Phantom Read Online Free PDF Page B

other people whose memory had not initially been altered. In the end, they had realized that, with such incalculable, sweeping, and calamitous consequences, a Chainfire event had the very real potential to unravel the world of life itself, so they had never dared even to test it.
    Those four Sisters of the Dark had—on Kahlan. They didn’t care if they unraveled the world of life. In fact, that was their ultimate goal.
    Richard had no time to sleep. Now that he had finally convinced Nicci, Zedd, Cara, Nathan, and Ann that he wasn’t crazy and that Kahlan existed in reality if no longer in their memories, they were committed to helping him.
    He desperately needed that help. He had to find Kahlan. She was his life. She completed him. She was everything to him. Her unique intelligence had captivated him from the first moment he met her. The memoryof her beautiful green eyes, her smile, her touch, haunted him. Every waking moment was a living nightmare that there was something more he should be doing.
    While no one else could remember Kahlan, it seemed that Richard could think of nothing else. It often felt to him as if he were her only connection to the world and if he were to stop remembering her, stop thinking about her, she would finally, once and for all…truly cease to exist.
    But he realized that if he was to accomplish anything, if he was to ever find Kahlan, he sometimes had to force his thoughts of her aside in order to concentrate on the matters at hand.
    He turned to Cara. “You don’t feel anything odd?”
    She arched an eyebrow. “We’re in the Wizard’s Keep, Lord Rahl—who wouldn’t feel odd? This place makes my skin crawl.”
    “Any worse than usual?”
    She heaved a sigh as she ran her hand down the long, single blond braid lying over the front of her shoulder.
    “No.”
    Richard snatched up a lantern. “Come on.”
    He swept out of the small room and into a long hall layered with thick carpets, as if there were too many carpets on hand and the corridor had been the only place that could be found to put them. They were mostly classic designs woven in subdued colors, but a few peeking out from underneath were composed of bright yellows and oranges.
    The carpets muted his boots as he marched past double doors to each side opened into dark rooms. Cara, with her long legs, had no difficulty keeping up with him. Richard knew that a number of the rooms were libraries, while others were elaborately decorated rooms seeming to serve no purpose other than to lead to other rooms, which led to other rooms, some simple and some ornate, all a part of the inscrutable and complex maze that was the Keep.
    At an intersection Richard took a right, down a hall with walls thickly plastered in spiral designs that had mellowed over the centuries to a warm golden brown. When they reached a stairway Richard hooked his hand on the polished white marble newel post and took to the stairs heading down. Glancing up the stairwell, he could see it climb around the square shaft high up into darkness, into the distant upper reaches of the Keep.
    “Where are we going?” Cara asked.
    Richard was a bit startled by the question. “I don’t know.”
    Cara shot him a dark look. “You just thought we would go search through a place with thousands upon thousands of rooms, a place as big as a mountain, a place built partly into a mountain, until you happen across something?”
    “There’s something wrong with the air. I’m just following that perception of it.”
    “You’re following air,” Cara said in a flat, mocking tone. Her suspicion flared again. “You aren’t trying to use magic, are you?”
    “Cara, you know as well as anyone that I don’t know how to use my gift. I couldn’t call upon magic if I wanted to.”
    And he most certainly didn’t want to.
    If he were to call upon his gift the beast would be better able to find him. Cara, ever protective, was worried that he would carelessly do something to call the beast