Temple of the Winds

This was the place where she and Richard had fought the mriswith queen. Her stinking, broken eggs still littered the rock. Small bits of the door blasted from Kolo's room still floated in the pool, providing islands for fat bugs that hissed at the intrusion.

Across the water, on the opposite side of the round tower room, was the opening to Kolo's room.

Kahlan quickly made her way around the walkway to the wide platform outside Kolo's room. The doorway had been blown open, leaving blackened, jagged edges. In some places the stone itself was melted like candle wax. The tower wall outside the doorway was streaked with blackened lines of soot from the unleashed power that had opened Kolo's room for the first time in millennia.

When Richard had destroyed the Towers of Perdition, it had destroyed the magic seal on this room, too. The towers had sealed the Old World away from the New in the great war three thousand years before. They had also sealed the room with the sliph, and sealed in the man who had been unfortunate enough to be the one guarding her at the time.

Stone fragments crunched under her feet as Kahlan stepped into the room where Kolo had died, the room where dwelled the sliph. The silence was oppressive. It droned in her ears. making her welcome the relief of her footsteps.

Richard had awakened the sliph after thousands of years. The sliph had taken Richard to the Old World, and had brought him and Kahlan safely back to Aydindril. When they returned, Richard had put the sliph back to sleep. All the years Kahlan had spent in the Keep, and she had never known the sliph was there.

Kahlan couldn't even imagine the magic the wizards of old could use to conjure a being such as the sliph, or how they could have put her to sleep for all that time. so that she could wake again. Only at the fringes of her imagination could she conceive of the power Richard wielded, but didn't comprehend.

What would the war wizards of old, who knew their gift well, have been able to do with such unfathomable magic? What terrors would a war among those with that kind of power have been like? The very thought gave her shivers.

It would have been things like the plague that had been set upon them, now. They could do those kinds of things.

The lamplight fell across Kolo's bones beside the chair. The pen and inkwell still sat on the dusty table. The round room, nearly sixty feet across, was capped with a high-domed ceiling, itself nearly as tall as the room was wide.

In the center was a round stone wall, like a well, twenty-five or thirty feet across. There dwelled the sliph. Kahlan held the light over the wall of the well, and glanced briefly down the smooth stone walls of the dark shaft that fell away seemingly forever.

The walls of the room were scorched in ragged lines as if lightning had gone wild in the place-another result of the same magic Richard had invoked when he destroyed the towers and when the doorway had been blasted open. Kahlan strode quickly around the room, checking to see if there was anything that might be useful. There was nothing in the room, other than the table, chair, and Kolo, except for a dusty set of shelves.

Kahlan was disappointed to find that there were no books on the shelves. There were three faded blue, glazed, lidded containers, probably once holding water or soup for the wizard on duty guarding the sliph. A white, glazed bowl held a silver spoon. A neatly folded cloth, or embroidery of some sort, sat on one of the shelves. When she touched it, it disintegrated into dust and little flakes where her fingers contacted it.

Kahlan bent lower, seeing that the bottom shelf held only a few spare candles and a lamp.

An abrupt sensation of icy alarm inundated her. She was being watched.

She froze, holding her breath, telling herself that it was just her imagination. The fine hairs at the back of her neck stiffened. She felt a cold wave of gooseflesh run up her arms.

She strained to hear a telling sound. Her toes cringed inside her boots. She feared to move. Carefully, quietly, she let her lungs draw a needed breath.

Slowly, ever so slowly, so as not to make a sound, she straightened a little. She dared not move her feet lest the stone chips crunch.

Courage, as thin as eggshells, urged her to hide behind the wall of the sliph's well. From there, she could determine if it was only her imagination spooking her. Perhaps it was just a rat.

She twisted to check the distance to the stone wall. Kahlan sucked a cry as she flinched back.

CHAPTER 36

The quicksilver face of the sliph had risen above the edge of the stone wall and was watching her.

The glossy metallic female features of the sliph reflected the lamplight and the room in a living mirror. It was obvious why Kolo called the sliph "she." The sliph was a silver statue. Except it moved with liquid grace.