Chainfire (Sword of Truth 9)

Ann followed Richard’s younger sister as she started down the hill, trying to keep up without running. It seemed like they had already walked half the night and she was winded. Ann hadn’t known of this graveyard, all but forgotten out in a distant, uninhabited expanse of wilderness. She wished that she had thought to bring along some of the food sitting on the plate back in her room.

“Are you sure Tom is still down here?”

Jennsen looked back over her shoulder. “He should be. Nathan wanted him to stand guard.”

“For what? To fight off the other body snatchers?”

“I don’t know, maybe,” Jennsen said without so much as a hint of a giggle.

Ann wasn’t very good at making people laugh. She was good at making their knees tremble, but she just wasn’t all that good at jokes. She guessed that a graveyard on a dark night wasn’t a good place for jokes. It certainly was a good place to make the knees tremble.

“Maybe Nathan just wanted company,” Ann suggested.

“I don’t think that was it.” Jennsen found a fallen section in the split-rail fence that surrounded the place of the dead and stepped over it. “Nathan asked me to bring you out here and he wanted Tom to stay and stand guard over the graveyard, I think to make sure there was no one around that he didn’t know about.”

Nathan liked being in charge; Ann guessed that being a gifted Rahl he could do no less. It was always possible that the whole thing was a pretense just to get Jennsen, Tom, and Ann to run around doing his bidding. The prophet was given to a sense of drama and a graveyard did tend to set a mood.

Actually, right then, Ann would have been happy were it nothing more than some idiosyncratic diversion of Nathan’s. Unfortunately, she had the queazy feeling that it was something not at all so simple, or so innocuous as a bit of theatrics.

In all the centuries she had known him, Nathan had at times been secretive, deceptive, and occasionally dangerous, but never to evil ends—although that hadn’t always been apparent at the time. During most of his captivity at the Palace of the Prophets he had tried the Sisters’ patience until they were ready to scream and tear out their hair, yet he wasn’t maliciously willful or contemptuous of good people. He had an abiding hatred of tyranny and an almost childlike glee about life. No matter how exasperating the man could be at times, and he could be exasperating in the extreme, Nathan had a good heart.

Almost since the beginning, despite the circumstances, he had been Ann’s confidant and ally against the Keeper getting a foothold in the world of life and against evil people having their way over the innocent. He had worked hard to help stop Jagang. He had, after all, been the one to first show her a prophecy about Richard, five hundred years before he would be born.

Ann found herself wishing that it wasn’t dark, and that they weren’t in a graveyard. And that Jennsen didn’t have such long legs.

It suddenly occurred to Ann why Nathan would need Tom to stand guard and “make sure no one was around that they didn’t know about,” as Jennsen had put it. Just like Jennsen, the people in Bandakar were pristinely ungifted. They were devoid of that infinitesimal spark of the Creator’s gift carried by everyone else in the world. That essential connection made everyone else subject to the reality and nature of magic. But for these people magic did not exist.

The absence of such an inherent, elemental nucleus of the gift not only made the pristinely ungifted immune to magic, but since they could not interact with what to them did not exist, it also made them invisible to the power of the gift.

If even one parent possessed the pristinely ungifted trait, then it was always passed on to the offspring. These people had originally been banished to preserve the gift in mankind’s nature. It had been a terrible solution, to be sure, but as a result the gift had survived in the human race. Had such a solution not been undertaken, magic would long ago have ceased to exist.

Because prophecy was magic, it too was blind to these people. No book of prophecy had ever had anything at all to say about the pristinely ungifted, or about the future of mankind and magic now that Richard had discovered these people and ended the banishment. What would happen now was completely unknown.

Ann supposed that Richard would have it no other way. He did not exactly enthusiastically embrace prophecy. Despite what prophecy had to say about him, Richard by and large discounted it. He believed in free will. He took a dim view of the notion that there were things about himself that were predestined.

In all things in life, and in magic especially, there had to be balance. In a way, Richard’s acts of free will were the balance to prophecy. He was the center of a vortex of forces. With Richard, prophecy was attempting to predict the unpredictable. And yet, it had to.

Most troubling was that Richard’s free will made him a wild card in prophecy, even those prophecies in which he was the subject. He was chaos among patterns, disorder among organization, and as capricious as lightning. And yet, he was guided by truth and driven by reason, not whim or chance, nor was he arbitrary. That he could be chaos among prophecy and at the same time be completely rational was an enigma to her.

Ann worried greatly about Richard because such contradictory aspects of the gifted were occasionally a prelude to delusional behavior. The last thing they would want was a leader who was delusional.

But all of that was academic. The central problem was that while there was still time they had to find some way to make sure he took up the cause fated to him in the prophecies and to fulfil his destiny. If they failed, if he failed, then all was lost.

Verna’s message sat like the shadow of death in the back of Ann’s mind.

Having spotted their light, Tom appeared out of the darkness, sprinting through the long grass to meet them. “There you are,” he said to Ann. “Nathan will be happy that you’re finally here. Come on and I’ll show you the way.”

By the brief glimpse she got in the weak yellow light from the lantern, Tom’s face looked troubled.

The big D’Haran led them deeper into the graveyard, where in areas there were rows of gently mounded graves outlined in stones. These had to be newer, because most of what Ann could see was nothing but tall grass that over time covered over stones and the graves they marked. In one area there were a few small granite gravestones. They were so weathered it could only be that they were ancient. Some of the graves were marked with simple boards with names carved in them. Most such markers had long ago turned to dust, leaving much of the graveyard looking like nothing more than a grassy field.

“Do you know what the fat bugs are that are making all the noise?” Jennsen asked Tom.

“I’m not sure,” Tom said. “I’ve never seen them before. They suddenly seem to be all over the place.”

Ann smiled to herself. “They’re cicadas.”

Jennsen frowned back over her shoulder. “They’re what?”

“Cicadas. You wouldn’t know what they are. At the last molt you would have probably still been a toddler, too young to remember. The life cycle of these cicadas with the red eyes is seventeen years.”

“Seventeen years!” Jennsen said in astonishment. “You mean they only come out every seventeen years?”

“Without fail. After the females mate with these noisy fellows, they will lay their eggs in twigs. When they hatch, the nymphs will drop from the trees and burrow into the ground, not to emerge for another seventeen years where their life as adults will be brief.”

Jennsen and Tom murmured their amazement as they moved on into the graveyard. Ann couldn’t see much of anything else by the light coming from Jennsen’s lantern, except the dark shapes of trees moving in the occasional muggy breeze. As the three of them quietly slipped through the graveyard, cicadas chirped incessantly from the darkness all around. Ann used her Han to try to sense if anyone else was about, but she didn’t feel anyone other than Tom and somewhere in the distance one other person, no doubt Nathan. Since Jennsen was one of the pristinely ungifted, she was intangible to Ann’s Han.

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Like Richard, Jennsen had been fathered by Darken Rahl. Births of the pristinely ungifted, such as Jennsen’s, had been an unexpected and random side effect of the magic of the bond carried by every gifted Lord Rahl. In ancient times, when that trait began to spread, the solution had been to banish the pristinely ungifted, sealing them away in the forgotten land of Bandakar. After that, all ungifted offspring of the Lord Rahl were put to death.

Unlike any past Lord Rahl, Richard had been jubilant to discover that he had a sister. He would never allow her to be put to death for the nature of her birth, nor would he allow her and those like her to be forced into banishment.

Even though Ann had been around these people for some time now, she was still not used to how disorienting it could be. Even when one of them was standing right in front of her, Ann’s ability said that there was no one there. It was a haunting sort of blindness, a loss of one of her senses that she had always taken for granted.

Jennsen had to take long strides to keep pace with Tom. To keep up with the two of them, Ann had to trot.

And then, as they came around a small knoll, a stone monument loomed up into view. The light from the lantern lit one side of a rectangular stone base that was a little taller than Ann, but not as tall as Jennsen. The coarse stone was heavily weathered and pitted, with stone molding carved around recessed squares on the sides. If it had ever been polished, the stone no longer showed any evidence of it. As the lantern light swept across the surface, it revealed layers of dirty discoloration from great age as well as the mottled growth of mustard-colored lichen. Atop the imposing base sat a large carved urn with stone grapes hanging out over one side. Grapes were a favorite of Nathan’s.

As Tom led them around the front of the stone monument, Ann was astonished to see that the rectangle of stone sat off kilter.

On the far side, faint light oozed up from beneath it.

It appeared that the entire monument had been pivoted aside, revealing steep stone steps that led down into the ground, down into the soft glow of light.

Tom gave them both a meaningful look. “He’s down in there.”

Jennsen leaned over a little and peered into the steep cavity. “Nathan is down there? Down those steps?”

“I’m afraid so,” Tom told her.