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Cassia, her eyes widening, tilted her head forward. “You are? Really?”
Kahlan smiled as she nodded. “Sisters of the Agiel know what is best for him. We all have to stick together in order to take care of him.”
Cassia flashed a conspiratorial smile. “You have that right.”
At the desk, Kahlan set the tray down to the side, out of Richard’s way. “The sun is up,” she said. “Well, it’s actually too cloudy to see it, but it’s light out, anyway. I brought you breakfast.”
Richard glanced up briefly to give her a perfunctory smile.
“Have some food, Richard. You need to eat.”
Without argument he briefly glanced over at the tray and retrieved a piece of bacon. He munched on it as he continued to study the scroll laid out on the desk before him. A candle in a heavy silver base held down one corner, a lantern the other. More scrolls lay in disorderly stacks all over the desk. Beyond the desk, the stuffed bear stood on its hind legs, towering over them, claws raised as it glared in a frozen, menacing roar.
Once he finished the bacon, Richard kept reading. Kahlan handed him another piece. He took it, offering a grunt of thanks, and kept studying the scroll without looking over.
Kahlan leaned a hip against the desk and folded her arms. “So, have you learned anything?”
“Too much,” he muttered.
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” he said without looking up at her, “that I’m beginning to wish I wouldn’t have come back from the world of the dead.”
Kahlan took hold of the wooden armrest and pulled his chair around so that he was facing her. She was not going to be ignored. When he started to protest she put a forkful of scrambled eggs in his mouth.
“You need to eat to keep up your strength,” she told him. “Fighting off that poison inside you is a constant effort. You need to eat.”
He chewed as he watched her eyes. She knew he couldn’t argue the point. Without pause, she scooped up more eggs and fed them to him each time he swallowed.
When he had finished eating most of the eggs, she handed him the cup of tea and smiled. “Good?”
He took a swallow, his gray, raptor gaze staying on her the whole time. “Yes, thanks. I didn’t realize how hungry I was.” He gestured vaguely to the disorderly stack of scrolls. “I’ve been absorbed in all these.”
Now that he had stopped and eaten something, she expected he would be more forthcoming. “So, do you want to tell me about it?”
He finally let out a deep sigh. “I don’t know. I guess I feel like the whole world has been turned upside down. It turns out that the things I’ve learned in recent years and I thought I knew hardly even scratched the surface. They were true, but only in a way, and only as far as they went. It turns out that nothing is like what I thought. I had no idea of what was actually going on beneath the surface–or even how much there was beneath the surface. I feel like I’ve been kept in the dark.”
“Really? Kept in the dark for how long?”
“Remember the day I first met you in the Hartland woods, and I told you that some men were following you?”
“Of course.”
“Since then.”
Kahlan gave him a smiling admonishment. “Richard, it can’t be that bad. Look at all we’ve overcome already. Besides, just because you’re reading something in these scrolls, that doesn’t mean it’s true. How many times have we thought we understood something because of what we read, only to find out later that it wasn’t true?”
“Unfortunately, this has proven to be true.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Emperor Sulachan would not be back in the world of the living right now if it weren’t true. You wouldn’t be alive if this were not true. I wouldn’t be alive. I had no idea of how much more there is to what is going on than I thought.”
“What’s not like you thought?”
“Everything.”
CHAPTER
28
“Everything,” Kahlan repeated. “Such as?”
Richard leaned back, letting out a deep sigh as he drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair, apparently considering where to begin.
“Do you know where prophecy comes from?” he began.
Kahlan thought it an odd question. “Real prophecy comes from prophets.”
“Dead prophets.”
Kahlan tilted her head forward. “What are you talking about?”
“When a prophet–a wizard gifted with prophecy–goes into a trance and prophecy comes to him, that prophecy is coming from dead prophets in the underworld. That is the source of prophecy.”
Kahlan gaped at him a moment. “You can’t be serious.”
Richard looked up from under his brow. “In the language of Creation, the symbol for prophecy can be translated in two different ways. One meaning of the symbol is ‘prophecy,’ the other translation is ‘the voice of the dead.’”
He turned to the desk and swept an arm over a scroll held open at each side with ledger books. “These scrolls are full of information about the nature of the world of life and the nature of the underworld. I never imagined that this much comprehensive information could be contained in one place. There is more information–important information–in these scrolls than all the libraries at the People’s Palace. It’s like everything we’ve ever found before, everything we’ve ever looked for, everything we’ve learned, only scratched the surface of what these scrolls contain.”
Kahlan didn’t like the sound of that. “Such as?”
Richard wearily rubbed the tips of his fingers against his temples. “Everything that has happened ever since I met you–for that matter everything since you and I were born–is in here. These scrolls tie all the loose ends together. They tie everything together.”
“Everything?” Kahlan couldn’t
fathom what he was talking about. “Richard, I’m not following what you’re getting at. Everything … like what?”
He looked up at the ceiling. “Where do I even begin?”
“Pick a place and start,” she said in as calming a voice as she could muster.
His head came down and he fixed her in his gaze. “Everything from the boxes of Orden to Sulachan to Regula to Hannis Arc to me is tied up in all of this. I don’t even know where to start or really even how to begin to explain it to you.”
Kahlan folded her arms. “Take it one thing at a time, Richard. Start with Regula. What does it say about the omen machine?”
Richard peered up from under his brow. “Regula is part of the power of the underworld. In a way, it’s death itself in our world, in our midst, in the world of life.”
She held up a hand to stop him. “Back up. It’s buried under the People’s Palace. Where did it come from?” she asked, trying to be as patient as she could to get him to calm down. “How did it get there?”
Richard tapped the side of his thumb on the desk for a moment. “I’m not exactly sure, yet, of the whole explanation. There are a lot of Cerulean scrolls left to go through.”
“I understand, but you said that it was in a way death itself in our midst. You must have a reason for saying that. What does that mean?”
He leaned forward. “Regula–its power, what makes it alive in a sense–was banished to the world of life, banished from the underworld.”
Kahlan made a face. “Banished to the world of life? From the underworld? I’m sorry, Richard, but I don’t understand.”
“Well, remember how the wizards back in the great war banished the Temple of the Winds to the underworld to protect the dangerous magic it contained?”
Kahlan had some pretty unpleasant memories of the Temple of the Winds. “It would be impossible for me to forget that even if I tried.”
“Well,” Richard said, using his hands as he talked, “part of the bargain–the balance for that–was that the world of life had to take the power of Regula and keep it hidden here.”
Kahlan squinted at him. “Wait–what is it? What is Regula? What is the power that was banished here?”
