Terry Goodkind - The Third Kingdom

CHAPTER

50

“And what if there are people down there, near the gates? What if there are guards standing watch?”

“I can’t imagine there would be guards,” Richard said. “After all, the barrier was built to keep the half people in, not to keep us out. Why would anyone want to go in there? They’d be slaughtered.

“The half people obviously want out so they can hunt souls. So why would they have guards?”

Samantha shrugged. “I don’t know. But what if there are homes or buildings right inside, a village or town of some kind, and the half people there would—”

“Samantha,” he said in a quiet voice, cutting her off to get her to stop talking. “Let’s not invent problems. We have enough real ones to solve. Let’s first take a look and see what we’re facing, then we can decide what we need to do. All right?

“Keep in mind, too, that this wall was not built to be a fortress wall. In many ways, as enormous as it is, it’s only symbolic. The real barrier was the gravity spells and the barrier spells keeping evil on the other side. Those spells are what kept the half people and the walking dead behind the wall for thousands of years.

“If that weren’t so, then over all this great expanse of time they could have cut through the wall, or dismantled it, or tunneled under it, or something, wouldn’t you think? If someone can put something together, then someone else can always find a way to take it apart. Especially given enough time and motivation. The half people had both.

“That means it’s the spells that matter, not the stone or the gates. The spells are the barrier, not the wall. Those spells are what would be of concern to anyone inside, not the stone or the gates. That works in our favor.”

“How?”

“Because it likely means they don’t care about the gates. Why would they? The gates wouldn’t hold any real significance to them except as a passage for them to get out into the world of life.”

Richard started making his way down the slope, staying in among the denser growth of trees and using the shadows and foliage for cover as best he could. Since he now knew precisely where he was going, he could cut through the dense woods to remain hidden in case anyone was watching.

The forest was strangely quiet. He was used to being in the woods and, night or day, there being signs of life and activity, but these ancient stands of trees seemed forlorn and empty. He had no way of knowing if that was out of the ordinary. Animals could sense things that humans couldn’t, so it was possible that such powerful magic had discouraged animals from living in the area near the wall.

Either that, or something else, some threat, had frightened them into silence. That was the possibility that worried him and kept him on high alert.

As he moved downhill, ever closer to the gates, he stopped periodically to peer out from behind the cover of the trees, checking for anyone. He still saw no one, no movement of any kind. The world felt so eerily empty outside the wall that in a way he wished he would see someone.

As they moved steadily down the slope, down lower toward the level of the ground outside the gates, the wall soaring up above them seemed even more impressive. To Richard, the enormity of the wall seemed a tangible representation of how much people in ancient times feared what was on the other side.

Richard paused. Something out of the corner of his eye caught his attention. He thought he saw lightning, or some kind of light, flicker from beyond the gates, but as soon as he focused his attention toward the gates, it was gone.

He carefully scanned the area around them before starting out again. He wished he could climb a tree to have a look over the wall to see what danger might lie beyond, but the trees, despite how huge they were, didn’t begin to reach the top of the wall. The only thing he could do was to keep moving toward the gates so that he could look in.

Coming down the hill, he began to see that there was no road, clearing, or even a path outside the open gates. That made sense, of course. No one had gone in or out of it for thousands of years.

He could see, though, that the bushes, small trees, ferns, and grasses in that area had been trampled by heavy foot traffic, most likely from all the half people leaving. The ones who had attacked him and Samantha had probably come this way not long ago. There were also the men who had attacked him and Kahlan at the wagon. There might have been a lot of others like them who had come out through the gates.

And then there were the Shun-tuk who had attacked Zedd, Cara, and the others. Those Shun-tuk had obviously come out through the gates. From all indications, though, it looked like they probably took their captives back to their own land.

Richard wished he could remember better what he had heard as he woke up.

He had no way of knowing what other nations or groups of people might be living in the third kingdom beyond the wall, living in a land where life and death existed together. There could be vast numbers of half people of all sorts, just as in all the various lands of the world of life.

As they finally reached the ground down by the gates, Richard led them closer to the wall, but stayed in the shadow of the woods where possible as they worked their way closer. The gates opened out, so that also helped provide some cover.

“Stay there, behind the trees, while I get a closer look,” he whispered to Samantha.

She nodded and quickly moved back into the shadows of young maples and spruce growing in an area of windfall pine that had opened the forest canopy.

The gates themselves were impossibly tall. They were considerably taller than the tallest pines in the surrounding forest. As he got closer, he thought that they looked more like movable walls than real gates. He supposed that made sense. They weren’t designed, after all, to open and close regularly. It was most likely that the gates had been closed only after the wall had been completed. Once closed, they were meant to stay closed.

As he came up into the deep shadow behind the nearest of the great gates, he saw that they were sheathed in squares of some kind of metal that had not rusted, although it did have the patina of great age. He reached out and put a hand against the metal. It was cool to the touch.

Signaling Samantha to stay where she was in behind the trees, Richard hiked his bow up on his shoulder, got down on the ground, and carefully crawled on his belly to the edge of the great door to have a look beyond. The edge of the door was several feet thick. It put him in mind of what an ant must feel like when around buildings.

As he peeked around the edge, he saw an open, rather barren landscape with broken, rocky terrain. The uneven ground was dotted here and there with a few scrub trees. There was no great forest like that outside the gates.

What alarmed him the most, though, was what he saw next.

In the distance, in various places, he saw flickering greenish light.

He had seen that specific kind of green light before. It was the same kind he had seen when he had first met Kahlan and they had crossed the boundary between Westland and the Midlands.

He had encountered the underworld a number of times since then. The veil before the world of the dead was always an eerie green color, an opaque green curtain of light.

That eerie green light was a boundary layer to the underworld itself.

When he inched out beyond the edge of the great gates to get a better view, he didn’t see anyone inside the gates. It was a dark, barren landscape dominated by towering rock jutting up from the ground like spikes pounded up through the surface from below. But that was not the worst of it. It looked all the more forbidding because of the specter of greenish light flickering here and there among those rock towers.