Confessor: Chainfire Trilogy Part 3

"You mean about the lesson Richard gave us one time about tracks?"

Cara nodded. "He talked about magic being able to hide tracks."

"True enough," Zedd put in. "But Rachel disappeared before Six showed up. If Six were trying to hide her tracks with some sort of magic, what would be the point of hiding her own tracks if she didn't hide Rachel's as well?"

Nicci halted abruptly. She turned back to the opening they had just passed through. A gilded pillar stood to each side of the small portal in the passageway. The pillars held up a stout beam with symbols carved in it.

She frowned at the pillars. "Wasn't there a shield there, before?"

Zedd's dark look told her that she was right. As he started away again they all rushed to catch up. At the end of the hall, he turned down a short passageway to the right that led to a spiral stairway.

Compared with some of the grand staircases in the Keep, the spiral stairs were small, but compared with typical spiral stairs, these were remarkable. They were wide enough for two people to walk side by side in the center of the tread, where its run was comfortable and a proper relation to the rise. The stairwell was so large, though, that the outer end of each wedge of tread would have required a person to take several steps before reaching each leading edge. The stairs also wandered with an odd twist, winding downward in an oblong corkscrew. The whole thing was disorienting and required her to pay attention lest she trip and fall on the unconventional configuration. As they descended she was able at last to see that the stairs were designed so as to make their way around and then under a formation of rock veined with sparkling minerals.

At the bottom of the stairs a short passageway spilled into the familiar split in the mountain that separated the rooms of the containment field from the bedrock of the mountain itself. This was very near the place where the witch woman had caught them unexpectedly. Nicci thought that the halls felt especially quiet after the violation of the witch woman roaming unfettered through them. Knowing as much as she did about shields, she didn't think that such a thing should have been possible. The wizards who had created this place and its defenses would certainly have made provisions to protect against all forms of magic, including that of a witch woman.

"Here," Zedd announced as he came to a halt. "This is where it first appeared."

He gestured up at the precisely fit stone blocks of the wall opposite the raw, carved-out, natural granite wall of the mountain itself.

Nicci looked along the length of the wall and noticed dark stains that didn't look natural. She scanned dozens of feet up along the rise of stone, picking out here and there the same dark patches. It seemed as if something might be weeping out of the stone itself.

"What is it?" She asked.

Zedd swiped a finger through one of the dark places. He held the finger up before her.

"Blood."

Nicci blinked. She stared at the thick, wet, red substance on his finger. She looked back at the wizard's eyes.

"Blood?"

He nodded solemnly. "Blood."

"Real blood?"

"Real blood," he confirmed.

"Blood from some kind of animals?" Nicci remembered all the bats that had fled through these very halls, driven before the witch woman. "Maybe the bats?"

"Human blood," the wizard said.

Nicci was momentarily struck speechless. She looked at Cara.

"Yes, we're sure," the Mord-Sith said in answer to the unspoken question.

"I give up," Nicci finally said. "What is human blood doing oozing out of the stone of this wall?"

"Not just this wall here in this hallway," Zedd said. "It's leaking out of stone in different places all over the Keep. There seems to be no pattern to where it appears."

Nicci looked again at some of the thick drips of blood running down the wall. She didn't want to touch it.

"Well," she finally said, "this certainly qualifies as trouble. I just don't know what kind of trouble." She turned her attention back to Zedd. "Do you have any idea what it means?"

"It means that the Keep itself is bleeding, in a way. It means that it's dying."

Nicci could only blink at what she'd just heard. "Dying?"

Looking grim, Zedd nodded. "That shield back there that you asked about? It has stood in that hallway for thousands of years. Now it's down. There are shields all over the Keep that are failing. The whole fabric of the Keep is in grave trouble.

"Six, as talented as she is, should not have been able to get in here without alarms going off, but they didn't. The alarms have failed. That's why we didn't know she was in the Keep. That's how she snuck up on us.

"If the Keep were well, and even if the alarms for some reason failed or were somehow defeated, the shields would have prevented her not only from moving freely but from getting this far into the interior of the Keep. This is a secure area. She simply should not have been able to get down here, but she was able to find ways around the working shields to go where she wanted.