Richard didn’t like to think how easy it would be for someone gifted in such a way to create trouble. “But to get back out, would he be able do that from beyond four locked doors? Could he somehow make the guards come back to unlock all the doors so he could get out? And wouldn’t they get suspicious when they were unlocking the doors so often over nothing?”
Shale looked back at the third door Richard had just locked as she considered. “I’m not sure, but there’s an even simpler explanation.”
“Like what?” Kahlan asked.
“He could have used a concealment spell so the guards wouldn’t see him and then simply taken a set of spare keys, like the ones you borrowed.”
Richard grunted unhappily. “You’re right. That certainly would be easier. Then, all he would have to do is cast a concealment web to go unnoticed as he came and went?”
Shale nodded. “That’s the idea.”
Richard unlocked the locks on each side of the final door and then started spinning the wheel in the center. As he did, it drew the heavy bolts back from the iron doorframe set into massive stone blocks to each side.
“It certainly looks like the builders went to a lot of trouble to make sure no one got in here,” Kahlan said.
Richard pulled on the door. “Unfortunately, they didn’t take witch men into account.” The door was so heavy that he had to tug on it several times to start it moving. Once it did start, it slowly glided open on silent hinges.
With the door standing wide open, they all stood and stared in amazement at what lay beyond.
16
There before them, beyond a wide space that stretched off for quite a distance until it vanished into darkness on each side, stood a tall wall made up of huge blocks of age-darkened stone. As with the sides, the light failed to reach far enough up for them to see the full height, but from remembering the plans, Richard thought it rose possibly three stories high. The width of it was far greater.
It almost appeared as if they were standing before a massive castle, as imposing as any Richard had ever seen, as if it had already been there for eons when the House of Rahl came along, and then it had been left in place and the palace built around it. He knew, of course, that wasn’t the case, but that was the impression it left him with.
In the center of the wall was a great doorway surrounded by a series of stepped stone arches jutting out from the face of the wall. Each of those stone arches, some carved to look like rope, some with repeated designs, was layered on top of a broader one behind. The mass of those intricate, layered arches was so thick they stood out several feet from the wall. The stacked arches surrounding the wooden wall with the door had to be a couple of stories tall.
A wall of age-darkened oak with large, hammered iron studs laid out in a grid pattern was set back far enough in the deep opening of the enormous arches that it almost made it look like a vestibule. Iron straps crisscrossed over the face of the heavy oak door in the center of that wall. Iron studs pinned where each of the straps crossed connected them solidly together. The strap-hinges looked large enough to easily to hold up the weight of the door. There were no locks in the door; there was simply a big iron ring in the center, held out in the hooked beak of a cast bronze eagle head, presumably used to pull open the door.
“Why do you suppose there would be such an elaborate and imposing entryway beyond the four locked doors?” Kahlan asked. “After all, who is going to see it?”
Richard shook his head as he studied the wall and the entryway, looking for anything suspicious. “I can’t imagine.” His brow twitched. “Unless it’s to pay homage to the spell.”
“You have to be kidding,” Shale said.
Richard merely flashed her a brief smile.
They all shared looks before Richard finally ascended three monolithic slabs making up the stone steps to get up to the door. He hesitated, wiping his palms on his pants before using both hands to grip the big iron ring held in the eagle’s beak. The door glided open, almost willingly, to reveal just the beginning of a dark corridor beyond.
“Are you sure about this, Lord Rahl?” Rikka asked.
Rather than answer, Richard walked through the doorway and into the dark corridor. As glass spheres to each side began to glow, he could see that it was a vast passageway that stretched off into darkness in a gentle curve to the right. He was pretty sure he knew which curved element it was from the spell-form of the complication. Grimy-looking stone walls rose up high to each side. Ornate crown moldings at the edge of the ceiling appeared to be carved from stone as well.
The corners of the ceiling and even joints in the stone of the walls had layers of dirty cobwebs that waved slightly as the air moved when they walked in.
The floor was covered with of a variety of darker marble tiles in a spiraled gridwork pattern. Big squares holding stone mosaics were set into frames of large marble tiles. The designs of the floor swept off into the distance, elaborate, yet dimmed over time by dust and dirt. The gloomy stone making up the walls appeared to be just as grimy from many centuries of accumulated dust. The walls and the floor were so dark they seemed to suck up the light. All the grout lines in the marble floor were packed with millennia of dirt that helped to darken the whole floor.
Michec might have been a warlock who could cast concealment spells, but as far as Richard knew, he couldn’t fly, so he had left footprints in the dusty floor just like any mortal. A pathway through the dirt and dust told Richard that the man had probably been hiding down in section M111-B for some time, since his coming and going had nearly cleared the grimy dirt away down the center of the broad passageway.
Richard spotted smaller footprints near the side, as if a lost woman had kept a hand on the wall for guidance as she walked haltingly on her way farther in to answer a calling from the complication spell. The light spheres wouldn’t work unless you were gifted, so unless she carried a lamp, she would have been blind in the total darkness, driven on by a compulsion she didn’t understand.
From the well-worn path through the dust, Richard couldn’t help but wonder how many times Michec had gone up into the palace proper and what he done on those occasions. He did know that one of those times he had captured Vika.
As Richard moved farther into the corridor, everyone followed silently. Richard held a hand back, touching Kahlan to make sure she stayed close. Nearby glass spheres in iron brackets all the way down the corridor began to glow when they got close enough, making it seem almost as if they were alive, the light welcoming and escorting them in, but the somber stone passageway was so murky that the glass spheres didn’t do much to illuminate anything beyond their immediate area.
Before long, as the corridor curved off into the distance, they encountered rooms randomly placed to each side. At each room, since they had no light spheres, Richard took one of the plentiful spheres from a bracket in the hall and carried it with him. The rooms were various sizes, dark, and all were empty. They were elaborately trimmed with complex molding, some with patterned stone paneling, but there was no furniture.
“Why in the world are there rooms in here?” Shale asked, sounding annoyed by the uncanny uselessness of the rooms.
“They’re actually representations of nodules in the complication,” Richard told her. “If you were to draw this spell-form in the dirt with a stick, these would be little tick marks you would make along the main, sweeping line of the spell. Their number and spacing has meaning to the complication. But since the spell-form is so big, it appears that rooms serve that purpose.”