Confessor

  Of more immediate concern to Richard, however, was learning to use the power of Orden to reverse the Chainfire spell.

  Nicci had been shocked to see the designs and symbols Richard had painted on himself and the other men. She recognized that he had combined familiar elements into completely new forms. But she also wanted to know how he had managed to integrate elements pertaining to Orden.

  Richard had explained that he had come to learn that some of the parts of the spells Darken Rahl had drawn to open the boxes of Orden were also parts of the dance with death, and he knew the symbols relating to the dance with death quite well.

  In a way, that association made sense. Zedd had once told him that the power of Orden was the power of life itself. The dance with death, used with the Sword of Truth, was really about preserving life, and Orden was itself drawn from the power of life and centered around preserving it from the rampages of the Chainfire spell.

  In a way, the Sword of Truth, the ability of a war wizard, and the power of Orden were all inextricably linked.

  Those links brought to Richard’s mind First Wizard Baraccus, the man who had thousands of years before written a book, Secrets of a War Wizard’s Power, for Richard. That book was meant to help him in this quest. That book was still hidden in Tamarang, where Richard had stashed it when Six had held him prisoner for a brief time. Richard knew that Zedd had been headed there to see if he could get the spell drawn in the sacred caves removed from Richard. Since Richard’s gift had returned, his grandfather had obviously been successful.

  Now that Richard was reconnected with his gift, he remembered every word of The Book of Counted Shadows. Nicci was convinced, and had convinced Richard, that the book he had memorized could only have been a false copy that could not be used to open the correct box of Orden.

  She believed, however, that even being a false copy it very likely still contained all, or most all, of the elements necessary to open and use the correct box of Orden. To make the version Richard had memorized a false copy would have required only a single sequence of necessary elements being out of order, but that didn’t mean that the elements themselves weren’t valid and therefore important and necessary.

  To that end, Richard had recited the entire book for her. They had made note of every element from the book. If he learned how to create or draw each of those elements, then when they got their hands on the true copy of The Book of Counted Shadows, he would simply have to use those components that were actually necessary by rearranging them in the proper order as revealed by the true copy of the book.

  For this reason, Nicci now knew what she needed to teach him. And Richard was farther along this path than she would have thought because he already understood many of the key elements involved. He already knew a vast array of the basic parts used in the spell-forms. He had, in fact, drawn them on his whole team and himself. The dance with death had already taught him the basics of those designs, making them by now seem almost intuitive to him.

  Richard had discovered that drawing the spell-forms was in fact a natural extension of not just the symbols employed in the depiction of the dance with death, but how he fought with a blade, and how he carved statues. At their base, all of those seemingly different things had basic parts in common. All of them shared movement and flow.

  For Richard it was astonishing to discover how it all fit together into a larger picture. As he drew the spell-forms Nicci was teaching him it didn’t feel awkward or difficult. It felt natural. He already knew the forms. He recognized in those forms not only the dance with death, but movements with a blade, both from fighting and from carving statues.

  Nicci, too, was unique as a teacher because she understood not only how much Richard knew about his varied abilities, but how he used his ability. She grasped, unlike anyone else, how he saw the use of magic. She recognized how different it was from the conventional wisdom and wasn’t in the least bit stymied by the way he viewed such things. If anything, it energized her.

  She also comprehended his concept of 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. What ever 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 acros
s 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 back 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 cont
inue 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?”