“You pulled Chandalen’s knife. I have never before seen you forsake your Agiel in favor of another weapon. No Mord-Sith would. How long, Cara?”
She wet her lips. Her eyes closed in defeat as she turned away.
“In the last few days I have begun to have trouble sensing you. I don’t feel any difference, except I have increasing difficulty sensing your location. At first, I thought it was nothing, but apparently the bond grows weaker by the day. The Agiel is powered by the bond to our Lord Rahl.”
When the Mord-Sith were within a reasonable distance, they always knew precisely where he was by that bond. He imagined it had to be disorienting to suddenly lose that sense.
Cara cleared her throat as she stared off at the distant storm clouds. Tears glistened in her blue eyes.
“The Agiel is dead in my fingers.”
Only a Mord-Sith would anguish over the failure of magic that gave her pain every time she touched it. Such was the nature of these women and their unqualified commitment to duty.
Cara looked back at him, the fire returning to her expression. “But I am still sworn to you and will do what I must to protect you. This changes nothing for the Mord-Sith.”
“And the D’Haran army?” Richard whispered as he considered the spreading extent of their troubles. The D’Haran people were charged to purpose through their bond. “Jagang is coming. Without the army…”
The bond was ancient magic he had inherited because he was a gifted Rahl. That bond was created to be protection from the dream walkers. Without it…
Even if Kahlan believed it was the Lurk, and not the chimes, Zedd had told them that, too, would cause magic to fail. Richard knew Zedd would have had to make whatever story he invented relate closely to reality in order to fool them.
Either way, Kahlan would understand the rotting fruits of the dying tree of magic. Her reassuring fingers found his arm.
“The army may not feel their bond like before, Richard, but they are bonded to you in other ways. Most in the Midlands follow the Mother Confessor, and they are not bonded to her by any magic. In the same way, soldiers follow you because they belive in you. You have proven yourself to them, and they to you.”
“The Mother Confessor is right,” Cara said. “The army will remain loyal because you are their leader. Their true leader. They believe in you—the same as I.”
Richard let out a long breath. “I appreciate that, Cara, I really do, but—”
“You are the Lord Rahl. You are the magic against magic. We are the steel against steel. It will remain so.”
“That’s just it. I can’t be the magic against magic. Even if it were the Lurk instead of the chimes, magic won’t work.”
Cara shrugged. “Then you will figure a way for it to work. You are the Lord Rahl, that is what you do.”
“Richard,” Kahlan said, “Zedd told us the Sisters of the Dark conjured the Lurk and that’s what’s causing magic to fail. You have no proof it’s really the chimes instead. We have but to do as Zedd has asked of us, and then he will be able to counter the Sisters’ magic. As soon as we get to Aydindril, everything will be back to right.”
Still, Richard could not bring himself to tell her. “Kahlan, I wish it were as you say, but it isn’t,” he said simply.
Her veneer of patience began cracking. “Why do you insist it’s the chimes when Zedd told us it was the Lurk?”
Richard leaned closer to her. “Think about it. My grandmother—Zedd’s wife—apparently told her little girl, my mother, a story about a cat named Lurk. Just that one time she told me about a cat named Lurk, but Zedd wouldn’t know she did. It was a small thing my mother told me once when I was little, like a hundred other little words of comfort, or phrases, or stories to bring a smile. I never mentioned it to Zedd.
“For some reason Zedd wanted to hide the truth. ‘Lurk,’ because he once had a cat by that name, was probably just the first thing that came into his head. Admit it, doesn’t the name ‘Lurk’ strike you as a bit… whimsical, once you think about it?”
Kahlan folded her arms across her breasts. She made a reluctant grimace.
“I thought I was the only one who thought so.” She mustered her resolve. “But that doesn’t really prove it. It could be coincidence.”
Richard knew it was the chimes. In much the same way he could sense the chicken that wasn’t a chicken, and had wished Kahlan would believe him, he dearly wished she would trust him in this.
“What are these things, these chimes?” Cara asked.
Richard turned away from the others and stared off toward the horizon. He didn’t know a lot about them, but what he did know made his hair want to stand on end.
“Those in the Old World wanted to end magic, much as Jagang does today, and probably for the same reason—so they could more easily rule by the sword. Those in the New World wanted magic to live on. In order to prevail, the wizards on both sides created weapons of inconceivable horror, desperately hoping they would bring the war to an end.
“Many of those weapons—the mriswith, for example—were created from people by using Subtractive Magic to remove certain attributes from a person, and Additive Magic to put in some other desired ability or quality. Still others, they simply added some ability they wanted.
“I think dream walkers were such people, people who had a capability added, people who the wizards obviously intended as weapons. Jagang is a descendant of those dream walkers from the great war. Now the weapon is in charge of making war.
“Unlike Jagang, who only wants to end our magic so he can use his against us, during the great war the people in the Old World truly were trying to end magic. All magic. The chimes were intended to do just that—to steal magic away from the world of life. They were conjured forth from the underworld—the Keeper’s world of the dead.
“As Zedd explained, such a thing conjured from the underworld, once unleashed, not only may end magic but, in so doing, could very well extinguish life itself.”
“He also said he and Ann could take care of it,” Kahlan said.
Richard looked back over his shoulder. “Then why did he lie to us? Why didn’t he trust us? If he really can take care of it, why not simply tell us the truth?” He shook his head. “Something more is going on.”
Du Chaillu, long silent, impatiently folded her arms. “Our blade masters will easily cut down these filthy—”
“Hush!” Richard crossed his finger over her lips. “Don’t say another word, Du Chaillu. You don’t understand this. You don’t know what trouble you might cause.”
When Richard was sure Du Chaillu would remain silent, he turned away from everyone again to stare off toward the clearing skies to the northeast, toward Aydindril. He was tired of arguing; he knew the truth of the chimes being loose. He needed to think what to do about them. There were things he needed to know.
He remembered that while frantically searching Kolo’s journal for other information, he had come across places where Kolo talked about the chimes, among a great many other things. Wizards were continually sending messages and reports back to the Wizard’s Keep in Aydindril, not only relaying information concerning the chimes, but also reporting on any number of other frightening and potentially catastrophic events that were taking place.
Kolo wrote about those communications, at least the ones he found interesting, significant, or curious, but he didn’t give complete accounts of them; he would have had no reason to reproduce them in his private journal. Richard doubted Kolo ever intended anyone to read the journals. Kolo’s habit was to briefly mention the pertinent information from a message, and then remark on the matter at hand, so the information Richard read on the reports had been frustratingly sketchy—and opinionated.
Kolo set down more information when he was frightened, se
eming almost to use his journal as a way to think through a problem in an effort to find a solution. There was a period of time when he had been very frightened by what the reports were saying in regard to the chimes. In several places Kolo wrote down what he had read in reports, almost as if to justify his fear, to underscore for himself his grounds for concern.
Richard recalled Kolo mentioning the wizard who had been sent to deal with the chimes: Ander. Somebody Ander—Richard couldn’t remember the whole name.
Wizard Ander proudly bore the cognomen “the Mountain.” Apparently, he was big. Kolo didn’t like the man, though, and in his private journal often derisively referred to him as “the Moral Molehill.” Richard gathered from Kolo’s journal that Ander thought a lot of himself.
Richard clearly remembered at one point Kolo expressing indignation that people were failing to properly apply the Wizard’s Fifth Rule: Mind what people do, not only what they say, for deeds will betray a lie.
Kolo had seemed incensed when he scrawled that by not minding the totality of the actions people were failing to properly apply the Fifth Rule to Wizard Ander. He complained that if they had, they would have easily discovered that the man’s true allegiance lay solely with himself, and not with the good of his people.
“You still have not said what the chimes are,” Cara said.
Richard felt the insistent breeze tug at his hair and his golden cloak, as if urging him onward. To where, he didn’t know. Here and there bugs lifted out of the wet spring grass to loop through the air. Far off to the east, backlit by the billowing honeyed storm clouds, the dark dots of geese in an undulating V formation were winging their way north.
Richard had never given any serious thought to the chimes when the subject came up at the wedding. Zedd had dismissed their concern, and besides, Richard’s mind was on other things.
But later, after the chicken had been killed outside the spirit house, after Juni had been murdered, after the chicken thing gave him gooseflesh every time it was anywhere near, and after Zedd had filled in some of the details, Richard’s rising sense of alarm had caused him to give himself over to recalling everything he could about the chimes. At the time, he had been searching Kolo’s journal for solutions to other problems, and hadn’t been paying particular attention to the information on the chimes, but nearly constant concentration and occasional trancelike effort had brought back a great deal.