Confessor: Chainfire Trilogy Part 3

Using his finger, Richard began laying down those lines on Johnrock's face. They were the lines of parts of the dance, the forms used to meet the enemy. Each combination of lines making up an element had meaning. Cut, sidestep, thrust, twist, spin, slash, follow through, deliver death swiftly even as you prepare to meet the next target. The lines he put on Johnrock's right cheek were admonitions to watch for all that would come at you, without focusing too narrowly.

Besides the elements of the dance, Richard found himself drawing parts of spells he had seen. At first he didn't realize he was doing it. At first, as he drew those components, he had trouble recalling where he'd seen them before. Then he remembered that they were parts of the spells that Darken Rahl had drawn in the sorcerer's sand in the Garden of Life as he had invoked the magic necessary to open the boxes of Orden.

Richard realized only then that the visit by the strange, ghostly figure the previous night still weighed heavily on his mind. The voice had told him that he'd been named a player. This was the first day of winter. He had one year to open the correct box of Orden.

Richard had been exhausted, but he could think of little else after that encounter. He had been unable to get much sleep. Being distracted by the pain of the wound in his leg and the one on his back kept him from fully devoting his mind to reasoning it out. The first day of winter had brought the inspection by Jagang. With his sudden concern over how to avoid being recognized by Jagang and all the Sisters in the Order's encampment, Richard hadn't been able to consider how it was possible for him to be a player for the boxes of Orden.

He wondered if it could be some kind of mistake-some misdirection of magic caused by the contamination left by the chimes. Even if he had the knowledge, which he didn't, his gift had been cut off by that witch woman, Six, so he didn't see how he could have somehow inadvertently put the boxes in play. He couldn't imagine how such a thing as opening the correct box would be able to be accomplished without his gift. He wondered if Six could be at the center of it all, if it could be some part of a plot he didn't yet understand.

Back when Darken Rahl had been drawing those spells just before he opened one of the boxes, Richard had not understood anything about their composition. Zedd had told him that drawing such spells was dangerous in the extreme, and that one misplaced line, drawn by the right person, in the right circumstance, in the right medium, could invoke disaster. At the time all the drawings had seemed like arcane motifs executed with mysterious elements that were all part of some complex foreign language.

As Richard had come to learn more about magical designs and emblems, he had come to grasp the meaning behind some of their elements-in much the same way he had at first learned the ancient language of High D'Haran by first coming to recognize individual words. As his understanding of words grew, he was able to grasp the ideas the words were expressing.

In much that same way, he had come to learn that some of the parts of the spells Darken Rahl had drawn to open the boxes of Orden were also parts of the dance with death.

In a way that made sense. Zedd had once told him that the power of Orden was the power of life itself. The dance with death was really about preserving life, and Orden itself was centered around life and preserving it from the rampages of the Chainfire spell.

Richard dunked his finger back in the red paint and laid down an arcing line across Johnrock's forehead, then supported it with lines that created a symbol for centering strength. He was using elements he understood, but combining them in new ways to alter them. He didn't want a Sister to see the drawings and recognize their direct meaning. While the designs he was painting were composed of elements he knew, they were original.

The men who had gathered all around leaned in a little, spellbound by not just the process, but by the drawing itself. It had a kind of poetry to it. While they didn't understand the meaning of the lines, they experienced the totality of them as expressive of meaningful purpose, as important, and as exactly what they were: threatening.

"You know what this whole thing, this drawing, reminds me of?" one of the men asked.

"What?" Richard murmured as he added more to the emblem that stood for a powerful strike meant to break an opponent's strength.

"In a way it reminds me of the play of the game. I don't know why, but the lines kind of look like the movements of certain attacks in Ja'La."

Surprised that the man-another captive-could pick up such a significant trait from the drawing, Richard shot the man a questioning frown.