Soul of the Fire

Chapter 29

Kahlan went willingly as he walked her off through the wet grass, more content to argue with him alone than in front of everyone else. For Richard’s part, he didn’t want to tell her what he had to say in front of others.

Over his shoulder, Richard saw Chandalen’s hunters leaning casually on their spears, spears dipped in poison. They looked to lazily wait for Richard and Kahlan to finish their talk and return. He knew there was nothing lazy about them. He could see they were strategically positioned to keep the Baka Tau Mana under guard. This was their land, after all, and despite them knowing Richard, the Baka Tau Mana were outsiders.

The Baka Tau Mana, for their part, looked completely indifferent to the Mud People hunters. The blade masters spoke a few nonchalant words to one another, looked out at the storm clouds on the horizon, or stretched and yawned.

Richard had fought Baka Ban Mana blade masters; he knew they were anything but indifferent. They were poised to kill. Having lived a tenuous existence surrounded by enemies bent on destroying them, their nature, by training, was to be prepared to kill at any moment.

When Richard had been with Sister Verna and they had first encountered the blade masters, he had asked her if they were dangerous. Sister Verna told him that when she was young, she had seen a Baka Ban Mana blade master who had gotten into the garrison in Tanimura kill nearly fifty well-armed soldiers before he was taken down. She said they fought as if they were invincible spirits, and that some people believed they were.

Richard wouldn’t like some small lapse in judgment or misstep in understanding to bring the Mud People and the Baka Tau Mana to a fight. They were all too good at fighting.

Cara, looking anything but dispassionate, painted them all with her glares.

Like the three sides of a triangle, the Mud People, the Baka Tau Mana, and Cara were all part of the same struggle. They were all allied to Richard and Kahlan, and to their cause, even though each looked at the world differently. They all valued most of the same things in life. Family, friends, hard work, honesty, duty, loyalty, freedom.

Kahlan placed her hand gently but insistently on his chest.

“Richard, despite anything else I’m feeling at the moment, I know your heart is in the right place, but you simply aren’t being reasonable. You’re the Seeker of Truth; you have to stop insisting you’re right and see the truth of this. We can stop the Sisters’ magic and their Lurk. Zedd and Ann will counter the spell. Why are you being so obstinate?”

“Kahlan,” he said, keeping his voice low, “the chicken-thing was a chime.”

She absently, unconsciously, fingered the dark stone on the delicate gold chain around her neck. “Richard, you know I love you and you know I believe in you, but in this case I’ve just about—”

“Kahlan,” he said, cutting her off. He knew what she thought and what she had to say. Now he wanted her only to listen. He waited until her eyes told him she would.

“You called the chimes into this world.

“You didn’t do it intentionally, or to cause harm—no one would believe otherwise. You did it to save me. I was near death and needed your help, so I’m part of this, too. Without my actions, yours would not have been necessary.”

“Don’t forget our ancestors. Had they not borne children, we wouldn’t have been born to commit our crimes. I suppose you’ll want to hold them to account, too?”

He wet his lips as he gently gripped her shoulders. “I’m just saying that giving help is the thing that started this. That does not, however, in any sense, make you guilty of malicious intent. You must understand that. But because you spoke the words completing the spell, that makes you inadvertently responsible. You brought the chimes into this world.

“For some reason, Zedd didn’t want us to know. I wish he would have trusted us with the truth, but he didn’t. I’m sure he had reasons that to him seemed important enough to make him lie to us. For all I know, maybe they were.”

Kahlan put her fingertips to her forehead, closed her eyes, and sighed with forbearance. “Richard, I agree there are puzzling aspects to what Zedd did, and there are matters yet to be answered, but that doesn’t mean we have to leap to a different answer just for the sake of having one. Zedd is First Wizard; we must trust in what he’s asked us to do.”

Richard touched her cheek. He wished he could be alone with her, really alone, and he could try to make up for his foolish forgetfulness. He dearly didn’t want to be telling her these things, but he had to.

“Please, Kahlan, listen to what I have to say, and then you decide? I want to be wrong, I really do. You decide.

“When the Mud People hunters were guarding us in the spirit house, the chimes were outside. One of them killed a chicken just because they like to kill.

“When Juni heard the noise, the same as I heard it, he investigated but found nothing. He then insulted the spirit of the killer in order to bring it out in the open. It came out in the open, and killed him for insulting them.”

“I insulted the chicken-thing, so why didn’t it kill me?” Kahlan wearily wiped a hand across her eyes. “Answer me that, Richard. Why didn’t it kill me?”

He gazed into her beautiful green eyes for a moment as he gathered his courage.

“The chime told you why, Kahlan.”

“What?” she said with a squint. “What are you talking about?”

“That chicken-thing wasn’t a Lurk. It was a chime, and it wasn’t calling you by your title of Mother Confessor. It was a chime. It said what it meant.

“It called you ‘Mother.’ ”

Kahlan stared at him in startled wide-eyed shock.

“They respect you,” he said, “to some limited extent, anyway, because you brought them into the world of life. You gave them life. They consider you their life-giver, their mother. You only assumed the chicken-thing was going to add the word ‘Confessor’ after it called you ‘Mother’ because you are so used to hearing yourself called by that title.

“But the chime wasn’t calling you by title, Kahlan. It was calling you by the name it meant: Mother.”

He could almost see the truth of his words inundating her carefully constructed fortress of rationale. Some truths, after a certain point, could be felt viscerally, and at that point everything clicked with the finality of a dead bolt on a prison of truth.

Kahlan’s eyes filled with tears.

She pressed closer to him, into the comfort and understanding of his arms. She gasped a sob against his chest and then angrily wiped her cheek as a tear rolled down.

“I think that was the only thing that saved you,” he said softly as he hugged her. “I wouldn’t want to again trust your life to their charity.”

“We have to stop them.” She stifled another sob. “Dear spirits, we have to stop them.”

“I know.”

“Do you know what to do?” she asked. “Do you have any idea how to send them back to the world of the dead?”

“Not yet. To find a solution, the first thing to be done is to recognize the true problem. I guess we’ve done that, now?”

Kahlan nodded as she wiped at her eyes. As quickly as understanding had brought tears, resolve banished them.

“Why would the chimes have been outside the spirit house?”

While they had been together after being married, exulting in their love, something had been outside the door exulting in death. It made him feel sick at his stomach just to think about it.

“I don’t know. Maybe the chimes wanted to be near you.”

Kahlan simply nodded. She understood. Near their mother.

Richard remembered the stricken look on Kahlan’s face when Nissel brought the stillborn baby into the house of the dead. The chimes had caused that, too. It was only the beginning.

“What’s a fatal Grace? You mentioned it before, yesterday, when we went to see Zedd and Ann.”

“Most of the stories about the chimes that I recounted came from an early report. Because Kolo was frightened, he wrote at greater length than usual. The report he quoted said at the end, ‘Mark well my words: Beware the chimes, and if need be great, draw for yourself thrice on the barren earth, in sand and salt and blood, a fatal Grace.’

“And what does that mean?”

“I don’t know. I was hoping maybe Zedd or Ann might know. He knows all about the Grace. I thought he might know about this.”

“But do you think this fatal Grace would stop the chimes?”

“I just don’t know, Kahlan. It occurred to me that it might be desperate advice on suicide.”

Kahlan nodded absently as she mulled over the words from Kolo’s journal.

“I could understand if it was advice on suicide. I could feel its evil,” she said as she stared off into her visions. “When I was in the house where the Mud People prepared bodies for burial, and the chicken-thing—the chime—was in there with me, I could feel its evil. Dear spirits, it was awful.

“It was pecking out Juni’s eyes. Even though he was dead, it still wanted to peck out his eyes.”

He pulled her into his arms again. “I know.”

She pushed away with rekindled hope. “Yesterday, with Zedd and Ann, you told us Kolo said they were quite alarmed at first, but after investigating they discovered the chimes were a simple weapon and easily overcome.”

“Yes, but Kolo only reported the relief at the Wizard’s Keep when they discovered it wasn’t the problem to counter they at first thought it would be. He didn’t write down the solution. They sent a wizard they called the Mountain to see to it. Obviously, he did.”

“Do you have any idea if there are any weapons that would be effective against them? Juni was heavily armed, and it didn’t do him any good, but might there be others?”

“Kolo never gave any indication. Arrows didn’t kill the chicken-thing, and fire certainly isn’t going to harm them.

“However, Zedd was emphatic that I retrieve the Sword of Truth. If he lied about it being a Lurk, that may have been to keep us away from harm. I don’t believe he would lie about the sword. He wanted me to get it, and he said it might be the only magic that would still work to protect us. I believe him in that much of it.”

“Why do you suppose the chicken-thing fled from you? I mean, if they consider me their mother, I could understand them maybe having some kind of . . . reverence, for me, and being reluctant to harm me, but if they’re so powerful, why would they run from you? You only shot at them with an arrow. You said arrows couldn’t hurt them. Why would it run from you?”

Richard raked back his hair. “I’ve wondered about that myself. The only answer I’ve been able to come up with is that they’re creatures of Subtractive Magic, and I’m the only one in thousands of years born with that side of magic. Maybe they fear my Subtractive Magic can harm them—maybe it can. It’s a hope, anyway.”

“And the fire? That one lone bit of our wedding bonfires that was still burning that you snuffed out? That was one of them, wasn’t it?”

Richard hated that they had been in their wedding bonfire. It was a defilement.

“Yes. Sentrosi—the second chime. It means ‘fire.’ Reechani, the first, means ‘water.’ The third, Vasi, means ‘air.’ ”

“But you put out the fire. The chime didn’t do anything to stop you. If they would kill Juni for insulting them, it certainly seems they would be angered by what you did. The chicken thing, too, ran from you.”

“I don’t know, Kahlan. I don’t have an answer.”

Peering into his eyes, she hesitated for a moment. “Maybe they didn’t harm you for the same reason they didn’t harm me.”

“They think I, too, am their mother?”

“Father,” she said, unconsciously stroking the dark stone at her throat. “I used the spell to keep you alive, to keep you from crossing over into the world of the dead. The spell called the chimes because they were from the other side and had the power to do that. Maybe, since we were both involved, they think of us as father and mother—as their parents.”

Richard let out a long breath. “That’s possible, I’m not saying it isn’t, but when I felt them near, I just got the sense of something more to it—something that made my hair stand on end.”

“More? More like what?”

“It was an overwhelming sense of their lust whenever they were near me, and at the same time monstrous loathing.”

Kahlan rubbed her arms, chilled by such obscene wickedness among them. A humorless smile, bitter with irony, crossed her face.

“Shota always said we would together conceive a monstrous offspring.”

Richard cupped her cheek. “Someday, Kahlan. Someday.”

On the verge of tears, she turned from his hand, his gaze, to stare off at the horizon. She cleared her throat and gathered her voice.

“If magic is failing, at least Jagang will lose his help. He controls those with magic to help his army. At least if he could no longer do that, there would be that much good in all this.

“He used one of those wizards to try to kill us. He was able to use one of the Sisters of the Light to bring the plague from the Temple of the Winds. If magic fails because of the chimes, at least it will fail for Jagang, too.”

Richard pulled his lower lip through his teeth. “I’ve been thinking about that. If the chicken-thing was afraid of me because I have Subtractive Magic, Jagang’s control over those with magic might very well no longer work, but—”

“Dear spirits,” she whispered, turning back to look up at him. “The Sisters of the Dark. They may not have been born with it, but they know how to use Subtractive Magic.”

Richard nodded reluctantly. “I fear that Jagang, if nothing else, might still have the Sisters of the Dark. Their magic will work.”

“Our only hope, then, is with Zedd and Ann. Let’s hope they will be able to stop the chimes.”

Richard couldn’t force a smile for her. “How? Neither of them is able to use Subtractive Magic. The magic they do have is failing along with all other magic. They will be just as helpless as that unborn child that died. I’m sure they’ve gone, but where?”

She gave him a look, very much a Mother Confessor look. “Had you remembered your first wife when you should have, Richard, we could have told Zedd. It might have made a difference. Now that chance is lost to us. You picked a very bad time to become negligent.”

He wanted to argue with her, tell her it wouldn’t have made any difference, tell her she was wrong, but he couldn’t. She wasn’t wrong. Zedd would have gone off alone to battle the chimes. Richard wondered if they might go back and track his grandfather.

She at last took his hand in hers, gave it a brave pat with her other, and then marched them back to where the others waited. She held her head erect. Her face was a Confessor’s face, devoid of emotion, full of authority.

“We don’t yet know what to do about them,” Kahlan announced, “but I’m convinced beyond doubt: the chimes are loose upon the world.”