s a terrible shock.”

Nathan squeezed out beside her. There was room for only two people on what was apparently an observation platform. Ann and Cara watched from just inside the doorway.

The height was dizzying. Nicci gripped the waist-high iron railing as she leaned out a little, peering over the side. She could see over the edge of the outer wall, and the plateau itself, all the way down to the Azrith Plain.

The ground immediately around the plateau was deserted. The Imperial Order had camped some distance back, apparently not wanting to chance drawing any unpleasant attention from the gifted up in the palace before absolutely necessary. While the Imperial Order had Sisters and even several young wizards who could shield them from any conjuring from above, Jagang would want to keep them in reserve, keep them healthy, strong, and alive until he began his final attack.

A thick red overcast hung above the distant plain black with the invading army. They spread all the way to the horizon in every direction. Nicci rubbed her shoulders with the chill she felt from within. While from this distance it was hard to see much detail, she knew what it was like to be among such men. She knew all too well what they were like. She knew all too well what their officers were like. She knew all too well what their leader was like.

It made Nicci’s skin crawl to think of being down among those men.

When she had served with that army she had not given a great deal of thought to how not only physically filthy but spiritually squalid it was. As the Slave Queen she had been willfully blind to it. She had believed that brutes like Jagang and his men were necessary in order to impose higher ideals on mankind. Benevolence enforced through brutality. Looking back on such a thought, she could hardly believe how contradictory those convictions really were, and that she had accepted them without question. Not just accepted them, but helped enforce them. She had been so effective at enforcing the Order’s will that she had become known as Death’s Mistress.

She could hardly believe that Richard had put up with her. Of course, she had given him no choice in the matter.

She felt tears sting at her eyes at the memory of all the times she had tried to force Richard to join her in service to their vile cause and how, instead, he had shown her something noble. She swallowed back a sob at how much she missed him, missed the light in his eyes.

The sight below made the silence up on the platform seem all the more bleak. These men, these millions of men spread out across the plain, were all there for one purpose: to kill everyone in the People’s Palace, anyone who opposed the rule of the Order. This was their last obstacle to imposing their beliefs on all of mankind.

Nicci stared out at the ramp rising up in the distance. It was larger than the last time she’d seen it. Beyond the ramp she could just make out scars in the ground where the material for the ramp was being dug. The top slope of the ramp aimed in a straight line right for the top of the plateau. Even though it was getting dark, there were snaking lines of men carrying dirt and rock to the construction site.

If anyone described such an undertaking to her she doubted that she would believe it was possible, but seeing it was different. Seeing it filled her with dread. It was only a matter of time until that ramp was completed and the dark sea of the Imperial Order flooded up it to assault the palace.

Standing at the edge of the platform, hugging her shoulders tightly, she knew that she was looking out onto more than a dark army. Nicci knew that she was looking out on a thousand years of darkness.

Having been a Sister of the Dark, and having been raised under the teachings of the Fellowship of Order, she knew, perhaps better than anyone, just how real the threat was. She knew how vehemently the followers of the Order believed in their cause. Their faith defined them. They were more than willing to die for it. After all, death was their goal; they had been promised glory in the afterlife. They believed that this life was only a test, a means to gain entry into everlasting life. If the Order required them to die, then they would die. If the Order required that they kill those who did not believe, then they would make the world a sea of blood.

Nicci understood precisely what it would mean for everyone if the Order won this war. It was not the army that would bring those thousand years of darkness, but the ideas that had spawned that army. Those ideas would cast the world into a living nightmare.

“Nicci, there is something you need to know about,” Nathan said, breaking the uneasy silence.

Nicci folded her arms and glanced over at the prophet. “What’s that, Nathan?”

“We’ve been studying books of prophecy here at the People’s Palace. Just like all the books of prophecy everywhere else, the Chainfire spell has caused sections of these books, sections that apparently touch on Kahlan, to vanish. But there is still useful information as of yet untouched by Chainfire. Some of those books are new to me. They’ve helped me to connect things I’ve read about in the past. They’ve helped me to see the larger picture.”

With the Chainfire spell having erased so much of their memories, she didn’t know how he could know if he really was seeing the larger picture—or how she could know if she was. Instead of saying so, Nicci waited silently, the cold wind ruffling her hair, watching Nathan look away to gaze out at the forces spread out across the Azrith Plain below.

“There is a place in the prophecies, a cardinal root, that leads to a determinative fork,” he said at last. “Beyond that fork, down one of its two branches, is a place the prophecies call the Great Void. ”

Nicci frowned into her recollections. There had always been a great deal of speculation surrounding that portion of prophecy.

“I’ve heard mention of it,” she said. “Do you finally know what that means?”

“One of the two branches after that crucial fork leads to areas of yet more branches, offshoots, and forks farther on.” Nathan flicked his wrist offhandedly, as if indicating those things unseen to anyone but him. “There are a few books of prophecy that I’ve been able to identify as having to do with issues that lie beyond on that branch. I’m sure that a concerted search would reveal others. So, you might say that down that fork lies the world as we know it.”

He tapped the palm of one hand on the railing as he gathered his thoughts. “On the other branch of that mantic root lies only the Great Void. There are no books of prophecy for what lies beyond. That is the reason it is called the Great Void. You might say that there is nothing on that branch for prophecy to see—no magic, no world as we know it, and thus no prophecy to illuminate it!”

He cast her a brief glance. “That is the world the Imperial Order wants. If they take us down that fork, mankind will go forever into the unknown of the Great Void, a place without magic and thus without prophecy.

“Some of my predecessors have speculated that since there is no prophecy for what lies beyond, it could only mean that the Great Void augurs the end of everything, the end of all life.”

Nicci could find no words. She didn’t think that there could be anything but darkness if the Order won, so this news wasn’t really all that surprising to her.

“From the books here that I have been studying, from the information they have given me—and from recent events—I have been able to fix us on the chronology of this prophetic root.”

Nicci’s gaze darted to the wizard. “Are you sure?”

Nathan held a hand out toward the army below. “Jagang’s army being here as they are, surrounding us, is one of a number of events that tells me that we are now on the cardinal root that takes us toward that fateful fork.

“I’ve known for centuries about the Great Void being in prophecy, but I didn’t know if it was significant because I was never sure precisely where it fit in the chronology of prophecy. As far as I knew it was always possible that we might end up following an altogether different arm of the tree of prophecy, never setting foot in the area containing that particular cardinal root with the Great Void.

“There was always the possibility that the Great Void would turn out to be somewhere beyond any one of hundreds of false forks, down a dead branch on the tree of prophecy. Ages ago, when I first started studying it, it had seemed to me that it would turn out to be nothing more than false prophecy, eventually to be left in the forgotten dust of history along with so much of the other dead wood of the possible things that never came to pass.

“Slowly, though, events have inexorably carried us to where we find ourselves today. I am now sure that we are on that trunk of prophecy, on that particular branch, on that cardinal root, about to encounter the determinative fork.

“You,” Nathan said to Nicci, “have irrevocably placed us there by putting the power of Orden in play in Richard’s name. The boxes of Orden were the final node on the mantic root.

“There is no longer any possibility for mankind but to face that fork.”