Chainfire (Sword of Truth 9)

At last she smiled.

Richard looked back to the mosaic, studying the picture. “Do you know what this means? This picture?”

Finally pulling herself away from the distant, ghastly screams of pain that drifted in from the darkness, she looked down at the picture. “See this wall here?” she asked as she pointed. “The tellings say that these walls held the graves of the people of the city. This place, here, is where we are, now. This place is the passage to the dead.

“The tellings say that there were always dead, but only this place to put them within the city walls. The people didn’t want their loved ones to be far from them, far from what they considered the sacred place for their ancestors, so they made passages where they could find resting places for them.”

Shota’s words echoed around in his memory.

You must find the place of the bones in the Deep Nothing.

What you seek is long buried.

“Show me this place,” he told Jillian. “Take me back there.”

It was more difficult to reach than he had expected it would be. There was a labyrinth of passages and rooms back through the building. Some of it went between walls that were open to the stars, only to reenter the dark depths of the building.

“This is the way of the dead,” Jillian explained. “The deceased were brought in through here. It is said that it was made this way in the hopes that the souls of the dead would be confused by the passages and these new spirits would not be able to wander back out. Instead, confined in this place and unable to come back among the living, they would then go on to be where they belonged in the spirit world.”

They at last came back out into the night. The crescent moon was rising above the ancient city of Caska. Lokey circled above and called down to his friend. She waved back. The graveyard spread out before him was good sized, but seemed inadequate for a city.

Richard walked with Jillian on the path through the crowded graves. Gnarled trees stood in places. In the moonlight it was a peaceful place, with wild flowers spread across the rising and falling contour of the land.

“Where are the passages you spoke of?” he asked her.

“I’m sorry, Richard, but I don’t know. The tellings speak of them, but do not say how to find them.”

Richard searched the graveyard, Jillian at his side, as the moon rose higher in the sky, and he could not find any evidence of passages. It all looked like any graveyard he had ever seen. Some of the ground was mounded with a number of markers. The stones for each grave were crowded close. Some yet stood, while others had long since fallen to lie flat on the ground, or be grown over.

Richard was running out of time. He couldn’t stay down in Caska, forever listening to the cicadas sing. This was getting him nowhere. He needed to look for answers where he was apt to find them. This ancient place did not appear to be the place.

At the People’s Palace in D’Hara there would be valuable books that Jagang had not yet been able to loot. It was more likely that he would find useful information there than in an empty graveyard.

He sat down on the side of a small hillock beneath an olive tree to consider what he might do.

“Do you know of any other place where there would be these passages that were mentioned in the tellings?”

Jillian’s mouth twisted as she considered. “I’m sorry, but no. When it is safe, we can go down and talk to my grandfather. He knows many things—much more than me.”

Richard didn’t know how much time he had to devote to listening to her grandfather’s stories, either. Lokey fluttered down to the ground nearby to feast on the newly emerging cicadas. After the seventeen years they’d lived underground, more of them were emerging—only to be pecked up by the raven.

Richard recalled the prophecy Nathan had read to him. It had mentioned the cicadas. He wondered why. It had said something about when the cicadas awakened, the final and deciding battle was upon them. The world, it said, was at the brink of darkness.

Brink of darkness. Richard glanced down at the cicadas as they emerged. He watched them coming up out of the ground.

As he watched, he realized that they were all coming up through a space in a gravestone laying facedown against the rise of ground. Lokey had noticed, too, and stood eating them.

“That’s odd,” he said to himself.

“What’s odd?”

“Well, look there. The cicadas aren’t coming up through the dirt, they’re coming up from under that stone.”

Richard knelt down and pushed his fingers down into the space. It seemed hollow underneath. Lokey cocked his head as he watched. Richard lifted, grunting with the effort. The stone began to lift. As it came up, he realized that it was hinged on the left. It finally gave way and opened.

Richard stared down into the darkness. It wasn’t a grave marker. It had been a stone cap to a passageway. He immediately pulled the glass sphere out of his pack. As it began to glow, he held it down in the dark maw.

Jillian gasped. “It’s a stairway!”

“Come on, but be careful.”

The stairs were stone, irregular, and narrow. The leading edge of each was swaybacked and rounded from countless feet making the journey. The passage was lined with blocks of stone, making a clear path down deep into the ground. The steps came to a landing and turned right. After another long run, they turned left and went deeper.

When they finally reached the bottom, the passage opened into wider corridors that were carved from the solid but soft rock of the ground itself. Richard held the glowing globe out in one hand and Jillian’s hand in his other as he bent a little to clear the low ceiling as he led them deeper. It wasn’t long before they encountered an intersection.

“Do your tellings say anything about finding our way down here?” She shook her head. “How about all those mazes you learned. Do you think they will do you any good down here?”

“I don’t know. I never knew this place existed.”

Richard let out a breath as he looked down each of the two passages. “All right, I’ll just start going in deeper. If you think you recognize anything, or any of the routes, let me know.”

After she agreed, they started down the left fork. To each side of the narrow passageway they began finding niches that had been carved into the walls. Inside each lay the remains of a body. In places the niches were stacked three or five high. Some had two bodies, probably a husband and wife.

Around some of the recesses, ancient painting still remained. The artwork was vines in some places, people with food in others, and in some places simple designs. From the different styles and the varying quality of the art, Richard guessed that it must have been done by loved ones for a member of their family who had died.

The narrow passageway opened up into a chamber with ten openings tunneling off in various directions. Richard picked one and started down it. It, too, opened into broader spaces, with a warren of branches. The elevation changed, from time to time going down deeper, and occasionally going up a bit.

They soon began encountering the bones.

There were rooms with stacks of similar bones in niches. Skulls had been carefully fit into one niche, leg bones all stacked end out in another, arm bones in another yet. Great stone bins carved in the side walls held smaller bones all laid in neatly. As Richard and Jillian moved through vault after vault, they saw walls of skulls that had to number in the tens of thousands. Knowing that he was seeing only one random passageway, Richard could not imagine how many people had to be interred in the catacombs. Even as startling, and

even horrifying, as it was to see so many of the dead, each of their bones looked to have been placed reverently. None were simply cast into a hole or a corner. Each had been carefully placed as if each had been a valued life.

For what had to be well over an hour, they made their way through the maze of tunnels. Each section was different. Some were wide, some narrow, some with rooms to each side. After a time, Richard realized that each spot must have been carved out of the soft rock to make space for a family; that was why the niches seemed to fill every available space in such a haphazard fashion.

And then they came to a section of the passage that had partially collapsed. A huge section of stone had toppled and rubble had fallen in around it.

Richard stopped and looked at the tangle of stone. “I guess this is as far as we go.”

Jillian squatted down, peering under the stone block lying at an angle across the passageway. “I can see a way under here.” She turned to Richard. Her copper-colored eyes looked frightening staring out from the black mask painted across her face. “I’m smaller. Do you want me to go have a quick look?”

Richard held the glowing sphere down in the opening to light it for her. “All right. But I don’t want you to keep going if you think it looks dangerous. There are thousands of tunnels down here, so there are plenty others to look in.”

“But this is the one the Lord Rahl found. It must be important.”

“I’m just a man, Jillian. I’m not some wise spirit returned from the world of the dead.”

“If you say so, Richard.”

At least she smiled when she said it.

Jillian disappeared into the angular hole like a bird going through a thornbush.

“Lord Rahl!” came her echoing voice. “There are books in here.”