The Third Kingdom

And then there were the Shun-tuk who had attacked Zedd, Cara, and the others. Those Shun-tuk had obviously come out through the gates. From all indications, though, it looked like they probably took their captives back to their own land.

Richard wished he could remember better what he had heard as he woke up.

He had no way of knowing what other nations or groups of people might be living in the third kingdom beyond the wall, living in a land where life and death existed together. There could be vast numbers of half people of all sorts, just as in all the various lands of the world of life.

As they finally reached the ground down by the gates, Richard led them closer to the wall, but stayed in the shadow of the woods where possible as they worked their way closer. The gates opened out, so that also helped provide some cover.

“Stay there, behind the trees, while I get a closer look,” he whispered to Samantha.

She nodded and quickly moved back into the shadows of young maples and spruce growing in an area of windfall pine that had opened the forest canopy.

The gates themselves were impossibly tall. They were considerably taller than the tallest pines in the surrounding forest. As he got closer, he thought that they looked more like movable walls than real gates. He supposed that made sense. They weren’t designed, after all, to open and close regularly. It was most likely that the gates had been closed only after the wall had been completed. Once closed, they were meant to stay closed.

As he came up into the deep shadow behind the nearest of the great gates, he saw that they were sheathed in squares of some kind of metal that had not rusted, although it did have the patina of great age. He reached out and put a hand against the metal. It was cool to the touch.

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.”