Rather than being flat, the center portion of the floor rose up in a dome formed by fat stone ribs filled in between with simple stone blocks. The dome forced them to use the walkway around the outer edges of the room. A lot of debris from above covered the dome, but much of it had slid down to build up in the well against the wall that was the only walk-way. Richard started around the room, climbing over the rubble. Kahlan clambered over huge stone pieces fallen from above, going around in the opposite direction.
The room appeared to serve no purpose except possibly as an inspection area for the structure. There were other places in the palace that were intended only as inspection ports for the foundation, or hidden parts of the support columns, connections, and beams, so he didn’t find that much of it surprising.
Richard wondered why, though, if that was true, it had been closed off from the Garden of Life. The stairway above the landing where the ladder rested appeared to have been dismantled. Since that part of the garden’s floor had collapsed, there was no longer any way to know if there had ever been access up into the garden. He supposed that it could have been nothing more than a construction access that had been sealed over.
“Over here,” Kahlan called out. “There’s a spiral staircase over here in the corner that goes down to what’s below.”
CHAPTER 28
Richard held the glowing sphere out ahead of him as he wound his way down the spiral of wedge-shaped stairs. There was no railing, making the descent into the darkness treacherous, especially since a lot of the sand and dirt from the floor of the Garden of Life that had fallen into the room above them had in turn poured down the spiral stairs. Richard had to pause in places to use the side of his boot to move dirt and debris aside so that they would have a safe place to step.
As they went ever lower into the blackness, the confining shaft for the spiral stairs opened up into a dark, dead still room. The light of the sphere Richard was holding cast only enough illumination into the distance to see that the simple, unadorned room was made of stone blocks. There were no doors or other openings that Richard could see. The room was empty except for what appeared to be a block of stone sitting in the middle.
“What in the world could this place be?” Kahlan asked.
Richard shook his head as he looked around. “I don’t know. Doesn’t look like much of anything. Maybe it’s just an old storage room.”
“It doesn’t make any sense that they would seal off a storage room the way this place has been sealed up.”
“I suppose not,” Richard conceded.
Kahlan was right. It didn’t appear that there had ever been any convenient access to the place.
As he moved into the gloomy room, proximity spheres set in wall brackets began to glow. By the time he made it around the perimeter of the room the four spheres, one on each wall, had all come to life, if weakly. Each sphere brightened as he came close and dimmed as he moved away. Even so, they cast sufficient light to banish enough of the blackness for them to see.
Looking around the room for any sign of what the place might have been used for, Richard only distantly noted the nondescript monolithic block sitting in the center of the room. He thought it might be a leftover block of stone used in the construction of the palace walls. The only thing that Richard thought was odd about it was that it sat square with the room, as if it had been carefully placed. It served no structural purpose as far as he could see.
Snowflakes drifted down from the stairwell and into the room to mix with the dust they had stirred up. Up above, the storm raged across the land, but the remnants of gusty wind could not make it this far down. Snowflakes floating by, catching the light of the proximity spheres, sparkled in the murky light.
A quick search around the perimeter confirmed that the room had no doors. There were no other stairs, or openings of any kind. There was no way out but the spiral stairs that had brought them down into the still grave of a room.
Richard wasn’t sure why, but the place was making the hair on the back of his neck stand out.
The still, silent room had the feel of a place deliberately built to be sealed over and forgotten. But why would anyone seal off and bury an empty room?
Kahlan inched in close to him. “Something about this place is creepy.”
“Maybe it’s because it’s a dead end. There’s no way out but the way we came in.”
“Maybe,” she said. “I sure wouldn’t like to get trapped down in here. No one would ever find you. Why would this place be sealed up like a tomb?”
Richard shook his head. He had no answer.
He half expected to see bones on the floor, but there were none. There were burial vaults in the lower reaches of the palace, but the Garden of Life was at the top of the palace, and besides, the tombs were grand places meant to revere the dead. None had the forsaken feel of this room.
As he looked around more carefully, Richard spotted something low against the far wall. He thought it might be a narrow ledge in the stone, maybe a stone block sticking out a little more than the rest. He held the sphere out to see better as he leaned in. He brushed away a layer of dust and crumbled granite flakes from the surface and saw that it was individual, small strips of metal, piled in tight, neat, orderly stacks.
He picked a strip of metal off one of the stacks and turned it in the light, trying to figure out what it was, or its purpose. Each was only a little longer than his longest finger, and soft enough that he could easily bend it. All the strips looked to be identical. Stacked tightly and evenly as they were, and covered in dust and dirt, the mass of them looked like part of the wall, like a ledge in the stone.
Kahlan bent close, trying to see it better. “What do you think they are?”
Richard straightened the strip of metal and set it back in its resting place atop one of the stacks. “They don’t have any markings on them. They seem to be nothing more than simple strips of metal.”
Kahlan’s gaze swept along the wall. “They’re stacked all around the edge of the room. There must be tens of thousands of them, maybe hundreds of thousands. What could they be for, and why are they buried in here?”
“It seems like they were left and forgotten. Or it could be they were hidden away.”
Kahlan’s nose wrinkled. “Why hide plain strips of metal?”
Richard could only shrug as he looked around, trying to see if the room held any other clues to its purpose. The place didn’t seem to make any sense. He scuffed the side of his boot across the floor. It was stone, covered with what was probably thousands of years of dust and crumbled, decayed granite from the surface of the walls. Even though he knew from being above the room that it had a vaulted ceiling above, the ceiling down inside the room was flat, a false ceiling, probably plastered over but now the same dark, dingy color as the walls.
All in all, other than the stacks of metal and the odd block of stone in the center, it was an unremarkable room. Except, perhaps, that it led to nowhere. Had the floor of the Garden of Life not collapsed, there would have been no way into the buried room. If not for the roof falling in, the room could easily have remained undiscovered for a few thousand more years.
As Kahlan trailed her fingers along the wall, looking for any hint of writing carved into the stone, or possibly a hidden passageway, Richard turned his attention to the square block that sat in the center of the dingy room. Oddly enough, the stone floor stopped short of the block, leaving a narrow gutter of dirt all the way around it. The block was slightly more than waist high. If he and Kahlan would have reached across from opposite sides, they wouldn’t have been able to touch their fingers.
He couldn’t imagine what it could be, or what it was doing there.
With snowflakes drifting past, he squatted down, holding out the glowing sphere to see better, and brushed the flat of his hand along the surface of the side.
He was surprised to realize that the surface was not stone, as he had thought, but thick, heavy metal.
He rubbed away at the
dust and grime of ages, trying to see it better. The surface of the metal was corroded and dirty, making it look like the stone in the room, but there could be no doubt, it was metal. Beneath the filth where he wiped his hand across the surface, metal glinted in the light of the sphere.
“Look at this,” Richard said.
Kahlan glanced back over her shoulder. “What is it?”
Richard thumped his fist against it. Even though it seemed to be extraordinarily heavy, he could just barely tell from the sound that it was hollow.
“This thing is made of metal. And look at this, here.”
He held the sphere out so she could see better as she came up next to him. There was a small slot, starting in the top and cut down into one side of the thing. Some of the curious strips of metal were stacked in the slot.
Kahlan removed one of the metal strips, inspecting it. As far as Richard could tell it was devoid of any markings, the same as all the others stacked against the wall.
He rubbed more of the dirt and debris off the side. “There’s some kind of emblem or something on the side. Kind of hard to tell what it is.”
With a heavy thud that shook the ground and made both of them flinch, light shot up from the center of the top. Dirt in the space between the metal monolith and the stone floor, disturbed by the thump, lifted into the still air.
As one, Richard and Kahlan took a step back.
“What did you do?”
“I don’t know,” Richard said. “I was brushing it with my hand to clean away the dirt to see what’s on the side.”