The Third Kingdom Read online

  “For a time, they had no way of stopping them. For a time, the half people owned the night. People quickly learned to lock themselves inside once the sun went down and hope those without souls didn’t come for them in large numbers.

  “Fearful whispers called these demonic hunters of souls the unholy half dead.”

  “Unholy half dead. That sounds like a pretty good description of them to me,” Samantha said.

  Richard agreed. “Naja says that Sulachan’s makers were eventually able to come up with a solution. They modified the magic they had used to create them and directed this need to kill against their enemies—the people here in the New World.”

  “Against us?” Samantha asked in alarm.

  Richard nodded. “I’m afraid so. She says that the half people, although no stronger than a normal person and nowhere near as strong as the awakened dead, are more dangerous because they are quicker, but more importantly because they still have the ability to think like a predator and hunt those with souls.

  “Although stripped of their higher reasoning functions, they learned to amass and attack in overpowering numbers. After the makers gained control and were able to modify the magic used create them, their savage nature and their ability to think was finally turned against Sulachan’s enemies.”

  Richard was weary from the effort of translating such complex symbols, but he couldn’t afford to miss anything or to stop. He rubbed his eyes and went on reading.

  When he was silent for a time, Samantha shook his sleeve. “What does it say? What are you reading? Speak it out loud.”

  Richard let out a deep sigh as he straightened. He gestured vaguely, dismissively, at the wall.

  “There’s no new information in this part. It’s just some material describing how the half people kill their victims.”

  “I need to know,” Samantha said when he fell silent. “They will come after our people, after me. Don’t try to protect me by keeping me in the dark. It’s no help to be ignorant of the truth. I need to know.”

  Richard glanced briefly to the determination in her eyes. He supposed that she was right. He gestured at the description.

  “They tear people open, believing the soul they crave is inside. The half people often eat the victim’s insides first because they think the soul resides in them. They drink the blood, fearing that the soul might escape by leaking away. When they aren’t satisfied because they still haven’t been able to get what they crave, they strip all the meat from the bones, devouring every bit of it in an attempt to find and consume the soul they think is hiding somewhere in the still-warm flesh.

  “Groups of them will compete for scraps, each hoping to get the soul for themselves. They eat everything—muscle, blood, organs, even the face. They suck the brain out of the skull, or crush it with a rock to get at it. They leave only some of the bowels and the bones, but often crack open larger bones and devour the marrow, still trying to find the elusive soul.”

  Samantha looked dumbfounded. “How do they possibly think they can get a soul by eating people?”

  “It’s a madness that drives them. It doesn’t make sense to us, but it does to them. They think that souls reside within a person or hide in bodily tissues. They’re looking for that moment when the spirit departs the dying body. They think that at that moment they can devour it, pulling it into themselves for their own. So, they eat everything, hoping to get it while it is hiding in the body, before it can escape the warm flesh.”

  Samantha’s eyes grew more liquid. “They are unholy demons.”

  “Soulless demons,” Richard agreed. He gestured to the symbols as he went on. “Failure to gain the soul they seek only makes them more frantic, more enraged. The more they kill, the more they fail to be sated, the more obsessed they become to possess a soul.

  “Naja says that the half people can sense the presence of a soul, the way a predator can smell blood.”

  Samantha grabbed his sleeve again and leaned in. “You mean they can use that ability to track and hunt people?”

  Richard nodded. “Naja says that the half people are death itself, with teeth, coming for the living.”

  He had to pause to take a breath. The account was graphic and making him sick. He had only given her the highlights so that she would understand what they faced. He judged it enough.

  Samantha, looking on the verge of tears, shook her head in horror. “Death with teeth, coming for the living,” she said to herself. “That’s what happened to my father, then. And maybe my mother. If they hadn’t already eaten her alive when they caught her, they would have by now.”

  “We don’t know that.” Richard put a hand around the girl’s small shoulders and hugged her against his side. “I’m sorry, Samantha, to have to read this to you.”

  She wiped her tears on her sleeve. “A kind lie would hardly serve me well. I’m the only gifted person left here. I need to know the truth of what my people face. I may be too young to really defend them, but I’m all they have.”

  Richard understood how she felt. He was terrified for Zedd, Nicci, Cara, and the rest of them. He redoubled his focus on translating the account. Any time he might have left was quickly running out. But he needed to understand what they faced and then go find them.

  Richard knew that with his gift corrupted and not working because of the touch of death in him, that meant that his bond to the people of D’Hara would not work. And if that bond didn’t work, then Cara’s Agiel, like Zedd’s and Nicci’s gift, would not work. Like the rest of them, she was virtually defenseless.

  “This is disturbing,” Richard told Samantha. “Naja says that when the emperor’s makers created the half people, their spirits, once pulled from the victim, were not allowed to go to the spirit world. Because of how the spells to reanimate the dead worked, the spirits of those dead are pulled from their place in the underworld. Those spirits, both of the dead and of the half people, are thus kept trapped between realms.

  “Unable to get to either the person they were pulled from or go through the veil into the underworld, these lost spirits sometimes drift back in this direction and end up haunting this plane of existence.” Richard looked over at Samantha. “Naja says that not all of them who drift back into the world of life are friendly.”

  She made a sour face. “Great.”

  Richard could only imagine the vengeful anger of such lost spirits.

  The account became more complex with some terms involving magic, both Subtractive and Additive, that Richard didn’t understand. While there were elements describing conjuring that he had never seen before, he was able to grasp the general meaning of what Naja was explaining. And what she was explaining was frightening.

  He scanned the next line of complex symbols twice before he was sure of what it said. He wished he weren’t, but he was sure.

  CHAPTER

  29

  “So,” Samantha prompted, “is that all of it?”

  He thought she sounded like she was trying to be hopeful even though she knew better.

  He wiped a hand across his eyes and read the last of Naja Moon’s account, hoping to at last come to some word of the solutions to the problems of the half people and the reawakened dead. He was disheartened by what he found.

  “She says that the best minds and most talented wizards of the New World were unable to come up with a way to eliminate the threat. She said that they fought the half people and the walking dead, often to victory, but even in victory they steadily lost valuable people. The Old World’s losses were meaningless to them because there are vastly more people there. Besides that, they could reanimate as many dead as they needed—often the very enemy we had been able to kill—while the losses on our side were costly and continually drained strength and resources from the New World.

  “She says they all knew that if something wasn’t soon done to end the threat, or to at least somehow contain it, the New World, and life itself, was going to lose the war to Sulachan’s forces.

  “Unable
to come up with an effective counter or a way to destroy such a threat, she says they were desperate for a solution that could save them from annihilation as well as preserve the world of life. Eventually they came up with an answer that was not as much as they had hoped, but it was the best that they could do.

  “She says that what the people here ended up doing was to use gravity spells that inexorably drew both the dead and the half people to this place beyond the mountains that we see out the portal. Once they had all been drawn in, the wizards in the New World were then able to seal these demons without souls behind a barrier of keeper spells.”

  “Gravity spells, keeper spells—I’ve never heard of any such magic.”

  “Me neither,” Richard said. “Naja doesn’t go into detail about the nature of those spells, but they seem pretty self-explanatory. She does say that in this way they were finally able to protect everyone from these demons without souls loose among the living.

  “She then goes to great lengths to apologize on behalf of her people that they were forced to pass this terrible danger on to some unknown future generation, but there was nothing else they could do because otherwise Sulachan would have won the war and then there would be no future generations.

  “She says that the best they could do was place the barrier and create a sentry village to watch over it and warn the wizards’ council of the mortal danger if and when the barrier failed.”

  Richard tapped the next symbols. “This is alarming. She says that hopefully by then, the wizards’ council will have come up with a way to eliminate the threat once and for all.”

  “Well, we pretty much know that never happened,” Samantha said. “And now there is no longer even a wizards’ council.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right. She implores people here to keep watch, for when that barrier finally fails those without souls will come for the living and the world of life itself will again be at risk.”

  Richard leaned in a bit, studying the next symbol. “She says that it’s important to know that the half people will seek those with the gift.”

  “The gifted?” Samantha asked with a frown. “She said before that the gift doesn’t work against these walking dead and the unholy half dead, so why would they bother to come after the gifted?”

  Richard shook his head. “I don’t know. She doesn’t explain.”

  His anger boiled just beneath the surface thinking about what had happened to the First File troops and to his friends. He couldn’t afford to wait any longer. He needed to know what he could learn from Naja’s account, but time was running out.

  Samantha was still frowning in thought. “Why would the half people want the gifted? I can see that in their madness they would want to steal a soul, crazy as that notion is, but why would they seek out the gifted?”

  Richard sighed in frustration as he scanned the rows of symbols. “It doesn’t say. Maybe they think the gifted have some way to give them souls.” He glanced over at Samantha out of the corner of his eye. “Or maybe these half people, in their deranged obsession to possess a soul, think that there is something special about a gifted soul. Maybe they think it’s easier to get, or maybe they even think that if they got a gifted soul, then besides having their soul they would also possess the gift.”

  CHAPTER

  30

  Unable to fathom why the half people would seek out the gifted, Samantha leaned in closer, examining the symbols carved in the wall as if maybe by studying them more carefully she might somehow suddenly be able to read them. Unable to learn anything, she finally turned to Richard.

  “Lord Rahl, are you sure of everything that you told me it says, here? That the half people really would eat people? That their souls and the souls of the awakened dead are really lost and left to wander between worlds? I mean, it’s all pretty hard to believe.”

  “I know what it says, Samantha.”

  “But these”—she waved a hand at the wall—“these symbols all over the wall are pretty complicated. I don’t doubt your knowledge of such things, Lord Rahl, but are you sure that you got the whole translation right?”

  He scanned the symbols he had just finished translating for any little thing, any clue, he might have missed. While there were a few elements he wasn’t completely positive about, they were minor points that didn’t alter the meaning or essence of Naja’s frightening story.

  “I translated it accurately.”

  Samantha’s nose wrinkled with a look of skepticism. “Isn’t it possible, though, that you could have gotten some of it wrong? Or that maybe you misunderstood the intent of some of the things it says? Don’t you think that with a language this old and strange and complicated that you might have interpreted at least some of it wrong?”

  He looked down at her, wishing there were some legitimacy to her doubts. “What about the barrier being breached for the first time since it was put in place? And what about those wounds on me that you healed? They were bite wounds. Those two men, come from beyond that barrier, were trying to eat me alive, just as it is described here.”

  Her mouth twisted a little as she struggled with the idea of it. “But do you really think their intent was to steal your soul? Maybe they were cannibals from beyond the barrier. Maybe they have a famine there and they have to eat people to survive.”

  “They were both healthy, strong, and looked well fed. They weren’t suffering from starvation. Just ask Ester if you doubt my memory. She was there, she saw them. The only thing they were hungry for was my soul.

  “What I heard them talking about when I was waking up is still a bit fuzzy, but as I read what’s written here about the barrier, some of the strange things I heard the two men saying started to make sense. They talked about eating me and taking my soul for themselves. Ester and the others arrived just in time to stop them and save my life.”

  Samantha pressed her lips tight in resignation. “Well, I’m glad they got there in time.” She tipped her head toward the wall. “After all, you’re the only one who knows how to read this. I guess you must have the translation right. I don’t really doubt you, Lord Rahl, it’s just that…”

  “I know, I wish I was wrong about it, too,” he said before going back to working the translation to the next part of Naja’s account.

  “It says here,” he said after a moment’s study, “that in the end, not knowing how to stop the single-minded attacks by Sulachan’s unholy half dead, the only hope for survival had been to lock all of them behind the barrier spells.”

  Looking forlorn, Samantha hugged her arms to herself. “Lord Rahl, I’m not saying that you aren’t translating it right, but could this all be a myth? Some kind of ancient legend they were passing down? A parable or lesson? Might that be all this is?”

  Richard wished she was right, but knew she wasn’t. He shook his head.

  “When I started to wake up, I remember hearing those two men saying that they were going to take Kahlan with them because they were afraid that the Shun-tuk would return, looking for survivors. The men were going to eat me then and there, then eat Kahlan later, or trade her. They said that the Shun-tuk would do anything to get people with souls. Those men and the Shun-tuk came from beyond the barrier, not from legends recorded here.”

  He tapped a finger to a sequence of several symbols. “There can be no doubt that this has to be true. I wish it was otherwise, Samantha, but it’s not.”

  She looked miserable, like she couldn’t take any more such talk. “That’s what they did to my father. They must have taken my mother to do that to her later, at their leisure, or else to trade her. I can’t imagine her misery at what they did to my father, and her terror at what they were going to do to her.”

  Richard realized, then, why she had been so persistent about his translation being wrong. She had been hoping it was wrong for a very personal reason. He pulled her close in a gentle hug.

  He had become so lost in trying to understand what was going on that he had started thinking of her as a sorceress, rath
er than a girl who had lost both her parents to this madness, a girl who was only now blossoming into a young woman and who until recently had not seen such terrible things.

  “I’m sorry, Samantha. I understand. I saw bones of some of my friends as well. They took the others the way they took your mother. I know how you feel.”

  She wiped at her eyes. “No, I’m sorry. I can’t let my weakness interfere with trying to find a way to stop those demons from coming for us all.”

  Richard cast a sideways look at the symbols on the wall, at the end of the account he had been reading on that very subject.

  “I don’t know if that’s possible.”

  She looked up, tears still brimming in her eyes. “What do you mean?”

  Richard turned back to the language of Creation on the wall, putting aside his feelings before going on with the account. He knew that time was working against him.

  “It says that they, too, were seeking a way to protect people of the New World and end the threat. Despite the best efforts of their wizards and hard work of other gifted people, they were never able to find a way to end the threat. Part of the reason was because Emperor Sulachan’s minions had been given otherworldly powers against which we had no defense.”

  “What kind of otherworldly powers? Does she say?”

  Richard nodded. “She says that the unholy half dead are able to use some kind of occult magic which was very ancient, very rare, and very powerful. It was widely feared because it was so little understood. She says that not only are the unholy half dead protected by these dark forces, some of them were even able to use this ability to awaken the dead.

  “Naja says that in the end all those on our side were able to do for the time being was to seal the threat away behind the barrier. Short of doing that, she says that the people of the New World would have been slaughtered.

  “She warns that one day the barrier would weaken and fail. She says that once the threat eventually breaks through that barrier, there is only one way to stop it from ravaging the world of life.”