Heart of Black Ice

CHAPTER 54

Nicci was devastated to hear the news from General Linden. She realized only then how much she had been counting on Richard and the D’Haran army. “What do you mean he’s not sending troops? Did I not convey the threat of the ancient army, of the Norukai fleet?”

“Yes, of course, Sorceress,” Linden said as he nervously shuffled the papers in front of him. “Lord Rahl says he can’t spare the army right now, and besides, such an army would never reach you in time.”

Nicci paced off a short distance as she struggled to control her worry over how serious the situation was. She knew Richard. She knew him perhaps better than anyone other than Kahlan. Richard would know that she would ask for that kind of help only if she was desperate. And, she also knew that Richard wouldn’t turn her down unless it was impossible for him to help her. Now, she had the added concern of what kind of problem Richard had on his hands, but she also realized that it was now her responsibility to defend Tanimura and the other cities in the south. Richard was putting his trust in her.

She turned back to Linden, her focus shifting. “Richard wouldn’t have left it at that. He must have said something else.”

Linden nodded as he pulled open one of the drawers in his desk. He gave her a shaky smile. From the desk drawer, he retrieved a leather-wrapped parcel. “He did. He sent this.” He placed the package on the desktop. “He said you would know what to do with it.”

Nicci cautiously unfolded the leather, worried about what message she would find. To her surprise, instead of a message, she found only a bone box in the leather pouch, a cube barely an inch on a side.

As she turned the cube in her fingers, studying it more thoroughly, she realized that, despite its size, this was an object of great importance.

“We were afraid to open the box, Sorceress.” Linden was intent and curious. “What is it?”

With her nail, she found a crack on the top edge and worked it open to reveal a cavity inside the box. The small cube held a floating, rotating orb of light no larger than a pea. The glowing sphere was lit from within by a network of faint lines and tiny sparks of light.

She recognized what it was, which only deepened her concentration. “It is a newly constructed spell.”

Probing with her gift, she was able to recognize that this compact nugget had the same type of power as the original magic from the design of the Wizard’s Keep, something that only Richard would understand. She realized that the spell was somehow keyed to the actual, ancient defensive nature of the Keep itself.

Linden looked on, his face full of questions.

“Whatever it is, Lord Rahl must mean for it to help defend us,” Nicci said. “To help me.” Still looking for answers, she felt inside the leather pouch again, but there was definitely no other message from Richard, no clue. She would have to figure this out for herself. The message must be on the bone box itself.

She closed the lid again, snapping it into place to hide the glowing pearl of the spell. The hard white sides of the cube bore fine etchings, lines, designs, and inscribed symbols. At first she couldn’t read them, but then she recognized the language of Creation—which Richard understood, and he knew that Nicci also understood. Here was her message!

She knew that if General Linden or the courier had opened the pouch and looked at it, and she assumed they had, they wouldn’t have known what those symbols were or what they could mean. Only those who could read the ancient language of Creation would be able to read those emblems and open such a box.

She also knew that only Richard could have made it, and Richard would know that no one but Nicci would be able to decipher those symbols. Until she could translate them, she could only wonder at the ancient power those symbols protected.

Richard would not have used spells in the language of Creation unless whatever was inside was both profoundly important and profoundly dangerous. This was personal, from Richard to no one else but Nicci. As she stared at the small bone box in her hand, she had to take a steadying breath at the connection to Richard she was holding. It was almost as if he was whispering a solution to her.

But what solution?

After long concentration and working through the symbols until she could read the markings, she still did not understand the answer. Life to the living. Death to the dead. How was she supposed to use that?

Nicci was mystified. With the stakes so high, why didn’t Richard just explain clearly? She had told him about the enormous threat of the reawakened army. She had counted on Richard, needed Richard’s wisdom and strength, and now she was upset that he hadn’t given her a plain answer.

Linden was smiling tentatively at her, hoping for good news. Distracted by the puzzle, she issued brusque orders for what she needed now. “I have to ignite a verification web to see what sort of constructed spell Richard created. I need space to work, an empty room where I won’t be disturbed.”

Linden jumped up from his desk and called soldiers. In only a few moments, they had pulled and scraped chairs from a meeting room down the hall. Nicci followed them into the empty chamber, preoccupied with her own investigation.

She knew she needed to do more than a standard verification web on this bone box, but rather an aspect analysis of a verification web from an interior perspective. That would allow her to examine the constructed spell down to its core element. She steeled herself, realizing that casting the web would require her to use Subtractive Magic. She had no other choice.

Nicci stood inside the large empty room in the garrison headquarters and looked around the whitewashed walls, the wooden floor. Linden and the soldiers waited eagerly just outside the door. “This place will do,” she said, looking down at the tiny box. “Make sure I am not disturbed as I work. Much depends on what I learn here.”

Fascinated by the enigma of the constructed spell, she paid no attention to the soldiers, who retreated farther from the door.

Using one of the daggers at her hip, she slashed her palm, interested only in the blood that welled up. She would need a lot of it.

Standing in the middle of the wooden floor, she used the dripping blood to draw a careful Grace across the boards. The Grace was a powerful device, and drawn in blood under only the rarest of circumstances, but Nicci needed that power now. An inner and outer circle represented the underworld and the world of the living, separated by a square, and then at the center an eight-pointed star indicated the Creator’s light, which radiated lines throughout the Grace. The entire process of drawing the complex symbol took her the better part of an hour.

When she was ready, Nicci stood in the center of the magic-infused emblem on the floor. Closing her eyes, she held the bone box in her intact palm, while she lifted the small lid with the other. Then she opened herself to her power.

Surrounded by her thoughts, keeping her eyes closed, Nicci felt nothing other than a kind of weightlessness. She drifted, searching, probing, and reached out with a verification web in search of answers.

Only when Nicci opened her eyes did she realize that she was floating upright and frozen in midair, drifting and slowly rotating several feet off the floor above the blood-drawn Grace. Through the open door to the room, she saw Linden and the curious soldiers watching her, astonished, but they were as still as statues. She heard not a whisper of air, couldn’t even hear her own heartbeat in her ears. As she floated, life itself seemed to be suspended.

Extending her sight further, she saw that she was surrounded by lines of glowing green light that formed an intricate geometric framework tangled around her. Nicci herself was the living core of a verification web for a constructed spell. Shifting her head, she also realized that one of her feet was suspended over the Grace’s outer circle that represented the underworld.

Still not understanding, Nicci used her gift to ignite the verification web, as she had planned. She stretched out, studying all the glowing lines in the air rising from the Grace, ensnaring her own body and the glowing pearl inside the bone box.

But the web offered no answers. No matter how hard Nicci tried, the magic gave her only a blank response, and the constructed spell’s mysterious purpose remained a complete cipher. Richard’s intent was no clearer than it was before.

Frustrated, she withdrew her power and shut down the web, extinguishing the lines of light. They retracted back into the glowing orb inside the bone box. Gently, she drifted back down to the floor and felt solid wood beneath her feet, but her mind still seemed disconnected. She stood still, regaining her balance for a frozen moment.

Out in the corridor, Linden and the soldiers were too hesitant to offer help. After wiping her bleeding palm on her black dress, Nicci snapped the box closed again and pocketed it. She was profoundly heartbroken that whatever Richard had sent seemed useless, or at least incomprehensible. She had hoped for a miracle. Now she had to solve it herself.

General Linden cleared his throat. “What did you discover, Sorceress? Do you understand the weapon Lord Rahl sent for us?”

She turned her cold blue eyes toward him. “I fear we are doomed.”