Soul of the Fire

Chapter 33

Kahlan was speechless.

Richard squeezed her shoulders. “What if the other, Joseph Ander’s half of that pair, still exists?”

She wet her lips. “It’s possible they might keep something like that in Anderith.”

“They must. They revere him—after all, they named their land in his honor. It seems only logical that if it still existed they would keep such a book.”

“It’s possible. But that isn’t always the way, Richard.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sometimes a person isn’t appreciated in his own time. Sometimes they aren’t recognized as important until much later, and sometimes then only to promote the contemporary causes of those currently in power. Evidence of a person’s true thoughts can be an inconvenience in such cases, and sometimes is destroyed.

“Even if that isn’t the case, and they did respect his thinking, the land changed its name to Anderith since Zedd left the Midlands. Sometimes people are revered because not enough remains of their philosophy for people to find objectionable, and so the person can become valuable as a symbol. Most likely nothing of Joseph Ander’s remains.”

Taken aback by the logic of her words, Richard rubbed his chin as he considered.

“The other unknown,” he finally said, “is that words written in journey books can be wiped away, to make room for new communications. Even if everything I’m thinking is true, and he wrote back to the Keep with the solution to the chimes, the book still exists, and it’s actually in Anderith, it still might do us no good, because that passage could easily have been wiped clean to make room for a future message.

“But,” he added, “it’s the only solid possibility we have.”

“No, it isn’t,” Kahlan insisted. “Another choice and the one with more weight of credibility on its side, is what we must do back at the Wizard’s Keep.”

Richard felt himself drawn inexorably toward Joseph Ander’s legacy. If he had any proof that his attraction to it wasn’t simply his imagination, he would have been convinced.

“Kahlan, I know . . .”

His voice trailed off. The hairs at the back of his neck began rising, prickling his neck like needles of ice. His golden cloak lifted lethargically in the lazy breeze. The slow wave billowing through it cracked like a whip when it reached the corner. The skin on his arms danced with gooseflesh.

Richard felt the gossamer fingers of wickedness slipping up his spine.

“What’s the matter?” Kahlan asked, consternation chilling her expression.

Without answering, gripped by dread, he turned and scanned the grassland. Emptiness stared back. Verdant waves rippled before him, painted with bold strokes of sunlight. In the distance knots of dark clouds at the horizon boiled from within with flickering light. Even though he couldn’t hear the thunder, every now and again he could feel the drumbeat underfoot.

“Where’s Du Chaillu?”

Cara, standing a few paces away as she kept an eye on the idle men, pointed. “I saw her off that way a few minutes ago.”

Richard searched but didn’t see her. “Doing what?”

“She was crying. Then I think she looked like she might have been going to sit down for a rest, or maybe to pray.”

That was what Richard had seen, too.

He called out Du Chaillu’s name over the grasslands. In the distance, a meadowlark’s crystalline song warbled across the vast silence of the plains. He cupped his hands beside his mouth and called again. The blade masters, when there was no answer the second time, sprang to action, fanning out into, the grass to search.

Richard trotted off in the direction Cara had pointed, the direction he, too, remembered last seeing her. Kahlan and Cara were right on his heels as he picked up speed, cutting through the tall grass and splashing through puddles. The blade masters and hunters searched as they ran, and with no reply as all called Du Chaillu’s name, their search became frantic.

The grass, a singular, undulating, sentient thing alive with mocking contempt, teased them with bowing nods to draw the eye first here, and then there, hinting but never divulging where it hid her.

Out of the side of his vision, Richard caught sight of a dark shape, distinct from the mellow green of new grass rising and falling above the washed-out tan of the lifeless stalks beneath the waves. He cut to the right, muddling leadenly through a spongy area where the mat of grass, as if it floated on a sea of mud, kept giving way beneath his feet.

The ground firmed. He spotted the out-of-place dark shape and altered his course slightly as he splashed through an expanse of standing water.

Richard came suddenly upon her. Du Chaillu reposed in the grass, looking like she might be sleeping, her dress smoothed down to the backs of her knees, her legs below it a pasty white.

She was facedown in water only inches deep.

Racing through the wet grass, Richard dove over her to avoid falling on her. He snatched the shoulders of her dress and yanked her back, rolling her onto her back on the grass beside him. The front of her sodden dress plastered itself across her pronounced pregnancy. Strings of wet hair lay across her bloodless face.

Du Chaillu stared up with dark dead eyes.

She had that same odd, lingering look of lust in her eyes Juni had had when Richard found him drowned in the shallow stream.

Richard shook her limp body. “No! Du Chaillu! No! I saw you alive only a minute ago! You can’t be dead! Du Chaillu!”

Her mouth slack, her arms splayed clumsily, she exhibited no response. There was no response to show. She was gone.

When Kahlan put a comforting hand on his shoulder, he fell back with an angry cry of anguish.

“She was just alive,” Cara said. “I just saw her alive only moments ago.”

Richard buried his face in his hands. “I know. Dear spirits, I know. If only I’d realized what was happening.”

Cara pulled his hands away from his face. “Lord Rahl, her spirit might still be with her body.”

Blade masters and Mud People hunters were tumbling to their knees all around.

Richard shook his head. “I’m sorry, Cara, but she’s gone.” Stark, taunting memories of her alive cavorted unbidden through his mind.

“Lord Rahl—”

“She’s not breathing, Cara.” He reached to close her eyes. “She’s dead.”

Cara gave his wrist a fierce tug. “Did Denna not teach you? A Mord-Sith would teach her captive to share the breath of life!”

Richard grimaced away from Cara’s blue eyes. It was a gruesome rite, the sharing of pain in that way . . . The memory flooded through him with horror to match that of Du Chaillu’s death.

A Mord-Sith shared her victim’s breath while he was on the cusp of death. It was a sacred thing to a Mord-Sith to share his pain, share his breath of life as he slipped to the brink of death, as if to view with lust the forbidden sight of what lies beyond in the next world. Sharing, when the time came to kill him, his very death by experiencing his final breath of life.

Before Richard killed his mistress in order to escape, she had asked him to share her last breath of life.

Richard had honored her last wish, and had taken into himself Denna’s last breath as she died.

“Cara, I don’t know what that has to do with—”

“Give it back to her!”

Richard could only stare. “What?”

Cara growled and stiff-armed him out of her way. She dropped down beside the body and put her mouth over Du Chaillu’s. Richard was horrified by what Cara was doing. He thought he had managed to give the Mord-Sith more respect for life than this.

The sight staggered him with the obscene memory, seeing it new again before his eyes, seeing her crave that corrupt intimacy again. It stunned him to see Cara covet something so ghastly from her past. It angered him she had not risen above her brutal training and way of life, as he had hoped for her.

Pinching Du Chaillu’s nose, Cara blew a breath into the dead woman. Richard reached for Cara’s broad shoulders to rip her away from Du Chaillu. It enraged him to see it, to see a Mord-Sith do such a thing to the freshly dead.

He paused, his hands floating there above her.

Something in Cara’s urgency, in her demeanor, told him all was not what it had at first seemed. With one hand under Du Chaillu’s neck and the other holding her nose closed, Cara blew another breath. Du Chaillu’s chest rose with it, and then slowly sank again as Cara took another for herself.

A blade master, his face red with rage, reached for Cara, since Richard seemed to have changed his mind. Richard caught the man’s wrist. He met Jiaan’s questioning eyes and simply shook his head. Reluctantly, Jiaan withdrew.

“Richard,” Kahlan whispered, “what in the world is she doing? Why would she do such a grotesque thing? Is it some kind of D’Haran ritual for the dead?”

Cara took a deep breath and blew it into Du Chaillu.

“I don’t know,” Richard whispered back. “But it’s not what I thought.”

Kahlan looked even more bewildered. “And what could you have possibly thought?”

Unwilling to put such a thing into words, he could only stare into her green eyes. He could hear Cara blow another deep breath into Du Chaillu’s lifeless corpse.

He turned away, unable to watch. He couldn’t understand what good Cara thought she was doing, but he couldn’t sit there while others watched.

He tried to convince himself that, as Kahlan had suggested, perhaps it was some D’Haran ritual to the departing spirit. Richard staggered to his feet. Kahlan caught his hand. He heard a wet sputtering cough.

Richard swung back around and saw Cara hauling Du Chaillu over onto her side. Du Chaillu gasped with a choking breath. Cara slapped the woman’s back as if she were burping a baby, but with more force.

Du Chaillu coughed and gasped and panted. Then she threw up. Richard fell to his knees and held her thick mass of dark hair out of her way as she vomited.

“Cara, what did you do?” Richard was dumbfounded to see a dead woman come back to life. “How did you do that?”

Cara thumped Du Chaillu’s back, making her cough out more water. “Did Denna not teach you to share the breath of life?” She sounded annoyed.

“Yes, but, but it wasn’t . . .”

Du Chaillu clutched at Richard’s arm as she panted and spat up more water. Richard stroked her hair and back in a comforting manner to let her know they were there with her. The squeeze on his arm told him she knew.

“Cara,” Kahlan asked, “what have you done? How did you bring her back from death? Was it magic?”

“Magic!” Cara scoffed. “No, not magic. Not anything near magic. Her spirit had not yet left her body, that’s all. Sometimes, if their spirit has not had time to leave their body, you still have time. But it must be done immediately. If so, you can sometimes give them back the breath of life.”

The men gestured wildly as they all jibber-jabbered excitedly to one another. They had just witnessed a marvel that was sure to be the birth of a legend. Their spirit woman had traveled to the world of the dead—and returned.

Richard stared slack-jawed at Cara. “You can? You can give dead people back the breath of life?”

Kahlan whispered encouragement as she picked wet strands of hair from Du Chaillu’s face. She had to stop and hold back the hair when the woman’s coughing was interrupted by another bout of heaving. As grim and sick as Du Chaillu looked, she was breathing better.

Kahlan took a blanket the men handed down and wrapped it around Du Chaillu’s shivering shoulders. Cara leaned close to Richard, so no one else would hear.

“How do you think Denna kept you from death for so long when she tortured you? There was no one better at it than Denna. I am Mord-Sith, I know what would have been done to you, and I knew Denna. There would have been times she had to do this to keep you from dying when she was not yet finished with you. But it would have been blood, not water.”

Richard remembered that, too—coughing up frothy blood as if he were drowning in it. Denna was Darken Rahl’s favorite, because she was the best; it was said she could keep her captive alive and on the cusp of death longer than any other Mord-Sith. This was part of how she did that.

“But I never thought . . .”

Cara frowned. “You never thought what?”

Richard shook his head. “I never thought such a thing was possible. Not after the person had died.” After she had just done something noble, he didn’t have the heart to tell Cara he had thought she was sating some grisly appetite from her past. “You did a miraculous thing, Cara. I’m proud of you.”

Cara scowled. “Lord Rahl, stop looking at me like I am a great spirit come to our world. I am Mord-Sith. Any Mord-Sith could have done this. We all know how.”

She snatched his shirt collar and pulled him closer. “You know of it, too. Denna taught you, I know she did. You could have done this as easily as I.”

“I don’t know, Cara, I’ve only taken the breath of life. I’ve never given it.”

She released his collar. “It is the same thing, just in the other direction.”

Du Chaillu sprawled herself across Richard’s lap. He smoothed her hair with gentle empathy. She clutched at his belt, his shirt, his waist, holding on for dear life, as he tried to keep her calm.

“My husband,” she managed between gasping and coughing, “you saved me . . . from the kiss of death.”

Kahlan was holding one of Du Chaillu’s hands. Richard took the other and placed it on a leg sheathed in leather.

“Cara is the one who saved you, Du Chaillu. Cara gave you back the breath of life.”

Du Chaillu’s fingers kneaded at Cara’s leather-clad leg, groping their way up until she found Cara’s hand.

“And the Caharin’s baby. . . . You saved us both. . . . Thank you, Cara.” She gasped another rattling breath. “Richard’s child will live because of you. Thank you.”

Richard didn’t think it the proper time to point out paternity.

“It was nothing. Lord Rahl would have done it, but I was closer and beat him to it.”

Cara briefly squeezed the hand before standing to make way for some of the grateful blade masters to get close to their spirit woman.

“Thank you, Cara,” Du Chaillu repeated.

Cara’s mouth twisted with the distaste of people appreciating her for having done something compassionate. “We are all glad your spirit had not yet left you, so you could stay, Du Chaillu. Lord Rahl’s baby, too.”