Both Mord-Sith, even though they looked apprehensive, nodded.
With that, and the urgency of the situation displacing any second thoughts, he stepped off the edge with the rest of them into the silvery pool.
CHAPTER 50
Gliding through the sliph was an otherworldly sensation, unlike anything Richard had ever been able to relate it to. Each time it felt familiar, and yet completely unexpected. There was a sense of still peacefulness, of a velvety eternity around him, combined with a dim awareness of savage speed.
He tightly held Kahlan’s hand in his right, Nicci’s in his left. He hoped that the two Mord-Sith were holding on to each of them as well.
There was nothing to see, as such. With his eyes closed he saw colors flash by, but when he opened them there was only darkness. When he closed his eyes again, those colors, spinning and swirling as if carried on a fitful wind, filled his mind. The hues and tones spread through empty space like vivid dyes through crystal-clear water.
There was no way to judge time in the sliph, any more than there had been a way to judge the passage of time in the underworld. While in the underworld Richard couldn’t tell if he had been dead for mere moments, or a thousand years. It was all the same. In the past, whenever he had asked the sliph how long they had been traveling, she always said that she was long enough, as if that was somehow answer enough.
He used that stretch of time suspended to consider what he needed to do. He analyzed it from every angle. As far as he could tell, the pieces he did have all fit. Try as he might to come up with another way, and as much as he might wish there were one, there wasn’t.
He was the bringer of death, and only he could do such a thing. He understood why every different source, from prophecy to the Cerulean scrolls, said as much.
Breathing the quicksilver fluid of the sliph was at once a giddy experience and a terrifying one. It tended to be giddy as long as he didn’t think about what he was actually doing. When he thought about how he was breathing in the silvery fluid instead of air, it switched to terrifying.
Light and shadow in blocky shapes suddenly flooded in around him.
Breathe.
It was the sliph telling him to let go of the fluid he was holding in his lungs and to breathe air instead. In the past he had never wanted to let go of the warm, silken, quicksilver sliph and take that first painful breath of cold air, but in this case he had urgent matters that he was focused on and the sensation of the sliph was a distant secondary thought.
He tilted his head back as he popped up above the surface of the rolling silver waters inside the well, and expelled the fluid of the sliph. With forceful, deliberate effort he drew in a deep breath of air. It hurt, as he expected, but that pain was only a distant consideration.
He looked around as he panted, catching his breath, once again getting accustomed to breathing air, and saw that the others were doing the same. He slipped one arm around Kahlan’s waist and grabbed the top of the wall with his other hand. When she threw her arms over the top, he helped lift her up and out of the well. Once she was out, a hand reached down and seized his arm.
It was Nathan’s.
Another hand took his other arm. It was Rikka’s. Through his still-blurred vision he could see that she was wearing her red leather–always a worrisome sign with Mord-Sith. He was relieved to see both Nathan and Rikka. That told him immediately that Hannis Arc and Emperor Sulachan had not yet captured the People’s Palace.
Together, the old wizard and the Mord-Sith helped lift him up and over the edge. The sickness inside him was sapping his strength. Besides Kahlan, Nicci and the two Mord-Sith were already out of the well. Nicci held her stomach, bending forward as she panted. Cassia rested with a hand on the stone wall of the well. As she caught her breath, Vale checked her single blond braid, marveling that it was not wet and dripping silver fluid.
Richard turned back to the well. “Thank you, Sliph. For now it would please me if you would stay here in case I need to travel again.”
The silver face smiled. “You were pleased, then, Master?”
Richard nodded, still catching his breath. “Yes. Always.”
Content with the answer, she said she would remain there. Her face melted back down into the choppy little waves of the quicksilver liquid and the pool gradually stilled until it was a quiet, mirrored surface of silver.
“Why would we need her again?” Kahlan asked, suspiciously.
“Who knows,” Richard told her, leaving it at that and hoping she didn’t ask anything else.
Fortunately, she instead turned to the prophet. “Nathan, what are you doing down here?”
“I came to greet you, of course,” he said, lifting an arm with a grand gesture a king might give an adoring crowd.
Nathan’s full head of straight white hair hung to his broad shoulders. His hawklike Rahl glare hooded his penetrating dark azure eyes. He was clean-shaven and ruggedly handsome, despite being nearly a thousand years old after having lived for most of his long life in the spell around the Palace of the Prophets that slowed time. Rather than the traditional robes of a wizard, he was wearing high boots, dark trousers, and a ruffled white shirt under an open dark green vest. He was also wearing a sword sheathed in an elegant scabbard at his hip.
A sword was about the last thing a wizard of Nathan’s ability needed, but he liked carrying one anyway. Most of his life he had dressed in the traditional simple robes of a wizard, as was required of him at the Palace of the Prophets. Now free of that place, he liked to dress in his image of an adventurer from many of the books he’d read. Richard had often wondered if because he had never had a normal childhood, Nathan was living it out now that he was free to do so.
Nathan, looking serious, gestured to Richard’s hip. “Where is your sword?”
Richard flicked a hand back at the well. “I couldn’t bring it through the sliph.”
“Ah” was all Nathan said.
The tall, blond Mord-Sith shared a nod with Cassia and Vale before turning her attention back to Richard.
“Lord Rahl, if I may ask, where is Cara? Why isn’t she protecting you? She should be with you.”
Richard’s breath caught at the name. Before he could answer, Cassia lifted Cara’s Agiel, worn around her neck, and answered in his place.
“She is, in a way. Cara died as all Mord-Sith want to die–giving her life for Lord Rahl. I carry her Agiel so that she may be with him in spirit, and so that I can always be reminded of her strength.”
Richard saw only a slight pause in Rikka’s breathing.
“And where have you two been all this time?” she asked, looking between Cassia and Vale. She sounded like a mother unhappy with children who had not shown up for dinner.
Richard spoke up for Cassia and Vale. “They and the others with them were captured and forced to serve the man who is coming here to kill us all. The rest of those women, except Vika, are dead. Some of them died defending us.”
The harsh edges of Rikka’s expression eased as she looked back at the two Mord-Sith. “Glad to have you both back to help protect Lord Rahl and the Mother Confessor.”
Cassia revealed the slightest of smiles. “From my experience, they require a lot of defending. Lord Rahl, especially, wouldn’t last long without at least one of us watching over him.”
Richard turned his attention back to Nathan. “How did you know we were coming? How is it that you were down here waiting for us?”
Nathan shrugged his broad shoulders as if it should be stone-cold obvious. “I’m a prophet. Prophecy came to me, saying that you would arrive down here, so we’ve been down here waiting.”