Warheart

CHAPTER 19

When Kahlan turned toward the bed, trying to dodge one way and then the other around the closest of the two dead men, he stepped to the side each time, matching her moves to block her. Up closer to him the gagging stench of his rotting corpse was overpowering, making it hard to draw a breath. The focus of his glowing red eyes stayed locked on her.

Out of the corner of her eye, Kahlan caught sight of the red leather of a Mord-Sith coming up behind the other man. Mord-Sith were quick, but the woman’s Agiel wasn’t going to stop this threat. Kahlan hoped that when she found that out she would be quick enough not to be caught and killed like the soldier lying sprawled up against the wall.

The second man, his focus also on Kahlan, swung an arm behind to brush away the Mord-Sith as if she were a petty nuisance. As Kahlan tried but failed to get past the closest man by feigning a move to her right and then her left, she caught a glimpse of the Mord-Sith ducking as the arm of the other man swept by over her head.

When the man missed catching her with his arm, the woman in red stood and rammed what Kahlan thought must have been her Agiel into the dead man’s back.

In that instant, the red glow in his eyes extinguished.

He briefly stood as still and stiff as a corpse before toppling forward and crashing to the floor. He was suddenly as dead as he had been before occult magic had pulled him from his grave.

Kahlan saw then that the Mord-Sith wasn’t holding an Agiel as she had thought, but instead had used a knife. This, though, was no ordinary knife. She had seen a knife like this before. It was one of the knives created by the half people to stop the living dead. Even though the gloomy light made it hard to see, she knew who had one of those knives.

When the Mord-Sith turned toward the light and looked up, their eyes met. Kahlan saw what she already knew. It was Cara.

Without pause, Cara raced up behind the other roaring dead man menacing Kahlan and rammed that occult weapon into the small of his back. She withdrew the knife and slammed it in two more times in quick succession just for good measure. Kahlan could hear the thuds of Cara’s fist hitting his back as the knife in her fist stabbed all the way in.

The red glow in his eyes went dark. His whole body stiffened. As his weight shifted over on the broken ankle, he toppled to his side, his dead weight landing with a heavy thud on the lines of the Grace drawn in blood on the wooden floor.

Kahlan ran to Cara, intending to throw her arms around the woman, but stopped short instead. There was something odd, something in a way distant about her. She looked the same as Kahlan remembered her always looking. She was muscular and tall, endowed with pure, graceful femininity. Her long blond hair was done in the traditional single braid of a Mord-Sith. On the surface she didn’t look any different than she had always looked.

But there was something strange and otherworldly about Cara’s blue eyes.

She had obviously fought her way into the citadel. She was covered in blood, now, but the red leather hid it well, and besides, being covered in blood was hardly strange for a Mord-Sith. Kahlan could see horrifically wounded bodies out in the hallway lying sprawled atop one another, all bleeding from gaping wounds of one kind or another. Most had been cut down by the soldiers. Some were missing arms, or legs, or even their heads. Some, though, Cara had stopped.

Kahlan saw flashes of steel down the dimly lit hallway as the soldiers still fought half people who raced in to join the frenzy. But there were less of them now than she had seen before.

“Cara,” Kahlan said as she stepped closer. “Dear spirits, I’ve missed you.” She couldn’t hold back her tears. “You don’t know how I’ve missed you, and all that’s happened.”

Cara stared back with that strange look in her eyes. “I know.”

Kahlan lifted an arm to point, sobs suddenly choking her words. “Cara … Richard is dead.”

Without looking where Kahlan pointed, Cara only looked into her eyes. “I know.”

“I’ve tried everything…”

“I know,” Cara said, her voice finally turning to gentle compassion.

“It hurts so much to be without him.”

“I know, Mother Confessor. I carry that same pain every moment. It makes life unbearable.”

Kahlan nodded. “I miss Ben, too.”

Kahlan wanted to hug the woman. She had missed her so. She wanted to tell her the whole story, explain what had happened and what they had done to try to get Richard back. But she could say none of it. Something about the look in Cara’s blue eyes made Kahlan keep her distance. It was Cara, and yet it wasn’t.

“Cara, are you all right?”

Cara smiled then, like the old Cara that Kahlan knew so well. It was a smile of knowing, of wisdom, of confidence softened with a glimmer of childlike mischief. It was the smile of a woman who had spent her adult life seeing things that no one should ever have to see, and yet still carried a spark of joy for life that had survived in some dark, distant corner of her tortured mind.

It was a smile of compassion and determination laced with madness.

“Yes, Mother Confessor. I am all right, now. Finally, things are about to be right again.”

Kahlan ignored the strange feeling and took a step forward to throw her arms around the woman. Cara felt cold as ice. The Mord-Sith reached up with her free hand and half returned the hug, then parted.

“I have to go, now,” Cara said in a voice like a mother speaking tenderly to a child.

Kahlan frowned. “Go? Go where? You’re home now.”

Cara shook her head. “Not yet, but I soon will be.”

With icy fingers, she gently touched Kahlan’s cheek. She turned then toward the bed for the first time as if she had always known that Richard was there. At the side of the bed, standing over him, she looked back over her shoulder.

“Don’t weep for me, Mother Confessor. Know that I love you both, and that I do this by my own choice alone. Know that I will be at peace. This is the way it is meant to be, the way it must be.”

Kahlan wanted to ask what she was talking about, but she couldn’t seem to find her voice.

Looking down, Cara spread her arms above Richard. It reminded Kahlan of nothing so much as a graceful bird spreading its wings. Or a good spirit.

Kahlan blinked at what she was seeing. The Mord-Sith seemed to have a glow about her, or rather within her. White robes made of light, almost like wings, draped from her arms.

There seemed to be a spirit form made of light in the same place as Cara. Kahlan knew that it was not Cara she was seeing. The features were similar in their graceful femininity, and yet they were different.

Cara bent over and placed her Agiel, hanging from the gold chain, around Richard’s neck. She cupped his cheek with a hand for a moment, just looking at him as she and the form made of light smiled lovingly at him.

And then she leaned forward and pressed her mouth to his, as if kissing him, but it was not a kiss.

Nicci stepped up beside Kahlan and whispered, “She is giving him the breath of life.”

Kahlan nodded. Richard had told her how 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 lay beyond in the next world. Sharing, when the time came to kill him, his very death by experiencing his final breath of life, and taking it for her own. Kahlan imagined that to some, it was a grotesquely intimate trophy–part of the madness of the Mord-Sith’s world and life.

Richard knew because Denna had done that to him when he had been her captive, used the breath of life to keep him alive, keep him on that cusp of death to prolong his agony.

But Kahlan had also seen Cara do that to a woman who had just died. Kahlan had at first thought it was some outrageous ritual of a Mord-Sith, but Cara had told her that she could sometimes give a person back the breath of life.

Cara now breathed that breath into Richard, his chest rising as his lungs filled with the breath she gave him, with her own breath of life.

Cara pulled away a few inches, Richard’s chest slowly sinking as she drew another deep breath. Once again she pressed her mouth over Richard’s, hand covering his nose, filling his lungs with her deep, life-giving breath.

“What are you talking about?” Red whispered from right behind them.

“She is the living bridge,” Nicci said, tears running down her face as well. “She is the one the spirits said he would need in order to return.”

Kahlan felt a spike of hope mixed with fear for Cara.

“That is a spirit with her, helping her,” Red whispered to them.

Nicci nodded. “It is the spirit of a Mord-Sith I saw protecting him in the underworld.”

“Denna,” Kahlan whispered, choking on her tears, her chin quivering, hardly able to believe what she was seeing.

What she was seeing was a good spirit joined with Cara in purpose. It was a sight of hope, of love, and at the same time it was horrifying to know what it meant for Cara.

“This is her choice,” Nicci said as if reading Kahlan’s mind. “She is doing what she must, and doing it of her own free will.”