Terry Goodkind - Chainfire - Chainfire Trilogy Part 1

“But it is the Keeper who promises you immortality. You cannot grant it.”

“No, not if we seek it through the Keeper.”

“Then how can you possibly grant immortality? You don’t have any such power.”

“Oh, but we will, we will.”

“How?”

Tovi fell to coughing and Nicci had to do some swift work on the wound just to keep the woman alive. It was nearly two hours before she again had her conscious and calm.

“Sister Tovi,” she said once the woman had opened her eyes and looked like she was seeing again. “I’ve had to repair some of your injury. Now, before I can repair the rest of your wound and fully heal you—so that you can have your reward of life—I need to know the rest of it. How can you think that you can grant immortality? You don’t have that power.”

“We stole the boxes of Orden. We intend to use them to destroy all life—except that which we wish to have around, of course. With the power of Orden, we will hold sway over life and death. We will have the power to grant Richard Rahl immortality. See? Bond fulfilled.”

Nicci’s head was spinning. “Tovi, your story is too impossible. It’s more complicated than you make it.”

“Well, there are other parts to the plan. We found catacombs under the Palace of the Prophets.”

Nicci had had no idea that such catacombs existed, but she wanted the woman to go on with her story, so she just let her talk.

“That’s when it all started. When we got the idea. You see, we had been wandering the lands, looking for ways to satisfy the Keeper . . .” She clutched Nicci’s arm so hard it hurt. “He comes in our dreams. You know that. He comes to you as well. He comes and torments us, forcing us to do his bidding, to work to free him.”

Nicci pulled the clawlike hand off her arm. “Catacombs?”

“Yes. The catacombs. We discovered ancient catacombs and in them books. We found a book called Chainfire —”

Goose bumps ran up Nicci’s arms. “Chainfire, what does that mean? Is it a spell?”

“Oh, it is much more than anything so simple as a spell. It was from ancient times. The wizards of the time had come up with a new theory of how to alter memory—in other words, real events altered with Subtractive power, with all the disconnected parts spontaneously reconstructed independently of one another. Namely, how to make an individual disappear to everyone else by making people forget this person, even as soon as they’ve just seen them.

“But the wizards who came up with this theory were timid men, fearful of unleashing such things not only because they realized that such a linked event would cause irreparable damage to the subject, but because there was no way for them to control it once it was initiated, it would be self-actuating and self-sustaining.”

“What do you mean? What does it do?”

“It unravels people’s memory of the subject, but that ignition starts a cascade event that can’t be predicted or controlled. It then burns through links they have with others, and then others those people know, and so on. It eventually unravels connections so that it corrupts everything. For our purposes, though, it doesn’t really matter, since our aim is to undo life anyway. For fear that it would be discovered what we were doing, we destroyed the book, and the catacombs.”

“But why did you need to destroy the memory of someone?”

“Not just someone, but the memory of the woman who bought us the bond in the first place, Kahlan Amnell, Richard Rahl’s love. By creating a Chainfire event, we ended up with a woman no one remembers.”

“But what can that possibly gain you?”

“The boxes of Orden. We used her to get the boxes, so that we can free the Keeper. With the boxes, we can grant Richard immortal life at the same time we also free the Keeper.

“The Keeper whispered to us in our dreams that Richard has the secret to opening the boxes, he has a necessary knowledge memorized. It exists nowhere else. Darken Rahl revealed it to the Keeper. Richard knows the way to unlock the secrets of Orden, only this time, we know the trick that defeated Darken Rahl.

“The book he knows says that we need a Confessor to open the boxes. And now we have a Confessor who no one remembers—so no one can bother us about her.”

“What about prophecy disappearing? Was that caused by Chainfire?”

“It’s part of Chainfire. They called it the Chainfire corollary. Part of the initiation phase of Chainfire requires that prophecy also be ignited with a Chainfire event, much the same as people’s memories are cast into the conflagration. The Chainfire event feeds on those memories to sustain the event, therefore prophecy must be involved as well. A blank is found in the proper fork—a place where a prophet left a space, should a future prophet wish to complete the work. We then fill in that void in prophecy with a completing prophecy which has the Chainfire formula invested in it. A Chainfire event thus infects and consumes all the associated prophecy on the branch, starting with related prophecy, either in subject or in chronology—in this case both: Kahlan, the woman we wiped away in life, is thus also wiped away in prophecy by the Chainfire corollary.”

“You seem to have it all worked out,” Nicci said.

Tovi grinned through the pain. “It gets better.”

“Better? How could it possibly get more delicious than this?”

“There is a counter to Chainfire.” Tovi giggled with the glee of it.

“A counter? You mean you risk Richard finding a counter to what you have done, a counter that could bring the entire plan crashing down?”

Tovi tried to stifle the giggle, but it bubbled up again. Despite the obvious pain, she was enjoying herself too much to stop. “This is the best part of all. The ancient wizards who came up with the Chainfire theory realized the potential for the total destruction of life. So they created a counter, should a Chainfire event ever somehow come to pass.”

Nicci gritted her teeth. “What counter?”

“The boxes of Orden.”

Nicci’s eyes widened. “The boxes of Orden were created to be the counter to the Chainfire event you’ve initiated?”

“That’s right. Isn’t that delicious? What’s more, we’ve put the boxes in play.”

Nicci let out a deep breath. “Well, like I said, you seem to have it all figured out.”

Tovi winced. “Well—almost. There is only one minor issue.”

“Like what?”

“Well, you see, the stupid bitch only brought out one box the first time we sent her in. We couldn’t allow the boxes to be seen, because, unlike Richard’s love, people would remember seeing the boxes of Orden.

“Kahlan said she had no room in her pack. Sister Ulicia was furious. She beat the girl to a bloody mess—you would have loved it, Sister Nicci—and told her to leave something out to make room if she had to, then sent her back in to get the other two boxes.”

Tovi winced under a pang of pain. “We feared to wait, though. Sister Ulicia sent me on with the first box and said she would catch up with us later.” Tovi groaned under the agony of another stitch of pain. “I had the first box with me. The Seeker, the one with Sword of Truth, anyway, surprised me and ran me though. He snatched the box. Once Kahlan finally retrieved them, Sister Ulicia then had those two and thought that I had the third, so before she left the palace, she put the magic of Orden in play.”

Nicci staggered to her feet. She felt dizzy. She could hardly believe it. But she knew, now, that it was all true. Richard had been right all along. With almost nothing to go on, he had basically figured it all out. And all along no one in the world would listen to him—no one in a world that was unraveling around them in an uncontrolled Chainfire event.