"Terry Goodkind - Sword Of Truth 10 - Phantom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goodkind Terry)

figures of dancers carved from 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


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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. "No70; 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
last had 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 rest52;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 women52;Sisters Ulicia, Cecilia, Armina, and Tovi52;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 Kahlan52;except Richard'sтАвhad 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.