The Third Kingdom

“Good. Now listen to me, Samantha. You may think I’m the one, but there are other people who are smarter about these kinds of things than me. Zedd knows more than I do about such things. Nicci perhaps more yet. They are both incredibly powerful people with vast experience and knowledge. Don’t discount the importance of that—they may be able to stop the threat even without me.”

“If they’re so powerful, then how did they get overpowered and caught in the first place?”

Richard let out a sigh at her simple insight. “No matter how powerful you are, that doesn’t mean you can always win. Sometimes, no matter how good you are, things just go wrong.”

Samantha nodded. “What now?”

“Now we go in there and find them. Stay close and stay alert.”

After she agreed, Richard peeked out around the gate. He saw no one out in the jumbled landscape of dark rock and flickers of the phantom luminescence here and there across the sprawling wasteland. In the distance a haze of smoke hung over the forbidding landscape.

CHAPTER

52

As they made their way around the gate, stepping into the broad opening, Richard looked up and saw the great stone arch over the gateway. He remembered seeing it from the viewing port back in Stroyza. Up close, in all its detail, it was more imposing, more frightening, than he remembered.

The arch formed a head with glaring eyes made of some kind of red marble. Two enormous, sharp fangs hung down, as if ready to strike at anyone who tried to enter. It was meant as a warning that crossing through these gates would be like entering the jaws of some monstrous creature. It was a clear statement of the lethality of the place.

It was so obviously threatening that it was almost like a warning not to be stupid enough to enter the place.

Once through the open gates, Samantha pointed. “Lord Rahl, look,” she whispered.

Richard turned and looked up. The insides of the gates had symbols embossed into the surface of the metal plates. When the gates were open, the enormous central emblem was broken in half, but when the gates were closed the symbol would have been whole and united. The element was in the language of Creation, like what Richard had seen on the omen machine, like Naja Moon’s account back in the cave at Stroyza.

Richard didn’t understand every component in the symbols, but he could clearly see that they were elements of a powerful spell. These symbols were meant to conjure powers Richard had never seen described before and didn’t entirely understand.

What he did understand from the meaning in parts of the designs was that these were barrier spells. The writing, in the language of Creation, was not meant to convey information so much as to call forces together.

With the gates standing open, that enormous barrier spell, that lock in the center that had spanned both doors, was now broken.

With a chill, Richard realized that the seal was off the gates to the underworld itself.

He didn’t want to take any more time to study all the symbols on the insides of the gates. Since the symbols and the spells they represented were now broken, what they had once meant was no longer important. Now, prepared or not, it was up to Richard to deal with the results.

He led them swiftly beyond the broad opening, toward rocky outcroppings off to the right that provided cover. They continued to move farther in beyond the gates and away from the wall, using the rocks as cover to stay out of sight as much as possible in case there were any half people traveling down to the gates out of the third kingdom.

In places, moving through the rocks, sheets of the greenish luminescence wavered off to the sides. He paused, watching veils of the eerie light drift lazily across the landscape, dragging a hem of light that flickered where it touched the ground. Richard kept an eye on the veils, making sure none were near, before starting to move again.

He had never seen the boundary to the underworld move like that. In the past it had always remained in place, an unmovable barrier to the world of the dead. The disconcerting sight of that boundary moving about the landscape sent a chill through him.

Coming around a column formation of stacked layers of slightly different colored rock, Richard abruptly spotted a man not far away, moving in their direction.

In that frozen moment, he realized that it was too late to hide. When the man looked up at the same instant and saw Richard and Samantha, the look in his eyes told Richard that this was a predator, one of the unholy half dead, that was always ready to exploit any opportunity it came across.

In a heartbeat, Richard had the bow off his shoulder. He whipped it around into position. He snatched an arrow from the quiver lashed to the side of the pack on his back. In another heartbeat he had the arrow nocked.

Time seemed to slow in Richard’s vision as the man’s lips curled back and he broke into a dead run toward them.