The Third Kingdom

CHAPTER 75

Richard couldn’t sense if he had been in that empty world for mere seconds, or for a hundred years. The void was without sight, sound, dimension, or time.

But then the darkness began to dissolve around him. The world came back in ragged patches like being able to begin to see objects when first coming awake. The sensation accelerated and as light and sound crashed in around him, he found himself standing in the cave outside his prison cell.

He looked back over his shoulder and saw that the sparkling, wavering greenish luminescence blocking the opening to where he had been held for so long was no longer there.

Samantha’s big dark eyes blinked as she stared in disbelief.

“Dear spirits,” she whispered. “Lord Rahl, you just stepped right out of the underworld.”

Richard looked down at himself. He appeared to be in one piece. He was all there. He wasn’t bleeding. He wasn’t in any pain. He felt normal, other than the persistent touch of death that still festered inside him.

“How could you do such a thing?” Samantha asked.

“I have death in me, remember?”

Samantha nodded her head of bushy black hair, clearly not understanding. “But how could you step right out of the world of the dead?”

“Do you remember what you told me?” he asked as he checked ahead and behind into the darkness. “You said that I was of that world—the third kingdom. Life and death together. Because I have death in me I’m of both worlds.”

“So you figured that if you are the world of life, and could exist here with death in you, at least for a while, then you could exist there, at least for a while, with life in you?”

Richard nodded. “At least for a short time.”

She seemed to remember her overriding urgency, then looked around and pointed. “The other voices I heard were down that way. We have to get them out. We have to get my mother out. Hurry before any of the Shun-tuk come back this way.”

Richard was nodding even as he was already moving. Samantha ran beside him.

“This way, Lord Rahl,” she said as she raced out in front of him and then cut down another passageway to the right.

It was dark in the rough, crooked tunnel, with distant greenish light reflecting off the rock in places, enabling him to at least see where they were going.

Richard raced past human bones. They lay discarded, piled up against the walls and drifted into irregular depressions to the side.

Panting from the short run, he stopped when Samantha skidded to halt and thrust out her arm to point. “There.”

“Your mother?” he guessed.

She nodded. “Hurry.”

Richard took a deep breath and then without delay stepped into the darkness beyond the flickering green curtain. It was the same timeless, black void as the first time. It was no easier to endure the uncomfortable, lost feeling of the timeless world. In a way, it felt as if he had never left.

As the wall dissolved back into the reality of the world of life, he saw a woman with black hair standing speechless before him, staring with big, dark eyes.

Samantha raced through the now-clear opening into the room where the woman stood in silent shock. She threw herself into the woman’s outstretched arms. Samantha looked like a small, frail, miniature version of her mother. Richard had expected her to look like her mother, but the striking similarity was more than he had expected.

“Sammie,” the woman said with profound relief. “Dear spirits, I never thought I would see you again.”

“This is Lord Rahl,” Samantha said with a nod as she tugged on her mother’s hand, pulling her toward the opening of the room.

“Lord Rahl…?” The woman’s mouth dropped open.

“Yes.” As she dragged her mother, Samantha waved a hand, urging Richard to come along after her. “Hurry, Lord Rahl. We need to get the others out.”

Not needing the urging, Richard was right on their heels, following them out. Samantha raced down the tunnel a short way before again skidding to a halt. She thrust out her arm, again pointing at a green curtain.

“There.”

Richard didn’t pause to question. Without slowing he raced through the green veil and into the coldly frightening void. As the darkness dissolved, and the inner cell came into view, he found himself standing before a number of the shocked faces of men of the First File. They were packed in, filling the room. The ones sitting, leaning against the wall, jumped to their feet.

“Lord Rahl?” one of the men said in surprise.

Suddenly, Cara raced through the men, pushing them aside to make way. She flew into his arms. “Lord Rahl! You’re alive! You’re alive!”

Her husband, Ben, the general in charge of the First File, was right there behind her. He looked as relieved to see Richard as Cara did, if more shocked.

Cara, as frazzled as she appeared, had never looked so good to him.

“Lord Rahl,” Cara said, “you look terrible.”

“Probably because a Mord-Sith has been using her Agiel on me.”

“What!”

“Long story, no time,” he said as he started pushing soldiers toward the now-clear opening and out into the tunnel.

Richard caught General Meiffert’s arm, stopping him, and spoke in a low voice. “Ben, where are the rest of the men?”

With a haunted look, Ben glanced over his shoulder at his men racing out of their prison. “They’ve been coming and taking them, one at a time. Lord Rahl, I know it sounds crazy, but they’ve been taking them out and eating them alive. We could hear it. We could hear the screams before—”

“I know,” Richard said. “I know.” He let out a distraught sigh as he shared a look with the man. “I’m so sorry. I wish I could have gotten here sooner.”

Ben shook his head as he looked Richard in the eye. “We are here to protect you, Lord Rahl, not the other way around.”

“Richard?”

It was the muffled sound of Zedd’s voice, off to the side, through another wall of greenish light.

“He’s in there,” Ben said, gesturing to the side. “We’ve been able to talk to him when we don’t think anyone is around. He says that Nicci is beyond, in another cell on the far side of him. They kept the gifted separated.”

Richard wasted no time in asking any questions or saying anything else. There was no time to waste on reunions or explanations of anything. There would be time enough for that if they could escape the caves and the Shun-tuk that hunted them. For now he needed to get the others and get out.

Richard raced past the men and out the now-clear opening into the craggy tunnel. He ran past Samantha and her mother to the next shimmering curtain of greenish light. Without a moment’s hesitation, Richard plunged into the greenish glow.

For an eternity, he floated in a timeless place, and then, as the dark, timeless emptiness resolved into the sights and sounds of the world, Richard saw an astonished Zedd rising to his feet. The old man moved with a pained slowness, as if he had been sitting on the stone floor for far too long. His wavy white hair stuck out in disarray. His simple robes were filthy.

Richard threw his arms around his grandfather in a quick embrace, then hurriedly pushed away.

“No time to talk,” he said to his grandfather before the old man had a chance to launch into a thousand questions. “We need to get out of here.”

Zedd flicked a bony hand toward the wall at the side. “Nicci. Nicci is over there. Can you get her, too?”

Richard nodded as he first hurried his grandfather out into the corridor where Samantha and her mother waited. Zedd took the woman’s hands, expressing wordlessly his relief at being out and seeing her out as well. Obviously, the two of them must have talked.

At the next sparkling greenish veil, the shadowed shapes of spirits beyond flailed and twisted expectantly as Richard came close. Again, without pause, he immediately plummeted into the world of the dead—his world, in a way. Beyond the first sparkling flash of greenish illumination as he made contact, there were no spirits. There was nothing. It was a frightening fall through darkness until the world of life abruptly crashed into view.

As it did, Nicci, in tears of joy at seeing him, already had her arms around his neck before he was sure that he was fully back in the world of life.

“Richard … how in the world—”

“Later,” he said, seizing her upper arm and pulling her out of the now-clear opening. She peered around the edges of the opening as she passed through, looking amazed at seeing the deadly underworld boundary so abruptly gone.

Out in the hall, Richard paused. When everyone started to talk at once, he held up his hand as he shushed them.

“Quiet. Half people are near and could hear you. We don’t want to have to fight them if we don’t have to, especially not down here.”

They instantly fell silent, many casting worried looks up and down the rocky tunnel.

Richard also needed quiet because he wanted to go within himself and feel the link to his sword’s power. He could feel that it was closer than it had been when he had been in his prison cell. As he closed his eyes and let the world around him fade into the background, it allowed him to embrace that faint inner sense.

He at last lifted his arm to point.

“That way.”

He raced down the tunnel winding its way through the pockmarked rock, at junctures of passageways taking the route where he could feel the strongest pull of the sword. He could feel himself getting closer to it all the time. He ran with a sense of urgent desperation to get his hands on it.

Along the way they encountered bones pushed to the edges of the passageway. There were were so many bones in places that they looked like debris that had been washed up in a flood. There were no large sections, such as intact spines, feet, or hands. All of the bones had been completely disjointed so that the individual small bits and pieces lay in dense mounds. All the skulls had been broken open so that the Shun-tuk could get at the brains, so that only fragments remained.

Richard, leading the silent group of soldiers and gifted, at last found the place where he felt his sword the strongest, where it felt near. He knew what it felt like to sense the sword and he could tell that it was only feet away beyond another underworld barrier. He dared not call it to hand, though. He feared that if he did, he might lose it in the void of the underworld.

He looked back for a brief moment at everyone’s tense expressions, and then he stepped through the boundary into the world of the dead.

Before the world even began to come back in around him, he already had his fingers around the hilt of the Sword of Truth. It was a huge relief to have the weapon back. He immediately slipped the baldric over his head and let the sword find its proper place at his left hip.

“Ben, get your men in here,” he called back through the opening where the green veil winked out of existence. He signaled with an urgent wave of his arms.

There were weapons—swords, axes, pikes, knives—stacked haphazardly in the room. The half people had thrown all the weapons they’d confiscated into the small chamber in the rock and covered it over with a wall of death.

The big men of the First File rushed in, all of them retrieving weapons as fast as they could, passing them back through the ranks to men outside in the corridor, crowded in close to the weapons cache. None of them bothered to try to find their own; they were just happy to get their hands on any weapon handed back to them. Richard understood the feeling. He felt that same sense of relief at having his own weapon back.

Out in the hall, as soon as they were once again armed, the crowd quickly gathered in close around him. Richard held up a hand before anyone could say anything.

“We have to get out of here,” he said as softly as possible, but loud enough so that they could all hear him. “We can talk later. Hannis Arc could be around here somewhere, along with a resurrected spirit of—”

“No, he’s not,” Samantha whispered.

Richard frowned at her. “What?”

“He left. Him and masses and masses of the Shun-tuk. There’s still a lot more left down here in these tunnels—hundreds and hundreds—but he and most of them have gone.”

Richard nodded, remembering that she had already told him that. “All right,” he said. “There are still hundreds of those flesh eaters about. For now, the important thing is that we get out of these caves before they catch us trying to escape, and then get away from here.”

Nicci ignored his urgency and placed two fingers against Richard’s forehead. “It’s worse,” she said quietly back over her shoulder to Zedd. He nodded knowingly.

“Richard, it’s important that we get you and Kahlan to the palace,” Nicci said, her face set with concern and urgency. “We have to heal you both of what you both have inside.”

Cara looked around. “Where is the Mother Confessor?”

Richard again shushed them all with a gesture. “Kahlan was unconscious,” he whispered. “I had to come alone to get you all out of here. She is undoubtedly awake by now back in Stroyza. She will be waiting for us. We’ll need to go get her before we head back to the palace. But first we need to get out of these caves and out of the third kingdom.”

“Come on,” Samantha said. “This way.”