Phantom: Chainfire Trilogy Part 2

Chapter 19

Richard glanced at Cara and Nicci. By their expressions there was no doubt in his mind as to what they thought of the very idea of leaving him without their protection. While he knew they were convinced of the necessity of their being close at hand, he didn’t really believe that he would be any safer for their watchful guard a step away rather than a few dozen—after all, Shota had just demonstrated as much. It was obvious, though, that they didn’t share such a view.

Richard thought that maybe he could find a solution that would satisfy everyone. “They’re on the same side. What difference—”

“The difference is that it is my wish.” Shota turned to the fountain, turning her back on him, and folded her arms. “If you want to hear what I have to say, then you will honor my wishes.”

Richard didn’t know if she was merely being obstinate or not, but he did know that this was not the time to test the point. If he was going to get any help from Shota he needed to show her his trust. Likewise, Nicci and Cara were just going to have to trust him.

He gestured toward the steps. “Please, both of you, go up there with Zedd and wait.”

Nicci clearly didn’t like the idea any more than did Cara, but she recognized by the look he gave her that he needed her to do as he asked. She shot the back of Shota’s head a hot glare. “If for any reason I believe you are about to harm him, I will reduce you to a charred cinder before you have a chance to act.”

“Why would I harm him?” Shota looked back over her shoulder. “Richard is the only one who has a chance to stop the Order.”

“Exactly.”

Richard watched as Nicci and Cara wordlessly turned and ascended the steps. He had expected more of an argument from Cara, but was glad not to have it.

He shared a long look with his grandfather. Zedd seemed to be uncharacteristically quiet. For that matter, so did Nathan and Ann. All three watched him as if studying a curiosity found under a rock. Zedd gave Richard a slight nod, urging him to go on, to do what needed doing.

Richard heard the fountain behind him abruptly start to flow again. When he turned back he saw the waters shooting up into the air at the pinnacle, falling back, and streaming from the points of the bowls to dance at last in the lower pool.

Shota sat on the short marble wall surrounding the pool, her back to him as she leisurely trailed the fingers of one hand through the water. Something about her body language made the hair at the back of Richard’s neck stand on end.

When she turned to look back over her shoulder, Richard found himself looking into the face of his mother.

His muscles locked stiff.

“Richard.” Her sad smile showed how much she loved and missed him. She didn’t look to have aged a day from his last boyhood memory of her.

As Richard stood frozen in place she rose fluidly before him.

“Oh, Richard,” she said in voice as clear and liquid as the waters of the fountain, “how I’ve missed you.” She slipped one arm around his waist as she ran the fingers of her other hand tenderly through his hair. She gazed longingly into his eyes. “How I’ve missed you so very much.”

Richard immediately choked off his emotions. He knew better than to be lulled into believing it was really his mother.

The first time he’d met Shota she had appeared to him as his mother, who had died in a fire when Richard had been but a boy. At the time, Richard had wanted to take Shota’s head off with his sword for what he interpreted as a cruel ruse. Shota had read the thought and reproached him for it, saying that appearing as she had was an innocent gift of a living memory of his love for his mother and her undying love for him. Shota had said that the kindness had been at a cost to herself that he would never be able to understand or appreciate.

Richard didn’t think that this time she was giving him a gift. He didn’t know what she was doing, or why, but he decided to confront it calmly and without jumping to conclusions.

“Shota, I thank you for the beautiful memory, but why is it necessary to appear as my mother?”

Shota’s brow, in the likeness of his mother’s, wrinkled in thought. “Do you know the name . . . Baraccus?”

The hairs at the back of Richard’s neck, that had only just begun to settle, again stiffened. He gently placed his hands on her waist and with great care backed her away.

“There was a man named Baraccus who was First Wizard back in the time of the great war.” With one finger, Richard lifted the amulet hanging at his chest. “This was his.”

His mother nodded. “He is the one. He was a great war wizard.”

“That’s right.”

“Like you.”

Richard felt himself blush at the idea of his mother calling him “great,” even if it was Shota in her guise.

“He knew how to use his ability; I don’t.”

His mother nodded again, a slight smile curling the corners of her mouth just as he remembered. His mother had smiled that way when she’d been proud that he had grasped the point of a particularly difficult lesson. He wondered if Shota meant that memory to have meaning.

“Do you know what happened to him, to Baraccus?”

Richard took a settling breath. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. There was trouble with the Temple of the Winds. The Temple and its invaluable contents had been sent to the safety of another world.”

“The underworld,” she amended.

“Yes. Baraccus went there to try to fix the trouble.”

His mother smiled as she again ran her fingers through his hair. “Just as you did.”

“I suppose.”

When she finally finished fussing with his hair, her beautiful eyes turned down, her gaze settling again on his. “He went there for you.”

“For me?” Richard looked at her askance. “What are you talking about?”

“Subtractive Magic had been locked away in the Temple, in the underworld, withdrawn from the world of life so that no wizard would again be born with it.”

Richard didn’t know if she was merely repeating what he had learned or if she was giving him what she believed to be the facts. “From the accounts of the time that I’ve studied, that’s what I’ve come to suspect. As a consequence, people were no longer born with the Subtractive side of the gift.”

She watched him with a kind of calm seriousness that he found disturbing in the extreme. “But you were,” she finally said in a way that carried great meaning concealed in simplicity.

Richard blinked. “Are you saying that he did something while he was at the Temple of the Winds so that someone would again be born with Subtractive Magic?”

“By ‘someone,’ I presume that you mean . . . you?” She arched an eyebrow as if to underscore the sobriety of the question.

“What are you suggesting?”

“None has been born with Subtractive Magic and more, born a war wizard, since then, since the Temple was sent from this world.”

“Look, I don’t know for sure if that’s true but even if it is that doesn’t mean—”

“Do you know what war wizard Baraccus did upon his return from the Temple of the Winds?”

Richard was taken aback by the question, wondering what relevance it could have. “Well, yes. When he returned from the Temple of the Winds . . . he committed suicide.” Richard gestured weakly to the vast complex above them. “He threw himself off the side of the Wizard’s Keep, off the outer wall overlooking the valley and the city of Aydindril below.”

His mother nodded sorrowfully. “Overlooking the place where the Confessors’ Palace would eventually be built.”

“I suppose so.”

“But first, before he threw himself off that wall, he left something for you.”

Richard stared down at her, not completely sure that he’d heard her correctly. “For me? Are you sure?”

His mother nodded. “The account you read was not privy to everything. You see, when he returned from the Temple of the Winds, before he threw himself from the side of the Keep, he gave his wife a book and sent her with it to his library.”

“His library?”

“Baraccus had a secret library.”

Richard felt like was was tiptoeing across fresh ice. “I didn’t even know he had a wife.”

“But Richard, you know her.” His mother smiled in a way that made the already stiff hair at the back of his neck stand out even more.

Richard could hardly breathe. “I know her? How is that possible?”

“Well,” his mother said with a one-shouldered shrug, “you know of her. Do you know the wizard who created the first Confessor?”

“Yes,” Richard said, confused by her change of subject. “His name was Merritt. The first Confessor was a woman named Magda Searus. There is a painting of them across the ceiling down in the Confessors’ Palace.”

His mother nodded in a way that made his stomach knot. “That’s the woman.”

“What woman?”

“Baraccus’s wife.”

“No . . .” Richard said as he touched his fingers to his forehead, trying to think it through. “No, she was the wife of Merritt, the wizard who had made her into a Confessor, not Baraccus.”

“That was later,” his mother said with a dismissive gesture. “Her first husband was Baraccus.”

“Are you sure?”

She nodded firmly. “When Baraccus returned from the Temple of the Winds, Magda Searus was waiting for him, where he had asked her to wait, in the First Wizard’s enclave. For days she had waited, fearful that he would never return to her. To her great relief he finally did. He kissed her, told her of his undying love, and then, in confidence, and after securing her oath of eternal silence, he sent her with a book to his hidden, private, secret library.

“After she had gone he left his outfit—the one you now wear, including those leather-padded silver wristbands, the cape that looks as if it has been spun from gold, and that amulet—in the First Wizard’s enclave, left them for the wizard he had just insured would be born into the world of life . . . left them for you, Richard.”

“For me? Are you sure that they were really meant for me, specifically?”

“Why do you think that there as so many prophecies that speak of you, that wait for you, that name you—‘the one born true,’ ‘the pebble in the pond,’ ‘the bringer of death,’ ‘the Caharin’? Why do you think those prophecies that revolve around you came about? Why do you think that you have been able to understand some of them when no one else for centuries, for millennia, has been able to decipher them? Why do you think that you have fulfilled others?”

“But that doesn’t mean that it was explicitly meant to be me.”

With an indifferent gesture, his mother declined to either support or deny his assertion. “Who is to say what came first, the Subtractive side finally finding a child to be born in, or it finally finding the specific child it was meant to be born in. Prophecy needs a kernel to spark its growth. Something must be there to engender what will be, even if it is merely the color of your eyes that has been passed down to you. Something must make it come about. In this case, is it chance or intent?”

“I would like to think a chance series of events.”

“If it pleases you. But at this point, Richard, does it really matter? You are the one born with the ability that Baraccus released from its confinement in another world. You are the one he intended to be born, either by chance or specific intent. In the end, the only thing that matters is what is: you are the one born with that ability.”

Richard supposed that she was right; exactly how it came to be didn’t change what was.

His mother sighed as she went on with the story. “Anyway, it was only then, after he had made his preparations for what he had insured would come about, that Baraccus emerged from his enclave and leaped to his death. Those who wrote the accounts did not know that he had already been back long enough to send his wife on an urgent covert mission. She returned to discover that he was dead.”

Richard’s head spun. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He felt dizzy from the unexpected account of ancient events. He knew, though, from having been to the Temple of the Winds, that such things were possible. He had given up the knowledge that he had gained there as the price of returning to the world of life. Even though he’d lost that knowledge, he was left with a sense of how profound it had been. The one who had demanded the price of leaving behind what he had learned in exchange for his return to Kahlan had been the spirit of Darken Rahl, his real father.

“In her grief, Magda Searus volunteered herself to be the subject of a dangerous experiment that Merritt had come up with, volunteered to become a Confessor. She knew there was a good chance that she would not live through the unknown hazards of that conjuring, but in her grief, with her beloved husband, the First Wizard, dead, her world had ended. She didn’t think that there was anything for her to live for, other than finding out who was responsible for the fateful events that had resulted in her husband’s death, so she volunteered for what everyone expected might very well be a fatal experiment.

“Yet she survived. It was only much later that she began to fall in love with Merritt, and he with her. Her world came back to life with him. The accounts of that time are in spots blurred, with pieces missing or misplaced in the chronology of events, but the truth is that Merritt was her second husband.”

Richard had to sit down on the marble bench. It was almost too much to take in. The implications were staggering. He had trouble reconciling the coincidences: that he had been the first in thousands of years to be born with Subtractive Magic, that Baraccus had been the last one to go to the Temple of the Winds until Richard himself, that Baraccus had been married to a woman who became the first Confessor, that Richard had fallen in love with and married a Confessor—the Mother Confessor herself, Kahlan.

“When Magda Searus used her newborn Confessor power on Lothain, they discovered what he had done at the Temple of the Winds, what only Baraccus had known.”

Richard looked up. “What did he do?”

His mother gazed into his eyes as if she were looking into his soul. “Lothain betrayed them when he was at the Temple by seeing to it that a very specific magic that had been locked away there would at some future point be released into the world of life. Emperor Jagang was born with the power that Lothain allowed to seep out of the safety of its confinement in another world. That magic was the power of a dream walker.”

“But why would Lothain, the head prosecutor, do such a thing? After all, he had seen to it that the Temple team was executed for the damage they had done.”

“Lothain had probably come to believe, as did the enemy in the Old World, that magic should be eliminated from the race of man. I guess his zealotry found a new fixation: he imagined himself as savior of mankind. To that end he insured the return of a dream walker to the world of life, to purge the world of magic.

“For some reason, Baraccus was unable to seal the breach created by Lothain, unable to undo the treason. He did the next best thing. He saw to it that there would be a balance, a counter, to the damage done, someone to fight against those forces bent on destroying those with the gift, someone with the required ability.

“That would be you, Richard. Baraccus saw to it that you would be born to counter what had been done by Lothain. That is why you, Richard Rahl, are the only one who can stop the Order.”

Richard thought he might be sick. It all made him feel as if he were but a cosmic pawn being used for a hidden purposes, a dupe doing nothing more than playing out the plan for his life contrived by others, performing his predetermined part in a battle across the sweep of millennia.

As if reading his mind, Shota, still looking and sounding for all the world like his mother, laid a compassionate hand on his shoulder. “Baraccus saw to it that there was a balance to counter this damage. He did not preordain how that balance would function or how it would act. He did not take your free will out of the equation, Richard.”

“You think not? It seems to me that I’m merely the final piece of this game being put into play at long last. I don’t see my free will, my own life, my choice, in any of it. It would seem others have determined my path.”

“I don’t think that is true, Richard. You might say that what they have done is not unlike training a soldier to fight. That training creates the possibility of accomplishing the goal of winning the battle should a battle come to pass. It doesn’t mean that when the battle does comes the soldier won’t run away, that he will instead stand and fight, or even that if he does fight to the best of his ability and training that he will win. Baraccus saw to it that you have the potential, Richard, the armor, the weapons, the ability, to fight for your own life and your own world should the need arise, nothing more. He was just giving you a helping hand.”

A helping hand sent across the gulf of time. Richard felt drained and confused. He almost felt as if he no longer knew himself, knew who he really was, or how much of his own life was of his own making.

It felt to him as if Baraccus had suddenly materialized out of the dust of ancient bones, a phantom come to haunt Richard’s life.