She realized that even if she left Samuel and struck out on her own, without knowing who she was where would she go? She saw trees and mountains as they rode past, but she didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know where she grew up, where she lived, where she belonged. She didn’t recognize the land or even remember any towns or cities, other than the places of the dead that she’d gone through after the Sisters had captured her. She was lost in a world that didn’t know her and she didn’t remember.
When she realized that the moon had risen above the trees, she looked over at Samuel. He had long ago finished his meal.
He was polishing his sword as it lay in his lap.
“Samuel,” she called. He looked up as if being yanked out of a trance. “Samuel, I need to know where we’re going.”
“To a place where we will be safe.”
“You’ve told me that before. If I’m going to continue to travel with you—”
“You must! You must come with me! Please!”
Kahlan was taken aback by his outburst of emotion. His eyes wide and round, he looked genuinely panicked.
“Why?”
“Because I will take us to safety.”
“Maybe I can take myself to safety.”
“But I can take you to someone who can help you get your memory back.”
He had her attention. She sat up.
“You know someone who can help me get my memory back?”
Samuel nodded vigorously.
“Who?”
“A friend.”
“How can I believe that you’re telling me the truth?”
Samuel gazed down at the gleaming weapon in his lap. He ran adoring fingers over its curves.
“I am the Seeker of Truth. You have a spell that has taken your memory. I have a friend who can help you recover your past, recover yourself.”
Kahlan’s heart pounded with the abruptly unexpected prospect of having her memory back. All of her other questions seemed suddenly insignificant.
Samuel had never told her that he was the Seeker of Truth. She didn’t know what the Seeker of Truth was, but she had seen the word truth in gold wire woven through the silver wire of the hilt. It seemed an odd title for someone so reluctant to offer any information about anything.
“When will I meet this person?”
“Soon. She is close.”
“How do you know?”
Samuel looked up. His yellow eyes stared at her, looking like twin lanterns in the darkness.
“I can feel her. You must stay if you want to recover your past.”
Kahlan thought about Richard with those strange symbols painted all over him. That was the past she was really interested in. She wanted to know her connection to that man with the gray eyes.
Richard knew that it was his only chance.
Darkness unlike anything he had ever known pressed in all around him. It was suffocating, terrifying, crushing.
Denna tried to protect him, but even she had no power to stop such a thing. No one did.
“You can’t,” came Denna’s whispering voice in his mind. “This is a place of nothing. You can’t do that.”
Richard knew that it was his only chance.
“I have to try.”
“If you do that, you will be naked to this place. Your protection will be stripped from you. You will not be able to be here any longer.”
“I’ve done what I must.”
“But you will not be able to find your way back.”
Richard cried out in agony. The protective structure of the spell-forms that he had created was being shredded. The blackness all around was seeping in and crashing the life from him. This was a place that did not tolerate life. This was a place that existed to draw life itself away into the dark eternity of nothing.
The beast had followed him into that void of the underworld, and now it had him trapped in its own domain.
Finding his way back was no longer what concerned him. That option was already lost to him. His connection to the entry point was gone, broken away by the beast as it tore apart the fabric of the protective spells. There was no way back to the Garden of Life, no way to find something in the middle of nothing.
Now escape was all that mattered.
The beast was a thing created of Subtractive Magic and it was in a Subtractive world. Richard was caught in its lair.
In this place there was no help to be had. Denna could do nothing against a conjured creature of this sort, a creature in its own element.
There was no way he could even make it back to the Hall of Sky, where the ceiling of stone was like a window showing the sky across its surface. Even that now seemed forever ago, forever distant across the eternity of nothing. His connection to it was lost somewhere in the blackness.
As he felt the tormenting claws of death itself tearing to get at him he only wanted out.
His mind held those essential elements he had come for in a death grip. The beast was trying to strip them away from him. Even if it cost him his life, he could not let those things go. If he lost those ephemeral aspects, there would be no point in going back to the world of life.
“I have to do it,” he cried through the stunning pain of what was ripping at his very soul.
Denna’s arms tightened protectively, desperately, around him, but there was no protection to be had in that embrace. Despite how much she wanted to help him, this was a thing she could not fight. She was his protector in this world, but only in the sense of being his guide to help him find what he needed while keeping him from straying into dangers that would suck him forever downward into darker places yet. She was not his guardian from what might come out of that darkness, and she had no ability to stop a conjured creature that did not exist.
“I have to!” he cried out, knowing that there was nothing else to try.
Shimmering tears traced their way down Denna’s beautiful, glowing face. “If you do this, I can’t protect you.”
“If I don’t, what do you suppose will happen to me?”
She smiled sadly. “You will die here.”
“Then what choice do I have?”
She began floating away, only her hand holding his.
“None,” her silken voice said in his mind. “But I can’t be with you if you do this.”
Twisting in pain as the beast tightened around him, Richard managed to nod. “I know, Denna. Thank you for all you have done. It was a true gift.”
Her sad smile widened as she drifted farther away. “For me, too, Richard. I love you.”
Richard felt her fingers still touching his. He nodded as best he could. “One way or another, you will always be in my heart.”
He felt her kiss on his cheek. “Thank you, Richard, for that above all else.”
And then she was gone.
When she vanished, and Richard was suddenly alone, enveloped in incomparable solitude and darkness, in the absence of everything, he released Additive Magic into the beast in a world where it could not exist.
In that instant, as the concussion of the Additive came into being in the heart of nowhere, the beast, unable to endure such an irreconcilable clash between what was and what was not, between the world of life and the world of the dead, between suddenly containing without any protective buffers an element of Additive in a world of Subtractive, disintegrated out of existence in both worlds.
At the same time, Richard felt a stunning blow from every direction at once.
There was suddenly ground under his feet.
Unable to stand, he collapsed among skulls.
Naked men, painted in wild designs, sat in a circle all around him.
Shaking with pain and shock, he felt comforting, calming hands on him. From all around he heard words he didn’t understand.
But then he began to see faces he recognized. He saw his friend Savidlin. At the head of the circle he saw the Bird Man.
“Welcome back to the world of life, Richard with the Temper,” a familiar voice said. It was
Chandalen.
Still catching his breath, Richard blinked at the grim faces watching him. They were all painted in wild designs with black and white mud. He realized that he understood the symbols. When he had first come to these people and asked for a gathering, he had thought the black and white mud was simply random patterns. He knew now that it wasn’t. It had meaning.
“Where am I?”
“You are in the spirit house,” Chandalen said in his deep, grim-sounding voice.
The men all around him speaking in the strange language were the Mud People elders. It was a gathering.
Richard looked around at the spirit house. This was the village where he and Kahlan had been married. This was the place where they had spent their first night as husband and wife.
The men helped Richard stand.
“But what am I doing here?” he asked Chandalen, still not sure if he was dreaming . . . or dead.
The man turned to the Bird Man. They exchanged brief words. Chandalen turned back to Richard.
“We thought you would know, and that you could tell us. We were asked to have a gathering for you. We were told that it was a matter of life or death.”
Richard frowned as he carefully stepped out of the collection of skulls of ancestors. “Who asked you to have a gathering?”
Chandalen cleared his throat. “Well, at first we thought it might be a spirit.”
“A spirit,” Richard said as he stared.
Chandalen nodded. “But then we realized it was a stranger.”
Richard tilted his head toward the man. “A stranger?”
“She flew here on a beast, and then—” He stopped when he saw the look on Richard’s face. “Come, they will explain it.”
“They?”
“Yes, the strangers. Come.”
“I’m naked.”
Chandalen nodded. “We knew you were coming, so we brought clothes for you. Come, they are just outside, and you can talk to the strangers. They are eager to see you. They feared you would never come. We have been in here for two nights, waiting.”
Richard wondered if it was Nicci and maybe Nathan. Who but Nicci could have known to do such a thing?
“Two nights . . .” Richard mumbled as he was funneled out the door among all the elders as they touched him, patted his shoulder, and jabbered greetings. Despite the unexpected circumstances, they were pleased to see him. He was, after all, one of them, one of the Mud People.
It was dark outside. Richard noticed the slender crescent of the moon. Attendants waited with clothes for all the elders. One of the men handed Richard buckskin trousers, and then a buckskin pullover shirt.
Once Richard was dressed, the group of men swept him through the narrow passageways. Richard felt as if he had awakened in some past life. He remembered all these passageways through the buildings.
Richard was eager to see Nicci. He couldn’t wait to find out what had happened, how she knew to help him escape. It was probably the prophet who had known of the problem he would face, and she must have figured a way to help him by providing a way for him to step back into the world of life. He couldn’t wait to tell her what he had managed to do in the underworld.
The Bird Man laid an arm around Richard’s shoulder and spoke in the words Richard didn’t understand.
Chandalen answered him, and then spoke to Richard. “The Bird Man wants you to know that he has spoken with many ancestors in a gathering, but in all his life he has never seen one of our people return from the spirit world.”
Richard glanced over at the smiling Bird Man.
“It’s a first for me as well,” he assured Chandalen.
In the open center of the village large fires were burning, lighting the crowds attending the feast. Children ran through the legs of adults, enjoying the festivities. People were gathered on and around the platforms.
“Richard!” a girl shouted.
Richard turned to the sound and saw Rachel jump off a platform and run toward him. She threw her arms around his waist. She seemed a head taller than the last time he’d seen her. As he embraced her, he couldn’t help laughing with the joy of seeing her again.
When he looked up, Chase was standing there as well. Chase made the largest among the Mud People look the size of children.
“Chase, what are you doing here?”
He folded his arms, looking unhappy. “It’s too incredible. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
Richard gave him a look. “I just came back from the underworld. I think I have you beat for incredible.”
Chase thought it over. “Maybe. I was at camp. I’d been searching for Rachel. My mother visited me.”
“Your mother? Your mother passed away years ago.”
Chase made a face as if to say he knew that better than Richard. “That kind of thing gets your attention.”
“Well,” Richard said, trying to grasp what was going on, “it obviously wasn’t your mother. Didn’t you think to ask who she really was?”
Chase, his arms still folded, shrugged. “No.” He glanced off into the darkness. “It was a rather emotional experience. You would have had to have been there.”
“I imagine you’re right,” Richard said. “Did she tell you why she had come to visit you?”
“She told me that I had to come here as fast as I could. She said that Rachel would be here, and that you needed help.”
Richard was dumbfounded. “Did she tell you what sort of help I needed?”
Chase nodded. “Horses. Fast horses.”
“My mother came to me, too,” Rachel said.
Richard looked from the girl back up at Chase. Chase shrugged as if to say he had no answer.
“Your mother?” Richard asked Rachel. “You mean Emma?”
“No, not my new mother. My old mother. My mother who gave birth to me.”
Richard didn’t quite know what to say. “What did she want with you?”
“She told me that I had to help you by coming here. She said that I needed to tell these people that you were in the spirit world and they had to have a gathering so that you would have a way to get back.”
“Really” was all Richard could think to say.
Rachel nodded. “She said I had to hurry, that there was little time, so she had a gar fly me here. His name was Gratch. He was real nice. Gratch told me that he loves you. But he had to go home after we came here.”
Richard could only stare.
“That was a few days back,” Chase said. “We’ve been waiting for you. The Mud People had to prepare for the gathering. I brought you three fast horses. We have food packed up for you. They’re ready to go.”
“Ready to go?”
Chase nodded. “As much as I’d like to visit, and believe me, I think we have some things to talk about, my . . . mother said that you would be in a hurry to get to Tamarang.”
“Tamarang,” Richard repeated. “Zedd was going to Tamarang.”
That wasn’t all that was there. The book that Baraccus had written for Richard and then hidden for him three thousand years before was in Tamarang. Richard had found the book but then been captured by Six. The book, Secrets of a War Wizard’s Power, was hidden in a stone cell in Tamarang.
He needed that book now more than ever. Baraccus had already provided invaluable help. If Richard was to open the boxes of Orden, though, that book might well provide the things he needed.
“Tamarang,” Richard said again in thought. “There was a spell there that cut me off from my gift.”
Rachel nodded. “I fixed it.”
Richard stared down at her. “You fixed it?”
Chase gave Richard a look. “Like I said, there are some things we need to talk about, but now is not the time. As I hear it told, you’re in a big hurry. You only have until the new moon.”
With a feeling of sinking dread, Richard glanced at the sliver of a moon. “I can’t get back to the People’s Palace by the new moon. It’s too far away.”
“You aren’t going
to the Peoples’ Palace,” Chase reminded him. “You’re going to Tamarang.”
Richard grasped Chase by the arm. “Take me to the horses. I’m running out of time.”
Chase nodded. “So my mother told me.”
Chapter 55
Zedd winced in pain. He heard someone calling his name again. The voice sounded like it was drifting into him from some distant world. He didn’t want to answer the call, didn’t want to open his eyes, didn’t want to be fully conscious and have to feel the full brunt of awareness.
“Zedd,” the voice called again.
A big hand shook him, gently rocking his body back and forth. Zedd forced his eyes open just a little, squinting with the full dread of consciousness. Rikka and Tom, hunched over him, were both looking down with intent worry. Zedd saw that the side of Tom’s blond hair was matted with blood.
“Zedd, are you all right?”
It was Rikka’s voice, he realized. He blinked, trying to tell if every bone in his body was broken or if it only felt that way. Fear lurking in the shadows of his mind whispered that this might be the end of everything.
His middle hurt. That was where Six’s spell had caught him.
He felt like a fool. Having taken the measure of her before, he had been prepared. He had been sure that he could counter the woman’s ability—and he would have been able to, except that she had caught him off guard with a form of constructed spell, a little surprise that she’d had drawn in the caves, patiently waiting for his arrival should he ever enter her domain. Even though it was the type of thing he’d never known a witch woman to do, he should have considered that possibility. He should have been ready for a trick.
She was a witch woman, not a sorceress or wizard, and she knew that, while she had considerable talents of her own, she was vulnerable to certain things Zedd could do. He had revealed some of those things back at the Wizard’s Keep by preventing her from killing him and the others when she tried. She had learned from that experience and found a way to construct a counter-something that was simply out of character for a witch woman. It was quite brilliant, actually, but right then he wasn’t exactly in the mood to marvel at her accomplishment.
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