The man sprang up in a full charge. He bared his teeth with a growl as he lunged at Richard. As he raced in, the man reached out to tackle his prey.
Richard had been ready and, rather than meeting the threat directly, dodged to the side at the last possible instant. Richard threw an arm around the man’s neck as he fell past and put a choke hold on him to keep him from crying out for help.
The man struggled, reaching back to claw at Richard, trying to get to his face, to gouge out his eyes. The man’s teeth were bared, but he couldn’t get a bite of flesh. Richard lifted the brawny man while putting pressure on the sides of his neck to cut off the blood supply.
The man’s struggles slackened as he quickly grew weak.
“Who are you?” Richard asked.
The man only growled, even as he did his best to keep his eyes open.
“How far to the north wall?” Richard asked.
Drool ran from the corners of the man’s mouth as he gasped for breath, as he fought to remain conscious and at the same time fight back.
“How far,” Richard asked again through gritted teeth.
“A day away, maybe.”
“And the Shun-tuk? How far to their land once beyond the north wall?”
When the man didn’t answer, Richard increased the pressure. The man’s eyes bulged. His tongue bulged from his mouth as his face turned red.
“How far is the kingdom of the Shun-tuk?” Richard asked again in a dangerously calm voice.
“Don’t know … never been that far. I’m not that stupid.”
“How far?”
“Days. A few days more. But they will catch you, eat your flesh, and drink your blood. They will have your soul.”
“You can’t gain someone’s soul by drinking their blood or by eating them. There is no way to get someone else’s soul. It’s not possible.”
The man struggled even harder, trying with renewed fury to reach back and get hold of something. He couldn’t. Richard wasn’t taking any chances and twisted harder to make his point.
“Lie!” the man gasped, red-faced from lack of air. “You want to keep it for yourself. All of you with souls are greedy. You soil the world with your nature. We will have your souls. We deserve them. We will have all of your souls!”
Samantha stepped up before the man’s face, regarding him calmly. “How do you figure you deserve our souls? What gives you the right?”
Richard had him tightly by the neck, but the man’s glare turned up to Samantha. He gave her an evil, lustful grin.
“We will eat your warm flesh and drink your warm blood and have your souls. We will rule the world of life.”
Richard twisted until the man cried out. “Are you with anyone else?”
“No!”
“Good,” Richard said under his breath as he snapped the man’s neck.
As Richard let the dead weight slip to the ground, he gestured to Samantha. “Let’s get going. Better that we are away from here in case others of his kind find him.”
CHAPTER
47
Richard was exhausted after a day of difficult travel over rough terrain. The farther north they went, the more uneven the ground became, and the darker and gloomier. At times the clouds were so low that the tops of the trees vanished in the gray overcast.
It was tiring to climb up steep, rocky rises only to have to descend the far side, and then do it all over again when the next steep ascent appeared through the trees. It was made worse in places by stretches of brush so dense that it was tiring to get through it and it bogged down their progress. In other places they encountered underbrush with tangled layers of thorny vines that were impassable and had to be skirted.
Richard hadn’t slept well the night before, after talking with the soulless man they found drinking at the brook who wanted to eat them alive. Richard wished he could have killed the man twice.
Samantha looked tired as well. She had been uncharacteristically quiet the night before and then all day as they trudged through the trackless forests of the Dark Lands. When Richard had asked if she was all right, she’d said that it had unnerved her to hear such an evil man say such terrible things—to have him look her in the eye and tell her that he wanted to eat her warm flesh, drink her blood, and take her soul.
Richard knew that what probably unnerved her the most was knowing that others with the same sentiment had murdered her father and were likely holding her mother captive.
At least, he hoped they were still holding her mother captive, and that they hadn’t harmed her. Richard hoped that Zedd and Nicci and Cara and Benjamin and the rest of the soldiers were all still alive as well, and that they hadn’t been slaughtered. He knew what a dim hope that really was, though. It had to be terrifying to be in the hands of such merciless cannibals. He couldn’t help being constantly haunted by fear for their safety. That fear kept him pushing forward as swiftly as he could.
Besides wanting to rescue his friends—to save the lives of those people he loved and cared about—he always had in the back of his mind that the only way to save Kahlan’s life as well was to get her back to the containment field at the People’s Palace along with Zedd and Nicci so that they could remove the Hedge Maid’s touch of death.
Richard glanced around when he noticed that the woods were growing darker all the time. It was still only late in the afternoon, not yet late enough for it to be getting dark. He looked up from time to time but the dense forest canopy was closed in so tightly overhead that he couldn’t see any sky, so he couldn’t tell how cloudy it was. He felt warm even though there was still a cold mist.
Moving along a narrow, marshy low area, Richard went to a knee. Overwhelmed with how weary he felt, how exhausted, he couldn’t seem to take another step. He had to stop, had to pause to rest a moment.
“Lord Rahl, what is it?” Samantha asked as she rushed to his side. “What’s wrong?”
Richard pulled a deep breath as his head hung. “I’m just so tired, that’s all.” He dismissed it with a gesture. “It’s nothing. It’s just that it’s been hard traveling and I didn’t sleep well.…”
Samantha laid her small hand against his forehead. “You have a fever.”
He wasn’t at all surprised. “Feels like it.”
She pushed against the front of his shoulder with one hand while gesturing with the other. “Here, sit back on that rock for a minute.”
Richard looked around behind and then sat back on the leaf-covered rock she was pointing to. Samantha stood in front of him, her face almost even with his. She pressed her fingertips to his temples. He could feel the slight but familiar tingle of magic.
She finally pulled her hands back. “It’s the darkness in you,” she told him in a quiet voice. “The touch of death. It’s what the Mother Confessor has in her, too. It’s the same dark evil that is trying to claim you both. It’s getting worse, as I told you would happen.”
“You did,” Richard said as he nodded. “Is there anything you can do?”
She was a long moment in answering. “I’m sorry, Lord Rahl. I’ve already healed you all I can. I wish I knew more about healing. I wish I knew of some trick or something to help, but I don’t. It will take your grandfather now if you and the Mother Confessor are to be truly helped.”
“What if you try to use the gift to strengthen me, rather than healing me?”
She thought it over and then put her fingertips to his temples. He again felt the warm tingle of her gift. He could hear birds in the distance, and feel a soft breath of damp air on his face. Inside him, he could feel the warm glow of magic. He felt the familiar suspension of time in the grip of that magic.
She removed her hands. “Did it help?”
Richard stood and rolled his shoulders, trying to sense if he felt stronger. At least he was able to stand.
“I think it helped. I do feel a little stronger. Thank you.”
“I wish it was more, Lord Rahl, but I’m afraid that it isn’t the real solution you need, just a
temporary boost. Rest would help more until you can be healed properly.”
He nodded and managed a small smile to reassure her. “I think I can walk, now. Let’s get going. Getting more rest will have to wait.”
Richard forced himself to move despite how much he wanted to slow down or stop to rest. He knew, somewhere deep down inside, that if he gave up and lay down, he would die, much the way people caught in winter storms would get tired, lie down, and go to sleep, and never to rise again.
When he died, he told himself, he would have all eternity to rest. If he wanted to live, if he wanted others to live, it was going to take effort.
As they came to the top of each new rise he wished that he could see through the dense green leaves, pine boughs, and dark shadows among the endless tree trunks to what lay beyond. He wished he could get to a vantage point so he could see how much farther, but there was no such vantage point in the endless, dark, forbidding forest.
As he walked, he glanced up at a tree, thinking that if he climbed up high, he might possibly get a view of what was ahead. But he didn’t have the energy to spare, much less the time, to go climbing trees. He supposed that he knew where he was going, and he knew that they were going in the right direction, so he simply needed to put one foot in front of another and they would eventually get there. Looking out from a high vantage point wouldn’t get them there any faster.
As the day wore on, he realized it was getting a little brighter. At first he thought the overcast might be breaking up, but then, coming over a rise, through an opening in the thick layers of limbs, he finally saw a patch of light.
He trotted toward a narrow opening in the trees and in the misty distance was rewarded with his first glimpse of the barrier. He had been impatient to get to it for days, and now, suddenly seeing it, he was stunned. He stopped dead in his tracks and stared. Samantha stood beside him, staring as well.
CHAPTER
48
Richard and Samantha stood with their backs to the dark woods, staring out into the gray light of a heavily overcast day at the enormity of the structure standing before them.
There was no way to see the ancient power invested in this wall to make it a barrier keeping evil contained. But what he could see—the wall itself—was a physical barrier of staggering proportions. It had looked big when he had seen it through the viewing port back at Stroyza, but seeing it up closer, seeing the sheer size of it, was bone-chilling.
Despite the strength and size of the physical barrier itself, and the power of spells cast by wizards with abilities Richard couldn’t entirely imagine, whatever was on the other side had still managed to escape.
From where they stood in a small clearing among a bed of cinnamon ferns and scraggly holly oak that gave them a broken view off through the pines standing guard at the edge of the forest, Richard could see that they were still some distance off to the side of where the opening would be, which was what he had wanted so as not to encounter any half people coming south through those gates from the third kingdom beyond. He wanted to remain hidden to give him an opportunity to survey the area.
“Come on,” he said to Samantha as he started out again.
He moved more quickly now that he knew for sure that they had finally reached the wall. Samantha had to trot to keep up with his long strides. Even as he put more effort into moving quickly, he still kept a wary eye on the surrounding countryside for any sign of trouble. He didn’t want to be surprised and find himself unexpectedly having to fight off a forest full of half people.
“What are we going to do when we get there?” Samantha asked, breathless from the effort of keeping up with him.
“I’m not exactly sure, yet. First, we have to get through the gates. After that we need to keep heading north until we find the land of the Shun-tuk.”
“Then what?”
Richard frowned back over his shoulder. “Then we rescue our people being held captive there.”
“How are we going to do that?”
Richard carefully danced across rocks to cross a small, slow-moving stream. “I wish I knew. We’ll have to look over the situation once we get there, then we can start to figure out a plan.”
“Maybe I can use magic to help somehow. You know, create a distraction, or something.”
“Or something,” Richard said.
At first animated now that they were close, Samantha fell to silent worry. She finally got around to the heart of her concern.
“Lord Rahl, you know the way Jit held you captive?”
Richard pushed a low pine bough aside, holding it out of the way to let her pass. “You mean the way she had us bound up in all those thorny vines?”
Samantha nodded as she ducked under the bough he held out of her way. “Well, what if they’re doing that to all the people we’re going in there to save?”
Richard’s brow drew together. “I don’t know what you’re getting at. Do you mean what will we do if they have all of them tangled up in thorn vines?”
“Not exactly.” She peeked around her mat of black hair to look over at him. “You know what they were doing to the Mother Confessor? What they were going to do to you?”
It suddenly dawned on him what she was getting at. “Oh. You mean the way they cut Kahlan and were bleeding her.”
“That’s right. You said they were draining her blood and collecting it in bowls and then feeding it to Jit.”
Richard half turned to her as he marched among the towering trees, his mood darkening. “Go on.”
“They were bleeding her, Lord Rahl. They would have done that to you had you not managed to kill Jit and escape. Jit was collecting and drinking the Mother Confessor’s blood, the same as she did with all her victims.”
Richard came to a stop. “What’s your point?”
“Remember what that man back at the brook said before you killed him? He said that he wanted to drink my warm blood. Naja spoke of them drinking every drop of blood, thinking that a soul might be in the blood and trying to escape. See what I mean? They think that the soul inhabits a living person and that it can escape. So, they drink people’s blood, hoping that they will capture the soul as it tries to escape.”
“So you’re wondering if the Shun-tuk, unlike the other half people you killed back in the forest, have evolved even more to think of blood as the ‘lifeblood’ of a person, that it’s the stuff of a person’s soul, and maybe they want captives in order to bleed them in an attempt to drain out the soul and drink it in themselves.”
Samantha shrugged her small shoulders. “I don’t know. Maybe. After all, Jit was from the third kingdom, so maybe what she was doing to the Mother Confessor tells us something about what the people there are like and how they think. That man seemed to feel that same way, even if the ones I killed back in the woods were more wild about wanting to eat us.”
Richard hadn’t thought of it that way. “I suppose it’s possible.”
“My mother said that she should have realized that Jit being in the swamp was a sign that she was one of the first to have escaped from behind the north wall. She said that she should have recognized it as one of the first indications that the north wall was failing.
“What if Jit is also a good indication of the way these half people think and what they do? What if the Shun-tuk wanted captives to keep for their blood, like we keep animals for their milk. What if they have those people imprisoned in order to drain them of their blood, thinking that fresh, warm blood is the way for them to gain their soul.”
“That does make some sense,” Richard said with a sigh, “but then why would they seem to be more interested in taking the gifted captive?”
Samantha didn’t have a ready answer.
“Unless they think the blood of the gifted has some special quality,” Richard said, following along with her line of reasoning. “Of course, they might have a more sinister reason for wanting to take the gifted captive.”
“A more sinister reason? Like what?”
R
ichard considered it in brooding silence as he made his way past branches and boughs on his way toward the gray light out ahead. “I don’t know. It could be something more complex. The main thing, though, is that the exact reason is really a secondary consideration. What really matters the most right now is the solution, not the problem. If the Shun-tuk do have them, and if our people are alive, we have to get them out of there. That’s what matters.”
Almost as soon as he said it, the forest began to grow lighter. In a few dozen more steps they emerged from the oppressive greenery on the edge of a small ridge that provided an opening in the forest, allowing them an expansive view.
They were face-to-face with an immense, towering wall.
CHAPTER
49
Richard put his arm out, stopping Samantha from stepping too far out of the woods into the open, where he feared they might be spotted. She stood beside him, silently gazing at the sight.
From the edge of the slight ridge they had a good view through the opening in the trees. The were looking down somewhat on a wall that rose up from the forest floor, up well past the tallest trees, so that they had to turn their heads up to see the top. The wall made the towering old-growth trees look like they were nothing more than saplings.
“From seeing it through the portal, I always knew it was big,” Samantha said, “but I still never realized that it was this big. Until you’re standing here in front of it, you don’t really know its true size.”
Richard understood what she meant. Sometimes, when the scale of something was so far out of the ordinary, or so far outside your frame of reference, so much larger than anything you’d ever seen before, and viewed from so far away, it was hard to comprehend its true size. Up close, such monumental sights often seemed even more incomprehensible.
The stone wall seemed impossibly high, even to Richard, and he had seen a number of spectacular sights, both natural and man-made. It made him a bit dizzy just looking at the size of the soaring stone face of the wall.