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The most they ever did to defend themselves was to lift an arm before their faces. That cost them the arm and then their head. It was ridiculously easy to kill such single-minded half people, but their sheer numbers were going to win out in the end, and then he and Samantha would be the ones butchered.
Richard turned when he heard Samantha suddenly scream in terror. He saw a clot of people crowded in around the narrow opening in the rock, all of them leaning in the opening from every direction at the same time, dozens of arms reaching, hands grabbing at her, trying to get even a fingerhold on her to try to drag her out.
Richard swung the sword in a wild frenzy, severing half a dozen arms at a time as if he were hacking away a thicket of brush. When he had slaughtered all those around the opening to her hiding place, he could see her wide eyes back in the darkness, tears of terror streaming down her face.
She reached out to him, pleading with her open arms, wanting him to come to her.
It was a sight of such abject misery that it nearly broke his heart.
Richard looked out at all the masses of people flooding in toward him from every direction.
There was nothing he could do.
He dove into the split in the rock, over Samantha, covering her, protecting her, with his own body. He put his back to her. He felt her arms close around him, clutching him in tight against her.
Richard pointed his sword outward to try to stall the inevitable as he waited for the end.
CHAPTER
42
Richard felt Samantha’s arms tighten around him.
“I’m sorry” was all he could whisper back over his shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Samantha.”
He felt shame for letting himself so easily be talked into allowing her to come along, for how miserably he had failed to protect her, how he had failed Kahlan, failed Naja, Magda, and Merritt’s efforts, failed everyone else who depended on him as the Lord Rahl to be their protector.
He should have never agreed to bring Samantha. She was one of the watchers. She was supposed to warn others. She had done that. She was not meant to fight the evil she was born there to warn others of.
He was supposed to be the one to end prophecy and end the threat. It was his responsibility, not hers.
Zedd had always told him to think of the solution, not the problem. He tried, but this time he had no solution. He had failed. He wanted to think that sometimes there simply wasn’t a solution, but that would be absolving himself of responsibility, when it had been his responsibility. To think there was no solution was to surrender.
It was to come to nothing, though. Despite how hard he tried, he could think of no solution, and he couldn’t fight any harder, couldn’t fight off such an overpowering mass of half people all wanting to rip him and Samantha apart and steal their souls. Not even Zedd, Nicci, Cara, Cara’s husband, Ben, the general of all those elite troops of the First File, had been able to hold off such overwhelming numbers.
Still, that was no excuse. He was the Lord Rahl. In the end it didn’t really matter that they failed. It only mattered if he failed.
Richard watched out through the opening in the rock. He could see all the hands reaching back into the darkness for him. Fingers clawed the air, trying to catch hold of his clothes. Some of them grabbed the sword instead, and lost those fingers.
He could see the shapes of hungry mouths growling with sick need. They bared their teeth for the task for which they so desperately lusted, for the taste of human flesh.
It was all coming to an end before his journey of rescue had even begun. They hadn’t even made it beyond the outskirts of Stroyza. The hadn’t even made it safely across the fields and into the forest.
“Don’t be sorry,” Samantha whispered back from the darkness behind him. “Don’t be sorry, Lord Rahl. You had the idea. It’s not your fault. It’s mine.”
“What?”
Samantha put her hand on the top of his head and pushed it lower. “Keep your head down,” she whispered as if from some distant, dreamlike place.
Richard frowned and was about to ask her what she was talking about when her small fingers tightened on his head, keeping it down.
And then the ground suddenly shook with a thunderous explosion.
An instant later a deep shock wave hammered his chest. He couldn’t make out its source.
Three more deafening explosions came in rapid succession, almost on top of one another. The earsplitting cracks of the detonations were like lightning hitting a tree right beside him. Each booming blast made him flinch. The explosions being so close left his ears ringing.
There was a brief moment of silence before another series of explosions, only there were more this time. All around the wallop of explosions shook the ground like a thunder and lightning storm gone crazy. The staggering concussions, one on top of another in rapid succession, sent shock waves ripping through the air. They shook the ground so powerfully that it made his head hurt. Dirt and small rocks rained down.
Again there was a preciously brief pause in the deafening thumps, and then the thunderous explosions erupted again, coming so close on top of one another that it reminded him of the sound of canvas ripping.
After the briefest of pauses, another series of explosions began, the echoing booms in a measured pace, one right after another, like some celestial blacksmith hammer raining down mighty blows on the anvil of the world. The very air shook with the power of those blows.
Then Richard heard clattering against the rock over his head as a rain of debris began falling. Some of it struck the rock with astounding violence. Other sharp impacts sounded like the crack of a whip. Some of it sounded like it might fracture the rock over his head.
And then pieces of wood began cascading down. Splinters of wood, some no bigger than sewing needles, pelted him while other pieces as big as oars crashed into the rock, bouncing back into the air to eventually come raining down all around. Richard saw that many of the pieces were covered in blood. Some even held skewered pieces of mangled flesh.
He could hear tree limbs under great weight snap in rapid succession, then the sound of massive trunks fracturing as trees crashed down through the forest canopy. The colossal trees shook the ground when they hit. The rumbling sound of trees toppling to the ground boomed all around them.
One of the enormous trunks smashed down with a jarring impact onto the rock they were cowering in. Richard thought that the rock might shatter from the blow. Instead, the impact of the great weight snapped the trunk in half above where Richard and Samantha crouched. Trees in the forest all around upended, ripping great limbs off as they fell. The ground shook with loud, booming blasts that reverberated through the woods.
As the tumultuous explosions continued at an unabated pace, the detonations moved ever outward, ever farther away, the ground shaking with each powerful blow until it all joined together to feel like an earthquake. It felt powerful enough to bring down mountains.
It seemed like it went on forever, but Richard knew that it had all happened in a mere moment in time, a thunderous, violent, murderous moment that had ripped through the forest with incredible brute force and merciless violence.
Almost as soon as they had started, the explosions came to an abrupt end.
Though the explosions stopped, trees continued to fall, each giant monarch snapping limbs of other trees on the way down, even splintering the trunks of neighbors that in turn were knocked over. Richard could hear the muffled sound of roots popping under the tremendous pressure as toppled trees fell against others. The ground shook with the impact when each one finally came to ground.
Giant splinters still rained down for another long moment. Tree trunks cracked in long ripping splits before they came crashing down. Gradually, the noises of all the destruction came to an end as one last tree smashed down not far away, making the ground rumble.
When the world finally went silent, Richard still didn’t move. He wasn’t sure he should, wasn’t sure it was really over. Saman
tha still had her hand protectively over his head, holding it down.
Samantha slowly withdrew her hand. “Lord Rahl?” she asked in a soft voice choked with tears. “Are you still alive? Are you all right? Dear spirits, please be alive.”
Richard blinked as he brought his head up. He had to push piles of bloody splintered wood off himself. There was so much debris piled into the narrow opening in the rock where he and Samantha hid that they were nearly buried.
“I’m alive.” He rotated and bent his arms. “I think I’m all right. Are you?”
He rocked his shoulders back and forth in order to squeeze himself out of the opening enough to turn and look back. Tears streamed down Samantha’s face. She looked more than miserable, more than merely exhausted.
She managed a nod. “I think so.”
Richard flicked his sword, shedding all the debris covering it, and then uncurled himself enough to stand up and take a quick look around to check for any threat from the half people, even though he truly didn’t expect to see anyone standing. He didn’t.
It looked like the world of life had been blasted out of existence.
The dense forest that had closed them in from overhead with a thick canopy that shut out the sky and daylight had been completely ripped open. Overhead, there was a large, open patch of sky, thickly overcast with leaden clouds. He could smell fresh, wet wood, as if from sawing logs. The scent of fresh wood was mixed with the gagging stench of blood.
Off in every direction around them, not a single tree still stood. All around them the trees lay felled.
Here and there a few grotesquely splintered trunks jutted from stumps. In other places toppled trees had pulled up mats of forest floor along with their broken roots.
It was a scene of such mass destruction that it was hard for Richard to believe what he was seeing. Timber lay everywhere like hundreds of broken sticks cast to the ground by a giant. The patches of forest floor he could see between downed trees were covered with a deep layer of shattered, splintered wood, sticking up every which way in fragmented, spiked debris.
Everywhere under tree trunks, enormous limbs, branches, and man-sized splinters, lay a carpet of bloody, shredded bodies. No one could have lived through such a fierce storm of fragmented splinters driven by so many violent explosions.
Gazing out over the expanse of that destruction, Richard didn’t see a single movement.
