Phantom Read Online Free PDF

bone, the smooth stones lying in velvet-lined boxes, and the decorative glass vases.
    “Lord Rahl,” she finally asked, “is something wrong?”
    Richard glanced back over his shoulder. “Yes. There’s something wrong with the air.”
    He realized only after seeing the tense concern in her expression that it must have sounded absurd saying that there was something wrong with the air.
    To Cara, though, no matter how absurd it might have sounded, all that really mattered was that he thought there was some kind of trouble, and trouble meant a potential threat. Her leather outfit creaked as she spun her Agiel up into her fist. Weapon at the ready, she peered around the little room, searching the shadows as if a ghost might pop out of the woodwork.
    Her brow drew tighter. “The beast, do you think?”
    Richard hadn’t considered that possibility. The beast that Jagang had ordered his captured Sisters of the Dark to conjure and send after Richard was always a potential threat. There had been several times in the past when it had seemed to appear out of the very air itself.
    Try as he might, Richard couldn’t tell precisely what it was that felt wrong to him. Although he couldn’t put his finger on the source of the sensation, it seemed like maybe it was something he should remember, something he should know, something he should recognize. He couldn’t decide if such a feeling was real or merely his imagination.
    He shook his head. “No…I don’t think it’s the beast. Not wrong in that way.”
    “Lord Rahl, on top of everything else, you’ve been up most of the night reading. Perhaps it’s just that you’re exhausted.”
    There were times when he did wake with a start just as he began to doze off, foggy and disoriented from the gathering descent into the dark grasp of nightmares that he never remembered when he woke. But this impression was different; it was not something borne out of the dullness of dozing off to sleep. Besides, despite his fatigue, he hadn’t been about to fall asleep; he was too anxious to sleep.
    It had been only the day before that he had finally convinced the others that Kahlan was real, that she existed, and that she wasn’t a figment of his imagination or a delusion caused by an injury. At long last they now knew that Kahlan was not some crazy dream he was having. Now that he at lasthad some help, his sense of urgency to find her drove him on and kept him wide awake. He couldn’t bear to take the time to stop and rest—not now that he had some pieces of the puzzle.
    Back near the People’s Palace, questioning Tovi just before she died, Nicci had learned the terrible details of how those four women—Sisters Ulicia, Cecilia, Armina, and Tovi—had invoked a Chainfire event. When they unleashed powers that had for thousands of years been secreted away in an ancient book, everyone’s memory of Kahlan—except Richard’s—had in an instant been wiped away. Somehow, his sword had protected his mind. While he had his memory of Kahlan, his sword had later been forfeited in the effort to find her.
    The theory of a Chainfire event had originated with wizards in ancient times. They had been searching for a method that would allow them to slip unseen, ignored, and forgotten among an enemy. They postulated that there was a method to alter people’s memory with Subtractive power in a way that all the resulting disconnected parts of a person’s recollection would spontaneously reconstruct and connect themselves to one another, with the direct consequence being the creation of erroneous memory to fill the voids that had been created when the subject of the conjuring was wiped from people’s minds.
    The wizards who had come up with the theoretical process had, in the end, come to believe that unleashing such an event might very well engender a cascade of events that couldn’t be predicted or controlled. They speculated that, much like a wildfire, it would continue to burn through links with