CHAPTER 51

The look on Ann's face as she stepped in the big door and saw Nicci entering the anteroom from between two red pillars was priceless. Nicci would have laughed aloud had her talk with Richard not so emotionally drained her.

The prophet, Nicci knew, was very old, but he was by no means feeble looking. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with distinguished white hair that hung to his shoulders. He looked like a man who could bend iron, and he wouldn't even need his gift to do so. It was the raptor gaze of his dark azure eyes, though, that made him at once intimidating and alluring. They were the eyes of a Rahl.

Ann stared, her own eyes wide. «Sister Nicci.»

The Prelate didn't say «So good to see you again,» or anything cordial. She seemed momentarily unable to think of what to say. Nicci found it just a little remarkable that this squat woman beside the towering prophet had for so long seemed so big in her eyes. Novices and Sisters often went for long periods without even seeing the Prelate around the Palace of the Prophets. Absence, Nicci guessed, added to her mythic stature.

«Prelate. I'm glad to see you well, especially after your unfortunate death and funeral.» Nicci glanced over at Richard as she finished the thought. «I hear that everyone believed you were dead. Amazing how a burial can be so convincing, and yet here you are, alive and well, it would appear.»

Richard's twitch of a smile told her that he caught her meaning. Zedd, to the side, at the brink of the three steps leading down into the center of the room with the fountain, gave Nicci a curious frown. The meaning hadn't been lost on him, either.

«Yes, well, that was unfortunately necessary, child.» Ann's expression darkened. «What with the Sisters of the Dark having infested the ranks of our Sisters of the Light.» She glanced briefly at Richard, Cara, and Zedd, the edge to her countenance softening. «It appears by the company you keep, Sister Nicci, that you have come back into the fold. I can't tell you how much it pleases me, personally. I can only think that the Creator Himself must have had a hand in saving your soul.»

Nicci clasped her hands behind her back. «The Creator had nothing to do with it, actually. I guess that while I was forced to spend my life serving everyone who decided they wanted the blood and sweat of my abilities, the Creator was busy. I guess he couldn't be bothered while I was being used by pious men telling me how it was my duty to serve and to submit and to grovel to them and to kill those who opposed the Creator's ways.

«I guess that all the times those champions of the Creator were raping me, the Creator didn't catch on to the irony.

«No more. Richard helped show me the value of my life to myself. And it is no longer 'Sister' Nicci-either of the Light or the Dark. Nor is it Death's Mistress, or the Slave Queen. It is just Nicci, now, if you please — and even if you don't.»

Ann's expression flashed between incredulity and indignation as her face went red. «But once you are a Sister you are always a Sister. You have done a wonderful thing and renounced the Keeper, so you are again a Sister of the Light. You can't simply decide on your own to forsake your duty to the Creator's.»

«If He has any objections, then let Him speak up right now!» As the echo of Nicci's heated words faded away, the room fell silent but for the splash of water in the fountain. She made a show of looking around, as if she thought that maybe the Creator might be hiding behind a pillar ready to pop out and make His wishes known.

«No?» She again clasped her hands. She put back on the defiant smile. «Well then, since He has no objections, Nicci it is, I guess.»

«I'll not have.»

«Ann, enough,» Nathan said in a deep, commanding voice. «We have important business and this isn't it. We didn't travel all this way simply for a dead prelate to lecture a reformed Sister of the Dark.»

Nicci was somewhat surprised to hear the voice of reason coming from the prophet. She allowed that perhaps she had put too much stock into idle gossip.

Ann's mouth twisted in resignation as she fingered a stray lock of hair into the loose bun at the back of her head. «I suppose you're right. I'm afraid that I'm a little out of sorts, my dear, what with all the trouble going on. Please forgive my rash presumption, will you, Nicci?»

Nicci bowed her head. «Happily, Prelate.»

Ann smiled, more genuinely, Nicci thought. «And it's just Ann, now. Verna is Prelate, now. I'm dead, remember?»

Nicci smiled. «So you are, Ann. Wise choice, Verna. Sister Cecilia always said that there was no hope of converting that one to the Keeper.»

«Someday when we have the luxury of time, I would appreciate hearing more about Sister Cecilia in addition to Richard's former teachers.» She sighed at the thought. «I never knew for sure that you and all five of the others were Sisters of the Dark.»

Nicci nodded. «I'd be happy to tell you what I know about them-the ones still alive, anyway. Liliana and Merissa are dead.»

«Tom, how is my sister?» Richard asked as soon as there was a brief break in the conversation. Nicci recognized that he had listened long enough and was signaling that he wanted to move on to more important matters.

«She is well, Lord Rahl,» the big blond-headed man near the door said.

«Good. Nathan, what's going on?» Richard anxiously asked, getting right to the point. «What trouble are you here about?»

«Well — among other things, prophecy trouble.»

Richard visibly relaxed. «Oh. Well, that's not something I can help you with.»

«I wouldn't be so sure,» Nathan said, cryptically.

Zedd stepped off the gold and red carpet and down into the room. «Let me guess. You're here about the blank places in the books of prophecy.»

Nicci had to run Zedd's words through her mind a second time before she was sure she'd heard him right.

Nathan nodded. «You've just sat down in the middle of the muck.»

«What do you mean you're here about blank places in the books of prophecy?» Richard looked suddenly suspicious. «What blank places?»

«Extensive sections of prophecy-that is, prophecy written down in the books of prophecy-have simply vanished off the pages of a number of the books we've so far inspected.» Nathan's brow bunched in an expression of apprehension. «We've checked with Verna and she confirmed that the books of prophecy at the People's Palace in D'Hara are suffering the same inexplicable problem. Therein lies the heart of our worry. We came, in part, to see if the works of prophecy here at the Keep are still intact.»

«I'm afraid not,» Zedd said. «The books here have been similarly corrupted.»

Nathan swiped a hand across his tired face. «Dear spirits,» he murmured. «We had been holding out hope that whatever is causing such havoc among the prophecies had not affected the books here as well.»

«You mean that entire sections of prophecy are missing?» Richard asked, stepping down into the heart of the room.

«That's right,» Nathan confirmed.

«Would there happen to be a pattern to the missing prophecy?» Richard asked, suddenly focusing on a line of reasoning that Nicci knew would end up being somehow related to his own search. Ordinarily she would have been frustrated or even annoyed that he could think of nothing else but his fixation with the missing woman, but this time she was heartened to see that the familiar Richard was back.

«Why yes, there is a pattern. They are all prophecies having to do with events beginning roughly around the time of your birth.»

Richard stared, dumbfounded. «What are the missing prophecies about-specifically? I mean, are they related to specific events, or are they nonspecific and instead share only a time period?»

Nathan stroked his chin as he considered the question. «That's the thing that makes this so strange. Many of the prophecies that are missing we know we should be able to recall, but they are suddenly and completely just as blank in our minds as they are on the page. We can't remember a single word of them. We don't recall what they were about, and since they're gone from the books as well I can't tell you if they were event related or time related-or something else. We realize that they are missing, but that's about all.»

Richard's eyes turned to Nicci, as if to ask if she caught the correlation. She thought he could see that she did. His voice remained casual, but Nicci knew how intent was the interest behind his words.

«Pretty odd that something you've known all your lives can just vanish right out of your memory, wouldn't you say?»

«I certainly would,» Nathan said. «Any thoughts on the subject, Zedd?»

Zedd, who had been silently and intently watching Richard, nodded. «Well, I know what's causing it, if that will help you out.»

He smiled innocently. Nicci noticed that Rikka, standing in the shadows back behind the red pillars, smiled as well. Nathan, at first stunned, became animated with curiosity.

Richard gently tugged Zedd's robes at his shoulder. «You know?»

«You do?» Nathan asked, urging Richard back out of the way as he stepped closer. Ann rushed forward with him. «What is it? What's happening? Tell us.»

«A prophecy worm, I'm afraid.»

Nathan and Ann blinked, their faces blank of any comprehension.

«A what?» Nathan finally ventured, somewhat cautiously, if not suspiciously.

«The text vanishing is caused by a prophecy worm. Once a fork of prophecy is infected with this scourge, it worms its way entirely through that branch, consuming it as it goes. Since it consumes the actual prophecy itself, that means that over time all manifestations of it, such as the written prophecy or any memory of it, are destroyed. It's quite virulent.» Zedd regarded their rapt stares with another polite smile. «If you want, I can show you the reference work.»

«I should say so,» Nathan said.

«Zedd this is important,» Richard said. «Why haven't you said something?»

Zedd gave him a familiar clap on the shoulder as he started away. «Well, my boy, when you arrived you weren't much in the mood to listen to anything but what you were here about. Remember? You were rather insistent that you had trouble and you needed to talk to me about it. Since then you haven't exactly been willing to talk. You've been rather — distracted.»

«I guess I was.» Richard caught his grandfather's arm, halting him before he could get far. «Zedd, look, I need to tell you something about all of that, and about that night.»

«Like what, my boy?»

«I know that a contradiction cannot exist.»

«I never really thought you did, Richard.»

«But there was more to it that night. The rule most involved down there at the grave site was not the one you quoted. It may have seemed that way to you at the moment, but the rule I made a mistake about was another —the one that says in part that people can be made to believe a lie because they fear that it's true. That's what I was doing. I wasn't believing a contradiction, I was believing a lie because I was so afraid it was true. The rule of noncontradiction is one of the ways I should have checked my assumptions. I didn't, and in that I made a mistake.

«I understand what it must have looked like to you since you weren't aware of everything that's been happening, but that doesn't mean I should have stopped looking for the truth out of a misplaced wish to make you happy, or out of fear of what you would think of me.»

He met Nicci's gaze for a brief moment. «Nicci helped me see what I was doing wrong.»

He looked back at his grandfather. «I think you meant to show me that the rule you quoted is more, though. It also means you can't hold contradictory values or goals. You can't say, for instance, that honesty is a meaningful value, and at the same time lie to people. You can't say that justice is your goal but refuse to hold the guilty responsible for their actions.

«At the heart of our struggle, the fact that contradictions can't exist is why the Imperial Order's regime is so ruinous. They hold up altruism as their highest purpose. Yet, out of their proclaimed selfless concern for one individual, they sacrifice another, soothing over the bloodletting by proclaiming that such a sacrifice is the moral duty of the sacrificial victim. It's really nothing more than organized looting, a passion for the happiness of thieves and murderers without any concern for their victim. Attempts at goals that depend on such contradiction can only lead to widespread suffering and death. It's the fraudulent advocacy of the right to life by embracing death as a means to achieve it.

«The rule you quoted means I can't, like Jagang's followers, say I want the truth and then, without checking my assumption, willingly believe a lie in its stead, even if out of fear. That's the way I violated the rule you quoted. I should have sorted out what looked like contradictions and found the truth staring me in the face. That's where I let myself down.»

«Are you saying that you now don't believe that was Kahlan Amnell?» Zedd asked.

«Who says that corpse has to be the woman you think it is? There were no facts there to contradict my belief that it wasn't her. I only believed there were out of fear that it was true. It wasn't.»

Zedd took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. «You're stretching things mighty thin, Richard.»

«Am I? You wouldn't be too pleased with my rationale if I said that there is no such thing as prophecy and held up the blank books as proof that your belief in the existence of prophecy is wrong. For you to believe that prophecy exists in the face of the fact that the supposed books of prophecy are blank is not a contradiction. It is a perplexing situation with insufficient information to as of yet explain the facts. You have no obligation to reach a conclusion or hold an opinion you don't accept for other reasons without adequate information or before you have finished investigating.

«What kind of Seeker would I be if I did that? After all, it's the mind of the man that makes him the Seeker, not the sword. The sword is merely a tool-you're the one who told me that.

«In the case of Kahlan, there are still too many unanswered questions for me to be convinced that what we saw that rainy night is really the truth. Until it's proved one way or another, I'm going to continue to look for the answers-for the truth-because I believe that what is going on is far more dangerous than anyone but me realizes, to say nothing of needing to find a person I love who needs my help.»

Zedd smiled in a grandfatherly way. «Fair enough, Richard, fair enough. But I expect you to prove it to me. I won't take your word for it.»

Richard gave his grandfather a firm nod. «For starters, I think you have to admit it's rather suspicious that prophecies revolving around Kahlan's and my lives are missing. The memory of her is gone. Now the prophecies are gone that would have to contain reference to her. In both cases everyone's memory of both real entities-the person and the prophecies referring to that real person-have been wiped away.

«Do you see what I'm getting at?»

Nicci was immeasurably relieved to see that Richard was thinking rationally again. She was also concerned that in a strange way, what he said actually did make some sense.

«Yes, my boy, I do see your point, but do you see that there is a problem with your theory?»

«What's that?»

«We all remember you, now don't we? And the prophecies about you are missing. As it turns out, in this case the problem with prophecy doesn't have anything at all to do with what you are hoping will explain or prove the existence of Kahlan Amnell.»

«Why not?» Richard asked.

Zedd started up the steps. «It has to do with the nature of what I found out when I did my own investigation of the problem with the books of prophecy. I'm not without my own sense of curiosity, you know.»

«I know that, Zedd. But it could be connected,» Richard insisted as he walked along beside his grandfather.

Nicci hurried after him. Everyone else was forced to fall in behind.

«It might seem that way to you, my boy, but your speculation is flawed because all the facts just don't fit your conclusion. You're trying to wear boots that look good but are too small.» Zedd clapped Richard on the shoulder. «When we get to the library I'll show you what I mean.»

«Who's Kahlan?» Nathan asked.

«Someone who vanished and I haven't found yet,» Richard said over his shoulder. «But I will.»

Richard paused and turned back to Ann and Nathan. «Do either of you know what Chainfire is?» They both shook their heads. «How about a viper with four heads, or the Deep Nothing?»

«I'm afraid not, Richard,» Ann said. «But as long as we're on the subject of important matters, we do have other things we need to speak with you about.»

«After we see Zedd's reference about prophecy,» Nathan said.

«Well, come on, then,» Zedd told them as he started off with a flourish of his simple robes.

CHAPTER 52

In the plush library, Richard stood behind Zedd, watching over his grandfather's bony shoulder as he flipped open a thick book bound in tattered, tan leather. The room was rather dimly lit by a number of silver reflector lamps on all four sides of five thick mahogany posts standing in a line down the center of the room. They held up the leading edge of a balcony running the length of the room. Heavy, dark wooden tables with polished tops lined the center of the room down the line of posts. Wooden chairs were spaced around the outside of the tables. Opulent carpets with elaborately woven patterns felt soft and quiet underfoot. Perpendicular to the long walls on each side were aisles of shelves packed with books. Above, the balcony held closely spaced shelves filled with yet more volumes.

A gray-blue shaft of sunlight slanting in from the single window up high at the very end of the room lit the dust floating in the stuffy air. The freshly lit lamps added an oily smell. The room had a vaultlike quiet about it.

Cara and Rikka stood off by themselves in the darker area beneath the window at the end of the room, arms folded, heads together, talking in low voices. Nicci stood beside Zedd along one edge of a table lit in a glowing rectangle of sunlight while Ann and Nathan stood impatiently on the opposite side, waiting for Zedd's explanation of how prophecy had vanished. Standing there, in the island of light, the rest of the room faded away into gloomy shadows around them.

«This book was compiled, I believe, sometime not long after the great war had ended,» Zedd told them as he tapped the open cover near the title: Continuum Ratios and Viability Predictions. «The gifted back then had discovered that, for whatever reason, fewer and fewer wizards were being born and the ones who were being born were not being born with both sides of the gift, as had almost always been the case before. What's more, the ones who were being born with the gift were all being born with only the Additive side. Subtractive Magic was vanishing.»

Ann looked up from under her brow. «It is hardly a novice and a boy wizard standing before you, old man. We know all this. We have spent our lives devoted to this very problem. Get on with it.»

Zedd cleared his throat. «Yes, well, as you may know, this also meant that there were fewer and fewer prophets being born.»

«How remarkably fascinating,» Ann mocked. «I, for one, would never have guessed such a thing.»

Nathan irritably hushed her. «Go on, Zedd.»

Zedd pushed back his sleeves, briefly casting a scowl Ann's way. «They realized that, with ever fewer wizards born to prophecy, the body of work of prophecy was of course going to cease to grow. In order to understand what the consequences of this might mean, they decided that they needed to do an intensive investigation of the entire subject of prophecy while they still could, while they still had prophets and other wizards with both sides of the gift.

«They approached the problem with the gravest of concern, realizing that with them, this might very well be mankind's last opportunity to comprehend the future of prophecy itself, and to offer future generations an insight to understanding what these wizards were increasingly coming to believe would one day be seriously corrupted or even lost.»

Zedd glanced up to see if Ann looked like she intended to offer anymore disparaging comments. She did not. This was apparently something she hadn't known.

«Now,» he said, «to their work.»

Richard moved up to the table beside Nicci and with a finger turned over pages as he listened to Zedd. He quickly noticed that the book was written in such strange technical jargon having to do with the intricacies of not only magic but prophecy as well that it was nearly incomprehensible to him. It might as well have been a different language.

One of the surprises was that the book contained a series of complex mathematical formulas. These were interrupted by diagrams of the moon and stars marked with angles of declination. Richard had never before seen a book about magic that contained such equations, celestial observations, and measurements-not that he had actually seen that many books about magic. Although, he recalled, The Book of Counted Shadows that he had memorized as a boy did have a number of sun and star angles that were necessary to know in order to open the boxes of Orden.

Yet more formulas were scratched in the margins, but by different hands, as if someone had come along and done the sums to check the work in the book, or perhaps approached it with updated information. In one instance, several of the numbers in an elaborate table were crossed out, with arrows pointing from new numbers scribbled in the margins to the stricken numbers in the tables. Zedd occasionally stopped Richard from turning pages in order to point out an equation and explain the symbols involved in the calculation.

Like a dog watching a bone, Nathan's dark azure eyes tracked the pages as Richard slowly turned each over, idly looking for anything that made sense to him as Zedd droned on about overlapping transpositional forks and triple duplexes bound to conjugated roots compromised by precession and sequential, proportional, binary inversions shrouding flawed bifurcations that the formulas revealed which could only be detected through Subtractive levorotatory.

Nathan and Ann stared without blinking. Once, Nathan even gasped. Ann incrementally went ashen. Even Nicci seemed to be listening with uncharacteristic attention.

The unfathomable concepts made Richard's head spin. He hated that feeling of drowning in incomprehensible information, of trying to keep his head above the dark waters of complete confusion. It made him feel dumb.

Intermittently, Zedd referred to numbers and equations from the book. Nathan and Ann acted like they thought Zedd was on the verge of revealing not only how the world was going to end but the precise hour.

«Zedd,» Richard finally asked, interrupting his grandfather in the middle of a sentence that showed no signs of ever coming to an end, «is there any way you can boil this stew down to some meat that I can chew?»

Mouth agape, Zedd regarded Richard for a moment before pushing the book across the table to Nathan. «I'll let you read it for yourself.»

Nathan cautiously picked up the book as if the Keeper himself might pop out at him.

Zedd turned back to Richard. «Basically, to put it in terms you might better grasp, and at great risk of oversimplifying it, imagine that prophecy is like a tree, with roots and branches. Like a tree, prophecy was continually growing. What these wizards were basically saying was that the tree of prophecy behaved as if there were a kind of life to it. They weren't saying that it was alive, mind you, only that in a number of ways it mimicked-not duplicated-some attributes of a living organism. It was this property that allowed them to come up with their theory and from that run their calculations-in much the way there are parameters by which you can judge the age and health of a tree and from that extrapolate about its future.