The Third Kingdom

  “That would be bad,” she said in a deadpan, stating the obvious.

  Richard nodded. “You have to be extremely alert at all times and respect that danger. If you let your guard down for an instant, you could unintentionally find yourself pulled into the underworld. If that happens, you are never coming back.”

  Samantha nodded solemnly. “I understand. Keep my eyes open and be prepared to move out of the way.”

  “Right,” he said with a firm nod. He took a quick look around. “We need to get going. But don’t forget what I told you, not for a second. I don’t know exactly what we will have to face in there, but this is already something I didn’t expect. We can’t ever let our guard down.”

  “I won’t, Lord Rahl.”

  “One other thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If anything happens and we somehow get separated, then getting those people out, my friends and your mother, is the priority. Understand?”

  “I understand, Lord Rahl. Find the wizard Zedd and the sorceress Nicci and get them out so that they can heal you of the death inside you so that you can end prophecy and end the threat to the world of life now that the barrier is down.”

  Richard would have smiled at how insane that sounded, and at her intensity, but the seriousness of the situation was nothing to smile about.

  “Good. Now listen to me, Samantha. You may think I’m the one, but there are other people who are smarter about these kinds of things than me. Zedd knows more than I do about such things. Nicci perhaps more yet. They are both incredibly powerful people with vast experience and knowledge. Don’t discount the importance of that—they may be able to stop the threat even without me.”

  “If they’re so powerful, then how did they get overpowered and caught in the first place?”

  Richard let out a sigh at her simple insight. “No matter how powerful you are, that doesn’t mean you can always win. Sometimes, no matter how good you are, things just go wrong.”

  Samantha nodded. “What now?”

  “Now we go in there and find them. Stay close and stay alert.”

  After she agreed, Richard peeked out around the gate. He saw no one out in the jumbled landscape of dark rock and flickers of the phantom luminescence here and there across the sprawling wasteland. In the distance a haze of smoke hung over the forbidding landscape.

  CHAPTER

  52

  As they made their way around the gate, stepping into the broad opening, Richard looked up and saw the great stone arch over the gateway. He remembered seeing it from the viewing port back in Stroyza. Up close, in all its detail, it was more imposing, more frightening, than he remembered.

  The arch formed a head with glaring eyes made of some kind of red marble. Two enormous, sharp fangs hung down, as if ready to strike at anyone who tried to enter. It was meant as a warning that crossing through these gates would be like entering the jaws of some monstrous creature. It was a clear statement of the lethality of the place.

  It was so obviously threatening that it was almost like a warning not to be stupid enough to enter the place.

  Once through the open gates, Samantha pointed. “Lord Rahl, look,” she whispered.

  Richard turned and looked up. The insides of the gates had symbols embossed into the surface of the metal plates. When the gates were open, the enormous central emblem was broken in half, but when the gates were closed the symbol would have been whole and united. The element was in the language of Creation, like what Richard had seen on the omen machine, like Naja Moon’s account back in the cave at Stroyza.

  Richard didn’t understand every component in the symbols, but he could clearly see that they were elements of a powerful spell. These symbols were meant to conjure powers Richard had never seen described before and didn’t entirely understand.

  What he did understand from the meaning in parts of the designs was that these were barrier spells. The writing, in the language of Creation, was not meant to convey information so much as to call forces together.

  With the gates standing open, that enormous barrier spell, that lock in the center that had spanned both doors, was now broken.

  With a chill, Richard realized that the seal was off the gates to the underworld itself.

  He didn’t want to take any more time to study all the symbols on the insides of the gates. Since the symbols and the spells they represented were now broken, what they had once meant was no longer important. Now, prepared or not, it was up to Richard to deal with the results.

  He led them swiftly beyond the broad opening, toward rocky outcroppings off to the right that provided cover. They continued to move farther in beyond the gates and away from the wall, using the rocks as cover to stay out of sight as much as possible in case there were any half people traveling down to the gates out of the third kingdom.

  In places, moving through the rocks, sheets of the greenish luminescence wavered off to the sides. He paused, watching veils of the eerie light drift lazily across the landscape, dragging a hem of light that flickered where it touched the ground. Richard kept an eye on the veils, making sure none were near, before starting to move again.

  He had never seen the boundary to the underworld move like that. In the past it had always remained in place, an unmovable barrier to the world of the dead. The disconcerting sight of that boundary moving about the landscape sent a chill through him.

  Coming around a column formation of stacked layers of slightly different colored rock, Richard abruptly spotted a man not far away, moving in their direction.

  In that frozen moment, he realized that it was too late to hide. When the man looked up at the same instant and saw Richard and Samantha, the look in his eyes told Richard that this was a predator, one of the unholy half dead, that was always ready to exploit any opportunity it came across.

  In a heartbeat, Richard had the bow off his shoulder. He whipped it around into position. He snatched an arrow from the quiver lashed to the side of the pack on his back. In another heartbeat he had the arrow nocked.

  Time seemed to slow in Richard’s vision as the man’s lips curled back and he broke into a dead run toward them.

  Richard was in that place where he controlled the world around the bladed point of his arrow. He settled the arrow and, in another heartbeat, it was away.

  In his headlong rush to close the distance, the arrow entered through the man’s left eye socket, right where Richard intended, where the bone wouldn’t be as dense and possibly deflect the arrow’s flight before it could do its work. It still had enough power behind it to erupt partway out the back of the man’s skull.

  Still flying at a dead run, the man crumpled and crashed facedown to the rocky ground, dead before he hit.

  Richard looked both ways to check for any other sign of threat before he rushed out from the cover of the rocks. He grabbed the man’s shirt at his shoulder and dragged him back in among the rocks.

  “What are you doing?” Samantha asked, arms spread in alarm. “Why are you bringing him back with you?”

  “We need to hide him. If someone else sees him it will alert them that there is someone with a soul in here, on this side of the gates, on their ground. I don’t want to give them reason to suspect such a thing, or to start hunting for us.”

  “It’s too open out here,” Samantha said as she looked around. “How in the world do you think you’re going to be able to hide him?”

  “Easy,” Richard said as he grabbed the man’s simple shirt in his fists and lifted his dead weight.

  Pulling him over onto his back, Richard was sorry to see that the arrow was broken when the man fell on his face, or he would have recovered it. He never liked to waste arrows.

  Richard strained to hold the dead man up off the ground and get a better grip as he waited for the right moment.

  And then, with a grunt of powerful effort, Richard heaved the man into a wall of shimmering green luminescence drifting toward them.

  The light flickered at
the contact. The greenish curtain wavered a little as the dead man tumbled through.

  The man vanished.

  “Well,” Samantha said, “isn’t that something. I guess it’s pretty plain to see what you mean about not stepping through the green light.”

  “It would be the last step you took, that’s for sure.”

  “I don’t get it, though,” Samantha said. “Dead I get, but where did his body go? When people die, their body doesn’t vanish, just their consciousness, their spirit. Where did it go?”

  “I don’t know, Samantha,” Richard said in a distracted tone. He had bigger things to worry about. “I don’t know the answers for how everything works, especially not in the third kingdom.”

  Richard looked carefully around as he kept an eye on the curtain of greenish light, the wall before the underworld itself. The eerie, opaque glow of flickering light drifted past them before beginning to fade away as if it had never been there. Richard kept scanning the area for any other threat, but he didn’t see anyone else. The man had apparently been alone.

  “Let’s go. Stay close.”

  “All right,” Samantha said, scrambling to keep up with him. “But it just seemed strange the way his body vanished, that’s all.”

  “The whole concept of this place is strange,” Richard said as the two of them moved deeper into the third kingdom.

  CHAPTER

  53

  Kahlan woke with a start.

  She heard a confusing commotion. As she tried to focus her attention, she became dimly aware of the muffled sound of distant voices. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, only the anxiety in their tone.

  She blinked at the smear of blurry candlelight. Her mouth was so dry her tongue felt swollen and stuck to the roof of her mouth. She swallowed, trying to work up some saliva. She was too weak to lift much more than a finger.

  Though the room was probably softly lit by candles, she still had to squint because the light from the flames seemed so bright to her. After what seemed like an eternity of bewildering darkness, the light hurt her eyes.

  She realized that she was lying on a mat on the floor in a small, simple room. She didn’t recognize the place. She had no idea at all where she might be. She couldn’t even guess.

  The fat candles were clustered together on shelves that looked to have been set back into simple plastered walls. The floor was spread with thick carpets with colorful designs. She saw a few chairs and a table that, while not fancy, were nicely made. A wooden door off across the room stood closed. As her vision began to clear, she saw that there were no windows, so she had no way of telling if it was day or night.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Kahlan saw a middle-aged woman, with short, straight hair and wearing a simple gray dress, sitting on a low chest not far to the side. The woman’s head was turned toward the muffled sound of voices in the distance. With her attention diverted, she didn’t realize that Kahlan had opened her eyes.

  She was glad to see the woman distracted by the same voices that Kahlan heard. Kahlan thought that most likely meant she wasn’t imagining the voices and they weren’t part of the dark world she seemed to have been trapped in for so long. She’d heard the frightening whisper of voices in that world, too. They had beckoned from somewhere beyond the darkness.

  Kahlan wiggled her tingling fingers, working feeling back into them. She rolled a stiff wrist. On the second attempt she managed to sit up a little, enough, at least, to get up onto her elbows. She had to lean back on her hands for support as she rested a moment before she was able to finally sit up the rest of the way.

  She leaned forward, bracing herself with one hand so she could use her other to feel her stomach where she had been cut by Jit. She expected it to hurt. She expected to find a horrible, bloody wound. Instead, she found a tidy seam sewing her shirt closed. She didn’t find a wound. She looked around, but didn’t see Richard.

  As she turned her head, searching, she saw another door at the back of the room. While there were simple designs carved around the outside of the door, in the center a Grace had been carefully carved into the wood. It was somewhat comforting to see the Grace. Her anxiety lowered a notch at seeing the familiar symbol depicting the ordered nature of the universe.

  Kahlan had a pounding headache. Worse, though, was that she was confused and couldn’t make sense of anything. It was frustrating that she couldn’t put the pieces she knew into proper order, frustrating that there was so much that seemed missing between the parts she did remember, frustrating that she didn’t know why so much was missing. Fragments of things—voices, images—floated in complete disarray.

  It felt as if she had been on some long and difficult journey, but she didn’t properly remember any of it. It seemed like maybe she had been having terrible dreams for ages as she lay unable to wake from an endless ordeal. It was hard to tell what was real and what was still the strange, echoing, blurry dreamworld that wouldn’t quite let her go.

  “Please,” she managed to say in a hoarse voice, “water…”

  The woman sitting on the bench to the side jumped. She put a hand to her chest, panting in surprise.

  “You gave me a start.”

  “Sorry” was all Kahlan could get out. Her tongue felt thick and wouldn’t move the way she wanted it to.

  “At last,” the woman said as she rushed in close to kneel at Kahlan’s side. “I was so worried waiting for you to wake. But Sammie—well, Samantha, I guess it is now—she said you would wake. And you did. She was right.”

  Kahlan weakly lifted a hand, laying it on the woman’s arm. “Please … water … please.”

  The woman threw up her hands. “Oh! I’m sorry! Yes, water. Right here. I have some right here. Let me get it.”

  Kahlan saw her rush to the table and pour water from a pitcher into a mug. Carrying the mug of precious water in both hands, she hurried back to Kahlan.

  She gently laid a hand on Kahlan’s back to steady her as she put the mug to her lips. “Easy, now. Don’t try to go too fast at first. You’ve been asleep for quite a while. Sammie—I mean Samantha—managed to make you drink when you were still asleep, but I fear it wasn’t nearly enough for how long—”

  “Who?” Kahlan asked, confused by the woman’s babbling.

  “Sorry. Not important at the moment. Take a sip. Go on, but go slow.”

  The water was more luxuriously delicious than anything she had ever tasted. Kahlan managed to gulp down a few swallows before the woman pulled the mug away to slow her down. “Easy. Go easy.”

  Kahlan nodded to earn the mug back. The second time she sipped slower, rolling the water around her mouth, relishing the wetness. She was able to swallow properly.

  Kahlan noticed that the woman’s eyes kept turning toward the door every time she heard the voices in the distance.

  When she turned back, she saw Kahlan looking at her. “Oh, I’m sorry, Mother Confessor. I’m Ester. Richard asked me to watch over you until you woke up.”

  “Richard,” Kahlan said with sudden relief and excitement. She glanced around, looking for his things. “He’s here? Where is he?”

  “No, I’m sorry. He and Sammie—”

  “Samantha.”

  The woman let out a bit of a giggle. “Yes, Samantha.”

  “Who is Samantha?”

  Kahlan was relieved that with the water her voice was finally starting to work. She thought that she almost sounded like herself.

  “Samantha is our sorceress. We had more. But now she’s the only one we have, since her father was murdered and her mother vanished.”

  Kahlan put a hand over her face in confusion as she closed her eyes for a moment to rest them from the light. She felt like she might still be in a dreamworld where nothing in the swirl of the things she was hearing made any sense.

  “Forgive me, Mother Confessor, I’m talking too fast and only confusing you.”

  Kahlan nodded. “Richard?”

  “He and Samantha had to go.”

/>   Kahlan’s heart sank. “Go? Go where?”

  Ester took a deep breath. “Well, it’s a long story, Mother Confessor. You’ve only just now woken up. I don’t want to throw it all at you at once. Sip the water. I should get you some soup. You look like skin and bones. You need to eat.”

  Kahlan looked down at herself. She did look to have lost some weight, but not a lot.

  “The Hedge Maid had me…” she said, trying to orient herself in the world, trying to understand how she had come to be in this strange, stone room.

  “Jit,” Ester said.

  Kahlan looked up. “Yes, that’s right. Jit.” She squinted, trying to remember. “Richard … I think Richard was there…”

  Ester was nodding. “Yes, he told us that he went there to get you away from that awful woman. The Hedge Maid was an evil creature. Unfortunately, Jit captured Richard as well, but then he killed her—”

  “Richard killed Jit?” Kahlan put a hand to her forehead, trying to remember such an important event, but she couldn’t.

  “Yes, but, but there was trouble in that.”

  Kahlan shook her head. “Trouble? I’m confused.” It all felt like so long ago. “I’m sorry, Ester, but I don’t understand what you’re talking about. I don’t understand what’s going on. I don’t know who you are or where I am or how I got here.”

  Ester looked toward the door. The voices were getting closer. Besides the tension in Ester’s face, Kahlan, too, recognized that the voices did not sound friendly. She thought she heard a man demanding something.

  Ester finally turned back. “Lord Rahl—and Henrik—”

  “Henrik.” She remembered Henrik. “Is he here? He’s all right, then?”

  “Yes, yes,” Ester said as she nodded. “Lord Rahl and Henrik told us most of what has happened. Not all of it, I expect, but much of it. Lord Rahl had to go, though, so he wanted me to explain it to you—to let you know what had happened.”

  “Go? Where did he go?” That didn’t sound like Richard, leaving her somewhere when she was unconscious. “Why would Richard leave me here?”