Terry Goodkind - Phantom - Chainfire Trilogy Part 2

“Well,” she said, a bit perplexed, “I could have used some help.”

“Is that so?” He appeared unmoved by her complaint. “You look to have managed.”

“But you don’t know. It was terrible. They locked me up in the box again, and they locked my tongue so that I couldn’t talk.”

Chase eyed her askance. “I don’t suppose you brought that tongue lock with you, did you? It sounds like a useful device.”

Rachel grinned and hugged him around his waist. When she had first met him she had to hug his leg because that was all she could reach. She basked in the comfort of his big hand on her back. It felt like everything in the world was right again.

“I thought you were dead,” she said as she started to cry.

He ruffled her chopped-off hair. “I wouldn’t do that to you, little one. I promised to take care of you, and I meant it.”

“I guess that I’m stuck with being your daughter.”

“Guess so. Your hair is ugly, though. You’ll have to grow it back if you want to stay with me. You can’t keep chopping it off like that if you want to be my daughter. I told you that before.”

Rachel grinned through her tears.

Chase was alive.

With Cara right on her heels, Nicci strode through the immense brass-clad doors covered in elaborate, engraved symbols. A flickering flash of lightning came in through the dozen round-topped windows between the towering mahogany columns to illuminate row upon row of shelves all around the cavernous room. They had managed to patch only the worst of the damage to the two-story-tall windows—enough, they hoped, that the room could be used for its intended purpose as a containment field. Some of the heavy dark green velvet draperies with gold fringe were getting wet as rain blew in the remaining holes on some of the stronger gusts.

Seeing what was in the center of the room, floating above the large table Nicci had once floated above herself, she hoped that a bit of errant rain would be all that came in through those missing parts of the windows.

Rushing to meet her, Zedd gripped her shoulders. Desperation was clearly evident in his eyes.

“Did you find him? He’s alive, isn’t he? Is he all right?”

Nicci took a breath. “Zedd, he survived the events in the sliph—I at least found out that much.”

The sliph had also already told them that much. Rikka had been there, guarding the well, when the sliph had unexpectedly returned. They were all surprised that the sliph had returned at all, much less returned to tell them what had happened.

The silver creature had abruptly been eager to talk—up to a point—to tell them what had happened to Richard. It wasn’t because the sliph wanted to tell where she had been with one of her travelers, but rather that Richard, her master, had told the sliph to tell them that he was safe and where he had gone. She was eager to do his bidding.

Unfortunately, the sliph’s nature was to be secretive, and they weren’t able to get straight answers from her on much more of it. Zedd had said that the sliph wasn’t being perverse; she simply couldn’t help the way others had created her. She was being true to her nature. He said that they would just have to go along with the sliph’s way of revealing information and do their best to learn what they could from her.

Zedd had also detected on the sliph the trace residue power left by a witch woman. They were pretty sure that it had to be Six. They weren’t sure what Six was up to, but at least they knew from the sliph that Richard had somehow escaped her clutches.

“But where is he? Did the sliph take you there? Take you where she said she left him?”

“She did.” Nicci glanced at the Mord-Sith and then laid a hand on Zedd’s shoulder. “After we got to the place where the sliph had taken him, she then told us where he had gone: to the land of the night wisps. We still had to travel some distance to get there.”

Zedd stared in astonishment. “The night wisps?”

“Yes. But Richard wasn’t there.”

“At least he’s alive. It sounds like he was acting on his own volition, and not that of a witch woman,” Zedd said, sounding a little relieved. “What did they say? What were the wisps able to tell you?”

Nicci heaved a sigh. “I wish you could travel so that you could have gone there, Zedd. Maybe they would have told you more than they would tell us. They wouldn’t even allow us to enter beyond this strange, dead forest.”

“Dead forest? What dead forest?”

Nicci lifted her hands. “I don’t know, Zedd. I’m no expert in the outdoors. There was this vast area of oaks but they were all dead—”

“The oak wood is dead?” Zedd leaned closer to her. “Are you serious? The oaks are dead?”

Nicci shrugged. “I guess. They were oak trees. Richard taught me what an oak was. These were all dead, though.”

Zedd glanced away as he scratched an eyebrow. “Were there bones among these oaks?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Cara said, nodding. “There were bones scattered everywhere among those dead trees.”

“Bags,” Zedd cursed under his breath.

“Why?” Nicci asked. “What is it?”

Zedd looked up. “Bui you talked to the wisps?”

Nicci nodded. “Tam, he said his name was.”

Zedd rubbed his chin as he stared off in thought. “Tam . . . don’t know him.”

“There was another, named Jass,” Nicci added.

Zedd’s mouth twisted as he considered the name. “I’m afraid I don’t know that one, either.”

“Jass said that Richard was looking for a woman that the wisps should know.”

“That would have to be Kahlan,” Zedd said with a knowing nod.

“That’s what we figured, too,” Cara said.

“But why would he go to the wisps to look for her?” His question sounded more for himself than for Nicci, but she answered it anyway.

“The sliph wouldn’t tell us about any of that part, only where she took him. Apparently, Richard wasn’t specific enough about what he instructed the sliph to tell us. She won’t go beyond her explicit instructions. Like you said, it’s her nature.

“The wisps wouldn’t tell us why he had been there, either. They said that his reasons for being there were his own and were not necessarily for others to know. They said that they couldn’t reveal such things on his behalf.”

“Not for others—but, but . . .” His voice ended in sputtering agitation. Zedd looked back at both of them. “But didn’t they tell you anything about what Richard was doing there? Anything at all? We have to know why he would go to the wisps. He was on his way here, and then something happened to cost him his gift while traveling—probably something involving Six—so he went to the wisps? Why? What did they tell him? What happened when he was there?”

“I’m sorry, Zedd,” Nicci said. “We really weren’t able to find out much. The sliph did tell us some of it—what happened to Richard, where she took him, and that he went to the wisps—but she either doesn’t know anything more, or she simply doesn’t want to tell us the rest of it for some reason. Richard never returned to the sliph, but because he can no longer travel that only makes sense. It could be that the sliph really doesn’t know any more.

“Richard would probably have started out on foot. I imagine he would head back here, to the Keep. After all, that’s where he was going when something went wrong in the sliph. For some reason he went to the wisps, but that may have had more to do with geography than anything else—he was much closer to them than coming all the way back here, so he may have decided to make a quick stop there before heading back to us. It may be nothing more than that.