“Like Sulachan, the dark ones he commands in the underworld recognize that taint of death on your souls and know that you do not have long to live. Those demons stir, restless in that realm, the world of the dead, eager to have you.
“When you die and your souls cross over, those eternal, dark demons will be there at the veil, waiting to latch on to both of you and drag you each down into the deepest, darkest depths of the underworld where you will be forever lost.
“Lord Arc would like to kill you with his own hands, to look into your eyes and watch you die, but he deals in occult powers and so he knows very well of the demons Emperor Sulachan has waiting for you when you cross over. He would like to kill you and personally send you into the clutches of those dark ones, but if you should happen to die first he wants us to bring him your head so that he knows that your soul is in the hands of those dark demons, suffering worse than any worldly horror he could inflict on you. So, you see, either way, he gets what he wants.”
Everyone watching seemed to be holding their breath.
The man looked around at his captors. “Know that when that taint of death touches your leader—sooner than you think—we will have all of you. We will hunt you down, eat your flesh, suck the marrow from your bones, and steal all of your souls for ourselves.”
He looked deliberately at Richard and then pointed with his chin at Kahlan. “Our people will devour the living flesh and drink the warm blood of your woman. We will enjoy her helpless screams as we rip her apart. Some will lick up her tears as others drink her blood.”
Richard made an effort of not showing his feelings but Kahlan had no trouble reading the anger in his body language. “You just said that your spirit king has dark spirits waiting for our souls, so your trackers can’t have any hope of having hers.”
The man smiled in a way that revealed his darkly determined, inalterable nature. “The trackers know that they cannot have your woman’s soul. They know it is promised to the dark ones in the underworld. But they will revel in drinking her warm blood anyway because she is yours and it will matter to you. Her fate has been ordered by our masters, because in her suffering, both of her flesh being torn from her bones and then the demons of the underworld having her soul to torment for all time, your pain will be intolerable beyond imagining. That is what awaits her, and you.”
It was a threat that not only sent a chill through Kahlan, it crossed a line with Richard.
He looked up from the remorseless eyes of the soulless brute, into the eyes of Commander Fister. Richard pulled a finger across his own throat in silent command.
Once he had given that command, he turned away. Jake Fister was a man devoted to putting down those who served evil. Richard did not need to witness the execution to know that it would be swiftly carried out.
On the way past, Richard took Kahlan’s arm, walking her back toward the center campfire where she had been healed. She could feel the hard tension of rage in his muscles.
“Any ideas about what we do next?” she asked him, trying to take his mind off the haunting threat they had just heard.
Before he could answer, before he could say anything, Richard lost a step.
He went to a knee beside her. Kahlan circled her arm tightly around his waist, trying to help him down so that he wouldn’t fall on his face. He was too big and heavy for her to hold up. All she could do was to help in easing him down.
He reached a hand up. It was a plea for help—gifted help.
Zedd and Nicci were already there, grabbing hold of Richard’s arms and lifting him back to his feet as they kept him from falling over. At Kahlan’s urgent signal, several men rushed in to put a shoulder under his arms.
Zedd pressed his fingers to Richard’s forehead as the soldiers helped move him along. “It’s the poison,” he said in a grim voice, telling them what Kahlan already knew. “Get him back by the fire where I can see better and then let’s lay him down.”
Kahlan’s heart pounded with worry. She felt worse than helpless. An icy wave of dread washed through her. She knew that the pull of death had grown stronger and he might die.
“Richard,” she said, clutching his big hand tightly, “hold on. Zedd and Nicci are going to help you. Hold on. Don’t you dare leave me. Don’t you dare.”
He didn’t respond. His hand was cold and limp.
She tried very hard to hold back her tears.
And then, she heard the howls way off in the darkness of the woods as the half people started their charge.
CHAPTER
16
As Kahlan held his hand, Richard hooked his other around the back of Nicci’s neck and pulled her down close as they lowered him onto a blanket on the ground near the fire. He gripped Zedd’s sleeve and pulled him close as well. He had managed to regain consciousness, if barely.
It took a great deal of effort for Richard to draw each labored breath through the obvious pain he was in. Kahlan knew that pain all too well. The intensity of it made her extremities tingle. The terrible weight of the pain felt as if it would crush her skull at the same time as nausea coursed through her body in dizzying waves.
At least until the blackness overcame her. Then it was worse because she was lost in a dark place, lonely beyond anything she had ever experienced. It was a terrifying, hopeless kind of loneliness that crushed her soul the way the pain felt like it would crush her skull.
But until the darkness overcame you, it stole your desire to speak. It made you not want to open your eyes because when you did the world spun and tilted in a stomach-churning blur. It made every sound feel sharp and stabbing, like knitting needles pushed in your ears. It took maximum effort simply to endure the agony and draw each breath. It was a struggle just to remain conscious.
She knew that the Hedge Maid had felt all of that when she had died, when that terrible, awful, horrifying scream had escaped her. All that lethal agony had been expressed in that one, long, shriek. Richard and Kahlan had been touched by the same call of death, and while not immediately fatal, they had felt much the same pain of what had taken Jit.
Kahlan knew, too, that such a feeling was part of the lure of death making you want to give up, to give in to it, to let it take you. It made you suffer, and in the suffering promised to make the agony stop, if only you would heed the call and step through the veil toward the blessed darkness. It was that beguiling call at the intolerable end of life that made death just beyond life seem so sweet, made it seem like a mere, simple, single step to the other side and then it would all so mercifully end.
Resisting that call was difficult in the extreme, especially when it meant you had to continue to endure the unendurable while telling yourself that you must.
Richard’s voice, when he was finally able to force himself to speak, betrayed all of that suffering and more.
“You two,” he said to Zedd and Nicci leaning close over him, “have Irena help you and the men fight off the Shun-tuk. They must be held back for a little longer.”
Zedd obviously thought Richard was too delirious to make any decisions. “I need to help you,” Zedd told his grandson. “I can’t leave you like this. I must help you now before it can take you. You can’t fight it on your own. The men can hold off the Shun-tuk. You can’t wait.”
Richard, his eyes closed, rolled his head from side to side. “The men won’t be able to hold them off.”
The certainty in his voice caused Kahlan to steal a quick glance around at the men rushing to the defensive lines. She met Nicci’s troubled blue eyes.
Nicci gripped Richard’s shoulder as she leaned in. “You need our help, Richard. If we don’t save you, we will all be lost. We must help you in order to help all the rest of us. Without you, we are lost.”
“Samantha can help me,” Richard told her. “The trackers can sense my weakness. They know that this is their chance. They will put all their effort into finishing us off quickly while they have the chance, while I can’t fight them. If you don’t help stop them, then we will
be lost.”
Zedd’s bushy brows drew tight as he, too, stole a quick glance around at the frantic activity of men preparing to do battle. He looked back down at Richard.
“Samantha? Richard, this is too serious. She is little more than a child. Without the right help—”
The breathless young woman rushed in, then, sliding to a halt on her knees. “I’m here, Lord Rahl.” She gulped air as she gathered up one of his hands in both of hers and held it tightly to her. “I’m here.”
“Listen, Samantha,” Richard said, “you helped give me strength to hold it off before—fight off the sickness. Remember?”
In the firelight Kahlan could see the tears welling up in the young sorceress’s eyes. She was on the verge of panic.
“What? You want me to do this? Lord Rahl, there are people here much better able to help you than me.”
“After we came across that man in the woods, before we made it to the north wall. I grew weak and you helped me. You gave me strength. Remember?”
Samantha nodded as if her life depended on it. “Sure, I remember.”
“I need you to do that again,” he told her. He opened his eyes to look up at the others. “While she helps me, the rest of you need to keep the Shun-tuk from overrunning the camp and killing us all. You need to buy us a little time.”
“It’s that unholy half person who did this,” Irena said. “I told you that he had occult powers and Richard should not go near him, but you wouldn’t listen. Now look what has happened!
“I know a lot more about healing than Samantha. I should be able to do something to help. Get back and let me see if I can do something to help.”
She immediately pushed in beside Zedd and pressed the palm of her hand over Richard’s forehead.
Before Kahlan could say anything, or Nicci had a chance to remove the woman’s hand from Richard, Irena yelped and jerked her hand back on her own.
“Dear spirits. Richard, I had no idea … We can’t heal such a thing.”
Concerned more with Richard and the erupting battle than wasting time lecturing the woman, Nicci didn’t say anything, but she did give Kahlan a look that betrayed her smoldering anger. The look in those blue eyes said it all to Kahlan.
Kahlan thought that Irena would be wise to be more respectful of Nicci. The seductively beautiful sorceress might have looked young and less experienced than Irena, but she was a former Sister of the Dark and as such possessed not only a wizard’s power, but the accumulated power of the gift from others she had killed.
Irena had no conception of where life had taken Nicci, or what she was capable of. Considering how far she had been to the dark side of life, and the journey back, to say nothing of all she had done for them, including all the times she had saved Richard when no other living person had the ability or knowledge to succeed at it, they could have no better friend and ally.
“That’s not what I need,” Richard insisted. His impatience with them was evident. Kahlan was beginning to suspect that he had something in mind, something bigger than the rest of them realized.
She could clearly see that the sickness was keeping him from explaining himself the way he would have liked and that was adding to his frustration. It was taking most of his effort simply to remain conscious, and more yet to speak even the small amount he had spoken. He wanted them to follow orders without having to explain it to them.
Off behind her, Kahlan could hear the sounds of the first of the Shun-tuk slamming into the defensive line. Men of the First File bellowing in rage as they slaughtered the first of the enemy and drove others back. Some of the half people screamed as they fell. Off in the darkness, Kahlan could hear the sounds of swords and axes slashing into people and the cries of pain as maces broke bones.
“Do as he says,” Nicci growled as she seized a fistful of Irena’s dress at the shoulder and hauled the woman up and out of the way. “Let Samantha deal with it.”
Nicci apparently realized that there was some purpose in Richard’s insistence. Nicci knew enough not to question Richard when there was no time for it.
“But, but, I know nothing about fighting,” Irena said. She looked on the verge of lapsing into a daze at what was happening.
Kahlan felt a pang of sorrow for the woman. She had, after all, seen the Shun-tuk eat her husband alive before she had been taken away to captivity herself to await the same fate. The idea of being overrun by the same bloodthirsty half people had her nearly paralyzed with fright.
“I understand,” Nicci said with surprising compassion to the hesitating Irena. “But we have to help keep the half people back. We need everyone helping, including you. Your daughter’s life depends on all of us helping in this.”
Irena met Samantha’s gaze and then nodded. “I understand.”
Zedd urgently leaned in and placed his fingers under his grandson’s chin. Richard’s eyes squeezed closed in pain. “Hold on, my boy. We’ll be back to help you just as soon as there is enough of a break.”
Richard inexplicably shook his head, but there was no time to try to wait for him to explain what he meant.
Without pause, Zedd turned and cast out a fist of air that knocked back a man who seemed to come out of nowhere to dive in toward them. Kahlan realized that some of the half people had already breached their defensive line and were in the camp. The soldiers fell on the man when Zedd’s blow threw him back into their midst.
Nicci paused, then turned back and went to a knee, quickly placing her fingers to Richard’s temples, assessing for herself. “I know,” she said in a very low voice to comfort him. “I know. I can feel it. Hold on, Richard. Zedd and I will be back as soon as we can. Hold on. Fight it until then. Samantha will help give you strength.”
Kahlan swallowed back the lump in her throat as she watched Nicci and Zedd stand and turn to the sounds of the battle erupting at the edge of camp. She wanted them to help Richard, but she knew it would have to wait. For now, their gifted ability was needed to fight off the attack and to try to keep the area around Richard clear of Shun-tuk. She hoped it was enough to help the men of the First File keep the enemy from taking the camp.
CHAPTER
17
Suddenly alone with Samantha and Richard as battle erupted in the night around them, Kahlan put a hand on Richard’s chest, unable to do anything more than to offer him silent comfort.
Kahlan had been in enough combat to know that what was raging around them wasn’t a conventional battle. This was different. This was fighting off predators possessed by a maniacal drive to devour them. She knew the nature of these soulless people, and their numbers, and she knew that she was soon going to have to join the fight. She didn’t have her powers, but she did have a knife and knew how to use it.
What she really needed was a sword. She had learned to use a sword from her father, but she had become truly adept with such a weapon only under Richard’s guidance. Richard was in so many ways a master of the blade, any blade, even a knife or chisel he used to carve the most astoundingly beautiful statues.
Behind her, Zedd sent a thundering bolt of fire slamming into a ghostly figure trying to climb up on the back of a big soldier fighting the enemy to the other side. The soldier was trying to elbow the man off his back, teeth snapping at his neck, while he used his other hand to stab his sword at half people rushing him from the front. The flash sent by Zedd ignited the Shun-tuk in a ball of fiercely glowing flame. He twisted in horrific pain as he sloughed from the soldier’s back into a heap on the ground. His entire body aflame, his flesh bubbling, the man rose up and stumbled blindly through the camp as he screamed. With a battle raging all around, no one noticed his desperate screams. They didn’t last long.
Unfortunately, many more of the ghostly figures seemed immune to the effects of ordinary Additive Magic, such as the fire Zedd was casting. In the tight confines of the camp, Zedd was unable to unleash wizard’s fire. Such a conflagration was not selective enough, and would have engulfed their own men in that lethal, s
ticky fire that burned with fierce intensity. So, Zedd was forced to use lesser, more targeted forms of fire.
Kahlan saw a number of the Shun-tuk emerge unscathed from those rolling balls of flame sent by the wizard, as if they were untouched by it. One of those men gave Zedd a murderous look, and started for him, only to be run through from behind by a lance. The soldier who had speared the man heaved him off to the side, like a carp speared in a pond, letting the body slide from the weapon so it would be free to use against the next intruder.
Kahlan and Richard had been unconscious and hidden in a wagon at the time, but it must have been very much like this before, at the first battle, when they had all been captured. Without Zedd and Nicci being able to bring the power of magic to bear effectively, the sheer numbers of Shun-tuk had been too much and they had overrun the men. The appalling number of casualties taken by the Shun-tuk in that attack didn’t seem to discourage them in the least. Nor did it seem to faze them in this battle, either.
After hearing the prisoner, Kahlan now understood why. Without souls, without the higher reasoning ability that having a soul implied, these people had no empathy for their own who were injured or killed. Even though they hunted in packs, they didn’t actually care about one another, the way these soldiers did. Men in battle fought to protect their friends as much as they fought to defeat the enemy. They cared about their fellow soldiers.
Each half person that was attacking only cared about getting a soul for themselves. What happened to others of their kind made no real difference to them. If one of their fellow Shun-tuk fell to a blade, it meant that they were more likely to be able to sink their teeth into a person with a soul. It was a “more for me” mentality.
Nicci cast out a crackling bolt of sizzling black lightning, like a whip. It cut a whitewashed figure in two. The suddenly exposed cluster of organs and intestines spilled out across the granite ledge. Another Shun-tuk right behind slipped on them and fell, only to have a soldier drive a sword down through him.
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