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Richard stood panting, his heart pounding, fighting to focus the rage on a threat he could not identify. He scanned the shadows and darkness back among the trees, looking for any movement. At the same time he struggled to sort out the confusion of what he was seeing on the ground before him.
Cara skidded to a halt to his left, ready for a fight. An instant later, Victor stumbled to a stop on his right, his mace held in a tight fist. Nicci raced in right behind, no weapon evident, but Richard could sense the air around her virtually crackling with her power ready to be unleashed.
“Dear spirits,” the blacksmith whispered. His six-bladed mace, a deadly weapon the man had made himself, rose in his fist as he cautiously started forward.
Richard lifted his sword in front of Victor to bar him from going any farther. His chest against the blade, the blacksmith reluctantly heeded the silent command and stopped.
What, at first, had been a bewildering sight became at last all too clear. A man’s forearm, missing the hand but still covered with a brown flannel shirtsleeve, lay in a bed of ferns at Richard’s feet. Not far away stood a heavy, laced boot with a jagged white shinbone stripped of sinew and muscle jutting out from the top. In a thicket of roughleaf dogwood just to the side lay a section of a torso, its flesh torn away to lay bare a section of the spine and blanched rib bones. Squiggles of pink viscera lay strewn over the log where the men had been sitting. Ragged pieces of scalp and skin lay atop bare rock and scattered everywhere through the grass and bushes.
Richard could not imagine what power could have caused such a shocking scene.
A thought struck him. He glanced back over his shoulder at Nicci. “Sisters of the Dark?”
Nicci slowly shook her head as she studied the carnage. “There are a few similar characteristics, but on balance this is nothing like the way they kill.”
Richard didn’t know if that was comforting news or not.
Slowly, carefully, he stepped forward among the still-bleeding remains. It didn’t look to him like it had been a battle; there were no cuts from swords or axes, no arrows or spears to mark the battlefield. None of the limbs or mangled ribbons of muscle appeared to have been cut. Every piece looked as if it had been torn away from where it belonged.
It was so horrific a sight, so incomprehensible, that it was beyond sickening. Richard found it disorienting trying to conceive of what could have created such devastation—not just of the men, but of the landscape where they had been. From somewhere beyond the boiling rage of the sword’s magic, he felt an agony of sorrow for what he had not been able to stop, and he knew that that sorrow would only grow. But right then, he wanted nothing so much as to get his hands on whoever—or whatever—had done this.
“Richard,” Nicci whispered from close behind, “I think it best if we get out of here.”
The direct, calm tone of her voice could not have been any more compelling a warning.
Filled with the rage from the sword in his fist, and his own impassioned anger at what he was seeing, he ignored her. If there was anyone left alive, he had to find them.
“There’s no one left,” Nicci murmured, as if in answer to his thoughts.
If the threat still lurked nearby, he needed to know.
“Who could have done this?” Victor whispered, clearly not interested in leaving until he had the guilty party in his grip.
“It doesn’t look like anything human,” Cara answered in quiet indictment.
As Richard stepped carefully through the remains, the silence of the shrouding woods pressed in on him like a great weight. No birds called, no bugs buzzed, no squirrels chattered. The muting effect of the heavy overcast and drizzle only served to thicken the hush.
Blood dripped from leaves, branches, and the tips of bent grasses. The trunks of trees were splattered with it. The coarse bark of an ash was smeared with oozing tissue. A hand, fingers open and slack, empty of any weapon, lay palm-up on a gravel slope beneath the large leaves of a mountain maple.
Richard spotted the footprints of where they all had entered the area and some of his own footprints where he had left only a short time ago with Nicci, Cara, and Victor. Many of the remains lay in virgin forest where none of them had walked. There were no peculiar footprints among the carnage, although there were unexplained places where the ground had been ripped open. Some of those gouges cut right through thick roots.
Taking a better look, Richard realized that the plowed gashes were places where men had been smashed to the ground with such violence that it had torn open the forest floor. In some spots, flesh still clung to the exposed ends of splintered roots.
Cara gripped his shirt at the shoulder, trying to urge him back. “Lord Rahl, I want you away from here.”
Richard pulled his shoulder free of her grip. “Quiet.”
As he stepped silently among the remains, the countless voices of those who had used the sword in the past whispered in the back of his mind.
Don’t focus on what you’re seeing, on what is done. Watch for what caused it and might yet come. Now is the time for vigilance.
Richard hardly needed such a warning. He was gripping the wire-wound hilt of the sword so tightly that he could feel the raised lettering of the word TRUTH formed by gold wire woven through the sliver. That golden word bit into the flesh of his palm on one side and his fingertips on the other.
At his feet a man’s head stared up at him from among scrub sumac. A mute cry twisted the expression fixed on the face. Richard knew him. His name had been Nuri. All that this young man had learned, all that he had experienced, all that he had planned for, the world he had begun to make for himself, was ended. For all these men, the world was finished; the one life they had had was gone forever.
The agony of that terrible loss, that ghastly finality, threatened to extinguish the rage from the sword and swamp him in sorrow. All these men were loved and cherished by those waiting for them to return. Each one of these individuals would be grieved over with heartache that would indelibly mark the living.
Richard made himself move on. Now was not the time to grieve. Now was the time to find the guilty and visit upon them retribution and justice before they had the chance to do this to others. Only then could the living mourn for these precious souls lost.
Despite how widely he searched, Richard didn’t see a single body—not a body in the sense of a whole, recognizable person—yet the entire area where the men had been waiting was littered with their remains. The surrounding woods, also, revealed parts of those remains, as if some of the men had tried to run. If that was the case, none had gotten far. As Richard moved through the trees, looking for any tracks that might help him identify who had killed these men, he kept one eye on the shadows off in the mist. He saw tracks of men who had run, but he saw no tracks chasing after them.
As he came around an ancient pine, he was confronted by the top half of a man’s chest hanging upside down from a splintered limb. The remains hung well above Richard’s head. What was left of the armless torso had been impaled on the stump of a broken limb as if it were a meat hook. The face was fixed with unbridled terror. Being upside down, the hair, dripping blood, stood out straight from the scalp as if frozen in fright.
“Dear spirits,” Victor whispered. Rage twisted his face. “That’s Ferran.”
Richard scanned the area, but saw nothing moving in the shadows. “Whatever happened here, I don’t think anyone escaped.” He noticed that on the ground where Ferran’s blood dripped there were no tracks.
Kahlan’s tracks were gone as well.
The pain, the horror, of wondering if this might be the same thing that had happened to Kahlan nearly buckled his knees. Not even the sword’s rage was enough to shield him from the agony of that pain.
Nicci, right behind him, leaned close. “Richard,” she said in a near whisper, “we need to get out of here.”
Cara leaned in beside Nicci. “I agree.”
Victor lifted his mace. “I want those who did this.”
His knuckles were white around the steel grip. “Can you track them?” he asked Richard.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Nicci said.
“Good idea or not,” Richard told them, “I don’t see any tracks.” He looked into Nicci’s blue eyes. “Perhaps you would like to try to convince me that I am imagining this, as well?”
She didn’t break eye contact with him, but she didn’t answer his challenge, either.
Victor gazed up at Ferran. “I told his mother that I’d watch over him. What am I going to say to his family now?” Tears of rage and hurt glistened in his eyes as he pointed with the mace back to the rest of the remains. “What am I going to say to their mothers and wives and children?”
“That evil murdered them,” Richard said. “That you will not rest until you know justice is done. That vengeance will be had.”
