Phantom: Chainfire Trilogy Part 2

Chapter 53

“Nicci,” Zedd said, hesitating as he gestured vaguely, seeming to search for words, “you are . . . well, someone who holds Richard in the same regard as I do, feels a similar passion and loyalty for him. In many ways you almost seem like . . .” He threw his hands up and let them flop back down at his sides. “I don’t know.”

“Zedd, you, Cara, me—we all love Richard, if that’s what you’re trying to say.”

“I guess that’s the core of it. I don’t have any recollection at all of Kahlan, but I imagine I must think of you in much the same way I can only imagine I must have thought of her, as more than just his confidante sharing the same struggle.”

Nicci felt as if she had just been hit by lightning. She dared not allow herself to even begin to consider the emotional charge in his words. With the greatest of difficulty, she managed to keep her composure and merely twitch her brow, finally asking, “What are you getting at?”

“Like Cara and Richard, I’ve come to think a great deal of you, especially considering what I thought of you in the beginning. I’ve come to trust you, like I say, as I would trust a daughter-in-law.”

Nicci swallowed but didn’t meet his gaze. “Thank you, Zedd. Considering where I came from, and what I thought of myself in the beginning, that means more to me than you could know. To have people actually, sincerely . . .”

She cleared her throat and finally looked up at him. Despite how his words hit her, she didn’t think that he meant them to have any meaning, but merely to preface something important. “You want to tell me something?”

He nodded. “I’ve learned some other things. Greatly disturbing things. I would not tell anyone else such things, but, well, other than Richard himself there is no one I would trust more than you and Cara. You two have become more than friends in all of this. I’m only trying to find a way to express to you how much . . .”

When his words trailed away and he stared off into the distance, Nicci gently laid a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll get him back, Zedd, I promise you that. But you’re right in how we feel about him. Richard completely changed my life. If there’s something you need to talk about, I would like to think that you can trust Cara and me almost as much as you would trust Richard. I think that’s what you’re getting at? We all feel the same about him, and about our cause. I . . . well”—she tapped her fingertips together—“you know what I mean.”

Fearing she’d already said too much, Nicci felt her face turning red.

“What I’m trying to say,” Zedd finally said, “is that I need your help, and I want you to know what you both mean to me—that I do not now reveal these things lightly or capriciously. All my life I’ve kept secrets because they had to be kept. It’s not the easiest thing to do, but that’s just the way it was. Things have changed, though, and I can no longer keep certain knowledge to myself. There is so much more involved now than there ever was before.”

Nicci nodded and turned her full attention to the wizard. “I understand. I’ll do what I can to be worthy of your trust.”

Zedd pursed his lips. “That book, The Book of Inversion and Duplex, was hidden in a place no one but me knows exists. It was in the catacombs beneath the Keep.”

Nicci shared a look with Cara. “Zedd,” she asked, “are you saying that there are bones beneath the Keep? And there are books there as well?”

Zedd nodded. “A lot of books. That was where I found The Book of Inversion and Duplex.”

He took a few steps away to stare at the windows flickering with light from the storm beyond the containment field. “No one that I’m aware of ever knew the place of the bones was down there. I found it when I was a boy. I knew that no other person had been in there for ages. Not a single footprint had marred the dust on the floors in thousands of years. I was the first to make a mark in that dust of ages. I did not need to be told the significance of that fact.

“As a boy it rather frightened me to find those ancient catacombs. I was already spooked because I was trying to find a way to sneak back into the Keep. When I found the catacombs I knew instinctively that it would not be hidden as it was unless there was a good reason, so, as much as I wanted to at times, I never told anyone about it. I almost felt as if the place had allowed me entry, but in return required my silence. I not only took my attitude of responsibility seriously, I felt genuinely protective of such an undiscovered place. It contained, after all, the remains of a great many people—perhaps even my own ancestors. I knew that there were always those who would exploit such a find and I didn’t want that to happen to a place so clearly held in sacred regard by those who had hidden it.

“Added to that, I felt rather guilty for having disturbed such a burial place for the feeble reason of trying to sneak back in to avoid getting in trouble for having gone out without permission in the first place. I had slipped out of the Keep to go to the market down in Aydindril to look at all the exciting baubles being hawked there. It seemed so much more fascinating than the dry studies to which I was supposed to be devoting my time.

“After my chance discovery, I quietly asked veiled questions and found that not even the old wizards I knew had any knowledge of the place beneath the Keep. Over time, I came to realize that such a place was not even suspected, much less rumored to exist.

“As a boy, I had a lot of studies that took up nearly all my time. Back then, there were many people living in the Keep, and with my assignments I never had a chance to spend—in total—more than a couple of hours down there. I quickly found that there were many of the same books that we had up in the Keep, so, as a boy, I came to believe that it wasn’t as important a find as I had at first believed it to be.”

He smiled distantly. “I fancied myself a great explorer, discovering ancient treasures. This treasure was mostly bones and books. There were endless dry books up here in the Keep that I had to study, so yet more books wasn’t exactly as exciting as thoughts of constructed spells encased in amber, or jewel-encrusted curses. But there was none of that down there. Just crumbling bones and old books.

“There are rooms upon rooms down in the catacombs filled with dusty old books. I never had much time to explore those rooms. I can’t even begin to guess at the numbers of books hidden down there. I never had time to do more than look at a small sampling. As I said, many I’d seen before up in the Keep and of the ones I hadn’t, at such a young age, none of them impressed me enough to remember, except a few, such as The Book of Inversion and Duplex.

“When I grew up I fell in love with the most wonderful woman and soon she was my wife. She gave birth to the other light in my life, a daughter—who grew up to be Richard’s mother. As a young wizard working at the Keep, there was always more to do than there were hours in the day. There was no time to spend down among old bones.

“And then the world was cast into a terrible war with D’Hara. It was a dark time of terrible struggle. I had become First Wizard. The battles were gruesome as battles always are. I had to send men to die. I had to look into the eyes of wizards, young and old, that I knew were not up to the challenges, and tell them to do their best when I knew their best would not be good enough, and they would likely die in the effort. I knew in my heart that if I were to do it myself it would get done and I could make it work, but there were a lot of those kinds of tasks that needed to be done, and only one of me.

“At times, I found responsibility, knowledge, and ability were a curse. To look at all the innocent people counting on me as First Wizard, and know that if I failed they would die, was almost more than I could endure.

“In that respect, I know exactly what Richard is going through. I have been in his place. I have carried the world on my shoulders.”

He gestured to dismiss his melancholy departure from the subject at hand. “Anyway, with all my other responsibilities, the catacombs lay mostly forgotten, as they had for thousands of years before I ever came along. I simply had no time to look into what might be down there. From my limited search as a boy I believed that there was nothing to be found but old and comparatively unimportant books buried along with forgotten bones. There seemed to be so many more pressing matters of life and death.

“To me, the most important thing about the catacombs was that they provided a secret passage for me to enter the Keep. That passage came to be invaluable when the Sisters of the Dark took the Wizard’s Keep.

“Back when I was younger, after the war in which my wife had died, the council and I had a bitter dispute over the boxes of Orden. And then . . . Darken Rahl raped my daughter. So I left the Midlands—quit it for good—taking my daughter with me through the boundary to Westland. She was all I had left and all that mattered to me. I thought I would live out all my days beyond the boundary in Westland.

“Then Richard was born. I watched him grow. My daughter was so proud of him. I secretly worried that he had the gift, and fretted that forces from beyond the boundaries would one day come for him. And then, there was a fire and all of a sudden my daughter, Richard’s mother, was gone from my life, from Richard’s life.

“I turned to Richard for solace. I gave him everything I could that would help him be all he could be. I had some of the best times of my life with him.

“Unbeknownst to me as I did my best to forget the outside world, Ann and Nathan, driven by prophecy, had helped George Cypher recover The Book of Counted Shadows from the Wizard’s Keep. It had been stored in the First Wizard’s private enclave, where I had left it for safekeeping.”

“Wait a minute,” Nicci said, stopping his story. “You mean to tell me that The Book of Counted Shadows, one of the most important books in existence, was just lying around in the Keep?”

“Well,” he said, “not exactly ‘lying’ around. Like I said, it was in the First Wizard’s enclave. That’s more secure than the Keep in general and not exactly an easy place to breach.”

“If it’s so secure,” Nicci reminded him, “then how did Ann and Nathan and George Cypher get in to take the book?”

Zedd sighed as he looked up at her from under his bushy eyebrows. “Therein lies what has come to trouble me—the only copy of a book that important being that vulnerable—”

“That’s what Richard was going to tell you,” Nicci said with a sudden flash of comprehension. “That’s why he was in such a hurry to get back here—he said he had to get to you right away. That was the reason!”

Zedd frowned. “What are you talking about?”

She stepped closer to the wizard and pulled the small book from her pocket. “This is the book that Darken Rahl used to put the boxes of Orden in play—”

“It’s what!”

“This is the book that Darken Rahl used to put the boxes of Orden in play,” she repeated to the astonished wizard. “We found it at the People’s Palace. I promised Richard that I would study it and see if there was a way to undo what Sister Ulicia had done, see if there was a way to perhaps take the boxes of Orden back out of play. I tried to explain to Richard that magic doesn’t work that way, but you know Richard, he doesn’t so easily accept that something can’t be done.”

Zedd stared at the book she was holding up as if it were a viper that might bite someone. “That boy has a way of turning over rocks and finding trouble.”

“Zedd, this warns that to use this book, the key must be used. Otherwise, without the key, everything that has come before, meaning what has been used from this book, will not only be sterile, but fatal. It says that within one full year the key must be used to complete what has been wrought with this book.”

“The key,” Zedd whispered, as if it were the end of the world. “The boxes must be opened within one year of being put into play. You need The Book of Counted Shadows to open the boxes. That book has to be the key.”

“I think so, too,” Nicci said. “The thing is, we found information from back at the time of the great war saying that some wizards had made five copies of ‘the book that was never to be copied.’ ”

“And you think that ‘the book that was never to be copied’ was The Book of Counted Shadows!”

“Yes. There is a book of prophecy that says ‘They will tremble in fear at what they have done and cast the shadow of the key among the bones.’ ”

Zedd was staring at her as if his world were crumbling apart. “Dear spirits. That sounds like it’s from Yanklee’s Yarns.”

“That’s right. The thing is,” Nicci said, “all the copies but one were false copies. Five copies—four false, one true copy.”

Zedd pressed a hand to his forehead. Nicci noticed that his breathing was faster than normal. He looked on the verge of passing out.

“Zedd, what is it?”

His fingers were trembling. “You know what you said about The Book of Counted Shadows being too easy to steal? That was always my thought too, but not something I consciously dwelled on. It was more one of those thoughts in the back of your mind that never fully surfaces.”

“Yes,” Nicci said, waiting patiently until he went on.

“Well, when I remembered The Book of Inversion and Duplex, I finally remembered where I had seen it as a boy: the catacombs. I needed it to test this spell, so while you were gone with Richard to the People’s Palace I went back into the catacombs and looked for The Book of Inversion and Duplex.”

Nicci knew what he was going to say before he said it.

“And while I was searching for The Book of Inversion and Duplex, I found a copy of The Book of Counted Shadows.”

“ ‘They will tremble in fear at what they have done and cast the shadow of the key among the bones,’ ” Nicci quoted again.

Zedd nodded. “All my life, I never knew there was a copy of that book. I had been taught that there were no other copies. I had been taught that there was only one copy. That alone told me how important that book was. But if it’s so important, then why was it not in a safer place? That question was what always stuck in the back of my mind.

“That was one of the reasons I was so angry with the council for giving the boxes of Orden away as gifts or favors. I knew how dangerous those boxes were, but no one would believe me. They all thought that the things I told them were only ancient superstitions, or children’s tales.

“Part of the reason that no one believed the truth of the danger that the boxes represented was that the book that was needed to put the boxes in play had never been found. Without the book, the boxes were only a fanciful tale.” He pointed at the book in Nicci’s hand. “In fact, no one ever even knew the name of that book. The title looks to be in High D’Haran. We’ll need someone to translate it.”

“I can read High D’Haran,” Nicci said.

“Of course you can,” Zedd said as if nothing could surprise him any more. “What is its name, then?”

“The Book of Life.”

Zedd turned nearly as white as his wavy hair. Apparently, he was not yet beyond shock. “The Book of Life,” he repeated as he wiped a hand wearily across his face.

“What an appropriate name,” he said. “The power of Orden is spawned from life itself. Open the correct box, and one gains the power of Orden—the essence of life itself, power over all things living and dead. They would have unchallenged power. Open the wrong box, and the magic would claim them—they’re dead. But open the other wrong box, and every living thing in existence is incinerated into nothingness. It would be the end of all life.

“The magic of Orden is twin to the magic of life itself, and death is part of everything that lives, so the magic of Orden is tied to death as well as to life. And the key is the means to know which box is which. The person opening them can take a chance, but they would be foolish to do so without using the key first, to be sure of which is which.”

“Foolish,” Nicci said, “like Sisters of the Dark who don’t necessarily care if they open the wrong box?”

Zedd could only stare at her.

“So, you were saying that you found one of the copies,” Cara finally said when Zedd had fallen silent for a time, lost in thought.

Nicci was relieved that Cara was the one to prompt him when he looked so stricken by contemplation of events so terrible she probably couldn’t even begin to imagine them.

“I’m afraid that’s not even the worst of it,” he said. “You see, Richard memorized The Book of Counted Shadows as a boy. George Cypher feared that the book would fall into the wrong hands, but he was wise enough that he didn’t dare destroy the knowledge the book contained, so he had Richard memorize it. After Richard had learned every word, he and George Cypher, the man who had raised him and who at the time Richard believed was his father, burned The Book of Counted Shadows.

“When Darken Rahl captured Richard, and was opening the boxes, he made Richard read out the instructions from The Book of Counted Shadows. I don’t recall how—probably as a result of the Chainfire spell.

“The point is, I was there. I remember that part quite well because I was so shocked—for two reasons. First, to learn that the book had been stolen from my enclave at the Keep for Richard to memorize and, secondly, because it was a book of magic and that fact meant that Richard could only memorize and speak the words because he was gifted.

“When I found the copy of The Book of Counted Shadows down in the catacombs, I was shaken to my core. I read it and sure enough it was word for word exactly what Richard had memorized.”

Nicci cocked her head. “It was the same? Are you sure?”

“Positive,” Zedd said, emphatically. “The two were identical.”

Nicci was beginning to feel sick herself. “That can mean only one of two things. Either one was the original, and the other the one true copy of that key . . . or else they were both false keys, false copies.”

“No, they couldn’t be false,” Zedd insisted. “When Richard read the book out, he left out an important element at the very end. It was by leaving out that one piece of the book that he defeated Darken Rahl. He, in essence, turned it into a false copy, thus tricking Darken Rahl to defeat him. As I often told Richard, sometimes a trick is the best magic.”

Nicci laid the book on the table. “That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the true key and not the false. Look at this.” She laid The Book of Life open and tapped a page in the very beginning that had only one thing all by itself on the page to emphasize how important—how central—it was.

“This is the introductory statement to The Book of Life. I already translated it. It’s a warning to anyone who would read this book.

“It says, ‘Those who have come here to hate should leave now, for in their hatred they only betray themselves.’ ”

Zedd squinted at the words in High D’Haran all by themselves on the page. “So you are saying, what . . . that because Darken Rahl turned to the boxes of Orden out of hate, he would have been destroyed by the true Book of Counted Shadows just the same as by a false one?”

“That’s one possibility,” Nicci said.

Zedd shook his head. “I don’t believe that. Some magic works by reading intent. The Sword of Truth works that way. People who hate don’t usually recognize that vile taint within themselves. They spew their hatred as righteous. That corruption is what makes them so evil—and so dangerous. They are able to do the most despicable things and think themselves heroes for having done them.”

“Then you are going to tell me that you believe that it was coincidence, luck, that both those books just happen to be the only true keys? And they just happened to be that close together? You think that the wizards who made the copies, sending them to distant, hidden places, would have put the one true copy right here, right near the only other true key? What would be the purpose of scattering the copies?”

Zedd rubbed his chin with his fingertips as he thought it over. “I see what you mean.”

“With books like this, there has to be a way to confirm the copies—to validate them.”

“There is,” Zedd told her. “In the beginning of The Book of Counted Shadows, it says, ‘Verification of the truth of the words of The Book of Counted Shadows, if spoken by another, rather than read by the one who commands the boxes, can only be insured by the use of a Confessor.’

“A copy constitutes ‘spoken by another,’ ” he said. “The person making the copy is, in essence, speaking it; the reader is not actually reading the original. Unless it’s the original key, and that original key is actually being read by the one who put the boxes in play, this forewarning invokes the necessity of verification.”

“Kahlan,” Nicci said.

The other two looked at her, and by the looks on their faces, they understood her meaning.

“Zedd,” Nicci finally asked into the silence, “None of us remembers Kahlan. If we could find her, and if we could somehow fix this Chainfire spell, or something . . . is there a way to make her remember what she right now would not recall?”

Zedd’s gaze wandered to the glowing spell-forms above the table. “No.”

Nicci hadn’t expected such certainty. “Are you sure?”

“About as sure as I can be. The spell destroys memory. It doesn’t cover it over, or block it from access, it destroys it. It doesn’t make people forget, it actually erases the memory. To the person upon whom such a terrible thing was unleashed, their memory is gone.”

“But there must be some way,” Cara insisted, “some magic this-or-that that will restore her mind.”

“Restore it with what? What none of us can recall? Memory is the stuff of life. Magic functions in specific ways, as do all things that exist. Magic is not some super-intelligent consciousness behind a veil that knows what we want to accomplish and can pull a person’s entire memory—their entire life—out of a pocket and hand it back just because we wish it.”

Cara didn’t look convinced. “But can’t—”

“Look at it this way. If I push that book off the table, it will fall to the floor. The invisible force of gravity makes it happen. Gravity functions in a specific way. I can’t wave my arms and by my wish command gravity to go make me dinner.

“Same with magic and memory. The Chainfire spell destroyed her memory. It can’t be brought back. You can’t restore what was and is no longer there. You just can’t. What’s gone is gone.”

Cara drew her hand down her long blond braid. “Then it sounds like we’re in a lot of trouble.”

“Trouble indeed,” the wizard conceded.

Nicci wanted to say that Richard’s heart was in a lot of trouble, but she dared not say such a thing out loud. She felt despondent for him, for what he would one day have to face. But she didn’t want to be the one to point it out.

“Then, if Richard finds her,” Nicci asked in a weak voice, “what is he to do?”

Zedd, hands clasped behind his back, stared at her a moment before looking away.

“There’s another way to confirm the true copy,” Cara said.

Zedd and Nicci both frowned at her, both relieved to have a diversion.

“You just find the other copies,” she said, “and compare them. The one Richard memorized is gone. So, if you find the others you can compare them. The one that’s different has to be the one true copy. The other four that are all the same have to be the false keys.”

Zedd arched an eyebrow. “And what if the people who made the false keys were worried that one day a clever Mord-Sith would think of that and so they made all the copies different from one another, so that they couldn’t be compared?”

Cara made a face. “Oh.”

Nicci threw up her arms. “How would he even go about finding the others, anyway? I mean, they’ve been hidden for three thousand years.”

“Not only that,” Zedd said, “but Nathan told us that there were catacombs under the Palace of the Prophets, and that place was destroyed. I know, I set the light spell myself. There would be nothing left, and even if somehow a pocket of the catacombs survived, the palace was built on an island. After the island was destroyed water would have flooded any underground room that hadn’t already been ruined.

“That one copy, if one of them was there, has already been destroyed. Was it a true or a false key? What if, over all this time, others have been destroyed? The question remains, how to tell if the one Richard knows, and the one I found, are the only two true keys.”

Nicci stared off. “I’m afraid they might be false copies—the one Richard memorized, and the one you found down in the catacombs.”

Zedd began pacing. “I don’t know any way to be sure.”

“There might be two ways,” she said. “The first, I can’t swear to, yet. I’ve only just started translating The Book of Life. But there is material having to do with the mention of using the key. It says that if the person who put the boxes in play fails to use the key properly, the boxes will be destroyed along with the one who put them in play.”

“Use the key properly . . .” Zedd said, deep in thought.

“That seems to me to say that if Darken Rahl would have failed to use the true key properly, such as by leaving off the last part—as you said Richard did when reciting it back to him—he would have been destroyed, but so would the boxes of Orden. As we know, the boxes of Orden weren’t destroyed, so that tells me Richard may very well have read him the false key and Darken Rahl simply opened the wrong box and it destroyed him.

“It doesn’t say that the boxes will be destroyed if a false key is used because at the time this was written there were no false keys yet, so that problem hadn’t been taken into consideration when this material was all created.”

Zedd frowned in thought. “Are you sure of this?”

“No,” Nicci admitted. “It’s complex and I’ve only just started to translate it. I scanned that part because it pertained to using the key to complete the required steps. It also has formulas that have to be taken into account. I’m only giving you my preliminary impression.”

Nicci ran her fingers back into her hair with one hand. She stood before the table with the open book on it, with her other hand on a hip.

“Do you see what I mean, though?” She gestured down at the book. “If Richard had corrupted the true key, making Darken Rahl pick the wrong box, this seems to indicate that the boxes would have been destroyed along with Darken Rahl. That seems to support the idea that Richard memorized a false key.”

“Maybe. You said you weren’t sure of that, yet.” Zedd rubbed the back of his neck as he paced. “Let’s not make the error of jumping to conclusions.”

Nicci nodded.

“You say there was something else you were going on?” Zedd asked.

Nicci nodded and then quoted the central prophecy, the one Nathan had told them. “ ‘In the year of the cicadas, when the champion of sacrifice and suffering, under the banner of both mankind and the Light, finally splits his swarm, thus shall be the sign that prophecy has been awakened and the final and deciding battle is upon us. Be cautioned, for all true forks and their derivatives are tangled in this mantic root. Only one trunk branches from this conjoined primal origin. If fuer grissa ost drauka does not lead this final battle, then the world, already standing at the brink of darkness, will fall under that terrible shadow.

“Do you see?” Nicci asked. “The ‘champion of sacrifice and suffering under the banner of both mankind and the Light’ is Jagang and the Imperial Order. The next words say that when he ‘finally splits his swarm,’ thus shall be the sign that prophecy has been awakened and the final and deciding battle is upon us. He has split his army. Half is holding the passes, while the other half has gone around to come up through D’Hara from the south. As it says, ‘the final and deciding battle is upon us.’ ”

As if to confirm what she had said, a fit of lightning flickered through the windows, accompanied by thunder rumbling the Keep beneath their feet.

Zedd frowned. “I’m not following your reasoning.”

“Why did Ann and Nathan steal the book in the first place for Richard? Because they misinterpreted prophecy—they thought the final battle was Darken Rahl. They thought that Richard needed The Book of Counted Shadows to fight Darken Rahl in the final battle. They found the only copy in existence—they thought.

“Don’t you see? That was too easy. Richard was born to fight this battle, now, with Jagang and with what the Sisters of the Dark have done by putting the boxes of Orden in play. This, now, is an extension of the same final battle begun with Darken Rahl.

“I think the prophecies may hint that Richard learned the wrong key: ‘Be cautioned, for all true forks and their derivatives are tangled in this mantic root.’ All true forks—true keys?—are on the prophetic root of this final battle. It says that the other forks are false. Maybe other forks contain the false keys.

“Couldn’t it be said that the battle against Darken Rahl was a false fork? Ann and Nathan didn’t know enough at the time—not enough events had unfolded, so they went down that fork, preparing Richard to fight Darken Rahl, not Jagang. But this prophecy says, ‘If fuer grissa ost drauka does not lead this final battle, then the world, already standing at the brink of darkness, will fall under that terrible shadow.’

“That terrible shadow is the power of Orden unleashed by the Sisters of the Dark. They want to darken the world of life. Ann, Nathan, and Richard were preparing for the wrong battle. This is the battle he was meant to fight.”

Zedd paced, his face creased in thought. He halted, finally, and turned to her. “Maybe, Nicci. Maybe. You’ve spent a great deal more time studying prophecy than I have. Maybe you have something.

“But then, maybe you don’t. Prophecy, as Nathan has explained, is not subject to study the way you have just explained. Prophecy is a means of communication between prophets. It can’t necessarily be studied, analyzed, or understood by those without the gift for prophecy.

“Just like Ann and Nathan may have jumped to conclusions without sufficient information, I think it’s also too early for you to draw such conclusions.”

Nicci nodded, conceding his point. “I hope you’re right, Zedd—I really do. This is not an argument I want to win. I’m only bringing it up because I think we need to consider the implications.”

He nodded. “There is something else to consider. Richard doesn’t take to prophecy. He is a creature of free will, and prophecy has a way of having to open up to accommodate him. In this case, with Darken Rahl, maybe Darken Rahl was a false fork, but had he won there are prophetic roots to cover that eventuality as well. Proponents of prophecy would have pointed to them to confirm that Darken Rahl was the true root. We would now find ourselves on one of those other branches, and this one would be false. You can find a prophecy to support just about any belief.”

“I don’t know,” Nicci said as she ran her fingers back through her hair, “perhaps you’re right.”

She was so tired. She needed to get some sleep; maybe then she could think more clearly. Maybe her worry was causing her to race down false trails.

“There is no way we can say at this point if the copies of The Book of Counted Shadows, the one I found and the one Richard knows, are true keys or false.”

“So, what are we going to do?” she asked.

Zedd halted his pacing and faced her. “We’re going to get Richard back, and he is going to find a way to stop this threat.”

Nicci smiled. He had a way of making her feel better in the darkest of times—just the way Richard did.

“But I’ll tell you one thing,” Zedd said. “Before that time comes, we had better find out if the key he memorized is the true or the false key.”

Nicci closed the cover on The Book of Life and picked it up, holding it in the crook of her arm. “I need to learn this whole book, cover to cover. I need to find out if there is a way to do what Richard asked of me—take the boxes back out of play, or somehow annul the threat.

“Failing that, I had better know it inside and out so that I can hopefully be useful to Richard in finding an answer to it all.”

Zedd appraised her eyes. “That’s going to be a great deal of work. It’s going to take a lot of time—a book that complex could take months to fully understand. I only hope we have that much time. I have to say, though, that I agree with you. I guess that you had better get started right away.”

Nicci slipped the book back into a pocket in her dress. “I guess that I had better. There may be books here that would help. If there are any I can think of, or that are mentioned, I’ll let you know. From what I’ve seen so far, there are technical matters I may need help with. If I get stuck, I could use the help of the First Wizard.”

Zedd smiled. “You have it, my dear.”

She shook a finger at him. “But if you come up with a way to find Richard, you had better tell me before you finish having the thought.”

Zedd’s smile widened. “Agreed.”

“What if we don’t find Lord Rahl?” Cara asked.

The other two stared at her. Thunder rumbled through the distant valley. Rain pattered steadily against the windows.

“We’ll get him back,” Nicci insisted, refusing to consider the unthinkable.

“Nothing is ever easy,” Zedd muttered.