Phantom: Chainfire Trilogy Part 2

Chapter 6

Although she couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, Nicci was aware of everything that was being said, even if the voices sounded hollow, distant, temporal, as if coming from some faraway world beyond the greenish shroud.

She wanted to scream Listen to him! But, held tightly as she was within the bosom of the casting, she could not.

More than anything, she wanted out of the terrible tangle of crushing power that encased her.

She hadn’t understood the true meaning of an interior perspective before—none of them had. None of them could have guessed at the reality. Only after initiating the process had she discovered that such a perspective was not simply a way to view a verification web in more detail from the inside, as they had thought, but rather a means for the person doing the analysis to experience it within themselves. By then it was too late and she could not tell the others that what it meant was that she would be perceiving the spell-form by having it ignited within her. The part surrounding her was the mere aura of the conjured power that had dawned within her. It had at first been a revelation bordering on the divine.

Not long after they had initiated it, though, something had begun to go wrong. What had been a profoundly beautiful form of vision had deteriorated into horrific agony. Every new line that sliced through space around her had a corresponding interior aspect that felt as if it were slashing through her soul.

In the beginning she had discovered that pleasure was part of the mechanism by which one perceived the spell as it unfolded. In much the same way in which pleasure could confirm wholesome, fitting aspects of life, it likewise revealed the intricate nature of the spell-form in all its glory. It felt like watching a particularly beautiful sunrise, or tasting a delightful confection, or gazing into the eyes of someone you loved and having them gaze back in the same way. Or, at least, it was like what she imagined it would feel like to have them gaze back in that way.

She had also discovered that, as in life, pain pointed out grievous disorders.

Nicci would never have guessed that such a method had once been commonly used to analyze the inner functioning of a constructed magic—of gauging its inner health. She would never have guessed the complexity or extent of what the method could reveal. She would never have guessed how much it could hurt when something within the spell went awry.

She wondered if she would still have insisted on doing such a thing had she known. She guessed that she would have, if it had a chance of helping Richard.

At that moment, though, there was little else that mattered to her but the pain. It was beyond anything she had ever experienced. Not even the dream walker himself had been able to give her this much pain. It was almost impossible for her to think of anything but her want of being free from the agony. So great was the magnitude of the taint within the spell that there was no doubt in her mind that experiencing it would, for her, be fatal.

Richard had shown them the place it had begun to go wrong. He had pointed out the fundamental defect. That contamination concealed within the spell was pulling her apart. She could feel her life bleeding away beyond that terrible outer circle of the Grace. That Grace, drawn with her blood, had become her life, and it would be her death.

For the moment, Nicci straddled two worlds, neither of them wholly real to her. While still in the world of life, she could feel herself inexorably slipping into that dark void beyond.

All the while, the world of life around her was losing its vibrance.

She was at that moment willing to let it all go, to let herself slip forever into the eternity of nonexistence, if only it would mean that the pain would end.

Even though she could not move, Nicci could see everything in the room—not with her eyes, but with her gift. Even beyond the suffering, she recognized such an exotic form of sight as an extraordinary experience. Vision through her gift alone had a singular quality that approached omniscience. She could see more than her eyes had ever allowed her to see. Despite her agony, there was a quiet majesty to it all.

Beyond the net of greenish lines, Richard looked from one startled face to another.

“What’s the matter with all of you? You have to get her out of there!”

Before Ann could launch into a lecture, Zedd gestured for her to keep quiet. Once sure her lips would stay pressed tightly together, he turned his attention back to his grandson.

Another line departed an intersection and traced a path through space. It felt to Nicci like a dull knitting needle taking a stitch in her soul, pulling the agony of that thread of light through her as it bound her ever more tightly to a dark death. It was all she could do to remain conscious. Surrender was seeming sweeter by the moment.

Zedd gestured up toward her. “We can’t, Richard. These things have to run a course. The verification web runs itself through a series of connections and in that way reveals information about its nature. Once the verification process has begun, it’s impossible to halt it. It has to run its course to completion and then it extinguishes.”

Nicci knew the grim truth of it.

Richard seized his grandfather’s arm. “How long?” He shook the old man like a rag doll. “How long does the process take?”

Zedd pried Richard’s fingers off his arm. “We’ve never seen a spell like this. It’s hard to say. But as complex as it’s proving to be I can’t imagine it taking less than three or four hours. She’s been in there an hour already so it will be hours yet before it runs its course and extinguishes.”

Nicci knew that she didn’t have hours. She had mere moments before the pull of the contamination drew her forever beyond the veil and into the world of the dead.

She thought it a strange way for her life to end. So unexpected. So uneventful. So pointless. She would at least have wanted it to be an end that in some way would have helped Richard, or to have been after they knew that they had accomplished something. She wished her death could have at least bought him something of value.

Richard turned back to gaze up at her. “She won’t last that long. We have to get out of there now.”

Inwardly, through her agony, she smiled. To the end. Richard would fight to the end against death.

“Richard,” Zedd said, “I can’t imagine how you could possibly know such a thing, and I’m not saying that I don’t believe you, but we can’t shut down a verification web.”

“Why not?”

“Well,” Zedd said as he sighed, “the truth is, I don’t even know if such a thing is possible, but even if it were, none of us knows how to do it. The standard verification process builds safeguards to shield itself from tampering. This thing is an order of magnitude more complex and involved.”

“Rather like trying to dismount in midgallop while racing along a ridgeline,” the tall prophet said. “You need to wait until the horse is finished running before you jump off, or you will only be leaping to your death.”

Richard returned to the table, frantically studying the structure constructed of light. Nicci wondered if he realized that, while it was to a degree tangible, what he was seeing existed mainly as a mere aura representing the real power raging through her.

As another line advanced from an intersection at an angle that was dreadfully wrong, Nicci gasped inwardly. She felt something vital within her being slowly ripped open. The pain of it sang through the marrow of her bones. She saw darkness layered over the room, and knew she was seeing into another world, the dark world where there would be no more pain.

She began to allow herself to drift toward that world.

And then she saw something in the otherworldly shadows. She caught herself, held herself back from the dark brink of death.

Something with glowing eyes, like twin coals, gazed out from the dark shadows. The malevolent intent of that furnace gaze was fixed on Richard.

Nicci struggled desperately to call out a warning. It cleaved her heart that she could not.

“Look,” Richard whispered as he gazed up at her, “there’s a tear running down her cheek.”

Ann sadly shook her head. “Probably because she isn’t blinking, that’s all.”

Richard’s hands fisted in frustration as he moved around the table, trying to decipher the meaning of the lines. “We have to find a way to shut the thing down. There has to be a way.”

Richard’s grandfather laid a hand gently on the back of Richard’s shoulder. “I swear, Richard, I would do as you want if I could, but I know of no method to halt a verification web. And what is it that has you so fired up, anyway? Why the sudden urgency? What is it that you think is contaminating the spell-form?”

Nicci’s attention was locked on the thing watching out from the shadowy world of the dead. Whenever the lightning flared, illuminating the room, the thing with the glowing eyes wasn’t there. Only when darkness again fell over the room could she see it.

Richard’s eyes turned from studying the lines to gaze up at Nicci’s face. She wanted nothing so much as for him to reach out and pull her free of the agony of the spell that had impaled her on lethal shards of magic, but she knew that he could not. Right then, she would have willingly given up her life for one moment in his arms.

Richard’s answer finally came in a soft resignation. “The chimes.”

Ann rolled her eyes. Nathan let out a sigh of relief, as if he now knew that Richard was merely imagining things.

Zedd’s brow lifted. “The chimes? Richard, I’m afraid that this time you’ve gotten it wrong. That simply isn’t possible. The chimes are underworld elements. While they certainly lust to enter our world, they can’t. They’re forever trapped in the underworld.”

“I know very well what the chimes are,” Richard said in a near whisper. “Kahlan freed them. She freed them to save my life.”

“She couldn’t possibly know how to do such a thing.”

“Nathan told her how, told her their names: Reechani, Sentrosi, Vasi. Water, fire, air. Calling them was the only way for her to save my life. It was an act of desperation.”

Nathan’s mouth fell open in surprise but he offered no argument. Ann cast a suspicious glare up at the prophet.

Zedd spread his hands. “Richard, she may have thought she was calling them, but I assure you, such a thing is monumentally complex. Besides, we would know if the chimes were free in our world. Be at ease about this much of it. The chimes are not loose.”

“Not anymore,” Richard said with grim finality. “I banished them back to the underworld. But Kahlan always believed that because she unknowingly brought them into our world it had engendered the beginning of the destruction of magic itself—the cascade effect, as you once described it to us.”

Zedd was taken aback. “The cascade effect . . . you could only have heard that from me.”

Richard nodded as he stared off into memories. “She tried to convince me that magic had been tainted by the presence of the chimes, and that banishing them back to the underworld would not halt that taint. I never knew whether or not she was right. Now I do.”

He pointed up at that awful place before Nicci, that core of her pain, her agony, her end.

“There is the proof. Not the chimes, but the corruption their presence caused: the contamination of magic. That contamination has infected this world. It was drawn to the strength of this magic. It has infected the Chainfire spell and it will kill Nicci if we don’t get her out of there.”

The room had grown darker yet. Nicci could hardly see through the veil of pain. But she could still see those sinister eyes behind Richard, in the shadows, watching, waiting. No one but Nicci knew that it was there, in that spectral place between worlds.

Richard would never know what hit him.

Nicci had no way to warn him.

She felt another tear roll down her face.

Richard, seeing that tear drip from her jaw, leaned close. With quiet determination, he used a finger to trace the primary pathways, the supporting junctures, and the main framework of the emblem, as he called it.

“It should be feasible,” he insisted.

Ann looked beside herself but she remained silent. Nathan watched with stony resignation.

Zedd pushed his simple robes farther up his bony arms. “Richard, it’s impossible to shut down a regular verification web, much less one such as this.”

“No, it’s not,” Richard said, irritably. “Here. See here? You have to interrupt this route, here, first.”

“Bags, Richard, how am I supposed to do such a thing! The spell shields itself. This web is powered by Subtractive as well as Additive Magic. It has integral shields constructed of both.”

Richard stared at his grandfather’s crimson face a moment before turning back to the maze of lines. He gazed up at Nicci again and then carefully inserted a hand in through the net of lines to touch Nicci’s black dress.

“I won’t let it have you,” he whispered to her.

No words had ever sounded sweeter, even if she knew he could not understand the impossibility of his promise.

When his finger touched her dress, the patterns shifted from two-dimensional to three-dimensional forms that looked more like a thornbush than a spell-form.

It felt to Nicci as if he had just twisted a knife through her insides. She struggled to remain conscious. She focused on the glowing eyes in the shadows. She had to find a way to warn Richard.

His hand paused. He carefully pulled it back out. The pattern flattened to two-dimensional.

Nicci would have sighed in relief could she breathe.

“Did you see that?” he asked.

Zedd nodded. “I certainly did.”

Richard glanced back over his shoulder at his grandfather. “Is it supposed to do that?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. It’s supposed to be inert, but the biological variable contaminating it has changed the nature of the host spell-form.”

Zedd’s expression tightened as he considered. “It seems pretty obvious that whatever is going on, it’s changing the way the spell works.”

Richard nodded. “Worse, it’s a random variable. The contamination caused by the chimes’ presence in this world is biological—it evolves. Probably so that it can attack different kinds of magic. This spell will undoubtedly continue to mutate. There’s probably no way to predict how it will change, but from the evidence here, it appears that it’s only going to become more virulent. As if Chainfire isn’t trouble enough, this could make it worse. It could even be that everyone affected by it will develop problems beyond their memory loss revolving around Kahlan.”

“What makes you say that?” Zedd asked.

“Just look at how many memories of events only tangent to Kahlan you’ve all lost. The lost memories could even be the means by which the contamination infects those people touched by the effects of the Chainfire event.”

As if the Chainfire event being loosed on the world weren’t potentially deadly enough, it now seemed catastrophic beyond imagining.

Ann was bottled fury. She gritted her teeth. “Where did you learn such gibberish?”

Zedd flashed her a scowl. “Be quiet.”

“I told you, I understand emblematic designs. This one is a mess.”

Nathan glanced to the windows as they lit with flashes of lightning. When the room again fell to darkness, Nicci could again see the thing watching from a dark world.

“And you sincerely believe that it’s somehow harming Nicci?” Zedd asked.

“I know it is. Look at this divergence, right here. Such a thing is lethal even without this added breach over here. I know a lot about representational designs involving lethality.”

Zedd gave Richard a forbidding look. “I need to know what you’re talking about, what you mean by ‘representational designs involving lethality.’ ”

“Later. We have to get her out of there, first, and we have to get her out now.”

Zedd shook his head in resignation. “I wish I knew a way, Richard, I truly do, but as I’ve said, I don’t. If you try to pull her out of there before the verification has run its course, that alone will kill her for sure. That much I do know.”

“Why?”

“Because her life is in a way suspended. Don’t you see that she isn’t breathing? The spell-form surrounding her supports her life while she cannot, while the web runs through the verification. She is, in a way, now a part of the spell itself. Pull her out, and you will be pulling her out of the mechanism that is keeping her alive.”

Nicci’s heart sank. For a moment, she had begun to believe Richard, to believe that he could do it. It was not to be.

All the while the glowing eyes watched. She could see the shape of it, now, standing there in the dark shadows beside a tall shelf. It looked something like a man twisted into a fearsome beast of sinew and knotted muscle. Its eyes gleamed out from the darkness of death itself.

It was the beast that hunted Richard. The beast sent by Jagang, the dream walker.

She would have done anything to stop it, to keep it from Richard, but she could not move a muscle. With every new line of light, she was being stitched tighter and tighter to her fate, pulled inexorably into the darkness of eternity beyond life.

“Even if it’s mutating,” Richard said as if thinking aloud, “it still has elements that support it while it grows.”

“Richard, a verification web is self-generating. Even if it was mutating like you say, there is no way to halt such an event.”

“If it can be shut down,” Richard murmured, “it will release her—then we won’t be pulling her out of it while her life is still being supported by the spell.”

Sighing, Zedd shook his head as if he thought Richard hadn’t understood a thing he’d said.

Richard studied the lines one last time, then abruptly reached out and placed his finger at an intersection that had been created back before the area of contamination.

The line extinguished at his finger.

“Dear spirits,” Nathan said as he leaned in.

The shadow took a step forward. Nicci could now see its fangs.

The line that had extinguished felt as if it pulled her insides out with it. Nicci fought to cling to life. If he really could do it, if he really could extinguish the spell, she had a chance to warn him.

If she could hold on that long.

Richard withdrew his finger. The line ignited again. It lanced through her like a razor-sharp spear. The world flickered.

“See?”

Zedd reached out to duplicate what Richard had done, but with a yelp of pain pulled his hand back as if he’d been burned.

“It’s shielded with Subtractive Magic,” Ann said.

Zedd shot her a murderous scowl.

“And remember the shields back at the Palace of the Prophets?” Richard asked her. “Remember how I was able to pass through them?”

Ann nodded. “I still have nightmares about it.”

Richard reached out again, quickly this time, and again blocked the line of light. Again it extinguished.

Richard then put a finger from his other hand at an intersection preceding the darkened line. In a blink, more lines went dark. He moved his first finger to insert it at another key point, working his way back through the putcrn, causing the spell to turn in on itself.

The darkened line raced around Nicci, hitting intersections, making turns, sweeping through and darkening arcs. The line Richard had extinguished ceased to exist in the pattern, its absence causing an interruption in the vitality of the rhythm.

Nicci marveled at the reaction of the spell-form within her. She could sense in detail the process of it dismantling, like a flower closing its petals.

The room again seemed to shimmer in Nicci’s gifted vision, as if lightning were flaring, but she knew that this was not lightning.

The glowing eyes peered about, as if it, too, sensed the fluctuation in the flux of power Richard had interrupted.

Didn’t anyone but Nicci realize that Richard was using his gift to penetrate such shields? Were they blind? The use of his gift drew the beast out of the underworld.

Outside, real lightning flashed and thunder boomed. The room flickered not only with the lightning but with the disruption of power within the spell-form. The wall of windows flashed between blinding brightness and inky obscurity.

It felt to Nicci as if both of those powerful discharges thundered right through her. She could not understand how she was still alive. It could only be that Richard was shutting down the spell without destroying it. He was methodically extinguishing it, like snuffing out the flames on a row of wicks.

Focused in concentration, Richard put his other hand down lower and blocked another line. The line went dark, racing back through the complex matrix.

The shadow of the beast began to step out of the underworld, partially into the world of life, pulling and flexing its arms with the difficulty of the task, testing its newborn muscle. Fangs glistened in the lamplight as the jaws stretched wide.

Their attention riveted on the lines around Nicci, no one noticed.

Holding a block in one network of lines, Richard carefully inserted a finger to occlude a preceding framework.

The entire web, having lost not just its most important supporting structure, but its very integrity, began to come apart. Angles opened. Intersections disjointed, letting connecting lines sag away. Other lines collided, sparking flashes of white light upon contact that made yet more lines go dark.

All of a sudden, the web of remaining lines collapsed downward, like a curtain falling. Nicci could feel the network of power laced all through her slough away. As the falling lines of light hit the Grace they went dark. In an instant, they were gone.

Free from the tangle, Nicci abruptly dropped to the table as she gasped a breath, like a scream drawn inward. Her legs had no strength to hold her and she crumpled, toppling over the edge of the table.

Richard caught her in his arms as she fell. Her dead weight took him to one knee. He maintained his balance, cradling her in his arms, saving her from hitting the stone floor.

Outside, lightning went wild, casting the room in fits of flickering light.

It was then that the beast, a soulless creature created for a single purpose, materialized fully out of the world of the dead and into the world of life.

And sprang straight for Richard.