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Confession over, she went to her bench and slumped down. “Thank you for coming, Nathan. I’ll not trouble you to come down here again. I will take my just punishment without complaint. If you don’t mind, I think I’d like to be alone right now to pray and consider the weight on my heart.”
“You can do that later. Now get up off your bottom, on your feet, and pick up your things. We have matters to attend to and we have to get going.”
Ann looked up with a frown. “What?”
“We have important things to do. Come on, woman. We’re wasting time. We need to get going. We’re on the same side in this struggle, Ann. We need to act like it and work together toward preserving our causes.” He leaned down toward her. “Unless you’ve decided to retire to sit around the rest of your life. If not, then let’s be on our way. We have trouble.”
Ann hopped down from the stone bench. “Trouble? What sort of trouble.”
“Prophecy trouble.”
“Prophecy? There is trouble with a prophecy? What trouble? What prophecy?”
Fists on his hips, Nathan fixed her with a scowl. “I can’t tell you about such things. Prophecy is not meant for the unenlightened.”
Ann pursed her lips, about to launch into scolding him up one side and down the other, when she caught the smile working at the edges of his mouth. It caught her up in a smile of her own.
“What’s happened?” she asked in the tone of voice friends used when they had decided that past wrongs were recognized and matters now set on a correct path.
“Ann, you’ll not believe it when I tell you,” Nathan complained. “It’s that boy, again.”
“Richard?”
“What other boy do you know who can get in the kind of trouble only Richard can get into.”
“Well, I no longer think of Richard as a boy.”
Nathan sighed. “I suppose not, but it’s hard when you’re my age to think of one so young as a man.”
“He’s a man,” Ann assured him.
“Yes, I guess he is.” Nathan grinned. “And, he’s a Rahl.”
“What sort of trouble has Richard gotten himself into this time?”
Nathan’s good humor evaporated. “He’s walked off the edge of prophecy.”
Ann screwed up her face. “What are you talking about? What’s he done?”
“I’m telling you, Ann, that boy has walked right off the edge of prophecy itself—walked right off into a place in prophecy where prophecy itself doesn’t exist.”
Ann recognized that Nathan was sincerely troubled, but he was making no sense. In part, that was why some people were afraid of him. He often gave people the impression he was talking gibberish when he was talking about things that no one but he could even understand. Sometimes no one but a prophet could truly understand completely what he grasped. With his eyes, the eyes of a prophet, he could see things that no one else could.
She had spent a lifetime working with prophecy, though, and so she could understand, perhaps better than most, at least some of his mind, some of what he could grasp.
“How can you know of such a prophecy, Nathan, if it doesn’t exist? I don’t understand. Explain it to me.”
“There are libraries here, at the People’s Palace, that contain some valuable books of prophecy that I’ve never had a chance to see before. While I had reason to suspect that such prophecies might exist, I was never certain they actually did, or what they might say. I’ve been studying them since I’ve been here and I’ve come across links to other known prophecy we had down in the vaults at the Palace of the Prophets. These prophecies, here, fill in some important gaps in those we already know about.
“Most importantly, I found an altogether new branch of prophecy I’ve never seen before that explains why and how I’ve been blind to some of what’s been going on. From studying the forks and inversions off of this branch, I’ve discovered that Richard has taken a series of links that follow down a particular pathway of prophecy that leads to oblivion, to something that, as far as I can tell, doesn’t even exist.”
One hand on a hip, the other tracing invisible lines in the air, Nathan paced the small room as he talked. “This new link alludes to things I’ve never seen before, branches that I’ve always known must be there, but were missing. These branches are exceedingly dangerous prophecies that have been kept here, in secret. I can see why. Even I, had I seen them years ago, might have misinterpreted them. These new branches refer to voids of some sort. Since they are voids, their nature can’t be known; such a contradiction can’t exist.
“Richard has gone into this area of void, where prophecy can’t see him, can’t help him, and worse, can’t help us. But more than not seeing him with prophecy, it’s as if where he is and what he is doing do not exist.
“Richard is dealing in something that is capable of ending everything we know.”
Ann knew that Nathan would not exaggerate about something of this nature. While she was in the dark about precisely what he was talking about, the essence of it gave her the cold sweats.
“What can we do about it?”
Nathan threw up his arms. “We have to go in there and get him. We have to bring him back into the world that exists.”
“You mean, the world that prophecy says exists.”
Nathan’s scowl was back. “That’s what I said, isn’t it? We have to somehow get him back on the thread of prophecy where he shows up.”
Ann cleared her throat. “Or?”
Nathan snatched up the lamp, then her pack. “Or, he will cease to be part of viable lines of prophecy, never to be involved with matters of this world again.”
“You mean, if we don’t get him back from wherever his is, he will die?”
N
athan gave her a curious look. “Have I been talking to the walls? Of course he will die! If that boy isn’t in prophecy, if he breaks all the links to prophecy where he plays a role, then he voids all those lines of prophecy where he exists. If he does that, then they become false prophecy and those branches with word of him will never come to pass. None of the other links contain any reference to him—because in the origin of those links, he dies, first.”
“And what happens on those links that don’t contain him?”
Nathan took up her hand as he pulled her toward the door. “On those links, a shadow falls over everyone. Everyone who lives, anyway. It will be a very long and very dark age.”
“Wait,” Ann said, pulling him to a halt.
She returned to the stone bench and placed the Rada’Han in the center. “I don’t have the power to destroy this. I think maybe it should be locked away.”
Nathan nodded his approval. “We will lock the doors and instruct the guards that it is to remain in here, behind the shields, for all time.”
Ann held a warning finger up before him. “Don’t get the idea that just because you’re not wearing a collar I will tolerate misbehavior.”
Nathan’s grin returned. He didn’t come right out and agree. Before he went through the door, he turned back to her.
“By the way, have you been talking to Verna through your journey book?”
“Yes, a little. She’s with the army and pretty busy, right now. They’re defending the passes into D’Hara. Jagang has begun his siege.”
“Well, from what I’ve been able to gather from military commanders here, at the palace, the passes are formidable and will hold for a while, at least.” He leaned toward her. “You have to send a message to her, though. Tell her that when an empty wagon rolls into their line, to let it through.”
Ann made a face. “What does that mean?”
“Prophecy is not meant for the unenlightened. Just tell her.”
“All right,” Ann said with breathless difficulty as Nathan pulled her through the tight doorway. “But I’d best not tell her you’re the one who said it, or she will likely ignore the advice. She thinks you’re daft, you know.”
