Severed Souls

CHAPTER 24

They didn’t have to go far before they encountered the soldiers. They had been slowing, hanging back a bit, trying to create a gap in case those with Richard had to take him and run for their lives. The men were trying to create a head start for the others if it ended up being a last-stand fight to the death. As Kahlan and Nicci squeezed between the men, headed back down the gorge, Nicci cast a small spark of flame out in front to provide enough light so they could get their footing, but it was only enough to light up a short distance ahead of them.

She knew that they had outpaced the Shun-tuk and been able to give themselves at least a slight lead, but the soldiers had now given back some of that gap to insulate Richard. Kahlan didn’t know how far they would need to go before they encountered the enemy.

When Nicci finally cast out a larger flame to drift higher up and out ahead of them, and it lit the entire scene beyond, Kahlan’s blood went cold.

“Dear spirits,” she whispered.

Beyond the dark figures of their own men in their chain mail and dark leather armor, all down the gorge was what looked like an endless sea of white figures snaking up the chasm. There were so many that Kahlan couldn’t see the far end of the serpent.

After all the Shun-tuk had entered the gorge, Sergeant Remkin was supposed to close them off from behind. Those men were supposed to be the hammer that would smash the Shun-tuk against Commander Fister’s anvil. Since she couldn’t see the end, she had no way of knowing if Remkin had been able to shut the back door.

Kahlan quickly recognized that there were a great deal more of the enemy than she had expected to see. She had expected vast numbers to have been vaporized by the wizard’s fire and Nicci’s power. Despite how many had died, there were more than ample Shun-tuk left to do the job they had been sent to do.

When they had been back in the encampment they had no way of knowing the numbers of the Shun-tuk scattered out beyond in the woods. She remembered the way they kept coming, but she now realized that they had been seeing only a limited view. She never realized how many more there were back in those woods.

She didn’t think that Commander Fister or any of the rest of them expected that there might be this many. These weren’t merely spirit trackers; this was an army. It was apparent that when Sulachan and Hannis Arc sent men to accomplish a task, they sent enough to make sure they could not possibly fail.

She now knew something important about both of them: they were never careless. They planned carefully and then deployed overwhelming, withering, brute force to accomplish what they were after. Neither employed subtlety—they were dedicated to applying overpowering might to crush any opposition.

As disheartening as that knowledge might be, she had just learned something important about their enemy. It would keep Kahlan from ever underestimating them.

It also brought to mind what the prisoner had told them—that Sulachan had dark spirits waiting for her and Richard beyond the veil to the world of the dead. Sulachan was not a man who was satisfied to merely kill those who opposed him.

In a flash of comprehension, Kahlan now realized that they had not captured that prisoner by chance or accident. Sulachan intended the man to be caught. Sulachan had wanted to deliver a message. The spirit king had wanted Richard and Kahlan to know that death would not be an ending of suffering, but the beginning of an eternity of it.

There would be no peace to be found in death for either her or Richard, no eternal rest.

Pushing the worry of such thoughts aside and focusing on the task at hand, Kahlan knew that the one thing they did have working for them was the narrowness of the gorge. In such a narrow space, the Shun-tuk couldn’t spread out to apply that overwhelming crushing weight of numbers. They could only present a limited leading edge of forces.

Because the pass was narrow, it allowed the First File to use a limited number of men to span the gap. That meant they could continually rotate fresh men to the front, so that the ones who had been fighting fiercely for a time could take a break to regain their breath while fresh men stepped in to work with maximum effort at hacking the enemy to pieces. By rotating men in that way, they could fight much longer, and with sustained, deadly brutality.

Richard, of course, had known that, and that was why he didn’t want to continue to try to fight them at the encampment. Seeing the numbers, now, seeing how many Shun-tuk they faced, Kahlan understood that he had made that call none too soon. Richard had known that their best chance was to fight them in the narrow gorge as opposed to back in the open of the encampment.

The tactic of rotating the men so the ones at the front were always fresh, especially when driven from both ends in a confined space like the narrow gorge, was a killing machine that could grind through a lightly armed enemy such as the Shun-tuk with frightening efficiency. In such a situation, the vast numbers the Shun-tuk had were not as much of an advantage. This kind of battle was more akin to butchery than fighting. But then, that was what war was. The purpose of warriors was to kill the enemy as swiftly and efficiently as possible in order to end the conflict.

The well-disciplined and practiced men of the First File stood in tight ranks, overlapping their shields like links of armor, and mowed down the enemy as they tried to advance. Lances laid over the shoulders of the foremost rank were used to stab at the unprotected enemy. If the enemy saw the danger and stopped advancing, it made no difference because the soldiers would then begin to advance toward them, pushing from both ends at once. The enemy couldn’t retreat. They were caught in the teeth of a meat grinder that relentlessly chewed through them.

The only problem in the plan, the thing that nagged at the back of Kahlan’s mind, was that not only were these half people driven by an insane desire to eat living flesh so that they could steal a soul, these were now the ones with occult powers.

That worry kept whispering from the back of her mind.

In the dimly lit, narrow defile, Kahlan could see that some of the sea of figures coming for them had glowing red eyes. Some of them were the dead that had been reanimated. That was going to be another problem with the tactic the First File was using.

Even the Shun-tuk who had no occult powers, and were still sufficiently intact, could be brought back from the dead to be more lethal than they ever had been in life. Even the ones who had been burned to death, as long as they still had arms and legs, could be used. They didn’t bleed and die like living people. Since they weren’t alive, simply stabbing them through vital organs wouldn’t stop them. They had to be hacked to pieces or burned to ash.

Zedd shuffled past Kahlan on his way back up the gorge. He gave her a vacant look. That single look frightened her almost as much as the sight of the Shun-tuk.

Kahlan knew by the way his feet dragged and his arms hung that Zedd was near the end of his ability to use his gift, much less focus the strength needed to create wizard’s fire. What he had already done was exhausting work and he had been at it for quite some time. He would need to rest and recover some strength if he was to continue fighting. He had to be rotated back, much as the men fighting at the leading edge needed to catch their breath and recover some of their strength. Zedd would need water and a quick bite to eat to give him strength.

Kahlan cupped her free hand to the side of the old man’s face. “Why don’t you stay back up behind and watch over Richard for a while.”

He nodded, offering her a brief smile as he moved on.

Kahlan spotted Nicci and saw that she was exhausted as well, but the sorceress had no intention of resting just yet.

Below them, the writhing mass of ghostly figures struggled with all their might to climb up the gorge as fast as they could. Only the difficulty of the terrain, the narrowness of the gorge, and their own numbers interfering with each other slowed them. Having to funnel through narrower spots in the walls meant that they had to slow to wait their turn. In their impatience to get a soul, some pushed the ones in front down and stepped on or over them. Despite how they might have been slowed in the tight spots, once through, each of the half people raced ahead with reckless determination.

Richard had been right. They were predators fixated on the bait and they were now in full chase mode.

With a sense of hopeless realization, Kahlan grasped that Richard’s plan had worked—the Shun-tuk would follow them up the gorge. The only problem was that despite the effectiveness of that plan, Kahlan instinctively understood that there were too many. The odds were too great. The sheer weight of numbers was going to be more than a problem. It could spell their doom.

But the sword she held didn’t care about such odds. If anything, the odds only stimulated the power of rage from the weapon. It demanded their blood, and the confined space still gave them the best chance to stop the Shun-tuk.

The problem for the soldiers was going to be the revived dead.

The sword she carried, though, had been created for just such problems.

Kahlan pushed her way through the men, racing down to the front of their lines, toward the men fighting closest to the enemy.

She descended into madness.