Severed Souls (20 page)

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.

It was the most elegantly composed scene of utter destruction Kahlan had ever witnessed.

As she watched the walls tumbling in, sending clouds of dust and debris rolling up through the trees, it went on and on, as if in a livid tantrum of destruction.

It sounded like the world was being ripped apart by the rapid series of thundering explosions. The sound reverberated through the mountains all around. Stone fragments of every size and shape sailed through the air, tumbling down the collapsing walls of the gorge, lifting above the flashes of explosions, or cascading and bouncing down atop what had already fallen.

All up and down the gorge below Samantha the world looked like it was coming apart. As a particularly immense cliff toppled, twisting as it fell so that it landed down the length of the defile, dust, like smoke, expelled from under where the cliff landed, billowed out to roll up the gorge. The wall of wind from the explosions and buckling walls nearly knocked Kahlan down again.

For just an instant, Kahlan wondered if this was the end of the world of life, if it was actually being caused by Sulachan, furious that they might escape his Shun-tuk.

Yet more cliffs, thrown forward by internal explosions that lit like lightning rippling along inside the rock, toppled out and then dropped with thundering force. They hit so hard the ground shook. The world rocked and moved as if it was all being caused by an earthquake. But Kahlan saw the explosions and she knew that this was no earthquake. It was directed destruction to a purpose.

The sound of cracking granite continued popping and reverberating through the canyon without abating. Another series of booming explosions farther down the gorge shook the ground with each thumping explosion. Each concussion felt like a fist pounding Kahlan's chest.

Clouds of dusty rock boiled up as yet more rock and debris came crashing down in specific places, ensuring that no part of the gorge escaped the calamity.

In a brief pause, Kahlan scrambled to her feet and raced back down the gorge to Samantha. The young woman still hadn't moved. Her black hair was covered in a layer of dust that made her look gray. The world around her was coming apart and she hadn't moved. Shun-tuk below her were dying by the hundreds, if not thousands, and still she had not moved.

There was no doubt in Kahlan's mind as to the intelligence directing the spectacle still going on.

Impossibly, Kahlan saw a few Shun-tuk, covered in dust, scrambling out from the leading edge of the rubble. There had to be a few dozen. They saw Kahlan and Samantha and started for them. Kahlan hoped they weren't the ones with occult sorcery, and that her sword could stop them.

Just then, Kahlan heard granite cracking in the cliff right above them. She looked up and saw the cliff tremble and shake. She could see huge cracks racing through the wet rock. Sections pulled apart, taking trees with them. A sudden thundering boom to each side over her head made Kahlan gasp.

She scooped the wisp of a young woman up in her arms and started running up the gorge. She ran with all her strength.

Right behind, the towering wall of rock cracked away from the mountain, toppled, and crashed down with thunderous force right where Samantha had been standing only a moment before. Kahlan almost lost her footing as the ground shook violently, but she managed to keep going.

Sections of rock the size of small palaces came to a rocking halt where Samantha had been standing moments before. Had Kahlan not snatched her up, the young woman would have been killed.

The Shun-tuk that had temporarily escaped had been buried under countless tons of the fallen mountain.

Kahlan stopped, turning back, trying to catch her breath. All down the gorge she could see loosened slabs continuing to topple. Enormous blocks, no longer having any support, slid with accelerating speed to sail out past the remaining edges to fall through space and pound down atop the rubble-filled gorge.

As she watched, spellbound, a few remaining sections that were fractured and loose gave way, collapsing down atop the masses of stone already fallen from the mountains. The gorge was filled with hundreds of feet of the stone debris. As far down the mountain as she could see, the sides of the gorge had all fallen in.

Kahlan couldn't be certain, of course, but she could not imagine how a single Shun-tuk could still be alive.

“Dear spirits, girl, what in the world did you just do?”

“What Lord Rahl taught me to do,” Samantha said, her voice choked with tears.

Her thin arms clutched Kahlan's neck as she wept into her shoulder.

Kahlan didn't know what Samantha was talking about.

“I was so afraid,” she cried, “I was so afraid we were all going to be eaten. I couldn't let that happen. I had to do something. I was so angry that they were going to eat us thinking they could steal our souls for themselves. I was so angry that they would eat my mother, especially after we just got her free, and that they would eat Lord Rahl, and you, and everyone else—all for some stupid belief. I was so angry.”

“So you used some kind of magic?” Kahlan asked. She couldn't understand what she had done or how.

“I knew my mother, and Zedd, and Nicci had tried to use regular magic, and it didn't harm the Shun-tuk, so I knew magic wouldn't work against them. But I heard you say that even if they had occult powers, they would still bleed. So then I knew that was the way to stop them—kill them without magic.

“All I could think of was to do what Lord Rahl taught me.”

Kahlan held the young sorceress's head of thick black hair to her shoulder. “It's all right, Samantha. You did good. Richard will be proud when I tell him that you just saved us all.”

Kahlan could not for the life of her imagine what in the world Richard could have taught Samantha that could bring mountains crashing down.

Kahlan watched carefully in the moonlight for a time.

There was no one chasing them.

 

CHAPTER

28

An impatient Commander Fister stood waiting in front of his men as Kahlan reached them.

“What in the world just happened?” he asked, sounding angry and frightened at the same time.

“The walls fell down,” Kahlan said.

He made the oddest face, and opened his mouth to say something, but then decided better of it.

Kahlan didn't think that any of them had ever seen such an extraordinary thing happen before. They had all just witnessed power on a rarefied level.

“Is Richard all right?” Kahlan asked the commander.

Fister nodded. “As all right as he was before, anyway.”

Samantha was still clutching Kahlan tightly and still weeping. It seemed she had been frightened, too, frightened by the realization of what she had done. Samantha had just used her power to kill probably thousands of people. Half people, anyway.

Kahlan suspected, though, that it was as much from the emotional exhaustion of the ordeal and the terror that had driven her to do such a thing as anything else. At the end of a particularly violent and exhausting battle, Kahlan sometimes felt like sitting down and having a good cry.

But she was a Confessor, and her mother had taught her from an early age that she couldn't let people who depended on her see such weakness. Seeing weakness in leaders made people lose confidence in that leader, and in themselves.

“Well, from what I was told,” the commander said, “Samantha had stopped in the middle of the brook and was just standing there. So what—”

“Not now, Jake,” Kahlan said. She gestured. “Let's get moving. I don't think that any of the Shun-tuk survived what I just saw, but if they did I don't want to have them catch us sitting around celebrating. I want to put some distance between us and them—if any are still alive.”

He pointed up to the soaring walls on each side of the gorge. “Besides, it's probably not the best idea to stand around under rocks and cliffs that might have been loosened by all that shaking. I wouldn't want what happened to the Shun-tuk to happen to us.”

Kahlan nodded with a worried look back down the gorge. It wasn't that far to the site of the buried Shun-tuk. That much violence could easily have weakened the walls above them.

The commander cocked his head. “Do you think any are still alive? I mean, they have that occult sorcery, after all.”

Kahlan considered his question briefly. “I can't be certain, of course, but I can't imagine how they could have survived the mountains to each side falling in on them. I think they were all crushed under hundreds of feet of rock. Doesn't matter how much sorcery you have if a boulder the size of a house falls on you. I'm pretty sure they are all dead.”

“Pretty sure.” He still sounded hesitant. “Couldn't there be a pocket created by a huge slab that spared some of them? If there are any alive, they might be able to dig out. They can bring the dead back to life, remember? If even one of them with such powers is alive, he could raise an army of dead to come after us.”

“After what I witnessed, I don't see how there could be anyone left to dig out and bring the dead back to life. Even if they survived in a pocket, they are still buried by hundreds of feet of rock. I can't imagine they could ever dig out.”

Kahlan let out a deep breath. “But just in case, and more importantly, to get out from under these steep walls, it's a good idea to keep moving. At least for a little while so we can put some distance between us and all the Shun-tuk buried down there. I don't like being this close to them, even if it is a graveyard now. I don't especially like sleeping beside a graveyard. Let's keep going, but take it a little slower. I think we're all pretty tired.”

“These are men of the First File, Mother Confessor. They can carry you on their shoulders and march double-time all night long.”

Kahlan nodded. “I know, but I think it's up to us to decide to give them the rest they may not be aware they need.” She arched an eyebrow at him. “Didn't I always make sure that you and your men were rested before you went out at night to bring me back strings of enemy ears?”