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

“Your sword won’t be of any help where we’re going.”

Cassia glanced over at Chase with a

long-suffering look. “Don’t feel bad. He hasn’t told me, either. He said it isn’t good to know how you might die.”

“Ah,” the big man said. “At least he has a good reason.”

“I haven’t told either of you because in the first place I wouldn’t know how, and in the second place I’m not even sure I can do this.”

The slits at the top of the chamber revealed that it was night. How deep in the night Richard wasn’t sure, but since Chase had been asleep, it seemed pretty clear that it was the heart of darkness.

Richard spotted the alcove set back in shadows and headed for it. Without delay he pressed his palms to the metal statues, closing his fingers around the shepherds. He felt them warm as before, and as before the stone groaned as it began to swing open.

“Get some torches,” Richard said.

Chase grabbed one for himself and handed Cassia a lantern. He gave Richard a torch.

Richard started in. “There are lots of steps. It goes down really deep into the mountain. The first flights are constructed, but you need to be careful once we get lower because they are carved from the rock and they aren’t even.”

“What’s the rush?”

Richard turned and looked at Chase. “A lot of people back at the palace are going to be slaughtered by half people before I can get back. It could even be that everyone there will die. I’m hoping to make it back before that happens. But even if it does, everyone else is going to die after that. I need to try to stop what is going to happen. I think this is the only way. Kahlan’s life hangs in the balance. Everyone’s life hangs in the balance. I don’t know if I will live through what I am going to do, but I have to save everyone I can. That’s the rush.”

Chase grunted his understanding and followed Richard when he started down, taking two steps at a time, half descending stairs, half falling the entire way. They went past landing after landing, racing down.

The torches suddenly revealed the chamber with the round table and the various tunnel openings. Richard ducked under the opening and went into the ninth one on the right, plunging down the shaft cut through the stone, down rough-cut stairs, the torches flapping in the wind as they raced ever downward.

They began encountering the dead in their carved resting places. Richard paid attention to where he was going, ignoring the hundreds upon hundreds of corpses they hurried past. Chase, though, looked to each side with big eyes. He hadn’t known the catacombs were there, beneath the Keep all this time. For that matter, generations had lived at the Keep without ever being aware of what lay below.

The long, winding, descending journey finally brought them to the arched opening into the precisely cut, square, broad passageway.

“This place is making the hairs at the back of my neck stand on end,” Chase said.

“Me too,” Cassia added.

“I know,” Richard said. “Come on. This way.”

At the end of the broad corridor, Richard stopped before the cloth hanging at the end. On the other side it was painted with wards to keep spirits from crossing.

“What is this place?” Chase asked, looking around at the carefully carved straight walls and precisely cut, flat ceiling, and especially the strange piece of cloth hanging across their way ahead.

Richard turned back to Chase. “It’s called the Sanctuary of Souls.”

“You mean … there are spirits, ghosts, down here?”

“Yes.” Richard gestured to the cloth. “There are these things, these cloth panels, hanging all throughout the maze. Some, like this one, have ancient wards painted on them. Those wards are powerful spell-forms that keep the spirits from crossing. It keeps them on the other side. Yet other cloth panels have spell-forms meant to draw the spirits to this place.”

“Draw them here?” Cassia asked. “Why?”

“Back in the caves in Stroyza, Naja left a message about what happened back in the great war.”

“Who is Naja?” Chase asked.

Richard waved away the question. “A sorceress who lived back in the great war. Not important right now. But the message she left for us is. You see, the half people don’t have souls. Naja says that when the emperor and his makers created the half people, those spirits, once pulled from the victim, were not allowed to go to the spirit world. That was how Sulachan created the half people. If their souls went to the underworld, then their bodies here would die. Instead, their souls were ripped from them, but not allowed to cross over into the underworld.”

Cassia ran her hand down Cara’s Agiel. “What happened to them, then?”

“Naja said that those souls are unable to go through the veil into the underworld, so those lost spirits drift back in this direction and end up haunting this plane of existence, not knowing where to go. Some of them have come to me before, seeking my help, but I didn’t understand at the time.”

Cassia pointed. “So you think some of them might be in there?”

“This is the Sanctuary of Souls. Look at all the trouble the people back in Naja’s time obviously went to in order to create this place. I think that some of the spell-forms draw those spirits here, making it safe for them. I think this maze is a place they can haunt, a place where they can gather and feel safe. A temporary home, of sorts. Once drawn in, the wards keep them from coming out here.”

“Why?” Chase asked.

“Naja says that not all of them who drift back into the world of life are friendly.”

The big man frowned. “Why not?”

“They’d probably be pretty angry about what was done to them, don’t you suppose? Ripped from their body and not allowed to cross over to a place of eternal peace. Forced to wander between worlds, always torn from the Grace, kept out of reach.”

Chase reached back and scratched his neck. “It’s making my skin crawl just thinking about it.”

“Lord Rahl, that still doesn’t answer what we’re doing here.”

Richard gave Cassia a long look. “I am the bringer of death. I’ve been in the world of the dead. I’ve been dead. The dead recognize me as one of them.”

“Well…” she drawled, “all right, but I don’t see–”

Richard yanked down the cloth and handed it to her. “I need you to carry this. Fold the symbols inward. Come on.”

As they hurried into the warren of passageways, Richard kept track of the shepherd symbols up on the walls so that he wouldn’t get lost in the maze. Along the way, he pulled down cloth hangings and draped them over Cassia’s outstretched arm.

As they went farther into the maze of tunnels, he could sense the presence of the spirits gathering around him in great numbers. He could hear their whispered pleas.

When they reached a larger, central hallway, he motioned to Chase and Cassia. “Go back there, to the end, and wait.”

With the shadowy forms passing through the torchlight, they didn’t need to be told twice.

Richard stood at the far end of the hallway, looking down the length of it back toward Chase and Cassia. As he watched, he saw sparkles, like dust caught in sunlight, begin to gather in what looked like rippling sheets. As more and more of them came together, creating swirling shapes that formed and moved together the way great flocks of birds did, he could sense the thousands of spirits present, come to someone they recognized as one of their own, but different.

As they gathered, their great numbers created sheets of light, like the northern lights Richard had often seen in the night sky. It was a beautiful sight, an underground show of the northern lights, except these lights were made from the specks of souls, all gathering together, all moving with the same purpose, the same longing, the same need.

Richard drew his sword.

The sound rang through the halls. It sounded pure, almost divine.

In the torchlight he could see that the blade still had the dark metallic gleam to it, taken on from having touched the world of the dead. It looked more sinister than it had ever looked, and rightly so. It now was cloaked in death.

H

e could feel the power of its magic flooding through him, lifting his own soul with the calling of the storm, touching the death he carried within him.

Richard held the sword out in both hands, then, pointed back up the hallway.

“Come home with me,” Richard whispered out to the constellation of souls twisting together before him in great sheets of sparkling light, looking like they were moving on an otherworldly wind.

As he held the sword out, the sheets of light began twisting, turning, spiraling in on the sword. The dark, gleaming blade seemed to absorb fold after fold of those sheets of glimmering souls, until at last they had all gone as dark as the blade.

Richard slid the sword back in its scabbard.

“Let’s go.”

“Where?” Cassia asked.

“Back to the sliph.”

Chase led the way as they raced back through the halls, then the catacombs with the countless niches filled with the dead, their souls safely in the world of the dead, up flights of stairs, and then up long runs of steps tunneling ever upward. It seemed like they ran for half the night. Richard felt like he lost parts of that run in a dim haze.

The sickness was overwhelming him. It sapped his strength as they ran up flight after flight of steps. It threatened to take his legs from under him. It threatened to take consciousness from him.

When he thought he could go on no longer, he thought of Kahlan and everyone else back at the palace, and what they faced. Hannis Arc and Sulachan were determined to take the palace. They would unleash the unholy half-dead on the living. When they did, everyone there would be slaughtered. But that would be only the beginning of the dying. It would be the beginning of the end for the world of life.

With that terrible thought uppermost in his mind, he ignored his pain and kept running.

When they reached the top, Richard closed the capstone to the catacombs and then dropped onto the bench, panting, trying to gather his strength, finding it hard even to breathe.

“Cassia,” he said without looking up.

She put a worried hand on his shoulder. “Yes, Lord Rahl?”

“This is why I brought you. You have to help me make it back. You have to be my strength.”