Warheart

CHAPTER 37

Richard wondered if he could get close enough to her to use the sword. That ruled out using the sword as a shield, first, because it gave her too much time with him in the open. In his mind he planned what he would need to do. He decided that he would race out from cover to draw her attention. She would change the focus of an attack toward him. That shift of her attention would take a fraction of a second, making her redirected attack less accurate. As she rushed to cast out another lightning bolt of power, he could throw himself to the ground, roll under it, and then spring up in front of her. If he could get in that close, he was pretty sure he would be able to take her down with the sword before she could react.

If she didn’t miss, though, it would all be over. He would be dead. Sulachan and Hannis Arc would win. Prophecy would live–at least until the world of life died out.

He gripped the sword tighter in both hands and gritted his teeth, readying himself to charge at the young sorceress.

Samantha stopped. She growled in rage, her whole body trembling with fury. When he snuck a quick glance, Richard could see the shape of the demon in the same place as her, in much the way that Sulachan’s spirit occupied his desiccated corpse in the same place at the same time.

But Samantha was not an innocent victim who was possessed by an evil spirit. She had invited that hateful spirit into her with her irrational, out-of-control anger and hate. Now they were one in purpose. Now they both were determined to kill.

The dark one was using her, encouraging her, and Samantha was willingly summoning the full power of her unbridled wrath.

As she shook with anger, the rock of the cave trembled in response. He knew what she was doing. He had, after all, taught her to do it.

Richard knew that he had no time to lose. If he was going to stop her, it had to be now, before she brought the rock down on them. He had no hesitation about the need to kill her. If that dance with death had taught him anything, it was that his life and the lives of innocent people couldn’t be forfeited for sentiment. A lethal threat had to be recognized for the reality of what it was. Such threats had to be stopped.

Before he could charge out, Richard had to duck when a slab of thicker stone behind them blew apart. Jagged shards of rock whistled through the air, one going over the top of his bowed head, just missing him.

Then another area out in front of him and down a side tunnel exploded apart. All up and down the passageways rock began exploding in a ripping string of thunderous blasts. The cave trembled with the unfathomable force Samantha was focusing into the rock, blowing it apart. The echo of explosions rippled throughout the cave.

Thunderous blasts rang out painfully in the confined space as the explosions of rock came almost one atop another. Richard was pelted with pieces of rock that sailed through the passageway and ricocheted off walls. The whole mountain shook. He had to close his eyes and turn his face away from debris clouds that blew past him. The sound of it was deafening.

And then, out in front of him, where he was just about to charge out at Samantha and tumble under anything she could throw at him, the entire ceiling let out a reverberating, crackling boom as it was abruptly driven downward by a thunderous explosion. The massive section of the mountain above them had suddenly collapsed.

The force of the entire ceiling giving way shook the mountain so violently that Richard, Kahlan, Nicci, Cassia, and Vale were all knocked from their feet. Along with the Mord-Sith, Richard immediately rolled up onto a hand and a knee, with his other foot on the ground, ready to spring into the fight. Kahlan was on her hands and knees, looking dazed. They all turned their faces away from the blast of wind forced out from under the rock as it came crashing down. The blast of the shock wave caught Nicci off-balance and knocked her flat on her back. The two Mord-Sith were also sent tumbling back by the wall of air.

Richard braced for the next blast, looking to the sides to try to find a place for them to run, a shelter where they could get away from the flying rock, but there was no other intersection. There was no immediate route for an escape. Cassia and Vale scrambled to their feet, picking up their torches off the ground as they did so.

The torches hissed and sputtered, but other than that, the debris settled, rocks rolled to a stop, and everything began to go quiet. The rumbling and shaking had stopped. The explosions had stopped. The echoes of it all gradually died out.

Richard wondered what would be coming next, what power Samantha would unleash. He needed to stop her, first.

In the sudden silence he finally peeked around the corner and saw something out ahead of them, beyond the nearly empty red leather Mord-Sith outfit. He took a torch from Vale and cautiously inched out from the protection of the jut of rock where he had been to see if it was what he thought it was.

He stood to his full height when he saw that he had been right. It was Samantha’s bloody arm sticking out from beneath a massive section of granite that had collapsed from overhead. It had crushed the young woman.

“Well, isn’t that something,” Cassia said as she stepped up beside Richard, holding her torch up with one hand as she brushed the dirt off herself with the other.

The wavering light of their torches lit the bloody forearm and fist–the only thing they could see of Samantha. The rest of her was buried under countless tons of stone that had let go and come down atop her.

“She gets so angry, so focused,” Kahlan said, “that she forgets about her own safety. When we were in the gorge when the army of half people were chasing us, she was bringing the mountain down atop them and I had to snatch her up and carry her away or it would have come down on top of her, just like this.”

Nicci was nodding in agreement. “I saw that immaturity in her. It frightened me from the first. Her ability exceeded her capacity to handle it.”

That bloody arm had a ghostly appearance to it, a dark shadow that moved as if it were alive whereas the arm was dead still. As Richard watched, that shadow faded away into nothing. The demon that had been with her, helping her, had melted back beyond the veil. Without a worldly form to possess and hold it in the world of life, it could not keep the skrin from pulling it back into the world of the dead.

For now, some of those forces still held. At least, to a certain extent.

“I can’t believe she so willfully killed those men,” Kahlan said. “She knew them. She liked them. At least, she did at one time. She had helped them. I can hardly believe she would so easily kill them.”

Richard felt a twinge of sadness for the girl whose ability made her so out of place and who had been trying so hard to become a woman. She’d had such potential. He guessed that the potential and talent did her no good in the end when she instead let herself be ruled by hate. In the end, hate destroyed her.

“She killed her entire village as well,” Richard said. “The people she had grown up with and had hoped to protect.”

Nicci glared at the bloody, splintered arm. “I told you she was dangerous, that her anger was dangerous.”

“One of the Wizard’s Rules I learned long ago,” Richard said. “Passion rules reason. I’m sorry that I didn’t see the indications in her sooner. Had I paid more attention to the signs I might have been able to help her to choose positive things rather than the dishonesty of hate. I guess I was blind to it, thinking she just needed to grow up a little.”

“A lot,” Nicci grumbled. “You couldn’t have helped her, Richard. It was what was inside her. It was her inborn nature. None of us could have changed her.”

Richard squatted down and touched the red leather that had belonged to Laurin.

“She gave her life trying to protect you, Lord Rahl,” Cassia said in comfort. “Any of us would have done the same. She died a noble death.”

“As did all those men,” he said. “But they are all still dead.”

He picked the Agiel out of the black crystallized pieces that were all that was left of Laurin. He stood and showed it to Vale. “Now you must wear the Agiel of a brave Mord-Sith, a sister of the Agiel, as does Cassia, and gain strength from it.”

She bowed her head as he placed the chain around her neck. “I’m sorry that those men and Laurin had to die this day.”

“Those men of the First File and Laurin died to protect you, Lord Rahl,” Cassia said. “That was their chosen calling. They died doing what they wanted most to do. They were all honored by your trust in them. They died heroes in their mission to make sure you and the Mother Confessor were safe, now.”

He smiled his thanks for her words.

“We’re not exactly, safe, though,” Richard said as he looked up at the solid wall of rock. “I’m afraid we’re trapped in here.”