"This isn't a trick, is it?" Raina asked. "You tricked us one other time to keep us out, to keep us from going where there was danger. Mord-Sith are not afraid of danger."

The wind lifted his gold cloak. "No, Raina, it's not a trick. This is important, but I don't want either of you risking your lives needlessly. If I can open the door, then I promise to take you both with me. Satisfied?"

Both women nodded. Richard gave them each an appreciative squeeze on the shoulder. He absently adjusted the metal bands on his wrists as he gazed at the towering bastion waiting at the end of the rampart.

A cold wind buffeted him as he started across. He could feel the pressure of the shield, like the weight of water when you swam toward the bottom of a pond. The fine hairs at the back of his neck stiffened as he progressed. The pressure made it difficult but not impossible to draw a breath, as Kahlan had said she had experienced.

Six immense columns of variegated red stone stood to each side of the gold-clad door, holding up a protruding entablature of dark stone. The architrave was decorated with brass plaques. As Richard approached it, he recognized some of their symbols as the same ones on his wristbands, belt, and boot pins. The frieze held round metal disks with other of the more circular symbols. The more linear of symbols he wore were also carved into the stone of the cornice.

Seeing the symbols he recognized reassured him, even though he didn't know their meaning. He wore these things by obligation, duty, and right-he was born to them, that much he knew. Why, he didn't know. Even if he wished it could be otherwise, it wasn't; he was a war wizard.

Distracted by the uncomfortable pressure and tingling of the shields, he reached the door almost before he realized it. The door was at least twelve feet tall, and a good four feet wide, gold-clad and embellished in the same symbolic motifs.

Embossed in the center was the more prominent of the symbols he wore: two rough triangles, with a sinuous double line running around and through them. Richard rested his left hand on the hilt of his sword as he fingered the symbol with his other hand, tracing its oval, undulating outer margin.

With the act of touching it, tracing it, following its pattern, he understood. The spirits who had used the Sword of Truth before him passed their knowledge on to him as he used the sword, but they didn't always convey that knowledge in words; in the heat of combat there wasn't always time. Sometimes it came to him in images, symbols: these symbols. This one on the door, like the ones on his wristbands, was a kind of dance used for fighting when outnumbered. It conveyed a sense of the movements of the dance, movements without form. The dance with death.

It made sense. He wore the outfit of a war wizard. Richard had learned from Kolo's journal that in Kolo's time the First Wizard, named Baraccus, had also been a war wizard, as was Richard. These symbols had meaning to a war wizard. Much as a tailor painted shears on his window, or a tavern sign had a mug on it, or a blacksmith nailed up horseshoes, or a weapons maker displayed knives, these symbols were signs of his craft: bringing death.

Richard realized that his fear had vanished. He stood in the Wizard's Keep, which had always before set his nerves on edge and worse, stood now before the most restricted and protected place in the Keep, yet he felt calm. He touched a starburst symbol on the door. This symbol was an admonition. Keep your vision all-inclusive, never allowing it to lock on any one thing. That was the meaning of the starburst symbol: look everywhere at once, see nothing to the exclusion of all else-don't allow the enemy to direct your vision, or you will see what he wishes you to see. He will then come at you as you become bewildered, looking for his attack, and you will lose.

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.