Verna's suspicion returned in a flash. "What meaning?"

"I don't have time to go into it right now. I need to get back and see if Zedd and the others have come up with anything."

"You mean about finding your wife, Lord Rahl?"

"Yes, General, but it gets worse. Other things are happening. There is fundamental trouble with magic."

"Such as?" Verna pressed.

Richard appraised her eyes. "You need to know that the chimes have contaminated the world of life. Magic itself has been corrupted. Parts of it have already failed. There is no telling when yet more of it will fail, or how soon. We have to get back and see what can be done — if anything. Ann is there, along with Nathan, and they are working with Zedd to find some answers."

Before Verna could launch into a barrage of questions, Richard turned his attention to the general. "One last thing. With no army here to stand in their way, I'm sure that Jagang will try to take the People's Palace."

General Meiffert scratched his head of blond hair as he thought it over. "I suppose." He looked up. "But the palace is high on a huge plateau. There are only two ways up: the small road with the drawbridge, or through the great inner doors. If the great doors were closed there's not going to be any assault up that way, and the road is pretty useless for an armed attack.

"Still," the general said, "just to be on the safe side, I would advise that we send some of our best men up to the palace as reinforcements. With all of us heading south, Commander General Trimack and the First File will be facing Jagang's entire army all alone. But still, an assault on the palace?" He shook his head skeptically. "The palace is impenetrable."

"Jagang has gifted with him," Cara reminded him. "And don't forget, Lord Rahl, those Sisters made it into the palace before, way back in the beginning. Remember?"

Before Richard could answer, Verna caught his arm and turned him back to her frown. "Why would those Sisters ignite this spell you mentioned, this Chainfire spell?"

"To make people forget that Kahlan exists."

"But why would they want to do such a thing?"

Richard sighed. "Sister Ulicia wanted to get Kahlan into the People's Palace to steal the boxes of Orden. The Chainfire spell was designed to make a person the same thing as invisible. With the Chainfire spell ignited on Kahlan, no one remembers her. No one remembers that she walked right in and took the boxes out of the garden of life."

"Took the boxes…" Verna blinked in astonishment. "What in the world for?"

"Sister Ulicia put them in play," Nicci said.

"Dear Creator," Verna said as she pressed a hand to her forehead. "I will leave some Sisters there with a stern warning."

"Maybe you ought to be one of them," Richard said as he glanced out and saw the wind come up to carry the rain sideways at times. "We can't allow the palace to fall. Causing havoc down in the Old World is relatively simple conjuring for the Sisters. Defending the palace from Jagang's horde and his gifted may be a much greater challenge."

"Perhaps you're right," she admitted as she pulled a lock of wind-borne, wavy hair back off her face.

"Meanwhile, I'll see what I can do to stop Ulicia and her Sisters of the Dark." Richard glanced around at Nicci and Cara, then out at all the men rushing about through the rain to carry out their new mission. "I need to get back."

General Meiffert clapped his fist over his heart. "We will be the steel against steel, Lord Rahl, so that you can be the magic against magic."

Verna touched Richard's cheek, her brown eyes welling up. "Take care, Richard. We all need you."

He nodded and gave her a warm smile, putting more than words could say into it.

General Meiffert slipped an arm around Cara's waist. "Could I escort you to your horses?"

Cara smiled up at him in a very feminine way. "I think we would like that."

Nicci pulled the hood of her cloak up as they ducked out into the downpour. She looked over at Richard and frowned suspiciously.

"Where did you get such an idea as the 'phantom legion'?"

He put a hand on the small of her back and guided her into the downpour. "Shota gave me the thought when she said I needed to stop chasing phantoms. She implied that a phantom can't be found, can't be caught. I want these men to be phantoms."

She gently circled an arm around his shoulders as they sprinted for their horses. "You did the right thing, Richard."

She must have read the sorrow in his eyes.

CHAPTER 26

Rachel yawned. Seemingly out of nowhere, Violet spun around and clouted her hard enough to knock her off the rock she'd been sitting on.

Stunned, Rachel pushed herself up on an arm. She cradled her cheek in one hand, waiting for the stupefying pain to loosen its grip, waiting for everything around her to come back into focus. Satisfied, Violet turned back to her work.

Rachel had been so groggy from not sleeping that she hadn't been paying attention, allowing Violet's blow to take her completely by surprise. Rachel's eyes watered with the tingling hurt but she knew better than to say anything or to make a show of the pain.

"Yawning is impolite, at best, disrespectful at worst," Violet's plump face peered back over her shoulder. "If you don't behave, then the next time I'll use the whip."

"Yes, Queen Violet," Rachel answered in a meek voice. She knew all too well that Violet wasn't making an empty threat.

Rachel was so tired she could hardly keep her eyes open. She had once been Violet's «playmate» but now she seemed to be nothing more than an object of abuse.

Violet had become preoccupied with extracting revenge. At night she had an iron device fastened in Rachel's mouth. It was a terrifying process. Rachel was made to stick her tongue into a beaklike clamp made of two flat, scored pieces of iron. The jaws were then tightened down hard enough to grip her tongue.

Resisting, Rachel had learned, earned her a whipping followed by guards prying her mouth open and then using painful tongs on her tender tongue to help accomplish the task of getting it placed in the clamp. They always won in the end; her tongue had nowhere to hide. Once the clamp was on her tongue, then the iron mask that was a part of it was locked around her head to kept her tongue immobile.

Once it was on, Rachel couldn't speak. It was hard even to swallow.

After that, Violet locked her in her old iron box for the night. She said she wanted Rachel to know what it was like to be mute and in pain.

And it was painful. Being locked in her iron cage all night with that terrible device clamped down on her tongue had nearly driven her crazy. At first, terrified out of her mind by the feeling of being trapped and alone, unable to get out, unable to get that painful thing off, she had screamed and screamed. Chuckling, Violet merely threw a heavy rug over the box to mute Rachel's cries. Crying and screaming, though, only made the iron jaws pinching her tongue hurt all the more and leave her bloody.

But what finally made her stop crying and screaming was that Violet came and put her face right up to the little window and said that if Rachel didn't be quiet, she would have Six cut Rachel's tongue out for real. Rachel knew that Six would do it if Violet asked.

After that she didn't scream or carry on. She instead curled up in a ball in her little iron prison and tried to remember all the things Chase had taught her. That, in the end, was what had calmed her.

Chase would have told her not to think of her present predicament, but to keep watching for the time when she could get herself out of it. Chase had taught her how to watch for patterns in the way people behaved, and openings where they weren't paying attention. So, that was what she did as she lay in the iron box every night, unable to sleep as she waited for morning to come, waited for the men who would pull her out of the box and remove the terrible device for the day.