Temple of the Winds

Instead, your vision must open to all there is, never settling, even when cutting. Know your enemy's moves by instinct, not by waiting to see them. To dance with death meant to know the enemy's sword and its speed without waiting to see it. Dancing with death meant being one with the enemy, without looking fixedly, so that you could kill him. Dancing with death meant being committed to killing, committed with your heart and soul. Dancing with death meant that you were the incarnation of death, come to reap the living. Berdine's voice drifted across the rampart. "Lord Rahl?" Richard looked over his shoulder. "What? What's wrong?" Berdine shifted her weight to her other foot. "Well, are you all right? You've been standing there for a long time, staring at the door. Are you all right?"

Richard wiped a hand across his face. "Yes. I'm fine. I was just. . just looking at the things written on the door, that's all."

He turned, and without thinking, slapped his hand to the cold metal plate in the polished gray granite wall. Kahlan had told him it was said that to touch that metal plate was like touching the cold, dead heart of the Keeper himself. The metal plate warmed. The gold door silently swung inward. Dim light came from beyond. Richard took a careful step into the doorway. Like a wick on a lamp being slowly turned up, the dim light coming from inside brightened. He took another step, and the light brightened more.

He scanned the inside as he motioned the two waiting Mord-Sith forward. Whatever magic prevented people from approaching apparently was now withdrawn; Berdine and Raina walked to him without any difficulty. "That wasn't so bad," Raina said. "I didn't feel anything." "So far, so good," Richard said.

Inside, there were glass spheres, about a hand-width in diameter, set atop green marble pedestals against the wall to his left and right. Richard had seen glass spheres similar to these before, down in the lower reaches of the Keep. Like those, these too provided light.

The inside of the First Wizard's enclave was an immense cavern of ornate stonework. Four columns of polished black marble, at least ten feet in diameter, formed a square that supported arches just beyond the outer edges of a central dome dotted by a high ring of windows. Between each pair of columns a wing ran off from the vast central chamber. He noticed that much of the stonework repeated the palm-leaf pattern that adorned the gold capitals atop the black marble columns. The polish of the marble was so high that it reflected images like glass.

Finely worked wrought-iron sconces decorated with the same palm-leaf pattern held candles. Fluidly worked iron formed railings at the edge of the expansive, sunken central floor.

This was not the sinister lair Richard expected. This was a place of grand splendor to match any he had seen. The place was so beautiful that it left him awestricken.

The wing in which the three of them stood, the entry hall, appeared to be by far the smallest of the four wings. Six-foot-tall white marble pedestals marched in a long double row beside the walkway laid with a long red carpet over a gold-flecked dark brown marble floor.

Richard wouldn't have been able to touch fingers were he to put his arms around one of the pedestals. The ribbed, barrel ceiling thirty feet overhead made the fat pedestals look miniscule.

Sitting atop some of the pedestals were objects Richard recognized: ornate knives, gems set in brooches or at the ends of gold-worked chains, a silver chalice, filigree bowls, and delicately worked boxes. Some sat on squares of cloth trimmed with gold or silver embroidery, others on stands carved from buried wood.

Other pedestals held contorted objects that made no sense to him. He would have sworn that they changed shape when he looked at them. He decided it would be best not to look directly at such things of magic, and warned the other two.

The distant wing opposite them, across the central area under the huge dome, ended at a round-topped window that had to be thirty feet tall. Before the window was a huge table piled with a clutter of objects: glass jars, bowls, and coiled tubes; a massive but simple iron candelabrum covered with ages of wax; stacks of scrolls; several human skulls; and a chaos of smaller items Richard couldn't make out from such a distance. The floor all around the table was similarly cluttered, along with things stacked up and leaning against the table.

The wing to the right was dark. Richard felt uncomfortable even looking in that direction. He heeded the warning, and looked to the left. In that wing, he saw books. Thousands of them.

"There," Richard said, as he gestured to the left. "That's what we're here for. Remember what I told you. Don't touch anything." He glanced at them both as they looked about with wide eyes. "I mean it. I don't know how to save you if you get in trouble touching something in here." Both pairs of eyes looked back at him. "We remember," Berdine said.