Chainfire (56 page)

Zedd smiled in a grandfatherly way. “Fair enough, Richard, fair enough. But I expect you to prove it to me. I won’t take your word for it.”

Richard gave his grandfather a firm nod. “For starters, I think you have to admit it’s rather suspicious that prophecies revolving around Kahlan’s and my lives are missing. The memory of her is gone. Now the prophecies are gone that would have to contain reference to her. In both cases everyone’s memory of both real entities—the person and the prophecies referring to that real person—have been wiped away.

“Do you see what I’m getting at?”

Nicci was immeasurably relieved to see that Richard was thinking rationally again. She was also concerned that in a strange way, what he said actually did make some sense.

“Yes, my boy, I do see your point, but do you see that there is a problem with your theory?”

“What’s that?”

“We all remember you, now don’t we? And the prophecies about you are missing. As it turns out, in this case the problem with prophecy doesn’t have anything at all to do with what you are hoping will explain or prove the existence of Kahlan Amnell.”

“Why not?” Richard asked.

Zedd started up the steps. “It has to do with the nature of what I found
out when I did my own investigation of the problem with the books of prophecy. I’m not without my own sense of curiosity, you know.”

“I know that, Zedd. But it could be connected,” Richard insisted as he walked along beside his grandfather.

Nicci hurried after him. Everyone else was forced to fall in behind.

“It might seem that way to you, my boy, but your speculation is flawed because all the facts just don’t fit your conclusion. You’re trying to wear boots that look good but are too small.” Zedd clapped Richard on the shoulder. “When we get to the library I’ll show you what I mean.”

“Who’s Kahlan?” Nathan asked.

“Someone who vanished and I haven’t found yet,” Richard said over his shoulder. “But I will.”

Richard paused and turned back to Ann and Nathan. “Do either of you know what Chainfire is?” They both shook their heads. “How about a viper with four heads, or the Deep Nothing?”

“I’m afraid not, Richard,” Ann said. “But as long as we’re on the subject of important matters, we do have other things we need to speak with you about.”

“After we see Zedd’s reference about prophecy,” Nathan said.

“Well, come on, then,” Zedd told them as he started off with a flourish of his simple robes.

In the plush library, Richard stood behind Zedd, watching over his grandfather’s bony shoulder as he flipped open a thick book bound in tattered, tan leather. The room was rather dimly lit by a number of silver reflector lamps on all four sides of five thick mahogany posts standing in a line down the center of the room. They held up the leading edge of a balcony running the length of the room. Heavy, dark wooden tables with polished tops lined the center of the room down the line of posts. Wooden chairs were spaced around the outside of the tables. Opulent carpets with elaborately woven patterns felt soft and quiet underfoot. Perpendicular to the long walls on each side were aisles of shelves packed with books. Above, the balcony held closely spaced shelves filled with yet more volumes.

A gray-blue shaft of sunlight slanting in from the single window up high at the very end of the room lit the dust floating in the stuffy air. The freshly lit lamps added an oily smell. The room had a vaultlike quiet about it.

Cara and Rikka stood off by themselves in the darker area beneath the window at the end of the room, arms folded, heads together, talking in low voices. Nicci stood beside Zedd along one edge of a table lit in a glowing rectangle of sunlight while Ann and Nathan stood impatiently on the opposite side, waiting for Zedd’s explanation of how prophecy had vanished. Standing there, in the island of light, the rest of the room faded away into gloomy shadows around them.

“This book was compiled, I believe, sometime not long after the great war had ended,” Zedd told them as he tapped the open cover near the title:
Continuum Ratios and Viability Predictions
. “The gifted back then had discovered that, for whatever reason, fewer and fewer wizards were being born and the ones who were being born were not being born with both sides of the gift, as had almost always been the case before. What’s more,
the ones who were being born with the gift were all being born with only the Additive side. Subtractive Magic was vanishing.”

Ann looked up from under her brow. “It is hardly a novice and a boy wizard standing before you, old man. We know all this. We have spent our lives devoted to this very problem. Get on with it.”

Zedd cleared his throat. “Yes, well, as you may know, this also meant that there were fewer and fewer prophets being born.”

“How remarkably fascinating,” Ann mocked. “I, for one, would never have guessed such a thing.”

Nathan irritably hushed her. “Go on, Zedd.”

Zedd pushed back his sleeves, briefly casting a scowl Ann’s way. “They realized that, with ever fewer wizards born to prophecy, the body of work of prophecy was of course going to cease to grow. In order to understand what the consequences of this might mean, they decided that they needed to do an intensive investigation of the entire subject of prophecy while they still could, while they still had prophets and other wizards with both sides of the gift.

“They approached the problem with the gravest of concern, realizing that with them, this might very well be mankind’s last opportunity to comprehend the future of prophecy itself, and to offer future generations an insight to understanding what these wizards were increasingly coming to believe would one day be seriously corrupted or even lost.”

Zedd glanced up to see if Ann looked like she intended to offer anymore disparaging comments. She did not. This was apparently something she hadn’t known.

“Now,” he said, “to their work.”

Richard moved up to the table beside Nicci and with a finger turned over pages as he listened to Zedd. He quickly noticed that the book was written in such strange technical jargon having to do with the intricacies of not only magic but prophecy as well that it was nearly incomprehensible to him. It might as well have been a different language.

One of the surprises was that the book contained a series of complex mathematical formulas. These were interrupted by diagrams of the moon and stars marked with angles of declination. Richard had never before seen a book about magic that contained such equations, celestial observations, and measurements—not that he had actually seen that many books about magic. Although, he recalled,
The Book of Counted Shadows
that he
had memorized as a boy did have a number of sun and star angles that were necessary to know in order to open the boxes of Orden.

Yet more formulas were scratched in the margins, but by different hands, as if someone had come along and done the sums to check the work in the book, or perhaps approached it with updated information. In one instance, several of the numbers in an elaborate table were crossed out, with arrows pointing from new numbers scribbled in the margins to the stricken numbers in the tables. Zedd occasionally stopped Richard from turning pages in order to point out an equation and explain the symbols involved in the calculation.

Like a dog watching a bone, Nathan’s dark azure eyes tracked the pages as Richard slowly turned each over, idly looking for anything that made sense to him as Zedd droned on about overlapping transpositional forks and triple duplexes bound to conjugated roots compromised by precession and sequential, proportional, binary inversions shrouding flawed bifurcations that the formulas revealed which could only be detected through Subtractive levorotatory.

Nathan and Ann stared without blinking. Once, Nathan even gasped. Ann incrementally went ashen. Even Nicci seemed to be listening with uncharacteristic attention.

The unfathomable concepts made Richard’s head spin. He hated that feeling of drowning in incomprehensible information, of trying to keep his head above the dark waters of complete confusion. It made him feel dumb.

Intermittently, Zedd referred to numbers and equations from the book. Nathan and Ann acted like they thought Zedd was on the verge of revealing not only how the world was going to end but the precise hour.

“Zedd,” Richard finally asked, interrupting his grandfather in the middle of a sentence that showed no signs of ever coming to an end, “is there any way you can boil this stew down to some meat that I can chew?”

Mouth agape, Zedd regarded Richard for a moment before pushing the book across the table to Nathan. “I’ll let you read it for yourself.”

Nathan cautiously picked up the book as if the Keeper himself might pop out at him.

Zedd turned back to Richard. “Basically, to put it in terms you might better grasp, and at great risk of oversimplifying it, imagine that prophecy is like a tree, with roots and branches. Like a tree, prophecy was continually growing. What these wizards were basically saying was that the tree
of prophecy behaved as if there were a kind of life to it. They weren’t saying that it was alive, mind you, only that in a number of ways it mimicked—not duplicated—some attributes of a living organism. It was this property that allowed them to come up with their theory and from that run their calculations—in much the way there are parameters by which you can judge the age and health of a tree and from that extrapolate about its future.

“During a previous time when there had been a great many prophets and wizards around, the works of prophecy and its many branches grew quite rapidly. With all the prophets who had contributed, it had solid, fertile ground in which to grow, and deep roots. With new prophets constantly bringing new vision to the collected works, new forks of prophecy sprouted continuously and those new branches, over time as other prophets added to them, grew thick and strong. As it grew, prophets continually examined, observed, and interpreted events, enabling them to tend the living stock and prune the deadwood.

“But then, the birthrate of prophets began to plummet and with each passing year there were fewer and fewer of them to attend to such duties. Because of this, the growth of the tree of prophecy began to slow.

“In essence, to explain it in simple terms you can understand, the tree of prophecy had in a way matured. Like an old monarch oak in a forest, these wizards knew that the vast tree of prophecy had many years of life ahead of it as a mature entity, but they also knew what the future eventually held in store.

“Like all things, the existence of prophecy could not be eternal. As time passed, prophetic events came to pass, becoming outdated. These no longer served any use. In this fashion, if nothing else, the passage of time would eventually supersede all the predictions dealt with in the work. In other words, without new prophecy, all the existing prophecy, whether or not they turned out to be true forks, nonetheless would eventually reach their chance in the chronological flux. As they did, their time passed—they would be used up.

“Thus, the commission studying the problem came to realize that the tree of prophecy, without the growth and life that it drew from prophets, from the constant stream of prophecy feeding the many branches, would eventually die. Their task, and the purpose of this book,
Continuum Ratios and Viability Predictions
, was to try to predict how and when this would happen.

“The best minds in prophecy studied the problem, took a measure of the health of the tree of prophecy. Through known formulas and predictions based on not only observed patterns in the decline of growth in prophecy, but a decline in prophets to sustain it, they determined how this particular tree of knowledge would become heavy with the deadwood of false and expired prophecy as prophetic forks were reached and chronology moved on down the sections of branches still viable. As this happened—as the tree of prophecy grew thick with age and deadwood that could no longer be culled by true prophets—they predicted how it would become susceptible to, to, well, a kind of malady, a decay, much like an old tree in the forest will eventually become susceptible to disease.

“That decline in viability, they found, would, over time, leave prophecy vulnerable to any number of ever growing problems. The infirmity that they concluded would be the most likely to strike first would come in a form they described as wormlike. They thought that it would begin to infest and destroy the living portions of the tree of prophecy itself, meaning the branches that are contemporary at the time of this wormlike infestation. In fact, they called it just that—a prophecy worm.”

The air felt heavy in the thick silence.

Hands in his back pockets, Richard shrugged. “So what’s the cure?”

Astonished by the question, Zedd stared at Richard as if he’d just asked how to heal a thunderstorm. “Cure? Richard, these experts who wrote this book predicted that there wasn’t any cure, as such. They concluded, in the end, that without the vitality provided by new prophets, the tree of prophecy would eventually rot and die.

“They said that prophecy would only come back strong and healthy when new prophets returned to the world—in effect, when a seed of new prophecy sprouted and flourished. Old trees die and make room for the new shoots. It was determined by these learned wizards that the fate of prophecy as we know it is also doomed to aging, infirmity, and eventual death.”

Richard had had to deal with any number of problems caused by prophecy, but the gloomy expressions around the table were infectious. It almost felt like a healer had come out of a back room to announce that an aging relative was near to passing on.

He thought about all the gifted prophets, devoted to their calling, who had worked all of their lives to contribute to this great body of work that
was now withering and dying. He thought about the statue he himself had worked so hard to create and how it made him feel when it was destroyed.

He thought, too, that it might simply be the concept of death itself, in any form, that was so dismal because it reminded him of his own mortality…and of Kahlan’s mortality.

He also thought that it might be the best thing that could happen. After all, if people no longer believed that prophecy had foreordained what would become of them, then maybe they would realize that they had to think for themselves and decide what was in their own best interest. Maybe, if unchained from a deterministic mindset, people would realize that it was they themselves who actually controlled their own destiny. If people comprehended what was really at stake, maybe they would come to realize the value of reason in the choices they made, instead of mindlessly just waiting for what was to happen, to happen.

“From what Ann and I have discovered,” Nathan said into the still, stale air of the library, “the branch of prophecy that is vanishing is that which refers to times roughly since Richard was born. That, of course, makes the most sense because temporal souls nourish the active, living tissue of prophecy upon which this prophecy worm would feed. But I was able to determine that it hasn’t all simply vanished, yet.”

Zedd nodded. “It’s dying back, but from the root, so some of it is still alive. I’ve found pockets of it alive and well.”

“That’s right—especially the portions from the present on into the future. As you suggest, it seems that the scourge has attacked the core of these branches, which began two or three decades back and so far have not extensively eaten their way into future events.

“That leaves sections of this prophetic branch—the branch involving you—that are still alive,” the prophet said as he leaned on his hands toward Richard, “but once it dies, we will then lose even those prophecies, along with the memory of how profoundly important they are.”

Richard glanced from Nathan’s grim expression to Ann’s equally serious face. He knew they had arrived at last at the heart of their purpose.

“That is why we’ve come looking for you, Richard Rahl,” Ann said with grave intonation, “before it’s too late. We have come about prophecy that so far is still alive and has warned us of the most serious crisis to face us since the great war.”

Richard frowned, already unhappy that prophecy once again seemed about to cause him trouble. “What prophecy?”

Nathan pulled a small book out of a pocket and flipped it open. As he held it in both hands, he fixed Richard with a steady gaze to make sure he looked like he was going to listen carefully.

When Nathan was at last sure he had everyone’s attention, he began. “‘In the year of the cicadas, when the champion of sacrifice and suffering, under the banner of both mankind and the Light’”—he glanced up from under his bushy eyebrows—“that would be Emperor Jagang—‘finally splits his swarm, thus shall be the sign that prophecy has been awakened and the final and deciding battle is upon us. Be cautioned, for all true forks and their derivatives are tangled in this mantic root. Only one trunk branches from this conjoined primal origin. 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.”