The Third Kingdom (36 page)

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.

Richard signaled for Samantha to come out of the trees. He aimed his thumb behind him, indicating that she should stay near the wall and to come up behind the door to join him.

She rushed out of the cover of the trees and quickly made her way through the smaller brush to crouch close behind him.

Not seeing anyone, Richard finally stood up and leaned out around the door for a better look into the third kingdom.

What he saw then both shocked and frightened him.

“What do you see?” she whispered. “What’s wrong? Do you see half people?”

“I don’t see anyone, but we have a problem and you need to know about it right now.”

“What?” Samantha asked. “What is it? What’s the problem?”

Richard turned and squatted down in front of her. “Listen to me. This is important. The third kingdom is what?”

She frowned a little, not sure what he was getting at. “It’s both the world of life and the world of the dead mixed together in the same place at the same time. It’s neither the kingdom of life, or the kingdom of the dead. It’s both, existing together.”

Richard nodded. “That’s right.”

She put a finger on his chest. “But besides being a place, it is also what you are. Life and death together where they shouldn’t be. You are of that place where life and death exist together at the same time.”

“Good,” he said with a single nod. “Beyond the gates is the third kingdom. The world of life and death together in the same place. There are places in there where there is greenish light—”

She frowned as she leaned toward him. “Greenish light?”

“Yes, kind of like … well, have you ever seen the sheets of light in the night in the northern sky?”

“Sure, of course.”

“Like that. It looks something like that, only it’s all a shimmering green light. That’s the boundary layer to the underworld, the world of the dead.”

She frowned suspiciously. Her head darted out to peek around the gate.

“Dear spirits …” She pulled back, her wide eyes staring into his. “Lord Rahl, that’s the same eerie green glow I told you I saw when I tried to heal the Mother Confessor for the first time. Remember? I saw the same thing within you.”

Richard wiped a hand across his mouth before letting out a deep sigh. “That green luminescence is death.”

“I told you so. I saw it in her. That’s when I first told you that she had death in her.”

He nodded reluctantly. “So you did. I remember. But that was in her. This here is out in the open.” Richard pointed a thumb behind him, beyond the gates. “If you walk into it, into that green veil of luminescence, you walk into the world of the dead. Understand?

“It’s the boundary between life and death, just like you described seeing in Kahlan, the place that tried to tempt you in. If you had crossed over when you were in her mind, you would have entered the world of the dead. You would never have come back.

“This here is the same. Beyond that luminescent glow is the world of the dead. If you step over, even a little, you will never come back.”

Her big dark eyes wide, she swallowed. “Then I guess it would be best not to walk through it.”

“Exactly. When we go in there you can’t ever let your guard down. You can’t ever relax. I don’t know the exact properties of how it works here, where the openings into the underworld will be, but in other places I’ve been you sometimes don’t see it until you get really close. The greenish light is kind of like a
warning that you are inches away from death, that you are about to cross over.

“Since you are so close to the underworld, the spirits of the dead beyond sometimes call to you, trying to entice you to cross over to them.”

She nodded. “They did that to me, when I was trying to heal the Mother Confessor and saw that green veil of death. I heard the spirits beyond.”

Richard nodded his understanding. “It seems that we can encounter death in a number of places, in a number of ways. You encountered that boundary to the eternal beyond in Kahlan, and in me. You saw and heard some of what was on the other side.

“In some places I’ve been that green wall will appear as a warning, much the way shields placed by wizards try to warn you with color and light if you start getting too close. In this case, it’s a warning that you are getting close to the boundary.

“In other places I’ve seen, the walls to the world of the dead are static. They stay in the same place, shimmering, so that you can see them from some distance off and know where they are. But here, it seems like those green boundaries into the world of the dead are flickering in and out of existence. That means they aren’t in one place. They move around.”

“That makes sense,” she said. “Life and death in the same place and at the same time, a kind of soup of ingredients mixing together.”

“That’s right, but it also means that this boundary between worlds may be different from what I’ve encountered before, where the lines between life and death were fixed and you could avoid them. Here, from what I saw beyond the gates, those boundaries appear to be fluid, moving like a gossamer carried on a breeze. That’s what’s different here. That’s what makes it so much more dangerous here.

“It means that you may not necessarily need to walk into
that boundary to be lost. In this place, they may drift in and come right over you.”

“That would be bad,” she said in a deadpan, stating the obvious.

Richard nodded. “You have to be extremely alert at all times and respect that danger. If you let your guard down for an instant, you could unintentionally find yourself pulled into the underworld. If that happens, you are never coming back.”

Samantha nodded solemnly. “I understand. Keep my eyes open and be prepared to move out of the way.”

“Right,” he said with a firm nod. He took a quick look around. “We need to get going. But don’t forget what I told you, not for a second. I don’t know exactly what we will have to face in there, but this is already something I didn’t expect. We can’t ever let our guard down.”

“I won’t, Lord Rahl.”

“One other thing.”

“What’s that?”

“If anything happens and we somehow get separated, then getting those people out, my friends and your mother, is the priority. Understand?”

“I understand, Lord Rahl. Find the wizard Zedd and the sorceress Nicci and get them out so that they can heal you of the death inside you so that you can end prophecy and end the threat to the world of life now that the barrier is down.”

Richard would have smiled at how insane that sounded, and at her intensity, but the seriousness of the situation was nothing to smile about.

“Good. Now listen to me, Samantha. You may think I’m the one, but there are other people who are smarter about these kinds of things than me. Zedd knows more than I do about such things. Nicci perhaps more yet. They are both incredibly powerful people with vast experience and knowledge.
Don’t discount the importance of that—they may be able to stop the threat even without me.”

“If they’re so powerful, then how did they get overpowered and caught in the first place?”

Richard let out a sigh at her simple insight. “No matter how powerful you are, that doesn’t mean you can always win. Sometimes, no matter how good you are, things just go wrong.”

Samantha nodded. “What now?”

“Now we go in there and find them. Stay close and stay alert.”

After she agreed, Richard peeked out around the gate. He saw no one out in the jumbled landscape of dark rock and flickers of the phantom luminescence here and there across the sprawling wasteland. In the distance a haze of smoke hung over the forbidding landscape.

As they made their way around the gate, stepping into the broad opening, Richard looked up and saw the great stone arch over the gateway. He remembered seeing it from the viewing port back in Stroyza. Up close, in all its detail, it was more imposing, more frightening, than he remembered.

The arch formed a head with glaring eyes made of some kind of red marble. Two enormous, sharp fangs hung down, as if ready to strike at anyone who tried to enter. It was meant as a warning that crossing through these gates would be like entering the jaws of some monstrous creature. It was a clear statement of the lethality of the place.

It was so obviously threatening that it was almost like a warning not to be stupid enough to enter the place.

Once through the open gates, Samantha pointed. “Lord Rahl, look,” she whispered.

Richard turned and looked up. The insides of the gates had symbols embossed into the surface of the metal plates. When the gates were open, the enormous central emblem was broken in half, but when the gates were closed the symbol would have been whole and united. The element was in the language
of Creation, like what Richard had seen on the omen machine, like Naja Moon’s account back in the cave at Stroyza.