Severed Souls

Gerald nodded. And then he was running. Running to warn people of what was coming—warn them to surrender and not resist what they could not stop or they would suffer an unimaginable death

Lord Arc had said that he intended to unite the world of life and the world of the dead.

Gerald believed him.

CHAPTER 10

Kahlan opened her eyes.

It was night. In the flickering firelight, as she tried to will her vision into focus, she saw fuzzy faces bent down over her. She felt as if she was a great distance away, and it was proving to be a long and difficult journey back.

As her focus began to resolve, she recognized Zedd’s weathered, worried face bent over her. His wavy white hair looked more unruly than usual. The tips of his bony fingers pressed firmly against her forehead. That explained the persistent tingling sensation down her spine. Seeing Zedd, she realized that what she felt was the healing power of the gift.

She saw Nicci, then, kneeling down close to her on the opposite side from Zedd. The sorceress looked no less concerned. Nicci squeezed Kahlan’s hand as she offered a reassuring smile to welcome her back from the dark world of the lost.

Samantha crowded in close behind Nicci, with her mother Irena, leaning in over her shoulder, watching intently.

Then, in the fluttering light from a nearby campfire, Kahlan spotted Richard a little farther back in the center of the other faces. She saw the relief in his eyes as he let out a deep breath.

As soon as she saw him, Kahlan sat up and threw her arms around his neck, squeezing him tightly to her. She had feared he had been killed by the half people and she would never see him again.

Now that she had her arms around his muscular neck, her cheek against his stubble, she let the joy and relief of seeing him alive run rampant through her. She put a hand to the back of his head and held him to her, thankful that he was all right and there with her. She wanted to envelop him.

“It’s so good to see you,” she whispered privately in the midst of the crowd. When she held him, there was no crowd, there was only him. There was always only him in her heart and soul.

His arms tightened around her. “You can’t imagine how glad I am to see you wake up.”

She finally parted from him, holding his shoulders, and saw that he had cleaned off all the blood of the half people he had fought. She looked around at all the grim faces, their bleak expressions finally easing.

“Well,” Zedd said, “it would seem that I have done it again.”

Richard laughed. Everyone else looked like they had thought for a time that they would never smile again.

“What happened?” Kahlan asked.

“I healed you,” Zedd announced, as if that should be explanation enough.

Kahlan waved a hand as she sat up the rest of the way. “No, I mean what happened with the half people that were after us?”

She saw firelight from a nearby fire reflecting up the face of the cliff. As she looked around, she saw that there were two more campfires, one to either side of them, their light also reflecting off the cliff and helping to light the general area and the trees nearby. The men of the First File were close by all around them. The fires were large, meant to keep the darkness at bay so that no one could easily sneak up.

“Well,” Richard said, “we made it here and we were able to fight them off. We set up camp with a tight defensive line. You were unconscious—”

“I healed you,” Zedd repeated, apparently trying to get across how difficult it had been without complaining directly.

“Was it hard?” Kahlan asked him. It was dawning on her that he was trying to say something more without saying it. “Was it extra difficult … for some reason?”

Zedd leaned back on his heels. “Yes, it was hard,” he confirmed with an earnest nod. He lifted one eyebrow. “Quite difficult, actually.”

Kahlan decided to cut through the dancing and turned to Nicci. “Why?”

Nicci didn’t shy from the question. “You were injured—one of the half people tried to steal your soul by eating you. The ever-present threat of death within you used that opportunity, when so much was going on, when you were weakened by the struggle, to try to pull you in. You were pretty far gone and it took all day and part of tonight, but Zedd managed to pull you back.”

Kahlan put a hand up to the top of her shoulder and felt only smooth skin. She thought she remembered the pain of teeth sinking into her flesh there. She remembered the terror of it. Then there was only blackness and the terrible feeling of being forever lost to it.

She smiled at the wizard. “Thank you, Zedd.”

Samantha leaned in, eager to tell the story. “Lord Rahl chopped the head off the man that was biting you so fast and with such power that I bet we were halfway here before it ever hit the ground.”

“You were unconscious, though,” Irena said, considerably more worried-looking than Samantha.

“Some of the men carried you,” Samantha said as she leaned past her mother, eager to get to the meat of the story. “That way Lord Rahl could fight off the Shun-tuk. You were bleeding pretty badly. Lord Rahl and the men—”

“We made it here,” Richard said, not at all interested in the drama of the tale. “Once we were here we were able to gain control of the situation and begin to reduce their numbers—”

“And then the Shun-tuk disappeared,” Samantha put in, not happy with Richard’s pace at storytelling. She snapped her fingers. “Gone, just like that.”

“We set up a defensive position,” Richard said, “so that Zedd and Nicci could heal you.” The ghost of worry reappeared on his features. “Or at least heal your more obvious wounds.”

Nicci laid a hand on Kahlan’s arm. “You know we can’t get the poison of death out of you, at least not here, or we would. We did the best we could to give you strength.”

“It’s getting worse, isn’t it?” Kahlan asked.

Nicci nodded. “I’m afraid so. It was touch-and-go for a while, there. We were worried that this time we wouldn’t be able to bring you back.”

Kahlan nodded. “Me too.”

“Ba,” Zedd said with a dismissive gesture. “Nicci was afraid. I knew I could do it.”

Nicci smiled at last. “Yes, Zedd, this time you proved yourself to be the wonder you have always insisted you are.”

With a wave, Kahlan cut off the small talk. “What about the men? Are they all right? Were any of them hurt or killed? Did we lose any of them?”

“Surprisingly enough,” Richard said, “we didn’t lose a single man. The First File knows how to fight. Half people typically don’t, although these are Shun-tuk, and they’re more trouble than the other half people we’ve encountered in the past. They don’t just attack randomly. They execute their attack according to a plan. That makes them more dangerous than the half people we’ve fought before.

“Worse, some of these obviously have an ability to use occult powers. We know how dangerous they are. After all, they’ve overwhelmed and captured these battle-hardened, elite troops and our gifted once before and took them beyond the barrier, so they’re confident they can take us again. Even though we managed to escape, it wasn’t before we lost a lot of men back beyond the barrier. It’s pretty clear that the Shun-tuk don’t give up.”

“What about the man we went to help?” she asked. “Is he all right, too, then?”

Richard nodded. “While Zedd and Nicci were working on you, Samantha helped by healing some of the men who were injured. None of them were as seriously hurt as Ned, the man we went to help.” He gestured to Samantha’s mother. “Irena healed him.”

“Ironic, isn’t it?” Nicci lifted an eyebrow as she looked up at the other sorceress on the opposite side of Kahlan. “She healed the man she would have had us leave to be eaten alive.”

Irena met Nicci’s glare in kind. “These men are Lord Rahl’s guard. Their duty is to protect him at all costs, even if that cost is their lives. That is their calling. They know the risks and accept them willingly. Yes, we saved him, but it was at a risk to Richard’s life that was not the wisest choice. It could all too easily have turned out quite differently.”

“And if we allow those men to be needlessly lost, then Lord Rahl loses their protection, now doesn’t he?” Nicci asked in cold challenge. “They can’t very well protect Lord Rahl if they are dead.”

Irena had used “Richard.” Kahlan noticed that Nicci clearly didn’t think the woman was entitled to be so familiar as to call him “Richard.”

Everyone but individuals close to him called Richard “Lord Rahl.” To everyone else, he was “Lord Rahl.” To some, it was a term of deep respect. To some, that name, attached to Richard, meant liberty. To others, it was tantamount to a curse.

Even Cara, his closest personal guard and close friend, had called him “Lord Rahl,” not out of duty, but because he had earned her respect. The Lord Rahl before Richard had enslaved her into service to him as a Mord-Sith. Richard had freed her from that servitude, and out of respect for him she called him Lord Rahl. Even though it was the same title, it meant something unique when applied to Richard.

Richard had wed Cara to her husband, Ben. He had been there when they had lost Ben. And, he had been the last person she came to see before she’d left.

Richard was not only the leader of the D’Haran Empire, he had created that empire out of war-torn, fragmented lands in order to win freedom from a world falling to tyranny. He had become Lord Rahl in every sense of the term.

To most people, titles were important touchstones of power and widely employed as a mark of that power. Kahlan, as the Mother Confessor, was all too familiar with the power a title represented, and the fear it engendered.

Richard didn’t do the things he did for a title to represent his power, or for power itself, or to impress anyone. Titles didn’t really matter to him. While others concerned themselves with titles, Richard simply did as he needed to do. He judged people as individuals and by their actions, not by their title, and expected them to judge him the same way, not by his title.

Nicci was one of the few for whom such familiar use of his name seemed to come naturally. To her his title meant something else. Kahlan wasn’t exactly sure what.

“We lost the horses,” Richard said, changing the subject. “One broke away and ran off in the confusion.”

Kahlan was brought out of her thoughts. “What? How?”

Richard gestured vaguely into the distance. “When we went after Ned, some of the Shun-tuk used the opportunity to go after our horses. They want to slow us down. They drew us away so they could cut the horses’ throats. One of the mares managed to get away and run off. We were able to get it back, but one horse won’t do us much good.”

Kahlan leaned forward. “Slow us down? You mean you think the whole attack was a diversion to draw us off just so they could get at the horses?”

Richard nodded. “I think that at least in part their plan is to prevent us from being able to get to the People’s Palace to warn them that Emperor Sulachan is heading their way with an army of half people.

“These Shun-tuk seem smarter than the ones we’ve fought before. Rather than simply relying on brute force, they’re employing rudimentary strategy, such as killing our horses to slow us down. This attack was part of a larger plan and I’m not sure what the rest of it is, except that it is meant to have us all in the end.”

“But they were trying to eat us in hopes of capturing our souls for themselves,” Kahlan said, remembering quite well the teeth sinking into her neck. “That’s what all the others we’ve fought before wanted.”

Richard arched an eyebrow. “They didn’t eat Ned when they had the chance. They wanted him making a lot of noise in order to draw us into coming to his aid, probably so that some of them could then get at the horses. Up until then the horses had been protected within our camp. We chose to try to save a life that was in immediate risk and that left the horses unprotected. Along with the horses, they also destroyed the carriage. All of that makes it easier for them to limit our ability to move swiftly.

“They’re acting more like a wolf pack, working together to take down their prey. But once that prey is down, it’s every wolf for itself.”

Richard and Kahlan had both been riding in the carriage most of the time. With both of them weakened by the poison of death rooted deep inside them, the more of their strength they used up, the sooner death would take them. Riding in the carriage helped save their strength and thus prolonged their lives until they could get back to the People’s Palace, where the poison could finally be removed.

Richard was right. Losing the horses would slow them down and make them more vulnerable. It also continued to leave the palace in the dark as to what was coming their way.

Before anyone else could say anything, a breathless soldier ran up to them.

“Lord Rahl!”

“What is it?” Richard asked.

“We got one of them.”

“What do you mean, you got one of them?”

“We caught one of those pale bastards. We captured him as he was trying to sneak up to spy on our camp.” He pointed off toward one of the other fires. “We’re holding him over there for you to question.”

CHAPTER 11

As they made their way across the camp to one of the other fires where the captive was being held, Kahlan met the gazes of young men cleaning weapons, repairing gear, standing watch over the dark forest beyond, or having a bite to eat before bedding down. She returned hopeful smiles, easing their concerned looks, reassuring them that she was all right.

She knew most of these men by name. All had fought in the long and bloody war with the Imperial Order, a war they had won. Now it seemed that the victory and the brief peace that followed had only been an illusion, because the ancient events that had sparked that war had flared anew, as if leapfrogging across time to come after them.

It seemed to Kahlan that most of her life had been lived in one war or another, first with Darken Rahl, then Jagang and the Imperial Order, and now with the long dead Emperor Sulachan, come back to life to finish what he had started thousands of years before.

These soldiers had come to the Dark Lands to protect her and Richard and get them safely back to the palace. It should have been a relatively easy mission after Richard had defeated the Hedge Maid. It had turned out to be anything but easy.

As it turned out, the Hedge Maid had been a harbinger of the evil that had finally managed to escape its long banishment. Her deadly touch had taken Richard’s gift and Kahlan’s power. She ached for her ability every waking moment. Her Confessor power was who she was. She had been born with it. It was part of her. And now she was cut off from it.

The camp was quiet, with all the activity subdued so some of the exhausted men could catch up on needed sleep. From what Kahlan could see when she was able to get a glimpse between the soldiers in the tight ring guarding the prisoner, it was obvious that the captive wasn’t going anywhere.

As they made their way to where the man was being held, she saw that the entire encampment was in a fairly tight but open space at the foot of a cliff. Since they were camped on what was mostly open ledge, it was free of trees and brush. Some of the closest trees beyond had been felled for firewood. Since the wood was green, it crackled and popped as it burned, sending snapping sparks billowing up in the acrid smoke.

With the cliff backing them, the enemy were able to attack from only one side. A heavily defended perimeter all the way around, from the cliff face on one end of the encampment to the cliff face on the other end, bristled with steel defenses. Having the men concentrated close together made it easy for reinforcements to move swiftly from point to point in the line to fight off any sudden charge of the bloodthirsty Shun-tuk.

Such a fortress strategy meant there would be no guards posted at distant points beyond their perimeter as an early warning of an attack, nor any scouts on patrol to gather information. Instead, all the men were being kept together so they could all watch over everything and one another.

While it did deny them advance warning of an attack, it also denied the enemy the opportunity to pick off softer targets, such as outposts and patrols, in order to gradually reduce their numbers. They didn’t have a lot of men to begin with and couldn’t afford to lose any.

The fires lit their encampment so that they could more easily spot anyone trying to slip into their midst. They also lit some of the forest beyond. That must have been how the men spotted and captured the Shun-tuk trying to sneak in closer.

Such a tight layout was generally not the best defensive tactic for an encampment, since an enemy force outside their perimeter could get in fairly close, hide among the trees, and use arrows or spears to pick off soldiers out in the open of the camp. While the enemy could hide off in the darkness, campfires inside the camp lit targets for them. But the half people didn’t have those kind of weapons, so in such circumstances a fortress encampment like this was the safest way to prevent vulnerable lone scouts or small groups of sentries from being attacked and killed, and it made for a hardened defensive line that was extremely difficult for a lightly armed enemy to penetrate.

Some of the soldiers of the First File moved aside when they saw Richard and the small party with him approaching the prisoner. The captive Shun-tuk was on his knees, not far from the fire. He had a big soldier to either side of him, each man holding a well-muscled arm out straight and twisted so that he couldn’t move.

A third, their even bigger commander, a D’Haran with closely cropped blond hair, had a boot planted on each of the man’s calves, pinning his knees to the ground. Since General Meiffert, Cara’s husband, had been killed by the Shun-tuk as they had escaped the caves, Commander Jake Fister was now the highest-ranking officer there with them. He had arms the size of Kahlan’s waist and a neck like an oak tree.

Standing behind the Shun-tuk, the powerfully built commander, obviously not wanting to take any chances, held a razor-sharp knife to the immobilized captive’s throat. Several other men kept nocked arrows pointed at the man.

Kahlan knew Jake Fister. He had served under Captain Zimmer when Kahlan had commanded the special forces in the war with the Imperial Order. Each morning Captain Zimmer would bring her a string of enemy ears collected the night before. Jake Fister, a sergeant at the time, had been one of Captain Zimmer’s most trusted men, and had been responsible for more than his fair share of the ears they collected. Those men were proud of what they accomplished on their nightly raids, striking fear into the hearts of the enemy troops. Each ear represented the life of one less enemy who could harm them. Kahlan had always shown her sincere appreciation of their grisly trophies, which pleased the men no end.

It seemed so long ago. At the time, Richard had been held captive down in the Old World by Nicci, when Nicci had been fighting on the other side for Emperor Jagang. With Richard gone, Kahlan had led the war in his place.

During his captivity, Richard had gradually taught Nicci the value of freedom and of her own life, and won her over. Few people valued freedom as much as those who had never had it, like Nicci, and had come to discover its true value in their own lives. Since that time, Nicci had more than earned her place as one of their most trusted and valuable friends.

Captain Zimmer was now Colonel Zimmer, serving in the First File at the People’s Palace. Jake Fister had been promoted to a commander in the First File and was one of the men handpicked by General Meiffert to come with him to the Dark Lands to bring Richard and Kahlan safely home. It sadly occurred to Kahlan that with Benjamin Meiffert dead, Colonel Zimmer was likely next in line for general to command the First File. She knew he would find it a sorrowful honor. Ben had been his friend.

Despite the arrows aimed at the prisoner, it was obvious to Kahlan by the way Jake was holding the knife to the man’s throat that at the first twitch of aggression, it was Commander Fister who would be the one to end it before an arrow cleared a bow.

The Shun-tuk prisoner wore only a coarse, bleached cloth wrapped around his waist and between his legs, as did many of his kind, including the women who fought with the Shun-tuk men. His legs, arms, and chest were bare. His mostly shaved head had a dense crop of long hair at the top, standing up like a sheaf of wheat at harvest. Strings of human teeth wound tightly around the bundle of hair kept it standing up straight.

Once she got closer, Kahlan could see in the firelight that his skin looked like it had been rubbed with a paste of ash, possibly mixed with something to make it stick better so that it wouldn’t rub off easily when they moved through heavy brush, or wash off in the frequent rains. It looked like the man habitually rubbed the ghostly ash paste over himself, so that in places it was thick, crusty, and cracked.

Like all of the Shun-tuk she had seen, black grease smeared around his eyes mimicked the eye sockets of a skull. He glared out from that darkness. As was the practice of some of the Shun-tuk, the same black grease had been used to paint a skeletal grin full of teeth on this man’s lips and cheeks to go with the skeletal eye sockets. Even held as securely as he was, because of the ghostly whitewash over his body and the skeletal face of a skull, the man presented a frightening, intimidating presence.

As Richard approached, the man’s glare seemed to grow more menacing. Despite how helpless he was, his eyes were filled with hate and defiance, like those of a wolf caught in a trap. He did not look the least bit frightened by his helpless situation or all the big men towering around him. He wanted to fight. Kahlan thought that if nothing else, he would be wise to be more than a little respectful of Commander Fister’s knife at his throat.

CHAPTER 12

Kahlan waited a few steps behind Richard along with Nicci and Zedd. Irena put out a hand to the side, stopping Samantha farther back. She leaned close to her daughter and whispered instructions for her to stay where she was, safely behind the rest of them. Samantha’s mouth twisted in disappointment as she folded her arms, but she accepted the order without a complaint.

She obviously wanted to go up closer to Richard and get a better look at the prisoner. She had fought these half people and she wanted to see what Richard might ask, but she always appeared respectful and deferential to her mother. Until Richard had shown up in Samantha’s village of Stroyza, life had probably always been a constant, with clear-cut lines of respect, with Irena their sorceress and authority figure.

When the barrier holding back the third kingdom and the half people was suddenly breached, Samantha’s mother had been captured by the Shun-tuk. Everything in young Samantha’s predictable, stable life suddenly changed. Her whole world had been turned upside down, and she found herself, young as she was, the only sorceress left in Stroyza. Richard had shown up in the middle of that crisis.

In their time spent together, Richard and Samantha had depended on each other for their survival as they went to the dangerous land beyond the barrier to rescue Irena, Zedd, Nicci, Cara, and the soldiers who had been captured.

Richard said that she was smart, and that she seemed to have a great deal of ability with her gift, although he wasn’t sure of all that she was capable of doing with her power. Samantha didn’t really know, either. Together, the two of them had succeeded in rescuing all those that the Shun-tuk had captured. At least, the ones still alive.

Kahlan could not help but notice that the young woman seemed to be infatuated with Richard. It was just a stage of youth, of growing up and discovering the wider world and the mysteries of the opposite sex. It didn’t help that the object of her affection was Richard. He was an easy man to like, handsome and commanding, yet kind and considerate. Kahlan could certainly understand what Samantha saw in him, even if she wasn’t particularly thrilled about it.