Phantom: Chainfire Trilogy Part 2

Chapter 22

Nicci spotted Richard far off down the long rampart, standing at the crenellated outer wall not far from the base of a soaring tower, gazing out over the deserted city far below. Twilight had muted the colors of the dying day, turning the distant rolling summer-green fields to gray. Cara stood not far from his side, silent but watchful.

Nicci knew Richard well enough that she could easily read the heightened tension in his body. She knew Cara well enough to see the reflection of that stress lurking in her intently calm appearance. Nicci pressed a fist over the knot of anxiety tightening in her middle.

Overhead the slate gray clouds roiled, spitting an occasional fat drop of rain. Distant thunder rumbled through the mountain passes, promising a tempestuous night to come. Despite the dark, seething clouds, the air was strangely still. The heat of the day had abruptly vanished, as if fleeing before the storm that was about to break.

As she came to a stop, Nicci rested a hand on the crenellated wall and took a deep breath of the humid air.

“Rikka said that you needed to see me. She said it was urgent.”

Richard looked the match for the brewing storm. “I have to leave. At once.”

Nicci had somehow expected just that. She glanced past Richard, to Cara, but the Mord-Sith showed no reaction. Richard had been brooding for days. He’d been quietly distant as he considered everything he had learned from Jebra and Shota. Zedd had advised Nicci to leave him to his deliberation. Nicci had not needed such advise; she probably knew his darker moods better than anyone.

“I’m going with you,” she said, making it clear that she was leaving no room for discussion.

He nodded absently. “It will be good to have you with me. Especially for this.”

Nicci was relieved not to have him argue, but the knot of anxiety tightened over the last part of what he’d said. There was a palpable sense of danger in the air. At that moment her concern was to insure that—whatever he was about to do—he was as well protected as she could manage.

“And Cara is going too.”

Still, he gazed off into the distance. “Of course.”

She realized that he was looking south. “Now that Tom and Friedrich are back, Tom will insist on coming along as well. His talents will be valuable.”

Tom was a member of an elite corps of protectors to the Lord Rahl. Despite his amiable appearance, Tom was more than formidable in his duty. Men like him were not advanced to such trusted positions of protection to the Lord Rahl because they had nice smiles. Like other D’Haran protectors to the Lord Rahl, Tom had come to feel passionately about his duty to protect Richard.

“He can’t come with us,” Richard said. “We’re going in the sliph. Only Cara, you, and me are able to travel in the sliph.”

Nicci swallowed at the thought of such a journey. “And where are we going, Richard?”

At long last, his gray eyes turned to her. He gazed into her eyes with that way he had about him, as if he was looking into her soul.

“I’ve figured it out,” he said.

“You’ve figured what out?”

“What I must do.”

Nicci could feel her fingers tingling with a shapeless dread. The look of terrible resolve in his gray eyes made her knees weak.

“And what is that you must do, Richard?”

He puzzled a moment. “Did I ever tell you thanks for stopping Shota when you did, when she was touching me?”

Nicci was not disconcerted by Richard’s abrupt change of topic. She had learned that it was Richard’s way. It was especially characteristic when he was greatly troubled. The more agitated he was, it seemed that there were all the more things going on in his head at the same time, as if his thoughts were in a whirlwind of inner activity that pulled everything up into that tumultuous rush of deliberation.

“You told me, Richard.”

About a hundred times.

He nodded slightly. “Well, thanks.”

His voice had turned absent, distant, as he descended back into the dark depths of some inner equation upon which the future hinged. “She was doing something painful to you, wasn’t she.”

It was not a question, but a statement that Nicci had come to believe more and more in the days following Shota’s visit. Nicci didn’t know what Shota had done, but she wished she had not allowed even that brief touch. There was no telling how much the witch woman could have conveyed in that touch, even as abbreviated as it had been. Lightning, after all, was brief as well. Richard had never said what Shota had shown him, but it was ground that Nicci, for some reason, feared to tread upon.

Richard heaved a sigh. “Yes, she was. She was showing me the truth. That truth is in part how I’ve come to understand at last what it is I must do. As much as I dread it . . .”

When he drifted into silence, Nicci patiently prodded him. “So, what have you figured out you must do?”

Richard’s fingers tightened on the stone as he looked out again over the darkening countryside far below, and then to the somber jumble of mountains rising up beyond.

“I was right in the beginning.” His gaze turned to Cara. “Right when I took you and Kahlan away to the mountains far back in Westland.”

Cara frowned. “I remember you saying that we were going back into those deserted mountains because you had come to understand that we could not win the war by fighting the army of the Imperial Order. You said that you could not lead them in such a battle that they were sure to lose.”

Richard nodded. “And I was right. I know that now. We can’t win against their army. Shota helped me to see that. She may have been trying to convince me that I must fight that battle, but in part because of all that she and Jebra showed me, I know now that we can’t win it.

“Now, I know what I must do.”

“And what would that be?” Nicci pressed.

Richard finally pushed away from the stone merlon. “We have to go. I don’t have time to lay it all out right now.”

Nicci started after him. “I threw some things together. They’re ready. Richard, why can’t you tell me what you’ve decided?”

“I will,” he said, “later.”

“You’re wasting your time,” Cara said under her breath to Nicci as she fell in with her behind Richard. “I’ve already paddled up that creek until I got too tired to paddle anymore.”

Richard, hearing Cara’s remark, took Nicci by the arm and pulled her forward. “I’m not finished thinking it all through. I need to finish putting it all together. I’ll explain it when we get there, explain it to everyone—but right now we don’t have the time. All right?”

“Get where?” Nicci asked.

“To the D’Haran army. Jagang’s main force will soon be heading up into D’Hara. I have to tell our army that we have no chance to win the battle that is coming for them.”

“That ought to cheer their day,” Cara said. “Nothing makes a soldier feel better on the eve of battle than their leader telling them that they are about to lose the battle and die.”

“You want me to tell them a lie, instead?” he asked.

Cara’s only answer was a scowl.

At the end of the rampart Richard pulled open the heavy oak door at the base of the tower. Inside was a room where some of the lamps were already lit. Nicci could hear people rushing up the stone steps to the side.

“Richard!” It was Zedd following behind the big, blond-headed D’Haran, Tom.

Richard halted, waiting for his grandfather to reach the top of the steps and make it into the simple stone room. Zedd rushed closer, gulping air.

“Richard! What’s going on? Rikka came by in a rush saying that you were leaving.”

Richard nodded. “I wanted you to know that I’ve got to go, but I won’t be gone for long. I’ll be back in a few days. Hopefully, in the meantime you and Nathan and Ann can find out something in the books that will be helpful with the Chainfire spell. Maybe you can even work on coming up with some solution to the contamination from the chimes.”

Zedd waved irritably at the suggestion. “While we’re at it, would you like me to cure the sky of that thunderstorm?”

“Zedd, don’t be angry with me, please. I have to go.”

“All right, but where are you going—and why?”

“I’m ready, Lord Rahl,” Tom said as he hurried into the room.

“I’m sorry,” Richard told him, “but you can’t go. We’re going to need to go in the sliph.”

Zedd threw his arms up in the air. “The sliph! You do your best to convince me that magic is failing, and now you intend to put your life in the hands of a creature of magic? Are you losing your mind, Richard? What’s going on?”

“I’m aware of the danger, but I must take the risk.” Richard gestured. “You know that starburst symbol on the door of the First Wizard’s enclave, up there?” When Zedd nodded, Richard tapped the top of his silver wristband. “It’s the same as this one here.”

“What about it?” Zedd asked.

“Remember, I told you that it has meaning? It’s an admonition not to allow your vision to lock on any one thing. It’s a warning to look everywhere at once, to see nothing to the exclusion of everything else. It means you mustn’t allow the enemy to draw your attention and make you focus on what he wishes you to see. If you do, you will be blind to everything else.

“That’s what I’ve been doing. Jagang has been forcing me—forcing everyone—to focus on one thing. Like a fool, I’ve been doing just that.”

“His army,” Nicci guessed. “That’s what you mean? That we’ve all been focusing on his invasion force?”

“That’s right. This starburst means that you must open to all there is, never settling on just one thing, even when cutting your enemy. It means that instead of focusing on one thing, you must open your mind to everything, even when it is necessary to keep that one central threat at the center of your attention.”

Zedd cocked his head. “Richard, you’ve got to focus on the threat that’s about to kill you. His army is millions of men strong. They’re coming to crush all opposition and enslave us all.”

“I know. That’s why we can’t fight them; we will lose.”

Zedd’s face went crimson. “So you propose to allow their army to roll into the New World unopposed? Your plan is to let Jagang’s army freely overrun cities and allow to happen all the things Jebra told us had happened in Ebinissia? You want to so easily allow all those people to be slaughtered or enslaved?”

“Think of the solution,” Richard reminded his grandfather, “not the problem.”

“Not very comforting advice to those having their throats cut.”

Richard froze and stared at his grandfather, seemingly struck silent by Zedd’s words.

“Look,” Richard finally said, running his fingers back through his hair, “I don’t have time for this right now. I’ll talk to you about it when I get back. Time is of the essence. I’ve already wasted far too much of it. I only hope that we still have enough time left.”

“Enough time for what!” Zedd roared.

Nicci heard footsteps rushing up the stairwell. Jebra dashed into the room.

“What’s going on?” she asked Zedd.

Zedd waved a hand in Richard’s direction. “My grandson has decided that we must lose the war, that we must not fight Jagang’s army.”

“Lord Rahl, you can’t be serious,” she said. “You can’t seriously consider allowing those brutes . . .” Jebra’s voice trailed off as she stepped forward, peering up at Richard. She stilled in midstride. She staggered back a step.

The blood drained from her face.

Her jaw dropped open. Her jaw trembled as she tried without success to bring forth words. Her features slackened with dread.

Her blue eyes rolled back in her head as she fainted.

As she toppled back, Tom caught her in his arms and laid her gently on the granite floor. Everyone closed in around the unconscious woman.

“What happened?” Tom asked.

“I don’t know,” Zedd said as he knelt down beside the woman, pressing his fingers to her forehead. “She’s fainted, but I’m not sure why.”

Richard headed for the door that opened to the iron stairs running down the inside of the tower. “I’ll leave you to take care of her, Zedd—you’re the expert at healing. She’s in good hands. I can’t afford to waste any more time right now.”

He turned back from the doorway. “I’ll be back as soon as I can—promise. We shouldn’t be more than a few days.”

“But Richard—”

He had already started down the iron steps. “I’ll be back,” he called up at them, his voice echoing from the gloom.

Without hesitation, Cara followed after him down into the dark tower.

Nicci didn’t want to let him get too far without her, but she knew that he would have to call the sliph, so she had a few moments. As Zedd checked different spots on Jebra’s head, Nicci squatted down beside the unconscious Jebra, across from him.

Nicci felt the woman’s brow. “She’s burning up.”

Zedd looked up in a way that nearly stopped Nicci’s heart. “It’s a vision.”

“How do you know?”

“I know about seers in general and this one in particular. She’s had a powerful vision. Jebra is more sensitive than most seers. Her emotions, with a certain kind of vision, sometimes overcome her. This vision had to have been something that was so powerful it rendered her unconscious.”

“Do you think it was about Richard?”

“There’s no way to tell,” the old wizard said. “She will have to be the one to tell us.”

Zedd may not have been willing to venture a guess, but Jebra had looked up into Richard’s eyes just before she fainted. Nicci didn’t have time to be discreet. She couldn’t allow Richard to leave without her—and she knew that he would if she wasn’t there when he was ready to go—but at the same time she couldn’t leave without knowing if Jebra had had a vision about him that could reveal something important.

Nicci slipped her hand under the woman’s neck, pressing her fingers to the base of Jebra’s skull.

“What are you doing?” Zedd asked, suspiciously. “If you’re doing what I think you are, that’s not just reckless but dangerous.”

“So is ignorance,” Nicci said as she released a flow of power.

Jebra’s eyes popped open. She gasped.

“No . . .”

“There, there,” Zedd comforted, “it’s all right, my dear. We’re right here with you.”

“What did you see?” Nicci asked, getting right to the point.

Jebra’s panicked eyes turned to Nicci. She reached up and snatched the collar of Nicci’s dress.

“Don’t leave him alone!”

There was no need for Nicci to ask who Jebra was talking about. “Why? What did you see?”

“Don’t leave him alone! Don’t let him out of your sight—not for an instant!”

“Why?” Nicci asked again. “What will happen if he is left alone?”

“If you leave him alone, he will be lost to us.”

“How? What did you see?”

Jebra reached up and with both fists pulled Nicci’s face closer. “Go. Don’t let him be alone. What I saw does not matter. If he’s not alone, then it can’t happen. Do you understand? If you let him get separated from you and Cara it will not matter what I saw—it won’t matter for any of us. I can’t tell you the means of separation, only that no matter what you must not let it happen. That’s all that’s important. Go! Stay with him!”

Nicci swallowed as she nodded.

“You’d better do as she says,” Zedd told Nicci. “There’s nothing I can do in this. It’s up to you.”

He reached out and grasped her hand, not as First Wizard, but as Richard’s grandfather. “Stay with him, Nicci. Protect him. In so many ways he’s the Seeker, the Lord Rahl, the leader of the D’Haran Empire, but in other ways he’s still a woods guide at heart. He’s our Richard. Protect him, please. We’re all depending on you.”

Nicci stared at him, at an appeal that seemed unexpectedly personal, an appeal that seemed to rise above all the wider needs of protecting the freedom of the New World and reduced it all to a simple love for Richard the man. She understood in that instant that without the sincere and simple concern for Richard as an individual, none of the rest of it mattered.

As she started to rise, Jebra pulled Nicci back down. “This is not a ‘maybe’ kind of vision, a possibility. This is certain. Don’t let him be alone or he will be at their mercy.”

“Whose mercy?”

Jebra bit her lower lip as her blue eyes welled up with tears. “The dark witch.”

Nicci felt a shudder of icy dread ripple up her shoulders.

“Go,” Jebra whispered. “Please, go. Hurry. Don’t let him leave without you.”

Nicci sprang up and rushed across the room. At the doorway she paused and turned back. Her heart was pounding so hard that it made her sway on her feet.

“I swear, Zedd. He will have my protection as long as I draw breath.”

She watched as Zedd nodded, a tear running down his weathered cheek. “Hurry.”

Nicci turned and ran down the iron steps, taking them two at a time, her footfalls echoing around the enormous tower. She wondered what else Jebra saw in her vision that awaited Richard if he became separated from them, if he was left alone, but in the end Nicci decided that it didn’t really matter what that visionary fate was, it only mattered that, no matter what, Nicci not allow it to happen.

Bats fluttered in undulating clouds up through the tower, funneling out through the open windows at the top, intent on their nightly hunt, as Nicci raced down the steps. The rushing sound of thousands of webbed wings made it seem the tower was exhaling in a long, low moan. She passed iron doors on landings without pause. She sometimes had to snatch the rail to keep her footing. At the bottom she raced around the walkway that surrounded the fetid water standing at the bottom of the tower. The black water rippled as small creatures slipped into the inky sanctuary.

Nicci ran in through the doorway that had been blasted open when Richard had destroyed the great barrier that had once separated the Old World from the new. The towers that powered that barrier had stood since the great war, three thousand years before. In more recent times, Jagang and his army of the Imperial Order had been kept at bay, unable to cross that barrier. But Richard had destroyed those towers in order to be able to return to the New World after having been held at the Palace of the Prophets, and as a result the Imperial Order had been loosed on the New World. The war was not Richard’s fault, but it could not have been rekindled without that act.

Richard and Cara were standing, waiting, on the wall of the great well of the sliph, the creature that had been walled away along with the Old World for all the time that the great barrier had stood.

Behind Richard and Cara the quicksilver face of the sliph watched Nicci as she hurried into the room. “Do you wish to travel?” the sliph asked in that eerie voice that echoed around the room.

“Yes, I wish to travel,” Nicci said breathlessly as she scooped up her pack. Cara must have put it there for her. “Thanks,” she said to the Mord-Sith.

Richard held his hand out as Nicci slipped an arm through a strap and lifted the pack onto her back. “Come on.”

Nicci took his hand, letting him hoist her up onto the wall with one mighty pull. Nicci’s heart felt as if it was coming up into her throat. She had traveled before so she knew the overwhelming ecstasy of the experience, and yet she could not help being afraid to breathe in the living quicksilver of the sliph. Such a concept just went against the very idea of the breath of life.

“You will be pleased,” the sliph said as Nicci joined the others. Nicci didn’t argue.

“Let’s go,” Richard said. “I wish to travel.”

A shiny arm lifted out of the pool to surround Richard and Cara, but not Nicci.

“Wait!” Nicci said. “I must go with them.” The sliph stilled. “Listen to me, Richard. You have to take Cara and my hands. Don’t let go for anything.”

“Nicci, you’ve done this before. It will be—”

“Listen! Cara and I are trusting you, and you have to trust us. You can’t get separated from us. Not for anything. Not for so much as an instant. If that happens then you are lost to us. If that happens then whatever you have planned won’t happen.”

Richard studied her face silently for a moment. “Did Jebra have a vision of something happening?”

“Only if you get separated from us. Only if you are alone.”

“What did she see?”

“The witch woman, Six. Jebra called her ‘the dark witch.’ ”

Richard studied her face a moment. “Shota is going after Six.”

“That may be, but Six has already usurped Shota’s authority in her own territory.”

“Maybe for the moment. But I’d not want to be her when Shota catches her. Shota covered her throne with the hide of the last person who came to take her home, and he was a wizard.”

“I don’t doubt how dangerous Shota is, but we don’t know how dangerous Six is. The gift is different in different individuals. Shota could in the end turn out to be no match for Six’s ability. I do know that the Sisters of the Dark were afraid of her. Jebra had a terrible vision and says that you must not be allowed to be alone. I don’t intend to allow her vision any chance to come to pass.”

He must have read the resolve in Nicci’s face, because he nodded. “All right.” He took her hand and then took Cara’s. “Don’t let go, then, and then we won’t have to worry about it.”

Nicci squeezed his hand in agreement. She leaned past him to address Cara. “Do you understand? We can’t let him out of our sight. Not for an instant.”

Cara’s brow drew down in a dark frown. “Since when have I ever wanted to allow him out of my sight?”

“Where do you wish to travel?” the sliph asked.

Nicci glanced to Richard and Cara and realized that the question was directed to her.

“To where they are going.”

The silver face turned sly. “I cannot reveal what my other clients do when they are in me. Tell me what you wish and I will please you.”

Nicci twitched a frown at Richard.

“She never reveals anything about anyone else; it’s a kind of professional confidence. We’re going to the People’s Palace.”

“The People’s Palace,” Nicci said. “I wish to travel to the People’s Palace.”

“She’s going with Cara and me,” Richard told the sliph. “To the same place. Do you understand? She is to stay with us as we travel there.”

“Yes, Master. We will travel.” The face, looking like a highly polished statue, smiled. “You will be pleased.”

The liquid silver arm tightened around all three of them, drawing them off the wall. Nicci’s hand tightened on Richard’s.

As they plunged into the total darkness of the sliph, Nicci held her breath. She knew she had to breathe, but the very idea of breathing the silvery liquid terrified her.

Breathe.

At last she did, a desperate gasp drawing the sliph into her lungs. Colors, light, and shapes melted together all around her in a spectacular display. Nicci tightly held Richard’s hand as they glided into the silken distance. It was a glorious, lazy, floating sensation of a headlong rush at impossible speed.

She drew in another dizzying breath of the sliph’s essence. It was a glorious release from everything that haunted her, from the crushing weight on her soul. She was left with only that connection to Richard. There was nothing else. There was no one else.

It was rapture.

She never wanted it to end.