Phantom: Chainfire Trilogy Part 2

And the silver face of the sliph, rather than looking out from within her well, had risen slightly from a rather small and irregular opening in the ancient stone floor. Ragged pieces from that stone floor now lay about on top of the dried leaves and rubble of branches, as if they had just been broken open from underneath — as if the sliph has broken up through them.

Richard sat up. "Sliph, are you all right?"

"Yes, Master."

"Do you know what happened? It felt like I was drowning."

"You were."

Richard stared at the face in the moonlight. "But how can that be? What went wrong?"

A silver hand reached up from the ground to trail quicksilver fingers across his brow, testing him.

"You do not have the required magic to travel."

Richard blinked in confusion. "I don't understand. I've traveled many times before."

"Before you had what was required."

"And now I don't?"

The sliph watched him a moment. "Now you do not," she confirmed.

Richard felt like he must be hallucinating. "But I have both sides of the gift. I can travel."

The sliph cautiously reached out and again felt his face. The hand slipped down to his chest, pausing for a moment to put light pressure against him. Her arm drew back into the dark hole in the broken stone.

"You do not have the required magic."

"You already said that. It makes no sense. I was already traveling."

"While you were traveling, you lost what is required."

Richard's eyes widened. "You mean to say that I lost one side of the gift?"

"No, I mean to say that you do not have the gift. You have no magic at all. You may not travel."

Richard had to run the words through his head again to be sure he'd heard correctly. He didn't see how he could have mistaken what the sliph had said. His mind raced through fragments of jumbled thoughts as he tried to grasp how such a thing was possible.

A terrible realization came to him. Could it be that the corruption caused by the chimes might be responsible? Had that corruption finally caught up with him and undone his gift? Rotted it away without his knowing it until it had finally failed?

But that would not explain the sensation he'd felt back in the sliph, just after he'd escaped the grip of the beast and just before he'd started drowning — the sudden sensation of some dark and furtive magic reaching out when he was most vulnerable and touching him.

Richard looked around but saw nothing other than the trees. They were dense enough that he couldn't see beyond them in the moonlight. As a guide, he hated the feeling of not knowing where he was.

"Where are we, anyway? How did we get here?"

"When it happened, when you lost what is needed to travel, I had to bring you here."

"And where is 'here'?"

"I am sorry but I don't know, exactly."

"How can you bring me here, and not know where you are? You always know where you are and the places to which you can travel."

"I already told you, I have never been to this place before. This place is an emergency passage. I knew of it, of course, but I have never been here before. There has never been an emergency within me before.

"That terrible beast hurt me. I was struggling to keep all of you alive. And then, there was something else that came within me. I could not stop it. Like the beast, it entered me without my permission. It violated me."

That confirmed Richard's sense of events, that just after the beast lost its grip on him, something else, some kind of power, had reached out and touched him with its dominion.

"I'm sorry that you were hurt, sliph. What happened to the beast?"

"After this other power came into me, the beast became no more."

"You mean that this other power destroyed it?"

"No. The power did not touch the beast. It touched only you with its full force. After it did, then you no longer had what is required to travel. After that, the beast cast around in me for a brief time, and then vanished. I could no longer sustain you within me, so I had to find the nearest emergency portal."

"What about Nicci and Cara? Were they hurt? Are they safe?"

"They, too, felt the pain of what happened to me, and one of them tried to use her power in me — something that is wrong to do. After I brought you here, I took them to the Keep where they had wished to travel. I told the one that used her power that it was dangerous to do so, and she must not do such a thing."

"I think I understand," Richard said. "It hurt me, too. Were they hurt badly?"

"They are safe at the Keep."

"Then we must be somewhere between the People's Palace and the Keep," Richard said, half to himself.

"No."

He looked over at the liquid silver face. "I don't understand. We were going from the palace to the Keep. If you let me out, then this place here, this emergency passage out, would have to be between the palace and the Keep."

"While I don't know this place, I do know its general area. We are at a place a little more than halfway across the Midlands from the Keep, past Agaden Reach, almost to the wilds."