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Nicci took a quick look at the books before tossing them back on the shelves. “Nothing that helps us.”
After passing several more empty, darkened rooms to the sides and checking that they were clear, they continued deeper yet into the mountain, finally coming to a stop at the face of what Richard knew to be a round stone disc. Carved in the center of the stone blocking the passageway was another grace. It was obvious what concerned the ancient builders of the place.
Richard gestured to the corroded and pitted metal plate set into the wall to the side. “My gift won’t work on the shields.”
Nicci leaned in and pressed the flat of her hand to the metal plate. At her touch, the stone blocking the doorway shuddered and began to roll to the right, revealing the dark passageway beyond. They all stood in silence, waiting until the heavy stone rolled out of the way to the side.
Nicci stepped through first. “Good, that will be better,” she said as she went to a bracket that held a glass sphere.
As the sorceress reached for it, the sphere began to glow. It brightened even more when she lifted it out of the bracket. The sphere sent its distinctive greenish radiance down the long hallway into the distance.
Unlike the rough cave walls of the rest of the village, these walls beyond the shielded stone entrance had been laboriously smoothed and squared with the floor and ceiling. There were no decorations of any kind on the flat walls, other than the very faint natural variations in the creamy consistency of the rock. This was a part of the mountain that was all composed of the softer rock, with none of the granite in it.
Being devoid of so much as a shelf or niche or bench, the hallway had a strangely sterile feel to it. At least back in the previous hallway there had been the niche with shelves holding statues of shepherds and a few books, but beyond the shields there were no such simple amenities. He guessed it seemed logical, because the passage was only a means to get to the areas that mattered.
“Are there any rooms in here?” Nicci asked.
Richard shook his head. “It’s just an outer passageway with a shield at the other end. I think it may be designed this way to trap intruders.”
Some shields were like that. They allowed people who didn’t belong to get in only so far, and then prevented them from getting back out. Such an arrangement discouraged intruders because scouts never returned with reports.
As they went deeper through the dark, dead-silent passage, rather than making sharp turns the corridor curved gently in places, meandering on its way until they reached another of the stone capstones blocking the way forward. As Richard had remembered, there hadn’t been a single room in the passageway.
Nicci saw the metal plate for the shield and without delay pressed the flat of her hand to it. As she did so, the light sphere she was holding brightened. Richard suspected that was an indication that the shields sensed that she was not an intruder, but rather someone who was allowed inside.
The second shield stone was much bigger and heavier. The mountain itself rumbled as the enormous round stone disc rolled to the right into a slot cut into the rock. The corridor beyond was wider and its walls were more precisely smoothed and squared, as if to indicate its elevated level of importance. The stone of the walls had also been laboriously polished. Kahlan touched her fingers to the creamy surface, amazed at the work that had been put into smoothing and polishing the walls deep in the mountain.
“Why would they go to this much trouble?” Kahlan asked.
“I think to stress the importance of what was in here,” Richard said. “Putting this much care into it showed all the future generations living in the simple caves that it was an important place and they needed to heed their responsibilities.”
“Nice theory,” Nicci said. “Too bad it didn’t work.”
Richard conceded the point with a small grunt.
Around a tight curve in the passageway, they began encountering symbols carved into the stone of the walls. Carving the symbols, rather than using paint of some sort, insured that they would endure for many generations.
The carved writing was all done in the symbols of the language of Creation. The farther they went down the passage, not only did the symbols become more numerous until they covered the entire wall to the left from floor to ceiling, but the symbology also became more complex.
“And so are there any rooms in this hall?” Nicci asked.
“No,” Richard said. She was clearly making a point that if there was no room with a well for the sliph, then there was no way for them to get out of the tomb of caverns.
Nicci scanned the writing as she trailed farther behind Richard and Kahlan. The two Mord-Sith moved along the opposite side of the hall, gazing silently at the wall of writing. The farther they all went, the brighter the corridor became. Natural light flooded in through a small round hole carved in the wall. The light coming in fell on the opposite wall, lighting the end of the passageway.
“This is it,” Richard said, pointing toward the opening. “This is the viewing port they used to watch the barrier.”
Kahlan stretched up on her tiptoes to take a quick glance out the port. “Do you think that when Irena saw the barrier failing she told Ludwig Dreier? Maybe he was the one who came up with the scheme for Jit to capture us.”
“I suspect that it was actually Hannis Arc’s doing,” Richard said. “He would have known from the Cerulean scrolls about the barrier failing long before Irena would have seen it. After all, he had long been making preparations for Sulachan’s return. I don’t see how Jit would have had any knowledge of us, and yet she used a very specific spell to draw both you and me in. Hannis Arc would have had the knowledge to direct her how to do such a thing.”
Kahlan sighed as she finally turned away from the port. “I think you’re right.”
Nicci held the light sphere up to see better as she read some of the writing on the wall. “I agree. Hannis Arc would’ve had the motive and the means.”
Richard nodded. “He has wanted to eliminate the House of Rahl since he was young. He has been plotting it for decades. I suspect he is behind the Hedge Maid being there in the swamp and her using an occult spell to draw us in.”
“All the more reason you need to kill him,” Nicci said in a distracted voice without looking away from the writing on the wall.
Richard knew she was right about that. The details no longer mattered. It only mattered that if Hannis Arc was not stopped, they were all going to be dead.
“So,” Nicci asked as she finally straightened and looked back at Richard. “Where is the well with the sliph so that we can get out of here?”
Richard raked his fingers back through his hair. “I’m afraid that I don’t know. We’re going to have to find it.”
“Find it how?” Nicci asked in a very pointed manner. It reminded him of the time long ago when she had been his teacher, trying to teach him to use his gift.
They all glanced around the hallway. Other than the writing incised into the wall, the place was featureless.
“Lord Rahl, there aren’t any other rooms,” Cassia said, adding emphasis to Nicci’s point without intending it. “There were none on the way in here once we were past the shields.”
“Maybe the room with the well is down a different tunnel,” Vale offered.
Richard shook his head. “No. Everything that was done here was done carefully, from the viewing port to the smooth walls to the shielding. They wouldn’t have put the well in a place that wasn’t safeguarded.”
Kahlan gestured to the viewing port. “That hole through the side of the mountain isn’t very deep, and there is already a hole there, so maybe Nicci could use her gift to break out some of the rock. Then we could get out of the trap of this cave.”
“Go stick your head in and have a look,” Richard said. “This face of the mountain is a sheer cliff. Even if we could expand the hole, the opening is thousands of feet up the side of a sheer cliff.”
“Maybe we could find ropes,” Vale offered.
“You looked in all the rooms on the way in here,” Richard said. “Did you see any ropes? Thousands of feet of ropes?”
Vale’s face showed her discouragement. “I guess not.”
“I guess that unless we can fly, that hole won’t offer us a way out,” Kahlan said, equally discouraged.
“What’s more important,” Richard said, “is that even if we could get out through that hole and somehow climb down, what good would it do us? We’re still too far from the People’s Palace to make it in time. With this poison in me I would be dead long before we ever got there.”
“You’re right,” Kahlan said with a sigh. “The only way is the sliph. If there really is a well somewhere in here.”
Nicci planted a hand on her hip as she looked around in a thoughtful manner. “When Samantha showed you this place and told you about their mission to warn others of the barrier, she said that her mother had to go to the Keep to warn everyone. She and her husband–on the face of it, anyway–set out on that journey. She always talked of it as a long journey on foot. That’s the way it was always presented.”
Richard looked up with sudden comprehension. “They thought they had to travel overland to get back there. That means they didn’t know about the well with the sliph. They never gave any indication that they had any knowledge of a sliph.”
Nicci smiled as she flicked a finger toward the wall. “Because they couldn’t read this writing, so they wouldn’t have any reason to suspect there was another way other than an overland journey. Over generations, the people here had lost the ability to understand the language of Creation.”
Richard tapped a thumb against the hilt of his sword. “If they lost that knowledge, then they likely would have also lost knowledge of the room with the well, especially if it is hidden and shielded.”
Kahlan stepped toward them. “Unless the knowledge of such a hidden room was passed down, then they would no more know about it than how to read this writing. They likely lost the link to that room.”
Cassia scrunched up her nose. “How could they lose a room?”
Richard ran his hand lightly along the wall with the language of Creation carved into it. “That room would have been important, and also a dangerous way for an invader to come here, so it probably has a secret way in. There would be shields or some means of protecting the well that also kept any enemy from getting into the caves.” He looked over at the wall. “It’s probably written here, in all these instructions.”
“But none of the people here knew about any of this?” Cassia asked.
“No,” Richard said. “Over all that time since the great war there were probably missing links in the lineage of the gifted who would have been able to pass on all their knowledge–you know, important gifted people who died unexpectedly before they could teach younger people the language of Creation or other important information, like how they could quickly get a warning to the Keep by using the sliph.”
Richard gestured to the wall. “From what I learned when I was first brought here, the gifted people here had only sketchy information about their duty here, and they knew virtually nothing about this writing. That means the instructions were here all along, but useless to them.
