Richard, of course, had known that, and that was why he didn’t want to continue to try to fight them at the encampment. Seeing the numbers, now, seeing how many Shun-tuk they faced, Kahlan understood that he had made that call none too soon. Richard had known that their best chance was to fight them in the narrow gorge as opposed to back in the open of the encampment.
The tactic of rotating the men so the ones at the front were always fresh, especially when driven from both ends in a confined space like the narrow gorge, was a killing machine that could grind through a lightly armed enemy such as the Shun-tuk with frightening efficiency. In such a situation, the vast numbers the Shun-tuk had were not as much of an advantage. This kind of battle was more akin to butchery than fighting. But then, that was what war was. The purpose of warriors was to kill the enemy as swiftly and efficiently as possible in order to end the conflict.
The well-disciplined and practiced men of the First File stood in tight ranks, overlapping their shields like links of armor, and mowed down the enemy as they tried to advance. Lances laid over the shoulders of the foremost rank were used to stab at the unprotected enemy. If the enemy saw the danger and stopped advancing, it made no difference because the soldiers would then begin to advance toward them, pushing from both ends at once. The enemy couldn’t retreat. They were caught in the teeth of a meat grinder that relentlessly chewed through them.
The only problem in the plan, the thing that nagged at the back of Kahlan’s mind, was that not only were these half people driven by an insane desire to eat living flesh so that they could steal a soul, these were now the ones with occult powers.
That worry kept whispering from the back of her mind.
In the dimly lit, narrow defile, Kahlan could see that some of the sea of figures coming for them had glowing red eyes. Some of them were the dead that had been reanimated. That was going to be another problem with the tactic the First File was using.
Even the Shun-tuk who had no occult powers, and were still sufficiently intact, could be brought back from the dead to be more lethal than they ever had been in life. Even the ones who had been burned to death, as long as they still had arms and legs, could be used. They didn’t bleed and die like living people. Since they weren’t alive, simply stabbing them through vital organs wouldn’t stop them. They had to be hacked to pieces or burned to ash.
Zedd shuffled past Kahlan on his way back up the gorge. He gave her a vacant look. That single look frightened her almost as much as the sight of the Shun-tuk.
Kahlan knew by the way his feet dragged and his arms hung that Zedd was near the end of his ability to use his gift, much less focus the strength needed to create wizard’s fire. What he had already done was exhausting work and he had been at it for quite some time. He would need to rest and recover some strength if he was to continue fighting. He had to be rotated back, much as the men fighting at the leading edge needed to catch their breath and recover some of their strength. Zedd would need water and a quick bite to eat to give him strength.
Kahlan cupped her free hand to the side of the old man’s face. “Why don’t you stay back up behind and watch over Richard for a while.”
He nodded, offering her a brief smile as he moved on.
Kahlan spotted Nicci and saw that she was exhausted as well, but the sorceress had no intention of resting just yet.
Below them, the writhing mass of ghostly figures struggled with all their might to climb up the gorge as fast as they could. Only the difficulty of the terrain, the narrowness of the gorge, and their own numbers interfering with each other slowed them. Having to funnel through narrower spots in the walls meant that they had to slow to wait their turn. In their impatience to get a soul, some pushed the ones in front down and stepped on or over them. Despite how they might have been slowed in the tight spots, once through, each of the half people raced ahead with reckless determination.
Richard had been right. They were predators fixated on the bait and they were now in full chase mode.
With a sense of hopeless realization, Kahlan grasped that Richard’s plan had worked—the Shun-tuk would follow them up the gorge. The only problem was that despite the effectiveness of that plan, Kahlan instinctively understood that there were too many. The odds were too great. The sheer weight of numbers was going to be more than a problem. It could spell their doom.
But the sword she held didn’t care about such odds. If anything, the odds only stimulated the power of rage from the weapon. It demanded their blood, and the confined space still gave them the best chance to stop the Shun-tuk.
The problem for the soldiers was going to be the revived dead.
The sword she carried, though, had been created for just such problems.
Kahlan pushed her way through the men, racing down to the front of their lines, toward the men fighting closest to the enemy.
She descended into madness.
CHAPTER
25
The Shun-tuk, in their insane drive for the souls of these men, were eager for the fight. They reached with clawed hands and snapped their jaws, hoping to get their teeth into flesh. Men cut them down relentlessly. The white figures coming from behind were equally determined. They were undeterred by how many white bodies lay dead at their feet. Those that had died only meant that they would have their chance. They climbed over their own dead to get at the soldiers, only to be run through with lances or laid open with swords and axes.
Kahlan spotted the first of the dead coming toward them. In the dim light, his glowing red eyes were easy to spot. She saw that he had only one arm. His chest had been ripped open, the ribs broken, so that she could see his lungs exposed. His lungs were still, though, as he had no need to breathe, but he was certainly coming for them. It was now occult powers that gave them strength and purpose.
This was the part that Kahlan had the best chance to handle. The dead didn’t fall easily to regular steel, but the Sword of Truth was an ancient weapon that existed for eliminating just such evil.
Finally able to unleash the fury of the sword, Kahlan brought it down so hard it split the dead man’s head and most of his body. He tried to move, to come after them, but he was far too damaged and only thrashed ineffectively. His right side fell over while the left side tried to drag the rest along. Her second blow ended the effort for good.
Kahlan was already past him, going after the walking dead. She could see their glowing red eyes glaring out from the darkness. The soldiers could fight the Shun-tuk; she needed to eliminate those difficult-to-stop awakened dead and leave the Shun-tuk for the men of the First File.
Kahlan scanned the faces, the gaping mouths, the painted black eye sockets, until she saw another pair of glowing red eyes. An instant after she saw them, her sword arced around and shattered the head. On the backswing she took off the head of another dead woman with glowing eyes, then stabbed the blade through the chest of a living Shun-tuk. His eyes opened wide in surprise before the life went out of them. As she yanked the blade free, she swiftly delivered several more blows to disable the headless dead to prevent them from using their arms against the soldiers.
Through the fury to get at the enemy, Kahlan recognized that half people were starting to come after her, specifically. She remembered, then, that they recognized her soul. She was a prize they wanted. She remembered what the prisoner had said about what they wanted to do to her.
She remembered the promise of the spirit king’s dark ones waiting for her in the underworld.
She realized, too, that in going after the reawakened dead, she had waded too far into the regular Shun-tuk.
Surrounded as she was, she still felt euphoric with each one she killed. More Shun-tuk coming closer in around her meant that she didn’t have to go after them in order to kill them. She could stand her ground and kill half people all around her as they came to her. The danger of her situation was a distant concern compared to the exhilaration of killing them. Each life the blade took fed the anger, giving glorious satisfaction that in turn on
ly drove the blade’s insatiable need for the enemy’s blood.
Her sword scythed white-painted men and women down by the dozens. What had been a trap closing around her turned into mounds of bodies clogging the gorge, making it more difficult for others to climb over the dead to get at her. Some slipped on blood and gore and fell, some smacking their heads on rocks, while others were stabbed to death before they could scramble to their feet.
Despite the blade’s hunger for enemy blood, Kahlan paid particular care to being sure she cut down any she saw with the red glowing eyes.
Killing the others between finding those with glowing red eyes was just a delicious treat until she could find another walking dead.
As she swung the sword, laying open chests, severing limbs, shattering skulls, she could feel their warm blood splattering across her face. Blood dripped from the stringy wet tips of her hair.
Still, the blood wasn’t enough. She wanted more. She went after them with ever-increasing fury. Teeth gritted with rage, she cut them down as fast as they could come at her.
Even as she fought, though, somewhere in the dim recesses of her mind, she knew that there were too many.
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.
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