Confessor: Chainfire Trilogy Part 3

When Richard laid back the final fold, there, in the center of the cloth, lay a single grain of white sand.

He looked up sharply. "Where did you get this?"

All six pointed down.

"Dear spirits," Nicci whispered.

"What?" Cara asked, leaning over to look at the single grain of white sand sitting in the center of the cloth. "What is it?"

Richard glanced up at the Mord-Sith. "Sorcerer's sand."

The people were crypt staff, so that had to mean that they had found it down in the crypt somewhere. The sorcerer's sand shone with prismatic light, but he was still somewhat astonished that they would have found a single grain of it.

He also wondered where they had come across it-and if there was more.

"Can you show me where you found this?"

All six nodded vigorously.

Richard carefully folded up the cloth back around the grain of sorcerer's sand. He noticed as he did so that the place where the drop of ink had fallen had, because the cloth had been folded at the time, made two identical spots of ink on opposite ends of the cloth. When the cloth had been folded they had been together, touching, but when the cloth was opened the two spots were on opposite sides.

He stared at it a moment, thinking.

"Let's go," he finally said as he stuffed the cloth into his pocket. "Take me there."

CHAPTER 48

Richard stepped over the melted white stone and into Panis Rahl's tomb. The crypt staff waited outside in the hallway. They had urged Richard to go in alone, first, wanting him to visit the tomb before they dared to enter. It was the tomb, after all, of his grandfather. These were people who had lived and died by the incomprehensible protocol of the previous Lord Rahl visiting his venerated ancestors.

Richard, though, reserved his reverence for those who deserved it. Panis Rahl had been a tyrant with ambitions of conquest little different from those of his son, Darken Rahl. Panis Rahl might not have managed to accomplish the level of evil his son had, but it wasn't for lack of trying.

In the war Panis Rahl had started against neighboring lands, Zedd, as a young man, had been the one called upon to lead free people against D'Haran aggression. In the end, Zedd, acting as First Wizard, had killed Panis Rahl and put up the boundaries that had for most of Richard's life walled off D'Hara.

Even though many had eagerly supported Panis Rahl's lust for conquest, Zedd had not wanted to kill all of the people of D'Hara. Many of them, after all, were also the victims of that tyranny; having been unfortunate enough to be born under a tyrant was not a willful act on their part. So instead of killing all the D'Haran people, Zedd had put up the boundaries.

He said that, in the end, leaving them to suffer the consequences of their own actions was the worst punishment he could inflict upon them. It also gave them the chance to choose to change and make something of their lives. But with the boundaries, they would not be able to continue their aggression against others.

It would have worked, and Richard would still be living in peace back in Westland, had those boundaries not failed. Darken Rahl had helped them along in that deterioration by traveling through the underworld to get past them. Had the boundaries not come down, though, Richard would not have met Kahlan. Kahlan made his life worthwhile. She was his life.

Richard remembered years before, shortly after Darken Rahl had opened the box of Orden and been taken by its power, that one of the palace staff had come to tell Zedd that Panis Rahl's crypt was melting. Zedd had told the man to use specific white stone to seal the tomb before the condition spread to the rest of the palace.

That stopgap of white stone sealing the entrance of the tomb had since mostly melted and the strange condition was beginning to damage the entire room. The walls were beginning to distort, causing the slabs of pink granite to be pushed out of their former flat plane. In the hallway outside, the joints between the ceiling and walls were coming apart from the deformation within the room. If it wasn't stopped, it looked like it could continue to twist support walls until the structure of the palace eventually started falling in on itself.

Richard looked all around, taking appraisal of everything as he crossed the room. The light of fifty-seven torches reflected off his grandfather's gold-enshrouded coffin sitting on a pedestal, making it not only glow in the center of the cavernous room, but almost look as if it were floating above the white marble floor. Words were inscribed not only on the coffin, but into the granite walls all around the room.

"I hate pink," Nicci murmured to herself as she peered around at the polished pink granite walls and vaulted ceiling.

"Any idea why the walls would be melting?" Richard asked Nicci as she walked slowly around the room, carefully inspecting everything.

"That is what really frightens me," Nicci said.