Terry Goodkind - Chainfire - Chainfire Trilogy Part 1

Nicci nodded thoughtfully. “I guess all that makes sense, and I guess it’s as good a place as any. It gets you out of immediate danger and that’s what matters most right now.”

“All right, sliph,” Richard said, “we wish to travel to the People’s Palace in D’Hara.”

A liquid silver arm came up and slipped around all three of them. Richard felt the warm, undulating grip compressing to get a firm grasp on him. Nicci had his hand in a death grip.

“Lord Rahl?” Cara asked.

Richard held up the hand that wasn’t holding Nicci’s to halt the sliph before she could lift them into the well. “What?”

Cara bit her lip before finally speaking. “You’re holding Nicci’s hand. Will you hold my hand, too? I mean, I wouldn’t want the three of us to get separated.”

Richard tried not to smile at the worry on her face. Cara feared magic, even if she had already done this before.

“Sure,” Richard said as he took her hand. “I wouldn’t want us to get separated.”

A sudden thought struck him.

“Wait!” he said, stopping the sliph before she could start.

“Yes, Master?”

“Do you know a person named Kahlan? Kahlan Amnell, the Mother Confessor?”

“This name means nothing to me.”

Richard sighed in disappointment. He hadn’t really expected the sliph to know Kahlan. No one else did, either.

“Would you happen to know a place called the Deep Nothing?”

“I know several places in the Deep Nothing. Some have been destroyed, but some still exist. I can travel to them if you wish.”

Richard’s heart quickened in surprise. “Are any of these places in the Deep Nothing also a central site?”

“Yes, one of them,” the sliph said. “Caska, in the Deep Nothing, is a central site. Would you like to travel there?”

Richard glanced to both Nicci and Cara. “Do either of you know this place, Caska?”

Nicci shook her head.

Cara was frowning. “I think I remember hearing something about it when I was little. I’m sorry, Lord Rahl, but I don’t remember exactly what—just that the name sounds familiar from old legends.”

“What do you mean, legends?”

Cara shrugged. “Old D’Haran legends—something about dream casters. Stories people told. Something about the history of D’Hara. It seems like Caska is a name from olden times.”

Olden times. Dream casters. Richard remembered that when he’d skimmed through some of the book Gegendrauss that he’d found back in the shielded room, he had seen something about casting dreams, but he hadn’t translated the passage. Even though Richard was the leader of the D’Haran Empire, he knew very little about the mysterious D’Hara.

Even if Cara didn’t know more, Richard still felt as if he had just taken a step closer to finding Kahlan.

“We wish to travel,” he said to the sliph. “We wish to travel to Caska, in the Deep Nothing.”

It had been a long time since Richard had traveled in the sliph and he felt a bit apprehensive. But his excitement that he was finally making connections to find the answers that had for so long eluded him swept away any concern.

“We travel to Caska, then,” the sliph said, her voice echoing around the stone room where once Kolo had died standing guard over her as the great war had come to an end. At least, everyone thought it had come to an end, but those ancient conflicts had not ended so easily and now they had again flared to life.

The arm lifted all three of them off the wall and plunged them down into the silver froth. Nicci’s grip on his hand tightened and she gasped in a breath before going under.

With an arrow’s speed, Richard flew through the silken silence of the sliph, yet at the same time he glided with the slow grace of a raven riding the stilled currents above towering trees on a moonlit night. There was no heat, no cold. In the silence, sweet sounds filled his mind. His eyes beheld light and dark together in a single, spectral vision, while his lungs swelled with the sweet presence of the sliph as he breathed her into his soul.

It was rapture.

Abruptly, it ended.

Grainy darkness exploded in his sudden vision. There seemed to be blocky shapes all around as he broke the surface. Nicci’s hand gripped his in terror.

Breathe , the sliph told him.

Richard let out the sweet breath, emptying his lungs of the rapture. With a needful gasp, he sucked in the alien air. Cara, too, gasped in the hot, dusty air.

Nicci floated face down, rocking gently in the silver fluid.

Richard threw an arm over the stone wall at the side of the sliph, pulling Nicci with him. He took his bow off his back to get it out of his way and quickly set it against the outside of the wall. With the sliph’s help, he hopped up on the wall, and then with the sliph lifting her, pulled the dead weight of Nicci up enough to get her shoulders and head up into the warm, dark air.

Richard slapped her on the back. “Breathe, Nicci. Breathe. Come on, you have to let go of the sliph and breathe. Do it for me.”

At last she did. She gasped in the air, her arms flailing in terror at being confused and lost in such strange surroundings. Richard pulled her close as he helped her get her arms over the side and, panting, climb up on the wall.

Brackets on the walls nearby held glass spheres, like back at the Keep, that glowed brighter as he climbed out of the well.

“What do you think this place is?” Cara asked as she peered around in the dim light.

“That was—rapture,” Nicci said, still under the sway of the experience.

“I told you,” Richard said as he helped her climb out.

“It looks like we’re in a stone room of some kind,” Cara said as she walked around the perimeter of the room.

Richard made his way toward the darkness at one end and two larger spheres in tall iron brackets brightened with an eerie green glow. He saw that they flanked steps. The steps, though, marched up to the ceiling.

“That’s pretty strange,” Cara said as she stood on the second step, inspecting the dark ceiling.

“Here,” Nicci said. She was leaning over to the side of the steps. “There’s a metal plate.”

It was the kind of metal plate Richard had seen in other places. They were trigger plates for shields. Nicci tapped her palm against it but nothing happened.

Richard pressed his hand to the icy cold plate and stone started grating as it moved. Dust came down in streamers.

The three of them ducked back as they all peered around in the gloomy light, trying to figure out what, exactly, was moving. The ground trembled. It felt like the whole room might be shifting and somehow changing shape. Richard then realized that it was actually the ceiling that was pulling aside.

A growing patch of moonlight fell across the steps.

Richard had no idea where they were, other than down in a stone room that appeared to be buried. He didn’t know where Caska was, other than the sliph said that it was in the Deep Nothing, and he didn’t know where that was, so he didn’t really know what to expect. He felt decidedly uneasy.

He reached for his sword.

The sword wasn’t there. For what felt like the thousandth time, he felt the sinking regret of realizing why and where it now was.

He drew his long knife instead as he started up the steps in a crouch, ducking low not only so as not to hit his head on the ceiling before it had moved out of the way, but out of caution for who might be outside and have heard stone sliding aside. Cara, seeing him draw his knife, spun her Agiel up into her fist. She tried to get out ahead of him, but he held his arm out, keeping her behind to the left. Nicci was close behind to his right.