“What are you talking about?”
“What if all of you are right and there really isn’t any Kahlan? What if I’m crazy? Even you think I am. I need to know what Shota can tell me. If I’m wrong about everything I believe, then what good is a sword going to do a crazy man? If all of you are right that I’m delusional, then what good can I do anyone else? What good am I to anyone if I’m crazy? What good am I at all?”
Her eyes looked liquid. “You’re not crazy.”
“No? Then you believe there really is a woman named Kahlan and I’m married to her?” When she didn’t answer, he pulled her other hand off his wrist. “I didn’t think so.”
Cara turned angrily to Shota, pointing with her Agiel. “You can’t take his sword! It isn’t fair and you know it! You’re taking advantage of his condition. You can’t take his sword!”
“The price I asked is but a trifling…. The sword isn’t even his. It never was.”
Shota beckoned with a finger. Samuel, watching from the shadows, scurried toward them through the trees.
Cara stepped between Richard and Shota. “It was given to Lord Rahl by the First Wizard. Lord Rahl was named to the post of Seeker and given the Sword of Truth. It’s his!”
“And where do you suppose the First Wizard got the sword in the first place?” Shota pointed a finger tipped with a long red-lacquered nail downward at the ground. “He got it here. He came here, into my home, and stole it. That’s where Zedd got the sword.
“Richard doesn’t carry it by right, but by theft. Giving it back to its rightful owner is a small penance to pay for what he wants to know.”
Cara had a dangerous look in her eyes as she lifted her Agiel. Richard gently grasped her wrist and lowered her arm before she started something that he knew could quickly turn ugly. He wasn’t sure of the results of such a confrontation, but he dared not risk losing what Shota could tell him…or risk losing Cara.
“I’m doing as I must,” he told Cara in a calm voice. “Don’t make this any more difficult than it already is.”
Richard had seen Cara in every sort of mood imaginable. He’d seen her happy, sad, disheartened, resolved, determined, and enraged, but until that moment he had never seen her anger focused so intently, deliberately, so directly at him.
And then he had a sudden vision of her taken by cruel anger once before, a long time ago.
He couldn’t afford to suffer the distraction of any such memory right then and shoved it out of his mind. This was about Kahlan, and about the future, not about the past.
Richard pulled the baldric off over his head and gathered it together with the scabbard. Samuel, not far behind his mistress’s skirts, stood quietly watching, his greedy eyes riveted on the wire-wound hilt.
Holding the gleaming gold and silver scabbard in both hands, bundled together with the ancient, tooled leather baldric, Richard lifted it out to Shota.
She made a move to take it. “The sword belongs to Samuel, my loyal companion.” She smiled triumphantly. “Give it to him.”
Richard stood frozen. He couldn’t let Samuel have the Sword of Truth. He just couldn’t.
He wondered then just what he thought Shota would want with the sword if not to give it to Samuel. He guessed that he had been trying not to think of what it really meant to hand it over to Shota.
“But the sword made him like that. Zedd told me that the sword’s magic did that to him, turned him into what he is now.”
“And when he has back what belongs to him, he will be who he once was, before it was stolen from him by your grandfather.”
Richard knew Samuel’s character. As far as Richard was concerned, Samuel was capable of anything, including murder. Richard could hardly give something so dangerous as the Sword of Truth to someone like that.
Too many people like Samuel had carried the sword, had fought over it, stolen it from one another, sold it to the highest bidder, who then became a Seeker whose services were for sale to any loathsome cause that could pay the price. In the shadows it passed from hand to hand, used for vile and violent purposes. By the time Zedd had finally gotten the Sword of Truth back and eventually given it to Richard, the Seeker had become an object of scorn and contempt, seen as nothing more than a criminal, and a dangerous one at that.
If he gave the sword to Samuel, it would be that way again. It would start all over again.
But if he didn’t, then Richard had no chance of ever stopping the far greater threat very likely loose in the world, or of ever seeing Kahlan again. While Kahlan was of paramount importance to him, personally, he was convinced that her disappearance augured an ominous menace far more sinister, with potential harm on a scale he feared to contemplate.
His responsibility as the Seeker of Truth was to the truth, not to the Sword of Truth.
Samuel inched closer, his eyes on the sword, his arms reaching, his palms held up, waiting.
“Mine, gimme,” Samuel growled impatiently, his hateful eyes glaring.
Richard lifted his head to look at Shota. She folded her arms, as if to say that this was his last chance. This was the last chance Richard had of ever finding the truth.
If he had known of any other way to find a solution, no matter how remote that chance might be, he would have taken the sword back and taken that chance instead. But he couldn’t lose this chance, lose what information Shota had. There was nothing else to do.
With trembling hands, Richard lifted the sword out.
Samuel, unwilling to wait the final seconds until it reached him, lunged and snatched the sword away, finally clutching the coveted object to his breast.
The instant he had it, a strange look came over his face. He glanced up into Richard’s eyes, his own wide with wonder, his mouth hanging agape. Richard couldn’t imagine what Samuel was seeing as a result of having his hands on the Sword of Truth. Richard thought that perhaps he was simply awestruck to realize that he actually did have it again.
He suddenly skittered away, swiftly disappearing into the trees. The Sword of Truth was once again among the shadows.
Richard felt naked, and stunned. He stared off in the direction Samuel had gone. He wished now that he had killed Shota’s companion the first time Samuel had attacked him. Samuel had attacked Richard more than once. Richard had let those chances slip away.
He turned a harsh glare on Shota. “If he harms anyone, it will be on your head.”
“I am not the one who gave him the sword. You did so of your own free will. I did not twist your arm or use my powers to force you. Do not try to shed responsibility for your own choices and actions.”
“And I am not responsible for his actions. If he harms anyone, I will see to it that this time he pays for his crimes.”
Shota glanced off among the trees dotting the sweep of grass. “There is no one here for him to harm. He has his sword. He is happy, now.”
Richard seriously doubted that.
With quiet fury, he turned his attention to the matter at hand. He didn’t want to hear any of her excuses so he came right to the point.
“You have your payment.”
She stared at him a long time, her face unreadable. Finally, in a quiet voice, she spoke a single word.
“Chainfire.”
She turned and started toward the road.
Richard seized her arm and turned her back. “What?”
“You wanted what I know that can help you find the truth. I have given it to you: Chainfire.”
Richard was incredulous. “Chainfire? What does that mean?”
Shota shrugged. “I have no idea. I only know that it is what you need to know to find the truth of all this.”
“What do you mean, you have no idea? You can’t just tell me some word I never heard of and then leave. That’s not a fair trade for what I’ve given you.”
“Nonetheless, that is the agreement you made, and I have upheld my end of the bargain.”
“You have to tell me what it means.”
“I don’t
know what it means, but I do know that it is worth the price you paid.”
Richard couldn’t believe that he had agreed to a deal in which he got nothing of value in return. He was no closer to finding Kahlan than he had been before he’d come to see Shota. He felt like sitting down right there on the ground and giving up.
“Our business is concluded. Good-bye, Richard. Please leave. It will be dark, soon. I can assure you, you would not like to be here when it gets dark.”
Shota started down the road toward her palace in the distance. As he watched her go, Richard reprimanded himself for embracing failure without even trying for success. He now knew something linked to the mystery. It was a piece of the puzzle, a piece of the solution, so valuable that it had previously been known only to a witch woman. It confirmed for him that Kahlan was real. He told himself that he was a step closer. He had to believe that.
“Shota,” Richard called.
She paused and turned back, waiting to hear what he might say, looking like she expected a tirade.
“Thank you,” he said in a sincere voice. “I don’t know what good knowing the word Chainfire will do me, but thank you. You have at least given me a reason to go on. When I came here, I had none; now I do. Thank you.”
She stared at him. He could not imagine what she could be thinking.
Finally, she took a slow step back toward him. She clasped her hands before herself, looking down a moment before she stared off at the trees, apparently considering something.
At last, she spoke. “What you seek is long buried.”
“Long buried?” he cautiously asked.
“Like the word Chainfire, I can’t tell you what that means. Things come to me in regard to issues, problems, questions. I am the carrier of the information, the channel you might say. I am not the source. I can’t tell you the meaning, but I can tell you that what you seek is long buried.”
“Chainfire, and seek something long buried.” Richard repeated as he nodded. “Got it. I’ll not forget.”
Her brow twitched, as if something else had just came to her. “You must find the place of the bones in the Deep Nothing.”
Richard felt goose bumps racing up his legs. He had no idea what the “Deep Nothing” was, but he didn’t like the sound of it, or the sound of looking for bones. He refused to consider the dire implications.
Shota turned again to the road and started making her way toward her palace. She had not gone more than a dozen paces when she stopped and turned back. Her ageless eyes met his gaze.
“Beware the viper with four heads.”
Richard cocked his head expectantly. “I don’t know what that means—the viper with four heads.”
“Whether or not you realize it right now, I have given you a fair trade. I have given you the answers you needed. You are the Seeker—or at least, you were; you will have to seek the meaning to be found in those answers.”
With that, she turned for the final time and walked off through the golden light down the long road.
“Let’s go,” he said to Cara. “I’d not like to find out why we don’t want to be here when it gets dark.”
Cara cast him an icy glare. “I would imagine it has something to do with a murderous maniac wielding a deadly sword coming at you out of the darkness.”
Richard gloomily supposed that she might be right. Samuel would probably not be content to simply have the sword. He would probably want to eliminate the rightful owner and thereby any chance that Richard might lay claim to it or somehow get it back.
Despite what Shota had said, the real thief had been Samuel. The Sword of Truth was the responsibility of the First Wizard. He was the one who named Seekers and gave them the sword. It did not belong to whoever might possess it by any means, it belonged to the true, wizard-named Seeker, and that was Richard.
With sickening dread, he realized that he had betrayed the trust his grandfather had placed in him when he had given Richard the sword.
But what value would the sword be to him if keeping it meant that Kahlan would lose her life?
There was no higher value to him than life.
Chapter 43
Richard was so deep in thought that he wasn’t fully aware of the arduous climb up the steep face of the cliff and out of Agaden Reach. In the golden light of the valley below them the long shadows of trees lengthened across the green fields, yet the quiet beauty of the place as the sun sank behind the enfolding mountains was lost on him; he wanted to be far away from the valley and out of the swamp before darkness took hold for good. He tried to devote his efforts to that task, that mission, of putting one foot before the other, of moving, advancing.
By the time they reached the top of the cliff and the vast swamp guarding the approach to Shota’s home, it was an early dusk in the deep niche of the towering mountains that ringed the place. Because the walls of rock cut the sunlight off early, it left the sky overhead a deep blue, but that light was unable to effectively penetrate the forest canopy, so that in the late day the vast green bog seemed mired in a perpetual gloom of half-night. The deep shadows were very different than those in Shota’s valley. The shadows in the swamp concealed palpable but for the most part ordinary threats; the shadows around Shota concealed dangers that were not so easily appreciated, but that Richard suspected were far more pernicious.
The sounds of the dank swamp all around him, the chirps, the whistles, the hooting calls, the clicks, the distant cries, hardly registered in Richard’s consciousness. He was deep in his own world of despair and purpose tangled together in a titanic struggle.
While Shota had told him a great deal about the blood beast that was hunting him, Nicci had already told him that he was being hunted by a beast conjured at Jagang’s behest. The visit to Shota had not been worth the minutiae he learned about the beast. It was the precious few things that Shota had said at the end that really mattered to him. It was those things for which he had traveled to this place. It was for those things he had paid a price so dear that he was only now beginning to fully grasp its significance. His fingers itched to touch the hilt of his sword for reassurance, but that familiar and faithful weapon was no longer there.
He tried not to think about it, and yet he could think of little else. He felt relief that he had gained what he felt sure would be crucial information, but at the same time he felt a crushing sense of personal failure.
He paid only enough attention to where he was walking to keep from stepping on a yellow-and-black-banded snake he spotted coiled in the lap of a root, or letting the fuzzy spiders clinging to the underside of leaves silently slide down silken lines to alight on him. He skirted brush when something within hissed at him.
Richard followed the darkening trail as fast as safely possible while in his mind he went over Shota’s every word, concentrating on the treasure for which he had paid such a terrible price. Cara followed close on his heels, swinging and swatting at the cloud of bugs hovering around their faces. Occasionally a bat fluttered in out of the dark shadows to snatch up some of those bugs.
As he made his way through the tangle of growth, Richard pushed aside vines and branches and stepped carefully around snarls of roots—some of which writhed like a nest of snakes when they got too close. On his first visit Samuel had shown him how those roots could grab an ankle if you got too close. Richard was so totally absorbed in trying to figure out what “Chainfire” could possibly mean, or what it could be, that he nearly stepped into a stretch of black water that was hard to see in the murky light. Cara’s hand snatching his arm halted him just in time. He glanced around and spotted the log they had crossed on before and took to that route.
He racked his brain trying to think if he had ever heard the word Chainfire before, but his hopes grew as dim as the failing light. It was a strange enough word, it seemed, that he would have remembered it if he had ever heard it before. He wished that Shota would have known its source or meaning, but he believed that she was telling the truth about these kinds of answers
coming to her without explanation or insight.
On the other hand, he feared that he knew all too well what Shota meant when she’d said, “What you seek is long buried.”
That warning made his chest ache. He dreaded that it very well might mean that Kahlan was already dead and long ago buried.
He’d felt lost ever since that morning he awoke to find her missing. Without Kahlan, everything else in the world seemed meaningless.
He couldn’t allow himself to envision her death as being true. Instead, he thought about her beautiful, intelligent green eyes, her special smile, her singular manner as being very real and very alive.
Shota’s words, though, kept returning to him. He had to figure out what meaning they could hold if he was to find Kahlan.
The last part, that he should “Beware the viper with four heads,” had made no sense to him at first, but the more he mulled it over, the more it began to feel to him like he should understand it, as if it was something that should make sense to him or something he should be able to figure out if he just thought about it hard enough. The implication that seemed obvious was that this four-headed viper—whatever it was—was somehow responsible for Kahlan’s disappearance.
He wondered if he only suspected that because it sounded sinister. He didn’t want to allow himself to start down the wrong roads on groundless impulses. That would only waste valuable time. He feared that he had already used too much time.
“Where are we going?” Cara asked, lifting him out of his snare of thoughts.
He realized that it was the first thing she had said since leaving Shota. “To get the horses.”
“You intend to try to make it over the pass tonight?”
Richard nodded. “Yes, if we can. If the storm has blown away, the moon will provide enough light.”
The first time he had come to see Shota, the witch woman had taken Kahlan back to her valley. Richard had followed their tracks over the pass at night. It wasn’t easy, but he knew it could be done. He knew how tired he was from the hard day of crossing the pass, and he knew that Cara had to be just as tired, but he didn’t intend to stop so long as he could still put one foot in front of the other.
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