"Terry Goodkind - Sword Of Truth 10 - Phantom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goodkind Terry)

Cara shot him a dark look. "You just thought we would go search through a place with thousands
upon thousands of rooms, a place as big as a mountain, a place built partly into a mountain, until
you happen across something?"
"There's something wrong with the air. I'm just following that perception of it."

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"You're following air," Cara said in a flat, mocking tone. Her suspicion flared again. "You aren't
trying to use magic, are you?"
"Cara, you know as well as anyone that I don't know how to use my gift. I couldn't call upon
magic if I wanted to."
And he most certainly didn't want to.
If he were to call upon his gift the beast would be better able to find him. Cara, ever protective,
was worried that he would carelessly do something to call the beast that had been conjured at the
orders of Emperor Jagang.
Richard turned his attention back to the problem at hand and tried to discern what it was about
the air that seemed so strange to him. He put his mind to analyzing precisely what it was that he
sensed. He thought that it felt something like the air during a thunderstorm. It had that edgy,
spooky quality.
At the bottom, several flights down the white marble stairs, they emerged in a simple corridor
made of stone blocks. They followed the corridor straight through several intersections and came
to a halt as Richard stared down a dark spiral of stone steps with an iron railing. Cara followed as
he finally started down. At the bottom they passed through a short passage with a barrel ceiling of
oak planks before coming out into a room that was the center of a hub of halls. The round room
had speckled, gray granite pillars all around the outside holding gilded lintels above each passage
that went off into darkness.
Richard held out the lantern, squinting as he tried to see into the dark passages. He didn't
recognize the round room, but he did recognize that they were in a part of the Keep that was
somehow different52;different in a way that made him understand what Cara meant when she
said the place made her skin crawl. One of the corridors, unlike the others, led at a rather steep
angle down a long ramp, apparently toward some of the deeper areas of the Keep. He wondered
why there would be a ramp, rather than yet more of the endless variety of stairs.
"This way," he told Cara as he led her down the ramp and into the darkness.
The ramp seemed endless in its descent. Finally, though, it emptied into a grand hall that, while
not more than a dozen feet wide, had to be seventy feet high. Richard felt like an ant at the
bottom of a long, narrow slit deep in the ground. To the left side rose a natural rock wall that had
been chiseled right out of the mountain itself while tightly fit, enormous stone blocks formed the
wall on the right. They passed a series of rooms in the block wall as they made their way onward
in what seemed an endless split through the mountain. As they moved steadily ahead, the
lanternlight was not strong enough to reveal any end in sight.
Richard suddenly realized what it was that he sensed. The air felt the way it occasionally felt in
the immediate area around certain people he knew who were powerful with the gift. He
remembered the way the air itself seemed to crackle around his former teachers, Sisters Cecilia,
Armina, Merissa, and especially Nicci. He remembered times when it seemed as if the air around
Nicci might ignite, so great was the singular power radiating from her. But that sensation had
always been in close proximity to the individual; it had never been a pervasive phenomenon.
Even before he saw the light coming from one of the rooms in the distance, he felt the air coming