The Third Kingdom

Samantha nodded. “She has that same touch of death in her as you do, so you must be right. It’s corrupting the order of her existence the same as it’s corrupting yours. Like you, even though she is alive, she, too, carries death within her. Except that with her that presence of death is stronger than it is within you.

“In that way, you both exist in two worlds—the kingdom of life, and the kingdom of death.” Samantha leaned a little closer in the sphere’s light, lifting an eyebrow to be sure he was paying attention. “Those two worlds don’t belong together.”

“Great,” Richard muttered, now concerned that on top of everything else, Kahlan didn’t have the protection of her power.

“Come on,” Samantha said as she started down the stone corridor.

CHAPTER

21

Richard followed behind the wisp of a girl, engulfed in the glowing cocoon of light from the glass sphere she was holding. The stone of the passageway walls had been laboriously smoothed and precisely squared with the floor and ceiling, much like the rest of the quarters where Samantha now lived. There were no decorations of any kind on the smooth walls, other than the very faint natural variations in the consistency of the rock.

The corridor, devoid as it was of furnishings or so much as a shelf or niche or bench, had an odd feel to him, a deliberately sterile sense, as if it had been built with the intention that there be no distractions of any kind, no reason to linger, for those meant to use this hallway. The skill and time invested in creating the flat precision was in and of itself the decoration.

In an odd way, it put him in mind of some of the private corridors in the People’s Palace, the ancestral home of the Lord Rahl. They were lined with beautiful paintings and statues that were meant to be a subtle reminder to the Lord Rahl, as he passed through those halls, of his duty to protect the sanctity of life. This corridor, devoid of anything that might be a distraction, in a contrary and subtle way seemed meant to remind those whose business it was to pass this way of the deadly seriousness of their purpose.

He wondered what that purpose could be.

In places the corridor curved gently. By the way it bent its way through the mountain, Richard had the impression that the meandering route was not for aesthetic reasons. The curves, being shallow turns rather than straight sections connected by corners, seemed yet another aspect of the guiding principle of minimizing distractions.

After a time, they arrived at another door similar to the first one. It, too, had a capstone covering the far side of the square passageway, to stop anyone who might have made it past the first from getting any farther. Without delay, Samantha pressed the flat of her small hand against the metal plate on the wall to the side.

Richard noticed that when she did, the light sphere glowed brighter as the magic recognized her as someone permitted to pass the shielded doorway. That told him that this shield was stronger than the first. In addition, this stone looked bigger and considerably heavier than the previous one, apparently another means to keep what was beyond more secure.

The mountain itself rumbled as the great, round stone disc began rolling to the right, its tremendous weight grinding small bits of dirt and popping flakes of rock, crushing them under the weight. The stone rolled back into a slot cut into the mountain. Once through, since the first had been closed, she left the second stone open.

Beyond the doorway, Richard noticed that the corridor was half again wider than the one they had just come from. The walls of this place were also smoothed, but to a far greater degree, so that they had a sheen to them. He ran his fingers along the cold, creamy surface of the stone, marveling at what it would have taken to accomplish such an effect. The light from the sphere Samantha held reflected off the wall in a way that revealed that the stone had been smoothed and then polished in much the same way marble statues were polished to create flesh in stone.

When they rounded a curve and abruptly encountered symbols on the walls to the left, Richard stopped in his tracks.

The designs had been incised into the featureless rock walls, making those symbols more enduring than paint would ever have been. Whoever had done this wanted those symbols to remain as long as the mountain stood. He could see that farther on into the passageway the symbols and designs proliferated to cover most of the wall.

Richard recognized the symbols.

Samantha turned back. “Come on. This way.”

Richard had a hard time pulling his gaze from the flowing designs, the circles within circles, the unique devices, and varied emblematic shapes. He started out again, hurrying to follow Samantha.