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Commander Karg shared in a brief, sly smile with the emperor before turning and yelling at the guards. “Let’s go!”
Jillian clutched Kahlan tightly on one side, Nicci on the other as they continued to slip away to the side, trying not to be seen. The guards helping Jagang started moving him out. The men Commander Karg had brought with him hacked and slashed their way back through the battle.
Kahlan dreaded the thought of being back in Jagang’s tent. As she kept an eye on the guards, she looked back over her shoulder, searching, but she didn’t see Richard.
Drunken, angry soldiers fought on all around the three of them as Kahlan watched the emperor’s guards start to organize a forward wedge to clear a path to get them back away from the Ja’La field and toward the emperor’s compound.
Almost all of the torches had long since gone dark in the fighting. The guards had brought some of their own, but they weren’t close. As dark as it was with the heavy overcast, Kahlan couldn’t even see the Ja’La field anymore. Even the plateau rising up above the Azrith Plain seemed to have vanished in the blackness. She had to use the distant ramp, lit by torchlight, to get her bearings.
With a thud that shook the ground, fire boiled up as Sisters apparently used their power to blast their way through the vast army in order to get to Jagang’s rescue. There had been hundreds of thousands of men at the Ja’La match. It didn’t seem like any were fleeing. Now the guards protecting the emperor needed to escape that mob.
Kahlan, Jillian, and Nicci, too, needed to escape through the mob, but they didn’t have thousands of heavily armed guards to help them. They relied, instead, on trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. Hunching to look harmless, they avoided looking directly at the men around them. They kept the hoods of their cloaks up and their heads down as they slowly slipped through pockets of relative calm amid the chaos. It was slow going. They still hadn’t managed to get clear of the guards engaged in hand-to-hand fighting with the mob. Somehow, they had to make it through that line of guards, and then through the army beyond.
Commander Karg, a wicked grin on his snake-face, abruptly appeared out of the darkness and seized Nicci by the upper arm. “There you are.” He pulled the hood of her cloak back to get a good look at her. “You’re coming with me.” He gestured to one of his men. “Take the girl along, too. Since we’re going to have a party, we might as well make it a proper affair with a young lady for my men.”
Jillian screamed as the man ripped her out of Kahlan’s grip and pulled her along as he followed after Commander Karg and Nicci. When Jillian tried to stab the man, he wrenched the blade from her hand. The men couldn’t see Kahlan, or they would have grabbed her as well.
Kahlan stepped in close behind the man holding Jillian. She started to lift her knife, but a powerful hand grabbed her wrist. It was one of her special guards—the sixth man, whom she’d lost track of. He towered behind her. Kahlan knew him. He was one of the smarter men. He wasn’t as careless as the others. He still had all his weapons.
As Nicci and a screaming Jillian were being dragged farther and farther away from Kahlan, the man twisted her arm behind her back until her fingers went numb. She cried out in pain. His expression was grim and indifferent to her torment as he stripped the knife out of her hand. She kicked back at his shins, trying to make him let go of her. Rather than let up, the man twisted her arm all the more until the pain made it impossible for her to struggle. He muscled her in the direction the emperor was going.
Nicci looked back at Kahlan as Commander Karg dragged her through the confusion of men. Kahlan could see only glimpses of blond hair between the churning bodies.
The hand holding her let go of her wrist. Instead it grabbed her upper arm. That hand abruptly pulled her back through the battling men, back into the darkness. Kahlan turned, ready to fight what the brute obviously intended.
Richard was standing right there instead.
The world seemed to stop.
His gray eyes were staring into her soul.
Up close like this, the strange bloodred designs painted on his face were terrifying. But the smile on his face made him look like the gentlest, kindest man in all the world.
He seemed to be unable to do anything but smile as he stared into her eyes. It took Kahlan a moment to remember how to breathe.
She finally glanced down and saw the special guard who had been holding her wrist. He was on the ground; his head was twisted around at an unnatural angle. He didn’t look to be breathing. With bodies sprawled everywhere, no one paid any attention to one more. After all, he was just a regular soldier, like all the men battling each other.
Except that he had been able to see her.
Kahlan’s thoughts came rushing back in. The thought of that man having Nicci and Jillian made Kahlan feel dizzy and sick. She flicked her hand in a quick gesture.
“We have to help Nicci and Jillian. Commander Karg has them.”
Richard didn’t hesitate. His gray eyes turned toward where Nicci had vanished. “Hurry. Stay close.”
Within a dozen steps they were back in the thick of battle. This time, though, it was not the regular soldiers that Richard had to fight—it was the royal guard. It didn’t seem to matter. He moved through them, cutting men down to clear a path for her when he had to, avoiding them when possible.
As a man thrust his sword, Richard stepped back, out of the way, and severed the man’s arm, catching the sword before it hit the ground. He tossed the sword to Kahlan. She caught it and immediately had to use it to stop a man going for Richard.
It felt good to have a sword in her hands. It felt good to be able to defend herself. The two of them cut their way onward through the royal guards.
Commander Karg glanced back and saw Richard coming. He let go of Nicci as he turned to his point man, grinning, ready to do battle. The guards all around saw that the commander wanted to handle this himself, so they turned back to their own problems.
“Well, Ruben, it seems—”
Richard swung, decapitating the snake without ceremony. He wasn’t interested in anything but what needed to be done. He was a man who didn’t need to teach the enemy a lesson. He was only interested in eliminating them.
A guard who had seen what happened started for Richard. Nicci swiftly reached around and pulled her knife across his throat. The man’s face registered complete surprise as he clutched at the gaping wound, dropping first to one knee before falling face-first to the ground.
In an instant, they were in the middle of a furious battle. With so many experienced men coming after them, Richard could no longer hold back. He cut into the royal guard with a vengeance.
Worried that there were too many for him, Kahlan couldn’t let him do it alone. She now had the advantage of being invisible. She could move among the men attacking Richard and do her own damage. Men expecting to fight Richard fell to her blade coming from nowhere. Between the two of them, they were slaughtering the guard.
Nicci, too, immediately went on the attack. The three of them now had a single purpose—to fight their way out of the midst of the royal guards.
“We need to get to the ramp!” Nicci shouted at Richard.
He pulled his sword out of a man falling past him and frowned at Nicci. “The ramp? Are you sure?”
“Yes!”
Richard didn’t argue. He changed the direction of the fight, covering Jillian as he battled his way through the endless mass of big men, making sure that none of them could get at her.
As they stabbed and hacked their way through, Kahlan knew that she had to stay clear of Richard so that he would have the room he needed. Most of the men were going after him. None could see Kahlan, so she pulled Jillian well back out of Richard’s way so that the guards couldn’t snatch her to use as a shield to get at Richard. Kahlan was better able to protect her than Nicci. Kahlan tried to shield Jillian while she also covered Nicci’s back as she went after men who weren’t paying attention.
As one of the men beh
ind lifted a sword on Jillian, someone ran him through from behind.
As the dying man fell away, Kahlan found herself staring into the smiling face of a man with the strangest golden eyes.
“I’m here to help you, pretty lady.”
Even in the near darkness, the man’s sword gleamed.
He was dressed like an Order soldier, but he wasn’t one of them. As Jillian backed against Kahlan when another man stabbed at her with a sword, the man with the golden eyes spun and with a backhanded swing caught the attacker along the side of the head. When the gleaming sword hit, the guard’s head exploded in bits of bone and brain.
Kahlan blinked in astonishment.
Richard saw what was happening and rushed up. The stranger, suddenly looking enraged, thrust that gleaming sword right at Richard.
Richard then did the strangest thing: he just stood there.
