Phantom: Chainfire Trilogy Part 2

He knew his mother would love Kahlan. She would be so happy for him, so proud to have a daughter-in-law like Kahlan. She always wanted him to have a good life. There could be no better life than a life with Kahlan.

But he no longer had a life with Kahlan.

He guessed that he had life and, all things considered, that was about as much as could be expected at the moment. At least he could work toward his dreams. Dead men had no dreams.

Richard lay on his back, letting the air saturate his burning muscles, letting himself regain his senses, his composure. He was so weak he could hardly move, so he didn't try to. Instead, as long as he was lying there recovering, he focused on everything that had happened, trying to put it all back together in his mind.

He had been traveling back to the Keep with Nicci and Cara when they had been attacked. It had been the beast. He had sensed its aura of evil. It appeared in a form different from any he had ever seen before, but it was the beast's nature to assume different forms. The only thing he could count on to be consistent was that the beast would continue to come after him until it killed him.

He remembered fighting it. His hand went to a place on his leg where one of the tentacles had squeezed until he thought his leg would be stripped of flesh. His thigh was swollen and painful to the touch but, fortunately, not torn open. He remembered slicing through some of the creature's arms. He remembered Nicci trying to use her power, and wishing that she would stop because it was somehow conducting right through the sliph so that some of the power she had unleashed against the beast had ripped through him. He suspected that were it not for the substance of the sliph, Nicci's magic could have killed him. It certainly didn't harm the beast — at least, not enough to slow it down. It, too, must have been insulated, at least to some extent, by the sliph.

He remembered Cara being pulled away from him. He remembered Nicci likewise being violently separated from him. He remembered the beast trying to rip him apart. And he remembered managing to abruptly break free.

But then something had happened that he did not understand.

While he was separated from the beast, he had been jolted by an unfamiliar, painful sensation that ripped right down into the core of his being. It had been distinctly different from the pain caused by Nicci's power — or that of any magic he had ever felt.

Magic.

Once he had formed the thought, he realized that he was right; it had been magic of some sort.

Even if it was the touch of a kind of conjuring completely unlike anything he had ever felt, he recognized that it had been the touch of magic. Even though he'd been free of the beast — he hadn't even known where the beast was at that particular moment — that was when everything had suddenly changed.

As he'd gasped in pain from the abrupt assault of the strange charge of power, the sliph's essence again filled his lungs. That breath had brought a shock of panic.

Richard remembered a similar feeling when he had been young. He'd been with several other boys, diving down to the bottom of a pond in a contest to retrieve pebbles. Their afternoon of swimming and diving from branches overhanging the small but deep pond had churned up the muddy bottom. Under the murky water, while diving for pebbles, Richard lost his sense of direction. He was out of air when he bumped his head on a thick branch. Being disoriented, he thought that bumping into the low branch meant that he'd broken the surface and run into one of the low-lying limbs hanging out over the edge of the pond. He hadn't. It had been a submerged branch. Before realizing what he had really done, he breathed in some of the muddy water.

He'd been close to the surface, to the shore, and to his friends. It had been a terrifying experience, but it had ended quickly and he'd recovered soon enough, learning a lesson to have more respect for water.

That memory of breathing in water as a boy, in addition to the natural unwillingness to inhale water, had made it all the more difficult to breathe in the sliph the first time. He overcame that fear, though, and it turned out to be a rapturous experience.

But in the sliph, when he suddenly found himself drowning, there was no surface, no shore, no help at hand. Such a thing had never happened in the sliph before. There had been no way for him to escape, no way to get to the surface, and no one to help him.

Richard looked over in the moonlight. The sliph was close by, watching him. He realized that she was not in a well, the way he had always seen her before. They were on the ground in a sparsely wooded place. He could hear no sounds but the sounds of nature. He could detect nothing but forest smells.

Beneath leaves, pine needles, forest debris, and roots Richard felt a rough stone floor. The grout joints were fat, more than a finger wide. These were not tight joints like those in finely crafted palaces, but they were without a doubt man-made.