Warheart (33 page)

Richard tapped a thumb against the hilt of his sword. “If they lost that knowledge, then they likely would have also lost knowledge of the room with the well, especially if it is hidden and shielded.”

Kahlan stepped toward them. “Unless the knowledge of such a hidden room was passed down, then they would no more know about it than how to read this writing. They likely lost the link to that room.”

Cassia scrunched up her nose. “How could they lose a room?”

Richard ran his hand lightly along the wall with the language of Creation carved into it. “That room would have been important, and also a dangerous way for an invader to come here, so it probably has a secret way in. There would be shields or some means of protecting the well that also kept any enemy from getting into the caves.” He looked over at the wall. “It's probably written here, in all these instructions.”

“But none of the people here knew about any of this?” Cassia asked.

“No,” Richard said. “Over all that time since the great war there were probably missing links in the lineage of the gifted who would have been able to pass on all their knowledge–you know, important gifted people who died unexpectedly before they could teach younger people the language of Creation or other important information, like how they could quickly get a warning to the Keep by using the sliph.”

Richard gestured to the wall. “From what I learned when I was first brought here, the gifted people here had only sketchy information about their duty here, and they knew virtually nothing about this writing. That means the instructions were here all along, but useless to them.

“If they couldn't read this writing, they wouldn't know about the secret room.”

“You still really think the well is in a secret room?” Kahlan asked.

“Well it certainly isn't in any room we've looked in, and I think we looked in them all. I'm convinced there is a well here. So it has to be hidden, or shielded, or both.”

Kahlan sighed as she gazed at all the writing. “I hope you're right, Richard.”

He turned to the sorceress. “Nicci, start looking for anything that talks about the Keep, or anything that explains the procedure for when the barrier fails.”

“Already looking,” she murmured under her breath as she ran her hand along under the writing while she deciphered it in her head.

Richard swept his hand along a section of the wall. “You can disregard this part, here,” he told Nicci. “This is Naja Moon's account, and I've already read all of this. There isn't any mention of the well in it.”

When he looked back, Nicci was squatted down, leaning in, urgently inspecting a line of symbols. “What? Do you see something?”

Nicci tapped the symbols and looked up at him. “Maybe. It says here that when the barrier to the third kingdom fails, the people here must protect the flock.”

“Well,” Richard said, “when you get down to it, that was ultimately their purpose here.”

Nicci looked up at him as he came over to where she was reading. “Yes, but look at this symbol, here, at the end of that part. I'm not quite sure what it means.”

Richard squatted down beside her to have a look at where she was pointing.

“Do you understand it?” the sorceress asked.

“Odd combination,” Richard mumbled to himself as he studied the symbol.

Cassia, Vale, and Kahlan gathered behind him as he translated it to himself.

Richard suddenly stood.

Nicci rose up beside him. “Do you know what it says?”

Richard looked back the way they had come in. “Yes. It says ‘Let the shepherd guide you.'”

“Does that mean something significant?” Kahlan asked.

“Yes,” Richard said, still staring back up the passageway. “I think I know where the well is.”

 

CHAPTER

40

Everyone followed Richard as he rushed back the way they had come through the dark passageway. Cassia trotted to catch up and stay at his right side, holding the lantern out to light the dark hallway for them once the light from the viewing port had faded into the distance behind them. Kahlan, with Nicci on the other side of her, took long strides to stay close on Richard's left side. The eerie green luminescence from the light sphere played across the smooth walls of the passageway, twisting with every hurried step Nicci took. Vale, still holding a torch, brought up the rear.

Since there was no one else in the caves and it wasn't possible for anyone to get in to surprise them, they hadn't closed the shielded stones. After he went past the second of the huge stone discs, Nicci reached past Kahlan and snatched his shirtsleeve to get his attention.

“Do you really think the room with the sliph's well would be outside the shielded area?”

“Yes,” he said without explaining.

“That doesn't seem likely,” she insisted.

“It is if that secret room is shielded as well, as I suspect it is.”

Satisfied that he must be right, or simply not wanting to argue the point for the moment, she didn't answer.

When they had almost reached the end of the hallway back into the quarters for the gifted of Stroyza, Richard came to a stop in front of the small niche with the three shelves.

He gestured to the two small statues of shepherds with their flocks. “‘Let the shepherd guide you,'” he quoted from the writing on the wall.

Without questioning, Nicci reached out and took hold of one of the shepherds. Nothing happened.

“There isn't any metal plate for a shield,” she said. “The statue doesn't respond, so that can't be the key to the shield.”

“Try the other one,” Kahlan suggested.

Nicci reached out and grasped the one shielding his eyes with a hand. They all waited, glancing around for any sign, as she kept hold of the statue. The hallways remained silent. There was no sound of a stone rolling out of the way or anything else to indicate there was a shield there.

Nicci let go of the statue. “Nothing.”

Richard couldn't believe it. He had been sure that the shepherds were the answer to the words on the wall, instructing them to let the shepherd guide them. He didn't know what else to do. This had been the answer he had been looking for and now that he found it, it didn't work.

“What do we do now?” Kahlan asked.

Richard could only stare at the two small clay statues. “I'm not sure.”

“Are you still sure that there is a sliph in here, somewhere?” Cassia asked.

Richard looked to her blue eyes for a moment and then looked back at the statues. Looking into her eyes, he was struck with the realization of how much they all depended on him, in everything both large and small. She was looking to him to be the magic against magic.

He reached out and gripped one then the other of the statues.

“That's kind of strange. They're attached to the shelf.”

“Maybe so they wouldn't accidentally be knocked off and broken,” Vale suggested.

Richard ran a thumb along his jaw as he stared at the statues, trying to figure out how the shepherd was supposed to guide them.

He squinted at the statue of the man shielding his eyes. More than one thing about it seemed odd.

“It's sitting at a funny angle on the shelf, don't you think?” he asked, looking at the four faces watching him. “And I don't think that it's attached to the shelf so that it can't be knocked off and broken. After all, how would it get knocked off a shelf set back in a niche like this?”

“What are you getting at?” Kahlan asked.

He looked over his shoulder in the direction the statue was looking with its hand shielding its eyes.

He frowned as he glanced over at Kahlan. “Do you see the direction he is looking?”

“I'm all turned around in here,” she admitted. “I'm not sure.”

Nicci was staring at the statue. “It's looking to the southwest,” she said, half to herself.

Richard nodded. “Toward the Wizard's Keep.”

He and Nicci shared a look of understanding.

The other thing he thought odd about the statue was that all the details looked thick. Richard had sculpted statues and he understood the process quite well. It wasn't that these two were poorly made, but rather that the details looked too bulky to his eye.

With everyone dead and the cave collapsed and buried, Richard didn't think that breaking the statue was going to be much of a problem. He pulled his knife from its sheath at his belt. Holding it by the blade, he used the handle like a hammer to whack the statue.

The clay shattered in an unexpected manner and a piece fell off. Where the broken piece had been, Richard saw the gleam of metal under the clay. He struck the statue half a dozen times, breaking the clay away to reveal that there was the same metal statue underneath, only properly detailed. The whole thing had been covered with clay slurry to encase it; that was why it looked too bulky to him.

“Why in the world would they make a statue like that?” Kahlan asked as she frowned up at Richard.

“If I'm right, to hide the sliph.”

He used his knife handle to hammer the other sculpture and it, too, shattered to reveal metal under the covering of clay. He reached in and broke off the remaining pieces, exposing the two metal sculptures of shepherds with their flocks.

“My gift doesn't work,” he said to Nicci. “You try it.”

Nicci reached in and grasped one of the statues. They all glanced around the hallway, expecting something to happen, but the hallway remained silent and still.

He gestured to the other. “Try holding both.”

Nicci reached in and wrapped her hand around the other shepherd, so that she was holding one in each hand. They all looked around the silent hallway.

Still, nothing happened.

With a disappointed sigh, she let her hands slip off the little statues. “I can't explain why there is metal under the clay, but it apparently isn't a trigger mechanism for a shield. It must simply be an ancient oddity.”

They all stared in frustration at the small statues of shepherds, trying to imagine their purpose. Nothing about what the original builders of the sentinel village of Stroyza did was random or pointless. Everything had been carefully planned not according to what was happening and what they feared, but according to the things they knew of the star shift and the Twilight Count. It all had a purpose.

He was at a loss to understand what that purpose was.

Cassia gestured with her lantern. “Lord Rahl, I don't think you are listening to the real meaning of the writing.”

Richard's brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

“It said ‘Let the shepherd guide you.'”

Richard opened his hands in bewilderment. “I know. Nicci tried it. Nothing happened.”

Cassia gave him a crafty smile. “She isn't our shepherd. You are our shepherd, Lord Rahl. You are the one who guides us.”

“But my gift doesn't work.”

She tipped her head at him in a meaningful way. “Maybe it isn't looking for the gift. Maybe it's looking for the shepherd.”

Richard stared at her for a moment, and then turned and grabbed both smooth metal statues.

He felt them both warm under his touch. The shelves began to shudder. The stone floor trembled. All the way around the niche, the wall began to crack in straight lines. Bits of stone flaked away from the ever-widening cracks as a section of the wall with the niche broke free and started to move in away from the hallway. The stone cracked and popped until the section of wall with the niche jolted free and swung back into a dark room.

“I don't understand,” Richard said. “My gift doesn't work.”

Nicci looked over at him. “You read the Cerulean scrolls, Richard. We're dealing with forces here that transcend the gift.”

 

CHAPTER

41

Nicci slipped in first to provide light from the sphere she'd brought with her. Richard followed, ducking under the short opening so he wouldn't hit his head. Kahlan did the same, staying close behind him. When the sorceress stepped into the room, a dozen light spheres in iron brackets around the outside of the circular room all brightened at her presence, illuminating the entire room with the same green luminescence common to light spheres.

There, in the center of the room, capped with a domed ceiling, was a short, circular stone wall. It looked like most of the other wells for the sliph that Richard had seen.

Kahlan slipped a hand around his biceps as she stared at the well in amazement. “You were right, Richard. Dear spirits, you were right.”

“It's hard to believe this has been here for thousands of years,” Nicci said as she, too, stared at the well. “The way the room was sealed, it's pretty clear that no one has seen this since it was built in the time of the great war.”

“Richard was right,” Kahlan said. “They lost the link to the knowledge of the past and none of them even knew it was here, right by the quarters for the gifted.”

Kahlan beamed with a bright smile as she gazed up at him. She was relieved that they weren't trapped in the caves after all.

“This will get us to the People's Palace,” she said. “As soon as we get there, Nicci will finally be able to get the poisonous touch of death out of you.”

Richard only smiled back. For now, he couldn't let her know that he could never allow that to happen.

Cassia bent over the edge, holding the lantern high to have a look down inside. “I've seen this kind of well before, at the People's Palace.”

“That's right,” Richard said. “We've used that one before.”

Nicci leaned over the short wall beside Cassia, holding out the light sphere to see better down inside.

“No sliph,” she announced.

Richard knew they wouldn't see the sliph yet. He stepped up beside Nicci. “We'll have to wake her.”

“How do we do that?” Vale asked.