Warheart

CHAPTER 40

Everyone followed Richard as he rushed back the way they had come through the dark passageway. Cassia trotted to catch up and stay at his right side, holding the lantern out to light the dark hallway for them once the light from the viewing port had faded into the distance behind them. Kahlan, with Nicci on the other side of her, took long strides to stay close on Richard’s left side. The eerie green luminescence from the light sphere played across the smooth walls of the passageway, twisting with every hurried step Nicci took. Vale, still holding a torch, brought up the rear.

Since there was no one else in the caves and it wasn’t possible for anyone to get in to surprise them, they hadn’t closed the shielded stones. After he went past the second of the huge stone discs, Nicci reached past Kahlan and snatched his shirtsleeve to get his attention.

“Do you really think the room with the sliph’s well would be outside the shielded area?”

“Yes,” he said without explaining.

“That doesn’t seem likely,” she insisted.

“It is if that secret room is shielded as well, as I suspect it is.”

Satisfied that he must be right, or simply not wanting to argue the point for the moment, she didn’t answer.

When they had almost reached the end of the hallway back into the quarters for the gifted of Stroyza, Richard came to a stop in front of the small niche with the three shelves.

He gestured to the two small statues of shepherds with their flocks. “‘Let the shepherd guide you,’” he quoted from the writing on the wall.

Without questioning, Nicci reached out and took hold of one of the shepherds. Nothing happened.

“There isn’t any metal plate for a shield,” she said. “The statue doesn’t respond, so that can’t be the key to the shield.”

“Try the other one,” Kahlan suggested.

Nicci reached out and grasped the one shielding his eyes with a hand. They all waited, glancing around for any sign, as she kept hold of the statue. The hallways remained silent. There was no sound of a stone rolling out of the way or anything else to indicate there was a shield there.

Nicci let go of the statue. “Nothing.”

Richard couldn’t believe it. He had been sure that the shepherds were the answer to the words on the wall, instructing them to let the shepherd guide them. He didn’t know what else to do. This had been the answer he had been looking for and now that he found it, it didn’t work.

“What do we do now?” Kahlan asked.

Richard could only stare at the two small clay statues. “I’m not sure.”

“Are you still sure that there is a sliph in here, somewhere?” Cassia asked.

Richard looked to her blue eyes for a moment and then looked back at the statues. Looking into her eyes, he was struck with the realization of how much they all depended on him, in everything both large and small. She was looking to him to be the magic against magic.

He reached out and gripped one then the other of the statues.

“That’s kind of strange. They’re attached to the shelf.”

“Maybe so they wouldn’t accidentally be knocked off and broken,” Vale suggested.

Richard ran a thumb along his jaw as he stared at the statues, trying to figure out how the shepherd was supposed to guide them.

He squinted at the statue of the man shielding his eyes. More than one thing about it seemed odd.

“It’s sitting at a funny angle on the shelf, don’t you think?” he asked, looking at the four faces watching him. “And I don’t think that it’s attached to the shelf so that it can’t be knocked off and broken. After all, how would it get knocked off a shelf set back in a niche like this?”

“What are you getting at?” Kahlan asked.

He looked over his shoulder in the direction the statue was looking with its hand shielding its eyes.

He frowned as he glanced over at Kahlan. “Do you see the direction he is looking?”

“I’m all turned around in here,” she admitted. “I’m not sure.”

Nicci was staring at the statue. “It’s looking to the southwest,” she said, half to herself.

Richard nodded. “Toward the Wizard’s Keep.”

He and Nicci shared a look of understanding.

The other thing he thought odd about the statue was that all the details looked thick. Richard had sculpted statues and he understood the process quite well. It wasn’t that these two were poorly made, but rather that the details looked too bulky to his eye.

With everyone dead and the cave collapsed and buried, Richard didn’t think that breaking the statue was going to be much of a problem. He pulled his knife from its sheath at his belt. Holding it by the blade, he used the handle like a hammer to whack the statue.

The clay shattered in an unexpected manner and a piece fell off. Where the broken piece had been, Richard saw the gleam of metal under the clay. He struck the statue half a dozen times, breaking the clay away to reveal that there was the same metal statue underneath, only properly detailed. The whole thing had been covered with clay slurry to encase it; that was why it looked too bulky to him.

“Why in the world would they make a statue like that?” Kahlan asked as she frowned up at Richard.

“If I’m right, to hide the sliph.”

He used his knife handle to hammer the other sculpture and it, too, shattered to reveal metal under the covering of clay. He reached in and broke off the remaining pieces, exposing the two metal sculptures of shepherds with their flocks.

“My gift doesn’t work,” he said to Nicci. “You try it.”

Nicci reached in and grasped one of the statues. They all glanced around the hallway, expecting something to happen, but the hallway remained silent and still.

He gestured to the other. “Try holding both.”

Nicci reached in and wrapped her hand around the other shepherd, so that she was holding one in each hand. They all looked around the silent hallway.

Still, nothing happened.

With a disappointed sigh, she let her hands slip off the little statues. “I can’t explain why there is metal under the clay, but it apparently isn’t a trigger mechanism for a shield. It must simply be an ancient oddity.”

They all stared in frustration at the small statues of shepherds, trying to imagine their purpose. Nothing about what the original builders of the sentinel village of Stroyza did was random or pointless. Everything had been carefully planned not according to what was happening and what they feared, but according to the things they knew of the star shift and the Twilight Count. It all had a purpose.

He was at a loss to understand what that purpose was.

Cassia gestured with her lantern. “Lord Rahl, I don’t think you are listening to the real meaning of the writing.”

Richard’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

“It said ‘Let the shepherd guide you.’”

Richard opened his hands in bewilderment. “I know. Nicci tried it. Nothing happened.”

Cassia gave him a crafty smile. “She isn’t our shepherd. You are our shepherd, Lord Rahl. You are the one who guides us.”

“But my gift doesn’t work.”

She tipped her head at him in a meaningful way. “Maybe it isn’t looking for the gift. Maybe it’s looking for the shepherd.”

Richard stared at her for a moment, and then turned and grabbed both smooth metal statues.

He felt them both warm under his touch. The shelves began to shudder. The stone floor trembled. All the way around the niche, the wall began to crack in straight lines. Bits of stone flaked away from the ever-widening cracks as a section of the wall with the niche broke free and started to move in away from the hallway. The stone cracked and popped until the section of wall with the niche jolted free and swung back into a dark room.

“I don’t understand,” Richard said. “My gift doesn’t work.”

Nicci looked over at him. “You read the Cerulean scrolls, Richard. We’re dealing with forces here that transcend the gift.”