What concerned her most was an issue at the center of Ordenic theory having to do with the connections between Orden and the subject of the Chainfire event—Kahlan. Nicci needed to better understand the nature of requirements for connections based on primary foundations. She needed to fully grasp how those foundations were established. She was troubled by the constraints on predetermined protocols—their need of a sterile field in order to re-create memory. She also needed to learn more about the precise conditions in which the forces needed to be applied.
At the center of it all, though, was that cautionary requirement of a sterile field. She needed to understand the precise nature of the sterile field Orden required and, more importantly, why Ordenic protocols needed it.
“I have all the shields up,” Zedd told her. “The entrances to the Keep are sealed. If anyone had entered without permission alarms would be going off all over the place. We’d all be plugging our ears until we found the cause.”
“There are gifted people who know about such things,” Nicci reminded him.
Zedd didn’t need to consider for long. “You have a point. Considering all that’s going on, and all we don’t yet know, we can’t be too careful. It wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to keep an eye on the box.”
Nicci nodded as she followed them out of the doorway. “Let me know as soon as all is clear.”
The towering hall outside, while not more than a dozen feet wide, rose nearly out of sight high overhead. The passageway formed a long, narrow rift deep within the mountain down in the lower part of the Keep. To the left side rose a natural rock wall that had been chiseled right out of the granite of the mountain itself. Even thousands of years later, the marks left by cutting tools could still be seen.
The wall on the side with the rooms was made up of tightly fit, enormous stone blocks. They formed the wall opposing the chiseled granite, rising up together sixty or more feet. That seemingly endless split through the mountain constituted part of the boundary of the containment field. The rooms within the containment area were all lined up along the very outer edge of the Keep that rose up out of the mountain itself.
Nicci followed the others only a short way through the seemingly endless hall, watching them until they reached the first intersection.
“This is no time to get sloppy or lenient,” she called after them. “Too much is at risk.”
Zedd accepted her warning with a nod. “We’ll be back after I look into it.”
Cara cast Nicci a look back over her shoulder. “Don’t worry, I’ll be there and I’m not in the mood to be lenient. In fact, I’m not going to be in a good mood again until I see Lord Rahl alive and safe.”
“You have good moods?” Zedd asked as they hurried away.
Cara scowled at him. “I’m frequently cheerful and pleasant. Are you suggesting that I’m not?”
Zedd held up his hands in surrender. “No, no. Cheerful describes you perfectly.”
“Good, then.”
“In fact, cheerful would come even before bloodthirsty in my book.”
“Come to think of it, I think I like bloodthirsty even better.”
Nicci couldn’t share the spirit of their banter. She wasn’t good at making people laugh. She frequently found herself perplexed by the way Zedd and others could ease tension with such exchanges.
Nicci knew all too well the nature of the people who were trying to kill them. She had once been one of those people of the Order. She had been as merciless as she had been deadly.
She had never once seen Emperor Jagang being jovial or lighthearted. He was hardly a man given to repartee. She had spent a great deal of time with him, and he was never anything but consistently lethal. His cause was deadly serious to him and he was fanatically dedicated to it. Knowing the kind of people coming for them, people like she herself had once been, and understanding their heartless nature, Nicci didn’t feel that she could be any less serious than they.
She watched Zedd, Cara, and Rikka hurry down the first hall to the right, heading for the stairway.
As they started up, Nicci suddenly understood the sound, the vibration she felt.
It was an alarm, of sorts.
She knew why Rikka didn’t recognize it.
She opened her mouth to call out to the others just as the world seemed to come grinding to a halt.
A dark cloud poured down the stairwell. It was like a million-speckled suggestion of a snake in midair, rolling, turning, twisting, thinning, thickening as it came roaring down the stairwell. The rolling, fluttering rumble was deafening.
Thousands of bats poured around the corner, a fat snake of them in midair, a thing alive made up of untold numbers of the little creatures. The sight of so many thousands of them coalesced into a single moving shape was riveting. The racket reverberated off the walls, filling the split in the mountain with a riot of noise. The bats seemed to be flying in a panic, their fused form coiling around the corner in a rush as they bolted from something.
Zedd, Cara, and Rikka seemed frozen where they had begun to climb the stairs.
And then the fleeing bats were gone, driven before some terror coming through the Keep behind them. The soft, fluttering sound they left in their wake echoed its muted alarm through the hall as the bats fled into deeper darkness.
That distant sound was what Rikka had heard but not understood.
Staring at the stairs from where the bats had come, Nicci felt as if she were frozen and immobile in an expectant, silent moment in time, waiting to breathe, waiting for something unimaginable. With a rising sense of panic, she realized that in fact she really couldn’t move.
And then a dark shape came sweeping down the stairs like an ill wind. Yet, at the same time, it inexplicably appeared to hang motionless. It seemed composed of swirling black shapes and flowing shadows, creating an inky eddy of obscurity. The dizzying shape of it, the entwining currents of darkness, implied movement that it didn’t have.
Nicci blinked, and it was gone.
She urgently renewed her effort to move, but she felt as if she was suspended in warm wax. She could breathe to a small extent, and make headway, but only in the most impossibly slow fashion. Every inch took monumental effort and seemed to take an eternity. The world had become impossibly thick as everything slowed toward a halt.
In the passageway, just behind the others in the hall at the bottom of the stairs, the shape appeared again, suspended in midair above the stone floor. It looked like a woman in a flowing black dress floating underwater.
Even in the midst of growing terror, Nicci found the exotic sight strangely fascinating. The others, with the intruder already past them, were in mid-stride ascending the stairs, as still as if caught in a painting.
The woman’s wiry black hair lifted lazily out all around her bloodless face. The loose fabric of the black dress swirled as if in whirls of water. Within the slow turbulence of black cloth and hair, the woman herself seemed nearly unmoving.
It looked like nothing so much as if she were floating under murky water.
Then the figure was gone again.
No, not underwater, Nicci realized.
In the sliph.
That’s how Nicci felt, too. It was that kind of strange, otherworldly, suspended sensation of drifting. It was impossibly slow and at the same time blindingly fast.
The figure suddenly appeared again, closer this time.
Nicci tried to call out, but she couldn’t. She tried to lift her arms to cast a web, but she drifted too slowly. She thought it might take an entire day just to lift her arm.
Sparkling shards of light glimmered and flashed in the air between Nicci and the others. Magic, she knew, cast by the wizard. It fell far short of the intruder. Even though the brief spate of power sputtered out without having any effect, Nicci was astounded that Zedd had managed to ignite it at all. She had tried much the same thing without any result.
Dark trailers of cloth drifted, fluidly flapping through the hallway. Snaking shapes and s
hadows curled around as they moved ever so slowly. The figure wasn’t walking, or running. It glided, floated, flowed, almost unmoving within the swirling cloth of the dress.
Then it was gone again.
In a blink, it reappeared, much closer yet. The ghostlike skin stretched tight over a bony face looking as if it had never been touched by sunlight. Snarls of weightless black hair rose up with wisps of the flowing black dress.