Chainfire: Chainfire Trilogy Part 1

Nicci nodded ever so slightly in concentration as she weighed his words. "I can see that your notion isn't at all the wild idea I thought it was at first. This is a line of reasoning that I've never encountered. I'll have to think about the possibilities. You may be the first to really understand the mechanism behind Jagang's scheme-or, for that matter, behind the creations of wizards in ancient times. This would explain a great many things that have nagged at me over the years."

Nicci's words were spoken with intellectual respect for a concept new to her, but a concept she fully grasped. No one who had ever spoken to Richard about magic had ever treated his ideas with such an insightful understanding. He felt as if this was the first time anyone had truly understood what he saw.

"Well," he said, "I've had to deal with Jagang's creations. Like I said, Nicholas was a great deal of trouble."

In the dim light, Nicci studied his face for a moment.

"Richard, from what I was able to find out," she said in a soft voice, "Nicholas was not Jagang's actual goal. Nicholas was merely practice."

"Practice!" Richard thumped his head back against the wall. "I don't know, Nicci. I'm not so sure about that. Nicholas the Slide was a formidable creation and one nasty piece of work. You don't know the trouble he caused us."

Nicci shrugged. "You defeated him."

Richard blinked in astonishment. "You make it sound like he was just a bump in the road. He wasn't. I'm telling you, he was a frightening creation who nearly killed us."

Nicci slowly shook her head. "And I'm telling you, as formidable as he may have been, Nicholas was not what Jagang was after. You told me not to sell the dream walker short-don't you now do that same thing. I never thought Nicholas was fully your match.

"What you say about the process of imagination in creating new things actually makes sense, especially in this instance. It may even explains few things. From the little I was able to learn, I believe that from the beginning Nicholas was only meant to expand the skills of the Sisters that Jagang had assigned to the task of creating weapons. Nicholas was not Jagang's objective, but simply practice on the way to that objective.

"With his dwindling number of Sisters that practice has gained a new urgency. Even so, he apparently has enough Sisters for the work of creating his weapons."

Richard felt goose bumps tingling up his arms as he began to realist the full implications of what Nicci was telling him.

"You mean to say that in creating Nicholas, it was like Jagang was just having his carpenters build a house as practice before he sends them on to build something vastly more complicated, like a palace?"

Nicci looked up at him and smiled. "Yes, that's it exactly."

"But he sent Nicholas with troops to govern a land as well as to capture us."

"A mere matter of convenience. Jagang had instilled in Nicholas a need to hunt you, but only as part of the testing for his greater goals. He didn't really expect the Slide to be able to accomplish his transcendent ambitions. The emperor may hate you for impeding his progress in conquering the New World, he may consider you unworthy as an opponent, and he may deem you an immoral heathen worthy only of death, but he's smart enough to give you credit for your ability. It's like when you said that you sent that captured soldier to assassinate Jagang. You didn't really expect that lone soldier to succeed at the difficult task of assassinating a well-guarded emperor, but the soldier was of no other value to you and since you thought that there was at least a chance that he might accomplish something, you might as well send him on the mission while you worked on far better ideas that you expected to have a more reasonable chance of success. And if the soldier was killed, then that was fine by you because he only got what was coming to him anyway.

"Nicholas was like that. He was a conjured creation, practice along the path to something altogether superior. In the scheme of things, Nicholas wasn't all that valuable to Jagang, so Jagang, instead of having him killed, him. If Nicholas succeeded, then Jagang would be ahead of the game and if you killed him, then you did him a service." Richard ran his hand back over his hair. He felt overwhelmed at the implications. He had criticized Nicci for not being open to seeing the larger picture, and here he had just been guilty of doing the same thing.

"Well then," he asked her, "what do you think Jagang might conjure up that's worse than Nicholas the Slide?"

The drone of the cicadas seemed oppressive, invasive, at that moment, as if they were the enemy surrounding him.

"I believe he has forged ahead and already created such a masterwork," Nicci said with quiet finality. She pulled her blanket up around her shoulders and held it closed at her throat. "I think that's what those men back there in the woods faced."

Richard watched her expression in the near darkness. "What do you know about what Jagang has done?"