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place asoft warm glow and reflected off the polished tabletops here and there between the confused disarray of books lying open everywhere.
    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.

Chapter 4
    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