Naked Empire

He had carved stone, and he knew what had gone into this. It was not what he would call fine work, but it was powerfully executed. Just looking at it gave him goose bumps.

"At least it doesn't look like you," Kahlan said.

At least there was that.

But this thing being there all alone for what very well might have been thousands of years was worrisome.

"What I'd like to know," Richard said to her, "is why this second beacon was down there, down the hill, in that cave, and not up here."

Kahlan shared a telling look with him. "If Jennsen hadn't done what she did, you would never have found it."

Richard walked around the base of the statue, searching-for what he didn't know. Almost as soon as he started looking, he saw, on the front of the base, on the top of one of the decorative moldings, an odd void in the snow. It looked as if something had been sitting there and had then been taken away. It was a track, of sorts, a telltale.

Richard thought the barren spot looked familiar. He pulled the warning beacon from his pack and checked the shape of the bottom. His thought confirmed, he placed the figure of himself in the void in the snow collected on the rim of the base. It was a perfect fit.

The little figure had been here, with this statue.

"How do you think it came to be down in the cave?" Cara asked in a suspicious voice.

"Maybe it fell," Jennsen offered. "It's pretty windy up here. Maybe the wind blew it off and it tumbled down the hill."

"And just managed to roll through the woods without being stopped by a tree, and then, neat as can be," Richard said, "roll right into the small opening of the cave, and then just happened to come to be stuck in the rock right near where you, by coincidence, ended up stuck. Stuck, I might add, in a terrifying place you aren't terrified of."

Jennsen blinked in wonder. "When you put it like that. ."

Standing at the crown of the pass, in front of the statue right where the warning beacon would have rested, and now again rested, Richard could see that the spot held a commanding view of the approach to Bandakar. The mountains blocking off the view to either side were as formidable as anything he'd ever seen. The rise where the sentinel sat overlooked the approach into the pass back between those towering, snowcapped peaks. As high as they were, they were still only at the foothills of those mountains.

The statue was not looking ahead, as might be expected of a guardian, but rather, its unflinching gaze was fixed a little to the right. Richard thought that was a bit odd. He wondered if maybe it was meant to show this sentinel keeping a vigilant eye on everything, on every potential threat.

Standing as he was, directly in front of the statue's base, in front of where the warning beacon sat, Richard looked to the right, in the direction the man in the statue was looking.

He could see the approach of the pass up through the mountains. Farther out, in the distance, he could see vast forests to the west, and beyond that, the low, barren mountains they had crossed.

And, he could see a gap in those mountains.

The eyes of the man in the statue were resolutely fixed upon what Richard now saw.

"Dear spirits," he whispered.

"What is it?" Kahlan asked. "What do you see?"

"The Pillars of Creation."

CHAPTER 35

Kahlan, standing beside Richard, squinted into the distance. From the base of the statue they had a commanding view of the approaches from the west. It seemed as if she could see half a world away. But she couldn't see what he saw.

"I can't see the Pillars of Creation," she said.

Richard leaned close, having her sight down his arm where he pointed.

"There. That darker depression in the expanse of flat ground."

Richard's eyes were better at seeing distant things than were hers. It was all rather hazy-looking, being so far away.

"You can recognize where it lies by the landmarks, there"-he pointed off to the right, and then a little to the left-"and there. Those darker mountains in the distance that are a little higher than the rest have a unique shape. They serve as good reference points so you can find things."

"Now that you point them out, I can see the land where we traveled from. I recognize those mountains."

It seemed amazing, looking back on where they'd been, how high they were. She could see, spread out into the distance, the vast wasteland beyond the barren mountain range and, even if she couldn't make out the details of the dreadful place, she could see the darker depression in the valley. That depression she knew to be the Pillars of Creation.

"Owen," Richard asked, "how far is this pass from your men-the men who were hiding with you in the hills?"

Owen looked baffled by the question. "But Lord Rahl, I have never been up this portion of the pass before. I have never seen this statue. I have never been anywhere close to here before. It would be impossible for me to tell such a thing."