Pushing on through the plane of pressure and briefly searing heat, he entered a small room beyond with glass mosaics, like the one at the other end of the little reading room. Both rooms had to be a kind of entryway before the shield to provide warning to anyone coming near, or maybe they were somehow an aid to the shields themselves. Nicci was standing just beyond, at an open iron door, her back to him, her thick fall of blond hair down around her shoulders.
At the railing on the platform beside her, Richard looked out into a round tower room at least a hundred feet across. Stairs spiraled up around the inside of the curving outer wall. The tower rose above them for over two hundred feet. At irregular intervals, small landings like the one where they stood interrupted the steps wherever there was a doorway. In the gloomy expanse above, shafts of light pierced the darkness.
The place smelled of rot. At the bottom of the tower, not too far below the landing were they stood, he saw a walkway with an iron railing that ringed the inside of the tower wall. Rain that could come in the openings above, along with seepage from the mountain itself, collected down in the center of the tower. Insects swarmed above the stagnant, inky water. Others skittered on its surface.
“I know this place,” Richard said as he peered around, getting his bearings.
“You do?”
He started down the steps. “Yes, come on.”
At the bottom, he followed the iron railing around to a wide platform in the walkway before a spot where a door had once been. The doorway had been blasted apart and the opening was now perhaps twice its previous size. The jagged edges of the broken stone were blackened in places. In other places the stone itself had been melted as if it were no more than candle wax. Twisting streaks on the surface of the stone wall ran off in every direction away from the blasted hole, marking where a kind of lightning had flailed against the wall and burned it.
Nicci stared in amazement. “What in the world happened here?”
“This room was once sealed away, along with the Old World. When I destroyed the barrier to the Old World, it blew this seal open.”
“Why? What’s in here?”
“The sliph’s well.”
“The thing you told me about that those in ancient times used to travel great distances? The thing you’ve traveled in?”
“That’s right,” he said as he stepped through the jagged opening that once had been a doorway.
The room inside was round, perhaps sixty feet across, its walls were also scorched in ragged lines as if lightning had gone wild in the place. A circular stone wall about waist-high, forming what looked like a huge well, occupied the center of the room.
The domed ceiling was nearly as high as the room was wide. There were no windows or other doors. To the far side of the sliph’s well was a table and a few shelves. That was where Richard had found the remains of the wizard who had in ancient times been sealed in the room when the barriers that had ended the great war had been brought to life. Thus trapped, the man had died in the sealed room. He had left behind a journal that the Mord-Sith Berdine now had. That journal had in the past, as Richard and Berdine had translated it, revealed valuable information.
Because of the importance of the information they’d gotten from the journal, they had called the man who wrote it Koloblicin, a High D’Haran word meaning “strong advisor.” Berdine and Richard had eventually taken to simply referring to the mysterious wizard as Kolo.
Nicci held her glowing globe over the side and peered down the well. The smooth walls fell away seemingly forever, the light illuminating the stone for hundreds of feet down before fading away into blackness.
“And you say that you put the sliph to sleep?”
“Yes, with these.” Richard tapped the insides of the leather padded silver wrist bands he wore against one another. “She told me that when she ‘sleeps,’ as she put it, she goes to be with her soul. She says it’s rapture for her to sleep.”
“And you can call her back the same way? By using those bands?”
“Well, yes, but, just like putting her to sleep, I would need to use my gift to do it. Not something I’d be at all eager to do again. I especially wouldn’t like to be inside this room, with only one door, calling the sliph, when the blood beast was also called by my gift.”
Nicci nodded as she saw his point. “Do you think the beast could follow you through the sliph?”
Richard thought it over for a moment. “I can’t say for sure, but I imagine it’s possible. But even if it couldn’t it still manages to appear wherever I am, so I’m not sure it would even need to bother with using the sliph. From what I’ve learned of its nature from you and Shota, as well as from experience, I suspect that the beast is able to travel the underworld.”
“And other people?” Nicci asked. “Can any of them use this?”
“To travel in the sliph you need to have at least some element of both sides of the gift. That made it a problem in the great war and that’s why they had a wizard always standing guard in this room and in the end why they had to seal it off—so the enemy couldn’t come through right into the heart of the Keep.
“Now, because of the requirement for an element of both sides of magic, there are few who can use the sliph. Cara has captured gifted people who have Additive Magic, and she captured a man who Kahlan said wasn’t entirely human and who happened to have an element of Subtractive Magic. It was enough so that Cara is able to travel in the sliph. A Confessor’s power is ancient and has an element of Subtractive to it, so Kahlan can travel in the Sliph. Those are the only ones I know who could travel in the sliph—other than Sisters of the Dark. One of my former teachers, Merissa, went through the sliph after me. You could travel in the sliph as well. That’s about it.
“Still, it remains a danger if awakened because Jagang could theoretically send any of his Sisters of the Dark through it.”
“What happens if you don’t have at least some element of both sides?” Nicci asked. “If, for example, someone like Zedd, a gifted person had only Additive Magic, tried to travel?”
Richard reached over to rest his hand on the pommel of his sword, but his sword wasn’t there. It made him sick to expect it and then realize he’d given it to Shota—to Samuel, actually. He put the constant, haunting worry of it from his mind.
“Well, traveling takes you great distances, but it still takes some time—it isn’t an instant procedure. I think the time varies according to distance, but I know that it takes a number of hours, at least. The sliph looks something like living quicksilver. To remain alive within her while she takes you to the place you wish to travel, you must breathe her in, breathe in that silvery liquid. You breathe the sliph, that liquid, and it somehow keeps you alive. If you don’t have an element of both sides, it doesn’t work and you die. Simple as that.”
For a fleeting moment, Richard gave thought to waking the sliph to ask if she remembered Kahlan, but the ancient wizards, men of prodigious ability, had created the sliph out of a very exclusive and high-priced whore. She had become caught up in political intrigue that had eventually cost her her life. The nature of that woman was still partly evident in the sliph; she never revealed the identity of one of her “customers.”
“We’d better get back up there and let Zedd know we’re all right.” Richard’s thoughts returned to the immediate problems. “Cara is probably fit to be tied by now.”
“Richard,” Nicci said in a soft voice as he started to leave.
He turned back to see her watching him. “Yes?”
“What are you going to do about Ann and Nathan?”
He shrugged. “Nothing. What do you mean?”
“I mean, what are you going to do about the things they had to say? What are you going to do about the war? The time has come, and I think you know it. You can’t go on chasing after your dream while the rest of the world faces the end of everything good—the end of all their hopes and dreams.”
He stared at her a moment. She didn’t shy away from his
gaze.
“Like you said, that body down there didn’t prove anything.”
“No, but it certainly does prove one thing: that you were wrong about what we would find there. Digging up the grave failed to prove what you thought it would—at the very least. That begs the question of why? Why was it different than you said it would be? The only possible answer I can think of is that someone put it there with the idea that you would find it. But why?
“It’s been a while since that night down at the grave. Since then you’ve accomplished nothing. Maybe it’s time you thought about the bigger picture. And in the bigger picture, that prophecy makes the stakes pretty clear. I understand the value of one life you love—even if she were real—but to some extent don’t you think you have to balance that one life against the lives of everyone else?”
Richard slowly paced off a ways, trailing his fingers along the top of the stone wall around the sliph. The last time he had traveled in the sliph he had taken Kahlan to the mud people so they could be married.
“I have to find her.” He looked back at Nicci. “I am not the tool of prophecy.”