The Third Kingdom (35 page)

“Come on,” he said to Samantha as he started out again.

He moved more quickly now that he knew for sure that they had finally reached the wall. Samantha had to trot to keep up with his long strides. Even as he put more effort into moving quickly, he still kept a wary eye on the surrounding countryside for any sign of trouble. He didn’t want to be surprised and find himself unexpectedly having to fight off a forest full of half people.

“What are we going to do when we get there?” Samantha asked, breathless from the effort of keeping up with him.

“I’m not exactly sure, yet. First, we have to get through the gates. After that we need to keep heading north until we find the land of the Shun-tuk.”

“Then what?”

Richard frowned back over his shoulder. “Then we rescue our people being held captive there.”

“How are we going to do that?”

Richard carefully danced across rocks to cross a small, slow-moving stream. “I wish I knew. We’ll have to look over the situation once we get there, then we can start to figure out a plan.”

“Maybe I can use magic to help somehow. You know, create a distraction, or something.”

“Or something,” Richard said.

At first animated now that they were close, Samantha fell to silent worry. She finally got around to the heart of her concern.

“Lord Rahl, you know the way Jit held you captive?”

Richard pushed a low pine bough aside, holding it out of the way to let her pass. “You mean the way she had us bound up in all those thorny vines?”

Samantha nodded as she ducked under the bough he held out of her way. “Well, what if they’re doing that to all the people we’re going in there to save?”

Richard’s brow drew together. “I don’t know what you’re getting at. Do you mean what will we do if they have all of them tangled up in thorn vines?”

“Not exactly.” She peeked around her mat of black hair to look over at him. “You know what they were doing to the Mother Confessor? What they were going to do to you?”

It suddenly dawned on him what she was getting at. “Oh. You mean the way they cut Kahlan and were bleeding her.”

“That’s right. You said they were draining her blood and collecting it in bowls and then feeding it to Jit.”

Richard half turned to her as he marched among the towering trees, his mood darkening. “Go on.”

“They were bleeding her, Lord Rahl. They would have done that to you had you not managed to kill Jit and escape. Jit was collecting and drinking the Mother Confessor’s blood, the same as she did with all her victims.”

Richard came to a stop. “What’s your point?”

“Remember what that man back at the brook said before you killed him? He said that he wanted to drink my warm blood. Naja spoke of them drinking every drop of blood, thinking that a soul might be in the blood and trying to escape. See what I mean? They think that the soul inhabits a living person and that it can escape. So, they drink people’s blood, hoping that they will capture the soul as it tries to escape.”

“So you’re wondering if the Shun-tuk, unlike the other half people you killed back in the forest, have evolved even more to think of blood as the ‘lifeblood’ of a person, that it’s the stuff of a person’s soul, and maybe they want captives in order to bleed them in an attempt to drain out the soul and drink it in themselves.”

Samantha shrugged her small shoulders. “I don’t know. Maybe. After all, Jit was from the third kingdom, so maybe what she was doing to the Mother Confessor tells us something about what the people there are like and how they think. That
man seemed to feel that same way, even if the ones I killed back in the woods were more wild about wanting to eat us.”

Richard hadn’t thought of it that way. “I suppose it’s possible.”

“My mother said that she should have realized that Jit being in the swamp was a sign that she was one of the first to have escaped from behind the north wall. She said that she should have recognized it as one of the first indications that the north wall was failing.

“What if Jit is also a good indication of the way these half people think and what they do? What if the Shun-tuk wanted captives to keep for their blood, like we keep animals for their milk. What if they have those people imprisoned in order to drain them of their blood, thinking that fresh, warm blood is the way for them to gain their soul.”

“That does make some sense,” Richard said with a sigh, “but then why would they seem to be more interested in taking the gifted captive?”

Samantha didn’t have a ready answer.

“Unless they think the blood of the gifted has some special quality,” Richard said, following along with her line of reasoning. “Of course, they might have a more sinister reason for wanting to take the gifted captive.”

“A more sinister reason? Like what?”

Richard considered it in brooding silence as he made his way past branches and boughs on his way toward the gray light out ahead. “I don’t know. It could be something more complex. The main thing, though, is that the exact reason is really a secondary consideration. What really matters the most right now is the solution, not the problem. If the Shun-tuk do have them, and if our people are alive, we have to get them out of there. That’s what matters.”

Almost as soon as he said it, the forest began to grow lighter.
In a few dozen more steps they emerged from the oppressive greenery on the edge of a small ridge that provided an opening in the forest, allowing them an expansive view.

They were face-to-face with an immense, towering wall.

Richard put his arm out, stopping Samantha from stepping too far out of the woods into the open, where he feared they might be spotted. She stood beside him, silently gazing at the sight.

From the edge of the slight ridge they had a good view through the opening in the trees. The were looking down somewhat on a wall that rose up from the forest floor, up well past the tallest trees, so that they had to turn their heads up to see the top. The wall made the towering old-growth trees look like they were nothing more than saplings.

“From seeing it through the portal, I always knew it was big,” Samantha said, “but I still never realized that it was this big. Until you’re standing here in front of it, you don’t really know its true size.”

Richard understood what she meant. Sometimes, when the scale of something was so far out of the ordinary, or so far outside your frame of reference, so much larger than anything you’d ever seen before, and viewed from so far away, it was hard to comprehend its true size. Up close, such monumental sights often seemed even more incomprehensible.

The stone wall seemed impossibly high, even to Richard, and he had seen a number of spectacular sights, both natural
and man-made. It made him a bit dizzy just looking at the size of the soaring stone face of the wall.

The wall stretched left and right to where it ended in the distance against enormous cliffs soaring upward as high as any mountains he had ever seen. High up, past broken clouds, he could see patches of snow lying on the steep rises. Another layer of clouds higher up, above the ragged shreds of clouds drifting by lower down, obscured the tops of the mountains so that he wasn’t even seeing the mountain peaks and thus their full height.

The wall standing before them was constructed of stones of different sizes and shapes, all fit precisely together like a complex puzzle. All the edges looked to be in solid contact with every part of each block locked in around them. He didn’t see any spot where so much as a piece of paper could have been pushed between the tightly fit blocks of stone. The wall appeared to have been constructed without mortar, with the exacting fit and enormous weight locking it all tightly together. It was as perfectly built a wall as Richard had ever seen. He had seen a number of spectacular man-made structures, but this one was remarkable in its singular simplicity and sheer scale.

Down the slope, off to the right, Richard could see the opening in the wall where the gates stood. There was a structure over the opening for the gates that he remembered seeing from the viewing port.

He didn’t see anyone anywhere. There were no people down in the area in front of the wall, no one watching from atop the wall, and no one coming and going through the open gates. It seemed odd to him that after thousands of years of the wall standing as an impenetrable barrier, now that the gates were open the area around them would be so deserted.

He wondered for a brief moment if all the half people from the third kingdom had already poured out of those gates to
go south into the world of life, seeking souls they believed were there for the taking. He didn’t know what their motives would be—to stay near their homes, or now that they were free to go on a rampage out into the world, to gorge themselves on flesh and blood.

For a time, Richard stood silently watching as he felt the cool speckles of mist on his face. He checked all along the top of the wall, trying to see if there was anyone watching them, if any guards looked out from time to time. It was impossible to tell for sure, of course, but he didn’t see anyone. He didn’t know if they might have some kind of small openings for looking out. Although, what would be the purpose? The wall was there to keep them in, not for defense.

He thought that it could be that all those who wanted to leave had already left, and those who didn’t had stayed back to the north, where they had lived for millennia. It was also possible that they only left at certain times, hunted, and then returned to the safety of their kingdom, like bats that emerged at nightfall to feed on blood.

What he wondered most, though, was how he and Samantha were going to get in without being spotted out in the open. There was certainly no hope of scaling the wall. The outside of it looked to be too smooth for them to get a handhold or foothold anywhere. Of course, closer up he might find that there were small handholds in between the stones, but he doubted it. More importantly, even if they could scale the wall they would be exposed and out in the open for a long time and could easily be picked off with arrows. Possible or not, Richard discounted the practicality of climbing the wall.

The mountains to either side looked even more formidable. Mountains offered better opportunities for climbing than the smooth wall looked to provide, but still, the cliffs appeared incredibly difficult if not impossible for him and Samantha to
scale, especially in the wet. Besides, the cliffs, too, would leave them out in the open and exposed for far too long.

Richard knew, too, that Naja’s people would not have put the barrier here if there was an easy way over or around the mountains. Certainly the barrier spells would be the primary means to keep the threat contained, but like the wall, the mountains also presented a formidable barrier once the spells began to weaken. Climbing those mountains was no more a realistic option than climbing the wall.

Besides, the reason he was looking for a way in without having to go through the gates was to stay out of the open so they wouldn’t be spotted. Scaling either the walls or the cliffs wouldn’t get them in without being seen.

Surprise was their greatest weapon. He didn’t want to give it up without a very good reason.

He wished he had a dragon handy to fly them in over the imposing wall filling the gap between the mountains, but it had been a very long time since he had seen a dragon.

That left the gates as the only realistic way into the third kingdom.

As Richard stood gazing at the enormity of the wall, he realized that what he was actually seeing was the physical manifestation of how much the people back in Naja’s time feared what was beyond that wall. That was not a comforting thought. He knew that there was no choice, so he deliberately pushed the thought aside and went back to thinking of solutions.

“Let’s make our way down closer to the gates,” he said in a quiet voice so that his voice wouldn’t carry. “We need to get a better look.”

“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.