The wall on the side with the rooms was made up of tightly fit, enormous stone blocks. They formed the wall opposing the chiseled granite, rising up together sixty or more feet. That seemingly endless split through the mountain constituted part of the boundary of the containment field. The rooms within the containment area were all lined up along the very outer edge of the Keep that rose up out of the mountain itself.
Nicci followed the others only a short way through the seemingly endless hall, watching them until they reached the first intersection.
“This is no time to get sloppy or lenient,” she called after them. “Too much is at risk.”
Zedd accepted her warning with a nod. “We’ll be back after I look into it.”
Cara cast Nicci a look back over her shoulder. “Don’t
worry, I’ll be there and I’m not in the mood to be lenient. In fact, I’m not going to be in a good mood again until I see Lord Rahl alive and safe.”
“You have good moods?” Zedd asked as they hurried away.
Cara scowled at him. “I’m frequently cheerful and pleasant. Are you suggesting that I’m not?”
Zedd held up his hands in surrender. “No, no.
Cheerful
describes you perfectly.”
“Good, then.”
“In fact,
cheerful
would come even before
bloodthirsty
in my book.”
“Come to think of it, I think I like
bloodthirsty
even better.”
Nicci couldn’t share the spirit of their banter. She wasn’t good at making people laugh. She frequently found herself perplexed by the way Zedd and others could ease tension with such exchanges.
Nicci knew all too well the nature of the people who were trying to kill them. She had once been one of those people of the Order. She had been as merciless as she had been deadly.
She had never once seen Emperor Jagang being jovial or lighthearted. He was hardly a man given to repartee. She had spent a great deal of time with him, and he was never anything but consistently lethal. His cause was deadly serious to him and he was fanatically dedicated to it. Knowing the kind of people coming for them, people like she herself had once been, and understanding their heartless nature, Nicci didn’t feel that she could be any less serious than they.
She watched Zedd, Cara, and Rikka hurry down the first hall to the right, heading for the stairway.
As they started up, Nicci suddenly understood the sound, the vibration she felt.
It was an alarm, of sorts.
She knew why Rikka didn’t recognize it.
She opened her mouth to call out to the others just as the world seemed to come grinding to a halt.
A dark cloud poured down the stairwell. It was like a million-speckled suggestion of a snake in midair, rolling, turning, twisting, thinning, thickening as it came roaring down the stairwell. The rolling, fluttering rumble was deafening.
Thousands of bats poured around the corner, a fat snake of them in midair, a thing alive made up of untold numbers of the little creatures. The sight of so many thousands of them coalesced into a single moving shape was riveting. The racket reverberated off the walls, filling the split in the mountain with a riot of noise. The bats seemed to be flying in a panic, their fused form coiling around the corner in a rush as they bolted from something.
Zedd, Cara, and Rikka seemed frozen where they had begun to climb the stairs.
And then the fleeing bats were gone, driven before some terror coming through the Keep behind them. The soft, fluttering sound they left in their wake echoed its muted alarm through the hall as the bats fled into deeper darkness.
That distant sound was what Rikka had heard but not understood.
Staring at the stairs from where the bats had come, Nicci felt as if she were frozen and immobile in an expectant, silent moment in time, waiting to breathe, waiting for something unimaginable. With a rising sense of panic, she realized that in fact she really couldn’t move.
And then a dark shape came sweeping down the stairs like an ill wind. Yet, at the same time, it inexplicably appeared to hang motionless. It seemed composed of swirling black shapes and flowing shadows, creating an inky eddy of obscurity. The dizzying shape of it, the entwining currents of darkness, implied movement that it didn’t have.
Nicci blinked, and it was gone.
She urgently renewed her effort to move, but she felt as if she was suspended in warm wax. She could breathe to a small extent, and make headway, but only in the most impossibly slow fashion. Every inch took monumental effort and seemed to take an eternity. The world had become impossibly thick as everything slowed toward a halt.
In the passageway, just behind the others in the hall at the bottom of the stairs, the shape appeared again, suspended in midair above the stone floor. It looked like a woman in a flowing black dress floating underwater.
Even in the midst of growing terror, Nicci found the exotic sight strangely fascinating. The others, with the intruder already past them, were in mid-stride ascending the stairs, as still as if caught in a painting.
The woman’s wiry black hair lifted lazily out all around her bloodless face. The loose fabric of the black dress swirled as if in whirls of water. Within the slow turbulence of black cloth and hair, the woman herself seemed nearly unmoving.
It looked like nothing so much as if she were floating under murky water.
Then the figure was gone again.
No, not underwater, Nicci realized.
In the sliph.
That’s how Nicci felt, too. It was that kind of strange, otherworldly, suspended sensation of drifting. It was impossibly slow and at the same time blindingly fast.
The figure suddenly appeared again, closer this time.
Nicci tried to call out, but she couldn’t. She tried to lift her arms to cast a web, but she drifted too slowly. She thought it might take an entire day just to lift her arm.
Sparkling shards of light glimmered and flashed in the air between Nicci and the others. Magic, she knew, cast by the wizard. It fell far short of the intruder. Even though the
brief spate of power sputtered out without having any effect, Nicci was astounded that Zedd had managed to ignite it at all. She had tried much the same thing without any result.
Dark trailers of cloth drifted, fluidly flapping through the hallway. Snaking shapes and shadows curled around as they moved ever so slowly. The figure wasn’t walking, or running. It glided, floated, flowed, almost unmoving within the swirling cloth of the dress.
Then it was gone again.
In a blink, it reappeared, much closer yet. The ghostlike skin stretched tight over a bony face looking as if it had never been touched by sunlight. Snarls of weightless black hair rose up with wisps of the flowing black dress.
It was as disorienting a sight as Nicci had ever seen. She felt as if she were drowning. Panic welled up in her at the feeling of not being able to breathe fast enough, of trying to get the air she needed. Her burning lungs were unable to work any faster than the rest of her.
When Nicci focused her gaze, the figure of the woman was gone. It occurred to her that her eyes, too, were too slow. The hallway was empty again. It seemed that her focus could not keep up with the movement.
Nicci thought that maybe she was having some kind of hallucination brought on by the spells she had cast, by the power of Orden she had tapped into. She wondered if it could be some kind of aftereffect of the spells. Maybe it was Orden itself come to claim her for tampering with such forbidden powers.
That had to be it—something to do with all the dangerous things she had conjured.
The woman appeared again, as if floating up through the murky deep, emerging suddenly into view out of the dark abyss.
This time Nicci could clearly see the woman’s austere, angular features.
Blanched blue eyes fixed on Nicci as if there was nothing else in her world. That scrutiny touched Nicci’s very soul with icy dread. The woman’s eyes were so pale that they seemed as if they had to be sightless, but Nicci knew that this woman could see just fine, not only in the light, but also in the blackest cave, or under a rock where the light of day never touched her.
The woman smiled as wicked a grin as Nicci had ever seen. It was the smile of someone who had no fear but enjoyed causing it, a woman who knew she had everything under her mastery. It was a smile that sent a slow shiver through Nicci.
And then the woman was gone.
In the distance more of Zedd’s magic sparked and sputtered briefly before it died out.
Nicci struggled to move, but the world was too thick, the way it sometimes felt in those terrible dreams she had, dreams where she struggled to move but simply couldn’t despite how hard she tried. It was the dream where she was trying to run from Jagang. He was always close, coming for her, reaching for her. He was like death itself, intent on the most unimaginable cruelty, as he came toward her. She always wanted desperately to run in those dreams but, despite extraordinary effort, her legs wouldn’t move nearly fast enough.
Those dreams always put her in a state of trembling panic. It was a dream that made death so real she could taste its terror.
She’d had that dream one time in camp. Richard had been there. He woke her, asking what was wrong. She gasped back tears as she told him. He cupped her face and told her that it was only a dream and she was all right. She
would have given anything to have had him hold her in his arms and tell her that she was safe, but he didn’t. Still, his hand on her face, covered with both of hers, and his gentle words, his empathy, had been a comfort that calmed her terror.
This, though, was no dream.
Nicci tried to gasp a breath, to call out to Zedd, but could do neither. She tried to call her Han, her gift, but couldn’t seem to connect to it. It was as if her gift was impossibly fast and she was impossibly slow. The two wouldn’t mesh.
The woman, her flesh the pallid color of the freshly dead, her hair and dress as black as the underworld, was suddenly right there, right beside Nicci.
The woman’s arm floated out, reaching through the swirling black cloth. Parched flesh stretched tightly over her knuckles served to emphasize the skeleton beneath. Her bony fingers brushed along the underside of Nicci’s jaw. It was a haughty touch, an arrogant act of triumph.
At the touch, the vibration in Nicci’s chest felt as if it might tear her apart.
The woman laughed a hollow, slow, burbling underwater laugh that echoed painfully through the stone halls of the Keep.
Nicci knew without doubt what the woman wanted, what she had come for. Nicci tried desperately to ignite her power, to grab the woman, to lunge, to do anything to stop her, but she could do nothing. Her power seemed impossibly distant, crackling so far away that it would take forever to reach it.
As the finger brushed along the length of Nicci’s jaw, the woman was gone again, vanishing gently back into the dark depths.
The next time she appeared, she was back at the brass-clad doors standing open to the room with the box. The woman drifted through the doorway, her feet never touching the ground, her dress washing lightly all around her.
Again she vanished out of Nicci’s focus.
The next time she appeared, she was between the room and Nicci.
She had the box of Orden under an arm.
As that terrible laughter echoed through Nicci’s mind, the world melted into blackness.
Rachel didn’t know who the horse belonged to, and she didn’t really care. She wanted it.
She had been running all night and she was exhausted. She had never stopped to consider why she might be running. It somehow didn’t seem important. It mattered only that she keep going, keep making progress. She needed to hurry. She needed to keep going.
She needed to go faster.
She needed the horse.
She was certain of the direction in which she had to go. She didn’t know why she felt so certain about it. She didn’t give that matter any serious thought. It remained only a question from somewhere deep in the back of her mind that never completely surfaced into full conscious concern.
As she crouched in the dry, brittle brush, she tried to remain still as a shadow as she figured out what to do. It was hard to stay still because she was so cold. She tried not to shiver for fear of giving herself away. She wanted to rub her arms, but she knew not to because any movement might draw attention. As cold as she was, what concerned her the most was getting the horse.
Whoever owned the horse didn’t seem to be nearby at the moment. At least, if he was, she couldn’t see him. He might be sleeping in the long, brown grass and be too low for her to see where he was. He might be off scouting.
Or, he might be waiting, watching for her, maybe with an arrow nocked and at the ready so that once she bolted from cover he could take aim and shoot her down. As scary as such a thought was, her fear of such a thing couldn’t compare to her need to keep going, her need to hurry.
Rachel checked the sun off through the thick stand of trees, checking her bearings, making sure she knew the direction she needed to go. She surveyed her choices of escape routes. There was a wide path, not quite a road, that would be a good place for a fast getaway. There was also a shallow, gravel-bottomed stream that ran through part of the open meadow. On the other side of the meadow the stream joined the road and ran beside it as both made their way southeast through the trees.
The sun, low, huge-looking, and red, hung just above the horizon. The color matched the color of the scratches all over her arms from running through the brush.
Before Rachel realized it, before she had finished thinking it through, her legs were moving. They almost seemed to have a mind of their own. Only a few steps out of the brush she was running, bolting out across the open ground toward the horse.
Out of the corner of her eye Rachel caught sight of the man as he suddenly sat up in the tall grass. Just as she had suspected, he had been sleeping. With his leather vest and studded straps holding knives, he looked like one of those Imperial Order men. He appeared to be alone. Probably on a scouting mission. That’s what Chase had taught her. Imperial Order troops out alone were likely scouts.
She didn’t really care who he was. She wanted the horse.
She thought that maybe she should be afraid of the man, but she wasn’t. She was afraid only of not getting the horse, of not hurrying.
The man threw his blanket aside as he shot to his feet. He scrambled into a dead run. He was coming fast, but Rachel’s legs had grown long over the summer and she was a fast runner. The soldier yelled at her. She paid him no never mind as she raced toward the bay mare.
The man threw something at her. She saw it streak by over her left shoulder. It was a knife. At such a distance she knew that it had been a foolish throw—a throw-and-pray, as Chase called it. He taught her to focus, to aim. He’d taught her a lot about knives. She also knew that a running target was difficult to hit with a knife.
She was right. The knife missed her by a good margin. With a soft thunk it stuck in a fallen log lying along the way between her and the horse. She yanked the knife out of the rotting log as she ran by and stuck it through her belt as she slowed.
The knife was hers now. Chase had taught her to take the enemy’s weapons whenever possible and be prepared to use them, especially if the weapon was superior to what she had. He had taught her that in a survival situation she had to use what ever was at hand.
Gulping air, she ran under the horse’s nose, snatching up the loose ends of the reins, but they were tied to a branch of the fallen log. Her fingers worked frantically to undo the tight knot, but they were numb with cold. They slipped on the leather as she clawed at it. She wanted to scream with frustration, but instead she kept tugging, working the knot. It seemed to take forever to get it loose. As soon as the reins were free she gathered them together in one hand.
It was then that she noticed the saddle not far away. She glanced up as the man yelled again, calling her a name. He was coming fast. She wouldn’t have near enough time to
even think about saddling the horse. Saddlebags—probably full of supplies—leaned against the saddle.
She slipped her arm under the flat piece of leather connecting the two halves of the saddlebag and ducked under the startled horse’s neck.
Rounding the far side she grabbed a fistful of mane and hung on tightly to help her vault up onto the animal’s bare back. The saddlebags were heavy and she almost dropped them, but she held on tight and pulled them up behind her. Even though the horse hadn’t been saddled, at least it had on its bridle. Somewhere in the dim recesses of her mind Rachel relished the warmth of the animal.
She laid the hefty packs across the horse’s withers in front of her legs. There would be food and water inside. She would need both if she was to be able to continue for long. She just assumed that it would be a long journey.
The horse snorted, tossing its head. Rachel didn’t take the time to gentle the animal as Chase had taught her. She laid the reins over as she thumped the horse’s ribs with her heels. The horse danced sideways, not sure about its strange new rider. Rachel glanced over a shoulder and saw the man almost there. Holding a fistful of mane tightly with one hand and the reins with the other, Rachel leaned forward and again thumped her heels into the horse’s sides, farther back. The horse bolted into a dead run.
The man, cursing, made a frantic dive for the bridle. Rachel jerked the reins to the side and the horse followed. The soldier flew past them and landed on his face, grunting with the force of the impact. Suddenly seeing the thundering hooves so close he cried out, his anger switching to fright as he rolled out of the way. He missed being trampled by inches.
Rachel felt no sense of triumph. She felt only the compulsion to hurry, to run southeast. The horse obliged.
She guided the racing mare to the stream at the far side
of the grassy clearing. Trees closed in around them as they ran up the wide swath of shallow water, the man disappearing far behind. Water splashed as the horse ran. The gravel bottom seemed to suit the horse’s gait.
Chase had taught her how to use water to hide her tracks.
Every galloping stride was one stride closer, and that was all that mattered.