A woman in a simple blue dress pushed through the small crowd of people, including some Sisters he recognized. “Richard! It is you! And Kahlan!” She grinned with unexpected joy. “And Sister Nicci! You’re here as well!”
Nicci bowed her head, ignoring the slight of the title she no longer used. “Sister Verna, or should I say Prelate, I must admit I’m very happy to see your beautiful, smiling face.”
Verna laughed as she rushed forward, her wavy brown hair bouncing, to hug Kahlan as if she were a long-lost sister.
Chase’s daughter, Rachel, leaned out from behind him. “Richard!” She ran up and threw her arms around his waist.
She seemed to have nearly grown into a woman since the last time he had seen her. Her arms and legs were considerably longer. Her beautiful, blond hair had also grown and was now almost as long as Nicci’s.
Verna separated from Kahlan, holding her at arm’s length as if not willing to let her go for fear she wouldn’t be real. “How in the world did you all come to be in there?”
As happy as he was to see these people he knew, Richard had bigger problems on his mind. He knew that time was dangerously short, and they were far from finished with their journey. He could feel how much stronger the poison inside him had grown. Death was trying to pull him back to that dark world before he could do anything about it.
“It’s a long story,” he said, hoping to avoid being drawn into a lengthy explanation.
“A story we really don’t have time for, I’m afraid,” Kahlan added as she glanced at Richard when she recognized his reserved tone.
Verna peered suspiciously at him for a moment and then stepped close to press her fingers to the sides of his temples. She jerked her hands back as she let out a little cry of dismay, as if the touch had burned her fingers.
“Dear spirits,” she whispered, her eyes widening. “You, you–”
“We know,” Kahlan said. “Like I mentioned before, it’s a long story and as you can tell, Richard is in trouble.”
Chase made a face as he hooked his thumb on his belt. “When is Richard not in trouble?”
Nicci’s face contorted in agreement. “Isn’t that the truth.”
Richard waved a hand for patience and turned to two small metal statues of shepherds that he had spotted set back in a recess of the alcove. When he grasped them he immediately felt them grow warm under his touch. As he held the statues, the enormous capstone slowly swung closed. Once it had again sealed the catacombs, the alarm bells throughout the surrounding corridors finally went silent.
Chase scratched his head as he peered about. “Well that would explain the alarms, if not what you were doing in there.”
Richard ignored the implied question as he cast a stern look at both Chase and Verna. “Don’t let anyone go in there. Don’t even let anyone try to get in there.”
“How would they get in?” Verna asked. “As far as I knew, that wasn’t even a cavern. We always thought it was simply a small place to sit on a bench and have a rest.”
“It’s a little more than that,” he said. “Keep people away from it.”
A scowl settled comfortably on her face. “How long has that passageway been sealed off?”
Richard glanced back at the stone briefly. “Since the great war, near to three thousand years ago.”
Her scowl hardened. “What’s in there?”
“The dead,” Nicci told her.
Verna straightened a little.
“And the spirits of the dead, I believe,” Richard added.
Verna’s jaw dropped. “Then what were all of you doing in there?”
“Traveling,” Richard said without explaining.
“Do you have anything to eat?” Cassia asked into the empty silence. “We’re all pretty hungry. I couldn’t find a rat down there to save my life.”
Verna stared for a moment at the impassive Mord-Sith, then half turned, holding out a hand. “Well, yes, of course. We will prepare a meal to celebrate–”
“We don’t have time for that sort of thing,” Kahlan said. “If we could get a quick bite to eat, maybe something we could take with us, that would be best. We need to get to the sliph.”
Richard recognized that she was focused on getting him back to the People’s Palace and the containment field so that Nicci could remove the poison of death from him. He had to get to the palace, but for other reasons.
Verna shared a worried look with Chase. “The sliph?” She leaned to the side, peering suspiciously behind Vale. “Is Zedd with you?” She caught the look on Richard’s face. “What’s wrong?”
“Verna, I don’t have the slightest idea where I could even begin to tell you everything that has happened and all that is wrong, but one thing you do need to know is that Zedd…”
Her eyes widened. “He’s dead?”
Richard pressed his lips tight and nodded.
“And everyone else is going to die if we don’t get to the People’s Palace,” Kahlan interrupted. “Richard will be the first to die, but he will soon be followed by the rest of us. You felt the poison in him. You know how serious it is. For now, you need to trust us. We will have to fill you in later.”
“Of course. But I thought you brought peace to the world. The war was ended. What could have happened?” Verna frowned with concern as she looked from Kahlan to Richard. “Can you at least tell me what this is all about? We might know something that would help.”
Richard started moving down the enormous, dimly lit chamber. “Do you know who Emperor Sulachan is?”
Verna hurried to keep up with them. She touched her fingertips to her forehead, looking down as she tried to think. “Sulachan, Sulachan.” Her scowl returned as her head came up. “If I’m not mistaken, wasn’t he the emperor back during the great war? He’s been dead for … what, nearly three thousand years or so?”
“Richard brought him back to life,” Nicci said.
Verna was struck speechless.
“Like I told you,” Richard said, “it’s a very long story, and right now there are more important things we need to worry about.”
“Like what?” Verna asked, not willing to let it go.
“Well, the important thing you need to know is that I have to stop Sulachan or he is going to destroy the veil and with it the world of life.”
Verna huffed in disapproval. “Richard, ever since I first met you, you have somehow been tied up in trouble with the veil. You have also been tangled in prophecy from the very first. Prophecy told us of your birth long before you were even conceived. Because of prophecy Prelate Ann was there when you were first born, helping to protect you. You were a child of prophecy.”
“Now I know why,” he said without explaining as he marched along at the head of the small crowd of people.
CHAPTER
48
Richard saw Sisters he knew among the small crowd accompanying them, along with a number of people he didn’t know. They were probably people from down in the city of Aydindril brought up to the Keep to help with bringing the place back to life. There used to be a lot of people from down in Aydindril working at the Keep.
Richard wasn’t keen on the idea of people he didn’t know hearing anything about what was going on. They might be trustworthy, but he didn’t know them. Even if they were, they could overhear something and start rumors or even a panic down in the city. Verna and Chase had no idea of the trouble they were all in, so they would have no reason to be careful of who was around. For all they knew, the world was at peace.
In the distance yet more people made their way through the room as they went about their errands and work. The enormous room was so long and poorly lit that he couldn’t make out the faces of those people at the far end.
Richard cast a sidelong glance at Chase, then deliberately looked at the people following along. Chase got the message.
He turned back to everyone. “Why don’t you all let everyone know that there is no problem and then check that all the alarms are reset. Verna and
I can see to this.”
The Sisters and some of the others offered their services if needed and then started turning off to the corridors to the side. Soon only Verna, Chase, and Rachel remained with them.
“Thanks,” Richard said in a quiet voice to his old friend.
He remembered that the long, tall room was a central hub leading to a number of important areas of the lower Keep. Besides providing daylight, the slits along the top of one of the walls helped the chamber serve as a ventilation chimney, drawing air through the lower Keep and providing fresh air. He could see small birds sitting on those high sills. Now the slits were letting a little daylight flood into the chamber along with fresh mountain air.
To the right, stone stairs built against the wall led to a narrow balcony high up on the wall. Widely spaced openings dotted the wall at irregular intervals along the balcony. Some of them had doors, while most were simply open into passageways to different areas and levels of the Keep.
It felt rather disorienting, after the places they had been and especially after being in the Dark Lands for so long, to find himself back in the Keep. It was all a bit bewildering to be so suddenly back in civilization. He had thought that perhaps he would never see it again. The Wizard’s Keep reminded him of Zedd, and brought back the pain of missing his grandfather.
He would have liked to allow himself to feel safe and relaxed to finally be back at the Keep, with Kahlan very near to Aydindril and the Confessors’ Palace, where she had grown up, but there could be no safety anywhere in the world of life as long as Sulachan was still a fugitive from the world of the dead.
It was additionally frustrating not knowing how many days they had been traveling from Stroyza. Even if he saw the moon he wouldn’t know for sure how much time had passed in the journey to the Keep. The Dark Lands were heavily overcast all the time, so he couldn’t ever see the moon phase.
So much had happened, to say nothing of having been in the timeless, changeless underworld, that he wasn’t sure how much time had passed since Hannis Arc and Sulachan had taken their army of half people through the barrier to the third kingdom and headed to the southwest toward the People’s Palace. Richard had simply lost track of the days.
The one thing he knew for sure was that the People’s Palace was in great danger. He knew why Hannis Arc wanted to get to the People’s Palace–he wanted to rule the D’Haran Empire as Lord Arc. While the plan had been profoundly complex, his goal was actually pretty simple. He wanted to usurp the House of Rahl and rule in its place.
But Sulachan was generously obliging him even though he had larger plans of his own. The men were using one another for their own ends, and each needed the other, but it seemed to Richard that Sulachan was not one to be led so easily, like a bull with a ring through his nose. From what Richard could tell, Sulachan was just as eager as Hannis Arc to capture the People’s Palace.
He wondered if it could have something to do with Regula. Regula was an underworld power that was alien to the world of life. It was powering prophecy in the world of life. It was choking off life with prophecy.
In a way, it was like the touch of death Richard had in him. That touch was leaching the life out of him. Regula for millennia had been leaching life out of the world of life.
Regula, in a way, was a bridge through the veil, an open conduit between worlds. Sulachan needed that conduit. More than anything else, that was why he was intent on taking the palace. He was simply using Hannis Arc for his goals, much the same as Hannis Arc was using the spirit king.
Kahlan took the prelate’s arm. “Verna, it would be very much appreciated if you could see to it that we were brought something simple to eat. Could you do that? We have two Mord-Sith with us who are about to boil me alive and eat me if we don’t feed them.”
That made Verna’s frown melt a bit. She glanced at the two steely-eyed Mord-Sith watching her as they marched along behind Kahlan. Richard needed to eat something to help keep up his strength, and he knew that Kahlan and Nicci had to be starving. They all needed food.
“Yes, of course.” She immediately broke away to rush over to some men loading firewood out of a room not far away.
They straightened beside their carts and nodded at her instructions before hurrying off into one of the corridors to the side.
Chase, taking long strides, stepped up closer beside them. “Richard, what can I do to help? What do you need?”
Richard thought about it a moment.
“I wish I knew.”
“Well,” the big man asked, “where are you headed?”
“We need to get to the People’s Palace in a hurry. The sliph is the fastest way.”
“What’s the hurry?”
Richard glanced over at his lifelong friend. “In the great war, Emperor Sulachan used occult power–”
“Occult power?” Verna interrupted as she returned to their side, the scowl back in her expression. “What’s that? What are you talking about?”
Richard let out a long sigh. The sliph wasn’t far, and there would be no time to explain everything that had happened, much less everything that was going to happen and why.
“There is far too much to be able to fill you in about it all right now,” he said, “but I do need to fill in a little and give you some information that you need to know. Sulachan uses occult power. Occult power is in many ways like magic yet it’s different.”
“Different?” she interrupted. “Different how?”
“It’s a balance to magic. You might say that occult power is the other side of magic. Think of it as the dark side.”
“Subtractive Magic is the dark side of Additive Magic,” she insisted.
Richard made a face at how complicated it all was, trying to think of how to explain it.
“There are layers upon layers of balance,” Nicci said when she saw that Richard was having difficulty trying to figure out how best to explain it. “Subtractive is the underworld side of magic. Additive the living side. They balance each other. But it is still all magic, all part of the same thing. They work together, much the way our fingers and thumbs work together. You might think of Additive Magic as the thumb, working in conjunction with the fingers, or Subtractive Magic.”
“So then what is occult power?” Rachel asked, fascinated by such exotic matters.
“Occult power is like a different phase of magic. Magic and occult power are different things. Each can exert force, much like either hand can do.” Nicci locked the fingers of opposite hands together. “Each hand is different, and each is powerful, but both hands together are far more powerful than either alone.”
Richard wasn’t sure that Verna understood, so he went on with what mattered. “Sulachan was gifted with both areas, as were some of the wizards back in his time. They used both those abilities together–because they are stronger together, like Nicci explained–to create weapons out of people. Using this occult power, Sulachan could do things that were thought impossible.”
“Like what?” Chase asked, now fully caught up in the explanation.
“He created the dream walkers, for one thing. Emperor Jagang was a descendant of the dream walkers originally created by Sulachan and his wizards. Sulachan then used his ability to create an army of half people–”
Chase put the back of a hand to Richard’s arm. “Half people?”
Richard nodded. “People without souls.”
Chase frowned as he scratched his scalp. “Why?”
“Because they live an incredibly long time–in much the same way as the Sisters did at the Palace of the Prophets. He wanted this army waiting here for him when he finally found a way to return from the dead.”
Verna frowned. “I don’t see how it’s possible to take a person’s soul from them. The Creator–”
Richard waved a hand, not wanting to get caught up in theological arguments. “That isn’t the point. Like we said, it’s a really long and complicated story.
“What matters for now, what’s important, and
what you need to know, is that the half people that were created went crazy without their souls–”
“Well I should think so,” Verna huffed.
“–and came to lust for them so intently that they began attacking people, tearing them apart with their teeth and eating them alive, believing they could get a person’s soul that way and have it for themselves. They hunt people with souls, intent on stealing those souls for themselves.”
“Well that’s just crazy,” Verna scoffed as she folded her arms.
“Tell that to them as you watch them ripping your flesh from your bones with their teeth and eating it,” Kahlan said.
“An account I read from back in that time says that the half people are death itself, with teeth, coming for the living. They are often called the unholy half-dead,” Richard added.
That sobered the prelate. “If these unholy half-dead people want so badly to eat us for our souls, why haven’t we ever seen them, or even heard of them?”
“Now you’re getting to what matters,” Richard said. “Back in the great war, Sulachan turned these crazed half people on the New World. The people up here managed to lock them all away behind a barrier in a distant, deserted place in the Dark Lands. That’s what ended the war. The people back then couldn’t eliminate the problem, because they didn’t have the power, but they could at least lock the evil away and end the war for the time being.”
“But now that evil has escaped,” Chase guessed.
“Yes. They’ve been banished there all this time, waiting for the chance to escape. That barrier finally failed. Once it did, Sulachan was brought back from the world of the dead and now he and his half people are flooding across the land.”
“What’s more,” Kahlan told them, “he and some in his army of half people who also possess occult powers can reanimate the dead. Those dead also do their bidding and fight for them.”
“Are you serious?” Chase asked in a low voice.
Richard gestured back to the alcove. “That’s most likely why the people back in that time sealed the catacombs. Sulachan could raise most of those dead, or at least the ones still mostly intact. They probably had to seal the catacombs to protect themselves.”
Warheart Page 30
