Chainfire (Sword of Truth – 9)

Ann sat up straighter when Verna's writing began appearing across the page.

Ann, I am comforted to have you back with me, if only in the journey book. There are so few of us left. I confess that sometimes I long for the days of peace back at the palace, the times when everything seemed to he so much easier and to make so much more sense and I only thought it was all so difficult. The world certainly has changed since Richard was born.

Ann couldn't argue with that. She popped a piece of cheese in her mouth and then leaned in and began writing.

I pray every day that such order and peace can again settle over the world and we can go back to complaining about the weather.

Verna, I am confused. What did you mean when you said that perhaps you were too successful in defending the passes? Please explain. I await your reply.

Ann leaned back in her straight-backed chair and chewed a slice of pear as she waited. Since her journey book was twinned with the one Verna had, anything written in one appeared at the same time in the other. It was one of the few ancient items of magic left from the Palace of the Prophets.

Verna's words again began moving across the blank page. Our scouts and trackers report that Jagang has begun his move. Because he has not been able to break through the passes, the emperor has split his forces and is taking an army south. General Meiffert had been fearing that he would do something like this.

It's not hard to guess his strategy. Jagang undoubtedly plans to take a large force of his troops down through the Kern Valley and then south around the mountains. Once he finally is clear of all the barriers he will swing around into the southern reaches of D'Hara and then head north.

This is the worst possible news for us. We can't abandon the protection of the passes, not while part of his army lies in wait on the other side. And yet, we cannot allow Jagang's forces to sweep up on us from the south. General Meiffert says we will have to leave sufficient forces here to guard the passes while the bulk of our army heads south to meet the invaders.

We have no choice. With half of Jagang's force to the north, on the other side of the passes, and half heading down to go around the mountains and come up from the south, that leaves the People's Palace right in the middle. Jagang is no doubt licking his chops over such a prospect.

Ann, I'm afraid I don't have much time. The entire camp is in an uproar,

We only just learned the news that Jagang has split his army and we are rushing to strike camp and start south.

I must also divide up the Sisters. So many have been lost that there are not many left to divide. At times I feel as if we are in a contest with Jagang to see who will be the last one with a Sister left. I fear what will happen to all these good people if none of us survive. If not for that, I would be satisfied to leave this world behind and join Warren in the spirit world.

General Meiffert says that we can't spare a moment and must be on our way at first light. I will be up the entire night with the arrangements, seeing to it that we have sufficient men and Sisters here to defend each of the Passes, and inspecting the shields to make sure they are sound. If the Order's northern army were to break through up here, it would be a much quicker death for us.

Unless you have something important that must be discussed right now, I'm afraid that I must go.

Ann covered her mouth with a hand as she read. The news certainly was disheartening. She wrote an immediate reply, so as not to inconvenience Verna.

No, my dear, nothing important just now. You know that you are in my heart always.

A message came back almost immediately.

The passes are narrow so we have been successful at defending them. The Imperial Order can't use their overwhelming power in such narrow places. I feel confident the passes will hold. Since Jagang is stymied by not having been able to cross the mountains, this buys us time while he is hived to take an army all the way south and then back up into D'Hara, now that he has the weather to his advantage. Since this is the greatest danger and threat, I will be heading south with the army.

Pray for us. We will eventually be forced to meet Jagang's horde in the open plains where he has the room to throw the full weight of his forces against us. I am afraid that, unless something changes, we will have no chance to survive such a battle.

I can only hope that Richard fulfills prophecy before we are all dead.

Ann swallowed before answering. Verna, you have my word that I will do what I must to see to it. Know that Nathan and I will be dedicated to the risk of seeing prophecy fulfilled. Perhaps no one but you would truly understand that this is what I have devoted myself to for over half a millennium. I will not abandon my cause; I will do whatever I can to see that Richard does what only he can. May the Creator be with you and all our brave defenders. You will all be in my prayers every day. Have faith in the Creator, Verna. You are prelate, now. Give that faith to all of those with you.

In a moment, a message began appearing. Thank you, Ann. I will check my journey book every night as we travel to see if you have any news of Richard. I miss you. I hope we can be together again in this life.

Ann carefully wrote her last reply.

Me too, child. Fair journey.

Ann leaned on her elbows and rubbed her temples. This was not good news, but it was not all bad. Jagang had wanted to break through the passes and end it swiftly, but the passes held and he had finally been forced to split his army and begin a long, grueling march. She tried to look at the bright side. They still had time. There were any number of things they could still try. They would think of something. Richard would think of something. Prophecy had promised that he held within him the chance for their salvation.

She couldn't allow herself to believe that evil would darken the world.

A knock on the door made her jump. She pressed her hand over her racing heart. Her Han hadn't warned her that someone was about.

«Yes?»

«Ann, it's me, Jennsen,» came the muffled voice from the other side of the door.

Ann replaced the stylus and tucked the journey book in her belt as she slid her chair back. She smoothed her skirts and took a deep breath to try to slow her heart back to normal.

«Come in, dear,» she said as she opened the door, smiling at Richard's sister. «Thank you for the plate of food.» She held an arm back toward the table. «Would you like to share it with me?»

Jennsen shook her head. «No, thank you.» Her face, framed by red ringlets, was a picture of concern. «Ann, Nathan sent me. He wants you. He was quite urgent about it. You know how Nathan gets. You know how his eyes get all big and round when he's excited about something.»

«Yes,» Ann drawled, «he does tend to get that way when he's digging up mischief.»

Jennsen blinked, looking a little startled. «I fear you may be right, he told me in no uncertain terms to come get you and bring you there straightaway.»

«Nathan always expects people to squeak when he pinches.» Ann gestured for the young woman to lead the way. «I guess I'd best see to it. Where is the prophet, then?»

Jennsen held her lantern up to light her way as she started out of the little room. «He's at a graveyard.»

Ann caught the sleeve of Jennsen's dress. «A graveyard? And he wants me to come to this graveyard?» Jennsen looked back over her shoulder and nodded. «What is he doing in a graveyard?»

Jennsen swallowed. «When I asked him that, he said he was digging up the dead.»

CHAPTER 10

In a broad weeping willow growing on the grassy slope leading down to the graveyard, a mockingbird was spending its night repeating a variety of strident calls meant to defend its territory against interlopers. Ordinarily, a mockingbird's calls, although intended as threats to others of its kind, to Ann's ear could be quite lovely, but in the dead-still quiet of night, such piercing whistles, chatters, and whoops were jarring to her nerves. She could hear another mockingbird in the distance making similar threats. Even the birds couldn't achieve peace.

Plowing through the long, wild grasses, Jennsen pointed as she held the lantern up with her other hand so that Ann could see her way. «Tom said that we would find him down there.»

Sweating from the long hike, Ann peered down into the darkness. She couldn't imagine what the prophet was up to. In all the time that she had known the man he had never done such a strange thing. He had done any number of strange things, to be sure, but this just wasn't one of them. As old as he was, one would think that he would want to avoid spending time in a graveyard any sooner than he had to.

Ann followed Richard's younger sister as she started down the hill, trying to keep up without running. It seemed like they had already walked half the night and she was winded. Ann hadn't known of this graveyard, all but forgotten out in a distant, uninhabited expanse of wilderness. She wished that she had thought to bring along some of the food sitting on the plate back in her room.

«Are you sure Tom is still down here?»

Jennsen looked back over her shoulder. «He should be. Nathan wanted him to stand guard.»

«For what? To fight off the other body snatchers?»

«I don't know, maybe,» Jennsen said without so much as a hint of a giggle.

Ann wasn't very good at making people laugh. She was good at making their knees tremble, but she just wasn't all that good at jokes. She guessed that a graveyard on a dark night wasn't a good place for jokes. It certainly was a good place to make the knees tremble.

«Maybe Nathan just wanted company,» Ann suggested.

«I don't think that was it.» Jennsen found a fallen section in the split-rail fence that surrounded the place of the dead and stepped over it. «Nathan asked me to bring you out here and he wanted Tom to stay and stand guard over the graveyard, I think to make sure there was no one around that he didn't know about.»

Nathan liked being in charge; Ann guessed that being a gifted Rahl he could do no less. It was always possible that the whole thing was a pretense just to get Jennsen, Tom, and Ann to run around doing his bidding. The prophet was given to a sense of drama and a graveyard did tend to set a mood.

Actually, right then, Ann would have been happy were it nothing more than some idiosyncratic diversion of Nathan's. Unfortunately, she had the queazy feeling that it was something not at all so simple, or so innocuous as a bit of theatrics.

In all the centuries she had known him, Nathan had at times been secretive, deceptive, and occasionally dangerous, but never to evil ends —although that hadn't always been apparent at the time. During most of his captivity at the Palace of the Prophets he had tried the Sisters' patience until they were ready to scream and tear out their hair, yet he wasn't maliciously willful or contemptuous of good people. He had an abiding hatred of tyranny and an almost childlike glee about life. No matter how exasperating the man could be at times, and he could be exasperating in the extreme, Nathan had a good heart.

Almost since the beginning, despite the circumstances, he had been Ann's confidant and ally against the Keeper getting a foothold in the world of life and against evil people having their way over the innocent. He had worked hard to help stop Jagang. He had, after all, been the one to first show her a prophecy about Richard, five hundred years before he would be born.

Ann found herself wishing that it wasn't dark, and that they weren't in a graveyard. And that Jennsen didn't have such long legs.

It suddenly occurred to Ann why Nathan would need Tom to stand guard and «make sure no one was around that they didn't know about,» as Jennsen had put it. Just like Jennsen, the people in Bandakar were pristinely ungifted. They were devoid of that infinitesimal spark of the Creator's gift carried by everyone else in the world. That essential connection made everyone else subject to the reality and nature of magic. But for these people magic did not exist.

The absence of such an inherent, elemental nucleus of the gift not only made the pristinely ungifted immune to magic, but since they could not interact with what to them did not exist, it also made them invisible to the power of the gift.

If even one parent possessed the pristinely ungifted trait, then it was always passed on to the offspring. These people had originally been banished to preserve the gift in mankind's nature. It had been a terrible solution, to be sure, but as a result the gift had survived in the human race. Had such a solution not been undertaken, magic would long ago have ceased to exist.

Because prophecy was magic, it too was blind to these people. No book of prophecy had ever had anything at all to say about the pristinely ungifted, or about the future of mankind and magic now that Richard had discovered these people and ended the banishment. What would happen now was completely unknown.

Ann supposed that Richard would have it no other way. He did not exactly enthusiastically embrace prophecy. Despite what prophecy had to say about him, Richard by and large discounted it. He believed in free will. He took a dim view of the notion that there were things about himself that were predestined.

In all things in life, and in magic especially, there had to be balance. In a way, Richard's acts of free will were the balance to prophecy. He was the center of a vortex of forces. With Richard, prophecy was attempting to predict the unpredictable. And yet, it had to.

Most troubling was that Richard's free will made him a wild card in prophecy, even those prophecies in which he was the subject. He was chaos among patterns, disorder among organization, and as capricious as lightning. And yet, he was guided by truth and driven by reason, not whim or chance, nor was he arbitrary. That he could be chaos among prophecy and at the same time be completely rational was an enigma to her.

Ann worried greatly about Richard because such contradictory aspects of the gifted were occasionally a prelude to delusional behavior. The last thing they would want was a leader who was delusional.

But all of that was academic. The central problem was that while there was still lime they had to find some way to make sure he took up the cause fated to him in the prophecies and to fulfill his destiny. If they failed, if he failed, then all was lost.

Verna's message sat like the shadow of death in the back of Ann's mind.

Having spotted their light, Tom appeared out of the darkness, sprinting Through the long grass to meet them. «There you are,» he said to Ann. «Nathan will be happy that you're finally here. Come on and I'll show you the way.»

By the brief glimpse she got in the weak yellow light from the lantern, Tom's face looked troubled.

The big D'Haran led them deeper into the graveyard, where in areas there were rows of gently mounded graves outlined in stones. These had in be newer, because most of what Ann could see was nothing but tall grass that over time covered over stones and the graves they marked. In one area there were a few small granite gravestones. They were so weathered it could only be that they were ancient. Some of the graves were marked with simple boards with names carved in them. Most such markers had long ago turned to dust, leaving much of the graveyard looking like nothing more than a grassy field.

«Do you know what the fat bugs are that are making all the noise?» Jennsen asked Tom.

«I'm not sure,» Tom said. «I've never seen them before. They suddenly seem to be all over the place.»

Ann smiled to herself. «They're cicadas.»

Jennsen frowned back over her shoulder. «They're what?»

«Cicadas. You wouldn't know what they are. At the last molt you would have probably still been a toddler, too young to remember. The life cycle of these cicadas with the red eyes is seventeen years.»

«Seventeen years!» Jennsen said in astonishment. «You mean they only come out every seventeen years?»

«Without fail. After the females mate with these noisy fellows, they will lay their eggs in twigs. When they hatch, the nymphs will drop from the trees and burrow into the ground, not to emerge for another seventeen years where their life as adults will be brief.»

Jennsen and Tom murmured their amazement as they moved on into the graveyard. Ann couldn't see much of anything else by the light coming from Jennsen's lantern, except the dark shapes of trees moving in the occasional muggy breeze. As the three of them quietly slipped through the graveyard, cicadas chirped incessantly from the darkness all around. Ann used her Han to try to sense if anyone else was about, but she didn't feel anyone other than Tom and somewhere in the distance one other person, no doubt Nathan. Since Jennsen was one of the pristinely ungifted, she was intangible to Ann's Han.

Like Richard, Jennsen had been fathered by Darken Rahl. Births of the pristinely ungifted, such as Jennsen's, had been an unexpected and random side effect of the magic of the bond carried by every gifted Lord Rahl. In ancient times, when that trait began to spread, the solution had been to banish the pristinely ungifted, sealing them away in the forgotten land of Bandakar. After that, all ungifted offspring of the Lord Rahl were put to death.

Unlike any past Lord Rahl, Richard had been jubilant to discover that he had a sister. He would never allow her to be put to death for the nature of her birth, nor would he allow her and those like her to be forced into banishment.

Even though Ann had been around these people for some time now, she was still not used to how disorienting it could be. Even when one of them was standing right in front of her, Ann's ability said that there was no one there. It was a haunting sort of blindness, a loss of one of her senses that she had always taken for granted.

Jennsen had to take long strides to keep pace with Tom. To keep up with the two of them, Ann had to trot.

And then, as they came around a small knoll, a stone monument loomed up into view. The light from the lantern lit one side of a rectangular stone base that was a little taller than Ann, but not as tall as Jennsen. The coarse stone was heavily weathered and pitted, with stone molding carved around recessed squares on the sides. If it had ever been polished, the stone no longer showed any evidence of it. As the lantern light swept across the surface, it revealed layers of dirty discoloration from great age as well as the mottled growth of mustard-colored lichen. Atop the imposing base sat a large carved urn with stone grapes hanging out over one side. Grapes were a favorite of Nathan's.

As Tom led them around the front of the stone monument Ann was astonished to see that the rectangle of stone sat off killer.

On the far side, faint light oozed up from beneath it.

It appeared that the entire monument had been pivoted aside, revealing steep stone steps that led down into the ground, down into the soft glow of light.

Tom gave them both a meaningful look. «He's down in there.»

Jennsen leaned over a little and peered into the steep cavity. «Nathan is down there? Down those steps?»

«I'm afraid so,» Tom told her.

«What is this place?» Ann asked.

Tom shrugged apologetically. «I'm afraid I have no idea. I didn't even know this was here until just a little while ago when Nathan showed me where I could find him. He told me to send you down just as soon as you got here. He was pretty insistent about it. He doesn't want anyone knowing this place is here. He wanted me to stand lookout and keep any people away from the graveyard, although I really don't think anyone ever comes out here anymore, especially at night. The Bandakaran people aren't the kind to go looking for an adventure.»

«Unlike Nathan,» Ann muttered. She patted Tom's muscled arm. «Thank you, my boy. Best do as Nathan said and stand watch. I'll go down and see what this is all about.»

«We'll both go,» Jennsen said.

CHAPTER 11

Driven by worried curiosity, Ann immediately started down the dusty steps. Jennsen followed close on her heels. A landing turned them to the right and down another flight. At a third landing, a long run of stairs turned to the left. The dusty stone walls were uncomfortably close together. The ceiling hunkered low, even for Ann; Jennsen had to crouch. It felt to Ann like she was being swallowed down though a moldering guild into the graveyard's belly.

At the bottom of the steps she halted to stare in disbelief. Jennsen lei out a low whistle. Beyond was not a dungeon, but a strange, twisting room unlike any Ann had ever seen. The stone walls zigged and zagged at odd angles, each of its own design and independently of the others. Plastering covered some of the stone walls. In a series of the convoluted angles, the whole room snaked off into the distance, disappearing around projections and pointed corners.

The place had a strange orderly disorder about it that Ann found somewhat unsettling. Dark niches here and there in the plastered walls were surrounded with faded blue symbols and decorations that had flaked off in places. There were words as well, but they were too old and dull to be legible without careful study. Bookshelves as well as ancient wooden tables, all layered in dirt, sat in several places up against the angled walls.

Dead-still cobwebs, heavy with dust, hung everywhere like drapes meant to decorate the room beneath the graves. Dozens of candles sat on tables and in some of the empty niches, giving the whole place a soft, otherworldly glow, as if all the dead above Ann's head must periodically descend to this place to discuss matters important only to the deceased, and to welcome new members into their eternal order.

Beyond the diaphanous curtains of dust-choked cobwebs, amongst four massive tables that had been dragged together, stood Nathan. Disorderly stacks of books were piled high all around him on the tables.

«Ah, there you are,» Nathan called from his book foil.

Ann cast a sidelong glance at Jennsen.

«I had no idea that this place was down here,» the young woman said in answer to the question that remained unasked on Ann's tongue. Points of candlelight danced in her blue eyes. «I didn't even know this place existed.»

Ann looked around again. «I doubt anyone in the last few thousand years knew this place existed. I wonder how he found it.»

Nathan snapped a book shut and placed it on a pile behind him. His straight white hair brushed his broad shoulders as he turned back. His hooded, dark azure eyes fixed on Ann.

Ann caught the unspoken meaning in Nathan's gaze. She turned to Jennsen. «Why don't you go up and wait with Tom, my dear. It can be a lonely job standing watch in a graveyard.»

Jennsen looked disappointed, but seemed to understand their need to be left to their business. She flashed a smile. «Sure. I'll be right up top if you need anything.»

As the sound of Jennsen's footsteps on the stone stairs dwindled away into a distant, echoing whisper, Ann struck a weaving course through the vails of cobwebs.

«Nathan, what in the world is this place?»

«No need to whisper,» he said. «See how the walls turn at all those odd angles? It cuts the echo.»

Ann was a little surprised to hear that he was right. Usually, the echo in stone rooms was annoying, but this odd twisting room had the hush of the dead.

«There's something strangely familiar about the shape of this place.»

«Concealment spell,» the prophet said, offhandedly.

Ann frowned. «What?»

«The configuration of the whole thing is in the form of a concealment spell.» He gestured to each side when he saw the puzzled look she gave him. «It's not the layout of the entire place, the placement of rooms and the course of the various halls and passageways-like at the People's Palace —that is the spell-form, but rather it's the precise line of the walls themselves that make up the spell-form, as if someone drew the spell large on the ground and then simply built the walls touching right against that line before hollowing out the middle. Because the walls are a uniform thickness, that means that the outside of the walls are also the shape of the spell-form, so that lends lo reinforce the whole thing. Quite clever, actually.»

For such a spell to work, it had probably been drawn in blood and with the aid of human bones. There would have been ample supply of those at hand.

«Someone certainly went to a lot of trouble,» Ann said as she appraised the space again. This time she began to recognize some of the shapes and angles in opposition. «What exactly is this place used for?»

«I'm not entirely sure,» he admitted with a sigh. «I don't know if these books were meant to be buried with the dead for all time, or they were being hidden, or there was some other purpose.» Nathan beckoned with his hand. «This way. Let me show you something.»

Ann followed him through several of the zigzags, around turns, and past yet more shelves lined with dusty books, until they reached an area of niches three high to each side.

Nathan leaned an elbow against the wall. «Look there,» he said as he pointed a long finger downward, indicating one of the low, arched openings in the stone wall.

Ann stooped and peered inside. It contained a body.

All that was left were bones clothed in dusty tatters of robes. A leather belt circled the waist while a strap crossed over one shoulder. Skeletal arms were folded over the chest. Gold chains hung around the neck. Ann could see by the glint of light off the medallion on one of the chains that Nathan must have lifted it for a look, and in so doing his fingers had cleaned off the dust.

«Any idea who he is?» she asked as she straightened and folded her hands before herself.

Nathan leaned down close to her.

«I believe he was a prophet.»

«I thought there was no need to whisper.»

He arched an eyebrow as he straightened his frame to its considerable height. «There are a number of other people interred here.» He flicked a hand off toward the darkness. «Back that way.»

Ann wondered if they could all be prophets as well. «And the books?»

Nathan leaned down again, and whispered again. «Prophecy.»

She frowned and looked back the way they had come. «Prophecy? You mean all of them? Those are all books of prophecy?»

«Most of them.»

Excitement bubbled up through her. Books of prophecy were invaluable. They were the rarest of jewels. Such books could offer guidance, provide answers they needed, spare them futile endeavors, fill in gaps in their knowledge. Perhaps more than at any other time in history, they needed those answers. They needed to know more about the final battle in which Richard was supposed to lead them.

As of yet they had not discovered when this battle was to take place. With the frustrating vagary of prophecy, it could yet be many years off. For that matter, it was even possible that it was not to take place until Richard was an old man. With all the difficulties they had faced in the past several years, they could only hope that it was still many years off and they would have time to prepare. Prophecy could help with that.

The vaults at the Palace of the Prophets had been filled with thousands of volumes of prophecy, but they had all been destroyed along with the palace to prevent it from falling into the hands of Emperor Jagang. Better to lose such works for all time than allow evil to look upon their pages.

But no one knew of this place. This place was hidden beneath a concealment spell. The dizzying possibilities spun through Ann's mind.

«Nathan — this is wonderful.»

She turned and looked up at the man. He was watching her in a way that made her fidgety. She reached out and placed a hand on his arm.

«Nathan, this is more than we could ever have hoped.»

«This is something more than that,» he said cryptically as he started hack. «There are books here that make me doubt my sanity,» he said with a sullen flourish of an arm.

«Ah,» Ann quipped as she followed along in his wake, «verification at last.»

He halted and turned a glare on her. «This is nothing to joke about.»

Ann felt goose flesh ripple up her arms. «Show me then,» she said in a serious tone. «What is it you've found?»

He shook his head, seeming to lose his momentary flash of ill humor. «I'm not even sure.» His usual flamboyance was nowhere in evidence as he moved in among the tables he'd dragged together. His dark mood turned guarded. «I've been sorting the books.»

Ann wanted to hurry him along and get to the meat of his discovery, but she knew that when he was troubled it was best to let Nathan explain things in his own way, especially when there was arcane speculation involved.

«Sorting them?»

He nodded. «These here in this pile don't appear to be of any real use to us. Most are prophecy long since outdated, contain only irrelevant records, or are in unknown languages-things like that.»

He turned and slapped a hand to the top of another stack. Dust boiled up. «These here are all books that we had back at the palace.» He swept his hand back and forth in front of the stacks of books piled high on the table behind him. «All of them. This whole tableful.»

Her eyes wide, Ann glanced at the shelves and niches going back along the strange room. «There are a great many more books other than these you have here on the tables. This is only a fraction of them.»