Her sword scythed white-painted men and women down by the dozens. What had been a trap closing around her turned into mounds of bodies clogging the gorge, making it more difficult for others to climb over the dead to get at her. Some slipped on blood and gore and fell, some smacking their heads on rocks, while others were stabbed to death before they could scramble to their feet.
Despite the blade’s hunger for enemy blood, Kahlan paid particular care to being sure she cut down any she saw with the red glowing eyes.
Killing the others between finding those with glowing red eyes was just a delicious treat until she could find another walking dead.
As she swung the sword, laying open chests, severing limbs, shattering skulls, she could feel their warm blood splattering across her face. Blood dripped from the stringy wet tips of her hair.
Still, the blood wasn’t enough. She wanted more. She went after them with ever-increasing fury. Teeth gritted with rage, she cut them down as fast as they could come at her.
Even as she fought, though, somewhere in the dim recesses of her mind, she knew that there were too many.
Soldiers recognized the danger she was in by wading too far into the enemy to get at the ones with glowing red eyes. Commander Fister hacked his way in close to her, trying to keep the chalky figures from getting to her. His powerful arms looked made for the task of cleaving an enemy apart with his sword.
Other soldiers chopped their way through Shun-tuk to get in close to her, and helped her to continually grind the leading edge of the enemy down under their blades.
Kahlan was only dimly aware of such things, though. She was lost in the killing.
With the Sword of Truth in her hands and this many of the enemy around her, it felt as if the purpose of her entire life had come down to this perfect moment of delivering death. Her training, her experiences, her beliefs, everything in her life, had brought her to this moment as the perfect killing machine.
The Sword of Truth fed off the intent of the one holding it. It read what the person considered good or evil. The blade would not harm what the person holding it believed to be good. It was committed to destroying what the holder of the blade considered evil. In the right hands, in the hands of one committed to reason and life, the sword became manifest justice.
Kahlan considered the half people and the ones who had sent them to be pure, unredeemable evil. She had never felt this kind of unleashed wrath. Anything white drew her blade. Severed arms spun through the air. Heads tumbled across the rocks. Bodies and parts of bodies littered the ground. Blood covered everything.
In places, advancing Shun-tuk had to wade through ankle-deep viscera. A head she took off with an angry swing of the sword tumbled and bounced down the rocks of the gorge. Even over the screams and yelling, she could hear the skull crack each time it bounced off a rock. Advancing Shun-tuk stepped aside to avoid it.
The men fighting beside her were just as lethal. The Shun-tuk, after all, were not all that hard to kill. They wore no armor, they carried no shields, and they did not use weapons to block attacks. Shielding their face with an arm cost them the arm before the sword buried itself in their face. She had yet to see one Shun-tuk draw a knife. Their teeth were their weapon of choice. They were animals racing in to slaughter their prey, and they in turn were being slaughtered.
Axes relentlessly chopped them down. Maces crushed skulls and caved in ribs and lungs. Swords of the First File cut apart the figures, and yet they kept coming. There was no sign of the end of the white throng snaking up the gorge. Sergeant Remkin and his men were too distant, and no doubt engaged in the same kind of fight for their lives.
And then one of the Shun-tuk not far in front of her did the oddest thing. He stood still in the center of the chaos, and smiled. It was a smile that, despite the sword’s rage, made Kahlan pause and her blood run cold.
As he gazed into her eyes, without ever looking away, he lifted a hand out toward one of the soldiers to her right.
The soldier screamed as the skin on his face immediately started bubbling and melting. The screams gurgled away.
His scalp split open in bloody strings as it sloughed down his head, exposing the top of his skull. His eyes liquefied in their sockets, running down and mixing with the gooey mess of his bloody, bubbling flesh. He was already dead, his joints separating as he crumpled.
The smiling Shun-tuk, his gaze still on Kahlan, almost at the same time lifted his other arm out toward the soldier to her left. The man screamed as his flesh and muscle liquefied and fell away from the bones of his arms in sticky strings. His nose and lips melted away even as he screamed in horrified agony. Flesh parted from cheekbones and skull. Both men had died in hardly more than a heartbeat.