The direct, calm tone of her voice could not have been any more compelling a warning.
Filled with the rage from the sword in his fist, and his own impassioned anger at what he was seeing, he ignored her. If there was anyone left alive, he had to find them.
“There’s no one left,” Nicci murmured, as if in answer to his thoughts.
If the threat still lurked nearby, he needed to know.
“Who could have done this?” Victor whispered, clearly not interested in leaving until he had the guilty party in his grip.
“It doesn’t look like anything human,” Cara answered in quiet indictment.
As Richard stepped carefully through the remains, the silence of the shrouding woods pressed in on him like a great weight. No birds called, no bugs buzzed, no squirrels chattered. The muting effect of the heavy overcast and drizzle only served to thicken the hush.
Blood dripped from leaves, branches, and the tips of bent grasses. The trunks of trees were splattered with it. The coarse bark of an ash was smeared with oozing tissue. A hand, fingers open and slack, empty of any weapon, lay palm-up on a gravel slope beneath the large leaves of a mountain maple.
Richard spotted the footprints of where they all had entered the area and some of his own footprints where he had left only a short time ago with Nicci, Cara, and Victor. Many of the remains lay in virgin forest where none of them had walked. There were no peculiar footprints among the carnage, although there were unexplained places where the ground had been ripped open. Some of those gouges cut right through thick roots.
Taking a better look, Richard realized that the plowed gashes were places where men had been smashed to the ground with such violence that
it had torn open the forest floor. In some spots, flesh still clung to the exposed ends of splintered roots.
Cara gripped his shirt at the shoulder, trying to urge him back. “Lord Rahl, I want you away from here.”
Richard pulled his shoulder free of her grip. “Quiet.”
As he stepped silently among the remains, the countless voices of those who had used the sword in the past whispered in the back of his mind.
Don’t focus on what you’re seeing, on what is done. Watch for what caused it and might yet come. Now is the time for vigilance.
Richard hardly needed such a warning. He was gripping the wire-wound hilt of the sword so tightly that he could feel the raised lettering of the word
TRUTH
formed by gold wire woven through the sliver. That golden word bit into the flesh of his palm on one side and his fingertips on the other.
At his feet a man’s head stared up at him from among scrub sumac. A mute cry twisted the expression fixed on the face. Richard knew him. His name had been Nuri. All that this young man had learned, all that he had experienced, all that he had planned for, the world he had begun to make for himself, was ended. For all these men, the world was finished; the one life they had had was gone forever.
The agony of that terrible loss, that ghastly finality, threatened to extinguish the rage from the sword and swamp him in sorrow. All these men were loved and cherished by those waiting for them to return. Each one of these individuals would be grieved over with heartache that would indelibly mark the living.
Richard made himself move on. Now was not the time to grieve. Now was the time to find the guilty and visit upon them retribution and justice before they had the chance to do this to others. Only then could the living mourn for these precious souls lost.
Despite how widely he searched, Richard didn’t see a single body—not a body in the sense of a whole, recognizable person—yet the entire area where the men had been waiting was littered with their remains. The surrounding woods, also, revealed parts of those remains, as if some of the men had tried to run. If that was the case, none had gotten far. As Richard moved through the trees, looking for any tracks that might help him identify who had killed these men, he kept one eye on the shadows off in the
mist. He saw tracks of men who had run, but he saw no tracks chasing after them.
As he came around an ancient pine, he was confronted by the top half of a man’s chest hanging upside down from a splintered limb. The remains hung well above Richard’s head. What was left of the armless torso had been impaled on the stump of a broken limb as if it were a meat hook. The face was fixed with unbridled terror. Being upside down, the hair, dripping blood, stood out straight from the scalp as if frozen in fright.
“Dear spirits,” Victor whispered. Rage twisted his face. “That’s Ferran.”
Richard scanned the area, but saw nothing moving in the shadows. “Whatever happened here, I don’t think anyone escaped.” He noticed that on the ground where Ferran’s blood dripped there were no tracks.
Kahlan’s tracks were gone as well.
The pain, the horror, of wondering if this might be the same thing that had happened to Kahlan nearly buckled his knees. Not even the sword’s rage was enough to shield him from the agony of that pain.
Nicci, right behind him, leaned close. “Richard,” she said in a near whisper, “we need to get out of here.”
Cara leaned in beside Nicci. “I agree.”
Victor lifted his mace. “I want those who did this.” His knuckles were white around the steel grip. “Can you track them?” he asked Richard.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Nicci said.
“Good idea or not,” Richard told them, “I don’t see any tracks.” He looked into Nicci’s blue eyes. “Perhaps you would like to try to convince me that I am imagining this, as well?”
She didn’t break eye contact with him, but she didn’t answer his challenge, either.
Victor gazed up at Ferran. “I told his mother that I’d watch over him. What am I going to say to his family now?” Tears of rage and hurt glistened in his eyes as he pointed with the mace back to the rest of the remains. “What am I going to say to their mothers and wives and children?”
“That evil murdered them,” Richard said. “That you will not rest until you know justice is done. That vengeance will be had.”
Victor nodded, his anger flagging, misery now filling his voice. “We have to bury them.”
“No,” Nicci said with grim authority. “As much as I understand your
want to care for them, your friends are no longer here, among these pieces of wrecked bodies. Your friends are now with the good spirits. It is up to us not to join them.”
Victor’s anger resurfaced. “But we must—”
“No,” Nicci snapped. “Look around. This was a blood frenzy. We don’t want to get caught in it. We can’t help these men. We need to get out of here.”
Before Victor could argue, Richard leaned close to the sorceress. “What do you know about this?”
“I told you before, Richard, that we needed to talk. But this is not the time or place to do it.”
“I agree,” Cara growled. “We need to get away from here.”
Looking from the remains of Ferran back to the bloody mess beneath the maple, Richard suddenly felt a sense of overwhelming loneliness. He wanted Kahlan so bad it hurt. He wanted her comfort. He wanted her safe. The agony of not knowing if she was alive and well was unbearable.
“Cara is right.” Nicci urgently gripped Richard’s arm. “We don’t know enough about what we’re up against, but whatever did all this, I fear that as weak as you are your sword can’t protect us from it—and right now, neither can I. If it’s still in these woods, now is not the time to confront it. Justice and vengeance need us to see them done. To do that, we must be alive.”
With the back of a hand, Victor wiped tears of grief and anger from his cheek. “I hate to admit it, but I think Nicci’s right.”
“Whatever was looking for you, Lord Rahl,” Cara said. “I don’t want you here if it should happen to return.”
Richard noted the way Cara, in her red leather, no longer seemed out of place in the woods. She blended right in with all the blood.
Still not ready to abandon the search for whatever had killed these men, and with a dark sense of alarm rising within him, Richard frowned at the Mord-Sith. “What makes you think it was after me?”
“I told you,” Nicci said through gritted teeth, answering in Cara’s stead, “now is not the time and this is not the place to talk about it. There is nothing we can hope to accomplish here. These men are beyond our help.”
Beyond help. Was Kahlan beyond help as well? He couldn’t allow himself to believe that.
He looked north. Richard didn’t know where to search for her. Just be
cause the rock that had been kicked out of its resting place had been found to the north of their camp didn’t mean that whoever took Kahlan went that way. They might have simply gone north, trying to avoid contact with Victor and his men and with the soldiers guarding the supply convoy. They might have only been trying to avoid being spotted until they got out of the immediate area. After that, they could have gone anywhere.
But where?
Richard knew that he needed help.
He tried to think of who could help him with something like this. Who would believe him? Zedd
might
believe him, but Richard didn’t think his grandfather could offer the specific kind of help he needed in this circumstance. It was awfully far to go if it ended up that Zedd’s abilities didn’t fit this particular kind of problem.
Who would be willing to help him, and might know something?
Richard turned suddenly to Victor. “Where can I get horses? I need horses. Where’s the closest place?”
Victor was taken off guard by the question. He let the heavy mace hang and with his other hand wiped rainwater back off his forehead as he considered the question. His brow bunched back up.
“Altur’Rang would probably be the closest place,” he said after a moment’s thought.
Richard slid his sword back into its sheath. “Let’s go. We need to hurry.”
Pleased with the decision to leave, Cara gave him a helpful shove in the direction of Altur’Rang. Suspicion lurked in Nicci’s eyes, but she was so relieved to have him start away from the site of so much death that she didn’t ask why he wanted horses.
Weariness forgotten, the four of them hurried away from men beyond any help. As heartsick as they felt about leaving, each of them understood that it would be too dangerous to stay to try to bury these men. A burial of the dead was not worth the risk to their lives.
With his sword put away, the anger extinguished. In its place welled up the crushing pain of grief for the dead. The forest seemed to weep with them.
Worse yet was the dread of wondering what could have happened to Kahlan. If she was in the hands of this evil…
Think of the solution, Richard reminded himself.
If he was to find her, he would need help. To get help, he needed horses. That was the immediate problem at hand. They still had half a day of daylight. He intended not to waste a moment of it.
Richard led them away through the tangled woods at an exhausting pace. No one complained.
In the deepening gloom of approaching nightfall, Richard and Cara used thin, wiry pine tree roots they’d pulled up from the spongy ground to lash together the trunks of small trees. Victor and Nicci foraged the understory along the base of the heavily forested slope, cutting and collecting balsam boughs. As Richard held the logs together, Cara tied off the ropelike root. Richard cut the excess for use elsewhere and slipped the knife back into its sheath at his belt. Once he had the log framework securely in place against an overhang of rock, he started stacking the balsam boughs along the bottom. Cara tied random branches on from inside to keep them all in place for the night as Richard continued layering more up the poles. Victor and Nicci dragged armfuls of boughs close to keep him supplied as he worked.
The area under the overhanging roof of rock was dry enough, it just wasn’t large enough. The lean-to would expand the shelter so as to provide a snug place to sleep. Without a fire it wouldn’t be especially warm, but at least it would be dry.
Throughout the day, the drizzle had turned to a slow, steady rain. While they had been on the move they had been warm enough because of their exertion, but now that they had to stop for the night, the inexorable embrace of the cold had begun. Even in chilly weather that wasn’t truly cold, being wet sapped a person of their necessary warmth and thus their strength. Richard knew that, over time, constant exposure to even mildly chilly wet weather could steal enough vital heat from the body to severely debilitate and sometimes even kill a person.
With as little sleep as he knew Nicci and Cara had gotten over the previous three days, and in his own weakened condition, Richard recognized that they needed a dry, warm place to get some rest or they would all be in trouble. He couldn’t allow anything to slow him down.
For the whole of the afternoon and evening they had set a steady, rapid pace on their march toward Altur’Rang. After the brutal slaughter of the
men, the four of them hadn’t been particularly hungry, but they knew that they had to eat if they were to have the strength for the journey, so they nibbled on dried meats and travel biscuits as they made their way through the trackless wilderness.
Richard was so exhausted he could hardly stand. Both to cut the distance and to avoid being spotted by anyone, he had guided the others through dense forest, most of it tough going and all of it well off any trails. It had been a grueling day’s travel. His head ached. His back ached. His legs ached. If they started early and kept up the strenuous pace, though, they might be able to reach Altur’Rang in one more day’s travel. After they got horses, the going would be easier as well as swifter.
He wished he didn’t need to go so far, but he didn’t know what else to do. He couldn’t spend forever searching the vast forests all around, on the off chance he would find another rock that had been disturbed so that he then might have an idea of which direction Kahlan had gone. He might never find another such rock, and even if he did, there was no reason to believe that if he kept going in that direction he would find Kahlan. Whoever took her might change direction without ever again disturbing a rock in a way that he would find it.
Their regular tracks were gone. Richard knew no way to track someone when magic had made their tracks vanish. Nicci’s gift wasn’t able to help. Wandering around aimlessly wasn’t going to solve anything. As reluctant as he was to leave the area where he had last seen Kahlan, Richard didn’t think that he had any other choice but to go for help.
He went through the motions of building the shelter without giving the work much thought. In the failing light, Cara, concerned for his well-being, kept watching him out of the corner of her eye. She looked like she expected him to fall over at any moment and if he did she intended to catch him.
As he worked, Richard mulled over the remote but real possibility that Imperial Order soldiers might be searching the woods for them. At the same time he fretted about what could have killed all of Victor’s men—and might now be chasing them. He considered what other precautions he might take, and he deliberated over how he would fight whatever could have done such violence.
Through it all, he kept trying to think of where Kahlan might be. He went over everything he could remember. He brooded over whether or not
she was hurt. He agonized over what he might have done wrong. He imagined that she must be filled with fear and doubt, wondering why he wasn’t coming to help her escape, why he hadn’t yet found her, and if he ever would before her captors killed her.
He struggled to banish from his mind the gnawing fear that she might already be dead.
He tried not to think about what might be done to her as a captive that could be infinitely more gruesome than a simple execution. Jagang had ample reason to want her to live a good long time; only the living could feel pain.
From the beginning, Kahlan had been there to frustrate Jagang’s ambitions and sometimes even reverse his success. The Imperial Order’s very first expeditionary force in the New World, among other things, slaughtered all the inhabitants of the great Galean city of Ebinissia. Kahlan came upon the grisly sight shortly after a troop of young Galean recruits had discovered it. In their blind rage, despite being outnumbered ten to one, those young men had been bent on the glory of vengeance and victory, on meeting upon the battlefield the soldiers who had tortured, raped, and murdered all of their loved ones.
Kahlan came across those recruits, led by Captain Bradley Ryan, just before they were about to march into a textbook battle that she realized would be their death. In their bold inexperience, they were convinced that they could make such tactics work and snatch victory, despite being overwhelmingly outnumbered.
Kahlan knew how the experienced Imperial Order soldiers fought. She knew that if she allowed those young recruits to do as they planned, they would be marching into a merciless meat grinder and all of them would die. The results of their shortsighted notions of the righteous glory of combat would be that those Imperial Order soldiers would then go on, unopposed, to other cities and continue to murder and plunder innocent people.
Kahlan took command of the young recruits and set about dissuading them of their ignorant notions of a fair fight. She brought them to fully understand that their only goal was killing the invaders. It didn’t matter how the Galeans came to stand over the corpses of those brutes, it only mattered that they did. In that undertaking of killing, there was no glory, there was simply survival. They were killing so that there could be life. Kahlan taught those recruits what they needed to know about fighting a force that
greatly outnumbered them, and she shaped them into men who could accomplish the grim task.
The night before leading those young men into combat, Kahlan went alone into the enemy camp and killed their wizard along with some of the officers. The next day, those five thousand young men fought at her side, followed her instructions, learned from her, and along the way took terrible casualties, but they eventually killed every last one of the Imperial Order’s fifty-thousand-man advance force. It had been an accomplishment rarely equaled in history.
That had been the first of many blows Kahlan struck against Jagang. In answer, he sent assassins after her. They failed.
In Richard’s absence, after Nicci had taken him away to the heart of the Old World, Kahlan had gone to join Zedd and the D’Haran Empire forces. She found them dispirited and on the run after having lost a three-day battle. In Richard’s place, carrying the Sword of Truth, the Mother Confessor pulled the army back onto its feet and immediately counterattacked, surprising the enemy and bloodying them. She brought backbone and fire to the D’Haran forces. She inspired them to the challenge. Captain Ryan’s men arrived to join with her in the fight against Jagang’s invading horde. For nearly a year, Kahlan led the D’Haran Empire forces as they frustrated Jagang’s efforts to swiftly subdue the New World. She harried and harassed him without pause. She helped direct plans that resulted in Jagang’s army losing hundreds of thousands of men.
Kahlan had bled the Imperial Order army, and helped grind them to a halt outside Aydindril. In winter, she had evacuated the people of Aydindril, and had the army take them over the passes into D’Hara. The D’Haran forces then sealed off those passes and, for the time being, held the Imperial Order at bay short of their final objective of conquering D’Hara and finally bringing the New World under the brutal rule of the Fellowship of Order.
Jagang’s hatred for Kahlan was exceeded only by his hatred for Richard. Most recently, the dream walker had sent an extremely dangerous wizard named Nicholas after them. Richard and Kahlan had only narrowly escaped capture.
Richard knew that the Order relished seeing to it that captured foes suffered monstrous abuse, and there was no one, other than Richard, whom Emperor Jagang wanted to put to torture more than the Mother Confessor.
There were no lengths to which he would not go to get his hands on her. Emperor Jagang would reserve for Kahlan the most unspeakable torture.
Richard realized that he was standing frozen, trembling, his fingers gripping a fistful of balsam boughs. Cara silently watched him. He knelt and again started laying the branches in place while struggling to put terrible thoughts from his mind. Cara went back to her work. He put all his effort into concentrating on the task of completing their shelter. The sooner they got to sleep, the more rested they would be when they woke, and the faster they could travel.
Even though they were nowhere near any roads and a great distance from the trails, Richard still didn’t want to have a fire for fear that scouting soldiers might spot it. Although they wouldn’t be able see the fire’s smoke through all the drizzle and fog, such weather tended to keep smoke low to the ground, drifting this way and that through the woods, so any Imperial Order patrols would be able to smell it. It was a real enough possibility that none of the others argued for a fire. Being cold was a lot better than having to fight for their lives.
Nicci dragged an armful of balsam boughs close as Richard continued to weave them up the lean-to. None of the others spoke, apparently absorbed in worry that whatever had killed the men might be out there, among the deepening shadows, hunting the four of them as they prepared to go to sleep in a fortress made of nothing more than balsam boughs.
Their first day’s journey toward Altur’Rang had felt less like traveling and more like running for their lives. But whatever had killed Victor’s men had not chased them. At least, Richard didn’t think it had. He couldn’t really imagine that whatever had the power to kill that many men in such a brutal fashion couldn’t manage to catch up with them if it had their trail. Especially not something filled with a blood frenzy, as Nicci had described it.
Besides, when he was in the woods Richard usually knew when there were animals about and where they likely were, and, as a rule, he knew when people were close. Had Victor and his men not been camped quite so far from Richard, Kahlan, and Cara’s camp, he would have known they were there. He also had a keen sense of when he was being pursued and if someone was following his trail. As a guide, he sometimes tracked people lost in the woods. He and other guides sometimes had contests to track one another. Richard knew how to watch for someone tracking him.
This, however, was less a matter of suspecting that someone was following them and more a feeling of icy dread, as if they were being chased by a murderous phantom in a blood frenzy. That fear constantly urged them to run. He knew, too, that running was often the trigger that made a predator pounce.
Richard realized, though, that it was only his imagination making him feel the hot breath of pursuers. Zedd had taught him that it was always important to understand why you had specific feelings so that you could decide if those feelings were caused by something that warranted attention, or something that didn’t. Other than the palpable fear caused by the brutality of the slaughter, Richard had no evidence that they were being chased, so he tried to keep the emotion in proper perspective.
Fear itself often proved to be the greatest threat. Fear made people do thoughtless things that often got them into trouble. Fear made people stop thinking. When they stopped thinking, they often made foolish choices.
Several times when he was growing up, Richard had tracked people who had gotten lost in the vast forests around Hartland. One boy Richard had tracked for two days kept running in the dark until he eventually fell from a cliff. Luckily it wasn’t a long fall. Richard found him at the bottom of the steep bank with a twisted ankle that was swollen but not broken. The boy was only cold, tired, and frightened. It could have been far worse and he knew it. He had been very glad to see Richard appear and held him tightly around the neck all the way home.
There were any number of ways to die out in the woods. Richard had heard of people attacked by a bear, or a cougar, or bitten by a snake. But he couldn’t imagine what had killed Victor’s men. He’d never seen anything like it. He knew it hadn’t been soldiers. He supposed that it could have been the gifted using some kind of terrible power to slaughter the men, but he just didn’t think that was the explanation.
He realized, then, that he was already thinking of it as a beast.
Whatever killed the men, Richard had taken precautions as they had set out. He followed shallow streams until they were a good distance from the sight of the slaughter. He was careful to lead them up out of the rushing water and away from the stream across ground where it would be much more difficult to track them. More than once throughout the day he had led them over bare rock or through water to make it extremely time-consuming for someone good at tracking to follow them. The shelter, too,
was designed to blend into the surrounding woods. It would be hard to spot, unless someone passed very near to it.
Victor dragged a heavy load of balsam boughs close and laid them at Richard’s feet. “Need more?”
With the toe of his boot, Richard nudged the pile, judging by its density how much and how well it would cover the remaining poles. “No, I think these and the ones Nicci is bringing should be enough.”