“It shouldn’t be as hard as it sounds. The libraries can be a bewildering maze when you wish to find something. I used to know a wizard who searched on and off his whole life for a bit of information he knew was in the libraries. He never found it.”
“Then how can we?”
“Because there are a few things that are specialized enough that they are kept together. Books of language, for example. I can take you to all the books on any specific language, because they’re not about magic and so they’re in one place. I don’t know how books on magic and prophecy are organized, if they even are.
“Anyway, this library is where certain records are kept, such as the records of trials held here. I’ve not read them, but I was taught about them.”
Kahlan turned and led them between two rows of shelves. Nearly midway down the fifty-foot-long aisle, she came to a halt.
“Here they are. I can see by the writing on the spines that they’re in different languages. Since I know all the languages but High D’Haran, I’ll search all the ones in other languages. Cara, you look at the ones in ours, and Berdine, you take the ones in High D’Haran.”
The three of them started picking books from the shelves and carrying them to the tables, separating them into three stacks. There weren’t as many as Kahlan had feared. Berdine had only seven books, Cara had fifteen, and Kahlan eleven, in a variety of languages. For Berdine, it would be slow going translating the D’Haran, but Kahlan was fluent in the other languages, and she would be able to help with Cara’s stack as soon as she finished her own.
As Kahlan started in, she quickly found that it was going to be easier than she’d first thought. Each trial began with a statement of the type of crime, making it simple to eliminate those that had nothing to do with the Temple of the Winds.
There were charges against the accused ranging from the taking of a cherished object of little worth to murder. A sorceress was accused of casting a glamour, but was found innocent. A boy of twelve was accused of starting a fight in which another boy’s arm was broken; because the aggressor had used magic to cause the injury, the sentence was the suspension of his training for a period of one year. A wizard was accused of being a drunkard, a third offense, the prior punishments having failed to halt his belligerent behavior. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out two days later, when he had sobered.
Habitually, drunken wizards were viewed not with tolerance but as the true dangers they were, capable, in their inebriated state, of causing mass injury and death. Kahlan herself had seen wizards drink to excess only one time.
The accounts of the trials were fascinating, but the seriousness of their purpose kept Kahlan skimming through the books, looking for a reference to the Temple of the Winds, or to a team charged with a crime. The other two were making quick progress, too. In an hour, Kahlan had finished all eleven books in the other languages, Berdine had only three left, and Cara six.
“Anything?” Kahlan asked.
Cara lifted an eyebrow. “I just found an account of a wizard who fancied hiking up his robes in front of women in the market on Stentor Street and commanding them to ‘kiss the serpent.’ I never knew wizards could get themselves in such a variety of trouble.”
“They’re people, just like any other people.”
“No, they’re not. They have magic,” Cara said.
“So do I. Have you found anything, Berdine?”
“No, not what we’re looking for. Just common crimes.”
Kahlan reached for one of the books Cara hadn’t been through, but paused.
“Berdine, you were down in the room with the sliph.”
Berdine made a show of shivering and producing a sound of revulsion from deep in her throat. “Don’t remind me.”
Kahlan shut her eyes, trying to remember the room. She remembered Kolo’s bones, and she remembered the sliph, but she only vaguely recalled what else was in the room.
“Berdine, do you remember if there were any other books down there?”
Berdine bit down on the end of a fingernail as she squinted in concentration. “I remember finding Kolo’s journal open on the table. An inkwell and pen. I remember Kolo’s bones, lying on the floor next to the chair, with most of his clothes long ago rotted away. His leather belt was still around him.”
Kahlan remembered much the same thing. “But do you remember if there were any books on the shelves?”
Berdine turned her eyes up as she thought. “No.”
“No there weren’t, or no you don’t remember?”
“No, I don’t remember. Lord Rahl was really excited about finding Kolo’s journal. He said it was something different from the books in the library, and he felt it was what he had been searching for: something different. We left right after that.”
Kahlan stood. “You two keep looking through these books. I’m going down there and have a look, just to be sure.”
Cara’s chair clattered against the floor as she stood. “I will go with you.”
“There are rats down there.”
Her expression vexed, Cara put a hand on her hip. “I’ve seen rats before. I will go with you.”
Kahlan remembered well Cara’s story about the rats. “Cara, there’s no need. I don’t need your protection in the Keep. Outside, yes, but in here I know the dangers better than you.
“I told you I wouldn’t take you near dangerous magic. Down there is dangerous magic.”
“Then there is danger to you.”
“No, because I know about it. You don’t. The danger would be to you, not me. I grew up here. My own mother let me have the run of the Keep when I was a little girl because I was taught about the dangers and how to avoid them. I know what I’m doing.
“Please stay here with Berdine and finish going through the books. It will save us time, and it’s important. The sooner we find the one we’re looking for, the sooner we can get home to watch over Richard. That’s where our real concern is.”
Cara’s leather creaked as she shifted her weight. “I guess you would know the dangers of the magic here better than I. I think you’re right about getting home. Nadine is back there.”
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.
36
The quicksilver face of the sliph had risen above the edge of the stone wall and was watching her.
The glossy metallic female features of the sliph reflected the lamplight and the room in a living mirror. It was obvious why Kolo called the sliph “she.” The sliph was a silver statue. Except it moved with liquid grace.
Kahlan pressed a hand to her hammering heart as
she panted, getting her breath. The sliph watched her, as if curious about what Kahlan might do next. Kolo often said in his journal that “she” was watching him.
“Sliph…” Kahlan stammered. “What are you doing… awake?”
The face distorted into a puzzled frown. “Do you wish to travel?” The eerie voice echoed around the room. Her lips hadn’t moved as she spoke, but she smiled pleasantly.
“Travel? No.” Kahlan took a step toward the well. “Sliph, Richard put you to sleep. I was here.”
“Master. He woke me.”
“Yes, Richard woke you. He traveled in you. He rescued me, and I traveled back with him… in you.”
Kahlan recalled that strange experience with a certain fondness. To travel in the sliph, you had to breathe her in. It was frightening at first, but with Richard there holding her hand, Kahlan had been able to do it, and had discovered the enthralling sensation of “traveling.”
To breathe the sliph was rapture.
“I remember,” the sliph said. “Once you are in me, I remember.”
“But don’t you remember Richard putting you to sleep again?”
“He woke me from the sleep of ages, but he did not put me back into the long sleep. He put me at rest, until I was needed.”
“But we thought—we thought you had gone back to sleep. Why are you not at… rest, now?”
“I felt you near. I came to look.”
Kahlan stepped to the stone wall. “Sliph, has someone traveled in you since Richard and I last did?”
“Yes. I was used.”
Suddenly realization broke through her surprise. “A man and a woman. They traveled in you, didn’t they?”
The sliph’s smile turned sly, but she didn’t answer.
Kahlan touched her fingers to the stone wall. “Who was it, sliph, who traveled in you?”
“You should know that I never betray those I hold within me.”
“I should know? How would I know?”
“You have traveled in me. I would not reveal you. I never betray my clients. You traveled, so you must understand.”