“This is much the same, although I’m simplifying it so that you can understand my point. In this there are not just symbols, but obsolete references to spells, making it all the more difficult to understand. Being in High D’Haran makes it worse yet because over time High D’Haran words and their meaning have changed. Added to that, this text is an ancient, argot form.”
Richard gripped her arm, drawing her attention. “Nicci, this is important; do you think you can manage to do it?”
She looked hesitantly at the book. “It will take some time before I can translate enough to be able to tell you if I have a chance of being successful.”
Richard took the book out of her hands, closed it, and handed it back to her. “Then you’d better take it with you. When we have more time you can study it and see if you can figure it out.”
She frowned suspiciously. “Why? What are you thinking?”
“Nicci, don’t you see? This could be our answer. If you can translate it, understand it, then what’s in here might provide us with a way to counter, reverse, or dismantle what Sister Ulicia did. With this, maybe we can take the boxes of Orden back out of play.”
Nicci gently rubbed her thumb over the cover of the little book. “That sounds like it makes sense, Richard, but knowing how to do something doesn’t mean that you can undo it.”
“Kind of like trying to get yourself unpregnant?” Cara asked.
Nicci smiled. “Something like that.”
Cara’s unexpected analogy threw Richard’s mind back to Kahlan, and when she had been pregnant. A gang of men had caught her alone and beaten her nearly to death. She lost her and Richard’s child. Her pregnancy ended before he’d even known about it.
The memory of seeing Kahlan so grievously hurt nearly buckled his knees. He had to force the ghastly thoughts back into the blackness from where they’d come.
Nicci’s brow twitched with a frown, apparently at seeing the anguish in his face. He ignored her unspoken worry for him.
“I don’t need to remind you how important this is,” he said.
She held him in her gaze for a long moment, as if wanting to tell him that it was impossible, but desperately not wanting to say no to him. She finally pressed her lips tight and nodded.
“I’ll do my best, Richard.”
Her expression suddenly brightened. She flipped to the end of the book and hurriedly turned back the last page. She stood absorbed for a moment as she scrutinized the final page.
“This is interesting,” she murmured.
“What?” Richard asked.
Nicci looked up from the middle of what she was reading. “Well, at the end of some books of magic, as a precaution against unauthorized use, they will occasionally have some final step that’s essential but not included. If so, then, even if the boxes are already in play, we might be able to interrupt the series of specific actions required. Do you see what I mean? Sometimes, if the book is dangerous enough, it won’t be complete in and of itself, but will require something else to complete it.”
“Something else? Like what?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I’m checking.” She held up a finger. “Let me read just a little of this part….”
After a moment she looked up as she tapped the page. “Yes, I was right. This warns that to use this book, the key must be used. Otherwise, without the key, everything that has come before will not only be sterile, but fatal. It says that within one full year the key must complete what has been wrought with this book.”
“Key,” Richard repeated in a flat tone.
He glanced to Berdine.
“‘They will tremble in fear at what they have done and cast the shadow of the key among the bones,’” she quoted from
Yanklee’s Yarns
. “You think that could be the key this book is talking about?”
Something stirred in the dark fringes of his consciousness.
With a lightning-swift spark of comprehension, Richard understood.
His whole body flashed icy cold. His arms and legs went numb.
“Dear spirits…” he whispered.
Nicci frowned at him. “Richard, what’s wrong. You’ve gone as pale as chalk.”
Richard had trouble making his voice work. Finally, he heard himself say “I’ve got to get back to Zedd.”
Nicci reached out and laid a hand on his arm. “What’s wrong?”
“I think I know what the key is.”
Richard began to pant as his heart pounded out of control. Everything he knew was turning upside down and all the pieces were coming apart. It felt like he couldn’t get his breath.
They will tremble in fear at what they have done and cast the shadow of the key among the bones.
“Well, what do you think—”
“I’ll explain when we get there. We have to go—now.”
Worried, Nicci slipped the book into a pocket in the black skirt of her dress. “I’ll do my best, Richard. I’ll figure this out—I promise.”
He nodded absently as his mind raced to try to fit all the pieces back together. He felt as if he were only watching himself begin to move.
He seized Berdine by the arm. “Baraccus had a secret place—a library. I need you to try to find out where it was.”
Berdine nodded at his urgency. “All right, Lord Rahl. I’ll see what I can learn. I’ll do my best.”
She glanced down at the white knuckles on his hand gripping her arm. Richard realized that he must be hurting her and let go.
“Thank you, Berdine. I know I can count on you.” The others were all staring at him. “I’ve got to get back to Zedd. I’ve got to talk to him right away. I’ve got to know where he got it.”
“Got what?” Nicci pressed a hand to his chest, stopping him before he went through the door. “Richard, what’s so important that—”
“Look, I’ll explain it when we get back there,” he said, cutting her off. “Right now I need to think this through.”
Nicci shared a troubled look with Cara. “All right, Richard. Calm down. We’ll be back to the Keep soon enough.”
He snatched a fistful of Cara’s red leather outfit and pushed her through the doorway ahead of him. “Get us back to the sliph—the shortest route.”
All business, now, Cara spun her Agiel up into her fist. “Come on, then.”
He turned back to Berdine, trotting backward after Cara. “I need you to find out everything you possibly can about Baraccus. Everything!”
Berdine raced along just ahead of Nicci. “I will, Lord Rahl.”
He pointed back at her. “Verna will be here soon. Tell her that I said I need her to help you. Have her Sisters help you, too. Go through every book in the entire palace if you have to, but find out everything you can about Baraccus—where he was born, where he grew up, what he liked, what he didn’t. He was First Wizard, so there should be information of some kind. I want to know who cut his hair, who made his clothes, what his favorite color was. Everything, no matter how trivial you think it is. While you’re at it, see if you can find out anything more about what the half-wits from
Yanklee’s Yarns
did.”
“Don’t worry, Lord Rahl, if there is any information to be had, I will have it. I’ll figure it out and have an answer when you return.”
Richard snatched Nicci’s hand to make sure she kept up and then turned toward Cara. “Hurry.”
Berdine, Agiel in her fist, ran after them, guarding the rear. Richard was only dimly aware of the flashes of light off polished armor and weapons, and the jangle of gear, as the soldiers took up the chase as if the Keeper himself were after the Lord Rahl.
As his mind raced as fast as his feet, Richard resolved that he had better go to Caska first.
The more he considered that idea, and as pieces of the puzzle started fitting together, he reconsidered the idea. With the sliph, he could travel swiftly back to Caska from the Keep.
It was more urgent that he get to Zedd.
As they ran through the labyrinth of halls, rooms, and passageways, Richard heard the distant toll of the bell, calling people to the devotion to the Lord Rahl.
He wondered if they would all soon be kneeling before the Keeper of the underworld, and saying their devotions to him.
Six abruptly stood. Without a word she took three long strides to the wall of the cave that held Violet’s expansive drawing. The woman carefully pressed her bony hands against the chalk symbols that Violet had drawn there days before. Those symbols had suddenly begun to glow, the yellow chalk glowing with yellow light, the red chalk with red light, and the blue with blue light. The eerie illumination from the flaring colors shimmered over the walls of the cave the way light reflected off rippling water.
Rachel glanced over at Violet, sitting on a squat, purple-tufted stool she’d had Rachel carry in for her days before. The bored queen picked with her fingernail at flaking stone on the wall behind her. Rachel had come to think of Violet as the queen of the cave, since that was where they spent more and more of their time.
Violet didn’t like sitting on rock when she wasn’t drawing. A filthy old rock, she’d said, was more than good enough for Rachel, but not for a queen. Six hadn’t cared at all about the stool. She appeared to always have more consequential matters on her mind than cushions for sitting. Violet, though, got tired of waiting while Six thought about those consequential matters, and so she’d had Rachel lug the heavy stool to the cave.
Now, the queen of the cave, under the flickering light of torches and glowing symbols, sat upon her tufted purple throne waiting for her advisor to advise her as to what needed to be done next.
“He comes,” Six hissed. “Again he comes through the void.”
It was clear to Rachel that the woman wasn’t really talking to Violet, but to herself. The queen might as well not have been there.
Violet glanced up. She didn’t look inclined to bother to stand unless Six told her that it was necessary that she do more drawings, but it was clear that her interest had been roused. This was, after all what she wanted and the whole reason she bothered to go to all the work of making such complex drawings down in a dank and dingy cave when she could just as
well be trying on dresses and jewels or attending grand feasts where guests fawned over the young queen.
Six seemed in a world of her own as her hands glided over the drawing. She put the side of her face against the stone and at the same time reached an arm back.
“Come, my child.”
A scowl creased Violet’s round features. “You mean, ‘my queen.’”
Six either didn’t hear her, or didn’t care to correct herself. “Hurry. It is time to begin the links.”
Violet stood. “Now? It’s long past dinnertime. I’m starving.”
Six, stroking her cheek against the chalk drawing of Richard like a cat rubbing the side of its face against a person’s legs, didn’t seem at all interested in dinner.
She rolled her long fingers, beckoning Violet. “It must be now. Hurry. We must not waste such a rare opportunity. Such links as we need will take time and there is no telling how much time we may have.”
“Well then why didn’t we begin earlier, when there—”
“It must be started now, when he is in the void.” Six clawed the air with one hand. “Easier to scratch his eyes out when he’s blind,” she said in her hissy voice.
“I don’t see why—”
“The way is the way. Do you wish this or not?”
Violet’s folded arms, along with her defiance, came undone. Her expression took on a dark set. “I do.”
A sinuous smile slipped across Six’s features. “Then let it begin. You must now complete the links.”
Looking suddenly resolute, Violet plucked the sticks of colored chalk off a little ledge in the stone wall behind her royal stool. As she strode up beside Six, the woman tapped a long, thin finger to the stone.
“Begin at the sign of the dagger, as I’ve taught you, just as you’ve practiced, to insure that, at the initiation of the link, what you have wrought will be ready to slice swift and sure.”
“I know, I know,” Violet said as she boldly touched the tip of the yellow chalk to the point of one of the elaborate glowing symbols off to the side of Richard.
Six snatched Violet’s wrist, pulling her hand back just enough to lift the chalk away from the wall. She moved Violet’s hand over a few inches,
then let the chalk again touch the symbol, but at the next apex in a design with a perimeter comprised of dozens of points.
“I told you,” Six said with strained civility as she helped Violet begin the line, “a mistake here will last us for eternity.”
“I know—I just got the wrong apex point, that’s all,” Violet huffed. “I’ve got it, now.”
Six, ignoring the queen, her gaze fixed on the drawing, nodded approvingly as she watched the chalk begin to move across the stone.
“Change to red,” Six prompted in a low voice after Violet had pulled the chalk a few inches across the open distance.
Without argument or hesitation, Violet changed the chalk for the red one and started it moving at an angle from the yellow line she had already drawn. After bringing it half the remaining distance toward the drawing of Richard, she stopped without needing to be told and switched to the blue chalk.
She hesitated, then, and glanced up at Six. “This is the node? Right?”
Six was already nodding. “That’s right,” she murmured, pleased with what she was seeing. “That’s right, take it around and back now to complete the first ligature.”
Violet drew a blue circle at the end of the red line before crossing the empty place on the smooth, dark stone wall. When the blue chalk reached one of the points on the next symbol, she went back and drew a line from the circle to connect to Richard. The completed triad of lines Violet had just drawn began to glow. The blue circle ignited with a beam of light, as if it were a beacon coming through a window in the dark stone.
Six abruptly held up a hand, commanding that Violet stop before she could put the chalk to the next point in the sequence.
“What’s wrong?” Violet asked.
“Something…is not right….”
Six pressed the side of her face to the drawing, this time laying her cheek right atop Richard’s face.
“Not right at all….”
Richard drew another silvered breath of the ecstasy but, with his urgent worries overriding the experience, it was something short of the remarkable essence of rapture that he usually experienced within the sliph.
He realized, though, that when he traveled in the sliph he was usually gravely troubled by something; after all, trouble of one sort or another was why he traveled in the sliph in the first place. Still, it had never before felt this way. This feeling was not dread so much as it was a sense of the great, but intangible, weight of foreboding. With every breath, that phantom weight pressed in on him ever more.
Within the sliph there was no real sense of vision, as such, just as there was no real sense of time, or up, or down. Even so, there was a semblance of sight; there were colors and, on occasion, obscure shapes that seemed to loom up and just as quickly vanish. There was also a visual perception of the phenomenon of mind-bending speed that made him feel as if he were nothing more than an arrow fired from a powerful bow. At the same time, there was a feeling of almost floating motionless within the thick void of the sliph. Those different sensations mixed together created a heady mix of the whole of the experience that suspended his urge to separate them into constituent parts.
As he raced through the quicksilver essence of the sliph, he began to discount his anxiety. It was then that Richard felt the faint brush of an odd sensation against his skin, a stealthy pressure that he instantly recognized as a sensation he had never before experienced as he traveled. Tingling apprehension rippling through him.
Forboding, he realized, was not tangible in the way that this touch had been.
As he drifted, held in the embrace of the vast silver emptiness, he tried to separate the perception of having been touched from everything else. Richard felt the placid isolation of the sliph surrounding him, caressing him, insulating him from the terrible, headlong rush of speed that otherwise seemed as if it would surely have to tear a person apart. He still felt the balm of serenity quelling his fear of breathing into his lungs the liquid in which he floated.
But Richard felt something else, even if he was not yet able to set the troubling sensation apart from all others enough to define it.
With growing conviction, though, he was sure that something was wrong. Frighteningly wrong. It was all the more disturbing because he couldn’t understand how he knew that something was imperfect. He worked to comprehend why he would think such a thing.
It had to have been, he decided, that furtive touch. He briefly wondered
if he could have imagined it, but then discounted the notion. He had felt it.
It seemed almost as if he were in the presence of an unholy taint, like lying in a warm, sunlit meadow on a beautiful day, surrounded by the cascade of colors and balmy aroma of wildflowers, watching cottony clouds slowly drift through a bright blue sky, and then catching the first faint whiff of a decomposing carcass while at the same time realizing that the vague sound you heard was the buzzing of flies.
What ordinarily seemed like a timeless spell spent racing through the smoothly silver sliph had begun to drag out into an agonizing suspension of headway.
Cara already had his right hand in an iron grip, but Nicci gripped his left hand even more tightly. He could tell in that urgent squeeze that she sensed something as well. He wished that he could ask her what she felt, but talking within the sliph was not possible.
Richard opened his eyes wider, trying to see more of what was around him, but it was a muted, murky world where there was little to be seen, other than the shimmering shafts of light—yellow, red, blue—piercing the gloom through which they raced. Richard didn’t think that those shafts of light were moving as they once had been. It was hard to tell such things for sure within the sliph, though. It was generally a hazy sense of events, rather than actual perception.
There was something out ahead of him, Richard realized, something maneuvering fluidly through the silver obscurity. At first it looked like long, slender petals just beginning to blossom open. As it came closer, Richard saw that it looked more like numerous arms—tapered, long, undulating objects—fanning open from a central element that for some reason he could not quite figure out.
It was disorienting to watch because it was so incomprehensible. As it came ever closer, it began to appear to Richard as if whatever it was was made up of segments of glass, all assembled into something orderly, something billowing open before him. He could see through the transparent, expanding arms, see the shafts of color and light shimmering beyond.
It was the oddest thing he had ever seen. As hard as he tried, he simply could not make sense of it. It was like it was there, but not there.
And then, with icy dread, comprehension washed through him.
At the same time, Nicci pulled his hand so hard that it nearly wrenched his arm right out of its socket. The yank must have pulled him back, because Cara, still holding his other hand, sailed around him as if falling through midair. Richard ducked. The translucent shape whipped past his face, just missing him.
Nicci had pulled him back just in time.
Richard knew now what it was.
It was the beast.
The sense of being in the presence of evil was suddenly so strong that it engulfed him with suffocating panic. As the beast, like some temporal vision, skimmed past him, it twisted around. The glassy arms fanned open as they reached out and again tried to snatch him.
With a sharp tug Nicci again drew him back from the star-shaped net of tentacles spread wide before him. Again they tried to close around him.
Richard pulled his hand away from Cara’s and drew his knife. With her now free hand, she immediately snatched a fistful of his shirt to hold on to him.
Richard did his best to slash at the ever-reaching arms trying to embrace him in their deadly grasp. It didn’t take long to realize that fighting with a knife within the sliph was close to impossible. It was too fluid an environment for Richard to be able to strike with any speed. It was like trying to maneuver in honey. He changed his tactics and instead waited for the arms to draw in around him, waited for whatever was at the glassy center to come to him.
When they did, he drove the blade toward that aware center of the translucent threat. Rather than be impaled on the blade, though, the creature only seemed to fold around Richard’s knife and twist effortlessly away.
And then it again came in to attack, now with a kind of abrupt, intent fury that Richard could sense. The thing moved with a fluid grace that didn’t seem to be hindered at all by the fluid world surrounding them.
To one side Richard saw the shimmering shape of Cara, still gripping his shirt as she tried to attack the beast with her free hand. To the other side, he knew, Nicci was trying to work magic. It didn’t seem that her magic was working in the environment of the sliph.
One of the beast’s arms coiled around Richard’s arm, another lashed around Cara’s. She seized his wrist with her other hand. The beast fastened onto her other arm as well and effortlessly ripped the two of them apart. In
an instant, Cara was gone. In the murky darkness Richard couldn’t tell where she was, or how close she might be. Worse, he didn’t know if she was all right, or if the creature had her.
Nicci tightened her arm protectively around Richard’s waist, holding on for dear life, as more of the undulating, transparent arms came out of the gloom and coiled around them. It was like getting tangled in a nest of snakes, all entwining themselves and constricting with great force once attached. The one around Richard’s leg drew so tight that he thought it would surely rip his flesh from the bone.
Even though Richard could not hear Nicci in the conventional sense, he could perceive her muffled cries of fury as she fought the thing that had snared them. An odd, muted form of lightning flickered madly around Nicci. Richard knew she was trying to use her power, but it wasn’t having any effect on the beast.
Richard ignored the pain of the glassy tentacles that already had him and stabbed over and over, cutting into thick arms that looked to be only partly there. With determined and focused rage he slashed with the knife and was able to cleave some of the arms away from the core of the thing. Once severed, they writhed wildly as they fell away into the void around them, as if sinking into a bottomless sea.