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Signaling Samantha to stay where she was in behind the trees, Richard hiked his bow up on his shoulder, got down on the ground, and carefully crawled on his belly to the edge of the great door to have a look beyond. The edge of the door was several feet thick. It put him in mind of what an ant must feel like when around buildings.
As he peeked around the edge, he saw an open, rather barren landscape with broken, rocky terrain. The uneven ground was dotted here and there with a few scrub trees. There was no great forest like that outside the gates.
What alarmed him the most, though, was what he saw next.
In the distance, in various places, he saw flickering greenish light.
He had seen that specific kind of green light before. It was the same kind he had seen when he had first met Kahlan and they had crossed the boundary between Westland and the Midlands.
He had encountered the underworld a number of times since then. The veil before the world of the dead was always an eerie green color, an opaque green curtain of light.
That eerie green light was a boundary layer to the underworld itself.
When he inched out beyond the edge of the great gates to get a better view, he didn’t see anyone inside the gates. It was a dark, barren landscape dominated by towering rock jutting up from the ground like spikes pounded up through the surface from below. But that was not the worst of it. It looked all the more forbidding because of the specter of greenish light flickering here and there among those rock towers.
Richard signaled for Samantha to come out of the trees. He aimed his thumb behind him, indicating that she should stay near the wall and to come up behind the door to join him.
She rushed out of the cover of the trees and quickly made her way through the smaller brush to crouch close behind him.
Not seeing anyone, Richard finally stood up and leaned out around the door for a better look into the third kingdom.
What he saw then both shocked and frightened him.
“What do you see?” she whispered. “What’s wrong? Do you see half people?”
“I don’t see anyone, but we have a problem and you need to know about it right now.”
CHAPTER
51
“What?” Samantha asked. “What is it? What’s the problem?”
Richard turned and squatted down in front of her. “Listen to me. This is important. The third kingdom is what?”
She frowned a little, not sure what he was getting at. “It’s both the world of life and the world of the dead mixed together in the same place at the same time. It’s neither the kingdom of life, or the kingdom of the dead. It’s both, existing together.”
Richard nodded. “That’s right.”
She put a finger on his chest. “But besides being a place, it is also what you are. Life and death together where they shouldn’t be. You are of that place where life and death exist together at the same time.”
“Good,” he said with a single nod. “Beyond the gates is the third kingdom. The world of life and death together in the same place. There are places in there where there is greenish light—”
She frowned as she leaned toward him. “Greenish light?”
“Yes, kind of like … well, have you ever seen the sheets of light in the night in the northern sky?”
“Sure, of course.”
“Like that. It looks something like that, only it’s all a shimmering green light. That’s the boundary layer to the underworld, the world of the dead.”
She frowned suspiciously. Her head darted out to peek around the gate.
“Dear spirits…” She pulled back, her wide eyes staring into his. “Lord Rahl, that’s the same eerie green glow I told you I saw when I tried to heal the Mother Confessor for the first time. Remember? I saw the same thing within you.”
Richard wiped a hand across his mouth before letting out a deep sigh. “That green luminescence is death.”
“I told you so. I saw it in her. That’s when I first told you that she had death in her.”
He nodded reluctantly. “So you did. I remember. But that was in her. This here is out in the open.” Richard pointed a thumb behind him, beyond the gates. “If you walk into it, into that green veil of luminescence, you walk into the world of the dead. Understand?
“It’s the boundary between life and death, just like you described seeing in Kahlan, the place that tried to tempt you in. If you had crossed over when you were in her mind, you would have entered the world of the dead. You would never have come back.
“This here is the same. Beyond that luminescent glow is the world of the dead. If you step over, even a little, you will never come back.”
Her big dark eyes wide, she swallowed. “Then I guess it would be best not to walk through it.”
“Exactly. When we go in there you can’t ever let your guard down. You can’t ever relax. I don’t know the
exact properties of how it works here, where the openings into the underworld will be, but in other places I’ve been you sometimes don’t see it until you get really close. The greenish light is kind of like a warning that you are inches away from death, that you are about to cross over.
“Since you are so close to the underworld, the spirits of the dead beyond sometimes call to you, trying to entice you to cross over to them.”
She nodded. “They did that to me, when I was trying to heal the Mother Confessor and saw that green veil of death. I heard the spirits beyond.”
Richard nodded his understanding. “It seems that we can encounter death in a number of places, in a number of ways. You encountered that boundary to the eternal beyond in Kahlan, and in me. You saw and heard some of what was on the other side.
“In some places I’ve been that green wall will appear as a warning, much the way shields placed by wizards try to warn you with color and light if you start getting too close. In this case, it’s a warning that you are getting close to the boundary.
“In other places I’ve seen, the walls to the world of the dead are static. They stay in the same place, shimmering, so that you can see them from some distance off and know where they are. But here, it seems like those green boundaries into the world of the dead are flickering in and out of existence. That means they aren’t in one place. They move around.”
“That makes sense,” she said. “Life and death in the same place and at the same time, a kind of soup of ingredients mixing together.”
“That’s right, but it also means that this boundary between worlds may be different from what I’ve encountered before, where the lines between life and death were fixed and you could avoid them. Here, from what I saw beyond the gates, those boundaries appear to be fluid, moving like a gossamer carried on a breeze. That’s what’s different here. That’s what makes it so much more dangerous here.
“It means that you may not necessarily need to walk into that boundary to be lost. In this place, they may drift in and come right over you.”
