Into Darkness

20

Richard watched as the mountain lion casually walked off into the distance. “We’re supposed to follow it.”

“Why do you think that?” Berdine asked.

He gave her a look. “Because it was sent to fetch us.”

Berdine’s nose wrinkled up. “How do you know that?”

“Because I’ve seen it before at another important moment, and I don’t believe it was a coincidence.”

Vika turned a troubled look toward Richard. “So then you think it’s the same mountain lion we saw up on the mountain when we found the mother’s breath?”

“Of course it’s the same one. When we found the mother’s breath, it left to tell its master.”

“And so you think its master lives here?” Berdine asked.

Richard gave her the same look again, as if to say it was a silly question. “Why else would a mountain lion be walking around inside this palace?”

“Oh,” she said, “I guess I see your point.”

“Odd choice for a house pet,” Shale said.

“It wouldn’t be the strangest one I’ve seen,” Richard muttered under his breath as he started out after the mountain lion. “Come on. We don’t want to lose sight of it.”

Shale leaned in. “But—”

“Hurry,” Kahlan said as she put a hand to the small of Shale’s back to get her moving.

The mountain lion led them across the broad, circular design in the floor under the towering dome. The animal stopped before a vestibule of sorts in the distance. Curved staircases on either side surrounded it on the way to an upper level with rooms beyond and to either side.

The mountain lion looked back for a moment to be sure they were following, then ambled onward. That vestibule, with more of the greenish-gray columns to either side, stood before a broad passageway that wasn’t as wide as the antechambers off to the sides of the domed area had been. This seemed to Richard more like it was an entrance into a central hall of some sort leading on into the interior. The significance of the central hall was evident from its elaborate architecture.

The same fluted columns of greenish-gray stone lined the long room. A great many ornate metal candlestands held what had to be hundreds of candles that not only lit the way ahead with soft light but lent a pleasant scent to the place.

To the sides, between pairs of fluted columns, inside stone frames, there were large square panels of incredibly beautiful red marble with swirls of green, gold, and black veins running through them. Each one of those massive red granite slabs seemed to glow in the soft candlelight.

It occurred to Richard that the swirly red marble panels reminded him of a floor covered with blood that had been cut out and then hung up for display. He paid closer attention to the red slabs as he passed by them, scrutinizing them to make sure they weren’t actually patterns of blood. Even though he stared closely at each one, he still wasn’t sure.

Farther down into the dark end of the magnificent but somber passageway, the pairs of columns were set closer together. Rather than the red marble that was displayed between the previous columns, between each of these there were faces, again carved in the greenish-gray stone. They were similar to the statues Richard had seen before, except these were only life-size busts. Each one leaned out, making it seem they were trying desperately to come right out of the wall.

All of the grim faces stretching out from either side were distorted in agony, or longing, or terror. Some of them reminded Richard of the carvings of tortured souls he had seen in the Old World. Like those statues he had seen there, he had seen the real thing in the underworld.

Other faces looked like they might be human, but if they were meant to be human, they were ghastly examples of torment and torture. The others, the ones that weren’t human, Richard couldn’t even guess at, but they, too, had horrified expressions, with mouths opened wide as if they had been frozen in mid-scream. The farther they went into the ever-darkening passageway, the more grotesque and distorted the faces became, with flesh carved to look like it was torn open so that the bones and teeth beneath the ripped cheeks were visible.

The wide hallway was enough to sap the courage of anyone who got this far, but it didn’t dim his determination. If anything, it reinforced his resolve to stop the person responsible for depictions of such horrors, but more importantly those responsible for what they were doing to Kahlan.

Shale looked from one side to the other, staring for a moment at each one of the faces looking like they were trying to push themselves out of the walls to escape.

“Why would anyone carve such awful things?”

Richard glanced back at her. “Well, I like to look at beauty, but there are people who choose instead to look at ugliness. That alone tells you a lot about them, don’t you think?”

Shale looked from Richard back to the busts. She shook her head in disgust. “I fear to think what this tells us about the people who live here.”

At the end of the long passageway, farther away from the light of the high windows and lit only by candles, Richard realized that the hallway didn’t simply get dark, it actually ended in a dark opening, but not the kind of opening that went with the rest of the place. It was a hole crudely chiseled into the stone of the mountain the palace had been built into.

It looked like nothing so much as the rough opening into a mine. Or the underworld.

Unlike everything else he had seen in the palace that was ornate and highly detailed, this was merely a roughly round opening cut into the rock with crude tools used for excavation. The mountain lion vanished into that dark maw. He saw the tail flick up briefly, and then it was gone down into the darkness.

When they got close enough, they could see that there was a bit of flickering light inside from somewhere far down below. As Richard paused at the opening to try to see where the mountain lion had gone, he saw then that there were steps leading down.

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Shale said. “We’re walking right into the heart of this trap.”

Richard turned back to her. “And how do you instead propose we free ourselves of that trap unless we face it and put an end to it?”

Shale’s features twisted unhappily. “I don’t know, but I don’t like it. There are remnants of a spell of some sort lingering here.”

Richard frowned at her. “What kind of spell? Can you tell?”

Shale shook her head. “It’s just a trace of something, but I can’t tell what.” She sniffed the air. She frowned. “I can sense them, but I can’t tell what sort of spells they might be. Whatever it is, it’s interfering with my sense of smell.”

“Well, we know that this trap was set with powerful magic,” Kahlan said, “so there are bound to be spells lingering about this place. Sometimes magic does that—leaves traces.”

Vika stepped ahead of him into the opening. “Rikka, Vale, come with me. The rest of you wait here. We will go down first and see if it’s safe.”

Richard gripped her arm and forcefully pulled her back before she could start down. “Are you out of your mind? Of course it’s not safe. Now, stay behind me.”

She looked so shocked by what he said that she did as he told her.

Richard started down with Kahlan at his side, expecting the rest of them to follow. Vika followed as close behind him as she could without stepping on his heels. Shale was right behind Kahlan. The others flowed down the steps behind them.

Only the first of the steps were carved well. On the way down, they soon became rough-hewn slabs in some places, and steps simply carved directly out of the stone of the mountain itself in others. Their uneven shape made footing treacherous. The treads and risers were different depths and heights, requiring care with every step they took. Sometimes it was a long stride and sometimes so short that they almost fell. Richard held on tightly to Kahlan’s hand as he held his other out behind to urge the others to be careful. He didn’t want them falling on top of him and Kahlan and causing them all to go tumbling down to somewhere far below.

As they cautiously descended the curving, irregular run of steps, he realized that the stairs followed the uneven excavation down along the rock walls. When they got farther down, he was finally able to see that they were descending to the edge of what was a vast, roughly circular chamber. He was astonished by how immense it was, both in width and height.

Like the opening above, the walls had been cut with excavation tools, leaving a rough, unfinished surface. It looked to Richard that in places on the walls great slabs of rock had collapsed down, actually aiding in the excavation. It resembled a mine more than a room, except that it was huge beyond any normal room, or any mine for that matter. He had seen chambers in natural caves that were this immense, but this was not a cave and not natural. He couldn’t imagine its purpose.

Rather than it getting darker, they began to see flickering firelight from below that helped them see the steps better. Keen to find out what this place was and what was going on, he had to force himself to be careful and not to hurry. The fact that it was a trap, with the mountain lion leading them into it, also tempered his urge to hurry.

He started to realize that this strange underground chamber had to actually be the true purpose of the palace. The place above was merely a façade. Like a man irresistibly drawn to a beautiful woman with an evil heart, Richard felt that he had first been charmed by the beauty of the palace architecture, but he was now being drawn to the evil heart of this place.

The stairs turned as they approached the bottom. He saw, then, that they were coming down behind enormous statues of ravens that were at least three times his height. Their wings were extended in front to hold stone bowls of flaming oil that provided light. The smell was similar to that of burning pitch. It also left a haze to settle in the cool air of the pit.

When they reached the bottom of the rough stairs, and they came around one of the ravens, he saw that there were more of the stone ravens all around the room in a circle, thirteen in all. They all faced inward to the center of the chamber.

Between and beyond the stone ravens, he could see that there were caverns all around the base of the room, going back into the stone of the mountain itself. Torches lit the tunneled passageways, but he couldn’t see what they led to.

Off in the middle of the room, he saw a line of intimidating people watching them approach. They were all women.

In the center of that line of silent women sat a tall, elegant throne. He could see the light from the burning pots dance and flare on the gold-leaf vines, snakes, cats, and other beasts carved into the arms and framing the tufted red velvet-covered back. A canopy draped with heavy red brocade and trimmed with gold tassels jutted out overhead, making an imposing statement.

The mountain lion sat beside the throne.

Richard had seen that throne before.

As he cautiously closed the distance, he recognized the woman sitting in the massive structure.

It was his mother.