Kahlan’s first thought was that maybe she could circle an arm around Samantha’s skinny waist, hike her up, hold her against a hip, and carry her up the gorge, but as soon as she thought of it she realized that she certainly couldn’t outpace the Shun-tuk while carrying the young woman, even if she was small and skinny.
She knew that if she tried, they would both die.
Kahlan knew that she was going to have to fight or run.
Leaving Samantha and running meant abandoning her to the savages to be eaten alive. Kahlan gripped her sword tighter.
Despite the magic from the sword desperately wanting the fight, wanting the blood of the enemy, Kahlan knew that fighting the Shun-tuk alone, even with the Sword of Truth, would be suicide.
There was no time. It was now or never. Run or fight.
The only thing that made any sense at all was to run.
If it was to be running, then it had to be now. They had to run or they were going to die.
“Samantha—there’s no time—”
“Run.”
That time the young woman said it was such cold power that it ran a chill through Kahlan.
Kahlan straightened and stared for a second at the motionless young sorceress, her fingers pressed to her temples, her head bowed, her eyes closed.
Kahlan glanced back at the black eye sockets, clawed hands, and open mouths of the Shun-tuk running wildly up the defile toward them.
There was no choice. If she stayed, they both died. Kahlan couldn’t help anyone else if she died trying to save this one person.
Viewed in that light, there was no choice.
Heartbroken at the choice, Kahlan bolted and took off running up the gorge, racing as if her life depended on it—because it did.
There was a good-size gap ahead to the men. A glance back over her shoulder showed another gap back to the Shun-tuk, but not much of one. Samantha stood motionless on the rock in the middle of the brook, in the center of that gap.
As Kahlan turned once more up the hill, running as fast as her legs would carry her, the ground suddenly shook with such a violent shock that she fell sprawling face-first in the center of the brook.
She twisted as she sat up, coughing out water, looking back when the concussion from the blast flattened her. It was so powerful that it felt as if it had stopped her heart for a beat.
Confused, Kahlan sat up again just in time to see the air of the moonlit defile filled with flying rock. She blinked at what she was seeing. It made no sense. Large jagged pieces of granite spiraled through the air. Huge slabs that had broken along rift lines slid downward with ever-accelerating speed. As they dropped, they trailed shattered bits of stone and smoke from the friction created under such tremendous weight.
To either side of the narrow defile explosions expanded the rock, lifting great chunks up and outward. Inside those expanding, interlocking pieces of rock, Kahlan could see the remnants of the flashes that had ignited deep inside the rock and blasted it apart. The sound of the explosions thundered and boomed, tearing the rock walls apart. More explosions in quick succession raced down the gorge on both sides, dozens of heart-stopping thumps in a rapid series, blowing the mountain to pieces. Flashes ripped in sequence down the faces of bluffs, loosening the bedrock from the mountain.
In the center of the turmoil below her, Samantha hadn’t moved an inch.
Below her, the thundering booms that shook the ground took the feet of the Shun-tuk out from under them.
The rock walls to either side below the young woman shook with repeated explosions racing down the length of the defile, blowing the walls apart. In the moonlight Kahlan could see stone spires topple, folding as they dropped. Countless tons of rock came crashing down atop the Shun-tuk trapped in the gorge below.
Through the thundering, echoing booms and the singular ripping sound of granite cracking and breaking, Kahlan could hear men and women screaming. The Shun-tuk were helpless beneath the cataclysm violently ripping rock apart above them. They had no time to escape and had nowhere to run.
Kahlan blinked as she saw a series of thundering booms rip along in an extensive chain down the rock walls. The flashes, like lightning within the stone itself, hammered in quick succession, one following almost atop the boom of the one before, rippling one after another down the gorge.
There could be no doubt whatsoever that whatever was happening was being directed intelligently. It was obvious to Kahlan by the order and placement of the rock-ripping explosions that it was meant to collapse the walls to both sides of the defile into the gorge at the bottom. Every blast that blew stone outward was timed in an ordered sequence that knocked out support to ensure that the colossal weight of the rock would help pull the walls down. By the enormity of the blasts, and their locations, the walls had to fall.