Wasteland

16

There before them, beyond a wide space that stretched off for quite a distance until it vanished into darkness on each side, stood a tall wall made up of huge blocks of age-darkened stone. As with the sides, the light failed to reach far enough up for them to see the full height, but from remembering the plans, Richard thought it rose possibly three stories high. The width of it was far greater.

It almost appeared as if they were standing before a massive castle, as imposing as any Richard had ever seen, as if it had already been there for eons when the House of Rahl came along, and then it had been left in place and the palace built around it. He knew, of course, that wasn’t the case, but that was the impression it left him with.

In the center of the wall was a great doorway surrounded by a series of stepped stone arches jutting out from the face of the wall. Each of those stone arches, some carved to look like rope, some with repeated designs, was layered on top of a broader one behind. The mass of those intricate, layered arches was so thick they stood out several feet from the wall. The stacked arches surrounding the wooden wall with the door had to be a couple of stories tall.

A wall of age-darkened oak with large, hammered iron studs laid out in a grid pattern was set back far enough in the deep opening of the enormous arches that it almost made it look like a vestibule. Iron straps crisscrossed over the face of the heavy oak door in the center of that wall. Iron studs pinned where each of the straps crossed connected them solidly together. The strap-hinges looked large enough to easily to hold up the weight of the door. There were no locks in the door; there was simply a big iron ring in the center, held out in the hooked beak of a cast bronze eagle head, presumably used to pull open the door.

“Why do you suppose there would be such an elaborate and imposing entryway beyond the four locked doors?” Kahlan asked. “After all, who is going to see it?”

Richard shook his head as he studied the wall and the entryway, looking for anything suspicious. “I can’t imagine.” His brow twitched. “Unless it’s to pay homage to the spell.”

“You have to be kidding,” Shale said.

Richard merely flashed her a brief smile.

They all shared looks before Richard finally ascended three monolithic slabs making up the stone steps to get up to the door. He hesitated, wiping his palms on his pants before using both hands to grip the big iron ring held in the eagle’s beak. The door glided open, almost willingly, to reveal just the beginning of a dark corridor beyond.

“Are you sure about this, Lord Rahl?” Rikka asked.

Rather than answer, Richard walked through the doorway and into the dark corridor. As glass spheres to each side began to glow, he could see that it was a vast passageway that stretched off into darkness in a gentle curve to the right. He was pretty sure he knew which curved element it was from the spell-form of the complication. Grimy-looking stone walls rose up high to each side. Ornate crown moldings at the edge of the ceiling appeared to be carved from stone as well.

The corners of the ceiling and even joints in the stone of the walls had layers of dirty cobwebs that waved slightly as the air moved when they walked in.

The floor was covered with of a variety of darker marble tiles in a spiraled gridwork pattern. Big squares holding stone mosaics were set into frames of large marble tiles. The designs of the floor swept off into the distance, elaborate, yet dimmed over time by dust and dirt. The gloomy stone making up the walls appeared to be just as grimy from many centuries of accumulated dust. The walls and the floor were so dark they seemed to suck up the light. All the grout lines in the marble floor were packed with millennia of dirt that helped to darken the whole floor.

Michec might have been a warlock who could cast concealment spells, but as far as Richard knew, he couldn’t fly, so he had left footprints in the dusty floor just like any mortal. A pathway through the dirt and dust told Richard that the man had probably been hiding down in section M111-B for some time, since his coming and going had nearly cleared the grimy dirt away down the center of the broad passageway.

Richard spotted smaller footprints near the side, as if a lost woman had kept a hand on the wall for guidance as she walked haltingly on her way farther in to answer a calling from the complication spell. The light spheres wouldn’t work unless you were gifted, so unless she carried a lamp, she would have been blind in the total darkness, driven on by a compulsion she didn’t understand.

From the well-worn path through the dust, Richard couldn’t help but wonder how many times Michec had gone up into the palace proper and what he done on those occasions. He did know that one of those times he had captured Vika.

As Richard moved farther into the corridor, everyone followed silently. Richard held a hand back, touching Kahlan to make sure she stayed close. Nearby glass spheres in iron brackets all the way down the corridor began to glow when they got close enough, making it seem almost as if they were alive, the light welcoming and escorting them in, but the somber stone passageway was so murky that the glass spheres didn’t do much to illuminate anything beyond their immediate area.

Before long, as the corridor curved off into the distance, they encountered rooms randomly placed to each side. At each room, since they had no light spheres, Richard took one of the plentiful spheres from a bracket in the hall and carried it with him. The rooms were various sizes, dark, and all were empty. They were elaborately trimmed with complex molding, some with patterned stone paneling, but there was no furniture.

“Why in the world are there rooms in here?” Shale asked, sounding annoyed by the uncanny uselessness of the rooms.

“They’re actually representations of nodules in the complication,” Richard told her. “If you were to draw this spell-form in the dirt with a stick, these would be little tick marks you would make along the main, sweeping line of the spell. Their number and spacing has meaning to the complication. But since the spell-form is so big, it appears that rooms serve that purpose.”

“The rooms aren’t close enough to share walls,” Kahlan noticed. “So what’s in the space between the rooms?”

Richard peered around in another of the empty rooms. “Good question. I have no idea, but since the empty space between the lines and nodes of the design doesn’t serve a function, I suspect those spaces are simply filled in with rubble or possibly stone blocks.”

When they finally came to a closed door on the left, Kahlan stopped and pointed in alarm. “Look. There are fingers sticking out from under that door.”

Richard turned the latch and pushed the door partway open against the weight of a desiccated corpse of a woman lying on the other side. The body looked like it might have been there for many decades, possibly centuries. Coils of long hair were still attached to the almost black, leathery skin of the skull. The full dress was so layered in dust that it was hard to tell what color it had been. The arms sticking out from the sleeves were bones covered in thin, leathery skin that was just as dark as that on the skull.

The delicate, dried-out fingers of one hand were extended under the door in a feeble, dying effort to somehow open the door. The woman, probably dying of thirst, had given up in that spot as the life went out of her.

“Why would she be doing that?” Kahlan asked. “Reaching under the door like that?”

Richard leaned in far enough to look at the other side of the heavy door to confirm what he suspected. “This branch of the spell-form, behind the door, flows in only one direction: in this way.”

Kahlan gave him a questioning frown. “So?”

“So, because it’s a one-way element, you can go into the room because that’s the direction of the flow. The door doesn’t have a handle on the other side, so once you go in and the door shuts, you can’t open it to come back out.”

“Why wouldn’t she break the door down?” Shale asked.

Richard arched an eyebrow. “It’s a one-way element of the spell-form. Besides having no handle on the other side, this is an awfully heavy door for a small woman to break down. But even if she had been strong enough, it would also likely be blocked by the spell’s magic to prevent anything flowing out.”

“Such a trap door is dangerous!” Shale objected. “Why in the world would the builders have put that in here?”

“They were building a complication, not a palace attraction for visitors,” Richard said. “No one is supposed to come in here. People aren’t safe anywhere in here.” He leaned in a little, giving her a look. “Not anywhere. That’s why there are four locked doors protecting the place. That alone should tell you something important.”

Shale’s mouth twisted a little in concession. “I guess you have a point.”

“Just keep that in mind,” Richard told them. “Everywhere in the complication is dangerous in ways that we often won’t even realize. So don’t wander off to look at anything. Stay close and keep a sharp lookout.”