Phantom: Chainfire Trilogy Part 2

Chapter 55

Nicci pulled her cloak tighter around herself as she leaned one shoulder up against the great stone merlon. She peered down through the crenellation to the road far below, watching the four riders making their way up the mountain toward the Keep. They were still quite a distance, but she thought she had a good idea who they were.

Nicci yawned as she looked out over the city of Aydindril below, and the vast carpet of forests all around. The vivid colors of autumn were beginning to fade. Looking at the trees spreading up onto the slopes of the surrounding mountains, and how they so boldly heralded the change of seasons, made her think about Richard. He loved the trees. Nicci had come to love them, too, because they reminded her of him.

She saw the trees in a different light for other reasons as well. They marked the turn of time, the passing of seasons, the change of patterns that were part of her world now, too, because of their connection to all the things she had been studying in The Book of Life. It was all intricately interconnected—how the power of Orden worked, and how that power functioned through its connection to the world of life. The world, the seasons, the stars, the position of the moon, were parts of the equation, all parts of what contributed to and governed the power of Orden. The more she studied and the more she learned, the more she felt that pulse of time and life that was all around her.

She had also come to recognize with complete clarity that Richard had memorized a false key.

She never made the point to Zedd. It seemed unimportant for the present. It was also a difficult case to make. It wasn’t so much what The Book of Life said, but how it said it. The book was in another language, and not just High D’Haran. While it was written in High D’Haran, the true language of the book was its interconnection to the power invoked through it. The formulas, spells, and procedures were only one aspect.

In many ways it reminded her of how Richard spoke so convincingly of the language of symbols and emblems. She was coming to understand what he meant by seeing it for herself all laid out in The Book of Life. She was coming to see the lines and angles in certain formulas as a language all their own. She was beginning to truly grasp what Richard meant.

The Book of Life carried meaning that had forced Nicci to look at the world of life in a new way—in a way that very much reminded her of the way Richard had always looked at the world, through a prism of excitement, wonder, and love of life. In a way it was a profound recognition of the precise nature of things, an appreciation of things for what they were, not for what people imagined of them.

In part, that was because The Book of Life was not just Additive, but Subtractive Magic in the same way that death was part of the process of life. It dealt with the whole. For that reason, Nicci couldn’t explain it to Zedd; he didn’t possess the ability to use Subtractive Magic. Without that ability, a constituent part of what was needed to understand The Book of Life was missing. She could explain the formulas, lay out the procedures, show him the spells, but much of it he could only observe through the filter of his limited ability. While he could intellectually understand some of it, he couldn’t actually perform what was involved.

It was something like the difference between hearing about love, understanding the depth of such feelings, grasping how it affected people, but never having actually experienced it. Without that experience, it was only academic, sterile.

Until you felt the magic, you didn’t know it.

It was in that sense that Nicci had come to know that Richard had memorized a false key. She had been right, before, in that if the person who put the boxes in play failed to use the key properly, the boxes would be destroyed along with the one who put them in play. But it was more than that simple statement. There was the whole complex nature of the processes involved in using the boxes that demonstrated that concept in ways that the words only presented in a simplified, condensed manner.

Through the mechanisms in the book, she could glimpse how the power functioned. By understanding that function on a profound level, she could see how the magic, if invoked, needed and used the key for completion. Through grasping that process, she could see how if the key was used improperly the boxes themselves were inescapably destroyed along with the person making the fatal mistake. The magic simply would not allow such a breach to go uncompleted.

It would be like tossing a rock and without any outside influence or intervention having it float in midair rather than fall back to the ground. It simply would not happen. In the same way, the magic of Orden had laws of its identity. By the way it functioned, by those laws of its identity, it had to destroy the boxes if the key was not used properly. The rock has to fall.

When Richard used his memory of what he believed was The Book of Counted Shadows, he changed it in order to trick Darken Rahl into opening the wrong box. But it had only been the wrong box named in a clever simulation that seemed as if it had meaning to The Book of Life. In fact, such a book was only a shrewd fake, a false key. Had it been real, and misused in such a way, the boxes would no longer exist.

A false key, a clever fake, simply could not trigger the power of Orden to destroy the boxes, but the real key, if used in the fashion that Richard had used it, would have caused the entire structure of spell to collapse in on itself, taking the boxes with it.

The boxes of Orden, after all, had been created for the purpose of countering the Chainfire spell. To misuse the key meant that someone without the proper intention and knowledge was trying to gain access to Orden’s power, in essence tampering with the purpose for which it had been created. The Book of Life made it all too clear within the structure of the spell-forms that, as a safeguard, if everything was not done correctly, namely completed with the key in the exact, prescribed manner, the formulas and spells would self-destruct—not altogether unlike the way in which Richard had shut down the verification web, collapsing it, to save Nicci.

Richard had memorized a false key, that was the truth of it.

“What is it?” came Zedd’s voice.

Nicci looked back over her shoulder to see the old wizard marching across the vast rampart. She knew that she had to set aside the things she had been considering. Telling Zedd about the false key now would only cause him to want to argue. Arguing with Zedd would serve no purpose.

Richard was the one who really needed to know that the key he possessed was false.

“Four riders,” Nicci told him.

Zedd came to a halt at the wall. He peered down at the road and grunted to indicate that he saw them.

“Looks like Tom and Friedrich to me,” Cara said. “They must have found someone sneaking around.”

“I don’t think so,” Nicci said. “They hardly look like prisoners. I can see the glint of steel. The man is carrying weapons. Tom would have disarmed anyone he thought was a threat. Besides, the other one looks like a little girl.”

“Rachel?” Zedd asked, frowning as he leaned out farther, trying to see better between the trees far down the road. It would not be many more days until those golden-brown leaves were gone for the season. “Do you really think it could be her?”

“That’s my guess,” Nicci said.

He turned and appraised her critically. “You look terrible.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Just what a woman likes to hear from a gentleman.”

He huffed a dismissal of his rude manners. “When’s the last time you got any sleep?”

Nicci yawned again. “I don’t know. Last summer, when I came back from the People’s Palace with that book?”

He made a face at her rather poor attempt at humor. She didn’t know why she tried to be funny with him. Zedd could make people laugh just by grunting. Whenever she said anything she thought was rather amusing, people just stared at her, the way Cara was doing.

“How is it coming?” he asked.

Nicci knew what he meant. She pulled some hair back off her face, holding it back from the grasp of the wind. “I could use your help with some star charts and angle calculations. It might speed things up if I didn’t have to do those myself. I could go on to some of the other translations and problems.”

Zedd laid a hand tenderly on her back, giving her a gentle rub that conveyed a personal, comforting warmth. “On one condition.”

“What’s that?” she asked as she yawned again.

“You get some sleep.”

Nicci smiled as she nodded. “All right, Zedd.” She gestured, pointing with her chin. “First I think we had better get down there to see who our guests are.”

They were just coming out the big door of the Keep at the side entrance with the paddock when the riders came under the arched opening in the wall.

Tom and Friedrich were escorting Chase and Rachel. Rachel’s hair was chopped short, rather than long the way it had been, and Chase looked to be in surprisingly good health for a man who had been stabbed with the Sword of Truth.

“Chase!” Zedd shouted. “You’re alive!”

“Well, it’s hard to ride a horse upright when you’re dead.”

Cara chuckled. Nicci glanced at her, wondering where the woman’s sudden appreciation for humor had come from.

“Found them returning,” Tom said. “First people we’ve seen out there in months.”

“It was good to see Rachel back,” Friedrich said. The older man regarded the girl with a grin, showing how much he really meant it.

Zedd caught Rachel as she slipped from the saddle while Cara took the reins of the horse.

“My, but you’re getting heavy,” Zedd told her.

“Chase rescued me,” Rachel said. “He was so brave. You should have seen him. He killed a hundred men all by himself.”

“A hundred! My, my, what an accomplishment.”

“You stabbed one in the leg for me,” Chase said as he swung down out of his saddle. “Otherwise I’d only have gotten ninety-nine.”

Rachel kicked her legs, eager to be put down. “Zedd, I brought something important with me.”

Once on the ground, she untied a leather bag hanging right behind her saddle. She brought it to the granite steps and set it down, then undid the drawstring.

When she pushed back the leather covering, darkness came out into the crisp late-autumn daylight. To Nicci, it felt like looking into the inky obscurity of Jagang’s eyes.

“Rachel,” Zedd said in astonishment, “where did you get this?”

“A man, Samuel, who had Richard’s sword had it. He stabbed Chase and took me with him. Then he gave it to a witch woman named Six, and to Violet, the queen of Tamarang, though I don’t think she’s queen anymore.

“You can’t believe how evil Six is.”

“I think I can imagine,” Zedd told her.

Having a little trouble following the story, he lifted the leather back a little for a better look inside.

Staring at one of the boxes of Orden sitting on the steps before her, Nicci felt as if her heart were in her throat. After the weeks and weeks of study of the book that went with the boxes, to actually see one was startling. Theory was one thing, but to see the reality of what this object represented was altogether something else.

“I couldn’t let them have it,” Rachel told Zedd. “So when I got a chance to escape I stole it and took it with me.”

Zedd ruffled her chopped-off blond hair. “You did good, little one. I always knew you were special.”

Rachel hugged the wizard around the neck. “Six made Violet draw pictures of Richard. It scared me to see what they were doing.”

“In a cave?” Zedd asked. When Rachel nodded, he glanced up at Nicci. “That explains a lot.”

Nicci took a step closer. “Was Richard there? Did you see him?”

Rachel shook her head. “No. Six left one day. When she finally came back she told Violet that she had been bringing him back, but the Imperial Order captured him.”

“The Imperial Order . . .” Zedd said.

Nicci tried to imagine what was worse, the witch woman having Richard in her clutches, or the Imperial Order capturing him.

She guessed that what was the worst was Richard stripped of his gift, his sword, and being in the hands of the Order.