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He stuck his hand back through the invisible barrier, and she gripped his wrist without hesitation. Slowly, he pulled her hand toward him until it penetrated the shield.
“Oh, that’s cold,” she complained.
“You all right? You want to try the rest of the way?”
When she nodded, he pulled her on. Once through, she shuddered and shook herself as if she were crawling with bugs.
Cara put her hand out toward the doorway. “Now me.”
Richard began to reach for her, but stopped. “No. The rest of you wait here until we come back.”
“What!” Cara shrieked. “You have to take us with you!”
“There are dangers I know nothing about. I can’t be watching out for all of you and at the same time pay attention to what I’m doing. Berdine is enough in case I need protection. The rest of you wait here. If anything happens, you know how to get out.”
“But you have to take us,” Cara pleaded. “We can’t leave you without protection.” She turned. “Tell him, Ulic.”
“She’s right, Lord Rahl. We should be with you.”
Richard shook his head. “One is enough. If something happened to me, then you wouldn’t be able to get back out through the shield. If anything happens, and we don’t return, I’m depending on you to carry on. If anything happens, you are in charge, Cara. If anything happens, get help for us, if you can. If you can’t, well, take care of things until my grandfather Zedd and Kahlan get here.”
“Don’t do this!” Cara looked more distraught than he had ever seen her. “Lord Rahl, we can’t afford to lose you.”
“Cara, it will be all right. We’ll be back, I promise. Wizards always keep their promises.”
Cara huffed in anger. “Why her?”
Berdine flipped her wavy brown braid back over her shoulder as she flashed Cara a self-satisfied smile. “Because Lord Rahl likes me best.”
“Cara,” Richard said as he scowled at Berdine, “it’s because you’re the leader. If anything happens to me, I want you to be in charge.”
Cara stood a moment, considering. A self-satisfied smile of her own finally spread on her lips. “All right. But you better never pull a trick like this again.”
Richard winked at her. “If you say so.” He looked up the gloomy corridor. “Come on, Berdine. Let’s go have a look around so we can finish and get out of this place.”
36
Passageways ran in every direction. Richard tried to keep to what he thought was the main one so that he could find his way out. As they passed rooms, he stuck his head in to see if there were any books or anything else that might be helpful. Most were simple, empty stone rooms. A few had tables and chairs, with chests or other plain furniture, but nothing of particular interest. One whole hall had rooms with beds. The wizards who stayed at the Keep must have lived unassuming lives, at least some of them. There were thousands of rooms and he had seen only a few.
Berdine peeked past him whenever he looked into a room, to see what he was seeing. “Do you know where we are going?”
“Not exactly.” He glanced off down another side hall. The place was a labyrinth. “But I think we should find some stairs. Start at the bottom and work our way up.”
She pointed back over her shoulder. “I saw some down a hall to our left, just back there.”
The stairs were where she said they would be. He hadn’t noticed them because it was just a hole in the floor with spiral stone steps descending down into darkness, and he had been looking for a stairwell. Richard reprimanded himself for not thinking to bring a lamp, or candle. He had a flint and steel in his pocket, and guessed that if he could find some straw or old cloth, he could get a small flame going and light one of the candles he had seen in iron sconces.
As they descended into the darkness below, Richard felt, as well as heard, a low hum coming from below. The stone, which had been disappearing in darkness, began to reveal itself in a bluish green light, as if someone were turning up the wick on a lamp. By the time they reached the bottom of the steps, he could see clearly in the eerie light.
Just around the corner at the bottom of the steps, he found the source of the light. In a ringed iron bracket sat a globe, about as wide as his hand, and looking to be glass. It was the origin of the light.
Berdine looked up at him, her face outlined in the strange illumination. “What makes it glow?”
“Well, there’s no flame, so I would guess it has to be magic.”
Richard cautiously reached toward the light. It brightened. He touched a finger to it, and the bluish green cast changed to a warmer yellow color.
Since touching it seemed to cause no harm, Richard carefully lifted it from the bracket. It was heavier than he expected. Rather than being a hollow sphere of blown glass, it seemed to be solid. In his hand, it threw off a warm, useful light.
Richard could see that far off down the tunnel-like hall there were other such spheres in brackets. In the distance, the closest barely glowed with bluish green light. As they passed them, each brightened at his approach, and dimmed as he moved on with the one he had taken.
At an intersection, the hall joined a wider, more welcoming corridor. Light pink stone ran in a band down both sides, and at places the passageway opened into cavernous rooms with padded benches.
Opening the wide, double doorways in one of the corridor’s big rooms, he discovered a library. The library looked cozy and inviting with its polished wood floor, paneled walls, and whitewashed ceiling. There were tables beside the rows of shelves, and comfortable-looking chairs. Glassed windows at the far side overlooked the city of Aydindril and made the room bright and airy.
He moved on to the next cavernous chamber in the hall, and discovered that it, too, had a library off of it. It appeared that the corridor ran parallel to the the face of the Keep, and along a whole row of libraries. They found another two dozen of the huge library rooms by the time they reached the end of the corridor.
Richard had never imagined that this many books existed. Even the vaults at the Palace of the Prophets, with all the books it held, seemed sparse to him after seeing this many volumes. It would take a year just to read all the titles. He felt suddenly overwhelmed. Where was he to start?
“This must be what you were looking for,” she said.
Richard frowned. “No, it’s not. I don’t know why, but this isn’t it. This is too ordinary.”
Berdine walked beside him as they moved on through passageways and down several stories when they came to a stairwell, her Agiel swinging on the chain at her wrist, and ever at the ready. At the bottom of the stairs stood an ornate, gold-leafed doorframe before a chamber beyond that, rather than stonework, had been excavated from inky rock, perhaps once a cave that had been enlarged. In places where the rock had been broken away, i
t left behind glossy, sharp facets. Fat columns looked to have been left in places as the rock had been carved out in order to support a low, craggy ceiling.
At the gold doorway Richard encountered a shield for the fourth time since he had entered the Keep, but this was different than the first three. The first three all had the same feel; this was nothing like the others. As he put his hand through, the vertical plane between the doorframe glowed red from no visible source, and the sensation, instead of the tingling, was hot where the red light touched him. It was the most uncomfortable shield he had ever felt. He feared it might singe the hair off his arm, but it didn’t.
Richard pulled his arm back. “This one is different. If it’s more than you want to do, you stop me.” He put his arms around Berdine to better protect her. She tensed. “Don’t worry, I’ll stop if you want me to.”
She nodded, and he shuffled into the doorway. When the red light touched the red leather on her arm, she flinched. “It’s all right,” she said. “Keep going.” He pulled her through, and released her. Only after he took his arms from around her did she seem to relax.
The glow of the sphere Richard held out cast sharp shadows among the columns, and he could see that there were small recesses carved in the stone all around the room. At the wall around the edge of the room, there were perhaps sixty or seventy such niches. Though he couldn’t make out what was in them, he could tell that each held objects of different sizes and shapes.
Richard felt the hairs on the back of his neck stiffen as his gaze swept over the nooks from a distance. He didn’t know what the things were, but he instinctively knew that they were more than dangerous.
“Stay close to me,” he told her. “We want to stay away from the walls.” He pointed with his chin across the vast room. “Over there. That passageway is where we want to go.”
“How do you know?”
“Look at the floor.” The rough, natural stone was worn smooth in a winding track cutting across the center of the chamber. “We’d better stay on this path.”
