Severed Souls(9)

Richard caught Kahlan around her waist to pull her along with him and under his protection. “They didn’t kill him on purpose,” he said as he bent close to her. “They wanted him to scream. It was a trap meant to draw us in.”

She glanced up at the rage in his gray eyes, eyes that at other times could be so kind and compassionate. “I thought the same thing.”

With a tip of his head he indicated the higher ground. “We need to make it to that defensive position before they spring the rest of it on us.”

“You think there is more to come besides this?”

“Absolutely.”

With the man now rescued and the soldiers protectively surrounding them, they followed the wedge-of-steel formation toward the rise of ground backed by the cliff rising up among the hardwood trees. From time to time Zedd was able to throw a flood of flame out ahead of them. The blinding yellow light ignited trees and lit the bottoms of the clouds. Pine needles to each side flared as they ignited and went up in flames, sending a cascade of fire up the sides of the trees before they were turned to ash.

Any Shun-tuk unfortunate enough to be caught in the blinding incandescence appeared skeletal for an instant before even that much of their remains was vaporized.

Kahlan thought the heat of it might burn away her hair and eyebrows. She didn’t know what kind of power these half people had, but the flames were doing more damage to the trees than most of them. Fortunately, it had been raining so much and everything was so wet that the fire was confined to the immediate area and didn’t set the woods ablaze.

While it didn’t catch up as many of the half people in the inferno as they would have hoped, it at least helped scatter them out of the way. It seemed that the half people, once conceived with occult powers outside the Grace, were not affected by magic the way normal people would have been.

Kahlan saw more of the half people pouring out of the woods behind.

To her right, Richard tightened his arm around her waist to help her keep up, while on her left Nicci kept a hand firmly planted between Kahlan’s shoulder blades not only to help move her as swiftly as possible, but to give her strength. Kahlan hated needing the help.

Irena ushered Samantha along close behind them.

“Lord Rahl,” Samantha called out, “what can I do to help?”

“Run faster,” he called back over his shoulder.

Samantha and her mother obeyed as the troops fought the enemy off from the sides. Zedd laid down yet more fire behind them to protect their flank as best he could. Kahlan knew that using such power was difficult and exhausting. She knew that he wouldn’t be able to keep up such an intense effort for long.

With the way ahead being cleared by the wedge of men of the First File, Kahlan was feeling more confident that they could make it to the defensive position on higher ground up against a rock wall. Once they made it there, then they would only have to fight the half people from one side rather than from every direction. In that way, they would be able to continually reduce the number of enemy and eventually, hopefully, if there weren’t too many, wipe them out.

Kahlan realized that she was falling, that one of the ghostly white figures had dropped from a tree onto her back, only when she felt the impact knock the wind from her lungs at the same time as she felt his teeth sink into the muscle at the side of her neck. She hit the ground hard, face-first, and went sprawling.





CHAPTER

5

Gerald frowned as he straightened from his work of putting a sharp edge on his shovel. He let the ring of the file against metal fade away as he listened. He thought that he heard a strange, low rumbling sound.

He paused, motionless for a moment after the ring of steel had faded, the file in his callused hands still in midair, as he cocked his head to listen. He could feel the rumble in the dirt floor beneath his feet more than he could hear it. It reminded him of distant thunder, but it was too even, too unwavering, too continual, for it to be thunder. Still, more than anything, that was what it reminded him of.

He carefully laid the file down on the wooden workbench and went to the small window at the side that overlooked the graveyard. Beyond the far side of the sodden hayfields the woods that covered most of the Dark Lands rolled off into the distance, over ever-rising ground, toward imposing snowcapped mountains.

Gerald didn’t especially like the woods. There were enough dangers in the Dark Lands without venturing too far into the woods. He had always thought that people were trouble enough without tempting fate with the things that lived in the woods.

Rather than brave the mysterious dangers of the trackless forests of the Dark Lands for no good reason, he preferred to stick to his work of tending the graveyard and burying folks who could no longer bring about any harm to anyone. People in the town of Insley didn’t like coming out to where dead bodies rotted in the ground, so they left him alone, shunning him because he tended his garden of the dead, as he thought of it.