Severed Souls (Sword of Truth 14)

Her arms felt like lead from swinging the sword. She knew that she was going to be sore for a couple of days. She reminded herself to be thankful for the sore muscles; it was better to be alive to feel sore than to be dead. She tried not to think of how many times she had come close to dying. She thought of Richard and tried not to think of how close both of them still were to dying.

At the top of the climb, in the lap of surrounding mountains, the land flattened out. A small lake collecting mountain runoff fed the falls and the brook down in the gorge. One of the men scouted out ahead beyond swampy ground thick with reeds and then through the woods beyond the far shore while another two scouted to either side. The center scout ran back from the woods and motioned for them with three sparks from his steel and flint. At seeing the three small flashes of sparks, they all hurried around the small moonlit lake, beyond the expanse of reeds, and into the woods beyond.

After following the man a brief distance across ground covered with a soft bed of pine needles beneath a stand of towering pines, they emerged on the far side, where they were brought to a halt at the brink of a chasm. In the moonlight it looked like a black snake stretching off to the left and right as far in each direction as they could see. Nicci cast a sparkling flame down the deep fissure. The light continued sinking far longer than Kahlan would have expected. Seeing how deep it was, they all took a step back from the edge. It was far too steep and too deep to climb down.

As far as she could see, there was no way over the chasm.

“Looks like we’re going to have to go either left or right,” Zedd offered.

Kahlan scanned the forest on the far side of the chasm. “Not a lot of choice. We’re hemmed by the gorge and this rift. If we could get to the other side, this kind of natural barrier would make it a safer place to get the rest we all need.”

“I left my wings at home,” Zedd grumbled.

Kahlan was at least cheered to hear that his impish nature was returning.

She turned when she heard a commotion coming through the woods. As a group of soldiers approached, getting slaps on the back from other soldiers, Kahlan recognized the men.

It was Sergeant Remkin and the men he had taken to block the rear of the gorge in order to trap the Shun-tuk.

“Remkin! How did you get here?” Commander Fister asked. “I feared we’d lost you. How did you manage to escape the walls falling in?”

“Blocking the rear turned out not to be so simple,” he said as he paused to catch his breath for a moment.

“What do you mean?” Kahlan asked.

“We waited and waited for the Shun-tuk to all get into the gorge so we could close it off. But they just kept coming. We were getting pretty nervous that there would be too many to fit the length of the gorge, and then we wouldn’t be able to trap them. We knew that would ruin the whole plan.

“Then we saw the wizard’s fire far off in the distance ahead. It slowed their advance at times, but rather than turning and running, they kept moving toward it. The whole time more of them coming out of the woods and racing into the gorge.”

“Did they all enter, though?” Kahlan asked. “Did all of them get into the gorge?”

The sergeant nodded. “When we saw the wizard’s fire begin and felt the ground shake, we knew we needed to get behind the tail end of them in case they decided to try to escape. Finally, we were pretty sure that they had all filed into the gorge. We waited a bit, wanting to make sure there wouldn’t be any stragglers to come out of the woods and surprise us from behind. We wanted to close the trap, not get trapped ourselves.

“So when we didn’t see more for a time, we knew that was our chance to finally close the gate on them. Despite the fire and lightning we could see off in the distance up ahead, they were so intent on chasing the rest of you they kept going. That’s when we came down the slopes to cut them off from behind.

“And then … a couple of them appeared, coming back at us. They were smiling.” He looked at each of them to make his point. “Smiling! Then they started doing something to our men.”

“Doing something? What do you mean?” Fister asked.

The sergeant rubbed a shoulder as he stared off again. “I don’t know. It sounds crazy.” He looked back at them. “I saw a man just seem to, to, I don’t know…”

“Melt,” Kahlan said.

His brow lifted in surprise. “Yes. Exactly. The skin started melting right off several of my men. Their bones came apart and they went down in a mess that no longer looked human.”

“Are you saying that there was more than one of these smiling Shun-tuk?” Kahlan asked.

“At least two that I saw. There might have been more, but I saw two for sure. Two was enough. I realized that if we stayed there trying to hold the back door, we were all going to die. I thought our best chance was to get up here and warn you of what kind of powers they had. Help you fight to get away.”

“It’s disheartening to know that the one we saw wasn’t the only one,” Kahlan said. “You did the right thing. There is no way to stand and fight such men.”

“You did,” Commander Fister reminded her. “You went after him. You killed the one we saw.”

Kahlan dismissed the notion with a gesture. “Yes, but I had Richard’s sword. Sergeant Remkin and his men would have been slaughtered for no good reason. They did the right thing. I would imagine that men with such dark talents would have been there as rear guards.”

Sergeant Remkin nodded. “I thought the same thing because after they killed several of our men and we took off, those smiling Shun-tuk rushed back like they were intent on protecting their rear.”

“But how did you get around all the rest of them and catch up with us?” Kahlan asked.

“It wasn’t easy,” he said. “Those I have with me, the ones still alive, are all mountain men. We grew up in this kind of country and we are used to traveling in mountains. We were able to get up on the higher portions of the hillsides, out of sight of those demons with occult powers.

“We knew by the lay of the land that ridges often run parallel to gorges. The higher ones can make good routes through this kind of country. We were lucky and found a ridge we could follow and quickly cover a lot of distance.”

He gestured down into the abyss. “We were following the edge of the ridge and keeping contact with the gorge to make sure we could get to you. From up there we encountered this chasm running in the same direction as some of the ridges, like a rift in the mountains. Far as we could tell, it cuts through a lot of territory. We didn’t follow the lower end to see how far it went back that way because we were trying to stay closer to the gorge. That’s when we saw you climbing up.”

“So then we at least know that this chasm runs back that direction for quite a distance,” Kahlan said, trying to think of what they would do to get around it. “So were you able to see if the Shun-tuk stayed in the gorge? Did any of them try to escape the lower end when you went up onto the ridge?”

“When we were still farther back, we reached the top after the wizard’s fire ended. We hung back to see if they would turn back, but they kept going, howling, intent on getting to you. They probably felt pretty safe with those smiling bastards bringing up the rear. We never saw any of them turn back.

“Then we started to hear explosions. The entire length of the gorge shook as it started exploding apart. At times up on the ridge, with the way the ground was shaking, we couldn’t even maintain our footing and stand up. It was crazy. The cliffs to both sides down the entire gorge all blew apart and collapsed down into the defile and buried the Shun-tuk.”

“Do you think it buried them all?” Kahlan asked.

He shrugged. “Hard telling from up as high as we were on the mountain. As far as I could tell, the explosions and the falling walls extended back well past where I’d seen the tail end of the line of Shun-tuk, so I’m pretty sure that with as fast as it all happened, it caught them all in the gorge and buried them. With as much stone as fell in on them,

surely none of them could have escaped with their lives. After it ended, we didn’t hear them howling anymore. There weren’t even any cries or screams of any left alive and injured. It was dead silent.”

Commander Fister let out a sigh. “That’s good news.”

“Still,” Kahlan said as she gestured at the dark rift before them. “I’d feel better if we could get across this chasm to the other side.”

“So then let’s get across,” Sergeant Remkin said, as if it were only a skip and a hop. It wasn’t. It was discouragingly wide—far too wide by a long shot for any person to jump.

“We don’t have a way to get across,” Kahlan said.

Remkin shrugged. “Easy.”

She frowned at the man. “Easy?”

Zedd leaned a bony shoulder into the conversation. “Nothing is ever easy.”