“Then I might have called them into this world.”
“Dear spirits,” Richard whispered. His face had gone bloodless. “They could be here.”
“No, no. There are countless safeguards, and numerous requirements that are exacting and extraordinary.” Zedd held up a finger to silence Richard’s question before it could come out his open mouth. “Among many other things, Kahlan, for example, would have to be your third wife.”
Zedd flashed Richard a patronizing smirk. “Satisfied, Mister Read-it-in-a-book?”
Richard let out a breath. “Good.” He sighed aloud again as the color returned to his face. “Good. She’s only my second wife.”
“What!” Zedd threw up his arms, nearly toppling backward. He huffed and hauled his sleeves back down. “What do you mean, she is your second wife? I’ve known you your whole life, Richard, and I know you’ve never loved anyone but Kahlan. Why in Creation would you marry someone else!”
Richard cleared his throat as he shared a pained expression with Kahlan. “Look, it’s a long story, but the end of it is that in order to get into the Temple of the Winds to stop the plague, I had to marry Nadine. That would make Kahlan my second wife.”
“Nadine.” Zedd let his jaw hang as he scratched the hollow of his cheek. “Nadine Brighton? That Nadine?”
“Yes.” Richard poked at the dirt. “Nadine… died shortly after the ceremony.”
Zedd let out a low whistle. “Nadine was a nice girl—going to be a healer. The poor thing. Her parents will be devastated.”
“Yes, the poor thing,” Kahlan muttered under her breath.
Nadine’s dogged ambition had been to have Richard, and there had been few bounds to that ambition. Any number of times, Richard had told Nadine in explicit terms there was nothing between the two of them, never would be, and he wanted her gone as soon as possible. To Kahlan’s exasperation, Nadine would simply smile and say, “Whatever you wish, Richard,” as she continued to scheme.
Though she would never have wished Nadine any real harm, especially the horrible death she suffered, Kahlan could not pretend pity for the conniving strumpet, as Cara called her.
“Why is your face all red?” Zedd asked.
Kahlan looked up. Zedd and Ann were watching her.
“Um, well…” Kahlan changed the subject. “Wait a minute. When I spoke the three chimes I wasn’t married to Richard. We weren’t married until we came here, to the Mud People. So, you see, I wasn’t even his wife at the time.”
“That’s even better,” Ann said. “Removes another stepping-stone from the chimes’ path.”
Richard’s hand found Kahlan’s. “Well, that may not be exactly true. When we had to say the words to fulfill the requirements for me to get into the temple, in our hearts we said the words to each other, so it could be said that we were married because of that vow of commitment.
“Sometimes magic, the spirit world’s magic, anyway, works by such ambiguous rules.”
Ann shifted her weight uncomfortably. “True enough.”
“But no matter how you reason it out, that would still only make her your second wife.” Zedd eyed them both suspiciously. “This story gets more complicated every time one of you opens your mouth. I need to hear the whole thing.”
“Before we leave, we can tell you a bit of it. When you get to Aydindril, then we’ll have the time to tell it all to you. But we need to return through the sliph right away.”
“What’s the hurry, my boy?”
“Jagang would like nothing better than to get his hands on the dangerous magic stored in the Wizard’s Keep. If he did, it would be disastrous. Zedd, you would be the best one to protect the Keep, but in the meantime don’t you think Kahlan and I would be better than nothing?
“At least we were there when Jagang sent Marlin and Sister Amelia to Aydindril.”
“Amelia!” Ann closed her eyes as she squeezed her temples. “She’s a Sister of the Dark. Do you know where she is, now?”
“The Mother Confessor killed her, too,” Cara said from back at the door.
Kahlan scowled at the Mord-Sith. Cara grinned back like a proud sister.
Ann opened one eye to peer at Kahlan. “No small task. A wizard being directed by the dream walker, and now a woman wielding the Keeper’s own dark talent.”
“An act of desperation,” Kahlan said. “Nothing more.”
Zedd grunted a brief agreeable chuckle. “There can be powerful magic in acts of desperation.”
“Much like the business of speaking the three chimes,” she said. “An act of desperation to save Richard’s life. What are the chimes? Why were you so concerned?”
Zedd squirmed to get more comfortable on his bony bottom.
“The wrong person speaking their names to summon their assistance in keeping a person from crossing the line”—he tapped the line of the Grace representing the world of the dead—“can by misfortune of design call them into the world of life, where they can accomplish the purpose for which they were created: to end magic.”
“They soak it up,” Ann said, “like the parched ground soaks up a summer shower. They are beings of sorts, but not alive. They have no soul.”
The lines in Zedd’s face took a grim set as he nodded his agreement. “The chimes are creatures conjured of the other side, of the underworld. They would annul the magic in this world.”
“You mean they hunt down and kill those with magic?” Kahlan asked. “Like the shadow people used to? Their touch is deadly?”
“No,” Ann said. “They can and do kill, but just their being in this world, in time, is all it would take to extinguish magic. Eventually, any who derived their survival from magic would die. The weakest first. Eventually, even the strongest.”
“Understand,” Zedd cautioned, “that we don’t know much about them. They were weapons of the great war, created by wizards with more power than I can fathom. The gift is no longer as it was.”
“If the chimes were to somehow get to this world, and they ended magic,” Richard asked, “would all those with the gift just not have it anymore? Would the Mud People, for instance, simply not be able to contact their spirit ancestors anymore? Would creatures of magic die out and that would be that? Just regular people and animals and trees and such left? Like where I grew up in Westland, where there was no magic?”
Kahlan could feel the faint rumble of thunder in the ground under her. The rain drummed on. The fire in the hearth hissed its ill will for its liquid antagonist.
“We can’t answer that, my boy. It’s not like there is precedent to which we can point. The world is complex beyond our comprehension. Only the Creator understands how it all works together.”
The firelight cast Zedd’s face in harsh angular shadows as he spoke with grim conviction. “But I fear it would be much worse than you paint it.”
“Worse? Worse how?”
Fastidiously smoothing his robes along his thighs, Zedd took his time in responding.
“West of here, in the highlands above the Nareef Valley, the headwaters of the Dammar River gather, eventually to flow into the Drun River. These headwaters leach poisons from the ground of the highlands.
“The highlands are a bleak wasteland, with the occasional bleached bones of an animal that stayed too long and drank too much from the poison waters. It’s a windy, desolate, deadly place.”
Zedd opened his arms to gesture, suggesting the grand scale. “The thousand tiny runnels and runoff brooks from all the surrounding mountain slopes collect into a broad, shallow, swampy lake before continuing on to the valley below. The paka plant grows there in great abundance, especially at the broad south end, from where the waters descend. The paka is able to not only tolerate the poison, but thrive on it. Only the caterpillar of a moth eats some of the leaves of the paka and spins its cocoon among the fleshy stems.
“Warfer birds nest at the head of the Nareef Valley, on the cliffs just below this poison highland lake. One of their favorite foods is the berries
of the paka plant that grows not far above, and so they are one of the few animals to frequent the highlands. They don’t drink the water.”
“The berries aren’t poison, then?” Richard asked.
“No. In a wonder of Creation, the paka grows strong on the contaminates from the water, but the berries it produces don’t contain the poison, and the water that flows on down the mountain, filtered by all the paka, is pure and healthy.