Terry Goodkind - The Third Kingdom

In some of the passageways off to the sides, Richard saw silent figures standing, as if guarding the passage. They were not Shun-tuk. They were the awakened dead. The corpses, one with a shoulder bone sticking from dried, crumbling, leathery skin, all watched with glowing red eyes.

Richard gave up trying to keep track of how he would ever find his way back out of the place. The entire network of caves was honeycombed with countless openings. He realized that he was hopelessly lost in the underground labyrinth. He wondered if he would ever have to face the problem of finding a way out.

They came to a series of caverns off to the sides that were shut off, some with rough planks that looked to serve as doors, or barriers. Other openings, though, were closed off with sheets of the wavering greenish underworld luminescence.

When Richard saw a figure standing beyond one of those curtains of green, he stopped to look. He could tell that it wasn’t one of the spirits that could be seen back in the world of the dead. This figure didn’t move the same, didn’t writhe and wail. It moved then stood still, like a man would. He knew that it was a person trapped on the other side of the green wall. It occurred to him that the veil of the underworld might be serving as a kind of prison door.

The Mord-Sith jabbed him lightly in the back of the shoulder with her Agiel to keep him moving. He put a hand over his shoulder as he stumbled ahead, comforting the unexpected stab of pain. From ample experience he knew that the pain could have been far worse, had she intended it. This time she had only intended to prod him along.

Not much farther along, Hannis Arc stopped and turned, watching Richard, Vika, and the mass of silent, whitewashed half people coming up around and behind Richard. When Richard came to a halt, Hannis Arc silently gestured to the Mord-Sith.

She understood what he wanted.

“Give me your sword,” she said as she moved around in front of Richard. “You won’t be needing it.”

Handing over his sword was about the last thing in the world he wanted to do, but his options were pretty limited. He could draw the weapon and fight, but there was no way he could hold off the horde of Shun-tuk all around him. His first target, of course, would have been Hannis Arc, but the man had already demonstrated his occult powers, so such an attack would swiftly prove pointless. Lastly, trying to use the weapon against a Mord-Sith was a mistake that he had made once before in his life. He would not make that same mistake again.

Vika lifted her hands out. Richard pulled the baldric off over his head and laid the sheathed sword in her upturned palms.

She looked a bit surprised. “Very good, Lord Rahl. If I didn’t know better, I would think that you had already been trained by a Mord-Sith.”

Without saying anything, Hannis Arc gestured to the half people crowded in close.

One of the Shun-tuk shoved Richard, turning him down a different tunnel to the left side. Once into the opening, Hannis Arc gracefully lifted a hand and a glimmering green veil rose over the opening, trapping Richard behind it.

CHAPTER

62

Richard, feeling naked without his sword, looked around in his sudden solitude, the greenish veil providing light enough to see by. He paced for a time, frustrated, angry, and feeling cornered not only by the shimmering green luminescence confining him in a chamber in the rock, but by the entire situation.

He had hoped that this would lead him to where Zedd, Nicci, Cara, and the others were being held captive. He suspected that he had to be close to them, but locked in such a spot he didn’t know how he would get to them.

It was obvious that Hannis Arc had long been plotting something, and Richard had been completely unaware of the man’s treacherous scheming. Richard didn’t know for sure what the man had planned or what his ultimate goal was, but Richard had some ideas and none of them were good.

He hated the feeling of being too far behind the flow of events, of feeling that he had been trapped before he even realized that anything was going on. Not only had the barrier to the third kingdom, built in Naja Moon’s time back during the ancient war, finally failed, but at the same time Hannis Arc was planning something ominous. It seemed obvious enough that the two events, the barrier failing and Hannis Arc capturing Richard, were connected.

He admonished himself for concentrating so much mental effort on the problem rather than trying to think of a way out of the situation. He was in the dark about Hannis Arc’s plans. He couldn’t know the extent of the problem and it was useless guessing.

At least Samantha had gotten away. That meant the situation wasn’t hopeless. Hannis Arc either didn’t care about her, or he hadn’t yet managed to catch her. Most likely he didn’t consider her a serious threat and so he didn’t concern himself with her. It was Richard he wanted.

Richard knew that he had to think of solutions rather than fret about the problem. He needed to tackle the obstacles one at a time. The immediate solution he needed was to see if there was a way to get out of the prison he found himself in. He had to put his mind to that, first.

Setting aside the swirl of worries and questions, he began exploring the irregular area in which he found himself confined.

There was a wooden bucket of water near a wall, but no food. He soon discovered that there were openings everywhere through the rock. Most of them were small dark holes he could fit no more than a finger or hand into. There were a few other openings barely large enough to possibly squeeze himself through, but they were dark as pitch. Richard suspected they led nowhere, so he would save them as a last resort to try. It would do him no good to try to wriggle through and get stuck. There were larger openings, like the one he had come in through, but they, too, were blocked with the glowing green walls.

Richard was careful to stay clear of that wavering greenish luminescence. He had been uncomfortably close to such boundaries to the underworld before, but he was unsure of the exact properties of the ones in this place. After all, Hannis Arc had commanded them into existence. It was impossible to know if the boundary between life and death behaved differently in the third kingdom, where life and death existed together, or if they behaved like others he had encountered in the past. More importantly, after coming through the gates into the third kingdom, those boundaries were not fixed—they moved. He didn’t want to be too close and have one of these unexpectedly engulf him. All the more reason to keep his distance from the wavering greenish veil.

As he glanced around, the thought occurred to him that the boundary veils blocking him in the prison might start closing in on him in order to pull him into the underworld. That seemed unlikely, though. Hannis Arc could have simply let the Shun-tuk have him if he had wanted Richard dead.

No, Hannis Arc had wanted him alive for some purpose. Maybe the same reason he had taken the others captive rather than kill them. Richard wished he knew what that purpose could be.

Sighing in frustration, he stuffed his hands into his back pockets as he walked around, inspecting every inch of his prison. He saw nothing useful and no way out. It seemed a very secure dungeon.

He hoped that Samantha hadn’t been caught by the Shun-tuk. In the back of his mind he constantly worried about her.

He considered the way he had able to call to her beyond the greenish veil trapping him. He remembered that she could hear him, but could not see him through the greenish veil.

That thought gave him an idea.

He went to one of the passages covered over with a glimmering sheet of the green light.