Warheart

CHAPTER 35

Richard led the five women and twelve men to the point where the narrow path started up along the face of the rock wall. Set back behind a tangle of scrubs and small, scraggly maple trees behind the boulders, it would have been easy to miss had he not known where it was. He looked back, taking a count to make sure everyone was with him.

“Lord Rahl,” the commander said in a quiet voice, “we don’t know what sort of trouble might be up top. Why don’t you let me take the men and go up first, ahead of you?”

Richard lifted his sword along with an eyebrow to make his point that there was more safety behind the sword he carried than the soldiers.

Knowing that arguing would be useless, and realizing that Richard was probably right, the commander only sighed. “Would you like me to post any men down here to make sure no one sneaks up behind us?”

“No. I want us to all to stay together.” Richard gestured up the cliff with his sword. “I’ve used the trail before. It would be safer if I go first, then it will be easier for you to follow after seeing the best place to step. If anyone slips and falls, it could take the rest down, so watch where I put my feet and where I use handholds. It’s really not a terribly difficult trail as long as you’re careful.”

After Commander Fister nodded, Richard began the climb upward. Kahlan followed close behind him, then the three Mord-Sith, then Nicci, then the soldiers.

There was no back door, no secondary entrance, no other way up to the cliff village of Stroyza except the path that followed along natural crags and ledges of the rock face. Where there were no natural footholds, the rock had been laboriously chipped away to create them. In places softer rock underfoot had been smoothed by the feet of people, who for thousands of years climbed and descended the cliff wall on a daily basis.

“Be careful,” Richard called back over his shoulder to those following behind. “The rock in this section is smooth and the drizzle makes it slippery along here. The people who lived here were familiar with the trail, but we aren’t. Pay attention to where you step and use these natural handholds along here, like I’m doing.”

In some places, where there were natural lifts of ledge, the path was wide enough to walk comfortably along. Even so, the path was still only wide enough for them to climb in single file. Some places were dangerously narrow and, even without the drizzle, quite treacherous. Fortunately, in those places there were iron bars pinned into the face of the rock so that particularly narrow spots didn’t feel so dangerous.

It might have been easier for Richard to climb the trail without having to hold his sword, but he didn’t want to put it away. Besides, he felt that he knew the trail well enough by now to manage with his sword out. Most of the men kept their swords out as well, so he kept an eye on them to make sure they were being careful. Some of them were as agile as mountain goats and had no difficulty. The people of Stroyza, using the trail all their lives, had been familiar enough with it to carry supplies up and down without much of a problem.

But the bodies at the bottom only served to bring into stark relief the dangers of the height.

Richard looked back down the face of the cliff from time to time to check on Kahlan and the rest of them. Each time he looked down, he couldn’t help noticing the sprawled, tangled remains of the people of Stroyza. He felt profoundly sorry for these simple people living out in the middle of the Dark Lands. They had lived successfully in a dangerous land for generation after generation. He wished he knew who had thrown them off the cliff.… Or made them jump.

These were the people who were the sentries meant to be the ones to alert everyone else of the threat from the third kingdom once the barrier was breached. They had never been able to send out that alert. As a result, they had somehow fallen victim to that threat escaping from the north.

He remembered the walking corpses that had attacked not long after Kahlan had been rescued and first taken to Stroyza by the villagers. Had he not been there with his sword, these people might very well have all died at that time. He wondered if more of those walking dead had returned to finish what they had not been able to accomplish the first time. Even if that had been the case, lookouts perched high above should have been able to simply knock any attackers off the wall. It was possible, he supposed, that anything the villagers could have thrown at such beings powered by occult magic might not have been enough.

Other than that possibility, what had happened didn’t make sense to him.

When Richard finally made it up to the top and stepped into the naturally formed, broad cavity, he could see that it was dark down all of the cavelike passageways and tunnels going deeper back into the mountain. Within short order, everyone behind him made it onto the safe ground of the cavern floor. In the natural light coming in through the broad cliff opening, the men rushed to collect torches standing in baskets to the sides so that they could light their way for a search deeper into the caves.

After Nicci used her gift to light them, the men held up the torches, allowing them to peer into dark passageways. Richard led them all a short distance into one of the broader passageways. There were a number of rooms built into natural clefts and crags along the way back into the cavern.

Many more of the rooms and the network of tunnels had been excavated from the semisoft rock. Lumps of granite, anywhere from fist-sized to pieces so enormous that there was no telling how big they might be, were embedded in the softer rock. Much of the ceiling was composed of the massive slabs of granite. Those ledges helped form a strong and stable ceiling. The caves were excavated from the amalgam of different rock under that harder stone.

When the cave village had been hollowed out from the mountain, the tunnels and passageways had to be dug mostly through the natural veins of softer rock. Richard remembered how that left a tangled network of passageways. It was easy to get lost back in those caverns.

The fronts of some of the hollowed-out rooms had mortared stone walls filling in the gaps. Some openings had simple wooden doors, while others were covered with animal skins. The rooms created a community of small homes.

Richard cupped a hand to the side of his mouth and yelled into the darkness. “Is anyone here? It’s Richard! I’ve come back!”

His voice echoed back from the darkness, and when that echo died out, the caves were dead silent. He couldn’t say that he was surprised. He thought by the number of bodies at the bottom that it looked like all the people of Stroyza were dead.

Richard turned back to the men and pointed in several places with his sword at the dwellings honeycombed throughout the warren of passages.

“Check in all the rooms. See if anyone is still alive.”

Richard suspected, because of the degree of decomposition of the bodies, that whatever or whoever had killed the people of Stroyza, the threat was probably long gone. But he kept his sword out, anyway.

“Do you sense anything alive back there?” Richard quietly asked Nicci as she came up beside him.

She gazed silently down the passageways for a moment. “It’s hard to tell. The network of caverns causes reflections that make it difficult to say for sure, but I don’t think there is anything down there for me to sense.”

Richard took a torch from one of the men, motioning for him to go retrieve another. “Maybe if we go farther in,” he told Nicci, “you will be able to tell better.”

Nicci went with him to one side, Kahlan staying close on the other side. The three Mord-Sith, each with a torch, stepped out in front to light the way and check for threat. They left the men behind, checking rooms, as Richard and the women moved deeper into the broad cavern. He could see that it would funnel them into a smaller passageway. Intersections branched off to the sides as they cautiously went deeper. The three Mord-Sith momentarily held their torches out toward the branching passageways, checking, but they saw no one.

The soldiers were conducting a more thorough search, taking the time to do a thorough check of each room. The Mord-Sith threw back the hanging over a doorway to their left to take a quick look inside, making sure everything was clear and that there was no threat. Richard saw pillows used as seating in the rooms, but he saw no people.

Behind them a thunderous roar suddenly shook the ground, nearly knocking them from their feet.

A blinding flash of light lit the walls all around.