Soul of the Fire (107 page)

“
I just thought you should know, Dalton,” she added. “I found it quite sad: my husband is humping your wife and you don’t know anything about it. It could be … awkward. You could inadvertently embarrass yourself, not knowing.”

“
Why, Hildemara?” he managed to ask in a whisper. “Why would you get so much satisfaction from this?”

At last her smile bloomed into true pleasure. “Because I always hated your smug superiority about your vows of fidelity—the way you looked down your nose, believing yourself and your wife better than all the rest of us.”

By sheer force of will, Dalton restrained himself. In times of trial or exigency, he was always able to become analytical in order to apply the best solution to the situation that confronted him.

With ruthless resolve, he did that now.

“
Thank you for the information, Hildemara. It could indeed have been embarrassing.”

“
Do me a favor and don’t go all gloomy about it, Dalton. You have reason to be enormously pleased. This is the Sovereign we’re talking about. It is, after all, an honor for any man to provide his wife for as reverend and sublime a figure as the Sovereign of Anderith. You will be loved and respected all the more because your wife is giving the Sovereign release from the stresses of his high calling.

“
You should know that, Dalton. After all, you made the man who he is: the Creator’s advisor in this world. Your wife is simply being a loyal subject.” She chuckled. “Very loyal, from what I’ve overheard. My, but it would take quite the woman to match her.”

She leaned close and kissed his ear. “But I’d like to try, Dalton, dear.” She looked him in the eye as she straightened. “I’ve always been fascinated by you. You are the most devious, dangerous man I’ve ever met, and I’ve met some real pieces of work.”

She turned back from the doorway. “After you come to accept it, you will find it of no importance, Dalton. You’ll see.

“
And then, as you suggested to me before, once your vow was broken, I will be the first you come to? Don’t forget, you promised.”

Dalton stood alone in his office, his mind racing, thinking on what he should do.
 

Kahlan laid her arms on his shoulders and leaned over, putting her cheek against his ear. It felt warm and comforting, despite the unneeded distraction. She kissed his temple.

“
How is it going?”

Richard stretched with a yawn. Where did one begin?

“
This man was bent seriously out of straight.”

“
What do you mean?”

“
I still have a lot to translate, but I’m beginning to get a picture of what happened.” Richard rubbed his eyes. “The man is sent here to banish the chimes. He at once scrutinizes the problem, and sees a simple solution. The wizards at the Keep thought it was inspired genius, and told him so.”

“
He must have been proud,” she said, clearly meaning the opposite.

He understood her sardonic tone, and shared the sentiment. “You’re right, not Joseph Ander. He doesn’t say it here, but from what we’ve read before, I know the way he thinks. Joseph Ander would have felt not pride in himself for understanding it, but contempt for those who had failed to.”

“
So,” she said, “he had the solution. Then what?”

“
They told him to see to it at once. Apparently they were having problems similar to ours with the chimes, and wanted the threat ended immediately. He complained that if they had the good sense to send him to see to it, then they should stop telling him what to do.”

“
Not a good way to treat his superiors at the Keep.”

“
They implored him to stop the chimes because of the people dying. Apparently, they knew him well enough to realize they had better not threaten the man, at least not with the rest of the war to worry about. So, they told him to use his best judgment, but to please hurry with a solution so people would be safe from the threat.

“
He was much more pleased to get such a message, but used it as a club to start lecturing the wizards at the Keep.”

“
About what?”

Richard ran his fingers back into his hair. It was frustrating to try to put into words what Joseph Ander was about.

“
There’s a lot left in here to translate. It’s slow going. But I don’t think this book is going to tell us how to banish the chimes. Joseph Ander just doesn’t think that way—to write it down.”

Kahlan straightened and turned around with her back to the table so she could stand facing him.

She folded her arms. “All right, Richard. I know you better than that. What aren’t you telling me?”

Richard stood and turned his back to her as he pressed his fingers to his temple.

“
Richard, don’t you trust me?”

He turned to her. He took up her hand. “No, no, it isn’t that. It’s just … just that some of the things he says, I don’t know where truth leaves off and Joseph Ander’s madness begins. This goes beyond anything I’ve ever heard about, been taught, or believed about magic.”

Now she did look concerned. He guessed, in one way, he was raising her fears wrongly. On the other hand, he couldn’t begin to raise them to the levels of his own fears.

“
Joseph Ander,” he began, “thought he was just
better
than the other wizards.”

“
We already knew that.”

“
Yes, but he may have been right.”

“
What?”

“
Sometimes, in madness resides genius. Kahlan, I don’t know where to draw the line. In one way not knowing about magic is a liability, but in another it means I’m not burdened by preconceived notions, the way the wizards at the Keep were, so I might recognize the truth in his words where they did not.

“
You see, Joseph Ander viewed magic not so much as a set of requirements—you know, a pinch of this, this word three times while turning round on your left foot, and all that kind of thing.

“
He saw magic as an art form—a means of expression.”

Kahlan was frowning. “I don’t follow. Either you cast a spell properly to invoke it, or it doesn’t work. Like I call my power with a touch. Like the way we called the chimes by fulfilling specific requirements of the magic, thereby releasing it.”

He knew that with her magical ability, her background, and her learning about magic, she would have the same problem the other wizards did. Richard felt just a trace of the frustration Joseph Ander must have felt. In that, too, he understood the man that much better—understood a tiny bit of the frustration of having people tell you the hard facts of something when you knew better, yet couldn’t get them to see the abstract concept of the greater whole right before them.

As did Joseph Ander, Richard thought to try again.

“
Yes, I know, and I’m not saying that doesn’t work, but he believed there was more. That magic could be taken to a higher level—to a plane beyond that which most people with the gift used.”

Now she really was frowning. “Richard, that’s madness.”

“
No, I don’t think so.” He picked up the journey book.

“
This is in answer to something unrelated they asked—but you have to hear this to understand the way Joseph Ander thinks.”

He read to her the crux of the translation.

“‘
A wizard who cannot truly destroy cannot truly create.’” Richard tapped the book. “He was talking about a wizard like the gifted now, a wizard with only the Additive—like Zedd. Ander didn’t even consider a man to have the gift, if he didn’t have both sides. He thought of such a man as simply an aberration, and hopelessly disadvantaged.”

Richard went back to the journey book and read on.

“‘
A wizard must know himself or he risks working ill magic that harms his own free will.’ That’s him talking about the creative aspects of magic beyond the structure of it. ‘Magic intensifies and concentrates passions, strengthening not only such things as joy, but ruinous passions, too, and in this way they may become obsessions, and unbearable unless released.’”

“
Sounds like he’s trying to justify being destructive,” she said.

“
I don’t think so. I think he’s on to something important, a higher balance, as it were.”

Kahlan shook her head, clearly not catching what he saw, but he could think of no way to get it across to her, so he read on.

“
This is important. ‘Imagination is what makes a great wizard, for with it, he is able to transcend the limitations of tradition and go beyond the structure of what now exists into the higher realm of creating the very fabric of magic.’”

“
That’s what you were talking about? About him thinking of it as an … an art form? A means of expression? Like he’s the Creator Himself—weaving a cloth of magic out of nothing?”

“
Exactly. But listen to this. This, I believe, may be the most important thing Joseph Ander has to say. When the chimes ceased being a problem, the other wizards cautiously asked what he did. You can almost read the anxiety in their words. This is his terse reply to their question of what he had done to the chimes.

“‘
A Grace might rise in obedience to an inventive spell.’”

Kahlan rubbed her arms, clearly disturbed by the answer. “Dear spirits, what does that mean?”

Richard leaned closed to her, “I think it means he dreamed up something—a new magic, outside the parameters of the original conjuring that brought the chimes into this world. Magic to suit the situation, and himself.

“
In other words, Joseph Ander got creative.”

Kahlan’s green eyes cast about. He knew she was considering the depths of aberration with which they were dealing. This was the madman who had finally inflicted the chimes on them.

“
The world is coming apart,” she whispered to herself, “and you’re talking about Joseph Ander using magic as an art form?”

“
I’m just telling you what the man said.” Richard turned to the last page. “I skipped ahead. I wanted to see the last thing he wrote the wizards.”

Richard studied the High D’Haran words again to be certain of the translation, and then read Joseph Ander’s words.

“‘
In the end, I have concluded I must reject the Creator and the Keeper both. I instead create my own solution, my own rebirth and death, and in so doing will always protect my people. And so farewell, for I shall lay my soul on troubled waters, and thus watch over for all time that which I have so carefully wrought, and which is now safeguarded and inviolate.’”

Richard looked up. “See? Do you understand?” He saw she didn’t. “Kahlan, I don’t think he banished the chimes as he was supposed to. I think he instead used them for his own purposes.”

Her nose wrinkled. “Used them? What can you use the chimes for?”

“
The Dominie Dirtch.”

“
What!” She squeezed the bridge of her nose between her finger and thumb. “But then how was it possible for us to follow such a well-defined, prescribed, strict outline and inadvertently call them forth? That sort of structure is exactly what you are telling me Joseph Ander thought he was beyond.”

Richard had been waiting for that exact argument. “That’s the balance. Don’t you see? Magic must be balanced. In order to do something creative, he had to balance it with something not creative, a very strict formula. That it is so strict in its requirements to free the chimes is in itself proof of the creativity of what he did.”

He knew her well enough to tell she didn’t agree, but wasn’t in the mood to argue. She said simply, “So how do we then banish the chimes?”

Richard shook his head with defeat in that much of it.

“
I don’t know. I fear there is no answer to that question. The wizards of Joseph Ander’s time were equally frustrated and beaten by the man. In the end, they simply considered this place lost to them. I’m beginning to believe Joseph Ander created an unbreakable magic inside a puzzle without a solution.”

Kahlan took the book from his hands, closed it, and placed it back on the little table.

“
Richard, I think you’re getting a little crazy yourself, reading the rantings of a lunatic. That’s not the way magic works.”

That’s what the wizards at the Keep had told Ander—that he couldn’t convert and control an element that was innately uncontrollable. Richard didn’t tell Kahlan that, though. She wasn’t prepared to think of magic in these terms.