Phantom

  Nicci stood. "Richard, no one is arguing that the Chainfire spell isn't terribly dangerous. We all know that. We all know that our memories have been damaged by the ignition of a Chainfire event. Do you have any idea how disturbing it is to be intellectually aware that we all did things, knew things, and knew people that we now can't remember? Don't you realize how haunting is to be in constant dread of what memories are lost, and what others might be lost? That your very mind is eroding? What are you getting at, anyway?"

  "Just that—what else is being lost. I think that the destruction is expanding through everyone's memory—that their minds are eroding, as you put it. I don't think that Chainfire was a single event of merely forgetting Kahlan. I think that the spell, once activated, is an ongoing, dynamic process. I think that everyone's memory loss is continuing to spread."

  Zedd, Cara, and Nicci all looked away from Richard's unwavering gaze. Nicci wondered how they could expect to help him if none of them were consciously capable of using their own minds, much less keeping what they still had from day to day.

  How could Richard trust any of them?

  "I'm afraid that as bad as that much of it is, it gets more involved and far worse," Richard said, the heat having left his voice. "Dragons, like many creatures in the Midlands, need and use magic to live. What if the corruption caused by the chimes extinguished the magic that they need in order to live? What if no one has seen any dragons for the last couple of years because they no longer exist and with Chainfire are now forgotten? What other creatures with magic might have also vanished from existence?"

  Richard tapped a thumb against his own chest. "We are creatures of magic. We have the gift. How long until that taint left by the chimes begins to destroy us?"

  "But perhaps…" Zedd's voice trailed off when he could think of no argument.

  "The Chainfire spell itself is contaminated. You all saw what it was doing to Nicci. She was in the spell and she knows the terrible truth of it." Richard began pacing as he spoke. "There is no telling how the contamination within the spell might change the way it works. It might even be that the contamination is the reason that everyone's memory loss is spreading beyond what would have otherwise happened.

  "But worse yet, it appears that the corruption has worked in conjunction with the Chainfire event in a symbiotic fashion."

  Zedd looked up. "What are you talking about?"

  "What is the mindless purpose of the chimes? Why were they created in the first place? For one single function," Richard said in answer to his own question, "to destroy magic."

  Richard paused his pacing to face the rest of them as he went on. "The contamination left by the chimes is destroying magic. The creatures that need magic to live—dragons, for example—would likely be the first to be affected. That cascade of events will continue. But no one is aware of it because the Chainfire event is simultaneously destroying everyone's memory. I think this may be happening because the Chainfire spell is contaminated, causing everyone to forget the very things being lost.

  "In much the way a leech numbs its victim so that they won't feel their blood being drained away, the Chainfire spell is making everyone forget what is being lost because of the corruption of the chimes.

  "The world is changing dramatically and no one is even aware of it. It's as if everyone is forgetting that this is a world that is influenced by, and in many ways functions through, the existence of magic. That magic is dying out… and so is everyone's memory of it."

  Richard again leaned on the sill and stared out the window. "A new day is dawning, a day in which magic continues to die out, and no one is even aware that it is fading away. When it passes entirely, I doubt that anyone will even remember it, remember what once was.

  "It's as if all that was this world is passing into a realm of mere legend."

  Zedd pressed his fingers to the table as he stared into the distance. The light of the lamp accentuated the deep creases of his drawn features. His face had gone ashen. At that moment, Nicci thought that he looked very old.

  "Dear spirits," Zedd said without looking up. "What if you're right?"

  They all turned to the sound of a polite knock. Cara pulled the door open. Nathan and Ann stood beyond the doorway, peering in.

  "We ran the standard verification web," Nathan said as he entered behind Ann, glancing around at the somber expressions.

  Zedd looked up expectantly. "And?"

  "And it reveals no flaws," Ann said. "It's perfectly intact in every way."

  "How can that be?" Cara asked. "We all saw the trouble with the other one. It nearly killed Nicci—and would have if Lord Rahl hadn't gotten her out."

  "Our point, exactly," Nathan said.

  Zedd's gaze fell away. "An interior perspective is said to be able to reveal more than the standard verification process," he explained to Cara. "This is not a good sign. Not a good sign at all. The contamination apparently buried itself as deeply as possible in order to conceal its presence. That's why it wasn't seen in the standard verification web."

  "Or else," Ann offered as she slipped her hands into opposite sleeves of her simple gray dress, "there is nothing really wrong with the spell. After all, none of us has ever run an interior perspective before. Such a thing hasn't been done in thousands of years. It's possible we did something wrong."

  Zedd shook his head. "I wish it were so, but I now believe it to be otherwise."

  Nathan's brow drew down with a suspicious look, but Ann spoke before he had a chance.

  "Even if the Sisters who unleashed the spell ran a verification web," she said, "they likely would not have run an interior perspective, so they wouldn't have suspected that it was contaminated."

  Richard rubbed his fingertips back and forth across his brow. "Even if they knew that it was contaminated, I don't think they cared. They wouldn't be concerned about what damage such contamination might cause the world. Their goal, after all, was to get the boxes and unleash the power of Orden."

  Nathan looked from one grim face to another. "What's going on? What's happened?"

  "I'm afraid that we've just learned that memory may only be the beginning of our loss." Nicci felt rather odd standing before them in a pink nightdress as she pronounced the end of the world as they knew it. "We are losing who we are, what we are. We are losing not just our world, but ourselves."

  Richard no longer seemed to be paying attention to the conversation. He was standing stock-still, staring out the window.

  "Someone is coming up the road to the Keep."

  "Maybe it's Tom and Friedrich," Nathan said.

  Zedd shook his head as he made for the window. "They wouldn't be back from a patrol of the surrounding countryside this soon."

  "Well, it could be that they—"

  "It's not Tom and Friedrich," Richard said as he started for the door. "It's two women."

  * * *

  CHAPTER 10

  "What is it?" Rikka called out as Richard, Nicci, and Cara ran toward her. Nathan and Ann had already fallen far behind. Zedd was somewhere in the middle.

  "Come on," Richard shouted to her as he ran past.

  "Someone is coming up the Keep road," Cara called back over her shoulder as Rikka joined in the charge through the halls.

  Richard veered around a long stone table set against the wall beneath a huge painting of a lake. Sheltered trails could be seen burrowed through the deeply shadowed pine groves. In the distance, through a bluish haze, majestic mountains rose up to catch brushstrokes of golden sunlight. It was a scene that made Richard long to be back in his Hartland woods on the trails he knew so well. More than anything, though, the painting always reminded him of the magical summer he'd spent with Kahlan in the home he had built for her far back in the mountains.

  The summer of Kahlan's recovery from her terrible injuries, as he showed her the natural beauty of his forested world and she once again blossomed back to health, had been one of the happiest times of his life. It had ended all too suddenly when Nicci had
arrived without warning and taken him away. He knew, though, that if Nicci had not interrupted it, something else would have. It had been a dream time that had to end; until the looming threat from the Imperial Order was halted, no one could live their dreams. They would all, instead, be swept up in the same nightmare.

  They turned a corner around a green marble pillar with a gold capital and base and all plunged down a spiral run of granite steps, Richard and Nicci in the lead with the two Mord-Sith following close on their heels. The stairwell was small for the Keep, but would have dwarfed anything Richard had ever seen growing up back in Westland.

  At the bottom, he slid to a halt, momentarily pausing to decide which would be the quickest route; in the Keep it wasn't always the way it would seem. Besides that, it was as easy to get lost in the Keep as it was to lose one's direction in a birch forest.

  Cara pushed through between Richard and Nicci, not only to be sure that there would be a red-leather-clad guard to each side of him, but so that she would be the one out ahead of him. As far as Richard knew, Mord-Sith didn't have rank, but Rikka, like the other Mord-Sith, always wordlessly conceded Cara's unspoken authority.

  Richard recognized the unique pattern of the thin black and gilded bands lining both sides of the mahogany wainscoting in one of the paneled corridors to the side. From almost since the time he had learned to walk, Richard had used the details of his surroundings to know his way. Like trees in the woods that he recognized because of some peculiarity like a twisted limb, a growth, or a scar, he had learned to navigate through the Keep and places like it by the details of architecture.

  He gestured. "This way." Cara charged off ahead of him.

  As they ran, their boot strikes echoed off the stone floor of the hall. Nicci was barefoot. He was somewhat surprised that without shoes she could keep up running across the rough stone. Nicci was not the kind of woman Richard ever envisioned running in bare feet. Even running in bare feet, though, she still looked somehow… regal.

  It wasn't all that long ago that Richard would not have imagined Nicci ever running again. He was still surprised that he had managed to get her out of the spell-form after the lightning had exploded through the window. For a time, he was sure that they had lost her. If Zedd had not been there to help after Richard had shut down the verification web, they very well might have.

  They turned down another hall; long carpets quieted their run and finally led them between two highly polished red marble columns and into the oval-shaped anteroom. A balcony, supported by pillars and arches, ran around the perimeter of the room. The doorways at the back of the balcony were all corridors, arranged like the spokes of a wheel, that led to different levels and areas of the Keep.

  Richard bounded down the five steps ringing the room inside the columns and ran past the great clover-leaf-shaped fountain centered in the tiled floor. The fountain's waters cascaded down successive tiers of ever wider, scalloped bowls to end up in a pool contained by a knee-high white marble wall that also served as a bench. A hundred feet overhead a glassed roof flooded the room with warmth and light.

  When he reached the far side of the room, Richard pushed ahead of Cara and threw open one of the heavy double doors. He paused on the top of the dozen wide granite steps outside. Nicci halted beside him, to his left, with Rikka on the far side of her. Cara took a defensive place close by on his right. All of them were still catching their breath from the brief but swift run through the Keep.

  The grass in the paddock across the way was lush and green in the early-morning light. Beyond the paddock the wall of the Keep rose straight up, making the inner courtyard seem like a cozy canyon. The passing of millennia had left the soaring wall of tightly fitted, dark stone stained with pale tan sediment. Creamy drips of calcium deposits gave the impression that the rock was slowly melting.

  Two horses clopped through the dark, arched opening to the left, which tunneled under part of the Keep to gain access to the inner courtyard. Richard couldn't tell who it was, hidden as they were back in the deep shadows of the broad, low archway, but whoever it was must have known where they were going and they apparently weren't afraid to enter an interior area of the Keep, an area used not by visitors but by wizards and those who had worked with them at the complex. But that was long ago. Still, Richard recalled his own trepidation the first time he cautiously ventured this far into the grounds of the Keep. His hackles rose at who might be bold enough to ride right into such a place.

  When the two riders emerged into the light, Richard saw that one of them was Shota.

  The witch woman locked eyes with him and smiled that quiet, knowing, private smile she wore so naturally. Like most other things about Shota, Richard didn't entirely trust the smile as significant, much less sincere, and so he couldn't be sure that it augured well.

  He didn't recognize the woman, maybe ten or fifteen years older, who rode deferentially half a length behind Shota. Short, sandy hair framed the woman's pleasant face. Her eyes were as intensely blue as the sky on a sparkling clear autumn day. Unlike Shota, she wore no casual smile. As they rode, her head swiveled and those blue eyes searched, as if she feared an imminent attack of demons who might materialize out of the dark stone of the surrounding walls.

  Shota, by contrast, looked calm and self-confident.

  Cara leaned past Richard toward Nicci. "Shota, the witch woman," she whispered confidentially.

  "I know," Nicci answered without taking her eyes off the beautiful woman riding toward them.

  Shota brought her horse to a halt close to the steps. As she straightened her shoulders she casually rested her wrists across the saddle's pommel.

  "I need to see you," she said to Richard as if he were the only one standing there. The smile, sincere or not, had vanished. "We have much to talk about."

  "Where is your murderous little companion, Samuel?"

  Shota, riding sidesaddle, slipped down off her horse in a way that Richard imagined must be how a spirit would slip to ground, if spirits rode horses.

  A hint of indignation narrowed Shota's almond-shaped eyes. "That is one of the things we need to talk about."

  The other woman dismounted as well and took the reins to Shota's horse when the witch woman lifted them to the side, much the way a queen would, not knowing or caring who would take them, but expecting without any doubt whatsoever that someone would. Her gaze remained fixed on Richard as she glided closer to the broad granite steps. Her thick, wavy auburn hair tumbled down over the front of her shoulders and glistened in the early light. Her revealing dress, made of an airy, rust-colored fabric that complemented perfectly the color of her hair, seemed to float with her effortless strides, clinging to her every curve, at least the ones it covered.

  Shota's gaze finally left Richard to take in Nicci with an "I dare you" look. It was the kind of look that would have withered just about anyone. It failed to wither Nicci in the least. It struck Richard that he was probably in the presence of the two most dangerous women alive. He half expected dark thunderclouds to roll in and lightning to nicker, but the sky remained defiantly clear.

  Shota's gaze finally slid back to Richard. "Your friend Chase has been gravely hurt."

  Richard didn't know what he had been expecting Shota to say, but that wasn't even close. "Chase…?"

  Zedd suddenly arrived and pushed his way through between Richard and Cara. "Shota!" he declared in a huff. His face had gone red and it wasn't from his run through the halls. "How dare you come into the Keep! First you swindle Richard out of the sword, and then—"

  Richard lifted an arm out across his grandfather's chest to stop him from charging down the steps. "Zedd, calm down. Shota says that Chase has been badly hurt."

  "How does she think—"

  Zedd's voice abruptly clipped off when Richard's words finally sank in. His wide eyes turned back toward Shota. "Chase, hurt? Dear spirits… how?"

  Zedd suddenly caught sight of the other woman standing a little farther back, holding the reins to th
e horses. He squinted against the bright light. "Jebra? Jebra Bevinvier?"

  The woman smiled warmly. "It has been quite a while. I wasn't sure that you would remember me, Wizard Zorander."

  This time Richard didn't try to stop Zedd when he rushed to descend the steps. He embraced the woman in a warm and protective hug.

  "Wizard Zorander—"

  "Zedd, remember?"

  She drew back to peer up at his face. A smile broke through the sadness that weighed so heavily in her eyes. Her smile ghosted away. "Zedd, my vision has gone dark."

  "Gone dark?" Concern tightening his features, he straightened and gripped her by the shoulders. "How long ago?"

  A terrible anguish flooded back into her blue eyes. "Nearly two years."

  "Two years…" Zedd said, his voice trailing off in dismay.

  "I remember you, now." Richard said as he moved down the steps. "Kahlan told me about you."

  Jebra cast Richard a puzzled frown. "Who?"

  "The phantom he chases," Shota said, her unwavering gaze fixed on him as if daring him to argue.

  "The woman he seeks is no phantom," Nicci said, drawing Shota's attention. "Thanks in part to the pricey and rather equivocal suggestions you offered, we have discovered the truth of what Richard has been telling us all along. Apparently you are still in the dark about it."

  Nicci's icy look reminded Richard that she had once been known as Death's Mistress. The cold authority in her voice matched the look. There were few women in the world as widely feared as Nicci had once been—except perhaps for Shota. Nicci's demeanor indicated that she was clearly a woman still to be feared.

  Shota, unfazed, deliberately took in the length of Nicci's pink nightdress. Richard expected a smirk. Instead, a hot look flashed in Shota's eyes.