Chainfire (Sword of Truth 9)

Victor nodded, his anger flagging, misery now filling his voice. “We have to bury them.”

“No,” Nicci said with grim authority. “As much as I understand your want to care for them, your friends are no longer here, among these pieces of wrecked bodies. Your friends are now with the good spirits. It is up to us not to join them.”

Victor’s anger resurfaced. “But we must—”

“No,” Nicci snapped. “Look around. This was a blood frenzy. We don’t want to get caught in it. We can’t help these men. We need to get out of here.”

Before Victor could argue, Richard leaned close to the sorceress. “What do you know about this?”

“I told you before, Richard, that we needed to talk. But this is not the time or place to do it.”

“I agree,” Cara growled. “We need to get away from here.”

Looking from the remains of Ferran back to the bloody mess beneath the maple, Richard suddenly felt a sense of overwhelming loneliness. He wanted Kahlan so bad it hurt. He wanted her comfort. He wanted her safe. The agony of not knowing if she was alive and well was unbearable.

“Cara is right.” Nicci urgently gripped Richard’s arm. “We don’t know enough about what we’re up against, but whatever did all this, I fear that as weak as you are your sword can’t protect us from it—and right now, neither can I. If it’s still in these woods, now is not the time to confront it. Justice and vengeance need us to see them done. To do that, we must be alive.”

With the back of a hand, Victor wiped tears of grief and anger from his cheek. “I hate to admit it, but I think Nicci’s right.”

“Whatever was looking for you, Lord Rahl,” Cara said. “I don’t want you here if it should happen to return.”

Richard noted the way Cara, in her red leather, no longer seemed out of place in the woods. She blended right in with all the blood.

Still not ready to abandon the search for whatever had killed these men, and with a dark sense of alarm rising within him, Richard frowned at the Mord-Sith. “What makes you think it was after me?”

“I told you,” Nicci said through gritted teeth, answering in Cara’s stead, “now is not the time and this is not the place to talk about it. There is nothing we can hope to accomplish here. These men are beyond our help.”

Beyond help. Was Kahlan beyond help as well? He couldn’t allow himself to believe that.

He looked north. Richard didn’t know where to search for her. Just because the rock that had been kicked out of its resting place had been found to the north of their camp didn’t mean that whoever took Kahlan went that way. They might have simply gone north, trying to avoid contact with Victor and his men and with the soldiers guarding the supply convoy. They might have only been trying to avoid being spotted until they got out of the immediate area. After that, they could have gone anywhere.

But where?

Richard knew that he needed help.

He tried to think of who could help him with something like this. Who would believe him? Zedd might believe him, but Richard didn’t think his grandfather could offer the specific kind of help he needed in this circumstance. It was awfully far to go if it ended up that Zedd’s abilities didn’t fit this particular kind of problem.

Who would be willing to help him, and might know something?

Richard turned suddenly to Victor. “Where can I get horses? I need horses. Where’s the closest place?”

Victor was taken off guard by the question. He let the heavy mace hang and with his other hand wiped rainwater back off his forehead as he considered the question. His brow bunched back up.

“Altur’Rang would probably be the closest place,” he said after a moment’s thought.

Richard slid his sword back into its sheath. “Let’s go. We need to hurry.”

Pleased with the decision to leave, Cara gave him a helpful shove in the direction of Altur’Rang. Suspicion lurked in Nicci’s eyes, but she was so relieved to have him start away from the site of so much death that she didn’t ask why he wanted horses.

Weariness forgotten, the four of them hurried away from men beyond any help. As heartsick as they felt about leaving, each of them understood that it would be too dangerous to stay to try to bury these men. A burial of the dead was not worth the risk to their lives.

With his sword put away, the anger extinguished. In its place welled up the crushing pain of grief for the dead. The forest seemed to weep with them.

Worse yet was the dread of wondering what could have happened to Kahlan. If she was in the hands of this evil…

Think of the solution, Richard reminded himself.

If he was to find her, he would need help. To get help, he needed horses. That was the immediate problem at hand. They still had half a day of daylight. He intended not to waste a moment of it.

Richard led them away through the tangled woods at an exhausting pace. No one complained.

Chapter 7

In the deepening gloom of approaching nightfall, Richard and Cara used thin, wiry pine tree roots they’d pulled up from the spongy ground to lash together the trunks of small trees. Victor and Nicci foraged the understory along the base of the heavily forested slope, cutting and collecting balsam boughs. As Richard held the logs together, Cara tied off the ropelike root. Richard cut the excess for use elsewhere and slipped the knife back into its sheath at his belt. Once he had the log framework securely in place against an overhang of rock, he started stacking the balsam boughs along the bottom. Cara tied random branches on from inside to keep them all in place for the night as Richard continued layering more up the poles. Victor and Nicci dragged armfuls of boughs close to keep him supplied as he worked.

The area under the overhanging roof of rock was dry enough, it just wasn’t large enough. The lean-to would expand the shelter so as to provide a snug place to sleep. Without a fire it wouldn’t be especially warm, but at least it would be dry.

Throughout the day, the drizzle had turned to a slow, steady rain. While they had been on the move they had been warm enough because of their exertion, but now that they had to stop for the night, the inexorable embrace of the cold had begun. Even in chilly weather that wasn’t truly cold, being wet sapped a person of their necessary warmth and thus their strength. Richard knew that, over time, constant exposure to even mildly chilly wet weather could steal enough vital heat from the body to severely debilitate and sometimes even kill a person.

With as little sleep as he knew Nicci and Cara had gotten over the previous three days, and in his own weakened condition, Richard recognized that they needed a dry, warm place to get some rest or they would all be in trouble. He couldn’t allow anything to slow him down.

For the whole of the afternoon and evening they had set a steady, rapid pace on their march toward Altur’Rang. After the brutal slaughter of the men, the four of them hadn’t been particularly hungry, but they knew that they had to eat if they were to have the strength for the journey, so they nibbled on dried meats and travel biscuits as they made their way through the trackless wilderness.

Richard was so exhausted he could hardly stand. Both to cut the distance and

to avoid being spotted by anyone, he had guided the others through dense forest, most of it tough going and all of it well off any trails. It had been a grueling day’s travel. His head ached. His back ached. His legs ached. If they started early and kept up the strenuous pace, though, they might be able to reach Altur’Rang in one more day’s travel. After they got horses, the going would be easier as well as swifter.

He wished he didn’t need to go so far, but he didn’t know what else to do. He couldn’t spend forever searching the vast forests all around, on the off chance he would find another rock that had been disturbed so that he then might have an idea of which direction Kahlan had gone. He might never find another such rock, and even if he did, there was no reason to believe that if he kept going in that direction he would find Kahlan. Whoever took her might change direction without ever again disturbing a rock in a way that he would find it.

Their regular tracks were gone. Richard knew no way to track someone when magic had made their tracks vanish. Nicci’s gift wasn’t able to help. Wandering around aimlessly wasn’t going to solve anything. As reluctant as he was to leave the area where he had last seen Kahlan, Richard didn’t think that he had any other choice but to go for help.

He went through the motions of building the shelter without giving the work much thought. In the failing light, Cara, concerned for his well-being, kept watching him out of the corner of her eye. She looked like she expected him to fall over at any moment and if he did she intended to catch him.

As he worked, Richard mulled over the remote but real possibility that Imperial Order soldiers might be searching the woods for them. At the same time he fretted about what could have killed all of Victor’s men—and might now be chasing them. He considered what other precautions he might take, and he deliberated over how he would fight whatever could have done such violence.