Temple of the Winds

Chapter 35

Kahlan tried to overlay her mental map of the Keep on the passageways, stairwells, and rooms she traversed as she wound her way lower. Rats squeaked and skittered away from her lamp.

Although she had often seen the tower outside Kolo’s room from the ramparts and walkways up on top of the Keep, she had never been down inside it until Richard had taken her there. Unfortunately, Richard had taken her there by way of dangerous passages, through shields she would never be able to get through on her own.

She was confident that there were other routes down to Kolo’s room. There were vast areas of the Keep that weren’t protected by any shields at all. She had only to find a way without shields, or with shields that her magic would be able to pass. The areas that Richard had taken her, protected by dangerous shields, she didn’t know at all, since she had never been beyond those before, but she was familiar with a myriad of ways to get around them.

Oftentimes the “hard shields,” as the wizards used to call them, were meant to protect something just beyond, rather than specifically to prevent passage to another area. Many of the rooms Richard had taken her through were like that: places of menacing magic she had never seen before. They oftentimes provided a more direct route, but required special magic.

If she was correct, that Richard had traversed a maze through dangerous places, rather than going through hard shields specifically protecting the tower, then there would be a way around the dangerous areas and into the tower room. In her experience, that was the way the Keep worked: if the tower room was meant to be off-limits, then it would be protected by its own hard shields. If it wasn’t forbidden, then there would be at least one way she could enter. She had but to find it.

Even though she had spent a great deal of time in the Keep, much of that time was spent in the libraries studying. She had explored, of course, but the Keep was almost inconceivably vast. Not only was the part that could be seen from the outside immense, but much more of the Keep was burrowed into the mountain. The outer walls were only the tip of the Keep, the visible part of the tooth, with much more of the root hidden beneath.

Kahlan went through an empty room, chiseled from bedrock, to one of the passages on the other side. There were numerous empty rooms in the Wizards’ Keep. Some of them, like the one she had just passed through, seemed nothing more than junctions where various passages connected, possibly enlarged to provide reference points.

The square-sided passage through the rock ahead appeared carefully cut and smoothed. Her lamp illuminated bands of symbols incised in the granite, with round areas in the field of swirling carvings polished to a high luster. Each encircling band marked the location of a mild shield that tingled against her flesh as she passed through.

Ahead, she saw the hall split into three passageways. Before she reached the junction, the air about her suddenly hummed. It took two steps before she could halt her onward rush. Each of those two steps caused the hum to raise in pitch to an uncomfortable buzzing. Her long hair lifted from her shoulders and back to stand straight out in all directions. The band carved in the stone ahead immediately began to glow red.

Kahlan retreated several paces. The humming lowered in pitch. Her hair settled down.

She cursed under her breath. A humming shield was an urgent warning to stay away. The red glow displayed the region of the shield itself. The hum warned that you were entering the field of a dangerous shield.

Some of these hard shields would actually prevent a person without the required magic from getting too close, by making the very air get as thick as mud, and then stone. Some of the humming shields didn’t prevent entry, but walking into one would sear the flesh and muscle right off a person’s bones. The lesser shields were meant to keep people without magic, and thus knowledge, from getting close to the danger.

Kahlan turned and held up the lamp as she quickly retraced her steps to the room. She took a different passageway that ran in the general direction she wanted to go. It was a much more congenial-looking hall, with whitewashed walls and ceiling, making the lamp better able to brighten her way.

She encountered no shields at all in the white hall. A stairway took her lower into the Keep. Another stone hall at the bottom provided quick travel devoid of shields. In her mind, she was retracing the halls, rooms, stairs, and cramped tunnels, and was pretty sure that, by eliminating the false routes she had taken, there was a way to get to and from the tower without encountering any shields.

Kahlan threw open the door at the end of the stone hall and stepped out onto a walkway with an iron railing. She held the lamp up in front of her. She stood at the bottom level of the tower.

The walkway ringed the hall. Stairs wound their way up around the inside of the immense stone tower, with landings at other doors along the way. In the center, at the bottom of the tower, lurked a pool of black water. Rocks broke the surface of the water here and there. Bugs skittered across the inky surface of the pool. Salamanders rested on the rocks, their eyes rolling to watch her.

This was the place where she and Richard had fought the mriswith queen. Her stinking, broken eggs still littered the rock. Small bits of the door blasted from Kolo’s room still floated in the pool, providing islands for fat bugs that hissed at the intrusion.

Across the water, on the opposite side of the round tower room, was the opening to Kolo’s room.

Kahlan quickly made her way around the walkway to the wide platform outside Kolo’s room. The doorway had been blown open, leaving blackened, jagged edges. In some places the stone itself was melted like candle wax. The tower wall outside the doorway was streaked with blackened lines of soot from the unleashed power that had opened Kolo’s room for the first time in millennia.

When Richard had destroyed the Towers of Perdition, it had destroyed the magic seal on this room, too. The towers had sealed the Old World away from the New in the great war three thousand years before. They had also sealed the room with the sliph, and sealed in the man who had been unfortunate enough to be the one guarding her at the time.

Stone fragments crunched under her feet as Kahlan stepped into the room where Kolo had died, the room where dwelled the sliph. The silence was oppressive. It droned in her ears, making her welcome the relief of her footsteps.

Richard had awakened the sliph after thousands of years. The sliph had taken Richard to the Old World, and had brought him and Kahlan safely back to Aydindril. When they returned, Richard had put the sliph back to sleep. All the years Kahlan had spent in the Keep, and she had never known the sliph was there.

Kahlan couldn’t even imagine the magic the wizards of old could use to conjure a being such as the sliph, or how they could have put her to sleep for all that time, so that she could wake again. Only at the fringes of her imagination could she conceive of the power Richard wielded, but didn’t comprehend.

What would the war wizards of old, who knew their gift well, have been able to do with such unfathomable magic? What terrors would a war among those with that kind of power have been like? The very thought gave her shivers.

It would have been things like the plague that had been set upon them, now. They could do those kinds of things.

The lamplight fell across Kolo’s bones beside the chair. The pen and inkwell still sat on the dusty table. The round room, nearly sixty feet across, was capped with a high-domed ceiling, itself nearly as tall as the room was wide.

In the center was a round stone wall, like a well, twenty-five or thirty feet across. There dwelled the sliph. Kahlan held the light over the wall of the well, and glanced briefly down the smooth stone walls of the dark shaft that fell away seemingly forever.

The walls of the room were scorched in ragged lines as if lightning had gone wild in the place—another result of the same magic Richard had invoked when he destroyed the towers and when the doorway had been blasted open. Kahlan strode quickly around the room, checking to see if there was anything that might be useful. There was nothing in the room, other than the table, chair, and Kolo, except for a dusty set of shelves.

Kahlan was disappointed to find that there were no books on the shelves. There were three faded blue, glazed, lidded containers, probably once holding water or soup for the wizard on duty guarding the sliph. A white, glazed bowl held a silver spoon. A neatly folded cloth, or embroidery of some sort, sat on one of the shelves. When she touched it, it disintegrated into dust and little flakes where her fingers contacted it.

Kahlan bent lower, seeing that the bottom shelf held only a few spare candles and a lamp.

An abrupt sensation of icy alarm inundated her. She was being watched.

She froze, holding her breath, telling herself that it was just her imagination. The fine hairs at the back of her neck stiffened. She felt a cold wave of gooseflesh run up her arms.

She strained to hear a telling sound. Her toes cringed inside her boots. She feared to move. Carefully, quietly, she let her lungs draw a needed breath.

Slowly, ever so slowly, so as not to make a sound, she straightened a little. She dared not move her feet lest the stone chips crunch.

Courage, as thin as eggshells, urged her to hide behind the wall of the sliph’s well. From there, she could determine if it was only her imagination spooking her. Perhaps it was just a rat.

She twisted to check the distance to the stone wall. Kahlan sucked a cry as she flinched back.