The Third Kingdom Page 10

  “I have no idea what’s going on,” Richard said, “but it seems pretty obvious that some kind of occult conjuring is involved. I don’t want any part of that conjuring left among you. Burn it all. Understand?”

  The men all nodded earnestly, fearful of the heat in Richard’s voice even if they knew it wasn’t directed at them.

  Hearing yet more screams, Richard turned to the sound. He realized that there were yet more than three of the dead men among them.

  He again sprang into a dead run, headed toward the sound. He wondered how many attackers had made it up into the cave. If there were many more, they could wipe out half the village before Richard could find and destroy them all.

  As he made his way down narrow passages, he had to squeeze past men, women, and children frantically trying to escape the threat. Some of them cried as they ran, some of them screamed, but they were all panic-stricken, not knowing what to do except run from the danger.

  At an intersection of several halls, Richard followed the chilling roars into a broader corridor. He recognized it as the passageway to Ester’s small home. The monster was near. He was getting close. As he panted from the run, he drew in the putrid stench of death. It was like a reminder of the touch of death from the Hedge Maid that lurked within him.

  In the distance he saw a flash of movement as a dark shape disappeared around a corner. As Richard ran he stopped suddenly at a doorway with a sheepskin covering. He ducked inside and in the candlelight saw Kahlan on the lambskin rug where he had left her. Ester was there, a knife in her fist as she stood protectively over Kahlan. Richard knew that she had no chance of stopping one of the walking dead, yet she was prepared to try.

  Sammie was gone.

  Richard let the covering drop back over the doorway as he started out again in pursuit of the threat. He raced toward the screams of startled people apparently awakened in the middle of the night by the attack. He had to shove some of the sleepy people aside when they stood dumbly in the dark passageway.

  Out ahead, he saw a blur of movement again as a small figure darted across an intersection only to vanish down a side hall. A dark shape roared as it chased after her. A second shape entered the tunnel, following behind the first and Sammie.

  It paused momentarily and turned to look in Richard’s direction. Back in that dark tunnel, Richard couldn’t make out much of the walking corpse, but he could see the piercing reddish glow of its eyes. It was like it was glaring out from the darkness of not only the tunnel, but death itself. And then it was gone, vanishing into the shadows of a side passageway, chasing after Sammie.

  Richard ran after them, racing as fast as he could. He ran so fast that the men following behind him couldn’t keep up. As Richard chased after the threat, and put distance on the men behind, he was losing the help of the light from their lanterns. He kept running despite how hard it was to see. Occasionally a room to one side or the other was lit with candles so that their faint light spilled out into the hallway, giving him enough of a glimpse of the tunnel to keep from having to slow.

  In the dark, he came upon the second of the two men running after his companion and Sammie. It was hard to see, but he could see well enough to tell that this man, too, was a walking dead man. Even without a good look, the smell alone was unmistakable.

  As the man stopped and turned back to see who was behind him, Richard was already there, swinging his sword down with all his might. The ceiling wasn’t very high, so he couldn’t put as much power into a full swing as he would have liked. Still, it was a blade powered by more than mere muscle, the same as these men were powered by more than life.

  As the man opened his mouth to bellow a threat at Richard, the sword came down with all Richard’s force and strength behind it. The blade cleaved the man from the top of his head down to the center of his chest. Parts of the head and neck fragmented off the corpse.

  Richard didn’t wait to see if it was enough. He hacked furiously at the man, screaming in rage the entire time, cutting the threat to bits. As the men with the lanterns caught up from behind, Richard could finally see that the threat from this particular intruder was no more than rubble in the hallway.

  With that one threat ended, Richard looked up. In the distance, faint candlelight came from a room to the right. Richard saw the silhouetted shape of the other man headed for that light. In that light, Richard could see that the hallway was a dead end beyond the room. Sammie was trapped down there. She had nowhere left to run, no way to escape.

  Richard charged down the passageway, knowing that he was in a race to kill the man before he could kill Sammie. He yelled as he ran, trying to distract the killer. The man paid no attention to Richard. His attention was on his prey.

  The hulking corpse stood just outside the doorway, looking in. Richard wasn’t close enough. The dark shape glanced Richard’s way with glowing eyes, then turned back to the room. He roared with menace as he stormed into the room.

  Richard ran with all his strength. The dark shape disappeared into the room at the dead end of the hall. Richard wasn’t close enough. He wasn’t going to make it in time. He knew that Sammie didn’t stand a chance.

  Just as he was about to reach the doorway, the big, dark shadow of the man flew backward out of the room and crashed into the wall on the opposite side of the tunnel. Dust billowed up from the impact.

  The man was clearly stunned but he recovered quickly. As he regained his footing, Sammie appeared in the doorway.

  Richard was almost there, but he wasn’t yet close enough. Sammie and her attacker were too far away for Richard to help her.

  The man again let out a thunderous roar of rage as he rushed the girl. Sammie lifted both arms out straight, with her palms up, as if she actually thought she could stop the charge of the big man.

  To Richard’s surprise, the man flew backward again, again slamming into the wall.

  This time, as he came off the wall, flying toward the girl, she shrieked when she tried a third time to stop him and it didn’t work.

  But this time Richard was there. With one mighty blow, the sword cleaved away the monster’s head and one shoulder. A second strike came like lightning, severing the other arm as it tried to strike at Richard. With quick swings, Richard hacked the body down to the waist, and then chopped the legs down at mid-thigh.

  The head, with the neck, a shoulder, and one arm still attached, lay on the ground, looking up with menacing, glowing red eyes. The hand reached out and snatched Richard’s ankle. Richard brought the sword down a half-dozen times in quick succession, hacking the arm and head apart. He crushed the hand with his boot after smashing the head to bits.

  Richard stood panting, sword in his fist, feeling the rage of it storm through him, drawing yet more of his own rage forth. He cocked his head, listening, but he didn’t hear any other screams or roars. It seemed that this was the last one.

  Sammie stared up at him.

  “Are you all right?” he asked her.

  She nodded as she let out a deep sigh of relief.

  He pulled her to him and with his sword arm, embraced her around her small shoulders, thankful that he had been in time. She had managed to buy a few precious seconds until he could get to her and end the threat for good.

  “You’re sure you are all right?” he asked again. “You’re sure that he didn’t hurt you?”

  She held some of her dusty, frizzy black hair back out of the way as she looked down, taking a good look at the remains.

  “No, I’m fine,” she assured him. She sounded remarkably calm.

  “Then do you mind telling me what you were doing?” Richard gritted his teeth as his fist tightened around the hilt of his sword. He leaned down toward her. “I told you to protect the Mother Confessor. When I left, I clearly told you to stay there and watch over her.”

  “I was watching over her.”

  “Until you ran. I trusted you to protect her, and instead you ran. I can’t fault you for being afraid, but I was counting on you and
you didn’t stay there and protect her.”

  Sammie shook her head. “I was protecting her—”

  “They came back in the caves after her. You ran.”

  Sammie folded her spindly arms and glared up at him. “They weren’t after the Mother Confessor. They were after me.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes I do.” She was still glaring from under a lowered brow. “That’s why I ran—to protect her by drawing the attackers away from her. That was the best way to keep her safe.”

  Richard straightened. “What are you talking about?”

  “Is she hurt? No. Are there monsters back there ripping her to pieces? No. Why do you suppose that is?”

  When Richard didn’t answer, she leaned toward him. “They aren’t back there killing her because they were after me. When they came into the room they didn’t even look at her. They were both looking at me with those glowing red eyes. As they came toward me I moved to the side of the room to see what they would do. Their gazes stayed locked on me. Do you know what they did then?”

  “They came after you instead of her,” Richard guessed in a considerably quieter voice.

  “That’s right. They didn’t even seem to see her. They were focused only on me. They came after me. I tried every bit of magic I knew to stop them. I admit that I don’t know a lot about such things or have much experience, but I tried everything I know. Nothing worked.

  “Then I remembered what Henrik said about what your friends did, so I threw a fist of air like they had done. It didn’t harm those two the way it should have, but it did knock them back just long enough for me to get to the door. When I did that, they left the Mother Confessor and came after me. Once I saw that they really were after me and not her, I ran to get them to chase after me so I could lead them away from her. They weren’t interested in the Mother Confessor. They both came after me.”

  She tapped her chest. “Me, not her. Me. So yes, I ran, but I ran to protect her the only way I could—by getting those monsters to chase me so I could lead them away from her.

  “I was afraid. Even though I was afraid, I knew that I had to think of something. I wondered if I could somehow trap them in a dead-end tunnel. Then, when I got down here, I had the idea to get them into that room and slip past them like I had before, and then I would collapse the hallway in to bury them down here in this room.”

  In the light from the lanterns carried by the men waiting back a ways up the passageway, Richard looked around. It was indeed a dead end, with only the one room at the end. If he hadn’t gotten there in time her plan might have worked. Of course, it might not have. She very easily could have been slaughtered.

  Yet, of all the people in the small village, she was the only one who had thought of something to stop the threat. She was the only one with a plan and she acted on it.

  Richard ran his fingers back through his hair as he let out a sigh. “Sammie, I’m sorry. You’re right. You did a very brave thing. Thank you for doing what you did to protect Kahlan.”

  “You don’t need to apologize,” she said as she showed him a small smile. “I can see in your eyes that you are in the grip of the magic of the sword. I can also see that its anger is all that’s keeping you on your feet. I need to heal you. It can’t wait any longer.”

  As he nodded, he realized that his wounds had opened back up in all the fighting. The blood running down his arms dripped off his fingers. Now that the urgent demand of fighting off the attack was over, he was feeling increasingly light-headed and the pain was again pressing in on him.

  “Listen, Sammie, there are a lot of your people back there who are hurt. Some are hurt pretty badly. They need your help. Please, tend to them first.”

  He was frantic to have help for Kahlan, but he knew that helping some of the others was more urgent. Without help, many would die. He thought he could wait.

  Sammie’s gaze swept over the remains on the floor outside the room where she had intended to trap her pursuers. She didn’t merely look worried for her people who were injured; Richard thought that she looked somehow older than she had earlier.

  She started back out of the dead-end tunnel. “We’d better hurry, then,” she said back over her shoulder.

  “Right,” Richard said as he sheathed his sword.

  When the blade slid home, the anger from it extinguished. His own rage went out with it.

  In that instant, the entire weight of the ordeal and the staggering pain of all his wounds set in with a vengeance. The sword had been all that had been holding it back.

  He couldn’t feel his fingers.

  It felt like the tunnel was collapsing in on him and the suffocating weight of it was crushing him.

  He managed to take one step, and as he did the world tilted as the floor began rushing toward him. Everything seemed strangely distant, as if he were looking through a long, dark tube at the world off in the distance. The concerned shouts he heard somewhere around him sounded eerily muffled.

  Before the floor reached him, the blackness closed in and shut the world away.

  CHAPTER

  18

  When Richard woke, he didn’t recognize his surroundings. He was lying on a woven straw mat in a windowless room softly lit by candles clustered along recessed shelves that had been meticulously carved into walls of the same stone as the rest of the cave village of Stroyza. The surface of the walls themselves had been flattened and finely smoothed, mimicking the look of plaster. From what he had seen of the rest of the excavated cave system, these were luxurious quarters.

  Kahlan lay on another mat close beside him. She was still unconscious and didn’t respond when he touched her shoulder. To his relief, he saw that she was breathing more evenly and easily than she had been before.

  He was surprised to see that her clothes were no longer soaked with blood. Not only were her clothes clean, the rips, tears, and cuts in them had been carefully sewn up so that it almost looked like the shirt had an embroidered design on it. Most importantly, though, she was no longer covered with cuts and hundreds of puncture wounds. From what he could see, it appeared that they had all been healed.

  He was relieved by that much of it, if not by the fact that she was still unconscious.

  He looked down, then, and saw that his own clothes were just as clean as Kahlan’s. Checking his arm confirmed his suspicion that the horrific bite wound had been healed. Running his fingers over the spot revealed only a slight swelling where the wound had been. A great deal of the pain, too, was gone, though he could still feel a lingering ache in the muscle. He was able to sense a hint of a tingling sensation that he recognized as the residual effect of having been healed.

  Even though his outward wounds seemed to all have been healed, he could still feel the awful, dark weight of a grim, inner sickness that was the touch of death left there by the Hedge Maid. That merciless weight was always there, trying to pull him down into its darkness. He knew that the same call of death itself still lay within Kahlan as well.

  Richard sat up, looking around. The place was bigger than Ester’s place, where they had been at first. The carpets were thicker, better made, and the colors in them were a little brighter than others he had seen. There were a few chairs and a table that, while not fancy, were well made. The door was wooden rather than a simple hanging. By the way the walls looked square and true, as well as the way they had been smoothed, he suspected that it was the home of someone important.

  When she saw him sit up, realizing that he was awake, Ester rose from a bench to the side. “Don’t try to stand, yet, Lord Rahl. How are you feeling?”

  “Better.” Richard blinked up at her in confusion. “What’s going on? Where are we?”

  “We’re in the home of our sorceress.” She pressed her lips tight with grief. “Well, it used to be her home, before…” She reconsidered and then swept a hand around. “Actually, I guess it still is the home of a sorceress. Sammie still lives here, and she is the only sorceress we have left. It
was her parents’ home, but now I suppose it’s her home.”

  Richard looked around. “Where is she?”

  Ester gestured to a door to the back of the room. A few simple designs carved around the outside of the door were a luxury in a village that existed in such a harsh place.

  Carved in the center of the door, though, was a Grace, the design that represented Creation, life, and out beyond the bounds of the world of life the eternity of the underworld. Radiating out through the world of life and the underworld beyond were lines representing the gift.

  Such a design would not be a luxury, especially not in the home of a sorceress. A Grace was often used as a serious tool of the gifted, and often served as a symbolic reminder to the gifted of their duty, their purpose, their calling. It was never drawn or used merely for the purpose of decoration.

  “Sammie is resting. Poor girl, she was exhausted.”

  “Exhausted? Then she helped the injured people? She healed all the people who had been hurt?”

  “Yes, yes, she worked hard healing people,” Ester said as she waved off his concern, seeming eager to change the subject. “Then she said that she needed to heal you both, as best she could, anyway. I told her that she needed to rest before she took up such a demanding task, but she insisted that it couldn’t wait any longer. She said that she had to do what she could for you and the Mother Confessor right away or you both would slip beyond what help she would be able to give.”

  Richard glanced over at Kahlan. He had known that she was in grave trouble. He also knew that Sammie couldn’t heal everything that was wrong with her. That healing would take someone with more ability and experience than Sammie, and it would take a containment field. He was thankful, though, for what Sammie had been able to do to help Kahlan.

  He knew that he needed to find Zedd and Nicci, and then they had to get back to the People’s Palace before it was too late if death’s touch was to be removed from both him and Kahlan.

  What he didn’t know was how much longer they could survive with that poison inside them. Kahlan, especially, was in urgent need of such help. She wouldn’t be able to survive in this unconscious state for long. Without food and water her condition would only worsen.