Kahlan gave the sorceress a look. “Like deciding that to save the world he must end prophecy. Does that sound normal to you?”
Shale made a face. “No. I’ve never seen him do anything I would call crazy, but now that you mention it, that most definitely would have sounded crazy to me.” She shook her head. “I have to say, it still does.”
“Well,” Kahlan said, gesturing at the locked doors, “now you have seen him do something else that seems a bit crazy.”
Shale conceded with a sigh.
17
Kahlan glanced over at Vika, a ways down the corridor. The Mord-Sith had backed the girl’s mother off quite a distance. The woman was wringing her hands in worry, peeking around Vika from time to time, trying to see what was happening with her daughter. Kahlan worried about that, too.
A few dozen men of the First File stood guard farther down to each direction of the corridor, well beyond the sitting area outside the library. The upper level of the palace was generally quite elegant. Most of it was calming and hushed. All the decorations and beautiful art contributed to that sense of tranquility. It seemed rather odd to her, considering the types of men who had been the Lord Rahl throughout history. In recent centuries, they had been a long string of tyrants, and the world was never calm and tranquil under their rule.
The one thing that didn’t fit with all the tasteful areas of the upper corridor was the orange-striped chairs in the sitting area outside this particular library. They were terribly uncomfortable to lean back in and were so ugly that Kahlan didn’t really like to sit on them.
“Why do you think they would have put chairs like this in such a beautiful corridor?” she said out loud to no one in particular.
Shale frowned at the question and then looked around at the chairs. “What’s wrong with them?”
“What’s wrong with them? They’re grotesque.”
Kahlan’s feet hurt from standing, so, as much as she didn’t like the chairs, she sat down again on the very front edge of one.
Berdine patted a hand in a familiar manner on the back of one of the chairs. “Richard’s father, Darken Rahl, never liked coming up here because he didn’t like these chairs, either.”
Kahlan stared openly at the Mord-Sith. “Then why in the world didn’t he order them changed? He routinely ordered the execution of countless innocent people. He delighted in throwing people from different lands into slavery and indentured servitude. He ruined lives across D’Hara and then the Midlands without a second thought. He ruled with an iron fist.
“So why, if he didn’t like these chairs, wouldn’t he order them removed, burned, and replaced with something else?”
Berdine raised her eyebrows, as if it were a silly question. “Because they have to be here.” The way she said it made it sound obvious.
Kahlan pressed the middle finger and thumb of one hand to opposite temples in an effort to calm herself. She had a headache from thinking about the helpless terror of all those poor, innocent people who had been slaughtered down in the lower reaches of the palace. The tension of this new threat was getting to her. She knew that her pregnancy had something to do with it. She was in a constant state of worry for the two babies growing inside her.
She took a deep breath before asking, “Why do these chairs have to be here?”
“Because they have ugly magic.”
“What?” Kahlan made a face at the woman. “Ugly magic? These chairs have ugly magic? What in the world kind of magic is ugly magic?”
“Well,” she said, gesturing to the closed doors, “that room is dangerous. It’s a repository, a containment field, for very dangerous spells. Darken Rahl rarely went in there himself. I’m pretty sure he was afraid of that room, although he never admitted as much.”
“What does that have to do with these ugly chairs?”
Berdine shrugged. “There are inviting places everywhere.” She gestured back down the corridor one way and then the other. “There are many comfortable, beautiful places outside other libraries to sit. You can sit and relax almost anywhere you like up on this level.”
“Well then,” Kahlan said with exaggerated patience, “who would want to sit here in these uncomfortable, ugly, orange-striped chairs?”
Berdine smiled. “Exactly.”
Shale blinked. “You mean, these chairs are—”
“You mean, they’re meant to discourage people from lingering here in front of that dangerous room,” Kahlan said, suddenly understanding.
Berdine nodded with a smile that Kahlan finally caught on. “One time,” she confided in both Kahlan and Shale, looking back and forth between them as if revealing a secret, “Darken Rahl said that a person would have to be crazy to use the room with the orange-striped chairs.”
“Crazy …” Kahlan glanced to the double doors. “Crazy, like Richard.”
Berdine confirmed it with a single nod of satisfaction. “You see? Ugly magic.”
Kahlan stood to gesture toward the doors. “Does Richard know that this room is dangerous?”
Berdine snorted a laugh. “Are you kidding? Of course he knows. Back when Lord Rahl—your Lord Rahl, not Darken Rahl, not that Lord Rahl—asked me to help him do research on things he desperately needed to find out, he asked me to go to all the libraries throughout the palace to search the reference works referring to specific things he needed.”
Kahlan frowned. “So?”
Berdine leaned in again, lowering her voice as if someone might overhear, even though there was no one other than Shale and Kahlan within earshot.
“So, when Lord Rahl asked me to search the reference books in all the libraries, he told me, ‘Except the one with the orange-striped chairs. I don’t want you going in that room—not for any reason. I will search that library myself.’ That’s how I know that he knew the place is dangerous. Of course, I knew it was dangerous before, because of Darken Rahl.”
Just then an onslaught of piercing shrieks erupted. Along with everyone else, Kahlan looked toward the doors. It sounded like the shrieks of demons.
Then came a collective howl so horrifying that it made Kahlan flinch in fright. The horrible screech from beyond the doors echoed through the corridor. Everyone—the soldiers, the Mord-Sith, Shale, and Kahlan—all turned to gape at the library. The sound made the hair on Kahlan’s arms and neck stand on end.
18
The hundreds of bloodcurdling shrieks joined into one collective howl that felt as if it tore the very fibers of Kahlan’s nerves. Her heart pounded out of control in her chest. She knew that the slaughtered people down below had heard those same shrieks as they were being ripped apart. She knew because she had heard one of those horrifying shrieks when she had been attacked, one claw pierced into her side to hold her while the other claw ripped down through the muscles of her arm.
The wail of it made her freshly healed claw wounds throb in sudden pain. Kahlan covered her ears, trying to shut out the horrifying sound. Tears sprang to her eyes from the bone-tingling terror for her husband beyond those doors.
Then, the whole palace shook with a sudden jolt that nearly took them all from their feet.
The powerful shock that rocked the palace made Shale gasp. The Mord-Sith spread their feet and went into a crouch to keep their balance. Kahlan grabbed one of the high-backed orange-striped chairs for support. Some of the others fell over.
She saw the doors to the library shudder in their frame, but they held, and not even the glass broke from the violent jolt that had come from inside that room. It was, after all, a containment field, so she would have expected the doors to hold. That brutal jolt to the palace brought an abrupt end to the needful, murderous howls.