Chainfire (Sword of Truth 9)

Richard was sick and tired of being driven by events. He was at his wits end with not understanding what was going on, with always feeling like he was one step behind the rest of the world and two steps behind whatever had happened to Kahlan. He was getting angry that everyone was telling him what to do and no one was interested in what was of paramount importance to him. They didn’t even want to let him decide his own fate. They thought prophecy had already decided for him.

It had not.

He needed to find out the truth of what had happened to Kahlan. He needed to find Kahlan, period. He was fed up with wasting time on what prophecy, along with any number of people, thought he ought to be doing. Anyone who was not helping him was, in reality, holding him back from something vitally important.

“I have no responsibility to live up to what anyone else expects of me,” he said to Ann as he picked up the small book Nathan had brought with him.

Ann and Nathan stared in surprise.

He felt Nicci’s reassuring hand on the small of his back. She may not believe in his memory of Kahlan, but at least she had helped him see that he had to be true to his principles. She wouldn’t allow him to lose by default. She had been a valued friend when he needed one the most.

The only other person he knew who would stand by him in that way, stand up to him in that way, was Kahlan.

He thumbed past all the blank pages in the book Nathan had brought. Richard was curious to see if there was more that might change the picture, if they were only telling him what they wanted him to believe. He also would like to find something—anything—that would help him understand what was going on.

And something was going on. Zedd’s explanation of the prophecy worm sounded airtight, but something about it bothered Richard. It explained the missing text in the books of prophecy in a way that suited what these people wanted to believe. It was too convenient and, worse, it was too much of a coincidence.

Coincidence always made Richard suspicious.

Nicci had a good point as well; it seemed just a little too convenient that the body buried down at the Confessors’ Palace would have a ribbon with Kahlan’s name embroidered on it…. Just in case there was any doubt, should someone dig up the body?

After blank page upon blank page, Richard found the writing. It was exactly as Nathan had read it.

In the year of the cicadas, when the champion of sacrifice and suffering, under the banner of both mankind and the Light finally splits his swarm, thus shall be the sign that prophecy has been awakened and the final and deciding battle is upon us. Be cautioned, for all true forks and their derivatives are tangled in this mantic root. Only one trunk branches from this conjoined primal origin. If fuer grissa ost drauka does not lead this final battle, then the world, already standing at the brink of darkness, will fall under that terrible shadow.

There were several things about the passage that puzzled Richard. For one thing, the reference to cicadas. It seemed a lowly creature to be worthy of prophetic mention, to say nothing of such a central role in the—purportedly—most important prophecy in three thousand years. He supposed that it could make sense that it was a key that helped set the chronology, but, from what others had told him, prophecy never went out of its way to set chronology, making it one of prophecy’s most difficult issues.

It also troubled him that this prophecy, so distant in so many ways from the other he had read at the Palace of the Prophets, would also refer to him in High D’Haran as fuer grissa ost drauka. He supposed that it could be, as Zedd had suggested, that such a linkage meant it was important.

But the link to the prophecy Richard had seen at the Palace of the Prophets with the reference to fuer grissa ost drauka was strongly connected to something else: the boxes of Orden.

In the old prophecy that named Richard the bringer of death, the word death meant three different things, depending on how it was used: the bringer of the underworld, the world of the dead; the bringer of spirits, spirits of the dead; and the bringer of death, meaning to kill. Each meaning was different, but all three were intended.

The second meaning had to do with how he used the Sword of Truth, and the third simply that he’d had to kill people. But the first meaning involved the boxes of Orden.

He supposed that in the context of the prophecy at hand, the third meaning seemed the obvious, that he had to lead the army and kill the enemy, so calling him fuer grissa ost drauka did make sense. Yet again, things seemed awfully convenient.

All the convenient explanations and coincidences were making Richard more than just a little suspicious. With Kahlan’s disappearance involved, he felt that there had to be more to what was going on.

He turned to the page ahead of the passage, and then the one preceding it, checking. They were blank.

“I have a problem with this,” he said, looking up at all the eyes watching him.

“And what would that be?” Ann asked as she folded her arms. She used the same tone of voice she would have if she’d been talking to an inexperienced, untrained, ignorant boy freshly brought to the Palace of the Prophets to be trained in the use of his gift.

“Well, there’s nothing around it,” he said. “It’s all blank.”

Nathan covered his face with a hand while Ann threw her arms in the air in a gesture of baffled outrage. “Of course not! They’ve vanished, along with a great deal more. That’s what we’ve just been talking about. That’s why this one is so important!”

“But without knowing the context, you can’t really say that this one is important, now, can you? To understand any information one must know the context.”

Contrary to Ann and Nathan’s agitation, Zedd smiled to himself at lessons taught long ago and remembered.

Nathan looked up. “What does that have to do with this prophecy?”

“Well, for all we know, there might have been mitigating text right before this, or something right after that went on to dismiss this. With the copy missing how are we to know? This prophecy could have been superseded by just about anything.”

Zedd smiled. “The boy has a point.”

“He’s not a boy,” Ann growled. “He’s a man, and the Lord Rahl, the head of the D’Haran Empire that he himself pulled together to fight the Imperial Order, and he’s supposed to lead those forces. All of our lives depend on him doing so.”

As Richard flipped back through the book, he saw writing that he hadn’t seen the first time. He paged back to it.

“Here’s something else that didn’t vanish,” he said.

“What?” Nathan asked with incredulity as he twisted around to look. “There was nothing else. I’m sure of it.”

“Right here,” Richard said, tapping a finger on the words. “It says, ‘Here we come.’ What could that mean? And why did it not vanish?”

“‘Here we come’?” Nathan’s face distorted in a look of confusion. “I never saw that before.”

Richard turned back more pages. “Look. Here it is again. Same thing. ‘Here we come.’”

“I could have missed it once, perhaps,” Nathan said, “but there is no way I could have missed a second one. You must be wrong.”

“No, look,” Richard said, turning the book to show the prophet. He went backward through the book, turning blank pages until he came to writing. “Here it is again. A whole page of the same thing written over and over.”

Nathan’s jaw hung in speechless astonishment. Nicci peered over Richard’s shoulder. Zedd rushed around next to him to see the writing in the book. Even the two Mord-Sith came to have a look.

Richard turned a page forward, to what a moment before had been blank. There, down the page, was the same sentence written over and over and over.

Here we come.

“I watched you turning it back.” Nicci’s silken voice carried a clear undertone of disquiet. “I know that page was blank an instant ago.”

Goose bumps prickled up Richard’s arms. The hair at the nape of his neck lifted.