Witch's Oath

11

Just then Kahlan caught movement out of the corner of her eye. It was Vika, naked, with her Agiel between her teeth and a knife in her fist, charging in at a dead run. She was a picture of muscled fury.

At the last instant she rammed the knife into Michec’s side, catching him off guard. Kahlan had thought that she would use the Agiel between her teeth, but she must have been more interested in cutting him open the way he had cut her.

He let out a terrible cry of pain and surprise as he fell away from her attack to escape her blade.

Michec twisted and spun to get some distance as she tried to cut him again, but missed. He clamped a hand over the wound. Kahlan could see the wet red stain under his hand growing on his filthy white robes.

He saw, then, the same thing Kahlan saw. As hard as it was to believe, Vika was completely healed. She didn’t have on a stitch of clothes and they could clearly see that she looked in perfect health. The flesh of her abdomen was flawless and looked never to have had so much as a scratch. Kahlan couldn’t imagine how her intestines could have been put back as well as they had and how such a gaping wound had completely closed.

In her hunger to cut Michec, Vika must have just had time to grab her knife from the sheath attached to her leather outfit. She screamed in fury as she scrambled to dive at him again and drive her blade into him again, but her bare feet slipped on the slime and blood all over the floor from the Glee. She leaped back up to her feet almost immediately.

The witch man moved faster than Kahlan would have thought his bulk would allow, spinning around twice so that Vika, on slippery footing in her bare feet, missed him when she took a swing and tried to slash him again. Though he escaped her stabbing him a second time, the first cut had obviously done damage. Because of his girth, Kahlan suspected that the blade had cut only fat and muscle. She didn’t think it had gone deep enough to damage internal organs. Vika had apparently been going for his kidney. Had she hit it, that would have stopped him or at least slowed him down enough for her to be able to finish him. As it was, he was still on his feet and while hurt, it was not enough to stop him.

Seeing an opportunity with Michec wounded, Kahlan cried out in fury of her own to startle him as she charged in at him sword-first. Even if the magic didn’t work against him, the sharp blade would. Ordinarily, Kahlan would have been unsure that it would be so simple that she could kill him with Richard’s sword, but the way Vika had driven her knife into him had clearly hurt the man. From behind Vika came flashes of red leather as the rest of the Mord-Sith raced to Vika and Kahlan’s aid.

Hurt from Vika’s first strike with her blade, Michec held one hand back to comfort the wound as he desperately swept his other hand up as if lifting a curtain before himself.

As his hand came up, the glass light spheres abruptly dimmed.

And then, the quickly waning light revealed nightmarish creatures densely packed together coming at them out of nowhere, all of them reaching with fury and lust.

They were terrors from a child’s nightmares, larger than a person, most with veined, membrane wings like bats. Those wings stretched and flapped. At the first joint of the leading edge of their wings they had a large, hooked claw that raked the air as they swept their partially folded wings forward, trying to snag Kahlan or one of the Mord-Sith.

The pale, wrinkled, ulcerated flesh of the monsters was hairless. In places that flesh looked rotted away, exposing gooey green slime and fibrous tissue beneath, like the damp, rotting, decomposing tissue of a corpse. They glided in just above the floor, their wings flapping to enfold their prey. As they got closer, they opened huge mouths full of fangs.

Their jaws opened wide as they roared, so wide that it distorted and stretched the skin of their faces. That flesh tore in places, exposing the decomposing sinew beneath. Under the tears in the stretched flesh she could see their jaw and cheek bones. Flesh hung in ragged flaps as it ripped apart when their mouths stretched even wider to snap at Kahlan and the others frantically backing away.

Kahlan and all the Mord-Sith continued to scramble back, trying to avoid being caught by the grotesque creatures as they hurtled in out of the rapidly gathering darkness. Their deafening howls echoed through the room. In the fading light, Kahlan saw that the creatures were not all the same. Not all were winged like bats.

Some of the things had no wings, but instead had long, skeletal arms. They grasped at the air with bony fingers as they rushed in, reaching for Kahlan and the others. Some were missing part of their skull, exposing the festering brain and internal structures. Some of the forms had only scraps of skin attached to bones. That kind, their joints separating from the effort, ripped themselves apart as they struggled to leap through the air to be the first at Kahlan and the Mord-Sith.

Others, with long gangly limbs, crabbed sideways across the floor, ducking in under the winged creatures. Others staggered with stiff limbs and a halting gait. Most of their mouths opened impossibly wide, as if they intended to devour Kahlan and the others whole in one bite.

It was a collection of creatures beyond imagining. None of them could possibly be anything that existed in the world of life.

And yet, Kahlan realized that she had seen these things before.

A whole army of the monsters charged in at her, wings made of stretched skin flapping, raptorlike claws extended, lips pulling back in snarls over fangs. As Mord-Sith leaped toward her to help, Kahlan swung the sword, ripping through the monsters. The sword seemed to tear them apart rather than cut them. Their bodies disintegrated as if made of crumbly dirt and dust. Flesh and bone fell to pieces as she swung the blade as fast as she could.

It was growing so dark so rapidly that she already couldn’t see the women fighting near her. But she could see the glowing red eyes of ever more of the things coming for her. She swung the sword as fast and hard as she could, knowing that if she stopped, they would be all over her. No matter how many she destroyed, their numbers pressing in at her seemed to multiply.

Only brief, terrifying moments after the battle had started, the room was plunged into total darkness. The blackness was filled with the terrible angry howls and ravenous screeches of the things coming at her and the others. Kahlan used their cries to find them, swinging the sword around when she heard them trying to get behind her. She had no hope but to keep fighting.

The darkness was so complete that the red glow of their eyes went dark, too, so that she could no longer even tell where the swirling mass of creatures were. In desperation Kahlan kept swinging the sword, hoping none of the Mord-Sith were close enough to get hit by the blade. She could feel the resistance each time it crashed through the monstrous things. She felt bony bits and reeking, wet scraps smacking into her as they disintegrated.

And then, when she knew that all hope was lost, the air suddenly seemed to explode. Flames filled the room, twisting, spiraling, rolling as if inside the inferno of a blast furnace. It was so bright Kahlan had to close her eyes and cover her face with a forearm against the blinding light and intense heat as she turned away. She feared she would be consumed in the conflagration.

Instead, the billowing flames were gone almost as soon as they had erupted, so fast that they didn’t burn her as she had thought they surely would; they didn’t so much as singe her hair.

As the flames vanished and the room was once again plunged into blackness, the air was filled with a swirl of burning embers that slowed and finally drifted down, sparking out as they touched the stone floor. In the faint light of those glowing embers, Kahlan saw the Mord-Sith nearby, like her with their weapons held up defensively.

After a moment of total darkness and dead silence once all the burning embers were gone, the light spheres around the edge of the room slowly began to brighten again. In the faint greenish glow, she could see that all the corpses were still hanging throughout the room. She had thought they might have been ripped to shreds by the ravenous creatures or burned to cinders in the flames, but they looked untouched. Apparently, the beasts had only come for the living and the flash of fire was too brief to consume the bodies.

But the fire had incinerated the creatures, burning them to ash. It left behind the stench of sulfur.

“What were those things?” Vale asked in a panting whisper.

Kahlan knew what they were but was afraid to say it out loud.

“Where did he go?” Rikka asked in a heated voice as she and the others raced around, searching among the forest of bodies for the witch man.

Cassia dropped to the floor to look under all the hanging corpses to see if Michec was hiding behind one of them, perhaps in the distance. She finally jumped back up.

“I don’t see him anywhere.”

Shale raced up, coming in protectively close to Kahlan.

“What in the world were those things?” Nyda asked as she worked to catch her breath. “I’ve had nightmares that haven’t been as scary as that.”

Shale cast a sidelong look at Kahlan. “I can only conjure snakes. Apparently, the witch man has the power to conjure demons.”

“Demons! Like from the underworld?” Nyda shook her head. “That can’t be true.”

“I’ve seen such things before,” Kahlan said.

Nyda looked incredulous. “Where?”

“In the world of the dead,” Kahlan finally told them in a troubled voice.

“You can’t be serious,” Shale said.

They all looked at Kahlan expectantly, awaiting more of an explanation.

“They’re called soul eaters.”

“Soul eaters!” Berdine exclaimed. “How could Michec bring demons from the underworld into the world of life?” She swept an arm out. “And what happened to them at the end? It was like they were suddenly exploded and burned to cinders.”

“I have no idea,” Kahlan said. “But from the smell of sulfur it seems clear to me that Michec somehow opened the veil enough to pull those things into this world to do his bidding.”

“It doesn’t matter, now. They’re gone.” Vika grabbed Kahlan’s arm. “We have to help Lord Rahl. He healed all of us. We have to help him.”

When a last, quick check around the room confirmed that Michec was nowhere to be seen and they knew that he wasn’t about to set upon them again, Kahlan rushed over to Richard, dropping to her knees to see if he had started breathing yet. She was alarmed when she found that not only wasn’t he breathing, he had no pulse.

“Richard!” She pounded his chest with her fist. “Richard!”

Shale leaned in close. She put a hand on his forehead, closed her eyes, and was silent for a moment.

The sorceress at last drew her hand back as if the touch had burned her fingers. She looked up at Kahlan, her eyes reflecting her horror. “He’s … gone.”

The Mord-Sith stared at her in stunned silence.

“He’s not gone,” Kahlan insisted. “He just needs our help to find his way back.”

Shale’s eyebrows lifted in disbelief. “From the dead? How do we help him do that?”

“He’s not dead.” Kahlan swallowed back her rising sense of panic as a vision of her children never knowing their father flashed through her mind. “He’s just lost.”

Shale gave the Mord-Sith watching her a troubled look before she looked back at Kahlan. “And how do you propose that we get him … unlost?”