Confessor: Chainfire Trilogy Part 3

Verna was already thumbing through her journey book. As she had expected, it was completely blank. "There is no message." She tucked the small book back behind her belt. "I'll try your suggestion, though, and write Ann a message. Perhaps she will look in her journey book and reply."

With a flourish of his cape, Nathan once again started away. "Before we go off to look elsewhere I want to check the tomb again."

"Post a guard up here," Cara called back to the soldiers. "The rest of you come with us."

Already some distance off down the hall, Nathan turned down a stairway. The rest of them all followed behind, their footsteps echoing as they hurried to catch up. Nathan, Cara, Adie, Verna, and the soldiers bringing up the rear all descended down to the next level.

The walls of the lower level were stone block, rather than marble. In places they were stained by centuries of water seeping through. The seepage left behind yellowish formations that made the stone look as if it were melting.

They soon enough arrived at stone that really had melted.

Nathan came to a halt before the opening to Panis Rahl's tomb. The tall prophet, his face grim and drawn, stared past melted stone into the tomb. It was the fourth time he had returned to look into the tomb and this time it looked no different than on previous visits.

Verna was worried about the man. While he was worried and wanted to find answers, there was a kind of rage simmering just below the surface. She had never seen him like this before. The only person she could think of who had same quality of quiet, bottled fury that could make her heart race was Richard. Such focused anger had to be, she thought, a Rahl quality.

Whatever doors had once guarded the crypt had been replaced with a kind of white stone intended to seal the large tomb. It appeared to have been hastily constructed, but it hadn't succeeded in halting the strange conditions overcoming Panis Rahl's tomb.

Inside, fifty-seven cold torches rested in ornate gold brackets. Nathan cast out a hand, using magic to light several of them. As they burst into flame the walls of the crypt came alive with flickering light that reflected off the polished pink granite of the vaulted room. Beneath each of the torches was a vase meant to hold flowers. By the fifty-seven torches and vases, Verna guessed that Panis Rahl must have been fifty-seven when he died.

A short pillar in the center of the cavernous room supported the coffin itself, making it look as if it floated above the floor of white marble. The gold-enshrouded coffin glowed softly in the wavering, warm light of the four torches. The way the walls were covered in polished crystalline granite that ran up and completely across the vaulting, Verna imagined that when all the torches around the room were lit the coffin must glow in golden glory as it floated all by itself in the center of the room.

Words carved in the ancient language of High D'Haran covered the sides of the coffin. Cut into the granite beneath the torches and gold vases. an endless ribbon of words in the same nearly forgotten language ringed the room. The deeply incised letters shimmered in the torchlight, almost making them look as if they were lit from within.

Whatever was causing the white stone that had once blocked the entrance to the tomb to melt was beginning to affect the room itself, although not to the same extent. Verna suspected that the white stone used to wall over the entrance was a stopgap, a sacrificial substance deliberately selected to draw and absorb the invisible force responsible for the trouble. Now that the white stone was almost all melted away those forces were beginning to attack the tomb itself.

The stone slabs of the walls and floor hadn't melted or cracked, but they were just beginning to distort, as if they were being subjected to great neat or pressure. Verna could see that the joints between the ceiling and walls out in the hall were splitting open under the pressure of the deformation from within the room itself. Whatever was causing such an event, it was obvious that" it was not a construction defect, but rather some kind of external force.

Nicci had said that she wanted to see the tomb because she thought she knew why it was melting. Unfortunately, she hadn't revealed the nature of her suspicion. There was no sign that she and Ann had visited the tomb.

Verna was impatient to find both women so that the whole mystery could be solved. She couldn't imagine what the trouble with the tomb of Richard's grandfather could be, or how much worse it would get, but she didn't think it would turn out to be anything good. Nor did she think that there was much time left to answer the riddle-any part of it.

"Lord Rahl," a voice called.

They all turned back. A messenger came to a halt not far away. All the messengers wore white robes trimmed around the neck and down the front with a design of intertwined purple vines.

"What is it?" Nathan asked.