Chainfire

by Terry Goodkind

  “But she wasn’t buried there! She wasn’t! It says that—‘she is not here’—for a reason.”

  “Then who is buried in her grave?” Zedd asked.

  Richard went still for a moment.

  “No one,” he finally said, his gaze wandering off as he thought. “Mistress Sanderholt—the cook at the palace—she was fooled by your death spell like everyone else. When I finally got here she told me that you stood there on the platform while Kahlan was beheaded—she was in mourning over it and terribly upset—but I realized that you wouldn’t do such a thing and so it had to be one of your tricks. You told me that—remember? Sometimes the best magic is just a trick.”

  Zedd nodded. “That part is true enough.”

  “Mistress Sanderholt told me that Kahlan’s body had been burned in a funeral pyre, the whole thing supervised by the First Wizard himself. She said that Kahlan’s ashes were then buried before that immense stone marker. Mistress Sanderholt even took me out to the secluded courtyard beside the palace where Confessors are buried. She showed me the grave. I was horrified. I thought it was her, that she was dead, until I figured out the message carved in the stone—the message the two of you left for me to find.”

  Richard gripped his grandfather’s shoulders again. “Do you see? It was just a trick to throw our enemies off her trail. She wasn’t really dead. She wasn’t really buried there. Nothing is buried there, except maybe some ashes.”

  Nicci thought that it was rather convenient that Richard imagined her being cremated in his story of the death-spell bluff so that all that remained were ashes that couldn’t be identified. He always came up with something that to his mind logically explained the lack of evidence. Nicci didn’t know if Confessors really were cremated, but if they were, that would only provide him with another useful pretext to prop up his story so that he could continue to deny that it was her. They would again have no way to prove otherwise.

  Unless, of course, he was dreaming up the funeral pyre part of his story and Confessors weren’t ordinarily cremated.

  “And so you say that you went there?” Zedd asked. “Down to where the gravestone stands?”

  “Yes, and then Denna came—”

  “Denna was dead,” Cara said, interrupting for the first time. “You killed her in order to escape from her at the People’s Palace. She couldn’t have been there…unless of course she appeared as a spirit.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Richard said, turning to Cara. “She did. She came as a spirit and took me to a place between worlds so that I could be with Kahlan there.”

  Cara’s eyes briefly turned to the wizard. Her incredulity was impossible for her to mask so she looked away from Richard and occupied herself with scratching the back of her neck.

  Nicci wanted to scream. His story grew more insanely convoluted by the moment. She remembered the Prelate once teaching Nicci as a novice how the seed of lies, once planted, only grew more tangled and out of control over time.

  Zedd came up from behind and gently grasped Richard’s shoulders.

  “Come on, my boy. I think you need to get some rest and then afterwards we can—”

  “No!” Richard cried out as he twisted away. “I’m not imagining it! I’m not making it up!”

  Nicci knew he was doing just that. In a certain sense, it was remarkable the way he was able, on the spot, to weave new events, based on his original delusion, to continually manage to escape the trap of the truth.

  But he could not escape it forever. There was the matter of the true Mother Confessor buried in the grave and that was all too real—unless it turned out that the Midlands actually did cremate their Confessors, in which case Richard would be able to continue to hobble along, clinging to his dream for a little while longer, until the next problem cropped up. Sooner or later, though, something was going to shatter those dreams.

  Zedd tried again. “Richard, you’re tired. You look like you’ve been living on a horse for—”

  “I can prove it,” Richard said in calm defiance.

  Everyone went quiet.

  “You don’t believe me, I know. None of you do—but I can prove it.”

  “What do you mean?” Zedd asked.

  “Come on. Come with me down to the gravestone.”

  “Richard, I told you, the gravestone very well could say what you said you remember, but that proves nothing. It’s a common enough sentiment to express on a gravestone.”

  “Do they typically burn the bodies of the Mother Confessor on a funeral pyre? Or was that just part of your trick so that you wouldn’t have to produce her body at the funeral when she was supposedly buried.”

  Zedd was beginning to look more than just a little indignant. “When I used to live here the bodies of Confessors were never desecrated. The Mother Confessor was placed in a silver-clad coffin in her white dress and the people were allowed to view her one last time, to say their farewells, before she was buried.”

  Richard glared at his grandfather, at Cara, and finally at Nicci. “Good. If I have to dig up the grave and prove to all of you that there is nothing buried under the gravestone, then that’s what I will do. We need to get this settled so that we can move on to the solution to what’s happening. In order to do that, I need you all to believe me.”

  Zedd spread his hands. “Richard, that isn’t necessary.”

  “Yes it is! It is necessary! I want my life back!”

  No one offered an argument.

  “Zedd, have I ever told you a malicious lie?”

  “No, my boy, you never have.”

  “I’m not lying now.”

  “Richard,” Nicci said, “no one is saying that you’re lying, only that you’re suffering the unfortunate effects of delirium induced by an injury. It’s not your fault. We all know you aren’t doing this deliberately.”

  He turned to his grandfather. “Zedd, don’t you see? Think about it. Something is going wrong in the world. Something is terribly wrong. For some reason that I haven’t been able to figure out, I’m the only one who is aware of it. I’m the only one who remembers Kahlan. There has to be something behind this. Something wicked. Maybe Jagang is responsible.”

  “Jagang had the beast created to come after you,” Nicci said. “He put everything into that effort. He wouldn’t need to do anything else. Besides, with the beast already stalking you, what purpose would it serve?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t have all the answers, but I know the truth of part of it.”

  “And how can it be that you alone know the truth and everyone else is wrong, that everyone’s memory but yours has failed them?” Zedd asked.

  “I don’t know the answer to that, either, but I can prove what I’m telling you. I can show you the grave. Come on.”

  “I told you, Richard, the marker says common words.”

  Richard’s expression turned dangerous. “Then we will dig up the grave so that you can all see that it’s empty and that I’m not crazy.”

  Zedd lifted a hand toward the still open door. “But it will be dark soon. What’s more, it’s going to rain.”

  Richard turned back from the doorway. “We have an extra horse. We can still make it down there while we have daylight. If we need to, we can use lanterns. If I must, I will dig in the dark. This is more important than worrying about a little rain or the lack of light. I need to get this over—now—so that we can get on to solving the very real problem and so that I can find Kahlan before it’s too late. Let’s go.”

  Zedd gestured heatedly. “Richard, this is—”

  “Let him do as he asks,” Nicci said, interrupting, drawing all eyes. “We’ve all heard enough. This is important to him. We must allow him to do as he thinks he must. It’s the only chance we have to finally settle the matter.”

  Before Zedd could answer her, a Mord-Sith appeared from between two red pillars at the opposite side of the room. Her blond hair was pulled back into a single braid like Cara’s. She wasn’t quite as tall as Cara, and not as lean,
but she looked just as formidable in the way she carried herself, as if she feared nothing and lived for an excuse to prove it.

  “What’s going on? I heard—” She stared in sudden astonishment. “Cara? Is that you?”

  “Rikka,” Cara said with a smile and a nod, “it’s good to see your face again.”

  Rikka bowed her head to Cara more deeply than Cara had before staring at Richard. She stepped forward into the room.

  Her eyes widened. “Lord Rahl, I haven’t seen you since…”

  Richard nodded. “Since the People’s Palace, in D’Hara. When I came to close the gateway to the underworld you were one of the Mord-Sith who helped get me up to the Garden of Life. You were the one who held my shirt at my left shoulder as all of you guided me safely through the palace. One of your sister Mord-Sith gave her life that night that I might complete my mission.”

  Rikka smiled in astonishment. “You remember. We were all in our red leather. I can’t believe you have that good a memory that you could remember me, much less that I was the one at your left shoulder.” She bowed her head. “And you honor us all to remember one who fell in battle.”

  “I do have a good memory.” Richard cast a dark glare at Nicci and then Zedd. “That was just before I came back to Aydindril and the gravestone with Kahlan’s name on it.” He turned back to Rikka. “Watch over the Keep, will you, Rikka? We all have to go down to the city for a while.”

  “Of course, Lord Rahl,” Rikka said, bowing her head again, looking almost giddy to be in Richard’s presence, and to be remembered.

  Richard again swept his raptorlike glare across the rest of them. “Let’s go.”

  Richard vanished out the doorway. Zedd caught Nicci’s sleeve on her way by.

  “He was hurt, wasn’t he?” When she hesitated, he went on. “You said he was suffering delusions from being injured.”

  Nicci nodded. “He was shot with an arrow. He almost died.”

  “Nicci healed him.” Cara leaned in as she spoke in a low voice. “She saved Lord Rahl’s life.”

  Zedd lifted an eyebrow. “A friend indeed.”

  “I healed him,” Nicci confirmed, “but it was difficult beyond anything I’ve ever attempted before. I may have saved his life, but I now worry that I didn’t do a good enough job of it.”

  “What do you mean?” Zedd asked.

  “I fear that I may have somehow done something to cause his delusions.”

  “That isn’t true,” Cara said.

  “I wonder if it is,” Nicci said, “if I might have done more, or done things differently.”

  She swallowed past the lump growing in her throat. She feared that it was true, that Richard’s problem was her fault, that she hadn’t acted quickly enough, or that she might have done something dreadfully wrong. She constantly fretted over her decision that terrible morning to get Richard to a safe place before working on him. She had feared an attack that would have fatally interrupted her efforts to heal him, but maybe if she would have simply started right then and there on the battlefield he might not now be chasing phantoms.

  After all, an attack never had come, so she’d made the wrong judgment about needing to get him to the deserted farmhouse. She didn’t know at the time that no attack was imminent, but maybe if she would have taken the time to have Victor’s men scout the area she could have started healing Richard much sooner. She hadn’t done that because she feared that if they scouted, and she was right about more of the enemy being nearby, then they would have had to move Richard anyway, and by then his time would have run out.

  Even so, she was the one who had made the decisions and Richard was the one now suffering delusions. Something had gone wrong that terrible night.

  There was no one in the world who mattered to her more than Richard. She feared that she was the one who had caused him the harm that was ruining his life.

  “What exactly was wrong with him?” Zedd asked. “Where was he shot with the arrow?”

  “In the left side of his chest—with a barbed bolt from a crossbow. That barbed head lodged in his chest without penetrating all the way through his back. He was able to partially deflect it, so it just missed his heart, but his lung and chest were rapidly filling with blood.”

  Zedd lifted an eyebrow in astonishment. “And you were able to get the arrow out and heal him?”

  “That’s right,” Cara confirmed with forceful passion. “She saved Lord Rahl’s life.”

  “I don’t know…” Nicci had difficulty putting it all into words. “I’ve been separated from him as I made my way here. Now that I see him again, see how he has latched so strongly onto his delusion and can’t come to see the truth, I’m not so sure I did him any good. How can he live if he can’t see the truth of the world around him? While his body may be healed, he’s suffering a dreadful kind of slow death as his mind fails him.”

  Zedd gave her shoulder a fatherly pat. Nicci recognized the light of life in his eyes. It was the same spark that Richard had. At least the same spark he used to have.

  “We’ll just have to help him see the truth.”

  “And if it destroys his heart?” she asked.

  Zedd smiled. It reminded her of Richard’s smile, the smile she missed so much.

  “Then we’ll just have to heal his heart, now won’t we?”

  Nicci was unable to bring forth more than a whisper that bordered on tears. “And how are we to do that?”

  Zedd smiled again and gave her shoulder a firm squeeze. “We’ll have to see. First we have to let him see the truth, then we can worry about healing the wound it will bring his heart.”

  Nicci could only nod. She dreaded seeing Richard hurt.

  “And what is this beast you mentioned? The one Jagang created?”

  “A weapon created with the use of Sisters of the Dark,” Nicci said. “Something from the time of the great war.”

  Zedd cursed under his breath at the news. Cara looked like she had something to say about the beast, but she thought better of it and instead started for the door. “Come on. I don’t want Lord Rahl to get too far ahead of us.”

  Zedd grumbled his agreement. “Looks like we’re going to get wet.”

  “At least if it rains,” the Mord-Sith said, “it will wash some of the horse off of me.”

  Chapter 48

  The drizzle started before they were out of the paddock. Richard was already gone. There was no telling how far ahead of them he had gotten. Cara wanted to hurry and catch up with him, but Zedd told her that they knew where he was going and there was no point in risking breaking the leg of one of the tired horses because, if that happened, then they would only end up having to walk down the mountain after Richard and then, after visiting the graveyard of the Confessors, walk all the way back up.

  “Besides,” Zedd told her, “you’ll never be able to catch him.”

  “Well, you might be right about that,” Cara said as she spurred her horse into a canter, “but I don’t want him alone any longer than necessary. I’m his protection.”

  “Especially since he’s without his sword,” Zedd muttered sourly.

  They had little choice but to hurry after Cara.

  By the time they’d raced down the mountain and reached the city, the daylight was fading and the drizzle strengthening. Nicci knew they were going to be soaked before it was over, but there was no helping it. Fortunately, it was warm enough that at least they wouldn’t be freezing in the wet weather.

  Knowing where Richard would be, they made their way to the grounds of the Confessors’ Palace where they quickly found his horse, tied to one of the rings holding chains strung between decorative granite stanchions. Since there was no opening in the chains, they were apparently meant to indicate a private area of the grounds. After the three of them tied their horses alongside Richard’s, Cara and Nicci followed Zedd as he stepped over the chain.

  This was clearly not a place where outsiders were welcome. The secluded courtyard was screened from public view by a ro
w of tall elms and a dense wall of evergreen junipers. Through the thick branches of the grand trees Nicci saw glimpses of the white walls of the Confessors’ Palace looming close by, enfolding and sheltering the wooded graveyard.

  Because of the way it was hidden away, Nicci had expected it to be small, but the place where Confessors were buried was actually quite extensive. Trees were placed so as to cut the openness and give each section of the graveyard an intimate feel. By the manner in which it was laid out, with a path and a small vine-covered colonnade ushering people approaching from the palace, it was apparently intended to be accessed solely from the palace through elegant, double glassed doors. In the muted gray light the quiet place beneath the canopy of trees had a hallowed feel to it.

  They found Richard up a slight rise in what would be the shady courtyard were it sunny, standing in the drizzle before a polished stone monument, running his fingers through the letters carved in the granite, through the letters of the name KAHLAN.

  Somewhere on the grounds to the Confessors’ Palace Richard had managed to find shovels and picks. They lay at the ready nearby. Scanning the area, Nicci saw that there were storage buildings for grounds keepers set back among hedges partly hidden around a corner of the palace and reasoned that Richard had found them there.

  As she quietly approached him, Nicci knew that Richard was on the brink of something potentially very dangerous…to him. She stood behind him, hands folded, waiting, as he tenderly touched Kahlan’s name in stone.

  “Richard,” Nicci finally said in a soft voice, feeling the need for a reverent tone in such a place, “I hope that you will think about everything I’ve told you, and if things don’t turn out the way at this moment you believe they will, know that we will all help you in any way we can.”

  He turned away from her name in stone. “Don’t be worried about me, Nicci. There is nothing under this ground. She isn’t here. I’m going to show that to all of you and then you will have to believe me. I’m going to get my life back. When I do, then you’re all going to understand that something is very wrong. Then we’re going to have to work to find out what’s going on and we’re going to find Kahlan.”