Severed Souls(85)
In a way, he was home, back home to the world of life.
It felt as if he had been in a dark place for a hundred years, unsure if he would ever find his way back.
Seeing Kahlan made him forget even the pain and made the vision of the dark ones recede.
He saw a tear run down Nicci’s cheek. Zedd, too, looked shaken.
“We made it, then,” Richard said, more a statement to himself than a question, and also meant to reassure them that he was indeed back and all right. “We made it up through the gorge. It worked.”
Samantha stuffed her head of frizzy black hair under Zedd’s arm to worm her skinny body in closer in order to hug her thin arms around Richard’s chest.
“Lord Rahl, you’re all right! We were so worried.”
“I wasn’t,” Zedd said to the girl who had snuck in under his arm. “Nothing to be worried about.” He paused to swallow. “Just a matter of applying the proper skills to the task at hand.”
Richard glanced over at Nicci. She rolled her wet blue eyes. He knew, then, that it had not been at all easy.
Although everyone in the camp looked relatively calm, except with regard to his wellness, he was worried that they might still be in danger from the Shun-tuk.
“Where are we? Did you manage to kill all the Shun-tuk that were after us? Were there any survivors? Did we get away from them? Are all of our men safe? Did we take any casualties?”
“Unfortunately, we lost a few of the men, but the rest of us are safe, now,” Kahlan assured him. “We made it up out of the gorge, and then the men built a bridge so we could cross a deep chasm.”
“A chasm?”
“A deep one, and it’s a long, long way around,” Commander Fister said from back behind Samantha and her mother. “On the off chance any survived, they will be a long time going around it to get to us.”
“They can track us,” Richard reminded them.
“With the bridge now at the bottom of that chasm,” Kahlan said, “we think we’re pretty safe for now.”
“Sulachan could have sent others,” he reminded them. “Maybe even worse, it’s not only the ones he sends that we need to worry about. Now that the barrier to the third kingdom has been breached, all the various tribes and nations of half people are now free to come out and hunt for those with souls. They migrate like swarms of locusts. Any of them could show up anywhere, anytime.”
“We had to stop so Nicci and Zedd could revive you,” Kahlan said in their defense. “We had no choice. They didn’t think they dared to wait any longer.”
Nicci and Zedd looked grim, as if to say Kahlan wasn’t telling him the half of it.
Irena leaned to the side so she could see him around Kahlan. “I helped, too.”
“Thank you,” Richard said to her. He saw the look Nicci gave the woman, but Irena was smiling at him, so she didn’t notice. If she had, she might have kept her mouth shut.
He was suddenly aware of how little any of them were actually saying about the battle with the Shun-tuk, or what had become of them.
“The plan worked, then?” he asked.
“We’re safe for now,” Kahlan assured him when she saw him looking from one person to the next, not quite believing it had been all that easy.
His gaze finally settled on Kahlan. No one else existed in that moment.
“Did you have to use the sword?”
The question visibly rattled her.
Looking into the depths of Kahlan’s bewitching green eyes for a long moment, watching the specter of that experience ghost across her face, he knew that she had.
He knew what it was like. He knew all about it.
“It’s different,” he said softly to her, “than killing those with a soul.”
Kahlan gave him a knowing nod. Now she knew as well.
“I don’t know how you are even able to think with that sword in your hand,” she said to him.
“Different?” Zedd interrupted, lifting a hand, leaning in a little, looking back and forth between the two of them. “What do you two mean, different?”
“When you use the sword to take a life,” Richard said, “the sword exacts a price for doing your bidding. It brings pain of taking a life. Righteous anger is your shield against the pain.
“Using the sword to kill separates a soul from its worldly anchor of its body, and thus life from death. But half people have no soul, so the sword is freed from any responsibility of guilt in breaking the Grace, so its rage is unbounded, and in turn it gives you no pain for your rampage.”
“Guilt?” he asked. “What do you mean?”
Richard thought for a moment how to explain such an experience.
“Well, there is a kind of pressure, a resistance, pushing back at your determination to kill. The soul of that person is struggling to remain here in this world, and their will to live is resisting crossing the boundaries between life and death.