“I suppose that such a use of magic is in theory possible, but I’ve never heard of it being done.” Nicci made herself look into Richard’s expectant gaze. “I think the explanation of why there are no tracks is quite a bit simpler and I think you know it, Richard.”
Richard couldn’t mask his disappointment. “Looking at this by itself, and not being familiar with the nature of tracks and what they reveal, I’ll grant that maybe it’s hard to see what I’m saying. But this isn’t all. I have something else to show you that may help you see the whole picture. Come on.”
“Lord Rahl,” Cara said as she tucked a wet wisp of hair back under the hood of her dark cloak and avoided looking at him, “shouldn’t we be getting on to other important matters?”
“I have something important to show the three of you. Are you saying that you wish to wait here while I show Victor and Nicci?”
Her blue eyes turned up to him. “Of course not.”
“Fine. Let’s go.”
Without further protest, they followed him at a quick pace as he headed in a northerly direction, deeper into the woods. They tiptoed from rock to rock to cross a broad ravine with dark eddies of murky water flowing through it. When Nicci nearly slipped and fell, Richard took her hand and helped her across. His big hand was warm, but not feverish, at least. She wished he would slow down and not stress his fragile health.
The gentle slope on the far side revealed itself only by degree as they climbed higher through the drizzle and trailers of low clouds. To the left loomed the dark shadow of a rocky rise. Nicci could hear the burbling rush of water tumbling down that rise.
As they went deeper into the swirling gray mist and dense green vegetation, huge birds lifted from their perches. Wings spread wide, the wary
creatures silently glided away beyond sight. Harsh screeches of unseen animals echoed through the somber woods. With the mass of overlapping spruce and balsam boughs and the tangled dead limbs of ancient oaks draped with gossamer moss curtains, to say nothing of the gloomy drizzle, vines, and dense tangle of saplings struggling to reach up for the elusive light, it was not easy to see very far. Only lower to the forest floor, where the sunlight rarely reached, was it more open.
Farther into the sodden forest, dark trunks of trees stood clear of the brush and thick foliage like sentinels watching the three people move among their gathered army. The ground where Richard took them was easier traveling since it was more open and covered with soft, sprawling mats of pine needles. Nicci imagined that even on the sunniest of days, only thin streamers of sunlight ever penetrated all the way down to the forest floor. Off to the sides here and there she saw nearly impenetrable tangles of brush and tightly knitted walls of young conifers. The expanse under the towering pines made a natural but unmarked pathway.
At last Richard halted, lifting his arms out to his sides so that they wouldn’t step out past him. Spread out before them was more of the same—sparse growth sprouting among the thick bed of brown needles. Following his direction, they squatted down beside him.
Richard gestured over his right shoulder. “Back that way is where Cara, Kahlan, and I came in on the night we camped—by where the battle took place. In various places around our camp are my tracks from when I stood second watch, and Cara’s tracks from third watch. Kahlan had first watch that night. There are no tracks from her watch.”
His glance to each of them in turn was a silent request to hear him out before they started arguing.
“Back that way,” he said, pointing as he went on, “was where the soldiers were coming up through the woods. From over in that direction, Victor, you and your men came to join the battle. In nearly the same place are your tracks from when you carried me back to the farmhouse. Off that way, where I already showed you, are the tracks of other soldiers who came in and found their fellow soldiers dead.
“None of us or any of the soldiers has been up this way.
“Here, where we are now, there are no tracks. Look around. You’ll see only my fresh tracks from this morning when I was searching. Other than
that, there are no footprints from anyone else coming through here—in fact, there’s no sign that anyone has ever been here. At least, it would appear that no one has ever been here before.”
Victor idly rubbed his thumb on the steel shaft of the mace hanging from his belt. “But you think otherwise?”
“Yes. Even though there are no tracks, someone did come this way. And, they left evidence.” Richard leaned out and with one finger touched a smooth rock about the size of a loaf of bread. “As they hurried past, they stumbled on this rock.”
Victor seemed caught up in the story. “How can you tell?”
“Look carefully at the markings on the rock.” As Victor leaned in a bit, Richard pointed. “See here, the way the top of the rock, where it was exposed to the air and weather, has the pale tannish yellow discoloration of lichen and such? And here—like the hull of a boat below the waterline—you can see the dark brown rime that shows where the belly of the rock had been lying beneath the ground.
“But it’s not lying that way now. It’s not settled into its socket in the ground, its recent resting place. It’s now lifted a little out of that socket and turned partway over. See how a section of the dark bottom is now exposed? Were it out of the ground for longer, the dark color would be worn away and the lichen would begin to grow there, too. But it hasn’t had that much time yet. This is recent.”
Richard waggled his finger back and forth. “Look at the ground, here, on this side of the rock. You can see the socket where the rock originally rested, but now the rock has been shoved back a little, leaving a void between this side of the rock and the wall of the cavity. On the back side, away from us, because the rock was recently disturbed, you can still see a ridge of dirt and debris that has been pushed up.
“The open socket on this side and the ridge on the far side shows that whoever stumbled on this rock and disturbed it was moving away from our camp, going north.”
“But then where’s their trail?” Victor asked. “Their footprints?”
Richard raked back his wet hair. “The trail has been erased with magic. I searched; there is no trail.
“Look at the rock. It’s been disturbed, kicked partway out of its resting place in the ground. But there is no scuff mark on it. While the rock wasn’t moved much, it was moved. A boot grazing this rock enough to move it
like this would have to leave a mark. Yet there is no mark, just as there are no other footprints.”
Nicci pushed her hood back. “You’re twisting everything you find around to fit what you want to believe, Richard. You can’t have it both ways. If magic was used to erase their trail, then why is it that are you able to detect their trail by this rock?”
“Probably because the magic they used erases footprints. The person who used that magic must not know a great deal about tracks or tracking. I don’t think they’re very familiar with the outdoors. When they used magic to erase their footprints, they probably never gave any thought to putting disturbed stones back in place.”
“Richard, surely—”
“Look around,” he said as he swept his arm out. “Look at how perfect the forest floor is.”
“What do you mean?” Victor asked.
“It’s too perfect. Twigs, leaves, bark are too evenly distributed. Nature is more erratic.”
Nicci, Victor, and Cara peered at the ground. Nicci saw only a normal-looking forest floor. Here and there small things—pine seedlings, spindly weeds, an oak sapling with only three big leaves—sprouted up through the litter of twigs, moss, bark, and fallen leaves sprinkled over the bed of pine needles. She didn’t know all that much about tracks or tracking, or forests, for that matter—Richard always left blazes on trees when he wanted her to be able to find and follow his trail—but it didn’t look like anyone had been through the place, nor did it look overly perfect, as Richard suggested. As she looked around, it appeared the same as other places she eyed for comparison. Victor and Cara seemed equally confounded.
“Richard,” Nicci said with strained patience, “I’m sure there could be any number of explanations as to why a rock looks disturbed to you. For all I know, it could be disturbed, as you suggest. But maybe an elk or a deer kicked it as they went by and over time their tracks have been worn away.”
Richard was shaking his head. “No. Look at the socket. It’s still well formed. You can read by how much the edges have degraded that it happened only a few days ago. Time—especially in the rain—erodes such edges and works to fill in the gap. Any deer or elk kicking this rock would have left tracks that would be just as recent. Not only that, but a hoof
would have scuffed it, the same as a boot. I’m telling you, three days ago someone stumbled on this rock.”
Nicci gestured. “Well, that dead branch over there could have fallen on it and disturbed it.”
“If it did, then the lichen growing on the rock would show the scar of the impact and the branch would show evidence that it had hit something hard. It doesn’t—I already looked.”
Cara threw up her hands. “Maybe a squirrel jumped from a tree and landed on it.”
“Not nearly heavy enough to have moved this rock,” Richard said.
Nicci drew a weary breath. “So what you’re saying is that the fact that there are no tracks from this woman, Kahlan, proves that she exists.”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying, not the way you’re putting it, anyway. But it does confirm it if you look at everything together—if you put it all into context.”
Nicci’s hands fisted at her sides. There were important matters that had to be addressed. They were running out of time. Instead of dealing with urgent matters in need of their attention, they were out in the middle of the woods looking at a rock. She could feel the blood going to her face.
“That’s ridiculous. All you’ve shown us, Richard, is proof that this woman you imagined is just that—imagined. She doesn’t exist. She left no tracks—because you only dreamed her! There’s nothing mysterious about it! It’s not magic! It’s simply a dream!”
Richard abruptly rose up before her. He changed in a heartbeat from a man of calm intensity to a figure of heart-stopping presence, power, and awakening anger.
But rather than confront her, he took a step past her, back toward the way they’d come from, and stopped. Still and tense, Richard stared back through the woods.
“Something’s wrong,” he said in low warning.
Cara’s Agiel spun up into her fist. Victor’s brow tightened as his fingers found the mace hanging from his belt.
In the distance back through the dripping forest, Nicci heard the sudden, wild alarm cries of ravens.
The cries that came next reminded her of nothing so much as the sounds of bloody murder.
Richard bounded back through the woods, back toward the waiting men, back toward the screams. He raced headlong through a blur of trees, branches, brush, ferns, and vines. He leaped over rotting logs and used a well-planted boot to bound over a boulder. He dodged his way through stands of young pines and a cluster of flowering dogwood. Without slowing, he batted aside tamarack limbs and ducked under balsam boughs. Nets of dead branches on the lower trunks of young spruce trees snatched at his clothes as he charged past. More than once, dead limbs jutting out, spearlike, from larger trees nearly impaled him before he sidestepped at the last instant.
Running at such a reckless speed through dense woods, let alone in the rain, was treacherous. It was hard to recognize hazards in time to avoid them. Any one of a number of protruding branches could easily gouge out an eye. One slip on wet leaves or moss or rocks could cause a skull-splitting tumble. Driving a foot down into a crevice or fissure at a dead run would likely shatter a leg. Richard had once known a young man who had done just that. His broken leg and ankle had never mended right, leaving him partially crippled for life.
Richard focused his concentration on his intended path, taking as much care as possible without slowing.
He dared not slow.
The whole way as he ran, he heard the terrible screams and cries, the shrieks, and the sickening snapping sounds. He could also hear Cara, Victor, and Nicci crashing through the brush behind him. He didn’t wait for them to catch up. Every long stride, every leap, took him farther out ahead of them.
Running as fast as he could, gasping for air, Richard was surprised to find himself winded before he should have been. At first disconcerted, he then remembered the reason. Nicci had said that he wasn’t yet recovered
and because he had lost a lot of blood he would need rest to gain back his strength. He kept running. He would have to make do with what strength he had. It wasn’t that much farther.
More than that, though, he kept running because the men needed help. These were men who had come to his aid when he had been in trouble. He didn’t know what was happening, but it was clear to Richard that they were in some kind of peril.
On the morning of the attack, if he’d known more about how to call upon his gift, he might have been able to use that ability to stop the soldiers before Victor and his men had arrived. Had he been able to do that, three of those men would not have died in the fighting. Of course, had Richard not been where he was and taken action to stop the soldiers, then Victor and his men might well have all ended up murdered at their camp, most while they slept.
Richard couldn’t help feeling that he might have done more. He didn’t want to see any of these men hurt; he kept running with all his strength, holding back nothing. He would use whatever strength he had. He could gain back his strength. Lives could not be gotten back.
There were times like this when he wished that he knew more about how to call upon his gift, but his ability regrettably worked differently than in others. Instead of functioning through cognizant direction, as Nicci’s power did, Richard’s ability worked through anger and need. The morning that the Imperial Order soldiers had poured in all around him he had drawn his sword for the purpose of his survival and in so doing had given his anger over to the weapon. Unlike his own gift, he knew that he could count on the power of his sword.
Others with the gift learned to use their ability from a young age. Richard never had. It had been an upbringing of peace and security that had given him a chance at life, at growing up to profoundly value life. The drawback was that such an upbringing had also left him unaware of and ignorant of his own talent.
Now that Richard was grown, though, learning to use his latent ability was proving more than difficult, not only because of his upbringing, but because his particular form of the gift was so extraordinarily rare. Neither Zedd nor the Sisters of the Light had had any success at all in teaching him how to consciously direct his power.
He knew little more than what Nathan Rahl, the prophet, had told him,
that his power was most often sparked through anger and a particular, specific kind of desperate need, which Richard had not been able to identify or isolate. As far as he had been able to determine, the character of the need required to ignite his power was unique to each circumstance.
Richard also knew that using magic did not involve whim. No amount of wishing or straining could ever produce results. The initiation and use of magic required specific conditions; he just didn’t understand how to produce or provide those conditions.
Even wizards of great ability sometimes had to use books to insure that they got the details right if the specific magic they wanted was to work. At a young age, Richard had memorized one of those books,
The Book of Counted Shadows.
That was the book which Darken Rahl had been hunting for after he had put the boxes of Orden in play.
On the morning Kahlan had vanished, to meet the threat of the seemingly endless ranks of soldiers charging in upon him, Richard had had to depend on his sword and not his own innate powers. The frenzied fighting had taken him to the brink of exhaustion. At the same time, his worry for Kahlan left him distracted to the point where his mind wasn’t fully on the fight. He knew that allowing such a diversion to beguile his attention was dangerous and foolish…but it was Kahlan. He had been helplessly worried for her.
Had his need not summoned his gift when it did, the hail of arrows suddenly showering in at him would have been fatal a few dozen times over.
He hadn’t seen the bolt fired from a crossbow. As it shot for his heart, he only recognized the threat at the last possible instant and, because of the crucial need to also stop the three soldiers lunging for him at the same time, he’d only been able to deflect the path of the arrow’s flight, not stop it.
It seemed like he’d already gone over the memory a thousand times and come up with any number of could-haves and should-haves that, in his mind’s harsh judgment, would have prevented what had happened. As Nicci had said, though, he was not invincible.
As he plunged through the woods, the forest unexpectedly fell silent. The echoing screams died away. The misty green wilderness was again left to the muted whisper of the light rain falling though the leafy canopy. In the outwardly peaceful and once again quiet world around him, it almost seemed as if he had only imagined the terrible sounds he’d heard.
Despite his fatigue, Richard didn’t slow. As he ran, he listened for any
sign of the men, but he could hear little more than his own labored breathing, his heartbeat pounding in his ears, and his swift footfalls. Occasionally he also heard branches behind him breaking as the other three tried to catch up with him, but they were still falling farther behind.
For some reason, the eerie calm was somehow more frightening than the screams had been. What had started out sounding like the ravens—hoarse croaks rising into the kinds of terrified cries an animal makes only when it’s being killed—had, somewhere along the line, begun to sound human. And now there was only the menacing silence.
Richard tried to convince himself that he had only imagined that the screams had turned human. As chilling as such cries had been, it was the haunting, unnatural stillness after they’d ended that made gooseflesh prickle the hair at the back of his neck.
Just before he reached the brink of the clearing, Richard finally drew his sword. The singular sound of freeing the blade sent the cutting ring of steel through the damp woodland, ending the silence.
Instantly, the heat of the sword’s anger flooded through every fiber of his being, to be answered in kind by his own anger. Once again, Richard committed himself to the magic he knew, and upon which he could depend.
Filled with the sword’s power, he ached for the source of the threat, and lusted to end it.
There had been a time when fear and uncertainty made him reluctant to surrender to the rising storm brought forth from the ancient, wizard-wrought blade, hesitant to answer the call with his own anger, but he had long since learned to let himself go into the rapture of the rage. It was that righteous wrath that he had learned to bend to his will. It was that power he directed to his purpose.
There had been those in the past who’d coveted the sword’s power, but in their blind lust for that which belonged to others, had ignored the darker perils they stirred by using such a weapon. Instead of being masters of the magic, they had become servants to the blade, to its anger, and to their own rapacious greed. There had been those who had used the power of the weapon for evil ends. Such was not the fault of the blade. The use of the sword, for good or for evil, was the conscious choice made by the person wielding it and all responsibility fell to them.
Racing through the wall of tree limbs, shrubs, and vines, Richard came to a halt at the edge of the clearing where the soldiers had fallen in the bat
tle several days before. Sword in hand, he gasped for air—despite how putrid the air smelled—struggling to catch his breath.
At first, as he scanned the bizarre scene spread out before him, he had trouble comprehending what it was he was seeing.
Dead ravens lay everywhere. Not just dead, but ripped apart. Wings, heads, and parts of carcasses littered the clearing. Feathers by the thousands had settled like black snow over the rotting corpses of the soldiers.
Frozen in shock for only an instant, and still breathless, Richard knew that this was not what he sought. Tearing across the battle site, he bounded up the short bank, through the gaps in the trees, and over trampled vegetation, toward where the men had been waiting.
The rage of the sword spiraled up through him as he ran, making him forget that he was tired, that he was winded, that he wasn’t yet fully recovered, preparing him for the fight to come. In that moment, the only thing that mattered to Richard was getting to the men, or, more precisely, getting at the threat to the men.
There was a matchless rapture in killing those who served evil. Evil unchallenged was evil sanctioned. Destroying evil was really a celebration of the value of life, made real by destroying those who existed to deny others their life.
Therein lay the fundamental purpose behind the sword’s essential, indispensable requirement for rage. Rage blunted the horror of killing, stripped away the natural reluctance to kill, leaving only its naked necessity if there was to be true justice.
As Richard raced out of the stand of birch, the first thing that caught his attention was the maple tree where the men had been waiting. The lower limbs had been stripped bare of leaves. It looked like a storm had swooped down to rip through the woods. Where only a short time ago small trees grew, now all that was left was shattered stumps. Branches thick with shimmering, wet leaves or pine needles lay scattered about. Huge jagged splinters of tree trunks stuck up from the ground like spent spears after a battle.
Beneath the maple, scattered across the forest floor, was a scene that, at first, Richard could make no sense of. Nearly everything that before had been some shade of green, whether dusty sage, yellowish, or rich emerald, was now tainted with the stain of red.
Richard stood panting, his heart pounding, fighting to focus the rage on
a threat he could not identify. He scanned the shadows and darkness back among the trees, looking for any movement. At the same time he struggled to sort out the confusion of what he was seeing on the ground before him.
Cara skidded to a halt to his left, ready for a fight. An instant later, Victor stumbled to a stop on his right, his mace held in a tight fist. Nicci raced in right behind, no weapon evident, but Richard could sense the air around her virtually crackling with her power ready to be unleashed.
“Dear spirits,” the blacksmith whispered. His six-bladed mace, a deadly weapon the man had made himself, rose in his fist as he cautiously started forward.
Richard lifted his sword in front of Victor to bar him from going any farther. His chest against the blade, the blacksmith reluctantly heeded the silent command and stopped.
What, at first, had been a bewildering sight became at last all too clear. A man’s forearm, missing the hand but still covered with a brown flannel shirtsleeve, lay in a bed of ferns at Richard’s feet. Not far away stood a heavy, laced boot with a jagged white shinbone stripped of sinew and muscle jutting out from the top. In a thicket of roughleaf dogwood just to the side lay a section of a torso, its flesh torn away to lay bare a section of the spine and blanched rib bones. Squiggles of pink viscera lay strewn over the log where the men had been sitting. Ragged pieces of scalp and skin lay atop bare rock and scattered everywhere through the grass and bushes.
Richard could not imagine what power could have caused such a shocking scene.
A thought struck him. He glanced back over his shoulder at Nicci. “Sisters of the Dark?”
Nicci slowly shook her head as she studied the carnage. “There are a few similar characteristics, but on balance this is nothing like the way they kill.”
Richard didn’t know if that was comforting news or not.
Slowly, carefully, he stepped forward among the still-bleeding remains. It didn’t look to him like it had been a battle; there were no cuts from swords or axes, no arrows or spears to mark the battlefield. None of the limbs or mangled ribbons of muscle appeared to have been cut. Every piece looked as if it had been torn away from where it belonged.
It was so horrific a sight, so incomprehensible, that it was beyond sick
ening. Richard found it disorienting trying to conceive of what could have created such devastation—not just of the men, but of the landscape where they had been. From somewhere beyond the boiling rage of the sword’s magic, he felt an agony of sorrow for what he had not been able to stop, and he knew that that sorrow would only grow. But right then, he wanted nothing so much as to get his hands on whoever—or whatever—had done this.
“Richard,” Nicci whispered from close behind, “I think it best if we get out of here.”