Phantom: Chainfire Trilogy Part 2

"Where are we going?" Cara asked, rushing to follow behind.

"Do you trust Richard? Trust him with your life?"

"Of course," Cara said without an instant of hesitation.

Nicci nodded as she continued on.

She passed corridors, intersections, rooms, and stairs without really seeing them. In a daze of purpose, she finally reached the hardened area of the Keep and the grand room where the verification web had nearly taken her life. She would have died had it not been for Richard. He insisted on finding a way to save her when no one else believed it could be done.

She trusted Richard with her life, and her life was very precious to her, thanks to him.

At the double doors, Nicci turned to Cara. "I need to be alone."

"But I — "

"This involves magic."

"Oh," Cara said. "Well, all right, then. I'll just wait out here in the hall in case you need anything."

"Thank you, Cara. You're a good friend."

"I never had any real friends — friends really worth having — until Lord Rahl came along."

Nicci smiled a little. "I never had anything worth living for until Richard came along."

Nicci closed the double doors. Behind her, the two-story windows flickered with lightning. Nicci didn't know if she had ever been in that room when there wasn't a storm.

Now the whole world was caught in a storm.

When the lightning flashed the room lit with the harsh glare. There was one thing in the room, however, that did not register the touch of even such intense light. It waited like death itself.

Nicci laid The Book of Life open on the table before the inky black box of Orden sitting in the center of the table. It seemed that every time the lightning tried to ignite, that black box swallowed the light before it could really get started. Staring at it was like looking into forever.

Nicci invoked the first spell, calling forth darkness to match the impossible blackness of the grim box sitting before her. She reminded herself that, like the People's Palace, it was the person who denned it. With a thunderclap of power filling the room, the door was barred. No one could enter. The containment field of the windows no longer mattered. She had conjured something more powerful. The room was silent and pitch black. Nicci's vision came from the powers she had called forth.

She spoke the words written on the next page, invoking the next spell that opened the pathway for the governing formulas. She used a sliver of Subtractive Magic to void a razor-thin piece of flesh at the tip of her finger, and used the blood that began to ooze to begin drawing the diagrams needed before the box of Orden. As more blood ran from the open wound, she drew a containment field around the box itself. It was something like the field of the room, but on a much more intense scale. Without being contained first, such power as was liberated from the box of Orden could unintentionally breach the veil, but in a way that would kill only the person attempting what Nicci was attempting.

Almost not needing to read the book that she had been studying for what seemed half her life, she went on to the equations involving the time of year: the first day of winter.

Once that was completed, she drew the two opposing symbols and the joint of the apex from the proper charts in blood.

It went on, one intense formula after another, for the next hour, with calculations bringing the resultant layer of magic forth to be folded into the next step. Each node in the book required that only the appropriate level of power be applied. At each spot, Nicci let it flow forth without reservation.

There was no other way.

As the night wore on, the lines of the spell built around the box — in some ways like the Chainfire verification web, with lines that glowed green. But others were a pure white, while yet others were constructed of Subtractive elements and they were blacker than black, looking like nothing so much as voids in the world where the lines belonged, like slits looking into the underworld.

When Nicci completed the last incantation, she finally heard the whisper of Orden itself, confirmation that she had done everything properly. Yet it was not so much a voice as a force that formed the concept in her mind.

The power is open, it whispered through the darkness, in words that felt like ice cracking.

"I call upon this time, this place, this world to turn with this play of the boxes of Orden."

Name the player.

Nicci placed her hands on the dead black box before her.

"The player is Richard Rahl," she said. "Heed his will. Do his bidding if he proves worthy, kill him if he does not, destroy us all if he fails us."

It is done. From this moment forward the power of Orden is in play by Richard Rahl.

Prophecy said, "If fuer grissa ost drauka does not lead this final battle, then the world, already standing at the brink of darkness, will fall under that terrible shadow."