Confessor (Sword of Truth 11)

Nicci shook her head in amazement. “It’s for sure that I didn’t know enough to deal with the likes of Six. What you did may not have been able to reach me, but at least it was enough to keep her from killing me.”

Zedd only smiled.

She looked up at him. “Where did you learn such a trick?”

He shrugged. “Harsh experience. I’ve dealt with witch women before, so I knew that there was only one thing I could do.”

“You mean Shota?”

“In part,” he said. “When I took the Sword of Truth back from her I had a great deal of trouble. That woman is cunning, clever, and trouble behind sparkling eyes and a crafty smile. I found out that doing things the usual way simply didn’t work. She found my struggles amusing. The more force I used, the worse I made things for myself, and the wider she smiled.”

He smiled himself as he leaned in a little. “That was her mistake—smiling.” He lifted a finger to make his point. “Her smile tipped me off that what I was doing was my own undoing. I realized in that instant that my use of force was what was giving her the power she needed.”

“So you didn’t use force.”

He spread his hands as if she had finally grasped the lesson. “Sometimes doing what you would most like to do can be the very worst thing to do. Sometimes to accomplish what you want in the end, you have to hold back in the beginning.”

As the concept he’d expressed sank in, yet more of her disordered memories—perplexing pieces of some grand puzzle that had never before fit anywhere—having been freed from where they languished in the dark corners of her mind, tumbled into place. It was as if she was seeing everything in a new light.

The sudden realizations were jolting.

Nicci’s jaw fell open. Her eyes went wide.

“I understand, now. I know what it meant. Dear spirits, I understand. I know the purpose of the sterile field.”

CHAPTER 13

“Sterile field?” Zedd’s bushy white brow drew down. “What are you talking about?”

Nicci pressed her fingertips to her forehead as she reasoned it all out. She could hardly believe she hadn’t realized it sooner. She looked up at the wizard.

“There is a complex order of events required for the power of Orden to work. Like you said, connections based on primary foundations must be established—just as in any magic. It was, after all, created by wizards and they would have had to have based anything they did on what they knew about the nature of the things they were manipulating.

“For the most part, at its core, Orden is a complex constructed spell. Like any constructed spell, in the right conditions it is triggered by a specific set of events. It then runs according to its predetermined protocols. Yet, no matter how complex it is, once begun it still functions according to basic principles.”

“And the sun rises in the east,” Zedd growled. “What are you getting at?”

“It all correlates,” she said to herself as she stared off at nothing for a moment.

She abruptly turned her attention back to the wizard. “The Book of Life explains how to put the power of Orden in play. It lays out the protocols. It’s basically an operating manual; it doesn’t explain the theory behind Orden—that’s not its purpose. To understand the whole thing you have to look elsewhere.

“While that power, like all forms of power, can be misappropriated and looted for the objective of dominion, it was created and intended for a specific purpose: to counter the Chainfire spell. Central elements of Orden are a constructed spell so, once ignited, it runs through established routines. Those routines in turn require specific conditions—such as properly using the key, The Book of Counted Shadows.”

Her mind was still racing through all the new connections as she fit together pieces from different sources that she had never before connected.

“Yes, yes,” Zedd said as he rolled his hand impatiently. “The boxes of Orden were created specifically to counter the Chainfire spell. We already know that. What’s more, it is self-evident that certain conditions must be met and that then the power will function in a given manner. That’s all stone-cold obvious.”

Nicci threw off the covers and stood in a rush, no longer feeling that she belonged in bed. She looked down and saw that she was in a pink nightdress. She hated pink. Why did they always end up putting her in a pink nightdress? She imagined that it must have been all they had at hand.

She ignited a razor-thin flow of Subtractive Magic almost without a thought and directed it downward through the fabric of the nightdress. With that power she scavenged through the fabric itself, allowing the Subtractive flow to seek only the elements of the dye, and eliminate it. The color in the nightdress, starting at the neckline, faded away in a wave that went through the entire garment. Eliminating the pink color left behind a simple, off-white color to the cloth.

Incredulous, Zedd stared at the nightdress. “Did you just use Subtractive Magic, the power of the underworld, the power of death itself, to take the color out of that thing?”

“Yes. Much better, don’t you think?” She wasn’t really paying much attention to the question as her mind was already on other things.

Zedd lifted a hand in protest. “Well, I don’t think it’s a good idea to—”

“What is the purpose of it all?” Nicci asked, cutting off the objection she hadn’t really heard and cared even less about.

Zedd’s hand paused. He was starting to look exasperated. “That is the purpose. To counter Chainfire.”

“No, no. I mean what is the specific function of the counter to the spell?”

His impatience with things that seemed only too obvious was curdling into annoyance. “To make us all remember the object of the spell.” His eyes flashed with that agitation. “In this case, that would be Kahlan.”

“Yes, in a sense, but that is an oversimplification of the process, an expression of the terminal objective.” Nicci lifted a finger, now the teacher instead of the student. “In order to do as you just said it has to restore what was destroyed in us. It has to re-create our memories.

“It’s not a matter of the power of Orden making us remember things we’ve forgotten but, rather, of needing to reconstruct what is no longer there.

“Those lost memories are gone. It isn’t that we’ve forgotten things and we can’t recall the people and events. There is nothing there in our minds for us to recall because those memories are nonexistent, not merely forgotten. They have been eroded and destroyed by the Chainfire event. It’s not that we just aren’t able to remember things. The reality is that those parts of our minds—of our memories—have been destroyed.

“In actual fact, there is nothing there for us to remember.

“Re-creating from scratch what is gone is altogether different from helping us to remember things. It’s the difference between someone who is asleep, and someone who is dead. On the surface both may look much the same, but having their eyes closed is about the only thing they have in common.

“The end objective may be the same in both instances, but both the problem and the means to solve it have nothing in common. In order for Orden to counter Chainfire and restore us to the way we were before, it needs to incarnate in our minds knowledge, awareness, of what has happened in the past. It needs to create new memories to replace those that were destroyed. It needs to bring our memories back to life.”

As he considered her words, tension had settled in Zedd’s brow, replacing the impatience that had been there. His gaze tracked her as she paced. “Well, yes, there somehow has to be a reestablishment to real events from the past.” He scratched his temple as he viewed her askance. “Are you saying that you think that you now understand how such a thing could work?”

Nicci’s bare feet padded across the carpets as she paced. “From what I’ve pieced together from what I’ve read, those who created the boxes of Orden, even though they intended them to be a counter to Chainfire, weren’t themselves convinced that such a thing could actually be

done.”

Nicci halted to look at him. “Can you even imagine how monumentally complex such a thing would have to be? How complicated it would be to rebuild and restore memories in everyone? How convoluted?

“I mean, those wizards back then must have driven themselves crazy trying to sort out how such a thing could rebuild what no longer has a template. How is Orden to know what you are supposed to remember? Or Cara? Or me? What’s worse, people believe all the time that they correctly recall things but their recollections are in error. How will Orden rebuild memories that once were but no longer are, when those memories themselves, when we had them, weren’t always true, or accurate?

“From what I read in the books on Ordenic theory, even the wizards who created Orden weren’t certain that it would work.”