Severed Souls

by Terry Goodkind

  Kahlan glanced back over her shoulder from time to time. As unlikely as it seemed, they had gained more distance on the Shun-tuk chasing them. She could have run a little faster herself, but the men were already exhausted from the long hours of battle back at the encampment before this one in the gorge had even begun. She knew that they were running on pure First File mettle.

  The men of the First File did not ever give up. For these men failure was not an option. Failure never entered their minds. Giving up wasn’t a part of their way of thinking. They focused only on finding a way to win.

  It was maddening the way the battle, despite the odds, had been working so well, and then in an instant everything had changed. But Kahlan knew that in battle you had to be prepared to switch tactics in an instant.

  Those who continued to press on with tactics that could not work ended up dead. Facing an enemy who refused to admit the reality of the futility of their strategy became a simple matter of killing them.

  Successful warriors always preferred that to a fair fight. Successful warriors were the ones who won wars. That ability came naturally to Richard and for good reason—he was a war wizard. He was always searching for solutions that would work. If he found himself facing an impossible situation, he found a way to change the rules.

  But at the moment, the rules were simple: run or die.

  With the sword in her hand, Kahlan was not about to run ahead and leave the soldiers without her help at the rear, close to the enemy. If there were revived dead among the Shun-tuk chasing them, then short of Richard wielding it, the Sword of Truth in her hands was the best chance they had of defeating that threat.

  As they ran up the steep ground, they came upon Zedd making slower progress up the rocky gully. He was losing ground to the rest of the men. He was wiry and stronger than he looked and ordinarily would have been able to run with the best of the Shun-tuk, but he had used a lot of his strength creating wizard’s fire. His endurance was waning.

  Kahlan snatched a chain-mail sleeve of a soldier and pulled him close. “Help him. Don’t tell him that I told you to do so.”

  The man nodded and then took one of Zedd’s arms. “Let me help, sir. I know you put up a valiant effort. You have to be exhausted. I saw what you did back there. I’ve never seen the like of it. It was truly magnificent.”

  “Yes, it was magnificent,” Zedd said, momentarily cheered. “Unfortunately, it was not nearly enough…” he said, his cheer sinking.

  “That’s all right,” another man said as he took Zedd’s other arm, helping to practically carry the wizard up the hill. Both men’s arms were nearly as big around as the skinny wizard’s waist. Kahlan saw that Zedd’s feet touched the ground only every third or fourth step.

  It took all of Kahlan’s effort to make herself stay with the men rather than turn and fight the enemy. That was what she wanted to do. The sword was in full rage after the fighting had started and it demanded blood. Once it was out and engaged in battle, the magic of it was never satisfied as long as there was an enemy still standing. With the threat still existent, the sword wanted only to take it out. That was its nature. It was pristine purpose, pure power, devoted only to destroying what the one holding it wanted destroyed. It was up to the one holding it to choose what it considered to be the enemy and to place limits on what they did with the weapon. It required a thinking mind to properly apply its power.

  It was a challenge just holding it and not letting it tell her what to do. She had a new appreciation for Richard’s ability to function calmly with the weapon in his hand.

  Water dripping in little rivulets off the cliff faces to each side drenched them as they ran through it. The Dark Lands were a gloomy place where, from what Kahlan had seen so far, it was almost always dark and overcast. There was frequent mist, drizzle, and it rained almost every day.

  All that water continually drained down the mountains, seeping through all the hairline cracks and fractures in the granite, soaking it through and through. It caused the granite to decompose over time and those crumbled bits accumulated in the gorge, making for difficult footing in places.

  Because of the water, the rocks were covered in wet moss and slime. Having boots helped some, but it was still treacherous to run in such conditions, especially in the dark. Fortunately Nicci was casting flares of light to help the men see well enough to run at full speed.

  Kahlan glanced back and saw several Shun-tuk slip and fall in an especially slimy, broad flat rock. Others tripped and fell over them. Because the ravine was so narrow, it slowed them until they could get the fallen men back up and out of the way. The next time she saw men slip and fall, frustrated half people didn’t bother to slow to help them. Rather, they simply trampled their companions to death under hundreds of feet. The tangle of limbs and bodies caused others to trip and fall, breaking arms and legs, only to be in turn trampled. There were spots where the falling figures upended dozens and dozens coming upon them, creating bottlenecks.

  It bought Kahlan and the men with her some precious breathing room. The way it kept happening, and the more of the barefoot half people that slipped on blood and slime and fell, the more it allowed her and the men of the First File to put a decent gap on their pursuers.

  But the gap wasn’t great, and she knew that the Shun-tuk were now fixated on their prey and they would not stop for anything.

  Kahlan saw the men ahead going around someone in the center of the gorge. She soon reached the spot and realized that it was Samantha.

  The young woman inexplicably stood motionless on a flat rock in the middle of the brook, the water pouring around either side of the rock.

  Kahlan came to an abrupt halt, letting the rest of the men run on past. When they saw her stop, they all skidded to a halt and turned back to protect her.

  Kahlan motioned frantically. “Keep going! Go, go, go!”

  Reluctantly, they followed her orders. She looked up the gorge. Everyone was running as hard as they could. Behind, the Shun-tuk, too, ran up the gorge as hard as they could.

  Samantha stood motionless all by herself in no-man’s-land.

  Her head was bowed. Her bony elbows stuck out to the sides. The first two fingers of each hand were pressed to her temples. Her mass of black hair was as motionless as the rest of her.

  Kahlan glanced back down the defile. There was precious little time until the half people caught up with where Kahlan and Samantha stood all alone.

  “Samantha, what in the world are you doing?”

  When she didn’t answer, Kahlan leaned in and yelled her name.

  “Samantha!”

  Without looking up, the young woman whispered one word.

  “Run.”

  Kahlan leaned closer. “Where’s Richard? You were supposed to be with him. I told you to take care of him.”

  “Run,” she repeated in a softly feminine voice.

  “What?”

  When the young woman didn’t answer, in frantic uncertainty, Kahlan ran the bloody fingers of her left hand back into her blood-soaked hair as she stole a quick look up the gorge. She didn’t see the horse among the men racing up the steep defile. She realized that if she couldn’t see it, that meant that someone else had to be leading the horse carrying Richard, probably Irena, or Kahlan would have seen it left behind. Richard had to still be safe.

  Kahlan leaned down farther and saw that Samantha’s eyes were closed. The young woman had not moved an inch. Eyes closed, her expression serene, fingers pressed to her temples, she didn’t move a muscle.

  The Shun-tuk coming for them started howling, eager for blood.

  “Samantha—”

  “Run.”

  CHAPTER

  27

  Kahlan straightened.

  She felt goose bumps tingling along her arms. She blinked at the mystifyingly motionless Samantha. She had no idea what the problem could be, but there was no time to stand there and work it out.

  Kahlan frantically tried to think. For sure they couldn’t s
tay there. They were mere moments from it being too late even to run.

  Just as Kahlan looked back down in the darkness, unable to tell for sure exactly how close the Shun-tuk were, the moon, almost directly overhead, broke through a hole in the thick cloud cover for the first time that night, lighting the narrow defile in pale, eerie light. Kahlan could see the wet, slick, nearly vertical stone walls soaring up from the narrow chasm of broken rock with the brook running down through it.

  At the base of those towering rock walls the river of white figures of the Shun-tuk raced up the ravine, predators with their prey almost within reach.

  Hundreds of men and women in the lead stretched clawed hands forward in anticipation, each wanting to be the first to have the soul in front of them. Mouths gaped open, teeth bared. They wailed like wolves after prey.

  Kahlan had no idea what Samantha was doing or what might be wrong with her. The thought occurred to her that maybe she was frozen in terror. Kahlan had seen that happen in battle. A person would be so panicked, so afraid, that their minds could no longer think and they would give up, just standing there in place waiting for death to take them. Sometimes, death was less frightening than what life had to offer.

  Kahlan’s first thought was that maybe she could circle an arm around Samantha’s skinny waist, hike her up, hold her against a hip, and carry her up the gorge, but as soon as she thought of it she realized that she certainly couldn’t outpace the Shun-tuk while carrying the young woman, even if she was small and skinny.

  She knew that if she tried, they would both die.

  Kahlan knew that she was going to have to fight or run.

  Leaving Samantha and running meant abandoning her to the savages to be eaten alive. Kahlan gripped her sword tighter.

  Despite the magic from the sword desperately wanting the fight, wanting the blood of the enemy, Kahlan knew that fighting the Shun-tuk alone, even with the Sword of Truth, would be suicide.

  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.