Severed Souls (30 page)

He had seen them there, waiting in the blackness, dark wings opening in anticipation of having him.

Nicci was kneeling on the ground to his left, Zedd to the right. They both had flinched back at how fast he'd sat up. They pressed their fingers back to his temples. It had been Nicci he'd heard screaming at him to breathe, and he now recognized that it had been Zedd's gift crackling through him like lightning.

Nicci closed her eyes as she bowed her head and put trembling fingers of her other hand to her forehead.

“Dear spirits … thank you…” she whispered to herself.

Richard panted, still confused, still trying to get enough air, still trying to make sense of where he was and what was happening. It felt so good having air fill his burning lungs that he simply wanted to feel himself breathe. It was such a relief not to see the dark ones coming for him.

As his dazed, murky awareness cleared, he could begin to sense the air of desperation around him.

Irena leaned in with joyful surprise. In her exuberance she knocked Nicci's and Zedd's hands off him in order to grip his shoulders. “Richard!” She gave him a gleeful shake. “You're back! You're at last awake!”

Richard blinked as he looked around, finally starting to catch his breath. Then he saw her.

Kahlan, beaming with a big smile, crowded Irena aside as she leaned in to put her arms around him in a tight hug, almost squeezing all the air back out of his lungs. She finally leaned back only because she needed to gaze into his eyes.

Her green eyes, even though they brimmed with tears, had never looked more beautiful to him.

“Welcome back,” she whispered to him in relief.

She bent forward, then, and kissed him.

It took his breath, but this time in a good way.

In that instant, it seemed that all the wonderful moments of being with her flashed across his mind's eyes, everything from the first time he had looked into her eyes in the Hartland woods, to the day they were married, to seeing her again, now.

The world was still spinning as all the sights and sounds rushed in around him, but Kahlan's soft lips on his made it all come gracefully to a halt.

Everything at last settled and seemed right again.

As Kahlan finally backed away to let him catch his breath, he saw men of the First File at a respectful distance back beyond the immediate group, all with serious, concerned expressions. Their postures eased in relief.

Towering pines sheltered them under a late-afternoon, leaden sky that threatened drizzle. The light there in the woods, under those low clouds and with the trees all around, was muted and mellow. Richard spotted a squirrel running across a limb, and heard birds singing and chirping. Leaves of a leaning birch tree shimmered in a breath of breeze. He found the sight of the woods all around them, the life all around them, cozy and comforting. It was like being home. It felt safe.

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.

“At the same time, in the back of your mind, there is always a comprehension of the full meaning of life as something sacred. Although necessarily committed to killing in order to preserve the lives of innocent people, that awareness of the soul you are sending to the underworld, and your own innate reverence for life, gives you a counter pressure to the need to do it. Because it was created by one with a soul, that same innate, inward resistance was inescapably forged into the blade.

“But when you kill half people without a soul—and although it is still killing and they may look human—they aren't really human, so there is no resistance to the sword's fury, or yours. You are not sending a soul to the underworld. Battling half people is like being plunged in a world of madness, where you feel boundless ecstasy at the bloodshed the magic can bring to them.

“Both you and the sword are free to kill without that innate resistance. You wade into the slaughter with a kind of immunity to guilt. As a result, your anger, the sword's anger, are liberated on a whole new level.

“It's as frightening as it is glorious.”

He was still gazing into Kahlan's eyes. “You used the sword in that way, so you know what I mean.”

When she slowly nodded, he knew what she had been through.

“Commander Fister,” Nicci said into the sudden silence, “would you please take Irena and Samantha back to get them some of that stew you have had cooking. They have both been standing by for quite a while in case they were needed. Now that Richard is awake they finally have a chance to get a bite to eat. They should do it now, in case we need them later.”

By her tone of voice, Commander Fister understood that it was a command she expected to be carried out. He put a big hand under Irena's arm and lifted the woman back with him.

“Come on, ladies, let me get you some of the boar stew,” he said, cheerfully eager for her to try it. “I helped make it myself. We added rabbit, spices, mushrooms we collected from stumps, marsh spinach, and some fat snails from along the stream. I'd really like a woman's opinion of how I did.”

“Well, I, I would really rather—” Irena stammered, looking back toward Richard, hoping for him to intervene. He only smiled his assurance that the commander was right and she should eat.

“It has to be done by now,” Commander Fister said as he dragged her along with him. “Before we serve it to anyone else, I would be honored if you would be the first to taste it and tell me what you think. Samantha, come along and taste it with your mother.”

Samantha stood, torn between staying close to Richard and going with her mother. After a moment's hesitation, she ran to catch up with her mother.

“I guess that I could give it a taste,” Irena said, looking back over her shoulder as she was being hauled away. Her face brightened then. “I'll give it a taste to make sure it's finished and then bring Richard a bowl. He needs to eat more than any of us.”

“Good idea,” Commander Fister said. “Let's go have a bowl and see what you think, first.”

 

CHAPTER

42

As soon as the two women were dragged far enough away, Nicci, looking particularly displeased, leaned toward Richard, her blue eyes ablaze. Some of her long blond hair fell forward over her shoulder as she peered intently at him.

“What did you teach that girl about using magic?”

He could see Kahlan's small smile as she sat back out of the way, not wanting to get in the middle of it.

“What are you talking about?”

Nicci gritted her teeth. “That girl has a temper. A very bad temper.”

“And you don't?” Richard asked.

“Not like hers.”

Richard frowned suspiciously as he looked at Zedd's guarded expression and then back at Nicci. “Why? What did she do?”

“That's what I want to know. I asked her where she learned such things”—Nicci jabbed a finger into his shoulder—“and she said that you taught her.”

Richard tipped his head back as he realized what she had to be talking about. “Ah. That.”

“Yes, that,” Nicci growled as she punctuated each word with another poke of her finger. “What did you teach her, Mister ‘I don't know how to use my gift'?”

“Actually,” Richard said, “I only taught her what you taught me.”

Her frown faltered. “What are you talking about?”

“Remember when you explained to me how you made trees explode?”

Nicci's gaze wandered as she tried to recall what she might have said. “All I ever told you was that by using my gift I concentrated heat inside one spot in a tree trunk so that the heat rapidly turned the sap to steam and with nowhere to go it expanded and blew the tree apart.”

“That's it. That's the explanation I gave her.” Richard tilted his head in toward her. “But, let me tell you, Samantha is really good at it.
Really
good.”

“What I told you about how I explode a tree trunk was a superficial explanation.” Nicci fixed him with a cynical scowl. “I never gave you any of the important details about how to do such a thing because I was never able to teach you about your gift. That means you have no knowledge of underlying principles or causative factors that you could pass along to her.

“So, you are trying to tell me that you simply gave her that superficial explanation and she was able to do it, like telling her to flap her arms and she could fly like a bird?”

“Well,” he admitted, “it wasn't exactly that simple.”

“Really,” she mocked. “Then how did she manage to do such powerful conjuring from what you told her?”

“Sometimes, in a desperate situation, people can instinctively apply their knowledge to a new problem. We were being chased by a lot of desperate half people. They were like swarms of locusts coming at us. It seemed like there were thousands of them. I didn't stop to count, but I probably cut down hundreds and it made little difference. They just kept coming. There were far too many for me to fight off with the sword.

“Samantha tried everything she knew, but regular magic doesn't work very well on half people. I knew we were in a lot of trouble and needed something more or we were going to die.