Phantom

  Denna had taught him to endure pain, though. He envisioned her standing there, watching him, waiting to see if would tip over the edge into death. There had been times with her when he had reached the crest of that distant, dark hill, and started down the other side.

  When that happened Denna would be right there to put her mouth over his, forcefully breathing her life into him. She had not only controlled his life, she had controlled his death. She had taken everything. Not even his own death belonged to him; it belonged to her.

  She watched him now. Her silver face came close, waiting to see what he would do. He wondered if he would be granted death, or if she would again put her mouth over his and…

  "Breathe."

  Richard puzzled at her. Denna didn't look at all like a silver statue. "You must breathe," the silken voice told him. "If you do not, you will die."

  Richard blinked at the beautiful face softly lit by the cold moonlight. He tried to pull a little more air into his lungs.

  He squeezed his eyes shut. "Hurts," he whispered with the entirety of that shallow breath.

  "You must. It is life."

  Life. Richard didn't know if he wanted life. He was so tired, so exhausted. Death seemed so inviting. No more struggle. No more pain. No more despair. No more loneliness. No more tears. No more agony of missing Kahlan.

  Kahlan.

  "Breathe."

  If he died, who would help her?

  He drew a deeper breath, forcing it past the scalding agony it pulled down into his lungs. He thought of Kahlan's smile, instead of the pain.

  He drew another breath. Deeper yet.

  A silver hand gently glided over the back of his shoulder, as if to comfort him in his agony of struggling to hold on to life. The face looked sadly sympathetic as it watched his struggle.

  "Breathe."

  Richard nodded as he tightened his fists and gasped in the cold fire of the night air.

  He coughed up thin red fluid and clots of blood that tasted metallic. He pulled in another breath, giving him the power to cough out more of the liquid burning his lungs. For a time he lay on his side, alternating between gasping in air and coughing out fluid.

  When he was breathing again, if raggedly, he flopped onto his back, hoping to make the spinning stop. He closed his eyes, but that only made it worse, adding a kind of tilting, rolling movement to the spinning. His stomach roiled, on the brink of upheaval.

  He opened his eyes and in the darkness stared up at the leaves above him. He saw mostly maple leaves in the canopy of tree limbs above him. Looking at leaves—talismans of the familiar—felt good. In the moonlight, he saw other kinds of trees as well. To take his mind off the pain and nausea, he made himself identify all the trees that he could make out. There were a smattering of heart-shaped linden leaves and, towering farther above, a bough or two of what looked to be white pine. There were some clusters of oak in the distance to the sides, along with spruce and balsam. Close by, though, there were mostly maples. With every breath of breeze he could hear the distinctive, soft rattle of cottonwood leaves.

  Beside the pain associated with the difficulty of breathing, Richard clearly recognized that there was something wrong within himself. Something far more basic, more elemental.

  It wasn't an injury, in the conventional sense, but he knew that there was something dreadfully wrong. He tried to identify the perception, but he couldn't pinpoint it. It was a hollow, empty, desolate feeling unrelated to the familiar emotions of his life, things like his need to find Kahlan, or what he had done with setting the D'Haran army loose on the Old World. He considered the troubling things Shota had told him, but that wasn't it, either.

  It was more a sense of a disturbing void within himself that he knew he had never felt before. That's why he had so much trouble identifying it: it was a completely unfamiliar condition. There had been something there, some sense of himself, that he realized he had never thought about, never identified as a distinct element, a discrete part of his makeup, that was now missing.

  Richard felt as if he was no longer himself.

  The story Shota had told him of Baraccus and the book he had written, Secrets of a War Wizard's Power, came to mind. Richard wondered if his inner voice was trying to suggest that such a book might help him in just such a situation. He had to admit that the problem did feel connected in some way to his gift.

  Thinking about that book caused his mind to wander to what Shota had told him about his mother, that she had not died alone in that fire. Zedd was insistent that he'd looked through the charred remains of the house and he had found no other bones. How could that be? Either Zedd or Shota had to be wrong. For some reason, he could not believe that either of them were.

  Somewhere deep in the back of his mind the answer ticked at him. Try as he might, though, he could not coax it out.

  Richard felt a pang of loneliness for his mother, a feeling that had visited him from time to time throughout his life. He wondered what she would have to say about all that had happened to him. She'd never had a chance to see him grow up, to see him as a man. She'd only known him as a boy.

  He knew his mother would love Kahlan. She would be so happy for him, so proud to have a daughter-in-law like Kahlan. She always wanted him to have a good life. There could be no better life than a life with Kahlan.

  But he no longer had a life with Kahlan.

  He guessed that he had life and, all things considered, that was about as much as could be expected at the moment. At least he could work toward his dreams. Dead men had no dreams.

  Richard lay on his back, letting the air saturate his burning muscles, letting himself regain his senses, his composure. He was so weak he could hardly move, so he didn't try to. Instead, as long as he was lying there recovering, he focused on everything that had happened, trying to put it all back together in his mind.

  He had been traveling back to the Keep with Nicci and Cara when they had been attacked. It had been the beast. He had sensed its aura of evil. It appeared in a form different from any he had ever seen before, but it was the beast's nature to assume different forms. The only thing he could count on to be consistent was that the beast would continue to come after him until it killed him.

  He remembered fighting it. His hand went to a place on his leg where one of the tentacles had squeezed until he thought his leg would be stripped of flesh. His thigh was swollen and painful to the touch but, fortunately, not torn open. He remembered slicing through some of the creature's arms. He remembered Nicci trying to use her power, and wishing that she would stop because it was somehow conducting right through the sliph so that some of the power she had unleashed against the beast had ripped through him. He suspected that were it not for the substance of the sliph, Nicci's magic could have killed him. It certainly didn't harm the beast—at least, not enough to slow it down. It, too, must have been insulated, at least to some extent, by the sliph.

  He remembered Cara being pulled away from him. He remembered Nicci likewise being violently separated from him. He remembered the beast trying to rip him apart. And he remembered managing to abruptly break free.

  But then something had happened that he did not understand.

  While he was separated from the beast, he had been jolted by an unfamiliar, painful sensation that ripped right down into the core of his being. It had been distinctly different from the pain caused by Nicci's power—or that of any magic he had ever felt.

  Magic.

  Once he had formed the thought, he realized that he was right; it had been magic of some sort.

  Even if it was the touch of a kind of conjuring completely unlike anything he had ever felt, he recognized that it had been the touch of magic. Even though he'd been free of the beast—he hadn't even known where the beast was at that particular moment—that was when everything had suddenly changed.

  As he'd gasped in pain from the abrupt assault of the strange charge of power, the sliph's essence again filled his lungs. That breath had brought a shoc
k of panic.

  Richard remembered a similar feeling when he had been young. He'd been with several other boys, diving down to the bottom of a pond in a contest to retrieve pebbles. Their afternoon of swimming and diving from branches overhanging the small but deep pond had churned up the muddy bottom. Under the murky water, while diving for pebbles, Richard lost his sense of direction. He was out of air when he bumped his head on a thick branch. Being disoriented, he thought that bumping into the low branch meant that he'd broken the surface and run into one of the low-lying limbs hanging out over the edge of the pond. He hadn't. It had been a submerged branch. Before realizing what he had really done, he breathed in some of the muddy water.

  He'd been close to the surface, to the shore, and to his friends. It had been a terrifying experience, but it had ended quickly and he'd recovered soon enough, learning a lesson to have more respect for water.

  That memory of breathing in water as a boy, in addition to the natural unwillingness to inhale water, had made it all the more difficult to breathe in the sliph the first time. He overcame that fear, though, and it turned out to be a rapturous experience.

  But in the sliph, when he suddenly found himself drowning, there was no surface, no shore, no help at hand. Such a thing had never happened in the sliph before. There had been no way for him to escape, no way to get to the surface, and no one to help him.

  Richard looked over in the moonlight. The sliph was close by, watching him. He realized that she was not in a well, the way he had always seen her before. They were on the ground in a sparsely wooded place. He could hear no sounds but the sounds of nature. He could detect nothing but forest smells.

  Beneath leaves, pine needles, forest debris, and roots Richard felt a rough stone floor. The grout joints were fat, more than a finger wide. These were not tight joints like those in finely crafted palaces, but they were without a doubt man-made.

  And the silver face of the sliph, rather than looking out from within her well, had risen slightly from a rather small and irregular opening in the ancient stone floor. Ragged pieces from that stone floor now lay about on top of the dried leaves and rubble of branches, as if they had just been broken open from underneath—as if the sliph has broken up through them.

  Richard sat up. "Sliph, are you all right?"

  "Yes, Master."

  "Do you know what happened? It felt like I was drowning."

  "You were."

  Richard stared at the face in the moonlight. "But how can that be? What went wrong?"

  A silver hand reached up from the ground to trail quicksilver fingers across his brow, testing him.

  "You do not have the required magic to travel."

  Richard blinked in confusion. "I don't understand. I've traveled many times before."

  "Before you had what was required."

  "And now I don't?"

  The sliph watched him a moment. "Now you do not," she confirmed.

  Richard felt like he must be hallucinating. "But I have both sides of the gift. I can travel."

  The sliph cautiously reached out and again felt his face. The hand slipped down to his chest, pausing for a moment to put light pressure against him. Her arm drew back into the dark hole in the broken stone.

  "You do not have the required magic."

  "You already said that. It makes no sense. I was already traveling."

  "While you were traveling, you lost what is required."

  Richard's eyes widened. "You mean to say that I lost one side of the gift?"

  "No, I mean to say that you do not have the gift. You have no magic at all. You may not travel."

  Richard had to run the words through his head again to be sure he'd heard correctly. He didn't see how he could have mistaken what the sliph had said. His mind raced through fragments of jumbled thoughts as he tried to grasp how such a thing was possible.

  A terrible realization came to him. Could it be that the corruption caused by the chimes might be responsible? Had that corruption finally caught up with him and undone his gift? Rotted it away without his knowing it until it had finally failed?

  But that would not explain the sensation he'd felt back in the sliph, just after he'd escaped the grip of the beast and just before he'd started drowning—the sudden sensation of some dark and furtive magic reaching out when he was most vulnerable and touching him.

  Richard looked around but saw nothing other than the trees. They were dense enough that he couldn't see beyond them in the moonlight. As a guide, he hated the feeling of not knowing where he was.

  "Where are we, anyway? How did we get here?"

  "When it happened, when you lost what is needed to travel, I had to bring you here."

  "And where is 'here'?"

  "I am sorry but I don't know, exactly."

  "How can you bring me here, and not know where you are? You always know where you are and the places to which you can travel."

  "I already told you, I have never been to this place before. This place is an emergency passage. I knew of it, of course, but I have never been here before. There has never been an emergency within me before.

  "That terrible beast hurt me. I was struggling to keep all of you alive. And then, there was something else that came within me. I could not stop it. Like the beast, it entered me without my permission. It violated me."

  That confirmed Richard's sense of events, that just after the beast lost its grip on him, something else, some kind of power, had reached out and touched him with its dominion.

  "I'm sorry that you were hurt, sliph. What happened to the beast?"

  "After this other power came into me, the beast became no more."

  "You mean that this other power destroyed it?"

  "No. The power did not touch the beast. It touched only you with its full force. After it did, then you no longer had what is required to travel. After that, the beast cast around in me for a brief time, and then vanished. I could no longer sustain you within me, so I had to find the nearest emergency portal."

  "What about Nicci and Cara? Were they hurt? Are they safe?"

  "They, too, felt the pain of what happened to me, and one of them tried to use her power in me—something that is wrong to do. After I brought you here, I took them to the Keep where they had wished to travel. I told the one that used her power that it was dangerous to do so, and she must not do such a thing."

  "I think I understand," Richard said. "It hurt me, too. Were they hurt badly?"

  "They are safe at the Keep."

  "Then we must be somewhere between the People's Palace and the Keep," Richard said, half to himself.

  "No."

  He looked over at the liquid silver face. "I don't understand. We were going from the palace to the Keep. If you let me out, then this place here, this emergency passage out, would have to be between the palace and the Keep."

  "While I don't know this place, I do know its general area. We are at a place a little more than halfway across the Midlands from the Keep, past Agaden Reach, almost to the wilds."

  Richard felt as if the world had just lurched and slid him far from where he had been. "But, but, that's much, much farther from the People's Palace than the Keep is. Why didn't you take me to the closest place—to the Keep?"

  "I do not function in that way. What to you may seem like the shortest distance between two places is not the shortest way for me. I am in many places at once."

  Richard leaned toward the sliph. "How can you be in many places at once?"

  "You have one foot on that dark stone, and one on a stone that is lighter. You are in two places at once."

  Richard sighed. "I guess I get your point."

  "I travel in a way that is different from your way of traveling. This place, here, even though it is halfway across the Midlands for you, was the closest place for me. I had to get you out into your world again so that you could breathe.

  "You no longer had what was needed to travel. Your lungs were filled with me. For those without the gift, breathing
me is poison. It will kill them. But for you, since you were in me and breathing me already, there was a brief period when you were going through a transition, so having me in you was not instantly fatal. You would have died soon, but there was a brief time before that would happen. I knew that the time you had before you would die was not very long at all. I thought to do my best to save you, to get you to a place where you could be back in your world and hopefully recover.

  "I brought you here, broke the seal, and placed you out in your world again. You were hurt, but I knew that the essence of me still within you would help sustain your life for a short time."

  "If I could no longer travel, because I don't have the required gift, then what made you think that?"

  "I was made to have properties to assist in emergencies. Those properties are within me—and thereby they were within you. They help to start the process of recovering. It is only intended for a crisis and even then I was warned that it could not be certain that it would work because there are variables that cannot be controlled.

  "While you slept between worlds, and my magic that you still had within you was working to extract what had now become poison to you, I finished taking the others to the Keep. When I returned, I waited with you until you were recovered enough to be ready to breathe again, then I helped to remind you what you must to do to live.

  "For a time I did not know if it would work. I have never had to do such a thing before. It was terrible to have to wait while I watched you lying there, not knowing if you would ever again breathe. I feared that I had failed you, and that I would be the cause of your death."

  Richard stared at the silver face for a long moment. Finally he offered her a smile. "Thank you, sliph. You saved my life. You did the right things. You did good."

  "You are my master. I would do anything for you."

  "Your master. A master who can't travel."

  "It is as puzzling to me as it is to you."

  Richard tried to think it through, tried to make sense of it, but with the pain of breathing after nearly drowning in the sliph still feeling like it was pressing heavily on his chest, he was having trouble making his mind focus on thinking.