She also comprehended his concept of the the creative aspects of magic itself and so she didn’t try to correct what he did, but instead guided him to accomplishing what was needed. She didn’t just pile on things to memorize; she instead built on what he already knew and the way he saw things. Because she intuitively sensed what he already grasped on his own, in his own way, she didn’t waste time dwelling on lessons covering what he already understood, and instead helped him add things he needed, at the place he needed them, when he needed them.
Nicci strolled to the table. “How are you doing?”
Richard yawned. “I don’t know anymore. It’s all running together in my head.”
Nicci nodded absently as she read something in the book she was holding.
“What you think is running together may mean that your interior mind is simply beginning to make associations and connections—organizing what you are adding to your knowledge.”
Richard sighed. “Could be.”
Nicci closed the book and tossed it on the table to the side. “There are some useful things in here. You should take a look.”
“I don’t think I can see straight to read any more right now.”
“Good,” she said. She gestured to the pen resting in a holder to the side. “Draw, then. You need to be able to draw those elements from the book you just finished. If the real Book of Counted Shadows has similar elements, you will be ahead of the game.”
Richard wanted to argue with her, to tell her that he was too tired, but then he thought about Kahlan. Weariness became irrelevant in that light. Besides, he had agreed that Nicci was going to teach him and he would not only do as she instructed but put his every effort into it.
She was a sorceress with invaluable knowledge, experience, and ability that Zedd had said amazed him. Even Verna had taken him aside and advised him to listen carefully to Nicci, that she was in many areas smarter than any of them. Richard knew that this was his only true opportunity to learn what he needed. He was not about to waste that opportunity.
He pulled a piece of paper close and then dunked the pen in the ink. He leaned close and started drawing spell-forms from a book laid open nearby.
One big problem they had not yet solved was the issue of sorcerer’s sand. According to The Book of Counted Shadows that he’d memorized, the spell-forms needed to open the correct box of Orden had to be drawn in sorcerer’s sand. Nicci had told him that even though the book he’d memorized was a false copy, the issue of needing to draw the spell-forms in sorcerer’s sand when the time came was true. Whatever spells turned out to be the ones necessary simply wouldn’t work without it.
Richard had told her how when Darken Rahl had opened the box of Orden he had been sucked down into the underworld—along with all the sorcerer’s sand he’d used to draw the spells. Up in the garden of life there was no more of that precious commodity. There was only dirt left where the sorcerer’s sand had been.
Nicci looked up from another book she was thumbing through. “This has some information about the Temple of the Winds.”
Richard looked up. “Really?”
She nodded. “You know, the thing that baffles me about that is how you said you crossed the world of the dead to get to it.”
It had appeared during the lightning and Richard had crossed over on a road while it was visible.
“I’m sorry, Nicci, but I told you everything I know on the subject.”
“According to this, and to what you told me you learned from studying accounts in old books, the Temple of the Winds was sent to the underworld. Because it was banished for protection, it resides somewhere distant across that great void. The whole purpose is to make it far away and impossible to get to.”
“But it was right there when the conditions were right. I stepped right across into the temple.”
She nodded absently as she went back to reading and pacing. She finally stopped again, looking impatient.
“It still doesn’t make sense. It’s impossible to get from here to there across the world of the dead. Crossing the void of the underworld is something like crossing the ocean. It would be like walking to the shoreline and stepping onto an island that’s on the other side of the world without having to travel across the intervening ocean.”
“Maybe the Temple of the Winds isn’t really that far away in the underworld. Maybe it’s like the island isn’t really across the ocean, but just right there, close to the shoreline.”
Nicci shook her head. “Not according to this, and not according to the things you told me. Every reference says that to banish the temple to safety they sent it across the underworld—rather like sending it across the universe itself.”
“Lord Rahl,” Cara called from the doorway.
Richard yawned again. “What is it, Cara?”
“I have some people here with me who need to see you.”
As much as he would like a break, Richard didn’t want to stop. He needed to learn all of it if he was ever to get Kahlan back.
“It seems to be important,” Cara added when she saw him hesitating.
“All right, bring them in.”
Cara led a group of six people in pristine white robes into the room. In the somewhat dark library, the white-robed figures almost glowed like good spirits. They all came to a halt on the other side of the massive mahogany table. They looked to Richard more like people fearing they might be executed than like people who wanted to see him.
Richard looked from the six nervous people, five men and one woman, to Cara.
“These are some of the crypt staff,” she said.
“Crypt staff?”
“Yes, Lord Rahl. They take care of the tombs and such.”
Richard looked at their faces again. They all looked away from his gaze to stare at the floor as they remained silent.
“Yes, I remember seeing some of you when I first came back—when we had the battle down there with the Imperial Order soldiers.”
He couldn’t imagine the horrific mess that would have had to be cleaned up. He had ordered that the bodies of the Order soldiers be thrown over the side of the plateau. They had more important things to worry about than caring for the remains of murderers.
The people nodded.
“What is it you wish to tell me?”
Cara waved a hand to dissuade him from that notion. “Lord Rahl, they are all mute.”
Richard gestured with the pen in his hand as he leaned back in his chair. “All of you?”
The six people nodded together.
“Darken Rahl cut out the tongues of all the crypt staff so that they couldn’t speak ill of his dead father.”
Richard sighed at hearing such a terrible thing. “I’m sorry you were abused like that. If it makes you feel any better I share your feelings about the man.”
Cara smiled as she looked at her six charges. “I told them of your part in his death.”
The six smiled a little and nodded.
“So, what’s this about? Can you help me understand what you want me to know?” he asked the six.
One of them reached out and carefully placed a folded, pristinely white cloth on the table. The man slid it toward Richard.
As Richard reached for it, a drop of ink dripped from his pen onto the white cloth.
“Sorry,” he mumbled as he set the pen aside.
He pulled the cloth closer. He looked up at the six. “So, what is it?”
When they made no attempt to explain, he glanced at Cara. She only shrugged. “They were insistent that you see it.”
One of them gestured with his hands held out flat, almost as if they were the pages of a book as it opened, then repeated the gesture.
“You want me to open it?”
All six nodded.
It didn’t really feel like it could contain anything at all, but Richard carefully started opening the folds of cloth back onto the table. Nicci, standing beside the six, leaned over the table watching.
When Richard laid b
ack the final fold, there, in the center of the cloth, lay a single grain of white sand.
He looked up sharply. “Where did you get this?”
All six pointed down.
“Dear spirits,” Nicci whispered.
“What?” Cara asked, leaning over to look at the single grain of white sand sitting in the center of the cloth. “What is it?”
Richard glanced up at the Mord-Sith. “Sorcerer’s sand.”
The people were crypt staff, so that had to mean that they had found it down in the crypt somewhere. The sorcerer’s sand shone with prismatic light, but he was still somewhat astonished that they would have found a single grain of it.
He also wondered where they had come across it—and if there was more.
“Can you show me where you found this?”
All six nodded vigorously.
Richard carefully folded up the cloth back around the grain of sorcerer’s sand. He noticed as he did so that the place where the drop of ink had fallen had, because the cloth had been folded at the time, made two identical spots of ink on opposite ends of the cloth. When the cloth had been folded they had been together, touching, but when the cloth was opened the two spots were on opposite sides.
He stared at it a moment, thinking.
“Let’s go,” he finally said as he stuffed the cloth into his pocket. “Take me there.”
Chapter 48
Richard stepped over the melted white stone and into Panis Rahl’s tomb. The crypt staff waited outside in the hallway. They had urged Richard to go in alone, first, wanting him to visit the tomb before they dared to enter. It was the tomb, after all, of his grandfather. These were people who had lived and died by the incomprehensible protocol of the previous Lord Rahl visiting his venerated ancestors.
Richard, though, reserved his reverence for those who deserved it. Panis Rahl had been a tyrant with ambitions of conquest little different from those of his son, Darken Rahl. Panis Rahl might not have managed to accomplish the level of evil his son had, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.
In the war Panis Rahl had started against neighboring lands, Zedd, as a young man, had been the one called upon to lead free people against D’Haran aggression. In the end, Zedd, acting as First Wizard, had killed Panis Rahl and put up the boundaries that had for most of Richard’s life walled off D’Hara.
Even though many had eagerly supported Panis Rahl’s lust for conquest, Zedd had not wanted to kill all of the people of D’Hara. Many of them, after all, were also the victims of that tyranny; having been unfortunate enough to be born under a tyrant was not a willful act on their part. So instead of killing all the D’Haran people, Zedd had put up the boundaries.
He said that, in the end, leaving them to suffer the consequences of their own actions was the worst punishment he could inflict upon them. It also gave them the chance to choose to change and make something of their lives. But with the boundaries, they would not be able to continue their aggression against others.
It would have worked, and Richard would still be living in peace back in Westland, had those boundaries not failed. Darken Rahl had helped them along in that deterioration by traveling through the underworld to get past them. Had the boundaries not come down, though, Richard would not have met Kahlan. Kahlan made his life worthwhile. She was his life.
Richard remembered years before, shortly after Darken Rahl had opened the box of Orden and been taken by its power, that one of the palace staff had come to tell Zedd that Panis Rahl’s crypt was melting. Zedd had told the man to use specific white stone to seal the tomb before the condition spread to the rest of the palace.
That stopgap of white stone sealing the entrance of the tomb had since mostly melted and the strange condition was beginning to damage the entire room. The walls were beginning to distort, causing the slabs of pink granite to be pushed out of their former flat plane. In the hallway outside, the joints between the ceiling and walls were coming apart from the deformation within the room. If it wasn’t stopped, it looked like it could continue to twist support walls until the structure of the palace eventually started falling in on itself.
Richard looked all around, taking appraisal of everything as he crossed the room. The light of fifty-seven torches reflected off his grandfather’s gold-enshrouded coffin sitting on a pedestal, making it not only glow in the center of the cavernous room, but almost look as if it were floating above the white marble floor. Words were inscribed not only on the coffin, but into the granite walls all around the room.
“I hate pink,” Nicci murmured to herself as she peered around at the polished pink granite walls and vaulted ceiling.
“Any idea why the walls would be melting?” Richard asked Nicci as she walked slowly around the room, carefully inspecting everything.
“That is what really frightens me,” Nicci said.
“What do you mean?” Richard asked as he started reading the High D’Haran words cut into the granite walls.
“Verna told me that when I came to the palace, just before I was captured, I had been on my way down here with Ann. Verna said that I told her that I knew why the walls down here were melting.”
Richard looked back over his shoulder at her. “And so why are they melting?”
Nicci looked strangely confused and worried. “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
“Don’t remember . . . what?”
“Why I was coming down here, or why the walls were melting. I asked Verna if she remembered anything I might have said, but she said that she didn’t.”
Richard lightly dragged a finger along his grandfather’s casket. “Chainfire.”
Nicci looked up, even more concerned. “Do you really think that’s the reason?”
“You don’t remember any of it?”
She shook her head. “No. I don’t remember ever telling Verna that I knew the cause of the problem, but what’s worse is that I don’t remember ever knowing why the walls were melting. How could I forget something important like that?”
Richard stared into her troubled blue eyes for a moment. “I don’t think you could, if things were normal.”
“That can only mean that the damage from Chainfire is spreading beyond the original target of the spell.”
“It’s the contamination,” Richard said in a quiet voice.
“If that’s true, then that means that whatever is going on in here is connected to what we must do to reverse Chainfire. The contamination in the chimes is erasing memory to protect itself.”
Such a frightening concept gave Richard pause. He knew, though, that it made sense. Now he had to worry not only about how Jagang might be one step ahead of him, but about how the contamination with Chainfire might also be acting to defend itself from extermination.
It didn’t need to be sentient to react to preserve itself and continue its purpose. To the chimes, eliminating magic was a value, and the contamination they left in their wake was their method of accomplishing that value, so such self-defensive measures were probably integral, much as thorns were sometimes a bush or tree’s means of self-defense. Having thorns didn’t mean the tree was able to think of how to hurt anyone who came near; it was merely its integral means of protecting itself so that it could continue to exist.
“We have to reverse Chainfire or it’s only going to continue to grow worse,” Richard finally said to Nicci. “It won’t be long before we even forget why we have to reverse it. I must invoke the power of Orden to counter the spell before it’s too late.”
“We need the boxes of Orden to do that,” she reminded him.
“Well, Jagang has two, and the witch woman took the third. Somehow we need to get them back.”
“Since Six is doing Jagang’s bidding by attacking our troops down in the Old World, I think we must assume that she intends to give him the third box.”
Richard traced a finger along some of the lettering on Panis Rahl’s casket. “I think you’re right. It’s only a matter of time before Jagang has all three bo
xes, if he doesn’t already.”
“We have something they need, though,” Nicci said.
“We do? What?”
“The Garden of Life. Since translating The Book of Life I’ve come to see the Garden of Life in a different way. The book confirmed some of the conclusions I had previously come to, after the last time I saw the garden.
“I now understand the Garden of Life through the context of the magic of Orden. I’ve studied the position of the room, the amount of light, the angles in relation to various star charts and how the sun and moon traverse the place. I’ve also analyzed the area within the room where the spells relating to Orden had been invoked—their specific placement in relation to the other elements.”
Richard was intrigued. “You mean to say that you really think that the Garden of Life is necessary to open one of the boxes?”
“Yes. The Garden of Life was constructed specifically to provide the controlled conditions necessary to open one of the boxes of Orden.”
Richard had to run that through his mind a second time before he was sure that he’d heard her right. “You mean to say that Jagang must get into that room in order to open the correct box?”
Nicci shrugged. “Unless he wants to construct his own room just like it. That certainly isn’t out of the realm of possibility, but the elements all brought together in that room are very exacting. Re-creating it would be a complex undertaking.”
“But it would be possible for him to do such a thing?”
“He would need the original references from which the plans for the Garden of Life were derived. He would also need the aid not only of sorceresses, but wizards. Lacking everything necessary to do it on his own, he would have to study the Garden of Life itself in order to know how to construct a new one. The only practical solution would be to duplicate what was already built here, since all that preliminary work has already been successfully carried out.”
“Well, if he could get into here to do that, he might as well use this one.”
Nicci leveled a look at him. “Exactly.”
Confessor: Chainfire Trilogy Part 3 tsot-11 Page 53
