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Besides that, Cara was right—Nicci had Subtractive Magic and there was no telling what elements of such sinister power she might have woven into the matrix to prevent the inner seal from being breached. He would not like to force his hand through the keyhole, so to speak, only to discover he had plunged it right into a cauldron of molten lead. Much less risky to untie the knot of magic than try to rip it apart.
Such difficulties only made Zedd all the more determined that he was going to find a way to get through. It was a personal trait of his that had in the distant past made his father surly—especially if it had been a shield that Zedd’s father had constructed specifically to keep out his inquisitive son.
Zedd’s tongue poked out the left corner of his mouth as he worked at threading his way through the fabric of the shield. He was already farther in than he had expected to get so quickly. He extended the invisible probe of power through the inner workings so that he could control it from inside.
And then, even though he was being careful beyond all reason, the weave of the shield tightened, neatly snapping off the foray of magic. It was as if it had maneuvered him into an ambush.
Zedd stood hunched before the brass-clad doors, surprised that a shield would have been able to react in that way. He was, after all, not yet trying to breach it, but merely to probe its inner workings—having a look in the keyhole, as it were.
He had done the very same thing any number of times before. It always worked. It should have worked. It was the most confounding shield he had ever encountered.
He was still bent over the lever, considering his next move, when the door opened inward.
Zedd turned his head a little, peering up. Nicci, one hand on the inner lever, the other at her side, towered over him.
“Did you ever think of knocking?” she asked.
Zedd straightened, hoping his face wasn’t going red but suspecting it had. “Well, actually, I did consider it, but then I discounted the idea. I thought you might have been working late on that book and might be asleep. I didn’t want to disturb you.”
Her blond hair was tumbled down over the shoulders of her black dress, a dress that hugged every curve of her perfect shape. Even though she looked as if she hadn’t slept a wink all night, her blue eyes were as penetrating as those of any sorceress he had ever met. The combination of her alluring beauty, aloof dignity, and keen intellect—to say nothing of the fact that she possessed enough power to turn just about anyone to ash—was both disarming and intimidating.
“If I had been asleep,” Nicci said in that calm, silken voice of hers, “then just how was breaking through a containment field that was buffered with a shield conjured from instructions in a three-thousand-year-old book and spiked with Subtractive counterlocks not going to wake me?”
Zedd’s level of alarm rose. Such shields were not constructed lightly, nor for a private nap.
He spread his hands. “I only meant to have a peek to check up on you.”
Her cool gaze was making him start to sweat. “I spent a very long time at the Palace of the Prophets teaching boy wizards how to behave themselves and school their powers. I know how to make shields that can’t be picked. As a Sister of the Dark I’ve had a great deal of practice at it.”
“Really? I’d be quite interested to learn about such arcane shields—from a strictly professional perspective, of course. Such things are rather a…hobby of mine.”
She still had a hand on the door lever. “What is it you want, Zedd?”
Zedd cleared his throat. “Well, quite honestly, Nicci, I was worried about what might be going on in there with that box.”
Nicci finally smiled just the slightest bit. “Ah. Somehow I didn’t think you were hoping to catch me cavorting naked.”
She stepped back into the library, implying permission to enter.
It was an immense room, with two-story-high round-top windows running the entire length of the far wall. Heavy dark green velvet draperies with gold fringe along with two-story polished mahogany columns rose up between each of the windows, each of those made of hundreds of thick squares of glass. Even the dawn light flooding in through those windows wasn’t enough to banish the somber atmosphere from the room.
Some of the panes of refractory glass making up the windows that were part of the containment field in this section of the Keep had been broken in an unexpected battle back when Richard had been there. Nicci had invited lightning in through those windows to obliterate the underworld beast that had attacked Richard. Asked how she had been able to coax lightning to do her bidding, she had shrugged and said simply that she had created a void that the lightning needed to fill, so it had been compelled to do so. Zedd understood the principle, he just couldn’t imagine how it could be accomplished.
While grateful that she had saved Richard’s life, Zedd had not been pleased that such valuable and irreplaceable glass had been destroyed, leaving the containment field breached. Nicci had offered to help with the repairs. Zedd wouldn’t have known how to accomplish such a thing by himself. He wouldn’t have thought that there was anyone alive who would have known how to bend forces in the way she had done, or who would have had the required power to do so. Who would ever have thought that there would be anyone alive who could re-create the glass in those windows? And yet she had.
It had put Zedd in mind of nothing so much as a queen come down to the royal kitchens to deftly demonstrate how to make a rare bread with a long-forgotten recipe.
While Zedd had known some very powerful sorceresses, he had never known any who were the equal of Nicci. Some of the things she could do with seeming ease were so confounding that it left him speechless.
Of course, Nicci was far more than a mere sorceress. As a former Sister of the Dark she knew how to command Subtractive Magic. As a Sister of the Dark, she would have taken the power from a wizard and added it to her own, creating something altogether unique—not something he liked to contemplate.
To a certain extent she frightened him. Without Richard to show her the value of her own life she would still be devoted to the cause of the Order. With so much of her life a mystery to him, with all that she had done but never spoke of, with all that she had once been a part of, Zedd wasn’t entirely sure of how far he could trust her.
Richard trusted her, though—trusted her with his life. She had proven worthy of that trust on numerous occasions. Other than himself and Cara, Zedd didn’t know anyone as fiercely devoted to Richard as Nicci. Nicci would without question or a second thought go to the underworld itself if she had to in order to save him.
Richard had brought this remarkable woman back from the depths of evil, just as he had done with Cara and the other Mord-Sith. Who but Richard could accomplish such a thing? Who but Richard could even think to do such a thing?
How Zedd missed that boy.
Nicci glided back into the library, and Zedd saw, then, what was on the table. His ability had told him that it was there, but his ability had not told him what more there was to it.
Behind him, Cara let out a low whistle. Zedd sympathized with the sentiment.
The box of Orden, sitting atop one of the massive library tables, absent the decorative covering that once had contained it, was a bewitching black that seemed as if it might suck the light right out of the dawn, a black so black it almost appeared as if the box itself was nothing so much as a void in the world of life. Staring at it felt uncomfortably like looking right into the underworld, the world of the dead.
But it was the containment spell that had been drawn all around the box that had him alarmed. It had been drawn in blood. There were other charms, other spells, drawn on the tabletop, and they, too, were drawn in blood.
Zedd recognized some of the elements of the diagrams. He didn’t know of anyone living who could have drawn such charms. Such things were not entirely stable, making them dangerous beyond belief. Any number of spells could kill in an instant if done improperly. These spells, drawn in blood no less, were among t
he most perilous spells in existence. Employing them successfully was not something Zedd himself, with a lifetime of knowledge, training, and practice, would ever consider attempting.
Zedd had seen such terrible spells drawn only once before. Those had been drawn by Darken Rahl—Richard’s father—when Darken Rahl had been completing the conjuring involved in opening the boxes of Orden. Opening one of the boxes had cost him his life.
Around the box itself, in midair, lines of green and amber light traced yet more spells through space. They were somewhat reminiscent of the glowing green lines of the verification web they had done for the Chainfire spell in that very room, but this structure of three-dimensional formulas was materially different. And these glowing lines pulsed as if alive. He supposed that made sense. The power of Orden was the power of life itself.
Other lines, connected to intersections of the green and, in places, amber light, were as black as the box. Peering at them was like looking through slits into death itself. Subtractive Magic had been mingled with Additive to create a network of power the likes of which Zedd had never imagined he would see in his lifetime.
The whole web of light and darkness hung in space.
The box of Orden itself sat in the center of that web, like a fat black spider.
The Book of Life lay open nearby.
“Nicci,” Zedd managed with only the greatest of difficulty, “what in the name of Creation have you done?”
When she reached the table, Nicci turned back and stared at him for an uncomfortably long moment.
“I have done nothing in the name of Creation. I have done it in the name of Richard Rahl.”
Zedd pulled his gaze away from the terrible thing within the glowing lines to stare at her. He was having difficulty drawing a breath.
“Nicci, what have you done?”
“The only thing I could do. The thing that had to be done. The thing that only I could do.”
The confluence of both sides of the gift holding the box of Orden within its glowing web was beyond imagining. It was the stuff of nightmares.
Zedd chose his words carefully. “Are you suggesting that you believe that you can put that box in play?”
The manner in which she slowly shook her head tightened his chest with dread. Her blue-eyed gaze riveted him in place.
“I have already put it in play.”
Zedd felt as if the floor might come apart under him and he might never stop falling. He wondered for just an instant if any of this was real. The whole room seemed to be swirling around him. His legs felt wobbly.
Cara’s hand came up under his arm to steady him.
