Severed Souls (Sword of Truth 14)

Nicci was crying for some reason. “In one of the bedrooms in the citadel.”

“No, I mean where am I?”

Nicci frowned through her tears. “I don’t understand.”

“Is this … death? It’s all wrong. It doesn’t make sense. Something isn’t right. Where am I?”

“You died,” Nicci said through her tears. “You were murdered. But you have both life and death in you, and that life sustained you for a bit while you were in the underworld.

“But now you are back, Kahlan. You’re alive. Dear spirits, you’re alive.”

Kahlan felt euphoric. She had been murdered, but now she was alive. She understood what it meant that she was going to live. Life, wonderful life, wasn’t over. She couldn’t stop smiling as she looked around. She was going to live.

“Where’s Richard?”

Nicci’s face went ashen.

Kahlan followed the woman’s stricken gaze and saw that someone lay beside her.

It was Richard.

Her heart jumped with a flash of joy at seeing him.

But as soon as she saw him, she knew that something was terribly wrong.

He was too still.

He wasn’t breathing.

He stared up at nothing with dead eyes.

Kahlan screamed when she realized the awful truth.

The instantaneous joy she had felt at seeing him, turned to horror.

She fell on him, throwing an arm over his chest, over his sword’s hilt clutched in his fists resting over his heart.

“No! Dear spirits, no! Don’t bring me back to this! Please, don’t do this to me!”

Nicci rushed to draw Kahlan back, pulling her arms from him, turning her away from Richard to take her up in her arms.

“What’s happening?” Kahlan wept against Nicci’s shoulder.

Nicci swallowed back her own sobs. “I’m so sorry, Kahlan. Richard gave up his life to go after you, to bring you back to life. He has only been gone a moment.”

Kahlan looked over at the horrifyingly still body of the man she loved, her everything. “But why isn’t he here? If I was able to return because I still had that third kingdom spark of life in me, then why didn’t he…”

She remembered, then.

It all flooded back in like a terrible, dark, profoundly troubling dream seeping back into your memory after you woke, a dream that left a sickening feeling behind in you that you couldn’t escape no matter how hard you tried.

“What?” Nicci asked, seeing the look on Kahlan’s face. “Do you remember?”

Kahlan nodded. “Richard’s spirit found me. In all that darkness, in all that eternity of nothing, Richard found me. I was lost in darkness and yet he found me.”

“Then what?” Nicci asked when Kahlan fell silent, staring off into the nightmare.

“Then he pulled the dark ones off me, drawing them away to chase after him, instead. I tried to stop him—I didn’t want him to do that to himself—but he was stronger and tore them away from me. He somehow pushed me back into the glowing lines of the Grace. I had no control. I wanted to stay with him, but I couldn’t. Those glowing lines pulled me back. I don’t know how.”

“Because you still had life in you,” Nicci said. “The Grace was healing itself, putting you back to where you belonged on that line of the gift coming from Creation.”

Kahlan gazed at Nicci in desperation. “Then why didn’t it do the same for Richard? Why didn’t he return with me?”

“He couldn’t. He went there to save you from Sulachan’s dark demons, and he did. He did what only Richard could do. He pushed you back toward life. But now, there is no one to save him, no one to help him get back to the light, to his lifeline.”

Kahlan looked over at him lying next to where she had lain. He had his sword clutched in his dead hands. His eyes no longer saw the world of life. Now, he was lost in a world of darkness.

To see Richard so still, without life in him, was beyond any kind of agony she had ever known.

“How did he die?” Her own voice sounded like someone else asking the unimaginable.

She looked back at Nicci when she heard the sorceress softly sobbing.

“Nicci, how did he die? What happened?”

She finally looked up with torment in her blue eyes.

“He asked me to stop his heart.”

Kahlan’s eyes widened. “You killed Richard?”

Nicci nodded, but couldn’t find the words as she wept with the horror at what she had done. It was a torture she would always have to bear.

“Nicci, how could you kill Richard? How could you possibly do such a thing? You, of all people. After all he has done for you, how could you have done such a thing to him?”

Nicci sniffled to get herself under control so that she could explain.

“Because not to have done so, not to have let him have his deepest wish to go after you to try to save you, would have been worse. It would have been saving his life but killing his soul.”

It was obvious what such a burden was doing to the woman. She looked ready to end her own life.

Kahlan reached out and cupped Nicci’s face. “Dear spirits, I understand. I’m so sorry, Nicci, that it had to be you to do such a thing. You, of all people.”

“I’m so sorry, Kahlan,” Nicci wept. “I’m so sorry.”

A spark of an idea, a spark of hope, came to her, then.

“Nicci, you stopped his heart. Can’t you start it again? You said you did it only a moment ago. Can’t you start his heart and let life come back into him, the way it came back into me?”

“No.”

That single word had a world of finality to it.

Kahlan touched her chest where she remembered the knife slamming into her. She remembered the pain, the helpless terror.

“But I was stabbed through my heart. How is it working now? I don’t understand. Why can’t you do that for him?”

“Richard had me heal the damage to you before he went … But I couldn’t bring back

your life, and I can’t bring back his. I don’t have the power. Your heart started spontaneously when your soul returned, when Richard sent you back. Even if I could start his heart beating again, there is no soul there, nothing to keep it going. I can’t pull his soul back from the world of the dead.”

Tears ran down Kahlan’s face as she stared at Richard lying there still as stone. She had fought countless battles, seen death more times than she cared to contemplate. She recognized that terrible stillness that existed only in death, when, after the last breath of life had faded away, the soul had left the body to journey beyond the veil.

It was a kind of stillness that was beyond redemption.

Richard was gone. It didn’t seem like it could be real, and yet, she knew it was.

Kahlan lay down against Richard’s dead body as she gave in to the agony and lost control.

All she could think was that he had come for her, traded places with her in death, and now there was no one to save him.

CHAPTER

88

Even as she wept against Richard’s body, the words kept echoing around in her mind. No one to save him.

Kahlan sat up suddenly. She sucked back the sobs and wiped the tears back from her face as she scooted to the edge of the bed and hopped down onto the floor.

“Where are Cassia, Laurin, and Vale?”

Nicci gestured. “Standing watch outside the doors.”

Kahlan raced to the doors and flung them open. The three Mord-Sith turned and gasped when they saw her.

“Mother Confessor!” Cassia cried. “How—I mean—I don’t—”

“Richard traded places with me in the world of the dead so he could send me back,” she said in a rush.

Their eyes widened, stricken with horror. “Lord Rahl is dead?” Vale asked in a shaky whisper.

“I’ll explain it later. Listen to me. Cassia, go get Commander Fister.”

She pointed to a hallway branching off not far down the corridor. “He is waiting right down there, not far but out of the way, along with a number of the men.”

“Good. Tell him to bring a few dozen men. At least half of them archers. Laurin, Vale, you two go down in the dungeon and get Dreier. That collar he is wearing keeps his powers contained, so you will be able to handle him.”