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Nicci fisted her hands. "He's not just any client! He's your master and he's in trouble! He's our friend! You have to take us to him!"
The sliph's reflective face moved away. "I cannot do such a thing."
Nicci and Cara stood mute for a moment, both at their wits' end, unable to think of how to convince the sliph to cooperate. Nicci felt like screaming, or crying, or unleashing enough magic to boil the sliph into talking.
"If you don't help us," she finally said in an even tone, "then you will feel more pain than you did from the beast. I will see to that. Please don't make me resort to that. We know you want to protect Richard. That's what we're trying to do, too."
The sliph stared in silence, like a silver statue, as if trying to assess the threat.
Cara pressed her fingers to her temples. "It's like trying to reason with a bucket of water," she muttered.
Nicci glared at the sliph. "You will take us to your master. That's an order."
"You'd better do as she says," Cara said, "or when she's done with you, then you will have to answer to me."
The Mord-Sith spun her Agiel up into her fist to make her point.
But when she did she suddenly froze stiff, staring at the weapon. The blood drained from her face. Even her hands stood out white against the red leather of her outfit.
Nicci leaned closer and laid a hand on Cara's shoulder. "What's wrong?"
Cara's hanging jaw finally moved. "It's dead."
"What are you talking about?"
Cara's blue eyes were filled with unbridled panic. "My Agiel is dead in my hand. I can't feel it."
While Nicci could clearly read the startled dismay in the Mord-Sith's voice, she didn't understand its source. Having an Agiel not give her pain hardly seemed like cause for panic. Even so, such naked terror was infectious.
"Does that mean something?" Nicci asked, fearing the answer.
The sliph watched from the far side of the well.
"The Agiel is powered through our bond to Lord Rahl—by his gift." She held the weapon out, as if in evidence. "If the Agiel is dead, then so is the Lord Rahl."
"Listen, I'll use my power if I have to to make the sliph take us to him. But Cara, don't start jumping to conclusions. We can't know—"
"He's not there."
"He's not where?"
"Anywhere." Still, Cara stared at her slender weapon held up in her trembling fingers. "I can no longer feel the bond." Her liquid blue-eyed gaze turned up to Nicci. "The bond always tells us where the Lord Rahl is. I no longer can feel him. I no longer feel where he is. He's not there. He's not anywhere."
A wave of nausea washed through Nicci. She felt faint. Her fingers and toes were going numb.
She turned back to the sliph.
It was gone.
Nicci leaned over the wall, peering down into the well. In the darkness below she saw a faint silver glimmer just as it vanished, leaving behind only blackness.
She turned back to Cara and seized a fistful of leather at her shoulder. She hopped down off the wall, pulling Cara with her.
"Come on. I know someone who can tell us where Richard is."
* * *
CHAPTER 32
With Cara at her side, Nicci raced down the torchlit hallway, over elaborately designed carpets that muted their footfalls, past doorways into darkness, past rooms with oil lamps warmly lighting only vacant furniture. The Keep, nearly as vast as the mountain that sheltered it beneath its stoic stone shoulders, felt empty and haunted. Nicci had spent decades in the vast complex known as the Palace of the Prophets, which in some ways was reminiscent of the Keep, but the palace had been alive with hundreds of people of all kinds living there, from the Prelate to the boys who tended the stables. It, too, had been a place of wizards—wizards in training, anyway. The Keep existed for the purposes of man, and yet it stood silent and absent of those who would give it life. If a place could be said to be forlorn, the immense structure of the Keep was such a place.
Cara ran with all her strength, driven by her loyalty and love for Richard, by dread that the worst had happened to him. Nicci ran just as fast, driven by fear of even considering the possibility that he was dead, as if trying to outrun death itself. She couldn't allow herself to even entertain such a concept, lest she collapse in despair. A world without Richard in it would be a dead world to her.
Cara slid across the polished gray marble floor to slow herself enough to make the turn when Nicci hooked a hand on a cold, black marble newel post and charged up the wide, black, granite steps. The windows far above were dark, making them look like black voids in the world. The stairwell, lit by a few glass proximity spheres, rose up through a soaring tower to seemingly impossible heights above them, making Nicci feel as if she were at the very bottom of a very deep stone well.
The sounds of their footsteps echoed through the Keep, like the haunting whispers of those long-dead souls who had once walked these very halls, climbed these very steps, laughed and loved and lived in this place. At the top of the third run of stairs, Nicci, her legs aching with the frantic effort, led them into a broad passageway. As she ran past the warm reddish brown cherry pilasters separating expanses of brightly colored, leaded glass, she pointed ahead, letting Cara know that they would be turning at the next hallway to the right.
Finally into the network of smaller halls leading to the quarters where they had been staying, Nicci spotted Zedd in the distance, marching toward them. Rikka followed close on his heels. The old wizard, looking grim as he drew to a halt, waited for them to close the last bit of distance.
"What is it?" he asked, apparently knowing by the looks on their faces that something was awry.
"Where's Lord Rahl?" Rikka demanded as she came to an abrupt halt right behind him.
Nicci recognized the anxious look on her face. It was the same look that Cara had worn ever since she'd discovered that her Agiel didn't work. Nicci glanced down and saw that Rikka was gripping her Agiel in a white-knuckled fist, the same as Cara. Those talismans of their connection to the Lord Rahl were now dead.
"Where's my grandson?" Zedd asked, framing it in an anguished, personal tone. "Why isn't he with you?"
The last of it sounded like an accusation, as if reminding them of the warning Jebra had given them before they left, and of the promise Nicci had made.
"Zedd," Nicci began, "we can't say for sure."
The wizard cocked his head, his white hair sticking out in disarray. The look he gave her was very much that of a wizard taking charge of the disquieted man.
"Don't give me the runaround, child."
Had the situation not been so deadly serious, Nicci might have laughed at the characterization.
"We were all together in the sliph, returning to the Keep," Nicci told him, "and somewhere along the way—it's impossible to tell where you are while you're traveling—we were attacked by the beast."
Zedd glanced to Cara. "The beast."
Cara nodded confirmation.
"Then what?"
"I don't know." Nicci lifted her arms in frustration at trying to find the words to describe the experience. "We tried to fight it off. It had all these snakelike arms. We were grappling with it. I tried to use my Han against it—"
"In the sliph?"
"Yes, but it was of little or no help. I was trying everything I could think of. Then, the beast just ripped both Cara and me away from Richard. We couldn't find him in the darkness. We tried, but we couldn't find anything?not even each other. Like I said, it's impossible to tell where you are when you're in the sliph. You can't see, you can't really hear. It's a confusing kind of place and, try as we might, we just couldn't rind Richard."
/> He was looking more angry by the moment. "Then why are you here, instead of in the sliph looking for him?"
"The sliph spit us out," Cara said. "We found ourselves here, back at the Keep. Nicci and I were each trying in our own way to find Lord Rahl, but… there was nothing. No Beast, no Lord Rahl. Then the sliph dumped us out here, at the place where we had all been headed when we were attacked."
"What are you doing up here, then?" he asked again in a menacing voice. "Why aren't you back in the sliph searching or, better yet, making the sliph tell you where he is?"
Nicci saw his hands fisted at his sides. She knew how he felt. She gently grasped his arm.
"Zedd, the sliph wouldn't tell us where he is. Believe me, we tried. It might be possible to get her to do so, I just don't know, but I think I know a better way—someone who might be able to tell us where Richard is: Jebra. I don't want to waste any more time, and I think Jebra might be able to provide an answer sooner than the sliph would."
Zedd pressed his thin lips tight as he considered. "It's worth a try," he said at last, "but you need to understand that the woman has been in quite a state since you left. She's been inconsolable at best and at times in the iron grip of something akin to hysteria. We've tried to calm her down, but to no avail. I'm afraid that, with all she's been through, it's all the more daunting for her to have to face the sudden return of her unique kind of visions. It's obviously difficult for her to come to grips with having them again, to say nothing of the nature of this particular one.
"We finally put her to bed, hoping that if she got some rest she would gain her strength back and be better able to sort out the confusion of her visions. At least she's not in a state like Queen Cyrilla; she's fighting not to allow herself to fall into that madness. She is aware that she needs to be able to help us, but at the moment her despair is simply overpowering her common sense. I'm sure, too, that her complete exhaustion is playing a role in her difficulty. We're hoping that after some rest she can add more to what she's already told us."
"And what has she said?" Nicci asked, hoping the answer might provide a clue.
