Richard had seen a number of magnificent places since leaving his home of Hartland. This was up near the top in the sheer splendor of the complex yet graceful architecture. He had never seen cold stone looking so warm in its intricate stateliness. The whole place made him feel small and inadequate. He supposed that was really the purpose and the point of it all. Those who entered should be humbled before the master of this domain.
Richard and those with him, all standing in a close cluster, stared around at the ornate stonework of the arches and the dome. It was achingly beautiful, but at the same time it was a clear statement that they were in the place of powers not to be trifled with.
In the center of the circular design in the floor, under the dome, the mountain lion sat on its haunches, watching them, its tail slowly sweeping back and forth across the floor.
When the mountain lion was sure that they had all looked around enough, it stood. As they all watched, it turned and started walking away, deeper into the palace, clearly expecting them to follow.
20
Richard watched as the mountain lion casually walked off into the distance. “We’re supposed to follow it.”
“Why do you think that?” Berdine asked.
He gave her a look. “Because it was sent to fetch us.”
Berdine’s nose wrinkled up. “How do you know that?”
“Because I’ve seen it before at another important moment, and I don’t believe it was a coincidence.”
Vika turned a troubled look toward Richard. “So then you think it’s the same mountain lion we saw up on the mountain when we found the mother’s breath?”
“Of course it’s the same one. When we found the mother’s breath, it left to tell its master.”
“And so you think its master lives here?” Berdine asked.
Richard gave her the same look again, as if to say it was a silly question. “Why else would a mountain lion be walking around inside this palace?”
“Oh,” she said, “I guess I see your point.”
“Odd choice for a house pet,” Shale said.
“It wouldn’t be the strangest one I’ve seen,” Richard muttered under his breath as he started out after the mountain lion. “Come on. We don’t want to lose sight of it.”
Shale leaned in. “But—”
“Hurry,” Kahlan said as she put a hand to the small of Shale’s back to get her moving.
The mountain lion led them across the broad, circular design in the floor under the towering dome. The animal stopped before a vestibule of sorts in the distance. Curved staircases on either side surrounded it on the way to an upper level with rooms beyond and to either side.
The mountain lion looked back for a moment to be sure they were following, then ambled onward. That vestibule, with more of the greenish-gray columns to either side, stood before a broad passageway that wasn’t as wide as the antechambers off to the sides of the domed area had been. This seemed to Richard more like it was an entrance into a central hall of some sort leading on into the interior. The significance of the central hall was evident from its elaborate architecture.
The same fluted columns of greenish-gray stone lined the long room. A great many ornate metal candlestands held what had to be hundreds of candles that not only lit the way ahead with soft light but lent a pleasant scent to the place.
To the sides, between pairs of fluted columns, inside stone frames, there were large square panels of incredibly beautiful red marble with swirls of green, gold, and black veins running through them. Each one of those massive red granite slabs seemed to glow in the soft candlelight.
It occurred to Richard that the swirly red marble panels reminded him of a floor covered with blood that had been cut out and then hung up for display. He paid closer attention to the red slabs as he passed by them, scrutinizing them to make sure they weren’t actually patterns of blood. Even though he stared closely at each one, he still wasn’t sure.
Farther down into the dark end of the magnificent but somber passageway, the pairs of columns were set closer together. Rather than the red marble that was displayed between the previous columns, between each of these there were faces, again carved in the greenish-gray stone. They were similar to the statues Richard had seen before, except these were only life-size busts. Each one leaned out, making it seem they were trying desperately to come right out of the wall.
All of the grim faces stretching out from either side were distorted in agony, or longing, or terror. Some of them reminded Richard of the carvings of tortured souls he had seen in the Old World. Like those statues he had seen there, he had seen the real thing in the underworld.
Other faces looked like they might be human, but if they were meant to be human, they were ghastly examples of torment and torture. The others, the ones that weren’t human, Richard couldn’t even guess at, but they, too, had horrified expressions, with mouths opened wide as if they had been frozen in mid-scream. The farther they went into the ever-darkening passageway, the more grotesque and distorted the faces became, with flesh carved to look like it was torn open so that the bones and teeth beneath the ripped cheeks were visible.
The wide hallway was enough to sap the courage of anyone who got this far, but it didn’t dim his determination. If anything, it reinforced his resolve to stop the person responsible for depictions of such horrors, but more importantly those responsible for what they were doing to Kahlan.
Shale looked from one side to the other, staring for a moment at each one of the faces looking like they were trying to push themselves out of the walls to escape.
“Why would anyone carve such awful things?”
Richard glanced back at her. “Well, I like to look at beauty, but there are people who choose instead to look at ugliness. That alone tells you a lot about them, don’t you think?”
Shale looked from Richard back to the busts. She shook her head in disgust. “I fear to think what this tells us about the people who live here.”
At the end of the long passageway, farther away from the light of the high windows and lit only by candles, Richard realized that the hallway didn’t simply get dark, it actually ended in a dark opening, but not the kind of opening that went with the rest of the place. It was a hole crudely chiseled into the stone of the mountain the palace had been built into.
It looked like nothing so much as the rough opening into a mine. Or the underworld.
Unlike everything else he had seen in the palace that was ornate and highly detailed, this was merely a roughly round opening cut into the rock with crude tools used for excavation. The mountain lion vanished into that dark maw. He saw the tail flick up briefly, and then it was gone down into the darkness.
When they got close enough, they could see that there was a bit of flickering light inside from somewhere far down below. As Richard paused at the opening to try to see where the mountain lion had gone, he saw then that there were steps leading down.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Shale said. “We’re walking right into the heart of this trap.”
Richard turned back to her. “And how do you instead propose we free ourselves of that trap unless we face it and put an end to it?”
Shale’s features twisted unhappily. “I don’t know, but I don’t like it. There are remnants of a spell of some sort lingering here.”
Richard frowned at her. “What kind of spell? Can you tell?”
Shale shook her head. “It’s just a trace of something, but I can’t tell what.” She sniffed the air. She frowned. “I can sense them, but I can’t tell what sort of spells they might be. Whatever it is, it’s interfering with my sense of smell.”