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The rooms they came across, some with empty openings, were just as bare as all the others they had investigated. In each room Richard had the feeling that there was someone in there, in the darkness, watching him. He kept his sword out. He wasn’t sure it would be of any use against spirits, but it made him feel better to have it in his hand than in its scabbard.
Moving through the darkness, they abruptly came upon a heavy burlap cloth blocking the hallway. Going around it he realized that it was only one of four cloths forming a square, several with passages behind them. One hanging covered in symbols had a blank wall behind it rather than a corridor.
They tried to continue on a straight course, but soon that became impossible as they found themselves in a complex network of passageways turning repeatedly and branching in every direction. To the sides, a few of the inky black tunnels didn’t have hangings covering their opening, while others did.
The hallway split over and over, with intersections everywhere, many at odd angles, making it a dizzying choice of which route to take. In the darkness inside the mountain there was no way to get his bearings. It was as if the angles and corners were intended to disguise direction. Behind some hangings the corridor simply stopped in a dead end, forcing them to backtrack.
Although some rooms had the cloth curtains over them he didn’t see a single door on any of them. Each room was completely barren, without any furniture. None of them looked to have ever been inhabited nor did they seem to have any purpose.
In some places they encountered layers of coarsely woven, raw linen hanging motionless directly across the passageway. It was unnerving to abruptly encounter the walls of cloth with symbols suspended in the darkness, seemingly for no reason. The hangings contributed to the confusion of the place, helping to turn it into an incomprehensible maze.
If the place had a purpose, Richard couldn’t figure it out. If there was any order to its layout, he couldn’t figure that out, either.
The underground hallways were dead quiet in a way that made them all jumpy. Every echoing crunch of crumbled rock underfoot made heads jerk around, searching the darkness behind them.
When he heard a soft sound from behind, Richard spun around, sword in hand, anger rising. There was no mistaking the fact that they hadn’t made the sound.
“What is it?” Kahlan whispered.
“We’re being followed.”
They all stared back into the darkness.
“Followed by who?” Kahlan asked in a whisper.
“If I had to hazard a guess, I would say we are being followed by spirits.”
“Spirits…” She stared into the dark, empty hallway behind them. “I don’t see anything.”
“Nonetheless they’re down here,” he told her. “I don’t know why, but this place is haunted with spirits. Lots of spirits. I can feel them everywhere down here.”
Kahlan’s grip tightened on his left arm. “You can’t know that for sure.”
Nicci gestured to one of the cloth panels hanging over a doorway to the side. “All of these symbols are meant for the dead. They have no purpose except for the dead. The place is called the Sanctuary of Souls, so it only seems logical that there would be spirits here.”
Cassia’s eyes widened. “Are you sure? Why would spirits be here, instead of in the underworld where they belong?”
Nicci glanced at the Mord-Sith but didn’t answer.
The place smelled dusty and dry. Richard lifted his nose a little, trying to smell anything that didn’t belong.
“Do any of you smell anything?”
“Just dust and stone,” Kahlan said.
“What do you think you smell?” Nicci asked.
Richard finally shook his head. “Nothing. That’s why I’m a bit puzzled. I was wondering if we could smell a trace of sulfur.”
Kahlan glanced around. “You think this place is an opening to the underworld?”
“It’s the Sanctuary of Souls,” he said. “Souls belong in the underworld, don’t they?”
Nicci looked skeptical. “Why would someone build an underground maze open to the underworld? I don’t think that explains what this place is doing here. It has some other purpose.”
“Like what?” Richard asked her.
Nicci finally shook her head. “I don’t know. The underworld is infinite. What would it need with some empty rooms and hallways?” She drew some of her long blond hair back over her shoulder as she looked around. “Whatever the purpose of this place, it’s not tied to the underworld. The symbols tell me that much. There is obviously some intent with this place.”
Richard wasn’t really listening to Nicci as he stared back into the darkness. Something else had his attention.
“Wait here. All of you.”
Kahlan snatched his sleeve before he could leave. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I want to go back a ways and have a look at something. I want all of you to wait here.”
Vale held out her lantern. “Take this, at least.”
Richard turned it down with a hand signal. “I need to go have a look. All of you stay here. I’ll only be a few minutes.”
As soon as he started back, he could begin to feel them. The farther he went back into the darkness, the more they closed in around him. As he felt the spirits crowding all around, he could begin to hear their whispers. He looked back over his shoulder and saw the four women in the distance, huddled together in the light of the two lanterns and one light sphere. They looked tiny and insignificant.
“Fuer grissa ost drauka.”
He turned at the whispered words. As soon as he did, he heard the same thing from another side. And then anoth
er. Before long the whispered words “Fuer grissa ost drauka” seemed to melt together into a hushed moan from the dead all around him.
“What is it you want?” Richard asked into the darkness.
“Help us,” a soft voice in the darkness answered. Another added the same call. Soon more joined in.
He looked all around but couldn’t see them, and yet he could. He saw amorphous forms and sorrowful, filmy faces out of the corner of his eye, but when he looked toward them, they weren’t there. He realized that there were thousands of them. Maybe tens of thousands. As he saw the forms gathering, he knew there were more than that. The available amount of room had no bearing on their numbers. They didn’t need space so much as a place. They spilled out of rooms and hallways to the sides, coming to see the stranger in their midst.
Richard turned and hurried back to the others.
“What is it?” Kahlan asked, seeing the concern on his face.
“We need to get out of here. We need to get out right now.”
CHAPTER
46
“I’m all for that,” Cassia said.
“Me too,” Vale agreed.
“How are we supposed to know the way out?” Kahlan asked.
Richard looked around, trying to decide which way to go. He gestured with his sword down at the floor.
“Look. Those are our footprints.” He pointed again with his sword. “See there, out ahead? The dust covering the floor out there is undisturbed. No one has been in these hallways before us for probably thousands of years. But these footprints are ours. We’ve been in this hallway before.”
Kahlan looked up from the dusty footprints. “We’re lost and going in circles.”
When Richard looked up into the distance, it was then that he saw it, up high on the wall at an intersection with a corridor to the right. There were no footprints in that dust out ahead, so he knew that they hadn’t been down in that area yet.
He pointed it out with his sword. “Look there. Up on the wall just before that corridor to the side. See it?”
Carved into the soft stone were four horizontal, uniformly wavy lines stacked atop one another with a heavier upright line at the end.
