The shelves were not what Richard had at first expected. There were indeed books on a number of them, but other shelves held clutters of objects — everything from neatly folded sparkling cloth, to iron spirals, to green glass flasks, to complex objects made of wooden rods, to stacks of vellum scrolls, to ancient bones and long, curved fangs that Richard didn't recognize and couldn't begin to guess at.

When the lightning flashed again, the shadows of the window mullions running over everything in the room, running across tables, chairs, columns, bookcases, and desks, made it appear as if the whole place were cracking apart.

"Zedd — what in the world are you doing?"

"Lord Rahl," Cara said in a low voice from right over his shoulder, "I think your grandfather must be crazy."

Zedd turned to peer briefly at Richard and Cara standing back in the doorway. The old man's wavy white hair, standing out in every direction, looked a pale shade of orange in the lamplight, but white as snow whenever the lightning flashed.

"We're a bit busy right now, my boy."

In the center of the room, Nicci floated just above one of the massive tables. Richard blinked, trying to be sure that he really saw what he thought he saw. Nicci's feet were clear of the table by a hand's width. She stood poised dead-still in midair.

As impossible and startling as such a sight was, that wasn't the worst of it. On the top of the table was drawn a magical design known as a Grace.

It appeared to have been drawn with blood.

Like a curtain encircling Nicci, unmoving lines also hung suspended in the air above the Grace. Richard had seen a number of gifted people draw spell-forms before, so he was pretty sure that that was what he was seeing, but he had never seen anything approaching this midair maze.

Consummately complex, composed of lines of glowing green light, it hung in the air like a three-dimensional spell-form.

In the center of that intricate geometric framework Nicci floated as still as a statue. Her exquisite features seemed frozen to stone. One hand was lifted out a ways. The fingers of her other hand, at her side, were spread.

Her feet weren't level, as if standing, but dangled as if she were in mid-jump. Her fall of blond hair was lifted out a little, as if in the midst of that jump up into the air her hair had risen away from her head, just before she was about to come back down… and at that precise instant she had been turned to stone.

She didn't look alive.

Richard stood transfixed, staring at Nicci poised in midair just above a heavy library table, a net of glowing green geometric lines tangled all around her. Nothing on her moved. She didn't appear to be breathing at all. Her blue eyes stared unblinking into the distance, as if gazing on a world only she could see. Her familiar, exquisite features looked perfectly preserved in the greenish cast given off by the glowing lines.

Richard thought that she looked more dead than alive, the way a corpse in a casket looked just before being laid to rest.

It was an impossibly beautiful and at the same time profoundly alarming sight. She appeared to be nothing so much as a lifeless statue made of flesh and light. Skeins of her blond hair in twisting, gentle arcs and curves, even individual strands of hair, stood out unmoving in midair. Richard kept expecting her to finally and suddenly finish her fall back to the table.

When he realized that he was holding his breath he at last let it out.

Seemingly in sympathy with the tempestuous intensity of the lightning out beyond the wall of windows, the air in the room fairly crackled with the power that had been focused into what was obviously, even to Richard's untrained eye, an extraordinary conjuring. It had been that rare quality to the air that had first caught his attention back in the small reading room.

For the life of him, Richard could not imagine what was going on, what could be the purpose of such a use of magic. He was at once fascinated by it and disconcerted that he knew so little about such things. More than anything, though, he found the sight darkly frightening.

Having grown up in Westland, where there had been no magic, he sometimes wondered what he had missed — especially at times like this, when he fell hopelessly ignorant. But at other times, like when Kahlan had been taken, he haled magic and wished never again to have anything to do with it.

Those devoted to the teachings of the Imperial Order would find cynical satisfaction at such cold thoughts about magic coming from the Lord Rahl.

Despite having grown up unaware of magic, Richard had since come to learn a few things about it. For one, he knew that the Grace drawn under Nicci was a powerful device used by those with the gift. He also knew that drawing it in blood was something that was rarely done and even then in only the gravest of circumstances.

As he glanced at the glistening lines of blood that made up the form of the Grace, Richard noticed something that made the hair at the back of his neck stand on end. One of Nicci's feet was poised over the center of the Grace — the part representing the Creator's light, from where emanated not only life but the rays that represented the gift that passed through life, the veil, and then on into the eternity of the underworld.

Nicci's other foot, however, was frozen mere inches above the table beyond the outer ring of the drawing — over the part representing the underworld.

Nicci hung suspended between the world of life and the world of the dead. Richard knew that such a thing was hardly trivial happenstance.

He focused beyond the startling sight of Nicci floating in midair and in the shadows beyond saw Nathan and Ann occasionally illuminated by flashes of lightning, like ghosts flickering in and out of existence. They, too, solemnly watched Nicci in the center of the glowing spell-form.

Zedd, one hand on a bony hip, his other running a slender finger down his smooth jaw, slowly moved around the table, observing the evergrowing, ever more intricate pattern of glowing green lines.

Outside, through the tall windows, lightning continued to flash in harsh fits, but the rumble of thunder was muted by the thick stone of the Keep.

Richard gazed up at Nicci's face. "Is she… is she all right?"

Zedd looked over as if he had forgotten that Richard had entered the room. "What?"

"Is she all right?"

Zedd's bushy brows drew together. "How would I know?"

Richard threw his arms up and let them flop down in dumbfounded alarm. "Well, for crying out loud, Zedd, aren't you the one who put her there?"

"Not exactly," Zedd muttered, rubbing his palms together as he moved on.

Richard stepped closer to the table below Nicci. "What's going on? Is Nicci all right? Is she in danger?"

Zedd finally looked back and sighed. "We don't exactly know for sure, my boy."

Nathan came out of the shadows and toward the table, into the greenish light. The tall prophet's dark azure eyes were clearly troubled. He opened his hands in a gesture of reassurance, his long white hair brushing his shoulders as he shrugged slightly. "We think she is all right, Richard."

"She should be just fine," Ann assured him as she joined Nathan.

The broad-shouldered prophet towered over her. In her plain woolen dress, with her graying hair gathered back into a loose bun, she looked all the more plain beside Nathan. Richard thought that just about anyone would probably look plain beside Nathan.

Richard gestured, indicating the net of geometric lines that encased Nicci. "What is this thing?"

"A verification web," his grandfather said.

Richard frowned. "Verification? Verification of what?"

"Chainfire," Zedd told him in a somber voice. "We're trying to figure out precisely how a Chainfire event functions so that we can see if there is a way to reverse it."