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With a growl of surrender, she ran along with him through the shower of glittering reflections from the glass mosaics that covered the walls of the room. “You’d better be right about this.”
He grabbed her hand and held it tight, just in case being born with the Subtractive side was necessary. Nicci had not been born with it, but had acquired the use of it. He didn’t know a great deal about magic, but from what he’d learned, there was a great gulf between being born with it and simply being able to use it. He had helped others, without the gift, through shields before, so between her abilities, and his hold of her, he figured he could get her through—if, that was, he could make it through himself.
The air all around them turned as red as a crimson fog. Without pause, Richard charged right though the doorway, pulling Nicci along with him.
The sudden avalanche of pressure felt like it would crush them. Nicci gasped.
Richard had to force himself against that pressure in order to advance. At the razor edge of the plane along the opening surrounded by polished stone pillars, heat seared across his flesh. It was so intense that for an instant he thought he’d made a huge mistake, that Nicci had been right, and that the shield would burn the flesh right off his bones.
Even as he flinched in reaction to the unexpected burning sensation, his momentum carried him through the doorway. He was somewhat surprised not only to find himself alive and well and not at all harmed, but that the passageway was not at all what it appeared from the other side. When he’d looked through the opening before, it looked like a simple stone block passage. Once past the pillars, it was polished stone that seemed to shimmer with a rippling silver surface that made it appear three-dimensional.
A glance back showed the snarl of shadows streaking for the entrance to the opening. Still holding Nicci’s hand, Richard backed them farther into the sparkling passageway.
He was too exhausted to run anymore.
“Here we live or die,” he told her as he labored to catch his breath.
Chapter 54
The shadow hit the opening with such a resounding thud that Richard thought the passageway they were in would certainly be blown apart. What had been a somewhat cohesive, dark shape exploded apart like glass on granite, shattering into thousands of dark shards. Piercing wails of frightful anguish echoed through the passageway in terrible, heartbreaking finality as light ignited in a blinding crimson flash. At the shielded opening, black fragments of shadows tumbled back through the room that was filled with shimmering, sparkling reflections off the glass mosaics. With what looked like a year’s worth of meteor showers all compressed into a single instant, the shadowy fragments burst into bright flares that flew in every direction as they glimmered into nothingness.
It was suddenly quiet but for Richard and Nicci’s labored breathing.
The beast was gone. At least it was gone for the moment.
Richard let go of Nicci’s hand and they both flopped down heavily on the floor and slumped back against the iridescent silver wall as they panted in exhaustion.
“You were looking for one of those shields, weren’t you?” Nicci asked as she worked at recovering enough breath to talk.
Richard nodded. “Nothing Zedd or Nathan or Ann conjured did anything to stop the beast. What you did at least seemed to have had an effect, even if a small one. That made me think that there must be something that would be able to counter it, maybe not in totality, but at least in the form it presented this time.
“I knew that the wizards from the time back when this place was built needed to stop anything that didn’t belong in here—and the beast, after all, was something from back in those times, something that Jagang had found described in old books. So I figured that those who made the shields here must have had to take such eventualities into account.
“Since they’re made to stop such threats, it takes, at the least, an element of Subtractive Magic to get through the shields. But because the enemy would have had Subtractive powers as well, I think the shields must also somehow read the nature of who is trying to pass through them, perhaps thereby interpreting the potential level of threat. It could even be that as we were chased through the Keep and kept going through shields, they somehow gathered information on the nature not only of us, but of the beast as well so that when we reached these higher threshold shields, they had finally judged it a threat and stopped it.”
Nicci considered what he’d said as she pulled sweaty strands of blond hair back off her face. “No one really knows a great deal about the gifted back then, but it makes sense that such an ancient threat would be vincible to ancient defenses.” She frowned as if an idea had come to her. “Maybe such shields would even be a way to protect you if it reappears.”
“Sure,” he said, “if I want to live down here like a mole.”
She looked around. “Any idea where we are?”
“No,” he said, letting out an exhausted sigh, “but I guess we’d better try to find out.”
They struggled to their feet and made their way the rest of the distance down the short passageway. At the end they emerged into a simple room constructed of stone blocks once covered in plaster that was now crumbling. The room was no more than fifteen paces long and not nearly as wide, with books on shelves along most of the length of the wall to the left.
While it did have some books, it was not a library like so many others he had seen in the keep. For one thing, it was far too small. For another, it was not at all elegant, or even nice, but rather stark. At best, it could be called utilitarian. Besides the shelves, the room was only wide enough for a table at the far end beside a passageway leading out the other side. There was a fat candle on the table and a wooden stool under it. The far passageway looked very much like the one they had come in through.
When Richard took a look, he saw that it had the same shimmering silver stone walls and another shield that looked just like the one they had come in through at the other end of the room, so that, unlike a number of places in the Keep that had shields, there was no way to go around and get into the room by way of another route without such powerful shields. It was through one of the two shields or not at all.
“With all the dust in here,” Nicci said, “it doesn’t look like anyone has cleaned in here for thousands of years.”
She was right. The room was devoid of color other than the dirty gray color of the dust that coate
d everything. The hair at the nape of Richard’s neck stood on end as he fully realized why.
“That’s because no one has been in here for thousands of years.”
“Really?”
He gestured to the far passage he’d just inspected. “The only two ways into here are protected with shields that require Subtractive Magic to cross. Not even Zedd, the First Wizard himself, has ever been in here. He can’t pass Subtractive shields.”
Nicci brushed her hands together. “Especially these shields. I’ve dealt with shields most of my life. From what I felt of these, they’re deadly. I suspect that without your help even I might have had some difficulty getting through them the first time.”
Richard tilted his head to be able to better read the titles as he perused the books along the shelves. Some had no titles on the spines. Some were in languages he couldn’t read. Some looked like they might be journals. Several, though, looked curious. One small book, Gegendrauss, in High D’Haran meant Countermeasures. He pulled out another beside it of a similar small size titled Ordenic Theory. As he blew off a thick coating of dust, he realized then that it must have caught his attention because Ordenic reminded him of Orden, as in the boxes of Orden. He wondered if there was any connection.
“Richard, look at this,” Nicci called to him from the far passage.
Richard tossed the book on the table as he made his way into the passageway, toward the shield. “What is it?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice echoed, and then he saw the crimson glow brighten and finally fade.
He realized that she must have gone beyond the shield. Alarmed at first, Richard was hugely relieved that there had been no horrific results. Nicci was an experienced sorceress. He suspected that after having gone through the last shield, she must have known what dangers to look for to tell her if she could pass this one as well. He reasoned that perhaps the first shield, when he had helped her through it, had keyed to her, allowing her to cross shields like it.
