Phantom, Page 3

  The next time she opened her eyes, Kahlan saw the girl cringing before the Sisters as they towered over her.

  "I don't know," the girl was saying. "I don't know why she left. She said she had to be on her way to Caska."

  The room rang with silence.

  "Caska?" Sister Armina finally asked.

  "Yes, that's what she said. She had to get to Caska."

  "Did she have anything with her?"

  "With her?" the girl whined, still sobbing and shivering. "I don't understand. What do you mean, with her?"

  "With her!" Sister Ulicia screamed. "What did she have with her! She had to be carrying things—a pack, a waterskin. But she had other things. Did you see anything else of what she had with her?"

  When the girl hesitated, Sister Ulicia smacked her across the face hard enough to have loosened her teeth.

  "Did you see anything she had with her?"

  A long string of blood from the girl's nose lay horizontally across her cheek. "When she was at supper one day, I went to take her clean towels and I saw something in her room. Something strange."

  Sister Cecilia leaned down. "Strange? Like what?"

  "It was, it was like a… a box. She had it wrapped in a white dress, but the dress was silky smooth and it had partly slipped off the box. It was like a box—only it was all black. But not black like paint. It was black like night itself. Black like it would take the light right out of the day."

  The three Sisters straightened and stood in silence.

  Kahlan knew exactly what the girl was talking about. Kahlan had gone in and taken all three of those boxes from the Garden of Life in the People's Palace—from Lord Rahl's palace.

  When she had brought the first one out, Sister Ulicia had been furious at Kahlan for not bringing all three of them out at once, but they were larger than expected and there had been no room to hide them all in her pack, so Kahlan had at first brought out only one. Sister Ulicia had wrapped that vile thing in Kahlan's white dress and had given it to Tovi, telling her to hurry and be on her way, that they would all meet up later. Sister Ulicia hadn't wanted to risk getting caught in the palace with one of (he three boxes and so she hadn't wanted Sister Tovi to wait while Kahlan went back up into the Garden of Life after the other two boxes.

  "Why did Tovi go to Caska?" Sister Ulicia asked.

  "I don't know," the girl wept. "I don't know, I swear I don't. I only know that I heard her say to my parents that she had to be on her way to Caska. She left a few days back."

  In the quiet, lying against the floor, Kahlan struggled to breathe. Each breath sent agonizing stitches of pain through her ribs. She knew that it was only going to be the beginning of the pain. When the Sisters finished with the girl they would turn their attention to Kahlan.

  "Maybe we had better get some sleep in out of the rain," Sister Armina finally suggested. "We can start out early."

  Sister Ulicia, her fist with the dacra on her hip, paced between the girl and the butcher block, thinking. Shards of pottery crunched under her hoots.

  "No," she said as she turned back to the others. "Something is wrong."

  "You mean with the spell-form? You mean because of the man?"

  Sister Ulicia waved a hand dismissively. "An anomaly. Nothing more. No, something is wrong about the rest of it. Why would Tovi leave? She had explicit instructions to meet us here. And she was here—but then she leaves. There were no other guests, no Imperial Order troops in the area, she knew we were on our way, and yet she leaves. It makes no sense."

  "And why Caska?" Sister Cecilia asked. "Why would she head for Caska?"

  Sister Ulicia turned back to the girl. "Who visited Tovi while she was here? Who came to see her?"

  "I already told you, no one. No one at all came here while the old woman was staying with us. We had no other callers or guests. She was the only one here. This place is out of the way. People don't come here for stretches."

  Sister Ulicia went back to her pacing. "I don't like it. Something is wrong about this, but I can't put my finger on it."

  "I agree," Sister Cecilia said. "Tovi wouldn't just leave."

  "And yet she did. Why?" Sister Ulicia came to a stop before the girl. "Did she say anything else, or leave a message—perhaps a letter?"

  The girl, sniffling back a sob, shook her head.

  "We have no choice," Sister Ulicia muttered. "We're going to have to follow Tovi to Caska."

  Sister Armina gestured toward the front door. "Tonight? In the rain? Don't you think we ought to wait until morning?"

  Sister Ulicia, deep in thought, looked up at the woman. "What if someone shows up? We don't need any more complications if we're to accomplish our task. We certainly don't need Jagang or his troops getting a whiff of us being about. We need to get to Tovi and we need to get that box—we all know what's at stake." She took the measure of both women's grave expressions before going on. "What we don't need are any witnesses who can report that we were here and what we're looking for."

  Kahlan knew very well what Sister Ulicia was getting at.

  "Please," she managed as she pushed herself up on shaky arms, "please, leave her be. She's just a little girl. She doesn't know anything of any value to anyone."

  "She knows Tovi was here. She knows what Tovi has with her." Sister Ulicia's brow drew tight with displeasure. "She knows we were here looking for her."

  Kahlan struggled to put force into her voice. "She is nothing to you. You're sorceresses; she is but a child. She can do you no harm."

  Sister Ulicia glanced briefly over her shoulder at the girl. "She also knows where we're going."

  Sister Ulicia looked deliberately into Kahlan's eyes. Without turning to the girl behind her, and with sudden force, she slammed her dacra back into the girl's midsection.

  The girl gasped in shock.

  Still staring down at Kahlan, Sister Ulicia smiled at such a deed as only evil could smile. Kahlan thought that this must be what it would be like looking into the eyes of the Keeper of the Dead in his lair in the darkest depths of the eternity of the underworld.

  Sister Ulicia arched an eyebrow. "I don't intend to leave any loose ends."

  Light seemed to flash from within the girl's wide eyes. She went slack and fell heavily to the floor. Her arms sprawled out at crazy angles. Her lifeless gaze stared fixedly right at Kahlan as if to denounce her for not keeping her word.

  Her promise to the girl—I'll protect you—rang through Kahlan's mind.

  She cried out in helpless fury as she pounded her fists against the floor.

  And then she cried out in sudden pain as she was flung back against the wall. Rather than crash to the floor, she stuck there as if held by a great strength. The strength, she knew, was magic.

  She couldn't breathe. One of the Sisters was using her power to constrict Kahlan's throat. She strained, trying to get air, as she clawed at the iron collar around her neck.

  Sister Ulicia approached and put her face close to Kahlan's.

  "You are lucky this day," she said in a venomous voice. "We don't have time to make you regret your disobedience—not right now, anyway. But don't think that you are going to get away with it without suffering the consequences."

  "No, Sister," Kahlan managed to say with great effort. She knew that not to answer would only make it worse yet.

  "I guess that you're simply too stupid to comprehend how insignificant and powerless you are in the face of your betters. Perhaps this time, when you are given another lesson, even one as lowly and ignorant as you will understand it."

  "Yes, Sister."

  Even though she knew quite well what they would make her endure to teach her that lesson, Kahlan would have done the same thing again. She regretted only failing to protect the girl, as she had promised. The day she had taken those three boxes out of Lord Rahl's palace, she had left in their place her most prized possession: a small statue of a proud woman, her lists at her side, her back arched, and her head thrown back as if facing forces that
would subdue her but could not.

  Kahlan had gathered strength that day in Richard Rahl's palace. Standing in his garden, looking back at the proud statue she'd had to leave there, Kahlan had sworn that she would have her life back. Having her life back meant fighting for life, even if it was the life of a little girl she didn't know.

  "Let's go," Sister Ulicia growled as she marched toward the door, expecting everyone to follow.

  Kahlan's boots thumped down on the floor when the force pressing her to the wall abruptly released her.

  She collapsed to her knees, her bloody hands comforting her throat as she gasped for air. Her fingers encountered the hated collar by which the Sisters controlled her.

  "Move," Sister Cecilia ordered in a tone that had Kahlan scrambling to her feet.

  She glanced over her shoulder and saw the poor girl's dead eyes staring at her, watching her go.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 3

  Richard stood suddenly. The legs of the heavy wooden chair he'd been silting in chattered as they slid back across the rough stone floor. His fingertips still rested on the edge of the table where the book he'd been reading lay open, waiting, before the silver lantern.

  There was something wrong with the air.

  Not with the way it smelled, or with the temperature, or with the humidity, although it was a warm and sticky night. It was the air itself. Something felt wrong about the air.

  Richard couldn't imagine why he would suddenly be struck with such a thought. He couldn't even begin to imagine what it was that could be the cause of such an odd notion. There were no windows in the small reading room, so he didn't know what it was like outside—if it was clear, or windy, or stormy. He knew only that it was deep in the night.

  Cara, not far away behind him, stood up from the thickly padded brown leather chair where she, too, had been reading. She waited, but said nothing.

  Richard had asked her to read several historical volumes he'd found. Whatever she could find out about the ancient times when the Chainfire book had been written might prove helpful. She hadn't complained about the task. Cara rarely complained about anything as long as it didn't in any way prevent her from protecting him. Since she was able to stay right there in the room with him, she'd had no objections to reading the books he'd given her. One of the other Mord-Sith, Berdine, could read High D'Haran and had in the past been very helpful with things written in the ancient language often found in rare books, but Berdine was far away at the People's Palace. That still left uncountable volumes written in their own language for Cara to review.

  Cara watched him as he peered around at the paneled walls, his gaze passing methodically over the ornamental oddities on the shelves: the lacquered boxes with inlaid silver designs, the small figures of dancers carved from bone, the smooth stones lying in velvet-lined boxes, and the decorative glass vases.

  "Lord Rahl," she finally asked, "is something wrong?"

  Richard glanced back over his shoulder. "Yes. There's something wrong with the air."

  He realized only after seeing the tense concern in her expression that it must have sounded absurd saying that there was something wrong with the air.

  To Cara, though, no matter how absurd it might have sounded, all that really mattered was that he thought there was some kind of trouble, and trouble meant a potential threat. Her leather outfit creaked as she spun her Agiel up into her fist. Weapon at the ready, she peered around the little room, searching the shadows as if a ghost might pop out of the woodwork.

  Her brow drew tighter. "The beast, do you think?"

  Richard hadn't considered that possibility. The beast that Jagang had ordered his captured Sisters of the Dark to conjure and send after Richard was always a potential threat. There had been several times in the past when it had seemed to appear out of the very air itself.

  Try as he might, Richard couldn't tell precisely what it was that felt wrong to him. Although he couldn't put his finger on the source of the sensation, it seemed like maybe it was something he should remember, something he should know, something he should recognize. He couldn't decide if such a feeling was real or merely his imagination.

  He shook his head. "No… I don't think it's the beast. Not wrong in that way."

  "Lord Rahl, on top of everything else, you've been up most of the night reading. Perhaps it's just that you're exhausted."

  There were times when he did wake with a start just as he began to doze off, foggy and disoriented from the gathering descent into the dark grasp of nightmares that he never remembered when he woke. But this impression was different; it was not something borne out of the dullness of dozing off to sleep. Besides, despite his fatigue, he hadn't been about to fall asleep; he was too anxious to sleep.

  It had been only the day before that he had finally convinced the others that Kahlan was real, that she existed, and that she wasn't a figment of his imagination or a delusion caused by an injury. At long last they now knew that Kahlan was not some crazy dream he was having. Now that he at last had some help, his sense of urgency to find her drove him on and kept him wide awake. He couldn't bear to take the time to stop and rest—not now that he had some pieces of the puzzle.

  Back near the People's Palace, questioning Tovi just before she died, Nicci had learned the terrible details of how those four women—Sisters Ulicia, Cecilia, Armina, and Tovi—had invoked a Chainfire event. When they unleashed powers that had for thousands of years been secreted away in an ancient book, everyone's memory of Kahlan—except Richard's—had in an instant been wiped away. Somehow, his sword had protected his mind. While he had his memory of Kahlan, his sword had later been forfeited in the effort to find her.

  The theory of a Chainfire event had originated with wizards in ancient times. They had been searching for a method that would allow them to slip unseen, ignored, and forgotten among an enemy. They postulated that there was a method to alter people's memory with Subtractive power in a way that all the resulting disconnected parts of a person's recollection would spontaneously reconstruct and connect themselves to one another, with the direct consequence being the creation of erroneous memory to fill the voids that had been created when the subject of the conjuring was wiped from people's minds.

  The wizards who had come up with the theoretical process had, in the end, come to believe that unleashing such an event might very well engender a cascade of events that couldn't be predicted or controlled. They speculated that, much like a wildfire, it would continue to burn through links with other people whose memory had not initially been altered. In the end, they had realized that, with such incalculable, sweeping, and calamitous consequences, a Chainfire event had the very real potential to unravel the world of life itself, so they had never dared even to test it.

  Those four Sisters of the Dark had—on Kahlan. They didn't care if they unraveled the world of life. In fact, that was their ultimate goal.

  Richard had no time to sleep. Now that he had finally convinced Nicci, Zedd, Cara, Nathan, and Ann that he wasn't crazy and that Kahlan existed in reality if no longer in their memories, they were committed to helping him.

  He desperately needed that help. He had to find Kahlan. She was his life. She completed him. She was everything to him. Her unique intelligence had captivated him from the first moment he met her. The memory of her beautiful green eyes, her smile, her touch, haunted him. Every waking moment was a living nightmare that there was something more he should be doing.

  While no one else could remember Kahlan, it seemed that Richard could think of nothing else. It often felt to him as if he were her only connection to the world and if he were to stop remembering her, stop thinking about her, she would finally, once and for all… truly cease to exist.

  But he realized that if he was to accomplish anything, if he was to ever find Kahlan, he sometimes had to force his thoughts of her aside in order to concentrate on the matters at hand.

  He turned to Cara. "You don't feel anything odd?"

  She arched
an eyebrow. "We're in the Wizard's Keep, Lord Rahl—who wouldn't feel odd? This place makes my skin crawl."

  "Any worse than usual?"

  She heaved a sigh as she ran her hand down the long, single blond braid lying over the front of her shoulder.

  "No."

  Richard snatched up a lantern. "Come on."

  He swept out of the small room and into a long hall layered with thick carpets, as if there were too many carpets on hand and the corridor had been the only place that could be found to put them. They were mostly classic designs woven in subdued colors, but a few peeking out from underneath were composed of bright yellows and oranges.

  The carpets muted his boots as he marched past double doors to each side opened into dark rooms. Cara, with her long legs, had no difficulty keeping up with him. Richard knew that a number of the rooms were libraries, while others were elaborately decorated rooms seeming to serve no purpose other than to lead to other rooms, which led to other rooms, some simple and some ornate, all a part of the inscrutable and complex maze that was the Keep.

  At an intersection Richard took a right, down a hall with walls thickly plastered in spiral designs that had mellowed over the centuries to a warm golden brown. When they reached a stairway Richard hooked his hand on the polished white marble newel post and took to the stairs heading down. Glancing up the stairwell, he could see it climb around the square shaft high up into darkness, into the distant upper reaches of the Keep.

  "Where are we going?" Cara asked.

  Richard was a bit startled by the question. "I don't know."

  Cara shot him a dark look. "You just thought we would go search through a place with thousands upon thousands of rooms, a place as big as a mountain, a place built partly into a mountain, until you happen across something?"

  "There's something wrong with the air. I'm just following that perception of it."