Warheart: Sword of Truth: The Conclusion (Sword of Truth 15)

“If they couldn’t read this writing, they wouldn’t know about the secret room.”

“You still really think the well is in a secret room?” Kahlan asked.

“Well it certainly isn’t in any room we’ve looked in, and I think we looked in them all. I’m convinced there is a well here. So it has to be hidden, or shielded, or both.”

Kahlan sighed as she gazed at all the writing. “I hope you’re right, Richard.”

He turned to the sorceress. “Nicci, start looking for anything that talks about the Keep, or anything that explains the procedure for when the barrier fails.”

“Already looking,” she murmured under her breath as she ran her hand along under the writing while she deciphered it in her head.

Richard swept his hand along a section of the wall. “You can disregard this part, here,” he told Nicci. “This is Naja Moon’s account, and I’ve already read all of this. There isn’t any mention of the well in it.”

When he looked back, Nicci was squatted down, leaning in, urgently inspecting a line of symbols. “What? Do you see something?”

Nicci tapped the symbols and looked up at him. “Maybe. It says here that when the barrier to the third kingdom fails, the people here must protect the flock.”

“Well,” Richard said, “when you get down to it, that was ultimately their purpose here.”

Nicci looked up at him as he came over to where she was reading. “Yes, but look at this symbol, here, at the end of that part. I’m not quite sure what it means.”

Richard squatted down beside her to have a look at where she was pointing.

“Do you understand it?” the sorceress asked.

“Odd combination,” Richard mumbled to himself as he studied the symbol.

Cassia, Vale, and Kahlan gathered behind him as he translated it to himself.

Richard suddenly stood.

Nicci rose up beside him. “Do you know what it says?”

Richard looked back the way they had come in. “Yes. It says ‘Let the shepherd guide you.’”

“Does that mean something significant?” Kahlan asked.

“Yes,” Richard said, still staring back up the passageway. “I think I know where the well is.”

CHAPTER

40

Everyone followed Richard as he rushed back the way they had come through the dark passageway. Cassia trotted to catch up and stay at his right side, holding the lantern out to light the dark hallway for them once the light from the viewing port had faded into the distance behind them. Kahlan, with Nicci on the other side of her, took long strides to stay close on Richard’s left side. The eerie green luminescence from the light sphere played across the smooth walls of the passageway, twisting with every hurried step Nicci took. Vale, still holding a torch, brought up the rear.

Since there was no one else in the caves and it wasn’t possible for anyone to get in to surprise them, they hadn’t closed the shielded stones. After he went past the second of the huge stone discs, Nicci reached past Kahlan and snatched his shirtsleeve to get his attention.

“Do you really think the room with the sliph’s well would be outside the shielded area?”

“Yes,” he said without explaining.

“That doesn’t seem likely,” she insisted.

“It is if that secret room is shielded as well, as I suspect it is.”

Satisfied that he must be right, or simply not wanting to argue the point for the moment, she didn’t answer.

When they had almost reached the end of the hallway back into the quarters for the gifted of Stroyza, Richard came to a stop in front of the small niche with the three shelves.

He gestured to the two small statues of shepherds with their flocks. “‘Let the shepherd guide you,’” he quoted from the writing on the wall.

Without questioning, Nicci reached out and took hold of one of the shepherds. Nothing happened.

“There isn’t any metal plate for a shield,” she said. “The statue doesn’t respond, so that can’t be the key to the shield.”

“Try the other one,” Kahlan suggested.

Nicci reached out and grasped the one shielding his eyes with a hand. They all waited, glancing around for any sign, as she kept hold of the statue. The hallways remained silent. There was no sound of a stone rolling out of the way or anything else to indicate there was a shield there.

Nicci let go of the statue. “Nothing.”

Richard couldn’t believe it. He had been sure that the shepherds were the answer to the words on the wall, instructing them to let the shepherd guide them. He didn’t know what else to do. This had been the answer he had been looking for and now that he found it, it didn’t work.

“What do we do now?” Kahlan asked.

Richard

could only stare at the two small clay statues. “I’m not sure.”

“Are you still sure that there is a sliph in here, somewhere?” Cassia asked.

Richard looked to her blue eyes for a moment and then looked back at the statues. Looking into her eyes, he was struck with the realization of how much they all depended on him, in everything both large and small. She was looking to him to be the magic against magic.

He reached out and gripped one then the other of the statues.

“That’s kind of strange. They’re attached to the shelf.”

“Maybe so they wouldn’t accidentally be knocked off and broken,” Vale suggested.

Richard ran a thumb along his jaw as he stared at the statues, trying to figure out how the shepherd was supposed to guide them.

He squinted at the statue of the man shielding his eyes. More than one thing about it seemed odd.

“It’s sitting at a funny angle on the shelf, don’t you think?” he asked, looking at the four faces watching him. “And I don’t think that it’s attached to the shelf so that it can’t be knocked off and broken. After all, how would it get knocked off a shelf set back in a niche like this?”

“What are you getting at?” Kahlan asked.

He looked over his shoulder in the direction the statue was looking with its hand shielding its eyes.

He frowned as he glanced over at Kahlan. “Do you see the direction he is looking?”

“I’m all turned around in here,” she admitted. “I’m not sure.”

Nicci was staring at the statue. “It’s looking to the southwest,” she said, half to herself.

Richard nodded. “Toward the Wizard’s Keep.”

He and Nicci shared a look of understanding.

The other thing he thought odd about the statue was that all the details looked thick. Richard had sculpted statues and he understood the process quite well. It wasn’t that these two were poorly made, but rather that the details looked too bulky to his eye.