Phantom: Chainfire Trilogy Part 2

Chapter 3

Richard stood suddenly. The legs of the heavy wooden chair he’d been sitting in chattered as they slid back across the rough stone floor. His fingertips still rested on the edge of the table where the book he’d been reading lay open, waiting, before the silver lantern.

There was something wrong with the air.

Not with the way it smelled, or with the temperature, or with the humidity, although it was a warm and sticky night. It was the air itself. Something felt wrong about the air.

Richard couldn’t imagine why he would suddenly be struck with such a thought. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what it was that could be the cause of such an odd notion. There were no windows in the small reading room, so he didn’t know what it was like outside—if it was clear, or windy, or stormy. He knew only that it was deep in the night.

Cara, not far away behind him, stood up from the thickly padded brown leather chair where she, too, had been reading. She waited, but said nothing.

Richard had asked her to read several historical volumes he’d found. Whatever she could find out about the ancient times when the Chainfire book had been written might prove helpful. She hadn’t complained about the task. Cara rarely complained about anything as long as it didn’t in any way prevent her from protecting him. Since she was able to stay right there in the room with him, she’d had no objections to reading the books he’d given her. One of the other Mord-Sith, Berdine, could read High D’Haran and had in the past been very helpful with things written in the ancient language often found in rare books, but Berdine was far away at the People’s Palace. That still left uncountable volumes written in their own language for Cara to review.

Cara watched him as he peered around at the paneled walls, his gaze passing methodically over the ornamental oddities on the shelves: the lacquered boxes with inlaid silver designs, the small figures of dancers carved from bone, the smooth stones lying in velvet-lined boxes, and the decorative glass vases.

“Lord Rahl,” she finally asked, “is something wrong?”

Richard glanced back over his shoulder. “Yes. There’s something wrong with the air.”

He realized only after seeing the tense concern in her expression that it must have sounded absurd saying that there was something wrong with the air.

To Cara, though, no matter how absurd it might have sounded, all that really mattered was that he thought there was some kind of trouble, and trouble meant a potential threat. Her leather outfit creaked as she spun her Agiel up into her fist. Weapon at the ready, she peered around the little room, searching the shadows as if a ghost might pop out of the woodwork.

Her brow drew tighter. “The beast, do you think?”

Richard hadn’t considered that possibility. The beast that Jagang had ordered his captured Sisters of the Dark to conjure and send after Richard was always a potential threat. There had been several times in the past when it had seemed to appear out of the very air itself.

Try as he might, Richard couldn’t tell precisely what it was that felt wrong to him. Although he couldn’t put his finger on the source of the sensation, it seemed like maybe it was something he should remember, something he should know, something he should recognize. He couldn’t decide if such a feeling was real or merely his imagination.

He shook his head. “No . . . I don’t think it’s the beast. Not wrong in that way.”

“Lord Rahl, on top of everything else, you’ve been up most of the night reading. Perhaps it’s just that you’re exhausted.”

There were times when he did wake with a start just as he began to doze off, foggy and disoriented from the gathering descent into the dark grasp of nightmares that he never remembered when he woke. But this impression was different; it was not something borne out of the dullness of dozing off to sleep. Besides, despite his fatigue, he hadn’t been about to fall asleep; he was too anxious to sleep.

It had been only the day before that he had finally convinced the others that Kahlan was real, that she existed, and that she wasn’t a figment of his imagination or a delusion caused by an injury. At long last they now knew that Kahlan was not some crazy dream he was having. Now that he at last had some help, his sense of urgency to find her drove him on and kept him wide awake. He couldn’t bear to take the time to stop and rest—not now that he had some pieces of the puzzle.

Back near the People’s Palace, questioning Tovi just before she died, Nicci had learned the terrible details of how those four women—Sisters Ulicia, Cecilia, Armina, and Tovi—had invoked a Chainfire event. When they unleashed powers that had for thousands of years been secreted away in an ancient book, everyone’s memory of Kahlan—except Richard’s—had in an instant been wiped away. Somehow, his sword had protected his mind. While he had his memory of Kahlan, his sword had later been forfeited in the effort to find her.

The theory of a Chainfire event had originated with wizards in ancient times. They had been searching for a method that would allow them to slip unseen, ignored, and forgotten among an enemy. They postulated that there was a method to alter people’s memory with Subtractive power in a way that all the resulting disconnected parts of a person’s recollection would spontaneously reconstruct and connect themselves to one another, with the direct consequence being the creation of erroneous memory to fill the voids that had been created when the subject of the conjuring was wiped from people’s minds.

The wizards who had come up with the theoretical process had, in the end, come to believe that unleashing such an event might very well engender a cascade of events that couldn’t be predicted or controlled. They speculated that, much like a wildfire, it would continue to burn through links with other people whose memory had not initially been altered. In the end, they had realized that, with such incalculable, sweeping, and calamitous consequences, a Chainfire event had the very real potential to unravel the world of life itself, so they had never dared even to test it.

Those four Sisters of the Dark had—on Kahlan. They didn’t care if they unraveled the world of life. In fact, that was their ultimate goal.

Richard had no time to sleep. Now that he had finally convinced Nicci, Zedd, Cara, Nathan, and Ann that he wasn’t crazy and that Kahlan existed in reality if no longer in their memories, they were committed to helping him.

He desperately needed that help. He had to find Kahlan. She was his life. She completed him. She was everything to him. Her unique intelligence had captivated him from the first moment he met her. The memory of her beautiful green eyes, her smile, her touch, haunted him. Every waking moment was a living nightmare that there was something more he should be doing.

While no one else could remember Kahlan, it seemed that Richard could think of nothing else. It often felt to him as if he were her only connection to the world and if he were to stop remembering her, stop thinking about her, she would finally, once and for all . . . truly cease to exist.

But he realized that if he was to accomplish anything, if he was to ever find Kahlan, he sometimes had to force his thoughts of her aside in order to concentrate on the matters at hand.

He turned to Cara. “You don’t feel anything odd?”

She arched an eyebrow. “We’re in the Wizard’s Keep, Lord Rahl—who wouldn’t feel odd? This place makes my skin crawl.”

“Any worse than usual?”

She heaved a sigh as she ran her hand down the long, single blond braid lying over the front of her shoulder.

“No.”

Richard snatched up a lantern. “Come on.”

He swept out of the small room and into a long hall layered with thick carpets, as if there were too many carpets on hand and the corridor had been the only place that could be found to put them. They were mostly classic designs woven in subdued colors, but a few peeking out from underneath were composed of bright yellows and oranges.

The carpets muted his boots as he marched past double doors to each side opened into dark rooms. Cara, with her long legs, had no difficulty keeping up with him. Richard knew that a number of the rooms were libraries, while others were elaborately decorated rooms seeming to serve no purpose other than to lead to other rooms, which led to other rooms, some simple and some ornate, all a part of the inscrutable and complex maze that was the Keep.

At an intersection Richard took a right, down a hall with walls thickly plastered in spiral designs that had mellowed over the centuries to a warm golden brown. When they reached a stairway Richard hooked his hand on the polished white marble newel post and took to the stairs heading down. Glancing up the stairwell, he could see it climb around the square shaft high up into darkness, into the distant upper reaches of the Keep.

“Where are we going?” Cara asked.

Richard was a bit startled by the question. “I don’t know.”

Cara shot him a dark look. “You just thought we would go search through a place with thousands upon thousands of rooms, a place as big as a mountain, a place built partly into a mountain, until you happen across something?”

“There’s something wrong with the air. I’m just following that perception of it.”

“You’re following air,” Cara said in a flat, mocking tone. Her suspicion flared again. “You aren’t trying to use magic, are you?”

“Cara, you know as well as anyone that I don’t know how to use my gift. I couldn’t call upon magic if I wanted to.”

And he most certainly didn’t want to.

If he were to call upon his gift the beast would be better able to find him. Cara, ever protective, was worried that he would carelessly do something to call the beast that had been conjured at the orders of Emperor Jagang.

Richard turned his attention back to the problem at hand and tried to discern what it was about the air that seemed so strange to him. He put his mind to analyzing precisely what it was that he sensed. He thought that it felt something like the air during a thunderstorm. It had that edgy, spooky quality.

At the bottom, several flights down the white marble stairs, they emerged in a simple corridor made of stone blocks. They followed the corridor straight through several intersections and came to a halt as Richard stared down a dark spiral of stone steps with an iron railing. Cara followed as he finally started down. At the bottom they passed through a short passage with a barrel ceiling of oak planks before coming out into a room that was the center of a hub of halls. The round room had speckled, gray granite pillars all around the outside holding gilded lintels above each passage that went off into darkness.

Richard held out the lantern, squinting as he tried to see into the dark passages. He didn’t recognize the round room, but he did recognize that they were in a part of the Keep that was somehow different—different in a way that made him understand what Cara meant when she said the place made her skin crawl. One of the corridors, unlike the others, led at a rather steep angle down a long ramp, apparently toward some of the deeper areas of the Keep. He wondered why there would be a ramp, rather than yet more of the endless variety of stairs.

“This way,” he told Cara as he led her down the ramp and into the darkness.

The ramp seemed endless in its descent. Finally, though, it emptied into a grand hall that, while not more than a dozen feet wide, had to be seventy feet high. Richard felt like an ant at the bottom of a long, narrow slit deep in the ground. To the left side rose a natural rock wall that had been chiseled right out of the mountain itself while tightly fit, enormous stone blocks formed the wall on the right. They passed a series of rooms in the block wall as they made their way onward in what seemed an endless split through the mountain. As they moved steadily ahead, the lanternlight was not strong enough to reveal any end in sight.

Richard suddenly realized what it was that he sensed. The air felt the way it occasionally felt in the immediate area around certain people he knew who were powerful with the gift. He remembered the way the air itself seemed to crackle around his former teachers, Sisters Cecilia, Armina, Merissa, and especially Nicci. He remembered times when it seemed as if the air around Nicci might ignite, so great was the singular power radiating from her. But that sensation had always been in close proximity to the individual; it had never been a pervasive phenomenon.

Even before he saw the light coming from one of the rooms in the distance, he felt the air coming from the place. He half expected to see the air in the entire hallway beginning to sparkle.

Immense, brass-clad doors stood open, leading into what appeared to be a dimly lit library. He knew that this was the place he was looking for.

Walking through those doors with elaborate, engraved symbols covering them, Richard froze in midstride and stared in astonishment.

A flickering flash of lightning came in through a dozen, round-topped windows and illuminated row upon row of shelves all around the cavernous room. The windows, rising two stories, ran the entire length of the far wall. Two-story polished mahogany columns rose up between them, hung with heavy dark green velvet draperies. Gold fringe lined the edges of the drapes, and swagged tassels held them back from the windows. The small squares of glass that made up the soaring windows were not clear, but thick and composed of numerous rings, as if the glass had been overly thick when poured. When the lightning flashed it made the glass seem to light as well. Lanterns with reflectors all around the room lent the place a soft warm glow and reflected off the polished tabletops here and there between the confused disarray of books lying open everywhere.

The shelves were not what Richard had at first expected. There were indeed books on a number of them, but other shelves held clutters of objects—everything from neatly folded sparkling cloth, to iron spirals, to green glass flasks, to complex objects made of wooden rods, to stacks of vellum scrolls, to ancient bones and long, curved fangs that Richard didn’t recognize and couldn’t begin to guess at.

When the lightning flashed again, the shadows of the window mullions running over everything in the room, running across tables, chairs, columns, bookcases, and desks, made it appear as if the whole place were cracking apart.

“Zedd—what in the world are you doing?”

“Lord Rahl,” Cara said in a low voice from right over his shoulder, “I think your grandfather must be crazy.”

Zedd turned to peer briefly at Richard and Cara standing back in the doorway. The old man’s wavy white hair, standing out in every direction, looked a pale shade of orange in the lamplight, but white as snow whenever the lightning flashed.

“We’re a bit busy right now, my boy.”

In the center of the room, Nicci floated just above one of the massive tables. Richard blinked, trying to be sure that he really saw what he thought he saw. Nicci’s feet were clear of the table by a hand’s width. She stood poised dead-still in midair.

As impossible and startling as such a sight was, that wasn’t the worst of it. On the top of the table was drawn a magical design known as a Grace.

It appeared to have been drawn with blood.

Like a curtain encircling Nicci, unmoving lines also hung suspended in the air above the Grace. Richard had seen a number of gifted people draw spell-forms before, so he was pretty sure that that was what he was seeing, but he had never seen anything approaching this midair maze.

Consummately complex, composed of lines of glowing green light, it hung in the air like a three-dimensional spell-form.

In the center of that intricate geometric framework Nicci floated as still as a statue. Her exquisite features seemed frozen to stone. One hand was lifted out a ways. The fingers of her other hand, at her side, were spread.

Her feet weren’t level, as if standing, but dangled as if she were in mid-jump. Her fall of blond hair was lifted out a little, as if in the midst of that jump up into the air her hair had risen away from her head, just before she was about to come back down . . . and at that precise instant she had been turned to stone.

She didn’t look alive.