Chainfire: Chainfire Trilogy Part 1

Richard felt goose bumps racing up his legs. He had no idea what the "Deep Nothing" was, but he didn't like the sound of it, or the sound of looking for bones. He refused to consider the dire implications.

Shota turned again to the road and started making her way toward her palace. She had not gone more than a dozen paces when she stopped and turned back. Her ageless eyes met his gaze.

"Beware the viper with four heads."

Richard cocked his head expectantly. "I don't know what that means —the viper with four heads."

"Whether or not you realize it right now, I have given you a fair trade. I have given you the answers you needed. You are the Seeker-or at least, you were; you will have to seek the meaning to be found in those answers."

With that, she turned for the final time and walked off through the golden light down the long road.

"Let's go," he said to Cara. "I'd not like to find out why we don't want to be here when it gets dark."

Cara cast him an icy glare. "I would imagine it has something to do with a murderous maniac wielding a deadly sword coming at you out of the darkness."

Richard gloomily supposed that she might be right. Samuel would probably not be content to simply have the sword. He would probably want to eliminate the rightful owner and thereby any chance that Richard might lay claim to it or somehow get it back.

Despite what Shota had said, the real thief had been Samuel. The Sword of Truth was the responsibility of the First Wizard. He was the one who named Seekers and gave them the sword. It did not belong to whoever might possess it by any means, it belonged to the true, wizard-named Seeker, and that was Richard.

With sickening dread, he realized that he had betrayed the trust his grandfather had placed in him when he had given Richard the sword.

But what value would the sword be to him if keeping it meant that Kahlan would lose her life?

There was no higher value to him than life.

CHAPTER 43

Richard was so deep in thought that he wasn't fully aware of the arduous climb up the steep face of the cliff and out of Agaden Reach. In the golden light of the valley below them the long shadows of trees lengthened across the green fields, yet the quiet beauty of the place as the sun sank behind the enfolding mountains was lost on him; he wanted to be far away from the valley and out of the swamp before darkness took hold for good. He tried to devote his efforts to that task, that mission, of putting one foot before the other, of moving, advancing.

By the time they reached the top of the cliff and the vast swamp guarding the approach to Shota's home, it was an early dusk in the deep niche of the towering mountains that ringed the place. Because the walls of rock cut the sunlight off early, it left the sky overhead a deep blue, but that light was unable to effectively penetrate the forest canopy, so that in the late day the vast green bog seemed mired in a perpetual gloom of half-night. The deep shadows were very different than those in Shota's valley. The shadows in the swamp concealed palpable but for the most part ordinary threats; the shadows around Shota concealed dangers that were not so easily appreciated, but that Richard suspected were far more pernicious.

The sounds of the dank swamp all around him, the chirps, the whistles, the hooting calls, the clicks, the distant cries, hardly registered in Richard's consciousness. He was deep in his own world of despair and purpose tangled together in a titanic struggle.

While Shota had told him a great deal about the blood beast that was hunting him, Nicci had already told him that he was being hunted by a beast conjured at Jagang's behest. The visit to Shota had not been worth the minutiae he learned about the beast. It was the precious few things that Shota had said at the end that really mattered to him. It was those things for which he had traveled to this place. It was for those things he had paid a price so dear that he was only now beginning to fully grasp its significance. His fingers itched to touch the hilt of his sword for reassurance, but that familiar and faithful weapon was no longer there.

He tried not to think about it, and yet he could think of little else. He felt relief that he had gained what he felt sure would be crucial information, but at the same time he felt a crushing sense of personal failure.

He paid only enough attention to where he was walking to keep from stepping on a yellow-and-black-banded snake he spotted coiled in the lap of a root, or letting the fuzzy spiders clinging to the underside of leaves silently slide down silken lines to alight on him. He skirted brush when something within hissed at him.