Warheart (15 page)

They stood close together as the man came to a stop on the other side of the candles. He looked unsure what to do and reluctant to step into the Grace to get at them.

Kahlan wondered how long his reluctance would last. She eyed the sword across the room even though she knew that she had little chance to make it. The dead man would likely snatch her in an instant.

But she also knew that the sword could stop the threat.

Out in the hall a battle raged. Kahlan caught glimpses of half people racing toward the bedroom only to be slaughtered by soldiers of the First File. Other soldiers were dragged down by half people as other men of the First File pulled them off. She saw flashes of the Mord-Sith's red leather as well.

Just as Kahlan was about to again try to make it to the sword, another dead man, this one bigger, stepped through the splintered doorway and into the bedroom. He was more decomposed than the first and smelled even worse. Flaps of dried skin with hair attached hung down over an ear. One arm didn't work right. Even so, he moved well enough. Like the first, his glowing red eyes appraised the room, the bed with Richard on it, and the three women standing in the center of the Grace.

Several soldiers charged in, hacking wildly at the intruders, trying to take them down. It was futile. Their weapons chopped off bits of the dried bodies, but did little to stop the dead men. With a mighty swipe of his one good arm, the dead man knocked down several soldiers.

“We have no power to stop them,” Red whispered even as her hands turned, trying to work some kind of witch-woman magic. Whatever it was she was doing, none of it was working.

Nicci again threw fists of air that staggered the first of the dead men back. The second man ducked to the side so that Nicci's next attempt blew out the edge of the doorway, sending chunks of wood flying.

“Are we safe in the Grace?” Kahlan asked.

Almost as if to answer, one of the two dead men charged across the room. He lunged, swinging an arm like a big hook, trying to snag one of the women as they stepped back just in time. He no longer seemed concerned by the lines of the Grace drawn in blood and stepped right into the midst of it.

When he took another step forward, the three of them split up and went in three different directions. Nicci moved around to the side of the man, hammering him with fists of air. It wasn't enough to stop him, but it distracted him, keeping his attention. When she hit him again in quick succession it knocked the man sideways. Because of his broken ankle he stumbled, but caught himself on the windowsill.

As soon as he was at the window, Nicci conjured a ball of wizard's fire between her palms. It lit the room with harsh yellow-orange light as it ignited into being. The sphere of liquid flame tumbled and rolled obediently between her hands, hissing and bubbling with need.

Almost as soon as she had created it, Nicci cast it out. The lethal inferno howled as it raced across the bedroom, lighting everything in blinding yellow-orange light. It hit the man with a thud that Kahlan could feel in her chest.

The liquid flame exploded against the dead man, enveloping him in a sticky, white-hot blaze. The man erupted in flames that rolled up the wall and billowed across the ceiling.

Before it could set the entire room on fire, Nicci threw yet more fists of air, but this time the man, frantically concerned with the impossible effort of putting out the flames, didn't see it coming. The compressed wall of air hit him hard. With a whoosh of swirling flame it knocked the dead man through the window. His burning body tumbled out and fell through the night, lighting the walls of the citadel. Kahlan heard the thud when he hit the ground.

Fire was one of the few ways to stop the walking dead men. As they turned back to the other one, yet another had joined him, so there were again two in the room, stalking the three women.

Kahlan knew that Nicci couldn't do the same thing with the other two unless she also got them near the window. If not done carefully, as she had done with the first man, wizard's fire unleashed inside the room could easily trap them in a burning inferno. It could set the whole place on fire and kill countless soldiers as well.

The sorceress lifted her hands and recalled the power from the wizard's fire she had unleashed. With another gesture she extinguished the burning tapestry before it was too late.

“You were lucky with that other one and knocked him out the window,” Kahlan told the sorceress. “Be careful or you will catch the bed on fire. We might be able to run, but Richard can't.”

It would be all too easy to accidentally turn the bed into Richard's funeral pyre. It wouldn't take much for it to go up in flames.

Kahlan danced one way and then the other, trying to get past the growling predators. She needed to get to the sword. Either one or the other of the two dead men matched every move she made, blocking her from getting to the sword. At the same time as they blocked her, they were advancing, moving the three women back toward a corner.

Out in the hallways Kahlan could see that a full-blown battle had erupted.

Half people howled as they attacked, and screamed as they were cut. Soldiers savagely fought the flood of half-naked bodies racing up the hallway.

 

CHAPTER

19

When Kahlan turned toward the bed, trying to dodge one way and then the other around the closest of the two dead men, he stepped to the side each time, matching her moves to block her. Up closer to him the gagging stench of his rotting corpse was overpowering, making it hard to draw a breath. The focus of his glowing red eyes stayed locked on her.

Out of the corner of her eye, Kahlan caught sight of the red leather of a Mord-Sith coming up behind the other man. Mord-Sith were quick, but the woman's Agiel wasn't going to stop this threat. Kahlan hoped that when she found that out she would be quick enough not to be caught and killed like the soldier lying sprawled up against the wall.

The second man, his focus also on Kahlan, swung an arm behind to brush away the Mord-Sith as if she were a petty nuisance. As Kahlan tried but failed to get past the closest man by feigning a move to her right and then her left, she caught a glimpse of the Mord-Sith ducking as the arm of the other man swept by over her head.

When the man missed catching her with his arm, the woman in red stood and rammed what Kahlan thought must have been her Agiel into the dead man's back.

In that instant, the red glow in his eyes extinguished.

He briefly stood as still and stiff as a corpse before toppling forward and crashing to the floor. He was suddenly as dead as he had been before occult magic had pulled him from his grave.

Kahlan saw then that the Mord-Sith wasn't holding an Agiel as she had thought, but instead had used a knife. This, though, was no ordinary knife. She had seen a knife like this before. It was one of the knives created by the half people to stop the living dead. Even though the gloomy light made it hard to see, she knew who had one of those knives.

When the Mord-Sith turned toward the light and looked up, their eyes met. Kahlan saw what she already knew. It was Cara.

Without pause, Cara raced up behind the other roaring dead man menacing Kahlan and rammed that occult weapon into the small of his back. She withdrew the knife and slammed it in two more times in quick succession just for good measure. Kahlan could hear the thuds of Cara's fist hitting his back as the knife in her fist stabbed all the way in.

The red glow in his eyes went dark. His whole body stiffened. As his weight shifted over on the broken ankle, he toppled to his side, his dead weight landing with a heavy thud on the lines of the Grace drawn in blood on the wooden floor.

Kahlan ran to Cara, intending to throw her arms around the woman, but stopped short instead. There was something odd, something in a way distant about her. She looked the same as Kahlan remembered her always looking. She was muscular and tall, endowed with pure, graceful femininity. Her long blond hair was done in the traditional single braid of a Mord-Sith. On the surface she didn't look any different than she had always looked.

But there was something strange and otherworldly about Cara's blue eyes.

She had obviously fought her way into the citadel. She was covered in blood, now, but the red leather hid it well, and besides, being covered in blood was hardly strange for a Mord-Sith. Kahlan could see horrifically wounded bodies out in the hallway lying sprawled atop one another, all bleeding from gaping wounds of one kind or another. Most had been cut down by the soldiers. Some were missing arms, or legs, or even their heads. Some, though, Cara had stopped.

Kahlan saw flashes of steel down the dimly lit hallway as the soldiers still fought half people who raced in to join the frenzy. But there were less of them now than she had seen before.

“Cara,” Kahlan said as she stepped closer. “Dear spirits, I've missed you.” She couldn't hold back her tears. “You don't know how I've missed you, and all that's happened.”

Cara stared back with that strange look in her eyes. “I know.”

Kahlan lifted an arm to point, sobs suddenly choking her words. “Cara … Richard is dead.”

Without looking where Kahlan pointed, Cara only looked into her eyes. “I know.”

“I've tried everything…”

“I know,” Cara said, her voice finally turning to gentle compassion.

“It hurts so much to be without him.”

“I know, Mother Confessor. I carry that same pain every moment. It makes life unbearable.”

Kahlan nodded. “I miss Ben, too.”

Kahlan wanted to hug the woman. She had missed her so. She wanted to tell her the whole story, explain what had happened and what they had done to try to get Richard back. But she could say none of it. Something about the look in Cara's blue eyes made Kahlan keep her distance. It was Cara, and yet it wasn't.

“Cara, are you all right?”

Cara smiled then, like the old Cara that Kahlan knew so well. It was a smile of knowing, of wisdom, of confidence softened with a glimmer of childlike mischief. It was the smile of a woman who had spent her adult life seeing things that no one should ever have to see, and yet still carried a spark of joy for life that had survived in some dark, distant corner of her tortured mind.

It was a smile of compassion and determination laced with madness.

“Yes, Mother Confessor. I am all right, now. Finally, things are about to be right again.”

Kahlan ignored the strange feeling and took a step forward to throw her arms around the woman. Cara felt cold as ice. The Mord-Sith reached up with her free hand and half returned the hug, then parted.

“I have to go, now,” Cara said in a voice like a mother speaking tenderly to a child.

Kahlan frowned. “Go? Go where? You're home now.”

Cara shook her head. “Not yet, but I soon will be.”

With icy fingers, she gently touched Kahlan's cheek. She turned then toward the bed for the first time as if she had always known that Richard was there. At the side of the bed, standing over him, she looked back over her shoulder.

“Don't weep for me, Mother Confessor. Know that I love you both, and that I do this by my own choice alone. Know that I will be at peace. This is the way it is meant to be, the way it must be.”

Kahlan wanted to ask what she was talking about, but she couldn't seem to find her voice.

Looking down, Cara spread her arms above Richard. It reminded Kahlan of nothing so much as a graceful bird spreading its wings. Or a good spirit.

Kahlan blinked at what she was seeing. The Mord-Sith seemed to have a glow about her, or rather within her. White robes made of light, almost like wings, draped from her arms.

There seemed to be a spirit form made of light in the same place as Cara. Kahlan knew that it was not Cara she was seeing. The features were similar in their graceful femininity, and yet they were different.

Cara bent over and placed her Agiel, hanging from the gold chain, around Richard's neck. She cupped his cheek with a hand for a moment, just looking at him as she and the form made of light smiled lovingly at him.

And then she leaned forward and pressed her mouth to his, as if kissing him, but it was not a kiss.

Nicci stepped up beside Kahlan and whispered, “She is giving him the breath of life.”

Kahlan nodded. Richard had told her how a Mord-Sith shared her victim's breath while he was on the cusp of death. It was a sacred thing to a Mord-Sith to share his pain, share his breath of life as he slipped to the brink of death, as if to view with lust the forbidden sight of what lay beyond in the next world. Sharing, when the time came to kill him, his very death by experiencing his final breath of life, and taking it for her own. Kahlan imagined that to some, it was a grotesquely intimate trophy–part of the madness of the Mord-Sith's world and life.

Richard knew because Denna had done that to him when he had been her captive, used the breath of life to keep him alive, keep him on that cusp of death to prolong his agony.

But Kahlan had also seen Cara do that to a woman who had just died. Kahlan had at first thought it was some outrageous ritual of a Mord-Sith, but Cara had told her that she could sometimes give a person back the breath of life.

Cara now breathed that breath into Richard, his chest rising as his lungs filled with the breath she gave him, with her own breath of life.

Cara pulled away a few inches, Richard's chest slowly sinking as she drew another deep breath. Once again she pressed her mouth over Richard's, hand covering his nose, filling his lungs with her deep, life-giving breath.

“What are you talking about?” Red whispered from right behind them.

“She is the living bridge,” Nicci said, tears running down her face as well. “She is the one the spirits said he would need in order to return.”

Kahlan felt a spike of hope mixed with fear for Cara.

“That is a spirit with her, helping her,” Red whispered to them.