Temple of the Winds

Their guide, a middle-aged man named Andy Millett, was waiting with the horses. He wore simple wool clothes of browns and greens, much like Richard used to wear. His shaggy brown hair hung past his ears. Andy was immensely proud that Lord Rahl had asked him to guide them to Mount Kymermosst. Richard felt a bit sheepish about that; Andy was simply the first person Richard found who knew where it was.

"Andy, I'd like to go up to the ruins on top."

Andy handed Richard the reins to the big roan. "Sure enough. Lord Rahl. There's not much up there, but I'd be glad to show you, just the same."

Big as his two guards were, they mounted lightly, their horses hardly moving under the sudden weight. Richard swung up into the saddle and wiggled his right boot into the stirrup.

"Can we get up there before dark? Most of that spring snowstorm is melted. The trail should be open."

Andy glanced at the sun, which was just about touching a mountain. "With the way you ride. Lord Rahl, I'd say long before. Usually, important people slow me down. I think I'm the one slowing you down."

Richard smiled. He remembered the same thing himself. The more important the person he guided, the slower they went, it seemed.

The sky was streaked with golds and reds by the time they reached the ruins. The surrounding mountains were cast in deep shadow. The ruins seemed to glow in the honeyed light.

There were some once elegant structures, now crumbling, that looked to have been a part of a larger place, just as Kahlan had said. Here and there on the barren mountaintop, parts of walls still stood, their stones not covered by vine and wood, as they would have been down below, but covered with a rust of lichens instead. Richard dismounted and handed his reins to Lieutenant Crawford. The building to the left of the broad road was large by any standards Richard had grown up with, but compared to castles and palaces he had seen since, it was an insignificant structure.

The doorway stood empty. Crumbling evidence of a doorfrarne remained, still partly covered with gold leaf. Inside, the walls echoed with his footsteps. A stone bench sat in one room of the roofless building. In another room a stone fountain held snowmelt.

A twisting hall with most of its barrel ceiling still in place led Richard past a warren of rooms. The hall split, leading, he surmised, to rooms at either corner of the building. He followed the left branch to the room at the end.

Like all the rooms on this side, it faced the cliff. Hollow rectangles gaped where windows once shielded the room from wind and rain. Beyond, through the openings, was a view past the edge of the cliff to the blue haze of the mountains beyond.

This was the place where visitors and supplicants to the temple would have awaited admittance. During their wait, they would have had a glorious view of the Temple of the Winds. If they were turned away, they left with at least that much. He could almost see what those who had stood in this very spot had seen.

It was his gift. he knew, that was telling him this, much the way the spirits of those who once held the Sword of Truth guided him when he used that magic.

As he stood staring, he could almost imagine it there, just beyond the edge, a place of grandeur and might. This was where the wizards had taken things of powerful magic for safekeeping. The wizards of old, some of them Richard's ancestors, had probably stood where he stood, looking out at the Temple of the Winds.

Richard strolled around outside in the fading light, past the stately columns, peering into guard huts and once magnificent garden structures, touching the deteriorating walls. Even though it all was now crumbling, it was easy for him to imagine the majestic scene it must once have been.

He stood in the center of the broad road that ran through the crumbling ruins, feeling his gold cloak billowing out behind in the wind, trying to visualize the place as it had been, trying to get the feel of it. The road, more than the buildings, gave him the eerie feeling of the presence of the temple beyond. This road had once led right into the Temple of the Winds.

He strode the wide roadway, imagining striding toward the Temple of the Winds, the winds that had said they were hunting him. He passed along part of a wall, and between the hollow stone buildings, feeling the timeless quality of the place, feeling the life that once was here.

But where had it gone? How was he to find it? Where else could he look? It had been here, and even now, Richard could almost see it, feel it, sense it, as if his gift were pulling him onward, pulling him home. Abruptly, he was jerked to a halt.

Ulic on one side of him, and Egan on the other, had seized him under his arms and pulled him back. He looked down, and saw that another step would have taken him out into thin air. Vultures soared in the updraft not twenty feet straight in front of him.