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“What is it?” Vale asked.
“It’s the symbol for a shepherd. It’s meant for me. They marked the way for us. Look for that symbol at every intersection.”
Without delay they all hurried down the passageway with the shepherd symbol above it. As they went down the hallway and at every intersection they all scanned the walls, looking around for the mark of the shepherd. When they didn’t see one at an intersection, they kept going in the same direction and ignored the hallways to the sides. They passed a number of rooms, but didn’t bother to search them. As they rushed past doorways and the light shined in, Richard could see that the rooms were empty. Except, perhaps, they were not empty of souls.
Cassia pointed up with her hand holding the lantern. “Lord Rahl, look. There is one of the shepherd symbols.”
“Good for you,” he said as he put a hand to their backs and ushered the others into the side passageway with the symbol, “you’re learning the language of Creation.”
As they rushed down the passageways the sound of their footsteps echoed back to them from the distance. The whole way Richard could feel eyes on him. They were everywhere. He could hear them whisper “Fuer grissa ost drauka” as if telling others who was coming. The joined whispers seemed to fill the hallways as it was spoken thousands of times.
“Do you hear them?” Richard finally asked. “Do any of you hear them?”
Nicci frowned at him. “Hear what?”
“I don’t hear anything but our footsteps,” Kahlan said.
“That’s all I hear,” Cassia added.
Richard let out an irritated sigh. He wished he weren’t the only one hearing them. It made him feel as if he were crazy.
Kahlan glanced back into the darkness. “What do you hear?”
Richard didn’t see any point in alarming them any more than they already were. “I don’t know. It kind of sounds like whispering.”
“Whispering?” Nicci, too, looked back over her shoulder. “Can you make out what they are saying?”
“I’m not sure,” he lied. “Let’s just keep moving.”
“Maybe it’s the echo of our footsteps against the stone,” Cassia suggested.
“Maybe.” He pointed with the sword. “Look. Up there. Another shepherd symbol. Take that hallway.”
They followed the corridor with the symbol and then raced past yet more intersections with hanging cloth covered with symbols meant for the dead, and past empty rooms that were packed with lonely, filmy faces watching him go by.
Richard noticed that some of the symbols painted on the hanging textiles were warnings to stay out. Yet more were the wards he had learned to recognize. Some were welcoming motifs offering peace, while yet others were simple geometric patterns, the purpose of which was a mystery to him.
Another one of the shepherd symbols then led them into a long corridor without any rooms or intersections. They came to a halt at the far end when they reached a cloth hung across the hallway. Long-faded colors had been painted in vertical geometric designs infused with wards.
Looking behind the textile, Richard saw an arched opening. Such an opening was different from anything they had so far encountered. They all followed Richard around the hanging cloth into a passageway that made the little hairs on the back of his neck stiffen.
The long corridor was noticeably different from any that had come before. It was wider than the others, with carefully carved straight walls and a precisely flat ceiling. It was also completely deserted and silent in a way that was oppressive.
They finally reached a dark opening at the end of the corridor. Beyond it they discovered tunnels that were not so carefully carved out of the soft stone. The edges between walls and ceiling were irregularly rounded, rather than squared. It was as if the broad corridor they emerged from had been a special place for the dead, and these new passageways were common areas used by the living. The separation was marked by the tingle of magic that set his fine hairs on end.
For the first time they encountered rooms with heavy wooden doors. Vale grabbed his arm.
“Lord Rahl, look.”
Richard was stunned when she held the light into the room and he saw that it was lined with shelves from floor to ceiling. The shelves held hundreds of books. Nicci slipped past the two of them to go have a look for herself. She set her light sphere on a shelf and pulled a few books down, inspecting them briefly before replacing them. The more books she looked at, the more her search quickened. She finally turned back to him.
“These books are all rare and valuable. Some are profoundly dangerous books of magic that would be kept away from public areas.”
Richard turned to Kahlan. “Do you recognize this place? Are we in the Keep?”
Kahlan shook her head with a look of disappointment. “I’ve never seen this place before in my life.”
“Let’s keep going,” he said.
The passageway, so small they had to walk in single file, was lined with rooms. Some were small and empty, with simple openings roughly hewn out of the rock. Some were more elaborate, with metal doors hung on rollers. Those looked to be workrooms of some sort. There were more libraries and rooms with tables, as if for taking meals. Many of the rooms had workbenches, stools, shelves, and a variety of tools. Other rooms had books left lying open on tables, as if people had once been studying them and for some reason not returned. One of the larger rooms had a crude kind of forge. A block and tackle for lifting heavy objects hung from an overhead beam.
They soon arrived at stairs carved into the stone and had to head upward through the caverns. As soon as they reached the higher level they came across niches carved back into the rock. All of the carved-out spaces held bodies wrapped in shrouds. Like everything else, they were all covered in layer upon layer of dust.
The twisting cavern forced them ever upward in a series of crudely cut stairs into continually higher warrens of the dead.
“Did you know the Keep had catacombs like this?” he asked Kahlan as they passed hundreds of hollowed-out spaces holding countless bodies.
Kahlan looked from side to side in wonder. “No. If this is the Keep, I never knew about this place.”
“Catacombs were sometimes abandoned for various reasons,” Nicci said. “Some would simply get full and people would move on to a new site.”
“But people would still want to visit them,” Kahlan said. “They would have wanted to pay their respect to ancestors. I grew up in the Keep. If these catacombs had been accessible I would have known about them.”
“Not only that,” Richard said as he gestured to a room with workbenches, tools, and yet more books, “but people apparently worked down here. The way tools and books are left around, it looks like the people abandoned the place in a hurry. It seems strange that they would have closed it all off.”
“Everything we’re seeing is thousands of years old,” Nicci said. “Everything down here, including the empty hallways, probably dates back to the time of the great war when Sulachan was still alive. The Wizard’s Keep was alive back then. It was a seat of power. The war would have been run from here.”
“That’s right. The gifted in Stroyza were supposed to come here to warn the wizards’ council when the barrier failed. That was because at the time, the Keep was the center of power.” With a sudden realization, Richard stopped and looked at Nicci and Kahlan. “Sulachan and his wizards could reanimate the dead.”
Kahlan lifted a finger as she caught his meaning. “Sulachan’s forces could have attacked the Keep–this center of power–by using the dead.”
Richard nodded. “It’s starting to make sense that they would have abandoned the catacombs.”
What didn’t yet make sense to him was why there would be a sanctuary for souls down below the catacombs.
