Terry Goodkind - Chainfire - Chainfire Trilogy Part 1

The silver arm swept them up. “Come, we will travel.”

Just before they plunged into the silvery froth, Nicci and Cara each seized one of his hands.

Nicci had hardly gotten her bearings, hardly recognized that they were in a marble room, hardly let the sliph out of her lungs and pulled in a desperate gasp of air, when Richard was already pulling her up over the wall by the hand.

Despite everything, she was still able, in some dim part of her mind, to thrill at holding his hand, for whatever reason.

She had thought that while in the sliph traveling to the People’s Palace, that she would be able to give thought to Richard’s strange new twist of finding a bit of a vine and leaping to the conclusion that the boxes of Orden were in play—all in an attempt to prove that Kahlan was real.

The room they were in was shielded. Richard pulled her and Cara through the powerful shield. They ran up a marble hall and out a double silver door with a lake embossed into the metal.

“I know this place,” Cara said. “I know where we are.”

“Good,” Richard said, “then you lead the way. And hurry.”

There were times when Nicci almost wished that she had gone along with Zedd, Ann, and Nathan’s plan to purge him of his memory of Kahlan.

Except for one thing. She had tried the theory on one of Jagang’s men back in Caska. She had tried to use Subtractive Magic to eliminate the man’s memory of the emperor. It sounded simple enough. She had done just as the three had wanted Nicci to do to Richard.

There had only been one problem.

It had killed the man. Killed him in a most horrifying fashion.

When she thought about how she had almost done that to Richard, how for a time she had let them talk her into it and had been committed to doing it, she had gotten so weak and dizzy that she had to sit down on the ground next to the dead soldier. Cara had thought Nicci had been about to pass out. The idea of what she had almost done left her shaking for an hour.

“Here,” Cara said as she led them up stairs that emptied into a broad corridor with parts of the roof glassed.

The light flooding in was reddish, so it was either almost sunset or just after dawn, Nicci didn’t know which. It was a disorienting feeling not to know if it was day or night.

The halls were filled with people. Many of them stopped to stare at the three people running along the corridor. Guards also noticed and came running, hands to weapons, until they saw Cara in her red leather outfit. Many of the people recognized Richard and dropped to a knee, bowing as he ran past. He didn’t slow to acknowledge them.

They went up a dizzying array of passages, over bridges, along balconies, between columns, and through rooms. Intermittently they ran up stairs. Occasionally Cara took them through service halls, undoubtedly as shortcuts.

Nicci took note of how magnificent the palace was, how remarkably beautiful. The patterned stone floors were laid with rare precision. There were grand statues—none as remarkable as the statue Richard had carved, but grand nonetheless. She saw a tapestry that was larger than any she had seen in her life. It depicted a sprawling battle and must have had several hundred horses in it.

“This way,” Cara said, pointing down a hall as she rushed toward it.

As they came around the corner, Cara crossed over to the other side of the passageway as she ran down it. Nicci, pulled along by her hand, would have liked to have discussed a number of things, to have asked some important and pointed questions, but it was all she could do to get her breath as she ran. Running was not something she really ever did until she met Richard.

Cara slid to slow down as she came to a pair of carved mahogany doors. Nicci was revolted to see the snakes carved into them. Without pause, Richard seized one of the door handles, a bronze skull, and yanked the door open.

Inside the quiet, carpeted room, four guards immediately sprang to block Richard’s path. They saw Cara, and looked at Richard again, uncertain.

“Lord Rahl?” one asked.

“That’s right,” Cara snapped. “Now, get out of the way.”

The men immediately pulled back, each putting a fist to their hearts.

“Has anything happened recently?” Richard asked as he caught his breath.

“Happened?”

“Intruders? Has anyone slipped in this way?”

The man snorted a laugh. “Hardly, Lord Rahl. We’d know if that happened and we’d not allow it.”

Richard nodded his thanks and raced to the marble stairs, nearly pulling Nicci’s arm out of the socket in the process. As they ran up the steps, Nicci thought that her legs might simply quit. Her muscles were so exhausted from the long run up through the palace that she could hardly make them go on, but she had to, for Richard.

At the top of the stairs, soldiers were running toward them, crossbows loaded with red-fletched arrows at the ready. They didn’t know it was the Lord Rahl. They thought someone was trying to get into the restricted area. Nicci hoped that someone got hold of their senses before one of the men got careless.

But by their reactions, Nicci realized that these men were highly trained and not prone to shooting arrows before they were sure of their target. Lucky for them, because she would have been faster.

“Commander General Trimack?” Richard asked an officer pushing his way through the ring of steel that had surrounded them.

The man stiffened and clapped a fist to his heart. “Lord Rahl!” He spotted the Mord-Sith. “Cara?”

Cara nodded in greeting.

Richard clasped arms with the man. “General, someone has gotten in here. They’ve taken the boxes in the Garden of Life.”

The general was momentarily struck speechless. “What? Lord Rahl, that’s not possible. You have to be mistaken. No one could get past us without our knowing it. It’s been peaceful as can be up here for ages. Why, we’ve only had one visitor.”

“Visitor? Who?”

“The Prelate. Verna. It was a while back. She was in the palace checking on something about books of magic, she said. She said that as long as she was here, she wanted to have a look to make sure the boxes were safe.”

“So you let her go in there?”

The general looked a bit indignant. A long scar stood out white when his face went red.

“No, Lord Rahl. I wouldn’t let her go in there. What we ended up doing was opening the doors so she could look in to see that everything was safe.”

“Look in?”

“That’s right. We surrounded her with men, all pointing these special arrows at her—arrows Nathan Rahl found for us that will stop even the gifted. We had her ringed in steel. The poor woman looked like a pincushion about to happen.”

Men all around nodded at the general’s words.

“She looked in the garden and said she was relieved to see that everything was fine. I took a look myself and saw the three black boxes sitting on the stone slab across the room. But I never let the woman set foot beyond the doors, I swear.”

Richard heaved a sigh. “And that’s it? No one else has opened those doors?”

“No, Lord Rahl. No one else has even been up here but my men. No one. We don’t let anyone even use these halls around the Garden of Life. As you may recall, you were rather insistent about it the last time you were here.”

Richard nodded, thinking. He looked up. “Well, let’s go have a look.”

The men, all jangling with weapons and armor, followed the surprise visitors down the polished granite hall until they reached two huge, gold covered doors.

Without waiting for someone else to do it, Richard pulled one of the heavy doors open and started into the room. The soldiers paused at the doors. This was apparently sacred ground, a sanctuary for the master of the palace alone, and unless invited by the Lord Rahl, none of them would enter. Richard didn’t invite them as he rushed off on his own.