Severed Souls (Sword of Truth 14)

With Nicci using her abilities against the enemy, Irena and Samantha had taken over the duty of casting small flames out ahead to light their way up the ravine. As trickles of water ran down from above, they gathered to cascade over rocks in a number of places, splashing and getting them wet, making traveling with the terror of being chased even more miserable.

Kahlan realized, then, that except for the small lights floating out ahead, the darkness hadn’t been interrupted for quite a while by the reflections of wizard’s fire off the towering rock walls. Nor had she heard the thumping explosions of Nicci’s power. After climbing in the quiet for a time, Samantha dropped back beside Kahlan.

“How is Lord Rahl doing?” the young sorceress asked.

Kahlan laid a hand over Richard’s back. “He’s still breathing, but other than that I have no way of telling.”

“I do,” Samantha said as she placed her small hand against the side of his face. “I’m familiar with the feel of the poison in both of you. I should be able to judge any change in it.”

It wasn’t long before she reluctantly withdrew the hand.

“Well?” Kahlan asked when Samantha didn’t say anything.

The young woman’s dark eyes looked up. “I’m sorry, Mother Confessor, but it’s worse than I’ve ever felt before.”

For the first time, Kahlan had the feeling, the real, fully realized feeling, that Richard was dying. He was slipping away from her and there was nothing she could do about it. Against her best efforts, she imagined Richard dying, and what a dead world it would be without him.

She swallowed and gripped the sword tighter.

When she heard the distant call of a mockingbird, she recognized it as a signal from men of the First File. The wizard’s fire had killed all that it was going to kill. That meant that the rest of the Shun-tuk they would face would be the ones with some degree of occult powers—powers that Kahlan and the rest of those with her knew nothing about. There was no telling what they were capable of, except she knew they could raise the dead, and that was certainly trouble enough.

Powers or no powers, though, they would bleed. It was up to the soldiers, now, to be the steel to protect them, to protect their Lord Rahl. Now was the time the threat had to be ended.

Kahlan looked down at Samantha. “Take the reins.”

“What?”

“Take the reins. We don’t have a lot of men. Every sword counts.” She lifted the point of the Sword of Truth, its power thundering through her. “I have to help the men. You need to lead the horse, now.”

Despite the fear in her eyes, Samantha nodded. “I understand.”

Kahlan spotted Nicci weaving her way up through the soldiers to get Kahlan. The sorceress’s beautiful features were set with grim determination.

“Let’s go,” she said. “It’s time to end this.”

This time, it was Kahlan who pushed out in front of Nicci, taking the lead.

The time had come at last for her sword to taste all the Shun-tuk blood it could ever want.

Both Kahlan and the sword were eager for the fight.

CHAPTER

24

They didn’t have to go far before they encountered the soldiers. They had been slowing, hanging back a bit, trying to create a gap in case those with Richard had to take him and run for their lives. The men were trying to create a head start for the others if it ended up being a last-stand fight to the death. As Kahlan and Nicci squeezed between the men, headed back down the gorge, Nicci cast a small spark of flame out in front to provide enough light so they could get their footing, but it was only enough to light up a short distance ahead of them.

She knew that they had outpaced the Shun-tuk and been able to give themselves at least a slight lead, but the soldiers had now given back some of that gap to insulate Richard. Kahlan didn’t know how far they would need to go before they encountered the enemy.

When Nicci finally cast out a larger flame to drift higher up and out ahead of them, and it lit the entire scene beyond, Kahlan’s blood went cold.

“Dear spirits,” she whispered.

Beyond the dark figures of their own men in their chain mail and dark leather armor, all down the gorge was what looked like an endless sea of white figures snaking up the chasm. There were so many that Kahlan couldn’t see the far end of the serpent.

After all the Shun-tuk had entered the gorge, Sergeant Remkin was supposed to close them off from behind. Those men were supposed to be the hammer that would smash the Shun-tuk against Commander Fister’s anvil. Since she couldn’t see the end, she had no way of knowing if Remkin had been able to shut the back door.

Kahlan quickly recognized that there were a great deal more of the enemy than she had expected to see. She had expected vast numbers to have been vaporized by the wizard’s fire and Nicci’s power. Despite how many had died, there were more than ample Shun-tuk left to do the job they had been sent to do.

When they had been back in the encampment they had no way of knowing the numbers of the Shun-tuk scattered out beyond in the woods. She remembered the way they kept coming, but she now realized that they had been seeing only a limited view. She never realized how many more there were back in those woods.

She didn’t think that Commander Fister or any of the rest of them expected that there might be this many. These weren’t merely spirit trackers; this was an army. It was apparent that when Sulachan and Hannis Arc sent men to accomplish a task, they sent enough to make sure they could not possibly fail.

She now knew something important about both of them: they were never careless. They planned carefully and then deployed overwhelming, withering, brute force to accomplish what

they were after. Neither employed subtlety—they were dedicated to applying overpowering might to crush any opposition.

As disheartening as that knowledge might be, she had just learned something important about their enemy. It would keep Kahlan from ever underestimating them.

It also brought to mind what the prisoner had told them—that Sulachan had dark spirits waiting for her and Richard beyond the veil to the world of the dead. Sulachan was not a man who was satisfied to merely kill those who opposed him.

In a flash of comprehension, Kahlan now realized that they had not captured that prisoner by chance or accident. Sulachan intended the man to be caught. Sulachan had wanted to deliver a message. The spirit king had wanted Richard and Kahlan to know that death would not be an ending of suffering, but the beginning of an eternity of it.

There would be no peace to be found in death for either her or Richard, no eternal rest.

Pushing the worry of such thoughts aside and focusing on the task at hand, Kahlan knew that the one thing they did have working for them was the narrowness of the gorge. In such a narrow space, the Shun-tuk couldn’t spread out to apply that overwhelming crushing weight of numbers. They could only present a limited leading edge of forces.

Because the pass was narrow, it allowed the First File to use a limited number of men to span the gap. That meant they could continually rotate fresh men to the front, so that the ones who had been fighting fiercely for a time could take a break to regain their breath while fresh men stepped in to work with maximum effort at hacking the enemy to pieces. By rotating men in that way, they could fight much longer, and with sustained, deadly brutality.