The Third Kingdom (16 page)

Richard looked back the way they had come. “But that means that Kahlan’s Confessor power likely won’t work. She was born a Confessor. It’s innate in her, just as I was born with my gift.”

It was a troubling realization that Kahlan very well might be without the protection of her Confessor power.

Samantha nodded. “She has that same touch of death in her as you do, so you must be right. It’s corrupting the order of her existence the same as it’s corrupting yours. Like you, even
though she is alive, she, too, carries death within her. Except that with her that presence of death is stronger than it is within you.

“In that way, you both exist in two worlds—the kingdom of life, and the kingdom of death.” Samantha leaned a little closer in the sphere’s light, lifting an eyebrow to be sure he was paying attention. “Those two worlds don’t belong together.”

“Great,” Richard muttered, now concerned that on top of everything else, Kahlan didn’t have the protection of her power.

“Come on,” Samantha said as she started down the stone corridor.

Richard followed behind the wisp of a girl, engulfed in the glowing cocoon of light from the glass sphere she was holding. The stone of the passageway walls had been laboriously smoothed and precisely squared with the floor and ceiling, much like the rest of the quarters where Samantha now lived. There were no decorations of any kind on the smooth walls, other than the very faint natural variations in the consistency of the rock.

The corridor, devoid as it was of furnishings or so much as a shelf or niche or bench, had an odd feel to him, a deliberately sterile sense, as if it had been built with the intention that there be no distractions of any kind, no reason to linger, for those meant to use this hallway. The skill and time invested in creating the flat precision was in and of itself the decoration.

In an odd way, it put him in mind of some of the private corridors in the People’s Palace, the ancestral home of the Lord Rahl. They were lined with beautiful paintings and statues that were meant to be a subtle reminder to the Lord Rahl, as he passed through those halls, of his duty to protect the sanctity of life. This corridor, devoid of anything that might be a distraction, in a contrary and subtle way seemed meant to
remind those whose business it was to pass this way of the deadly seriousness of their purpose.

He wondered what that purpose could be.

In places the corridor curved gently. By the way it bent its way through the mountain, Richard had the impression that the meandering route was not for aesthetic reasons. The curves, being shallow turns rather than straight sections connected by corners, seemed yet another aspect of the guiding principle of minimizing distractions.

After a time, they arrived at another door similar to the first one. It, too, had a capstone covering the far side of the square passageway, to stop anyone who might have made it past the first from getting any farther. Without delay, Samantha pressed the flat of her small hand against the metal plate on the wall to the side.

Richard noticed that when she did, the light sphere glowed brighter as the magic recognized her as someone permitted to pass the shielded doorway. That told him that this shield was stronger than the first. In addition, this stone looked bigger and considerably heavier than the previous one, apparently another means to keep what was beyond more secure.

The mountain itself rumbled as the great, round stone disc began rolling to the right, its tremendous weight grinding small bits of dirt and popping flakes of rock, crushing them under the weight. The stone rolled back into a slot cut into the mountain. Once through, since the first had been closed, she left the second stone open.

Beyond the doorway, Richard noticed that the corridor was half again wider than the one they had just come from. The walls of this place were also smoothed, but to a far greater degree, so that they had a sheen to them. He ran his fingers along the cold, creamy surface of the stone, marveling at what it would have taken to accomplish such an effect. The light from
the sphere Samantha held reflected off the wall in a way that revealed that the stone had been smoothed and then polished in much the same way marble statues were polished to create flesh in stone.

When they rounded a curve and abruptly encountered symbols on the walls to the left, Richard stopped in his tracks.

The designs had been incised into the featureless rock walls, making those symbols more enduring than paint would ever have been. Whoever had done this wanted those symbols to remain as long as the mountain stood. He could see that farther on into the passageway the symbols and designs proliferated to cover most of the wall.

Richard recognized the symbols.

Samantha turned back. “Come on. This way.”

Richard had a hard time pulling his gaze from the flowing designs, the circles within circles, the unique devices, and varied emblematic shapes. He started out again, hurrying to follow Samantha.

As he rushed along the hallway to catch up with her, scanning the patterns carved into the wall, Richard saw that the designs grew not only more numerous the farther he went, but more complex. Soon they covered much of the wall to their left from floor to ceiling. Their very number conveyed a sense of urgency to the messages contained in the symbols.

Coming around another curve in the passageway, he was surprised to see a soft blush of light up ahead. He realized that it wasn’t more of the light from the spheres. This was daylight. It seemed to be coming from some kind of window or opening on the wall to the left. The muted light coming in that opening fell on the wall on the opposite side of the corridor, brightening the whole hallway, making all the designs on the wall to the left stand out all the more plainly.

“Here,” Samantha said, placing her glowing sphere in an iron bracket among the symbols before going on ahead to stand in
the radiance of natural light. She gestured to the round opening in the wall that was letting that light in.

Richard rushed up and looked in. He saw that an opening had been bored through the rock to the outside of the mountain. He stuck his head into the circular portal to take a look out. The opening had been cut precisely and was perfectly round. It started out about four feet across but tapered slightly as it went through the stone toward the outside of the mountain. It looked to be eight or ten feet long, with smooth sides similar to the hallway, but not polished. By the time the hole reached the far end where it emerged out on the side of the mountain, letting in the daylight and fresh air, it had narrowed down to less than three feet in diameter.

The strange hole allowed him to look out in a different direction than the cliff opening where he had come up into the cave village.

This hole faced north.

Richard frowned at Samantha. “What is this?”

She pointed through the opening. “Look.”

He put his hands on the edge and leaned in a little, looking out through the cylindrical opening into a murky dawn. He saw in the gloomy light a valley spread out before them. Not much of the dense forest of the valley far below was visible. The length and shape of the cylindrical opening restricted the view to a specific place off in the distance.

The opening framed a gap in soaring mountains many miles away. He bent down, trying to look up, trying to see how high the mountains were, but they were so immense and because of the way the opening was made it wouldn’t allow him to see the mountaintops. All he could see were impassable walls of stone rising up from a valley below.

A deep canyon between the rock walls appeared to be the only way through the barrier of the mountains. Having been a woods guide, Richard understood the difficulties of finding
passable routes through rugged wilderness. There was often only one passage through such mountainous country. It appeared to him that the valley was the only way back into and beyond those mountains.

He backed away. “What is it I’m supposed to see?”

“Well,” she said, gesturing to two small metal plates in the wall around the opening, “you need to use these.”

Framing the opening was a design with a several distinct motifs. Like the others, Richard recognized the symbols that made up the designs. To each side, where Samantha pointed, within elements of the design where he hadn’t noticed them at first, there were small metal plates, each about half the size of his palms. The metal was in better condition than the first shield plates he’d seen. It looked to be worn smooth by the touch of countless hands.

“Here, let me show you.” Since his gift didn’t work, she ducked under his arm and popped up in front of him so that she could put her hands on both plates for him. She was tiny enough that she could easily slip into the space between him and the wall. The top of her mass of black hair came up only to the middle of his chest.

“Lean around me and look in,” she said.

As Samantha bent to the side, keeping a hand on each plate, Richard leaned past her to put his head inside the circular opening.

To his surprise, the air wavered, similar to the way the air above a fire wavered, except that it did it in a circular pattern, more like ripples in a pond radiating outward. It was a dizzying sight that made his stomach feel a bit queasy.

But then the ripples in the air cleared, so that the distant view out the hole through the rock suddenly appeared much closer. It was as if he were abruptly shifted much closer to the mountains than he had been only a moment before.

As his eyes adjusted to the light and the resolving clarity of
the scene, he realized that there was something built across the valley. Framed in the center between the two mountains, at the base of the canyon, a wall that was obviously man-made stretched between the cliff walls to either side.

Richard squinted as he studied the detail of the wall. It was enormous. It was as colossal as any man-made structure he’d seen. The lofty wall towered over the forest at its base.

In the center of the wall, also made of stone and rising up higher yet, was what appeared to be a monster of some sort, jaws gaping open, with fangs hanging down over a massive portal, as if walking through it would be like walking into the waiting maw of some grotesque stone beast. In that opening, great doors stood taller than the tallest trees. The doors were nearly as colossal as the wall holding them.

The doors stood open.

Richard backed away from the round portal. Samantha removed her hands from the metal plates to each side and the view through the portal wavered, resolving back to the way it had looked when he had first looked out.

“The north wall,” Samantha said in simple explanation.

“The north wall,” he repeated. By his tone he let her know that he didn’t understand the significance.

“As long as I’ve been alive,” she explained, “those gates have always been closed. As long as my mother had been alive, those gates were always closed. As long as our people have lived in this place, those gates have stood closed.”

“Do you know how long your people have lived here?”

“I’m not sure, exactly. I heard it said that we’ve been here for thousands of years. But my mother was only just starting to teach me about our duty, the duty of the gifted here, of our mission to stand watch over the north wall. Those lessons were cut short when in the middle of one of them my mother saw that the gates in the north wall were open.

“In all my life I had never seen my mother that upset. She
kept muttering that she had never expected that it would happen in her lifetime, or mine. She was angry with herself.”

“Why would she be angry with herself?”

“I heard her say that Jit should have made her suspect that something was wrong. She said that it could only be that such a being coming into the Dark Lands was because the north wall was failing and some of those from the other side were beginning to slip through. The Hedge Maid didn’t belong here. She had to be one of those creatures from the other side, like others that we’ve heard rumored. My mother said that she had known that something was wrong, but she never suspected that it could have to do with the north wall.

“When I asked her what she was talking about, what it meant, she said that it meant that life as we knew it would never be the same. That the world would never be the same.

“She said that the world of life might very well not survive what was to come.

“I was terrified and wanted her to explain it to me, but she said that there was no time. She rushed back out of here. She said that she had to go before it was too late.”

“Go?” Richard glanced out the opening again, and then back at Samantha. “Go where?”

“To warn those who needed to know.”

Samantha’s gaze sank to the ground. “My parents died—my father did, anyway—when they left to go to the Keep to talk to the wizards’ council, to carry out our ancient mission of warning the head wizards that the north wall had been breached.”

Richard stared down at the girl. “The wizards’ council? There is no wizards’ council at the Keep.”

Samantha looked up at him in shock. “There’s not?”

“No. There hasn’t been a wizards’ council at the Keep for a long time. Until my grandfather recently moved back there with some other people, the Keep had long been deserted.”

“But when my mother and father left, they were going there to warn the wizards’ council. That’s what they said.” Samantha’s gaze looked lost as it darted about. “They said that the wizards’ council at the Keep would be the authority on the matter of the north wall. That’s what my mother told me—that she had to go to the Keep to warn those who would know what to do about it.”

Richard was only now starting to realize just how isolated the village of Stroyza was from the rest of D’Hara, not just in distance, but in knowledge of the outside world. He felt sorry for these people, thinking they were serving a vital mission for wizards who no longer existed.

He spread his hands in regret. “I’m sorry, Samantha, but there is no such council there at the Keep. There used to be, but that was long ago. There is no longer a wizards’ council at the Keep, or anywhere, for that matter.