"You're following air," Cara said in a flat, mocking tone. Her suspicion flared again. "You aren't trying to use magic, are you?"
"Cara, you know as well as anyone that I don't know how to use my gift. I couldn't call upon magic if I wanted to."
And he most certainly didn't want to.
If he were to call upon his gift the beast would be better able to find him. Cara, ever protective, was worried that he would carelessly do something to call the beast that had been conjured at the orders of Emperor Jagang.
Richard turned his attention back to the problem at hand and tried to discern what it was about the air that seemed so strange to him. He put his mind to analyzing precisely what it was that he sensed. He thought that it felt something like the air during a thunderstorm. It had that edgy, spooky quality.
At the bottom, several flights down the white marble stairs, they emerged in a simple corridor made of stone blocks. They followed the corridor straight through several intersections and came to a halt as Richard stared down a dark spiral of stone steps with an iron railing. Cara followed as he finally started down. At the bottom they passed through a short passage with a barrel ceiling of oak planks before coming out into a room that was the center of a hub of halls. The round room had speckled, gray granite pillars all around the outside holding gilded lintels above each passage that went off into darkness.
Richard held out the lantern, squinting as he tried to see into the dark passages. He didn't recognize the round room, but he did recognize that they were in a part of the Keep that was somehow different—different in a way that made him understand what Cara meant when she said the place made her skin crawl. One of the corridors, unlike the others, led at a rather steep angle down a long ramp, apparently toward some of the deeper areas of the Keep. He wondered why there would be a ramp, rather than yet more of the endless variety of stairs.
"This way," he told Cara as he led her down the ramp and into the darkness.
The ramp seemed endless in its descent. Finally, though, it emptied into a grand hall that, while not more than a dozen feet wide, had to be seventy feet high. Richard felt like an ant at the bottom of a long, narrow slit deep in the ground. To the left side rose a natural rock wall that had been chiseled right out of the mountain itself while tightly fit, enormous stone blocks formed the wall on the right. They passed a series of rooms in the block wall as they made their way onward in what seemed an endless split through the mountain. As they moved steadily ahead, the lanternlight was not strong enough to reveal any end in sight.
Richard suddenly realized what it was that he sensed. The air felt the way it occasionally felt in the immediate area around certain people he knew who were powerful with the gift. He remembered the way the air itself seemed to crackle around his former teachers, Sisters Cecilia, Armina, Merissa, and especially Nicci. He remembered times when it seemed as if the air around Nicci might ignite, so great was the singular power radiating from her. But that sensation had always been in close proximity to the individual; it had never been a pervasive phenomenon.
Even before he saw the light coming from one of the rooms in the distance, he felt the air coming from the place. He half expected to see the air in the entire hallway beginning to sparkle.
Immense, brass-clad doors stood open, leading into what appeared to be a dimly lit library. He knew that this was the place he was looking for.
Walking through those doors with elaborate, engraved symbols covering them, Richard froze in midstride and stared in astonishment.
A flickering flash of lightning came in through a dozen, round-topped windows and illuminated row upon row of shelves all around the cavernous room. The windows, rising two stories, ran the entire length of the far wall. Two-story polished mahogany columns rose up between them, hung with heavy dark green velvet draperies. Gold fringe lined the edges of the drapes, and swagged tassels held them back from the windows. The small squares of glass that made up the soaring windows were not clear, but thick and composed of numerous rings, as if the glass had been overly thick when poured. When the lightning flashed it made the glass seem to light as well. Lanterns with reflectors all around the room lent the place a soft warm glow and reflected off the polished tabletops here and there between the confused disarray of books lying open everywhere.
The shelves were not what Richard had at first expected. There were indeed books on a number of them, but other shelves held clutters of objects—everything from neatly folded sparkling cloth, to iron spirals, to green glass flasks, to complex objects made of wooden rods, to stacks of vellum scrolls, to ancient bones and long, curved fangs that Richard didn't recognize and couldn't begin to guess at.
When the lightning flashed again, the shadows of the window mullions running over everything in the room, running across tables, chairs, columns, bookcases, and desks, made it appear as if the whole place were cracking apart.
"Zedd—what in the world are you doing?"
"Lord Rahl," Cara said in a low voice from right over his shoulder, "I think your grandfather must be crazy."
Zedd turned to peer briefly at Richard and Cara standing back in the doorway. The old man's wavy white hair, standing out in every direction, looked a pale shade of orange in the lamplight, but white as snow whenever the lightning flashed.
"We're a bit busy right now, my boy."
In the center of the room, Nicci floated just above one of the massive tables. Richard blinked, trying to be sure that he really saw what he thought he saw. Nicci's feet were clear of the table by a hand's width. She stood poised dead-still in midair.
As impossible and startling as such a sight was, that wasn't the worst of it. On the top of the table was drawn a magical design known as a Grace.
It appeared to have been drawn with blood.
Like a curtain encircling Nicci, unmoving lines also hung suspended in the air above the Grace. Richard had seen a number of gifted people draw spell-forms before, so he was pretty sure that that was what he was seeing, but he had never seen anything approaching this midair maze.
Consummately complex, composed of lines of glowing green light, it hung in the air like a three-dimensional spell-form.
In the center of that intricate geometric framework Nicci floated as still as a statue. Her exquisite features seemed frozen to stone. One hand was lifted out a ways. The fingers of her other hand, at her side, were spread.
Her feet weren't level, as if standing, but dangled as if she were in mid-jump. Her fall of blond hair was lifted out a little, as if in the midst of that jump up into the air her hair had risen away from her head, just before she was about to come back down… and at that precise instant she had been turned to stone.
She didn't look alive.
* * *
CHAPTER 4
Richard stood transfixed, staring at Nicci poised in midair just above a heavy library table, a net of glowing green geometric lines tangled all around her. Nothing on her moved. She didn't appear to be breathing at all. Her blue eyes stared unblinking into the distance, as if gazing on a world only she could see. Her familiar, exquisite features looked perfectly preserved in the greenish cast given off by the glowing lines.
Richard thought that she looked more dead than alive, the way a corpse in a casket looked just before being laid to rest.
It was an impossibly beautiful and at the same time profoundly alarming sight. She appeared to be nothing so much as a lifeless statue made of flesh and light. Skeins of her blond hair in twisting, gentle arcs and curves, even individual strands of hair, stood out unmoving in midair. Richard kept expecting her to finally and suddenly finish her fall back to the table.
When he realized that he was holding his breath he at last let it out.
Seemingly in sympathy with the tempestuous intensity of the lightning out beyond the wall of windows, the air in the room fairly crackled with the power that had been focused into what was obviously, even to Richard's untrained eye, an extraordinary conjuring. It had been that rare quality to the a
ir that had first caught his attention back in the small reading room.
For the life of him, Richard could not imagine what was going on, what could be the purpose of such a use of magic. He was at once fascinated by it and disconcerted that he knew so little about such things. More than anything, though, he found the sight darkly frightening.
Having grown up in Westland, where there had been no magic, he sometimes wondered what he had missed—especially at times like this, when he fell hopelessly ignorant. But at other times, like when Kahlan had been taken, he haled magic and wished never again to have anything to do with it.
Those devoted to the teachings of the Imperial Order would find cynical satisfaction at such cold thoughts about magic coming from the Lord Rahl.
Despite having grown up unaware of magic, Richard had since come to learn a few things about it. For one, he knew that the Grace drawn under Nicci was a powerful device used by those with the gift. He also knew that drawing it in blood was something that was rarely done and even then in only the gravest of circumstances.
As he glanced at the glistening lines of blood that made up the form of the Grace, Richard noticed something that made the hair at the back of his neck stand on end. One of Nicci's feet was poised over the center of the Grace—the part representing the Creator's light, from where emanated not only life but the rays that represented the gift that passed through life, the veil, and then on into the eternity of the underworld.
Nicci's other foot, however, was frozen mere inches above the table beyond the outer ring of the drawing—over the part representing the underworld.
Nicci hung suspended between the world of life and the world of the dead. Richard knew that such a thing was hardly trivial happenstance.
He focused beyond the startling sight of Nicci floating in midair and in the shadows beyond saw Nathan and Ann occasionally illuminated by flashes of lightning, like ghosts flickering in and out of existence. They, too, solemnly watched Nicci in the center of the glowing spell-form.
Zedd, one hand on a bony hip, his other running a slender finger down his smooth jaw, slowly moved around the table, observing the evergrowing, ever more intricate pattern of glowing green lines.
Outside, through the tall windows, lightning continued to flash in harsh fits, but the rumble of thunder was muted by the thick stone of the Keep.
Richard gazed up at Nicci's face. "Is she… is she all right?"
Zedd looked over as if he had forgotten that Richard had entered the room. "What?"
"Is she all right?"
Zedd's bushy brows drew together. "How would I know?"
Richard threw his arms up and let them flop down in dumbfounded alarm. "Well, for crying out loud, Zedd, aren't you the one who put her there?"
"Not exactly," Zedd muttered, rubbing his palms together as he moved on.
Richard stepped closer to the table below Nicci. "What's going on? Is Nicci all right? Is she in danger?"
Zedd finally looked back and sighed. "We don't exactly know for sure, my boy."
Nathan came out of the shadows and toward the table, into the greenish light. The tall prophet's dark azure eyes were clearly troubled. He opened his hands in a gesture of reassurance, his long white hair brushing his shoulders as he shrugged slightly. "We think she is all right, Richard."
"She should be just fine," Ann assured him as she joined Nathan.
The broad-shouldered prophet towered over her. In her plain woolen dress, with her graying hair gathered back into a loose bun, she looked all the more plain beside Nathan. Richard thought that just about anyone would probably look plain beside Nathan.
Richard gestured, indicating the net of geometric lines that encased Nicci. "What is this thing?"
"A verification web," his grandfather said.
Richard frowned. "Verification? Verification of what?"
"Chainfire," Zedd told him in a somber voice. "We're trying to figure out precisely how a Chainfire event functions so that we can see if there is a way to reverse it."
Richard scratched his temple. "Oh."
He was liking the whole thing less and less. He desperately wanted to find Kahlan, yet he was deeply worried for what could happen to Nicci in such an attempt to unravel mysterious powers created by ancient wizards. As First Wizard, Zedd had abilities and talents that Richard could not begin to fathom, and yet those wizards in ancient times far surpassed Zedd's gift. With as much as Zedd, Nathan, Ann, and Nicci knew, as powerful as they all were, they were still dabbling with things outside their experience, things beyond their ability, things that even those ancient wizards feared. Still, what choice did they have?
Besides caring deeply for Nicci, Richard needed her to help him find Kahlan. While the others might in some areas be more powerful or more knowledgeable than Nicci, the sum of everything about her put her on a different plane. She was probably the most powerful sorceress ever to have drawn a breath. What others could do with a great effort, Nicci could do with a glance. As remarkable as that was, to Richard that was probably one of the least remarkable things about Nicci. Other than Kahlan, he didn't know anyone who could focus on a goal as tenaciously as Nicci. Cara could be just as unflinching about defending him, but Nicci was able to center that kind of tenacity on anything she set her mind to. Back when she had fought against him, her reckless determination made her not just brutally effective but profoundly dangerous.
Richard was glad all that had changed. Since the search for Kahlan had begun, Nicci had become his closest and most steadfast friend. Nicci knew, though, that his heart belonged to Kahlan and that could never change.
He raked his fingers back through his hair. "Well, why is she up there in the middle of the thing?"
"She's the only one of us who knows how to use Subtractive Magic," Ann said in simple summary. "A Chainfire event needs Subtractive elements to ignite it and then to make it function. We're trying to understand the whole spell—both the Additive and Subtractive components."
Richard supposed that made sense, but it still didn't make him feel any better about it. "And Nicci agreed to this?"
Nathan cleared his throat. "It was her idea."
Of course it was. Richard sometimes thought the woman had a death wish.
It was times like this that he wished he knew more about such things. He was feeling ignorant again. He gestured up at the totality of everything floating above the table. "I never realized that verification webs used people. I mean, I never knew that such webs were cast around someone like that."
"Neither did we, exactly," Nathan said in that deep, commanding voice of his.
Richard felt uncomfortable under the prophet's gaze, so he turned to Zedd. "What do you mean?"
Zedd shrugged. "This is the first time any of us has ever done an aspect analysis of a verification web from an interior perspective. To do so requires Subtractive Magic, so casting a verification web in this manner probably hasn't been done in perhaps thousands of years."
"Then how did you know how to do it?"
"Just because none of us has ever done such a thing," Ann said, "doesn't mean we haven't studied various accounts of it."
Zedd gestured to one of the other tables. "We've been reading the book you found—Chainfire. It's more complex than anything any of us has ever seen before, so we wanted to try to understand everything about it. While we've never done an interior perspective before, it's really just an extension of what we already know. As long as you know how to run a standard verification web, and you have the required elements of the gift, you can perform the aspect analysis from an interior perspective. That's what Nicci is doing—that's why she had to be the one to do it."
"If there's a standard process, then why would this method be needed?"
Zedd lifted a hand toward the lines around Nicci. "An interior perspective is said to show the spell-form in more revealing detail—down to a more elemental level—than you see in the standard verification process. Since it is said to show more than can be learne
d in the standard process, and Nicci was able to initiate it, we all decided that it would be an advantage to do it this way."
Richard was starting to breathe a little easier. "So then using Nicci in this way is just an abstract analysis. It means nothing more."
Zedd looked away from Richard's eyes as he lightly rubbed the furrows on his brow. "This is only a verification process, Richard, not an ignition of the actual event, so, in a sense, it's not real. What the real spell does in an instant, this inert form stretches out into a lengthy verification process so as to enable a comprehensive analysis. Although not without its risks, that's not the viable spell itself you see around Nicci."
Zedd cleared his throat. "When the actual spell would have been cast, though, instead of Nicci, that would have been Kahlan, and it would have been all too real."
Goose bumps ran up Richard's arms. His mouth felt so dry that he could hardly talk. He could feel his heart pounding through the veins in his neck. He wanted that not to be true.
"But you said that you needed Nicci in order to cast this web. You said that you could only do it because she can work Subtractive Magic. Kahlan wouldn't have been able to do that for the Sisters—and in any event she wouldn't have cooperated."
Zedd shook his head. "The Sisters were casting the real spell around Kahlan. They had command of Subtractive power and would have had no need for Kahlan's cooperation. We needed Nicci to work it from inside, using both Additive and Subtractive aspects, so that we can try to determine how it functions. The two aren't analogous."
"Well, how—"
"Richard," his grandfather said, gently cutting him off, "as I said, we're rather busy. Right now is not the time to discuss this. We need to observe the process so we can try to figure out the equational behavior of the spell. Let us do our job, will you?"
Richard slipped his hands into his back pockets. "Sure."
He glanced back at Cara. She wore what people might see as a blank expression, but to Richard, as well as he knew her, it revealed a great deal and seemed to reflect his own suspicions. He turned back to his grandfather. "Are you having some kind of… trouble?"