Severed Souls (Sword of Truth 14)

Soldiers recognized the danger she was in by wading too far into the enemy to get at the ones with glowing red eyes. Commander Fister hacked his way in close to her, trying to keep the chalky figures from getting to her. His powerful arms looked made for the task of cleaving an enemy apart with his sword.

Other soldiers chopped their way through Shun-tuk to get in close to her, and helped her to continually grind the leading edge of the enemy down under their blades.

Kahlan was only dimly aware of such things, though. She was lost in the killing.

With the Sword of Truth in her hands and this many of the enemy around her, it felt as if the purpose of her entire life had come down to this perfect moment of delivering death. Her training, her experiences, her beliefs, everything in her life, had brought her to this moment as the perfect killing machine.

The Sword of Truth fed off the intent of the one holding it. It read what the person considered good or evil. The blade would not harm what the person holding it believed to be good. It was committed to destroying what the holder of the blade considered evil. In the right hands, in the hands of one committed to reason and life, the sword became manifest justice.

Kahlan considered the half people and the ones who had sent them to be pure, unredeemable evil. She had never felt this kind of unleashed wrath. Anything white drew her blade. Severed arms spun through the air. Heads tumbled across the rocks. Bodies and parts of bodies littered the ground. Blood covered everything.

In places, advancing Shun-tuk had to wade through ankle-deep viscera. A head she took off with an angry swing of the sword tumbled and bounced down the rocks of the gorge. Even over the screams and yelling, she could hear the skull crack each time it bounced off a rock. Advancing Shun-tuk stepped aside to avoid it.

The men fighting beside her were just as lethal. The Shun-tuk, after all, were not all that hard to kill. They wore no armor, they carried no shields, and they did not use weapons to block attacks. Shielding their face with an arm cost them the arm before the sword buried itself in their face. She had yet to see one Shun-tuk draw a knife. Their teeth were their weapon of choice. They were animals racing in to slaughter their prey, and they in turn were being slaughtered.

Axes relentlessly chopped them down. Maces crushed skulls and caved in ribs and lungs. Swords of the First File cut apart the figures, and yet they kept coming. There was no sign of the end of the white throng snaking up the gorge. Sergeant Remkin and his men were too distant, and no doubt engaged in the same kind of fight for their lives.

And then one of the Shun-tuk not far in front of her did the oddest thing. He stood still in the center of the chaos, and smiled. It was a smile that, despite the sword’s rage, made Kahlan pause and her blood run cold.

As he gazed into her eyes, without ever looking away, he lifted a hand out toward one of the soldiers to her right.

The soldier screamed as the skin on his face immediately started bubbling and melting. The screams gurgled away.

His scalp split open in bloody strings as it sloughed down his head, exposing the top of his skull. His eyes liquefied in their sockets, running down and mixing with the gooey mess of his bloody, bubbling flesh. He was already dead, his joints separating as he crumpled.

The smiling Shun-tuk, his gaze still on Kahlan, almost at the same time lifted his other arm out toward the soldier to her left. The man screamed as his flesh and muscle liquefied and fell away from the bones of his arms in sticky strings. His nose and lips melted away even as he screamed in horrified agony. Flesh parted from cheekbones and skull. Both men had died in hardly more than a heartbeat.

Even as it was still happening, Kahlan’s sword was already coming around with lightning speed. Evil was targeted in the center of her vision. The blade flew toward where her eyes were focused. The tip whistled with its incredible speed as she brought it down with all her might. She could hear herself screaming in rage, adding her fury to that of the blade. It caught the smiling man on the side of his neck, just below his left ear, before the smug smile could leave his lips. The blade drove down with such force that it cleaved off his head at an angle along with his right shoulder and still-extended arm. With part of his chest attached, the head, shoulder, and arm tumbled away. As the bottom half fell, organs spilled out across the rocks.

Although she had killed this one, she now realized the danger they were in from those among the Shun-tuk who possessed the same kind of occult ability.

This kind of Shun-tuk might not have armor, or shields, or swords, but the men of the First File had no defense against their occult weapons. The soldiers’ chain mail had done them no good; their flesh had melted and dripped right through it. Kahlan didn’t think that Zedd or Nicci or Irena would be able to offer any defense against such sorcery. If regular magic worked against such half people, it already would have. Kahlan had seen some of these ghostly figures walk through fire unharmed. The smiling Shun-tuk would not be there in the first place if regular magic could kill them.

Blades obviously worked just fine, but how many would those with such occult sorcery kill before they could be cut down? Worse, there was no telling if the man she had just killed was the only one, the way they had only one wizard, Zedd, among them, or if there were dozens more like the smiling Shun-tuk. For all she knew, there could be hundreds.

In an instant, the equation had changed.

Kahlan spun around and frantically pushed at the men near her, turning them around.

“Run!” she screamed. “Run!”

Commander Fister, having seen the same thing that Kahlan had just witnessed, windmilled his arm in command to his men. “Pull back! Run! Pull back, pull back!”

The men of the First File would have stayed and fought to the death had they been commanded to do so, but at her command and that of their commander they abandoned the hopeless cause and turned to run for their lives.

Nicci caught Kahlan’s arm on her way by. “What is it? What’s happening?”

Kahlan spun the sorceress and shoved her to get her moving with the rest of them. “After what I just saw, unless you know how to stop occult sorcery, you had better run for your life.”

Nicci didn’t argue. Kahlan had no idea what they were going to do. As far as she could tell, without any effective defense at hand, their only hope was to outrun the Shun-tuk.

And trying to outrun a predator was a very bad option.

CHAPTER

26

As they ran up the narrow ravine between the towering walls of dark stone to either side, at least the Shun-tuk also had to funnel through the narrow defile the same as Kahlan and the soldiers, so they couldn’t spread out and try to get out around them.

Kahlan knew that if some of the soldiers slipped and fell in the dark, it would be disastrous. Running as fast as they could, if some of them at

the front fell, others would be unable to avoid tripping and falling over them. If that happened, they could all be slowed enough to be caught by the river of white figures coming after them.

What Kahlan had just seen terrified her. She had seen men die often enough, and in such agonizing and horrifying ways as to color every aspect of her thinking for the rest of her life, but she’d never before seen anything like what she had just witnessed. She knew that Zedd, Nicci, and Irena had no defense against such deadly occult sorcery. As far as Kahlan knew, the only option they had was to outrun the savages snapping at their heels. She had no idea how they would ever be able to stop men with such powers.

If mere half people had this kind of occult ability, she shuddered to think of what a spirit king returned from the dead might be able to do.

Because they had boots and the Shun-tuk were barefoot, on such rough terrain they were little by little able to begin to outpace the half people. Running over sharp rocks was difficult even for people used to running without shoes. At such a breakneck pace it was all too easy for even tough feet to impact the edge of a sharp rock and split open their flesh. They were better at running over rocks in the dark than Kahlan would have thought possible, but it was still slowing them just enough to allow her and the soldiers to begin to pull out a lead.

It wasn’t much of a lead, but it was something and it was growing. It also clearly wasn’t enough that it was going to allow them to escape, but at least the distance seemed to keep the Shun-tuk from using their occult sorcery to take them all down from behind.

But if the ground grew any less rugged and rocky, the bloodthirsty half people would soon catch up with them, because the soldiers had to run with heavy gear and armor. Most of them were muscular, brawny men, men good with weapons and hand-to-hand combat, so they were easily able to carry their loads, but in such circumstances carrying any extra weight slowed them down. On top of that, these men weren’t especially built for running the way the wiry Shun-tuk were. The soldiers of the First File had to be the best at everything, including running, but the Shun-tuk appeared to be built for the singular purpose of running down prey.