Warheart: Sword of Truth: The Conclusion (Sword of Truth 15)

The dark one was using her, encouraging her, and Samantha was willingly summoning the full power of her unbridled wrath.

As she shook with anger, the rock of the cave trembled in response. He knew what she was doing. He had, after all, taught her to do it.

Richard knew that he had no time to lose. If he was going to stop her, it had to be now, before she brought the rock down on them. He had no hesitation about the need to kill her. If that dance with death had taught him anything, it was that his life and the lives of innocent people couldn’t be forfeited for sentiment. A lethal threat had to be recognized for the reality of what it was. Such threats had to be stopped.

Before he could charge out, Richard had to duck when a slab of thicker stone behind them blew apart. Jagged shards of rock whistled through the air, one going over the top of his bowed head, just missing him.

Then another area out in front of him and down a side tunnel exploded apart. All up and down the passageways rock began exploding in a ripping string of thunderous blasts. The cave trembled with the unfathomable force Samantha was focusing into the rock, blowing it apart. The echo of explosions rippled throughout the cave.

Thunderous blasts rang out painfully in the confined space as the explosions of rock came almost one atop another. Richard was pelted with pieces of rock that sailed through the passageway and ricocheted off walls. The whole mountain shook. He had to close his eyes and turn his face away from debris clouds that blew past him. The sound of it was deafening.

And then, out in front of him, where he was just about to charge out at Samantha and tumble under anything she could throw at him, the entire ceiling let out a reverberating, crackling boom as it was abruptly driven downward by a thunderous explosion. The massive section of the mountain above them had suddenly collapsed.

The force of the entire ceiling giving way shook the mountain so violently that Richard, Kahlan, Nicci, Cassia, and Vale were all knocked from their feet. Along with the Mord-Sith, Richard immediately rolled up onto a hand and a knee, with his other foot on the ground, ready to spring into the fight. Kahlan was on her hands and knees, looking dazed. They all turned their faces away from the blast of wind forced out from under the rock as it came crashing down. The blast of the shock wave caught Nicci off-balance and knocked her flat on her back. The two Mord-Sith were also sent tumbling back by the wall of air.

Richard braced for the next blast, looking to the sides to try to find a place for them to run, a shelter where they could get away from the flying rock, but there was no other intersection. There was no immediate route for an escape. Cassia and Vale scrambled to their feet, picking up their torches off the ground as they did so.

The torches hissed and sputtered, but other than that, the debris settled, rocks rolled to a stop, and everything began to go quiet. The rumbling and shaking had stopped. The explosions had stopped. The echoes of it all gradually died out.

Richard wondered what would be coming next, what power Samantha would unleash. He needed to stop her, first.

In the sudden silence he finally peeked around the corner and saw something out ahead of them, beyond the nearly empty red leather Mord-Sith outfit. He took a torch from Vale and cautiously inched out from the protection of the jut of rock where he had been to see if it was what he thought it was.

He stood to his full height when he saw that he had been right. It was Samantha’s bloody arm sticking out from beneath a massive section of granite that had collapsed from overhead. It had crushed the young woman.

“Well, isn’t that something,” Cassia said as she stepped up beside Richard, holding her torch up with one hand as she brushed the dirt off herself with the other.

The wavering light of their torches lit the bloody forearm and fist–the only thing they could see of Samantha. The rest of her was buried under countless tons of stone that had let go and come down atop her.

“She gets so angry, so focused,” Kahlan said, “that she forgets about her own safety. When we were in the gorge when the army of half people were chasing us, she was bringing the mountain down atop them and I had to snatch her up and carry her away or it would have come down on top of her, just like this.”

Nicci was nodding in agreement. “I saw that immaturity in her. It frightened me from the first. Her ability exceeded her capacity to handle it.”

That bloody arm had a ghostly appearance to it, a dark shadow that moved as if it were alive whereas the arm was dead still. As Richard watched, that shadow faded away into nothing. The demon that had been with her, helping her, had melted back beyond the veil. Without a worldly form to possess and hold it in the world of life, it could not keep the skrin from pulling it back into the world of the dead.

For now, some of those forces still held. At least, to a certain extent.

“I can’t believe she so willfully killed those men,” Kahlan said. “She knew them. She liked them. At least, she did at one time. She had helped them. I can hardly believe she would so easily kill them.”

Richard felt a twinge of sadness for the girl whose ability made her so out of place and who had been trying so hard to become a woman. She’d had such potential. He guessed that the potential and talent did her no good in the end when she instead let herself be ruled by hate. In the end, hate destroyed her.

“She killed her entire village as well,” Richard said. “The people she had grown up with and had hoped to protect.”

Nicci glared at the bloody, splintered arm. “I told you she was dangerous, that her anger was dangerous.”

“One of the Wizard’s Rules I learned long ago,” Richard said. “Passion rules reason. I’m sorry that I didn’t see the indications in her sooner. Had I paid more attention to the signs I might have been able to help her to choose positive things rather than the dishonesty of hate. I guess I was blind to it, thinking she just needed to grow up a little.”

“A lot,” Nicci grumbled. “You couldn’t have helped her, Richard. It was what was inside her. It was her inborn nature. None of us could have changed her.”

Richard squatted down and touched the red leather that had belonged to Laurin.

“She gave her life trying to protect you, Lord Rahl,” Cassia said in comfort. “Any of us would have done the same. She died a noble death.”

“As did all those men,” he said. “But they are all still dead.”

He picked the Agiel out of the black crystallized pieces that were all that was left of Laurin. He stood and showed it to Vale. “Now you must wear the Agiel of a brave Mord-Sith, a sister of the Agiel, as does Cassia, and gain strength from it.”

She bowed her head as he placed the chain around her neck. “I’m sorry that those men and Laurin had to die this day.”

“Those men of the First File and Laurin died to protect you, Lord Rahl,” Cassia said. “That was their chosen calling. They died doing what they wanted most to do. They were all honored by your trust in them. They died heroes in their mission to make sure you and the Mother Confessor were safe, now.”

He smiled his thanks for her words.

“We’re not exactly, safe, though,” Richard said as he looked up at the solid wall of rock. “I’m afraid we’re trapped in here.”

CHAPTER

38

“What do you mean we’re trapped in here?” Nicci asked with a mix of suspicion and concern. “There were passageways everywhere. There have to be interconnecting tunnels running all through this place. There has to be a way to get around this collapsed section of ceiling.”

As his gaze swept over the wall of rock, Richard slowly shook his head. “You’re right that the tunnels interconnect. A little farther back we could have gone down some of those side intersections and they would take us a different way around to the opening at the top of the cliff. But not this far back in this particular corridor.

“We’re now in a dedicated corridor that runs back deeper into the mountain. This passageway is unlike the rest. It has a primary purpose, so it doesn’t hav

e the typical intersecting routes that crisscross in and out of the general network of tunnels. The builders apparently intended to limit access to it.

“It does have side branches with a number of rooms, some of them places where people lived, but those side passageways are all part of this limited-access area, so none of them lead back out. They all dead-end. From back here the only way back out, back into the general tunnel complex, is through this collapsed wall of rock.”

“Maybe it’s not as big a problem as it seems,” Cassia said, trying to sound positive. “Maybe the five of us can dig our way out. It probably wouldn’t be as hard as it looks.”

Richard frowned over at her. “Look at it.” He gestured to the wall of rock. “Cassia, it’s solid granite. It’s not a pile of rubble that maybe we could dig through. It’s a single, massive block of granite.

“Granite is often layered in thick lifts like this. Some of those slabs can be dozens of feet thick and they can run on horizontally for quite some distance. Weather will create and open up natural breaks, but protected inside a mountain like this, these lifts are massive. It must have fractured along a natural horizontal split higher up in the rock and because of what Samantha was doing, the unsupported weight all dropped down into this void.”

“Maybe it’s not very wide, though,” Kahlan offered. “People cut granite into blocks to use in buildings.”

“Sure,” Richard said, “but that takes specialized chisels and wedges to split the rock. We don’t have any of that.”

Kahlan turned hopefully to Nicci. “Maybe you can use your gift to open up a hole–maybe crack the rock or something–to get us through to the other side? Move some of it aside?”