Chainfire (Sword of Truth 9)

“Where will you go? What can you do next? You’ve been to Shota, and you came here to Zedd. No one knows anything about Kahlan, or Chainfire, or the rest of it. You’ve exhausted all your ideas, all your options. If not now, then when is the time to finally face reality?”

Richard rubbed his fingertips across his brow. As much as he didn’t want to admit it, he feared that Nicci was right. What was he going to do? He could think of nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. At least, nothing specific, not at the moment, anyway. He couldn’t imagine what good it would do him to wander around without a plan, without any idea where to look for Kahlan.

The room was dead quiet. The sliph’s well was empty, the sliph off somewhere with her soul. He wondered if Kahlan was still alive. He swallowed as he experienced one of those brief but terrifying moments when he wondered if she ever had been. He was so tired of the ever growing doubts, not just about Kahlan, but about himself.

At the same time, he was being crushed under the weight of guilt for not answering the call to lead the D’Haran people against the terrible threat to their freedom. He thought often of all the countless good people he didn’t even know who also had loved ones under mortal threat from the coming storm of the Imperial Order. Could he just desert all of them in order to chase around, forever looking for Kahlan?

Nicci moved closer.

“Richard,” she said in a soft, silken, sympathetic voice, “I know it’s hard to say it’s over…to say it’s over, and realize that you have to move on.”

Richard broke the gaze first. “I can’t do that, Nicci. I realize that I can’t explain it to anyone’s satisfaction, but I just can’t do that. I mean, if she got sick and died, then I would be devastated, yet eventually I know I would have to deal with the business of life. But this is different. It’s almost as if I know she’s in some dark river somewhere, calling for help, and I’m the only one who can hear her, who knows she in terrible danger of drowning.”

“Richard—”

“Do you really think I don’t care about all the innocent people under the threat of the horde coming to slaughter and enslave them? I do care. I can’t sleep with worry, and not only worry for Kahlan. Can you even begin to imagine how torn I feel?

“How would you feel if you were torn between someone you loved and doing what everyone else said was the right thing to do?

“I wake in a cold sweat in the dead of night not only seeing Kahlan’s face, but the faces of people who will never have a chance at life if Jagang isn’t stopped. When people tell me how all those people are depending on me, it breaks my heart—both because I want to help them, and because they think they need me, because they think that I, one man, can be the difference in a war involving millions of people. How dare they put that much responsibility on me?”

She came closer yet and gently put a hand to the side of his arm, rubbing up and down in a reassuring gesture. “Richard, you know that I wouldn’t want you to do anything that you thought was wrong. Not even when it was to let you believe she was dead based on what I knew wasn’t good evidence, even though I believe that evidence, if for other reasons.”

“I know.”

“But since that night when you dug up the grave, while you’ve been wandering around thinking about what you can do, I, too, have been doing a lot of thinking.”

Richard flicked small stone fragments from the top of the well, not wanting to have to look up at her. “And what have you come up with?”

“Among other things, as I watched you walk the ramparts, a troublesome idea came to me. I haven’t said anything about it yet partly because I don’t know for sure if it could be the answer to what is happening to you, and partly because if it is, then it would be even more trouble than any mere delusion caused by your injury. I don’t know if it’s really the answer, but I fear that it very well might be. Mostly, though, I haven’t said anything because the evidence is gone, so I have no way of proving it, but I think the time has arrived to broach the subject.”

“Evidence?” Richard asked. “You said that the evidence is gone?”

Nicci nodded. “The arrow you were shot with. I fear that this may have all been caused by that arrow, but in a different and far more disturbing way than we’ve realized.”

Richard was taken aback by her grave expression. “What do you mean?”

“Did you see who shot the arrow that hit you? Who held the crossbow?”

Richard took a deep breath while staring off as he sifted through the dim snatches of mental images of the morning of the fight. He’d only just awakened after hearing the howl of a wolf. Shadowy tree limbs had appeared to move about in the darkness. Then there had been soldiers all around him. He’d had to fight off men from all sides rushing in at him. He remembered quite vividly the feeling of holding the Sword of Truth, of feeling the wire wound hilt in his hand, of its power surging through him.

He recalled seeing men back in the trees shooting arrows at him. Most had bows, but there had been some with crossbows. That would have been rather typical for such a patrol of Imperial Order troops.

“No…I can’t say as I recall seeing who shot the bolt that hit me. Why? What is it that you’ve come up with?”

Nicci appraised his eyes for what seemed an eternity. Her ageless eyes sometimes reminded him of others with magic; Ann, the old Prelate; Verna, the new Prelate; Adie; Shota; and…Kahlan.

“The barbs on that arrow made it impossible to get it out of you in any ordinary way in time to save your life. I was in a desperate hurry. I never gave any thought to checking the arrow before I used Subtractive Magic to take it out of existence.”

Richard didn’t like the direction toward which her worry seemed to be drifting. “Check it for what?”

“A spell. A diabolically simple spell that would be profoundly destructive.”

Richard was now sure he didn’t like her idea even though he hadn’t heard it, yet.

“What kind of spell?”

“A glamour spell.”

“Glamour?” Richard frowned. “How would that work?”

“Well, think of it as a love potion.”

Richard stared at her in surprise. “A love potion?”

“Yes, after a fashion.” She lightly tapped the fingers of opposite hands together as she reflected on how best to explain it. “A glamour spell would cause you to have a mental vision of a woman, a real woman would be the normal object of the spell, but as I thought about it I realized that it would work just as well for an imaginary woman. Either way, it would make you fall in love with her. But even that is a rather weak way of describing such a powerful spell. Under a glamour spell the woman would become an obsession. Such an obsession would be to the exclusion of almost everything else.

“A glamour spell is a kind of dark secret among sorceresses, usually taught by a gifted mother. Such a spell would be used to ma

ke a specific person fixate on the subject of the spell, usually a real individual—the sorceress herself, in most cases. Like I said, it’s a kind of love spell.

“Some gifted women could not resist the lure of using a glamour on men. The spell is so effective that at the Palace of the Prophets it was a very serious matter for one of the Sisters to even be suspected of using a glamour. To be caught using a glamour was a grave crime, the moral equivalent to rape. The punishment was severe. The sorceress was at the least banished, but she could just as well be hanged. There have been sisters convicted of such a crime.

“As I recall, the last one caught at the palace was over fifty years ago. She was a novice, Valdora. The tribunal was split between hanging or banishment. The Prelate broke the tie and had the young novice banished.

“I would expect that Jagang’s Sisters know how to invoke a glamour spell. It wouldn’t have been all that hard for one of them to tag a glamour to that arrow, or a number of the arrows that morning. If the arrow didn’t kill you, it would spell you.”

“This is no spell,” Richard said, his tone turning darker.

Nicci ignored not just his tone, but his denial as well. “It would explain a great deal. A glamour spell seems absolutely real to the victim. It bends their mind, their thinking, around the subject of the obsession.”

Richard again raked his fingers back through his hair, trying not to get angry with Nicci. “What would be the purpose of doing such a thing? Jagang wants to kill me. You’re the one who came and told me that he created a beast to accomplish that task. The spell you’re talking about doesn’t make any sense.”

“Oh, but it makes all the sense in the world. It would accomplish far more than merely killing you, Richard. Don’t you see? It would destroy your credibility. It would leave you alive to destroy your cause yourself.”