Phantom: Chainfire Trilogy Part 2

Chapter 40

Richard was winded by the time he had finally crested the rise. It wasn’t just that he was out of breath, though; he was out of strength as well. He knew that he hadn’t taken the time to eat as much as he should have along the way, and now he was paying the price for it. His legs felt like lead. His stomach ached with hunger. He felt weak and just wanted to lie down, but he couldn’t, not now, not when he was this close. Not when there was so much at stake.

He’d eaten some pine nuts and a few handfuls of huckleberries he’d come across as he went along, but he hadn’t gone out of his way to collect any more. He just hadn’t wanted to take the time.

At least he had his pack with him, so the night before he had been able to set out a fishing line in a small lake just at sunset. He then collected an armload of dry wood and started a fire with a flint and steel. By the time the fire was hot he had three trout on his setline. He had been so hungry that he’d been tempted to eat them raw, but fish cooked quickly, so he waited.

Not wanting to stop any longer than necessary, he’d gotten little sleep on the short journey from the sliph. He reasoned that the sooner he got his hands on the book that Baraccus had left for him, the better off he would be. The book had already been waiting there for him for three thousand years. He didn’t want it to wait another night. He thought about how, if he had been smart enough to find the book sooner, he might have avoided the problems he now faced. He was hoping that it could somehow help him in finding Kahlan, maybe even help him find a way to reverse the tainted Chainfire spell.

He’d reasoned that the best plan would be to recover the book as soon as possible; then he could do some reading while he took the time to eat. He would worry then about sleeping and getting back to the Keep.

The Keep was a long way off. He didn’t know exactly where he was, except that he was a good distance south of Agaden Reach in what appeared to be an uninhabited area either near or in the wilds, so he was concerned about how he was going to find some horses. One problem at a time, he reminded himself, one problem at a time.

As difficult as it had been to undertake the climb up the steep, rocky rise in the dark, he couldn’t bring himself to stop when he knew that he was close. Besides, if he wanted to see the night wisps, it could only be at night, so he didn’t want to wait until morning to make the climb and then have to wait around all the next day for it to get dark again.

Finally reaching the top, Richard scanned the area to get his bearings. Above the edge of the steep slope the ground leveled off into a sparsely wooded oak grove. The breeze from earlier in the day had died hours ago, at sunset, and it was now dead calm. The silence felt like an oppressive weight lying over him. For some reason, the typical night sounds of small animals, insects, and such that were common in the lowlands stretching out endlessly behind him were silent up at the top of the long climb.

In the moonlight, Richard immediately noticed that there was something wrong with the trees. It looked as if they were all dead. The fat, squat trunks were twisted and gnarled. The bark had started to come away in ragged strips. The bent and distorted branches looked like claws reaching out to snatch anyone who dared enter the place.

Richard had been focused at the trek and the climb, but he suddenly switched to being on guard, his attention riveted as he listened for any sound in the eerie silence. He moved carefully beneath the trees, trying to make as little noise as possible. It was difficult, though, since the ground was littered with dry sticks and leaves. The branches looming overhead cast grotesque shadows in the moonlight, and the air had a chill to it that ran a shiver up his back.

With the next step, something underfoot broke with an odd, bony pop. In all the years he’d spent in the woods, Richard had never heard a sound like that.

He froze in place, listening, waiting. His mind raced as he went over the memory of the sound, trying to come up with its cause. Try as he might, he couldn’t place it. When he heard nothing more, and saw nothing move, he carefully backed up, lifting his foot off whatever it was that had broken.

After checking in every direction, appraising every shadow, he squatted down to see what it was that he had stepped on. Whatever it was, it was covered in leaves. He cautiously pushed the decaying leaves aside.

There, half-buried in the forest loam, dark with age, was a broken human skull staring up at him. The weight of his foot had broken in the rounded top of the skull. The eye sockets, which seemed to be watching him, were still intact.

Richard scanned the forest floor and saw other humps under the leaves. He also saw something else: more skulls that weren’t buried beneath the forest litter. Just from where he crouched, he could see a good half-dozen skulls lying at least partially atop leaves, and even more rounded shapes below them. Beneath the leaves he found the rest of the bones that belonged to the skull he had stepped on.

He stood slowly and began moving again, scrutinizing the ground, the fat, twisted tree trunks, as well as the limbs overhead as he went. He saw no one and heard nothing.

Now that he knew what he was looking for, he was able to spot skulls seemingly everywhere. He stopped counting once he’d reached thirty. The bones appeared scattered, not bunched together as if people had all died together or in groups. With a few exceptions, they appeared to have been individuals who had died at those particular places. He supposed that the bodies might have been placed there; he had no way of really knowing. The few exceptions were skulls close together, but he reasoned that might have been chance—people who had happened to have fallen near another body.

Richard crouched down to inspect a number of the skulls, both those lying exposed and those buried beneath the litter. His initial thought was that it was possibly the site of a battle, but as near as he could tell in the moonlight these people had not died at the same time. There were some bones that were sound, while others were moldering away. Some appeared so ancient that they fell apart when he touched them. The place was like a graveyard, but with all of the bodies above ground, rather than being buried.

The other thing that he noticed was that no predators looked to have disturbed the dead. Richard had come across remains in the woods when he had been a guide. Animals always got at the dead, human or otherwise. It looked as if each one of these bodies, though, had rotted away over time, leaving the bones lying in the exact same position in which the person had fallen—on their sides, or with arms sprawled, or facedown. None had been laid out as if in burial, with arms neatly crossed on their chests, or at their sides. They looked simply to have fallen dead. It still might not have seemed quite so peculiar except that not one of the corpses looked to have been touched by any predator.

As Richard walked endlessly through the oak grove, he wondered if it would ever end. On a moonless, cloudy night, or even a cloudy day for that matter, it was the kind of place where it would have been easy to get lost. Everything looked the same. The trees were spaced evenly, and there was nothing to indicate if he was going in the right direction, except the moon and stars.

For what seemed like half the night, Richard moved ever onward through the forest of the dead. He was sure that he had followed the directions the sliph had given him. The sliph, however, had no way to know exactly what he would find; she had only been given directions from Baraccus, and that had been three thousand years before. The landscape could have changed a great deal since the time of Baraccus. The bones, though, didn’t look to be anywhere near that old. Of course, it could be that lying in the oak grove there were bones thousands of years old, but by now those would have all crumbled to dust.

As Richard continued on, the woods began growing murkier, until he found himself entering the black shadows of a dark forest of immense pines, their trunks standing close together and each nearly as big as his house back in the Hartland woods had been. It was like encountering a wall of mountains that rose up into the sky. The trunks, like pillars, were clear of branches until somewhere up out of sight. But those branches completely closed off the sky and left the forest floor below a dark and confusing maze among the massive trunks.

Richard paused, considering how he would keep to a direction in the pitch blackness that lay ahead while being unable to move in anything resembling a straight line.

That was when he heard the whispers.

He cocked his head, listening, trying to make out the words. He couldn’t, so he carefully stepped deeper into the gloom, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness before taking a few more steps. Before long he began to be able to make out the shapes of the trees ahead, so he moved forward, ever deeper into the close canyons among the trunks of the monumental pines.

“Go back,” came a whisper.

“Who’s there?” he whispered back.

“Go back,” said a faint little voice, “or stay forever with the bones of those who have come before you.”

“I’ve come to speak with the night wisps,” Richard said.

“Then you have come for nothing. Go, now,” the voice repeated with more strength.

Richard tried to lay the sound of the words over his memory of what a wisp sounded like. While it wasn’t the same, it did have qualities in common.

“Please come forward so that I may talk with you.”

Only silence surrounded him. Richard moved ahead a dozen paces into the darkness.

“Last time warned,” came the eerie voice. “Go, now.”

“I have come a long way. I’m not going back without speaking with the wisps. This is important.”

“Not to us.”

Richard stood with one hand on a hip as he tried to conceive of what to do next. He was far from clearheaded. His weariness was hampering his thinking.

“Yes, this is important to you, too.”

“How?”

“I have come for what Baraccus left for me.”

“So did those whose bones you have passed.”

“Look, this is important. Your lives ultimately depend upon this as well. In this struggle there will be no uninvolved bystanders. All will be drawn into the storm.”

“The stories you have heard about a treasure are empty lies. There is nothing here.”

“Treasure? No—you don’t understand. That’s not what this is about at all. I think you misunderstand me. I’ve already passed the tests Baraccus left for me—that’s why I’m here. I’m Richard Rahl. I’m married to Kahlan Amnell, the Mother Confessor.”

“We don’t know this person you speak of. Go back to her while you still can.”

“No, that’s the point, I can’t. I’m trying to find her.” Frustrated, Richard ran his fingers back into his hair. He didn’t know how much time he might have to say what he needed to say, or how much he should leave out, if he was to convince the wisps of his true reason for being there—to convince them to help him.

“You once knew her. Magic was used against Kahlan to make everyone forget her. You knew her, too, but you forgot her like everyone else. Kahlan used to come here. In her role as the Mother Confessor she fought to protect the land of the night wisps and to keep others out.

“She told me about the beautiful land of the night wisps. She told me about the open fields in ancient, remote forests. She has been among the wisps as they gather at twilight to dance together in the grasses and wildflowers.

“She told me that she spent many a night lying on her back in the grass as the wisps gathered around her, speaking with her of things common to both of your lives: of dreams and hopes, of loves.

“Please, the wisps knew her. She was your friend.”

Richard saw, then, a tiny light come out from behind a tree. “Go, or your bones will remain out there, with the others who seek treasure, and no one will ever see you again or know what became of you.”

“If I need gold I earn it. I have no interest in treasure.”

The tiny spark of light started away. “Not all treasure is gold.”

As it glided into the distance, the shafts of spinning light played over the trunks of trees it passed.

“I knew Shar,” Richard called out.

The light paused. It stopped spinning.

For a moment, Richard watched as the spark of light hung there, in the distance, faintly illuminating the closely gathered monarchs of the forest standing like sentries for what lay beyond.

“You did not come because of the legends that there was treasure to be found here?”

“No.”

“What do you know of the name you spoke?”

“I was with Shar after she went through the boundary. Shar crossed that boundary to help stop the threat from Darken Rahl. Shar crossed the boundary to help in the effort to find me so that I, too, could help in that struggle. Before she died, Shar said that if I ever needed the help of the night wisps, then I should say her name and they would help me, for no enemy may know it.”

Richard pointed back toward the grove of dead oaks, where the forgotten, moldering remains reposed. “I have a feeling that none of the people whose bones lie back there knew her name, or the name of any wisp.”

The light slowly returned through the trees, finally coming to a stop not far from him. He could feel the softly glowing shafts of light gliding over the contours of his face. They almost felt like the faint touch of a spider’s web.

Richard took a small step closer. “I spoke with Shar before she died. She said that she could not live away from those of her kind any longer, and she did not have the strength to return to her home place.

“She gave me my first test from Baraccus. She said that she believed in me, believed that I had inside me what it takes to prevail. It was a message from him. She asked me about secrets.”

The tiny light turned a warm, rosy color as it spun in silence for a moment.

“And you passed her test?”

“No,” Richard admitted. “It was too soon for me to understand it all. Later, I finally came to understand. The sliph said that I have now passed the test that Baraccus left for me.”

“What is your name?”

“I grew up named Richard Cypher. Since then I’ve come to learn that I am Richard Rahl. I have been called by other names as well: the Seeker; the one born true; the bringer of death; Richard with the Temper; the Pebble in the Pond; and Caharin. Does one of those names mean anything to you?”

“Does the name Ghazi mean anything to you?”

“Ghazi?” Richard thought a moment. “No. Should it?”

“It means ‘fire.’ Ghazi was given that name by prophecy. If you were the one, you would know that name, too.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t. I don’t know why, but I can tell you that I don’t hold much with prophecy.”

“I am very sorry, but misery has come to this land. The wisps are in a time of suffering. We cannot help you. You should go now.”

The wisp began leaving again, spinning as it floated off into the towering trees.

Richard took a step forward. “Shar said that if I needed the help of the wisps, they would help me! I need your help!”

The little point of light paused again. Richard got the distinct impression by the way it hovered motionless that it was considering something. After a moment, it slowly began rotating, casting off shimmering beams of light. It came partway back.

The wisp then spoke a name that Richard had not heard spoken aloud in many years.

His blood turned to ice.

“And does this name mean anything to you?” the wisp asked.

“How do you know my mother’s name?” Richard whispered.

The wisp slowly drew closer. “Many, many seasons ago, Ghazi went through a dark boundary to find her, to help her, to tell her of her son, to tell her many things she needed to know, many things her son would need to know. Ghazi never returned.”

Richard stared, his eyes wide. “What do the wisps do in the day? When it’s light?”

The wisp, like nothing more than a glowing silver ember, slowly spun, throwing shafts of light across Richard’s face. “We go where it is dark. We do not like being in the light.”

“Does fire hurt you?”

The shafts of light dimmed. “Fire can kill us.”

“Dear spirits . . .” Richard whispered.

The wisp came closer, the shimmering light brightening . . . again, as it seemed to study his face. “What is it?”

“What was the prophecy about Ghazi?” Richard asked.

The slowly spinning light paused. “The prophecy was about Ghazi’s death. It said he would die in fire.”

Richard’s eyes closed for a moment. “Many seasons ago, when I was but a boy, my mother died in a fire.”

The wisp remained silent.

“I’m sorry,” Richard said in a small voice as Shota’s words rang through his head. “I think Ghazi died in my home. Our house caught on fire. After my mother brought my brother and me safely out, she went back in for something—we never knew what. She was probably overcome by the smoke. She never came out. I never saw her again. She died in the blaze.

“I think she went back for Ghazi. I think my mother and Ghazi died together in that fire, without him ever completing his purpose.”

The wisp seemed to watch him for a time. “I am sorry for what happened to your mother. After all this time, tears still come to you.”

Richard had run out of words and could only nod.

The wisp again started spinning faster. “The name Richard Cypher is the name we know you as. Come, Richard Cypher, and we will tell you what Ghazi went to tell your mother.”