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Richard gazed up at Nicci's face. "Is she… is she all right?"
Zedd looked over as if he had forgotten that Richard had entered the room. "What?"
"Is she all right?"
Zedd's bushy brows drew together. "How would I know?"
Richard threw his arms up and let them flop down in dumbfounded alarm. "Well, for crying out loud, Zedd, aren't you the one who put her there?"
"Not exactly," Zedd muttered, rubbing his palms together as he moved on.
Richard stepped closer to the table below Nicci. "What's going on? Is Nicci all right? Is she in danger?"
Zedd finally looked back and sighed. "We don't exactly know for sure, my boy."
Nathan came out of the shadows and toward the table, into the greenish light. The tall prophet's dark azure eyes were clearly troubled. He opened his hands in a gesture of reassurance, his long white hair brushing his shoulders as he shrugged slightly. "We think she is all right, Richard."
"She should be just fine," Ann assured him as she joined Nathan.
The broad-shouldered prophet towered over her. In her plain woolen dress, with her graying hair gathered back into a loose bun, she looked all the more plain beside Nathan. Richard thought that just about anyone would probably look plain beside Nathan.
Richard gestured, indicating the net of geometric lines that encased Nicci. "What is this thing?"
"A verification web," his grandfather said.
Richard frowned. "Verification? Verification of what?"
"Chainfire," Zedd told him in a somber voice. "We're trying to figure out precisely how a Chainfire event functions so that we can see if there is a way to reverse it."
Richard scratched his temple. "Oh."
He was liking the whole thing less and less. He desperately wanted to find Kahlan, yet he was deeply worried for what could happen to Nicci in such an attempt to unravel mysterious powers created by ancient wizards. As First Wizard, Zedd had abilities and talents that Richard could not begin to fathom, and yet those wizards in ancient times far surpassed Zedd's gift. With as much as Zedd, Nathan, Ann, and Nicci knew, as powerful as they all were, they were still dabbling with things outside their experience, things beyond their ability, things that even those ancient wizards feared. Still, what choice did they have?
Besides caring deeply for Nicci, Richard needed her to help him find Kahlan. While the others might in some areas be more powerful or more knowledgeable than Nicci, the sum of everything about her put her on a different plane. She was probably the most powerful sorceress ever to have drawn a breath. What others could do with a great effort, Nicci could do with a glance. As remarkable as that was, to Richard that was probably one of the least remarkable things about Nicci. Other than Kahlan, he didn't know anyone who could focus on a goal as tenaciously as Nicci. Cara could be just as unflinching about defending him, but Nicci was able to center that kind of tenacity on anything she set her mind to. Back when she had fought against him, her reckless determination made her not just brutally effective but profoundly dangerous.
Richard was glad all that had changed. Since the search for Kahlan had begun, Nicci had become his closest and most steadfast friend. Nicci knew, though, that his heart belonged to Kahlan and that could never change.
He raked his fingers back through his hair. "Well, why is she up there in the middle of the thing?"
"She's the only one of us who knows how to use Subtractive Magic," Ann said in simple summary. "A Chainfire event needs Subtractive elements to ignite it and then to make it function. We're trying to understand the whole spell—both the Additive and Subtractive components."
Richard supposed that made sense, but it still didn't make him feel any better about it. "And Nicci agreed to this?"
Nathan cleared his throat. "It was her idea."
Of course it was. Richard sometimes thought the woman had a death wish.
It was times like this that he wished he knew more about such things. He was feeling ignorant again. He gestured up at the totality of everything floating above the table. "I never realized that verification webs used people. I mean, I never knew that such webs were cast around someone like that."
"Neither did we, exactly," Nathan said in that deep, commanding voice of his.
Richard felt uncomfortable under the prophet's gaze, so he turned to Zedd. "What do you mean?"
Zedd shrugged. "This is the first time any of us has ever done an aspect analysis of a verification web from an interior perspective. To do so requires Subtractive Magic, so casting a verification web in this manner probably hasn't been done in perhaps thousands of years."
"Then how did you know how to do it?"
"Just because none of us has ever done such a thing," Ann said, "doesn't mean we haven't studied various accounts of it."
Zedd gestured to one of the other tables. "We've been reading the book you found—Chainfire. It's more complex than anything any of us has ever seen before, so we wanted to try to understand everything about it. While we've never done an interior perspective before, it's really just an extension of what we already know. As long as you know how to run a standard verification web, and you have the required elements of the gift, you can perform the aspect analysis from an interior perspective. That's what Nicci is doing—that's why she had to be the one to do it."
"If there's a standard process, then why would this method be needed?"
Zedd lifted a hand toward the lines around Nicci. "An interior perspective is said to show the spell-form in more revealing detail—down to a more elemental level—than you see in the standard verification process. Since it is said to show more than can be learne
d in the standard process, and Nicci was able to initiate it, we all decided that it would be an advantage to do it this way."
Richard was starting to breathe a little easier. "So then using Nicci in this way is just an abstract analysis. It means nothing more."
Zedd looked away from Richard's eyes as he lightly rubbed the furrows on his brow. "This is only a verification process, Richard, not an ignition of the actual event, so, in a sense, it's not real. What the real spell does in an instant, this inert form stretches out into a lengthy verification process so as to enable a comprehensive analysis. Although not without its risks, that's not the viable spell itself you see around Nicci."
Zedd cleared his throat. "When the actual spell would have been cast, though, instead of Nicci, that would have been Kahlan, and it would have been all too real."
Goose bumps ran up Richard's arms. His mouth felt so dry that he could hardly talk. He could feel his heart pounding through the veins in his neck. He wanted that not to be true.
"But you said that you needed Nicci in order to cast this web. You said that you could only do it because she can work Subtractive Magic. Kahlan wouldn't have been able to do that for the Sisters—and in any event she wouldn't have cooperated."
Zedd shook his head. "The Sisters were casting the real spell around Kahlan. They had command of Subtractive power and would have had no need for Kahlan's cooperation. We needed Nicci to work it from inside, using both Additive and Subtractive aspects, so that we can try to determine how it functions. The two aren't analogous."
"Well, how—"
"Richard," his grandfather said, gently cutting him off, "as I said, we're rather busy. Right now is not the time to discuss this. We need to observe the process so we can try to figure out the equational behavior of the spell. Let us do our job, will you?"
Richard slipped his hands into his back pockets. "Sure."
He glanced back at Cara. She wore what people might see as a blank expression, but to Richard, as well as he knew her, it revealed a great deal and seemed to reflect his own suspicions. He turned back to his grandfather. "Are you having some kind of… trouble?"
