"Wizard?" Ann frowned. "Who? Which wizard?"
"Marlin Pickard," Kahlan said.
"Marlin!" Ann sighed with a shake of her head. "The poor boy. What happened to him?"
"The Mother Confessor killed him," Cara said without hesitation. "She is a true sister of the Agiel."
Ann folded her hands in her lap and leaned toward Kahlan. "But how did you ever find out-"
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"We would expect him to try such a thing again," Richard interrupted, drawing Ann's attention back. "But can a dream walker invade the mind of... of something other than a person?"
Ann considered the question with more patience than Kahlan thought it merited. "No. I don't believe so."
"You 'don't believe so.' " Richard cocked his head. "Are you guessing, or are you certain? It's important. Please don't guess."
She shared a long look with Richard before finally shaking her head. "No. He can't do such a thing."
"She's right," Zedd insisted. "I know enough about what he can do to know what he can't do. A soul is needed. A soul like his own. Otherwise, it just won't work. Same as he couldn't project his mind into a rock to see what it was thinking."
With his first finger, Richard stroked his lower lip. "Then it's not Jagang," he muttered to himself.
Zedd rolled his eyes in exasperation. "What's not Jagang?"
Kahlan sighed. Sometimes attempting to follow Richard's reasoning was like trying to spoon ants.
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CHAPTER 6
RATHER THAN ANSWER ZEDD'S. question, Richard seemed to once again already be half a mile down a different road.
"The chimes. Did you take care of them? It's supposed to be a simple matter. Did you take care of it?"
"A simple matter?" Zedd's face stood out red against his shock of unruly white hair. "Who told you that!"
Richard looked surprised at the question. "I read it. So, did you take care of it?"
"We determined there was nothing to 'take care of,' " Ann said, her voice taking on an undertone of annoyance.
"That's right," Zedd grumbled. "What do you mean it's a simple matter?"
"Kolo said they were quite alarmed at first, but after investigating they discovered the chimes were a simple weapon and easily overcome." Richard threw up his hands. "How do you know it's not a problem? Are you certain?"
"Kolo? Bags, Richard, what are you talking about! Who's Kolo?"
Richard waggled a hand as if begging forbearance before he rose up and strode to the window. He lifted the curtain. The chicken wasn't there. While he stretched up on his toes to peer out into the driving rain, Kahlan answered for him.
"Richard found a journal in the Keep. It's written in High
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D'Haran. He and one of the Mord-Sith, Berdine, who knows a little of the dead language of High D'Haran, have worked very hard to translate some of it.
"The man who wrote the journal was a wizard at the Keep during the great war, but they don't know his name, so they call him Kolo, from a High D'Haran word meaning 'strong advisor.' The journal has proved invaluable."
Zedd turned to peer suspiciously at Richard. His gaze returned to Kahlan. The suspicion moved to his voice. "And just where did he find this journal?"
Richard began pacing, his fingertips to his forehead in -deep concentration. Zedd's hazel eyes waited for her answer.
"It was in the sliph's room. Down in the big tower." "The big tower." The way Zedd repeated her words sounded like an accusation. He again glanced briefly at Richard. "Don't tell me you mean the room that's sealed." "That's the one. When Richard destroyed the towers between the New and Old Worlds so he could get back here, the seal was blasted off that room, too. That's where he found the journal, Kolo's bones, and the sliph."
Richard halted over his grandfather. "Zedd, we'll tell you about all this later. Right now, I'd like to know why you don't think the chimes are here."
Kahlan frowned up at Richard. "Here? What does that mean, here?"
"Here in this world. Zedd, how do you know?" Zedd straightened a finger toward the empty spot in their circle on the floor around the Grace. "Sit down, Richard. You're making me jumpy, pacing back and forth like a hound wanting to be let out."
As Richard checked the window one last time before returning to sit, Kahlan asked Zedd, "What are the chimes?" "Oh," Zedd said with a shrug, "they're just some vexatious creatures. But-"
"Vexatious!" Ann slapped her forehead. "Try catastrophic!"
"And I called them forth?" Kahlan asked, anxiety rising
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in her voice. She had spoken the names of the three chimes to complete magic that saved Richard's life. She hadn't known what the words meant, but she had known that without them Richard would have died within a breath or two at most.
Zedd waggled a hand to allay her fears. "No, no. As Ann says, they have the potential to be troublesome, but-"
Richard hiked up his trousers at the knees as he folded his legs. "Zedd, please answer the question. How do you know they aren't here?"
"Because, the chimes are a work of threes. That's partly why there are three: Reechani, Sentrosi, Vasi."
Kahlan nearly leaped to her feet. "I thought you weren't supposed to say them aloud!"
"You are not. An ordinary person could say them with no ill effect. I can speak them aloud without calling them. Ann can, and Richard, too. But not those exceedingly rare people such as yourself."
"Why me?"
"Because you have magic powerful enough to summon their aid on behalf of another. But without the gift, which protects the veil, the chimes could also ride your magic across into this world. The names of the three chimes are supposed to be a secret."
"Then I might have called them into this world."
"Dear spirits," Richard whispered. His face had gone bloodless. "They could be here."
"No, no. There are countless safeguards, and numerous requirements that are exacting and extraordinary." Zedd held up a finger to silence Richard's question before it could come out his open mouth. "Among many other things; Kahlan, for example, would have to be your third wife."
Zedd flashed Richard a patronizing smirk! "Satisfied, Mister Read-it-in-a-book?"
Richard let out a breath. "Good." He sighed aloud again as the color returned to his face. "Good. She's only my second wife."
"What!" Zedd threw up his arms, nearly toppling back-
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ward. He huffed and hauled his sleeves back down. "What do you mean, she is your second wife? I've known you your whole life, Richard, and I know you've never loved anyone but Kahlan. Why in Creation would you marry someone else!" •
Richard cleared his throat as he shared a pained expression with Kahlan. "Look, it's a long story, but the end of it is that in order to get into the Temple of the Winds to stop the plague, I had to marry Nadine. That would make Kahlan my second wife."
"Nadine." Zedd let his jaw hang as he scratched the hollow of his cheek. "Nadine Brighton? That Nadine?"
"Yes." Richard poked at the dirt. "Nadine ... died shortly after the ceremony."
Zedd let out a low whistle. "Nadine was a nice girl- going to be a healer. The poor thing. Her parents will b devastated."
"Yes, the poor thing," Kahlan muttered under her breath. Nadine's dogged ambition had been to have Richard, and there had been few bounds to that ambition. Any number of times, Richard had told Nadine in explicit terms there was nothing between the two of them, never would be, and he wanted her gone as soon as possible. To Kahlan's exasperation, Nadine would simply smile and say, "Whatever you wish, Richard," as she continued to scheme.
Though she would never have wished Nadine any real harm, especially the horrible death she suffered, Kahlan could not pretend pity for the conniving strumpet, as Cara called her.
"Why is your face all red?" Zedd asked. Kahlan looked up. Zedd and Ann were watching her. "Um, well..." Kahlan changed the subject. "Wait a minute. When I spoke the three chimes I wasn't married to Richard.
We weren't married until we came here, to the Mud People. So, .you see, I wasn't even his wife at the time."
"That's even better," Ann said. "Removes another stepping-stone from the chimes' path."
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Richard's hand found Kahlan's. "Well, that may not be exactly true. When we had to say the words to fulfill the requirements for me to get into the temple, in our hearts we said the words to each other, so it could be said that we were married because of that vow of commitment.
"Sometimes magic, the spirit world's magic, anyway, works by such ambiguous rules."
Ann shifted her weight uncomfortably. "True enough."
"But no matter how you reason it out, that would still only make her your second wife." Zedd eyed them both suspiciously. "This story gets more complicated every time one of you opens your mouth. I need to hear the whole thing."
"Before we leave, we can tell you a bit of it. When you get to Aydindril, then we'll have the time to tell it all to you. But we need to return through the sliph right away."
"What's the hurry, my boy?"
"Jagang would like nothing better than to get his hands on the dangerous magic stored in the Wizard's Keep. If he did, it would be disastrous. Zedd, you would be the best one to protect the Keep, but in the meantime don't you think Kahlan and I would be better than nothing?
"At least we were there when Jagang sent Marlin and Sister Amelia to Aydindril."
"Amelia!" Ann closed her eyes as she squeezed her temples. "She's a Sister of the Dark. Do you know where she is, now?"
"The Mother Confessor killed her, too," Cara said from back at the door.
Kahlan scowled at the Mord-Sith. Cara grinned back like a proud sister.
Ann opened one eye to peer at Kahlan. "No small task. A wizard being directed by the dream walker, and now a woman wielding the Keeper's own dark talent."
"An act of desperation," Kahlan said. "Nothing more."
Zedd grunted a brief agreeable chuckle. "There can be powerful magic in acts of desperation."
"Much like the business of speaking the three chimes,"
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she said. "An act of desperation to save Richard's life. What are the chimes? Why were you so concerned?"
Zedd squirmed to get more comfortable on his bony bottom.
"The wrong person speaking their names to summon their assistance in keeping a person from crossing the line"-he tapped the line of the Grace representing the world of the dead-"can by misfortune of design call them into the world of life, where they can accomplish the purpose for which they were created: to end magic."
"They soak it up," Ann said, "like the parched ground soaks up a summer shower. They are beings of sorts, but not alive. They have no soul."
The lines in Zedd's face took a grim set as he nodded his agreement. "The chimes are creatures conjured of the other side, of the underworld. They would annul the magic in this world."
"You mean they hunt down and kill those with magic?" Kahlan asked. "Like the shadow people used to? Their touch is deadly?"
"No," Ann said. "They can and do kill, but just their being in this world, in time, is all it would take to extinguish magic. Eventually, any who derived their survival from magic would die. The weakest first. Eventually, even the strongest."
"Understand," Zedd cautioned, "that we don't know much about them. They were weapons of the great war, created by wizards with more power than I can fathom. The gift is no longer as it was."
"If the chimes were to somehow get to this world, and they ended magic," Richard asked, "would all those with the gift just not have it anymore? Would the Mud People, for instance, simply not be able to contact their spirit ancestors anymore? Would creatures of magic die out and that would be that? Just regular people and animals and trees and such left? Like where I grew up in Westland, where there was no magic?"
Kahlan could feel the faint rumble of thunder in the
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ground under her. The rain drummed on. The fire in the hearth hissed its ill will for its liquid antagonist.
"We can't answer that, my boy. It's not like there is precedent to which we can point. The world is complex beyond our comprehension. Only the Creator understands how it all works together."
The firelight cast Zedd's face in harsh angular shadows as he spoke with grim conviction. "But I fear it would be much worse than you paint it."
"Worse? Worse how?"
Fastidiously smoothing his robes along his thighs, Zedd took his time in responding.
"West of here, in the highlands above the Nareef Valley, the headwaters of the Dammar River gather, eventually to flow into the Drun River. These headwaters leach poisons from the ground of the highlands.
"The highlands are a bleak wasteland, with the occasional bleached bones of an animal that stayed too long and drank too much from the poison waters. It's a windy, desolate, deadly place."
Zedd opened his arms to gesture, suggesting the grand scale. "The thousand tiny runnels and runoff brooks from all the surrounding mountain slopes collect into a broad, shallow, swampy lake before continuing on to the valley below. The paka plant grows there in great abundance, especially at the broad south end, from where the waters descend. The paka is able to not only tolerate the poison, but thrive on it. Only the caterpillar of a moth eats some of the leaves of the paka and spins its cocoon among the fleshy stems.
"Warfer birds nest at the head of the Nareef Valley, on the cliffs just below this poison highland lake. One of their favorite foods is the berries of the paka plant that grows not far above, and so they are one of the few animals to frequent the highlands. They don't drink the water.',,'
"The berries aren't poison, then?" Richard asked.
"No. In a wonder of Creation, the paka grows strong on the contaminates from the water, but the berries it produces
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don't contain the poison, and the water that flows on down the mountain, filtered by all the paka, is pure and healthy. "Also living in the highlands is the gambit moth. The way it flits about makes it irresistible to warfer birds, which otherwise eat mostly seeds and berries. Living where it does, it is preyed on by few animals other than warfer birds.
"Now, the paka plant, you see, can't reproduce by itself. Perhaps because of the poisons in the water, its outer seed casing is hard as steel and will not open, so the plant inside can't sprout.
"Only magic can accomplish the task." Zedd's eyes narrowed, his arms spread wide, and his ringers splayed with the spinning of the tale. Kahlan recalled her wide-eyed child wonder at hearing the story of the gambit moth for the first time while sitting on the knee of a wizard up in the Keep.
"The gambit moth has such magic, in the dust on its wings. When the warfer birds eat the moth, along with the berries of the paka, the magic dust from the moth works inside the birds to breach the husk of the tiny seeds. In their droppings, the warfer birds thus sow the paka seeds, and because of the singular magic of the gambit moth, the paka's seeds can sprout.
"It is upon the paka, thus brought to leaf, that the gambit moth lays it eggs and where the new-hatched caterpillars eat and grow strong before they spin their cocoon to become gambit moths."
"So," Richard said, "if magic is ended, then ... what are you saying? That even creatures such as a moth with magic would no longer have it, and so the paka plant would die out, and then the warfer bird would starve, and the gambit moth would in turn have no paka plant for its caterpillars to eat, so it would perish?"
"Think," the old wizard whispered, "what else would happen."
"Well, for one thing, as the old paka plants died and no new ones grew, it would only seem logical that the water going into the Nareef Valley would become poisonous."
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"That's right, my boy. The water would poison the animals below. The deer would die. The raccoons, the porcupines, the voles, the owls, the songbirds. And any animal that ate their carcasses: wolves, coyotes, vultures. All would die." Zedd leaned forward, raising a finger. "
Even the worms."
Richard nodded. "Much of the livestock raised in the valley could eventually be poisoned. Much of the cropland could become tainted by the waters of the Dammar. It would be a disaster for the people and animals living in the Nareef Valley."
"Think of what would happen when the meat from that livestock was sold," Ann coached, "before anyone knew it was poison."
"Or the crops," Kahlan added.
5 Soul of the Fire Page 6