Chainfire: Chainfire Trilogy Part 1

Chapter 35

The distant howl of a wolf woke Richard from a dead sleep. The forlorn cry echoed through the mountains, but went unanswered. Richard lay on his side, in the surreal light of false dawn, idly listening, waiting, for a return cry that never came.

Try as he might, he couldn’t seem to open his eyes for longer than the span of a single, slow heartbeat, much less gather the energy to lift his head. Shadowy tree limbs appeared to move about in the murky darkness.

Richard gasped as he fully awoke. He awoke angry.

He was lying on his back. His sword lay across his chest, one hand clutching the scabbard, the other gripping the hilt so hard that the letters of the word TRUTH were pressed painfully into his palm on one side and his fingertips on the other. The Sword of Truth was pulled partway out of its scabbard. Its anger, too, had partly slipped its bounds.

The first, faint traces of dawn were just beginning to silently steal through the forested mountainside. The thick woods were quiet and still.

Richard slid the blade back into its scabbard and sat up, laying the sword down beside him on his bedroll.

He drew his legs up and put his elbows on his knees as he ran his fingers back through his hair. His heart still raced from the sword’s rage. It had stolen into him without his conscious awareness or direction, but he wasn’t surprised or alarmed. It was hardly the first time he had begun to draw the sword as he’d remembered that fateful morning while slipping the bonds of sleep. Sometimes he woke to find that he’d pulled the blade completely free.

Why did he keep having that memory as he awoke?

He knew all too well the reason. That was the morning he had awakened to find Kahlan missing. It was the terrible memory of the morning she’d disappeared. It was a waking nightmare about the nightmare that had become his life, and yet, he knew that there was something about it that kept making it go through his mind. He had been over it a thousand times but he couldn’t figure out what was so meaningful about that particular memory. The wolf waking him had been a bit odd, but that didn’t seem so strange that it would keep haunting him.

Richard looked around in the deep gloom but he didn’t see Cara. Off through the thick stands of trees he could just make out the faint stain of red streaking the rim of the eastern sky. The slash of color almost looked like blood seeping through a gash in the slate black sky beyond the perfectly still trees.

He was bone-weary from the relentless pace of their wild ride up from deep in the Old World. They had been stopped a number of times by patrolling soldiers scattered throughout the Midlands, and by occupying troops. It was by no means the main force of the Imperial Order, but they had been trouble enough. Once they’d let Cara and Richard, posing as a stone carver and his wife, go on their way to a job Richard had invented for the glory of the Order. The rest of the times the two of them had had to fight their way out of the situation. Those encounters had been bloody.

He needed more sleep—they had gotten very little on their journey—but as long as Kahlan was missing they couldn’t afford to sleep any more than was absolutely necessary. He didn’t know how much time he had to find her, but he didn’t intend to waste any of it. He refused to believe that his time had long since run out.

One of the horses had died of exhaustion not long ago; he couldn’t remember exactly when. Another had come up lame a while back and they’d had to abandon it. Richard would worry about finding more horses later. There were more important concerns at hand. They were close to Agaden Reach, Shota’s home. For the last two days they had been climbing steadily into the formidable mountains that ringed the Reach.

As he stretched his aching, tired muscles, he again tried to think of how he would convince Shota to help him. She had helped him before, but that was no guarantee she would help him this time. Shota could be difficult, to say the least. There were people who were so terrified of the witch woman that they wouldn’t even say her name aloud.

Zedd had told him once that Shota never told you anything you wanted to know without also telling you something that you didn’t want to know. Richard couldn’t really imagine what he didn’t want to know, but he understood quite clearly what it was he did want to know and he intended Shota to tell him anything she knew about Kahlan’s disappearance of where she might be. If Shota refused, there was going to be trouble.

As his anger heated he realized that he felt the cool, tingling touch of mist on his face.

It was then that he also noticed something moving in the trees.

He squinted in an effort to see in the darkness. It couldn’t be the breeze moving the leaves; there was no wind in the silent predawn woods.

Shadowy tree limbs appeared to move about in the murky darkness.

There had been no wind at all that morning, either.

Richard’s sense of alarm rose to match his heart rate. He stood in his bedroll.

Something was slipping through the trees.

It wasn’t disturbing the branches or brush the way a person or an animal would. It was higher up, maybe at eye level. There simply wasn’t enough light for him to see what it was. As dark and still as the morning was, though, he couldn’t be certain that there really was something there. It might have been his imagination; being this close to Shota certainly was enough to make him uneasy. While she might have helped him in the past, she had also caused him no end of trouble.

But if nothing was there in the trees, then why was his skin tingling with dread? And what was the almost imperceptible sound he heard, like a soft hiss?

Without taking his eyes off the dark woods, Richard reached out and put his fingertips against a nearby spruce for balance as he carefully squatted down enough to pick up his sword from where it lay on the bedroll. As he quietly slipped the baldric over his head, he tried to focus his eyes in the darkness out ahead of him to see what, if anything, was moving. Whatever was moving, it couldn’t be much, yet he was more and more convinced by the moment that it really was something.

The most disconcerting aspect of it was the way it moved. It didn’t move in short bursts, like a bird flitting from branch to branch, or in rapid start-and-stop spirts like a squirrel. It didn’t even move with the stealth of a snake that glided, then paused, then glided some more.

This moved not only fluidly and quietly, but continuously.

The horses, off through the trees in a corral Richard had constructed by using saplings to fence off the end of a narrow chasm, snorted and stumped their hooves. A flock of birds in the distance suddenly burst from their roost and took to wing.

For the first time, Richard realized that the cicadas were silent.

Richard detected the faint scent of something out of place in the forest. Carefully, quietly, he sniffed the air, trying to place the scent. He thought it might be a whiff of something burning. The odor wasn’t anywhere near as strong as a fire would be. It almost smelled like a campfire, but they had no campfire; Richard hadn’t wanted to take the time or to chance attracting attention. Cara had a lantern with a light shield around it, but it didn’t smell like the lantern flame.

He scanned the woods all around, checking for Cara. She was on watch so she was probably nearby, but Richard didn’t see her anywhere. Surely she wouldn’t have gone far, especially not after the attack the morning Kahlan had disappeared. She was all too worried about his safety and knew that this time, if he was shot with an arrow, there would be no Nicci to save his life. No, Cara would be close.

His instinct was to call out for her, but he suppressed the urge. He first wanted to find out what was happening, to find out what was wrong, before he called out an alarm; an alarm would also alert any adversary that he was already aware of them. It was better to let an opponent, especially an opponent sneaking up on you, believe that they had not been detected.

As he studied the surrounding area, Richard thought that there was something not right about the woods. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but they looked wrong. He supposed that he had that impression in part because of the curious burning smell. It was still too dark to be able to see anything clearly, but from what he was able to see, the branches didn’t seem to look right. There was something odd about the pine boughs, the leaves. They didn’t seem to be hanging naturally.

He remembered all too well coming to Agaden Reach the first time. Farther back down the mountains he had been attacked by some strange creature. As he had been frantically fighting it off, Shota had snatched Kahlan and taken her down into the Reach. That attack had been in the guise of a stranger trying to lead him to an ambush. The creature had finally been frightened off. And, this time there was no such stranger. Still, that didn’t mean that such a creature, having failed before, might not this time try a different approach. He remembered, too, that his sword has been all that had kept the monstrous thing at bay.

As quietly as possible, Richard slowly drew his sword from its sheath. In an attempt to keep it from making any noise, he pinched the sides of the blade right at the throat of the scabbard, letting the steel slide between his finger and thumb as it slipped out of the scabbard. Even so, the blade hissed ever so softly as it came free. The sword’s rage, too, slipped its bounds.

As he steadily drew his sword, he began cautiously moving toward the spot where he thought he saw movement. Whenever he was looking elsewhere, he thought that out of the corner of his eye he could see a faint shape of something ahead of him, but when he then looked directly at the place, he couldn’t see anything. He didn’t know if it was a trick of his sight, or if there was nothing to see.

He was well aware that in dark conditions the center of the eyes’ vision was not nearly as good as the peripheral vision. Being a guide and having spent a great deal of time outdoors at night, he had often used the technique of not looking directly at what it was that he needed to see, but instead gazing at least fifteen degrees away from it. At night, the peripheral vision worked better than direct vision. Since leaving his woods where he had been a guide, he had learned that the knack of focusing his awareness to specific places in his peripheral vision while not turning his eyes there was invaluable in sword fighting.

Before he had gone three steps, his pant leg came up against something that shouldn’t have been there. It was a light contact, almost like a low branch. He halted immediately, before putting any pressure on it. He smelled something again, only stronger. It smelled like scorched cloth.

He then felt the intense heat against his shin. Quickly, and without making a sound, he drew back.

For the life of him, Richard could not figure out what it was he had touched. It was not anything natural that he could think of. He might have suspected that it was a tripwire of some sort to warn anyone hidden in the trees nearby if he moved, but a tripwire wouldn’t burn him the way this thing had.

Whatever it was, it pulled at his pants, like it was sticky, when he drew away. When he backed free of it, the sleek movement in the trees abruptly halted, as if it had detected the contact against his pant leg being broken. The dead silence ringing in his ears was almost painful.

The mist was too fine to make any sound hitting the leaves and the moisture that the pine needles combed from the damp air was not enough id collect and drip very much. Besides, the sound he had heard had been something different than rainwater. Richard focused his concentration into the dark shadows, trying to make out what it was that had stopped moving.

Then, it started in again, only more rapidly, as if with more purpose. The soft, silky sound whispering among the limbs of the trees in a way that reminded him of the blade of an ice skate gliding across smooth ice.

As Richard backed away, something caught his other pant leg. It was sticky, just like the thing that he’d snagged before. It too, felt hot.

As he turned to see what it was that was against his pant leg, something brushed his arm, just above his elbow. He didn’t have on a shirt, and the instant the sticky thing touched him it burned into his flesh. He jerked his arm back and then stepped away from the thing touching his pant leg. With the hand holding the sword, he silently comforted the searing pain on his left arm. Warm blood ran down over his fingers. His anger, and the anger flooding into him from the sword, together threatened to overpower his sense of caution.

He turned around, trying to see in the darkness what was there that should not be there. The razor-thin red slash of light at the horizon glinted off his blade as he turned, making the polished metal look like it was coated in blood to match the very real blood covering his hand on the hilt.

The shadows around him were beginning to pull inward toward him. Whatever it was, as it moved closer it caught limbs and boughs all around him, gently pushing leaves and brush aside as it advanced. Richard suspected that the soft hissing sound he heard was actually the sound of vegetation being scorched when it was touched. The smell of burning leaves he had first detected began to make sense to him; he just didn’t have any idea what could be causing it, or how. He would doubt his judgment, doubt that such a thing could be real, were it not for the fierce burning pain of its touch. He certainly wasn’t imagining the blood running down his arm.

Instinctively, Richard knew that he was running out of time.