Phantom: Chainfire Trilogy Part 2

Chapter 10

“What is it?” Rikka called out as Richard, Nicci, and Cara ran toward her. Nathan and Ann had already fallen far behind. Zedd was somewhere in the middle.

“Come on,” Richard shouted to her as he ran past.

“Someone is coming up the Keep road,” Cara called back over her shoulder as Rikka joined in the charge through the halls.

Richard veered around a long stone table set against the wall beneath a huge painting of a lake. Sheltered trails could be seen burrowed through the deeply shadowed pine groves. In the distance, through a bluish haze, majestic mountains rose up to catch brushstrokes of golden sunlight. It was a scene that made Richard long to be back in his Hartland woods on the trails he knew so well. More than anything, though, the painting always reminded him of the magical summer he’d spent with Kahlan in the home he had built for her far back in the mountains.

The summer of Kahlan’s recovery from her terrible injuries, as he showed her the natural beauty of his forested world and she once again blossomed back to health, had been one of the happiest times of his life. It had ended all too suddenly when Nicci had arrived without warning and taken him away. He knew, though, that if Nicci had not interrupted it, something else would have. It had been a dream time that had to end; until the looming threat from the Imperial Order was halted, no one could live their dreams. They would all, instead, be swept up in the same nightmare.

They turned a corner around a green marble pillar with a gold capital and base and all plunged down a spiral run of granite steps, Richard and Nicci in the lead with the two Mord-Sith following close on their heels. The stairwell was small for the Keep, but would have dwarfed anything Richard had ever seen growing up back in Westland.

At the bottom, he slid to a halt, momentarily pausing to decide which would be the quickest route; in the Keep it wasn’t always the way it would seem. Besides that, it was as easy to get lost in the Keep as it was to lose one’s direction in a birch forest.

Cara pushed through between Richard and Nicci, not only to be sure that there would be a red-leather-clad guard to each side of him, but so that she would be the one out ahead of him. As far as Richard knew, Mord-Sith didn’t have rank, but Rikka, like the other Mord-Sith, always wordlessly conceded Cara’s unspoken authority.

Richard recognized the unique pattern of the thin black and gilded bands lining both sides of the mahogany wainscoting in one of the paneled corridors to the side. From almost since the time he had learned to walk, Richard had used the details of his surroundings to know his way. Like trees in the woods that he recognized because of some peculiarity like a twisted limb, a growth, or a scar, he had learned to navigate through the Keep and places like it by the details of architecture.

He gestured. “This way.” Cara charged off ahead of him.

As they ran, their boot strikes echoed off the stone floor of the hall. Nicci was barefoot. He was somewhat surprised that without shoes she could keep up running across the rough stone. Nicci was not the kind of woman Richard ever envisioned running in bare feet. Even running in bare feet, though, she still looked somehow . . . regal.

It wasn’t all that long ago that Richard would not have imagined Nicci ever running again. He was still surprised that he had managed to get her out of the spell-form after the lightning had exploded through the window. For a time, he was sure that they had lost her. If Zedd had not been there to help after Richard had shut down the verification web, they very well might have.

They turned down another hall; long carpets quieted their run and finally led them between two highly polished red marble columns and into the oval-shaped anteroom. A balcony, supported by pillars and arches, ran around the perimeter of the room. The doorways at the back of the balcony were all corridors, arranged like the spokes of a wheel, that led to different levels and areas of the Keep.

Richard bounded down the five steps ringing the room inside the columns and ran past the great clover-leaf-shaped fountain centered in the tiled floor. The fountain’s waters cascaded down successive tiers of ever wider, scalloped bowls to end up in a pool contained by a knee-high white marble wall that also served as a bench. A hundred feet overhead a glassed roof flooded the room with warmth and light.

When he reached the far side of the room, Richard pushed ahead of Cara and threw open one of the heavy double doors. He paused on the top of the dozen wide granite steps outside. Nicci halted beside him, to his left, with Rikka on the far side of her. Cara took a defensive place close by on his right. All of them were still catching their breath from the brief but swift run through the Keep.

The grass in the paddock across the way was lush and green in the early-morning light. Beyond the paddock the wall of the Keep rose straight up, making the inner courtyard seem like a cozy canyon. The passing of millennia had left the soaring wall of tightly fitted, dark stone stained with pale tan sediment. Creamy drips of calcium deposits gave the impression that the rock was slowly melting.

Two horses clopped through the dark, arched opening to the left, which tunneled under part of the Keep to gain access to the inner courtyard. Richard couldn’t tell who it was, hidden as they were back in the deep shadows of the broad, low archway, but whoever it was must have known where they were going and they apparently weren’t afraid to enter an interior area of the Keep, an area used not by visitors but by wizards and those who had worked with them at the complex. But that was long ago. Still, Richard recalled his own trepidation the first time he cautiously ventured this far into the grounds of the Keep. His hackles rose at who might be bold enough to ride right into such a place.

When the two riders emerged into the light, Richard saw that one of them was Shota.

The witch woman locked eyes with him and smiled that quiet, knowing, private smile she wore so naturally. Like most other things about Shota, Richard didn’t entirely trust the smile as significant, much less sincere, and so he couldn’t be sure that it augured well.

He didn’t recognize the woman, maybe ten or fifteen years older, who rode deferentially half a length behind Shota. Short, sandy hair framed the woman’s pleasant face. Her eyes were as intensely blue as the sky on a sparkling clear autumn day. Unlike Shota, she wore no casual smile. As they rode, her head swiveled and those blue eyes searched, as if she feared an imminent attack of demons who might materialize out of the dark stone of the surrounding walls.

Shota, by contrast, looked calm and self-confident.

Cara leaned past Richard toward Nicci. “Shota, the witch woman,” she whispered confidentially.

“I know,” Nicci answered without taking her eyes off the beautiful woman riding toward them.

Shota brought her horse to a halt close to the steps. As she straightened her shoulders she casually rested her wrists across the saddle’s pommel.

“I need to see you,” she said to Richard as if he were the only one standing there. The smile, sincere or not, had vanished. “We have much to talk about.”

“Where is your murderous little companion, Samuel?”

Shota, riding sidesaddle, slipped down off her horse in a way that Richard imagined must be how a spirit would slip to ground, if spirits rode horses.

A hint of indignation narrowed Shota’s almond-shaped eyes. “That is one of the things we need to talk about.”

The other woman dismounted as well and took the reins to Shota’s horse when the witch woman lifted them to the side, much the way a queen would, not knowing or caring who would take them, but expecting without any doubt whatsoever that someone would. Her gaze remained fixed on Richard as she glided closer to the broad granite steps. Her thick, wavy auburn hair tumbled down over the front of her shoulders and glistened in the early light. Her revealing dress, made of an airy, rust-colored fabric that complemented perfectly the color of her hair, seemed to float with her effortless strides, clinging to her every curve, at least the ones it covered.

Shota’s gaze finally left Richard to take in Nicci with an “I dare you” look. It was the kind of look that would have withered just about anyone. It failed to wither Nicci in the least. It struck Richard that he was probably in the presence of the two most dangerous women alive. He half expected dark thunderclouds to roll in and lightning to nicker, but the sky remained defiantly clear.

Shota’s gaze finally slid back to Richard. “Your friend Chase has been gravely hurt.”

Richard didn’t know what he had been expecting Shota to say, but that wasn’t even close. “Chase . . . ?”

Zedd suddenly arrived and pushed his way through between Richard and Cara. “Shota!” he declared in a huff. His face had gone red and it wasn’t from his run through the halls. “How dare you come into the Keep! First you swindle Richard out of the sword, and then—”

Richard lifted an arm out across his grandfather’s chest to stop him from charging down the steps. “Zedd, calm down. Shota says that Chase has been badly hurt.”

“How does she think—”

Zedd’s voice abruptly clipped off when Richard’s words finally sank in. His wide eyes turned back toward Shota. “Chase, hurt? Dear spirits . . . how?”

Zedd suddenly caught sight of the other woman standing a little farther back, holding the reins to the horses. He squinted against the bright light. “Jebra? Jebra Bevinvier?”

The woman smiled warmly. “It has been quite a while. I wasn’t sure that you would remember me, Wizard Zorander.”

This time Richard didn’t try to stop Zedd when he rushed to descend the steps. He embraced the woman in a warm and protective hug.

“Wizard Zorander—”

“Zedd, remember?”

She drew back to peer up at his face. A smile broke through the sadness that weighed so heavily in her eyes. Her smile ghosted away. “Zedd, my vision has gone dark.”

“Gone dark?” Concern tightening his features, he straightened and gripped her by the shoulders. “How long ago?”

A terrible anguish flooded back into her blue eyes. “Nearly two years.”

“Two years . . .” Zedd said, his voice trailing off in dismay.

“I remember you, now.” Richard said as he moved down the steps. “Kahlan told me about you.”

Jebra cast Richard a puzzled frown. “Who?”

“The phantom he chases,” Shota said, her unwavering gaze fixed on him as if daring him to argue.

“The woman he seeks is no phantom,” Nicci said, drawing Shota’s attention. “Thanks in part to the pricey and rather equivocal suggestions you offered, we have discovered the truth of what Richard has been telling us all along. Apparently you are still in the dark about it.”

Nicci’s icy look reminded Richard that she had once been known as Death’s Mistress. The cold authority in her voice matched the look. There were few women in the world as widely feared as Nicci had once been—except perhaps for Shota. Nicci’s demeanor indicated that she was clearly a woman still to be feared.

Shota, unfazed, deliberately took in the length of Nicci’s pink nightdress. Richard expected a smirk. Instead, a hot look flashed in Shota’s eyes.

“You have been sleeping in his bed.” She sounded almost surprised by her own words, as if the information had come to mind unexpectedly.

Nicci shrugged with satisfaction at Shota’s ire. “So I have.”

The slightest smile in turn curled the corners of Shota’s mouth. “But you have not succeeded in bedding him yet.” Her smile widened. “Have you tried, my dear? Or do you fear the sting of rejection?”

“I don’t know, why don’t you tell me how it felt, then I’ll decide.”

Richard gently pulled Nicci back from the edge of the step before the two woman did something stupid—like try to scratch out each other’s eyes. Or reduce each other to ashes.

“You said you were here for a reason, Shota—this had better not be it.”

Shota heaved a soft sigh. “I found your friend Chase. He was gravely injured.”

“So you said. How was he injured?”

Shota’s gaze didn’t shrink from his. “He was hurt by a sword you would be quite familiar with.”

Richard blinked in astonishment. “Chase was hurt by the Sword of Truth? Samuel attacked Chase?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Zedd shook a bony finger at Shota. “This is your doing!”

“Nonsense.” Shota, too, lifted a finger as Zedd stepped closer, but in warning rather than accusation. The gesture, and her words, kept Zedd from taking another step. “I need no sword to accomplish harm.” She arched an eyebrow. “Like to see, wizard?”

“Stop it!” Richard descended the steps two at a time and put himself between Shota and his grandfather. He turned a glare of his own on Shota. “What’s going on?”

She sighed unhappily. “I’m afraid that I don’t entirely know.”

“You gave Samuel my sword.” Richard tried to keep the heat out of his voice, to keep from letting his anger show, but he feared that it wasn’t working very well. “I warned you about his nature. Despite my warning, you insisted that he have it. I want to know what he is up to. Where is Chase? How badly is he hurt? And where is Rachel?”

Shota’s brow twitched. “Rachel?”

“The girl with him—the girl he adopted. The two of them were on their way back to Westland. Chase was going to bring his family back to the Keep. You mean to say that the girl wasn’t there, with him?”

“I found him gravely injured.” For the first time, Shota looked disconcerted. “There was no girl with him.”

As he watched Rikka take the reins to the two horses and pull them toward the paddock, Richard tried to imagine what was going on, why Rachel hadn’t stayed with Chase. He worried about the possible reasons, worried for what might have happened to Rachel. Knowing how resourceful and devoted she was, Richard wondered if she had gone for help and was now wandering around all by herself.

Another thought struck him. “And how was it that you just happened to come across Chase?”

Shota wet her lips. She looked reluctant to say something obviously distasteful to her, but finally she did. “I was hunting Samuel.”

Surprised, Richard glanced at Nicci. Her expression showed no reaction and her features appeared so absolutely devoid of emotion that for an instant it reminded Richard of a similar look he had from time to time seen on Kahlan. A Confessor’s face, she had called it. Confessors would occasionally shed all emotion in order to do the terrible things that were at times necessary.

“How is Chase?” Richard asked, considerably quieter. He wanted to know why Shota was hunting Samuel, but at the moment there were more important worries weighing on his mind. “Is he going to be all right?”

“I believe so,” Shota said. “He’d been run through with a sword—”

“With my sword.”

Shota didn’t argue the distinction. “I’m not a healer, but I do have certain abilities and I was able to at least reverse his journey toward death. I found some people who could care for him and help him recover. I believe he is safe for the time being. It will be a while before he is on his feet again.”

“And why didn’t Samuel kill him?” Cara asked from the top step.

“He stabbed Tovi the same way,” Nicci said. “He didn’t kill her, either.”

“Samuel is certainly capable of murder,” Richard pointed out.

Shota clasped her hands before herself. “Samuel apparently couldn’t muster the courage to kill with the sword. He has done so in the past—when the sword was his before—and so he knows the pain it causes when it is used to kill.” She arched an eyebrow at Richard. “I’m sure you know well what I’m talking about.”

“It’s a weapon that does not belong in the wrong hands,” Richard said.

Shota ignored Richard’s gibe and went on. “His is the way of a coward. A coward will often leave the person to die on their own, away from his sight.”

“They suffer all the more that way,” Zedd pointed out. “It’s more cruel. Perhaps that was his reason.”

The witch woman shook her head. “Samuel is a coward and an opportunist; his goal is not cruelty but rather is entirely self-centered. Cowards don’t necessarily think things out. They act on whim. They want what they want when they want it.

“Samuel will rarely bother to consider the consequences of his actions; he simply snatches something when he sees an opportunity, when he sees something he desires. He shrinks from the pain it would cause him to kill with the sword and so he fails to complete the killing he initiated on impulse. If the person he injures suffers an agonizing and prolonged end, it doesn’t matter to Samuel because he isn’t around to witness it. Out of sight, out of mind. That was what he did to Chase.”

“And you gave him the sword,” Richard said, unable to disguise his anger. “You knew what he was like and you still made it possible for him to do this.”

Shota regarded him a moment before answering. “That’s not the way it was, Richard. I gave him the sword because I thought it would make him content. I believed that he would be satisfied to have it back in his possession. I thought it would mellow his lingering resentment at having the sword so abruptly taken from him.”

Shota cast a brief but murderous look at Zedd.

“So, you didn’t consider the consequences of your actions,” Richard said. “You simply wanted what you wanted when you wanted it.”

Shota’s gaze slid back to Richard. “After all this time, and everything that has happened, you are still as flippant as ever?”

Richard wasn’t in a mood to apologize.

“I’m afraid that there is more to this,” Shota said, somewhat less heatedly, “more than I realized at the time.”

Zedd rubbed his chin as he considered the situation. “Samuel must have stabbed Chase and then kidnapped Rachel.”

Richard was surprised by Zedd’s suggestion; he hadn’t thought of that. He had assumed that Rachel had gone to find help.

He turned a frown on Shota. “Why would Samuel do such a thing?”

“I’m afraid that I don’t have any idea.” Shota looked up at Nicci, still standing at the top of the granite steps. “Who is this woman you say he stabbed? This Tovi?”

“She was a Sister of the Dark. And it is no idle accusation. Tovi didn’t know the person who stabbed her, didn’t know who Samuel was, but she certainly knew the Sword of Truth; she was once one of Richard’s teachers back at the Palace of the Prophets. Just before she died she told me how she and three other Sisters of the Dark had ignited a Chainfire spell around Kahlan to make everyone forget her. They then used Kahlan to steal the boxes of Orden from the People’s Palace.”

Shota’s brow creased. She looked truly perplexed.

“The boxes of Orden are in play,” Richard added.

Shota flicked a hand dismissively as she stared off in thought. “That much I have come to know. But I did not know how it came to be.”

Richard wondered how much more of the story she knew, but he told it anyway. “Tovi was taking one of the boxes of Orden away from the People’s Palace, in D’Hara, when Samuel jumped her, ran her through with the sword, and then stole the box she was carrying.”

Shota again looked surprised, but the look was quickly banished by quiet fury as she silently considered what she’d been told.

“I’ve known Chase my whole life,” Richard said. “While anyone can make a mistake, I’ve never known him to be caught off guard by someone lying in wait. I can’t imagine that Sisters of the Dark are much easier to ambush. Gifted people of their level of talent and ability have a sense of people being around them.”

Shota looked up at him. “Your point?”

“Samuel was somehow able to surprise a Sister of the Dark, and a boundary warden.” Richard folded his arms across his chest. “What’s more, every time Samuel tries to accomplish something evil you always act all surprised and disavow any knowledge of what he was up to. What’s your part in all this, Shota?”

“None. I had no idea of what he was up to.”

“Unlike you to be so ignorant.”

Her cheeks mantled. “You don’t know the half of it.” She finally turned away from him and headed for the steps. “I told you, we have much to talk about.”

Richard caught her arm, turning her back. “Did you have anything to do with Samuel being able to sneak up on Chase or surprise Tovi and steal that box? Other than providing him with the weapon to accomplish the deed and no doubt telling him all about the power the boxes of Orden contain, I mean.”

She searched his eyes for a time. “Do you wish to kill me, Richard?”

“Kill you? Shota, I’ve been the best friend you’ve ever had.”

“Then you will put your anger aside and listen to what we have come to tell you.” She pulled away from the grip on her arm and again started for the steps. “Let’s get inside and out of this foul weather.”

Richard glanced to the blue sky. “The weather is beautiful,” he said as he watched her ascend the steps.

At the top she halted to share a brief glare with Nicci before turning to look down at Richard. It was the kind of haunting, timeless, troubling look that he imagined only a witch woman could conjure.

“Not in my world,” she said in a near whisper. “In my world it’s raining.”