In those moments when she thought their present problems were insurmountable, she felt again the way she had as a child, like a slave to the problems. In those dark moments of self-doubt she wondered if she could ever really shed the mantle Jagang himself had laid around her shoulders when he named her the Slave Queen. He’d had no idea how apt the title really was.
In a way, that was how she sometimes felt in this struggle. While she knew that this cause was right, it still seemed hopeless to think that they could win when they were up against so many who sought to crush them.
Sometimes, in the face of the seemingly insurmountable, Nicci wanted nothing so much as to sit down and give up. In private moments in the past, Richard had confessed to having the same self-doubts as she felt, and yet she’d seen how he still forged ahead. Whenever Nicci felt discouraged, she thought of Richard, of how relentless he was, and she once again made herself get to her feet if for no other reason than to make him proud of her.
She believed in and fought for their cause, but that cause was crystallized in Richard.
They needed him. She didn’t know how they were ever going to find him or, if they did, how they would get him back. That was assuming he was still alive.
Richard being dead, though, was a thought that she refused to contemplate and so she immediately shoved the very idea aside.
Ann seized Nicci’s upper arm in a firm grip, bringing her out of her dark thoughts. “You put the boxes of Orden in play, and you named Richard the player?”
Nicci wasn’t in the mood to address the denouncement within the rhetorical question, to yet again have the same argument she’d already had with Zedd.
“That’s right. I had no choice. Zedd at first had the same reaction as you. When I explained it all to him, explained why I had to do as I had done, and once he’d calmed down, he came to see that there truly is no other way.”
“And who are you to decide such a thing?” Ann demanded.
Nicci chose not to rise to the insult and instead kept her voice, if not deferential, at least civil. “You yourself said that Richard is the one who must lead us in this battle. You and Nathan have waited nearly five hundred years for Richard to be born and worked to make sure that he could lead us. You yourself saw to it that he had The Book of Counted Shadows so that he could fight this fight. You seem to have decided a great deal for him before I ever came along.
“The Sisters of the Dark have already put Orden in play. I hardly need to tell you what their goal is. That makes this the final battle—the battle for life itself. Richard is the one who must lead us. If he is to succeed he must have the ability to fight them. You gave him a mere book. I gave him the power, the weapon, that he needs to win.”
Nathan laid a big hand on Ann’s shoulder. “Perhaps Nicci has a point.”
Ann glanced up at the prophet. She visibly cooled as she considered his words. Back when she’d lived at the Palace of the Prophets, Nicci would never have expected the prophet, of all people, to be able to bring the prelate to see reason. There had been few at the palace who thought that Nathan had the ability to reason.
“Well, done is done,” Ann said, her voice considerably calmer. “We’ll have to give some thought to what we must do next.”
“What about Zedd?” Nathan asked. “Does he have any ideas to help Richard?”
Nicci tried to keep her voice, as well as her expression, from betraying her level of concern. “Since Zedd believes that spells cast in the sacred caves in Tamarang are responsible for blocking Richard from the use of his gift, he, Tom, and Rikka are on their way there now. They hope to be able to help Richard by finding a way to eliminate whatever spell is barring him from his gift.”
“You make it sound simple,” Nathan said as he considered the problem. “Such a thing will be far from simple.”
Nicci lifted an eyebrow. “I doubt that standing around wishing for a solution will work better.”
Nathan grunted his agreement. “What about the Keep?”
Nicci turned and started down the hall, talking back over her shoulder. “After Cara and I left in the sliph, and before he started out for Tamarang, Zedd was going to use a spell to close down the Keep.”
“What about the others—Chase, Rachel, and Jebra?” Nathan asked.
“Jebra vanished a while back. Zedd thinks it’s possible that she regained consciousness and because of everything she’s been through, she simply ran away.”
“Or the witch woman has been influencing her mind yet again,” Nathan suggested.
Nicci opened her hands. “That’s possible too. We just don’t know. Rachel vanished as well, just the other night, the night before Six arrived. Chase went looking for her.”
Nathan shook his head in frustration. “I hate being stuck here when so much is going on.”
“Zedd wanted you two to know about the trouble with the magic of the Keep,” Nicci said. “He said that there are defenses protecting the People’s Palace that may be similar to those at the Keep, so he wants you to be aware of the problem. There’s no telling how the contamination from the chimes will affect magic, whether it will hamper all similar power, or whether it’s a function of location—if the contamination might be confined to a specific area.”
“After we’re finished here,” Cara put in, “Nicci and I are going to travel in the sliph down to the Tamarang area to help Zedd get Lord Rahl’s power back. Then we’re going after Lord Rahl.”
Nathan didn’t object that he presently held the title of Lord Rahl. He, of all people, knew that Richard was the one that prophecy had named to lead them. Nathan was the one, after all, who had originally revealed that prophecy said they stood a chance against the coming storm only if Richard led them.
Cara’s plan that they were “going after Lord Rahl” was news to Nicci. If they knew where Richard was, Nicci would already be headed there.
As Nicci continued to answer Ann’s steady barrage of questions, Nathan led them through several rather simple passageways until they finally came to one with a heavy oak door at the end. As Nathan pulled the door open for them, cold air rushed in.
A bloodred sky greeted Nicci as she stepped out onto a platform high above the rampart of the outer wall. “Dear spirits,” she whispered to herself. “Every time I see them it’s a terrible shock.”
Nathan squeezed out beside her. There was room for only two people on what was apparently an observation platform. Ann and Cara watched from just inside the doorway.
The height was dizzying. Nicci gripped the waist-high iron railing as she leaned out a little, peering over the side. She could see over the edge of the outer wall, and the plateau itself, all the way down to the Azrith Plain.
The ground immediately around the plateau was deserted. The Imperial Order had camped some distance back, apparently not wanting to chance drawing any unpleasant attention from the gifted up in the palace before absolutely necessary. While the Imperial Order had Sisters and even several young wizards who could shield them from any conjuring from above, Jagang would want to keep them in reserve, keep them healthy, strong, and alive until he began his final attack.
A thick red overcast hung above the distant plain black with the invading army. They spread all the way to the horizon in every direction. Nicci rubbed her shoulders with the chill she felt from within. While from this distance it was hard to see much detail, she knew what it was like to be among such men. She knew all too well what they were like. She knew all too well what their officers were like. She knew all too well what their leader was like.
It made Nicci’s skin crawl to think of being down among those men.
When she had served with that army she had not given a great deal of thought to how not only physically filthy but spiritually squalid it was. As the Slave Queen she had been willfully blind to it. She had believed that brutes like Jagang and his men were necessary in order to impose higher ideals on mankind. Benevolence enforced through brutality. Looking back on such a thought, she could ha
rdly believe how contradictory those convictions really were, and that she had accepted them without question. Not just accepted them, but helped enforce them. She had been so effective at enforcing the Order’s will that she had become known as Death’s Mistress.
She could hardly believe that Richard had put up with her. Of course, she had given him no choice in the matter.
She felt tears sting at her eyes at the memory of all the times she had tried to force Richard to join her in service to their vile cause and how, instead, he had shown her something noble. She swallowed back a sob at how much she missed him, missed the light in his eyes.
The sight below made the silence up on the platform seem all the more bleak. These men, these millions of men spread out across the plain, were all there for one purpose: to kill everyone in the People’s Palace, anyone who opposed the rule of the Order. This was their last obstacle to imposing their beliefs on all of mankind.
Nicci stared out at the ramp rising up in the distance. It was larger than the last time she’d seen it. Beyond the ramp she could just make out scars in the ground where the material for the ramp was being dug. The top slope of the ramp aimed in a straight line right for the top of the plateau. Even though it was getting dark, there were snaking lines of men carrying dirt and rock to the construction site.
If anyone described such an undertaking to her she doubted that she would believe it was possible, but seeing it was different. Seeing it filled her with dread. It was only a matter of time until that ramp was completed and the dark sea of the Imperial Order flooded up it to assault the palace.
Standing at the edge of the platform, hugging her shoulders tightly, she knew that she was looking out onto more than a dark army. Nicci knew that she was looking out on a thousand years of darkness.
Having been a Sister of the Dark, and having been raised under the teachings of the Fellowship of Order, she knew, perhaps better than anyone, just how real the threat was. She knew how vehemently the followers of the Order believed in their cause. Their faith defined them. They were more than willing to die for it. After all, death was their goal; they had been promised glory in the afterlife. They believed that this life was only a test, a means to gain entry into everlasting life. If the Order required them to die, then they would die. If the Order required that they kill those who did not believe, then they would make the world a sea of blood.
Nicci understood precisely what it would mean for everyone if the Order won this war. It was not the army that would bring those thousand years of darkness, but the ideas that had spawned that army. Those ideas would cast the world into a living nightmare.
“Nicci, there is something you need to know about,” Nathan said, breaking the uneasy silence.
Nicci folded her arms and glanced over at the prophet. “What’s that, Nathan?”
“We’ve been studying books of prophecy here at the People’s Palace. Just like all the books of prophecy everywhere else, the Chainfire spell has caused sections of these books, sections that apparently touch on Kahlan, to vanish. But there is still useful information as of yet untouched by Chainfire. Some of those books are new to me. They’ve helped me to connect things I’ve read about in the past. They’ve helped me to see the larger picture.”
With the Chainfire spell having erased so much of their memories, she didn’t know how he could know if he really was seeing the larger picture—or how she could know if she was. Instead of saying so, Nicci waited silently, the cold wind ruffling her hair, watching Nathan look away to gaze out at the forces spread out across the Azrith Plain below.
“There is a place in the prophecies, a cardinal root, that leads to a determinative fork,” he said at last. “Beyond that fork, down one of its two branches, is a place the prophecies call the Great Void.”
Nicci frowned into her recollections. There had always been a great deal of speculation surrounding that portion of prophecy.
“I’ve heard mention of it,” she said. “Do you finally know what that means?”
“One of the two branches after that crucial fork leads to areas of yet more branches, offshoots, and forks farther on.” Nathan flicked his wrist offhandedly, as if indicating those things unseen to anyone but him. “There are a few books of prophecy that I’ve been able to identify as having to do with issues that lie beyond on that branch. I’m sure that a concerted search would reveal others. So, you might say that down that fork lies the world as we know it.”
He tapped the palm of one hand on the railing as he gathered his thoughts. “On the other branch of that mantic root lies only the Great Void. There are no books of prophecy for what lies beyond. That is the reason it is called the Great Void. You might say that there is nothing on that branch for prophecy to see—no magic, no world as we know it, and thus no prophecy to illuminate it.”
He cast her a brief glance. “That is the world the Imperial Order wants. If they take us down that fork, mankind will go forever into the unknown of the Great Void, a place without magic and thus without prophecy.
“Some of my predecessors have speculated that since there is no prophecy for what lies beyond, it could only mean that the Great Void augurs the end of everything, the end of all life.”
Nicci could find no words. She didn’t think that there could be anything but darkness if the Order won, so this news wasn’t really all that surprising to her.
“From the books here that I have been studying, from the information they have given me—and from recent events—I have been able to fix us on the chronology of this prophetic root.”
Nicci’s gaze darted to the wizard. “Are you sure?”
Nathan held a hand out toward the army below. “Jagang’s army being here as they are, surrounding us, is one of a number of events that tells me that we are now on the cardinal root that takes us toward that fateful fork.
“I’ve known for centuries about the Great Void being in prophecy, but I didn’t know if it was significant because I was never sure precisely where it fit in the chronology of prophecy. As far as I knew it was always possible that we might end up following an altogether different arm of the tree of prophecy, never setting foot in the area containing that particular cardinal root with the Great Void.
“There was always the possibility that the Great Void would turn out to be somewhere beyond any one of hundreds of false forks, down a dead branch on the tree of prophecy. Ages ago, when I first started studying it, it had seemed to me that it would turn out to be nothing more than false prophecy, eventually to be left in the forgotten dust of history along with so much of the other dead wood of the possible things that never came to pass.
“Slowly, though, events have inexorably carried us to where we find ourselves today. I am now sure that we are on that trunk of prophecy, on that particular branch, on that cardinal root, about to encounter the determinative fork.
“You,” Nathan said to Nicci, “have irrevocably placed us there by putting the power of Orden in play in Richard’s name. The boxes of Orden were the final node on the mantic root.
“There is no longer any possibility for mankind but to face that fork.”
CHAPTER 17
Cara stuck her head out of the doorway far enough that the wind coming up the walls of the palace lifted her blond braid. “You mean, if Richard takes us down one of those two forks we will survive, but if he doesn’t, and we go down the other…”
“There is only the Great Void,” Nathan finished for her. He turned back to Nicci, laying a hand on her shoulder. “Do you understand the significance of what I’m telling you?”
“Nathan, I may not know everything that prophecy has had to say about it, but I certainly know what is at stake. The boxes of Orden were put into play by Sisters of the Dark, after all. I hardly see any outcome should they win except for the end of everything good. As far as I can see, Richard is the only one who has a chance to stop that from happening.”
“Quite so,” Nathan said with a sigh. “This is why Ann and I have been
waiting five hundred years for Richard to come into the world. He was the one meant to navigate the forks that would successfully carry us through a dangerous tangle of shrouded knots within prophecy. If he succeeded, which he has so far done, then he is the one who must lead us in this final battle. We’ve known that for a long time, now.”
Nathan rubbed a finger along the side of his temple. “We’ve always understood that the boxes of Orden were the final node upon which this cardinal root forks.”
Nicci frowned as his words sunk in. She suddenly understood.
“That’s where you made the mistake, before,” she said, half to herself.
Ann leaned through the doorway a little, her eyes narrowing. “What?”
“You were tracing the wrong root in prophecy,” Nicci said, even as parts of the puzzle were still falling into place in her own mind. “You were aware of the importance of the boxes of Orden, but your chronology was jumbled and as a result you ended up tracing a false fork. You mistakenly thought that it was Darken Rahl who, by using the boxes of Orden, created the terminal node. You thought it was Darken Rahl who would lead us into the Great Void.”
Understanding the gravity of the mistake, Nicci turned to stare at the former prelate. “You thought that you had to prepare Richard to deal with that threat, thinking it was this fork of prophecy—the one we find ourselves on right now—so you stole The Book of Counted Shadows and gave it to George Cypher, meaning it for Richard when he got older. You thought Darken Rahl was the final battle, the terminal node in prophecy. You wanted Richard to fight Darken Rahl. You thought you were giving him the tools he needed to fight the final battle.
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