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She encountered no shields at all in the white hall. A stairway took her lower into the Keep. Another stone hall at the bottom provided quick travel devoid of shields. In her mind, she was retracing the halls, rooms, stairs, and cramped tunnels, and was pretty sure that, by eliminating the false routes she had taken, there was a way to get to and from the tower without encountering any shields.
Kahlan threw open the door at the end of the stone hall and stepped out onto a walkway with an iron railing. She held the lamp up in front of her. She stood at the bottom level of the tower.
The walkway ringed the hall. Stairs wound their way up around the inside of the immense stone tower, with landings at other doors along the way. In the center, at the bottom of the tower, lurked a pool of black water. Rocks broke the surface of the water here and there. Bugs skittered across the inky surface of the pool. Salamanders rested on the rocks, their eyes rolling to watch her.
This was the place where she and Richard had fought the mriswith queen. Her stinking, broken eggs still littered the rock. Small bits of the door blasted from Kolo’s room still floated in the pool, providing islands for fat bugs that hissed at the intrusion.
Across the water, on the opposite side of the round tower room, was the opening to Kolo’s room.
Kahlan quickly made her way around the walkway to the wide platform outside Kolo’s room. The doorway had been blown open, leaving blackened, jagged edges. In some places the stone itself was melted like candle wax. The tower wall outside the doorway was streaked with blackened lines of soot from the unleashed power that had opened Kolo’s room for the first time in millennia.
When Richard had destroyed the Towers of Perdition, it had destroyed the magic seal on this room, too. The towers had sealed the Old World away from the New in the great war three thousand years before. They had also sealed the room with the sliph, and sealed in the man who had been unfortunate enough to be the one guarding her at the time.
Stone fragments crunched under her feet as Kahlan stepped into the room where Kolo had died, the room where dwelled the sliph. The silence was oppressive. It droned in her ears, making her welcome the relief of her footsteps.
Richard had awakened the sliph after thousands of years. The sliph had taken Richard to the Old World, and had brought him and Kahlan safely back to Aydindril. When they returned, Richard had put the sliph back to sleep. All the years Kahlan had spent in the Keep, and she had never known the sliph was there.
Kahlan couldn’t even imagine the magic the wizards of old could use to conjure a being such as the sliph, or how they could have put her to sleep for all that time, so that she could wake again. Only at the fringes of her imagination could she conceive of the power Richard wielded, but didn’t comprehend.
What would the war wizards of old, who knew their gift well, have been able to do with such unfathomable magic? What terrors would a war among those with that kind of power have been like?
The very thought gave her shivers.
It would have been things like the plague that had been set upon them, now. They could do those kinds of things.
The lamplight fell across Kolo’s bones beside the chair. The pen and inkwell still sat on the dusty table. The round room, nearly sixty feet across, was capped with a high-domed ceiling, itself nearly as tall as the room was wide.
In the center was a round stone wall, like a well, twenty-five or thirty feet across. There dwelled the sliph. Kahlan held the light over the wall of the well, and glanced briefly down the smooth stone walls of the dark shaft that fell away seemingly forever.
The walls of the room were scorched in ragged lines as if lightning had gone wild in the place—another result of the same magic Richard had invoked when he destroyed the towers and when the doorway had been blasted open. Kahlan strode quickly around the room, checking to see if there was anything that might be useful. There was nothing in the room, other than the table, chair, and Kolo, except for a dusty set of shelves.
Kahlan was disappointed to find that there were no books on the shelves. There were three faded blue, glazed, lidded containers, probably once holding water or soup for the wizard on duty guarding the sliph. A white, glazed bowl held a silver spoon. A neatly folded cloth, or embroidery of some sort, sat on one of the shelves. When she touched it, it disintegrated into dust and little flakes where her fingers contacted it.
Kahlan bent lower, seeing that the bottom shelf held only a few spare candles and a lamp.
An abrupt sensation of icy alarm inundated her.
She was being watched.
She froze, holding her breath, telling herself that it was just her imagination. The fine hairs at the back of her neck stiffened. She felt a cold wave of gooseflesh run up her arms.
She strained to hear a telling sound. Her toes cringed inside her boots. She feared to move. Carefully, quietly, she let her lungs draw a needed breath.
Slowly, ever so slowly, so as not to make a sound, she straightened a little. She dared not move her feet lest the stone chips crunch.
Courage, as thin as eggshells, urged her to hide behind the wall of the sliph’s well. From there, she could determine if it was only her imagination spooking her. Perhaps it was just a rat.
She twisted to check the distance to the stone wall.
Kahlan sucked a cry as she flinched back.
36
The quicksilver face of the sliph had risen above the edge of the stone wall and was watching her.
The glossy metallic female features of the sliph reflected the lamplight and the room in a living mirror. It was obvious why Kolo called the sliph “she.” The sliph was a silver statue. Except it moved with liquid grace.
Kahlan pressed a hand to her hammering heart as
she panted, getting her breath. The sliph watched her, as if curious about what Kahlan might do next. Kolo often said in his journal that “she” was watching him.
“Sliph…” Kahlan stammered. “What are you doing… awake?”
The face distorted into a puzzled frown. “Do you wish to travel?” The eerie voice echoed around the room. Her lips hadn’t moved as she spoke, but she smiled pleasantly.
“Travel? No.” Kahlan took a step toward the well. “Sliph, Richard put you to sleep. I was here.”
“Master. He woke me.”
“Yes, Richard woke you. He traveled in you. He rescued me, and I traveled back with him… in you.”
Kahlan recalled that strange experience with a certain fondness. To travel in the sliph, you had to breathe her in. It was frightening at first, but with Richard there holding her hand, Kahlan had been able to do it, and had discovered the enthralling sensation of “traveling.”
To breathe the sliph was rapture.
“I remember,” the sliph said. “Once you are in me, I remember.”
“But don’t you remember Richard putting you to sleep again?”
“He woke me from the sleep of ages, but he did not put me back into the long sleep. He put me at rest, until I was needed.”
“But we thought—we thought you had gone back to sleep. Why are you not at… rest, now?”
“I felt you near. I came to look.”
Kahlan stepped to the stone wall. “Sliph, has someone traveled in you since Richard and I last did?”
“Yes. I was used.”
Suddenly realization broke through her surprise. “A man and a woman. They traveled in you, didn’t they?”
The sliph’s smile turned sly, but she didn’t answer.
Kahlan touched her fingers to the stone wall. “Who was it, sliph, who traveled in you?”
“You should know that I never betray those I hold within me.”
“I should know? How would I know?”
“You have traveled in me. I would not reveal you. I never betray my clients. You traveled, so you must understand.”
