"Good idea." Kahlan looked up at Tom. "Let's get going-find a place to stop for the night."
Tom nodded as he threw off the brake. At his urging, the horses heaved their weight against the names and the wagon lurched ahead.
Betty, puling softly, lay beside an unconscious Richard and put her head down on his shoulder. Jennsen stroked Betty's head.
Kahlan saw tears running down Jennsen's cheeks. "I'm sorry about Rusty."
Betty's head came up. She let out a pitiful bleat.
Jennsen nodded. "Richard will be all right," she said, her voice choked with tears as she took Kahlan's hand. "I know he will."
Zedd thought he heard something.
The spoonful of stew he was about to put into his waiting mouth paused.
He remained motionless, listening.
The Keep often had sounded alive to him, as if it were breathing. Once in a while it even sounded as if it were letting out a small sigh. Ever since he was a boy, Zedd had, on occasion, heard loud snaps that he never could trace. He suspected such sounds were most likely the massive stone blocks moving just a tad, popping as they yielded ground against a neighbor.
There were stone blocks down in the foundations of the Keep that were the size of small palaces.
Once, when Zedd was no more than ten or twelve, a loud crack had rung through the entire Keep as if the place had been struck with a giant hammer.
He ran out of the library, where he'd been studying, to see other people coming out of rooms all up and down the hall, looking about, whispering their worries to one another. Zedd's father had later told him that it was found to be nothing more than one of the huge foundation blocks cracking suddenly, and while it posed no structural problem, the abrupt snap of such an enormous piece of granite had been heard throughout the Keep. Although such occurrences were rare, it was not the last time he heard such a harmless, but frightening, sound in the Keep.
And then there were the animals. Bats flew unrestricted through parts of the Keep. There were towers that soared to dizzying heights, some empty inside but for stone stairs curving up around the inside of the outer wall on their way up to a small room at the top, or an observation deck. In the dusty streamers of sunlight penetrating the dark interiors of those towers there could be seen myriad bugs flitting about. The bats loved the towers.
Rats, too, lived in parts of the Keep. They scurried and squeaked, sometimes causing a fright. Mice were common in places, making noise scratching and gnawing at things. And then there were the cats, offspring of former mousers and pets, but now all wild, that lived off the rats and the mice. The cats also hunted the birds that flew in and out of uncovered openings to feed on bugs, or to build nests up in high recesses.
There were sometimes awful sounds when a bat, a mouse, a bird, or even a cat went somewhere they weren't permitted. The shields were meant to keep people away from dangerous or restricted areas, but they were also placed to prevent unauthorized access to many of the items stored and preserved in the Keep. The shields guarded against life; they made no distinction between human and nonhuman life.
Otherwise, after all, a pet dog that innocently wandered into a restricted area could theoretically retrieve a dangerous talisman and proudly take it to a child master who could be put in peril by it. Those who placed the shields were aware that it was also possible for unscrupulous people to train animals to go to restricted areas, snatch whatever they might be able to carry, and bring it to them. Not knowing what animal might potentially be trained for such a task, the shields were made to ward all life. If a bat flew into the wrong shield, it was incinerated.
There were shields in the Keep that even Zedd could not get through because they required both sides of the gift and he had only the Additive.
Some of the shields took the form of a barrier of magic that physically prevented passage in some way, either by restricting movement or by inducing a sensation so unpleasant that one wouldn't force oneself beyond. Those shields were meant to prevent ungifted people or children from entering certain areas, not to prevent entrance to the gifted, so it was not necessary for those shields to kill.
But such shields only worked for those who were ungifted.
In other places, entrance was strictly forbidden to anyone but those with not only the appropriate ability, but proper authority. Without both the appropriate ability and authority granted by spells keyed to the particular defenses in that area, such as metal plates that had to be touched by an authorized wizard, the shields killed whatever entered them.
The shields killed animals as infallibly, as effectively, as they would kill any intruder.
