Phantom: Chainfire Trilogy Part 2

Chapter 33

Richard coughed violently.

The pain of the involuntary upheaval jolted him to consciousness. He heard himself trying unsuccessfully to groan. He had no breath with which to make a groan. With consciousness came a growing, confused panic of suffocation, as if he were somehow drowning.

He coughed again, wincing in pain as he did so. He tried to cry out in agony as he curled up into a ball on the ground, arms pressed tight across his middle, trying to prevent another fit of convulsive coughing.

“Breathe.”

Richard regarded the haunting voice that seemingly came from some netherworld place as the voice of insanity. He was doing everything he could not to breathe. He took careful, shallow, thimbleful breaths, trying to prevent another racking bout of coughing.

“Breathe.”

He didn’t know where he was and at the moment he didn’t really care. All that mattered was the feeling of suffocating. He didn’t want to breathe, despite how desperately he needed a breath. That sensation was so oppressive, so sickening, that in his mind it was not only completely debilitating, but all-powerful. Dying seemed preferable to the feeling continuing. He couldn’t endure it continuing.

Richard didn’t want to move because, with each passing moment, it was becoming easier not to breathe. It seemed that if he could just manage to keep from breathing a little longer, then over the crest of that dark hill out there somewhere ahead of him the pain and suffering would lift. He fought to lie perfectly still, hoping the spinning world would stop before he vomited. He could not imagine how much that would hurt. If he could just lie still a little longer, then it would all become easier. If he could just lie still a little longer, then it would all go away.

“Breathe.”

He ignored the distant, silken voice. His mind drifted to a time in the past when he had hurt this much. It had been when Denna had him chained and helpless, when she had him at her mercy, when she hurt him until he was delirious from being tortured.

Denna had taught him to endure pain, though. He envisioned her standing there, watching him, waiting to see if would tip over the edge into death. There had been times with her when he had reached the crest of that distant, dark hill, and started down the other side.

When that happened Denna would be right there to put her mouth over his, forcefully breathing her life into him. She had not only controlled his life, she had controlled his death. She had taken everything. Not even his own death belonged to him; it belonged to her.

She watched him now. Her silver face came close, waiting to see what he would do. He wondered if he would be granted death, or if she would again put her mouth over his and . . .

“Breathe.”

Richard puzzled at her. Denna didn’t look at all like a silver statue. “You must breathe,” the silken voice told him. “If you do not, you will die.”

Richard blinked at the beautiful face softly lit by the cold moonlight. He tried to pull a little more air into his lungs.

He squeezed his eyes shut. “Hurts,” he whispered with the entirety of that shallow breath.

“You must. It is life.”

Life. Richard didn’t know if he wanted life. He was so tired, so exhausted. Death seemed so inviting. No more struggle. No more pain. No more despair. No more loneliness. No more tears. No more agony of missing Kahlan.

Kahlan.

“Breathe.”

If he died, who would help her?

He drew a deeper breath, forcing it past the scalding agony it pulled down into his lungs. He thought of Kahlan’s smile, instead of the pain.

He drew another breath. Deeper yet.

A silver hand gently glided over the back of his shoulder, as if to comfort him in his agony of struggling to hold on to life. The face looked sadly sympathetic as it watched his struggle.

“Breathe.”

Richard nodded as he tightened his fists and gasped in the cold fire of the night air.

He coughed up thin red fluid and clots of blood that tasted metallic. He pulled in another breath, giving him the power to cough out more of the liquid burning his lungs. For a time he lay on his side, alternating between gasping in air and coughing out fluid.

When he was breathing again, if raggedly, he flopped onto his back, hoping to make the spinning stop. He closed his eyes, but that only made it worse, adding a kind of tilting, rolling movement to the spinning. His stomach roiled, on the brink of upheaval.

He opened his eyes and in the darkness stared up at the leaves above him. He saw mostly maple leaves in the canopy of tree limbs above him. Looking at leaves—talismans of the familiar—felt good. In the moonlight, he saw other kinds of trees as well. To take his mind off the pain and nausea, he made himself identify all the trees that he could make out. There were a smattering of heart-shaped linden leaves and, towering farther above, a bough or two of what looked to be white pine. There were some clusters of oak in the distance to the sides, along with spruce and balsam. Close by, though, there were mostly maples. With every breath of breeze he could hear the distinctive, soft rattle of cottonwood leaves.

Beside the pain associated with the difficulty of breathing, Richard clearly recognized that there was something wrong within himself. Something far more basic, more elemental.

It wasn’t an injury, in the conventional sense, but he knew that there was something dreadfully wrong. He tried to identify the perception, but he couldn’t pinpoint it. It was a hollow, empty, desolate feeling unrelated to the familiar emotions of his life, things like his need to find Kahlan, or what he had done with setting the D’Haran army loose on the Old World. He considered the troubling things Shota had told him, but that wasn’t it, either.

It was more a sense of a disturbing void within himself that he knew he had never felt before. That’s why he had so much trouble identifying it: it was a completely unfamiliar condition. There had been something there, some sense of himself, that he realized he had never thought about, never identified as a distinct element, a discrete part of his makeup, that was now missing.

Richard felt as if he was no longer himself.

The story Shota had told him of Baraccus and the book he had written, Secrets of a War Wizard’s Power, came to mind. Richard wondered if his inner voice was trying to suggest that such a book might help him in just such a situation. He had to admit that the problem did feel connected in some way to his gift.

Thinking about that book caused his mind to wander to what Shota had told him about his mother, that she had not died alone in that fire. Zedd was insistent that he’d looked through the charred remains of the house and he had found no other bones. How could that be? Either Zedd or Shota had to be wrong. For some reason, he could not believe that either of them were.

Somewhere deep in the back of his mind the answer ticked at him. Try as he might, though, he could not coax it out.

Richard felt a pang of loneliness for his mother, a feeling that had visited him from time to time throughout his life. He wondered what she would have to say about all that had happened to him. She’d never had a chance to see him grow up, to see him as a man. She’d only known him as a boy.

He knew his mother would love Kahlan. She would be so happy for him, so proud to have a daughter-in-law like Kahlan. She always wanted him to have a good life. There could be no better life than a life with Kahlan.

But he no longer had a life with Kahlan.

He guessed that he had life and, all things considered, that was about as much as could be expected at the moment. At least he could work toward his dreams. Dead men had no dreams.

Richard lay on his back, letting the air saturate his burning muscles, letting himself regain his senses, his composure. He was so weak he could hardly move, so he didn’t try to. Instead, as long as he was lying there recovering, he focused on everything that had happened, trying to put it all back together in his mind.

He had been traveling back to the Keep with Nicci and Cara when they had been attacked. It had been the beast. He had sensed its aura of evil. It appeared in a form different from any he had ever seen before, but it was the beast’s nature to assume different forms. The only thing he could count on to be consistent was that the beast would continue to come after him until it killed him.

He remembered fighting it. His hand went to a place on his leg where one of the tentacles had squeezed until he thought his leg would be stripped of flesh. His thigh was swollen and painful to the touch but, fortunately, not torn open. He remembered slicing through some of the creature’s arms. He remembered Nicci trying to use her power, and wishing that she would stop because it was somehow conducting right through the sliph so that some of the power she had unleashed against the beast had ripped through him. He suspected that were it not for the substance of the sliph, Nicci’s magic could have killed him. It certainly didn’t harm the beast—at least, not enough to slow it down. It, too, must have been insulated, at least to some extent, by the sliph.

He remembered Cara being pulled away from him. He remembered Nicci likewise being violently separated from him. He remembered the beast trying to rip him apart. And he remembered managing to abruptly break free.

But then something had happened that he did not understand.

While he was separated from the beast, he had been jolted by an unfamiliar, painful sensation that ripped right down into the core of his being. It had been distinctly different from the pain caused by Nicci’s power—or that of any magic he had ever felt.

Magic.

Once he had formed the thought, he realized that he was right; it had been magic of some sort.

Even if it was the touch of a kind of conjuring completely unlike anything he had ever felt, he recognized that it had been the touch of magic. Even though he’d been free of the beast—he hadn’t even known where the beast was at that particular moment—that was when everything had suddenly changed.

As he’d gasped in pain from the abrupt assault of the strange charge of power, the sliph’s essence again filled his lungs. That breath had brought a shock of panic.

Richard remembered a similar feeling when he had been young. He’d been with several other boys, diving down to the bottom of a pond in a contest to retrieve pebbles. Their afternoon of swimming and diving from branches overhanging the small but deep pond had churned up the muddy bottom. Under the murky water, while diving for pebbles, Richard lost his sense of direction. He was out of air when he bumped his head on a thick branch. Being disoriented, he thought that bumping into the low branch meant that he’d broken the surface and run into one of the low-lying limbs hanging out over the edge of the pond. He hadn’t. It had been a submerged branch. Before realizing what he had really done, he breathed in some of the muddy water.

He’d been close to the surface, to the shore, and to his friends. It had been a terrifying experience, but it had ended quickly and he’d recovered soon enough, learning a lesson to have more respect for water.

That memory of breathing in water as a boy, in addition to the natural unwillingness to inhale water, had made it all the more difficult to breathe in the sliph the first time. He overcame that fear, though, and it turned out to be a rapturous experience.

But in the sliph, when he suddenly found himself drowning, there was no surface, no shore, no help at hand. Such a thing had never happened in the sliph before. There had been no way for him to escape, no way to get to the surface, and no one to help him.

Richard looked over in the moonlight. The sliph was close by, watching him. He realized that she was not in a well, the way he had always seen her before. They were on the ground in a sparsely wooded place. He could hear no sounds but the sounds of nature. He could detect nothing but forest smells.

Beneath leaves, pine needles, forest debris, and roots Richard felt a rough stone floor. The grout joints were fat, more than a finger wide. These were not tight joints like those in finely crafted palaces, but they were without a doubt man-made.

And the silver face of the sliph, rather than looking out from within her well, had risen slightly from a rather small and irregular opening in the ancient stone floor. Ragged pieces from that stone floor now lay about on top of the dried leaves and rubble of branches, as if they had just been broken open from underneath—as if the sliph has broken up through them.

Richard sat up. “Sliph, are you all right?”

“Yes, Master.”

“Do you know what happened? It felt like I was drowning.”

“You were.”

Richard stared at the face in the moonlight. “But how can that be? What went wrong?”

A silver hand reached up from the ground to trail quicksilver fingers across his brow, testing him.

“You do not have the required magic to travel.”

Richard blinked in confusion. “I don’t understand. I’ve traveled many times before.”

“Before you had what was required.”

“And now I don’t?”

The sliph watched him a moment. “Now you do not,” she confirmed.

Richard felt like he must be hallucinating. “But I have both sides of the gift. I can travel.”

The sliph cautiously reached out and again felt his face. The hand slipped down to his chest, pausing for a moment to put light pressure against him. Her arm drew back into the dark hole in the broken stone.

“You do not have the required magic.”

“You already said that. It makes no sense. I was already traveling.”

“While you were traveling, you lost what is required.”

Richard’s eyes widened. “You mean to say that I lost one side of the gift?”

“No, I mean to say that you do not have the gift. You have no magic at all. You may not travel.”

Richard had to run the words through his head again to be sure he’d heard correctly. He didn’t see how he could have mistaken what the sliph had said. His mind raced through fragments of jumbled thoughts as he tried to grasp how such a thing was possible.

A terrible realization came to him. Could it be that the corruption caused by the chimes might be responsible? Had that corruption finally caught up with him and undone his gift? Rotted it away without his knowing it until it had finally failed?

But that would not explain the sensation he’d felt back in the sliph, just after he’d escaped the grip of the beast and just before he’d started drowning—the sudden sensation of some dark and furtive magic reaching out when he was most vulnerable and touching him.

Richard looked around but saw nothing other than the trees. They were dense enough that he couldn’t see beyond them in the moonlight. As a guide, he hated the feeling of not knowing where he was.

“Where are we, anyway? How did we get here?”

“When it happened, when you lost what is needed to travel, I had to bring you here.”

“And where is ‘here’?”

“I am sorry but I don’t know, exactly.”

“How can you bring me here, and not know where you are? You always know where you are and the places to which you can travel.”

“I already told you, I have never been to this place before. This place is an emergency passage. I knew of it, of course, but I have never been here before. There has never been an emergency within me before.

“That terrible beast hurt me. I was struggling to keep all of you alive. And then, there was something else that came within me. I could not stop it. Like the beast, it entered me without my permission. It violated me.”

That confirmed Richard’s sense of events, that just after the beast lost its grip on him, something else, some kind of power, had reached out and touched him with its dominion.

“I’m sorry that you were hurt, sliph. What happened to the beast?”

“After this other power came into me, the beast became no more.”

“You mean that this other power destroyed it?”

“No. The power did not touch the beast. It touched only you with its full force. After it did, then you no longer had what is required to travel. After that, the beast cast around in me for a brief time, and then vanished. I could no longer sustain you within me, so I had to find the nearest emergency portal.”

“What about Nicci and Cara? Were they hurt? Are they safe?”

“They, too, felt the pain of what happened to me, and one of them tried to use her power in me—something that is wrong to do. After I brought you here, I took them to the Keep where they had wished to travel. I told the one that used her power that it was dangerous to do so, and she must not do such a thing.”

“I think I understand,” Richard said. “It hurt me, too. Were they hurt badly?”

“They are safe at the Keep.”

“Then we must be somewhere between the People’s Palace and the Keep,” Richard said, half to himself.

“No.”

He looked over at the liquid silver face. “I don’t understand. We were going from the palace to the Keep. If you let me out, then this place here, this emergency passage out, would have to be between the palace and the Keep.”

“While I don’t know this place, I do know its general area. We are at a place a little more than halfway across the Midlands from the Keep, past Agaden Reach, almost to the wilds.”

Richard felt as if the world had just lurched and slid him far from where he had been. “But, but, that’s much, much farther from the People’s Palace than the Keep is. Why didn’t you take me to the closest place—to the Keep?”

“I do not function in that way. What to you may seem like the shortest distance between two places is not the shortest way for me. I am in many places at once.”

Richard leaned toward the sliph. “How can you be in many places at once?”

“You have one foot on that dark stone, and one on a stone that is lighter. You are in two places at once.”

Richard sighed. “I guess I get your point.”

“I travel in a way that is different from your way of traveling. This place, here, even though it is halfway across the Midlands for you, was the closest place for me. I had to get you out into your world again so that you could breathe.

“You no longer had what was needed to travel. Your lungs were filled with me. For those without the gift, breathing me is poison. It will kill them. But for you, since you were in me and breathing me already, there was a brief period when you were going through a transition, so having me in you was not instantly fatal. You would have died soon, but there was a brief time before that would happen. I knew that the time you had before you would die was not very long at all. I thought to do my best to save you, to get you to a place where you could be back in your world and hopefully recover.

“I brought you here, broke the seal, and placed you out in your world again. You were hurt, but I knew that the essence of me still within you would help sustain your life for a short time.”

“If I could no longer travel, because I don’t have the required gift, then what made you think that?”

“I was made to have properties to assist in emergencies. Those properties are within me—and thereby they were within you. They help to start the process of recovering. It is only intended for a crisis and even then I was warned that it could not be certain that it would work because there are variables that cannot be controlled.

“While you slept between worlds, and my magic that you still had within you was working to extract what had now become poison to you, I finished taking the others to the Keep. When I returned, I waited with you until you were recovered enough to be ready to breathe again, then I helped to remind you what you must to do to live.

“For a time I did not know if it would work. I have never had to do such a thing before. It was terrible to have to wait while I watched you lying there, not knowing if you would ever again breathe. I feared that I had failed you, and that I would be the cause of your death.”

Richard stared at the silver face for a long moment. Finally he offered her a smile. “Thank you, sliph. You saved my life. You did the right things. You did good.”

“You are my master. I would do anything for you.”

“Your master. A master who can’t travel.”

“It is as puzzling to me as it is to you.”

Richard tried to think it through, tried to make sense of it, but with the pain of breathing after nearly drowning in the sliph still feeling like it was pressing heavily on his chest, he was having trouble making his mind focus on thinking.

Richard rested his forearms across his knees. “I don’t suppose there is any way for you to take me back to the Keep?”

“Yes, Master. If you wish to travel, I can take you.”

Richard sat up straighter. “You can? How?”

“You must simply acquire the required magic, and then I can take you again. Then we will travel. You will be pleased.”

Acquire the required magic. He didn’t even know how to use the magic he had—or used to have. He couldn’t imagine what had happened to his gift, and he had absolutely no idea how to get it back. There had been any number of times he’d wanted to be rid if it, but now that it had actually happened all he could think about was getting it back.

When his gift had failed, the beast had apparently lost him in the sliph. As consolation to losing his gift, it seemed the beast would be one less problem he had to face at the moment—his gift, after all, had been the mechanism by which the beast was keyed to him, the way in which it hunted him. There was supposed to be balance in magic; perhaps that was the balance to losing it.

Richard raked his fingers back through his hair. “At least Nicci and Cara made it through and are safe.” He looked up at the sliph. “You’re sure that they’re all right?”

“Yes, Master. They are safe. I took them to the Keep, where they had wished to travel. They had what was required to travel.”

“And you told them where I was. You told them what had happened.”

She looked surprised by what had sounded more like a mandate than a question. “No, Master. I would never reveal what I do with another.”

“Oh, great,” he muttered. He worked to keep his exasperation in check. “But you’ve told me about others.”

“You are my master. I do things with you that I would not do with anyone else.”

“Sliph, they are my friends. They’re probably frantic with worry for me. You must tell them what they need to know.”

The silver head tilted toward him. “Master, I cannot betray you. I would not.”

“It’s not a betrayal. I’m telling you that it’s all right to tell them what happened.”

The sliph looked like she thought this was just about the strangest request she had ever had. “Master, you wish me to tell others about us, about what we do when we are together?”

“Sliph, try to understand. You are no longer a whore.”

“But people use me for their pleasure.”

“It’s not the same thing.” Richard raked his fingers back through his hair, trying not to sound angry. “Listen, wizards in ancient times changed you from who you were, from what you were.”

The sliph nodded solemnly. “I know, Master. I remember. I was the one it happened to, after all.”

“You’re different now. It’s not the same. You can’t equate the two things. They’re different.”

“I have been given a duty to serve others in this capacity. My nature is still within me.”

“But there are some of us who use you who greatly value your help.”

“I have always been valued for what I do.”

“This is different from what you did before.” Richard didn’t want to be having this argument. He had more important matters to worry about. “Sliph, when you travel with us you are often helping to save lives. When you traveled with us to the People’s Palace, you were helping me to end the war. You are doing a good thing.”

“If you say so, Master. But you must understand that those who created me made me the way I am. They used what I once was to create me as I am now. I can be no way other than the way I am. I cannot wish myself to be different, any more than you can travel now simply by wishing it.”

Richard sighed. “I suppose not.”

With one hand he snapped dry twigs in half as he thought it over. He shared a long look with the beautiful face watching him, hanging on his every word. Finally, he spoke softly.

“There are times when there is no other way, and you must trust others. This is one of those times.”

Something about his words clearly struck home. The beautiful, liquid face came a little closer.

“You are the one,” the sliph whispered.

“The one? Which one?”

“The one Baraccus told me would come.”

The hair on the back of Richard’s neck stood on end.

“You knew Baraccus?”

“He was once my master, like you are, now.”

“Of course,” Richard whispered to himself. “He was First Wizard.”

“He is the one who insisted that I possess the emergency elements I told you about. He also directed that there be this emergency portal. Had he not done those things, you would have died. He was very wise.”

“Very wise,” Richard agreed as he stared wide-eyed at the sliph. “You said that Baraccus told you something about one who would come?”

The sliph nodded. “He was kind to me. His wife hated me, but Baraccus was kind to me.”

“You knew his wife, too?”

“Magda.”

“Why would she hate you?”

“Because Baraccus was kind to me. And because I took him away from her.”

“You mean, you took him away when he wished to travel.”

“Of course. When I would tell him that he would be pleased, she would fold her arms and glare at me.”

Richard smiled a little. “She was jealous.”

“She loved him and did not want him to leave her. When I would return with him after we traveled, she would often be there, waiting for him. He would always smile when he saw her, and she would smile in turn.”

“And what was it that Baraccus said about me?”

“He told me the same thing that you just did, that there are times when there is no other way, and you must trust others. Those were his words, just as they were yours. He said that one day another master would say those exact same words, and then add exactly the same words you did: ‘This is one of those times.’

“He told me that if a master ever said these words, that meant that they were the right one and I was to tell them some things.”

Richard could feel every hair on his arms stand on end.

“You took Magda Searus somewhere, didn’t you?”

“Yes, Master. After that I never saw Baraccus again. But before, when he told me that someday someone would say those words, he told me to tell them his message.”

“He left a message?” When she nodded, he rolled his hand. “So what is it?”

“ ‘I am sorry. I don’t know the answers that would save you. If I did, please believe that I would give them eagerly. But I know the good in you. I believe in you. I do know that you have within you what you must to succeed. There will be times when you doubt yourself. Do not give up. Remember then that I believe in you, that I know you can accomplish what you must. You are a rare person. Believe in yourself.

“ ‘Know that I believe you are the one who can do it.’ ”

Richard sat frozen. The words echoed around in his head. They were oddly familiar.

“I’ve heard almost those exact words before.”

The sliph glided a little closer, her features tightening. “You have?”

Richard concentrated as he ran the words through his mind again, trying to recall . . .

And then he did. It was right after Shota had told him about Baraccus. Just before she left, she’d said those very words to him. There was something about those words, spoken by Shota, that had aroused an indistinct memory.

“It was Shota, the witch woman,” Richard said as he frowned in recollection. “She told me those words.”

The sliph retreated. “I am sorry, Master. You have failed the test.”

Richard looked up at her. “What test?”

“The test Baraccus just gave you. I am sorry, but you have failed his test. I can tell you nothing more.”

Without further word, the sliph abruptly vanished into the black hole in the stone.

Richard threw himself down on his stomach, leaning down into the hole. “No! Wait! Don’t leave!”

His own voice echoed up out of the empty, black shaft.

The sliph was gone. Without his gift, he had no way to call her back.