Chainfire: Chainfire Trilogy Part 1

Of course, in times long past there would have been scribes who, besides their work of making copies of important works, attended the libraries and were responsible for specific sections. The master could then easily ask a few relevant questions, narrowing the search to the individual dedicated to the particular area of interest, and be pointed in the right direction. Now, without such specialists tending the libraries, the priceless information contained in the countless volumes was considerably more difficult to retrieve. In a way, the magnitude of information became a hinderance to its own purpose, and, like a soldier carrying so many weapons he couldn't move, nearly useless.

The books held in this one library alone represented almost an unimaginable amount of work by countless scholars and a great many prophets. A short stroll through the isles had revealed works here on history, geography, politics, the natural world, and prophecy that Verna had never seen before. A person could spend a lifetime lost in the place, and yet, Berdine had said that the People's Palace had a number of such libraries, from some that a variety of people were allowed to visit, to some that no one but the Lord Rahl, and, Verna assumed, his most trusted confidants, could enter. This library was one of the latter.

Berdine had said that because she knew High D'Haran, Darken Rahl had sometimes brought her into the most private of the libraries to get her opinion on translations of obscure passages in ancient texts. As a result, Berdine was in a unique position to know at least something about the wealth of potentially hazardous knowledge stored in the palace.

Not all prophecy was equally troublesome, though. A lot of it turned out to be incidental and rather harmless. What most people didn't realize was that a lot of prophetic space was taken up with what amounted to little more than the stuff of gossip.

But by no means was all prophecy so congenial or frivolous, and wandering through the titillating trivia of everyday lives tended to lull one into complacency and then when you least expected it, dark things came out of the pages to snatch at your soul.

While there were volumes that were by and large completely harmless, there were others that were, for anyone but the untrained, unsafe from the first words to the last. This particular library held some of the most dangerous books of prophecy Verna knew of, books that at the Palace of the Prophets were considered so volatile that they were not kept in the main vault, but in smaller, heavily shielded vaults restricted to all but a handful of people at the palace. The presence of those books was probably the reason why this particular library was a very private retreat for Master Rahl alone; Verna seriously doubted that the guards would have allowed her in had a Mord-Sith not been escorting her.

Verna could happily spend a great deal of time in such a cozy place, exploring countless books she had never seen before. Unfortunately, she didn't have the luxury of time. She idly wondered if Richard had ever even seen what was now his as the Lord Rahl.

Berdine tapped a finger to the blank page in The Glendhill Book of Deviation Theory. "I'm telling you, Prelate, I studied this book with Lord Rahl at the Wizard's Keep in Aydindril."

"So you said."

Verna found it interesting, to say the least, that Richard knew of The Glendhill Book of Deviation Theory. She found it even more curious, considering his distaste for prophecy and the fact that this book of prophecies was mostly about him, that he'd studied it.

There seemed no end to the curious little things that from time to time Verna discovered about Richard. Part of his dislike for prophecy, she knew, was his aversion to riddles: He hated them. She also knew, though, that in large measure his animus toward prophecy was due to his belief in free will, his belief that he himself, and not the hand of destiny, made his own life what it was.

While enormously complex and with layers of meaning beyond most people's comprehension, prophecy certainly did revolve around core elements of the preordained in its nature, and yet Richard had more than once fulfilled prophecy while at the same time proving it wrong.

Verna sourly suspected that, in a perverse way, prophecy had foretold of Richard's birth just so that he could come into the world to prove the concept of prophecy invalid.

Richard's actions had never been easy to predict, even, or perhaps especially, for prophecy. In the beginning Verna had been baffled by the things he would do and was perpetually unable to predict how he would react to situations or what he might do next. She had come to learn, though, that what she had thought was his confounding switching in a blink from one matter to something completely unrelated was, simply, at its core, his singular consistency.