The wall stretched left and right to where it ended in the distance against enormous cliffs soaring upward as high as any mountains he had ever seen. High up, past broken clouds, he could see patches of snow lying on the steep rises. Another layer of clouds higher up, above the ragged shreds of clouds drifting by lower down, obscured the tops of the mountains so that he wasn’t even seeing the mountain peaks and thus their full height.
The wall standing before them was constructed of stones of different sizes and shapes, all fit precisely together like a complex puzzle. All the edges looked to be in solid contact with every part of each block locked in around them. He didn’t see any spot where so much as a piece of paper could have been pushed between the tightly fit blocks of stone. The wall appeared to have been constructed without mortar, with the exacting fit and enormous weight locking it all tightly together. It was as perfectly built a wall as Richard had ever seen. He had seen a number of spectacular man-made structures, but this one was remarkable in its singular simplicity and sheer scale.
Down the slope, off to the right, Richard could see the opening in the wall where the gates stood. There was a structure over the opening for the gates that he remembered seeing from the viewing port.
He didn’t see anyone anywhere. There were no people down in the area in front of the wall, no one watching from atop the wall, and no one coming and going through the open gates. It seemed odd to him that after thousands of years of the wall standing as an impenetrable barrier, now that the gates were open the area around them would be so deserted.
He wondered for a brief moment if all the half people from the third kingdom had already poured out of those gates to go south into the world of life, seeking souls they believed were there for the taking. He didn’t know what their motives would be—to stay near their homes, or now that they were free to go on a rampage out into the world, to gorge themselves on flesh and blood.
For a time, Richard stood silently watching as he felt the cool speckles of mist on his face. He checked all along the top of the wall, trying to see if there was anyone watching them, if any guards looked out from time to time. It was impossible to tell for sure, of course, but he didn’t see anyone. He didn’t know if they might have some kind of small openings for looking out. Although, what would be the purpose? The wall was there to keep them in, not for defense.
He thought that it could be that all those who wanted to leave had already left, and those who didn’t had stayed back to the north, where they had lived for millennia. It was also possible that they only left at certain times, hunted, and then returned to the safety of their kingdom, like bats that emerged at nightfall to feed on blood.
What he wondered most, though, was how he and Samantha were going to get in without being spotted out in the open. There was certainly no hope of scaling the wall. The outside of it looked to be too smooth for them to get a handhold or foothold anywhere. Of course, closer up he might find that there were small handholds in between the stones, but he doubted it. More importantly, even if they could scale the wall they would be exposed and out in the open for a long time and could easily be picked off with arrows. Possible or not, Richard discounted the practicality of climbing the wall.
The mountains to either side looked even more formidable. Mountains offered better opportunities for climbing than the smooth wall looked to provide, but still, the cliffs appeared incredibly difficult if not impossible for him and Samantha to scale, especially in the wet. Besides, the cliffs, too, would leave them out in the open and exposed for far too long.
Richard knew, too, that Naja’s people would not have put the barrier here if there was an easy way over or around the mountains. Certainly the barrier spells would be the primary means to keep the threat contained, but like the wall, the mountains also presented a formidable barrier once the spells began to weaken. Climbing those mountains was no more a realistic option than climbing the wall.
Besides, the reason he was looking for a way in without having to go through the gates was to stay out of the open so they wouldn’t be spotted. Scaling either the walls or the cliffs wouldn’t get them in without being seen.
Surprise was their greatest weapon. He didn’t want to give it up without a very good reason.
He wished he had a dragon handy to fly them in over the imposing wall filling the gap between the mountains, but it had been a very long time since he had seen a dragon.
That left the gates as the only realistic way into the third kingdom.
As Richard stood gazing at the enormity of the wall, he realized that what he was actually seeing was the physical manifestation of how much the people back in Naja’s time feared what was beyond that wall. That was not a comforting thought. He knew that there was no choice, so he deliberately pushed the thought aside and went back to thinking of solutions.
“Let’s make our way down closer to the gates,” he said in a quiet voice so that his voice wouldn’t carry. “We need to get a better look.”
CHAPTER
50
“And what if there are people down there, near the gates? What if there are guards standing watch?”
“I can’t imagine there would be guards,” Richard said. “After all, the barrier was built to keep the half people in, not to keep us out. Why would anyone want to go in there? They’d be slaughtered.
“The half people obviously want out so they can hunt souls. So why would they have guards?”
Samantha shrugged. “I don’t know. But what if there are homes or buildings right inside, a village or town of some kind, and the half people there would—”
“Samantha,” he said in a quiet voice, cutting her off to get her to stop talking. “Let’s not invent problems. We have enough real ones to solve. Let’s first take a look and see what we’re facing, then we can decide what we need to do. All right?
“Keep in mind, too, that this wall was not built to be a fortress wall. In many ways, as enormous as it is, it’s only symbolic. The real barrier was the gravity spells and the barrier spells keeping evil on the other side. Those spells are what kept the half people and the walking dead behind the wall for thousands of years.
“If that weren’t so, then over all this great expanse of time they could have cut through the wall, or dismantled it, or tunneled under it, or something, wouldn’t you think? If someone can put something together, then someone else can always find a way to take it apart. Especially given enough time and motivation. The half people had both.
“That means it’s the spells that matter, not the stone or the gates. The spells are the barrier, not the wall. Those spells are what would be of concern to anyone inside, not the stone or the gates. That works in our favor.”
“How?”
“Because it likely means they don’t care about the gates. Why would they? The gates wouldn’t hold any real significance to them except as a passage for them to get out into the world of life.”
Richard started making his way down the slope, staying in among the denser growth of trees and using the shadows and foliage for cover as best he could. Since he now knew precisely where he was going, he could cut through the dense woods to remain hidden in case anyone was watching.
The forest was strangely quiet. He was used to being in the woods and, night or day, there being signs of life and activity, but these ancient stands of trees seemed forlorn and empty. He had no way of knowing if that was out of the ordinary. Animals could sense things that humans couldn’t, so it was possible that such powerful magic had discouraged animals from living in the area near the wall.
Either that, or something else, some threat, had frightened them into silence. That was the possibility that worried him and kept him on high alert.
As he moved downhill, ever closer to the gates, he stopped periodically to peer out from behind the cover of the trees, checking for anyone. He still saw no one, no movement of any kind. The world felt so eerily empty outside the wall that in a way he wished he would see someone.
> As they moved steadily down the slope, down lower toward the level of the ground outside the gates, the wall soaring up above them seemed even more impressive. To Richard, the enormity of the wall seemed a tangible representation of how much people in ancient times feared what was on the other side.
Richard paused. Something out of the corner of his eye caught his attention. He thought he saw lightning, or some kind of light, flicker from beyond the gates, but as soon as he focused his attention toward the gates, it was gone.
He carefully scanned the area around them before starting out again. He wished he could climb a tree to have a look over the wall to see what danger might lie beyond, but the trees, despite how huge they were, didn’t begin to reach the top of the wall. The only thing he could do was to keep moving toward the gates so that he could look in.
Coming down the hill, he began to see that there was no road, clearing, or even a path outside the open gates. That made sense, of course. No one had gone in or out of it for thousands of years.
He could see, though, that the bushes, small trees, ferns, and grasses in that area had been trampled by heavy foot traffic, most likely from all the half people leaving. The ones who had attacked him and Samantha had probably come this way not long ago. There were also the men who had attacked him and Kahlan at the wagon. There might have been a lot of others like them who had come out through the gates.
And then there were the Shun-tuk who had attacked Zedd, Cara, and the others. Those Shun-tuk had obviously come out through the gates. From all indications, though, it looked like they probably took their captives back to their own land.
Richard wished he could remember better what he had heard as he woke up.
He had no way of knowing what other nations or groups of people might be living in the third kingdom beyond the wall, living in a land where life and death existed together. There could be vast numbers of half people of all sorts, just as in all the various lands of the world of life.
As they finally reached the ground down by the gates, Richard led them closer to the wall, but stayed in the shadow of the woods where possible as they worked their way closer. The gates opened out, so that also helped provide some cover.
“Stay there, behind the trees, while I get a closer look,” he whispered to Samantha.
She nodded and quickly moved back into the shadows of young maples and spruce growing in an area of windfall pine that had opened the forest canopy.
The gates themselves were impossibly tall. They were considerably taller than the tallest pines in the surrounding forest. As he got closer, he thought that they looked more like movable walls than real gates. He supposed that made sense. They weren’t designed, after all, to open and close regularly. It was most likely that the gates had been closed only after the wall had been completed. Once closed, they were meant to stay closed.
As he came up into the deep shadow behind the nearest of the great gates, he saw that they were sheathed in squares of some kind of metal that had not rusted, although it did have the patina of great age. He reached out and put a hand against the metal. It was cool to the touch.
Signaling Samantha to stay where she was in behind the trees, Richard hiked his bow up on his shoulder, got down on the ground, and carefully crawled on his belly to the edge of the great door to have a look beyond. The edge of the door was several feet thick. It put him in mind of what an ant must feel like when around buildings.
As he peeked around the edge, he saw an open, rather barren landscape with broken, rocky terrain. The uneven ground was dotted here and there with a few scrub trees. There was no great forest like that outside the gates.
What alarmed him the most, though, was what he saw next.
In the distance, in various places, he saw flickering greenish light.
He had seen that specific kind of green light before. It was the same kind he had seen when he had first met Kahlan and they had crossed the boundary between Westland and the Midlands.
He had encountered the underworld a number of times since then. The veil before the world of the dead was always an eerie green color, an opaque green curtain of light.
That eerie green light was a boundary layer to the underworld itself.
When he inched out beyond the edge of the great gates to get a better view, he didn’t see anyone inside the gates. It was a dark, barren landscape dominated by towering rock jutting up from the ground like spikes pounded up through the surface from below. But that was not the worst of it. It looked all the more forbidding because of the specter of greenish light flickering here and there among those rock towers.
Richard signaled for Samantha to come out of the trees. He aimed his thumb behind him, indicating that she should stay near the wall and to come up behind the door to join him.
She rushed out of the cover of the trees and quickly made her way through the smaller brush to crouch close behind him.
Not seeing anyone, Richard finally stood up and leaned out around the door for a better look into the third kingdom.
What he saw then both shocked and frightened him.
“What do you see?” she whispered. “What’s wrong? Do you see half people?”
“I don’t see anyone, but we have a problem and you need to know about it right now.”
CHAPTER
51
“What?” Samantha asked. “What is it? What’s the problem?”
Richard turned and squatted down in front of her. “Listen to me. This is important. The third kingdom is what?”
She frowned a little, not sure what he was getting at. “It’s both the world of life and the world of the dead mixed together in the same place at the same time. It’s neither the kingdom of life, or the kingdom of the dead. It’s both, existing together.”
Richard nodded. “That’s right.”
She put a finger on his chest. “But besides being a place, it is also what you are. Life and death together where they shouldn’t be. You are of that place where life and death exist together at the same time.”
“Good,” he said with a single nod. “Beyond the gates is the third kingdom. The world of life and death together in the same place. There are places in there where there is greenish light—”
She frowned as she leaned toward him. “Greenish light?”
“Yes, kind of like … well, have you ever seen the sheets of light in the night in the northern sky?”
“Sure, of course.”
“Like that. It looks something like that, only it’s all a shimmering green light. That’s the boundary layer to the underworld, the world of the dead.”
She frowned suspiciously. Her head darted out to peek around the gate.
“Dear spirits…” She pulled back, her wide eyes staring into his. “Lord Rahl, that’s the same eerie green glow I told you I saw when I tried to heal the Mother Confessor for the first time. Remember? I saw the same thing within you.”
Richard wiped a hand across his mouth before letting out a deep sigh. “That green luminescence is death.”
“I told you so. I saw it in her. That’s when I first told you that she had death in her.”
He nodded reluctantly. “So you did. I remember. But that was in her. This here is out in the open.” Richard pointed a thumb behind him, beyond the gates. “If you walk into it, into that green veil of luminescence, you walk into the world of the dead. Understand?
“It’s the boundary between life and death, just like you described seeing in Kahlan, the place that tried to tempt you in. If you had crossed over when you were in her mind, you would have entered the world of the dead. You would never have come back.
“This here is the same. Beyond that luminescent glow is the world of the dead. If you step over, even a little, you will never come back.”
Her big dark eyes wide, she swallowed. “Then I guess it would be best not to walk through it.”
“Exactly. When we go in there you can’t ever let your guard down. You can’t ever relax. I don’t know the
exact properties of how it works here, where the openings into the underworld will be, but in other places I’ve been you sometimes don’t see it until you get really close. The greenish light is kind of like a warning that you are inches away from death, that you are about to cross over.
“Since you are so close to the underworld, the spirits of the dead beyond sometimes call to you, trying to entice you to cross over to them.”
She nodded. “They did that to me, when I was trying to heal the Mother Confessor and saw that green veil of death. I heard the spirits beyond.”
Richard nodded his understanding. “It seems that we can encounter death in a number of places, in a number of ways. You encountered that boundary to the eternal beyond in Kahlan, and in me. You saw and heard some of what was on the other side.
“In some places I’ve been that green wall will appear as a warning, much the way shields placed by wizards try to warn you with color and light if you start getting too close. In this case, it’s a warning that you are getting close to the boundary.
“In other places I’ve seen, the walls to the world of the dead are static. They stay in the same place, shimmering, so that you can see them from some distance off and know where they are. But here, it seems like those green boundaries into the world of the dead are flickering in and out of existence. That means they aren’t in one place. They move around.”
“That makes sense,” she said. “Life and death in the same place and at the same time, a kind of soup of ingredients mixing together.”
“That’s right, but it also means that this boundary between worlds may be different from what I’ve encountered before, where the lines between life and death were fixed and you could avoid them. Here, from what I saw beyond the gates, those boundaries appear to be fluid, moving like a gossamer carried on a breeze. That’s what’s different here. That’s what makes it so much more dangerous here.
“It means that you may not necessarily need to walk into that boundary to be lost. In this place, they may drift in and come right over you.”