The Third Kingdom

Richard was in that place where he controlled the world around the bladed point of his arrow. He settled the arrow and, in another heartbeat, it was away.

In his headlong rush to close the distance, the arrow entered through the man’s left eye socket, right where Richard intended, where the bone wouldn’t be as dense and possibly deflect the arrow’s flight before it could do its work. It still had enough power behind it to erupt partway out the back of the man’s skull.

Still flying at a dead run, the man crumpled and crashed facedown to the rocky ground, dead before he hit.

Richard looked both ways to check for any other sign of threat before he rushed out from the cover of the rocks. He grabbed the man’s shirt at his shoulder and dragged him back in among the rocks.

“What are you doing?” Samantha asked, arms spread in alarm. “Why are you bringing him back with you?”

“We need to hide him. If someone else sees him it will alert them that there is someone with a soul in here, on this side of the gates, on their ground. I don’t want to give them reason to suspect such a thing, or to start hunting for us.”

“It’s too open out here,” Samantha said as she looked around. “How in the world do you think you’re going to be able to hide him?”

“Easy,” Richard said as he grabbed the man’s simple shirt in his fists and lifted his dead weight.

Pulling him over onto his back, Richard was sorry to see that the arrow was broken when the man fell on his face, or he would have recovered it. He never liked to waste arrows.

Richard strained to hold the dead man up off the ground and get a better grip as he waited for the right moment.

And then, with a grunt of powerful effort, Richard heaved the man into a wall of shimmering green luminescence drifting toward them.

The light flickered at the contact. The greenish curtain wavered a little as the dead man tumbled through.

The man vanished.

“Well,” Samantha said, “isn’t that something. I guess it’s pretty plain to see what you mean about not stepping through the green light.”

“It would be the last step you took, that’s for sure.”

“I don’t get it, though,” Samantha said. “Dead I get, but where did his body go? When people die, their body doesn’t vanish, just their consciousness, their spirit. Where did it go?”

“I don’t know, Samantha,” Richard said in a distracted tone. He had bigger things to worry about. “I don’t know the answers for how everything works, especially not in the third kingdom.”

Richard looked carefully around as he kept an eye on the curtain of greenish light, the wall before the underworld itself. The eerie, opaque glow of flickering light drifted past them before beginning to fade away as if it had never been there. Richard kept scanning the area for any other threat, but he didn’t see anyone else. The man had apparently been alone.

“Let’s go. Stay close.”

“All right,” Samantha said, scrambling to keep up with him. “But it just seemed strange the way his body vanished, that’s all.”

“The whole concept of this place is strange,” Richard said as the two of them moved deeper into the third kingdom.

CHAPTER

53

Kahlan woke with a start.

She heard a confusing commotion. As she tried to focus her attention, she became dimly aware of the muffled sound of distant voices. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, only the anxiety in their tone.

She blinked at the smear of blurry candlelight. Her mouth was so dry her tongue felt swollen and stuck to the roof of her mouth. She swallowed, trying to work up some saliva. She was too weak to lift much more than a finger.

Though the room was probably softly lit by candles, she still had to squint because the light from the flames seemed so bright to her. After what seemed like an eternity of bewildering darkness, the light hurt her eyes.

She realized that she was lying on a mat on the floor in a small, simple room. She didn’t recognize the place. She had no idea at all where she might be. She couldn’t even guess.

The fat candles were clustered together on shelves that looked to have been set back into simple plastered walls. The floor was spread with thick carpets with colorful designs. She saw a few chairs and a table that, while not fancy, were nicely made. A wooden door off across the room stood closed. As her vision began to clear, she saw that there were no windows, so she had no way of telling if it was day or night.

Out of the corner of her eye, Kahlan saw a middle-aged woman, with short, straight hair and wearing a simple gray dress, sitting on a low chest not far to the side. The woman’s head was turned toward the muffled sound of voices in the distance. With her attention diverted, she didn’t realize that Kahlan had opened her eyes.