Severed Souls

CHAPTER 25

The Shun-tuk, in their insane drive for the souls of these men, were eager for the fight. They reached with clawed hands and snapped their jaws, hoping to get their teeth into flesh. Men cut them down relentlessly. The white figures coming from behind were equally determined. They were undeterred by how many white bodies lay dead at their feet. Those that had died only meant that they would have their chance. They climbed over their own dead to get at the soldiers, only to be run through with lances or laid open with swords and axes.

Kahlan spotted the first of the dead coming toward them. In the dim light, his glowing red eyes were easy to spot. She saw that he had only one arm. His chest had been ripped open, the ribs broken, so that she could see his lungs exposed. His lungs were still, though, as he had no need to breathe, but he was certainly coming for them. It was now occult powers that gave them strength and purpose.

This was the part that Kahlan had the best chance to handle. The dead didn’t fall easily to regular steel, but the Sword of Truth was an ancient weapon that existed for eliminating just such evil.

Finally able to unleash the fury of the sword, Kahlan brought it down so hard it split the dead man’s head and most of his body. He tried to move, to come after them, but he was far too damaged and only thrashed ineffectively. His right side fell over while the left side tried to drag the rest along. Her second blow ended the effort for good.

Kahlan was already past him, going after the walking dead. She could see their glowing red eyes glaring out from the darkness. The soldiers could fight the Shun-tuk; she needed to eliminate those difficult-to-stop awakened dead and leave the Shun-tuk for the men of the First File.

Kahlan scanned the faces, the gaping mouths, the painted black eye sockets, until she saw another pair of glowing red eyes. An instant after she saw them, her sword arced around and shattered the head. On the backswing she took off the head of another dead woman with glowing eyes, then stabbed the blade through the chest of a living Shun-tuk. His eyes opened wide in surprise before the life went out of them. As she yanked the blade free, she swiftly delivered several more blows to disable the headless dead to prevent them from using their arms against the soldiers.

Through the fury to get at the enemy, Kahlan recognized that half people were starting to come after her, specifically. She remembered, then, that they recognized her soul. She was a prize they wanted. She remembered what the prisoner had said about what they wanted to do to her.

She remembered the promise of the spirit king’s dark ones waiting for her in the underworld.

She realized, too, that in going after the reawakened dead, she had waded too far into the regular Shun-tuk.

Surrounded as she was, she still felt euphoric with each one she killed. More Shun-tuk coming closer in around her meant that she didn’t have to go after them in order to kill them. She could stand her ground and kill half people all around her as they came to her. The danger of her situation was a distant concern compared to the exhilaration of killing them. Each life the blade took fed the anger, giving glorious satisfaction that in turn only drove the blade’s insatiable need for the enemy’s blood.

Her sword scythed white-painted men and women down by the dozens. What had been a trap closing around her turned into mounds of bodies clogging the gorge, making it more difficult for others to climb over the dead to get at her. Some slipped on blood and gore and fell, some smacking their heads on rocks, while others were stabbed to death before they could scramble to their feet.

Despite the blade’s hunger for enemy blood, Kahlan paid particular care to being sure she cut down any she saw with the red glowing eyes.

Killing the others between finding those with glowing red eyes was just a delicious treat until she could find another walking dead.

As she swung the sword, laying open chests, severing limbs, shattering skulls, she could feel their warm blood splattering across her face. Blood dripped from the stringy wet tips of her hair.

Still, the blood wasn’t enough. She wanted more. She went after them with ever-increasing fury. Teeth gritted with rage, she cut them down as fast as they could come at her.

Even as she fought, though, somewhere in the dim recesses of her mind, she knew that there were too many.

Soldiers recognized the danger she was in by wading too far into the enemy to get at the ones with glowing red eyes. Commander Fister hacked his way in close to her, trying to keep the chalky figures from getting to her. His powerful arms looked made for the task of cleaving an enemy apart with his sword.

Other soldiers chopped their way through Shun-tuk to get in close to her, and helped her to continually grind the leading edge of the enemy down under their blades.

Kahlan was only dimly aware of such things, though. She was lost in the killing.

With the Sword of Truth in her hands and this many of the enemy around her, it felt as if the purpose of her entire life had come down to this perfect moment of delivering death. Her training, her experiences, her beliefs, everything in her life, had brought her to this moment as the perfect killing machine.

The Sword of Truth fed off the intent of the one holding it. It read what the person considered good or evil. The blade would not harm what the person holding it believed to be good. It was committed to destroying what the holder of the blade considered evil. In the right hands, in the hands of one committed to reason and life, the sword became manifest justice.

Kahlan considered the half people and the ones who had sent them to be pure, unredeemable evil. She had never felt this kind of unleashed wrath. Anything white drew her blade. Severed arms spun through the air. Heads tumbled across the rocks. Bodies and parts of bodies littered the ground. Blood covered everything.

In places, advancing Shun-tuk had to wade through ankle-deep viscera. A head she took off with an angry swing of the sword tumbled and bounced down the rocks of the gorge. Even over the screams and yelling, she could hear the skull crack each time it bounced off a rock. Advancing Shun-tuk stepped aside to avoid it.

The men fighting beside her were just as lethal. The Shun-tuk, after all, were not all that hard to kill. They wore no armor, they carried no shields, and they did not use weapons to block attacks. Shielding their face with an arm cost them the arm before the sword buried itself in their face. She had yet to see one Shun-tuk draw a knife. Their teeth were their weapon of choice. They were animals racing in to slaughter their prey, and they in turn were being slaughtered.

Axes relentlessly chopped them down. Maces crushed skulls and caved in ribs and lungs. Swords of the First File cut apart the figures, and yet they kept coming. There was no sign of the end of the white throng snaking up the gorge. Sergeant Remkin and his men were too distant, and no doubt engaged in the same kind of fight for their lives.

And then one of the Shun-tuk not far in front of her did the oddest thing. He stood still in the center of the chaos, and smiled. It was a smile that, despite the sword’s rage, made Kahlan pause and her blood run cold.

As he gazed into her eyes, without ever looking away, he lifted a hand out toward one of the soldiers to her right.

The soldier screamed as the skin on his face immediately started bubbling and melting. The screams gurgled away.

His scalp split open in bloody strings as it sloughed down his head, exposing the top of his skull. His eyes liquefied in their sockets, running down and mixing with the gooey mess of his bloody, bubbling flesh. He was already dead, his joints separating as he crumpled.

The smiling Shun-tuk, his gaze still on Kahlan, almost at the same time lifted his other arm out toward the soldier to her left. The man screamed as his flesh and muscle liquefied and fell away from the bones of his arms in sticky strings. His nose and lips melted away even as he screamed in horrified agony. Flesh parted from cheekbones and skull. Both men had died in hardly more than a heartbeat.

Even as it was still happening, Kahlan’s sword was already coming around with lightning speed. Evil was targeted in the center of her vision. The blade flew toward where her eyes were focused. The tip whistled with its incredible speed as she brought it down with all her might. She could hear herself screaming in rage, adding her fury to that of the blade. It caught the smiling man on the side of his neck, just below his left ear, before the smug smile could leave his lips. The blade drove down with such force that it cleaved off his head at an angle along with his right shoulder and still-extended arm. With part of his chest attached, the head, shoulder, and arm tumbled away. As the bottom half fell, organs spilled out across the rocks.

Although she had killed this one, she now realized the danger they were in from those among the Shun-tuk who possessed the same kind of occult ability.

This kind of Shun-tuk might not have armor, or shields, or swords, but the men of the First File had no defense against their occult weapons. The soldiers’ chain mail had done them no good; their flesh had melted and dripped right through it. Kahlan didn’t think that Zedd or Nicci or Irena would be able to offer any defense against such sorcery. If regular magic worked against such half people, it already would have. Kahlan had seen some of these ghostly figures walk through fire unharmed. The smiling Shun-tuk would not be there in the first place if regular magic could kill them.

Blades obviously worked just fine, but how many would those with such occult sorcery kill before they could be cut down? Worse, there was no telling if the man she had just killed was the only one, the way they had only one wizard, Zedd, among them, or if there were dozens more like the smiling Shun-tuk. For all she knew, there could be hundreds.

In an instant, the equation had changed.

Kahlan spun around and frantically pushed at the men near her, turning them around.

“Run!” she screamed. “Run!”

Commander Fister, having seen the same thing that Kahlan had just witnessed, windmilled his arm in command to his men. “Pull back! Run! Pull back, pull back!”

The men of the First File would have stayed and fought to the death had they been commanded to do so, but at her command and that of their commander they abandoned the hopeless cause and turned to run for their lives.

Nicci caught Kahlan’s arm on her way by. “What is it? What’s happening?”

Kahlan spun the sorceress and shoved her to get her moving with the rest of them. “After what I just saw, unless you know how to stop occult sorcery, you had better run for your life.”

Nicci didn’t argue. Kahlan had no idea what they were going to do. As far as she could tell, without any effective defense at hand, their only hope was to outrun the Shun-tuk.

And trying to outrun a predator was a very bad option.