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“I think the Mother Confessor be right. We must consider what be the most important action we can take. We must not risk everyone for a danger to a few.”
Kahlan stood before Gratch. With the way he was squatting down, she was eye to eye with him. “Gratch, Richard is in great danger.” Gratch’s tufted ears twitched. “He needs Zedd to help him. And you too. I’ll be safe enough; no mriswith have been here. Can you get Zedd to Aydindril? He’s a wizard and can make himself easy for you to carry. Will you do it for me? For Richard?”
Gratch’s glowing eyes moved among the three of them, considering. At last he rose. His leathery wings spread as he nodded. Kahlan hugged the gar, and he returned the tender embrace.
“Are you tired, Gratch? Do you want to rest, or can you leave right now?”
Gratch flapped his wings in answer.
In growing alarm, Zedd looked from one to the other. “Bags. This is the most foolish thing I’ve ever done. If I was meant to fly, I’d have been born a bird.”
Kahlan offered a weak smile. “Jebra said she had a vision of you with wings.”
Zedd planted his fists on his bony hips. “She also said she saw me being dropped into a ball of fire.” He tapped his foot. “All right. Let’s get going, then.”
Adie stood to seize him in a hug. “You be a brave old fool.”
Zedd grumbled in disgust. “Fool, indeed.” He finally returned the embrace. He let out a sudden yelp when she pinched his bottom.
“You look handsome in your fine robes, old man.”
Zedd was overcome with a helpless grin. “Well, I guess I do.” A frown returned. “A little anyway. Take care of the Mother Confessor. When Richard finds out I left her to make her own way back, he may do more than pinch me.”
Kahlan threw her arms around the skinny wizard, feeling suddenly forsaken. Zedd was Richard’s grandfather, and it had made her feel at least a little better having that much of Richard with her.
When they parted, Zedd cast a wincing glance to the gar. “Well, Gratch, I guess we had best be on our way.”
In the cold night air, Kahlan caught the wizard’s sleeve. “Zedd, you have to talk some sense into Richard.” Her voice heated. “He can’t do this to me. He’s being unreasonable.”
Zedd studied her face in the dim light. He spoke softly, at last. “History is rarely made by reasonable men.”
35
“Don’t touch anything,” Richard reminded them again as he scowled over his shoulder. “I mean it.”
The three Mord-Sith didn’t answer. They turned to look up at the high ceiling of the arched entry and then at the huge, intricately joined blocks of dark granite just inside the raised, massive portcullis marking the entrance to the Wizard’s Keep.
Richard glanced back past Ulic and Egan, to the wide road that had led them up the mountainside and at last over a stone bridge two hundred and fifty paces long that spanned a chasm with near vertical sides that dropped away for what seemed thousands of feet. He wasn’t sure of the full depth of the yawning abyss because in the far distance below, clouds hugging the ice-slicked walls obscured the bottom. Walking over the bridge and looking down into that dark, jagged maw made him dizzy and light-headed. He couldn’t imagine how the stone bridge could have been erected over such an obstacle.
Unless one had wings, there was but this single way into the Keep.
Lord Rahl’s official escort of five hundred men waited back on the other side of the bridge. They had intended to come with him into the Keep until they had reached that spot, having just rounded a switchback, and every eye, including his, had looked up at the vastness of the Keep, its soaring walls of dark stone, its ramparts, bastions, towers, connecting passageways, and bridges, all of which presented an unmistakable sensation of sinister menace jutting from the stone of the mountain, somehow looking alive, as if it were watching them. Richard’s knees had gone weak at the sight, and when he ordered them to wait there, none had raised so much as a single word of protest.
It had taken considerable will for Richard to force himself to go on, but the idea of all those men seeing their Lord Rahl, their wizard, balk at going into the Wizard’s Keep kept his feet moving when he would have wished otherwise. Besides, he needed to do this. Richard summoned courage by remembering Kahlan telling him that the Keep was protected by spells, and that there were places even she couldn’t go because those spells so sapped one of courage that they couldn’t proceed. That’s all it was, he assured himself, just a spell to keep the curious away, only a feeling, and not a real threat.
“It’s warm here,” Raina said, her dark eyes looking about in astonishment.
Richard realized she was right. Once they were beyond the iron portcullis, the air had lost its chill with each step, until it was like a fine spring day inside. The somber, steel gray sky into which the sheer mountainside ascended above the Keep, and bitter wind on the road up, held no hint of spring, though.
The snow on his boots was beginning to melt. They all took off their heavy mantles and tossed them in a pile to the side, against the stone wall. Richard checked that his sword was clear in its scabbard.
The towering, arched opening they passed beneath was a good fifty feet long. Richard saw that it was merely a breach in the outer wall. Beyond, the road continued through an open area before tunneling into the base of a high stone wall and disappearing into the gloom beyond. Probably just went to the stables, he told himself. No reason to go in there.
Richard had to resist the urge to shroud himself in his black mriswith cape and become invisible. He had been doing that more and more of late, finding comfort not only in the solitude it provided, but in an odd, indefinably pleasurable sensation it invoked, almost like the reassurance of the magic of the sword at his hip, always there, always at his beck and call, always his ally and champion.
All around, intricate junctures of masonry walls created of the bleak courtyard a craggy canyon, its walls dotted by a number of doors. Richard chose to follow a stepping-stone path through the gravel of granite fragments, to the largest of the doors.
Berdine suddenly clutched his arm so hard he winced in pain, turning away from the door to pry off her fingers.
“Berdine,” he said, “what are you doing? What’s the matter?”
He extricated his arm from her grasp, but she grabbed it again. “Look,” she finally said in a tone of voice that made the hair at the back of his neck stand on end. “What do you suppose that is?”
Everyone turned to see where she pointed with her Agiel.
Rock fragments and stones rolled in waves, as if some huge stone fish swam beneath their surface. As the unseen thing underneath came closer, they all inched toward the center of their stepping-stone. The gravel crunched and gnashed as it undulated in waves, like water in a lake.
Berdine’s grasp on his arm tightened painfully as the crest of the waves approached. Even Ulic and Egan gasped with the rest of them as it seemed to pass beneath the stepping-stones under their feet, the waves lapping stone chips up onto the rocks upon which they stood. Once beyond, the rolling movement of the gravel abated until all was still.
“All right, just what was that?” Berdine blurted out. “And what would have happened to us if we had gone a different way, to one of the other doors, instead of along the only path to this one?”
“How should I know?”
She blinked up at him. “You’re a wizard. You’re supposed to know these things.”
Berdine would have fought Ulic and Egan by herself, without a second thought, if he were to command it, but unseen magic was something altogether different. All five of them were fearless against
steel, but none of them were the least bit shy about letting him see their anxiety toward magic. They had explained it to him any number of times: they were the steel against steel, so that he could be the magic against magic.
“Look, all of you, I’ve told you before that I don’t know very much about being a wizard. I’ve never been to this place before. I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know how to protect you. Now, will you do as I asked, and wait with the soldiers on the other side of the bridge? Please?”
Ulic and Egan folded their arms in mute reply.
“We’re going with you,” Cara insisted.
“That’s right,” Raina added.
“You can’t stop us,” Berdine said as she finally released his arm.
“But it could be dangerous!”
“And we must protect you,” Berdine said.
Richard scowled down at her. “How? By squeezing the blood out of my arm?”
Berdine turned red. “Sorry.”
“Look, I don’t know about the magic here. I don’t know the dangers, much less how to stop them.”
“That is why we must go,” Cara explained with exaggerated patience. “You don’t know how to protect yourself. We might be of help. Who’s to say that an Agiel—” She lifted a thumb to Ulic and Egan. “—or muscles, aren’t what will be needed? What if you fall down a simple hole with no ladder, and there is no one to hear you call for help? You could be hurt by something not magic, you know.”
Richard sighed. “Well, all right. I guess you have a point.” He shook a finger at her. “But if you get your foot bitten off by some stone fish or something, don’t you complain to me about it.”
The three women grinned in satisfaction. Even Ulic and Egan smiled. Richard let out a weary sigh.
“Come on, then.”
He turned toward the twelve-foot-tall door set back in an alcove. The wood was gray and weathered, and spanned with simple but massive iron straps spiked on with cut nails as big as his fingers. Above the door, words were carved in the stone lintel, but they were in a language none of them could understand. As Richard reached for the lever, the door began to move inward on silent hinges.
