Blood of the Fold

Chapter 36

Passageways ran in every direction. Richard tried to keep to what he thought was the main one so that he could find his way out. As they passed rooms, he stuck his head in to see if there were any books or anything else that might be helpful. Most were simple, empty stone rooms. A few had tables and chairs, with chests or other plain furniture, but nothing of particular interest. One whole hall had rooms with beds. The wizards who stayed at the Keep must have lived unassuming lives, at least some of them. There were thousands of rooms and he had seen only a few.

Berdine peeked past him whenever he looked into a room, to see what he was seeing. “Do you know where we are going?”

“Not exactly.” He glanced off down another side hall. The place was a labyrinth. “But I think we should find some stairs. Start at the bottom and work our way up.”

She pointed back over her shoulder. “I saw some down a hall to our left, just back there.”

The stairs were where she said they would be. He hadn’t noticed them because it was just a hole in the floor with spiral stone steps descending down into darkness, and he had been looking for a stairwell. Richard reprimanded himself for not thinking to bring a lamp, or candle. He had a flint and steel in his pocket, and guessed mat if he could find some straw or old cloth, he could get a small flame going and light one of the candles he had seen in iron sconces.

As they descended into the darkness below, Richard felt, as well as heard, a low hum coming from below. The stone, which had been disappearing in darkness, began to reveal itself in a bluish green light, as if someone were turning up the wick on a lamp. By the time they reached the bottom of the steps, he could see clearly in the eerie light.

Just around the corner at the bottom of the steps, he found the source of the light. In a ringed iron bracket sat a globe, about as wide as his hand, and looking to be glass. It was the origin of the light.

Berdine looked up at him, her face outlined in the strange illumination. “What makes it glow?”

“Well, there’s no flame, so I would guess it has to be magic.”

Richard cautiously reached toward the light. It brightened. He touched a finger to it, and the bluish green cast changed to a warmer yellow color.

Since touching it seemed to cause no harm, Richard carefully lifted it from the bracket. It was heavier than he expected. Rather than being a hollow sphere of blown glass, it seemed to be solid. In his hand, it threw off a warm, useful light.

Richard could see that far off down the tunnel-like hall there were other such spheres in brackets. In the distance, the closest barely glowed with bluish green light. As they passed tnem, each brightened at his approach, and dimmed as he moved on with the one he had taken.

At an intersection, the hall joined a wider, more welcoming corridor. Light pink stone ran in a band down both sides, and at places the passageway opened into cavernous rooms with padded benches.

Opening the wide, double doorways in one of the corridor’s big rooms, he discovered a library. The library looked cozy and inviting with its polished wood floor, paneled walls, and whitewashed ceiling. There were tables beside the rows of shelves, and comfortable-looking chairs. Glassed windows at the far side overlooked the city of Aydindril and made the room bright and airy.

He moved on to the next cavernous chamber in the hall, and discovered that it, too, had a library off of it. It appeared that the corridor ran parallel to the the face of the Keep, and along a whole row of libraries. They found another two dozen of the huge library rooms by the time they reached the end of the corridor.

Richard had never imagined that this many books existed. Even the vaults at the Palace of the Prophets, with all the books it held, seemed sparse to him after seeing this many volumes. It would take a year just to read all the titles. He felt suddenly overwhelmed. Where was he to start?

“This must be what you were looking for,” she said.

Richard frowned. “No, it’s not. I don’t know why, but this isn’t it. This is too ordinary.”

Berdine walked beside him as they moved on through passageways and down several stories when they came to a stairwell, her Agiel swinging on the chain at her wrist, and ever at the ready. At the bottom of the stairs stood an ornate, gold-leafed doorframe before a chamber beyond that, rather than stonework, had been excavated from inky rock, perhaps once a cave that had been enlarged. In places where the rock had been broken away, it left behind glossy, sharp facets. Fat columns looked to have been left in places as the rock had been carved out in order to support a low, craggy ceiling.

At the gold doorway Richard encountered a shield for the fourth time since he had entered the Keep, but this was different than the first three. The fast three all had the same feel; this was nothing like the others. As he put his hand through, the vertical plane between the doorframe glowed red from no visible source, and the sensation, instead of the tingling, was hot where the red light touched him. It was the most uncomfortable shield he had ever felt. He feared it might singe the hair off his arm, but it didn’t.

Richard pulled his arm back. “This one is different. If it’s more than you want to do, you stop me.” He put his arms around Berdine to better protect her. She tensed. “Don’t worry, I’ll stop if you want me to.”

She nodded, and he shuffled into the doorway. When the red light touched the red leather on her arm, she flinched. “It’s all right,” she said. “Keep going.” He pulled her through, and released her. Only after he took his arms from around her did she seem to relax.

The glow of the sphere Richard held out cast sharp shadows among the columns, and he could see that there were small recesses carved in the stone all around the room. At the wall around the edge of the room, there were perhaps sixty or seventy such niches. Though he couldn’t make out what was in them, he could tell that each held objects of different sizes and shapes.

Richard felt the hairs on the back of his neck stiffen as his gaze swept over the nooks from a distance. He didn’t know what the things were, but he instinctively knew that they were more than dangerous.

“Stay close to me,” he told her. “We want to stay away from the walls.” He pointed with his chin across the vast room, “Over there. That passageway is where we want to go.”

“How do you know?”

“Look at the floor.” The rough, natural stone was worn smooth in a winding track cutting across the center of the chamber. “We’d better stay on this path.”

Her blue eyes glanced up in unease. “You be careful. If anything happens to you I’ll never get out of this place to get help from the others. I’ll be trapped down here.”

Richard smiled and then started out across the dead silent cavern. “Well, that’s the risk you take for being my favorite.”

Her unease didn’t diminish at his attempt to lighten the mood. “Lord Rahl, do you really think that I believe I am your favorite.”

Richard checked that they were still on the path. “Berdine, I only said that because it’s what you always say.”

She thought in silence as they moved cautiously across the room. “Lord Rahl, may I ask you a question? A serious question? A personal question?”

“Sure.”

She pulled her wavy brown braid over her shoulder and held on to it. “When you marry your queen, you will still have other women, won’t you?”

Richard frowned down at her. “I don’t have other women now. I love Kahlan. I’m loyal in my love to her.”

“But you are the Lord Rahl. You can have any you wish. Even me. That is what the Lord Rahl does; he has many women. You have but to snap your fingers.”

Richard got the distinct impression that she was definitely not making an offer. “Is this about when I put my hand on you, on your breast?” She glanced away and nodded. “Berdine, I did that to help you, not because . . . well, not because of anything else. I hoped you would know that.”

She quickly put a concerned hand to his arm. “I do know. That’s not what I mean. You’ve never touched me in the other way. What I mean is that you never make those requirements of me.” She chewed her lower lip. “The way you put your hand on me has me feeling very ashamed.”

“Why?”

“Because you risked your life to help me. You are my Lord Rahl, and I have not been honest with you.”

Richard gestured, guiding them on the path around a column twenty men couldn’t have held hands around. “You’re getting me confused, Berdine.”

“Well, I say that I am your favorite so that you will not think I don’t like you.”

“You are trying to say you don’t like me?”

She clutched his arm again. “Oh no. I love you.”

“Berdine, I told you I have—”

“Not like that. I mean I love you as my Lord Rahl. You have freed me. You have seen that I am more than simply Mord-Sith, and you have trusted me. You saved my life and returned me to whole. I love you for the kind of Lord Rahl you are.”

Richard shook his head as if to clear it. “You’re not making any sense. What does this have to do with you always saying that you’re my favorite?”

“I say that so you won’t think I wouldn’t willingly go to your bed if asked. I feared that if you knew that I didn’t want to, then you would force me, to be perverse.”

Richard held the light out as they reached the passageway leading from the room. It looked a simple block hall. “Stop fretting about it.” He motioned her onward. “I’ve told you I wouldn’t.”

“I know. And after what you did—” She touched her left breast. “—I believe you. But I didn’t before. I’m beginning to see that you really are different in more ways than a few.”

“Different from who?”

“Darken Rahl.”

“Well, you’re right about that.” As they walked on down the long hall, again he suddenly looked at her. “Are you trying to tell me that you’re in love with someone, and you have only been saying those things to me so than I wouldn’t think you were trying to avoid my affections, and therefore wouldn’t be provoked to force you?”

Her fist tightened on her braid as her blue eyes closed for a moment. “Yes.”

“Really? I think that’s wonderful, Berdine.” At the end of the hall, they came to a broad room, the walls lined with bundled tufts of fur and hair hanging from framed panels. Richard studied the displays from a distance. He recognized one tuft as gar fur.

Richard looked over as he started out again and grinned. “Who is it?” He waved his hand, feeling a sudden flush of embarrassment that, considering her odd mood at the moment, he might be overstepping his bounds. “Unless you don’t want to tell me. You don’t have to tell me. I don’t want you to feel you have to. It’s your business, if you choose.”

Berdine swallowed. “Because of the things you have done for us, for me, I wish to confess.”

Richard made a face. “Confess? Telling me who you’re in love with isn’t a confession, it’s—”

“Raina.”

Richard’s mouth snapped shut. He looked back to the way they were going. “Green tiles, left foot only. Right foot only on the white ones, until we cross this space. Don’t skip a green or white tile. Touch the pedestal before you step from the last tile.”

She followed him as he stepped carefully from the green to the white tiles until they had reached the stone floor on the other side, touched the pedestal, and moved into a tall, narrow corridor of sparkling silver stone, like a cleft in a huge jewel.

“How did you know that—the green-tlle-white-tile business?”

“What?” He glanced back with a frown. “I don’t know. It must have been a shield or something.” He looked back to her as she walked with her eyes on the floor. “Berdine, I love Raina, too. And Cara, and you, and Ulic and Egan. Kind of like family. Is that what you mean?” She shook her head without looking up. “But . . . Raina is a woman.”

Berdine shot him a cool scowl.

“Berdine,” he said after a long silence, “you had better not tell Raina this or—”

“Raina loves me, too.”

Richard straightened, not knowing quite what to say. “But how can . . . you can’t . . . I don’t see . . . Berdine, why are you telling me this?”

“Because you have always been honest with us. At first, when you told us things, we thought you would not do as you said. Well, not all of us. Cara has always believed you, but I did not.”

Her expression slipped back to the distant countenance of a Mord-Sith. “When Darken Rahl was our Lord Rahl, he found out, and he ordered me to his bed. He laughed at me. He . . . liked to take me to his bed because he knew. It was his way of humiliating me. I thought that if you knew, too, you would do the same, so I tried to hide it from you by making you think I fancied you.”

Richard shook his head. “Berdine, I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“I know that, now. That is why I had to confess to you, because you’ve always been honest with me, but I was not honest with you.”

Richard, shrugged. “Well, then I’m glad you feel better.” He thought as he turned her down a winding hall of plastered walls. “Did Darken Rahl make you this way, by choosing you to become a Mord-Sith? Is that what made you hate men?”

She frowned up at him. “I do not hate men. I just, I don’t know, I just always looked at girls from the time I was young. Boys didn’t interest me in that way.” She drew her hand down her braid. “Now you hate me?”

“No, No, I don’t hate you, Berdine. You are my protector, the same as always. But can’t you try to not think about her or something? It just isn’t right.”

She smiled distantly. “When Raina smiles at me in her special way, and the day is suddenly wonderful, it seems right. When she touches my face, and my heart races, it seems right. I know my heart is safe in her care.” Her smile withered. “But now you think I am despicable.”

Richard looked away, shame coming over him in a cold wave. “That’s the way I feel about Kahlan. One time, my grandfather said I should forget about her, but there was no way I could.”

“Why would he say that?”

Richard couldn’t tell her that it was because Kahlan was a Confessor, and Zedd was doing it for Richard’s best interest; no one was supposed to be able to love a Confessor. He felt bad that he couldn’t be honest with Berdine now. He shrugged. “He didn’t think she was the one for me.”

Richard pulled her through another of the tingly kind of shields when they reached the end of the hall. The triangular room had a bench. He sat her down beside him and set the glowing ball between them.

“Berdine, I think I can see how you feel. I know how I felt when my grandfather said I should forget Kahlan. No one else can tell you what to feel. You either do, or you don’t. Though I don’t understand or approve of this, all of you are becoming my friends. Being a friend means you don’t have to be exactly alike, and you are still friends.”

“Lord Rahl, I know that you can never accept me, but I had to tell you. Tomorrow, I will return to D’Hara. You should not have to have one you do not approve of as your guard.”

Richard thought a minute. “Do you like boiled peas?”

Berdine frowned. “Yes.”

“Well, I hate boiled peas. Does that make you like me any less, because I dislike something you like? Or make you want to abandon being my protector?”

She made a face. “Lord Rahl, this is different from boiled peas. How can you have faith in someone you do not approve of?”

“It’s not that I don’t approve of you, Berdine. It’s just that to me it doesn’t seem right. But it doesn’t have to. Look, I had a friend when I was younger, another woods guide. Giles and I spent a lot of time together, because we had a lot in common.

“He fell in love with Lucy Fleckner. I hated Lucy Fleckner; she was cruel to Giles. I couldn’t understand how he could care for her. I didn’t like her, and I thought he should feel the same. I lost my friend because he couldn’t be the way I thought he should be. I didn’t lose him because of Lucy, I lost him because of me. I lost all the good things we had because I wasn’t willing to let him be who he was. I’ve always regretted what I lost.

“I guess this is something like that. As you learn to be other than Mord-Sith, like I learned as I grew up, you’ll find that being a friend is to like a person for who they are, even the parts you don’t understand. The reasons you like them makes the things you don’t understand unimportant. You don’t have to understand, or do the same, or live their lives for them. If you truly care for them, then you want them to be who they are; that was why you liked them in the first place.

“I like you, Berdine, and that’s all that matters.”

“True?”

“True.”

She put her arms around his neck and hugged him. “Thank you, Lord Rahl. After you saved me, I feared you would wish you hadn’t. I’m glad I told you, now. Raina will be relieved to know you will not do to us as Darken Rahl did.”

As they stood, a part of the stone wall slid to the side. Richard took her hand and led her from the odd room, through the new doorway, down a stairway and through a dank, wet room with a stone floor that mounded into a huge hump in the center.

“If we are becoming your friends, then I can tell you what you did that I don’t like, what I don’t approve of, and how you did a wrong?” Richard nodded. “I don’t like what you did to Cara. She is angry at what you did to her.”

Richard glanced back in the strange room that seemed to swallow the light. “Cara? Angry with me? What did I do to her?”

“You have treated her badly because of me.” When Richard wrinkled his face in puzzlement, she went on. “When I was under that spell, and I threatened you with my Agiel after you came back from looking for Brogan, you became angry with all of us. You treated them like they had done it too, though it was only I.”

“I didn’t know what was going on. I felt threatened by Mord-Sith because of what you did. She should realize that.”

“She does, but when you found out at last, and made me whole again, you never told Cara and Raina that you were wrong to treat them as if they had threatened you the same as I. They did not.”

Richard felt his face flush in the darkness. “You’re right. Now I feel terrible. Why didn’t she say something?”

Berdine lifted an eyebrow. “You are Lord Rahl. If you decided to beat her because you did not like the way she said good morning, she would not say anything.”

“Then why are you saying something?”

Berdine followed him into a strange corridor with a cobblestone floor only two feet wide and smooth, round, tubelike, waifs covered completely in gold. “Because you are a friend.”

As he looked over his shoulder and smiled his thanks, she reached out to touch the gold. Richard snatched her wrist before she could touch it. “Do that and you’re dead.”

She frowned at him. “Why do you tell us that you do not know anything about this place, and then you walk through it like you have lived here you whole life?”

Richard blinked at the question. His eyes suddenly went wide with the realization. “Because of you.”

“Me!”

“Yes,” Richard said in astonishment. “By talking to me, you distracted my conscious mind. You had me so intent on the things you were saying, and on thinking about them, that it let my gift guide me. I never ever realized it as it was happening. Now that I’ve been through this way, I know the dangers and the way back. I can get back, now.” He squeezed her shoulder. “Thank you, Berdine.”

She grinned. “What are friends for?”

“I think we’re through the worst. This way.”

At the end of the gold tunnel was a round tower room at least a hundred feet across, with stairs spiraling up around the inside of the outer wall. At irregular intervals, small landings interrupted the steps at doors. In the gloomy expanse above, shafts of light pierced the darkness. Most of the windows above were small, but one looked huge. Richard couldn’t tell for sure how far the tower rose, but it had to be close to two hundred feet. Below, the circular shaft descended into dank obscurity.

“I don’t like the looks of it,” Berdine said as she peered over the edge of the iron rail at the landing. “This looks like the worst of it to me.”

Richard thought he saw something move in the murk below. “Stay close and keep your eyes open.” He fixed his gaze on the spot where he thought he had seen movement, trying to see it again. “If anything happens, you have to try to get out.”

Berdine glanced with disapproval over the railing. “Lord Rahl, it has taken us hours to get down here. We have been through more shields than I can remember. If anything happens to you, I am dead, too.”

Richard considered his options. It might be better if he were cloaked in his mriswith cape. “You wait here. I’ll go have a look.”

Berdine snatched his shirt at his shoulder and yanked him around to face her fiery blue eyes. “No, you will not go alone.”

“Berdine—”

“I am your protector. You will not go alone. Is that understood?” She had that penetrating, iron look in her eyes that made his tongue fear a mistake. He finally let out a breath.

“All right. But you stay close and do as I say.”

She cocked her head. “I always do as you say.”