Richard stood panting, his heart pounding, fighting to focus the rage on a threat he could not identify. He scanned the shadows and darkness back among the trees, looking for any movement. At the same time he struggled to sort out the confusion of what he was seeing on the ground before him.
Cara skidded to a halt to his left, ready for a fight. An instant later, Victor stumbled to a stop on his right, his mace held in a tight fist. Nicci raced in right behind, no weapon evident, but Richard could sense the air around her virtually crackling with her power ready to be unleashed.
“Dear spirits,” the blacksmith whispered. His six-bladed mace, a deadly weapon the man had made himself, rose in his fist as he cautiously started forward.
Richard lifted his sword in front of Victor to bar him from going any farther. His chest against the blade, the blacksmith reluctantly heeded the silent command and stopped.
What, at first, had been a bewildering sight became at last all too clear. A man’s forearm, missing the hand but still covered with a brown flannel shirtsleeve, lay in a bed of ferns at Richard’s feet. Not far away stood a heavy, laced boot with a jagged white shinbone stripped of sinew and muscle jutting out from the top. In a thicket of roughleaf dogwood just to the side lay a section of a torso, its flesh torn away to lay bare a section of the spine and blanched rib bones. Squiggles of pink viscera lay strewn over the log where the men had been sitting. Ragged pieces of scalp and skin lay atop bare rock and scattered everywhere through the grass and bushes.
Richard could not imagine what power could have caused such a shocking scene.
A thought struck him. He glanced back over his shoulder at Nicci. “Sisters of the Dark?”
Nicci slowly shook her head as she studied the carnage. “There are a few similar characteristics, but on balance this is nothing like the way they kill.”
Richard didn’t know if that was comforting news or not.
Slowly, carefully, he stepped forward among the still-bleeding remains. It didn’t look to him like it had been a battle; there were no cuts from swords or axes, no arrows or spears to mark the battlefield. None of the limbs or mangled ribbons of muscle appeared to have been cut. Every piece looked as if it had been torn away from where it belonged.
It was so horrific a sight, so incomprehensible, that it was beyond sickening. Richard found it disorienting trying to conceive of what could have created such devastation—not just of the men, but of the landscape where they had been. From somewhere beyond the boiling rage of the sword’s magic, he felt an agony of sorrow for what he had not been able to stop, and he knew that that sorrow would only grow. But right then, he wanted nothing so much as to get his hands on whoever—or whatever—had done this.
“Richard,” Nicci whispered from close behind, “I think it best if we get out of here.”
The direct, calm tone of her voice could not have been any more compelling a warning.
Filled with the rage from the sword in his fist, and his own impassioned anger at what he was seeing, he ignored her. If there was anyone left alive, he had to find them.
“There’s no one left,” Nicci murmured, as if in answer to his thoughts.
If the threat still lurked nearby, he needed to know.
“Who could have done this?” Victor whispered, clearly not interested in leaving until he had the guilty party in his grip.
“It doesn’t look like anything human,” Cara answered in quiet indictment.
As Richard stepped carefully through the remains, the silence of the shrouding woods pressed in on him like a great weight. No birds called, no bugs buzzed, no squirrels chattered. The muting effect of the heavy overcast and drizzle only served to thicken the hush.
Blood dripped from leaves, branches, and the tips of bent grasses. The trunks of trees were splattered with it. The coarse bark of an ash was smeared with oozing tissue. A hand, fingers open and slack, empty of any weapon, lay palm-up on a gravel slope beneath the large leaves of a mountain maple.
Richard spotted the footprints of where they all had entered the area and some of his own footprints where he had left only a short time ago with Nicci, Cara, and Victor. Many of the remains lay in virgin forest where none of them had walked. There were no peculiar footprints among the carnage, although there were unexplained places where the ground had been ripped open. Some of those gouges cut right through thick roots.
Taking a better look, Richard realized that the plowed gashes were places where men had been smashed to the ground with such violence that it had torn open the forest floor. In some spots, flesh still clung to the exposed ends of splintered roots.
Cara gripped his shirt at the shoulder, trying to urge him back. “Lord Rahl, I want you away from here.”
Richard pulled his shoulder free of her grip. “Quiet.”
As he stepped silently among the remains, the countless voices of those who had used the sword in the past whispered in the back of his mind.
Don’t focus on what you’re seeing, on what is done. Watch for what caused it and might yet come. Now is the time for vigilance.
Richard hardly needed such a warning. He was gripping the wire-wound hilt of the sword so tightly that he could feel the raised lettering of the word TRUTH formed by gold wire woven through the sliver. That golden word bit into the flesh of his palm on one side and his fingertips on the other.
At his feet a man’s head stared up at him from among scrub sumac. A mute cry twisted the expression fixed on the face. Richard knew him. His name had been Nuri. All that this young man had learned, all that he had experienced, all that he had planned for, the world he had begun to make for himself, was ended. For all these men, the world was finished; the one life they had had was gone forever.
The agony of that terrible loss, that ghastly finality, threatened to extinguish the rage from the sword and swamp him in sorrow. All these men were loved and cherished by those waiting for them to return. Each one of these individuals would be grieved over with heartache that would indelibly mark the living.
Richard made himself move on. Now was not the time to grieve. Now was the time to find the guilty and visit upon them retribution and justice before they had the chance to do this to others. Only then could the living mourn for these precious souls lost.
Despite how widely he searched, Richard didn’t see a single body—not a body in the sense of a whole, recognizable person—yet the entire area where the men had been waiting was littered with their remains. The surrounding woods, also, revealed parts of those remains, as if some of the men had tried to run. If that was the case, none had gotten far. As Richard moved through the trees, looking for any tracks that might help him identify who had killed these men, he kept one eye on the shadows off in the mist. He saw tracks of men who had run, but he saw no tracks chasing after them.
As he came around an ancient pine, he was confronted by the top half of a man’s chest hanging upside down from a splintered limb. The remains hung well above Richard’s head. What was left of the armless torso had been impaled on the stump of a broken limb as if it were a meat hook. The face was fixed with unbridled terror. Being upside down, the hair, dripping blood, stood out straight from the scalp as if frozen in fright.
“Dear spirits,” Victor whispered. Rage twisted his face. “That’s Ferran.”
Richard scanned the area, but saw nothing moving in the shadows. “Whatever happened here, I don’t think anyone escaped.” He noticed that on the ground where Ferran’s blood dripped there were no tracks.
Kahlan’s tracks were gone as well.
The pain, the horror, of wondering if this might be the same thing that had happened to Kahlan nearly buckled his knees. Not even the sword’s rage was enough to shield him from the agony of that pain.
Nicci, right behind him, leaned close. “Richard,” she said in a near whisper, “we need to get out of here.”
Cara leaned in beside Nicci. “I agree.”
Victor lifted his mace. “I want those who did this.”
His knuckles were white around the steel grip. “Can you track them?” he asked Richard.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Nicci said.
“Good idea or not,” Richard told them, “I don’t see any tracks.” He looked into Nicci’s blue eyes. “Perhaps you would like to try to convince me that I am imagining this, as well?”
She didn’t break eye contact with him, but she didn’t answer his challenge, either.
Victor gazed up at Ferran. “I told his mother that I’d watch over him. What am I going to say to his family now?” Tears of rage and hurt glistened in his eyes as he pointed with the mace back to the rest of the remains. “What am I going to say to their mothers and wives and children?”
“That evil murdered them,” Richard said. “That you will not rest until you know justice is done. That vengeance will be had.”
Victor nodded, his anger flagging, misery now filling his voice. “We have to bury them.”
“No,” Nicci said with grim authority. “As much as I understand your want to care for them, your friends are no longer here, among these pieces of wrecked bodies. Your friends are now with the good spirits. It is up to us not to join them.”
Victor’s anger resurfaced. “But we must—”
“No,” Nicci snapped. “Look around. This was a blood frenzy. We don’t want to get caught in it. We can’t help these men. We need to get out of here.”
Before Victor could argue, Richard leaned close to the sorceress. “What do you know about this?”
“I told you before, Richard, that we needed to talk. But this is not the time or place to do it.”
“I agree,” Cara growled. “We need to get away from here.”
Looking from the remains of Ferran back to the bloody mess beneath the maple, Richard suddenly felt a sense of overwhelming loneliness. He wanted Kahlan so bad it hurt. He wanted her comfort. He wanted her safe. The agony of not knowing if she was alive and well was unbearable.
“Cara is right.” Nicci urgently gripped Richard’s arm. “We don’t know enough about what we’re up against, but whatever did all this, I fear that as weak as you are your sword can’t protect us from it—and right now, neither can I. If it’s still in these woods, now is not the time to confront it. Justice and vengeance need us to see them done. To do that, we must be alive.”
With the back of a hand, Victor wiped tears of grief and anger from his cheek. “I hate to admit it, but I think Nicci’s right.”
“Whatever was looking for you, Lord Rahl,” Cara said. “I don’t want you here if it should happen to return.”
Richard noted the way Cara, in her red leather, no longer seemed out of place in the woods. She blended right in with all the blood.
Still not ready to abandon the search for whatever had killed these men, and with a dark sense of alarm rising within him, Richard frowned at the Mord-Sith. “What makes you think it was after me?”
“I told you,” Nicci said through gritted teeth, answering in Cara’s stead, “now is not the time and this is not the place to talk about it. There is nothing we can hope to accomplish here. These men are beyond our help.”
Beyond help. Was Kahlan beyond help as well? He couldn’t allow himself to believe that.
He looked north. Richard didn’t know where to search for her. Just because the rock that had been kicked out of its resting place had been found to the north of their camp didn’t mean that whoever took Kahlan went that way. They might have simply gone north, trying to avoid contact with Victor and his men and with the soldiers guarding the supply convoy. They might have only been trying to avoid being spotted until they got out of the immediate area. After that, they could have gone anywhere.
But where?
Richard knew that he needed help.
He tried to think of who could help him with something like this. Who would believe him? Zedd might believe him, but Richard didn’t think his grandfather could offer the specific kind of help he needed in this circumstance. It was awfully far to go if it ended up that Zedd’s abilities didn’t fit this particular kind of problem.
Who would be willing to help him, and might know something?
Richard turned suddenly to Victor. “Where can I get horses? I need horses. Where’s the closest place?”
Victor was taken off guard by the question. He let the heavy mace hang and with his other hand wiped rainwater back off his forehead as he considered the question. His brow bunched back up.
“Altur’Rang would probably be the closest place,” he said after a moment’s thought.
Richard slid his sword back into its sheath. “Let’s go. We need to hurry.”
Pleased with the decision to leave, Cara gave him a helpful shove in the direction of Altur’Rang. Suspicion lurked in Nicci’s eyes, but she was so relieved to have him start away from the site of so much death that she didn’t ask why he wanted horses.
Weariness forgotten, the four of them hurried away from men beyond any help. As heartsick as they felt about leaving, each of them understood that it would be too dangerous to stay to try to bury these men. A burial of the dead was not worth the risk to their lives.
With his sword put away, the anger extinguished. In its place welled up the crushing pain of grief for the dead. The forest seemed to weep with them.
Worse yet was the dread of wondering what could have happened to Kahlan. If she was in the hands of this evil…
Think of the solution, Richard reminded himself.
If he was to find her, he would need help. To get help, he needed horses. That was the immediate problem at hand. They still had half a day of daylight. He intended not to waste a moment of it.
Richard led them away through the tangled woods at an exhausting pace. No one complained.
Chapter 7
In the deepening gloom of approaching nightfall, Richard and Cara used thin, wiry pine tree roots they’d pulled up from the spongy ground to lash together the trunks of small trees. Victor and Nicci foraged the understory along the base of the heavily forested slope, cutting and collecting balsam boughs. As Richard held the logs together, Cara tied off the ropelike root. Richard cut the excess for use elsewhere and slipped the knife back into its sheath at his belt. Once he had the log framework securely in place against an overhang of rock, he started stacking the balsam boughs along the bottom. Cara tied random branches on from inside to keep them all in place for the night as Richard continued layering more up the poles. Victor and Nicci dragged armfuls of boughs close to keep him supplied as he worked.
The area under the overhanging roof of rock was dry enough, it just wasn’t large enough. The lean-to would expand the shelter so as to provide a snug place to sleep. Without a fire it wouldn’t be especially warm, but at least it would be dry.
Throughout the day, the drizzle had turned to a slow, steady rain. While they had been on the move they had been warm enough because of their exertion, but now that they had to stop for the night, the inexorable embrace of the cold had begun. Even in chilly weather that wasn’t truly cold, being wet sapped a person of their necessary warmth and thus their strength. Richard knew that, over time, constant exposure to even mildly chilly wet weather could steal enough vital heat from the body to severely debilitate and sometimes even kill a person.
With as little sleep as he knew Nicci and Cara had gotten over the previous three days, and in his own weakened condition, Richard recognized that they needed a dry, warm place to get some rest or they would all be in trouble. He couldn’t allow anything to slow him down.
For the whole of the afternoon and evening they had set a steady, rapid pace on their march toward Altur’Rang. After the brutal slaughter of the men, the four of them hadn’t been particularly hungry, but they knew that they had to eat if they were to have the strength for the journey, so they nibbled on dried meats and travel biscuits as they made their way through the trackless wilderness.
Richard was so exhausted he could hardly stand. Both to cut the distance and
to avoid being spotted by anyone, he had guided the others through dense forest, most of it tough going and all of it well off any trails. It had been a grueling day’s travel. His head ached. His back ached. His legs ached. If they started early and kept up the strenuous pace, though, they might be able to reach Altur’Rang in one more day’s travel. After they got horses, the going would be easier as well as swifter.
He wished he didn’t need to go so far, but he didn’t know what else to do. He couldn’t spend forever searching the vast forests all around, on the off chance he would find another rock that had been disturbed so that he then might have an idea of which direction Kahlan had gone. He might never find another such rock, and even if he did, there was no reason to believe that if he kept going in that direction he would find Kahlan. Whoever took her might change direction without ever again disturbing a rock in a way that he would find it.
Their regular tracks were gone. Richard knew no way to track someone when magic had made their tracks vanish. Nicci’s gift wasn’t able to help. Wandering around aimlessly wasn’t going to solve anything. As reluctant as he was to leave the area where he had last seen Kahlan, Richard didn’t think that he had any other choice but to go for help.
He went through the motions of building the shelter without giving the work much thought. In the failing light, Cara, concerned for his well-being, kept watching him out of the corner of her eye. She looked like she expected him to fall over at any moment and if he did she intended to catch him.
As he worked, Richard mulled over the remote but real possibility that Imperial Order soldiers might be searching the woods for them. At the same time he fretted about what could have killed all of Victor’s men—and might now be chasing them. He considered what other precautions he might take, and he deliberated over how he would fight whatever could have done such violence.