Jillian stepped between them. "Leave her be!"

Sister Ulicia straightened with a glower. "How dare you interfere. I'll wring your scrawny neck."

"I think we ought to skin her alive," Sister Armina said, "and leave her bleeding corpse out there for the vultures."

Sister Ulicia snatched Jillian's collar. "Get out of the way so I can teach this lazy ox a lesson."

"Leave her be," Jillian repeated, refusing to back down.

"Let's just cut the little brat's throat and be done with her," Sister Cecilia complained. "We don't have time for this. We can find Tovi on our own, now."

Knowing that she had to pacify the Sisters before they carried out their threats to harm the girl, Kahlan finally managed to regain her feet. She immediately took Jillian's arm and pulled her back out of harm's way.

"I'm sorry — it's my fault," Kahlan said. "We can go now."

Kahlan half turned to start out, but she didn't take a step. She knew better than to do so without permission. Sister Ulicia didn't move. She had murder in her eyes.

"Not until she sees you get the kind of lesson we've owed you for quite a while now," she said. "You're getting far too used to being treated lightly at your every transgression."

"You will leave Kahlan be," Jillian said from halfway behind Kahlan, trying not to be pushed any farther into the background.

Sister Ulicia planted her fists on her hips. "Or what?"

"Or I'll not show you where Tovi is."

"You foolish child," Sister Ulicia growled. "We already know where Tovi is. She's in here. You've already led us to her."

Jillian slowly shook her head. "There are miles of passageways down there. You'll get yourselves lost among the bones. You leave Kahlan be or I'll not show you the way."

"I can sense Tovi," Sister Cecilia said with a dismissive sigh. "Cut the girl's throat. We're close enough that I can find Tovi, now, with my gift alone."

"I, too, can sense her," Sister Armina said.

"Sensing that she is near," Jillian said, "doesn't mean that you will be able to find the correct passageway to get to her. Down there, down with the bones, you may be only a short distance from her but if you take one wrong turn among many you must make, you will go for miles and never reach her. People have gone down there and died because they couldn't find their way back out."

Sister Ulicia clasped her hands, considering, as she peered down her nose at the girl.

"We don't have time for this right now," she finally announced. "Get going," she told Jillian. She turned a meaningful look on the other two Sisters. "Soon enough we will even this score — along with others."

She turned back with a menacing expression that widened Jillian's eyes. "You get us to Tovi or she's liable to get impatient and start breaking your grandfather's bones… one at a time."

Jillian's face registered sudden alarm. She immediately led them into a labyrinth of passages and rooms through the back of the building. There were places where the passageways were open to the moonlight. In other places it was cramped and black as death. The Sisters lit small flames that hovered above their palms so that they could see. Jillian looked startled to learn that the women could do such a thing.

They emerged from the building into another graveyard. Without slowing, Jillian led them through the place of the dead, among hillocks covered with gnarled olive trees and rows of graves mottled with wild-flowers. She finally brought them to a halt above a gravestone standing on its side beside a black hole in the ground.

"Down this rat hole?" Sister Armina asked.

"If you want to get to Tovi." Jillian grabbed a lantern from beside the cover stone and, after a Sister lit it, started down.

They all funneled into the narrow stairway, following Jillian down. The ancient stone steps were irregular, with their leading edges rounded over and worn smooth. For Kahlan, with all the weight she was carrying on her back, the descent was treacherous. The sisters held out wavering flames to help them see. At landings they all turned with the stairs and continued ever deeper into the realm of graves.

When they finally reached the bottom the passage opened into wider corridors that were carved from the solid but soft rock of the ground itself. All around were niches carved in the rock walls. Kahlan noticed that all those recesses held bones.

"Watch your heads," Jillian said over her shoulder as she went through one of the doorways to the side.

They all ducked as they went through after her and into a room with a ceiling just as low as the doorway. At intersections Jillian took turns without any hesitation, as if she were following a trail painted on the floor. Kahlan noticed that there were a few footprints in the dust, but she also saw footprints going off down many of the different corridors. The prints were bigger than would have been made by the girl's small feet.

The cramped corridor finally opened into larger chambers. They passed through seemingly endless rooms stacked with orderly piles of bones. Other, narrow rooms were lined with niches stacked full of bones, as if they had begun to run out of places to put all the dead.

There was a series of several rooms filled only with skulls. Kahlan estimated that there had to be thousands of them. They had all been carefully fitted together into large niches, each skull facing out. Each niche was filled right up to the top. Kahlan gazed at all the hollow eyes staring back at her, watching her pass. She reminded herself that these things had once been people. They all had once been alive. Each had once been a living, breathing, thinking individual. They had once lived lives filled with fears and longings. It reminded her of how precious and brief life was, how important it was because once it was gone, for that person it was gone for good. It reminded her yet again of why she wanted her life back.

With Jillian, Kahlan felt that she now had a link back to the world, to who she was. When Jillian saw and remembered her, Kahlan felt just a little more alive, as if she really was somebody, and her life had meaning.

They passed through rooms with leg bones stacked in their own niches, arm bones in yet others. Long stone bins carved at the base of the side walls lined some of the rooms. These bins held smaller bones, all laid in neatly.

Separating the bones of skeletons in such a way seemed to Kahlan a strange thing to do. She thought that, surely, it would be more respectful of the dead to leave the bones of the deceased together. It was possible, she supposed, that they didn't have the luxury of space, since stacking them this way did save a great deal of space. Maybe it was simply too much work to carve a niche for just one body, or one family, when there were so many dead to bury. Maybe there had been a great sickness that claimed a large portion of the population and they couldn't be burdened with such niceties.

The city within the walls looked pretty cramped. Space must have been at a premium. If the people, and their dead, were to remain within the walls of the city, the living would have had to make concessions.

It seemed an odd problem, since the land around the city stretched empty from horizon to the horizon. She wondered if it could have been a time of war, when sentimental considerations for the dead had to be abandoned in favor of the needs of the living. The headland did seem the most defensible place around. While parts of the walls were at the edge of the sheer bluffs, they could always have enlarged the city farther back on the headland. She supposed that it could be that expanding such massive city walls was considered too difficult.

She wondered if it could be, too, that the people who had once lived here simply didn't have the same sentiment for the dead that other peoples did. After all, what real significance was there in bones? The life was gone from them. The individual they once had been was no more. It was life, after all, that really mattered. Their world had ended with their death.