The Third Kingdom

As he rushed along the hallway to catch up with her, scanning the patterns carved into the wall, Richard saw that the designs grew not only more numerous the farther he went, but more complex. Soon they covered much of the wall to their left from floor to ceiling. Their very number conveyed a sense of urgency to the messages contained in the symbols.

Coming around another curve in the passageway, he was surprised to see a soft blush of light up ahead. He realized that it wasn’t more of the light from the spheres. This was daylight. It seemed to be coming from some kind of window or opening on the wall to the left. The muted light coming in that opening fell on the wall on the opposite side of the corridor, brightening the whole hallway, making all the designs on the wall to the left stand out all the more plainly.

“Here,” Samantha said, placing her glowing sphere in an iron bracket among the symbols before going on ahead to stand in the radiance of natural light. She gestured to the round opening in the wall that was letting that light in.

Richard rushed up and looked in. He saw that an opening had been bored through the rock to the outside of the mountain. He stuck his head into the circular portal to take a look out. The opening had been cut precisely and was perfectly round. It started out about four feet across but tapered slightly as it went through the stone toward the outside of the mountain. It looked to be eight or ten feet long, with smooth sides similar to the hallway, but not polished. By the time the hole reached the far end where it emerged out on the side of the mountain, letting in the daylight and fresh air, it had narrowed down to less than three feet in diameter.

The strange hole allowed him to look out in a different direction than the cliff opening where he had come up into the cave village.

This hole faced north.

Richard frowned at Samantha. “What is this?”

She pointed through the opening. “Look.”

He put his hands on the edge and leaned in a little, looking out through the cylindrical opening into a murky dawn. He saw in the gloomy light a valley spread out before them. Not much of the dense forest of the valley far below was visible. The length and shape of the cylindrical opening restricted the view to a specific place off in the distance.

The opening framed a gap in soaring mountains many miles away. He bent down, trying to look up, trying to see how high the mountains were, but they were so immense and because of the way the opening was made it wouldn’t allow him to see the mountaintops. All he could see were impassable walls of stone rising up from a valley below.

A deep canyon between the rock walls appeared to be the only way through the barrier of the mountains. Having been a woods guide, Richard understood the difficulties of finding passable routes through rugged wilderness. There was often only one passage through such mountainous country. It appeared to him that the valley was the only way back into and beyond those mountains.

He backed away. “What is it I’m supposed to see?”

“Well,” she said, gesturing to two small metal plates in the wall around the opening, “you need to use these.”

Framing the opening was a design with a several distinct motifs. Like the others, Richard recognized the symbols that made up the designs. To each side, where Samantha pointed, within elements of the design where he hadn’t noticed them at first, there were small metal plates, each about half the size of his palms. The metal was in better condition than the first shield plates he’d seen. It looked to be worn smooth by the touch of countless hands.

“Here, let me show you.” Since his gift didn’t work, she ducked under his arm and popped up in front of him so that she could put her hands on both plates for him. She was tiny enough that she could easily slip into the space between him and the wall. The top of her mass of black hair came up only to the middle of his chest.

“Lean around me and look in,” she said.

As Samantha bent to the side, keeping a hand on each plate, Richard leaned past her to put his head inside the circular opening.

To his surprise, the air wavered, similar to the way the air above a fire wavered, except that it did it in a circular pattern, more like ripples in a pond radiating outward. It was a dizzying sight that made his stomach feel a bit queasy.

But then the ripples in the air cleared, so that the distant view out the hole through the rock suddenly appeared much closer. It was as if he were abruptly shifted much closer to the mountains than he had been only a moment before.

As his eyes adjusted to the light and the resolving clarity of the scene, he realized that there was something built across the valley. Framed in the center between the two mountains, at the base of the canyon, a wall that was obviously man-made stretched between the cliff walls to either side.