Severed Souls (Sword of Truth 14)

CHAPTER

56

The next instant, Richard pulled his sword free from its scabbard, its fury already fully alive the instant his hand had reached the hilt.

It only took a couple of heartbeats after the sound of steel filled the quiet night before the entire force of the First File had rushed in through the woods around them.

Richard stood panting, trying to find a direction for his rage. He scanned the moonlit scene, hunting for a cause, a threat, an explanation. He saw nothing out of the ordinary other than his grandfather lying beheaded in the middle of a soft, moonlit bed of moss surrounded by small, wispy ferns.

In the next heartbeat, Samantha cried out in horror. Her mother stared in disbelief, both hands covering her open mouth.

Nicci, standing beside him, briefly looked at Richard’s face before rushing to kneel beside Zedd’s body.

“How could this happen?” Richard asked no one in particular. “Who could have done this? We had watches posted!”

His own booming voice echoed back to him out of the silent woods. He could see nothing out of the ordinary. The only blood he could see was on Zedd.

Men were already racing off in every direction, searching for the killer, shamed that someone had gotten through their defenses. The men of the First File did not make these kinds of mistakes.

One by one, the men returned, each giving the commander a shake of his head, none of them wanting to look at Richard.

“Tracks?” the commander asked his men, looking from one to another.

One of them gestured off toward the woods. “Some of us came through here earlier to check the area and we saw those tracks, but no one other than us has been through here. There aren’t any tracks out beyond, either. We can’t find any evidence of anyone coming into this area from outside. They had to have snuck in through the camp. That’s the only way.”

“Unless they were hiding here the whole time we set up camp,” Commander Fister said, “waiting for someone important to pass by. Maybe they slipped away after they did this.”

Richard didn’t know that such an explanation made any sense—unless they were being followed. Other than the animal Kahlan had named Hunter, he hadn’t seen anyone or anything watching them. He supposed they could have used occult powers to mask themselves as they shadowed the group. Other than that, he was having trouble understanding how it could have happened. With a thousand thoughts tumbling through his mind all at once, he couldn’t think clearly.

No matter how they did it, there was no doubt that the camp had been penetrated by a killer.

The way Richard’s heart pounded with rage also made it difficult to think. He needed a direction for that bottled fury, but couldn’t find one.

He watched, tears running down his face, as Nicci gently lifted Zedd’s head and brought it back, placing it by his body so that the old wizard almost looked right again.

Richard dropped to his knees beside Nicci, staring down at his grandfather. Zedd’s dead hazel eyes stared up at the dark sky. Kahlan knelt beside him, one hand on Richard’s shoulder as she cried, holding her other trembling hand over her mouth, holding back the scream.

Richard, noting men return and whisper reports to Commander Fister, finally looked up at the man. “Anything? Did the men find anything at all?” His own voice sounded distant and wooden to him, as if it belonged to someone else.

“I’m sorry, Lord Rahl. Other than this,” he said with a nod toward Zedd’s corpse, “nothing looks wrong or out of the ordinary.”

“How could this happen right here, right under our noses? How could we not know, not see anything, not hear anything?”

Richard remembered, then, the soft thump he’d heard. He realized then what he had heard hitting the mossy ground.

“I wish I had an answer for you, Lord Rahl,” Commander Fister said in little more than a sorrowful whisper.

“I told you,” Irena said in a quiet voice, “things like this are common in the Dark Lands. There are dangers here that no one knows about.”

Richard wasn’t in the mood to talk about the dangers of the Dark Lands. He stood up, then, his mind racing, his heart hammering, his fist clenched around the hilt of his sword. He forced himself to cap off his emotion. He couldn’t let those emotions free. None of them could afford for him to lose control right then.

He could hear his own voice inside his head, telling himself to think. It felt like he was somewhere above, watching himself standing there in the little clearing lit by moonlight, looking down on Zedd’s body.

No one knew what to do, what Richard would do. They were afraid to move, afraid to do anything. They all waited for him to give everyone direction.

Richard swallowed and cleared his throat, making sure his voice would not fail him. “We can’t carry his remains with us to Saavedra,” he said, his own voice sounding surprisingly calm. “There would be no point to it. Zedd didn’t know the place. It would have meant nothing to him.”

Kahlan still knelt, bent over Zedd’s chest, her face buried in her hands as she wept. Zedd had been the wizard she had come through the boundary to find. He had been “the one.” Everyone had needed him. She had come to pull him away from his peaceful life in Westland and back into a world ablaze with war. They had all needed the First Wizard so he could name a Seeker. They needed the First Wizard to set things right.

Richard knew what else was going through her mind at that moment—the same memory that was going through his thoughts—Zedd marrying the two of them.

Nicci, standing close to his left shoulder, looked up at him. “What do you want us to do, Richard?” she asked in a broken voice.

He knew that hesitation, failure to make a decision, was deadly. They were already in enough trouble, and there was obviously yet more they hadn’t been aware of lurking in the night. It was most likely something to do with occult sorcery, otherwise Zedd and Nicci would have detected it.

He needed to make a decision, he needed to make it quickly, and he needed it to be the right decision.

He tried to think of what Zedd would want him to do, what he would advise. Richard looked around. No one knew Zedd’s wishes better than Richard. He knew that Zedd would tell him that he must push on, that he had to get to the citadel or everything, all their efforts and hopes, would be in vain.

His grandfather would tell him that the living couldn’t sacrifice their chance at life to mourn the dead.

“Zedd told me that he thought this was a beautiful place. His soul is in the hands of the good spirits, now. He is safe, there, with them, and finally at peace. He no longer has need of this vessel in which he has for so long sailed the world of life. He would want us to purify his remains in a funeral pyre. We need to build up a platform of wood and place him on it.

“We need to be quick about it. We don’t know what danger is here among us. We can’t stay here. We need to take care of Zedd, and then we must be gone.”

“I w

ill see to it at once, Lord Rahl,” the commander said.

Richard turned to Nicci. “If we get to a containment field can you cure Kahlan and me by yourself—without Zedd?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

Nicci did not hesitate. “Absolutely.”

“Could you tell how he was beheaded? By what method?”

Nicci swallowed. “No. It looks like a blade, but it could have been something else.”

“You mean like the gift?”

“Yes. I’ve seen it done often enough. It looks much the same. But I can detect no gifted people anywhere near—other than myself, Irena, and Samantha right here with us.”

“They could have been lying in wait, and then when they saw an opportunity killed the first person of rank that they could, and then run off,” Commander Fister said.

Richard nodded. “Possibly. Send your best trackers out and have them search while we take care of Zedd. But if they do find any evidence of an intruder, they could be gifted so I don’t want them following or trying to take them on. Just come get me instead.”

He turned back to Nicci. “Could it have been someone using occult sorcery?”

Nicci’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Yes, I suppose, but I have no way of knowing, and if it was, I can’t sense such people. They could be standing right next to me and I wouldn’t be able to detect such powers. Occult powers are like the dark side of the moon. They remain out of sight and a mystery.”

Richard turned to a stricken-looking Irena. “Can you?”

She wiped her nose on her sleeve as she shook her head.

Richard gritted his teeth for a moment, fighting to keep control of the rage thundering through him. He was on the razor edge of losing control, but there was no target for his fury. He told himself yet again to think of what his grandfather would advise him to do.

“All right then, we need to see to taking care of Zedd’s remains as swiftly as possible. He is with the good spirits now. We can weep for his soul but we have to move while we weep. Though his body is only an empty vessel, now, I don’t want animals getting at it. With our gifted, we can have a fire hot enough to purify his remains in short order.