Without wasting another moment, Richard stepped away from the tree, spun around, drew back, and with all his might swung the sword as hard as he could. Knowing that his life depended on it, he put every bit of fury and energy behind the blade, driving it with all his power. The tip whistled as it came round with lightning speed.
The blade crashed through the tree with a loud boom that sounded like a lightning strike and did just as much damage. The tree's trunk shattered. Jagged splinters flew everywhere. Long fragments spiraled through the air. Smaller chips and a shower of bark were netted by the sticky tangle beyond.
The mighty spruce groaned as the towering crown pulled itself through the tangled canopy above as the tree began to topple. With gathering speed, it plunged through the tight stand of trees, ripping thick branches from other trees as the great weight of the spruce dropped through the crowded forest.
As the tree fell, it ripped the strands where the trunk rose through the tangled web above him, pulling gummy ropes along with it, and then it crashed down atop the entanglement of sticky strands, whipping them down against the ground, burying them under the trunk and the thick thatch of limbs.
Before the web had time to re-form or heal itself and close the yawning gap, Richard leaped up onto the trunk even as it was still rebounding from hitting the ground. He held his arms out and crouched for balance. The rain was picking up and the trunk of the tree was slippery. As the great trunk bounced and settled to the ground, and limbs, bark, branches, needles, and leaves still rained down on him, Richard used the opportunity to race across the length of the spruce, using it like a bridge to cross the sticky net.
Panting, he reached Cara, free at last of the trap. Cara, having seen him coming, had climbed up on a stout limb to be ready to help him across. She seized his arm to keep him from falling on the wet bark as he ran through the snarl of branches.
"What in the world is going on?" Cara asked through the roar of the downpour as she helped him down to the ground.
Richard was still trying to catch his breath. "I have no idea."
"Look," she said, pointing at his sword.
The gummy substance still stuck to his sword had begun melting away in the rain.
The mass of strands tangled all through the woods were also beginning to soften and sag. As strands came apart, the rain beat the net down, pulling yet more of the long, thick fibers from the trees. It dropped to the ground in dark masses, where it hissed in the rain and melted like the first snow of the season failing to survive as the storm turned back to rain.
In the gray dawn Richard could see the extent of the mass that had woven its way around him. It was an immense snarl. When the tree ripped the weave of the mesh open at the top it seemed to have undone the integrity of the whole thing, causing its weight to tear itself apart and collapse.
With the cold rain coming down harder all the time, the dark strands were washed from the branches and brush. They lay on the ground looking like nothing so much as the dark viscera of some great dead monster.
Richard wiped his sword on wet bushes and grasses until the sticky substance was all off.
The mass on the ground melted away with increasing speed, evaporating into a gathering gray fog. Back in the shadows of the trees, like steam rising from the entrails of a fresh corpse on a winter day, that dark fog slowly lifted from the ground. Carried on a faint breeze that had come up, murky patches drifted away beyond the thick veil of trees.
Back in the cover of trees, that dark fog shifted abruptly in some vague manner that Richard couldn't quite follow, solidifying into an inky black shadow. In a flash, before he could make sense of it, that sinister apparition disintegrated into a thousand fluttering shapes that darted off in every direction, as if a dark phantom were decomposing into the rainy shadows and mist. In an instant they were gone.
A chill ran up Richard's spine.
Cara stared in astonishment. "Did you see that?"
Richard nodded. "It looked something like what the thing back in Altur'Rang did after it came though the walls after me. It disappeared in much the same way just before it would have had me."
"Then it has to be the same beast."
In the early morning downpour, Richard surveyed the shadows among the trees all around them. "That would be my guess."
Cara, too, watched the woods all around for any sign of threat. "Lucky for us the rain came when it did."
"I don't think it was the rain that did it."
She wiped water from her eyes. "Then what did?"
"I don't know for sure, but maybe just the fact that I escaped its trap."
"I can't imagine a beast with that kind of power being so easily discouraged—the last time or this time."
"I don't have any other ideas. I know someone who might, though." He took Cara by the arm. "Come on. Let's get our things together and get out of here."
She gestured off through the woods. "You go get the horses. Let me pack up our bedrolls. We can dry them out later."
"No, I want us out of this place right now." He quickly pulled a shirt out of his pack, along with a cloak to try to keep relatively dry. "We'll leave the horses. With them fenced into a place where they have grass and water they'll be fine where they are for a while."
"But the horses would get us away from here faster."
Richard kept an eye on the surrounding woods as he stuffed his arms through the sleeves of his shirt. "We can't take them over the mountain pass—it's too narrow in places—and we can't take horses down into Agaden Reach where Shota lives. They can get a needed rest while we go see the witch woman. Then, when we find out what Shota knows about where Kahlan is, we can come back and get the horses. Maybe Shota will even know how we can get rid of this beast that's following me."
Cara nodded. "Makes sense, except I'd rather get out of here as quickly as we can and horses would help in that."
Richard squatted down and started rolling up his sodden bedroll. "I agree with the sentiment, but the pass is close and the horses can't make it over, so let's just get moving. Like I said, the horses need a rest anyway or they're not going to be any good to us."
Cara stuffed the few things she had out back into her pack. She, too, pulled out a cloak. She lifted the pack by a strap and threw it up onto a shoulder. "We'll need to get things out of our saddlebags, back with the horses."
"Leave them. I don't want to have to carry any more than we must; it would just slow us down."
Cara gazed off through the veil of rain. "But someone might steal our supplies."
"Thieves won't come near Shota."
She frowned up at him. "Why not?"
"Shota and her companion walk these woods. She's a rather intolerant woman."
"Oh great," Cara muttered.
Richard swung his pack around onto his back and started out. "Come on. Hurry."
She scurried after him. "Have you ever considered that maybe the witch woman is more dangerous than the beast?"
Richard glanced back over his shoulder. "You're a regular little miss sunshine this morning, aren't you?"
CHAPTER 37
The rain had turned to snow after they'd climbed out of the dense forest and made it into the crooked wood at the transition out of the tree line. Because of the harsh conditions common at that elevation, the stunted trees, mantled in meager vegetation, grew in bizarre, windblown shapes. Walking through the crooked wood was like passing among the petrified forms of desiccated souls whose limbs were frozen for all time in tormented stances, as if they had emerged from their graves only to find their feet forever anchored in hallowed ground, preventing them from ever escaping the temporal world.
While there were those who would not enter the surreal world of the crooked wood without some form of mystical protection, Richard wasn't superstitious about the place. In fact, he considered all such beliefs to be the refuge of the willfully ignorant. Richard saw through the trappings to what lay beneath all superstition—nothing less than the call to surrender t
o the view of man as helpless in accomplishing his own ends and dealing with the reality of the world around him in order to further his own survival, instead embracing the notion that he existed only at the whim of vague and unknowable forces that can only be persuaded to stay their cruel and merciless impulses if man falls to his knees in supplication, or, if they have to enter a spiritual place, by carrying the proper fetish.
While Richard had always found it eerie being in a crooked wood, he knew what it was and why it had grown to be that way, even if it still fell rather haunting to be in such a place. He was aware that there were basically two ways to deal with that primordial emotion. The superstitious solution was to carry sacred talismans and amulets to ward off spiteful demons and incomprehensible dark forces thought to inhabit such places, hoping that the fates would be persuaded to kindly stay their fickle hand. Even though people proclaimed with complete confidence that such mysterious forces were fundamentally unknowable to mere mortals, they nonetheless passionately believed, without evidence, that they could be certain that the power of charms would soothe the savage temper of those menacing forces, insisting that faith was all that was necessary—as if faith were a mystical plaster with the power to patch over all the yawning holes in their convictions.
Believing in free will, Richard instead chose the second way of dealing with such fear, which was to be watchful, alert, and ready to take responsibility for his own survival and life. At its core, that battle of belief between the cruel fates and free will was his essential disagreement with prophecy and why he discounted it. To choose to believe in fate was at once an admission of free will and at the same time an abdication of one's responsibility to it.
As he and Cara passed through the crooked wood, Richard kept a watchful eye out but he saw no legendary beasts or vengeful ghosts. Only the wind-borne snow wandered the wood.
Having traveled at a breakneck pace for so long in the oppressive heat and humidity of summer, they found that the encounter with bitter cold high up in the mountain pass made the effort of the climb all the more difficult, especially after being drenched by the miserable rain. Despite being fatigued from the altitude, Richard knew that, as wet as they were, they had to keep moving at a brisk pace to keep warm or the cold could easily overcome them. He was well aware that the seductive song of the cold could entice people to stop and lie down for a rest, luring them to surrender to sleep and the death that waited under its inviting cloak. As Zedd had once told him, dead was dead. Richard knew that he would be no less dead from the cold than he would be from an arrow.
More than that, though, he and Cara were both eager to put distance between them and the trap that had nearly captured him back at their camp. His burns from the brief contact with his would-be death trap had blistered. He shuddered to think of what had nearly happened.
At the same time, he was leery about going to see Shota in her lair at Agaden Reach. The last time he had been in the Reach she had told him that if he ever came back there she would kill him. Richard didn't doubt her word or her ability to carry out the threat. Even so, he believed Shota would be his best chance of getting the kind of help necessary to find Kahlan.
He was desperate to find someone who could tell him something useful, and after going through a list of things he might do, people he might go to, and in the end he couldn't come up with anyone else who could be as potentially informative as Shota. Nicci hadn't been able to offer any solutions. Zedd, he knew, might be able to help him in some ways, and maybe there were others with the capacity to be able to add some piece to the puzzle, but to Richard's mind, when all was said and done, none of them were as likely as Shota to be able to point him in the right direction. That alone made the choice simple.
When he glanced up, Richard briefly saw the snowcap through gaps in the driving snow. Some distance off, over the open, broken ground of the steep slope, the trail over the pass would skirt the lower reaches of the mountain's year-round icy mantle. The clouds, laden with moisture, clung to the soaring gray rock. The low trailers of mist and fog dragging past left visibility limited in most places and nearly nonexistent in others. It was just as well; the precipitous drop-offs in spots along the infrequently used and increasingly slippery trail offered frightening glimpses down the towering mountainside.
When a fresh flight of icy gusts carried curtains of wet snow into their faces, Richard pulled his cloak tight against the buffeting onslaught. Out of the cover of the trees, making their way across the loose scree, they had to lean not only into the steep incline, but into the wind. Richard hunched a shoulder, trying to keep the icy wet sting off his face. Wind-driven snow built a brittle crust on one side of his cloak.
With wind howling through the mountain pass, talking was difficult at best. The altitude and the exertion left them both winded and in no condition to be able to easily carry on a conversation. Just getting the air they needed was effort enough and he could tell by the look on Cara's face that she felt just as nauseated by the altitude as he did.
Richard wasn't in the mood to talk, anyway. He'd been talking to Cara for days and it never got him anywhere. Cara, for her part, seemed just as frustrated by his questions as he was by her answers. He knew that she thought his questions were absurd; he thought her answers were. The inconsistencies and gaps in Cara's recollection were at first disappointing and confounding but eventually they became maddening. Several times he'd had to bite his tongue and remind himself that she was not doing it to be malicious. He knew that if Cara could have honestly said what he wanted to hear she would have eagerly done so. He knew, too, that if she lied it would be of no help in getting Kahlan back. He needed the truth; that, after all, was why he was going to see Shota.
Richard had systematically gone through of long list of times when Cara had been with him and Kahlan. Cara, though, remembered events that should have been momentous to her in ways that were not consistent with what had really happened. In a number of cases, such as the time he had gone to the Temple of the Winds, Cara simply didn't recall key parts of the circumstances in which Kahlan had been involved. In other instances, Cara remembered events very differently from how they had actually happened.
Happened, at least, as Richard remembered them. There were depressing moments when he sank into a despondent fear that it was he who was for some reason the one with the problem. Cara thought that it was he who was remembering things that had never taken place. Although she didn't try to put too fine an edge to her convictions, the more things he brought up the more she thought his delusions about a fantasy wife were cropping up everywhere in his memory like weeds after a rain.
But Richard's clear memory of events and the way those events were knit tightly together always brought him back to the solid conviction that Kahlan was real.
Cara's memory about certain incidents was very clear and very different from his, while in regard to other things her memory was agonizingly fuzzy. That his story of situations was so different from her memory of those same situations only served, in Cara's mind, to further convince her that he was even more delusional than she had previously realized or feared. While that obviously saddened her, he'd continued to press her.
At his and Kahlan's wedding, Cara had been the only Mord-Sith in attendance. Richard knew that such an event had been significant to her in more ways than one, yet Cara remembered only that she'd gone with him to the Mud People's village. And why did they go there if not for the wedding? Cara said that she didn't know for certain why he'd gone there, but she was sure that he had his reasons; her duty was to go where he went and protect him, not to question his motive every time he turned around. Richard wanted to pull his hair out.
Cara didn't remember that she, Kahlan, and Richard had traveled together to the wedding site in the sliph. At the time Cara had been apprehensive about climbing down into the sliph's well and breathing in what appeared to be living quicksilver. Yet now she had no awareness that Kahlan had helped her overcome her anxiety about traveling within s
uch a creature of magic. Cara remembered Zedd being there at the Mud people's village, and Shota making a brief appearance, but instead of the witch woman coming to offer Kahlan the necklace as a wedding gift and truce, Cara only recalled Shota being there to congratulate Richard on stopping the plague by going to the Temple of the Winds.
When Richard questioned Cara about Wizard Marlin, the assassin Jagang had sent, she clearly remembered him coming to kill Richard, but not any of the parts where Kahlan had been involved. When he asked how in the world she thought he could have even gotten to the Temple of the Winds in the first place, or how he had been cured of the plague, were it not for Kahlan's help, Cara only shrugged and said "Lord Rahl, you're a wizard, you know about such things—I don't. I'm sorry, but I can't tell you how you managed to accomplish astonishing things with your gift. I don't know how magic works. I only know that you did it. I only remember you doing what you had to do in order to make things work out—and they did, so I must be right. I could no more easily tell you how you healed me; I only know that you used your gift and you did it. You were the magic against magic, as is your duty to us. I simply don't recall this woman being any part of it. For your sake I wish I did, but I don't."
For every single instance where Kahlan had been present, Cara remembered it either differently or not at all. For every one of those events, she had an answer to explain it away with an alternate version or, when that would have been impossible, simply didn't recall what he was talking about. To Richard, there were a thousand little inconsistencies in her version that just didn't add up or make sense; to Cara's mind, it seemed not only simple and clear, but straightforward.
To say that it was exasperating trying to convince Cara of the reality of Kahlan's existence would not begin to touch the depth of his frustration.
Because it was pointless to continue to remember significant events in an effort to try to help her remember, when it never did any good, Richard had lost interest in trying to bring Cara around to reality. She simply didn't recall Kahlan. It seemed that her mind had healed over missing chunks of what had really happened.
[Sword of Truth 9] - Chainfire Page 42